Building a Bridge to the 18th Century : How the Past Can Improve Our Future (Vintage)

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Summary: If you find this interesting...
Review: ...then you should read the novel "The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson. Set somewhat in the future, the world has splintered into various social enclaves. Pre-eminent among these is the enclave of "The New Victorians" - who have adopted Victorian values and culture to a dizzingly advanced world of technology. They have consciously chosen this culture on the grounds that the Victorian age was the last truly viable form of civilization. Needless to say of Stephenson, this is only one intriguing idea out of a broad palette of stunning perspectives.

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Summary: Thin
Review: I wanted to like this book, but I found it disappointingly thin. I wouldn't go so far as the previous reviewer and dismiss it as "hopeless", but it's certainly superficial: Postman seems to rely on secondary sources about Enlightenment thought, rather than any deep reading of Enlightenment texts. The idea of "building a bridge to the 18th century" seems more like a marketing device, a fresh way of presenting some of Postman's familiar themes, than a serious proposition (He even includes a summary of his "disappearance of childhood" argument in an appendix). It's a shame, really, because the Enlightenment has been getting too much undeservedly bad press for far too long, and Postman is correct when he points out that we owe much of what's good and admirable about contemporary society to Enlightened thinking. For a much more substantial survey and defence of Enlightenment thought and culture, read Roy Porter's _The Creation of the Modern World: The British Enlightenment_.

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Summary: Cautioning Us of Improved Means to an Unimproved End
Review: In declaring himself an enemy of the twentieth century, Neil Postman grieves that the past century forgot the importance of precise language in public dialogue. The consequences have resulted in the most inhumane and violent period in all history. (Richard Rubinstein's book "The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future" has already reminded us of the unprecedented scale of atrocity committed in this century. Need I mention the battle of Verdun, Pol Pot, China's Communist revolution, two world wars, the atomic bomb - alas, where shall I stop?) Postman is aware of the eighteenth century's cruelties - child labor, slavery, anonymity of women, but he believes that the great thinkers of the period were almost unique in offering the kind of thought that could make the course of history more humane.

Indeed, he even posits that childhood is not a biological condition, but was an invention of the eighteenth century, for it was the civilization that actually thought that a youthful period of preparation was necessary. Regrettably, he argues, our generation has regressed by eliminating childhood. Does childhood exist if television, the Internet and the media expose the young to the same information that adults receive? In this respect, we are more like a fourteenth century civilization that bypassed the written word and granted full exposure of adult knowledge, sexuality, and activity to anyone who could speak.

Postman cautions that we tend to evaluate technology by the claims of technologists alone, forgetting to ask the ethicist, the poet, the novelist, and the artist for an evaluation. It doesn't occur to most people to question the benefit of a new technology, and who benefits, and who pays.

Of high importance is a return to the written word, for the written word requires an author to forever place his name on an idea, but the stream of information and the interactive media make all the populace instant plebiscites and pose us for an end of democracy, or a democracy that degenerates into a "mobocracy."

His book is not a road map or a menu or an agenda. He does not tell us what to think, but reminds us of the importance of learning how to think analytically and humanely.

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Summary: One of Postman's best
Review: Postman's books have always divided readers. Some feel that his critical eye is too focused on the past and doesn't adequately and realistically weigh in today's cultural variables. Others feel that his is one of the most stable and eloquent voices of reason in a predominately subjective society. While I'll admit that Postman is oftentimes to social criticism what Wynton Marsalis is to jazz, he is first and foremost a questioner, a modern day Socrates who asks how technology both hurts and helps us. It is his empirical approach that keeps me buying his books.

To reduce Postman to a traditionalist is far too limiting. While he does champion the past and favor reason over emotion, he is also an idealist who believes that society has the power to cure what ails it, if it's only willing to take the necessary steps. "Building A Bridge To the 18th Century" is a collection of suggested steps based on 18th century utilitarian values and practices.

Above all, I like Postman's style. He is a direct, eloquent writer, a person whose ideas and insights are clearly spelled out. And despite others' charge that he is a curmudgeon, I find him humorous and open-minded.

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Summary: A disappointing ramble
Review: Readers looking for an introduction to the great thinkers of the Age of Reason will be disappointed by this book. Postman's explanations are cursory at best, and he seems to use the Age of Reason as a launching lad for airing some of his pet peeves about modern life. He does not use e-mail, nor a word processor, nor the Internet, and he doesn't understand why anyone else would want to, either. Postman suggests that when a new technology is proposed, we should ask, who benefits? He doesn't seem to have much faith in the free market to decide the question for us. I think useless products will not succeed, products that people find useful, will. Or, to take further issue with Mr. Postman, why can't people be silly and frivolous and spend their money on things HE would choose not to?

On the question of education, he is on more solid ground, since education is the proper province of a democratic government. I agree that teaching logic and rhetoric in school would help our children cope with the Information Age.

Overall though, this book is self-indulgent, a miscellaneous collection of thoughts and arguments. I suggest the reader's time would be better spent with the original curmudgeon (as preserved by his biographer, Boswell): Dr. Samuel Johnson: a better writer, a better wit, and a better introduction to the period of history called the Age of Reason.

Rating:
Summary: A disappointing ramble
Review: Readers looking for an introduction to the great thinkers of the Age of Reason will be disappointed by this book. Postman's explanations are cursory at best, and he seems to use the Age of Reason as a launching lad for airing some of his pet peeves about modern life. He does not use e-mail, nor a word processor, nor the Internet, and he doesn't understand why anyone else would want to, either. Postman suggests that when a new technology is proposed, we should ask, who benefits? He doesn't seem to have much faith in the free market to decide the question for us. I think useless products will not succeed, products that people find useful, will. Or, to take further issue with Mr. Postman, why can't people be silly and frivolous and spend their money on things HE would choose not to?

On the question of education, he is more solid ground, since education is the proper province of a democratic government. I agree that teaching logic and rhetoric in school would help our children cope with the Information Age.

Overall though, this book is self-indulgent, a miscellaneous collection of thoughts and arguments. I suggest the reader's time would be better spent with the original curmudgeon (as preserved by his biographer, Boswell): Dr. Samuel Johnson: a better writer, a better wit, and a better introduction to the period of history called the Age of Reason.

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Summary: Not a Luddite
Review: Somehow Postman has been accused of being a luddite. I'm not sure how he got theis reputation. He is certainly critical of present excesses, but as this book shows, he merely - and justly - questions current ideas that have degenerated to produce dubious advantages. he has no objections to technology or science but, he argues, there is aneed to revert to a more humanist (which also implies liberal in the good sense of the word) approaches to temper the way technology is creeping intrusively into our lives. In philosophical terms he argues against cultural relativism and its older brother deconstruction - i.e. Derrida, Lacan. in this he is joined - though he does not mention it - by several leading physicists and, indeed, Fashionable Nonsense by Sokal confirms this. Like many greek classical philosophers, from Plato to Epicurus, postman excercises healthy doubt and merely questions the present. Not all change is good. I also found the book to be very well written, erudite and humorous.

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Summary: Postman Delivers!
Review: This is my third Postman book and I am still enthralled in the reading of his works. Mainly, I believe, because he writes with a particular verve that I find lacking in many of his contemporaries. His discourse covers a wide range of topics, some of them superficially, but all of them intended to support his thesis: children are losing their childhood; and meaning needs to be revived in language, education, narrative, and culture. He is iconoclastic.

Even though it is possible to read his book in a cursory manner, don't fault the easily accessible work as trite. Postman's criticism is erudite, precise and well-articulated.

I hope he doesn't stop writing. His voice needs to continue.

Rating:
Summary: Postman Delivers!
Review: This is my third Postman book and I am still enthralled in the reading of his works. Mainly, I believe, because he writes with a particular verve that I find lacking in many of his contemporaries. His discourse covers a wide range of topics, some of them superficially, but all of them intended to support his thesis: children are losing their childhood; and meaning needs to be revived in language, education, narrative, and culture. He is iconoclastic.

Even though it is possible to read his book in a cursory manner, don't fault the easily accessible work as trite. Postman's criticism is erudite, precise and well-articulated.

I hope he doesn't stop writing. His voice needs to continue.

Rating:
Summary: Hopelessly Superficial and Self-Indulgent
Review: With the publication of "Building A Bridge To The Eighteenth Century", Neil Postman has produced another thoughtful, articulate, and informative tome describing the numbing effects of postmodern society on individual consciousness, moral values, and the disintegration of our culture. In previous books he cited the dangers associated with runaway technological innovation ("Technopoly") and the corrosive cumulative effect of the manipulation of what we see through electronic media, profoundly biasing the ways we come to view, interpret and understand the world at large ("Amusing Ourselves To Death"). Here he examines a multitude of problems associated with the obvious circumstances of our rapidly disintegrating sense of commonality with our fellows in local and regional communities.

Not surprisingly, Postman finds solace and hope in the values and ideas of the Enlightenment, and in particular with authors like Voltaire, Goethe, Jefferson, and Thomas Paine. He quite artfully broaches the problems we currently have and meaningfully connects them to the assault on traditional systems of meanings that former societies had a wealth of. Yet Postman also understands one cannot simply glue or graft old ideas and values onto contemporary situations and expect them to cohere and work. Although he never quite articulates the notion, one can certainly connect the dots among the lines of his argument to disocver a stunning indictment of our present culture, which he apparently sees as hollow, superficial, and cravenly focused on material acquisition. In this fashion he seems to be accepting the arguments of a number of other contemporary thinkers who see the hope for the future in terms of recognizing what our material progress has cost.

In saying that we have become so enamored of progress that we have lost our social narrative, he seems to be recognizing the degree to which our stated values and ideals no longer cohere or make adequate sense in terms of motivating or integrating the social community at large. In this he falls into a long tradition of social criticism that reaches back to classic sociologists like Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim, each of whom argued that rapid scientific and technological progress and the eclipse of the traditional values associated with Christian communities posed enormous dangers for continuation of western culture, since, unlike religion, science had no core values which could act to integrate the community by reference to common values and ideals. In this sense, one can draw a line between these 19th century thinkers and others like C. Wright Mills, John Maynard Keynes, the early Alvin Toffler (before he became an apologist and fellow-traveler of the rich and famous), and contemporary authors such as Noam Chomsky, Wendell Beery, and Theodore Roszak.

This is a thoughtful and wide-ranging book written by someone who understands just how complex our current dilemma is, and who also appreciates that correcting it takes more than the kinds of superficial corrections in course being bandied about in this year of political promises and presidential campaigns. It also shows Postman's powerful intellect at work. He understands that progress in and of itself is meaningless unless it is informed by a meaningful direction in which to grow toward some greater fulfillment of real human possibilities. What we have now is hardly anything like meaningful progress; it is much more like a blind thirst for egregious acquisitions of more and more material wealth at the cost of everything we once treasured. This is an informed excursion into the past in order to better appreciate how we can use our traditional values more meaningfully to avoid the pitfalls of runaway technological innovation and the cultural detritus it has left in its wake. I highly recommend this book. Enjoy!