Enough.: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life

Chapter 9. Too Many Twenty-First-Century Values, Not Enough Eighteenth-Century Values

A few summers back, I at last got around to reading a book that the late Neil Postman—prolific author, social critic, and professor at New York University—had autographed and given me. The central message of Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century is encapsulated in its opening epigraph:

Soon we shall know everything the 18th century didn't know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us.^[21]

Postman's book presents an impassioned defense of the old-fashioned liberal humanitarianism that was the hallmark of the Age of Reason. His aim was to restore the balance between mind and machine, and his principal concern was our move away from the era in which the values and character of Western civilization were at the forefront of the minds of our great philosophers and leaders, and when the prevailing view was that anything that's important must have a moral authority.

To Postman's way of thinking, truth is invulnerable to fashion and the passing of time. I'm not so sure. While that is the way things work in the long run—of course reality ultimately prevails—perception often wins in the short run. Indeed, I would argue that we have moved away from truth—however one might define it—to (with due respect to television commentator Stephen Colbert) truthiness, the presentation of ideas and numbers that convey neither more nor less than what we wish to believe in our own self-interest, and persuade ...