The Endearing Irascibility of Neo-Luddism and Its Ambiguous Place on America's Current Political Compass
The prolific yet niche mid-to-late 20th century media theorist and critic Neil Postman was a technology skeptic whose work some are returning in our technologic age.
Neil Postman, active between 1950-2003, is America's lovable Luddite. He is unique in that his is of the thoughtful and erudite variety, but curmudgeonly around technology nonetheless! A prolific author, thoughtful pedagogue, and idiosyncratic theorist, Postman draws heavily from Marshall McLuhan’s work and “the medium is the message” concept in his writing. Postman’s interests were quite concentrated and led him to help found the field of media ecology. He is also a sort of dinosaur of a different era - largely a challenge to decode for contemporary audiences who are used to filtering thinkers into right and left ideological camps. He simultaneously appears both a free-thinking liberal and cranky conservative. Postman had overtly progressive commitments concerning the importance of education in a democracy and educational policy generally yet held deeply Romantic notions about human capacity and harbored elite cultural sensibilities. These latter sentiments animate ideas that are hard not to label reactionary, though some of this is due to wild and sometimes incomprehensible shifts in the ideological valence of ideas overtime. Considered together, Postman’s idiosyncrasies make him an interesting read even when he’s serving up brutal technological critiques, which are surely unlikely to find acolytes in the era of smart phones and social media.
Although I was introduced to Postman’s work in high school, it had been a longtime since I had returned to it. But due to the free availability of some of his work on Audible and the increasingly pitched debate about the sociopolitical effects of social media in our current discourse, I decided to listen to Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992). Technopology is a sequel of sorts to Postman's most famous work, Amusing Ourselves to Death, which argued that television had degraded public discourse into a form of entertainment. Technopoly expands the scope to this argument to all manifestations of technology, asserting every innovation drives changes in human psychology and behavior. He argues that we have surrendered all the important processes of human decision-making to mechanistic and algorithmic methods and that this is socially and individually impoverishing. He then proceeds to somewhat implicitly and incompletely argue that certain technologies are materially better than other in terms of developing a robust, healthy culture. For instance, Postman favors the written words over audiovisual forms of communication. The work is largely theoretical and rhetorical. Postman isn’t marshaling tons of data or doing any quantitative analysis to support his claims, but this of course would be surrendering to the technocratic assumption he is critiquing. It is Postman declaring war on the engineering mentality of Americans using the best of the tools the humanities have to offer.
Technopology is a wide-ranging work, moving through a number of important topics in Postman’s direct and concentrated style. As mentioned above, his perspectives on technology are interestingly heterodox when digested from within today hyperpolarized discourse, though in some ways cross-ideological critiques of technology are still shared and these sentiments are recognizable yet distinct here. Postman's aesthetics are prescriptively elitist and traditional yet his politics are seemingly socialist or at least oriented toward working-class material concerns. Today, we would place Postman in the anti-”Trust the Science” camp or at least firmly with David Hume and the irresolvability of the is/ought question. For example, he dedicates a portion of Technopoly to criticizing "scientism," which he defines as,
Not merely the misapplication of techniques such as quantification to questions where numbers have nothing to say; not merely the confusion of the material and social realms of human experience; not merely the claim of social researchers to be applying the aims and procedures of natural science to the human world [but also] the desperate hope, and wish, and ultimately the illusory belief that some standardized set of procedures called ‘science’ can provide us with an unimpeachable source of moral authority.
In our present and recently pandemic times, tweeting the above quote would be liable to get one labeled as a dangerous right-wing crank by many, especially by public health professionals. Even from a right-of-center perspective, I think Postman's dismissal of the possibility of consilience among the natural and social sciences is flippant and unwise. The application of the scientific method to social and human questions isn't necessarily a problem. In fact, there are growing and exciting fields of research at the boundaries of biological, psychological, and social science right now (e.g. sociogenomics). Problems arise when strong conclusions are drawn from poorly designed studies, limited sets of data, flimsy analyses, and fallacious statistical practices. It is this lack of rigor and epistemic humility underlying many technocratic governing decisions that contribute to political calamity and profligacy not the application of science to social problems. Nonetheless, I am sympathetic to parts of Postman's critique. Some technocratic failures also arise from ignorance of traditional and aesthetic profundity, especially the kind provided by the Western canon of philosophy and literature. Postman relishes pointing this fact out, delving deep into important human lessons drawn from great literature. These asides are some of the best content the book has to offer.
It is unfortunate that Postman is not around today to comment on our current affairs. I’m sure he’d be horrified for many reasons, and I’m sure I’d find many of his ideas misguided or plainly incorrect. However, I’d be interested to see his analysis of some of the success stories of technocratic rule. For instance, what would Postman say about Bernanke’s handling of the 2008 credit crisis or Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s "Nudge" approach (and behavioral economics generally)? Although neither example is above critique, both can reasonably be cited as success stories for technocracy. But taking the most capacious and favorable view of Postman’s claim, it in some sense must be true. There are plenty of civilizational, social, psychological, behavioral, and artistic questions that cannot be resolved definitively by science, innovation, technology, or technocracy. Most of these are eternal questions that will never and can never be answered though, and thus it would be wise for science to cede them to the humanities.
Neil Postman's Technopoly is a demure polemic about the cultural perils attendant to technology itself and the reliance technocratic solutions to human problems. Postman's thesis makes him both a bit of a crank and a prophet, who is likely to appear all around prickly to contemporary "very online" audiences. Despite this, I think Technopoly is eminently readable and engaging. It it an intellectual stretching of sorts and a necessary reminder to not thoughtless default to the easy solutions proffered by tech. I hope that Technopoly makes it onto the syllabi of many high school and college courses just like Amusing Ourselves to Death has.