Musing on McLaren's emc: Amusing

This is the fifteenth in a periodic series of reflections on Brian D. McLaren's everything must change. Quotations used by kind permission of the author, with page citations from the edition featured on the Emerging Church Reading List to your right. 

"The first task in my research [into the top global problems] was to review the literature addressing global problems-- which, to my surprise, occupied comparatively few inches of shelf space in a library, next to wide shelves sagging with tell-all celebrity biographies, self-help books, and apocalyptic fiction. One might wish there were more books on averting the destruction of the earth than books amusing us while it proceeds. Perhaps that paucity of attention is itself a key dimension of the crises" (p. 46).

On reading Brian's lament about "books amusing us while [the destruction of the earth] proceeds," I remembered Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, published in-- note the year-- 1985.

In his Foreward, Postman contrasted Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984:

"Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.  Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture. . . . As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny 'failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.'  In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure" (pp. vii-viii).

Comments

[jeff wahlgren]

Bread and circuses. Witness the coincidental presentation of the iPad versus the congressional AIG hearings testimony. The con man is always using one hand to distract you from the other hand that is busy cheating you.

[Bill Roberts]

Hey, Jeff! I'm honored you've not only found my blog but read a post. The con man description reminds me of his polar opposite who suggested not letting the left hand know what the right hand is doing in giving help to the needy.