When we think of our advanced information technology, we immediately marvel at how advanced our science and engineering have become and how far we have progressed.
But the pioneering media scholar Marshall McLuhan, writing mainly about electronic media such as television but anticipating what would be soon coming, argued that this technology was actually making us more primitive. With its immediacy, dependence on visual images, emotionalism, and undercutting of rationalism, electronic information media undermines the ways of thinking shaped by the earlier technology of the printing press.
Reading a book, McLuhan pointed out, requires a sustained attention span that promotes rational analysis. Reading is a private activity, so it promotes individualism and personal liberty. At the same time, since a printing press enables books to be mass produced, it was a catalyst for universal education, breaking down the medieval hierarchies and leading eventually to democratic forms of government. The printing press gave us the Reformation, science, liberal democracy, and, in short, the modern world.
The new technology, by contrast, takes us back to the preliterate days. Information is conveyed in ways closer to the oral tradition–speaking, hearing, relating to others–than to the era of printing. The new technology is emotional, communal, immediate, and non-reflective. McLuhan said that the new information environment creates a “global village,” in which the world is smaller and people are more interconnected, but also a small town environment of conformity, peer pressure, and immediate sensation.
McLuhan died in 1980, three years before the official birth of the internet and 24 years before Facebook came into existence.
Most of us cultural critics decry what this technology is doing to us, and we yearn to find a way to bring back at least elements of print-oriented thinking.
British author Mary Harrington, though, a conservative, kind of likes it. She has written in the mostly-Catholic journal First Things an article entitled The King and the Swarm.
The end of print culture is already upon us. With its end, we are already witnessing the disintegration of modernity’s load-bearing foundations, including the valorization of facts and objectivity, and a conception of the individual subject as a universal model of human personhood. This reality-picture, which crystallized in the seventeenth century, is already well on its way to dissolution in the solvent bath of digital media, a process radically accelerated by the spread of AI.
It is perhaps too neat to say the transition from print to digital forces us to replay the seventeenth century again, but in reverse. And yet much that is happening today makes sense, seen in those terms. And perhaps its most momentous effect is to undermine the cultural norms and habits of thought that form the bedrock of modern liberal democracy.
She is among those conservatives who believe dissolving liberal democracy is a good thing. By going back to a pre-modern global village–before the Reformation and the Enlightenment–we could repair our culture and our alienated minds.
This indeed “makes sense” of “much that is happening today.” Spending Thanksgiving with family in Houston, we went to the Renaissance Festival. I enjoyed the jousting, jesters, and juggling, but I was astonished to see that not only the cast but most of the visitors came dressed like knights, fairies, fair damsels, elves, witches, and even a few monks. This new medievalism may help account for the new popularity of Catholicism, the Latin Mass, and why First Things published Harrington’s article.
Harrington does not draw away from the political implications of this neo-medieval overturning of liberal democracy:
Of all possible alternative modes of governance, the one that today carries the most potent cultural charge still lurks, mostly shadowed, at the fringes of the contemporary political imaginary. It is not deemed legitimate among respectable people, in respectable countries. And no wonder: It is the political form whose abolition forms the origin story of Whig history as such. It was the most common mode of governance across the West in premodern times, this political form that now seems, at least to many of today’s extremely online young radicals, to call seductively not from the deep past but rather from the future: the king.
I don’t mean to be too critical of Harrington, whose writings I have often found beneficial. She is British, so she actually has a king. She describes herself as a “a mildly heretical Anglican” who often writes for Catholic publications, so I understand her aversion to the Reformation.
To her credit, she recognizes that most of today’s postmodernists, while being post-print, are far from recognizing the objective doctrines and the hierarchical structure of the Middle Ages:
As this has grown increasingly difficult to deny, a bitter struggle has erupted over how best to shape the post-print (which is to say post-liberal, post-democratic) political order. To date, the incumbency advantage has rested with those seeking to continue print-era democratic desiderata, within a body politic now predominantly formed by and for digital media consumption. This “swarm” model frames its program as radically democratic, and as surfacing organically from the aggregate desires of the people. In practice it withdraws political agency from that people to an expert class of purportedly neutral functionaries. And the program such functionaries implement is often unpopular, its structures viewed as illegitimate by the very people it purports to represent. Its unpopularity is due not to a rupture with democratic principles so much as to continuity with these principles, and particularly with the democratic presumption of a somewhat agonistic relation between rulers and demos.
To be ruled by a king, though, is to acknowledge authority, become an organic part of a community, and feel a “friendship” between the ruler and the ruled. This would be far better than the postmodern relativism and division that we have today.
Let me propose an alternative explanation. Postmodernism does indeed make us more primitive. But the Middle Ages were far from primitive. The theologians of that time were highly literate and rationalistic to a fault. The global village created by electronic media does not take us back to the Middle Ages; rather, it takes us back before those times, to barbarism.
The Dark Ages after the Fall of Rome with its classical civilization was a time of tribalism, with the contending tribes waging war against each other. (Sound familiar?) It was a time of vandalism, a term that comes from the name of one of those tribes famous for destroying libraries. (Sound familiar?) It was a time of diversity, to be sure, when each little tribe asserted its own religion and its own truth. (Sound familiar?) It was a time when small-time tribal chieftains called kings tried to seize power, though few outside the tribe recognized their authority. (Sound familiar?)
The Middle Ages brought us out of the Dark Ages, for the most part. Objective truth, objective morality, and objective authority were taken for granted. To be sure, most medieval folk were not literate, were filled with superstition, and were horribly oppressed by their rulers. But with the help of information technology–the printing press–that would change.
C. S. Lewis in his role as a major literary scholar stressed the continuity between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. I think he is right. And the trajectory of people moving from postmodernism to Catholicism and other sacramental churches (such as Lutheranism) is progress to something less digital and more humane. As far as kings go, I can’t think of many who were as “friendly” to their subjects as Harrington calls for. And there was no good way to replace a bad king, as most of them were. Being able to vote them out of office was a better way to ensure friendly politicians.
Photo: A Medieval Party by RandomDan (talk) – I created this work entirely by myself., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19708203
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