Forty Years Later: Revisiting Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death
by Anthony Urti
My family recently went out for dinner at a very lively restaurant where the tables were packed and the food was good. Despite the success of the menu, however, my main takeaway from the evening was the number of televisions on the wall. There was nary an inch between the rectangular displays that beamed sporting events and the news of the day into a space that, at one point in our history, was reserved for dining and conversation.
This all-too-common scenario was timely, as I had just revisited Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman’s piercing condemnation of the television age. The book was written in 1985 (before the full impact of the smart phone and other technologies), but Postman was prescient in his ability to see the fundamental shifts that the television age wrought upon America.
Although written forty years ago, the book is still well worth your time. I will take up one observation that is of particular importance to education: the shift from what Postman calls the “typographic mind”—a mind furnished with texts and words—to a mind shaped by fleeting images and time constraints imposed by the medium.
One example of this shift can be seen in presidential debates. In the mid 19th century, American citizens with a “typographic mind” listened to Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas debate for hours because they had the capacity to understand the verbal interchange and because they felt a sense of civic duty to do so. By contrast, the debates during the most recent election cycle allowed for no more than three minutes of dialogue on any particular topic, reflecting both the taste and the capacity of the modern listener.
What does a shift like this mean for classical parents and teachers? In a world that favors the superficial and fleeting, is an education that focuses heavily on texts doomed?
Well, without deep intentionality, it would seem the answer is yes. As Postman points out, “Television’s way of knowing is uncompromisingly hostile to typography’s way of knowing.” Television’s way of knowing is the operating system of modern life: it goes on in the background, without awareness, and we simply take this as a given. As we’ve seen so clearly in the public schools, this leads to pulling away from texts in favor of image-based communication and information.
In his book, Postman develops a subargument about whether George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was a better predictor for the direction of modern society. Orwell feared that draconian governments would ban books, while Huxley feared that people would become so anesthetized by pleasure and distraction that they’d not want to read them. As Postman sums it up, “…Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.” Needless to say, Postman believed that Huxley was right.
If we seek to preserve a literary culture—or to simply be “people of the book,” as Christians have been called—then there is some serious work to be done in our homes, churches, and schools. G.K. Chesterton famously quipped, “A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.” But if in Christ we are alive, and if we call His name in faith and in repentance, then we are not cultural floaters. The modern world calls us to superficiality and distraction, but we need not float downstream—in fact to do so is sin (see Proverbs 21:25).
Raising children in the modern world is a challenge. However, raising children has always been a challenge. Give your children words—beautiful words—and lots of them. Furnish their minds so they do not default to mere entertainment when bored. Help them to value that which is not fleeting. This is the concept of paideia, and it is why schools like ours were formed!
Anthony Urti lives in Delaware with his wife and three children where he serves as Head of School at Delaware Valley Classical School in New Castle, DE. Despite fierce temptation, he did not use AI to write this bio.
