April 14, 2011--Ruined By Pleasure

A former New York University colleague and friend, Neil Postman, in 1985, published a book with the title, Amusing Ourselves to Death. In only 163 pages he takes on a huge issue--how, because of the proliferation of electronic media, we have become saturated with so many amusements that we have lost our capacity to engage in serious public discourse.

I have been looking at it again as I see the debasement of that discourse accelerating as well as discourse itself becoming transformed into its own form of entertainment.

The Bill O'Reilly's on the right and the Keith Olbermann's on the left are more entertainers than serious political commentators. All the recent flapping about Katie Couric's tenure as CBS evening news anchor has focused almost entirely on ratings (her "show" continues to wallow in third place), her loss of "perkiness," and how much leg she should appropriately show as the inheritor of the Walter Cronkite news throne.

Pick up a copy of Neil's book if you haven't read it. It explains a lot.

To give you a flavor of what he has to say, see this extended quote in which Postman draws a neat and telling distinction between George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. The latter, he claims, is the world which we are in danger of creating:

Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppressor, to admire the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared that we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared that we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

Sound familiar?