YP McLuhan's pragmatism

[Henry Secularpeturbations]

Marshall McLuhan was a skeptic, a joker, and an
erudite
  maniac. He read too deeply from Finnegans Wake, had
too great a fondness for puns, and never allowed his
fun to be   ruined by the adoption of a coherent point
of view. He was   dismayed by any attempt to pin him
down to a consistent   analysis and dismissive of
criticism that his plans were   impractical or absurd.
His characteristic comment during one   academic
debate has taken on a mythic life of its own. In
  response to a renowned American sociologist,
  McLuhan countered: "You don't like those ideas? I
got
  others."    In a letter to Canadian Prime Minister
Pierre Trudeau, with   whom he had a long friendship,
McLuhan argued that in the   modern electronic
environment, it is inadvisable to be
  coherent. "Any moment of arrest or stasis permits
the public   to shoot you down." McLuhan preferred to
make his rebuttals   in the form of a quip. As he
explained to Trudeau: "I have   yet to find a
situation in which there is not great help in   the  
phrase: 'You think my fallacy is all wrong?' It is
literally  disarming, pulling the ground out from
under every
  situation! It can be said with a certain amount of
poignancy  and mock deliberation." 
  McLuhan's idea that media are extensions of man was
  influenced by the work of the Catholic philosopher
Pierre  Teilhard de Chardin, who believed that the use
of  electricity extends the central nervous system.
McLuhan's  mysticism sometimes led him to hope, as had
Teilhard, that  electronic civilization would prove a
spiritual leap forward  and put humankind in closer
contact with God.  But McLuhan did not hold on to this
brief hope, and he later  decided that the electronic
unification of humanity was only  a facsimile of the
mystical body. As an unholy imposter, the  electronic
universe was "a blatant manifestation of the
  Anti-Christ." Satan, McLuhan remarked, "is a very
great  electric engineer." 
  Though he enjoyed observing the battles of the day
as they  were played out in the media, McLuhan was
deeply attached to  the church and suspicious enough
of worldly goings-on to be  immune to large-scale
politics or reformation movements. He  put his faith
in Christ. When challenged by a British  journalist
about the deleterious effects of electronic  culture,
McLuhan responded that he had "no doubt at all that
  Christus  vincit. That is why a Christian cannot but
be amused at the antics of worldlings to 'put us on.'"
The true Christian  strategy, McLuhan believed, was
"pragmatic and tentative."  Pragmatic and tentative
hardly seem the right adjectives for
  one of our era's greatest provocateurs. But in light
of his  Catholicism, McLuhan's pragmatism makes sense.
Mystics are  attuned to the voice of the Holy Spirit
coming in directly,  and they are the great
demolishers of doctrine. Pragmatic  does not mean
practical, but nonsystematic. Tentative does  not mean
weak, but provisional and willing to change course
  under the influence of new revelations. 

  Next, 

The pragmatic Penn vs the principled New Englander in
The Education of Henry Adams.


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