Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future.

Neil Postman. Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future. New York: Knopf, 1999.

In Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century, Neil Postman, one of America's most distinguished observers of contemporary society and a former editor of ETC, suggests we would be wise to look back to the Enlightenment as a source of guidance and inspiration for the new millennium.

Postman argues that the scientific, religious, political, and educational insights provided by Enlightenment thinkers such as Goethe, Voltaire, Diderot, Kant, Edward Gibbon, Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, Jefferson, and Franklin offer a model of sane authority and meaningful purpose that is sorely lacking in today's computer-driven culture. He suggests that their ideas on inductive science, religious and political freedom, popular education, rational commerce, the nation-state, progress, and happiness offer a unifying narrative of humane direction that speaks more to the important question of how we should lead our lives than do our current obsessions with high-definition TV, e-mail, the Internet, cellular phones, and all the rest that digital technology has produced. (For example, Goethe commented, "One should each day, try to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if possible, speak a few reasonable words.")

In making his case for the Enlightenment, as he has done in his many previous books, Postman uses witty, provocative, and well-reasoned arguments. And he doesn't just offer high-level abstractions. Postman also makes a passionate plea for specific new guidelines in the education of America's children, with an emphasis on developing the intellect as successfully as we are developing a craving for new technology. And, in a delightful appendix titled "Comments on the Nature of Language by People Who Never Heard of Jacques Derrida," he offers sensible quotes from sensible writers on a subject (the use of language) that modern day deconstructionists have tried their utmost to render insensible.