Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future

by Neil Postman

the most paradoxical one is his reference to “rearview mirror” thinking. All of us, he said, are speeding along a highway with our eyes fixed on the rearview mirror, which can tell us only where we have been, not what lies ahead.

In his journal, Søren Kierkegaard remarks that foresight is really hindsight, a reflection of the future revealed to the eye when it looks back upon the past.

Imagined futures are always more about where we have been than where we are going.

To forget our mistakes is bad. But to forget our successes may be worse.

Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill Is daily spun; but there exists no loom To weave it into fabric.

Nothing can be clearer than that we require a story to explain to ourselves why we are here and what our future is to be, and many other things, including where authority resides.

building a bridge to the new century. But to the question “What will we carry across the bridge?” they answer, “What else but high-definition TV, virtual reality, e-mail, the Internet, cellular phones, and all the rest that digital technology has produced?”

Marcus Aurelius said, “At every action, no matter by whom preferred, make it a practice to ask yourself, ‘What is his object in doing this?’ But begin with yourself; put this question to yourself first of all.”

Goethe told us, “One should, each day, try to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if possible, speak a few reasonable words.”

What I am driving at is that in order to have an agreeable encounter with the twenty-first century, we will have to take into it some good ideas.

If looking ahead means anything, it must mean finding in our past useful and humane ideas with which to fill the future.

But for all of this, their most luminous intellect, Plato, was the world’s first systematic fascist.

What else is history for if not to remind us about our better dreams?

am not suggesting that we become the eighteenth century, only that we use it for what it is worth and for all it is worth.

And so the eighteenth century is a kind of metaphor referring to the time, as Kant put it, when we achieved our release from our self-imposed tutelage.

But it was in the eighteenth century that the arguments were generated that made these inhumanities both visible and, in the end, insupportable.

All of this knowledge and its technological manifestations were the outgrowth of what we now call “rationalism.”

We might say that most rationalists turned against theology and priests rather than spirituality and God.

The relationship between rationalism and Christianity is a very complex one, expressed with some irony in Crane Brinton’s remark that “the Enlightenment is a child of Christianity—which may explain for our Freudian times why the Enlightenment was so hostile to Christianity.”

as we know, the Enlightenment produced two great republics—the United States and France. And more would follow.

Superstition, inherited “wisdom,” obedience to tradition, and supernatural metaphysics fell before the assumed power and authority of reason.

Happiness and peace and moral rectitude will be established here on Earth. And this can be done through the power of reason, which will do for all people what it allowed Newton and Locke to do: to understand the universe, to shape the environment, to control nature and themselves.

if we may say that Newton and Locke were the fathers of the Enlightenment, Bacon might be called its grandfather.

David Hume and Adam Smith argued that there existed a self-generating impulse of rising expectations that must lead to a society of continuous improvement.

We are indebted to Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet, and, of course, Jefferson, Madison, and Washington, for their calm and balanced sense of reason which led us, in the long run, to modern liberal societies.

It is only through love, tenderness, and beauty, he wrote, that the mind is made receptive to moral decency, and poetry is the means by which love, tenderness, and beauty are best cultivated.

The idea of progress, then, is one of the great gifts of the Enlightenment. The eighteenth century invented it, elaborated it, and promoted it, and in so doing generated vast resources of vitality, confidence, and hope.

Reason, when unaided and untempered by poetic insight and humane feeling, turns ugly and dangerous. Blake, Carlyle, Ruskin, and William Morris agreed. And their saying so is part of the gift of the Enlightenment.

It is more accurate and (as it happens) more useful to say that the eighteenth century, having invented the idea, then proceeded to express doubts about it in the form of significant questions: What is progress? How does it happen? How is it corrupted? What is the relationship between technological and moral progress?

The gift of the eighteenth century is to be found in the intelligence and vigor of the questions it raised about progress, a fact that was well understood by the best minds of the century that followed.

For all of Twain’s enthusiasm for the giantism of American industry, the totality of his work is an affirmation of pre-technological values.

And its reality was given special force by the great invention of the nineteenth century: the invention of invention. We learned how to invent things, and the question of why receded in importance.

The idea that if something could be done, it should be done was born in the nineteenth century.

In 1822, Charles Babbage announced that he had invented a machine capable of performing simple arithmetical calculations, and, in 1833, he produced a programmable machine that is the forerunner of the modern computer.

In studying nineteenth-century America, for example, one can almost hear the groans of religion in crisis, of mythologies under attack, of a politics and education in confusion. But the groans are not yet death throes.

It is enough to say that if Diderot, Adam Smith, and Jefferson had lived through what we have lived through, they could not possibly have believed in the friendly flow of history.

We have all become existentialists, which lays upon us responsibilities that once were shared by God and history.

I speak only on behalf of the application of quiet reason to the fury of technological innovation.

Having answered the question, What is the problem to which this technology is a solution?, it is wise to follow with the question, Whose problem is it?

We need to be very careful in determining who will benefit from a technology and who will pay for it. They are not always the same people.

There certainly does not exist compelling evidence that any manifestation of computer technology can do for children what good, well-paid, unburdened teachers can do.

It is not human nature we worry about here but rather what part of our humanness will be nurtured by technology.

have the impression that “community” is now used to mean, simply, people with similar interests, a considerable change from an older meaning: A community is made up of people who may not have similar interests but who must negotiate and resolve their differences for the sake of social harmony.

To use the term an “electronic town-hall meeting” similarly obscures the difference between an eighteenth-century, face-to-face gathering of citizens and a packaged, televised pseudo-event.

Nonetheless, I find it useful to ask of any technology that is marketed as indispensable, What problem does it solve for me? Will its advantages outweigh its disadvantages?

The period which is called “the Enlightenment”1 is also called “the Age of Prose.”

the modern novel, it should be said, is, for the most part, a creation of the Enlightenment.

The scientific revolution in the eighteenth century was, as much as anything else, a revolution in language.

Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte, who shared the beliefs that the natural sciences provide a method to unlock the secrets of both the human heart and the direction of social life, and that society can be rationally and humanely reorganized according to principles that social science will uncover.

clear thinking. Diderot, Voltaire, Swift, Johnson, Rousseau, Madison, Tocqueville, Jefferson—they are to exposition what Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, and Goldsmith are to the novel.