daily notes #3: The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore (book review)

This book is a “highlight reel” of Marshall McLuhan’s major works and a good introduction to his thought. Quentin Fiore’s photo layouts and graphic design hold up well.

Some content and summary: “All media work us over completely.” The conflict between electronic and linear print mediums is generational and has particular implications for education. The printing press created a new era of book authorship which “Xerography” is bringing to a close. “Visual space is uniform, continuous and connected,” creating fragmentation and specialism. Gone are “jobs,” the kids want “roles” in the context of simultaneous audio. We are now -as of 1967- in “a global village.” Electronic communication “profoundly involves men with one another.” “Print technology created the public. Electronic technology created the mass.”

I’m personally very conflicted about McLuhan and whether or not to pursue him. There was a McLuhan revival in the 90’s and many attempts to do “Digital McLuhan” since. Media discourse is oversaturated and becoming banal as the social media era drags on. Much of it is preoccupied with “content” as opposed to social environment, scale and the medium itself. In that context McLuhan’s major insights are still extremely important. There you have it.

Toronto’s new streetcars

Toronto’s new streetcars do much to symbolize the city’s incredible change. Their smartphone-like glossy front and back end match the new tech aesthetic and economy. Street photographers, TikTokers and other marketers love to have them cameo in their content.

The new streetcars were completely called for. They put Toronto on par with most other major cities and are more accessible. But while the old streetcars certainly needed to go, they have qualities that I’ll miss that have no place in the new Toronto. Let me play up the contrast between old and new.

Compare the massive windows of the new streetcars to the old rectangular windows a rider could open and close. In comparison to the new, that functionality is almost touchingly democratic. Remember that time you were on a streetcar, saw a friend, opened the window and yelled at them?

The lighting is more severe in the new streetcars and they have a wide open and washed out feel. In contrast, the old streetcars—if you were on board at the right moment—had a cozier almost den-like vibe complete with woodgrain. The new streetcars can sometimes put riders awkwardly at level and on display next to drivers—a rare event in the elevated old cars.

The harshly lit fishbowl effect of the new streetcars imply a drive toward full transparency but what does that mean in the current context? Increasingly—as a matter of degree, but a significant one—there is a class divide in terms of who actually takes the TTC. Uber, Covid-19 and Toronto’s stark inequality are the triumvirate of causes.

Economic inequality and the housing crisis—most pointedly homelessness—come to bear on everything that’s open to the public or at the street level. The new streetcars superficially match the new Toronto’s aesthetic and aspirations but arrive just as the ridership and rider experience is suffering.

The city’s problems are wide open for all to see.. but you can act like you didn’t see anything—or weren’t seen—thanks to the soft tint of the new streetcar windows.

Tyndale’s influence, the English Bible, Luther’s German Bible and colloquial speech

Quoted from The Reformation by Patrick Collinson

“Up to the mid-seventeenth century there were proportionally more Bibles printed and sold in England than anywhere else in Europe. The poetics of the seventeenth century, from John Donne to John Milton, is saturated with the richly tentacular tropes and metaphors of the Bible, while the speech of every day became peppered with scriptural phrases that rivaled Erasmus’s proverbs: ‘the burden and heat of the day,’ ‘filthy lucre,’ ‘God forbid,’ ‘the salt of the earth,’ ‘the powers that be,’ ‘eat, drink, and be merry’ —all are Tyndale’s inventions.

…

Luther’s German Bible was as large a landmark in the history of the German language as Tyndale’s was in English, the first work of art in German prose. Like Tyndale’s, Luther’s achievement was to pitch on a literary language that was close to colloquial speech, settling somewhere between the crudities of dialect and a language too elevated for ordinary mortals. He wrote, ‘One must ask the mother at home, the children in the street, the man at the market, and listen to how they speak, and translate accordingly.'”

Walter Lippmann anticipates Kenneth Gergen’s Saturated Self

“Novelties crowd the consciousness of modern men. The machinery of intelligence, the press, the radio, the moving picture, have enormously multiplied the number of unseen events and strange people and queer doings with which he has to be concerned. They compel him to pay attention to facts that are detached from their backgrounds, their causes and their consequences, and are only half known because they are not seen or touched or actually heard. These experiences come to him having no beginning, no middle, and no end, mere flashes of publicity playing fitfully upon a dark tangle of circumstances. I pick up a newspaper at the start of the day and I am depressed and rejoiced to learn that: anthracite miners have struck in Pennsylvania; that a price boost plot is charged; that Mr. Ziegfeld has imported a blonde from England who weighs 112 pounds and has pretty legs; that the Pope, on the other hand, has refused to receive women in low-necked dress and with their arms bare; that airplanes are flying to Hawaii; and that the Mayor says that the would-be Mayor is a liar…

Now in an ordered universe there ought to be place for all human experiences. But it is not strange that the modern newspaper-reader finds it increasingly difficult to believe that through it all there is order, permanence, and connecting principle. Such experience as comes to him from the outside is a dissonance composed of a thousand noises. And amidst these noises he has for inner guidance only a conscience which consists, as he half-suspects, of the confused echoes of earlier tunes.”

Vilfredo Pareto on bourgeois balance

Legendary Italian social analyst Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) asserted that there are two kinds of middle class or “bourgeois” people, Rs and Ss. The first group, the Rs, are adventurers who represent dynamism, change and economic progress. R’s speculate, they have the savvy and confidence to triage significant economic opportunities.

The second group, the Ss, are much more conservative and tend to be content with a “fixed income.” The humble small business owner is a classic S-type. Pareto said that both Rs and Ss are necessary for an economy to function and that balance between the two must be maintained. 

If we take Pareto’s analysis forward to the present day what do we see? Perhaps the greatest threat to Pareto’s notion of balance between the two groups is the ambient threat to the dignity of the second group, the Ss. Who wants to humbly generate a modest fixed income anymore? That’s not exactly the middle class zeitgeist. Accordingly, suspect schemes and dreams are ubiquitous. R types are inherently volatile and that’s good according to Pareto, but we may be in situation where too many Ss also feel the need to be Rs.

Osterhammel on India’s “double communications revolution”

“The daily newspaper was a European-American invention that soon spread beyond the North Atlantic area. Where the colonial system offered the opportunities, indigenous educated classes soon took advantage of them to make their voices heard in both local languages and those of the colonial rulers. British India was again an especially clear case in point. Here the press developed in fairly close synchrony with Europe’s, one difference being that the printing press appeared in India at the same time as the newspaper: a double communications revolution. The first English-language paper came out in 1780 in Calcutta; the first in an Indian language (Bengali) in 1818. The Gujarati-language Bombay Samachar, founded in 1822, is still published today (as Mumbai Samachar). Soon there appeared English-language papers produced by Indians. Lithographic technology, which soon spread to smaller cities, was common to all. Another reason why the new medium was taken up so quickly, eagerly, and successfully in India was that the country could build upon a rich culture of written reporting. The years from 1835 to 1857 were a time of vibrant progress, in liberal conditions that people in the German Confederation could only dream of at that time. After the Great Rebellion of 1857–58, the colonial government reacted more heavy-handedly to Indian criticisms and tightened its control of the press, but this never escalated into a muzzling of public opinion. The viceroys valued the press both as a means of communicating with the population and as a source that relayed information and attitudes from Indian society. Together with the English legal tradition that generally tied the hands of the state, these pragmatic considerations explain nineteenth-century India’s significance as a country with a highly developed press system.”

Jacques Barzun on “envy and self-justification” way before social media (1969)

“If we could take an objective look at the amount of talk in our society which amounts merely to self-praise, we would be appalled. It begins with individuals and goes on to institutions, to colleges and universities particularly. Every little group, every momentary or permanent establishment, feels the need to continually say what good work it is doing and to show other groups (which scarcely pay attention) that they are indispensable to the welfare of the whole.

The combination of envy and self-justification have dire consequences. It leads first to what might be called a biased self-analysis. What am I doing here? Why am I doing it? Have I done more in the first six months of this year than the first six months of the year before? How is that other outfit doing? These questions generate a self-consciousness which is just as bad as the intolerable shyness of an adolescent standing on one foot and now on the other, putting his fingers in his mouth and not knowing whether he wants to be there or underground.

Self-consciousness, in turn, is at the root of our alienation -the knowledge that reality has withdrawn, for the obvious reason that we are always thinking about ourselves, our place in the room, our place in the world or in the whole line of endeavor that we happen to pursue. We are not living, we are spectators at our life. Notice how it comes out in our talk, in the self-depreciation that matches and becomes as bad and automatic as the self-praise. The two are the two halves of what would be a real life lived.”

German nationalism vs. France in the 19th century

Quoted from Jugendstil and Racism: An Unexpected Alliance by Angelika Pagel

“…hostility grew strong as a result of Napoleons occupation of Germany. The hoped for unification of the many petty German states under the leadership of Prussia and with the help of the French Revolution had not been achieved. The Vienna Congress of 1814-15 failed to establish a sovereign German nation-state with unified national politics and France, though defeated, even managed (through Talleyrand’s diplomacy) to emerge from the talks with its hegemony in Europe re-affirmed. Germany’s struggle for national unity would continue throughout the 19th century while the other major European powers had long since achieved this status. Disappointed and envious, Germans turned inward and backward, to ideas of tribal nationalism, of common ancestry in a shared Germanic past. Gradually, this idea of an integral German nation and people (Deutsche Nation und Volkstum) degenerated into the myth of blood-and-soil; antisemitism emerged as a “logical” consequence of this tribalism and the Nazi battlecry “One People, one Empire, one Leader” (Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer) epitomized the desire for national unity spanning the entire 19th century. Even after the Vienna Congress, the “glorious power of French nationhood” was experienced by the Germans in painful contrast to their own lack of national unity.”

France vs. England in the 14th Century (the Estates vs. Parliament)

Quoted from The Age of Adversity by Robert E. Lerner

“There are many reasons why the history of the Estates is so strikingly different from that of Parliament. The fact that the Estates were normally called only in major crises made them appear more revolutionary than constitutional and thus alienated the large majority of their potential supporters. Furthermore, the French were more deeply divided than the English not only by class but also by local loyalties. Both the use of free farmers, or yeomen, in the army and the fact that the lesser nobles or knights sat as county representatives alongside the burgesses in the House of Commons are cited as examples of social integration in England that could not be matched in France. There the peasants were rigorously excluded from any but servile occupations and the townspeople were considered social inferiors and political rivals by the nobles. To this social prejudice must be added the fact that provincial loyalties were often stronger than those to the monarchy and that the interests of the northern and southern halves of the country were frequently quite disparate. As a result, the establishment of a unified constitutional opposition was extremely difficult; and the very failure of the Estates, at least by contrast, served to enhance the prestige of the crown.”

Fritz Stern on “liberalism” as understood by the Germanic Ideology and the Conservative Revolution

The Germanic Ideology on liberalism

“Above all, these men loathed liberalism, Lagarde and Moeller saw in liberalism the cause and the incarnation of all evil. It may seem curious that they should have fastened on liberalism, the one political force in Germany that perpetually lost. To understand why they did this leads us to the core of their thought. They attacked liberalism because it seemed to them the principal premise of modern society; everything they dreaded seemed to spring from it: the bourgeois life, Manchesterism, materialism, parliament and the parties, the lack of political leadership. Even more, they sensed in liberalism the source of all their inner sufferings. Theirs was a resentment of loneliness; their one desire was for a new faith, a new community of believers, a world with fixed standards and no doubts, a new national religion that would bind all Germans together. All this, liberalism denied. Hence, they hated liberalism, blamed it for making outcasts of them, for uprooting them from their imaginary past, and from their faith.”

The Conservative Revolution on liberalism

“The chief target of the conservative revolutionaries, however, was liberalism. All the vast and undesirable changes in the lives and feelings of Western man they blamed on liberalism. They sensed that liberalism was the spiritual and political basis of modernity and they sought to equate liberalism with Manchesterism, with the disregard of man’s spiritual aspirations, with the acceptance of economic selfishness and exploitation, with the embourgeoisment of life and morals. They ignored -or maligned- the ideal aspirations of liberalism, its dedication to freedom, the hospitality to science, the rational, humane, tolerant view of man. For what they loosely called liberalism constituted little less than the culmination of the secular, moral tradition of the West.

That liberalism was much more than an economic or political philosophy has been recognized for a long time. In the 1860’s already, Cardinal Newman said of liberalism: “It is scarcely now a party; it is the educated lay world . . . it is nothing else than that deep, plausible scepticism, which I spoke about as being the development of human reason, as practically exercised by the natural man.” Nearly a centruy later, Lionel Trilling said of America that liberalism was our “sole intellectual tradition.” It was liberalism in this larger sense that the conservative revolution fought, and by doing so, it could most easily make the leap from cultural to political criticism.”