Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century.(Review)

Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century, by Neil Postman; Scribe Publications(Carlton North, Vic.), 2000, $27.50.

OF NEIL POSTMAN'S many books, I suppose the most influential have been his early Teaching as a Subversive Activity (with Charles Weingartner, 1969), and his powerful Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). The first of these emphasises the role of education in equipping school students with "bulldust detectors", and the second identifies television culture as having dumbed-down all public discourse (both on and off television). Both of these ideas find their way into this latest book. Postman is not an obscurantist, guru-like thinker: he does not attract disciples devoted to explicating his thought, because his thought does not need explication. Rather, his reputation is as a shrewd, reasonable, informed and passionate commentator for a general readership on the state of intellectual life. As such, he is without peer.

The enemies of the life of the mind whom Postman identifies are both those outside the gates--the teachers and the media--and those within--the thinkers who believe that knowledge and its communication are not really possible. Postman believes that the issues are not merely academic, but in the end moral. In looking to find serviceable ideas to take with us from the recently last century into the presently new, Postman suggests that there are few that originated in the twentieth century that are worth considering. Most of the ideas which, he says, "offer a humane direction to the future" are ideas that were developed in the European "enlightenment"--the eighteenth century.

Although Postman does not mention the fact, it was, I think, Bill Clinton who talked of "building a bridge to the twenty-first century". One must wonder at the seemingly natural human impulse to be in a hurry to get somewhere to which we are all inevitably going, and to which none of us can get any faster than anyone else. Bridge or no bridge, here we all are in the twenty-first century. Not that I think that the future can look after itself. But it's the past I'm worried about: that's to say, I'm worried that in the future, fewer and fewer people will have a realistic sense of the past, let alone any knowledge of what happened in it. When we get to the next century, or the next day, we'll only find there what we've been bothered to take with us. What ideas from the past we ought to take is, in this book, Postman's burden.

He is not too intent on proving his thesis about the eighteenth century. In reality, it is a hook on which to hang essays on what he thinks are the best and most threatened aspects of Western culture. In some ways, almost any century would have done. Knowing that the past is real and was very different seems almost enough, at least for a start. To far too many young people the past seems a metaphysical fog, in which dream and memory are indistinguishable, in which Churchill, Caesar, Karl or Groucho Marx, Sherlock Holmes, Jesus Christ, Ned Kelly and Hitler all wander about. But as an eighteenth-centuryist, I can strongly identify with Postman's attraction to the lively discourse of that disputatious century. It was a time (in Western Europe) in which the pace of change began to speed up, but not so fast that it could not be discussed by the leading thinkers of the time.

Postman's chapter headings in this new book suggest a recycling or at least a revisiting of the themes of most of his previous books: Technology (from Technopoly), Language (Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk), Information (amusing Ourselves), Children (The Disappearance of Childhood), Education (The End of Education and Teaching). Still, not everyone picks up a book by a well-known writer having read all or any of his previous work. Postman is not writing for an intellectual elite, who tend to over-value purported originality, and who want to see scholarly footnotes to primary sources. He opens his book with a rueful observation about the reportedly high percentage of Americans who believe in alien abductions. As he says, no one who took such statistics seriously would bother writing for a general readership. Academics will regard Postman's work as pretty lightweight, but he must be admired for hoping that general intelligent conversation is still possible.

Still, I must say (and I'll get my complaints out of the way now) that I am disappointed by an unnecessarily slapdash approach in this book. It could have been far more rigorous and just as (or possibly, more) readable. He uses endnotes, but they are sometimes uninformative. A journal article by Thomas Haskell is cited without either a date or volume number. One note refers to a "famous article by David Putnam", but there is no title given nor any listing in the bibliography. Susan Sontag is quoted by name at one point (page 88), and Walter Ong at another (page 149), but there are no endnotes, nor any writing of either author in the bibliography.