Book Review: Amusing Ourselves To Death, Part 1

Postman's Past: Boston and Typographic Culture

This is the first installation of a three-part series initially published on reddit.

Part 2: Postman's Present: Las Vegas and Show Business

Part 3: Postman's Future: Silicon Valley and Internet Culture

Do you recall Socrates's argument against writing? Fortunately, Plato wrote it down, so we can review it today:

And so it is that you by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.

Most of the time, we raise it to chuckle at the carelessness of the past and how people will fearmonger over every new development. There's a time-honored tradition of laughing at doomsaying. After reading Joshua Foer's account of studying mnemonics, though, it makes me chuckle for a different reason altogether: Socrates was completely right. People talk about rediscovering mnemonics, about surprise at learning just what feats of memory we're capable of. Such rediscovery was only ever relevant because a culture of writing supplanted an oral culture. As Socrates expected, the more we learned to rely on external marks, the less we relied on our own memories.

My point is this: As easy as it is to mock doomsayers who rise up with each new technology, there is still something to be learned from their object-level points. We typically judge the tradeoffs of shifting to new tools to be worthwhile, but there are things we lose alongside our gains. Pessimism is not a new genre, but sometimes the pessimists have real points.

With that in mind, let's jump into the work of one of the most prescient pessimists in recent history.

You may or may not have heard of Amusing Ourselves To Death, but if you're reading this it's very likely you've at least come across one quote from it, perhaps in comic form. The book was written in 1985, just after the world collectively breathed a sigh of relief in seeing that the world had not, in fact, turned into an Orwellian hellscape. Ever the optimist, Postman sat down to remind everyone Orwell was only one of the two dystopian writers to sear their visions into the collective mind. As he puts it, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. Postman, sharing that fear, wrote a book of prophecies. The rest of us, being human, leapt headlong onto Postman's nightmare.

Postman spends the book carving out and analyzing distinct cultural eras of American history, notably a typographic culture of the past and the show business culture of his present, each of which I will devote a section to. He marks the shifting of the national spirit with cities most emblematic of the spirit of an age, marking Boston, then New York, then Chicago in turn as the symbols of one day or another. Las Vegas, the city devoted wholly to entertainment, is his choice for the metaphor of his day. As the national spirit has moved on to San Francisco and Silicon Valley at some point in the 35 years since his writing, I will spend another section exploring his future, our present, in light of his thoughts.

Postman's Past: Boston and Typographic Culture

"The poorest labourer upon the shore of the Delaware thinks himself entitled to deliver his sentiment in matters of religion or politics with as much freedom as the gentleman or scholar.... Such is the prevailing taste for books of every kind, that almost every man is a reader." - Jacob Duché, 1772

1.

One of Postman's recurring obsessions through the book is the way the biases of our communication mediums shape the thoughts within them. In a moment that could have been ripped straight from Legal Systems Very Different From Ours, he describes the oral law of a west African tribe. When disputes come up, complainants go to the tribe chief, who rather than consulting a written body of law dives around in his recollection for a proverb that suits the situation and satisfies the complainants (p.18, future pages as noted). Wisdom is the essence of their legal system.

The Greeks, meanwhile, placed rhetoric towards the heart of their truth-seeking process, where "to disdain rhetorical rules, to speak one's thoughts in a random manner, without proper emphasis or appropriate passion, was considered demeaning to the audience's intelligence and suggegstive of falsehood" (p.22). Both stand in stark contrast to our truth-seeking process, where as Postman puts it, in ours "lawyers do not have to be wise; they need to be well briefed" (p.20). We like written records, preferably with plenty of numbers. One who aims to contain legal truth in a proverb here would be laughed out of court. Economists use data, not poetry, to convey truths about our standards of living. Our metaphors change, and shape us as we shape them.

Postman lists a number of demands of what he calls print-intelligence: a requirement to remain immobile for extended time, to pay no attention to the shapes of the letters, to assume an attitude of objectivity, to analyze tone and attitude, to delay a verdict and hold in mind questions as the argument unfolds, to bring to bear your relevant experience and knowledge while withholding the irrelevant.

What did typography bring in its wake? It "fostered... modern individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration... created prose but made poetry into an exotic and elitist form... made modern science possible but transformed religious sensibility into mere superstition." (p.29) Shifts. Good shifts? Probably. But shifts nonetheless.

Postman claims that the America of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was remarkably print-oriented, perhaps more so than any other culture in history. To be honest, I was hoping for more evidence than he provided, but it's worth going through the highlights. He cites evidence that the male literacy rate in 17th century Massachusetts was "somewhere between 89 and 95 percent", 62 percent for women. Other data he cites for the time: Middlesex County records at the same time indicated that 60% of the estates contained books, and between 1682 and 1685 Boston's leading bookseller imported 3,421 books from one English dealer for a community of 75000 - equivalent to ten million or so for the US today. They established laws for maintenance of "reading and writing" schools almost immediately.

One of the more convincing moments was his overview of the success of Paine's Common Sense. In its first two months, it sold 100,000 copies, and its print run reached somewhere between 300,000 and half a million. Scaling it up proportionate to 1985, it had a reach of 24 million, comparable to the Super Bowl (p.35). Uncle Tom's Cabin was only modestly less successful, selling 305,000 copies in its first year (equivalent to four million in modern America). After running through all that, he provides a charming but difficult-to-assess overview of the literary culture in late 18th and early 19th century America: pamphlets and broadsides disseminating like wildfire, the Federalist Papers recently made famous once more by the musical Hamilton, libraries blossoming around the country, people passing around "pirated" editions of Dickens in the absence of international copyright laws and then greeting him like a rock star when he arrived in the country, Lyceum lecture halls springing up in every town for leading intellectuals like Ralph Waldo Emerson to address the public (p.39).

This is all notable, Postman insists, not only because of its quantity but because it was all people had. There weren't a horde of competing mediums, no telegraph or radio or internet. The public discourse was, fundamentally, a print discourse, not limited to elites. "It is no mere figure of speech," he quotes from Paul Anderson," to say that farm boys followed the plow with book in hand, be it Shakespeare, Emerson, or Thoreau" (p.63).

2.

What does all that matter? Again, what does a print discourse do? His core example comes with the Lincoln-Douglas debates. One was an extended affair in which Douglas delivered a speech for three hours, after which Lincoln encouraged everyone to break for dinner because he would use a similar length of time, after which Douglas would still need to present a rebuttal. At the time of the encounter, neither was even a Senate candidate. It was just part of the everyday fabric of events, where speakers at state fairs were often allotted several hours for their arguments. Other times, people would deliver literal stump speeches near felled trees, gathering audiences for a few hours. (p.45)

It isn't just the length Postman emphasizes, but the form. Take a look at an excerpt from one of Lincoln's debates:

It will readily occur to you that I cannot, in half an hour, notice all the things that so able a man as Judge Douglas can say in an hour and a half; and I hope, therefore, if there be anything that he has said upon which you would like to hear something from me, but which I omit to comment upon, you will bear in mind that it would be expecting an impossibility for me to cover his whole ground.

After citing this, Postman muses, perhaps ironically for 2020: "It is hard to imagine the present occupant of the White House being capable of constructing such clauses in similar circumstances" (p.46). He goes on to point out that the speeches, including rebuttals, were written, and the whole of it carried "the resonance of typography". In such a culture, he says, "public discourse tends to be characterized by a coherent, orderly arrangement of facts and ideas" (p.51).

This culture spread to domains as diverse as preaching and advertising. Postman contrasts revivalist preachers like Jonathan Edwards and Charles Finney with modern figures like Billy Graham, with their sermons featuring "tightly knit and closely reasoned expositions of theological doctrine" and a steady feeling of intellectualism. I can't speak to that directly, but as someone who spent most of my childhood poring over one of the fruits of the Great Awakening, I can attest at least somewhat to its rhetorical density. For better or worse, theological lectures of the time were not light affairs.

And advertising! Take a look at an ad from one Paul Revere:

Whereas many persons are so unfortunate as to lose their Fore-Teeth by Accident, and otherways, to their great Detriment, not only in Looks, but Speaking both in Public and Private:--This is to inform all such, that they may have them re-placed with false Ones, that look as well as the Natural, and Answers the End of Speaking to all Intents, by PAUL REVERE, Goldsmith, near the Head of Dr. Clarke's Wharf, Boston. (p.59)

Per Postman, advertisers of the time assumed potential buyers to be literate, rational, and analytical, making wordy pleas aimed at conveying information. (p.59) This started to change sometime around the 1890's, with the introduction of slogans, and beyond.

I'm not certain entirely what to make of Postman's romanticized view of the typographic culture of the past. Much of it feels perhaps too good to be true, a highlight reel of a long period, selectively glancing at the best it had to offer in support of his thesis. I'm not sure how convinced I am that the Lincoln-Douglas debates, for example, were the rule rather than an exception memorable enough to work its way into the history books. Even a culture able to support them as an exception, though, would say something.

More, that print was broadly uncontested at the time is true, and it's hard not to read extant works from that era without noticing the floweriness, the seriousness, the complexity of the language. I brought the Book of Mormon up deliberately, because I think it makes a good case study of early 19th century literature, written (as Mormons hasten to remind) by one who very much fit the profile of a farm boy following the plow with book in hand. It is the sort of work that arises, and gains enough influence to spur a religious movement converting thousands, only in a print-centric culture.

My verdict, if it matters, is broadly towards the idea that a culture like the one Postman describes was influential throughout early American history, even while the reality was less romantic than his portrayal of it could be read as. Common Sense and the Federalist Papers, religious movements of the time, and the sheer length of the Lincoln-Douglas debates all suggest there is at least some fire beneath the smoke signals he describes.

Part 2: Postman's Present: Las Vegas and Show Business

Part 3: Postman's Future: Silicon Valley and Internet Culture