I have to praise your great piece on McLuhan. You've dissected well the conflicted nature of his thinking. But, of course, McLuhan never said he was anything but conflicted and never claimed to be bounded by rationality. That's what makes him so exciting and so contemporary. The multi-galatic patterns of his writing will still be mined for insights in the centuries to come (that's some legacy). Where we depart company is over your advocacy of modern-day thinkers such as Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Carr makes the same mistake that McLuhan made when he said that Castro ruled as a "popular" dictator because of the persuasive powers of TV and that Hitler rose to power by manipulating radio - bewitching the German psyche in the process. People who overrate Freud often share similar assumptions. But I don't rate the media's influence - or even PR's and our subliminal inclinations - so highly.
BTW: On my blog 21st-Century PR Issues, I recently posted on a reconsideration of McLuhan, which anybody interested can search out on Google.
This is a very nice piece on McLuhan. I think it's absolutely right that his Catholicism shaped his thinking in profound ways, and I think it's fair to place him within the Catholic mystical tradition that has produced so many visionary (if often incoherent) writers over the centuries.
I'm almost inclined to also place him within the tradition of visionary scientific writers you mention, like Darwin, Freud and Marx, but the fact is that McLuhan's freely-confessed lack of analytic rigor and, above all, his sentimentality, puts these men out of his league. Darwin was the only one of the four who was indisputably a scientist. And say what you will about Freud and Marx getting the details wrong: their errors can't be chalked up to sentiment. I'm afraid the same can't be said for McLuhan. This penchant for sentiment and romance over logical consistency is, in my opinion (and at the risk of indulging in inappropriate cultural essentialism), one of the defining traits that divides the Jewish intellectual tradition exemplified by Freud and Marx from the Catholic intellectual tradition (Einstein might be conjured up as a counterexample, but his mystical romanticism was fairly well divorced from his scientific contributions). I don't mean here to paint romanticism in strictly pejorative colours — romance has its place in promulgating a new mythology that people can use to make sense of their world — but I think it's one of the traits of McLuhan's writing that makes him difficult to read today without a bit of eye-rolling.
A single shot fired in the McLuhan/Mailer debate goes a long way to support one of McLuhan's traditionalist romantic axioms, that the artist's unique eye lets him see farther forward than can the common man.
McLuhan said in 1968: "The environment is not visible. It’s information. It’s electronic."
1. This proposition is a scientific commonplace nowadays; in 1968 it was not.
2. McLuhan probably said this in the heat of exchange/argument (his preferred method of inquiry, very different from orthodox exposition) and by intuition or guesswork. No evidence suggests that McLuhan ever understood (in the way we do in 2011) molecular biology as information. It is not likely that he ever read Claude Shannon except at second-hand, e.g. through Norbert Wiener.
McLuhan's intuitionism resisted the systematic construction of such comprehensive world-views as molecular biologists nowadays find essential. Instead, reinforced by either his religious faith or 1800-vintage faith in the prophetic imagination, he ignored demands for (tedious) logic and system to get on with the (more exciting) business of envisioning the future by intuition.
McLuhan's Catholicism is of an unorthodox sort. In fact his most important Catholic source was undoubtedly the borderline heresies of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin whom he reads very much like in many ways.
"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 intellectuals of his era."
It is good that we continue to think about MM and his extraordinary contribution. But—despite the above quotation—MM's Catholicism has just about nothing to do with this most important insights and theories. The cause-and-effect in the second sentence above is unacceptably simple minded and, in fact, ludicrous.
Doing a course in welfare at the South Australian Institute of Technology in 1987-8, I came by chance across a film on Marshall McLuhan at the library there and used it as a presentation on media studies. The film was in mint condition, but my fellow students were like stunned mullets after seeing it, and no one had any questions to pose, which is just as well because I probably couldn't have answered them, anyway.
But it gave an insight into the sparkling insight and originality of one of the most gifted minds of the twentieth century. A shame he didn't live long enough to see the internet and how it's wiring us all tightly into a 'global village'. We can thus all take turns at being learners, challengers or village idiots.
very interesting, but unacceptably laudatory piece. i have always been inclined towards reading mcluhan as a grossly overrated charlatan; the writer overrates mcluhan as a canadian thinker. mcluhan pirated the ideas of harold innis, a vastly more original, and more rigourous, canadian thinker and simplified and popularised them. innis may well have been the first thinker to grasp and elucidate the role of means of communication in history.
rm
Interesting article, but the contrast with Norman Mailer is a little misleading, portaying McLuhan as the future-oriented man of television. In his personal tastes, McLuhan actually did not like television very much and his intellect was largely shaped by reading. McLuhan's religious faith and his tendency to think by analogy were both reflections of his early dedication to the rhetorical rather than the philosophical tradition in literacy. This may also be the source of some of the problems with McLuhan, such as the absence of falsifiability in his writing.
Treating McLuhan literally is to miss the point. McLuhan is and always will be style thing more than an instruction leaflet. A great and important thinker.
It really strange i have scrolled the entire page looking to the "Like" button, This is a fabulous article, I love and work in technology everyday and it has really kicked my higher functions out of neutral and into drive. I love pieces like this, the "nosphere" we live in today just seems like and awful group think, I recognize from this article how fortunate we have become in many regards by embracing the digital age.
PS. twitter - awful group think catalyst
I once read a quotation attributed to McLuhan, to the effect that, when asked why he was so fascinated by subliminal messages, McLuhan replied, "because grace is subliminal." So count me among those who agree that McLuhan's faith and his understanding of media can usefully be understood as intimately related.
I attended a seminar McLuhan conducted at my college in the mid-1970s. At the time, I knew nothing about him except that he'd said "the medium is the message" and that he'd been satirized on television's "Laugh-In" in a one-line running gag: "Marshall McLuhan, what're ya doin'?" But the effect of seeing him in person was electric. Whereas my professors had, generally, treated their subjects as sub-specialties within sub-specialties, resenting any critiques that violated departmental boundaries, rejecting any effort to synthesize across disiciplines or even to draw from their studies practical implications for human life, McLuhan was truly visionary. A statement like "the medium is the message" is admittedly, taken literally, absurd, not falsifiable because it is so transparently false, and yet one could see McLuhan was onto something profound. The effects of media far transcend the message they contain (so that even today, my fellow commuters are much more likely to talk about their Kindles than talk about what they read on their Kindles). One might legitimately quarrel about his contradictions or the opacity of much of his writing, but certainly McLuhan inspired one to be unafraid to synthesize, to search for relations among seemingly unrelated disciplines, and to draw important implications for understanding our own lives. In any event, that night made a huge difference for me.
Now: "anyone addicted to Facebook understands..." I have signed up for Facebook, and am decidedly not addicted, incapable of understanding, except in the most abstract way, what all the fuss is about. In that sense I am suspended between the futuristic message of McLuhan's philosophy, and an admittedly reactionary response to much of the media that surrounds me. But, when we read about McLuhan's Catholicism, we sense that perhaps he lived within a similar conflict. So, yes, it seems we cannot adequately appreciate McLuhan apart from his faith.
Couldn't stick with just getting McLuhan wrong, eh. Had to slag other Catholics such as Michael Coren and Pat Buchanan, those "cartoon Catholics" who use doctrine as a "blunt instrument" against "political foes." That's it — just toss out unsupported dicta? To reduce Marshall McLuhan's conversion to the Church to some kind of refuge is (not to put too sharp a point on it) a joke, and patronizing to boot. Apparently his entry into the Church could not be because McLuhan accepted the Bible's description of the Church as the "bulwark and pillar of the truth" per 1 Tim 3:15. However elliptically and disjointedly he expressed himself, truth mattered to the man. McLuhan was neither a Marx nor a Darwin in any real or rhetorical sense, and his fervent attachment to the Catholic faith was viscerally and intellectually grounded, and borne out in his morning Scripture reading discipline and his oft-recalled debt to G.K. Chesterton.
It's vexing to find another attempt at remaking Marshall McLuhan into the image and likeness of a commentator who barely grasps the "ground" of his "figure." The commentator, not the subject, is the message here. A salient corrective to Mr. Heet's left-tilting, if sincerely held, distortions might be the fascinating interviews done with Pierre Babin, 1974-1977 published as "The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion," edited by his son Eric McLuhan.
Thank you for this interesting piece. A few responses to other commenters.
As much as Teilhard may have missed on a few points, he is hardly unorthodox. He was the first theologian to engage the natural history of the world as we have come to understand it via the natural sciences. Anyone who is the first will be clarified by those who follow. But very many \"orthodox\" Catholics find Teilhard interesting and helpful, including the current Pontiff.
As to whether or not cathedrals and stained glass can open a mind, I submit that Catholicism is essential to work like McLuhan\'s because it has always understood a human person as more than an intellect, as its liturgies and architecture demonstrate. Post-modernism\'s critique of modernism is, in large part, based on our finally getting over this enlightenment bias. And it\'s a bias that the Catholic Church never went for.
Finally, I did not get the sense that McLuhan entered the Catholic Church only as a refuge. I thought the Catholic Church ended up looking quite good here and, as a Catholic, did not feel attacked.
I\'m always amazed that so many people get McLuhan\'s most famous title wrong. It\'s The Medium is the MASSAGE, not message. It makes much more sense this way.
Heer writes that:
"McLuhan’s 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."
Unfortunately, Heer's own writing demonstrate none of these virtues. He evidently reads others only to confirm his own prejudices. McLuhan needing challenge and expansion, but Heer does not, apparently. A very narrow and ideological piece of work.
Good to read the article, and good to see commentators provoked in so many different ways. Well done.
Let's make it simple. McLuhan may have been a bright guy, but it's important to be right. And he wasn't. Catholicism is a pack of lies, and if it ever had a moral compass, it's gone. De Chardin's philosophy is a futuristic fantasy which fails to take the material world seriously. As for the idea of "controlling nature," that's the biggest and most dangerous lie out there. We are a part of "nature," and not the best part. Human beings cannot even begin to comprehend the natural world, and the notion that they can "control" it is simply preposterous delusion. Most folks can barely control themselves — and their overactive bladders. But controlling nature? Sorry, ain't gonna happen. Human beings are not God and not likely to be promoted to that position any time soon. It wasn't difficult for Mailer to win the debate. One suspects, after due reflection, that de Chardin was probably a heretic, and will be declared such and excommunicated one of these days. But who cares? McLuhan had a curious animus against books, and it's likely he didn't read the right ones. 400 years from now he won't even rate a footnote. That's the ultimate conclusion.
Wonderful and insightful piece, thank you. I didn't even know that McLuhan was Catholic.
“His core insight was a simple one: technology isn’t 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 aren’t separate from us but rather interact with us and alter, be it ever so slightly, who we are.”
That phrase “each new technology humanity has invented” pushes Jeet Heer’s paraphrase of the medium is the message almost to the point of accuracy, but not quite. He still allows technologies the dominant role, and thus misses the full significance of interacting. The relation of culture to technology is complexly dynamic, not linear, and neither dominates. But someone always initiates the order to the endless cycle, at least so far. We make our networks and then our networks make us. The interactivity is a product of a single human act, not of “humanity.” And art, not science, is central to the imagination and design of a new technology. It takes deep technique to be able to improvise that one more note that completely changes the song.
McLuhan pushed into the question of mankind as community because the Catholic Church's view of mankind is: a community saved by Christ and organized by Christ into a spiritual entity that as a community has a relationship with God. It's a big leap of faith to think of all of mankind as a community "facing God" but that's what the mainstream of the best theologians and philosophers of that Church not only thought, but thought they perceived. McLuhan was descended in this regard from the greatest minds of the Western Church: from Christ to Saint Paul, to Aquinas, to DesCartes and Francis Xavier. There were a number of brilliant Catholic intellectuals—real minds—in the 1950s and 1960s: Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor, Marshall McLuhan.
McLuhan's greatest gift was his understanding that any questions can be asked, and that all terms, even the literal, are metaphorical at base. His freedom of inquiry and lightning-fast free-associative insights left almost everyone behind. But he was right about almost everything.
His most powerful successor was the equally brilliant Joshua Meyrowitz, whose "No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior" (1986) actually systematized what McLuhan had been saying. Where McLuhan leaped from metaphor to metaphor to suggest what was happening to the world, Meyrowitz wrote a huge, very smart plodding argument about American civilization post TV that combined McLuhan with Goffman's theory of social life as drama. Meyrowitz proved that television had indeed transformed the Western world, and he showed how it happened, why it happened, and what the means were. He filled in the gaps McLuhan had sensed but had not investigated. NSOP is readable, but it requires a Victorian-era level of attention to read. The last time I read it, it took 36 hours.
Great article. It's a very interesting insight that intellectual inquiry might be inspired by a confidence in a world that is meaningful (an idea that follows from a faith the earth and everything in it is monitored not only by satellites, but also by the eyes of God). This idea is, I think, also present in the minds of the people we now call scientists who began to explore a world they understood to be rational.
I agree with commentor "GEORGEMILLS" that Joshua Meyrowitz's *No Sense of Place* is a brilliant followup to the works of McLuhan and Goffman (and he pains himself to produce understandable prose), and I'd also recommend Neil Postman's *Technopoly: the Surrender of Culture to Technology* as a fascinating read that helps to clarify the mind of a half-mad genius.
Couldn't help thinking that using "Catholicism" as a term in relation to practices of the established Catholic Church as something like using "Islamism" in relation to established Islam - some intellectual construct that may in fact be true but doesn't much reflect on, justify or condemn, the mass of true believing followers. Using Coren and Buchanan as demagogues of Church Irrelevant is to evade the moral question of John Paul and Benedict as the ultimate fathers of the Church Relevant, and whatever McLuhan might make of them.
That said, learned from this, and thanks for it.
"GeorgeMills" you are oh so right. McLuhan worked from or with analogy and metaphor because as a good Thomist, and a highly trained expert on the arts, he could do nothing else (although he had started out as an engineer). The commenters here do not seem to have read many of McLuhan's letters which show how well he understood Aquinas. I sat in on a year of his lectures, observed him going to daily Mass on the campus of St. Michael's College, knew several of his circle of admirers. He was not mad or half crazy; he understood the time in which he lived far better than his contemporaries, and what he said (wrote) in his lifetime has proved to be predictive in an astonishing way. His Catholic faith was integral to his character and views and without it he could not have produced the body of work that he did.
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