november 29th, 2025 | 40 years
The publishing of little known media theorist’s work on entertainment’s disastrous intersection with politics, religion, and culture, Amusing Ourselves to Death was met with little applause then and (as we’ll ponder together today through this piece) now.
A polemic against entertainment with the foundations of civil life as the stakes?
Chicken little had a greater chance at giving a people pause when he cried wolf.
Of course, among the burgeoning fields of media theory and digital ecology his work was lauded. He stepped into a stream of brilliance flowing from thinkers like Marshall McLuhan, Lewis Mumford, Walter Ong, and others from before the previous century who had witnessed early signs of societal decay from the Industrial Revolution. Experts understood his wisdom and recognized the impending cliff culture barreled towards with every added device on american Christmas lists.
Postman would warn us again of our Technopoly’s dire developments seven years later in his next work and would turn his seemingly forlorn attention to the next generation in The End of Education when the tenth anniversary of Amusing rolled around in 1995. In this way, Postman’s attitude in the decade following the release of his magnum opus could be viewed as a bell curve of wariness (Amusing, ’85), despair (Technopoly, ‘92), and apathy (Education, ’95) as the once self-assured prophet witnessed the rise of Apple, pre-iPhone, the ever-presence of Microsoft, and the flourishing of a start-up-centered economy seeding companies with aplomb like Netflix, Amazon, and Google until his death in 2003.
To view Postman’s influence in light of that continuum is to ignore the bubbling awareness of an inescapable solution that presented itself in his final work. This solution may have even shaped Postman’s conclusion of hope as his analysis of the problem showed an increase in a multi-faceted premise of distress.
Thirty years following the close of this spiritual trilogy of books, we are, in some ways, left with the handbag.
The problems Postman defined have been amplified. In this, he receives vigorous nods (not applause, then as today) and his work acts as an autopsy report does to a body already decomposing, the details of the report hardly changing the demise of their subject.
The despair & distress win out in any accounting of the ledger of harms we have accrued in face of the absence of implementing Postman’s solutions. We could list the ways our failure to turn the ship manifests using terms like conspiracy theories, fake news, political partisanship, mental health crisis, epidemic of loneliness, declining attention span, decreasing IQs, and digital addiction. We could count the deaths, bodily & relational, political & historic, spiritual & natural. We could witness daily atrocities of the deformed character of social life in the West.
We could despair.
Despair is a unique thing because of its relationship to relationships;
Despair is caused by a loss of hope, and
Hope is a unique product of communion in community.
As connected creatures made for relationship, we place our trust (and ultimately, hope) in those that surround us.
It follows that a method for navigating despair is navigating it together.
Finding Pathways to walk with others who see the same things we do.
One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds…
Aldo Leopold
Thinkers like these give the voice of a prophet to those that seek to wound and the comfort of a friend to those who seek to heal.
Reading can be a way to walk with others who see as we do (find Karen Swallow Prior & Alan Jacob’s writing on solidarity in story).
Reading doesn’t shy away from showing us new ways to see (find Jorge Luis Borges’ writing on reading for the ambiance here).
And in the face of the digital despair of our time, you can find no better guide and friend for the path than Neil Postman.
November 29th of 2025.
Read & walk alongside Pathway Two, originally laid with the prescience of one who walked from despair to hope and saw a solution for our time as all time.
