Neil Postman

The Weekly Wrap: March 23-29

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woman in white crew neck t shirt in a bookstore wrapping books
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Becoming Real

An image of some tattered old books brought to mind this quote from The Velveteen Rabbit: on how one becomes Real:

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

We often take what it means for stuffed animals to become Real and apply it to people. Hair, eyes, joints, shabbiness–by those tokens I’m becoming more real all the time! Much of this for stuffed animals comes down to being beloved companions. And I suspect that whatever “Realness” there is in me could not be apart from my wife and other loving companions.

But I mentioned books. Certainly they are already real, tangible objects. However there are books with many words on many pages that sit on my shelves that are little more than that. Then again, other books have become “Real” to me. I’ve come to live in Middle-earth, the ancient biblical world, “The Road Not Taken.” Most of the works of C.S. Lewis are “Real.” The pages are yellowed and marked up, the cover worn and curled.

The richness of reading consists at least in part of those books that become Real for us. One reading is not enough. But during first readings, we hear the book’s invitation. And something inside us answers, “I want to know you better.” You know a book has become real when it filters into your conversation. You describe a particularly hospitable home as like Rivendell. Or you refer to those times of encountering the Transcendent that changed you as “burning bushes.”

Do you have books that have become real? If not, are there books that resonated deeply whose invitation to know them better you’ve yet to heed. In answering that call, not only will some books become Real. You will as well.

Five Articles Worth Reading

One of the most “Real” writers I’ve encountered is Flannery O’Connor. This week marked the centennial of her birth. “The Immanent Grace of Flannery O’Connor” offers a glimpse into her insights into both our humanness and the grace we need.

This year also marks the hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitgerald. A.O. Scott, in a visual piece, “It’s Gatsby’s World, We Just Live in It“,” portrays how Gatsby turns up everywhere from Seinfeld to Peanuts.

It’s only been forty years since Neil Postman published a somewhat academic book title Amusing Ourselves to Death. It became Real for me because of its explanatory power. “Still Amusing Ourselves” explores why this book continues to have “legs.”

The idea of citizenship has come up quite a bit in our recent political discourse. “Eight Books About the Complicated History of U.S. Citizenship” offers a crash course on its often contended history.

By the way, Citizen by Claudia Rankine was ranked number one in the Atlantic’s “The Best American Poetry of the 21st Century (So Far).” Looking for contemporary poetry to read? This is a list of twenty-five collections you might look for.

Quote of the Week

As I noted above, March 25 marked the centennial of Flannery O’Connor’s birth in 1925. Here’s a quote in which she “keeps it real”:

“I don’t deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.”

Miscellaneous Musings

Robin Wall Kimmerer’s little book, The Serviceberry is a ray of sunshine amid trade wars and sinking stocks. She writes of a different economy–one of generosity, abundance, and reciprocity–in short, a gift economy. One of the reasons I’ve never tried to monetize this blog or any other platform is that I receive so much from books (and the publishers who send them) that it just makes sense to pass along the gifts.

I wonder if a seed of much of our discontent is that we have not learned the meaning of “enough.” We want more and more (which we then have to figure out how to get rid of), we build economies around never having enough, and of late, in the U.S. have taken to thinking that this great land we call our national home is not enough. I think this will end very badly, and we will never be content so long as we live this way.

But I continue to be grateful for the fine writing of William Kent Krueger. I just began Vermilion Drift. Not only does he portray a middle-aged man dealing with loss as children move away (among other losses) as well as the fate of aging mining towns. It doesn’t hurt that his stories are page-turners as well.

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: Han Kang, We Do Not Part

Tuesday: The Month in Reviews: March 2025

Wednesday: Todd C. Ream et al, Habits of Hope

Thursday: Michael F. Bird, Religious Freedom in a Secular Age

Friday: Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for March 23-29, 2025!

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page

Review: Conscientious Objections

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Conscientious Objections: Stirring Up Trouble About Language, Technology, and Education, Neil Postman. New York: Vintage, 1992.

Summary: A collection of essays of social criticism, considering our communications media and rhetoric, education and its purpose, and technology and how it shapes society.

It has been some time since I’ve read Neil Postman. Twenty years ago, I appreciated his trenchant critique of television and how it was making us dumb, long before critiques of the internet, and of his concerns about how technology was shaping modern society. This collection of essays, which I’ve finally gotten around to reading, revisits some of the same themes, but what I found different (or perhaps didn’t remember) is the biting wit of these essays–these feels like Neil Postman unfiltered–or at least less filtered. Many were originally spoken presentations, which perhaps accounts for some of the difference.

He opens with a critique of the idea of “social science” and would place himself in the camp of those who deny that this is a science at all, calling it “moral theology.” He includes himself in his critique and argues that “social scientists” are story tellers, reminding us in fresh ways of the nature of the human condition and the character of human society. He then considers the purpose of education. Is it to inculcate our culture or to defend us against it? He would argue for the latter and particularly the importance of teaching an awareness of the nature, uses, and power of language.

At times, he can be tongue-in-cheek, as in his essays “The Naming of Missiles” and “The Parable of the Ring Around the Collar” (some of us remember this and other commercials, to which he alludes). He treats these as modern redemption tales. “Megatons for Anthromegs,” “Future Schlock,” “Safe-Fail,” and “My Graduation Speech” are additional examples.

As in Amusing Ourselves to Death, there are several essays on the influence of television on our habits of discourse. “A Muted Celebration,” on the two hundredth anniversary of The Columbian, discussing the decline of literary magazines with the rise of other media. “The News” explores the problems inherent in trying to cover the news of the day on television in 22 minutes or less (I wonder what he would have thought of 24/7 news outlets). “Remembering the Golden Age” considers the period of 52 minute plays written for television by the likes of Paddy Chayevsky, Rod Serling and Gore Vidal for series such as The Kraft Television Theatre.

Many of the tongue-in-cheek essays discuss the language games we play to deceive or cover despicable things in sanitary language. In one essay, he highlights a thinker, Alfred Korzybski, who he believes deserves more attention, because he “helped to heighten our awareness of the role of language in making us what we are and in preventing us from becoming what we ought to be but are not yet.”

Perhaps worth the price of admission is his essay on “The Disappearance of Childhood.” If you have not read Amusing Ourselves to Death, this essay argues how our new media are contributing to the destruction of the idea of childhood, treating children as little adults, or indiscriminately exposing them to the adult.

This collection is a good introduction to Postman’s longer works, covering in brief many of the themes he develops in greater length in them. Reading him thirty years down the road, I’m struck with how prescient he was in many respects, anticipating how media shapes us (even before social media) and how technology is not neutral but value-laden. He anticipates the decline of print media, and warns us of the dangers of the manipulation of language, so much the greater in our “post truth” generation. While the book is dated, it is a valuable piece of social history, indeed of “moral theology,” that indicates that we had been warned of what was coming.

My Precious…

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img_2388I’ve been thinking about an insight that came up in two different books I read recently on the Inklings, the circle of academics at Oxford that featured C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and others. The insight that both Lewis and Tolkien had was into the destructive power that technology could have when detached from human values.

One of the things they also recognized, with the Ring as an outstanding example, is how beings may pour their power into objects, which they may use to dominate others or control their world, and yet in the end come to dominate us and gain a stranglehold on our hearts. One thinks of Gollum’s relentless pursuit to regain the ring he had lost, his “precious.” Indeed, it was not only precious to him, but even more to Sauron, who had poured so much of his power into the Ring to dominate others. Both Lewis and Tolkien, having seen the machines of war, recognized how destructive technology could be, with consequences unintended but deadly.

There has always been a double edge to just about any technological advance. Antibiotics enable the body to fight off infection, and breed superbugs impervious to their effects. Automobiles have given us the opportunity to quickly travel across a city or state, and changed our urban landscapes in the process.

I’ve been thinking about how we’ve poured so much of our power into our smartphones. Until a few years ago, I had a “dumb” phone. Even it could be a phone, I could text, take pictures, and play some games–a big advance, it seemed over a landline, which was just a phone. Now, I can phone, text, tweet, blog, email, post, find my way around an unfamiliar town, deposit checks to my bank account, access credit accounts, store a credit card to pay for things, plan an exercise routine, track my step counts, see what books my friends are reading, load books I want to read, music I want to hear, take incredible photos and share them with other people taking incredible photos, keep an appointment calendar, share documents, catalogue my record collection, check in for flights and load boarding passes, check the weather, get ratings for just about any business, quick order something from Amazon, access my health insurance provider, reserve a rental car, access choral music my choir is rehearsing–I think you get the idea.

Today, I was just about to sit down in a restaurant and realized I’d left the phone plugged into my car charger. I had to go retrieve my “precious.” A little over a year ago, I either wasn’t doing the things above, or I was handling them differently. Now the power to do all this stuff is concentrated on this phone. And, as convenient as this is, I wonder if this is a good thing.

Neil Postman has proposed that we can reach a stage in our use of technology where technology controls us and shapes our lives, and this may not always be good. This summer, we were sitting out, and noticed a number of people walking while staring at their phones. Now people often do this to some degree, but this seemed especially intent–and then we realized that we were watching Pokemon-Go in action. There is an episode of Star Trek, where a game takes over the lives of the Enterprise crew. Is this happening with us?

I struggle with this. I look at my phone too much, and sometimes when I should be listening to a real person. The alerts, little numbers telling me I have emails and messages lure me in, the endless surfing from post to tweet. I keep checking it to see if anything else has happened in the 5 or 15 or 30 minutes since I last looked at it. I’m learning that “smartphone hygiene” isn’t about spraying my phone with Lysol. It is about not accessing it when I should be present elsewhere, not sleeping with it nearby, and not using it as an entertainment substitute most of the time.

I also struggle with what we surrender for this convenience. All the data we yield up about ourselves–how will that be used? One thing I know is that a huge amount of brainpower is going into reaping more and more from that data. It makes me wonder, am I seen as a human being, or simply as a data source?

I suspect this is far from the only “precious” in my life. But it is a vivid illustration. I carry an incredible “power” in my pocket. I wrestle with the reality of its power over me as a person who ultimately acknowledges only one Power worthy of my ultimate loyalties. I sometimes am tempted to just find the equivalent to Mt. Doom and toss it in. Far harder it is to live with the double-edged character of technology without surrendering to it.

Then again, maybe that is why so many of these things are catching on fire…