"Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think....There are two ways the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first - the Orwellian - culture becomes a prison. In the second - the Huxleyan - culture becomes burlesque."

Let us take leave, but only temporarily, from the ongoing series on paleoliberalism as espoused by Russell Kirk, to address a related (if only tangentially) topic. Since I only just read the book (clearly, as it was published a quarter-century ago, I am irreparably behind on my "to do" list), I am exceedingly late to this particular party. But Neil Postman’s "Amusing Ourselves to Death", a critique of modern culture that is both timeless and exquisitely relative to our 3^rd Millennium society, is worth waiting for. It is rare for me (being as oddly archaic and anachronistic as I am) to find a book that so clearly elucidates every thought I have had about the state of American society that I was compelled, at regular intervals during its reading, to stand up and shout: "Right on, brother!" [See? I told you I am an anachronism!). Amusing Ourselves to Death is such a tome. In my own clumsy way, certainly less entertaining than Postman, I had already addressed the main thesis of the book in this BLOG (See "Lowering the Bar"). So, the book and the comments that follow on it fit very well into my personal "world view" and, I suspect, likewise into that of many of my readers. This, I assume because, res ipso loquitur, they still actually read.

There have been three great movements in the way that mankind transmits knowledge from one generation to the next. First, obviously, there was the spoken tradition. When we climbed out of the trees of the African savannah and began facing the dangers of a grounded existence, man quickly developed oral communication. It was reasonable to standardize our grunts and shouts into signals to our tribesmen that a tiger was nearby, food or water is over here or, hey, there is a village with a some hot chicks around the next bend. Necessity is, after all, the mother of invention. Vocabularies grew and discourse, eventually, became more than a early warning system. It was, in fact, honed into a vehicle for discussion of life and what man deemed important to his welfare and the instruction of the young, inexperienced members of the tribe in tribal lore.

Perhaps the zenith of the oral tradition arose in the Greek Lyceum where Socrates - who never wrote anything down - sought truth and dispensed wisdom through a spoken dialectic. Or, consider the life of Jesus (who also never wrote anything, Himself) and the "Sermon on the Mount". We know, in the earliest years of mankind, the "oral tradition" was typical of cultures as diverse as the Native Americans and the Chinese, Arabic and Egyptian societies. Conversation and story-telling was the chief mode of information exchange in all nascent societies and, as it grew in precision, discourse achieved the status of an "art form". Those speakers and teachers who could hold their audience captive - I think, chiefly, of Jesus of Nazareth, Cicero of Rome and the aforementioned Socrates of Greece - were held in high esteem and valued for their rhetoric. [At least, until Socrates became so skilled he was perceived as dangerous and condemned to death; ditto Cicero and Jesus].

The second great movement came with the written word. While alphabets and written documents have existed since 2700 B.C. in Egypt and, certainly, Greek and Roman culture had writing, these earliest of documents were strictly for legal and governmental matters and not for public consumption as informational resources. The spoken work reigned supreme for, easily, the first half of human history. But, in the last 500 years B.C., writing became a public resource, most famously exemplified by the Dialogues of Plato and, later, the Bible. Books (crude hand-written documents on clumsy scrolls or parchment) took the form of (but never replaced) the spoken word. The tracks were greased and the written word gained momentum when Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 1450s. As a result, books were not the exclusive possessions of the wealthy but accessible to all. People on the farms and the colonies of empires, far from the urban and university centers of the "thinkers", could read of their opinions, ideas and innovations. In Edmund Burke’s famous commentary delivered before Parliament on the American Revolutionary War (1775), he observed, that the American colonists bought more books than all of England! Books were voraciously consumed near and far from the seats of power and learning.

The autodidact became common occurrence and it should be remembered that some of the most learned men in early America, if not the world of the 18^th Century, never spent one hour in college - George Washington and Benjamin Franklin are two that leap to mind. Through books, youngsters could become learned men even without the benefit of the environment of intellectuals and teachers cloistered at the University, which in the rural setting and, particularly, for the poor, were far removed.

The important thing to remember here is that books did not displace discourse; it improved it and enhanced it. Speech began to mimic the written word and the form that written word took. Prospective rhetoricians learned the rules of grammar and syntax from reading the written word and refined their speech to, eventually, the sublime levels capable of moving their fellow citizens to action. The grand idea of liberty seeped from the written word of such luminaries as Hume, Voltaire and the other philosophers of the 16^th and 17^th Century and made their way into the minds of the reading public. It was the written word that set revolutions into motion and inspired the monumental documents we know as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. The fiery rhetoric of Patrick Henry, the cold, analytical thoughts of James Madison, the practical reason of Benjamin Franklin, the New England pragmatism of John Adams and, most prominently, the romanticism of Thomas Jefferson, all sprang, full blossomed, from the classics. All rose to great heights only because they were standing on the books of the ancients and their lofty ideals.

We are now well into the third evolution in the mode of social intercourse and I am lately convinced that it, unlike its predecessors, signals not a quantum leap forward but the death knell of rational, informed, thoughtful information exchange. While the refinement of the oral tradition and the egalitarianism of the written word pushed mankind firmly toward reason and contemplation of the unexplained, the latest iteration of mass communication is destined to close our minds to personal introspection and intellectual inquiry. I speak now of that demon of luminescence, the television.

How can this be so? Do we not live in the "information age" where everything we ever wanted to know is either accessible by the Internet or broadcast, 24/7/365, over one of the hundreds and hundreds of channels? While the proponents of this age of text messaging, voice mail, e-mail, cell phones, PDAs, iPhones, and streaming video claim we are the best informed generation in the history of the world, those of us with a healthy modicum of Luddite blood coursing through our veins ask this: If we are so wonderfully "informed", why are we becoming more and more stupid?

For some time now, writers have been bantering about the term "information overload" with regularity and frequency. Wikipedia defines this as "an excess amount of information being provided, making processing and absorbing tasks very difficult for the individual because sometimes we cannot see the validity behind the information." I want to take this one step further. To whit, we are not suffering from "information overload" so much as we are suffering from "disinformation overload". Which is to say, an "information smokescreen has befallen us. In brief, we are systematically distracted from what is truly important and useful (dare I say, imperative?) to know and, through the mesmerizing glitter of television, led to titillation and useless "infotainment". With thoughts of where Madonna might adopt her next foreign baby, octomom’s trials and tribulations, whether of not Joan van Ark has had too much plastic surgery and the ceaseless angst about the latest performances on American Idol, America has become the penultimate brain-dead, self-absorbed, narcissistic poster child for the world. And we deserve the recognition, damn it!

The problems are not limited to the systematic degeneration of our brains (portrayed, comically, but not without an uncontrollable urge to squirm, uncomfortably in one’s seat, in Alec Baldwin’s commercial). We have progressively lost our ability to filter, digest, process, assimilate and analyze information. When our "serious" newscasts spend an average of 30 seconds or so reporting on North Korea’s missile launch, the President’s visit to South America, and the state-sponsored piracy of Somalia, and an equal amount of time reporting the latest box office receipts of new movie releases or the most recent DUI arrest of some Hollywood gliterrati, one can understand how our difficulties might occur. The confusion is heightened when the stories are "pureed" - North Korea launches missile - Jennifer Anniston Proclaims "there will never be another Brad Pitt" - President Obama shakes hands with Hugo Chavez - and, now, the baseball scores.... - each story delivered with the same mix of mock-seriousness and gravitas by the talking head who clearly doesn’t signal anything singularly different or nuanced about any of the stories. After all, he is just reading the teleprompter and probably doesn’t know anything more about the importance of an individual story than his make-up person or hair stylist.

Before you dismiss me as an old, cranky technophobe, stuck in the past, reading Thucidides by candlelight, and wistfully longing for what has long passed, let me admit that I watch about 2 hours of television a day. When taken for what it is, TV can be entertaining and, when the writers and actors are really in sync, the drama that comes over the airways can be superb. I have, on this very BLOG, extolled the excellence of such triumphs as "Deadwood" (HBO), "Dexter" (Showtime) and "Damages" (Fx). On the commercial channels, I enjoy "Criminal Minds" and "Without a Trace" with all the rest of the mob. These are examples of what TV does with excellence. There can be no real harm from these offerings (children excluded, of course) with adults distracted by good drama a few hours nightly. Even Neil Postman agrees in his prophetic book when he admits: ""....I appreciate junk as much as the next fellow, and I know full well that the printing press has generated enough of it to fill the Grand Canyon to overflowing. Television is not old enough to have matched printing's output of junk".

The insidious problem, however, occurs when TV uses the same "tricks of the trade" to foist important information on the public - not as a problem to solved or an issue to be decided - but solely as entertainment. Vital information, in the usual television format, becomes nothing more than theater of the absurd. It is little more than something to viewed for its 30 second play and, then, dismissed from the mind as quickly as the anchorman switches to a commercial break. There is no discussion, debate or background proffered. Viewers are not informed of anything; they are simply bemused by twirling 3-D graphics, well-coiffed "newscasters" and titillated by pablum and monosyllabic dialogue. The show ends, generally on the most amusing or, alternatively, heart-wrenching, story of the day and, as the credits roll, everything is quickly forgotten. Regardless of the state of the world, it’s now time for Wheel of Fortune. What was he saying about Darfur? Never mind; here’s the next show!

Even worse, are the quasi-news presentations that feature little more than a moderator (usually a biased, polarized talking head with his microphone set to highest volume) and two "guests" (often viewed in tiny windows to either side of the host. These convey little more than a three-way shouting match, each opinionated mouth vying to be heard above the din. One wonders, when the inevitable commercial breaks interrupts the proceedings, what anyone actually said. These, gentle reader, are not the Lincoln-Douglas debates but their 21^st Century equivalent. No civility, no listening to contrary views, no contemplation and, surely, no give and take. The show ends with the larger talking head waxing ineloquently about the stupidity of his guests and reassuring the viewers that, when all is said and done, he is the only one that was right in his assessment. What that assessment actually was, we are left empty, at best, confused at worst. But, no worries: It’s time for WWE’s Slam Down! Get the popcorn, little wife!

These are the dangerous forms of the current television - news-as-drama or, worse, debate-as-argument. No opinions are formed (much less changed), no issues are defined, no minds are moved to thought and, certainly, no one is challenged to action. The viewers are, instead, benumbed, befuddled and, just as the medium would have it, "entertained". And the impotent circus qua "television as great educator" is extended to everything from Presidential debates to wars and disasters, all with the same ineptitude and mind-numbing banality. And, now, with the Internet exploding with misinformation and reviewed (literally) hogwash, we can expect America to become even more disinformed and prejudicial.

All this because we stopped reading and, more to the point, conversing. Huxley’s Brave New World got it right. We have no fear of book burning or censorship from Orwell’s Big Brother. We were so vigilant of that scenario, we overlooked Huxley’s more dire warnings. More’s the pity.

We have closed our minds, all on our own, and are quite literally giggling ourselves quite to death.