While reading Neil Postman’s from Technocracy to Technopoly, I was reminded of how in Brave New World, traditional ideals were not followed. This article allowed me to grasp a better understanding of what technocracy and technopoly really meant. The way that tradition is vaporized and forgotten is very similar in Brave New World and Neil Postman’s article. When John asks about Shakespeare, the Headmaster in the school responds with indignation: “Our library,” said Dr. Gaffney, “contains only books of reference. If our young people need distraction, they can get it at the feelies. We don’t encourage them to indulge in any solitary amusements.” This illustrates the disconnect between literature (tradition) and the life of the average citizen in New London.
In order to understand the technopoly of Brave New World, or of the United States, for that matter, it is easier to look at the technocracy of the past in the United States. A technocracy is “society only loosely controlled by social custom and religious tradition and driven by the impulse to invent” (Postman 41). We were first a tool-developing nation. Then we invented machines and slowly people took a backseat to machines and became inferior to those machines. With each passing decade, machines took front stage and people became a means to an end. We became consumers and mass producers at the expense of the individual.
Fredrick Winslow Taylor contributed to this discussion. Postman talks about him as being the originator of scientific management. Taylor’s philosophy was that machines were more important than people. His philosophy was eventually being put into use with armed forces, legal professions, home, church, and education. Taylor’s philosophy can be summed up in this quote: “The goal of human labor and thought is efficiency; that technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment; that in fact human judgment cannot be trusted, because it is plagued by laxity, ambiguity, and unnecessary complexity; that subjectivity is an obstacle to clear thinking; that what cannot be measured either does not exist or is of no value; and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by experts.” While many people do not remember Taylor specifically, his works have led generations of reform in the twenty-first century.
A technolopoly is a “totalitarian technocracy” (Postman 48). In a technopoly, tradition is replaced, not by making it illegal or immoral, but making it obsolete or ”by redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by history, by truth, by intelligence, so that our definitions fit its new requirements” (Postman 48). If we follow this line of thinking further, we would eventually find ourselves in the world of Singularity and lose the very essence of humanity.
