McLuhan's C/catholic f/pun

[alice wellintown]

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.

For the pragmatic Penn vs the principled new englander see
the chicago chapter of The Education of Henry Adams.