Amusing Ourselves to Death

There’s been a lot of talk about technology in the evangelical blogosphere lately.  Several of the blogs I visit on a regular basis have had interesting and informative posts about the role of technology in our lives.  Challies, Desiring God, and Al Mohler’s blog are a few such blogs.  Their posts have been a timely addition to the myriad of thoughts that were already swarming around in my head about this very topic.   Recently, I read Neil Postman’s classic book, Amusing Ourselves to Death and right now I am in the process of reading The Dumbest Generation by Mark Bauerlein.  I thought I would summarize what I learned from Postman(I’ll finish Bauerlein before I comment on his book), who wrote back in the eighties before the advent of cell-phones, ipods, and the internet, but whose message has proven very prophetic.   His main thrust was that technology is not neutral.  “The medium is the message,” Postman postulates, quoting another social critic, Marshall McLuhan.  Postman insists that there is “a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture.”  With television, as it was in the eighties when Postman wrote the book, now being the dominant form of communication, American culture has changed, and not for the better.  Postman goes on to demonstrate how journalism, politics, religion, and education have been negatively impacted by the onslaught of a television culture.  Fast moving images as compared to slow moving print have all but eroded our ability to reflect, think critically, and appreciate genuine beauty.  We now only know how to be entertained and that is what we expect from our news, our politicians, our preachers, and our teachers.

Eerily true.   I’ve seen it firsthand when it comes to education.   The majority of my students this past school year wanted to be entertained.  They watched me like a television, but I expected something from them, unlike a television.  They couldn’t turn me off, there were no commercial breaks, and they couldn’t flip the channel when they were bored.  And even when I was as exciting and passionate as possible, well, I learned you just can’t compete with the latest tween show on the Disney channel or the latest high-tech video game.   Having worked with my husband in full-time  ministry for many years as well, it isn’t too difficult to see it among some church members either.  Serious expositional preaching.  No way.  People want skits, jokes, exciting power-point presentations, and Christianity-lite.   Postman, a non-Christian, states, “I believe I am not mistaken in saying that Christianity is a demanding and serious religion.  When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether.”   Postman, also does a good job contrasting the preaching of a preacher of the past like Jonathan Edwards to modern day television preachers like Pat Robertson or Robert Schuller.   Although the names have changed, the game certainly hasn’t and we can easily substitute Joel Osteen and Joyce Meyers for Robertson and Schuller.  We no longer live in the Age of Exposition, but in the Age of Show Business, and there’s no business but show business, quips Postman.    What about politics?  It doesn’t take much insight to realize that  rarely does anyone discuss serious issues in a serious way for a serious length of time anymore.   Sound  bites and photo-ops are about all the debate and discussion we encounter in the political arena.   Postman compares this to 150 years ago and asks  if  we could honestly imagine anyone in today’s culture sitting for seven hours and listening to the famous debates that took place between Lincoln and Douglas.    And as for news media?  Postman made me laugh out loud when he called TV journalists “talking hairdos.”    That immediately conjured up images of a channel here in Boston, Channel 7.  They perfectly fit that description.  Postman says that it is more important to be “likable” than “credible”  when it comes to reporting news.  He also complains that the stories are so fragmented, with so little time spent on any one story, and commercial breaks interrupting any possibility of serious reflection on them, that there is no coherent, contextual understanding of what happens in our world today.

“We are a culture overwhelmed by irrelevance, incoherence,and impotence,”  remarks Postman.  Postman, I am sure, wanted to save our deteriorating  culture from this.  That was his purpose in writing this book.  I, too, care about culture, but in a different way than Postman.  I know that only Christ can save culture.  He came to save the people of culture from their sin and restore them to a relationship with God.  The “irrelevance, incoherence, and impotence” of our culture is a direct result of the sin Christ came to redeem.  Postman concludes this book with a chilling vision from Aldous Huxley’s book, Brave New World, where Huxley tries to tell us “that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.”    Scary, isn’t it?  But as a Christian, my life is centered on eternal truths, such as heaven and hell, and they are not trivial matters.   They are weighty realities that give me much to ponder on and have a direct bearing on how my life is lived.  “Joy is the serious business of Heaven, ” is how C.S. Lewis puts it.  And also of earth.  How sad if we amuse ourselves to death, culturally and intellectually, but how utterly tragic is the possibility of amusing ourselves to death – spiritually, eternally!