Free Technopoly by Neil Postman Page B

as credulous as was the averageperson in the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages, people believed in the authority of their religion, no matter what. Today, we believe in the authority of our science, no matter what.
    However, there is still another possibility, related to Shaw’s point but off at a right angle to it. It is, in any case, more relevant to understanding the sustaining power of Technopoly. I mean that the world we live in is very nearly incomprehensible to most of us. There is almost no fact, whether actual or imagined, that will surprise us for very long, since we have no comprehensive and consistent picture of the world that would make the fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction. We believe because there is no reason not to believe. And I assume that the reader does not need the evidence of my comic excursion into the suburbs of social science to recognize this. Abetted by a form of education that in itself has been emptied of any coherent world-view, Technopoly deprives us of the social, political, historical, metaphysical, logical, or spiritual bases for knowing what is beyond belief.
    That is especially the case with technical facts. Since this book is filled with a variety of facts, I would hardly wish to shake confidence in them by trying my experiment on the reader. But if I informed you that the paper on which this book is printed was made by a special process which uses the skin of a pickled herring, on what grounds would you dispute me? For all you know—indeed, for all
I
know—the skin of a pickled herring could have made this paper. And if the facts were confirmed by an industrial chemist who described to us some incomprehensible process by which it was done (employing, of course, encomial dyoxin), we might both believe it. Or not wholly disbelieve it, since the ways of technology, like the ways of God, are awesome and mysterious.
    Perhaps I can get a bit closer to the point with an analogy. If you open a brand-new deck of cards and start turning the cards over, one by one, you can get a pretty firm idea of whattheir order is. After you have gone from the ace of spades through to the nine of spades, you expect a ten of spades to come up next. And if the three of diamonds appears, you are surprised and wonder what kind of deck of cards this is. But if I give you a deck that had been shuffled twenty times and then ask you to turn the cards over, you do not expect any card in particular—a three of diamonds would be just as likely as a ten of spades. Having no expectation of a pattern, no basis for assuming a given order, you have no reason to react with incredulity or even surprise to whatever card turns up.
    The belief system of a tool-using culture is rather like a brand-new deck of cards. Whether it is a culture of technological simplicity or sophistication, there always exists a more or less comprehensive, ordered world-view, resting on a set of metaphysical or theological assumptions. Ordinary men and women might not clearly grasp how the harsh realities of their lives fit into the grand and benevolent design of the universe, but they have no doubt that there
is
such a design, and their priests and shamans are well able, by deduction from a handful of principles, to make it, if not wholly rational, at least coherent. The medieval period was a particularly clear example of this point. How comforting it must have been to have a priest explain the meaning of the death of a loved one, of an accident, or of a piece of good fortune. To live in a world in which there were no random events—in which everything was, in theory, comprehensible; in which every act of nature was infused with meaning—is an irreplaceable gift of theology. The role of the church in premodern Europe was to keep the deck of cards in reasonable order, which is why Cardinal Bellarmine and other prelates tried to prevent Galileo from shuffling the deck. As we know, they could not, and with the emergence of technocracies moral