Quote of the Day (from Marshal McLuhan)

If you live in Eugene, Oregon, as I do, you likely know that it is almost always one the top five cities for worst grass pollen in the entire nation this time of year. Today it is #1, and I can hardly begin to express how delightful it is to be doped up on a cocktail of allergy medication while still sneezing, gasping, and otherwise feeling as though I am drowning in a roomful of loose, super-dry insulation. (Yes, I'm working hard for the sympathy vote here, but I don't want to go too overboard, so this is my only stump speech on the issue).

Anyhow, all whining aside, a reader (thanks, Charlie!) sent me a link to this interesting article in The Walrus about Marshal McLuhan, and while I don't agree with several of the points made in the piece, I did enjoy the quote I've bolded below:

McLuhan's pioneering studies of popular culture were part of a sea change in Catholic intellectualism, as the Church gave up the siege mentality of earlier decades and tried to offer a more nuanced and positive account of modern life. As well, the Church began to move away from its defence of authoritarianism to support pro-democracy political movements around the world. McLuhan underwent his own political evolution: the young man who admired Franco became the academic who engaged in a long correspondence with Pierre Trudeau. And while The Mechanical Bride condemns the comic strip Blondie for undermining the patriarchal ideal of the man as the natural head of the household, in later writings, such as Understanding Media, McLuhan deliberately eschewed traditionalist strictures, because he thought it was more important to understand the world than to condemn it. As he told an interviewer in 1967, "The mere moralistic expression of approval or disapproval, preference or detestation, is currently being used in our world as a substitute for observation and a substitute for study."

On moral matters, he remained very conservative. He was adamantly anti-abortion, for example. But part of his achievement as a mature thinker was his ability to bracket off whatever moral objections to the modern world he might have had and to concentrate on exploring new developments — to be a probe. Indeed, although he joined the Church as a refuge, his faith gave him a framework for becoming more hopeful and engaged with modernity. This paradox might be explained by the simple fact that as he deepened in his faith he acquired an irenic confidence in God's unfolding plan for humanity. In a 1971 letter to an admirer, McLuhan observed, "One of the advantages of being a Catholic is that it confers a complete intellectual freedom to examine any and all phenomena with the absolute assurance of their intelligibility."

Read the entire article.