How Marshall McLuhan Predicted Re-enchantment

Many theories have been offered concerning the recent explosion of interest in pre-modern forms of religious practice, both Christian and pagan. But what seems to have gone underreported is that this evolution is squarely in line with the predictions of one of the most influential academics of the 20^th Century.

Marshall McLuhan’s legacy can be summed up as the explanation of the modern shift from a mechanical way of understanding the world to a spiritual or mythological one. It is this shift that lies at the basis of all his poetic and sometimes abstruse discussions of media and culture.

He describes the last 500 years or so of Western culture as an example of “literate” culture, that is, a culture whose way of thinking and understanding is deeply influenced by the effects of the phonetic alphabet. What we have witnessed in the 20^th century and continue to live through today is the shift away from the abstract, rationalist culture of the literate West. This post-literate shift stands as an opposite bookend from the pre-literate world that the West emerged out of, so we are returning to a primitive world of myth, poetry, and ritual.

If you have never read a word of McLuhan, this is the bird’s eye view of the arc by which he understands the history of the West. The breadth of its application and his prescience of developments that we have now witnessed in the decades since his death lend powerful attestation to his insight.

And what is driving this shift? Why are we returning now to a more primitive, pre-literate way of understanding the world around us? McLuhan said that the answer lies in media, the technology we use to communicate and collectively make sense of our world. The phonetic alphabet leads to a particular way of seeing, processing, and understanding, but when that cultural arc brought about the invention of electronic media, an entirely new processing software sprang to the fore, so to speak.1

When we learn about the world through video feeds, able to see the faces and hear the voices of anyone around the globe, it is no mystery that the world strikes us as animated and humane in a way that could never be conveyed in a printed news article. This change in media, from print to electronic, amounted to a re-wiring of our collective cultural brain.

What we are discovering today is that this re-wiring included the latent potential for a revival of ancient religious practice and belief. There is something about the instant communication of electronic media that has wakened a dormant part of our cultural mind. The poetry and myth of pre-literate religion have regained the relevance, even the urgency, that it had in the ancient world.

What’s the Big Deal with the Phonetic Alphabet?

It may sound strange that cultural change on the largest scale would be instigated by, of all things, the phonetic alphabet. But McLuhan makes his case powerfully by pointing out that pre-literate and post-literate sensemaking bears obvious similarities. Even better, he explains what it is about the phonetic alphabet itself that causes the idiosyncrasies of literate culture.

McLuhan theorizes that the adoption and use of the phonetic alphabet by the ancient Greeks accounts for the sudden cultural changes that we see in the 5^th Century BCE. Why would ancient Dionysian rituals practiced time out of mind suddenly transform into Greek theater productions? And why would these quickly give way to the abstractions of Greek philosophy?

The reason, he argues, is due to the power of the phonetic alphabet to push one’s thinking into more abstract forms. Instead of the direct, tangible understanding offered by religious ritual, the abstract way of thinking wants to remove itself from that immediacy, and to make universal, objective statements that totally encompass truth. This abstract, propositional way of thinking and communicating drains its content of all poetic nuance or multiplicity of meaning. It values rigorous and logical clarity instead. Myth gives way to philosophy.

What makes the phonetic alphabet different from the ideograms or hieroglyphs that precede it is that the phonetic letters themselves have no inherent meaning. Ideograms present one with a pictorial representation of some action or idea. As it sits on the page, the symbol itself registers in the mind as having innate and immediate meaning. It is a gestalt, a meaningful whole that resonates with the concrete world.

The Chinese symbol for chi, for example, shows the depth of meaning that non-phonetic language can convey. Chi is the Chinese idea of a life force that surges through everything, which causes the constant transformation or unfolding of the material world. The ideogram depicts rice cooking in a pot—an image which includes the five elements of ancient Chinese medicine: Water, wood, fire, earth (rice), and metal. The transformation of these elements is the movement of Chi itself.

The fact that an idea of cosmic scale could be represented by a mundane image is precisely the point. The meaning is understood to be fractal—the same pattern manifests on every level from something as simple as boiling rice to the change of the seasons to the rise and fall of civilizations. This is not unique to China; it is a standard example of pre-literate thinking. And all that latent meaning is available in one written symbol.

Phonetic letters, on the other hand, represent nothing but a meaningless particle of speech. We learn to read not by recognizing gestalts but by rote memorization of abstract letter-sound associations. It is only after piecing together a sequence of these sound signifiers that a word emerges. Because this system relies on arbitrary associations (i.e. there is no inherent gestalt that the mind is interacting with), and assembling these symbols in sequence, reading a phonetic alphabet relies heavily on the left hemisphere of the brain. So as one reads, they begin to make sense of what they read and understand the world around them in more left-brained terms: abstract, mechanical, and drained of the mystical immediacy of poetry or myth.

The effect of this is illustrated, McLuhan believes, by the story of Cadmus sowing dragon’s teeth that grow into armed men. Phonetic letters, standing in rows like dragon’s teeth, give rise to industrial processes, technologization, and the ability to exert control over one’s surroundings, whether barbarian tribes or nature itself.

The phonetic alphabet, then, opens the door to what McLuhan describes as the literate cultural forms. Greek theater gives way to philosophy as a cultural truth-seeking mechanism. Rome inherits the phonetic system and uses its clarity and precision to create laws, imperial commands, that can be administered across an entire continent. Mass industrial processes produce the largest and best-equipped military force that had ever existed under a unified command. And in terms of religion, while the rustic pagans were loath to give up their ancient ways, the intellectual elites were composed largely of skeptics and atheists who reduced to wild energy of pagan religion to ideas and abstractions (even as they valued the social practicality of religious rituals).

When Rome falls, the West falls into pre-literate “darkness,” another age of myth and mysticism, this time Christian rather than pagan. Literate culture resurges when classical thought returns with Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastics, but even then, it does not descend from the Ivory Tower into broader culture until the invention of the printing press.

This invention essentially had an inverse effect of the arrival of electronic media half a millennium later. The printing press confronted a culture still organized around the mystical hierarchy and ritual of the Catholic Church. It rewired the cultural mind in such a way that Catholic hierarchy could be perceived as downright objectionable. It was only a matter of decades between the widespread use of the printing press and the shattering of Europe by the Reformation.

Protestantism bears many of the same hallmarks of left-brain sensemaking evident in Classical culture: A preference for a literal, propositional approach to a de-mythologized truth; organizing around abstract ideas rather than mystical ritual, objects, or images; an egalitarian impulse rather than a hierarchical one. Just as Dionysios himself disappears from the stage of the theater ritual in Athens, Christ disappears from the Protestant eucharist. That any mystical Presence could be superimposed upon or unified with a symbolic, material act is viewed with suspicion to the left-brained literalist. The precision of abstract ideas is always preferred, as a point of pride, over against the layered complexity of mysticism.

A University library is emblematic of this sensemaking approach. Innumerable experts offer theories in their niche, an infinitesimal piece of Total Knowledge, but it is understood that the work of each expert can and should comport with the overall Grand Narrative. Where disagreement among experts occurs, it’s a given that these will be resolved in favor of the more rationally defensible theory. The point is to build a single, unified picture of the world—a Tower of Babel approach to understanding.

Coming Into the Post-Literate Age

That Tower is collapsing now into the cacophony of discordant worldviews that we are bombarded with in our electric age. As we scroll through infinite content in our palm, there’s simply too much to process in the old-fashioned way, too many cultures, stories, religions, theories—in rationalist terms, there’s too much data. No amount of academic rigor can sift through the totality of global human experience. Worse, it’s obvious now that it’s impossible to view anything from the outside, no matter how “objective” we claim to be. Sensemaking must shift gears. Our only choice is to enter into the cacophony and resolve the discordant images into meaningful patterns.

In short, all the effects of the phonetic alphabet just described are being undone. As the electronic world of images and sounds continues to replace books and newspapers, we can see that the post-literate world will be much like the pre-literate one, with all its myths and enchantments.

McLuhan theorized that the first inklings of this sensemaking change were perceived by poets and artists after the invention of the first electronic medium, the telegraph. An awareness of the world that was once assembled piecemeal by human couriers of written reports was fundamentally changed when telegraphs enabled instantaneous (by comparison) messaging. Suddenly, newspapers could report on events that happened on the other side of the globe yesterday. Having instantaneous access to the whole permits an entirely different kind of sensemaking, one in which the globe already begins to shrink into our palms.

Processing this all-at-once-ness requires the abilities of the right-hemisphere of the brain. Think of the artist’s ability to reduce the immense complexity of their subject material into a single work, and yet to convey with that single work immense complexity. Or think of an athlete’s ability to read the motion of all the players on the field and to instantly know the most advantageous next move. This is the realm of the right hemisphere, which replaces the plodding sequentialism of the left-hemisphere with an instant understanding of the whole.

But the right-hemisphere shift of the post-literate age becomes more evident when print media is replaced, first by radio, and eventually by the image and sound of television. Sensemaking without use of the phonetic alphabet frees the brain of its reliance on abstraction. A simple example can show what an important change this was.

If you think of an image of an American flag, a flood of associations will come to mind. These might be positive or negative, but the meaning of the image of the flag is bound up in the meaning that you, the viewer, bring to the table. You could say that this kind of sensemaking involves two-way traffic. The meaning depends on what the image brings to you and what you bring to it. This kind of media can connect to the viewer on a more personal level. It utilizes and conveys more of our history, our feeling, our culture, our humanity.

Contrast this with the literate equivalent of this image spelled out in letters: “The American Flag.” When we read it, the meaning is direct, literal, and abstract. It refers not to human experience but to a literal, material object: the rectangle with red and white stripes, and white stars on a blue field. When we see “The American Flag” written on a page, nobody bothers to salute or protest it. That is the point. This is the abstraction and objectification of the left-hemisphere. It is detached from the full weight of our humanity, but useful for the clarity and precision of what is meant by it.

Much of the upheaval of the 20^th century is due to the impact of replacing cold abstractions with visceral images in our media. Policy makers could formulate an abstract case for military intervention in Vietnam, for instance, but when this abstraction went toe-to-toe with the violent sights and sounds of war being piped into television sets in American living rooms, it stood no chance of popular support.

Because imagery carries the existential weight of our common humanity, our paradigm of what sorts of things are intuitively acceptable changes drastically. Cultural mores turned sharply toward acceptance of the humanity of others, as their suffering became something felt rather than mere abstraction.

The overall movement in the emerging post-literate culture was away from the belief that left-brained ideas or concepts could contain the deepest human truths, and toward the appreciation that ideas must always be married to the material world through embodiment and participation. Story became the preferred vehicle of truth, rather than objective and universal theories. For what truth requires is a perspective, a view from somewhere, embedded within human experience, human hopes, human suffering, on our mortal road toward death. In the end, there is no other kind of truth that could be available—or indeed relevant—to us. So in the 20^th century the institution with the preeminent cultural sway was Hollywood.

In the stories that Hollywood produced we get a hint of what McLuhan meant by the post-literate return to primitive pre-literate culture. The leaders of primitive cultures were shamans and storytellers who could do the hard work of making sense of our human existence by telling profound stories of deceptive simplicity. Today we gather around the light of our screens as people once gathered around the light of the fire to hear a story, which we always understand to be a story about ourselves.

Re-enchantment: From Story to Myth

We can return now to the question with which we started. Why is it that people are turning again to pre-modern spirituality? Why are young people rushing in to participate in traditional Latin Mass or Orthodox divine liturgy, or else fascinated by witchcraft and pagan rituals? The answer is that these are natural progressions from the new cultural trajectory made possible by post-literate electronic media. People are naturally drawn toward spiritualism the way we once were toward materialism.

What literate culture once dismissed as material impossibilities is no longer viewed as impossible to the post-literate. For example, materialists once objected to the idea that God could hear and answer the prayers of millions of global Christians simultaneously. Such a thing is unthinkable to a mechanistic mindset in which all processes are understood as piecemeal actions happening in sequence, like a Ford assembly line. But God’s simultaneous hearing and answering of prayers is far easier to stomach in an instantaneous electronic age. It is not so different from Youtube or Facebook “hearing” and “answering” requests from millions of its global users. Time and space collapse in our electronic world. The intuitive barriers against spirituality that arose in the literate/mechanical age are now gone.

A literate culture over time sees the world in left-brained terms: as a meaningless conglomeration of bits, mechanistically clunking forward one step at a time. But a post-literate culture, through the use of electronic media, again sees the world in right-brained terms: An animated field of shifting and layered complexity; a place where the cause and effect is multiple, instantaneous, and simultaneous; where meaning is never “objective” but always rooted in human perspective and experience. The human consciousness that was always working in the background of the literate age is now foregrounded in post-literacy.

To illustrate it another way, you could ask what something like TikTok “really” is. A literate, materialist paradigm would want to reduce it to its material substrate—it is “really” just such-and-such set of signals, processors, and devices. But the post-literate young person would find this answer awkward and oddly dogmatic. Because what TikTok “really” is to them is obviously its effect on consciousness, rooted in the meaning and relevance of the content that it delivers. And what TikTok “really” is to its investors is the attention that it garners. The medium is of course married to a material substrate, but the hardware is of secondary importance compared to its effect on minds. This illustrates the broader point: What things “really” are is grounded in consciousness, not material composition. The spiritual precedes the concrete.

And if the world is fundamentally defined by the spiritual forces of consciousness, then making sense of it requires the virtues of the right hemisphere. You cannot pick apart and analyze such a dynamic world—it won’t sit still long enough to let you do so, and you can’t get outside of it to view it objectively. You need to perceive in instantaneous wholes; in fractal patterns that continually manifest and dissolve, which pull even the most mundane actions up into cosmic significance; in terms, not of impersonal forces, but spirits with a power and agency of their own, with whom we have no choice but to relate as friend or foe.

In short, to make sense of the world, you need to return to myth, and thus the world is re-enchanted. When we enter the ancient church and watch the priest swing the censer, or the procession of altar boys circling like the planets, we can again recognize it as an act of cosmic significance, pulsating with the Energy that created the world. Making sense of this mystical world requires participation. You cannot sit back and theorize about it all, you need to join yourself to the Meaning that lies at the center. Participation in ritual is the only way you can enter into Myth, the only way you can truly understand. To young people especially, the appeal is obvious. It’s the only way forward.

Coda: A New Fork in the Road

Traditional secularism is dead, or at least terminally ill. The benign materialism that we grew up with, the sophisticated set that denied religion but still maintained an essentially Christian moral compass, is fading fast. As technology rushes into the hockey-stick curve of innovation, it is quickly losing its neutral, secular sense, and our detached relationship with the world is giving way to complete mythological immersion into digital space.

The technology is itself appearing more overtly spiritual. It wields its own will, at least apparently, and works autonomously toward its own goals. The promise of technology is the salvific culmination of the story of Mankind, the obliteration of limits by a vast expression of power. It is the gateway to a level of comfort and abundance never dreamed of—possibly the defeat of death itself.

The question before us at the crossroads is becoming increasingly clear. There are two competing mythologies at play, both of which are in some sense enchanted, which lay complete claim on our bodies and our futures. On one side there is the resurgent form of ancient Christianity, the ritual union with the Real, and the acceptance of death. On the other side is emergent techno-mysticism, the hope of transcending human limitation and the rejection of death.

They represent opposing answers to the question of what the highest principle or deepest foundation of cosmic order is. Is the cosmos ultimately ordered by the truth, beauty, and goodness of God, or is it a Nietzschean abyss, a blank slate upon which mankind dictates its will? What will we choose: trusting the God who conquered death, or seizing power to conquer death for ourselves? It is strikingly similar to the question humanity faced in the garden, now coming into its stark final expression.