The Weekly, September 16, 2024
Hi all,
As I read Postman I’ve been struck by an observation he makes that one of the basic human problems we all face is managing the information that is available to us. This is, in fact, one of the chief functions of healthy social institutions.
Think about families: Part of parenting is determining what information your children simply do not need access to until a certain phase in their life, if ever. (I now have conversations with our older kids about certain political events. I don’t have those conversations with my four-year-old. That’s information that you grow into. There are other types of “information” that you simply never need to encounter—pornographic material is the obvious example here.)
Postman:
Social institutions of all kinds function as control mechanisms. This is important to say, because most writers on the subject of social institutions (especially sociologists) do not grasp the idea that any decline in the force of institutions makes people vulnerable to information chaos. To say that life is destabilized by weakened institutions is merely to say that information loses its use and therefore becomes a source of confusion rather than coherence.
Social institutions sometimes do their work simply by denying people access to information, but principally by directing how much weight and, therefore, value one must give to information. Social institutions are concerned with the meaning of information and can be quite rigorous in enforcing standards of admission.
What happens when these institutions break down?
Postman:
The relationship between information and the mechanisms for its control is fairly simple to describe: Technology increases the available supply of information. As the supply is increased, control mechanisms are strained. Additional control mechanisms are needed to cope with new information. When additional control mechanisms are themselves technical, they in turn further increase the supply of information. When the supply of information is no longer controllable, a general breakdown in psychic tranquility and social purpose occurs. Without defenses, people have no way of finding meaning in their experiences, lose their capacity to remember, and have difficulty imagining reasonable futures.
An illustration of this: I work in media, so I’m in regular communication with many people. That said, I live in Lincoln, NE so of the people relevant to my work that I communicate with regularly, only one is local. All the others I communicate with with tools like Signal, Discord, Slack, email, etc. But this glut of information (in the form of notifications) can make it hard to do my work. So my solution to this has been two-fold: On my computer when I especially need to focus and am having difficulty doing so, I have an app called Freedom that I use to disable access to distracting software. Meanwhile, on my phone I have turned off notifications for every app except my phone and text messaging app. I also keep my phone in do not disturb mode all the time and have it set up so that when in do not disturb mode the only people whose messages or calls get through are my parents, my wife, and our publisher at Mere O. (I also have it set up so that if someone calls twice in 15 minutes the second call will go through.) So this is how I manage the information glut that simply occurs in my life as a result of ordinary daily work.
But note: Managing the glut of information requires… more information. I need to be aware of Freedom and know how to use it. I also need to know how to turn off notifications on my phone, set up do not disturb, set up exceptions so that people who might genuinely need to reach me in an emergency actually can, and so on. This is what Postman is talking about: The simple act of trying to take control of my information intake requires additional information intake. Small wonder we’re all tired.
Now back to Postman:
One way of defining Technopoly, then, is to say it is what happens to society when the defenses against information glut have broken down. It is what happens when institutional life becomes inadequate to cope with too much information. It is what happens when a culture, overcome by information generated by technology, tries to employ technology itself as a means of providing clear direction and humane purpose. The effort is mostly doomed to failure. Though it is sometimes possible to use a disease as a cure for itself, this occurs only when we are fully aware of the processes by which disease is normally held in check.
Later he continues:
In principle a bureaucracy is simply a coordinated series of techniques for reducing the amount of information that requires processing… The invention of the standardized form—a staple of bureaucracy—allows for the “destruction” of every nuance and detail of a situation. By requiring us to check boxes and fill in blanks the standardized form admits only a limited range of formal, objective, and impersonal information, which in some cases is precisely what is needed to solve a particular problem. Bureaucracy is, as Max Weber described it, an attempt to rationalize the flow of information, to make its use efficient to the high degree by eliminating information that diverts attention from the problem at hand… Bureaucracy ignores all information and ideas that do not contribute to efficiency.
Bureaucracy is not in principle a social institution; nor are all institutions that reduce information by excluding some kinds or sources necessarily bureaucracies. Schools may exclude dianetics and astrology; courts exclude hearsay evidence. They do so for substantive reasons having to do with the theories on which these institutions are based. But bureacracy has no intellectual, political, or moral theory—except for its implicit assumption that efficiency is the principal aim of all social institutions and that other goals are essentially less worthy, if not irrelevant. That is why John Stuart Mill thought bureaucracy a “tyranny” and C. S. Lewis identified it with Hell.
Books
I’m midway through a bunch of books right now because I have too many projects going simultaneously. The book manuscript has me reading Schmemann on baptism as well as this volume on Calvin’s doctrine of the Word and the Sacraments. I’ve also been dipping into Rowan Williams’s Being Christian for the same project.
For the Covenant talks I have coming in a couple weeks I’m reading Rosa, Postman, and Barba-Kay. And, finally, as part of my ongoing liberalism discourse project I’m reading Guelzo’s Our Ancient Faith and Miles Smith’s Religion and Republic. (I’ve had the thought of doing a review essay in the sixth print issue on Guelzo, Smith, and Jeff Stout.)
Articles
Maybe early Christians didn’t meet in houses?
Gracy Olmstead on farm wives
Leah Sargeant on the mutual endangerment society
Leah Sargeant on policy-level penalties for marriage that target the poor
Matthew Lee Anderson on the state of the pro-life movement
Abigail Anthony on the inherent issues with eugenics and IVF
Michael Wear on the demoralized public square
Adam Gopnik on Charles Taylor
Paul Kingsnorth on the religious void in the modern west
Martin Shaw on Ruth and Naomi
Matteo Wong on what AI will mean for the overwhelming majority of languages spoken around the world
Joseph Lawler on population density and highway expansion
Elsewhere
It’s fall, so we already got one round of fresh apples from a friend’s acreage where they have a couple apple trees. Those went into a great apple crisp from the L’Abri cookbook—I haven’t been able to find our version online. The Dutch L’Abri has a Dutch language cookbook of their recipes and the apple crisp we made came from the Dutch L’Abri. But I’m guessing most of you don’t read Dutch, so that isn’t helpful.
Anyway: I’ve experimented with homemade ciders in the past and may try that again this fall. (The other thing I like to do is after straining all the solids out of the cider and removing the cinnamon sticks you can usually throw all the pulp into a blender and make a really enjoyable apple butter.)
Probably I’ll also be having plenty of Stone Fences this fall—it’s a Revolutionary War era drink made by combining hard cider with bourbon, rye, or applejack. It’s dead simple. But you won’t want to drink more than one in an evening. They pack a punch.
Thanks for reading!
Under the Mercy,
~Jake