Neil Postman, social critic, media scholar, cultural commentator, and intellectual disciple of Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, S.J. Jacques Ellul and others has died. He passed away in the early evening of Sunday, October 5, from complications relating to lung cancer, which he was diagnosed with two years ago.
Postman was the author of over 20 books, including the perennial best-sellers as Teaching As A Subversive Activity, The Disappearance of Childhood, Amusing Ourselves To Death, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, and The End of Education. Yet Neil’s influence on the world of scholarship, popular culture, and religion was much more than that of a “talking head” on PBS, or a gravelly voice on NPR, or a dinner-and-debate companion to Camille Paglia in Harper’s magazine. Neil ate with vice-president Gore, spoke to the assembly at Davos Switzerland, and was the direct influence on Roger Waters’ (the former Pink Floyd lead-singer) stunning solo album, Amused to Death, a fact which single-handedly increased the enrollment numbers at NYU’s Media Ecology program. In the Master’s and Ph.D level of that program, Dr. Postman influenced hundreds of lives, directly contributed to dozens of communications departments, and has been a father and grandfather figure to many through his teaching, his generosity of spirit, and through thirty years of hosting the annual Media Ecology retreat in upstate New York.
The term media ecology was coined by Marshall McLuhan, the guru of the electronic age and the preeminent media theorist of the 20th century and a devout Catholic whose first published essay was on his own intellectual hero, G.K. Chesterton. According to the best of anyone’s recollection, Neil Postman first uttered the phrase media ecology in public to a lecture audience in November of 1968, a fact I’ve always appreciated, since it was the month and year of my birth. What the phrase actually means, of course, is something you can spend the rest of your own life pondering, but here’s a starter.
I was fortunate enough to study under Dr. Postman from 1995 to 1996, in the Master’s Degree program at NYU, and then again, from 1997 until his death this past October, in the Ph.D. program in Media Ecology. Since my area of interest was the intersection of media and religion, Neil took me under his wing in a way that was gracious, personal, and meaningful. Neil was not only the department chair; he was also my academic advisor and my dissertation committee chair. He was more than just a good teacher; he was a good listener, a good questioner, and a good encourager. He was a great storyteller, and many of his stories are ones that I still tell my own students.
While Neil was not himself religious, he was nevertheless a friend to religion, and to those who were believers. Like so many things, he was surprisingly good at contributing to those fields in which he was not a specialist. His Jewish background, race, and overall mensch-ness allowed Dr. Postman to particularly enjoy the irony of being most widely read and revered in, of all places, Germany. This was but one of many implicit ways that he taught his students to value the position of the outsider as the one who could best see in and through the semantic environments created by media and technology. He wore as a badge of honor the fact that he never once published a scholarly (refereed) article, while at the same time he was quoted by all those who were published in the official journals. He saw, as most communication departments historically have seen, that the real motivation behind studying communication media and its effects was to prevent another holocaust. As he understood it, social science was simply a form of moral theology under a different name, and a theory was only useful insofar as it had “explanatory power” and a “connection to some identifiable moral purpose.”
Despite once telling me his feeling that God was perhaps nothing more than a word, Neil was published in First Things magazine (“Science and the Story That We Need”) and said that he received more invitations for guest lectures at Christian universities and institutions than anywhere else. He also said that he enjoyed speaking at these places more, not because they believed, but because their belief gave them a ground upon which to stand, which led them to ask better questions than their secular counterparts. For Neil, having a good audience was always as important as having something good to say, because he far preferred a good question to a correct answer. This humble and profound insight was one of the most deeply ingrained lessons that he taught his students—by example, by his writing, speaking, and teaching style. His most famous question, which became the litmus test aphorism for any new technology or medium, was that we always ask of it, “To what problem is this particular media or technology a solution?” In most, if not all cases, Postman believed that technology was a Faustian bargain, in which you do gain something, but only at the expense of losing something else. In the story of Faust, however, the thing you lose is of infinitely more value than the thing you gain. And Faust’s story was, of course, a dramatization of Jesus Christ’s most-famous question: “What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world, but lose his own soul?”
Postman was never actually a Luddite, as many accused him of being, but he was deeply suspicious of the definition of progress that science and technology had wrought in human affairs. He didn’t get an office computer until late in the 1990’s, and he only used it as a glorified secretary, dictating his messages to his assistant who would then key them in and send them. He only sent one e-mail in his life, which is worth reading.
Perhaps the most quoted piece of Postmania from American pulpits is this insight from his 1985 work, Amusing Ourselves To Death:
In studying the Bible as a young man, I found intimations of the idea that forms of media favor particular kinds of content and therefore are capable of taking command of a culture. I refer specifically to the Decalogue, the Second Commandment of which prohibits the Israelites from making any concrete images of anything, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water beneath the earth.” I wondered then, as so many others have, as to why the God of these people would have included instructions on how they were to symbolize, or not symbolize, their experience. It is a strange injunction to include as part of an ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture. We may hazard a guess that a people who are being asked to embrace an abstract, universal deity would be rendered unfit to do so by the habit of drawing pictures or making statues or depicting their ideas in any concrete, iconographic forms. The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter a culture. People like ourselves who are in the process of converting their culture from word-centered to image-centered might profit by reflecting on this Mosaic injunction. But even if I am wrong in these conjectures, it is, I believe, a wise and particularly relevant supposition that the media of communication available to a culture are a dominant influence on the formation of the culture’s intellectual and social preoccupations.
That last sentence, where Neil acknowledges the possibility that he may be mistaken, with the phrase, “even if I am wrong in these conjectures,” was the essence of what made him such a great force in teaching. He felt things strongly, and articulated them wisely—often with a wink and a smile—but was always willing to concede the possibility that his feelings were stronger than his facts, which made us all the more likely to agree with him, and admit, that at the end of the day, we largely felt the same way about the world. I remember what he said about marriage in his class Language and Human Behavior—that what made a good marriage was neither a set of gender roles nor a pretense to equality in all things, but an agreement by each spouse with themselves and each other on just what roles each would play. He illustrated this by telling us of his dinner with Al Gore. The then-Vice President was standing in the middle of three or four guests, exchanging political quips when his wife came up to him and said, “Do you hear those kids? Go upstairs and tell them to quiet down.” Whereupon, Neil related, Mr. Gore’s VP hat came off and his agreed role as father and household lawgiver took over: far from being humiliated by his wife in public at a politically significant moment, the Vice President immediately bounded upstairs and took care of his children. Neil said he thought it was that kind of flexibility that made for a good marriage. His lifelong marriage to his wife Shelley, who I only met once (at the 5th anniversary of the Media Ecology Association at Fordham University, a month before Neil died), seemed to have a similar flexibility and underlying commitment.
Neil Postman put me on the path of my life. There are many in my shoes, and many whose lives he impacted in other significant ways. To those he inspired by thought, word, book, and deed, his own life was a gift, for which we are all grateful.
Copyright 2004-2005 :: The New Pantagruel 1.1.