Thinking about Marshall McLuhan
I have been re-reading some Marshall McLuhan (he was raised a Methodist and converted to Catholicism). He talks about how The Eucharist – which McLuhan believed was both symbol and substance, metaphor and material – offered a vessel for his media theories. “Analogy is not a concept,” he wrote. “It is community. It is resonance. It is inclusive. It is the cognitive process itself. That is the analogy of the divine Logos.” He was strident: “I do not think of God as a concept, but as an immediate and ever-present fact – an occasion for continuous dialogue.” Additionally, “faith is not a matter of concepts; it’s percepts, a matter of immediate reality.” When he would talk about Jesus, it was as the synthesis, for in him, “there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message: it is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully the same.”
Now, what is interesting as he is a convert to Catholicism —McLuhan stressed that “the church is a thing, and not a theory” – a community and belief so masterfully simple and accurate that “the poor and the children of the world can grasp it, whereas the wise and the learned have serious conceptual problems blocking their perceptual lives.” He cautioned that while theology “should ideally be the study of the thingness, the nature of God, since it is a form of contemplation, a theoretical or intellectual construct, it is purely a game.” Is McLuhan imagining who God is and what God is in the universe?
McLuhan’s religious beliefs would be both the foundation and structure of his media theories(think social media today and AI) because God and the electronic world were omnipresent in their ways. He writes, “When I study media effects, I am studying the subliminal life of a whole population since they go to great pains to hide these effects from themselves.” McLuhan thought that reading scripture needed to be a regular activity so that it might “pass into your daily life,” for only then “do you get the message, that is, the effect. Only at that moment do the medium and message unite.”
The inevitable electronic world of the 20th century required a prophet, a person of faith who might observe, document, describe, and gently offer suggestions. “The Church is the only institution capable of coping with this situation and is not very keen on it,” McLuhan observed. “A new doctrine is needed that should have been promulgated one hundred years ago: at the instant of Incarnation, the universe’s structure was changed. All of creation was remade. There was a new physics, a new matter, a new world. The doctrine would enable modern man to take the Church much more seriously.”
This new arrival would happen without our permission, portending a second coming of sorts. “The new matrix is acoustic, simultaneous, and electric, which in one way is very friendly to the Church. That is, the togetherness of humanity is now total,” he noted. “As long as there is the means of communion, social and divine,” McLuhan assured, “there is an indefinite number of forms in which it can be achieved.”
McLuhan believed that “it is especially the job of the catholic humanist to build bridges between the arts and society today.” (think of Catholicism in the universal sense here.) Think about that…we don’t see that in the hierarchy of any denomination today. or in the clergy as a whole. Is the theater dead?
This needed to be an active pursuit, in his mind, not merely a mode of contemplation; otherwise, as McLuhan explained, “our secular contemporaries” would master the world of electronic interaction and “use it for power over the minds of men.” think of Thomas Merton here. And while we are at it, think James Joyce.
‘I see no possibility of a worldwide Luddite rebellion that will smash all machinery to bits, so we might as well sit back and see what is happening and what will happen to us in a cybernetic world. Resenting a new technology will not halt its progress,‘ said McLuhan in 1969. Think about the era at that time. On my website, I put the definition of cyberspace, and I do that because I don’t think people have a correct notion of what the word means.
It is a skeptical point of view but a realistic one. What was needed was a person of faith who was willing to make grand pronouncements in the most public of venues and willing to be wrong and criticized. What was needed was a deft rhetorician with a love for language and a firm footing in intellectual and literary traditions. McLuhan thought that while the print world was visual, the electronic world–especially television and cyberspace–was a medium of touch. It enveloped us.
For McLuhan, God was everywhere, including in the cyberspace light. What was needed was a person who was serious in his self-effacements, who was in the world but never indeed of the world. What was required was Marshall McLuhan in the 20th century, and today, we should ask, who is our modern-day McLuhan?