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

by Neil Postman

Among many others, Franklin, Jefferson, Mason, Madison, Adams, Dr. Benjamin Rush, Joel Barlow (to whom Paine, on his way to a French prison, entrusted the manuscript of The Age of Reason), Manasseh Cutler, Joseph Priestley (who fled England for America), and, of course, Tom Paine were America’s answer to the great philosophes of Europe.

All of them—from Rush, who was a devout Christian, to Paine, who was hostile to traditional Christianity—believed in a Creator who intended humans to have inalienable and natural rights.

The references to nature’s God, the Creator, and Divine Providence in the Declaration of Independence are not mere rhetorical flourishes but a tribute to the ultimate source of authority in which all of the signers believed.

The American Enlightenment came somewhat later than its European counterpart, some scholars dating its beginnings in 1741, with the founding of the American Philosophical Society.

other words, the ideas of the American philosophes were borrowed from a variety of sources—ancient and recent—to which was added a special dimension because of the unique geography and history of the “New World.”

America was the testing ground of a new narrative intended to provide practical answers to what is “right”—morally, socially, and politically.

This is not a mistake the philosophes made. They proceeded with a narrative centered on skepticism, reason, and natural rights, to which they added the force of a divine principle.

But, doubts or no, all of them proceeded as if there is a Divine Providence granting authority for their actions. They understood that vulgar relativism—that is to say, the idea that values are mere historical prejudices—would lead to despair and inaction.

They believed that, as there is a physical order to the universe, there is also a moral order, and that humanity is, and has always been, in a quest to discover its details.

But the philosophes believed that, as science will gradually reveal our errors about the design of the universe and bring us closer to the truth, the maturing of our moral consciousness will do the same for our social life.

The purpose of a narrative is to give meaning to the world, not to describe it scientifically.

What we may learn from these two great philosophes, Einstein and Mill, is what they learned from their predecessors—that it is necessary to live as if there is a transcendent authority.

That there is a tendency as part of our nature toward our being “moral”—detesting wanton killing, honoring parents, caring for children, speaking truthfully, loving mercy, overcoming egotism, and all the other exhortations we find shared by sacred texts—is a legacy of the Enlightenment.

For it is clear that most Enlightenment philosophes understood that absolute certainty is an evil that chokes reason and perverts faith; is, in fact, the opposite of the religious spirit.

Their narrative had only to be sufficient to guide them to a path of righteousness as defined by reason and historical agreement.

The modern Christian apologist C. S. Lewis refers to “historical agreement” as the Tao, the summary of commands and prohibitions found in all collections of moral discourse from ancient Egypt to Babylonia to the Chinese analects to Homer’s Iliad to the Old and New Testaments.

It is also assumed that, as we proceed into a postmodern world, we are bereft of a narrative that can provide courage and optimism; that we are facing what Vaçlav Havel and others have called “a crisis in narrative.”

Where can we find such a narrative as Havel seeks? The answer, I think, is where we have always found new tales: in the older ones we have already been telling.

The great revolutions and revelations of the human past, and I include the Christian revelation, have all been great retellings, new ways of narrating ancient truths to encompass a larger world.

Science read as universal truth, not a human telling, degenerates to technological enslavement and people flee it in despair. Scripture read as universal Truth, not a human telling, degenerates to … to what? To Inquisition, Jihad, Holocaust—and people flee it in despair.

Childhood is not a biological necessity but a social construction.

Between 1750 and 1814, to take one example, there were produced 2,400 different titles of children’s books. Before that time, almost none.

Locke saw the connections between book learning and childhood, and proposed an education that, while it treated the child as a precious resource, nonetheless demanded rigorous attention to the child’s intellectual development and capacity for self-control.

Rousseau’s obsession with a state of nature and his corresponding contempt for “civilized values” brought to the world’s attention, as no one had done before him, the childhood virtues of spontaneity, purity, strength, and joy, all of which came to be seen as features to nurture and celebrate.

two intellectual strains of which the idea was composed. We might call them the Lockean, or the Protestant, conception of childhood, and the Rousseauian, or the Romantic, conception.

On the other hand, Rousseau wrote in Emile that “plants are improved by cultivation, and man by education.” Here is the child as a wild plant, which can hardly be improved by book learning.

To Rousseau, education was essentially a subtraction process; to Locke, an addition process.

Neither Locke nor Rousseau ever doubted that childhood required the future-oriented guidance of adults.

But if, by seven or eight or even eleven and twelve, they have access to the same information as do adults, how do adults guide their future?

Children are neither blank tablets nor budding plants. They are markets; that is to say, consumers whose needs for products are roughly the same as the needs of adults.

discussed. On the other hand, why should it be? The whole idea of schooling, now, is to prepare the young for competent entry into the economic life of a community so that they will continue to be devoted consumers.

In this conception, a child’s mind is not the pages of a book, and a child is not a plant to be pruned. A child is an economic creature, not different from an adult, whose sense of worth is to be founded entirely on his or her capacity to secure material benefits, and whose purpose is to fuel a market economy.

As for the first, it is as obvious as it is depressing that the structure and authority of the family have been severely weakened as parents have lost control over the information environment of the young.

If parents wish to preserve childhood for their own children, they must conceive of parenting as an act of rebellion against culture.

For example, for parents merely to remain married is itself an act of disobedience and an insult to the spirit of a throwaway culture in which continuity has little value.

Similarly, to insist that one’s children learn the discipline of delayed gratification, or modesty in their sexuality, or self-restraint in manners, language, and style is to place oneself in opposition to almost every social trend.

most rebellious of all is the attempt to control the media’s access to one’s children.

Those parents who resist the spirit of the age will contribute to what might be called the Monastery Effect, for they will help to keep alive a humane tradition.

the liberal tradition has tended to encourage the decline of childhood by its generous acceptance of all that is modern, and a corresponding hostility to anything that tries to “turn back the clock.”

It is permissible, I think, for those of us who disapprove of the arrogance of fundamentalism to borrow some of their memories.

There are economic and political interests that would be better served by allowing the bulk of a semiliterate population to entertain itself with the magic of visual computer games, to use and be used by computers without understanding.

However, were our schools to grasp that a computer is not a tool but a philosophy of knowledge, we would indeed have something to teach.

After all, the printing press shattered the cohesion of a world religious community, destroyed the intimacy and poetry of the oral tradition, diminished regional loyalties, and created a cruelly impersonal industrial system. And yet, Western civilization survived with some of its humane values intact and was able to forge new ones, including those associated with the nurturing of children.

Voltaire favored an “enlightened monarchy.” Diderot wanted a “constitutional monarchy” (and tried to convert Catherine the Great to that view).

I am interested in making the point that any sentence that begins with “Democracy is …,” as if there is some essential, God-given meaning to the word, misleads us.

We must keep in mind that the Founders (Gore Vidal refers to them as the Inventors) were men of wide learning and refined intellect, and were not without what we would call “elitist” tendencies.

It should also be remembered that in America’s beginnings, citizens did not directly vote for the president, vice-president, or members of the Senate; and, as noted earlier, the Founders favored a Roman conception of republicanism more than the Greek “democracy.”

Aristotle in his contention that democracy is best for small city-states, oligarchy for medium-sized states, and monarchy for large states; that is to say, that there is a relationship between the kind of government that is desirable and the means of communication that are available.

John Stuart Mill dwelt on this point, arguing that the active participation of the governed in the processes of government is an essential component of a democratic system. “The food of feeling,” he wrote, “is action.… [L]et a person have nothing to do for his country, and he will not care for it.”

Political indifference is the death of democracy.