What Marshall McLuhan Still Has to Teach Us: A Conversation with Grant Havers

Few academics enjoyed the degree of attention in the popular culture as the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan did in the late 1960s. A fixture on the television circuit of the period, McLuhan laid out his view that "the medium is the message" on television programs such as NBC Experiment in Television and was interviewed by hosts including Dick Cavett and David Frost. Although McLuhan's thinking was derided at times by fellow academics, his insights on media proved widely influential and shaped the thinking of those in the next generation of media theorists, including Neil Postman.

It was McLuhan who argued for what are now considered key tenets of media studies, such as the idea that one can only appreciate a particular period of technological change after it has passed or that electric media tend to move a society away from a contemplative and deliberative culture based on the primacy of the written word. The type of medium, McLuhan famously argued, is more fundamental than the content transmitted through said medium.

Although McLuhan's celebrity waned in the years preceding his death in 1980, in the age of artificial intelligence (AI) and TikTok, there is reason to believe that McLuhan's ideas about the transformative power of new types of media deserve re-examination. As such, in September of last year, Grant Havers, the chair of Trinity Western University's department of philosophy, released his book The Medium Is Still the Message: Marshall McLuhan for Our Time. In it, Havers provides key biographical insights about McLuhan from his upbringing to his conversion to Catholicism to his views on certain political matters of the day before exploring McLuhan's essential insights. New media, Havers explains through McLuhan, tend to have profound impacts on society—and not always for the better.

In the following conversation with Merion West editor-in-chief Erich J. Prince, Havers discusses fundamental concepts in McLuhan's work such as "the medium is the message," the impact of the televised 1960 presidential debate on politics, and the distinction between "hot" and "cool" media. Crucially, they discuss the potential impacts of artificial intelligence and other new technologies on society, including our increased dependence on them. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

A lot of people have heard this phrase “the medium is the message.” They may also be aware that there was this person called Marshall McLuhan. As you do in the book, can you offer an overview of who McLuhan was? He hailed from your country of Canada of course.

Marshall McLuhan’s full name was Herbert Marshall McLuhan. He was born in Edmonton, Alberta, in western Canada, in 1911, but he spent most of his formative years in Winnipeg, Manitoba, after his family moved there a few years later.

After completing his studies in literature and philosophy at the University of Manitoba, he went to Cambridge and deepened his study of English literature and philosophy. That is where he began to study the media. During the 1930s, while he was at Cambridge, he began to take an interest in media as an environment and media as an art form. His dissertation was on the Renaissance satirist Thomas Nashe, which reflected his growing interest not only in the study of language itself as a medium but also in Catholic thought. In the late 1930s, in fact, he converted to Catholicism.

After leaving Cambridge, he taught at several American universities, including the University of Wisconsin and Saint Louis University in Missouri. He became increasingly interested in advertising, magazines, and other forms of media that he believed had not received enough attention. In the late 1940s, he was hired by St. Michael’s College, a Catholic affiliate of the University of Toronto, where he spent the rest of his teaching career. There he further explored the relationship between media and practically everything else in society: politics, economics, culture, theology, and so on.

His first study of the media was The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, which came out in 1951. That was a scathing critique of the effects of advertising. McLuhan later disavowed that study, in a sense, because he thought it was too moralizing. He also believed that the rise of television had rendered its critique of magazine advertising obsolete.

By the late 1950s and early 1960s, he was starting to make a name for himself by studying television, which was an emerging medium at the time. By the mid-1960s, he had almost become a household name. While he was studying television and its effects, he was also appearing on television quite often in the mid- to late 1960s, and he became something like the intellectual version of a rock star. By the 1970s, the last decade of his life, the attention devoted to him was declining. He received far less attention than he had in the 1960s, but he continued writing books about media and giving talks. He also became involved in the pro-life movement in Canada at a time when there were moves to legalize abortion. By the late 1970s, his celebrity status had declined considerably. He died in Toronto on New Year’s Eve in 1980.

Do you have a sense of how he felt about his relative decline as a celebrity?

If you look at his private correspondence from the 1970s, I think he felt that his message about the media had not had quite the impact he wanted. In the 1960s, when he was a famous intellectual—perhaps the most famous intellectual on the planet at the time—he enjoyed his fame and fortune, but he also saw it as an opportunity to educate the public and shake people out of their somnambulism toward the media.

He tried to generate this awareness through catchphrases such as “the medium is the message,” as well as using probes, put-ons, and puns. He liked to use those [devices] to gain attention. But if you look at his correspondence from the 1970s, I think he was disappointed that his popular, pedagogical way of promoting awareness of the media had not really panned out.

He believed that most people still were not fully aware that the media were the real environments—the often invisible environments—that shaped our perception in all kinds of ways. Very few people understood that. I think he was disappointed that he had not generated as much awareness as he had hoped.

You mentioned his conversion to Catholicism. There was a piece in The New York Times in the past couple of days about the relatively high number of people converting to Catholicism today. In any case, do you have a sense of, first, what prompted his conversion and, second, the extent to which it influenced his thinking?

McLuhan grew up in a loosely Protestant context. His mother, who had a very deep intellectual influence on him, often explored different Protestant sects and even more exotic movements such as Christian Science. His religious background, then, was loosely Protestant.

As he deepened his study of literature and theology at Cambridge, however, he was exposed to a great deal of Catholic writing and scholarship. It deeply impressed him because of its richness, its understanding of natural law, and its understanding of what he called the books of nature and Scripture integrated together. He believed that the Catholic intellectual tradition, properly understood, was a very strong foundation for understanding creation and how we need to take responsibility for creation. That was one of the recurrent themes of his thought. His particular focus was technology, a form of creation that he studied throughout most of his life.

His view, which I think reflects his indebtedness to Catholic theology, was that while God blesses us with the ability to create things that can be quite good, we also need to take responsibility for what we create. We need to understand the effects, including the unintended effects, of our creations. Unfortunately, that does not happen very often.

For McLuhan as a Catholic, it was important to understand that creating things is among the most natural things in the world for human beings. But understanding what we create, as any parent well knows, is a different task. There is an ethical imperative—a Christian imperative—at work in a subtle way in McLuhan’s thought. McLuhan also believed that we can end up idolizing the things we create. We can create things that seem to have godlike power, but that is not the way we should understand them as such. We need to take control of what we create rather than surrendering control to technologies that become idols. So there is a very Christian or biblical theme that runs throughout all his studies of media.

Throughout your book, you discuss McLuhan’s various works. I know you mentioned that he later came to disavow The Mechanical Bride because of its moralizing. Could you talk about how works such as The Mechanical Bride, The Gutenberg Galaxy, and War and Peace in the Global Village differ from one another, or how his central arguments evolved over the course of his career?

The Mechanical Bride, in his own words, reflected a kind of Rousseauian view: that the civilization we have created is bad, and we need to return to a kind of original nature that has, hopefully, remained unspoiled by technology in the form of mass advertising and consumerism.

For McLuhan, moralizing very quickly becomes scolding. I think he realized that you can't scold people into becoming more aware of what is going on. In retrospect, that is how he viewed The Mechanical Bride. Denouncing a medium on moral grounds is not the best way to reach people because most people do not want to be scolded or denounced for being ignorant in some sense. After The Mechanical Bride, he became more subtle and perhaps more satirical in his treatment of media. Again, he used probes, puns, and put-ons—like “the medium is the message”—to grab attention.

The Gutenberg Galaxy, of course, is a study of the effects of the print revolution that began with Gutenberg’s printing press. But it is written in a very aphoristic way. It is not a conventionally composed scholarly work; it is an aphoristic work. It contains long quotations from different authors and some commentary, but it has no obvious linear design or purpose. It tends to jump from one topic to another, and that design was intentional on McLuhan's part.

He thought that writing dry textbooks was not the way to reach people in the television age, largely because television had rendered print obsolete—not extinct, but obsolete. So if one were to write books, one would have to capture people’s attention through aphorisms or, later, through pictures and photographs. Some of his more popular books, such as The Medium Is the Massage, used that style of presentation.

So McLuhan very much wanted to provoke the attention of powerful people, as well as less powerful people. He rarely refused an invitation to speak to a corporate audience, in the hope that people who used technology on a regular basis, as corporations did, might become more aware of the side effects—often the unintended side effects—of new media. But one of his most sobering conclusions during the 1960s was that people generally do not understand the effects of a medium, especially a new medium, until it's too late. He called that “rear-view mirror thinking.” We're very good at understanding the past once we have transcended a previous historical period, but by then it is largely too late.

By the 1960s, it was becoming apparent that television had transformed all kinds of aspects of life, but, by then, it was already too late to put the genie back in the bottle. According to McLuhan, that is a recurring pattern in the history of technology and media. We appreciate a medium—such as the written word—only after it has become obsolete and its hegemony has been displaced by a new medium. His focus on unintended effects, and his hope that they might be understood before it was too late, became an important theme of his mature study of media.

You have alluded to the celebrity McLuhan experienced during his lifetime, but, as you point out in the book, not everyone was enamored with his thoughts. You cite Paul Johnson calling McLuhan “an enemy of society” and deriding his work as “pseudoscience.” Carroll Quigley similarly wrote that McLuhan “pounds away at these misconceptions.” What were his critics driving at? What did they least appreciate about McLuhan’s work that led them to describe it as "pseudoscience"?

First of all, I think it was jealousy. I think it was as primal as that. Most academics at the time knew McLuhan only from television and probably had not read a single word of his work. Many were jealous of the attention he was receiving.

There were other reasons. One was that McLuhan urged his colleagues and peers in the academy to think in interdisciplinary terms. That would not be controversial today. Most scholars in the humanities now understand, or have understood for the past two or three decades, that one should build bridges between one’s discipline and others. In McLuhan’s time, however, and particularly in the 1960s, it was a very unconventional idea that philosophers, for example, should pay attention to literature or other disciplines. That did rankle many of his colleagues, some of whom thought specialization was the only way to approach one’s field. McLuhan believed that specialization was simply a process of learning more and more about less and less.

This animus toward interdisciplinarity put people in a very poor position to understand the media because media as an environment affected everything. Media affected every discipline and every aspect of life, so an interdisciplinary response drawing on science, politics, literature, philosophy, and practically every discipline imaginable would, therefore, be the most effective one.

I think one other reason was that McLuhan urged his colleagues to study popular culture. That probably would not be controversial today, but it was controversial in the late 1950s and early 1960s because many scholars—probably most—thought that popular culture was beneath them.

I remember that, not very long ago, when one university offered a course on Seinfeld, there were considerable objections from traditionalists in the academy who thought that studying a sitcom was inappropriate or that nothing could be learned from it.

There is still some resistance to that, but McLuhan was the kind of academic who could refer to Kierkegaard in one sentence and Batman in the next without missing a beat. He knew, as most of his colleagues did not, that the real educator of the young was no longer books; it was television. One might not like television, but one had to pay attention to it and take account of its effects on the educational system and beyond.

Many critics, including Carroll Quigley, thought that McLuhan was celebrating these changes. That was not his intent. He often said that, "If someone tells you your house is on fire, that does not mean the person is an arsonist." In other words, "Don't shoot the messenger." When McLuhan devoted so much attention to the often invisible effects of media, he was not celebrating them. He was saying that we have to pay attention to the transformative forces that are changing what we do and why we think the way we do.

One association that often appears in discussions of Marshall McLuhan is with Neil Postman, who, as I understand from your book, was a student of McLuhan’s. Could you discuss Postman and the degree to which he was influenced by McLuhan, as well as where he differed from him? Looking back, we sometimes paint the past with a broad brush and lump these two thinkers together: “the medium is the message,” Amusing Ourselves to Death, The Disappearance of Childhood. But what are the principal similarities and differences between them?

Postman was deeply indebted to McLuhan, and they were friends as far as I know. Postman lamented that McLuhan’s celebrity status probably cost him the serious attention McLuhan deserved from the academy. But, of course, that changed after McLuhan’s death with the rise of the Internet, so Postman certainly welcomed the serious revival of interest in McLuhan’s thought during the 1990s. But Postman was definitely influenced by McLuhan. You mentioned his book The Disappearance of Childhood, in which Postman argues that without the written word—and, of course, without print media—we wouldn't really have a stable concept of childhood. With the rise of writing and mass literature, it became possible to think about the educational development of a child eventually becoming an adult, largely through literacy and education based on the written word.

That is a very McLuhanesque lesson because Gutenberg did not build a printing press in his fifteenth-century workshop for the purpose of affecting education. That was an unintended effect of the printing press. But without the press and the rise of mass literature and mass education, it would be difficult to distinguish between what a child is capable of and what an adult is capable of. So the rise of literacy essentially enabled the rise of mass education.

But then Postman warned that the rise of electric media such as television was eroding the distinction between child and adult. When it comes to writing, a child, of course, has to learn how to write and has to go through a process of education. But, when it comes to television, a child does not really have to learn anything in order to absorb the messages of television. The same could be said of radio.

To put it simply, print media presupposed the rise of literacy and education. Electric media—and now digital media—do not. They do not require literacy. That is why Postman later argued in his book on television, Amusing Ourselves to Death, that transplanting the content of print onto a television show is, in a sense, pointless. He called that “edutainment.” In his view, mixing the content of one medium with the form of another does not necessarily lead to any kind of improvement of one’s intellect. Reading the Bible on television, for example, will not have the same impact as reading the Bible in one’s private study. Television transforms the content of the Bible. So I would see that as a clear example of the extent to which Postman was indebted to McLuhan.

I suppose one difference, though, is that Postman was less reluctant to apply moral judgments to media such as television. I think there are some moral judgments in McLuhan’s work after The Mechanical Bride, but they are subtler and more nuanced. Postman was not reluctant to condemn television for its effects on a child’s intellect. God knows what he would say about digital media today!

Relatedly, McLuhan notably writes, “The man of print culture is necessarily a self-educated man.” Conversely, he writes, “Instant access to information coincides with people becoming instant too in their response of pity or fury, when they must share the common extension of the central nervous system with the whole of mankind.” How does the movement away from print culture imperil the autodidact or the individual reasoning independently toward the conclusions he adopts?

I think of this because, as I mentioned in my essay on Ben Sasse that you read, Sasse has argued that when we receive all our information from TikTok rather than reading, say, The Federalist Papers, that shift is potentially at odds with the way a small-r republic was designed: that it was designed for the man of print media.

McLuhan associated the literate mind, or the print mind, with a private identity. What he meant was that when you are reading—learning how to read, or reading in a serious way—you have to hide yourself away from the rest of the world. I mean I certainly do. I can't read in public, at least not well.

Reading is a private process, so McLuhan believed that reading culture, or literate culture, gave rise to what we might now call a bourgeois, individualistic period in history, in which people thought of themselves as individuals because they had a private identity based on the very private experience of reading. By reading, I mean reading in a serious way. For McLuhan, there is a definite relationship between having a private identity detached from the world, on the one hand, and an identity deeply involved with the world, on the other. The latter is what the electric media of the global village—a term he popularized—enable. Electric and digital media definitely discourage a private identity.

Can you explain what McLuhan meant by the “global village”? It is a term I have heard frequently. One of my first writing jobs was at a media-industry publication called MediaVillage, founded by someone who was very interested in the thought of both McLuhan and Postman. To avoid any misinterpretation, what exactly did McLuhan mean when he used the phrase “global village”?

McLuhan popularized the term. I think the term, or a version of it, was originally coined by Wyndham Lewis, with whom McLuhan had a long-standing friendship. Lewis was a controversial figure in his own right.

McLuhan believed that electric media, especially television, brought into being the global village, in which the whole planet becomes a village united by technology. And it is a village because everyone is involved in everyone else’s business. Today we would associate that with twenty-four-hour news: Anything that happens in the world is immediately transmitted to our living rooms. There is involvement, and involvement is the opposite of the detachment, on which the literate or print mind is based. There is nothing detached about the global village. You are in it whether you like it or not, and you know what is going on in the village.

That does not mean peace and harmony result from the global village. In fact, McLuhan believed it was full of conflict and violence. Terrorists who want attention can easily get it because of the technology of the global village. Before the global village, one could say, terrorists were nobodies whom most people had never heard of. Thanks first to television and now to digital media, a terrorist can become the center of attention, at least for a moment.

That kind of involvement may sound informative, but for McLuhan involvement is not necessarily a good thing. At some point, you have to detach yourself from the media in order to make sense of the media. Involvement is not the same as study. He liked to use the fish-in-water analogy: We don't know who discovered water, but we're fairly certain it was not a fish. This is because the fish is so immersed in its environment that it does not even realize how powerful that environment is. We may think we’re aware of how the environment is affecting us, but usually people who are intensely involved in a medium are not aware of it because it requires a certain amount of detachment, which is hard to do because the involving nature of the global village keeps pulling us in. McLuhan once said, "We've all become spies like James Bond. We can all spy on each other thanks to electric technologies that provide instantaneous information." That may sound very informative, but that kind of involvement counters the kind of intellectual detachment that the print revolution made possible.

You mentioned McLuhan’s relationship with Wyndham Lewis. In your book, you also describe a 1953 exchange of letters between McLuhan and Eric Voegelin regarding the resurgence of gnosticism. Could you discuss that exchange, as well as where those two men’s ideas might overlap? More broadly, where did other major intellectual figures of the time find common ground with what McLuhan was trying to get across?

McLuhan and Voegelin shared a deep interest in gnosticism and even worried about its rise within academia. It is interesting that McLuhan also thought Hollywood had certain gnostic tendencies because, in very broad terms, gnosticism, which has very ancient roots, teaches two things: One, that the world is deeply flawed and even impure; and two, as a result of point one, the world must be radically reinvented.

It is, therefore, not surprising that both McLuhan and Voegelin associated gnosticism with magical thinking—the belief that if you do not like the reality in which you find yourself, you can reinvent it. Electric media, and digital media even more so, foster this tendency or mentality, whether people are aware of it or not. The idea that one can replace an inferior reality with a superior one by using the supposedly godlike power electric and digital media give to us was, I think, a deep worry for McLuhan. And that overlapped with his interest in gnosticism and his correspondence with Voegelin.

Can you speak to this idea that McLuhan believed that Adolf Hitler was distinctly a product of the radio medium?

McLuhan called Hitler a radio man but also a tribal man. And I think the evidence for that is on the side of McLuhan. I point out in the book that it's safe to assume that more people heard Hitler on the radio than read his autobiography Mein Kampf.

And what was curious about Hitler's use of the radio, which was very effective according to McLuhan, was that Hitler reproduced the Orson Welles effect for real. So you'll know that Orson Welles was a narrator of the famous War of the Worlds broadcast that happened, I think around 1938, and it was so realistic, the narration of Orson Welles, that people thought the Martians really were landing.

In the case of Hitler, of course, the effects were far more dramatic and violent and dangerous because Hitler understood the haunting power of radio that involves people simply listening to a communicator that almost engages in a kind of magical usage of speech, which doesn't require any real verification from the listener. To put that another way, radio doesn't require literacy. One can reach people through radio who have never read a book in their lives. For that reason, McLuhan described radio as a "hot medium" which provides a lot of content and, at the same time, doesn't require the listener to fill in any of the message that the speaker is communicating. So, radio gives enormous power to an effective speaker to say all kinds of things that—that an illiterate audience, I should say, easily lap up.

Interestingly, as you point out in the book though, when it came to the 1960 presidential debate, the people who were listening to the radio thought Nixon won, and the people who were watching television thought Kennedy won the debate.

That's right. And that was another illustration of McLuhan’s view that we understand the effects of a new medium only when it is too late. So, it became apparent during the 1960 presidential election debates that television had changed things, that in fact the image of Kennedy on television was actually relevant to political success. Even though radio was still important in 1960, and, as you said, the listeners on radio thought Nixon's answers were more substantial than those of Kennedy, the fact that television has an inherent tendency to reward image, a charismatic image, was understood by 1960. But, by that point, it was hard to reverse the growing effect or hegemony of television.

I'm glad you mentioned that because that brings me to my final question proper, which brings up this key idea that "Human beings do not make this effort to understand new media until it's too late." What mistakes are we currently making in terms of failing to appreciate the effects of artificial intelligence?

I think what would not surprise McLuhan if he were alive today is that there are now all these warnings about the effects of AI that should have been anticipated from the beginning of AI. As you know, science fiction writers have been warning about AI for generations now.

This would be a classic example to McLuhan of how even people who create a technology do not fully understand its effects until it's too late. We do have people in Silicon Valley who are darkly predicting that the AI revolution may lead to a post-human or even anti-human world, in which human intelligence is surpassed by AI. I don't think McLuhan believed that the computer could ever replace human intelligence. Of course, computers in the 1960s were six feet tall and much larger than what we would consider computers today.

But McLuhan would definitely point to the tendency of even very powerful people, people in politics or in business, who are only starting to realize the side effects of AI now. And even then, they're not paying much attention to those effects because of the rush-to-market mentality. Of course, McLuhan, like Harold Innis, a famous influence on his thought, believed that electric media are very space-oriented; they operate according to speed. They want to conquer barriers very quickly, and they want to connect the world very quickly, hence the global village.

AI does that in spades, but the faster its effects, or the faster the process of transformation, the more difficult it is to do something about the side effects along the way. I was just reading that more schools are banning cell phones and screens from the classroom, which is not a bad idea. Maybe that will even restore literacy, we'll see. But this is ten years or fifteen years after these technologies were introduced. So many children have already become habituated to screen time. It's very hard to wean them off of that long after the effects of screen time have become entrenched.

When I was more of a full-time political reporter, it was very common to hear that when it came to legislatures regulating technology, they were always said to be about a decade behind.

Right.

In closing, I'll turn the floor over to you if there's anything you would like to add about the enduring relevance of Marshall McLuhan's thoughts to our current moment in time.

Even though McLuhan didn't pin his hopes on whether the political process would address the most serious side effects of a new medium, in a political sense, McLuhan was a conservative. I don't mean that in a partisan sense. Despite the popular misconception that he was some kind of progressivist or counterculture warrior who was celebrating every new medium, he understood himself to be a conservative, and that's consistent with his conservative Catholic faith. He opposed Vatican II quite rigorously because he believed that, in fact, tradition will make a comeback. The last thing the church should do is to get rid of tradition, as Vatican II tried to do to some extent. In fact, people who are seeking an identity need tradition now more than ever.

McLuhan could be subtle in terms of conveying what his political thoughts were. He wanted to reach as many people as possible—not just conservatives. At the same time, he did believe that literate civilization or civilization of print gave us traditions that are worth preserving. It is difficult to preserve them, though, because our political and economic systems simply want to advance technological change, now in the form of AI, without taking into account the effects of all that on tradition.

I think McLuhan held out the cautious hope that perhaps many people would experience such a degree of saturation that they would rediscover tradition and literacy and the great books. I think he cautiously hoped for that, but, at the same time, he warned that there's nothing really conservative about technology per se. It always transforms what it touches.