My book on postmodernism, Truth Decay, assessed both the philosophy of postmodernism (nonrealism) and how cultural factors contributed to the postmodern view of truth as relative, negotiable, and constructed. Although we now hear less about postmodernism as a philosophy, it has taken root in the common mind and mood. I have found no better social critic to explain “truth decay” than social critic and media theorist, Neil Postman (1931–2003). By the term “truth decay,” I mean “a cultural condition in which the very idea of absolute, objective, and universal truth is considered implausible, held in open contempt, or not even seriously considered.”[1] I wrote that in 2000, but the situation has gotten far worse in the age of social media, influencers without knowledge or credibility, fake news, AI simulations (especially “deep fakes”), and more.
1. Douglas Groothuis. Truth Decay: Defending Christianity Against the Challenges of Postmodernism (Kindle Locations 157-158). Kindle Edition.
Nevertheless, one antidote to truth decay is an awareness of the potentially deceptive power of images and the need for spoken and written discourse to discern truth and find knowledge (justified true belief) through the evaluation of evidence and through reason. To that end, I will excerpt from and expand on sections from Truth Decay that address this issue of addressing reality aright, with frequent reference to Neil Postman’s, seminal book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, as well as his work Technopoly.
Information, Reading, and Watching
Postman describes the general problem of information overload, which is, paradoxically, tied to ignorance of reality.
The tie between information and human purpose has been severed, i.e., information appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume and at high speeds, and disconnected from theory, meaning, or purpose.[2]
2. Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology(New York: Knopf, 1992), 70.
We often do not know how to assess information for reliability, how to separate the wheat from the chaff. Thus, most Americans are well-informed, hyperactive ignoramuses. They are information-rich, information-ravenous, and knowledge-deprived. To use biblical language, they are “tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming” (Eph. 4:14).
Moreover, most of this information is presented as entertainment or in entertainment-oriented form, usually dominated by alluring moving images. Hence the title of Postman’s book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. Amuse literally means not to think (or muse). While Postman’s work was written pre-internet and focused on the rise and dominance of television, his essential insight is that the production and distribution of images made possible by television—and now overwhelmingly more so by the internet—debases our public discourse about religion, politics, education, and everything else.
Sociologist Jacques Ellul (1912–94) observes that the “visionary reality of connected images cannot tolerate critical discourse, explanation, duplication, or reflection”—all rational activities required for separating truth from error. Cognitive pursuits “presuppose a certain distance and withdrawal from the action, whereas images require that I continually be involved in the action.” The images must keep the word in check, keep it humiliated, since “the word produces disenchantment with the image; the word strips it of its hypnotic and magical power.”[3] Words can expose an image age as false or misleading, as when we read in a magazine that a television program “re-created” an event that never occurred.
3. Jacques Ellul, The Humiliation of the Word, trans. Joyce Main Hanks (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1985), p. 142.
When the image overwhelms and subjugates the word, the ability to think, write, and communicate in a linear and logical fashion is undermined. Television’s images have their immediate effect on us, but that effect is seldom to cause us to pursue their truth or falsity. Television’s images are usually shorn of their overall context and meaning and are reduced to factoids (at best). Ideas located within a historical and logical setting are replaced by impressions, emotions, and stimulations. While images communicate narrative stories and quantitative information well (such as graphs and charts), words are required for more linear and logical communication. Propositions and beliefs can be true or false; images in themselves do not have truth value.
By contrast, the act of reading requires an intellectual focus and patience not afforded by the spectacles of electronic images; it demands a deep level of intellectual engagement and bestows tremendous pleasure and benefit for the faithful. We watch television; we read books. Few have described the truth-conducive nature of print and reading with as great clarity and insight as Postman when he explains what is demanded from the reader of words on a page. Postman deserves to be quoted at length.
Whenever language is the principal medium of communication—especially language controlled by the rigors of print—an idea, a fact, a claim is the inevitable result. The idea may be banal, the fact irrelevant, the claim false, but there is no escape from meaning when language is the instrument guiding one’s thought. . . If a sentence refuses to issue forth a fact, a request, a question, an assertion, an explanation, it is nonsense, a mere grammatical shell.
As a consequence a language-centered discourse such as was characteristic of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America tends to be both content-laden and serious, all the more so when it takes its form from print. It is serious because meaning demands to be understood. A written sentence calls upon its author to say something, upon its reader to know the import of what is said. And when an author and reader are struggling with semantic meaning, they are engaged in the most serious challenge to the intellect.
Postman then elucidates the need for discernment when reading. If we are interested in ascertaining truth, we must attend carefully to what is written.
This is especially the case with the act of reading, for authors are not always trustworthy. They lie, they become confused, they over-generalize, they abuse logic and, sometimes, common sense. The reader must come armed, in a serious state of intellectual readiness. This is not easy because he comes to the text alone. In reading, one’s responses are isolated, one’s intellect thrown back on its own resources. To be confronted by the cold abstractions of printed sentences is to look upon language bare, without the assistance of either beauty or community.
Although Postman does not write from a Christian perspective (he was Jewish), he chimes in with the biblical theme of being attentive to truth and error through concentration. As Hebrews 5:11–14 warns:
We have much to say about this [Christ as high priest], but it is hard to make it clear to you because you no longer try to understand. In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.
The author scolds his readers for intellectual laziness and turpitude. How much more does this apply to those whose sensibilities have been addled by constant exposure to the welter of images assaulting us daily through the Internet? By attending to reading and developing the requisite skills to read well, we can overcome these infantile habits. Postman continues:
Thus, reading is by its nature a serious business. It is also, of course, an essentially rational activity. From Erasmus in the sixteenth century to Elizabeth Eisenstein in the twentieth, almost every scholar who has grappled with the question of what reading does to one’s habits of mind has concluded that the process encourages rationality; that the sequential, propositional character of the written word fosters what Walter Ong calls the “analytic management of knowledge.” To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusions, and overgeneralizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense. It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one generalization to another. To accomplish this, one must achieve a certain distance from the words themselves, which is, in fact, encouraged by the isolated and impersonal text.[4]
4. Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (50–51). Penguin Publishing Group. I have split Postman’s long paragraph into a two separate paragraphs for ease of reading. I hope the good professor wouldn’t mind.
The mental act of reading is not passive, but active. It engages the mind and the imagination in wondrous ways not possible through television—in ways that are, in fact, discouraged by television. Through reading, truth becomes possible and knowable. The discipline of wresting meaning from texts and assessing their truth is invaluable for people who aspire to “[speak] the truth in love” (Eph. 4:15). Truth is restored by attending to the Good Book—whose authors are trustworthy, but not always easy to understand (1 Tim. 3:15–17; 2 Pet. 3:16)—and to good books, which require the kind of cognitive criticism Postman describes (Phil. 4:8).[5] As the late Professor Vernon Grounds (1914–2010) said, the Christian should be a master of one book and the reader of many books.[6] This especially applies to leaders in the church, who are held to a higher standard for what they teach since they influence so many at a profound level (Mal. 2:7–8; Jas. 3:1–3; Titus 2:7–8).
5. Douglas Groothuis. Truth Decay: Defending Christianity Against the Challenges of Postmodernism (Kindle Locations 3031-3034).
6. See Bruce Shelley, Transformed by Truth: The Vernon Grounds Story(Discovery House, 2003).
Postman’s Challenge
While Neil Postman’s critique of image-based and entertainment- focused culture dates to the middle of the 1980s, his warning about the dominance of the electronically-mediated image (which we watch) over the word (which we read) should still challenge us today, especially since the dangers he exposed are more potent today given the explosion of internet media.[7] If we are to speak the truth in love in the church and before the watching world, we must attend earnestly to what is true and avoid all truth-denying or truth-obscuring ways of engaging culture (Rom. 12:1–2; 1 John 2:15–17).
7. Equally significant in this regard is Ellul’s work, The Humiliation of the Word. See also my early treatment of the Internet, Douglas Groothuis, “The Fate of Truth in Cyberspace,” The Soul in Cyberspace (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1997). See also Quentin Schultz, Habits of the High-Tech Heart (Grand Rapids, Baker Books, 2002).
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Douglas GroothuisDouglas Groothuis (PhD, University of Oregon) is professor of philosophy at Denver Seminary. He is the author of numerous books, including Christian Apologetics, Fire in the Streets, Philosophy in Seven Sentences, Unmasking the New Age, Truth Decay, On Pascal, On Jesus, and Walking Through Twilight. He has written for scholarly journals such as Religious Studies, Sophia, Research in Philosophy and Technology, Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, and Philosophia Christi, as well as for numerous popular magazines.
The Log College 