Technopoly

Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology has been on my shelf for 12 years. At the Asbury College faculty retreat in the fall of 1997, the Provost gave us all a copy of the book. It looked interesting to me then, but for some reason I’ve never gotten around to reading it until now.

It’s an excellent read, especially worthwhile for any educator interested in exploring the ramifications of the age we live in. It was published in 1993. While the book sat on my shelf, its author died of lung cancer in 2003. Time has shown it to be a prophetic book, and though its impact was greater when it was first published, it still has much light to shed on the present day.

Postman offers first a lens for reading the progression of culture from tool-using (in which tools remain firmly subordinated to the worldview and belief systems of those who use them), to technocratic (in which technology gains a life of its own and co-exists alongside the systems of belief — the “narratives” — that give a culture its coherence), to technopoly, in which technology becomes totalitarian. In a technopoly, technology overrides the stories and value-systems that give a culture its shared identity and moral order, redefining its terms, elevating “efficiency” and “progress” above all other values, and creating a whole new thought-world.

Of course that’s only the broadest outlines of Postman’s argument, made in the book’s first chapters. The rest examines aspects of how technopoly has taken hold and manifests itself in various areas, and concludes with a chapter on how it might be resisted through a stirring description of Postman’s educational plan.

The generally depressing reality described in this book is tempered not just by Postman’s constructive final chapter, but by his sense of humor. I’ll give just a few examples:

The fact is, there are very few political, social, and especially personal problems that arise because of insufficient information. Nonetheless, as incomprehensible problems mount, as the concept of progress fades, as meaning itself becomes suspect, the Technopolist stands firm in believing that what the world needs is yet more information.

Useless, meaningless statistics flood the attention of the viewer… For example: “Since 1984, the Buffalo Bills have won only two games in which they were four points ahead with less than six minutes to play.” Or this: “In only 17 percent of the times he has pitched at Shea Stadium has Dwight Gooden struck out the third and fourth hitters less than three times when they came to bat with more than one runner on base.” What is one to do with this or make of it?

We must keep in mind the story of the statistician who drowned while trying to wade across a river with an average depth of four feet.

Postman’s discussion is insightful and wide-ranging, and his view of education develops in much greater depth and detail the view of western liberal arts tradition I’ve touched on in previous posts here. His reflections on writing struck the nerve I’ve been thinking about lately; he also recalled to mind Wendell Berry — particularly in his discussion of the worship of quantification. (I thought of the poem in which Berry writes, “I take the side of life’s history against the coming of numbers.”)

There were a few things I hesitate to agree with. I always feel naive when writers speak of the decline of the “Christian narrative;” a little voice inside says meekly, “But I believe it. And lots of others do too. Their numbers are growing.” I think he means not that no one believes it anymore, but that the Christian story is no longer the majority moral authority in American culture. Science is, but it cannot answer the meaningful questions.

Flipping through the book, I find too many underlined passages and dog-eared pages to do it justice. I’m glad that Postman along with a number of other cultural critics (including Sven Birkirts) have stepped into the fray to offer a thoughtful response to the trends at work so pervasively in American culture today. They’re voices of sanity.

Postman was a firm supporter of public education, and even regarded it as “America’s principal instrument for correcting mistakes and for addressing problems that mystify and paralyze other social institutions.” That’s one of the very reasons I home school, actually. I’m not interested in the state working out its social agendas in my children’s hearts and minds. But Postman’s prescription for education is one I can get behind — in fact, I’m already putting it into practice: a curriculum with history at the center of all the subjects that fosters some critical distance and a restored sense of humanness in a technopolist age.