Talking Hairdos and the Ten Commandments: The Warnings of Neil Postman

A few weeks ago, one of the most astute media critics of our age, Neil Postman, died at the age of 72. In remembering the long-time New York University professor, the press described Postman's warnings about the dangers of mass communication.

In his devastating critique of television, titled AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH, Postman declared that television turns even the most tragic news into mere entertainment, delivered by "talking hairdos."

Postman's book was reviewed in all the right places, and it has been around for some time -- but not once did we learn where Postman got his ideas. It turns out he got them from the Bible.

Postman's thesis is that different media encourage different ways of thinking. The printed word requires sustained attention, logical analysis, and an active imagination. But television, with its fast-moving images, encourages a short attention span, disjointed thinking, and purely emotional responses.

Postman says he first discovered the connection between media and thinking in the Bible when, as a young man, he was struck by the Old Testament words: "You shall not make for yourself a graven image." Postman says he realized that the idea of a universal deity cannot be expressed in images, but only in words.

As he put it, "The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking." This is the God Christians worship today -- a God known principally through His Word and incarnate.

Many religions have a scripture, of course. Yet most teach that the way to contact the divine is through mystical visions, emotional experiences, or Eastern-style meditation. Judaic Christianity insists on the primacy of language.

Gene Edward Veith, in his book READING BETWEEN THE LINES, explains why: The heart of our religion is a relationship with God -- and relationships thrive on communication. We can't know people intimately by merely being in their presence, according to Veith. It takes conversation to share thoughts and personalities.

Christians are meant to have an ongoing conversation with God. He addresses us in the language of Scripture, and we address Him through the language of prayer.

This emphasis on the Word has had a deep impact on Western culture. Reading was once confined to the elite. But it was the Reformation that first aimed at universal literacy, so that the Bible could be read by every person.

Today's missionaries are similarly concerned with literacy. In nonliterate societies, they develop a written form of the native language and teach people to read the Bible.

They can then go on, of course, to read about anything -- sanitation, health care, democracy -- things that often transform their culture, much as the Reformation transformed Western culture.

Here in the West we are in danger of coming full circle: The visual media may ultimately undermine literacy. If that happens, can biblical faith still flourish?

Neil Postman's writings remind Christians of the dangers of television. We need to learn when to turn it off lest we lose our historical reputation as the "people of the book."

Actually it is possible to intelligent television and films.

They're called "documentaries." There is no necessary connection between the disjointed, illogical, and liberally-biased communication of American commercial television and the "visual" medium of "images." Words intelligently spoken by non-liberal Christians are effective.

The problem with TV has to do with the corporate sponsors who back the junk and the liberalism. It also has to do with the entertainment and media industry being dominated by non-Christian liberals. They pander to crass banality, vulgarity, and bad taste. It doesn't have to be that way. The better documentaries on Cable and EWTN are much better forms of communication on television. The Word became flesh. God intended incarnate beings to be able to speak. We are capable of doing that intelligently and truthfully in and through the visual images of our created bodies and voices.

Contemporary TV culture is pretty bad, but it need not be that way.

He has valid points. Biblical iconoclasm will not make television go away. It has to be civilized by conservative Christians. There are very good films and television documentaries. Much of the current style of entertainment is pretty bad - intellectually, stylistically, in terms of taste, content, and ideological message. The medium will not disappear.

That said, we should encourage literacy, discursive reasoning in the printed word, and reasoned debate in writing. We will need better schools to do that which are not controlled as social engineering labs by secular humanist liberals. Obviously, texts of the Judaic and Christian traditions MUST be included in sound formal education. This long social experiment by the NEA, the Supreme Court, Deweyite liberals, and other secular humanist cabals promoting America's pathetic post-Christian cultural decline, must be ended.

All conservatives should support school choice and kick the NEA and other liberal secular humanist cabals out of our children's lives and out of our homes (and schools). Tremendous harm has been done to America and the rest of the world by decadent American post-Christian education sophistry.

In remembering the long-time New York University professor, the press described Postman's warnings about the dangers of mass communication.

If doing that didn't hurt them hijjus, then we're further gone than even I thought. Oh, the irony.

Amusing Ourselves to Death crystallized a lot of thoughts for me when I read it in 1987. If you take it simply as a warning against television indulgence, you miss the point. He was concerned about the way in which mass media of every sort warp the stories that they tell us, by their very nature.

Back in the years between the printing press and the telegraph, news, views, and commentary wouldn't be printed and circulated unless it was found to be of some lasting importance. There was a natural delay between the event and the report of the event, which tended to shake out the baloney and false first impressions.

This country shows the effect of this delay in that general elections (such as for President and Congress) are held in November but the Congress does not convene for two months afterward ( and the President originally did not take office until March! ) That left time for elections to be counted, certified, and published without any mass media other than a public bulletin board or the local news sheet.

All that changed with the coming of the telegraph, which cut the time from event to print, consequently, the news became at once more voluminous and less "dense", or, shall we say, "important". I seem to remember Postman quoted Thoreau to the effect of dissing the transatlantic cable project, in that once the cable is laid and the news starts coming through, America would be treated to momentous revelations such as that "Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough".

After the telegraph came the telephone, then radio, then TV. With each one, the time-to-market of news became less, and the news became progressively more immediate--but at the same time, it became more voluminous--and more unimportant. The really important, consequential events are buried in a cacophonous sea of irrelevancies (such as pronunciamentos from the Center for Science in the Public Interest.) Besides, we constantly see stories reported with a breathless immediacy, only to find out several days later (if at all!) that the report was mostly wrong.

So, yes, Postman didn't have much good to say of TV, but his indictment of the media reaches much further back. He traced the roots of the stupefying influence of mass media two hundred years back.

I wonder now, where does FR fall in all this? After all, it is quite "immediate", but it doesn't seem to have the mind-numbing effect of TV. Seems to me that "immediacy" is not the problem. It's a matter of how many people have vetted the information that is published. Too many cooks spoil the broth, but when it's a narrative of important current events in the pot, the more hands that stir it the better. Back when broadsides and pamphlets had to be hand typeset and distributed, people took time to digest and certify what they were writing. Others read the pamphlets and critiqued them, published pamphlets of their own, etc. All this took time, but, before electronic communications, folks had time.

Enter the tele(whatever) and the very speed of the medium blocks the possibility of commentary by any but the few who are attached to the wire. Everybody else is "on the outside, looking in." Understandably, those who controlled the transmission media eventually realized the power these conferred (principally that of insulation from independent critique) and so arose the modern establishment press, with its insufferable totalitarian bias.

Today, with the internet, we little people can now hook into the wire ourselves, and offer commentary on the news served up as fast as the news itself. In a way, sites such as FR have partially restored the checks and balances once provided by the community in the days of the old printing press. Anybody can set up a blog, link to anything that interests him, and comment on it all day long. The people go where they find the good stuff, and stay away from the bad, all on their own. This is the same process that makes a good book into a "classic", telescoped into the time scale of the daily news.

Books still operate on the scale of centuries, so it's too soon to tell if Postman has scored a "classic", but it's a good read for all that.

Requiescat in pace.

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