Irony and other important vitamins and minerals

Have I praised Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death yet?

Postman retells a fable in which an inventive god comes to present his clever inventions before the king. The god introduces and describes his inventions one by one, and the king, in turn, replies with approval or criticism. When the god introduces the incredible invention of writing, one would expect resounding applause from the king. (After all, where would we be without writing?)

Instead, the king criticizes this invention on the grounds that it is a substitute for knowledge. "How can that be?" you ask. Here's his point: If you no longer have to remember something, if you no longer have to keep it in your mind, you're free to forget it. The oral tradition by which knowledge was passed from generation to generation before writing was commonplace required knowledge to be always retained in the mind lest it be forgotten. And of course knowledge is useful only when it is present in the mind.

We live in what is commonly referred to as "the information age". I love it, because I can gather facts more quickly and easily than I ever could as a child growing up 30 miles from the nearest library, and also because so much knowledge is freely published on the internet.

As much as the rise of Fox News has contributed to balanced news coverage, their radio-news intro is dangerously misleading. "Information is power," they claim. Not so. Knowledge is power. Without digressing into a discussion of semantics, allow a simple explanation to suffice: Knowledge is information made useful.

72 - 3.5 = 68.5

That's information. You can find that information by punching a few buttons on a calculator. A carpenter makes use of that information when determining what length to cut a board so it'll fit properly.

President Lincoln suspended habeus corpus laws during the Civil War. "Yeah? So? What's your point?" That information is useful in understanding civil rights during wartime as opposed to peacetime.

Lone facts are useful only in Trivial Pursuit. (They're called "trivia" for a reason.) We consider some facts to be important, sure. Their importance is not ontological, however; it derives, rather, from the use we make of them.

"But we all know scads of isolated facts and trivia, don't we?" Indeed we do - and that ought to tell us something: If we're not making use of all this information, we're limiting our knowledge. We need to be doing something with it, not merely storing it in our brains, as one might write it in a book to be placed on a shelf and consulted only to settle after-dinner disputes.

And so now we've come round to books again, and finally to what prompted me to write this post. My copy of Postman's book has not arrived yet. I had initially checked it out from the local library before deciding to purchase it. But I tend to read like my father: with a highlighter pencil in hand - something I can't do with library books. And good books belong in one's personal library, since it takes time to transfer the knowledge from a book to one's mind. I'm not talking about transferring facts and information; those can be easily retrieved when needed, just as a calculator can tell you "It's 68.5" anytime you need. I'm talking about the knowledge found in an incisive book.

I've had Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind on my shelf for some three years, bookmarked where I left off just beyond his introduction. I recently restarted it, and found I still can't get beyond the introduction! It contains a wealth of knowledge on politics, society, culture and education, and I want that knowledge in my mind, not just on my bookshelf.

I've been trying to remember the names of the god and the king in that ancient fable Postman retells. But just as the king criticizes writing for being a substitute for memory and knowledge, I find myself anxious for the arrival of the book because I can't remember. Ironic, isn't it?