Neil Postman Sixteen Years On

Neil Postman died sixteen years ago today. The sadness I feel still is hard to describe.

In the e-mail that brought me news of his death from lung cancer at the age of 72, Lance Strate described Neil, very accurately, as "the mentor of hundreds, in fact thousands of graduate students, and so the loss is personal as well as professional. We will miss him as a friend, colleague, teacher, and father."

I have to say right off the bat that I was not one of those people to whom Lance refers. I cannot claim Neil Postman as a mentor. A teacher and an inspiration? Yes. But not a mentor. Frankly, he frightened and intimidated me (not deliberately, of course; the insecurities were all mine) and reminded me of my own self-perceived intellectual inadequacies. (In fairness to the topic, if anyone deserves credit – or perhaps I should say blame – for mentoring me, it would be Neil’s NYU colleague Christine Nystrom, who was able to encourage and coax from me my best thinking and writing.) Yet Neil supported and helped me in so many ways--academically, professionally, personally—and, as it turns out, influenced my thinking far more deeply than I understood at the time, that the shock of his passing has barely abated in ten years. How I’d love to sit and talk with him now about our shared media ecology.

I first heard of Neil Postman while working on my Master’s Degree in Communication at New York Institute of Technology around 1976. A couple of serendipitous events occurred. One, I took a course with a professor named Irving Weingarten who, during my time at NYIT, defended his dissertation and received his Doctorate in Media Ecology from New York University and introduced me to Neil’s work. Two, I took a course with Philip Miele – “Vocabulary of the Media Critic” – whose core text was Harold Innis’s “The Bias of Communication.” I had, of course, read Marshall McLuhan’s “Understanding Media” as an undergraduate – depending on your point of view, either essential reading or de rigueur at the time – and was of course fascinated by him and his aphoristic probes. But I had an uneasy feeling that one could make of much of McLuhan’s wisdom just about anything one wanted. A Nostrodamus for the electronic age. There was great vision and imagination – even poetry – in McLuhan’s probes but not a whole lot of specificity.

Innis, on the other hand, supplied the structure and method that I felt lacking in McLuhan’s work. Innis told me, in different words, that the medium is the message. But he also supplied me with historical examples that provided a foundation upon which I could build an understanding of exactly what that phrase meant. And Irv Weingarten turned me on to Neil’s writing and the concept of a “media ecology,” so similar to what I was reading in McLuhan but so much more grounded in common sense and reason. My first encounter with Neil’s work was “Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk” (1977), followed almost immediately by “Teaching as a Subversive Activity” (1969). By the time I was awarded my Master’s degree in 1980, I knew I had to get into that “Media Ecology” program at NYU. Money, work, life being what they are, it took me six more years.

Neil was a humble, funny, gregarious person who, at the same time, was a towering, imposing figure. He was also, at the time of my arrival, the author of a new book that everyone seemed to be talking about, “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in an Age of Show Business.” At the risk of repeating myself, I had enormous difficulty finding the same comfort level with Neil as so many others in the program so easily managed to do. At first, my end of our infrequent exchanges were limited pretty much to a stumbling “Yes, sir” and “No, sir” and “I’m not sure, sir.” Oh, I answered questions and gave my opinion when called upon to do so, but I’m pretty sure my mouth dried and my tongue tied every time I had to speak with him. At the end of the first semester, in our “Seminar in Media Ecology: Analysis,” my colleagues and I in the class of ‘90 cohort had to write and submit a brief (mine was 35 pages) history of a medium, after which we defended it orally in front of Neil and Chris Nystrom. I’ll never forget the feeling of horror and humiliation as I sat across from the two of them and watched Neil hold my paper between his thumb and forefinger, dangling it to his side as though it were a soiled tissue picked up from the floor, while he leaned back in his chair, took a deep drag on his cigarette, paused, and said only this: “Peter…your writing is so…florid…” Chris rescued me, even remarking that she enjoyed my writing, but if I could have melted into the woodwork at that moment, I surely would have. I must also say (with considerable pride but also immeasurable relief) that in time Neil came to appreciate and perhaps even respect both my writing and my thinking.

Over the years, I learned so much from Neil, as well as from Chris, Terry Moran, Henry Perkinson, John Mayher, and others. It was impossible not to learn in this program. I learned about and read the works of John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, Alfred Korzybski, I.A. Richards; of Alfred North Whitehead and Suzanne Langer; of Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul; of Marx, Engels, and Freud; of Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas; and of course, of Marshall McLuhan. For Neil, there was no educational replacement for the information technology of the Gutenberg era, the printed book. As he explained to Jay Rosen with typical understatement, “We’re just trying to give people a good liberal arts education,” and that good liberal arts education was the education of literacy, the education of the Enlightenment. I got to know Neil Postman as an eminently reasonable – and rational – man; but a man for whom reason was simply one piece of the human intellect, incomplete without its complementary counterpart, imagination. And the imagination, seat of the emotional life, was the foundation of empathy.

“From the beginning,” Neil said in the keynote address at the inaugural convention of the Media Ecology Association, “we were a group of moralists.” This appealed to me, because I am something of a media moralist myself. It was what attracted me to the program in the first place. I could see this moralism subtly in Innis, more overtly in Ellul. But it was absent in McLuhan. McLuhan had once said “A moral point of view too often substitutes for understanding in technological matters” (I have an imaginary discussion of this point with McLuhan here). I couldn’t understand why, in the act of understanding media, one would not be moved to improve the situation of the people that those media serve. And so my affinity for Neil’s thinking grew. “It was our idea,” Neil continued in his 2000 keynote, “to have an academic department that would focus its attention on the media environment, with a particular interest in understanding how and if our media ecology was making us better or worse. Not everyone thought that this was a good idea—Marshall McLuhan, for one. Although McLuhan had suggested that we start such a department at NYU, he did not have in mind that we ought to interest ourselves in whether or not new media, especially electronic media, would make us better or worse. He reminded me several times of the lines in Stephen Vincent Benét’s long poem John Brown’s Body. At the end of the poem, Benét makes reference to the Industrial Revolution and finishes with these lines:

“Say neither, it is blessed nor cursed.

“Say only ‘It is here.’

“No room for moralists there. McLuhan claimed that we ought to take the same point of view in thinking about modern media: that they are neither blessed nor cursed, only that they are here. He thought that this moral neutrality would give the best opportunity to learn exactly how new media do their stuff. If one spent too much time on the question of whether or not that stuff was good, one would be distracted from truly understanding media. As a consequence, although I believe McLuhan liked me, I feel sure he would not have much liked my books, which he would have thought too moralistic, rabbinical or, if not that, certainly too judgmental.”

Neil Postman was a true heir to the legacy of the Enlightenment: a proponent of propositional language and thought who wrote clear, concise, rational prose; a man of imagination and transcendence who knew that humans were more than the sum of their material parts. Far from being the Luddite he is generally accused of being, Neil rejected the idea that all technological change constituted “progress” and refused to be controlled by technology – or the people who market them – but enthusiastically embraced those technologies – and only those – that measurably improved the quality of human life. And he did not apologize for that.

He did not hesitate to point a finger at the mendacity of marketers who sell newness for its own sake or to ridicule the baseless and unsupported claims of the acolytes of our new digital religion. “Through the computer, the heralds say, we will make education better, religion better, politics better, our minds better — best of all, ourselves better. This is, of course, nonsense, and only the young or the ignorant or the foolish could believe it.”

But throughout human history, Neil also acknowledged, it was technologies that shaped the information, psychic, and spiritual environments that allowed people to make things better. In true humanist fashion, Neil left us some questions to think about when trying to make judgments about which value system would be served by a given technology: “The first question is this: To what extent does a medium contribute to the uses and development of rational thought? Here is a second question: To what extent does a medium contribute to the development of democratic processes? A third question—related to the previous two—is: To what extent do new media give greater access to meaningful information? Here is a final question: To what extent do new media enhance or diminish our moral sense, our capacity for goodness?” Neil would never rejectaAny technology that provided suitable answers to those questions.

Ten brief years after his death, one of my fondest memories of Neil is sitting in the courtyard of Fordham's Lincoln Center campus at lunchtime during the first MEA conference. My Mom had just died, and I was nursing my Dad through his final (three year) illness. Much of my personal life, at that moment, was a shambles. Neil came and sat with me and we just talked about life--its difficulty, its tragedy, and its beauty. I was impressed not so much by what he said – what does one say, after all, to someone who believes his life is falling apart? – but by the sheer humanity of the gesture. I really don’t remember the specifics of our conversation, but I’ll never forget the moment. One of the reasons that Neil was the teacher, thinker, and writer that we know him to be is that he was – for all the criticisms of his "Luddite" work – wholly alive and in love with life and the phenomenon of human intelligence. He had a profound faith in ALL of us. Those moments with Neil – no longer the “towering figure” I stammered before but the compassionate friend who listened to me – are burned into my memory forever.

Ten years ago this semester I began a new phase in my career and my life out here on the prairie, and I was unable to attend the various memorials and social events in Neil's honor. I was unable to be in NY for his funeral, although I would dearly have loved to pay my respects in person to all who knew Neil. My sympathies remain with all of you who continue to mourn Neil's passing, just as my joy will always be with those of you who celebrate his life and carry on his work. I am proud to count myself among your ranks. I honestly believe it is time for a “Neil Postman Renaissance.” We need a corrective to the orgy of technophilia that has surrounded this false information “revolution” for the last two decades. We need a direction and while Neil Postman is not that direction – and would blanch at any suggestion to the contrary – his work may provide with clues to that direction.

At the end of his 2000 MEA keynote, Neil (who was snarky before snarky was cool) made it clear that he, if no one else, envisioned Media Ecology as a logical extension of Enlightenment and Renaissance humanism, in which no answers are given, but methods for questioning are constantly improved and the end of this intellectual activity is the improvement of the human condition. He concluded “by saying that as I understand the whole point of media ecology, it exists to further our insights into how we stand as human beings, how we are doing morally in the journey we are taking. There may be some of you who think of yourselves as media ecologists who disagree with what I have just said. If that is the case, you are wrong.”

Neil Postman Bibliography

Author

•Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century:  Ideas from the Past that Can Improve Our Future.  New York: Knopf, 1999.

•The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School.  New York, Knopf, 1995

•The Disappearance of Childhood:  Redefining the Value of School.  New York: Vintage Books, 1994, c.1982.

•Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology.  New York: Vintage Books, 1993

•Conscientious Objection:  Stirring Up Trouble About Language, Technology and Education.  New York: Vintage Books, 1992, c.1988.

•Amusing Ourselves to Death:  Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.  New York: Penguin, 1985

•Teaching as a Conserving Activity.  New York: Delacorte Press, 1979.

•Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk:  How We Defeat Ourselves by the Way We Talk and What to Do About It.  New York: Delacorte Press, 1976.

•Teaching as a Subversive Activity.  New York: Delta Book Publishing, 1971, c.1969.

•Languages of Discovery.  New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1967.

•The Uses of Language.  New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1967.

•Exploring Your Language.  New York:  Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1966.

•Linguistics: A Revolution in Teaching.  New York: Delta Book Publishing, 1966.

•The New English: A Forward Look.  New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1965.

•Discovering Your Language.  New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1963.

•Television and the Teaching of English.  New York: Appleton Centruy Croft, 1961.

Co-author

•with Donald N. Wood.  Post-Intellectualism and the Decline of Democracy:  The Failure of Reason and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century.  Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1996.

•with Steve Powers.  How to Watch TV News.  New York: Penguin, 1992.

•et al.  Myths, Men and Beer:  an Analysis of Beer Commercials on Broadcast Television.  Church Falls, VA.:  Foundation for Traffic Safety, 1987.

•with Charles Weingartner.  The School Book: for People Who Want to Know What all the Hollering Is About.  New York: Delacorte Press, 1973.

•with Charles Weingartner.  How to Recognize a Good School.  Bloomington: Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation, 1973.

•with  Charles Weingartner.  The Soft Revolution:  A Student Handbook for Turning Schools Around.  New York: Delacorte Press, 1971.

•with Charles Weingartner.  Teaching as a Subversive Activity.  New York: Delacorte Press, 1979, c. 1969.

•with Charles Weingartner.  Linguistics:  A Revolution in Teaching.  New York: Delacorte Press, 1966.

•with Howard C. Damon.  The Language of Discovery.  New York:  Delacotre Press, 1965.

•with Howard C. Damon.  Language and System.  New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1965.

•et al.  Television and the Teaching of English.  New York: Appleton Century Crofts, 1961.

Editor

•Language in America: A Report on Our Deteriorating Semantic Environment.  New York: Pegasus, 1969.

•The Roots of Fanaticism.  Ed. with Howard C. Damon.  New York: Holt Reinhart and Winston, 1965.

Articles

•“Science and the Story that We Need.   First Things.  No. 69 (1997), 29-32.

•“Making a Living, Making a Life: Technology Reconsidered.”  College Board Review.  No. 176-177 (1995), 8-13.

•“Virtual Students, Digital Classroom.”  The Nation. No. 261 ign (1995), 377-378ff.

•“The American Experiment”  Education Week, Vol. 15 (1995), 56.

•“Error of Our Ways.”  Teacher Magazine.  Vol. 6 (1995), 32-37.

•“Technology as Dazzling Distraction.”  The Education Digest.  Vol. 59 (1994), 25-28.

•“Deus Machina”  Technos.  Vol. 1 (1992), 16-18.

•with Camille Paglia.  “She Wants Her TV! He Wants His Book!”  Harper’s Vol. 282 (1991), 44-51, 54-55.

•“What is a Conservative? (And Why Reagan Is Not One).”  Utne Reader (Mar/Ap, 1989), 75.

•“Learning by Story.”  The Atlantic.  No. 264 (1989) 119-124.

•“The Educationist as Painkiller.”  English Education.  (1988), 7-17.

•“The Blurring of Childhood and the Media.”  Religious Education, Vol. 82 (1987) 293-295.

•“The Limits of Language.”  Etc.  Vol. 43 (1986), 227-235.

•“TV News as Vaudeville.”  The Quill.  Vol. 74 (1986), 18-23.

•“Media and Technology as Educators.”  Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education. (1985), 183-200.

•“Social Science as Theology.”  Etc.  Vol. 41 (1984), 22-32.

•“The Day Our Children Disappear: Predictions of a Media Ecologist.”  Phi Delta Kappa.  Vol. 62 (1981), 382-386.

•“Fine Tuning the Balance Between Education and Media Culture.”  Teacher.  Vol. 98 (1980), 28-30.

•“Language Education in a Knowledge Context.”  Etc.  Vol. 37 (1980), 25-37.

•“Landmarks in the Literature: the Limits of Language.”  New York University Education Quarterly.  Vol. 11 (1979), 29-32.

•“The Ascent of Humanity: a Coherent Curriculum.”  Educational Leadership.  Vol. 37 (1980), 300-303

•“Order in the Classroom!”  Atlantic.  Vol. 244 (1979) 35-38.

•“The First Curriculum.”  Phi Delta Kappa.  Vol. 61 (1979), 163-168.

•“The Information Environment.”  Etc.  Vol. 36 (1979), 234-245.

•“Landmarks in Literature: Where Have All the Critics Gone?”  New York University Education Quarterly. Vol. 9 (1977), 28-31.

•“What an Educator Means When He Says…”  Journal of the International Association of Pupil Personnel Workers.  Vol. 20 (1976), 153-156.

•“Whatever I Call It, It Is.”  Etc.  Vol. 31 (1974), 37-44.

•with Charles Weingartner.  “Two Tests to Take - to Find Out if Yours Is a Great School.”  American School Board Journal.  Vol. 161 (1974), 23-26.

•“Media Ecology: A Growing Perspective.”  Media Ecology Review.  Vol. 3 (1973), 10-11.

•“Illich, Pro and Con.”  Social Policy.  Vol. 2 (1971), 33-42.

•“The New Literacy”  Grade Teacher.   Vol. 88 (1971), 2-52.

•“The Politics of Reading.”  Harvard Educational Review.  Vol. 40 (1970), 244-252.

Plato's Phaedrus: Beware of Bullshit

Phaedrus by Plato
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Spoiler alert: This book is not about a "philosophy of love" as many reviewers seem to believe. As every dream has its manifest content (a storyline) that masks a latent content (the suppressed, unconscious emotions that bubble into our semi-conscious REM sleep), Socrates' discourse on the nature of love thinly masks the true subject of this dialogue: bullshit, how to produce it, and how to recognize it. For the reader, his dialectical approach gives us a hint about how to resist it.

With self-deprecating charm -- true to form -- Socrates schools beautiful young Phaedrus on his own susceptibility to bullshit, alternately praising Phaedrus's current object of infatuation, the silver-tongued rhetor Lysias, and ruthlessly dismantling the rhetorical artifices of Lysias' manufacture.

This excellent translation by Christopher Rowe is not only accessible to the reader not familiar (or terribly comfortable) with the Socratic dialogs, but manages, too, to emphasize Socrates' sharp wit, good humor, and gentleness of pedagogy. Rowe's scholarly introduction provides context and background making clear the significance of this work.

It is a testament to Plato -- an early generation child and devotee of alphabetic literacy -- that he takes pains to accurately convey to us Socrates' belief that writing would sap the intelligence of the Athenian youth, making them both less knowledgeable about the universal precepts of logic, and less inclined to engage in a dialectic with thought externalized and made permanent.


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My (Imaginary) Conversation with Marshall McLuhan

I had heard of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media as a freshman in high school in 1968, but didn’t read it until four years later when I got to college. It was only the second book I had read about the power of media to shape societies (oddly enough for an eighteen-year-old, my baptism into the field of media studies was provided by Harold Innis’s The Bias of Communication, but I had to read that one several times before I really, truly even began to comprehend it), and it so captured my attention and fired my curiosity that I was compelled to spend the rest of my life studying the interactions of technology and culture. So I was thrilled and proud when my first book, Printing, Literacy and Education in Eighteenth Century Ireland: Why the Irish Speak English, won the Media Ecology Association’s Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology in 2007.

Yet, since almost the very beginning I’ve been bothered by McLuhan. I was looking for answers and McLuhan kept posing me riddles. Alternately dazzlingly clear and maddeningly cryptic, so much of what he had to say left many people feeling uncomfortable and skeptical; others, wildly enthusiastic and hopeful. For me – and many others who were moved to dedicate their lives to understanding media – McLuhan’s words were intriguing and enticing, inviting questions and urging deeper consideration. They made my head hurt, but they showed me for the first time that questions are, after all, far more important than answers.

I have, I believe, come to terms with McLuhan in the intervening thirty-eight years. Or I have almost come to terms with him. I’m at the very least minimally comfortable with his method; the “probe,” oracular aphorisms, heuristic in nature, not particularly suited to empiric measurement, a kind of “intellectual Rorschach test” that everyone can read something into and get something out of.

What I am not comfortable with is a single phrase: “A moral point of view is a poor substitute for understanding in technical matters.” So I decided to sit and talk with him about it.
What follows is a (totally imaginary) conversation I had recently with the “the oracle of the electric age.” Many of McLuhan’s responses are direct quotes from his works, many more are close paraphrases altered only for the sake of the literary integrity (such as there may or may not be) of this essay. I have, by necessity, invented some of McLuhan’s responses to my questions posed here, but only then on the basis of what I honestly believe might have been his actual response. Needless to say, this essay very possibly says more about me and my understanding of McLuhan than it does about McLuhan himself. But I’d be willing to argue that point:

Peter K. Fallon: “A moral point of view is a poor substitute for understanding in technical matters.” Why? It seems to me that understanding technical matters absent a moral point of view is not “understanding” at all.

Marshall McLuhan: Well, first of all let me just mention that I don’t always agree with everything I say. The point is not to say something and stand by it; the point is to push the limits of human perceptions and assumptions and see what we can find beyond them. If you don’t like that idea, let’s try something else.

PKF: Well, it seems to me that you’re abdicating moral responsibility for questioning the role of media in social change. It seems to me that you’re presenting as a given certain, almost pre-determined, consequences of technology and positing that this vague concept of “understanding” is all human beings can do in the face of rapid and radical technological change.

MM: Does that bother you?

PKF: Yes, it bothers me. It bothers me something awful. I have spent years defending you – from many who I don’t believe really understand what you’re saying – against the charges of “technological determinism,” yet in far too many cases you sound as though you’re saying that the best we can hope for is to understand the changes that technology brings us, not manage them.

MM: What does it matter if some call me a “technological determinist” or a “guru” or, for that matter, a “Charlatan”? There is absolutely no determinism in my work, because I urge a willingness to contemplate what is happening. I need no defense, Peter, from such charges. My job, as I see it, is to alert people to the changes going on around them. That in itself is a moral imperative, and no abdication of responsibility. Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior. I’ve just tried to bring more understanding into the picture. The electronic age has presented us with a dilemma: we are awash in electronic and digital information, and the swirl of this maelstrom of information tosses us about like corks on a stormy sea. But if we keep our cool during our “descent into the maelstrom,” and study the process as it happens, like Poe’s sailor we can save ourselves.

PKF: Yes. That’s another thing. It’s always bothered me that the “old sailor” – who was, of course, not old at all but aged prematurely by his ordeal – did not or could not save his brothers. One brother is flung outright from the boat, another goes mad at the sight of the enormous whirlpool and dies in its vortex. But the “old sailor” “keeps his cool” as you say and studies the patterns of the maelstrom. He notices – in a way that presages Einstein and relativity – that in the midst of the maelstrom’s power, with its force propelling the boat in circles within its cone, he appears to be sitting still, and the opposite side of the whirlpool remains stationary in relation to him.

MM: Moving along within the maelstrom, at its speed, in its direction, there is a certain curious peace, and the sailor has time to study its patterns and make inferences about its behavior.

PKF: Yes, and he saves himself with the knowledge he gains within the chaos. But his brothers die.

MM: Well, yes. But, Peter, it’s only a story. No one actually died in its telling by Edgar Poe.

PKF: But it’s a story that describes your views on understanding media, that you have stated serves as a metaphor for your approach to studying media and their effects. And so we’re back to my original difficulty: the idea of understanding anything absent a moral point of view. Why didn’t he try to save his brothers?

MM: Because he would have died, it’s as simple as that. Why is what you call “a moral point of view” so important to you, Peter? Is a “moral point of view,” by its nature, any better or worse than an immoral point of view, or an amoral point of view, or a secular point of view, or a humanist point of view? Point of view, whatever its orientation, is imaginary. It is part and parcel of the typographic mindset, the cordoning off of the individual from the group, the artificial separation of one from the other. We don’t live in that world anymore, but in a world of electric simultaneity that brings people together in a tribal village that is a rich and creative mix, where there is actually more room for creative diversity than within the homogenized mass urban society of Western man. In such a world a point of view – any point of view – reveals itself to be a dangerous luxury, an intellectual self-indulgence, especially when substituted for insight and understanding.

PKF: A world of chaos and – to use Harry Frankfurt’s term – bullshit, if you ask me. A world with no point of view and no real knowledge. “Understanding media” today means the opposite of what you probably intended – or perhaps not…? “Understanding media” means knowing how to work them, knowing how to use them. Literacy has given way to “media literacy” and “information literacy” and “visual literacy” and point of view has given way to pointlessness and objectivity has given way to a truly egoistic subjectivity…I see no “rich and creative mix” – although people tell me I’m constantly surrounded by it – any more than I see understanding. And I don’t see understanding any more than I see a moral point of view. We’re left with nothing except a sort of psychic “I got mine, fuck you” environment that empowers us (if that is at all the appropriate word) to focus on ourselves to the detriment of the rest of the world. It seems to me that in a world like this, a point of view – if it is a positive point of view – is a Godsend. But what is worse, any point of view – even an entirely stupid one – strikes many who have none of their own, and are entirely unable to identify one, as a Godsend.

MM: Peter, you may be over-reacting. This age we live in of infinite connections and the liberation of consciousness from the body – the age of “discarnate man” – is barely half a century old. Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair such as those you appear to feel invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition. Your assumptions about alphabetic man, if you’ll allow me to say to you critically, may have outlived their uselessness. It was alphabetic man himself who was disposed to desacralize his mode of being, not we. In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness, a seamless web of experience. This is not the individualist, trivial (in all senses of the word) consciousness of alphabetic man, but a consciousness that begins in the senses, is rooted in perception, and is derailed by concepts or ideas.

PKF: I know you’re referring now, however obliquely, to your Christian faith, and specifically to your adopted faith of Catholicism.

MM: As you say.

PKF: And here again I have a hard time coming to terms with your ideas, which to my ears sound so sanguine. I know that your work was profoundly influenced by that of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

MM: I am not in the slightest influenced by Fr. Teilhard’s works, even though we may share areas of common interest.

PKF: As you say. But Teilhard famously anticipated many of your ideas and even your tone. And I am a great admirer of Teilhard’s work, as I am of yours…

MM: (~~feigns satisfaction with an irrelevant opinion~~)

PKF: …and I hope – no, I pray – that Teilhard is correct about many of his ideas, but I fear he is wrong. Because in the final analysis I do in fact see a determinism in your work, but it is not a technological determinism. It is a determinism of faith and salvation. Teilhard’s “noosphere” is merely an anticipation of your “global central nervous system.” And Teilhard’s conception of the “Omega point” – the parousia – sounds very much like your idea that “Psychic communal integration, made possible at last by the electronic media, could create the universality of consciousness foreseen by Dante when he predicted that men would continue as no more than broken fragments until they were unified into an inclusive consciousness. In a Christian sense, this is merely a new interpretation of the mystical body of Christ; and Christ, after all, is the ultimate extension of man.” You appear to have adopted an eschatological approach to your pursuit of understanding media – very, very similar to Teilhard’s – that you don’t ever explicitly identify.

MM: Is that so?

PKF: Well, I certainly believe it is so. It seems to me that you’ve put your faith entirely in acceptance of Christ – medium and message – without ever considering the human agency involved in salvation. As a Catholic, and in the knowledge of your devout Catholicism, I’m confounded by what sounds to me like the Protestant principle of sola gratia – salvation by God’s grace alone – ignoring the quintessential Catholic principle of salvation by grace and good works. Your “evangelism” – it seems to me – is more of the Lutheran or Reformation variety than of a fully- (and rightly-) formed Catholic one.

Understanding media alone will not bring about a better world (the Kingdom of God?), but ought to be the foundation of good works that may bring it about: constructing an environment of truly free-flowing and uninhibited information, to be sure, but also reaffirming and supporting the structures of thought that allow us to identify error and falsehood, and empowering us to label bullshit as bullshit, as Harry Frankfurt suggests. The global village, with its “rich and creative mix” full of “creative diversity” can be the perfect venue to put bullshit on an equal footing with truth. I see nothing in this situation that is either constructive or Catholic.

MM: That is your point of view.

PKF: (~~sigh~~) Yes, it is. I’ll stand by it.

MM: In my defense, I’ll say only this: The revealed and divinely constituted fact of religion has nothing to do with human opinion or human adherence. In Jesus Christ, there is no separation or distance between the medium and the message; it is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same. To know Christ – to truly know him – is to accept Him. And there is no greater moral action – no greater “good work” – than understanding media.


At any rate, that's how I imagine the conversation going...