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
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