Echoes
"Today, in the electronic age of instantaneous communication, I believe that our survival, and at the very least our comfort and happiness, is predicated on understanding the nature of our new environment, because unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitute a total and near-instantaneous transformation of culture, values and attitudes..."
The gays in Florida today, after the election of Howard Dean as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, expressed a new determination for 'coming out' in the world of politics, not being used either as "puppets" of the Democratic party or as a wedge by Republicans to frighten their base. An openly gay Orlando city commissioner said "I don't want to reach across the aisle, I want to win." Dean himself, in accepting the office spoke of taking the race to the local level, not conceding any ground in the political and cultural struggle. The Democratic party has been boarded and captured by those who realize we aren't going back to any time or place where we can rely on a bedrock of solid moral certainty. In the short we may have to endure some, perhaps many, political defeats, but in the long run I'd rather take part in exploring the textures of a world that's coming than to hide in the shadows of one that's fading away. I don't hesitate therefore to throw my lot in with the queers and the artists and the malcontents of America, with those who live outside the margins of Disneyworld.
Republicans, who speak so often these days of being a party of big ideas, long ago perceived that underneath the political battles over big government and foreign policy a much wider and deeper conflict was being waged over cultural perceptions embodied in rhetoric about "values." Neoconservatives staged their brilliant coup d'tat by adopting the most reactionary stance the mainstream public could tolerate, one based on the fundamental fear of change. Those most in fear, they rightly reasoned, are most motivated to show up at the polls. They painted their political opponents as not only wrong, but as dangerously insane. One questions how to find a middle ground in an atmosphere of such cynical manipulation that the world appears upside down, as in George Orwell's books. Those who tell the biggest lies are glorified as the greatest upholders of virtue.
"Whenever we watch a TV screen or read a book, we are absorbing these extensions of ourselves into our individual system and experiencing an automatic "closure" or displacement of perception; we can't escape this perceptual embrace of our daily technology unless we escape the technology itself and flee to a hermit's cave. By consistently embracing all these technologies, we inevitably relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms."
To anyone on the outside of our bizarre national discourse all of the talk about opposing values in American society must appear very strange. For most of the rest of the world, subjected to the overbearing effects of America's high tech bacchanalia, our values are clear and universal. We believe in something called "progress" which roughly translated means "of everything, faster." Religious revivals in America are nothing new, as religion has always been the primary excuse for our insufferable sense of self-righteousness. Nevertheless, by firmly declaring the separation of church and state at the founding, America ensured in the long run that no particular creed would dominate, and our national character would be propelled by a more universal sense of desire. Being the product of a worldwide revolution that sprung from the 'age of reason' our dominant cultural "value" by default became something we identify as 'freedom' which manifests as the no-holds barred acquisition of goods and property, tempered by a humanistic faith in the inherent strength of technological innovation in the face of hostile nature.
We now find ourselves stuck, on one hand looking at our own contradictions coming back at us in the form of rampant moral and cultural decay, as the rest of the world abandons itself to replicating our lifestyle. On the other hand we face militant resistance waged by those who choose to hang onto their own unique culture in the face of the implacable advance of shopping malls and factories. In America itself, where once the dangerous realm of creative imagery was confined to carefully delineated rituals enacted in public space, the fantastic spectacle of constant 'progress' has come to occupy a large and most honored place in our living rooms. The hearth has been replaced by the television set, and we've traded up our traditions for the constant dramatization of fantasy. The necessity to experience whatever is real beyond our home entertainment center appears greatly diminished, and where once there was community and the commons there is now the media saturated household as virtual prison.
"It is absurd and ignoble to be shaped by such means. Knowledge does not extend but restricts the areas of determinism...the influence of unexamined assumptions derived from technology leads quite unnecessarily to maximal determination in human life. Emancipation from that trap is the goal of education."
Americans try to worship both God and Mammon, both divinity and materialism. In the end one only serves the other in our minds, and it's almost always the former which serves the latter. Jesus is now both big money and big politics as televangelists from their corporate fortresses in Colorado Springs strive to define their middle-class version of Christianity as the state religion of empire. It's no coincidence that Focus On the Family shares the same municipality as the headquarters for the North American Air Defense Command. In the bizarre world of scrambled meanings and twisted logic characterizing popular media one could predict that the headquarters of our military defense would be just up the street from the Jesus sales brigade. In times of trouble those who most loudly profess their religious devotion appear equally devoted to the photogenic spectacle of endless war. War, after all, sells both Bibles and military contracts.
"And now we break from our regular family programming to bring you the news..."
"One of the factors of electronic speed is that it pushes all the unconscious factors up into consciousness...the hidden aspects of the media are the things that should be taught because they have an irresistible force when invisible. When these factors remain ignored and invisible they have an absolute power over the user."
Perhaps children coming up amid their parent's media trance will see more clearly through the layers of deception as their own lives get consumed in the effort to maintain the non-virtual structures of empire. One's life and health is a big price to pay to maintain a fantasy. Yet, a culture of junkies, severely strung out on constant doses of the soothing lull of electronic media are willing to sacrifice an awful lot for that moment of reassurance and pleasure, and we start children on the road to addiction very early these days. In one of the best scenarios I can come up with this leads to a kind of immunity, forcing marketers to become ever more clever and circuitous to get the message through audience filters, until the message is rendered completely absurd and useless.
The biggest change taking place in the media sphere is the gradual replacement of central programing with individually customized and interactive 'open source' forms, where a work of art or technology emerges like a medieval cathedral out of the contributions of a community of interested parties, rather than from an individual nexus of creativity. The effect of open source programming is likely to be the gradual dissolution of massively centralized superstructures in business, government, entertainment and religion. The fluid open source collective is much more able to respond accelerating complexity and unexpected circumstance than any centrally directed entity. For those with high investment in hierarchies of power and wealth the dissolution appears as moral decay. The vanishing of central authority triggers the reactionary political movements and heavy handed government sanctioned paranoia we are witnessing. When familiar patterns of security are threatened we revert to our animal nature and gather around the strong leader who can promise protection from unpredictable chaos. We align ourselves with the power of 'Father knows best' over the bewildering interrelated complexities of the natural world. In the long run we are likely to discover that the principle of survival outweighs that of power, and nature holds the ultimate cards in our ultimate evolution.
"It is rather fatuous to insist upon values if you are not prepared to understand how they got there and by what they are now being undermined. 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. People hope that if they scream loudly enough about "values" then others will mistake them for serious, sensitive souls who have higher and nobler perceptions than ordinary people. You might as well start screaming about a house burning down. To start announcing your own preferences for old values when your world is collapsing and everything is changing at a furious pitch - that is not the act of a serious person."
Politicians long ago caught on to the fact that the truth is less important to most people than the appearance of a consistent narrative. The advertising dollar of our present government far exceeds the budget of most large social programs. We tell stories of righteousness and terror to one another in order to support our collective purpose. At the same time that we speak of our moral superiority and common values we proceed to replace all sense of common identity and common labor with the hollow facade of mass consumption. While we pretend that our highest ideals are freedom and the pursuit of happiness we are unable to envision freedom as anything more than the 'right' to partake in a culture of mass conformity governed by those who run the marketing agencies. The primary enemy of civilization isn't terrorism as much as the contradiction between what we collectively profess to believe and the daily sleepwalking that governs our individual lives.
"The artist picks up the message of cultural and technical challenge decades before its transforming aspect occurs. He, then, builds models or Noah's arks for facing the change that is ahead."
We are in a new universe, where almost nothing is familiar. Everything is changed or changing; art, literature, commerce, war, all are different than what we've known. Those who cling to structures of power will find their reliability dissolving in an ocean of complexity. We are in a battle of power, between the past and the present. Only when we are fully awake can we catch a glimpse beyond the precipice and perceive the shape of the future. We have to find new ways of speaking and listening and not be afraid of losing what no longer serves.
Terrence McKenna used to talk about an "object at the end of time" that sends echoes of itself back through history. We experience these echoes as revelations, as glimpses of a world that appears totally new, if only for a moment. These are the moments that have always driven artists, philosophers and visionaries to risk everything they own and to travel outside of the circle, beyond the edges of the world we know. Some people live on the fringes with the lights of civilization at their back, the sound of lost highways muffled in the distant fog. Here we stand and wait, praying for the vision that sooner or later must come.
Marshall McLuhan quotes from the chapter "McLuhan Mosaic" in Marshall McLuhan: The Man and HIs Message, edited by George Sanderson and Frank MacDonald, Fulcrum, Inc., Golden Colorado, 1989.
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