Neil Postman: Amusing Ourselves to Death, translated by Zhang Yan, Guangxi Normal University Press, 2004

In buying books and reading books, there often turn up certain experiences that can be explained as “mystical”: when, during a certain period, I have been thinking about some questions, then one day I suddenly wander into a bookstore and find a certain book in a spot I usually seldom pay attention to; I buy it on all sorts of other impulses, and when I bring it home and browse through it, I slap the table and say, “Isn’t this exactly what I’ve been wanting to say?” As if the book had been written by me in the past, and some kind of revelatory power had led me to find it again……
Of course, in fact there is nothing mystical about it; it’s just that I really do wander into bookstores far too often……

This book basically counts as a bestseller (of course, it can’t be compared with those disgusting books), so although I had already been paying some attention to it before, I hadn’t really focused on it. But now, after reading 1984 and Brave New World, when I saw the preface to this book again, I knew I absolutely had to buy it.

The book is thin; although its academic content is not all that profound (which is also an advantage), it is unquestionably a fairly rigorous scholarly book. The most immediate sign is that there is at least one note per page on average, as well as a bibliography and a table of the translated titles; the citations are规范, and it ranges widely. Guangxi Normal University Press is indeed very good at publishing works of this kind that combine bestseller appeal with scholarship.

This book is my “quarterly recommendation” — and it doesn’t even matter which quarter exactly~; anyway, a year probably gets three or five books recommended in this way. I vaguely remember that my previous quarterly recommendation was Brave New World? This one just happens to follow on.

Below I’ll paste the preface; in a few days I’ll add my notes and reflections (I will gradually return to the way I used to read books earlier).

People have always been paying close attention to the year 1984. That year duly arrived, and George Orwell’s prophecy about 1984 did not become reality; the Americans, relieved after their anxieties, could not help but softly sing a song of self-praise. The roots of freedom and democracy were able to continue, and no matter whether Orwell’s nightmare descended elsewhere, at least we were spared.

But we forgot that besides Orwell’s terrible prophecy, there was another version that was equally chilling, though this version was a little older and not nearly as widely known. That was Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Even well-educated people would not have expected that Huxley’s and Orwell’s prophecies were radically different. Orwell warned that people would be enslaved by external oppression, whereas Huxley believed that people’s loss of freedom, success, and history was not “Big Brother’s” fault. In his view, people would gradually fall in love with oppression and worship the industrial technologies that deprived them of the ability to think.

Orwell was afraid of those who forcibly banned books, while Huxley worried about losing any reason to ban books, because no one would want to read books anymore; Orwell was afraid of those who deprived us of information, while Huxley worried that people would increasingly become passive and selfish in a sea of information; Orwell was afraid that truth would be concealed, while Huxley worried that truth would be drowned in the trivialities of a tedious daily world; Orwell was afraid that our culture would become a controlled culture, while Huxley worried that our culture would become a vulgar culture full of sensory stimulation, desire, and ruleless games. As Huxley mentioned in Brave New World Revisited, those libertarians and rationalists who are always ready to resist dictatorship “completely ignore people’s endless appetite for entertainment.” In 1984, people are controlled by pain, whereas in Brave New World, people lose freedom through pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate would destroy us, while Huxley feared that we would perish by what we love.

What this book wants to tell everyone is that it may be Huxley’s prophecy, rather than Orwell’s, that could become reality.

November 11, 2006

最新评论

unic
2006-11-11
21:05:04
Haha~ that’s exactly what you mean, haha; I also want to read this book. 
During this period, every now and then I think of your view on Brave New World; in fact, I had already begun to agree with it, but I still need to think about it some more. Such an important question. 
Today I also went to a bookstore, looked at the prices of several books I wanted to buy, and searched for a few books that were hard to find. I also took the chance to see whether there were any new books. 
Shanghai Translation Publishing House has reprinted a series of classic books; coincidentally, the first one I saw was 1984. The dust jacket is very plain, not bad, and it was only 10 yuan. 
Now, only the Commercial Press and a few old state-run publishers still sell a little of these plain and inexpensive books.
       
However, in today’s age of pervasive commercialization, it is already not easy for someone to be willing to sell things cheaply.