[Bliss is a Canadian historian and educator who specializes in the history of business, economics, and modern medicine. In the following essay, he assesses McLuhan's impact on Western culture.]

The young wonder who Marshall McLuhan was. Maybe some kind of TV commentator in the sixties? The rest of us remember "the medium is the message," and "a global village," and that McLuhan was otherwise unintelligible. He was famous for a while, and then sort of disappeared. You may have read the obituaries in 1980. Does anyone take seriously today this Canadian academic who was once billed as "the most important thinker since Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and Pavlov"?

It seems that a McLuhan revival is slowly gathering steam. Biographers and essayists are at work, the University of Toronto Press will soon publish his last manuscript, and a major collection, Letters of Marshall McLuhan, which was released in Canada [in November 1987], has just been published in Great Britain and the United States. The 450 letters in this volume, brilliantly annotated by William Toye, encompass McLuhan's whole career, and are offered as the "autobiography" he never bothered to write. They are an essential source for all reconsiderations of McLuhan.

He emerges from his letters as a failed metaphysician of the media. McLuhan's system and style proved ludicrously inadequate as a guide to our time, which is why he fell into comparative obscurity after about 1972. But the man and his ideas are fascinating artefacts. To a handful of true believers, McLuhan will endure as oracle. To the rest of us he is passing into history as an interesting product of a strange moment in Western culture.

Marshall McLuhan grew up in Winnipeg where his father worked as a life-insurance salesman and his mother became a professional elocutionist. The letters effectively begin in 1934 when the twenty-three-year-old graduate of the University of Manitoba went to Cambridge on an IODE scholarship. Reacting against both his Baptist and his Canadian upbringing, he discovered culture and Roman Catholicism in England. "I simply couldn't believe that men had to live in the mean mechanical joyless rootless fashion that I saw in Winnipeg," he wrote his mother.

In 1936 McLuhan began an unremarkable apprenticeship as at teacher of literature, mostly at Saint Louis University, a Jesuit college in St. Louis, Missouri. He migrated to Assumption College in Windsor, Ontario, in 1944, largely to avoid having to serve in either country's armed forces, and in 1946 moved to St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto. He was neither prolific nor well known as a scholar, too lowbrow for most academics when he wrote about comic strips and advertising, too highbrow for many in his professorial role as an expert on difficult modernist writers such as James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound.

He got little attention for his first book, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951), or the obscure periodical, Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication, that he helped edit through the 1950s. The fame began with The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man in 1962, followed by Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man in 1964. Soon it was evident that McLuhan and the media were engaged in mutual lionization: the academic preached the transcendent importance of electronic communications, the communicators heralded the visionary academic. From 1963 he presided over a special Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, and in 1967–68 was paid the then enormous sum of $100,000 for a guest stint at Fordham University in New York. He jet-setted and hobnobbed and corresponded with prime ministers and pundits and corporation presidents; he was the subject of eight books between 1967 and 1971. McLuhan played himself in Woody Allen's film Annie Hall. As Tom Wolfe put it in a famous McLuhan profile, the overwhelming question was "What if he is right?"

McLuhan was much more than an intellectual gadfly or adroit self-promoter. As a literary scholar, he immersed himself in the avant-garde techniques, images, and social attitudes of modernist writers. In dozens of letters to Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, both of whom he met and championed, McLuhan proved a faithful and eager disciple, mimicking even their verbal mannerisms, particularly Pound's punning wordplay. Steeped in modernism's emphasis on form over content, McLuhan latched easily and enthusiastically onto the ideas of pioneering communications theorists such as Harold Adams Innis who emphasized the primacy of the forms of media over the messages they transmit. McLuhan's synthesis, which had emerged by 1960, was based on two claims: (1) sensory perception and communications technologies are interrelated, the latter as extensions of the former; (2) new media technologies, such as the printing press, cinema, or television, change the balance of our senses, and thus create new modes of consciousness, behaviour patterns, and social forms, all of this independently of their content.

"Harry me boy, it works," McLuhan exults to another media guru in 1964. "To deal with the environment directly is my strategy Harry…. All that I've said about the medium is the message is sound…. The principle works in many ways…. It works also for all modes of perception. Can now put the entire Gutenberg Galaxy on a single page."

McLuhan was convinced that he had discovered the fundamental principles of human sensory perception and symbiosis with the environment, and began to refer to himself as a "metaphysician." As a possessor of universal insight, untempered by humility or caution, he was happy to interpret anything in literature, history, the whole universe, past, present, and future. McLuhan offered thoughts on Ovid and Aquinas and Blake and comic books, race relations and toplessness, streakers, Watergate, hippies, prayer mats, Cadillacs, corporations, Canadian culture—the works.

There were apocalyptic overtones to McLuhan's prophecies about television's destroying all established bureaucratic and political organizations. But there was also an offer of transcendence to those who believed. "I am saying it is now possible to by-pass what used to be called 'fate,'" he wrote [Pierre] Trudeau. If the prime minister would keep in touch by telephone or personal emissary, the prophet would tell him how to do it. Others could subscribe to the McLuhan Dew-Line Newsletter, containing the latest probes from this intellectual radar station up in barren Toronto.

Would McLuhanism supersede other views of the psyche and society? He thought comparisons between himself and Freud made sense, but only if Freud's failure was recognized: "The merely individualist psychology of Freud has flunked out in the new age of tribal and corporate identities." In fact both McLuhan and Freud were the founders of closed systems based on largely untestable hypotheses about the hidden workings of the mind. Both tried to apply their doctrines universally. Both welcomed disciples and were intolerant of critics. Both seemed, for their time, to supply dazzling insights.

But McLuhan's time was very short. He was far more shallow and reckless than Freud and far less able to handle criticism. His prophecies did not come true. Television technology did not totally tribalize today's teenagers or the rest of society. Organizations did not collapse. Content mattered. When McLuhan tried to duck his critics by labelling them mere "content men" and falling back on his Delphic, Pound-like style—as a questioner, a prober, a jester, not necessarily to be taken seriously—he stopped being taken seriously. In his later letters McLuhan seems incapable of serious dialogue about his ideas—he preaches and repeats himself—yet is pathetically eager to find intellectual support for his collapsing system. His last refuge is the arrogant elitism of modernist aesthetics—a view of the artist as prophetic outsider.

There are enough alienated intellectuals, technological determinists, Catholic neotribalists, and Cancultists to keep the McLuhanist flame flickering indefinitely. The Letters, a representative selection culled from the McLuhan papers in the National Archives of Canada, provide a new stock of flashing McLuhanisms. Some oracle, though. What was really in those precious letters to the prime minister's office? Nothing more concrete than a conservative Catholic's dislike of abortion and support for capital punishment. McLuhan had little more to say to the politicians and decision makers of his time than his mentors, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, had to say in theirs. He apparently did not share their flirtations with fascist ideology, but he had little more insight into political reality. The correspondence contains no anticipation of the one true global upheaval of his lifetime: "There will be no war in Europe," twenty-seven-year-old McLuhan writes in September, 1938. "The real villains in the piece are not Hitler etc. but the Comintern, the free masons and the international operators who have their headquarters in Prague." When war does come, he chooses not to serve. There are no letters printed from mid-1940 to mid-1943.

For about fifteen minutes in the 1960s there was enormous interest in the electronic media, in communications generally, and in the idea that all the old forms of behaviour were being shattered in the modern world. It was a cloistered professor of literature, an expert on the breaking of forms by Joyce, Pound, et al., who came forward with the explanations that we dutifully took seriously and then sensibly dismissed. As an intellectual, McLuhan bridged and symbolized and popularized, running a unique gamut from the modernist literary revolution of the 1890s and early 1900s to cultural theorizing in the 1960s. For that reason, and for his audacity and the fame he enjoyed, McLuhan survives.

Michael Bliss, "False Prophet," in Saturday Night, Vol. 103, No. 5, May, 1988, pp. 59-60, 62.