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

by Neil Postman

To write political philosophy did not require, of him or anyone else, the mastery of an arcane, specialized vocabulary. The language of the common person was deemed entirely suitable for the expression of philosophical ideas.

If one goes through the list of famous prose writers of the Enlightenment, one finds few who thought of themselves as professional authors; fewer, as philosophers; even fewer who made a living as either.

Bundled together in this paragraph is almost everything we mean by Enlightenment prose—the straightforwardness, the courage, the skepticism, the clarity.

Indeed, for the first forty years of America’s existence as a nation, all the presidents (excepting Washington), vice presidents, and secretaries of state were lawyers.

And it is this change that takes the name of postmodernism (sometimes post structuralism), because it calls into question some of the more significant “modern” assumptions about the world and how we may codify it—in other words, assumptions and ideas inherited from the Enlightenment.

In trying to comprehend more or less precisely what postmodernism is trying to teach us, I have found it near-impossible to locate two people who agree on what it is.

Einstein and his colleagues did not believe that words had “essential” meanings. They understood that language was a social convention and that both its structure and its content were not necessarily useful in understanding the nature of reality.

Indeed, the idea that we are, in a sense, imprisoned in a house of language is concisely expressed in Werner Heisenberg’s famous remark that we do not see nature as it is but only as a consequence of the questions we put to it. We might

What it comes down to (or up to) is that we do not and cannot experience reality bare. We encounter it through a system of codes (language, mathematics, art). The codes themselves have a shape, a history, and a bias, all of which interpose themselves between what we see there and what is there to be seen.

Scarcely any two nations speak the same language, or understand each other; and as to translations, every man who knows anything of languages knows that it is impossible to translate from one language into another, not only without losing a great part of the original, but frequently mistaking the sense.…6

inoculations against smallpox, sending astronauts to the moon and returning them safely to Earth, and two hundred million other procedures executed daily by sane people, they work because they are derived from sets of propositions whose ‘truths’ have been tested and shown to be in accord with our limited understanding of the structure of reality.”

Of course, if one does deny the universality of these “truths,” one must explain why some of them—for example, “those who govern must do so by the will of the governed”— appeal to people all over the world, why even the most repressive regimes will call themselves “a people’s democracy.”

To label an idea “Eurocentric” does not necessarily mean it does not have universal application.

To say that all reality is a social construction is interesting, indeed provocative, but requires, nonetheless, that distinctions be made between what is an unprovable opinion and a testable fact.

they ought to read Diderot, or Voltaire, Rousseau, Swift, Madison, Condorcet, or many of the writers of the Enlightenment period who believed that, for all of the difficulties in mastering language, it is possible to say what you mean, to mean what you say, and to be silent when you have nothing to say.

is possible to use language to say things about the world that are true—true, meaning that they are testable and verifiable, that there is evidence for believing.

The same purpose was pursued, especially in France, through the creation of salons—gatherings of aristocratic and middle-class people who shared ideas and new information in social settings.

As the century progressed, salons were established in many places, becoming of particular importance in Germany, Austria, and England.

The salons served especially well as media through which information about foreign lands could be shared.

The eighteenth century also introduced engineering schools, commercial schools for training businessmen in accounting and foreign languages, and medical and surgical colleges.

Everyone else regarded the ability to read as the key to the cultivation of social, political, and moral consciousness.

Literacy rates are notoriously difficult to assess, but there is sufficient evidence that between 1640 and 1700 the literacy rate for men in Massachusetts and Connecticut was somewhere between eighty-nine and ninety-five percent, quite probably the highest concentration of literate males to be found anywhere in the world at that time.

The settlers came to America as readers who believed that reading was as important in the New World as it was in the Old.

Beginning in the seventeenth century, a great epistemological shift had taken place in which knowledge of every kind was transferred to, and made manifest through, the printed page.

No one was ridiculed more in the eighteenth century, especially by Jonathan Swift, than the pedant, the person who collected information without purpose, without connection

Most dictionaries today are history books, describing how words have been used. Johnson meant his dictionary to be a law book, asserting how words ought to be used.

One did not give information to make another “informed.” One gave information to make another do something or feel something, and the doing and feeling were themselves part of a larger idea.

The change in the meaning of information was largely generated by the invention of telegraphy and photography in the 1840s.

There is no beginning, middle, or end in a world of photographs, as there is none implied by telegraphy. The world is atomized. There is only a present, and it need not be part of any story that can be told.

“mythinformation”—no lisp intended. It is an almost religious conviction that at the root of our difficulties—social, political, ecological, psychological—is the fact that we do not have enough information.

The point is that having successfully solved the problem of moving information continuously, rapidly, and in diverse forms, we do not know, for the most part, what to do with it or about it—except to continue into the twenty-first century trying to solve a nineteenth-century problem that has already been solved.

Which brings us to the question: What is information and how much of it do people need?

Information consists of statements about the facts of the world.

Facts are transformed into information only when we take note of them and speak of them, or, in the case of newspapers, write about them.

Statements about facts—that is, information—can be wro...

In fact, there is no problem older than this—how to know the difference between true and false statements.

Here, I am addressing a problem no culture has faced before—the problem of what to do with too much information.

My focus here is on how at least one medium—the newspaper—can assist in helping everyone overcome information glut.

There are newspapers whose editors do not yet grasp that in a technological world, information is a problem, not a solution.

As things stand now, at least in America, television and radio are media for information junkies, not for people interested in “because”

And there is no more fundamental requirement of a knowledge medium than that it make clear why we are being given information. If we do not know that, we know nothing worth knowing.

I mean by wisdom the capacity to know what body of knowledge is relevant to the solution of significant problems. Knowledge, as I have said, is only organized information. It is self-contained, confined to a single system of information about the world.

Knowledge cannot judge itself. Knowledge must be judged by other knowledge, and therein lies the essence of wisdom.

Editorials merely tell us what to think. I am talking about telling us what we need to know in order to think. That is the difference between mere opinion and wisdom.

to know what one needs to know to have an opinion is wisdom; which is another way of saying that wisdom means knowing what questions to ask about knowledge.

Wisdom does not imply having the right answers. It implies only asking the right questions.

“radical historicism.” To put it simply, which its advocates sometimes find hard to do, it is the claim that there are no ultimate truths, especially moral truths; that there is no transcendent authority to which we may appeal for a final answer to the question, Is this a right or wrong thing to do?

To those who take their god or gods to be an ultimate moral authority, there is no problem. They clear their path by claiming that the gods of others are wrong.

The construction of narratives is, therefore, a major business of our species; certainly, no group of humans has ever been found that did not have a story that defined for them how they ought to behave and why.

the American inheritors of the Enlightenment were philosophes, not philosophers. They were certainly not preoccupied with the mind and soul of the individual, or great theological and moral questions. They were concerned with society and its institutions.