A Community Filled with the Radiant Love of the Spirit
Translating the truth of Christ into this dark, technological age (Part Two of a series on Neil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death)
This post is the second in our series on Neil Postman’s classic book Amusing Ourselves to Death, which will celebrate its 40th anniversary later this year. In anticipation of this occasion, this series focuses on re-reading and reflecting on the book and its relevance today. You can read the first post in this series here:
My book, The Virtue of Dialogue, is now available, and is a helpful backdrop for understanding the sorts of reflections that get posted here on The Conversational Life.
“[Although] culture is a creation of speech, it is recreated anew by every medium of communication – from painting to hieroglyphs to the alphabet to television.”
- Neil Postman
Just as God spoke creation into existence, Neil Postman suggests that humankind also speaks life and culture into existence, and our communication media provide forms for the possibilities in which that culture might emerge. In an oral culture that has no technologies for writing, or printing, or broadcasting, a message is tightly coupled with the voice, and thus the embodied life, of the one who spoke its words. And with each layer of new technologies for communicating, messages become further removed from the embodied life of their human source, and the possibility for manipulation, illusion, and difficulty in discerning the truth of a message grows exponentially.
This observation is central to Postman’s second chapter, “Media as Epistemology.” (Epistemology is the philosophy of knowing, or how we discern if something is true. And for anyone reading the book along with my reflections, these first couple of chapters are pretty heavy on philosophy, but they do serve to lay a foundation for his reflections in the rest of the book.) He writes; “My argument is … that a major new medium changes the structure of discourse; it does so by encouraging certain uses of intellect, by favoring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a certain kind of content – in a phrase, by creating new forms of truth-telling” (27).
A important corollary of Postman’s observation here – which pushes back against the Luddite tendency not only to resist new technologies, but also to operate as if they did not exist – is that society’s structure of discourse and its epistemologies have indeed changed, even for those who object to the new medium of communication. There can be benefits, of course, from resisting “a major new medium,” but we need to understand that once a medium has saturated society, we ultimately live and communicate in the world dictated by that new medium.
As highlighted in the introductory post to this series, we have likely undergone two shifts in major new communication media since Postman’s book was published 40 years ago – with the rise of the internet and then, more recently, social media. It is worth emphasizing here, as sociologist Hartmut Rosa has argued, the increasing rapidity with which these shifts are coming. The era dominated by print as the primary medium of communication lasted a few hundred years (precisely how long is contingent upon the ambiguous question of when it achieved saturation and was established as the preeminent communication medium), the subsequent era of television lasted less than 50 years, the internet era’s era of preeminence lasted less than two decades (and possibly as little as a single decade).
Set in this historical context of technological acceleration and in the context of Postman’s observation that epistemological shifts accompany shifts in communication media, it is little wonder that we struggle to have conversations today and that the conversations we do have tend to be so inflammatory! The elders of our age have lived within four different communication eras, and the vast majority of adults (let’s say those of age 30 or more) have lived within three eras.
As the authors of the recent book, The Shape of Our Lives, have reminded us (full disclosure: I am Executive Editor of Englewood Press, which published this book) these shifts in communication media and epistemologies form us both personally and socially. We need to acknowledge our formation as part of a society marked by these rapid shifts in communication, but at the same time also remember our formation in Christ as the people of God, a community on the margins whose means of communication and epistemologies never fully align with that of the dominant culture. (It’s too far afield for me to explore in this post what the distinctives of Christlike communication and epistemology might be, but this question is one that deserves significant reflection at this point in history.)
What I do want to explore briefly here is how we live faithfully at this moment, given our dual-formation noted above?
In thinking about this question, I am reminded of Willie Jennings’s interpretation of the Pentecost story in his Acts commentary. To paraphrase Jennings, when the Holy Spirit is poured out, we speak a language that is not our own, and we speak within epistemologies that are not our own. “The Miracle of Pentecost is less in the hearing and much more in the speaking,” he writes, “Disciples speak in the mother tongues of others, not by their own design but by the Spirit’s desire” (27). Our work as a community filled with the Holy Spirit will always be a work of translation, and this is grueling work, but we do it, as Jennings notes, out of a love for those in the culture into which we are speaking.
The truth of Jesus, to which we bear witness, is above all incarnational, that is to say embodied. Although we are speaking – via translation – into this highly technological moment in history, and although we likely will use contemporary technologies to some degree or another, our message is of Jesus as truth, resisting illusion, and of the centrality of bodies (created by and in the image of God) in this increasingly disembodied age.
Communication media are always about the masses, and fundamentally about power and control within a society. Seizing this sort of power is an ever-present temptation for the people of God, but it was a temptation that Jesus explicitly rejected in the wilderness and throughout his lifetime and that we likewise should reject. (Although the sad reality is that many people throughout history who claim the name of Christ have succumbed to this temptation, including the Christian nationalists of our day.) As part of our constant work of translation in the Spirit, we use these media, but never for their intended purposes of domination and control. We use these media to bear witness to the propaganda and illusions that they produce (recall Donald Trump as the supreme icon of illusion, as highlighted in the previous post in this series), and to invite our fellow humans into a deeper, embodied life that is rooted and bears fruit primarily in local faith communities.
In following Christ’s refusal to seize power, God’s people will always be a community on the margins, but at the same time a community filled with the radiant love of the Spirit that can speak compellingly – in translations of sorts – to those who know no culture other than the dominant culture of the day.
I love that last sentence!
I’m going to need to share that quote!