Saturday Evening Post (August 10, 1968) p. 34-36
Marshall McLuhan discusses the effects of television on politics and explains why the current candidates are irrelevant.
Marshall McLuhan discusses the effects of television on politics and explains why the current candidates are irrelevant.
All of the Candidates are Asleep
By: Marshall McLuhan
“Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace! But now they are hid from your eyes.” (Luke 19:42)
An election is a period of programmed violence, because it is a quest for new images of national identity. The present elections is a “tragic” one, because the American sense of identity has been in jeopardy from new technology for some time. Every new technology creates a new sensory environment that rearranges the images we make of ourselves. To discover and to elect representatives in a period of deep personal uncertainty is to be involved in a struggle for images, not a struggle for goals.
A tragic hero has no goal. He has to find out who he is when the foundations of his world have fled. His “irrational violence” is a probing of the unknown. Like our own TV generation, he cannot “fit in” to a world that has changed radically. His tragic agon, or struggle, is a process of making, not matching. He cannot “represent” people until he has invented or discovered them anew.
The Vietnam war has taught Americans that they cannot have a hot war in a cool, or involved, age. When electric immediacy has got everybody involved in everybody, mechanized violence is no more tolerable than mechanized education or mechanized politics or mechanized charity.
The ballot box is a “hot box” that is hard to cool in an election year. An old-fashioned hot campaign is hard to accommodate to a TV public engaged in the “first world war fought on American soil.”
All wars are world wars, under electric conditions. TV brings them into our homes, and some American parents have seen their own sons killed on TV news programs. Seeing them on TV, moreover, we experience all sons as our own.
From all the present candidates for the Presidency, the TV viewer gets the impression that it would be possible to have an intelligent conversation with any one of them under conditions of privacy and solitude, during which that candidate could be allowed to learn some of the central events in the contemporary world.
The simple fact is that no such possibility of intelligent conversation exists. If any one of them were to become aware of the actual dynamics of the 20th century, he would at once dissociate himself from political lie. The compliance and submission needed in “practical politics,” or for any cooperation with any political machine excluded the possibility of any serious character appearing on the scene.
Now that Bob Kennedy has left the scene it is easier to see how much bigger he was than the mere candidate role he undertook to perform. His many hidden dimensions appeared less on the rostrum than in his spontaneous excursions into the ghettos and in his easy rapport with the surging generosity of young hearts. He strove to do good by stealth and blushed to find it fame. It was this (reluctant hero) quality that gave integrity and power to his TV image.
None of the candidates understands TV, either in its effect on him or on society. If Canada’s Pierre Trudeau is a great TV image in politics, it is because he is indifferent to political power. Anyone who looks as if he wants to be elected had best stay off TV. TV demands sophistication—that is, multi-level perception. It is a depth medium, an X-ray form that penetrates the viewer.
Sen. Eugene McCarthy could have come out of any Hollywood casting bureau as a small-town philosopher. His yokel quality provides a very pleasing feeling of TV involvement, which gives him a nice, modest rapport with the young.
TV, of course, has transformed the primaries from regional popularity contests into national mage-making shows. Radio and jet travel, like press coverage, still count on the candidate’s have a special slogan, a special issue, that identifies him. TV has ended that. The press can only tag along to comment on what happened on TV.
But, in a deep sense, TV bypasses the ballot box as a means of creating political “representatives.” TV is not concerned with views or interests or issues. It is a maker and finder of images that ride over all points of view and over all age-groups as well. The TV image ends all national and party politics.
Why should TV demand sophistication and insouciance? Simply because it is a depth medium for which earnestness is fatal. Depth requires perception on many levels and, therefore, an absence of single purpose or direction. An all-at-once world, fashioned by electric information, demands a candidate full of puns and unexpected nuances. Such a man is one who knows so much about the contemporary interface of all cultures that he cannot possibly be deluded into any earnest regard for any one of them. The new changes are not moral but technological.
The question is whether we are to “go to bed” and “take our slumber” for the next four years with Humphrey’s “platform of happiness” and bubbly ebullience, or with Nixon’s “serene certainty” to “jog along” with Senator McCarthy, or to fix our gaze on loner Reagan. This question has all the immediacy and involvement of the choice between listening for four years to the same theme songs. Are we to endure four years of I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles (Humphrey), I Love You Truly (Nixon), Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms (McCarthy) or As Time Goes By (Reagan)?
In merely media terms, a Negro in the White House would have the most soothing and cooling effect on both national and international politics. Negroes make enormously better color-TV images than whites, because the contour of this image does not depend upon light and shade.
In media terms, a glance at presidential candidates, past and present, reveals that “running for office” only became possible when transportation reached a high degree of development. Until the telegraph and the railway, the office had to chase after the candidate. He sat home, writing letters to the local press. Slogans were basic. Cartoons and photography began to play a large political function even before railways made it possible for candidate to enter the age of caboose and whistle-stop oratory.
The radio age turned Oriental and inward. It became tuned to the cosmic and to ESP. The world in Joyce’s phrase, “went Jung and easily Freudened.” Magazines featured “The Yellow Peril,” while matrons played mah-jongg. Spengler announced the end of the West. Youth politics appeared (Cf. The Doom of Youth by P. Windham Lewis). Peter Pan and the child cult loomed along with “permissiveness” in psychology. Negro jazz became a new world idiom.
The radio age turned Oriental and inward. It became tuned to the cosmic and to ESP. The world in Joyce’s phrase, “went Jung and easily Freudened.” Magazines featured “The Yellow Peril,” while matrons played mah-jongg. Spengler announced the end of the West. Youth politics appeared (Cf. The Doom of Youth by P. Windham Lewis). Peter Pan and the child cult loomed along with “permissiveness” in psychology. Negro jazz became a new world idiom.
Radio politics produced a new race of tribal chieftains who “represented” nobody. They “put on” their public, like any star or any emperor. The media are the emperor’s new clothes, as it were. Mussolini, Stalin, Churchill, F.D.R.—these men were made bby radio.
Jack Kennedy was the first TV President. He had that indifference to power without which the TV candidate merely electrocutes himself.. When a man has enormous wealth or power, his human survival depends on his indifference to these things. Anybody who pretends to want such things proclaims his inability to perceive their terrifying responsibilities. In a word, he acts like a somnambulist, a highly motivated dreamer who prefers to remain insulated from a frightening world. But the hum dimension itself has gone from power, in the satellite age. Excess make power, as such, silly and unacceptable.
The TV generation has been robbed of its identity by the establishment consisting of highly motivated somnambulists. Any new technology that creates a new environment alters the image the people have of themselves. It changes their relation to others. The gap so created can only be filled by violence. Such violence has no goal except the need to form a new image, to create a new meaning for the individual or the group.
Radio and TV both create global environments of “software.” They envelop us in radiation and information. Radio retribalized world politics, bringing people very much closer together by eliminating space and time. Great violence was released by radio technology, in the course of the pursuit of new images and identity.
The Second World War was a radio war, the first software war, the first guerrilla war of decentralized forces fighting on many fronts at once. War, now as always, is education, an accelerated distribution of data and information. It is compulsory education, especially for the enemy. In this sense war has always been a major “progressive” force, both in ancient and modern worlds. War is also a quest for identity. “Hardware” wars follow the “territorial imperative,” but this is also the quest for a corporate image.
The most creative response to radio was American Negro jazz. Jazz was a syncopated audile-tactile form of cultural gesture-language that cut across all verbal barriers, even more than radio itself. Unlike the language of private and visual culture, the auditory world of jazz is discontinuous. It is a non-Newtonian space-time world of total involvement. Only the visual sense gives detachment. Only the eye cultures, based on the phonetic alphabet, have ever achieved a visual order of civilized detachment and private individualism. Hence the present panic:
The American colonies began with print. The entire educational, industrial and political structure of the U.S.A. stem from the printed word, as de Tocqueville explained long ago. All other cultures had centuries of pre-print existence and political organization. Hence, unlike other cultures, the North American colonies began as a decentralized group and moved toward bureaucratic centralization. In the age of software this trend will reverse, and, of course, the United States has much to lose from decentralization.
An instantaneous electric environment decentralizes any structures, personal or corporate, commercial or political. The old hardware structure of road and rail and print had, by contrast, centralized and specialized all functions.
Hence the dilemma of the TV generation: The Establishment is centralized and specialized in politics, in education and in business. The Establishment is goal-oriented. The new software environment is a total field of simultaneous data in which no goals are possible, no detachment is possible and involvement is mandatory.
Faced with an educational plant devoted to separate subjects, and training in special skills, the TV generation is baffled. This applies equally to the Negro. He is asked to acquire literacy and to detribalize at a time when the latest technology is retribalizing the entire globe. The backward individual, like the backward country, has no stake in the old hardware, the old literacy and the old specialism. He is immediately “turned on” by the new software electric culture.
By contrast, the possessors of the old hardware, the Establishment, are “turned off” by the new electric environment. Age-old habits of classification, detachment and specialism make it impossible for them to come to terms with an electric technology that offers total integration of life and knowledge.
The TV generation is dedicated to the “inner trip” and the erosion of personal identity. It can only form a new image of itself by destroying the old hardware environment. Yet destruction of the hardware environment is not a goal for the TV generation It can have no goal. It can only be involved in a struggle. The new core of the TV generation is now 12 to 14 years of age. The confrontation with the Establishment will take place four of five years hence. In the meantime, faint indications of the coming conflict are apparent at Columbia and elsewhere.
As Peter Drucker points out in Managing for Results, the bigger the environment created by an environment of technology, the less aware are the occupants of that environment or technology. The global environments created by the new software, or pervasive electric information, are such hidden services. The hardware environments of industry and print had created services such as the postal system, highways and railways. Printing, or assembly-line technology by the use of uniform movable types, became the unconscious model for all industrial activity whatever, for all educational training and all job organization. These hardware environments gave ordinary workers access to goods and services such as the wealthiest person in the world could not have provided for himself.
A vast discrepancy was created between the old image of agrarian man and the new image of industrial man. This discrepancy released a century of old struggle and wars that were necessary to form new images of identity.
Every gap is an interface, an area of friction or ferment. Hardware “communism” existed, that is to say, decades before the Communist Manifesto of 1848. The utopia of Karl Marx, like all utopias, before or since, was an image in a rearview mirror. Communism had already happened. Karl Marx was unaware of the meaning of the vast new hardware environment of communal services, as we are unaware of the global environment of software services or total and instant information.
The sort of theme and issues that the present candidates consider it necessary to mention have nothing whatever to do with what is going on in the world. Moral concern over poverty and injustice and stupidity are now steeped in a software environment of affluent images. The discrepancy between the old and the new images enrages the victims.
The child standing in his crib wallows in TV images of adult life as much as the poor are enveloped in images of physical splendor. The result is that the young TV watcher decides to bypass childhood and adolescence. The poor quite naturally decide to bypass the bureaucratic maze that denies them cornflakes.
The new software environment of images is not nearly as invisible to the victims as it is to the Establishment that witlessly perpetuates it. The effects are the same whether the causes are noted or not. For centuries the literate world in general has been concerned with events rather than causes.
The new Milton Eisenhower Commission to investigate the causes of violence will produce an inventory of violent events plus a moral exhortation. Causes will not be considered.
The TV generation has been robbed of its identity by the inventors and managers of an electric software environment of global services. These managers, it cannot be insisted upon too strongly, are highly motivated somnambulists. (The recent psychological studies by Dr. Roger Broughton at McGill University have indicated that somnambulism is a motivated condition.)
Without exception the McCarthys, the Humphreys, the Reagans, the Stassens, the Wallaces and the Nixons, the Rockefellers are men of integrity and good will who find it expedient to sleep out the current time. Why should the ld wake up merely to confront a violent struggle for new identity, which the young and the backward alike find it necessary to pursue in order to attain any image of themselves?
