The "Loving Resistance Fighter"
In his book Technopoly:The Surrender of Culture to TechnologyNeil Postman suggests that
America has undergone three social experiments in its history. At each juncture certain key questions
emerged to challenge the central arguments for the experiments. In the first instance during the eighteenth century
the questions were "can a nation allow the greatest possible degree of political and religious freeedom
and still retain a sense of identity and purpose?" At the end of the nineteenth century according to
Postman, "a second great xeperiment was undertaken, posing the question, Can a nation retain a sense
of cohesion and community by allowing into it people from all over the world?"
As We approach the twenty-first century, Postman states that the current social experiment--"the great experiment of Technology--"
raises the question, "Can a nation preserve its history, originality, and humanity by submitting itself totally to the sovreignty
of a technological thought-world?" Such a submission Postman contends can be resisted by those
he calls "loving resistance fighters." Accordingly, "loving resistance fighters" are those:
"who pay no attention to a poll unless they know what quetions were asked and why;
who refuse to accept efficiency as the pre-eminent goal of human relations;
who have freed themselves from the belief in the magical power of numbers, do not regard calculation as an adequate substitute for judgement,
or precision as synonymous for truth;
who refuse to allow psychology or any 'social science' to pre-empt the language and thought of common
sense;
who are, at least suspicious of the idea of progress, and who do not confuse information with
understanding;
who do not regard the aged as irrelevent;
who take seriously the meaning of family loyalty and honor, and who, when they 'reach out and touch
someone,' they expect that person to be in the same room;
who take the great narratives of religion seriously and who do not believe that science is the only
system of thought capable of producing truth;
who know the difference between the sacred and the profane, and who do not wink at tradition for
modernity's sake;
who admire technological ingenuity but do not think it represents the highest possible form of human
achievement."1
_________________
1Neil Postman, Technopoly:The Surrender of Culture to Technology (Vintage Press, 1993) pp. 183-184.
Liberal Education and the Polytechnic Home Page
Liberal Education, Technology and the Twenty-First Century
