. . .
Not a word of his great masterwork had ever been published, and yet
Teilhard had enjoyed a certain shady eminence for years. Some of his
manuscripts had circulated among his fellow Jesuits, sub rosa, sotto
voce, in a Jesuit samizdat. In Canada he was a frequent topic of conversation
at St. Michael's, the Roman Catholic college of the University of
Toronto. Immediately following his death, his Paris secretary, Jeanne
Mortier, to whom he had left his papers, began publishing his writings
in a steady stream, including The Phenomenon of Man. No one paid closer
attention to this gusher of Teilhardiana than a 44-year-old St. Michael's
teaching fellow named Marshall McLuhan, who taught English literature.
McLuhan was already something of a campus star at the University of
Toronto when Teilhard died. He had dreamed up an extracurricular seminar
on popular culture and was drawing packed houses as he held forth
on topics such as the use of sex in advertising, a discourse that
had led to his first book, The Mechanical Bride, in 1951. He was a
tall, slender man, handsome in a lairdly Scottish way, who played
the droll don to a "T," popping off deadpan three-liners--not one-liners
but three-liners--people couldn't forget.
One
time I asked him how it was that Pierre Trudeau managed to stay in
power as prime minister through all the twists and turns of Canadian
politics. Without even the twitch of a smile, McLuhan responded, "It's
simple. He has a French name, he thinks like an Englishman, and he
looks like an Indian. We all feel very guilty about the Indians here
in Canada."
Another
time I was in San Francisco doing stories on both McLuhan and topless
restaurants, each of which was a new phenomenon. So I got the bright
idea of taking the great communications theorist to a topless restaurant
called the Off Broadway. Neither of us had ever seen such a thing.
Here were scores of businessmen in drab suits skulking at tables in
the dark as spotlights followed the waitresses, each of whom had astounding
silicone-enlarged breasts and wore nothing but high heels, a G-string,
and rouge on her nipples. Frankly, I was shocked and speechless. Not
McLuhan.
"Very
interesting," he said.
"What
is, Marshall?"
He nodded
at the waitresses. "They're wearing...us."
"What
do you mean, Marshall?"
He said
it very slowly, to make sure I got it:
"They're...putting...us...on."
But the three-liners
and the pop culture seminar were nothing compared to what came next,
in the wake of Teilhard's death: namely, McLuhanism.
McLuhanism was
Marshall's synthesis of the ideas of two men. One was his fellow Canadian,
the economic historian Harold Innis, who had written two books arguing
that new technologies were primal, fundamental forces steering human
history. The other was Teilhard. McLuhan was scrupulous about crediting
scholars who had influenced him, so much so that he described his
first book of communications theory, The Gutenberg Galaxy, as "a footnote
to the work of Harold Innis." In the case of Teilhard, however, he
was caught in a bind. McLuhan's "global village" was nothing other
than Teilhard's "noösphere," but the church had declared Teilhard's
work heterodox, and McLuhan was not merely a Roman Catholic, he was
a convert. He had been raised as a Baptist but had converted to Catholicism
while in England studying at Cambridge during the 1930s, the palmy
days of England's great Catholic literary intellectuals, G. K. Chesterton
and Hilaire Belloc. Like most converts, he was highly devout. So in
his own writings he mentioned neither Teilhard nor the two-step theory
of evolution that was the foundation of Teilhard's worldview. Only
a single reference, a mere obiter dictum, attached any religious significance
whatsoever to the global village: "The Christian concept of the mystical
body--all men as members of the body of Christ--this becomes technologically
a fact under electronic conditions."
I don't have
the slightest doubt that what fascinated him about television was
the possibility it might help make real Teilhard's dream of the Christian
unity of all souls on earth. At the same time, he was well aware that
he was publishing his major works, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and
Understanding Media (1964), at a moment when even the slightest whiff
of religiosity was taboo, if he cared to command the stage in the
intellectual community. And that, I assure you, he did care to do.
His father had been an obscure insurance and real estate salesman,
but his mother, Elsie, had been an actress who toured Canada giving
dramatic readings, and he had inherited her love of the limelight.
So he presented his theory in entirely secular terms, arguing that
a new, dominant medium such as television altered human consciousness
by literally changing what he called the central nervous system's
"sensory balance." For reasons that were never clear to me--although
I did question him on the subject--McLuhan regarded television as
not a visual but an "aural and tactile" medium that was thrusting
the new television generation back into what he termed a "tribal"
frame of mind. These are matters that today fall under the purview
of neuroscience, the study of the brain and the central nervous system.
Neuroscience has made spectacular progress over the past 25 years
and is now the hottest field in science and, for that matter, in all
of academia. But neuroscientists are not even remotely close to being
able to determine something such as the effect of television upon
one individual, much less an entire generation.
That didn't hold
back McLuhan, or the spread of McLuhanism, for a second. He successfully
established the concept that new media such as television have the
power to alter the human mind and thereby history itself. He died
in 1980 at the age of 69 after a series of strokes, more than a decade
before the creation of the Internet. Dear God--if only he were alive
today! What heaven the present moment would have been for him! How
he would have loved the Web! What a shimmering Oz he would have turned
his global village into!
But by 1980 he
had spawned swarms of believers who were ready to take over where
he left off. It is they, entirely secular souls, who dream up our
fin de siècle notions of convergence for the Digital Age, never realizing
for a moment that their ideas are founded upon Teilhard's and McLuhan's
faith in the power of electronic technology to alter the human mind
and unite all souls in a seamless Christian web, the All-in-One. Today
you can pick up any organ of the digital press, those magazines for
dot.com lizards that have been spawned thick as shad since 1993, and
close your eyes and riffle through the pages and stab your forefinger
and come across evangelical prose that sounds like a hallelujah! for
the ideas of Teilhard or McLuhan or both.
I did just that,
and in Wired magazine my finger landed on the name Danny Hillis, the
man credited with pioneering the concept of massively parallel computers,
who writes, "Telephony, computers, and CD-ROMs are all specialized
mechanisms we've built to bind us together. Now evolution takes place
in microseconds. ...We're taking off. We're at that point analogous
to when single-celled organisms were turning into multicelled organisms.
We are amoebas and we can't figure out what the hell this thing is
that we're creating. ...We are not evolution's ultimate product. There's
something coming after us, and I imagine it is something wonderful.
But we may never be able to comprehend it, any more than a caterpillar
can comprehend turning into a butterfly.
Teilhard seemed
to think the phase-two technological evolution of man might take a
century or more. But you will note that Hillis has it reduced to microseconds.
Compared to Hillis, Bill Gates of Microsoft seems positively tentative
and cautious as he rhapsodizes in The Road Ahead: "We are watching
something historic happen, and it will affect the world seismically."
He's "thrilled" by "squinting into the future and catching that first
revealing hint of revolutionary possibilities." He feels "incredibly
lucky" to be playing a part "in the beginning of an epochal change...
We can only appreciate
Gates' self-restraint when we take a stab at the pages of the September
1998 issue of Upside magazine and come across its editor in chief,
Richard L. Brandt, revealing just how epochally revolutionary Gates'
Microsoft really is: "I expect to see the overthrow of the U.S. government
in my lifetime. But it won't come from revolutionaries or armed conflict.
It won't be a quick-and-bloody coup; it will be a gradual takeover.
... Microsoft is gradually taking over everything. But I'm not suggesting
that Microsoft will be the upstart that will gradually make the U.S.
government obsolete. The culprit is more obvious. It's the Internet,
damn it. The Internet is a global phenomenon on a scale we've never
witnessed.
In less able
hands such speculations quickly degenerate into what all who follow
the digital press have become accustomed to: Digibabble. All of our
digifuturists, even the best, suffer from what the philosopher Joseph
Levine calls "the explanatory gap." There is never an explanation
of just why or how such vast changes, such evolutionary and revolutionary
great leaps forward, are going to take place. McLuhan at least recognized
the problem and went to the trouble of offering a neuroscientific
hypothesis, his theory of how various media alter the human nervous
system by changing the "sensory balance." Everyone after him has succumbed
to what is known as the "Web-mind fallacy," the purely magical assumption
that as the Web, the Internet, spreads over the globe, the human mind
expands with it. Magical beliefs are leaps of logic based on proximity
or resemblance. Many primitive tribes have associated the waving of
the crops or tall grass in the wind with the rain that follows. During
a drought the tribesmen get together and create harmonic waves with
their bodies in the belief that it is the waving that brings on the
rain. Anthropologists have posited these tribal hulas as the origin
of dance. Similarly, we have the current magical Web euphoria. A computer
is a computer, and the human brain is a computer. Therefore, a computer
is a brain, too, and if we get a sufficient number of them, millions,
billions, operating all over the world, in a single seamless Web,
we will have a superbrain that converges on a plane far above such
old-fashioned concerns as nationalism and racial and ethnic competition.
I hate to be
the one who brings this news to the tribe, to the magic Digikingdom,
but the simple truth is that the Web, the Internet, does one thing.
It speeds up the retrieval and dissemination of information, messages,
and images, partially eliminating such chores as going outdoors to
the mailbox or the adult bookstore, or having to pick up the phone
to get ahold of your stockbroker or some buddies to shoot the breeze
with. That one thing the Internet does, and only that. All the rest
is Digibabble.
May I log on
to the past for a moment? Ever since the 1830s, people in the Western
Hemisphere have been told that technology was making the world smaller,
the assumption being that only good could come of the shrinkage. When
the railroad locomotive first came into use, in the 1830s, people
marveled and said it made the world smaller by bringing widely separated
populations closer together. When the telephone was invented, and
the transoceanic cable and the telegraph and the radio and the automobile
and the airplane and the television and the fax, people marveled and
said it all over again, many times. But if these inventions, remarkable
as they surely are, have improved the human mind or reduced the human
beast's zeal for banding together with his blood brethren against
other human beasts, it has escaped my notice. One hundred and seventy
years after the introduction of the locomotive, the Balkans today
are a cluster of virulent spores more bloody-minded than ever. The
former Soviet Union is now 15 nations split up along ethnic bloodlines.
The very zeitgeist of the end of the 20th century is summed up in
the cry, "Back to blood!" The thin crust of nationhoods the British
established in Asia and Africa at the zenith of their imperial might
has vanished, and it is the tribes of old that rule. What has made
national boundaries obsolete in so much of eastern Europe, Africa,
and Asia? Not the Internet but the tribes. What have the breathtaking
advances in communications technology done for the human mind? Beats
me. SAT scores among the top tenth of high school students in the
United States, that fraction who are prime candidates for higher education
in any period, are lower today than they were in the early 1960s.
Believe, if you wish, that computers and the Internet in the classroom
will change all that, but I assure you it is sheer Digibabble.
. . .
