"Words are Entrusted to us as Equipment for our Life Together"

Part Three of our series on Neil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death

This post is the third in our series on Neil Postman’s classic book Amusing Ourselves to Death, which will celebrate its 40^th 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 previous post in this series here (and link back from it to the beginning of the series):

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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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Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash

It’s taken me a little longer than I hoped to get back to my reflections on Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, but I finally found time over the last few days to dig into the book’s next two chapters. (The last three weeks have been abundantly full, as the high school track team that I help to coach worked its way through the ups and downs of another championship season. But, as of Thursday night, the track season is over and I’m delighted to return now to a more normal schedule of activities.)

Chapters Three and Four of Amusing Ourselves to Death, entitled “Typographic America” and “The Typographic Mind” respectively, explore why print culture matters. Print culture as Postman defines it is a culture deeply formed by the printed word, including the accessibility of written texts that the printing press made possible. A contrast can be drawn between print culture and the eras of oral culture and the culture of the written word that preceded it, and the ages of television and the internet that have followed it.

In short, “Typographic America” explores the role that the printed word played in our nation’s formation. Postman, in fact, argues that “[The] Americans, among whom [Ben] Franklin lived were as committed to the printed word as any people who have ever lived” (31). Books, pamphlets, newspapers, and other printed materials in the early chapters of our nation’s history gave shape to a public discourse that had “a content: a semantic, paraphrasable, propositional content” (49). Even the oral discourse of the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he notes, deeply reflected the proliferation of the printed word. Postman summarizes his history of the emergence of the American print culture:

The influence of the printed word in every arena of public discourse was insistent and powerful not merely because of the quantity of printed matter, but because of its monopoly. This point cannot be stressed enough, especially for those who are reluctant to acknowledge profound differences in the media environments of then and now. One sometimes hears it said, for example, that there is more printed material available today than ever before, which is undoubtedly true. But from the seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century, printed matter was virtually all that was available. There were no movies to see, radio to hear, photographic displays to look at, records to play. There was no television. Public business was channeled into and expressed through print, which became the model, the metaphor and the measure of all discourse. The resonances of the lineal, analytical structure of print, and in particular of expository prose, could be felt everywhere (41).

At this point, it would be easy for some readers in the twenty-first century to wax nostalgic for this golden era of print culture. As we will find as we move further into the book, Postman does not do so, and I am convinced that neither should we. Language matters, and is the basis for a culture of civil discourse that is as vital in the church as it was in the earliest chapters of U.S. history. What we need instead is communities that take the written word seriously and who are committed to the sort of conversation that flows from this deep commitment to the written word. Cultivating this kind of community in our time, I’m convinced, will require disciplined – nearly monastic – practices of resistance to the temptation to abandon ourselves fully to the prevailing culture of screens. We cannot avoid screens, but we can, and I am convinced that we should, embody habits in our life together that reinforce that the visual media of screens is secondary to that of print media. The messy part of this work, of course, is adopting these sorts of habits gracefully in a way that is not legalistic, nor shaming of those persons in or around our congregations who have been deeply formed by screen culture.

Although Postman focuses in these two chapters on the formative role of the printed word in shaping American culture, he highlights throughout the key role that Christianity played in establishing this historical print culture. “It is to be understood,” he says, “that the Bible was the central reading matter in all households [in the seventeenth century United States]” (32). In later eras of this section of U.S. history, Postman emphasizes the role that preaching played in cultivating our nation’s print culture. He writes: “Unlike the principal figures in today’s ‘great awakening’ – Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart, et al. – yesterday’s leaders of revivalist movements in America were men of learning, faith in reason, and generous expository gifts. Their disputes with the religious establishments were as much about theology and the nature of consciousness as they were about religious inspiration” (54-55).

The media by which we communicate give shape to our communities by providing structures for how we talk together and the sorts of content that are crucial for our life together. I recently was reminded of a passage from Marilyn McEntyre’s essential book Caring For Words in a Culture of Lies (which eventually may be worth exploring in a similar series here on this Substack). She writes:

Caring for language is a moral issue. Caring for one another is not entirely separable from caring for words. Words are entrusted to us as equipment for our life together, to help us survive, guide, and nourish one another. We need to take the metaphor of nourishment seriously in choosing what we "feed on" in our hearts, and in seeking to make our conversation with each other life-giving. A large, almost sacramental sense of the import of words can be found in early English usage, where conversation appears to have been a term that included and implied much more than it does now: to converse was to foster community, to commune with, to dwell in a place with others. Conversation was understood to be a life-sustaining practice, a blessing, and a craft to be cultivated for the common good.

And to bring this passage from McEntyre’s book into the context of Postman’s research in chapters three and four, caring for words also requires our attention to the media by which these words are communicated. Because conversation matters to us as followers of Jesus, in the ways that McEntyre highlights, we also need to be attentive to both the form and the content of the words that feed us and feed our conversations, and as emphasized above doing so will require disciplined habits because the broader internet culture around us does little to help us in this careful cultivating of language.

And in closing, one important caveat. Cultivating communities that are attentive to the formative power of language is not the exclusive domain of the highly educated. Education can provide some useful tools for this work, but anyone who is willing can participate in it. Postman provides rich evidence in these chapters that in the golden era of print culture, people of all classes participated in American public discourse. “[No] literary aristocracy emerged in Colonial America,” he writes, “Reading was not regarded as an elitist activity, and printed matter was spread evenly among all kinds of people. A thriving, classless reading culture developed” (34). A crucial piece of our work as churches will be cultivating this sort of care for language, as an expression of God’s love and care for all humanity, not just the highly educated elite.