by Neil Postman
184pp.
In his previous book The Disappearance of Childhood, Neil Postman gave an intriguing but very brief overview of a major shift that occurred in Western culture between 1850 and 1950. This book makes an extended examination of that shift, when America (and later the world) moved from the Age of Print into the Age of Show Business.
Postman argues that as a result of this shift, many aspects of life have taken a turn for the worse. Perhaps the most fundamental is that emotion has conquered reason, and as a result the Enlightenment project is now dead. Those who know us will know that we don't mourn the death of that benighted, God-hating intellectual movement. But we have to ask—is it good to end the worship of reason by replacing it with the worship of emotion?
Postman is very good at tracing malevolent trends back to their not always malevolent sources. Take as an example how he describes the economics of commercial television: the advertiser is the buyer, the television network is the seller, and you are the product. The truth of this is undeniable—what else could advertisers be buying with their millions of dollars—and there is nothing particularly wicked about their willingness to pay for your attention. But what does it say about us that we are willing to submit ourselves to their manipulations for the sake of a few hours of quickly-forgotten entertainment.
As with The Disappearance of Childhood, the Christian reader will find this a challenging book. Postman is not a believer and venerates man-centered Enlightenment thinking, and so he idealizes eighteenth-century rationalism for the wrong reasons. This shortcoming is mitigated by the fact that Postman offers no positive program for remedying the problems he identifies. The solution is left as an exercise to the reader, and so the Christian reader is free to build on his trenchant observations and insightful analyses as he ponders the Biblical alternative.
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