This transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors
McManus
Marshall McLuhan has been making people think, laugh, and even worry from the earliest days of television. His arena: the world. Historical period: from the beginning of time. Subject matter: you and I. My guest: Dr. Marshall McLuhan.
McManus
Dr. Marshall McLuhan, way back in the early fifties you predicted that the world was becoming a global village, we’d have global consciousness, and I’m wondering: now, do you think it’s happening?
McLuhan
Well, you’ve heard of Julian Jaynes? The Bicameral Mind? The split-up of same and the rise of consciousness?
McManus
So your prediction is correct. We’re into it?
McLuhan
No, no, I think now we’re playing backwards. We’re going back into the bicameral mind, which is tribal, collective, without any individual consciousness.
McManus
But it seems, Dr. McLuhan, that this tribal world is not friendly.
McLuhan
Oh no. Tribal people, one of their main kinds of sport is sort of butchering each other. It’s a full-time sport in tribal societies.
McManus
But I had some ideas. We got global and tribal. We were going to become—
McLuhan
The closer you get together, the more you like each other? There’s no evidence of that in any situation that we’ve ever heard of. When people get close together, they get more and more savagely impatient with each other.
McManus
Why is that? Because it’s in the nature of man?
McLuhan
Yeah, his tolerance is tested in those narrow circumstances very much. Village people aren’t that much in love with each other. And the global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations.
McManus
Do you see any pattern of this in, for example, desires of Quebec to separate?
McLuhan
I should think that they are feeling very abrasive about the English community and about the way the American South felt about the Yankee North a hundred years ago.
McManus
But is it a need for space?
McLuhan
No, it’s a need for a less abrasive encounter and a little more space between the wheel and the axle. When the wheel and the axle get too close together, they lose that playfulness. There’s no play left. And so they have to have a bit of oil, a bit of distancing from each other, and so on.
McManus
And is this distancing, is this going to be a pattern right around the world?
McLuhan
Apparently, separatism is very frequent all over the globe at the present time. Every country in the world is loaded with regionalistic, nationalistic little groups. Even Belgium has a big separatist movement.
McManus
But in Quebec, for example, they define it as the quest for identity.
McLuhan
Yes, all forms of violence are a quest for identity. When you live out on the frontier, you have no identity. You’re a nobody. Therefore, you get very tough. You have to prove that you are somebody. And so you become very violent. And so identity is always accompanied by violence. This seems paradoxical to you? That ordinary, ordinary people find the need for violence as they lose their identities. So it’s only the threat to people’s identity that makes them [???]—terrorists, hijackers: these are people minus identity. They are determined to make it somehow, to get coverage, to get noticed.
McManus
And all this is somehow in effect of the electronic age?
McLuhan
Oh, no. But people in all times have been this way. But in our time, when things happen very quickly, there’s very little time to adjust to new situations at the speed of light. There’s very little time to get accustomed to anything.
McManus
Would, then, the quest for identity of the French Canadians, and the kind of inherent violence that you speak of that’s concomitant with that, it would have not come so soon without…?
McLuhan
Without electric technology? Yes, that’s true. Things like radio can push people up into a new kind of awareness, which makes it very difficult for them to relate to other people. Ireland has shown many responses to this situation in its relations with North and South Ireland and its relations with England. I mention them because everybody tends to know a bit about that. And it has been irreconcilable—until now, anyway. The English representing the highly literate society, and the Irish representing a more oral and much more communal tribal group. And where the tribal feelings are strong, radio sends them up the wall. So radio has sent tribal societies around the globe up the wall with intensity of feeling. One of the big violence-makers of our century has been radio. Hitler was entirely a radio man and a tribal man.
McManus
And what does television do then to that tribal man?
McLuhan
Well, I don’t think Hitler would have lasted long on TV. Like Senator Joe McCarthy, he would have looked foolish. He was a very hot character. And like Nixon made a very bad image on television; he was far too hot a character, much better on radio or on the movies. Not bad on the movies, which will take quite hot characters. But Nixon was hopeless on TV.
McManus
The investigations now, the CIA and the FBI—and even our own, God forbid, RCMP—has this anything to do with the electronic age?
McLuhan
Well, yes, because we now have the means to keep everybody under surveillance. No matter what part of the world they’re in, we can put them under surveillance. It has become one of the main occupations of mankind: just watching other people and keeping a record of their goings-on. This is the way most businesses are run. Every business has a huge espionage sector, and this is called public relations and it’s called audience research. And this is around the clock. And this has become the main business of mankind: just watching the other guy.
McManus
And invading privacy.
McLuhan
Invading privacy—in fact, just ignoring it. Everybody has become porous. They got the light and the message to go right through us. By the way, at this moment, we are on the air, and on the air we do not have any physical body. When you’re on the telephone or on radio or on TV, you don’t have a physical body. You’re just an image on the air. When you don’t have a physical body, you’re a discarnate being. You have a very different relation to the world around you. And this, I think, has been one of the big effects of the electric age. It has deprived people really of their private identity.
McManus
So that’s what this is doing to me?
McLuhan
Yes. Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It’s called being mass man. It began quite a long time ago.
McManus
God, that sounds…! New technology, you say, is a revolutionizing agent.
McLuhan
Yes, it creates new situations to which people have very little time to adjust. They become alienated from themselves very quickly, and then they seek all sorts of bizarre outlets to establish some sort of identity by put-ons. Show business has become one way of establishing identity by just put-ons. And without the put-on, you’re a nobody. And so people are learning show business as an ordinary daily way of survival. It’s called role-playing. Role-playing has become the normal mode of survival in the business world. Jobs have disappeared, as it were, but role-playing has come in on a huge scale. And it’s much more flexible than job-holding. And jobs are rather static, repetitive things, whereas role-playing is very flexible. You can play many roles, but you can only have one job at a time.
McManus
Now, we’ve reached a point now where everybody 24 years and under is the TV generation, right?
McLuhan
Yes.
McManus
Do you feel these young people out there under 24 have been totally tribalized?
McLuhan
They have lost their sense of direction. They do not have goals. They don’t have objectives. And that is putting it mildly.
McManus
You think that’s new?
McLuhan
I think that that is typical of the 24 years and under. And yes, I think that’s new. It’s—
McManus
You say, too, that between today’s child who’s been raised electronically and who must still live in a literate world—because we are still in the literate world—that there’s a 2,400-year gap between that boy or girl and his parents.
McLuhan
And his parents—who grew up in a literate society. Well, the alphabet—the phonetic alphabet, the beginnings of Western literacy—came in about 500 B.C. And since then, between then and now, it’s approximately 2,400–2,500 years. And we are the first post-literate generation, as it were. That is, we have bypassed the literate world—of hardware and the lineal left-hemisphere technology—we have bypassed it by moving once more again into the altogether world, the holistic world of the right-hemisphere people, who are the third world people. So what is happening to our own children is: we’re watching them become third world.
McManus
What does that mean?
McLuhan
Well, it means that they feel much more groupie and trendy than they do private or goal-oriented.
McManus
I see.
McLuhan
And so the disc jockeys helped this along in a huge way. And there’s all the nostalgia. By the way, one of the big marks of the loss of identity is nostalgia. And so revivals on all hands in every phase of life today: revivals of clothing, of dances, of music, of shows, of everything. We live by the revival. It tells us who we are, or where.
McManus
Now these children that are more groupie and less private, are they also more passionate or more violent?
McLuhan
I think that the sheer dislocation of their lives has put them through a very violent course indeed. They have been ripped off.
McManus
But they’re kind of rudderless?
McLuhan
They don’t have goals.
McManus
Don’t have goals?
McLuhan
Because at the speed of light, what is a goal? You’re already there. You name it and you’re there.
McManus
The violence of the media, you say, itself invading those not prepared for it. It’s not the content that’s primary, it’s this invasion of privacy that people are not prepared for, that is destructive.
McLuhan
We recently had this trial of the young man who appealed to Kojak as his alibi for murder. This is a pathetic thing because nobody ever mistook fictional entertainment violence for reality. It’s impossible. Only people who are leading a merely a drugged fantasy life could do that. And there is the strange factor that television is quite a potent drug. It is addictive. It is an inner trip. And it is a tranquilizer. And recently the Detroit Free Press offered $500 for anybody who would stop watching television for a few days. And they didn’t get many takers. But those who did take out the thing dropped out very quickly. They couldn’t bear it.
McManus
Do you feel that the fact that you and I have enjoyed the rewards of literacy, that we are more protected against television than in Detroit?
McLuhan
Yes. I think you get a certain immunity. Just as you get a certain immunity from booze by literacy. The literate man can carry his liquor, the tribal man cannot. That’s why in the Muslim world or in the native world booze is impossible. It’s the demon rum. However, literacy also makes us very accessible to ideas and propaganda. The literate man is the natural sucker for propaganda. You cannot propagandize a native. You can sell him rum and trinkets, but you cannot sell him ideas. Therefore, propaganda is our Achilles’ heel. It’s our weak point. We will buy anything if it’s got a good hard sell tied to it. And so propaganda is the great big soft spot in the makeup of the literate man.
McManus
Electronic people, you say, lose their religion very easily.
McLuhan
Well, their attention span is very weak, as you know. We have invented the one-liner in place of the joke. Because people can’t wait around to hear you tell a joke. It takes too long. As for critics, I said to Sam Goldwyn: don’t even ignore them. That’s a one-liner. And that’s all we have time for. There was a wonderful one-liner in the Morning Smile the other day. The teacher asked: somebody define for me nothing. And a child put his hand up at once and said: teacher, when you peel a balloon, what you have left is nothing. That’s a one-liner. That’s all we have time for. Attention span gets very weak at the speed of light. And that goes along with a very weak identity.
McManus
And religion, which involves ideas, requires a little more time?
McLuhan
Well, religion is a form of indoctrination which requires a considerable amount of literacy. You cannot get religion into people minus literacy. And as literacy weakens, people lose their religious affiliations.
McManus
You’ve written to or been quoted as saying something to do with criminals in jail who have watched endless hours of television. Was that a put on?
McLuhan
No, that’s a little mixed up. What I was referring to was a recent study made in Colorado of the boys behind bars. And the discovery was that every one of them is a dyslexic.
McManus
This is behind prison bars?
McLuhan
Yes, in penitentiaries in Colorado. 100% dyslexic. That is people with learning disabilities. And this happens in our world. There have been studies here in Toronto and in Canada of the same phenomenon. And the strange thing is that nine out of ten dyslexic (or nine out of ten learning disability) people are boys. Only one in ten is a girl.
McManus
But what’s the relationship with television? Why is it television?
McLuhan
Well, TV has a strange effect on the eye muscles. It tends to paralyze or to hypnotize the motor muscles of the eyes, so that the much television-viewing person tends to have a very poor ability to move his eyes across the printed word or on the printed page. And he needs exercises to correct this, and the exercises need to be taken quite early, while he’s in his early years. Because otherwise they harden. But the ideal exercise for this purpose is the trampoline—for loosening up the eye muscles. But now, the reason that boys are so prone to this problem and girls are not is that the exercises that boys take—hockey and baseball and football—these exercises are very crude muscularly and do not help the eye muscles in the reading activity. Whereas skipping and sewing and cosmetics and so on give the girls a much more delicate muscular coordination than boys. And they have less learning disability.
McManus
I see. What now, briefly, is this thing called media ecology?
McLuhan
It means arranging various media to help each other so they won’t cancel each other out—to buttress one medium with another. You might say, for example, that radio is a bigger help to literacy than television. But television might be a very wonderful aid to teaching languages. And so you can do some things on some media that you cannot do on others. And therefore, if you watch the whole field, you can prevent this waste that comes by one cancelling the other out. We have paid no attention to the effects that—for example, as we’ve just been talking about—the effects of television on the printed page. This radio—movies don’t have this effect. They don’t slow down the eye muscles. But we have never studied these phenomena.
McManus
But do you think that perhaps at the end of your studies of media ecology you’re going to advise a cut down on watching television? $500 for anyone who’ll give it up for a day?
McLuhan
Europeans have cut back on that almost down to nothing long ago, because they realized that it threatened literate values very much. An hour a week is what about the French child gets for television.
McManus
Is that right? Dr. McLuhan, you have admitted in the past that you hate to see the upheaval that our world is in. True?
McLuhan
I wouldn’t say hate to see it. But it is a very confusing kind of world in which, as I say, you have no time to get adjusted to anything or acquainted with anybody. You know, we live in a world where you meet many, many people per day for the once and only time in your life or their lives.
McManus
But I’m thinking more about the fact that born in Winnipeg and mastered in English, and English is largely studied at Cambridge for graduate studies, English was largely your world in literature. It’s been under attack by these new electronic media, especially television. This been hard on you?
McLuhan
I don’t think so. Because there is always the challenge of meeting the opposition head on.
McManus
But you wouldn’t like to see the literate world disintegrate?
McLuhan
By no means. My values are strongly centered in literacy, which I teach day and night, as it were.
McManus
And do you think it will survive?
McLuhan
I imagine so. I think so.
McManus
It’s said, too, that you felt hostile to modern life, that you loathed machinery and you hated big cities.
McLuhan
Are they talking about maybe a period when I wrote The Mechanical Bride? It’s a little while ago, alright. I haven’t had much time to feel, to indulge those feelings. I’ve been too busy to develop those hostilities. And I’ve had a wonderful luck in meeting fascinating people, and having wonderful students year in and year out. And so the amount of satisfaction is huge. And it would be a very selfish thing to blame anybody for anything else.
McManus
You’ve also said that you’ve really never been lonely for a moment in your life.
McLuhan
That’s true. I’ve never had that experience.
McManus
You describe your conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1938 as a long pilgrimage and a solitary one, done entirely by reading.
McLuhan
That’s, I think, true. Except, again, that I had luck. I met people too. But it was mainly a literary activity.
McManus
A book by Gilbert Keith Chesterton: What’s Wrong with the World.
McLuhan
Yes. Handed to me on a Winnipeg street by Tom Easterbrook. He said to me: “I hated this book. I think you’ll like it.”
McManus
I’ve often wondered—you know, I read some Chesterton myself in my younger days—and I’ve often wondered if you’d be satisfied with your contribution (on a much more global scale than Chesterton’s), but being something similar to his. He was always taking the accepted and turning it upside down and inside out.
McLuhan
Having a good look at it from many sides. He was Cubist, you see. A paradox is a form of Cubism in which you look at the same situation simultaneously from different directions. And—
McManus
So there are some parallels there?
McLuhan
Oh, well, sure. The habit of discontinuous and multi-leveled perception. But it goes partly also with my interest in Joyce, Poe, and Eliot, because they are also multi-faceted people and very right-hemisphere people. But the—
McManus
And Harold Innis?
McLuhan
Harold Innis—I was very lucky to encounter him. It was through The Mechanical Bride that I met him. And when I heard that he had put it on his reading list, I was fascinated to find out what sort of an academic would put a book like The Mechanical Bride on a reading list. So that’s how I went around and met him and we became acquainted for the few years that remained of his life. He only had about three years to live at that time. But Innis, I think, is the only man, since the beginnings of literacy 2,400 years ago, who ever studied the effects of technology. And I think that is an amazing thing in view of the numbers of great minds that had this opportunity. He is the only human being that ever studied the effects of literacy on the people who were literate—or the effects of anything on anybody. Now this, as I say, is a unique thing in Innis’s case. Aristotle and Plato never studied the effects of anything on anybody.
McManus
Would you list The Mechanical Bride and The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media as the three monuments of yours as far as books are concerned?
McLuhan
I have a new book called The Laws of the Media, which I hope will be much more attractive. But I’m working on new things all the time.
McManus
And still looking for pattern recognition?
McLuhan
It’s one of the big excitements of life. It’s a sort of detective activity, you know? I do a lot of sleuthing.
McManus
On being a Canadian, I think Northrop Price says that one of the things Canada gives you is a chance to be an observer.
McLuhan
Yes, because you’re not too deeply involved in other people’s problems. And our own problems are relatively small compared to other people’s problems.
McManus
And a certain freedom, then?
McLuhan
Yeah, it does. And so you can be an Ann Landers to the world.
McManus
What about the multi-cultured mosaic?
McLuhan
That is an amazing ploy to preserve the cultural identity of Quebec and other minorities. It’s—
McManus
Why do you call it a ploy?
McLuhan
Yes, well, it’s a sort of official ending of melting pot. The Quebecois are terrified of being merged in the American culture. I think it’s as simple as that. And I think they’re right. They’re absolutely vulnerable. We’re all vulnerable to the Americans. And they’re a very attractive and wonderful people, and I think we could easily become merged in their lives—as we intend to be, anyway.
McManus
Well, does that mean that, in order to lessen their fears, we attempt to paralyze different immigrant groups coming in at the state of their arrival?
McLuhan
Yeah. And keep their cultures intact and separate. That is the meaning of the multicultural mosaic. The mosaic is static. It isn’t in a state of constant inter-inanimation or interplay. No, it’s static. And that’s exactly the way the French want to remain. They want to remain just the way they are. And so it’s not that easy. So this is an amazing, as I say, ploy developed to make this possible. I don’t know if it will work, but I certainly don’t wish them ill on this maneuver. It is a kind of media ecology, you see. It’s a way of using our available resources in the communication to keep people apart and to keep them intact without merging. So I think it’s a drastic move. I never heard of it occurring in any other country. Did you? I never heard of a multicultural mosaic as an idea for immigration. It’s an amazing strategy of survival. Survival, however, is a legitimate goal in life, especially in a fast-changing world.
McManus
And you felt this yourself?
McLuhan
Oh, yes. I have an essay coming out in a Harvard book on Canada called “Canada—A Borderline Case.” It’s in a book called The Canadian Imagination. And the theme has to do with the strange effects of being on so many borderlines in Canada. We have so many cultural borderlines in every direction that it is very confusing to the idea of private identity, or even group identity. But it is very enriching too, because people on frontiers have a very rich life of interplay with other people, other cultures.
McManus
Right. I know you don’t like to make predictions.
McLuhan
I make them all the time, but I make absolutely sure they’ve already happened.
McManus
You don’t like being called a prophet. But of course, I think in the biblical sense, there was an understanding of a prophet of someone who’s not only talking about the future, but he’s telling you what is happening now. Would you like to tell us whether the country is going to stay together or not? And thereby be telling us what’s happening to us now?
McLuhan
Well, I don’t know if I’d call that a prophecy or not. There is a sense in which the separatism occurred long ago. But there is a hardware sense in which it is still intact. The country is still intact in a hardware sense, legal sense. It is the hardware, I think, that is under danger under electric conditions. The hardware world tends to move into software form at the speed of light.
McManus
You’re losing me again, Dr. McLuhan. So in fifteen seconds I’ve got one question for you: how much television do you watch?
McLuhan
Whenever I get a chance. Not too often. I missed Rigoletto last night. I was very disappointed.
McManus
But you don’t watch it that often?
McLuhan
No, I don’t have that many opportunities.
McManus
I see. Thank you, Marshall McLuhan. I hope you’ll come back again. I really enjoyed it. And thank you very much. And good night.