Against the “Reversal of History” Thesis
More than 60 years ago, Marshall McLuhan detailed the rise of what he called the “global village,” summarized by Edward Sapir as:
the multiplication of far-reaching techniques of communication…[increasing] the sheer radius of communication, so that for certain purposes the whole civilized world is made the psychological equivalent of a primitive tribe.
Marshall McLuhan
Our planet’s relatively newfound global interconnectedness has been of monumental importance for advancing democratic and liberal movements in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But some authors have argued that global telecommunications has also had the negative consequence of “reversing history,” signifing a new relationship between what can be called a “meta-narrative of history” and a “universal human history.” In a “meta-narrative of history,” one refers to various narratives and interpretive schema through which the events of history are variously measured and evaluated relative to certain value judgments. A “universal human history” is an understanding of history which posits that the entirety of human thought, spanning across different cultures and different time periods, can be reconciled to one singular narrative. In placing greater emphasis on the need for a plurality of meta-narratives that are particular to certain groups, global interconnectedness reintroduces a stance that shuns social progressivism and rejects an account of a universal human history. In what follows, I propose that this conclusion—that global interconnectedness leads to an end of universal human history—is too hastily drawn. Instead of a coexisting as a true plurality of views, it is rather the case that the multiplicity of interpretive methods for understanding history today are still unified under one universal, political reality: the desire to avoid economic and social collapse.
Currently, the phrase “global village” enjoys such widespread use that even those unfamiliar with the history of the term know that it refers to a sense of global interconnectedness which has arisen in the past few decades. Typically, the actors identified as fostering this sense of interconnectedness are synonymous with those responsible for globalization more generally: multinational corporations, international legislative bodies, and so forth. Yet according to McLuhan’s account, the “global village” is not a reality which emerged according to the conscious forethought of any one person or group of people. Rather, it is a byproduct of a certain kind of technological thinking which extends back to at least the invention of the printing press. Prior to Gutenberg’s invention, the average peasant did not have the educational means to challenge the religious and political mythos of his time. Once the printing press made mass literacy possible, this same peasant gained a means of separating himself from his contemporaries. “The interiorization of the technology of the phonetic alphabet,” explains McLuhan, “translates man from the magical world of the ear to the neutral visual world.” While reading, there is no need to rely on the interpretive schema of venerable tradition to make sense of the text. Instead, one is invited to render their own judgment about a work through critical, informed engagement with it, and to likewise shun axiological populism, superstition, and authoritative declaration.
McLuhan’s account of the printing press seems at first to offer a narrative of individualism. However, he argues that the progression of media technologies over history have ultimately lead to the reemergence of collectivism. This is especially true in the “electric age,” when “the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history.” “Our extended faculties and senses,” writes McLuhan, “now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious.” Early printing technologies divided the realm of experience into segments fit for private reflection. As the causal agent of bourgeois individualism, it is therefore surprising to observe that the epistemological standards proposed by mass literacy also ultimately brought about the prioritization of unity over individuality as well as a plurality of living over a homogenized account of human nature. New forms of media, while developed and introduced to facilitate specialized functions or private consumption of information, have in fact induced a qualitative change in our value judgments that at first glance resembles a “tribal” preference for emotion, mythos, and anti-intellectualism.
McLuhan provides an example of this thesis in The Mechanical Bride, where he cites a story of a WWII soldier who died beholding a bullet-ridden picture of the pin-up girl archetype, a story that, when first printed, was immediately followed by an advertisement for the publisher. McLuhan asks:
What is more moving than to think that this soldier fought and died for the fantasies that he had woven around the image of Betty Grable? It would be hard to know where to begin to peel back the layers of insentience… implied in such an ad. And what would be found as one stripped away those layers, each marked with the pattern of sex, technology, and death? Exactly nothing. One is left staring into a vacuum…
McLuhan’s goal here is to draw his readers’ attention to how prolonged exposure to an ever-shifting array of information increasingly diminishes the effectiveness of this information in changing our preestablished worldviews. A culture ruled by a global telecommunications medium does not, like literature, invite introspective meditation on its contents. Instead, the medium of digital culture intrinsically rejects the meaningfulness of its content so that the form of the content—its arrangement, its political orientation, its marketability—can have a greater appeal and thereby solicit more “engagement.”
Within a mass telecommunications culture, the psychological need for stability of ideological principles frequently clashes with a flow of data that updates too quickly and too frequently for it to offer either stability or substantive challenge to these worldviews. Indeed, if being an informed citizen or a good employee requires one to pay ever greater attention to an increasing number of global concerns, then the perpetual contradiction of information against itself will compel him to rely on his own ill-informed judgment about a proposition’s soundness. This increased reliance on personal judgment, when fashioned together with Man’s social nature, tribalizes his social relations, as he will tend only to associate with those who share his worldview. The inevitable establishment and entrenchment of these echo chambers leads to that inability to reach a political or moral consensus such as we have seen in recent Western politics. The end result is a technologically induced tribalism.
McLuhan sees our modern, technologically induced condition as a product of tensions between individualism and tribalism. Grant Havers offers an interpretation of McLuhan’s work that frames the “re-tribalization” of the world as the completion of a historical narrative stretching from tribalist ancient history, moving through bourgeois individualism and detribalization, and finally reversing into an era of “alliances of individuals” which prioritizes unity over individuality. According to Havers, this reversal occurs at the instant that technological change, born from individualistic values, compels a “break boundary” within these values. Such a break can be seen in the epistemic prioritization of sentiment over a neutral presentation of facts as well as digital culture’s intrinsic rejection of the meaningfulness of its content.
This, as McLuhan states elsewhere, is the modern propensity for “mythic” living; because information is presented as a consumable and customizable product, the individual is allowed to enter into a relationship with said information that is utterly detached from the socially homogenizing effect that it would otherwise have on them. The social application of this conclusion negates the possibility of values as “held in common” and that exist over and above the subjective tastes of various political actors. In this sense, values are no longer held in common by an alliance of individuals, except by communities formed through the conscious choice of individual members. Thus, despite the presence of what McLuhan describes in Understanding Media as a “consensus of technology and experience that raises our communal lives to the level of a world-wide consensus” in the form of the Internet, the cohesive and all-important value of tribal loyalty remains absent within this global village. With information unable to serve as a tool for the fashioning or refashioning of identities, its ability to induce social cohesion is also absent.
The consequences that this lack of loyalty has for the “reversal of history” thesis are profound. When information is presented as primarily fit for personal consumption, its contextual appropriateness is excluded and left to be proverbially “filled in” by the person consuming it. As a result, the once authoritative judgment of history regarding the coherence of a certain view has been replaced by the judgment of the individual. Owing to the affirmation of the subjective relevance of any historical data relative to a preformatted historical narrative, the authoritative force of history in determining the contextual appropriateness of a particular set of values is diminishing.
In spite of this, we observe one such political and social homogeneity today. While deep disagreement characterizes the modern condition, it remains true that certain economic and political pressures coerce our participation in the preservation of the current relations between the public, the government, financial institutions, and other sociopolitical actors. Despite such deeply felt skepticism towards one’s neighbors, who may have different tribal loyalties, economic necessity compels an uneasy peace so as to ensure basic needs are met. Wariness of the alternative, any alternative, stems from the desire to not disrupt one’s own sense of security.
It is therefore understood and even accepted that we must “get along” with others if for no other reason than to keep the lines of production running and a constant stream of goods flowing. Cynicism and pessimism about these intractable differences, about the possibility of meaningful ideological change, thus coalesce into an actual political reality: namely, a defeatist brand of conservatism regarding the status quo. We must admit the impossibility of the kind of ideological change proper to history precisely at the same time we insist on the necessity of economic and political continuity. What is assented to within this outlook is an ideological commitment preserving the current power structures for fear of catastrophic results should a proposed overhaul go awry. The presence of such pressures in turn suggests a passive agreement to at least one political insight: the avoidance of collapse. Fear, therefore, serves as a master principle in the digital age among the majority of the voting public, and fear’s pervasiveness as a political reality reveals a sociopolitical homogeneity that should be theoretically impossible in a fully re-tribalized society. History has not reversed course. At least, not yet. But should we fail to recover at least some substantive form of historical and political consensus, should fear give way to communal apathy, its reversal may be forthcoming.
Éamon Brennan is a third year PhD student at McMaster University where he specializes in philosophy of technology