In The Pentagon of Power from 1970, Lewis Mumford lights into McLuhan in ways that, if not remotely informative as to McLuhan’s insights and aims, are often quite funny. More: they are indicative by a kind of reverse osmosis how the superlative thinking already achieved by Plato and Aristotle more than two millennia ago, and periodically retrieved by isolated thinkers in the years since, has repeatedly been mis-cast into a parody of itself, arguably with catastrophic consequence. An attempt to shed some light on this enduring process will be made in a future post, McLuhan on Mumford, which will examine a 17 page unpublished and untitled essay which McLuhan wrote in February 1973 on Mumford’s 1970 book.

Here in page order (concentrated between pages 293 and 298)¹ are Mumford’s slings and arrows from The Pentagon of Power:

the controllers who set up this supermechanism will themselves serve as its final sacrificial victims; for when the planetary megamachine reaches its terminal point of soulless perfection, the originating human intelligence will have become completely absorbed — and thus eliminated. So man’s final achievement, at the summit of his progress, would be to create an ineffable electronic God: the deity for whom his chief contemporary prophet, Marshall McLuhan, has already composed an appropriately incoherent and frantically meaningless Holy Writ. (228) 

Perhaps Homo sapiens will come to a quicker end by a shorter route, already indicated in many manifestations of modern art, and expressed with psychedelic extravagance by Professor Marshall McLuhan and his followers. The seemingly solid older megamachine with its rigid limitations and predictable performance might give rise to the exact antithesis: an electronic anti-megamachine programmed to accelerate disorder, ignorance, and entropy. In revolt against totalitarian organization and enslavement, the generation now responding to McLuhan’s doctrines would seek total ‘liberation’ from organization, continuity, and purpose of any sort, in systematic de-building, dissolution, and de-creation. Ironically, such a return to randomness would, according to probability theory, produce the most static and predictable state possible: that of unorganized matter. (293) 

In the first stage of this ‘liberation,’ as McLuhan sees it, instantaneous planetary communication will bring about a release from all previous cultures and past modes of regimentation: machines themselves will vanish, to be replaced by electronic equivalents or substitutes. In McLuhan’s trancelike vaticinations, he actually appears to believe that this has already happened, and that even the wheel is about to disappear, while mankind as a whole will return to the pre-primitive level, sharing mindless sensations and pre-linguistic communion. In the electronic phantasmagoria that he conjures up, not alone will old-fashioned machines be permanently outmoded but nature itself will be replaced: the sole vestige of the multifarious world of concrete forms and ordered experience will be the sounds and ‘tactile’ images on the constantly present television screen or such abstract derivative information as can be transferred to the computer. (293-294)

Psychiatry reveals the true nature of this promised state. What is it but the electronic equivalent of the dissociation and subjective inflation that takes place under lysergic acid and similar drugs? In so far as McLuhan’s conception corresponds to any existential reality, it is that of an electronically induced mass psychosis. Not surprisingly, perhaps, now that the facilities for instantaneous communication have planetary outlets, symptoms of this psychosis are already detectable in every part of the planet. In McLuhan’s case, the disease poses as the diagnosis. (294)

Though my generation usually associates this burning [of books] with the public bonfires lighted by the Nazis in the nineteen-thirties, that was a relatively innocent manifestation, for it disposed of only a token number of the world’s store of books. But it remained for McLuhan to picture as technology’s ultimate gift a more absolute mode of control: one that will achieve total illiteracy, with no permanent record except that officially committed to the computer, and open only to those permitted access to this facility. This repudiation of an independent written and printed record means nothing less than the erasure of man’s diffused, multi-brained collective memory: it reduces all human experience into that of the present generation and the passing moment. (294)

McLuhan’s denigration of the printed word, expressed in his hostility to ‘Typographical Man’ — itself a figment of his imagination — has nevertheless given support to purely physical assaults on books, as well as a chronic indifference to their contents. Similar insensate student demonstrations have taken place in universities on every continent. As in so many other phenomena of the power system, electronic communication has only hastened the speed, not changed the goal. The goal is total cultural dissolution — or what McLuhan characterizes as a ‘tribal communism‘, though it is in fact the extreme antithesis of anything that can be properly called tribal or communistic. As for ‘communism’, this is McLuhan’s public-relations euphemism for totalitarian control. (295)

These pages [from Mumford’s own 1934 Technics and Civilization] diminish, I am afraid, the claims of priority and peculiar insight often made for McLuhan as the unique prophet of the Electronic Age — thirty years later. But it leaves him with few rivals in the art of rationalizing the irrationalities introduced by megatechnics: so much so that by concentrating upon McLuhan’s errors one can clear the board of a large mass of similar mis-statements. (296)

For this problem² McLuhan and his technocratic contemporaries have a simple solution. It is to replace human autonomy in every form by an up-to-date electronic model of the megamachine. The mass media, he demonstrates, are “put out before they are thought out. In fact, their being put outside us tends to cancel the possibility of their being thought at all.” Precisely. Here McLuhan gives the whole show away. Because all technical apparatus is an extension of man’s bodily organs, including his brain, this peripheral structure, on McLuhan’s analysis, must, by its very mass and ubiquity, replace all autonomous needs or desires: since now for us “technology is part of our bodies,” no detachment or divorce is possible. “Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease of our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights [read ‘autonomy’]³ left. This latter point might well be taken as a warning to disengage ourselves, as soon as possible, from the power system so menacingly described: for McLuhan it leads, rather, to a demand for unconditional surrender. “Under electric technology,” he observes, “the entire business of man becomes learning and knowing.” Apart from the fact that this is a pathetically academic picture of the potentialities of man, the kind of learning and knowing that McLuhan becomes enraptured over is precisely that which can be programmed on a computer: “We are now in a position . . . ,” he observes, “to transfer the entire show to the memory of a computer.” No better formula could be found for arresting and ultimately suppressing human development. (296)

Audio-visual tribalism (McLuhan’s ‘global village’) is a humbug. Real communication, whether oral or written, ephemeral or permanent, is possible only between people who share a common culture (…) the notion that it is possible to throw off all these limits is an electronic illusion. (297)

Anthropological studies have repeatedly demonstrated that the fluidity and ephemerality that McLuhan attributes to oral communication is precisely what no primitive tribal culture could tolerate except by courting dissolution. If our own complex inheritance should continue to follow McLuhan’s injunctions, it would dissolve — is it not already dissolving? — before our eyes. It is only at a high stage of individuation, made possible at first by the painted or carved image, the written symbol, and the printed book, that true freedom — the freedom to escape from the passing moment and the present visible place, to challenge past experience or modify future action — can be achieved. To be aware only of immediate stimuli and immediate sensations is a medical indication of brain injury. (298)

McLuhan’s ideas about the role of electronic technology have been widely accepted, I suggest, because they magnify and vulgarize the dominant components of the power system in the very act of seeming to revolt against its regimentation. In treating the planet as a ‘tribal village’ by instant electronic communication, he has, in fact, united the crippling limitations of a pre-literate culture, which made the scattered, farming population of the world an easy prey to military conquest and exploitation, with the characteristic historic mischief of ‘civilization’: the subjugation of a large population for the exclusive benefit of a ruling minority. (298)

If  proof were needed of the real nature of electronic control, no less a promulger of the system than McLuhan has supplied it. “Electromagnetic technology,” he observes in Understanding Media,⁴ “requires utter human docility [italics mine]⁵ and quiescence of meditation such as befits an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide. Man must serve his electric technology with the same servo-mechanistic fidelity with which he served his coracle, his canoe, his typography, and all other extensions of his physical organs.” To make his point McLuhan is driven brazenly to deny the original office of tools and utensils as direct servants of human purpose. By the same kind of slippery falsification McLuhan would reinstate the compulsions of the Pyramid Age as a desirable feature of the totalitarian electronic complex. (338-339)

What McLuhan understands has long been familiar to students of technics: it is his singular gift for misunderstanding both technology and man that marks his truly original contributions. (456)