Programming peace for survival

We Need a New Picture of Knowledge, 19631

What I have been proposing in this essay is that it is no longer necessary to move from one model to another of the educational process2 as if we were following the higher dictates of some Hegelian disturbance in the emotional life of the Absolute.3 It is now possible to discern the structural features of the cultural situation that shaped the growth of the very special bias of Western consciousness. It is just as easy to discern the [structural features or] causes4 that shaped the bias of the Eastern mind.5 The [isolation and investigation]6 of all these [structural features or] causes is now within our grasp. We can deliberately pattern our cultures today by altering the mix of components with their attendant “closures” or effects7 [that result in] our outlook and desires and goals.8 For the goals of any culture are included in its initial structure exactly as the Polaris missile has its target built into it by gyroscopy.9 Any alteration of [that initial] structure [results in]10 a change of target. But since men do not choose [or ‘target’] to be missiles,11 their new awareness of [how to investigate the domain of experiential]  structure12 can be used to free them from the consequences of any one structure. We can now deliberately create total “field” situations which hold the usual structural consequences [like our endless wars] in abeyance.

As McLuhan already in 1951 pointed out in ‘Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry‘:13

The new method is to work backwards from the particular effect [for example, genocide (which apparently nobody today in 2025 has any idea how to prevent or counteract)] to the objective correlative or (…) means14 of evoking that precise effect, [hence also of revoking it,] just as the chemist begins with the end product and then seeks the [elementary] formula which will produce it.15 

Similarly in Network #2, 1953:

Edgar Poe’s Philosophy of Composition anticipated the technique of the modern sciences of physics, chemistry, archaeology and psychology. Poe discovered a new method of precision, economy and control in writing backwards.  To start with the effect and to invent the cause, to move from emotion to the formula of that particular emotion. This is what Whitehead in Science and the Modern World refers to as the discovery of the technique of discovery.

And here he is in his 1969 Playboy interview:16

Our survival (…)17 is predicated on understanding the nature of our new environment, because unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitute a total and near-instantaneous transformation of culture, values and attitudes. This upheaval generates great pain and identity loss, which can be ameliorated only through a conscious awareness of its dynamics. If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them; but if we continue in our self-induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves. Because of today’s terrific speed-up of information moving, we have a chance to apprehend, predict and influence the environmental forces shaping us — and thus win back control of our own destinies.

  1. In New Insights and the Curriculum, ed Alexander Frazier, 1963. ↩
  2. McLuhan’s essay appeared in the Yearbook of the National Education Association. Therefore the particular reference here to “educational process”. But his understanding of “educational process” was far broader than ‘school learning’. It was his view that all experience, without exception, is an “e-ducational process”, an ‘extensional’ bid to come to grips with the world, whose elements and their laws of combination it was his lifelong labor to attempt to isolate and investigate. Essential to such dis-covery was a revolution from diachronic or chronological time (“necessary to move”) to synchronic or ‘all-at-once’ time, so that McLuhan ended We Need a New Picture of Knowledge with this sentence: “In the electronic era (…) the real work of mankind becomes learning and teaching in a timeless process of exchange and enrichment by the human dialogue.” ↩
  3. This funny but obscure sentence may be translated as follows. Until now attempts to dis-cover the fundamental structure of human experience (aka, the “educational process” per note 2) have been unsuccessful (partly because of the difficulty implicated in the “educational process” of hunting for the fundamentals of the “educational process”). Various models have succeeded one another in haphazard linear sequence, “as if we were following the higher dictates of some Hegelian disturbance in the emotional life of the Absolute” — rather than pursuing that very human “educational process” which has led to the dis-covery of the elementary “structural features” needed to inaugurate sciences like chemistry. And the key to this change, in turn, is the flip from matching to making. See Preface to The Mechanical Bride: “provisional affairs for apprehending reality”. ↩
  4. McLuhan substitutes “causes”‘ for “structural features” here, apparently because — aside from a nod to Aristotle — he will shortly begin talking of “effects”. The basic idea is that once elementary “structural features” have been identified, so also, either in fact or in principle, will be their associated properties: cause and effect. On this basis, just as with chemistry, desirable properties like social harmony may be promoted and undesirable ones like genocide demoted. ↩
  5. The repeated “bias” here as the key to consciousness and mind is, of course, a tip of the hat to Harold Innis. As McLuhan wrote in his ‘Introduction’ to the 1964 reprinting of Innis’ The Bias of Communication: “Innis taught us how to use the bias of culture and communication as an instrument of research. By directing attention to the bias or distorting power of the dominant imagery and technology of any culture, he showed us how to understand cultures.” ↩
  6. For ‘isolation and investigation’ McLuhan has “control” ↩
  7. “Components with their attendant ‘closures’ or effects” — compare ‘chemical elements with their attendant valences and other properties’. McLuhan’s claim is nothing less than that the perpetual dysfunctions of human being like war and genocide can now be investigated as properties or “effects” of structural elements that can uncontentiously be isolated and investigated. Hence his repeated claim that the central concern of his work was “survival”. ↩
  8. McLuhan has “components with their attendant ‘closures’ or effects on our outlook and desires and goals”, not ‘that result in our outlook etc’. But his argument is exactly that “our outlook and desires and goals” are properties or effects of prior elementary structures and are not properly conceived as being already there for effects to be exercised on them. ↩
  9. With ‘gyroscopy’ McLuhan means ‘cybernetics’, which was developed during WW2 at MIT as an automated means of targeting. ↩
  10. McLuhan: ‘is’. ↩
  11. “Men do not choose to be missiles”: McLuhan might seem to be offering an uncharacteristic hope here rather than an observation. In point of fact, men, and women too, all too often do “choose to be missiles” and wish nothing more than to hurl themselves, with their explosive ‘payloads’, at children. But McLuhan did not at all mean to imply that the solution he proposed would turn on individual or collective choice. Instead, we human beings are affected and effected far more by the general environment than by any component of it including our wills: the medium is the message and the massage. Hence McLuhan earlier in this passage: “the cultural situation that shaped the growth of (…) Western consciousness”. So it will be, if we do not destroy ourselves first, that men and women will no longer “choose to be missiles”, not by the magical exercise of individual moral choice, but on account of the open investigation of human experience with its “chance to apprehend, predict and influence the environmental forces shaping us” (Playboy interview above) — and so, ultimately, by the altered world that that investigation will constellate. (Compare what has happened to the world since the discovery of the chemical elements beginning around 1800.) Hence McLuhan’s reference, concluding the lead passage above, to the “total ‘field’ situation which (will be able to) hold the usual structural consequences (like genocide) in abeyance.” ↩
  12. As illustrated by the existing sciences, the definition of any domain must include not only its elements but also the various ways by which they can be isolated and investigated. ↩
  13. In Essays in Criticism. 1:3, 1951, reprinted in The Interior Landscape, 1969. ↩
  14. ‘Means’ in 1951 will become ‘medium’ in 1958: ‘the medium is the message‘. In keeping with the subject of his essay, McLuhan has ‘poetic means’ here. But as he goes on in the same sentence to evidence, he saw the arts and sciences as mutually implicating. ↩
  15. “The elements and their formula” is what McLuhan in the lead passage above from ‘We Need a New Picture of Knowledge’ calls “the mix of components with their attendant ‘closures’ or effects”. ↩
  16. Page 5 of the pdf. ↩
  17. Omitted here: “and at the very least our comfort and happiness”. ↩