“Divine Inspiration” Marshall McLuhan by Jeet Heer

7/30/2019 Divine Inspiration Marshall McLuhan by Jeet Heer

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D i v i n e I n s p i r a t i o n

How Catholicism made Marshall McLuhan one of the twentiethcenturys freest and finest thinkers

BY JEET HEER ART BY DAVID ROKEBY

MEDIA FROM THE JULY 2011 MAGAZINE

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Installation view ofThrough the Vanishing Point, commissioned by the 2010 Scotiabank

Contact Photography Festival and the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, Coach

House Institute, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto

PPROPRIATELY ENOUGH, a century after his birth in 1911, Marshall McLuhan

has found a second life on the Internet. YouTube and other sites are a rich

repository of McLuhan interviews, revealing that the late media sage still has

the power to provoke and infuriate. Connoisseurs of Canadian television should track

down a 1968 episode of a CBC program called The Summer Way, a highbrow cultural and

political show that once featured a half-hour debate about technology between

McLuhan and the novelist Norman Mailer.
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Both freewheeling public intellectuals with a penchant for making wild statements,

Mailer and McLuhan were well matched mentally, yet they displayed an appropriate

stylistic contrast. Earthy, squat, and pugnacious, Mailer possessed all the hot qualities

McLuhan attributed to print culture. Meanwhile, McLuhan adopted the cerebral and

cavalier cool approach he credited to successful television politicians like John F.

Kennedy and Pierre Trudeau, who responded to attacks with insouciant indifference.

Early on in the program, McLuhan and Mailer tackle the largest possible issue, the fate

of nature:

McLuhan: We live in a t ime when we have put a man-made satellite

environment around the planet. The planet is no longer nature. Its no

longer the external world. Its now the content of an artwork. Nature has

ceased to exist.

Mailer: Well, I think youre anticipating a century, perhaps.

McLuhan: But when you put a man-made environment around the

planet, you have in a sense abolished nature. Nature from now on has to

be programmed.

Mailer: Marshall, I think youre begging a few tremendously serious

questions. One of them is that we have not yet put a man-madeenvironment around this planet, totally. We have not abolished nature

yet. We may be in the process of abolishing nature forever.

McLuhan: The environment is not visible. Its information. Its

electronic.

Mailer: Well, nonetheless, nature still exhibits manifestations which

defy all methods of collecting information and data. For example, anearthquake may occur, or a tidal wave may come in, or a hurricane may


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strike. And the information will lag critically behind our ability to control

it.

McLuhan: The experience of that event, that disaster, is felt everywhere

at once, under a single dateline.

Mailer: But thats not the same thing as controlling nature, dominating

nature, or superseding nature. Its far from that. Nature still does exist as

a protagonist on this planet.

McLuhan: Oh, yes, but its like our Victorian mechanical environment.

Its a rear-view mirror image. Every age creates as a utopian image a

nostalgic rear-view mirror image of itself, which puts it thoroughly out of

touch with the present. The present is the enemy.

Its a measure of McLuhans ability to recalibrate the intellectual universe that in this

debate, Mailer a Charlie Sheenstyle roughneck with a history of substance abuse,

domestic violence, and public mental breakdowns comes across as the voice of

sobriety and sweet reason. Mailer once observed that McLuhan had the fastest brain of

anyone I have ever met, and I never knew whether what he was saying was profound or

garbage. Many others were similarly divided. It was easy to be overawed by McLuhans

quick-wittedness, his startling erudition, and his ability to describe the familiar world

in shockingly fresh language while remaining uncertain about the ultimate value of his

ideas.

McLuhan has strong claims to being the most important thinker Canada has ever

produced. In his first book, The Mechanical Bride, published in 1951, he established

himself in the emerging field of cultural studies by offering a caustic survey of the

dehumanizing impact of popular magazines, advertising, and comic strips. By the

1960s, he had widened his lens to examine the power of media as a whole. In The

Gutenberg Galaxy, he offered a map of modern history by highlighting the hitherto-


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unexplored effect of print in shaping how we think. This was followed by Understanding

Media, which prophesied that new electronic media would rewire human consciousness

just as effectively as print once did, giving birth to a global village where people all

over the world would be linked via communication technology.

McLuhan has also long been a fiercely polarizing figure, especially during the height of

his fame in the 1960s and 70s. For instance, the American novelist and social critic Tom

Wolfe praised him in the most extravagant terms: At the turn of the nineteenth

century and in the early decades of the twentieth there was Darwin in biology, Marx in

political science, Einstein in physics, and Freud in psychology. Since then there has

been only McLuhan in communications studies. Meanwhile, the German essayist and

poet Hans Enzensberger denounced McLuhan as a reactionary and a charlatan, a

shallow theorist who attempted to dissolve all political problems in smoke and

promised the salvation of man through the technology of television.

One of the most contentious aspects of McLuhans life and work was his devout

Catholicism, which some critics saw as antithetical to his academic pursuits. In 1971,

the British intellectual Jonathan Miller published a short monograph on McLuhan as

part of Fontana Books Modern Masters, a series of pocket guides on important

thinkers. Unrelentingly hostile, Miller argued that McLuhans ideas were rooted in a

reactionary Catholicism and had little basis in science. According to Miller, the hidden

bias of McLuhans work was that it was strongly animated by Catholic piety. He

claimed that McLuhan found it necessary to elaborate a psychological theory which

owes considerably more to the unacknowledged authority of St. Thomas Aquinas than

it does to any of the scientific sources he openly refers to. A running theme of Millers

book is that McLuhans ideas were cloaked in the impartial language of science, but

carried with them implicit moral values based on his Catholicism.

Since McLuhans death in 1980, there has been an outpouring of biographical and

exegetical texts, ranging from a hefty collection of his letters, to a superb biography by

Philip Marchand, to insightful explications of his work by writers like Douglas


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Coupland. Arguably, this thriving book industry is paradoxical for an author associated

with the death of print culture. But the benefit of this ever-growing body of literature is

that it allows us to revisit the debates about McLuhans work with a fresh batch of

evidence. As it turns out, his relationship with Catholicism was more complicated and

layered than his critics allowed, serving not as a hidden bias but rather as a spur toward

creativity. His faith provided him with special insights that enabled him to become the

Marx of the media age and the Darwin of the digital revolution.

RITICS LIKE MILLER are dead accurate on one point: the absolute centrality of

Catholicism to McLuhans intellectual life. McLuhan was born in Edmonton to

a generically Protestant family. His father, a good-natured but unsuccessful

businessman, was a Methodist, while his mother, a strong-willed public speaker and

actress, was a Baptist. He grew up in Winnipeg and would later claim that much of his

personal life was shaped by his horrified reaction to that industrial city, which led him

to search for a more humane culture in Europe.

In a 1935 letter to his mother explaining his increasing interest in Catholicism,

McLuhan noted that I simply couldnt believe that men had to live in the mean

mechanical joyless rootless fashion that I saw in Winnipeg. The young McLuhan was a

romantic anti-industrialist who came to conclude that Protestantism was to blame for

the ills of the modern world. His thinking was much influenced by the Catholic

apologist G. K. Chesterton, who advocated distributist politics that sought to restore

the guild ideals of the Middle Ages as a counterforce to both capitalism and socialism.

In the same letter to his mother, McLuhan noted that I need scarcely indicate that

everything that is especially hateful and devilish and inhuman about the conditions

and strain of modern industrial society is not only Protestant in origin, but it is their

boast(!) to have originated it.

In converting to Catholicism in 1937, McLuhan was joining a Church he saw as a refuge

from the ills of modernity, a litany of evils that included everything from sexual

promiscuity to wives bossing around their husbands. At the time, the Church was


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under the sway of Pius IXs Syllabus of Errors, an 1864 proclamation condemning the

idea that the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to reconcile himself with progress,

liberalism, and modern civilization. McLuhan admired the fascist Spanish dictator

Francisco Franco as a necessary bulwark against godless communism and anarchism. He

thought that feminism and the homosexual cult were working in tandem to

undermine the natural authority of men over the family.

If he had remained so reactionary, his ideas would have been no more intellectually

challenging than those of Michael Coren or Pat Buchanan, cartoon Catholics for whom

Church doctrine is largely useful as a blunt instrument with which to attack political

foes. McLuhans great saving grace, however, was his ceaseless curiosity, which led him

to expand his intellectual framework. Even in the years before his conversion, he

wrestled with theologians whose thinking challenged his own prejudices.

He made an extensive study of his contemporary Jacques Maritain, who was attempting

to update the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas as a way of making a rapprochement

between Catholicism and modernity. As a neo-Thomist, Maritain argued that Catholic

social thought was compatible with pluralism and democracy (in the abstract) and

contemporary North American society (in particular). These ideas were radical in the

1930s and 40s, but they would eventually influence the direction of the Church in the

great doctrinal revolution of the 1960s, Vatican II.

Maritain frequently lectured at St. Michaels College, at the University of Toronto,

whose faculty McLuhan joined in 1946. McLuhan was attracted to the lucidity and

order with which Maritain expounded the ideas of Aquinas. If McLuhan had any

critique, it was that Maritain did not go far enough to integrate Catholicism with

developments in the social sciences. McLuhan also took inspiration from the avant-

garde theology of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit scientist who argued for a

congruence between evolutionary theory and the doctrine of redemption. In a 1952

review ofThe Mechanical Bride, Father Walter Ong, a Jesuit intellectual who studied

under McLuhan, drew connections between McLuhans theories and de Chardins


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concept of a noosphere where the whole world [is] alerted simultaneously everyday

to goings-on in Washington, Paris, London, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, and Moscow.

McLuhans pioneering studies of popular culture were part of a sea change in Catholic

intellectualism, as the Church gave up the siege mentality of earlier decades and tried to

offer a more nuanced and positive account of modern life. As well, the Church began to

move away from its defence of authoritarianism to support pro-democracy political

movements around the world. McLuhan underwent his own political evolution: the

young man who admired Franco became the academic who engaged in a long

correspondence with Pierre Trudeau. And while The Mechanical Bride condemns the

comic strip Blondie for undermining the patriarchal ideal of the man as the natural head

of the household, in later writings, such as Understanding Media, McLuhan deliberately

eschewed traditionalist strictures, because he thought it was more important to

understand the world than to condemn it. As he told an interviewer in 1967, The mere

moralistic expression of approval or disapproval, preference or detestation, is currently

being used in our world as a substitute for observation and a substitute for study.

On moral matters, he remained very conservative. He was adamantly anti-abortion, for

example. But part of his achievement as a mature thinker was his ability to bracket off

whatever moral objections to the modern world he might have had and to concentrate

on exploring new developments to be a probe. Indeed, although he joined the

Church as a refuge, his faith gave him a framework for becoming more hopeful and

engaged with modernity. This paradox might be explained by the simple fact that as he

deepened in his faith he acquired an irenic confidence in Gods unfolding plan for

humanity. In a 1971 letter to an admirer, McLuhan observed, One of the advantages of

being a Catholic is that it confers a complete intellectual freedom to examine any and all

phenomena with the absolute assurance of their intelligibility.

Indeed, his faith made him a more ambitious and far-reaching thinker. Belonging to a

Church that gloried in cathedrals and stained glass windows made him responsive to

the visual environment, and liberated him from the textual prison inhabited by most


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intellectuals of his era. The global reach and ancient lineage of the Church encouraged

him to frame his theories as broadly as possible, to encompass the whole of human

history and the fate of the planet. The Church had suffered a grievous blow in the

Gutenberg era, with the rise of printed Bibles leading to the Protestant Reformation.

This perhaps explains McLuhans interest in technology as a shaper of history. More

deeply, the security he felt in the promise of redemption allowed him to look

unflinchingly at trends others were too timid to notice.

CENTURY AFTER his birth, what is McLuhans status as a thinker? Much more

robust than his critics would have expected. Consider again the statement that

so shocked Mailer: Nature from now on has to be programmed. Living as we

do in an age grappling with climate change and proposals to control the planets

temperature through geoengineering, McLuhans observations seem like a sober recital

of facts. His core insight was a simple one: technology isnt just an external tool; it also

changes how we think. The medium is the message means that each new technology

humanity has invented, from the wheel to the alphabet to the Internet, creates new

mental habits and new patterns of thought. Anyone addicted to Facebook understands

what he meant: our tools arent separate from us but rather interact with us and alter,

be it ever so slightly, who we are.

As a scholar, McLuhan had a multitude of flaws. He was often sloppy and made many

factual errors. But to judge him simply in terms of whether all his quotations and

citations are accurate is to misunderstand the role of a master thinker. Like Marx and

Freud, he was an intellectual agitator, a conceptual mind expander, the yeast in the

dough. After Marx, we can no longer ignore the reality of class difference; after Freud,

we cant pretend that our mental life isnt saturated with sexual impulses; after

McLuhan, we cant imagine that technology is just a neutral tool. Moreover, like

Darwin and Marx, McLuhan is no longer just one man but rather a living and evolving

body of thought. The literary critic Guy Davenport once argued that McLuhan was a

half-mad genius and one of those strange figures whose brilliance can be articulated

by others though not by themselves.


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Davenport may have gone too far: works like The Gutenberg Galaxy remain fertile

reading. But it is true that to fully appreciate the profoundness of McLuhans thinking,

you need to read books like Hugh Kenners The Mechanic Muse, Walter Ongs Orality and

Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, and Nicholas Carrs The Shallows: What the

Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. These sober, scholarly works about the interaction

between technology and culture build on McLuhans work while avoiding his tendency

toward blunt hyperbole. Kenner shows how modernist literature emerged out of

industrial culture, and Ong demarcates how the shift from orality to literacy changed

the way we think, a process Carr sees as being replicated as we move on to electronic

communication. Taken together, they demonstrate the solidity of the intellectual

framework McLuhan created. In this new century, countless other thinkers will find

inspiration from his work; he has become an inescapable part of the worlds intellectual

heritage.

Jeet Heer is co-editing the Walt and Skeezix series, whose fifth v olume will be released this fall.

David Rokeby has won a BAFTA Award for interactive art and a Governor General's Award in visual and

media arts.


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2013 The Walrus Foundation
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