The last posting, “Early On,”[1]
initiated a series of upcoming postings that addresses American history and how
levels of deviance Americans have experienced, either as perpetrators or as
victims, developed. That posting
reviewed the early clash of ideas – and feelings – they struggled through, that
being between Calvinism (fire and brimstone) and transcendentalism (the genteel
tradition).
That review depended on the work of George
Santayana[2]
who wrote during the early years of 1900s of this clash. The posting ended with a reference to the
contribution of William James. James is
considered an early advocate of pragmatism.
Santayana shared his thoughts on this construct, a philosophy that sinks
its creeds and theories over various estimates that were characterized as being
a “local and temporary grammar of action.”[3]
That is, while maintaining the spotlight on the
individual, as in transcendentalism, pragmatism judges the individual not as a
maker of meaning, but an extraordinary observer (known as “radical empiricism”)
and a possessor of great affect (known as “radical romanticism”): People, according to pragmatist ideals should
be about compassionately interacting with things, not with books and idealized
generalities. Realities, for pragmatists,
will change over time, leaving a person relying on “book knowledge” with
dysfunctional intellectualized principles.
Santayana adequately shares a basis for this
American philosophy. He describes a
development that enshrines the individual through transcendentalism, and now,
in the 1800s, pragmatism. Along the way,
Americans institutionalized processes based on the assumptions that hold
action, temporal concerns, and self-initiative as implicit ideals. But Santayana could still write of an
American people light of heart and comporting themselves, for the most part, in
civil modes of behavior.
This cultural foundation, though, would
encounter a fundamental institutional change some years later that would have
profound sociological and psychological consequences. Without the sobering influence of Calvinism,
to a meaningful degree, the demystified philosophic core of American culture
only needed a newer standard of temporal goodness to set off a chain of
institutional changes.
That occurred, resulting in creating within
America a pervasive incivility – the higher level of deviance for which
Americans are known as suffering through today.
And that turn brings this account into the twentieth century. That is, to this view of the temporal and
action orientation came an invention that would greatly cement and further the
biases of pragmatist thought.
And to explain the effect of that invention –
television – this blogger is well advised to borrow from the very psychology
that he sees as a product of its influence.
To explain: Neil Postman argues
that a society’s basic mode of communication governs its epistemology (its
origins and natures of knowledge). He observes:
Our conversations about nature and about
ourselves are conducted in whatever “languages” we find it possible and
convenient to employ. We do not see
nature as “it” is but only as our languages are. And our languages are our media. Our media are our metaphors. Our metaphors create the control of our
culture.[4]
Surely, the effects of TV might have well been
eclipsed to some degree since Postman wrote these words – there has been the
rise of social media – but the main point is still valid.
Media defines the languages a people employ in
the current advanced world. That is, a people’s metaphors dictate how they see reality
and define their expectations of reality.
This blogger hesitates using Postman’s views because those views seem to
support what is argued to be part of the problem. Postman, as the description in the next
posting will attest, bases his argument on mental processes as opposed to
reality, and the position here is that Americans need to find ways to deal with
the real.
To
be clear, it is not claimed here that how a people view that reality has no
effect on how they interact with it, but what American culture, at least, has
done is to glorify image over reality and that is what the blogger sees as Postman
helping his readers understand. This
blog will next compare the epistemology created by television and that of the
printed word. It is in this analysis
that Postman makes his most meaningful contribution from his cited book, and
this blogger believes it sheds powerful insights into what ails the current
condition in American culture.
[1] Robert Gutierrez, “Early On,” Gravitas: A Voice for Civics, February 13, 2024,
accessed February 15, 2024, URL: https://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/.
[2] George Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition in America”
in The Annals of America, Vol. 13 (Chicago, IL: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1968),
277-288.
[3] Ibid., 285.
[4] Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (New
York, NY: Penguin Books, 1985), 15.
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