McLuhan, Marshall. The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man. New York: The Vanguard Press, 1951.
For people carried
about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines,
listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie
entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an
exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be
anything but supine consumers of processed goods. Society begins to take
on the character of the kept woman whose role is expected to be submission and
luxurious passivity. Each day brings its addition of silks, trinkets, and
shiny gadgets, new pleasure techniques and new pills for pep and
painlessness. (p. 21)
Thus, as passivity becomes extreme in the bulk of society, a sizeable segment
of citizens detaches itself from the dream-locked majority. As vulgarity
and stupidity thicken, more and more people awaken to the intolerability of
their condition. Much can be done to foster this state of awareness, even
though little can be done directly to change the policies of those in control
today of the media and communication. (p. 22)
The superhighways of thought and feeling which have been stretched across the
contemporary mind are even more menacing than financial or bureaucratic
concentrations of power. They can scarcely be expected to encourage the
development of spontaneity or sensitive taste. (p. 22)
Sinuous writhings and self-abasements mark the prose styles of the twentieth
century. The reader is to be habitually soused with sex and violence but
at all times protected from the harsh contact of critical intellect. (p. 23)
(cf Percy)
Let the kids' comic books do their worst, they will fall far short of the
pretentious infantilism of these serious efforts of reputed adults who govern
the affairs of the trade routes of contemporary fiction. (p. 24)
Today the big extroverts in any field would on the whole make poor company for
a well-read boy - though there are some of them who merely conceal intelligent
interests and insights which would, if known, destroy the confidence of their
associates. This urgency for the concealment of intelligence is felt
today as acutely among leaders as formerly among intelligent girls on an
average date. (p. 28)
More common and
hopeful is the effort to modify the social and individual effects of technology
by stressing concepts of social biology, as Lewis Mumford and others do. But in this conception there is the dubious
assumption that the organic is the opposite of the mechanical. (34)
Consequently we have
now arrived near the day of the automatic factory, when we shall find it as
natural for an unaided factory to produce cars as for the liver to secrete bile
or the plant to put forth leaves. (34)
The symbolist
esthetic theory of the late nineteenth century seems to offer an even better
conception than social biology for resolving the human problems created by
technology. This theory leads to a
conception of orchestrating human arts, and pursuits rather than fusing in a
functional biological unit, as even with Giedion and Mumford. Orchestration permits discontinuity and
endless variety without the universal imposition of any one social or economic
system. (34)
Harnessed merely to a variety of blind appetites for power and success, it
draws us swiftly into that labyrinth at the end `of which waits the
minotaur. So it is in this period of passionate acceleration that the
world of the machines begins to assume the threatening and unfriendly
countenance of an inhuman wilderness even less manageable than that which once
confronted prehistoric man. (p. 34)
Much hope, however, still emerges from those parts of the scene where rational
self-awareness and reasonable programs of self-restraint can be
cultivated. Combatants merely infect one another. But the friendly
dialogue of rational beings can also be as catching as it is civilizing.
(p. 34)
On many people the cumulative effect of such magic seems to be to reduce them
to a coma. In this coma they remain avid customers for the success
manuals and beauty treatments which by themselves constitute a large line of
merchandise - a line not to be despised even when set beside the big-thriller
industry of fantasy, violence, mayhem, and murder consumed by men of action.
(p. 35)
Do you have a personality? Our executive clinic will get rid of it for
you. (p. 35)
The successful executive has to strip himself of every human quality until he
is nearly mad with boredom. Then he can work, work, work without
distraction. The work is the narcotic for the boredom, as the boredom is
the spur to work. (p. 37)
As a new pattern in industrial life, this means that less and less will
individuals seek "creative values" in "the romance of
business" and selling. Competitive drives and ambitious impulses
will be transferred increasingly to leisure and home occupations.
Business and political life will take on mainly the character of diversion and
entertainment for the passive public. So far as business and politics are
concerned, the public is likely to become a mere audience, increasingly
passive, like the shareholders of a corporation. In fact, all these
tendencies have gone very far already. (p. 40)
Technology means constant social revolution. (p. 40)
Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of
models of eloquence, but the ad agencies. Whereas the older concept of
eloquence linked it to public responsibility and ceremony and a unified program
for enlisting the passions on the side of reason and virtue, the new school of
eloquence is virtually demagogic in its headlong exploitation of words and
emotions for the flattery of the consumer. (p. 42)
By keeping everybody in a panic through daily invitations to "See how you
stack up with your fellow man on the following issues," the individual can
be torn between the fear of being a misfit and the passion for the distinction
conferred by purchasing a mass-produced item. (p. 48)
To these techniques of observation is added the psychoanalytic insight that the
most valuable data are yielded by individuals or groups involuntarily, in
moments of inattention. It is that latter consideration which makes
popular culture so valuable as an index of the guiding impulses and the
dominant drives in a society. (p. 50)
Why are the American
rich such proletarians in mind and spirit? (55)
By far the majority
of the rich are daily drudges in the same mills as the go-getters who are still
on the make, and they work tirelessly at tasks which render operation of their
wealth and power as uncontrollable as that of any other marketer. (55)
In practice, then,
the very rich today are bureaucrats in their various monopolistic empires of
soap, oil, steel, cars, movies, newspapers, magazines, and so on. And they have the minds of bureaucrats. They are timid, cautious, conformists. (55)
The relative
helplessness, social isolation, and irresponsibility of the rich highlights the
same situation among those who are striving toward that goal. The circumstances of the struggle insure
that the winners will arrive in no condition to enjoy their advantages. (56)
But the rich are dim
and obscure, sharing the tastes and make-up of the very people above whom they
have risen, and yet deprived of the satisfactions of mass solidarity in an
egalitarian society. (56)
Are prosperity and
male confidence the fruits of war? (70)
The thoughtful
observer will find some cause for dismay in the disproportion between the
educational budget of the advertising industry and that for the education of
the young in school or college. The
classroom cannot compete with the glitter and the billion-dollar success and
prestige of this commercial education.
Least of all with a commercial education program which is disguised as
entertainment and which by-passes the intelligence while operating directly on
the will and the desires. The result,
inevitably, is that the curriculum now wistfully tags belong behind the ad
industry, and is even becoming geared to that industry. (72)
Impersonal,
irresponsible, and unconscious as most of this process is, there can be no
question that it renders the individual and the mass alike helpless. The more acceleration, the helpless. And those who call the changes are just as
helpless as their victims, because all are equally sold on the joys of
immersion in this destructive element.
(75)
Either we penetrate
to the essential character of man and society and discover the outlines of a
world order, or we continue as flotsam and jetsam on a flood of transient fads
and ideas that will drown us with impartiality. (75)
As the unity of the
modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair,
the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the
real direction of our own collective purposes.
Conversely, the arts can become a primary means of social orientation
and self-criticism. (87)
The arts both as
storehouse of achieved values and as the antennae of new awareness and
discovery make possible both a unified and an inclusive human consciousness in
which there is easy commerce between old and new, between assured success and
tentative inquiry and experiment. (87)
The magic that
changes moods is not in any mechanism.
It is critical vision alone which can mitigate the unimpeded operation
of the automatic. (87)
The pocketbook is
the gland in the new body politic that permits the flood of goods and
sensations not to be arrested by our protective shell but to sweep into our
lives. This gland compensates for the
calloused state that sets in “shortly after diaperhood” and propels us into the
dream tunnel of equality and conformity.
(88)
Genuine science, of
course, is neutral. But its practical
effects, when harnessed to the appetites of the market, are something less than
neutral. Heartbeats are human, but when
harnessed to a public-address system, they can be terrifying. Ordinary human appetites for comfort,
prestige, or power have in history been troublesome enough, but when they are
given exaggerated expression by means of applied science they promise swift
destruction. (93)
Anybody who takes
time to study the techniques of pictorial reportage in the popular press and
magazines will easily find a dominant pattern composed of sex and
technology. Hovering around this pair
will usually be found images of hectic speed, mayhem, violence, and sudden
death. (98)
Those who submit to
training only because it will link them more effectively to a great economic
and bureaucratic mechansm are using their best years and faculties as a means
of enslaving themselves. They are
seizing opportunities in order to have the economic means to be exactly like
everybody else. (126)
The teacher in America is admittedly in a peculiar position. Educationally qualified to advance himself economically, he or she appears to take a vow of poverty instead. The judgment of the community on the teacher has long been; “He can’t take it.” Assuming a voluntary noncompetitive poverty, the teacher stands as a reproach to the rest of the community engaged in the scramble for monetary reward. He asserts his “nerve of failure.” The community retaliates with a certain degree of distrust and contempt. Distrust of his motives, contempt for his lowly status and lack of gumption. (p. 126)
Modern warfare is another point of vantage which enables the observer to note how the mere logistics of the war machine cause the spread of technological and specialist education. Really, in the same order of cause and effect, mechanized or total war fosters prosperity and an economic well-being which is itself an immediate exposure of a situation in which we tend to have lost control and view of our own purposes. As the creator of wealth and opportunity for all, war has put peace to shame in our time. War has provided higher education and higher consumer standards for more people than peace ever did. (pp. 127-128)
Accelerated change and planned obsolescence constitute the basic principle of an industrial power-economy built on applied science. (128)
There is actually emerging a large number of independent critical minds today. As the nightmare moves to its unwelcome dramatic peak, the sleeper stirs and writhes. It is nice to be enfolded in a collective dream as long as the comfort is greater than the pain. But we have nearly passed that critical point. Consciousness will come as a relief. (128)
Excitement, not fun, is the object or function of sport in a competitive industrial world. The passions which sport arouses systematically are much too intense to leave any scope for that element of detachment which provides fun in life and art. One has only to listen to the tense gunfire delivery of radio sports announcers to understand this. (137)
It would be instructive to study the Greek and Elizabethan tragic heroes in comparison with out own. Our relative crudity appears in the quality of the catharsis we demand. The gangster hero stands in relation only to the laws of land which he has defied. The Greek tragic hero stands in relation to a wider and more terrible law. He may be a most respectable citizen. The Greeks were prepared to admit that even a good family man who paid his bills and income tax might be offensive to the gods. Our entertainment shows few signs of any eagerness on our parts for that degree of catharsis. (147)
The great artist necessarily has his roots very deep in his own time – roots which embrace the most vulgar and commonplace fantasies and aspirations. (152)