The man who said “the medium is the message”
has an important message for us.
The medium and the light: Reflections on religion. By Marshal McLuhan. Edited by Eric McLuhan and Jacek Szklarek. 3rd edition. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers. 2018. 219 pp. $28.00. paper.
There are absolutely too many brilliant sentiments within the pages of The Medium and the Light to do referential justice to any of them. Every essay, page, and word exemplifies McLuhan’s scholarship and communication. Even the mundane is full of verve, vitality, conviction. He knows words matter, using them as both scalpel and chainsaw. He understands that character is determined within individuals and institutions by “religion” (15). He knows “significance” is a universal passion (17). But he sees within culture the pressure of speed (46-47). Print causes its own problems according to McLuhan suggesting the “illusion of self-sufficiency and private authority” (49). He does not believe in being a pessimist or an optimist for both are “a purely secular state of mind.” Rather, as a Christian, McLuhan believes in “apocalypse” because it is “salvation” (60). Incarnation is a central concern in Medium. “Electric man” is literally “dis-carnate” (50). “Zombie-ism” makes McLuhan wonder if Christians “go to Church to be alone” (117-35). But he sees that even unbelievers cannot help but adopt Christian love as the solution to problems born by every person (173).
Offerings range from sources as variant as letters to a wife to public addresses, to unpublished journal articles. What may seem to some uneven content will be a treasure trove of mindset expansions for others. McLuhan’s writing is thick: his phrasing makes the reader ponder. For instance, we should spend more time writing letters to show future generations how we think. Indeed, we should spend more time reading letters of our forebears to see how others think. The book’s organization is difficult to follow logically which is surely understandable given the fullness of the book’s interests. Part I has the reader encounter McLuhan’s Catholic conversion. The Church and its (non-)understanding of media incorporates a multiplicity of ideas in Part II. Liturgy with its media intersection takes up Part III. Forecasting future concerns for The Church as a whole incorporates Part IV. Two appendices on Thomas Nashe, Henry Newman, and T.S. Eliot round out the volume. It comes as no surprise that the man who made famous the phrase “the medium is the message” (79) is concerned that the visual has overtaken the verbal, that people are in danger of becoming “the walking dead” because of “technological innovation” (62).
Central to McLuhan’s concern is The Church’s responsibility “to shake things up” (62). But it is McLuhan who attempts to do the same to Christ’s Bride. A visually oriented Church attends itself to “bigger everything” (62). God’s people are “being wiped out electrically” (63) existing “on the Reader’s Digest level” of literacy (64). McLuhan’s faith is prayer-based, “superhuman,” uncomfortable, anti-cultural (64), committed to “Imagination” (66), words (69), community (72), “the formal cause” (74), and “the international motley” (75-78). The hermeneutics of the last phrase – a focus on attire – is itself worthy of its own explanation, insofar as McLuhan challenges every Church process in an electronic age (79-88). He worries that “now” will usurp the “then” (80). He confirms a need for “catechism” (94), the problem of Buddhist thinking in Christianity (95-97), even the prevalent problem of the microphone in worship (95, 107-16)!
McLuhan’s lasting contribution – among the myriad of beneficial insights – are his connections to educational psychology and educational brain research (i.e., 52). To say McLuhan was ahead of his time is an understatement. Chapter four brims with insights he made from the 1950’s anticipating concepts such as privatization, phone apps, podcasts, artificial intelligence, tribalization, global village, packaged curricula, and “decay of dialogue” to name just a few. He is concerned with technologically ordered knowledge having an unconscious impact on human thought making it superficial. Essential synthesis between visual and verbal is well stated in negative terms, “Eye and ear, both are completely right, but when one begins making value judgments about the other . . . the trouble begins (44). He knows that a form of communication “acts upon you” and “invades your senses (38). He believes we are shaped by our tools (59). Change happens so quickly, McLuhan contends, that “no human psyche or any human community can withstand” while private identity “has been dissolved” (63) causing “new areas of blindness” (70). In his view, “philosophers and psychologists” have not properly understood how important technological innovations are to the shaping of human intelligence, hence, educational processes (89-93). McLuhan’s cautionary insights into educational practice are not to be missed (94-104).
Theologians, and seminaries that house them, ought to make this compendium of essays essential reading. Indeed, McLuhan takes to task “uninterested” theologians (45, 89, 129) whose research capabilities should have taught them better. He was disillusioned to discover time and again that he could not interest theologians in the insights he thought would have them guard against the “Prince of this World” who is himself “a great P.R. man . . . a master of the media” (xxiii). He disparages, rightly or not, preachers who hold learning and reason in contempt (22). McLuhan understands the importance of theology while unfortunately disparaging Protestants over Catholics; his incisive comments notwithstanding (24-30). What celebrity personages could learn from McLuhan’s committed stance, “I am loath to sacrifice my intellectual standards to achieve a more popular success” (29).
Looking back on McLuhan’s relentless attacks, one can see issues with which to disagree. His esoteric brilliance can be inhibited by his ethereal verbiage. He writes and speaks in the foreign language of erudition which, at times, compromises his essential arguments. His consistent attacks on “Protestantism” truncate his own belief in a catholic (universal) Church. Interviews belie a tendency to overstate his case. His view of Church administration (83) or individualism being “scrubbed right off our culture” (85) exaggerate their own importance. Church authority seems to offer a convoluted Scriptural authority (98-99). He also leaves one with the impression that the analysis of process can proceed without “value judgments” (140).
The Medium and the Light is not just a book for the communication department. McLuhan opines philosophically on politics, marketing, business, media, journalism, sociology, psychology, literature, and religion. Homeschooling groups could learn from a man who “wrote his doctoral thesis on the history of the trivium” (x). Moving easily between subjects and persons he can quote Hopkins (35), then Pope (36), making short work of mathematical philosophy (39), moving to Peter Drucker, and finally to the philosophies of Mircea Eliade (44).
The centerpiece, perhaps better, the vortex, of McLuhan’s remarks is his unbridled, uninhibited refrain that “Our senses are not passive receptors of experience” (91). The book’s summary (89) “There seems to be a general unwillingness to consider the impact of technological innovation on the human sensibility” is an indictment upon thinkers who should know better. He knows (in 1959!) that people are concerned with information overload (34). The subtitle, “Reflections on Religion,” could have included all the disciplines in an academic catalog. The editors cut to the chase, “There was at this time little or no distinction between literature, theology, and politics” (xi). Marshall McLuhan, who foresaw “cottage economies” (xxviii, 85) and the need to “build bridges between the arts and society” (174), would be amazed that people would still ignore “the pervasive and penetrating character of the TV image, or service, itself” (xxi).
Review by Mark D. Eckel, President, The Comenius Institute, Indianapolis, IN; Professor of Leadership, Education and Discipleship, Capital Seminary and Graduate School, Lancaster, PA. [Published July, 2019 in Christian Education Journal.]