Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/07/17/amusing-ourselves-to-death-was-a-1985-wake-up-call-we-didnt-know-wed-need-forty-years-later.html
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I still reference Amusing Ourselves to Death frequently in conversation.
The other Postman I read is Technopoly. I read it when it came out, so I’d have to re-read it to see how it stands up, but I imagine there are quite a few interesting things in there relevant to today.
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Reading this excellent book in the early 90s was one of the factors that led to my quitting the TV news business. Of course, I went from there into the dotcom industry, but we all had such high hopes for the Internet back then.
Anyone who enjoys this book will also want to read the superb 1980 long essay “Within the Context of No Context” (later slightly expanded into a book) by the fine writer George WS Trow. It covers similar themes about the degradation of American culture that’s led us to this dark place.
Thanks for the quote from Sagan, @generic_name. Since this seems to be the day for prescient works of this nature on Boing Boing (see also Yoy’s post on Dorothy Thompson’s “Who Goes Nazi?”) I’ll also post these quotes from Richard Rorty’s 1998 book Achieving our Country:
Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.
and then… [offensive terms edited – I don’t like using them in my comments even as a quote]
One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words ‘n-gger’ and ‘k-ke’ will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.
[source – Vox article on Rorty worth reading in whole.]
I’m sure that others will add their own suggestions (more recently, Masha Gessen provides a Russian perspective, and Timothy Snyder an historical one), but the takeaway will always be the same: the current rise of fascism in America and the cultural trends it would ride on were predicted decades ago. We were warned.
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Isn’t that a weird way to put this as a fact, because college graduates do not actually dictate their manners to badly educated Americans, it’s just that they feel that this is what happens.
People are merely exposed to consequences for acting in a racist or sexist way.
I feel that this distinction is rather an obvious and essential one to make.
But that would not help so much with that whole “Cultural Left” argument. I’m not too fond of that, I must admit.
Correct my if I’m wrong, but the argument here goes: the left started a culture war instead of improving the life of anyone in a meaningful way, that’s why we have fascism now.
Do you think that is true?
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The Vox article is rightly critical of that, as am I. I think Rorty, for all his insight, bought into that right-wing framing of the post-60s left as a result of his more positive experience with real and long-lasting achievements (at least for white Americans) of what he calls the “reformist left” (the tradition of the first half of the 20th century).
That said, what he calls the “cultural left” did effectively get rolled over by conservatives since the 1980s. However, it wasn’t due to a lack of focus on progressive economics. In large part it happened because many of its members abandoned their ideals during the Reagan era, leaving American leftism (as opposed to liberalism) a shadow of its former self until recently.
You need numbers to effect real political change, and too many Jerry Rubins* will allow right-wing demagogues to take advantage of the situation they created in exactly the way as his quotes and the current situation describe.
[* ETA: and Bill Clintons, for that matter]
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I think of this book often these days. I used this book in my history classes in 1990 and 1991–some students took to it, a few resented its pointed critiques. My favorite takeaway is the today represents not Orwell’s 1984 come to fruition but rather Huxley’s A Brave New World. Not a boot on the throat of humanity, but rather distractions and diversions preventing true meaning from issuing from the techno society. Saw Postman speak in 1992 and left disappointed, as he was coasting when speaking on matters, using anecdotal evidence, not real analysis of the times
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I just took a glance, will read it more thoroughly then.
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The criticism is toward the end, right after the photo of Walt Whitman.
Thanks, I can bear to read the whole thing, though.
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He’s not totally wrong, but he’s not completely correct either…
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“Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images . They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”
The clearest expression of this is in the “meme.” As proposed originally by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, a “meme” was an idea which replicated itself across minds. It now means a picture with a “witty” caption, used to comment on something without the effort of writing.
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A bit like this (my bold):
“Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren’t. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn’t be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it—not because we think she’s wrong but because we know she’s right.”
― J.D. Vance
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Those “we’s” are doing a lot of lifting for a Yale-educated lawyer and venture capitalist who probably isn’t feeding anyone in his family McDonalds. He may have started out as a “we”, but now it’s just cosplay.
Obama strikes at the insecurities of those Americans who think they’re more entitled to success than any Black man in the country. Vance and his new boss pander to those insecurities.
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The comments are perhaps appropriate in starting a commentary on contemporary media usage as entertainment, but it isn’t a warning.
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Which brings us back to the remark attributed to Lyndon B. Johnson:
If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.
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Haven’t read the Postman book, but some of the tone is reminiscent of these classics, in a Debordian vein of guerrilla media :
… while these are probably a bit further toward the Orwell end of the scale - it’s likely where any ones personal experiences might fall along the Huxley ↔ Orwell axis correlates with skin tone, economic status and degree of in-group identity.
Which qualifies, I know this may be shocking, still as an idea.
Memes can be a very effective form of communication, a kind of shorthand, because they can convey a lot of information, because those known to the audience present a general pattern of comment or argument, which is applied to a specific topic, or point being made in a discussion, by adapting the text. In that sense, memes are amazingly effective and can help in discussion of complex topics.
This, of course mostly eludes those who don’t speak this new language well enough.
Memes are also often more that a a caption added to a picture, sometimes there is a lot more design going on.
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I think the problem here is: some people made an argument that fascism will rise again because of X, and now people say fascism is on the rise again, as was predicted, therefore it must be because of X as predicted. Which is a fallacy.
For me the key take away from reading the article is the idea that the USA is still unachieved. It is obvious, but really a powerful narrative against fascism, because we obviously cannot go back into the past where it was even more unachieved. We can not make it great again when it never has been great in the first place.
And this does not only apply to America, but to (almost) all democracies on this planet.
So thanks for sharing that idea. I will make good use of it.
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