A Jewish prophet of the 1980s would be horrified to see that we didn’t heed his warnings
Neil Postman’s 1984 ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’ anticipated our image-saturated, post-literate world
A close-up view of the NBC television control room screens during a 1988 Summer Olympics broadcast. Photo by Getty Images
By Robert Zaretsky October 1, 2024
On Oct. 2, 1984, Neil Postman, a professor at New York University, gave the keynote address at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The fair’s theme, not surprisingly, was the novel that had given that same year such existential import: George Orwell’s 1984.
Yet Postman came not to praise Orwell, but instead to raise the name of a different author. Western liberal countries did not live under the shadow of Big Brother, he declared, but instead under the influence of “Soma,” as Aldous Huxley suggested in Brave New World. While Orwell feared a world that banned books, Huxley feared a world where no one bothered to read books. In Orwell’s world, pain is used to terrify the populace; in Huxley’s world, pleasures are used to sedate it — both worlds shape a citizenry that, either too deadened or too distracted, complies with the powers that be.
Forty years later we can take full measure of Postman’s insight. His Frankfurt address was expanded and, under the title Amusing Ourselves to Death, was published the following year. Its impact was tidal, rocking both academic and popular culture. (It rippled across Roger Waters, who issued his album Amused to Death long before he began to issue his serial inanities on Israel and Jews.)
Waters is probably unaware that Postman, who died in 2003, was born into a Jewish family on the Lower East Side. Though not observant, his parents sent him to Hebrew school because the teacher was very poor. It was, Postman recalled in Myrna and Harvey Frommer’s oral history Growing Up Jewish in America, “a good deed, a form of tzedakah.” Postman’s book also serves as a kind of tzedakah written to open our eyes and see what the television screen — he was writing well before the advent of the Internet, iPhones, and influencers — has done both to world and to us.
In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman analyzes (and agonizes) over the rupture in human history between the written word and televised image. Crucially, his intellectual mentor was Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian academic who, when not making cameos in Woody Allen films, was making famous the phrase “the medium is the message.” Postman, like McLuhan, argues that the meaning of any statement resides not in the statement itself, but instead with its delivery system — i.e., its medium.
During what Postman calls the Age of Typography, the medium of the printed word cultivated the skills required to manage our knowledge. There was nothing inevitable or natural about our turn to reading. It entails the hard but essential work of staying still and focused while we draw meaning from markings on a page. It trains us to follow a line of reasoning and know when that line has been crossed or lost, to distinguish between false and true propositions and to identify holes in logic before we trip and fall into them.
The decoding of the markings on a page — in a word, drawing meaning from words — not only informs us, but also forms our perception of the world. But this particular form of understanding changed, perhaps forever, with the metastasis of the screen. The problem with television, Postman argued, is not that it is entertaining — he insisted he loved “junk television” — but that “it has made entertainment itself the natural format for all representation of experience.”
Once you pull away from the screen you are now staring at, think about the consequences of this dizzying pivot in human history. Serious activities like news reporting and long analyses, political debate and topical discussion — all essential for a healthy democracy — have been undone and made unserious by the nature of the medium of television. For Postman, the two most terrifying words uttered in this medium are “Now…this.” This phrase, uttered by talking heads on the evening news, marks the shift from one subject, even the most despairing, to another subject, even the most delightful.
This rupture in logical and ethical reasoning has widened with new forms of content providers like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. Coming of age in this fragmented world of images which cascade non-stop across their personal screens and are disconnected from what precedes and what follows, even my best students struggle with reading books. No less importantly, they also struggle, as do their professors, present company included, to make sense of events unfolding across their screens.
This issue has become all-consuming since the Hamas massacre last October and the Israeli invasion that soon followed. Susie Linfield, like Postman also a professor at NYU, recently observed, “Images, more and more, are used as a kind of incitement to violence rather than a revelation of it.” Her great fear is that viewers of these images are “becoming addicted to the violence of the images without thinking about what’s behind them.” Or conversely, as Susan Sontag argued, most of us “tune out images of the same traumas and horrors day after day, especially if the images represent people and places detached from the lived experience of the viewer and this erodes the emotional power of the images.”
It is hardly necessary to observe that Postman would be appalled by the horror of events in Gaza no less than in Israel. As a social scientist who believed that he had a professional duty to better the society he studied, he would also have protested the way in which images from this war have been mediated by our screens. He would have almost certainly sought ways to offer insights, or tzedakah, to better understand our current moral and intellectual confusion.
Several years ago, Lance Strate, a professor of communications at Fordham, made a nuanced case for the Judaic worldview of his late teacher and friend. He underscored the importance of an early passage in Amusing Ourselves to Death, where Postman refers to the Second Commandment. He had long been perplexed, Postman writes, that God would insert a prohibition against the making of graven images in what otherwise was a series of ethical laws. Perhaps, he suggests, God knew that to accept an abstract and universal deity, the Israelites first needed to break the habit of drawing pictures or making statues. If the God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, iconography had to become a ‘blasphemy.’”
Whether the images are graven or pixelated, Neil Postman has given us the means, though the printed word, to grasp just how blasphemous they have become.
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