A tribute to and a lament for Marshall McLuhan. Five days a week, Tuesday through Saturday, I present one of McLuhan’s observations and talk about its relevance today. 300 ideas. 300 days. 300 posts.
Politics
Marshall McLuhan (Summer 1968, age 57). You can lead a Mailer to water but you can’t make him drink
This morning I had a chat with Norman Mailer on the CBC’s TV program “The Summer Way,” hosted by Warren Davis and Ken Lefolii. The program was called a meeting of minds, which is half right, minds were present, but not much meeting was going on.
Mailer was good on the give and take of conversation. He gave a lot compliments and then proceeded to take them away. For example, he described my ideas as “fascinating ad repellent, no not repellent, stimulating.” Can’t use that on a dust jacket blurb, can I? Mailer also said he agreed with almost everything I have said but only up to a particular point. For example, he said he agreed with the idea that electronic media are changing the planet, but thinks I err by not declaring this change a bad thing or a good thing. I suggested that declaring value judgments about things of this magnitude is both impossible and injurious to the critical faculties, but he didn’t see the value of the point. I wonder why?
Me (December 2009, age 57). Marshall McLuhan on objectivity
In only one of his books does McLuhan embrace the making of value judgments – The Mechanical Bride (1951). In that book, for example, He says about Professor Mortimer Adler and Dr Hutchins’ advertisement of their great books experiment at the University of Chicago that they have “come to bury and not praise Plato and other great men.” That the purpose of public opinion polls is not to discover facts but change people’s minds about themselves, and for the most part this is only a good thing for companies who want to change minds in order to sell people more of what they produce. Emily Post? For the “socially immature.” Reader’s Digest? For the “mentally exempt.” Mailer would have loved the this is good, that is bad Mechanical-Bride McLuhan.
McLuhan’s big idea is that calling things good and bad interferes with one’s ability to view the world objectively, to see the world as it is, rather than as you would like it to be or not to be. This is an idea worth pursuing even if Mailer did not want to pursue it. (More on the Mailer-McLuhan unmeeting of minds tomorrow.)
On what aspects of the world do you find yourself most quickly leaping to judgement? Politics? Religion? Sex? Money? If you’ve already made up your mind why bother looking? Isn’t it far more comfortable to praise or condemn rather than have to change your life if you discover the world is not how you thought it was?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Tags: Advertising, Books, Communications, Criticism, Mechanical Bride, Politics, Relationship, Social media
Marshall McLuhan (November 15, 1967, age 65). Don’t fence me in
I remember the excitement I felt when I first realized I didn’t have to restrict my studies to literature. Innis taught me that I could roam through all history and all subjects in search of the true meaning of the medium is the message. My friend Tom Easterbrook who teaches economics at Toronto University tells me that F. von Hayek (Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, 1967) says, “Nobody can be a great economist who is only an economist – and I am even tempted to add that the economist who is only an economist is likely to become a nuisance if not a positive danger.” Likewise, no student of media studies can afford to be only a student of media studies. A man who only reads about TV is as good for a man as a steady diet of coke and chips.
If pressed to state my specialty it is the pursuit of all meaning, all understanding of the significance of the medium is the message. Once the fence of content analysis is smashed through what vistas open up.
Me (December 2009, age 57). McLuhan the specialist-generalist
Marshall McLuhan’s specialization was in his approach to all literature, all subjects, rather than in the choice of any one particular field of discourse. To everything he read, to everything he observed, he always asked himself how does this reveal the ways media work on us, the messages they send us by their being what they are and doing what they do. Thus he found clues to the way media work on us in the writings of Adam Smith and Harold Innis (economics and economic history), William Blake and W. B. Yeats (poetry), and Edgar Allan Poe and Sigfried Giedeon (prose and architecture).
One of the questions I always ask myself is “How does this thought, event, phrase, or circumstance relate to the life and thought of Marshall McLuhan?” I call it the Marshall McLuhan game. For example, take the word “Economics.” How does Economics relate to the life and thought of Marshall McLuhan? Answer: when Marshall McLuhan graduated from the University of Manitoba in 1933, he won the gold medal in English and the silver medal in Economics. That same year his friend, Tom Easterbrook, won the Gold medal in Economics and the Silver medal in English. I have only been stumped once since I started playing the game in August: One morning Mrs Hinton says to me at breakfast, “We have to watch Dog Bounty Hunter on TV tonight, Baby Lyssa’s pregnant and Dog’s going to talk to her boyfriend.”
What is your speciality? Do you have a question or group of questions you are pursuing ruthlessly? If you did imagine what power this concentration of focus would bring to your ability to understand the world.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Marshall McLuhan. The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1962, p.265-279.
Tags: American mind, Communications, Deborah Hinton, Education, Learning, Politics, Reading, Thinking
Marshall McLuhan (January 23 1953, age 41). The Gutenberg Era
I’ve told Ezra Pound and I’ve told Walter Ong. I have a big idea I’m writing a book about. The movement from script to print created the logical, visual western world. The new electric media are returning us to the oral, acoustic world from which we came 2000 years ago. The important thing is not the content of these media but their technique. Print is the mechanization of writing. Radio, movies, and TV are the mechanization of voice and gesture. Every day sees new discoveries opening up this new uncharted place. “We were the first that ever burst into that land-locked sea.”
Michael Hinton (2009, age 57). McLuhan was a hedgehog who thought he was a fox
The philosopher Isaiah Berlin proposed the idea that all thinkers can be usefully divided into two groups, hedgehogs who relate everything they write about to a single unifying vision and foxes who come to every question with ways to think about it, who have not one vision but hundreds. In economics, Milton Friedman is a hedgehog, John Kenneth Galbraith a fox. In religion, both the Pope and the Dahli Lama are hedgehogs. In politics, Reagan is a hedgehog, Clinton is a fox. In literature Ayn Rand is a hedgehog, Charles Dickens is a fox.
The question is what is Marshall McLuhan? His biographers give the impression that they believe McLuhan to be a fox. But I think this is not the case. McLuhan loved specific examples, observations and was not at his best in writing up systems of thinking about the media. However in one important way he was a hedgehog. Throughout his life in everything he did in studying media he displayed an obsession about exploring the impact of media on us by means of their operation as forms, rather than through their content.
In your life are you a hedgehog or a fox? What about the people you admire most, parents, teachers, politicians, mentors, writers, thinkers, activists: Are they hedgehogs or foxes?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
McLuhan, Marshall. Letters of Marshall McLuhan, 1987, pp. 234.
Tags: American mind, Communications, Gutenberg Galaxy, Medium is the message, Movies, Politics, Technology, Thinking
Marshall McLuhan (September, 1964, age 53). These guys don’t get it
I spoke at the Progressive Conservative party’s Conference on goals for Canada. Former Prime Minister Diefenbaker was there when I made my address, but I don’t think he heard what I was saying. He hasn’t been listening a lot lately. Not in the flag debate. Don’t like that new flag much myself but it doesn’t do any good to resist change you must lead it. Among other things I told them that “political parties must now begin to think seriously about their responsibility to teenagers.” I hope they heard that one if they don’t they’re dead.
Michael Hinton (October, 2009, age 57). They still don’t get it
According to journalist Martin Sullivan after Marshall McLuhan spoke, Eugene Forsey, one of the senior figures in the party, turned and said, “Is McLuhan suggesting Diefenbaker should where a Beatle wig?”
To understand the importance of McLuhan’s idea you need to understand some Canadian political history. In 1963, after winning with a minority in 1962 and the largest majority to date in Canadian political history in 1957, John Diefenbaker’s Conservatives were defeated by Mike Pearson’s Liberals. The conference McLuhan spoke at in 1964 had been organized by Dalton Camp. Camp was a major strategist and power broker in the Federal Conservative party, who would orchestrate the removal of John Diefenbaker from the leadership of the party, in ‘the night of the long knives’ in the hopes of shifting the Liberals from power in the next election. Camp believed “there are business and professional men, and the rising generations of young people, who do not find political organization in its traditional form either appealing or challenging.” The conference, as Forsey’s remarks suggest, did not succeed in Camp’s aim which was as he put it, to stimulate, “from fresh springs of awareness new channels of thought, inquiry and purpose. What we cannot do again is merely ingest the realities of a new society into an inert doctrinaire conservatism.” That, however, is precisely what the Conservatives did and the Liberals held onto power for the next 16 years.
Given that today most Canadians under 30 seem to have little interest in the traditional political process and political parties is their anything Canadians learn from this? What about in other countries, such as the United States and Britain, where those under 30 also appear to be disengaged from politics? Why don’t political parties think seriously about their responsibility to teenagers? If they did what would they do differently?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Sprague, D.N. Post-Confederation Canada: The structure of Canadian History since 1867. Scarborough, Ont.: Prentice-Hall, 1990, pp. 255-321, and appendix I.
Sullivan, Martin. Mandate ‘68. Toronto: Doubleday, 1968, pp. 89-91.
Tags: Communications, Culture, Education, Global village, Listening, Politics, Rhetoric
Marshall (July 1948, age 37). To disagree is to think (Cogito ergo disputandum)
I wish someone would disagree with me. No one does that here in Toronto. They’re all zombies, sleepwalkers. Whatever you say they agree with you and go on just as they were before. Agreement is the feature of this age.
Me (October 2009, age 57). Come on, disagree with me (Disputio ergo sum)
I wish someone would disagree with me too. Agreement said McLuhan was the characterizing feature of the late 1940s (which in the US and Canada was the beginning of the 1950s). Have we entered a new 1950s? Today, and especially at our universities, the willing subjugation of the individual to the group is – and has long been – the norm on questions of politics, gender, and diversity.
As we approach the end of the first week of postings, anything you disagree with?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
P.S. See you here tomorrow.
READING FOR THIS POST
The Letters of Marshall McLuhan. Selected and edited by Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and Wiliam Toye. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 198-199.
William H. Whyte. The Organization Man. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1956, pp. vii-xvi.
Tags: Communications, Education, Global village, Medium is the message, Politics