Understanding the Present Empire of Illusion

Launching a Series of 40th Anniversary Reflections on Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death.

In November of this year, Neil Postman’s classic book Amusing Ourselves to Death will celebrate its 40^th anniversary. In anticipation of this occasion, this new Substack series will focus on re-reading and reflecting on the book and its relevance today.

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.

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I first read Amusing Ourselves to Death in my college years; a mere decade after its original release. I can’t remember exactly why I picked it up, but it may have been required reading for an honors seminar on technology and culture that I took with one of my favorite professors. (What I do remember from that course is that Wendell Berry was the central writer that we read that semester. This class wasn’t my introduction to Berry, but it was my first deep immersion into his work.) I’ve probably re-read through Postman’s book once or twice since this initial reading, and it is one that often comes to mind.

Not surprisingly, Postman’s book released to a mixed reception of appreciation and skepticism. The New York Times, for instance, covered the book twice in the first month of its publication, and both writers exhibited this mixed reaction. (Here are gift links to both of these reviews: Books of the Times column by Walter Goodman -and- Anatole Broyard’s review in the NYT Book Review.)

Although Broyard’s tone is mostly critical, he does, near the end of his review, strike a prescient note that evokes the present phenomenon of doomscrolling:

Much of ''Amusing Ourselves to Death'' is true, but it's not the whole truth and nothing but the truth. For most people, watching television may be what psychotherapists call ''the presenting symptom,'' the visible disturbance that stands in for a deeper torment. It's possible that many people turn to television not in the hope of entertainment but in despair, after all else has failed. Freud called religion ''the universal obsessional neurosis of mankind''; it might not be too hyperbolical to call television the universal depression of our time.

Broyard also states quite elegantly why this book continues to be a significant one for me personally, and for the basic themes of this Substack:

Television, according to Mr. Postman, has evolved or metastasized from a way of looking to a way of thinking. It has infected our epistemology, the way we arrive at knowledge. In making ''entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience,'' television has altered public discourse. ''All culture is a conversation,'' and the quality of this conversation depends on the vocabulary and the conditions in which it is held. (Emphasis added.)

In this vein, my comments about the book over the next few posts will largely focus on the effects that television, and its more recent technological heirs – e.g., the internet and social media – have had on public discourse, the way that we talk with one another in our local communities and in American society at large.

Postman begins the book with a foreword that has become renowned over the last few decades. In it, he contrasts the dystopian visions of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley:

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 oppression, to adore 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 the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance (xix).

He concludes the foreword with the stunning projection: “This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”

Forty-some years after Postman put these words to paper, it is not at all clear that Huxley’s projection has won out. Yes, I tend to agree with Postman’s sense that Huxley’s vision is predominant in the direction of our technological society, and we certainly are more deeply entrenched in the sort of mindlessness that disturbed Postman about the medium of television. But, on the other hand, we are presently faced with an Orwellian sort of government that lusts for fascism; gushes all manner of lies and doublespeak; and seems to be intensely fearful of books and the sort of thoughtful research that goes into their production (Consider, for instance, that assaults on science and medicine are at the forefront of the present administration’s agenda.)

For a sort of guidepost along the historical journey from Postman to the present, one might read Chris Hedges’s captivating 2009 book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. Writing specifically about professional wrestling, but with resonance in many other spheres of society, Hedges writes:

We are chained to the flickering shadows of celebrity culture, the spectacle of the arena and the airwaves, the lies of advertising, the endless personal dramas, many of them completely fictional that have become the staple of news, celebrity gossip, New Age mysticism, and pop psychology. ... Those who manipulate the shadows that dominate our lives are the agents, publicists, marketing departments, promoters, script writers, television and movie producers, advertisers, video technicians, photographers, bodyguards, wardrobe consultants, fitness trainers, pollsters, public announcers, and television news personalities who create the vast stage for illusion. They are the puppet masters. No one achieves celebrity status, no cultural illusion is swallowed as reality without these armies of cultural enablers and intermediaries (15-16)

Donald Trump, of course, is perhaps the supreme icon of our age of illusion. If you want to understand his rise over the last four decades that culminated in his two terms as president, read Postman’s book and Hedges’s too.

It’s tempting to vilify Trump, but his ascendance was driven by us – that is, by the currents of technological society in the United States. Without television, and without the internet, there would be no President Trump. Indeed, there would be no Donald Trump period, or at least not in the flashy, gold-encrusted manner that he has come to be known.

And so it is with this lens that we will consider Postman’s book. And I should emphasize that this exploration is not primarily a partisan one. Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and most politicians of both parties, have all thrived through the illusory nature of our increasingly technological society. One might adapt the Chris Hedges quote above about celebrity status to observe that: “No one succeeds in Washington without feeding on the tools of illusion.” But none have been more successful at doing so than our current president. And if we want to see our society head in a different direction, we will need to understand how we have gotten into this mess in the first place, a question that will drive this series on Neil Postman’s book.