Amusing Ourselves to Death was published in 1985. It’s author, Neil Postman, died in 2003. The book’s re-issue, with a new foreword by Neil’s son, Andrew, attests to two things. The message this book conveys. And the timeless brilliance of the man who wrote it.

In Neil Postman’s original foreword, he talks about 1984 and Orwell’s “dark vision” of oppression from an external force. But Postman brings up another visionary, Aldous Huxley, whose Brave New World presents a population that willingly concedes its ability to direct its fate.

          Orwell feared those who would ban books.
          Huxley feared no one would care to read one.

          Orwell feared the absence of information.
          Huxley feared a mind-numbing amount of it.

          Orwell feared a lack of truth.
          Huxley feared a wealth of irrelevance.

          Orwell feared a culture of control.
          Huxley feared a culture of triviality.

          Orwell feared we would be controlled through pain.
          Huxley feared we would be happily distracted to death.

Postman talks about early America, a time he terms “Typographic America”, when the ‘typographic mind’ devoured pamphlets, newspapers, books, and was willing to sit and listen to hours of oratory. He talks about today, “The Age of Show Business”, when information is everywhere and nowhere, and we know of lots of things, but nothing about them.

In the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Douglas would speak for an hour, Lincoln would take an hour and a half to reply, and Douglas would then have a half hour to rebut Lincoln’s reply. Were that to happen today, perhaps we’d have an informed electorate instead of merely an opinionated one.

Neil Postman was writing this book just at the leading edge of the computer era. There were no blogs, no Google. Would he have found worth in such immediate access to information? Or would he have decried the instantaneous nature of it all as too superfluous, too removed?

“In the Huxleyan prophecy,” Postman says, “Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk: culture-death is a clear possibility.”

This is a smart, witty, thought-provoking book. I think Karl Rove read it. Maybe we all should.