In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman has an excellent critique of the data-driven mindset of Enlightenment Modernism, which looks to quantitative research alone to solve all of society's problems. (As an educator, I see this problem in education, which is dominated by standardized testing.) Quantitative research is just one way to discover/regulate/define truth among many, but modern society sees it as virtually infallible. Postman calls out this bias:

We have [many prejudices today], as for example, the equation we moderns make of truth and quantification. In this prejudice, we come astonishingly close to the mystical beliefs of Pythagoras and his followers, who attempted to submit all of life to the sovereignty of numbers. Many of our psychologists, sociologists, economists, and other latter-day cabalists will have numbers to tell them the truth or they will have nothing. Can you imagine, for example, a modern economist articulating truths about our standard of living today by reciting a poem? Or by telling what happened to him during a late-night walk through East St. Louis? Or by offering a series of proverbs and parables, beginning with the saying about a rich man, a camel, and the eye of a needle? The first would be regarded as irrelevant, the second merely anecdotal, the last childish. Yet these forms of language are certainly capable of expressing truths about economic relationships, as well as any other relationships, and indeed have been employed by various peoples. But to the modern mind, resonating with different media-metaphors, the truth in economics is believed to be best discovered and expressed in numbers. Perhaps it is. I will not argue the point. I mean only to call attention to the fact that there is a certain measure of arbitrariness in the forms that truth-telling may take. We must remember that Galileo merely said that the language of nature is written in mathematics. He did not say everything is. And even the truth about nature need not be expressed in mathematics. For most of human history, the language of nature has been the language of myth and ritual. These forms, one might add, had the virtues of leaving nature unthreatened and of encouraging the belief that human beings are part of it. It hardly befits a people who stand ready to blow up the planet to praise themselves too vigorously for having found the true way to talk about nature.

I find that I am constantly confronted with suffering and chaos. It is ever present through social media, television, and the media-saturated world we live in. Sadness screams at us from every screen, casting a cloud of felt sickness and despair that we can’t seem to do anything about. I once heard one of my professors in Communications Studies call this “compassion fatigue.” We are bombarded by the voices of the news that make us feel helpless and guilty. Surely with a world such as this we should do something about it.

I believe seeing the world this way leads not to action, but to a kind of paralysis and dehumanization. We begin to see the world and its people as the dead, dying, and distressed, but we feel powerless to stop or change anything. In that focus on darkness, we forget what makes the atrocities of the world so awful to begin with: the destruction of beautiful, potato loving, culture building, jazz music playing human beings. Violence, illness, and war try with all their powers to deny, discolor, and dilute the true, vibrant, colorful nature of life. When our minds are filled with thoughts of “dying people” and “war,” we forget why it is that we fight against these things: because life, in all its pulsing, hobby filled, giggling reality is beautiful and to be preserved.

This does not mean that we forget the sad things that are happening in the world, or our fellow human beings suffering, or that we don’t fight for what is right and true. Rather, it means that we do not accept darkness as the ultimate reality. It means we dance in defiance, and we sing when the music stops. Only light can put out darkness. Only life can defeat death, and life is made up of a thousand things that never make the news.

Joy Clarkson, "The Importance of Playing the Saxophone"