[Woodcock is a Canadian educator, editor, and critic best known for his biographies of George Orwell and Thomas Merton. He also founded Canada's most important literary journal, Canadian Literature, and has written extensively on the literature of Canada. In the following essay, which was originally published in The Nation in November 1971, he compares McLuhan's vision of an electronic "global village" to worldviews expressed in Utopian literature.]

It has become a commonplace in discussing the effect of the media in modern society to point to the way in which reputations can be instantly made, and lost with equal rapidity. The situation is all the more piquant when this happens to a media figure like Marshall McLuhan. Remembering his career, one is tempted to adapt the slogan of a celebrated gasoline advertisement which for some reason he overlooked in compiling The Mechanical Bride: "That's McLuhan—that was."

It is true that, as a disturbing sport among academics, McLuhan has been in evidence for twenty years. But neither The Mechanical Bride (1951) nor The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) marked the real beginning of his brief reign as a mod hero. That came with the publication of Understanding Media (1964), a thinly veiled celebration of the impending reign of the electronic media and the return to tribalism, now universalized. All the basic ideas of that book (and McLuhan really has few ideas, but repeats them constantly in varying forms) had in fact been sketched in The Gutenberg Galaxy, and the notion of swimming with the maelstrom had made its appearance in The Mechanical Bride. But in Understanding Media McLuhan translated his gospel from academic hieratic into Madison Avenue demotic, and stunned many apparently intelligent people into accepting a highly exaggerated view of the role of electronic communications in our lives.

None of the curious intermedial volumes in which, after Understanding Media, McLuhan tried to develop a mosaic of picture and aphorism (in a vain attempt to evade the charge that he used print to declare the end of print), made an impression like that of his earlier books, and their failure confirmed the implications of the continuing success of the paperback revolution in publishing: that under modern conditions people are in fact reading more than they did a generation ago, and that the Gutenberg dynasty remains in control of a very large territory in the Western consciousness. Since 1964, moreover, there is evidence that, like mosquitoes resisting DDT, the human mind is learning to absorb television without the extraordinary changes in consciousness McLuhan predicted. We have not yet become Global Village enough to diminish the passions of nationalism; indeed, to give an example very close to the bone when dealing with McLuhan, the spread of television in Canada, and particularly the prevalence of American shows, has been followed by an upsurge of national feeling, a strong reaction against the very influences that not long ago made it seem as though North America might become the prototype of the Global Village.

I do not know how far the evident failure of his teachings to work out in the short run has affected McLuhan's viewpoint; recently he has withdrawn into the academic fastness from which he emerged. But it is certain that during the past three or four years his influence has waned, and I doubt if there are many ardent McLuhanites left except among slightly unfashionable PR officers and belated Op artists. And now the burial beetles are at work on his reputation; interestingly, they are led by late disciples. The authors of two recent books, Jonathan Miller (Marshall McLuhan, 1971) and Donald F. Theall (The Medium is the Rear View Mirror, 1971) are former McLuhanites turning against the master, Miller in total opposition and Theall in that spirit of revisionism which to the faithful always seems worse than downright rejection.

Having held even at the height of general McLuhanacy the critical attitude of the working journalist, who knows that things are never as simple as aphorists and myth makers declare, I find it hard to resist the kind of I-told-you-so smugness which anarchists used to assume towards Trotskyists when they talked of Stalin. It is easy—all too easy—to say: How could you really believe McLuhan's nonsense about TV being tactile? How could you swallow those absurd assurances that an Eskimo lived in an auditory world when his very survival as a hunter depended on a visual sense that reads the landscape as accurately as any of us reads a page of print? How could you allow McLuhan the insolent claim that the front page of a newspaper, with its "instantaneous mosaic," is less rather than more visual than a page of print?

Yet McLuhan remains a phenomenon that has to be acknowledged. Even after his vogue has dissipated, some of his works will remain as curiosities in the history of Western culture. The Gutenberg Galaxy, for example, is likely to be read for the very feature that the later McLuhan would have dismissed as irrelevant—its content. It is, like Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy or Proudhon's De la Justice, one of those eccentric compendia of strange knowledge that omnivorous readers will find entertaining long after the argument has ceased to be topical. And even his earlier scholarly essays, recently collected in The Interior Landscape, plodding and murkily written though they may be, are interesting because of the traditionalist and elitist gloss which they provide on his latest work. "The Southern Quality" and "Edgar Poe's Tradition," neither of which McLuhan has repudiated, read like parodies on the myths of gentlemanly Dixie, while an anticipation of his later excesses in relation to the media appears when he seeks to show that the symbolist theory of analogies and correspondences originated in the front pages of newspapers, whose arbitrary juxtaposition of dissimilar incidents supposedly inspired Mallarmé and Rimbaud.

The study of this earlier McLuhan, the search for the roots of his later ideas in his Canadian origins, in his convert's Catholicism, in his admiration for Joyce, Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, provides the most interesting chapters in both Miller's Marshall McLuhan and Theall's The Medium is the Rear View Mirror.

Unfortunately Miller becomes so involved in tracing McLuhan's debt to Innis and Whorf and Giedion and the prairie Populists and the Sophist tradition that he leaves little room for what one had imagined to be the purpose of the Modern Masters series in which his book figures, the lucid exposition and criticism of the chosen writers. It seems obvious that a consciousness of space running out induced him to concentrate on the books up to The Gutenberg Galaxy and to say virtually nothing about Understanding Media or anything later. Yet it is in Understanding Media that McLuhan's most pernicious maxim, "The medium is the message," was worked out in such a way that the leaders of industrial and advertising corporations adopted him briefly as an instant guru. That monstrous half-truth, implying that content is irrelevant, seemed for a time to be accepted as a white flag of surrender offered on behalf of the whole intellectual community—offered not merely because McLuhan's growing determinism made him regard the triumph of the electronic media as inevitable, but also because he seemed to desire the recreation of a community hostile to the intellect. It is in Understanding Media that McLuhan finally reveals himself in all his effrontery as the know-all know-nothing, a character worthy of the imagination of his master Wyndham Lewis.

There are of course good things in Miller's little book. As a doctor knowledgeable in neurology, he is able to pick apart very effectively McLuhan's assumptions regarding the co-ordination of the senses, and as a television man he can show how McLuhan's theories fail to work out in the practice of the media. But his general hostility to his subject weakens his case. One reacts with incredulity to the dismissal of all of McLuhan as "a gigantic system of lies." It is of course something far more insidious—a gigantic chaos of half-truths.

Here—as well as in his fuller treatment of his subject—Theall is more credible than Miller. While the most Miller will allow McLuhan is that he sets us thinking, Theall does him the justice of granting that, despite his monstrous exaggerations and his pedantic ways of shocking the pedants, McLuhan has spotted some genuine trends in our society. What Theall does not develop clearly is the process by which the trend-spotter became the trend-setter. I still think the book which McLuhan has since rejected as obsolete, The Mechanical Bride, is his most true and useful book, since here he is merely revealing, with some acuteness, the way in which advertising both reflects and moulds the attitudes of our world. It is when in his later books he himself takes a role in moulding attitudes, and does so by intellectually dubious means, that McLuhan becomes one of the great exemplars in our generation of la trahison des clercs.

I am always surprised that, except for a few rather slight hints in the essays Raymond Rosenthal collected some years ago in McLuhan: Pro and Con (still the best book on McLuhan), nobody—and that includes Miller and Theall—has examined seriously McLuhan's role as the leading Utopian fantasist since Huxley and Orwell, or how this role is related to the fact that his transformation into a prophet took place in Canada.

Seen as a great false metaphor for the ideal society, McLuhan's vision reflects in its form the discredit that in recent years has fallen on the conventional Utopia. As a detailed model of an ideal society, Utopia began to lose its appeal as soon as the first signs of the welfare state appeared, and the failure of Utopia in time present—i. e. Communist Russia—resulted in the inversion of Utopia in the future into a negative vision, pioneered by E.M. Forster and Zamiatin, developed by Huxley and Orwell. But the desire persisted for some kind of Utopian pattern in which human alienation could be shown ending in a culture that reunited man's nature as well as his society; it persisted especially among Catholic converts who fervently believed in their own kind of vanished golden age. Man came out of a tribal world, where the unity of the group protected him psychologically as well as physically from the hostility in the darkness around the tribal fire. Let him return to a worldwide tribalism, a global village, in which a balance of all the senses and a reconciliation of intellect and emotion would at last prove itself superior to nature and transform the earth into a vast artifact.

Once one considers it in this way, McLuhan's vision is seen to have a great deal in common with many Utopian novels, and here I am not merely talking about the incidental anticipations of electronic devices which one finds in books like Bellamy's Looking Backward. Much more impressive is the forecast in Forster's "The Machine Stops," written about sixty years ago, of a world where man's fate is actually determined by a technological structure he himself has created and which brilliantly anticipates the type of communications network McLuhan imagines as the arterial structure of world tribalism.

Even more interesting is the anti-intellectualism, the prejudice against a literary or even a literate culture, that pervades so many Utopias. Even in Utopia itself there is a strong suggestion that oral is superior to written discourse, and Swift's Utopians, the Houyhnhnms, like the inhabitants of Plato's golden age, have no writing and are the wiser and more moral for the lack; the same applies to the underground people in Herbert Read's The Green Child. In the anti-Utopias the attack on literacy becomes an attack on thought. Anything but the most elementary intellectual activity is forbidden in the worlds of We and 1984 and Brave New World, and in the last of these, technological advances are used, as McLuhan envisages, simply to cultivate and gratify all the senses. In Huxley's novel there is also a kind of world tribalism, exemplified particularly in the ritual orgies of its people.

Though he acknowledges no debt to Huxley, what McLuhan poses as inevitable and therefore—by its Panglossian logic—desirable, is something very near to a realization of Brave New World. The flaw in the vision is that he does not take into account that serpent in the electronic Eden, the content in the message; man will still want to eat of the Tree of Knowledge, and from that reality McLuhan can escape no more than he now escapes the tyranny of print.

That a late-blooming Utopian vision should emerge in Canada is not surprising, particularly if one remembers the teachings of another and more reasonable Canadian guru of world fame, Northrop Frye. Writing on Canadian literature, Frye has developed the thesis that traditionally Canada was a garrison society, a society of pioneers whose situation until the recent wave of urbanization was analogous to that of a tribal people, with the northern Wilderness fulfilling the same role of circumambient enmity as the African forest. One can go beyond Frye to remark that, since a common fear creates unity in tribal and garrison communities alike, they have no need of Utopian visions. It is when human societies loosen out into civilizations, and the sense of community dissipates, that the dream of ideal worlds in past or future emerges. The Homeric Greeks, if one is to believe the epics, had no thought of either a lost golden age or an ideal Platonic republic. Similarly, one of the striking features of Canadian literature until recently was the almost complete absence of Utopias or anti-Utopias; keeping the watch in the garrison was the important task. But now, in a mere generation, Canada has passed out of the pioneer phase, Canadian critics like Frye himself have begun to study Utopian myths, and Canadian poètes manqués like McLuhan have begun to create Utopian visions. The fact that what to Forster and Huxley was anti-Utopia should have become Utopia to McLuhan may be an alarming symptom of the degree of alienation in the collective Canadian psyche, struggling towards self-recognition, yet plagued by dissension. It may also be merely an externalization of McLuhan's own plight, of a longing for the return, at any cost to human dignity, to the great warm womb of the tribal unconscious.

George Woodcock, "McLuhan's Utopia," in his The World of Canadian Writing: Critiques & Recollections, Douglas & McIntyre, 1980, pp. 235-40.