The approach of the millennium has inspired visions of apocalypse driven by technology and utopia delivered by it. The Internet will lead to world peace and the withering away of the nation-state -- unless we are fighting over food and water in the aftermath of a disaster caused by the Y2K bug. To counteract such fashionable nonsense, one would welcome a sensible critique of the claims made on behalf of technology, along with a defense of old-fashioned liberal humanism. Neil Postman attempts to provide both in "Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future."

Postman, the author of several previous books on the media and education, including "The End of Education" (1995) and "Technopoly" (1992), is frequently on the mark in his criticisms of techno-utopianism. Quoting an author who anticipates the invention of machines that speak, Postman writes, "He has nothing to say about how we may become different by talking to doorknobs (and has no clue about how talking to answering machines is far from comfortable)." Postman's rebuttal of the claim that the Internet will produce a new kind of participatory democracy is just as shrewd and sly: "To call a train an 'iron horse,' as we once did, may be picturesque, but it obscures the most significant differences between a train and a horse-and-buggy." Postman provides another example of the abuse of language by technophiles: "I have the impression that 'community' is now used to mean, simply, people with similar interests, a considerable change from an older meaning: a community is made up of people who may not have similar interests but who must negotiate and resolve their differences for the sake of social harmony."

Postman's concern with the values of literacy and rationality lead him, in this book as in his previous ones, to discuss education. In two chapters about children (one of them, for no obvious reason, an appendix), Postman makes an interesting argument that the conception of "childhood" as a distinct stage of life was a product of print culture and the need to ensure widespread literacy: "The modern school was a creation of the printing press with movable type, for it was to school that the young were taken to learn how to be literate, and therefore how to be an adult." Today, however, according to Postman: "There are economic and political interests that would be better served by allowing the bulk of a semiliterate population to entertain itself with the magic of visual computer games, to use and be used by computers without understanding. In this way the computer would remain mysterious and under the control of a bureaucratic elite. However, were our schools to grasp that a computer is not a tool but a philosophy of knowledge, we would indeed have something to teach."

When Postman turns from analyzing contemporary culture and education to the more ambitious project of defending the Enlightenment tradition, the results are less impressive. He has the unusual and annoying habit of asserting that apparently incompatible philosophies or religions can be harmonized on a higher level of abstraction. A few examples will have to serve: "We may add to the list Confucius, Isaiah, Jesus, Muhammad, the Buddha, Shakespeare, Spinoza and many more. What they tell us is all the same: There is no escaping ourselves." Elsewhere he writes: "We might fairly say that Friedrich Froebel, Johann Pestalozzi, Maria Montessori, Jean Piaget, Arnold Gesell and A. S. Neill are all Rousseau's intellectual heirs." Even Postman feels a twinge of guilt over this practice, admitting that, when discoursing on linguistic indeterminacy, "I went, perhaps, to extremes by referring to the matter as the 'Einstein-Heisenberg-Korzybski-Dewey-Sapir-Whorf-Wittgenstein-McLuhan-et al. hypothesis.' "

Using the same technique, Postman conflates the views of a number of radically different thinkers into his amorphous ideal, to which he refers alternately as "the 18th century" and "the Enlightenment." To the Enlightenment he assigns not only the usual suspects like the American founding fathers and the French philosophes, but also "Blake, Carlyle, Ruskin and William Morris." These diverse figures are reduced to totemic ancestors, to whom various platitudes can be attributed: "The words of the sages can calm and comfort us." For example, Postman invokes Mill and Einstein (whom he describes as Enlightenment thinkers of later eras) as authorities for his assertion that science and religion can be reconciled: "Mill called his story the Religion of Humanity. Einstein spoke of Cosmic Religious feeling." Postman helpfully provides a catechism: "The universe was created by a benign and singular God who gave to human beings the intellect and inspiration to understand his creation (within limits), and the right to be free, to question human authority and to govern themselves within the framework established by God and Nature. Humanity's purpose is to respect God's creation, to be humble in its awful presence, and, with honesty toward and compassion for others, seek ways to find happiness and peace."

No religion would be complete without commandments. Postman cites C. S. Lewis's notion of "the Tao, the summary of commands and prohibitions found in all collections of moral discourse from ancient Egypt to Babylonia to the Chinese Analects to Homer's 'Iliad' to the Old and New Testaments. The 18th century could not have used the term 'Tao,' but this is what 18th-century thinkers meant." No doubt -- just as "There is no escaping ourselves" is what Jesus and Shakespeare and Spinoza meant. Postman would have us follow Paine, Jefferson and other 18th-century deists by adopting this denatured religiosity -- not because it is true (he admits that scientific naturalism may be correct), but because of its beneficial social effects: "They understood that vulgar relativism -- that is to say, the idea that values are mere historical prejudices -- would lead to despair and inaction."

It is hard to square Postman's appeals to authority on behalf of an insipid deism with the definition of the Enlightenment with which he begins his book: "A philosophical movement of the 18th century focusing on the criticism of previously accepted doctrines and institutions from the point of view of rationalism." Invoking Voltaire, Postman all too often resembles Dr. Pangloss.