![]() As such, Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century is designed to function on two levels: as an overview of Enlightenment thought and, more importantly, as a critique of modern culture, one which he feels is in dire need of moral direction and guidance. He is not interested in offering an intellectual history of the period so much as culling from it a useful set of ideas and principles that can illuminate the present. Postman speaks of this period variously as the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment, and the dawn of the modern world. It was a time when reason began its triumph over superstition, and it was the age when a profoundly new understanding of the meaning and purpose of history began to take hold the idea of progress. It was the century we first articulated our ideas about inductive science, about religious and political freedom, about popular education, and about rational commerce. Postman feels that the eighteenth century is the most useful source of intellectual and social guidance because it offers "a humane direction to the future." It was the century of Goethe, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Kant, Hume, Gibbon, Adam Smith, the American founding fathers, and many other seminal minds. He also dismisses the God-centered outlook of the Middle Ages, noting that "in a theocratic world, everyone is a fundamentalist." In a technological and multicultural society such as ours, "fundamentalism is a side issue, confined to those places that are still theocratic and are therefore regarded as a danger to world harmony." produced a wealth of good ideas most notably, the idea of democracy but he rejects Ancient Greece because the Athenians are "too far from us and too strange and too insular and too unacquainted with the power of technology" to help guide us into a new century. Postman admits that the fifth century B.C. And in order to do that, we need to look back to take stock of the good ideas available to us." The case Postman makes is this: "In order to have an agreeable encounter with the twenty-first century, we will have to take into it some good ideas. While it doesn't rank among Postman's best (and has been criticized for drawing heavily on his previous works), it is nevertheless a prescient, sensible, and nicely argued book. Neil Postman uses these aphorisms as a point of departure in Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century, a witty and absorbing little book aimed at revitalizing some of the neglected ideals of the past and applying them to the pressing challenges facing us at the turn of the millennium. Soren Kierkegaard struck a similar chord when he said that there is no such thing as a visionary, that those who claim to know what tomorrow will bring are merely reclaiming some idea from the past and projecting in into the future. George Santayana famously observed that when we forget the mistakes of the past we are condemned to repeat them. ![]() Building a Bridge to the 18th Century by Neil Postman :: A Book Review by Scott London
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