Belinda:
To my fellow students and facilitator
This
week I wish to share with you an article that appeared in the Globe & Mail,
a newspaper that is considered by many to be Canada’s national newspaper. I think the content connects with theme
question #1 concerning the profound changes that our world underwent throughout
the last century. My husband has tried
to locate this article on the Globe & Mail website and been unable to do. It may not be there because of copyright
reasons. I suggest anyone who wants to
find more about this try Google. The
article is actually an edited excerpt from the foreword written by TomWolfe to a book called Understanding Me:
Lectures and Interviews of Marshall McLuhan, edited by Stephanie McLuhan
and David Staines and published by McClelland & Stewart.
I
will now recount the content that I found most interesting.
Marshall
Mcluhan, a Canadian born in 1911, attended Cambridge, converted to Roman
Catholicism and became a professor of English at St Michael’s college at the
University of Toronto, emerged in the 1960’s as a major communication theorist
when he published his book Understanding Media. In this and other works he theorized that
print enhanced the visual sense at the expense of other senses which led to
much specialization (which proved productive in may ways) and also to
fragmentation of human experience and activity. Thus we have bureaucracy, science, modern armies, nationalistic
wars and other things such such as fragmentation of society by age and
pornography which is the separation of sex from love, etc. In mid-century T.V. burst upon the Western
world and is now found virtually everywhere.
McLuhan thought this medium would reverse this process restoring a kind
of “preliterate” sensory balance with the auditory and tactile senses. He called T.V. an “audio-tactile”
medium. To him T.V. and other
electronic media would eventually spread itself as a “seamless web” over the
world. McLuhan believed this medium
would force a profound change in education and that this would bring about a
“Total Change” (his capitals). Just as
the axe is an extension of the human arm and the wheel an extension of the
human foot, the electronic media would be an extension of the human central
nervous system and that these nervous systems would be brought together
irresistibly and human nature would be different. Nationalism would be impossible and people would be “irrevocably
involved with and responsible for” one another. Racial groups would no longer be insulated from each other. We would be living in the “global
village”. He did not assume this
“global village” would necessarily be an utopia as it could just as easily be a
slaughterhouse but the possibility for an advance is definitely there. Actually McLuhan believed that this new age
contained possibility of something
quite sublime. Here is where his
Catholicism comes in for he the notion of all men as members of the “body of
Christ” as being a technological possibility.
In
this respect, McLuhan expressed the influence of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,
geologist and paleontologist, who had become a Jesuit priest at age 30 in
1911. He had taken up as his life’s
mission to take Darwin’s elucidation of
the processes of evolution and reconcile it with Christian belief by showing
how this physical evolution was but the first part of God’s grand design for
the evolution of man. Teilhard believed
that right now in the 20th Century God was
directing the evolution of man into a
”noosphere”, a term he coined to describe a more spiritual state of mankind
and the unification of all which he
believed was made possible through technology.
He talked of the development of communications that would weave us all
together. He thought that our time was
when the age of civilizations is ending and the age of “one civilization”
(his underlining) is beginning.
The
writer of this “foreword” comments on the amazingly accurate prediction of both
these scholars of the system we have today.
And here we are, my friends, working with that very system of planet-embracing communication predicted by
them and by Shoghi Effendi even earlier.
See the World Order Of Baha’u’llah, p. 203. “A mechanism of world inter-communication
will be devised, embracing the whole planet, freed from national hindrances and
restrictions, and functioning with marvelous swiftness and perfect
regularity.” This was written by Shoghi
Effendi in 1936!
I
am impressed by exactness of the vision of both Teilhard de Chardin and McLuhan
and their complete unawareness of its origin.
Nevertheless they both help push humanity forward.