Rocco D’Ambrosca: 05/10/2010
The misperceived evils of modern day culture are annoyingly brought to our attention constantly by confused alarmists and the media agencies who nauseatingly give these fools a voice. But this isn’t a new phenomenon; man has always been frightened of change or more correctly the unknown that results during such change. The removal or replacement of existing systems and paradigms causes such insecurity, uncertainty, and fear that it often blinds many to the immeasurable benefits that come as a result. Such is the case of Neil Postman, who in “Informing Ourselves to Death” is neurotically obsessed with the false notion that computer technology has intensified the information age to a state where no one can make sense out of the overwhelming flow of data that comes at them. While, Charles Paul Freund in “In Praise of Vulgarity” correctly addresses the fears of other alarmists, when he sets them straight concerning the true relationship between culture, capitalism, and democracy within modern culture. It will be shown that Freund’s overarching societal analysis can directly address the specific concerns of Postman. Plainly stated, within any setting man will always unfailingly breakthrough any restraints or clutter to find what is meaningful to him as an expression of his own self created identity.
Postman begins his condemnation of computers by stating that, “technological change is always a Faustian bargain” or in common terms, a deal with the devil (Postman1). Here he has already polarized his view in negative terms as he feels it is his duty to be the voice of descent in the room. His argument against computers is that they facilitate to a greater degree his perceived dangers of the information age. Postman argues that, “the average person today is about as naïve as was the average person in the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages people believed in the authority of their religion, no matter what. Today, we believe in the authority of our science, no matter what.” (Postman4). From here, Postman makes the leap to say that, “There is almost no fact – whether actual or imagined – that will surprise us for very long, since we have no comprehensive and consistent picture of the world which would make the fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction. We believe because there is no reason not to believe. No social, political, historical, metaphysical, logical, or spiritual reason.” (Postman4).
What Postman painfully seems to be missing is that science gives us hard empirical evidence and proof for what it tells us to believe as the truth; while a priest of the Middle Ages can only say you should believe it as truth because the good book says so. Is Postman advocating for cold comfort ignorance in the form of artificially contrived order? He seems to believe that order, no matter how false, is preferable to the temporary uncertainty of competing theories in science. Postman is fond of repeating his belief that, “in a world without spiritual or intellectual order, nothing is unbelievable; nothing is predictable, and therefore, nothing comes as a particular surprise.” (Postman4). But he is unbelievably wrong!
Postman’s argument of the computer can almost completely be blamed on his self admitted ignorance, “I do not know very much more about computer technology than the average person – which isn’t very much.” (Postman1). He sees the computer only as a means of creating more information to confuse us from what is the truth, completely ignoring its infinite capacity as a means to sort through it all. As a separate machine disconnected from the internet the computer can store boundless amounts of text, photos, video, or in other words media or information. An entire library can be stored in a single computer. In digitized form all of this information can be quickly sorted and searched through with the aid of software. Which is faster, typing in a search on such a computer or looking through a card catalogue in a traditional library? It’s obvious that with such speed offered by a computer, it is not only faster to find what you are looking for but also to sort through what you do find, based on the easy manipulation of nonphysical information. Add the internet to this computer and you can easily see how much better the system becomes. Now all of these computers can be networked together, along with their users, to create an ever improving system of collected and sorted knowledge or information. On the level of community, brought forth by the internet, the good information can be sorted from the bad information at an unprecedented level of speed and efficiency. Wikipedia and Google are shining examples of such wisdom of crowds at work. Wikipedia is constantly updated and proofread for errors and misinformation, while Google bases its search results on the quality of each result measured by the global community’s approval of each site based on links and traffic. This can be seen as a direct parallel to the scientific community agreeing on specific truths, through mutual agreement on evidence derived from repeatedly shared experiments.
Postman mentions the printing press as the start of the information age, but seems to miss the parallel to the internet. The printing press eventually let anyone publish a book and therefore opened the floodgates of misinformation. The internet allows the same power; anyone can create a webpage saying anything. But honestly, is there any worry that the authors’ of books or websites proclaiming the earth to be flat will gain any traction or support. No! They are simply ignored and tossed aside after proper study and analysis. What Postman ignores in his argument is what Freund champions; the ability of man to think for himself and define his own meaning out of the chaos of confusion and tyrannical forces that he encounters within the world.
Freund is in the opposite position of Postman. While Postman is an alarmist preaching against the collective wisdom of the group he is addressing, Freund is standing as the voice of cool calculated wisdom, attempting to calm the collective panic of the alarmists. He faces an army of alarmists who believe, “The capitalist system is doomed, suicidal. In fact, it has been destroying itself since its appearance. These critics have isolated democracy, capitalism, and culture from one another, and have each of them surrounded by the others. Real democracy can’t survive because it is choked by a capitalist “culture” driven by money and power; true culture can’t survive because it is destroyed by capitalism’s manufactured populism; capitalist prosperity can’t survive because it is undermined by the anti-democratic forces of self-absorption that it unleashes.” (Freund4). The fear being that, “Instead of pursuing a democratic civil ideal, people will waste their time and money on a poisonous bath of selfish consumerism” (Freund4). What Freund argues in response is that such fears assume that people are brainwashed zombies, who only buy what marketers and advertisers tell them to. Freund therefore sets out to disprove such an assumption with numerous examples of individuals within cultures creating their own identities independent of corporate or governmental manipulation.
“In the USSR, it was low, disruptive culture that generated a “consumerist” demand for the artifacts that embodied its values as well as a popular demand for the freedom to engage in its activities. Because neither consumerism nor democratic freedoms existed in the country, shadow versions of both eventually developed. The entire process, from beginning to end, was founded on vulgarity.” (Freund6). This was a result of Stalin’s attempt, “to extirpate every aspect of American culture from Soviet life. Jazz, which had been played publicly in the USSR as recently as the war years, was now officially regarded as decadent capitalist filth; to even speak of jazz during this period was a criminal act. The same was true of anything American: It was all capitalist decadence, and it was all dangerous and usually illegal.” (Freund6). The solution to such oppression “was a piece of genius. A jazz-loving medical student realized that he could inscribe sound grooves on the surface of a medium that was actually plentiful in the Soviet Union: old X-ray plates. He rigged a contraption that allowed him to produce “recordings” that, while obviously of low quality, at least contained the precious music and allowed its admirers to listen to it at will. He and his imitators were to make a lot of well-earned money on the black market” (Freund8).
These individuals were not risking criminal prosecution at the behest of Madison Avenue advertisements. They were going to such extraordinary and dangerous lengths because they personally identified with the music and culture as part of themselves; as part of their own identity. “The point of the various musical countercultures under the Soviets was not simply to hear music. What the authorities never understood, and what many cultural critics in the West similarly don’t understand, is that the fans who inhabit such “vulgar” and disruptive subcultures are not being exploited. It is the fans who are using the music scene and the paraphernalia that surrounds it for their own expressive purposes. If there is no one to sell them paraphernalia – the clothes, the imagery, the recordings – then the members of these subcultures will not go without it. They will create it themselves.” (Freund8). Quite simply, “In the end, it wasn’t the musical subcultures that were delegitimized but Soviet authority. The inability of such a system to allow its citizens to construct their own cultural identities – that is, to meet their “consumer demands” – was a major factor in robbing communism of credibility among its own populations.” (Freund8).
What Freund comes to express through examples like this is that, “far from being a drain on prosperity, the drive to create and recreate identity has proven irresistible, even in circumstances where no cultural industry exists. Where such industries do exist, self-fashioning immediately becomes an engine of the economy.”; “the key factor in the increasingly positive attitude toward work in the 18th century was neither religion nor legislation but “the growth of new patterns of leisure and consumption,” primed by wage increases. Generally speaking, workers didn’t start punching the clock because they were forced to but because they wanted to. Regular hours – and regular wages – gave them more time and money to buy and enjoy the crass, vulgar, and base artifacts from which they fashioned their senses of self.” (Freund13). Therefore, to the hypocritical horror of such confused and ignorant alarmists, “the evidence from the beginning has been that culture, capitalism, and democracy actually reinforce one another” (Freund13).
The ultimate piece of wisdom that Postman and the rest of us can take from Freund is simply that, “Culture is built around meaning, and meaning proceeds from one’s self.” (Freund13). No matter how much clutter or how many barriers are placed in front of man, he has the capacity and determination to find or create what is meaningful to him. Such is the strength of the human spirit. It is the ignorance and hypocrisy of a few members of society which leads to such exaggerated, hysterical, and completely unfounded fears as presented by Postman and the cultural critics that Freund addresses.
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