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Thought for the Day

From Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death (1984). A most excellent book.

The traditional civil libertarian opposition to the banning of books from school libraries and from school curricula is now largely irrelevant. Such acts of censorship are annoying, of course, and must be opposed. But they are trivial. Even worse, they are distracting, in that they divert civil libertarians from confronting those questions that have to do with the claims of new technologies....

The fight against censorship is a nineteeth-century issue which was largely won in the twentieth. What we are confronted with now is the problem posed by the economic and symbolic structure of television. Those who run television do not limit our access to information but in fact widen it. Our Ministry of Culture is Huxleyan, not Orwellian. It does everything possible to encourage us to watch continuously. But what we watch is a medium which presents information in a form that renders it simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual; that is to say, information packaaged as entertainment. In America, we are never denied the opportunity to amuse ourselves...

How delighted would be all the kings, czars and fürhrers of the past (and commissars of the present) to know that censorship is not a necessity when all political discourse takes the form of a jest.

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