Transcription
This is Lewis Forestdale, July 17th, 1978. TL 411b: Topics and Communication.
Um, our guest speaker today is Professor Marshall McLuhan from the University of Toronto. Um, all of you know Professor McLuhan; all of you know his credentials. I talked with you on the first day about, um, my feelings about him as as one of the, um, towering uh people in the 20th century in the field of of communication.
Um, I'd like to say something else now at a much more personal level. Um, I've known Marshall for 30 years now. It it develops—we were talking about it last night—I invited him to come down to TC for a session, which I described in our first U period. And we have developed through the years a kind of um of a close distant friendship in which we see each other once or twice a year and exchange letters and and and so forth.
Um, and I've come to regard him as as um not only one of the towering intellectual figures in the field of communication, but also as um—there's a side of him which I admire tremendously too—and that's a a personal loyalty. Um, which I would like to express my appreciation for, Marshall. It's it's a great privilege to um to have someone who remains a a loyal friend for so long um over a span of um of space.
What I propose doing, since this um friendship has and got us kind of on the same wavelength, um, is engaging in it, at least in the beginning of the section, with um in a dialogue format. And in which I'm going to pose some questions, generally as The Devil's Advocate, because I know the answers, but uh pose the questions of of the kind that I think are would be interesting for the the group to get involved with. At a certain point when we get going—give us a little while to get underway—then I would welcome um you coming in. I always reserving the right to try to steer us back to to what I think of as um as the course we might be taking, because um because of inside information I have of of of where he's been and where he's going. I think okay. Um, it's it's a Mutt and Jeff act that that we sometimes do. Um, anybody remember Mutt and Jeff? Me? Mutt—this one of the expressions in the old comic strip, Mutt and Jeff, a comic strip in which Mutt is or Jeff is a short one and and Mutt is and the other one is lanky—is is a lanky one. Well, let us let us begin our our our dialogue. Um, Marshall, it um it seems to me that the in looking back over your work, which is quite numerous indeed—14 or 15 books, a thousand magazine articles, a thousand speeches—the basic thrust of the of the thing has been, it seems to me, to invite our attention to the necessity of looking at the form of media and what the form of media does to our sensibility and to human arrangements, rather than attending only to to content. Now, I I toss that out to you as whether you think that is as a beginning kind of well generalization.
I I wish I had time to eulogize my friend Lou, but uh he has invited us to plunge right in here. And uh so the in—well, for example—why not use examples? When you're on the telephone, you don't have a body; you're a discarnate disembodied intelligence. You have an image—acoustic—but no physical body. When you're on radio or TV, you have no physical body. What do you think the effect of not having a body is on the user of the telephone or the radio or television? Uh, the effect is always a hidden ground; it's never part of the figure. The thing you see is figure; the thing that affects you is ground. And that's what I mean by the medium is the message. The medium is hidden; the message is obvious. But the the real effect comes from the hidden ground, not from the content, not from the figure; it comes from the ground, which is never noticed. Nobody in the history of the telephone has ever mentioned that on the telephone you do not have a physical body. There's a recent book by Ethal the Solar—somebody—Ethio the Solar Pool Pool—a ridiculous name and and a ridiculous book, because it's called the social effect or impact of the telephone, and about which he knows nothing. I mean a whole group of people formed this uh did this study on the social impact of the telephone; they didn't know what an effect was. By which I think you mean that they did a study of the number of people using telephones, the number of messages, what they use them for—what they use them for, which you feel is not—they never—the deepest level of effect—they never noticed the effects at all, but they did notice the inputs. For example, they notice the fact that the telephone was at first used for servants' intercom inside big homes. The new a new medium is always used at first for the old functions. Any—this is true of the computer; it's true of the Xerox; it's true of the motor car; true of any any medium whatever—is used always at first for the old function. There's also an interesting example, as you yourself have pointed out in *The Gutenberg Galaxy*, which at one time you regarded as perhaps the best work you had done. Well, how do you feel about that, by the way? I'm parenthetical. I I think it's still basic—*The Gutenberg Galaxy*.
Marshall: The effects of printing. But one of the interesting things—apropos of your observation that the new medium always does what the old medium was doing—is that the first um designers of type, you know, designed handwriting to be put into mechanical form. Why not? It's a natural thing. That I don't have it with me, but there's an advertisement for the Xerox shows a couple of monks who are engaged in making manuscripts, and they're so delighted to have Xerox—it speeds up their work so much. It's it's been an ad on television in the United States, Marshall, for yeah, I know, for some time. I've seen it. But this was in *The New Yorker*. I tore it out. But the the uh the—at first, any new medium is at first used for the old old functions and um well, after we might come back for a moment to what do you think the effect of not having a body is on the user—want to take the telephone—telephone, radio, or TV—you don't have a physical body at all.
Okay. Are are you inviting an open response?
I am.
Okay. A hunch uh it says depersonalization. No. Complete the observation. Is it would be depersonalization? It's um well, you are there—the sender is sent. By the way, on all electric media, the sender is sent; that is the message. You are the message; they send you. On the telephone, you are sent, and the person to whom you are speaking, they are sent to you. The sender is sent also. As you say, you lose your identity. You're Nobody. The person who was sent is nobody. Why is is the person who writes somebody—has a greater sense of identification than the person who's talking on the telephone?
Mhm. Why?
Hardware. Why? Hardware in own paper and pen and ink and uh Courier sending this missive to another party somewhere else. You mean it's not a transient—it's not instant thing. Okay. It's not—it's it's electric—is always instantaneous. There's no delay. That's why you don't have a body. Instantaneous communication is minus the body. So that began with the telegraph. The telegraph also had that uh built-in dimension of the instantaneous, and it completely transformed news and information. M. The mere speed didn't matter—what was written—the fact that it went at the speed of light transformed everything. It caused the Civil War. The hidden ground of the American Civil War was the telegraph. No historian knows this. Read a book by Kenneth Stampp called *The Causes of the American Civil War*, and you will find no mention of the telegraph anywhere. The telegraph is acoustic, not visual, at the speed of light. The ear comes into play; it's not the eye. Let me grab on to another point, to be be sure that that we've gotten it. What you're saying is that with the telegraph, the telephone, that the the major message is the speed of communication, MH, and that that very speed, as contrasted with writing a letter and sending it by a horseback um or however we do it—it's a good deal slower than horseback—but the major message is the speed with which information is sent, and what that does to social relationships in the human psyche, regardless of the content—the content couldn't matter less. This is increasingly true of news under TV conditions. The content is of no importance; it's all fantasy at the speed of light. All hardware news is translated into fantasy. It's inner trip. However, that's a quite—that's taking quite a leap forward. Let's notice that when you move at the speed of light on the telephone, you do you do not have a private identity. And when you don't have a private Identity, or rather when you don't have a body, you don't relate to natural law. Gravity has no control over you. At the speed of light, you are suddenly outside of the natural scheme of things; you're a Superman. This does all sorts of things to the human psychology; completely transforms people. It's a completely hidden ground; it has nothing to do with the content. What they say on the phone couldn't matter less. This transformation—complete transformation of the user—is never mentioned in all the literature on the telephone—not a word about it—because it's hidden. The effect of writing—the effect—I'll talk about that sometime today—the effect of printing—*The Gutenberg Galaxy* is mainly about the effect of printing, although it has a section on writing. The effects of these things have never been studied by—well, I could say anybody except you—wouldn't exclude yourself?
No. And no, I guess I I could include myself. Uh, Havelock, in his *Preface to Plato*, has quite a bit to say about um some of the transformations of the human psyche resulting from use of the phonetic alph—Eric—Eric—calog. However, there—very—he was a Havelock was a student of or colleague of Harold Innis at the U—University of Toronto. And uh Innis was the first man since the alphabet was instituted 2500 years ago—Harold Innis was the first man to study the effects of the alphabet on people and politics. Havelock was a student of Harold Innis, and U carried on that work. I am a student of Harold Innis, and I'm carrying on his work—*Empire and Communication*, *Bias of Communication*—books by the late Harold Innis. The effects—we'll we'll talk in due time about the effects of writing, which are fantastic uh but um I mean alphabetic writing. I gather that Julian James does not know the difference between alphabetic writing and other kinds of writing. Phonetic writing rather is the only kind of writing that has this special effect on the on the human psyche. Ordinary writing, say uh Sanskrit, Hebrew, and other alphabets do not have the effect of the phonetic alphabet.
Let me make sure that we've we were clear on this point. The phonetic alphabet is the kind of alphabet in which the sounds of the language—A, B, C, D—are analyzed, and a finite number of marks are put down representing the sounds of the language. We use a phonetic alphabet in English; it doesn't work very well because it isn't—we would need about 48 letters to be equivalent to the necessary sounds to do a good spelling job. There are other methods of writing—pictographic writing, for example, where you the writing attempts, you know, to show a tree and is gradually reduced in more abstract form—or ideograms, in which in which arbitrary um in in Chinese, honesty is the is the figure of a man standing—physically standing—beside his word—that means honesty—a man stands by his word. Two things—figure, ground. So you're saying that the phonetic alphabet, the one which derives from speech, is the alphabet that we should be concentrating on and thinking about the major effects of writing on on the human psyche.
Why?
Because when you translate from sound into sight, you pull out the physical ground and the situation, and you're left only with figure. Instead of having a Gestalt of figure and ground, writing leaves you only with figure. It is an extremely abstract process. It—you see the the letters in the phonetic alphabet have no meaning, as I say—the A, B—it's not A, B, C, D; it's A, B—these meaningless phonemic sounds enable you to translate any language—doesn't matter what language—into those sounds—meaningless sounds. If the letters have any meaning at all, you can't translate. But you have to have this neutral abstract meaningless set of figures as a way of translating sounds into sight. And when you do this, you pull the ground out from the Gestalt and are left only with a figure. And the result of having figure without a ground is—is Euclid. What is called logic is pulling out the ground from under the figures and tying the figures together in tight patterns. It began with the alphabet—with Parmenides and onward through the Greeks—that is logic did—logic. Logic is figure without a ground. Is that the same as or close to saying—when you say figure without ground—is that close to saying that it's abstract?
Well, that it's arbitrary. Yes, it's very abstract. But you see, when you're on the telephone, you're totally abstract; you are an image without a body—that is figure without a ground. When you're on the air, on radio, TV, you are without a body—with figure images there with no body. So in an oral culture—what you and I are doing here—yeah, this does not have the same quality as if we were talking on the telephone, because there's—we have figure, ground here. Okay. And uh interplay is is between figure and ground, which is called Gestalt. Incidentally, apropos the hemispheres of the brain uh the right hemisphere is the Gestalt side of the brain, the figure-ground side. The left hemisphere is the figure without ground—abstract. There is one side of the brain which is able to perform with non-Gestalt—abstractly—figure minus ground. That is called the rational side—ridiculously—it's merely the abstract side. The abstract side of the brain. The left hemisphere is figure without ground; it is logical and lineal and connected; it has classification—places to put things—it has syntax, grammar, order—which is all figure without ground. The right hemisphere is all figure and ground and is called intuitive—is called simultaneous—or not called, but they've discovered that it has these characteristics of just by rule of thumb. Fortunately, the hemispheres are not a theory; they are empirically established by the most painstaking methods. But the right hemisphere is simultaneous—that is the electric side of the brain.
Are you for or against the right or the left hemisphere?
I am for the underdog. And uh the the the right hemisphere is the underdog side of our world. The gifted child is a right hemisphere child, and there's no place for him in the school system. The school system is built only on the left hemisphere—quantified, classified, graded, and so on. IQ tests are all left hemisphere tests. Einstein wouldn't have made 90 on a on an IQ test. He was so right hemisphere—he could hardly talk; he he certainly couldn't spell, and he couldn't even do mathematics. He was intuitive, and he had his friends help him to mathematize his intuitions. But there's a wonderful book about him—recent book by Foyer—it's called *Einstein and the Generations of Science*. It's a book of stories and anecdotes and dialogue between Einstein and a dozen or so of his friends when they were growing up in Zurich and Bern and so on—F E Fur Pyer—Lou—Louie J, I think—Louis J Poyer—does he spell it correctly? Lou, I think so. The um anyway, the the right hemisphere is the underdog side. Western man has not used it very much. It is the Third World; it is the Orient. The Orient and the Third World are 100% right hemisphere—that's why they're backward—that is they they can't forge ahead quantitatively the way the left hemisphere does.
Are you using "backward" with a little bit of irony?
Oh, yeah, well, sure. Because the gifted people are all very backward. But our school system has no place for gifted people, and the universities likewise—no place for gifted people. They don't fit into the courses; they don't fit into anything. Let's back up a little bit. Um, you subscribe to the proposition that that we were basically right hemisphere people wandering around the world prior to the phonetic alphabet?
Yeah. Mankind, for many many eons, was right hemisphere—minus any development of the left. Heaven knows what—well, we do know how the left hemisphere did suddenly get activated—it was by Phoenician businessmen. They they they worked out this alphabetic code just out of sheer need for speed in their calculations and bookkeeping, and they passed it along to the Greeks. Fascinating story about how the Greeks happened to pick it up. It was not picked up by educated people and gradually transmitted to the hoi polloi. Havelock has a a new essay on the um alphabet; it's in the new *Literary History*. He explains that the alphabet got going thanks to the um what do they call these people who do inscriptions?
Inscribes?
No—are working in stone and uh Stone scribes.
Yeah. Uh, working in wood and stone. These people would put names down and and uh events, just as they do today, and uh they began to use this alphabet. It gradually moved upward into the educated area, but only after centuries. It was centuries before it actually became an educational factor in Greece. And um so it's been around, say, from the 8th or 7th or 8th century, and it began to perform a little bit in the 6th, and then it had its big day in the 5th century BC. But uh that's 2500 years ago. It began to flow.
Is there any contemporary information about um—there is, of course—this is one of the one of the the signal questions—any information about contemporaries at the time the the alphabet was introduced and and how they felt about it? Anybody like it? Didn't like it?
I hope you have a book down in in the Columbia bookstore by Professor Riley of Oxford; it's on the progress of the Platonic dialogue. Um, I don't know the exact title because I've never had the book in my hand, but there's a new book by Riley on the development of the Platonic dialogue. It did not uh have very highbrow beginnings; uh it began as as fun and games—that is the dialogue, not the book. The dialogue of play—old—yeah uh it began—in fact, Plato, we are told, came to Athens with a mime—a mime troop—mim—just to perform and uh be somewhat like the—no uh Japanese plays—they're like Disney cartoons uh with um they they put on uh they rather they dramatize uh Aesop's fables, things like that. And that's still today in Japan—the uh the Noh drama is um very close to the old Platonic m and the miming of the dialogues and uh so on—began as fun and as a as a special art form—nothing to do with philosophy—and it was just uh entertainment. But there's quite a bit about this in a book on Bakhtin—B A K T I N—B—B A K T I N—he's a Russian uh with this new book on the Poetics of Dostoevsky. And this now—Dostoevsky—Dostoevsky was entirely a right hemisphere man, and um he too puts on these mimes, these carnival-like—migra—crazy performances and that were a traditional Byzantine form. Now, Byzantium—you've heard of another name for it—is Istanbul, where you've just been. And Byzantium has a big tie-in with Russia, and Russian origins are very close to these Byzantine origins, and and Byzantium was Hellenic, not Roman, and so hence the Greek—tian. Byzantium came out of the Old Hellenic Eastern world—the world eventually hung on to Aristotle. Remember Aesa and Aois gave Aristotle finally to the West?
Remember them?
Well, yes. But Aristotle was—had been kept in this Eastern world through the centuries, and eventually about the 12th century, he was—his text was given to the West from the Arab world. The Arabs kept Aristotle and used his philosophy before the West had him. So in the same way, Dostoevsky was using art forms that go way back into Byzantine times, Hellenic times, and are based on the Migra Festival—World of Fun and Games. And his *Notes from Underground* or his *Idiot* or whatnot—these are really parts of ancient uh and traditional entertainments. And among the one of the major forms of function for these entertainments was to put down the highbrows—to debunk—what do they call it—used to call it the uh the on the on the radio programs—eggheads—going—going—the the programs that were devised against the eggheads—the um the—all there's various titles, but *The $64,000 Question* was one of them—in which stumping the experts—that sort of thing—stumping the experts was a normal activity of these old fun and game shows from the Hellenic times. This is where the Platonic dialogues began. They began as a way of putting down the highbrow. Now that gimmick of putting down the highbrow—debunk the pretentious—comes right along through European tradition—out of the Orient—out of Hellenic times—and uh finally gets to forms we are familiar with—*Don Quixote*, *Tristram Shandy*—these are direct descendants of the old carnivalistic—carnivalistic debunking of the institutions of society.
Now we were back with the alphabet. Now the alphabet—I I would—y—okay—the Platonic um dialogue—boys—cotton much to the alphabet?
No, they—they certainly—they—remember Plato accepted Euclid as a basis for um entrance requirement for his Academy—nobody—let nobody come here who doesn't know his Euclid. Euclid was one of these first gifts of the alphabet—that is, when you pull out everything except the figure—all the attributes of space and and time are pulled out except certain abstract features. Euclid could not have happened before the alphabet, and he has never happened in any other country except with the alphabet. China does not have Euclid, nor does Africa, nor India—without the phonetic alphabet—without the phonetic alphabet, there's no Euclid, and there's no logic. There is no logic in India—if you read the history of logic by Bensky—there's only one—history—history of logic—big fat one—Bochenski's history of logic. Uh, when you get to the Hindus, there's about three or four pages of um sort of scribbles and um Chinese likewise—they have no logic. And uh logic is a form that is possible only where the alphabet has pulled out the ground and left only the figures. Euclid is a world of figures without a ground. Now this—Euclid—one of the major messages—McLuhan style—with respect to the invention and the introduction of the alphabet is the birth and growth—overwhelming growth—of the notion of logical thinking—connected—connected thinking—because the right hemisphere does not have any connections. Bogen, the surgeon—neurosurgeon—has a wonderful essay on the hemispheres and education, in which he explains that the left hemisphere is—has propositions, and the right hemisphere has appositions. There are no propositions in the right hemisphere; it's all apposition—meaning figure-ground—no connections—just just—and this by the way is what happens to your newspaper under telegraph conditions—at the speed of light—there are no Connections in the news—everything is apposed or juxtaposed—minus connections. There are no Connections in the news; they're just Mosaic. At the speed of light, you have a mosaic under one dateline and no connection. Footnote: If you physically look at the front page of *The New York Times* or any other newspaper, what you will discover is a story here um about something that's happening in Bonn at the moment, a story down in the lower right-hand corner about how the crime rate on the east side of New York City is increasing, a story in the upper right-hand column um about Governor Brown in California, inflation in—story someplace else about inflation—observation is being made that there once was a time in journalism—pre-telegram—when all of this stuff would have been connected in long essays, and with the telegram coming in—up—etc.—it's a paced-up job of stuff that has no con—literally—the essays of *The Spectator*, essays of Addison and Steele, were newspapers—that's the form of the first newspapers—essays—but um they were editorials—the news came later—but the uh at the speed of—by the way, simultaneous—that's a—the right hemisphere thing uh is acoustic, whereas lineal is visual. Now, remember the alphabet translated the acoustic—translated Homer, who had been recited and performed for centuries—they translated him into visual terms—lineal terms—at which point you could read him, but you didn't need any more sound effects. So Homer became very abstract; he became a literary figure. Whereas up till the time of...
The alphabet. He had been performed operatically. And a gentleman in Greek times was a person who could perform Homer; who could sing him from one beginning to the end of *The Iliad* and *The Odyssey*. Uh, and by the way, the it would be interesting to go into the nature of those poems, but they were very practical poems; they were pragmatic to the core. They had nothing fancy or literary about them; they were the days dog book, and uh, they were really down to earth. They were not intended for aesthetic effects; they were education. And Plato was against the education of Homer because it was all for the ear. So Plato became, you know, he he went to war with the poets because they were performers, and he wanted logos. So philosophy was born when you pulled out the acoustic thing and got instead the logical visual thing. Visual is it being used in the sense here literally meaning I look at a, b, c on the page rather than hear the sounds. It means lineal. Now that's a a point that is very very basic for, again, it has not been studied by modern psychologists or any other psychologist, but visual space is the only space that is connected; is a continuum. Touch is totally discontinuous. Acoustics are completely discontinuous, and so with all the other senses. The sense of sight alone is a continuum, and it was isolated or abstracted by the alphabet. The alphabet left sight and the connected spaces of sight in the saddle; it pulled out the other senses, left sight alone and supreme. That's the Greek world in which sight is supreme. Sight is a connected continuum; it is uniform and static. Visual space is continuous, homogeneous, connected, and static. I wonder if we can sort of reduce those notions into some kind of example by visual space. Yeah, you mean when I look out here at this group of people, and you look out there, this—that's what you're talking about with visual space. John Locke has written an essay on human understanding; it's all about visual space because in his world of the 18th century, the only Newton's world—Newton is a completely visual man; no nothing acoustic in in Newton; all visual, all connected, all uniform, all logically tied together. And by the way, you come electronic speeds, Newton was toppled, and non-Newtonian physics took over; non-Euclidean geometry took over in about 1900. So visual man was obsolescent by electric speed. We are now living in a world in which the left hemisphere is obsolete, and the right is surging back into dominance, and our school systems are obsolete. Nobody conspired; nobody had any intention of this happening because they didn't understand what they were doing. Does anybody have any control over it? No, none at all, and no plans, no programs in sight; just, you know, full steam ahead, damn the torpedoes. Uh, this is the left hemisphere talking; the right hemisphere would never say full steam ahead and damn the torpedoes. The right, the right hemisphere is the hemisphere of the hunter, the man who studies the whole environment; it is ecological. Well, by the way, though, having said that, the visual is the continuous, the connected, the static; the simultaneous is the world of the acoustic, because you hear from all directions. The right hemisphere is acoustic, musical, but acoustic space has peculiar properties, again ignored by the psychologists. Acoustic space is a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose margin is nowhere. Acoustic space is a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose margin is nowhere.
Footnote: Imagine yourself; you are the hearer; your ears are working; you hear from all directions simultaneously; you hear from behind you, beside you, above you, below you; you hear from everywhere. Stimuli are from everywhere impinging upon you; hence this hemispheric or spherical um input, which is untrue of the visual stuff, which operates out here in some kind of an oval fashion. I can't see what's happening behind me, although I can hear. The different nature of acoustic space from that of visual space and tactile space is very much in attention in the electric age, because the odile and the tactile are very close. Tactile space is the space of the interval. When you touch something, you create an interval, not a connection. And when you if you if there are any connection between your finger and what you touch, you wouldn't have a finger. So it's interval, and it's resonance. The resonant interval is touch, and that is called the chemical bond by Linus Pauling. A book on the nature of the chemical bond is a story of the resonating interval. There are no connections in matter; there are no connections between molecules or electrons; there are only interfaces and resonating intervals. This is one of the great discoveries of quantum mechanics and about 1900—that matter has no connections. Ergo, is totally nonvisual and nonvisualizable. You cannot visualize any aspect of matter because it moves at the speed of light and without connections. So the things like the electronic microscope and so on are really uh very doubtful about what they you render in the way of knowledge. It's an area of opacity and confusion, but you don't certainly it does not show you micro—um the u the electronic microscope does not show you electrons; it does show you the effect that electrons have when they bump into each other, but not the electrons. It it is a world of effects. By the way, the Greeks did not have a name for color, any color. What they used instead was the effect that that color had on you. The wine-dark sea does not tell you the color of the ocean; it tells you the effect looking at the ocean has on the viewer. But that's merely e—the world of effects is right hemisphere, and right hemisphere people do not use visual metaphors. The Chinese have no visual metaphors, and the pre-Socratics—you can read all about them in books today; Cornford has a big collection of essays about them—and uh you will look in vain for a single visual metaphor among the pre-Socratic. That means pre-phonetic alphabet. The moment alphabet came in, all the metaphors and philosophy became visual. The ideas of Plato are all visual; the archetypes are all visual. But up till up till the time of Plato, ideas or the ideas of the Heraclitus and Thales and so on were all non-visual, and their poems—and they wrote their philosophy in a poetic form; their poems are all acoustic. That is, tend to call upon images which are acoustic. In, for example, the cosmos; the cosmos of the universe is a a sphere, a perfect sphere. Uh, this is where Humpty Dumpty came from, by the way; it was a sphere that had periodically shattered and then put itself back together again somehow. This uh this is a sort of story of the beginnings, and the sphere is of course that acoustic sphere, the sphere that is simultaneous. So the the egg, the Humpty Dumpty story about the fall of Humpty Dump and so on is really a record of the pre-Socratic philosophers. However, the acoustic man, the man who plays it by ear, is late; the oral man, the oral man—he's coming back today at the electric age with devastating effects on our establishment. Because the electric man not only lacks a private identity, he also lacks any morals because he has no relation to natural law; not having a body, he has no relation to natural law and therefore no [Music] morals; no morals in the ordinary sense of the word. Anyway, he can relate to supernatural law, but he cannot relate to natural law, which may help to account for the strange revival of religion. Discarnate man, disembodied man cannot relate to natural religion, but he can relate to supernatural religion. Is discarnate man. Again, I go back to the notion that face to face here in this room, um we are not discent—well, all senses are are are in operation here; we see each other, we hear each other, we can touch each other um and smell each other. Smell each other—the bo is one of the most basic forms of identity. So what's happening is each unique; each one is unique like fingerprints. What's happening then is an abstracting out of certain of the sensory incapacities. With the alphabet, it was abstracting out the visual stuff, which was up for centuries. Now, in what you're referring to as electronic age, we are still abstracting out; that is, if you're watching television, you're not in the presence literally of the person; you're abstracting out an image of some kind. If you're on the telephone, you're abstracting out an inner trip. So this abstracting out of certain qualities um isolated so to speak in in the cell of your living room and with telephone um television tape recordings uh records and so forth uh is is what you're suggesting is is leading toward this tendency toward um not confronting another person um bodily so to speak. Um, that's why we have encounter groups, sort of to compensate for the lack of bodies and uh confrontations and u sensitivity groups, which are exact very unsensitive or insensitive and so on. But the attempts to—by the way, the huge nostalgia of our time in every field of music, literature, clothing, everything—nostalgia is an attempt to get back to the time when we had bodies and identities. When you lose identity, you become violently concerned about recapturing it. How do I get it back again? That was called the existential crisis, angst of the existence movement in the in the well how in in the 30s, 40s, 40s and u exist—tends to one of the first moments when they suddenly realized they had lost their identities; they were no bodies, and they had no body. I ain't got nobody. How does that all—no, I ain't got plenty of nothing; nothing's plenty for me. There was an old song, I ain't got nobody, but that meant I ain't got nobody else. You're saying I ain't got nobody else; I ain't got my own body, my own identity anymore; i' I've I've somehow lost that in this process of high technology abstraction. So inner trip takes the place of um outer trip. The right hemisphere is an inner trip, world of fantasy, and today what we call news is fantasy. It moves at the speed of light, and it it it lasts about the same amount of time. By the way, that's another feature—at the speed of light, you lose the power of recall; attention span gets very short, and recall gets very short. So in educational terms, that's a big problem—you're dealing with students who have very little attention span and very little power of recall. Anything we can do about it? Yes, the first thing is to find out what the heck is the situation, naturally. Uh, there's no point in acting blindly. Uh, there's a visual metaphor uh or we've got to play—we've got to play it by ear. No point in acting blindly, right? No, we've got to tune in, turn on, tune in, drop out. Um, but no, the—what about our our friends with the ecological media program? There's an ecological media program at NYU; is it uh fronted by Neil Postman and that group? Paul? Yes, yeah. Well, media ecology means that using the media so that they help each other instead of just wiping each other out. Neil Postman, our graduate of the Teachers College communication program who's at the at NYU School of Education in their medology program. Yeah, medology means that that if print or if the written word is in danger, it can be rescued by some other medium or propped up, and uh don't just let something like that go down the drain without any counter activity. How do you feel about our the the Back to Basics movement, where every teacher sensing the crisis because every parent is screaming, my kid can't read anymore—the tendency of the school is to say, away with everything but print, you know? Well, you know about the back—it's whistling in the dark, isn't it? I mean, the the one thing that they cannot possibly obtain by that uh wishful attitude is Basics. There's nothing basic about the basic programming; they've never looked into why why the need for Basics; they've never studied the media or the effects of the media on anybody, let alone their students. So if you're dealing with a lot of discarded kids who have spent many hours with the tube on inner trips, then the programs needed for such people are uh have not yet to be devised; they haven't even been thought of. To go back to basics, to go back to hardware for kids who have lived only with software is meaningless; it isn't practical. You have to recover somehow or other the meaning of private identity, physical bodies, goals, and objectives. By the way, goals and objectives are meaningless at the speed of light; there at the at the speed of light, you you don't you're not going somewhere; you're already there. On the telephone, you're not going somewhere; you're there. And in the electronic world, there are no goals or objectives; we're already there. And so the basics program based on the old hardware where people had fixed goals and objectives is literally meaningless. And you it would follow then that um if your observation is is an accurate one, that kids who've grown up in in this simultaneous, this fast-moving world don't feel the necessity themselves of no a goal in life. No, I'll tell you what to take in the place of goals: I have a book called *Take Today*, and it means just that—let's have a look at today, take today. Uh, *The Executive Dropout*, and it is um it has three basic themes: first, that we have moved from hardware to software; second, we have moved from jobs to role-playing; and third, we have moved from central to decentralist forms of activity. Uh, what is taken—the reason the job, the whole job thing is in such a hassle is that jobs are obsolete as a form of human activity at the speed of light. The role-playing takes the place of job holding. Now, what is role play? Because it is not a job. If you are an actor on a stage and you are in the role of Hamlet, uh playing that role has nothing in common with having a job, a 9-to-5 job. It means putting on an audience. Role-playing means a put-on. Instead of getting a repetitive hardware sort of performing area to work in, you have to learn how to put on your audience in such a way that you become important to them. Role players—let's see where would one begin to explain a role-playing uh in in in everyday life? Score volunteers. Role players. Yes, uh children playing are all playing in role—role-playing is literally playing, not working. And at the speed of light, play becomes the major meaning of a human activity. Now, play—there's a wonderful book on the subject by Huizinga, *Homo Ludens*, *Man Playing*. Uh, it's about the role of play in human institutions and human learning and so on. He goes through the the world of p and others. But play means, again, not connections but interval. When you have a wheel and an axle, you have play between the wheel and the axle. The interval is where the action is; it's called play. When you are really in action, you are at play. So that the a painter or an artist when he is working at full capacity is completely at play because the only way an artist can work is by exploring, inventing, playing, and trying to discover all the potential in the situation. It's done by play. Uh, playing means, of course, though, are put-on; it depends on an audience. Uh, and this is uh something that all children understand, but it isn't part of the educational establishment—that um role-playing, the put-on, is a kind of sanity. Remember that group of people who got themselves uh accepted into a a madhouse and u were horrified to discover that once they were in, nobody could tell that they were sane except the extreme psychotics who pointed at these intruders and said, they're playing. They really far-out nuts saw these invaders and said, they're playing, which is a name for sanity. When you stop playing, you're mad. When you take yourself—playing by the rules, by the way, too. Yeah, okay. Well, if that is play, the accepting accepting rules is itself a form of play, right? You can't—by the way, when when Al Shefflin comes, uh remind me or you ask him um when schizophrenia was invented—not discovered, but invented—and he will tell historically, as as a psychiatrist, when it was invented in France to serve a certain need, to fill certain buildings that were had been left unoccupied because leprosy had suddenly gone into a decline, and schizophrenia was invented, so Al claims at that time, to fill up the the leprosarium. Isn't that also in the work of Michel Foucault? Could be. He has a history of of medicine yes, in which he explains that um the Ship of Fools was a a a ship that when it left the port, they they raked down and put all the nuts on just as it was leaving so that they could get rid of them. There was no place to put these mad people at in those days, and so they put them on boats that were leaving for some other port, and it was called a Ship of Fools. Most of them came to the United States. Um, well, there are some very serious people, and which is another name for insanity. There are some terribly earnest people. *The Importance of Being Earnest* means The Importance of Being a Madman. The by—when you become very earnest, very uptight, you're you're off your rocker. Yeah. So uh our friend uh who is *The Importance of Being Earnest* man—wild, wild Oscar Wilde. Think wild; it's he—word play. He—well, no, but by the way, there's an there's an acoustic observation—people's names have a lot to do with the sort of activities into which they are drawn gradually uh not uh necessarily uh classified but just acoustically tuned towards certain activities. And so when you look over the names of some of the manufacturing outfits and the names of some of the handicraft people and so you'll see a strange echo going between the name of the man who runs the brick company and the brick—uh, here's a weird story: in St. Louis, there is a Proofrock Brick Company. Now, Mr. Elliott lived in—was born in St. Louis, and his daddy ran a brick company; his dad—his father's company was called the Hydraulic Brick Company. They had a rival called the Proofrock Brick Company, and and had waited for years to take a a pass at Proofrock—his poem on the sale of J. Alfred Prufrock—this ridiculous guy, this ridiculous name. Uh, let's circle back to the Greeks and the the way in which they use dialogue as game and logic as game, and let us suggest that if you wanted to get back Back to Basics and wanted to re uh validate the left hemisphere in our time, you would have to approach it as a game, and you could reestablish the validity and the fun of Basics and of grammar and arithmetic and so on if you approached it through the right hemisphere. I have long ago discovered, for example, that mathematics is a bore, but the higher math is fun. If you get up very high in mod physics, math of of physics today, you're in a poetic world; it's fun; it's only the lower math that is dull and flat-footed, you know, two plus two and that stuff. But uh no, the higher math is pure fun, and I I have a friend, Bob Logan at UT, who teaches a course in Po in poetry and mathematics. No, it's poetry and physics. Yeah, the grad course, and I I've taken this course, and it's a lot of fun. It's only the lower echelons where the dullness is. But if you wanted to Red—if you wanted to revalidate, I say, left hemisphere curriculum, then approach it as a fun, fun game through the right hemisphere. Should we want to revalidate the left hemisphere? No, because if we want to hang on to any of our institutions, legal or otherwise, uh you have to keep it in in a good shape, but not necessarily overwhelming, not not necessarily tyrannizing or dominating. Now you see another factor about the two hemispheres—again, it's there's so many that you can't remember them all unless one made a just a list—one of the factors about the dominance of the hemisphere depends upon what is the ground under it. The left hemisphere became dominant when they invented this new ground of lineality, logic, and courier systems and connected spaces. The military took over; instead of an armed horde of Highland fighters, you've got suddenly phalanxes and lineal military structures. I mean, with the Greeks. Now, when you get a great big lineal structure going in the society, the left hemisphere goes up up up. Today, when you have a simultaneous electronic ground, the right hemisphere goes up up up; it's inflating. The right hemisphere is becoming dominant thanks to the new ground of electric information. It is not conspiratorial; it is not intended, and it could be controlled; it could be dimmed down by balancing the media—not content, that's right—but the very presence of—by rationing, rationing the amount of time you are allowed to spend with those things. The French spend about 1/2 an hour a month with TV; they they regard it as poison; they want to maintain their institutions; that is realism. Don't let the kids near the thing except as a very occasional treat; otherwise, it's you're merely poisoning their psyches. And you're not talking about violence; nothing to do with the program; not talking about sex; nothing to do with the—nothing to do with the—keep saying that because you know you got to dig that he's talking about the form of the thing and what that's that's that's doing to us. Shall we take um a short break? Yeah, yeah. Um, five minutes. One of the things I'd like—that means beyond the left hemisphere, back into the right. By—well, and want to—okay. Professor McLain has in his hand a new book which he'd like to call to your attention, made by Arthur W. Foshay, who used to be here at Teachers College and he retired recently, and uh it's called *Beyond the Scientific*, which means again flipping over into the right hemisphere and um retaining the scientific. Um, publisher's is on the back, and I'll look inside. What that means um—for used to be in the um Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Teachers College. This therefore will be a book about the implications of hemisphere research on education specifically. It's a collection of learning—I I I I don't know what SSEC stands for. Yeah, I got a thing through the mail; it's an obscure publisher, but um it'll be at in the Columbia Library probably if you want to look at it and find the publisher um do so, not now, but um after the class is out. Yeah. Let me let me ask you this: um what what what are you up to today? What what what's interesting you now? Well, I was mentioning just a moment ago that uh the behind every joke is a grievance, and without the grievance there'd be no joke. So the hidden ground—the joke is the figure; under the figure is a grievance. When the grievance peeps through the the joke slightly, then you have fun. If there's if it's just pure grievance, well, then there's no laughing. In French Canada at the present time, there's no no jokes; it's getting grim. Uh, the grievances are too strong for the any kind of humor. Uh, you can though cool situations systematically by pouring humor across them, and humor as a kind of cathartic or cure or therapy for grievance and misery uh is um very effective itive thing, but it it's true of—let's sample uh anywhere. I I have in front of me a whole book of one-liners; the first one uh I see is that the largest room in the world is the room for improvement. It's like that the little pothole said of the big pothole, you are holier than I. But you—by the way, there the pothole itself, you see, suggests grievance; the pothole is—it causes a lot of misery. And the one one of the most famous jokes in the history of the 20th century was the one about the better old—old Bill is looking—now he's down at the bottom of a great big bomb pit—World War I—World War I—and your friend is saying, hey Bill, what are you doing down there? And he says, well, if you know a better hole, lead me to it. He's using it for protection. But uh the better hole became a classic grievance joke. But you cannot have any kind of humor without a grievance. If that is the gestalt, the figure-ground. So when the grievances get so bad that there are no more jokes, then you're in trouble. But now I mentioned this peeping through—the light coming through the situation—that is called, by the way, phenomenology. It took me a long time to discover—the phenomenologists managed to cover their tracks pretty well; they like to make out that they are a very serious bunch, hard-headed, logical.
People, the Hiers, and the hust, and so on—all they're telling you, and this has been for ever since Hegel and his phenomenological stuff, ever since Hegel—all they have been telling you is this: that behind every situation there's another situation that peeps through, and that peeping through is phenomenology. And I call it simply: the medium is the message, or the figure in the ground. The ground comes through the figure, or the figure comes through the ground; it can be both ways, but it's that process of light through that is phenomenology.
Now, when you think of the thousands of books that have been written without even getting close to saying that, why are they motivated to conceal their credentials? I've discovered this in most of the highbrow activities of our world: the jealous guarding of the sacred territory, the specialty. But there is no specialty that is not quite easily understood in quite simple terms, if you know enough. You can translate it into very simple terms. But my understanding media is phenomenology of the media. If you don't know that's one of Professor McLuhan's early books, *Understanding Media*, sort of the classic. That it's not that early—my gosh! This is another example of that narrow attention. It's it's it's after a lot of literary criticism, after *The Mechanical Bride*. Oh no, no, *The Mechanical Bride* is '51. No, *Understanding Media* is '64, 19—I said it's after—oh, it's after—after—oh yeah, I thought yeah, and I agree with you; it's not all that early, but it's—no, it's uh, what, 12, 14 years old. But the—um—you were asking me what I've been up to. I've been working on the history of Menippean satire, on history of—who—Menippean, that is. I mentioned it earlier, apropos the Dooley book. Back—Menippean satire includes Lucian, *The Dialogues of Lucian*; it includes um, the uh Petronius, uh, *The Satyricon*, the world of funny stories, including the *Thousand and One Nights*. These are all Menippean satires, and they come on down through the *Decameron*. They come down through our Western World in various forms, including *Don Quixote*. I mentioned the world of—well, it's like the Marx Brothers. It's a world of crazy adventures and and—uh—debunking, debunking serious things and serious people. Um, Erasmus is *Praise of Folly*, Rabelais, *Gargantua*—these are Menippean satires that are debunking serious people and pretension; it's their put-on. And um, what—what—what interests you in that? I'm working on *Tristram Shandy*. Why? Well, Eric, my son Eric, is doing a doctor on *Tristram Shandy* and Menippean satire in *Tristram Shandy*. Aside from fatherly affection—no, interests you? What's it got to do with—well, it has a lot to do with my own dissertation, which was on the history of the Trivium. I'm also revamping my history of the Trivium uh for publication. And the Trivium is grammar, logic, rhetoric—talking about basics. And um, grammar, by the way, is one of the ground things that gets pulled out of—by the logicians—always pull out the grammar ground and throw it away. *Grammatica*, by the way, means reading the book of nature, reading the whole text of nature as a book. That was called *grammatica*. Boy, has that ever changed! Grammarians pay no attention whatsoever to to the whole text of nature. Now it's totally an abstract business, isn't it?
Well, no, it's uh, I think it's come—we're coming back more and more to it very much. But the idea of taking a total field theory—field theory in physics is book of nature—interdisciplinary is book of nature—not allowing specialism to take over. But grammar, logic, rhetoric had been for—from the ancient times—a sort of basic curriculum concerned with eloquence and with the word, the *logos*. And um, the study of the word as resonating with wisdom, and incidentally resonating with therapeutic power, goes way back. There's a book by someone called *The Therapy of the Word*, in classical Antiquity—uh—m t r a l g o—I forgot—he's a a medical historian of the word—the word—uh—that is a basic book. Like Havelock's *Preface to Plato*. *Therapy of the Word* is a—concerns the work of the witch doctors and the shamans who did the spell—cast the Spells and so on, help people to get well. And the the Spells were cast in various art forms—lyric, epic, dramatic odes and so on—were all part of the Shaman's equipment. Uh, the genre of what we call the genre of literature began in the Spells cast by witch doctors and the shamans. And uh, eloquence was thought of as having the power to heal minds. The whole idea of eloquence in uh, in Cicero's day—orator is the idea of wholeness, healing. And the therapy of the word was a—this is of course especially true of Christianity. The whole idea of the word, the the Divine word as healing; the *logos* was thought of as therapeutic, and it was thought of as most therapeutic when sung and performed richly, so in Opera and so on. There's a book out called *Poetry is a Therapeutic Experience*. Yeah, came out about 6 months ago, goes into a lot of that. The editor—Learner—L R N R—L R N R—like Max Lerner, the same name, right? I think it's Arthur—Arthur Learner. Make a note. The um, *Poetry as Therapeutic*. Um, the uh Ezra Pound had a phrase: is the poets are the antenna of the race, meaning they pick up the messages first. They are the means of orientation in a crazy world. You—they can put you—they can tune you in on situations by by adjusting their rhythms and um, perform absolutely necessary functions for the society. They anticipate then, for example, the forms which lie ahead, the the the structures, the interconnections. And if you're sensitive to to what the artist is doing and can can dig it, you've got a leg up on on finding out where we may be or be going. Yes, the painter or the poet should be able to give you at least a 30 years warning on when—where you were headed, because they pick up the messages that much earlier—at least a generation before the establishment or the bureaucracy. Menninger has got a a thesis that is another group that has almost equal sensitivity in a culture, and it's what we normally refer to as neurotics. Mhm. That is that neurotic styles change. Um, in Freud's time, the the great Neurosis was um, hysterical conversion, in which you suddenly went lame, and then you got on the couch and and learned that you—your father, you know, when you were 3 years old, did XYZ. And Freud says, "Get up and walk." That's known as hysterical conversion. When um—now the um, numerically one of the the major neurotic problems um is impotence—that is both physical and psychic. I can't do—nothing about it—um—I've got no control—I've got no control over the situation. And you know, fits in beautifully what you're talking about. Typically the Greek—who—not Celsus—who is the Greek medical man—the Big G—Galen—G—he was a mechanist uh, whereas most of the world, especially the Hellenic and and Semitic world was uh, saw the the sick person as sinful, as suffering from sin. Uh, the Semitic idea of disease was sin, and the the Galen or Greek idea was mechanism. Uh, modern medicine is still mechanical—one cure for one disease. The pill will cure you of this—if they find the right therapeutic pill, then you're okay. The idea is gradually coming in that cancer is not a disease but a way of life, and that cardiac problems are also so—not a disease but a way of life. They are environmental. When I went into a tuberculosis sanatorium many years ago, on the first day the head doctor came around and said to me, "What are you doing here?" And rather than, you know, clobbering him, I said, "I've got tuberculosis." And he said, "I know that, but everybody has got tuberculosis. Everybody who walks in the face of the Earth houses the tuberculosis bacillus. How come you've decided, you know, to let it take over?" Being quite serious, and he was, you know, among the early—well, not that early by any means, but he was a holistic doctor who was saying, "Look, let's look at your life and see how come it was convenient for you at this moment to have uh tuberculosis." It's a sort of an out-of-fashioned disease, too, you know, among other—well, actually, diseases are human artifacts. Oh yeah, diseases are not just something that nature produces; they're made by man. And as the cures, too, are artifacts, which reminds us of the—L's—okay—uh—the—uh—we have these—I have a—I have law of the medium—laws of the media. I call L's, for sure, for simple. But uh, I have this book uh, sort of ready to appear, and I think I'll call—now call it *The Phenomenology of the Media*, but it's called *Laws of the Media* at the present time. And I have some samples here, and I think you'll find that they do help to bring together something we've been talking about this morning. All of my laws of the media are right hemisphere—radio—all of them. It doesn't matter—doesn't matter which one. Okay, so give us—give us the background of—well, of what this crazy adventure is all about. The—I simply was talking or making notes one day, and I came across this phrase of Karl Popper: that a scientific hypothesis is one that can be disproved. If it's science, it can be disproved, not proved, but disproved. And for some reason or other, this prompted me to set down at that very moment a hypothesis about money. If money can be hypothesized, then you could put it down in a simple form. So I simply said: A, money enhances or speeds up exchange; B, money obsolesces barter; C, money brings back something that had been pushed out earlier; it brings back potlatch. Potlatch was an old form of conspicuous consumption among native peoples—Kwakiutl Indians—and still use it in British Columbia. It was a way of showing off and also a way of inspiring further production. But then, having got A, B, C, I decided uh, that if you push anything far enough, it's going to flip into the opposite form. You push money far enough, and it becomes credit, which is not money. Credit has its completely different set of laws. But anyway, I—here—using these four, I've approached every kind of human artifact I can think of uh, and by artifacts I mean words, pencils, safety pins, bulldozers—anything man-made—disease. I was gratified recently when Dr. McCullagh of our Cancer Institute in Toronto took hold of these tetrads and applied them to some of his own work and found to his amazement that they saved him a lot of time by predicting certain events that would occur if they were used. Uh, he was talking about therapy, but uh, I don't know if I have the—I don't think I have that one here. But what they've got in front of them is radio—Marshall—radio at the moment. Um, now what does it enhance? I've forgotten what we assigned to radio as a beginning. Oh, here it is: enhances access to the entire planet—to everybody on the air. You're everywhere—minus a body. It obsolesces wires and cables and physical bodies. It retrieves tribal—ecological environments, which in turn have traumatic and paranoic effects. But it reverses into the Global Village—Orson Welles' *Invasion*—where there are no spectators, only actors. Let's go through that slowly, to be sure that we got the steps. Yeah, you can—when the first one—the first one is crucial, of course, because you decide at that point what the figure-ground is going to be. Radio, of course, is figure in the in the hardware sense, but then you ask what does it do? It enhances access to the entire planet—first basic message—then of the medium is access to entire planet. Then you hypothesize that radio, as will all other media, move to a second stage in which something is obsolete. By the way, they tend—they are simultaneous; they're not sequential. Okay, but that's—that's—it's handy to use sequence, but these four aspects are simultaneous in every case, and they also form a metaphor; they are a four-part metaphor—A is to B as C is to D. They are in ratio. This was not intended; it was only after some time I discovered that these four—these four things were metaphors. And by the way, this right hemisphere thing is called metaphoric as opposed to scientific—the quantified, to measurable—SI. Left hemisphere is called scientific because it is quantifiable, whereas the other one is called metaphoric because you can't quantify it. But the four divisions in these little uh tetrads are simultaneous, and they are in their relation to each other; they form a metaphor. Now, that is to say, if if it happens that every single artifact man ever made has this character—that is to say that he is dealing with a rational Universe—because metaphors have a reasonable proportion in them—metaphors are our proper proportional ratios—he's dealing with a pattern Universe in which these four qualities you hypothesize always occur, and that is close to or the same as rational. Yeah. Yes, they are rational, not in the logical sense, but in the an analogical sense. Four parts are analogy, and three parts are logic. Logic has a three-part structure; metaphor has a four-part structure. Uh, three-part structures are like—simil—sticy—m—mummy—sim—these are three parts; metaphors are four parts. They're not logical; they're analogical. But analogy—if if these four are in every single artifact of man, and I have yet to find one where they do not have that form—uh—if it means that we're living in a reasonable universe, and that our relation to it is rational, so that the things we make are things for which we are responsible—they have a reason and a rationale.
Do you find any difficulty with the four in this particular case? Let's let's go through them. First thing radio does is give everybody access to the entire planet. Okay, that seems reasonably obvious, doesn't it? Second thing it does, by its very nature, is obsolesces wires and cables and the presence of the physical body visa-vis another physical body. You can be geographically and physically removed. Obsolesces—that the key is that every medium enhances, obsolesces, retrieves, and reverses what it retrieves—that is to say, brings back—is a kind of tribal—simultaneous—ecological environment. Everybody knows everybody's business uh, around the world, and therefore it retrieves that—that is a—that is a—elect dimension, but ecologically—uh—the Primitive man was terribly sensitive about the environment because his whole being depended upon the environment. He—he didn't just grow wheat or corn uh, or some particular crop; he depended on the entire environment for his food, and so he was very sensitive to any defects, any upset of balance in that environment, and he, you know, had all these magical dances and things to keep it in good order. You, I suspect, would regard it as um, less than coincidental that the rise of the electric media, of which radio is a prime example, have brought us back once again to thinking about the—in the natural environment as well as this environment that we're living in. Yeah, because we sure as hell have come back with rocket speed to thinking about what's happening to the natural environment. I—I think you can date uh, that moment from Sputnik—1957—October 1957—when Sputnik went around the planet and put the planet inside a man-made environment. The planet became an art form when enclosed. You see, it's like a frame and a picture—when enclosed, the planet ceased to be nature; became a human art form for which we are now completely responsible. Let me tell a story that you don't remember, Marshall, but when Sputnik went up—when was it? '57—we were editing around here a little newspaper which I was in charge of, and I wrote to a number of people and said, "What do you think the—the Sputnik going up means in the long run?" And I wrote a letter to Marshall, and he wrote back—um, I'm sure you don't remember this—uh—saying, "It's obvious it will result in an intense driving of attention earthward—to the planet on which we live"—totally unexpected, you know, sort of thing that nobody else was saying—that uh, but indeed that's what I just finished saying now. And what I want to say is that he didn't make that up. Now, when Sputnik went up, he said, "Sure, the result will be intense consideration of spaceship." Apropos that—I've never done a tetrad on moonshot. What did the moonshot or moon landing do to us? What did it enhance? I never asked myself. Let's think about it for a second. Then what did it enhance? When um, when Armstrong put—put foot on the the moon, and it was just about this time—at least it was July—20th July—20th July is the moon month, by the way, in the Zodiac—Moon—Moon month. So it was deliberately chosen by somebody. All the moon landings were in July; they never tried another month for them. Um, but what—what did it enhance? Did it make the moon more visible, or did it make us more visible? I think you know—there—there must be certain stages, for example, in history, there were certain points such as discovery of gunpowder, etc., that mark very radical departures from the normal social histories of various peoples. Now, for example, with, you know, certain giant steps that Humanity has taken, either by accident or through conscious planning or Discovery—conscious design—I think that today, because the biggest problem we face is one of Science and Technology and our lack of ability to control science—for example, Atomic weapons being the the prime and most important problem we have to deal with in this Century—by the way, the left hemisphere man is unable to control environments. Right hemisphere—no problem. But the left hemisphere man—he has a goal; he drives quantitatively; he's going to use up every bit of gasoline on this planet; he's going to use up the whole atmosphere; he's going to use up everything. That's left hemisphere. Okay, so we are in one of those moments of leaps forward. The question is: what has that done to the human psyche on on Earth? When Neil Armstrong stepped down with that giant step forward, what—what did it enhance? Did it enhance the human eagle? Was it a great Triumph for man? It depends if you're an optimist or a pessimist. If you're—it only depends if you're an optimist or a pessimist. You're optimistic—see—well, we just gain more mobility, you know, the sky is the limit—we can go—more power—power—power. If you're pessimistic, you can see ourselves even smaller; we realize how large—Universal—we're not the center. Let's ask ourselves what happened to the men who did it—Aldrin and Shepherd, Collins, Armstrongs. What happened to them? They had the experience, and they also had the experience of uh, studying the Earth from out there. It had a strange effect on them. If it had a big effect on them, it must have had one also on us—less obvious. They are figures, and we are the ground, you see, in every sense. By the way, wonderful New Yorker joke: his guy says, "I've been through most of the places on this Galaxy, and Earth makes the best popcorn." Now, Russell Schweickart, one of the astronauts—Russell Schweickart, one of the astronauts—talks very eloquently about what it did to him when on a space walk, when he went extravehicular and he put up his thumb to his eye, looking down toward Earth, and he could blot it out just like that—it was that minuscule. And he said to himself, out there wandering around in outer space, tied to an umbilical cord, "Wow!" And he also said to himself, as have a lot of other astronauts reported back, "What a delicate, fragile place we live on—what a delicate place that is—how susceptible to utter destruction that is—how thin the layer of atmosphere around Earth is." Schweickart said it's no bigger than a than an orange peel in thickness as compared to the Earth—no thinner, he said, than an orange peel. And we were about to contaminate that out of existence. Um, it enhanced their thinking about a lot of things—earthward. All right, you—you're saying it enhanced their awareness of the Earth as a delicate and precious heritage. Schweickart said there's nothing else out there that has green, blue, and brown on it—nothing else that can be seen. Earth was the only place which had green and blue in addition to brown; everything was brown or gray. He also said, by the way, "If you were from outer space, what would you point for if you were landing and didn't know, you know, what green, blue, and and brown meant?" Just as an aside—um—joke. The Russians have pointed, by the way, toward the brown—landing spots or the the white landing spots. We've pointed toward the blue landing spots, for whatever that's worth. Well, it—it's rather significant. I'm not sure just why, but if if it is a preference, it uh, it would have certainly a lot of significance. Well, look, if it—if it enhanced our sense—if the moonshot enhanced—now, of course, we're talking now about their point of view—the the Moon—Moon Walkers—if it enhanced their sense of the precious heritage of Earth or the delicate and fragile character of this place, um, what did it do to us? Was it—was that awareness repeated in us? Did we also get that sense? I have the feeling we went in both directions, depending on on how we regarded it. Some people said, "Um, why the money on that?" No, it was a big war effort—prestige. It—um—on the other hand, what did it obsolesce? We got to race—because we're—we're—we're done with this period, Marshall, right now. So as soon as we can race through this one, we got to ceremoniously—unceremoniously—oh—what did it obsolesce in the moonshot? Green cheese. Yeah, that the moon is made of green cheese. Yes, it obsolesced mythology and um, yeah, a lot of mythology about the moon once you set foot on it. And then what did it bring back? Can you make the same kind of love under the moon now that somebody has said—for—no—definitely not. It has deglamorized that—the old moon altogether. Uh, it is deglamorized uh, the—what does it bring back uh, that had been pushed out earlier? Uh, the ancient world naturally was very much concerned with the Moon—the Moon and um, and the womb, too. But they also had uh voyages to the Moon as a popular form of literature in Antiquity. There's um—yeah, they—they have actually titles of of stories—voyages to the Moon. Um, but um—well, I suppose you could say it retrieved—um—the fictional reality—voyages to the Moon. It trans—trans—at the fiction into a reality. It also retrieved—one would have to go back and do this pretty systematically—pretty left hemisphere—but it also retrieved a forgotten feeling about the earth. Oh yeah, that is—we're now headlong looking at what's happening around us here. It's uh, it's precious, and it's ecologically—the sense that it's in a state of balance that has to be carefully protected and could easily be—not knocked out—but we experienced it—media. Yes. So that your awareness of the moonshot was mainly through—then remember how, after the first one or so, people lost interest. There's a film which suggests that the whole thing was done in the studio. Yeah, *Capricorn One*. Okay, then—new American film that says it never happened. All right, you've just reached the point D in the in the tetrad. What does it flip into when pushed all the way? Just fiction—phony. Do we really believe it? What does it mean? People cease to take it seriously. But the um—you can play with those—the tetrads—you can't—they're not—they don't belong in a rigid form. But uh—Highrise—just uh, for example—remember Highrise—as a—is it sitting here handy? Highrise is here. Yes, as a tetrad. I think it's a handy one. And there's some others—as you go—Highrise as enhances privacy; it obsolesces community; it retrieves catacomb—apartment is not a home; it reverses us into slum—instant slum. Because in a crisis, the high-rise dwellers form a community at once. But the uh—enhances privacy—is extreme form of privacy—obsolesces community—people are so private they don't want to ever get acquainted—retrieves the catacomb—an apartment is not a home—an apartment is a catacomb—and reverses into slum. But that is a—that Dr. McCullagh, the cancer man, found that he could take any of his therapies and put them in that form and find out what they would flip into if pushed too far—the actual therapies he was using on his cancer patients. We have got this, St. Marshall, and ladies and gentlemen, I'm putting over here three other examples of the tetrad—PR, prob—liation, ZX, and Highrise. I would suggest to you that what we have heard is a kind of exploration in how to think formally about things—structurally about things—without respect—
To content. That's the, the major message which has been Marshall's major, by the way, message from the beginning. A basic phrase of mine is: the user is the content in all situations. You're the content; content of your clothing, of the motor car, of your language, of anything you read: you are the content. It can't mean anything that it doesn't mean to you.
I thank you very much. We all thank you very much.