By DONALD DeMARCO
Herbert Marshall McLuhan was born in Edmonton, Alberta, in the year 1911. During his adolescent period, he explored his conflicted relationship with religion and turned to literature to “gratify his soul’s hunger for truth and beauty.” He later referred to this stage as agnosticism.
While studying in England, he read G.K. Chesterton, whose effect on him was similar to the effect he had on C.S. Lewis. “A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading,” Lewis remarked, after imbibing Chesterton’s persuasive logic. McLuhan abandoned his agnosticism just as C.S. Lewis abandoned his atheism.
In a letter to his mother, in 1935, McLuhan revealed his indebtedness to the persuasive Chesterton: “Had I not encountered Chesterton, I would have remained an agnostic for many years at least.”
McLuhan completed his conversion process and entered the Catholic Church in 1937. His father accepted his son’s conversion, but his mother was inconsolable and feared that his Catholic identity would hurt his career. This proved most emphatically not to be the case. In fact, McLuhan owed a great deal of his success to Catholic thinkers, especially to St. Thomas Aquinas.
After teaching at the University of Wisconsin for a year, McLuhan taught only at Catholic schools: St. Louis University, Assumption College, Fordham University, and St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto where he taught until 1979. He attended Mass on a daily basis.
His approach to teaching was to help students sharpen their perceptions so that they could see exactly what was going on. He was a staunch enemy of propaganda and saw the media as its most effective ally.
“The medium is the message” is his most popular aphorism and cuts to the essence of his thinking. Therefore, we must understand the effect that radio, TV, newspaper print, movies, and other media forms have in distorting the message they convey. Without this understanding, the “medium is the massage,” hypnotizing us into unthinking servo-mechanisms.
“All media exist,” he maintained, “to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.”
Not any of the fine arts, he argued, but “advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.”
McLuhan’s 1964 book, Understanding Media, was a great success and was translated into more than 20 languages, although the subtlety of its message escaped many of its readers. It earned its author the title of “Oracle of the Electric Age.” Encomia were extravagant, regarding the work as “The most influential book by the most debated man of the decade.”
The New York Herald Tribune praised McLuhan to the level of “The most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov.”
McLuhan, however, was not bamboozled by media hype. He remained a man of deep faith and found it amusing that San Francisco hippies could applaud a Catholic whose thought was founded on the Thomistic notion that knowledge is an order of perceptions. McLuhan wanted people to stay “in touch.”
I knew Marshall McLuhan personally and found him to be gracious, generous, and delightfully humorous. I once asked him why he had grown a mustache. “To obsolesce all previously existing photographs of me,” was his instant reply. He wrote the foreword to my first book, Abortion in Perspective.
Naturally, he was a defender of life and spoke at various pro-life conventions. He loved word play and there can be little doubt that his reference to the fact that diaper spelled backwards is “repaid” is associated with the infant care of his six children. The medium is the message, but it is also true that “the medium is the mess age” as well as the “massage,” and that it is also the “mess sage.” “All my words are on parole,” he was fond of saying.
It has been said that McLuhan’s greatest achievement was his fame. This is unfair to the perceptive student of the electric age.
Personally, I am grateful to him for three things. First, is his serene confidence that the human mind is capable of understanding whatever it is that is unfolding within our electronic world. Here, the influence of Aquinas is apparent. As McLuhan stated again and again, “There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”
The second is his personalistic conviction that the whole person must be involved in order for understanding to take place. The specialist and the expert fragment things and therefore cannot see what is going on.
“Comprehension,” he wrote, “is never mere classification. It means the perceiving of total processes by using every sense in any situation.” He encouraged people to learn how poets could see things that escaped the more prosaic mind. Many of his aphorisms were provocative and got us to think more responsibly. “There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.” He was always ahead of his time, reminding us that the fate of the planet is in our hands.
Finally, I am indebted to McLuhan for his extensive treatment on the theme “breakdown is breakthrough.” It is through our personal failures, our lack of unity with the world around us, that we can gain insights and see things we could not see if we were entirely one with the world. When our mores merge with the world, there is no consciousness. Thus, only the man who fails is eligible for success.
McLuhan lived with the abiding faith that Christ’s final breakdown — His crucifixion and death — preceded His ultimate breakthrough: the Resurrection.
I recall coming home after a New Year’s Eve party and clicking on the TV. What I was told, through this ubiquitous media form, was that on the final day of 1979, communications expert Marshall McLuhan passed away.
He seemed larger than life to me and I was stunned by the sad news. My prayers were laced with the hope that his final breakdown was his ultimate breakthrough.
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(Dr. Donald DeMarco is a senior fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College in Cromwell, Conn., and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. His latest works, How to Remain Sane in a World That Is Going Mad; Poetry That Enters the Mind and Warms the Heart; How to Flourish in a Fallen World, and Footprints on the Sands of Time: Personal Reflections on Life and Death are available through Amazon.com.
(Some of his recent writings may be found at Human Life International’s Truth and Charity Forum. He is the 2015 Catholic Civil Rights League recipient of the prestigious Exner Award.)
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