Thoughts on the philosophy of Marshall McLuhan.......
Transcript:
https://app.podscribe.ai/episode/53072631Speaker 1 (0s): All right. I am hopeful where for all of you, a full week of sunshine who was serious of openings and start a full go up, the darkness can be punctuated with the beams of life. Wow.
Speaker 0 (34s): Well, you made it to the end of the week. No, what? I think, I think you deserve something special, something real. Nice. Thank you very much. So whatever it is, I want you to go get it for yourself. It's just go ahead. Just do it. If you feel like you deserve it, go ahead and get him, just do it. And if you feel like picking up something nice for me, Hey who am I to argue with you and your judgment and your ideas about rewarding MI for, you know, he is awesome podcast.
So who am I in to get in the way of that? I will know this. I love you are happier here. Happy. It's Friday I'm looking forward to a good weekend. I'm looking forward to reading some more of you guys' comments. I'm looking forward to reading some more of your ladies comments. I'm just thankful to be here. I wish I could give you a hug. Is that weird? So what are you thinking so far about mr.
Marshall McLuhan? I don't know about you, but I need a shovel because I'm digging it, but a bumper I'm loving it. It does that make me think of McDonald's. So this is getting this right back to where we started these little idiosyncrasies, these little, but I'm pumped, but I remember this one. What was the one, but I dunno by a million number on that show is Seinfeld.
He was like, because stanza, so you can piggyback these little audio oddities and you can piggyback these little means that are already out there. And just their, like a little virus that you put your own DNA into. Then you can use that successful virus to penetrate the minds of the people around you, get them to think things, get them to do things. And that's ex that's quite a bit about what we've been talking about with some of Marshall McLuhan's ideas.
In fact, that's part of the reason why we are in Marshall McLuhan's eyes devolving into a more archaic society. It's fascinating
Speaker 2 (3m 0s): To me cause we've covered Terence McKenna. We've covered Joseph Campbell and now we're covering Marshall McLuhan. And there was this
Speaker 3 (3m 11s): Odd thread,
Speaker 2 (3m 16s): This Ariadne thread to help us through the maze. If you know
Speaker 3 (3m 19s): It will
Speaker 2 (3m 22s): Do you know what? I think it was Terence McKenna who talked about an archaic revival about returning to some parts of the archaic returning ourselves to some systems have thought that may lead us out of this bind. And of course it was Joseph Campbell who spoke to us about the power of myth.
And here we have Marshall McLuhan forecasting, right. It kind of what turns McKinnon was talking about.
Speaker 3 (4m 3s): All right.
Speaker 2 (4m 6s): It's interesting to me too. Think about why Marshall McLuhan thought this and how he was able to predict this so long ago, and then being able to see
Speaker 3 (4m 19s): How so
Speaker 2 (4m 21s): Some of the social media companies and the internet companies there. I think there's a new documentary out on Netflix that talks about how social media is in fact changing our behavior. I forgot the name of it. However, it's pretty widespread right now. And is it talks a lot about what Marshall McLuhan was talking about now. So what do you say
Speaker 3 (4m 50s): We
Speaker 2 (4m 51s): Pick up where we left off and keep on trucking. So we were talking about the left and right hemispheres of the brain we left off with. I think the last sentence was the present electronic age in its in a escapable confrontation with simultaneity presents the first serious threat to the 2,500 year dominance of the left hemisphere.
There are a variety of factors which can give salience or mastery either to the Right simultaneous and acoustic hemisphere of the brain or to the left lineal and visual hemisphere, no matter how extreme the dominance of either hemisphere in a particular culture, there was always some degree of interplay between the hemispheres thanks to the Corpus callosum and the anterior and hippocampal comma sewers, that part of the neural cable network, which the hemispheres, even the Chinese with there are extreme cultivation of the right hemisphere, which invests every aspect of their lives, their language.
They are writing with artistic delicacy, exert, much left hemisphere bias and quality in their practicality and concern with moral wisdom, how ever their stress falls heavily on what Heisenberg calls the resonant interval or touch. It is a matter of the experience of time and space, a westerner, for example, arranges flours in space, the Chinese and the Japanese harmonized.
The space between the flours, the importance of this discontinuous space becomes clear in the following passage from the Chinese eye by Cheong ye indeed the use of space is one of the Chinese painter's most coveted secrets, one or the first thoughts in his head when he begins to plan his composition, almost every space in our pictures has a significance.
The onlooker may fill them up with his own imagined scenery or with feeling merely there was a Chinese poet of the song dynasty <inaudible> chin who wrote the sorrows of a parting and describe the seen as follows. One of the three parts spring seen to our sadness. And the other part is nothing but wind and rain.
The Chinese, in other words, allow the right hemisphere to direct the left. They use the I as an ear, creating the seemingly paradoxal situation that Tony Schwartz notes in the responsive cord are proposed the TV image in watching television, our eyes function like our ears. The experience have the right brain leading the left is by no means foreign to us.
Herbert Krugman performed brainwave studies comparing the response of subjects to print and television. One subject was reading a book as the TV came on. As soon as she looked up, her brainwaves slowed significantly
Speaker 4 (8m 35s): <inaudible>.
Speaker 2 (8m 40s): She was in a predominantly alpha state, relaxed, passive, unfocused, or brainwave response to the three different types of TV. Content was basically the same, even though she told Krugman, she liked one disliked another, and was born by a third as a result of a series of such experiments. Krugman argues that this essential alpha state is characteristic of how people respond to TV.
Any TV hearing, Mark, let me pause for a minute. How has this woman just reading a book? She looks up and in a matter of seconds, her brain wave response, it was slowed. Significantly thinks about that with just a few seconds, you are put into a relaxed, passive and unfocused
Speaker 3 (9m 44s): Position. Okay.
Speaker 2 (9m 45s): All right. Like what better way to have a message seek, seek into your thoughts or a better, what better way to program somebody then to have them be in this particular, almost vegetative slash meditative state, right?
Speaker 3 (10m 4s): You've got mail
Speaker 2 (10m 6s): Krugman remarked, the ability of respondent's to show hi, right. Brain response to even familiar logos they're right. Brain response to storeys even before the idea is content has been added to them, the predominantly right brain response to TV, and even perhaps too, what we call print advertising. This also just that in contrast to teaching the unique power of the electronic media is to shape the content of people's imagery.
And in that particular way, determine their behavior.
Speaker 3 (10m 43s): And there are views
Speaker 2 (10m 45s): Krugmans investigations where he met. He admitted initially undertaken to disprove the medium is the message, his quantitative result point to a massive And subliminal erosion have our culture through the right hemisphere, indoctrination by a TV in a wider sense. All electronic media as a new configuration or ground gives salients only to the right hemisphere. There is no way of quantifying the right hemisphere, which emphasizes intere and qualitative aspects of experience.
The current Speight of dyslexia and other learning disability difficulties. Some 90% of the victims are male may well be a direct result of TV and other electronic media pressuring us into returning to the right hemisphere. Dyslexia is, and it is an inability to adopt a single fixed point of view with respect to all letters and words, conversely, a consists of approaching letters and words from many points of view, simultaneously I E re brain fashion, without the assumption that is near one of you, it's your problem that filled so will problems with a left hemisphere alphabetic form.
Is there a direct relationship between soaring delinquency rates in the us and Canada and reading disability and the cubists as artists and the antennae of the race, detective the ship some 70 years ago and explore the emerging grammar of the right brain sensory modality. If literacy is to survive in the West or writing system will soon have to be recast and a mold congenial to the right hemisphere sensibilities in satisfactions.
It may be necessary for example, to make a transition from stick and ball penmanship, to italics from the Palmer method to a shortened form of calligraphy. In brief, every man, a Cubist, we have long been accustomed to using the interval between the wheel and the axle as an example, not only if today, but also have play without play, without that a figure ground interval they're is neither a wheel nor axle the space between the wheel and the axle, which defines both, is where the action is.
And this space is both audio and tactile. The Chinese, as we have said, use the interval between things as a primary means of getting in touch with situations. Nothing could be more expressive than this interval of the properties have the right hemisphere in contrast to the left for it to the left brain. The interval is a space which must be logically connected, filled, and bridged such is the dictate right of linear reality and visual order in contrast to the resonating interval of, or gap, excuse me, such as the dictator of linear reality and visual, or in contrast to the resonating interval or a gap of the simultaneous world of the right hemisphere in the book of T OCHA, Cora cocoon.
So explains the Japanese attitude to social relationships as a constant readjustment to our surroundings. This is the extreme contrast to the Western or a visual point of view, which assumes a fixed position from which to examine each situation and to assert one's preference, right? Hemisphere culture has no place for the private individual, just as the left hemisphere society, regards tribal groups as sinister and threatening EEG.
The yellow peril world war II soldiers and sailors use to refer to natives' in the South Pacific Suzuki. The great authority on Zen Buddhism describes Mugu as ecstasy with no sense of, I am doing it effortlessness. The observing self is eliminated. Amen loses himself. That is he sees is to be a spectator of his acts.
Suzuki says with the awakening of consciousness, the wheel is split into two Akhtar and observer conflict is inevitable for the actor. Mine is self wants to be free from the limitations of the observer self. Therefor in enlightenment, the disciple discovers that there is no observer self No. So entity as an unknown or knowable quantity, nothing remains, but the goal and the act that accomplishes it, the right hemisphere culture has a great affinity for the simultaneity of the age of electronic information as an Oakland Cora cocoon.
So explains the present is the moving Infiniti. The legitimate sphere of the relative relativity scene seeks adjustment adjustment is art. The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings. The right hemisphere culture naturally seeks to tune or reconfigure intervals rather than to connect situations.
And in relationships, the terrorists claimed that the comedy of life could be made more interesting. If everyone would preserve the Unity's to keep the proportion of things in King place to others, without losing one's own position was the secret of success in the mundane drama. We must know the whole play in order to properly act our parts, the conception of totality must never be lost.
And that of the individual, this Laos, this Lao sea illustrates by his favorite metaphor of the vacuum. He claimed that only in the vacuum lay the truly essential, the reality of a room for instance, was to be found and vacant space enclosed by the roof and walls, not in the roof and the walls themselves, the usefulness have a water pitcher dwelt, and the emptiness where water might be put not in the form of the pitcher or of the material of which it was made.
Vacuum is all potent because it is all containing in a vacuum alone. Motion becomes possible. One can see immediately how the concept of zero. It must have struck the West when it was first introduced through Africa to Europe in the middle ages, the Oriental idea suggested the possibility of play in mathematics and science. The absence of which tended to cripple the computation of the Romans in the Greeks cocoon.
So ad's in jujitsu, one Sikhs to draw out and exhausts the enemy's strength by non-resistance
Speaker 0 (18m 51s): Vacuum.
Speaker 2 (18m 53s): Well, conserving one's own strength for a victory in the final struggle in Western art, we admire the power of statement and the bounding line and design. Whereas the right hemisphere culture gives play to the opposite principle. Instead of statement, the stress is on the value of suggestions.
Speaker 0 (19m 12s): Good
Speaker 2 (19m 15s): And art. The importance of the same principle is illustrated by the value of suggestion in leaving something unsaid, the beholder is given a chance to complete the idea and thus a great masterpiece. Irresistibly rivets your attention until you seem to become actually a part of it. A vacuum is there for you to enter and fill up to the full measure of your aesthetic emotion.
Speaker 0 (19m 43s): This is up to date,
Speaker 2 (19m 45s): Same order as the preliterate Greek technique of my nieces discussed earlier yet some of our most perceptive Western writers, particularly in the early part of the century were so captured by the rigidity of a fixed point of view of object to you
Speaker 0 (20m 5s): That they failed
Speaker 2 (20m 7s): To give it equal time, too. The reconciliation of opposites. They did not understand that oral cultures regard Robotism as a desirable norm in contrast, wind ham Lewis in men, without art maintains that the role of the civilized artists is to prevent our becoming adjusted since to individualized Western society. The well-adjusted man is an impersonal radiant automation.
The term Robotism therefore, as we use it does not mean the mechanically rigid behavior of row sums universal robots.
Speaker 3 (20m 52s): Carol
Speaker 2 (20m 53s): Coppock used the word in his 1938 play. Rather Robotism in this context means the suppression of the conscious to the suppression of the conscious observer self or a conscience. So as to remove all fear, and circumspection all encumbrances to ideal performance, such as a man, as Suzuki says, becomes as the dead who have passed beyond the necessity of taking thought about the proper course of action, The dead are no longer returning on.
They are free. Therefore to say, I will live as one already dead means a Supreme release
Speaker 3 (21m 45s): From conflict.
Speaker 2 (21m 47s): The Japanese use living as one already dead two mean that one lives on a plane of expertness. It is the extinction of the left hemisphere detached and objective self. If the result resembles detachment, it is from pushing the right hemisphere to the state of total enlargement or enhancement to the point of reversal of a parent characteristics as a rude Benedict remarks. It is used in common, everyday exploration to encourage a boy who is worrying about his final exams from middle school.
A man will say, take them as one already dead and past them easily to encourage someone who is undertaking an important business deal with a friend will say B as one already dead. When a man goes through a great soul crisis and cannot see his way ahead, he quite commonly emerges with the resolve to live as one already dead. She continues. It points up vividly. The difference between Western and Eastern Psychology that when we speak of a consciousness of American, we mean a man who no longer feels the sense of sin, which should accompany wrongdoing.
However, in the Japanese sense, is there an equivalent phrase? He makes a man who was no longer ten's and hindered by the American means a bad man. The Japanese means a good man, a trained man, a man able to use his abilities to the utmost. He means a man who can perform the most difficult and devoted deeds of unselfishness. The great American sanctioned for good behavior is guilt.
A man who becomes a callous conscious can no longer feel. This has antisocial
Speaker 0 (23m 49s): The job. And he is culture diagram. The problem differently because according to their philosophy, man in his, in most Sol is good. If his impulse can be directly embodied in his deed, he acts virtuously and easily. Therefore he undergoes in expertness self-training to eliminate the self censorship of shame only then his, the sixth sense free of hindrance.
It is his Supreme release from self-consciousness and conflict. Do you guys see the difference? They're the paradox today is that the ground have the latest Western technologies is electronic and simultaneous, and thus is structurally right hemisphere and Oriental and oral in its nature and affects the reason for this state of affairs is that most Western technologies retain often quite unnecessarily like the computer, a mechanical one thing at a time basis, as a form of 19th century cultural lag.
This situation began with right the Telegraph over a century ago. Do you overwhelming pattern of procedures in the Western world remains lineal, sequential and connected in political and legal institutions also in education and commerce, but not in entertainment or art or a formula for a complete chaos. The ground have the Oriental right hemisphere world. Meantime is rapidly acquiring some of the hardware connectedness of the left hemisphere, a Western world before 1940, Japan began to compete in the arena of modern industrialism in textiles, shipbuilding, et cetera.
Today it rivals American competence in the making of semiconductors in small autos. China has recently embarked on a program of mass out of it for basic literacy, which will wrap it up. And her acquiring a completely left hemisphere, a cultural bias, plunging the Chinese into a new phase of individualized enterprise and aggression for which they are already developing. Once again, a ground of industrial hardware as one Canadian observer who had been there in the 1980 with a Canadian symphony with a Canadian symphony orchestra, says the Chinese are in the act of tearing their cultural skin off in order to protect themselves against Russian hardware.
I think it's important to note this book was written some time ago. So we have some of the references are right, David. You know what in it needs to be noted that left hemisphere man has very little power to observe or control environments or to see the patterns of change. The Oriental tradition on the other hand reflects a particular attunement to all facets of ground and immediate responsiveness to changes in ground configuration in the 1970s, the Japanese quickly perceived the developing public need for small cars on a world scale.
American car makers were mesmerized by the car as an object. The Japanese saw the car is ground as part of the service environment, which encompassed it oral peoples' in Asia or the third world are notoriously conservative about new technologies because of their sensitivity to the side effects involved the new ground. They bring into play and there, and there's are histories of rejections of innovations.
Westerners in contrast, tend to adopt anything that promises an immediate profit to ignore all side effects.
Speaker 5 (27m 52s): It is this sense that
Speaker 0 (27m 54s): Tivity to ground, plus a strong sense of decorum and a lack of private identity that enables the Eastern culture to change behavior instantly from water in a pattern to another, for example,
Speaker 5 (28m 12s): All right,
Speaker 0 (28m 13s): August, 1945, the Chu code of loyalty demanded of the Japanese people that they fight to the last man against the enemy. When the emperor changed the requirements of Chu by broadcasting Japan's capitulation, the Japanese out did themselves and expressing their cooperation with their victors. Occidentals cannot easily credit the ability of the Japanese to swing from one behavior to another. Without psychic cost, such extreme possibilities are not included in our experience yet in Japanese life.
The contradictions as they seem to us are as deeply based in their view of life as are uniformities RNRs, it is especially important for occidentals to recognise that the circles in to which the Japanese divided life do not include any circle of evil. This is not to say that the Japanese do not recognize bad behavior, but they do not see human life as the stage on which forces have good contend with the forces of evil.
And they see existence as a drama, which calls for careful balancing of the claims of one circle against another and have one course of procedure against another each circle and each course being in itself
Speaker 5 (29m 40s): Good
Speaker 0 (29m 42s): Instead of an abstract or objective uniform visual code of conduct applicable to all situations they're is rather a multisensory equilibrium or a balance of property's to be adjusted constantly. The ground must remain tuned. Robotism is instant. Readjustment angle is I'm. On the other hand, insures a rigidity of point of view, which is largely a consequence of linear and visual logic.
It is best characterized as promoting confrontation and fragmentation. Some of the chief elements in the illusion of objectivity one emphasizes the eye over the ear. The function of Robotism is the reverse. As a little Thomas, you have to say on the air, you are everywhere. The robotic man is capable of instant adjustment to any social situation without guilt.
Since he keeps his ear tuned to a collective, a moral identity, which we call the audience by the attentive crowd in audience is tuned grounds. That is something we should all try and understand a little bit more is the ability for some culture's to turn on the dime and other culture is to be a Slave to their linear end visual logic.
You just take a few minutes to think about this last little bit that we talked about. I think it accurately portrays what's happening in our world today. The adversarial system of the West, which would be the analytical left brain. It's so great in so many ways in it causes such critical thinking and it helps us solve a lot of issues and don't get me wrong.
I'm not saying I don't truly understand how either system can be correct, but I think that's the thing. That's the point of Marshall McLuhan. I was trying to make his, that we needed to be working with both hemispheres of the brain. If you just have the left analytical side, then your going to be promoting confrontation and fragmentation, which may be good in the short term, the confrontation, the battle of ideas, the best idea wins.
That sounds great. In theory, until it gets to a point where neither is mine side will give up. Both know my ideas better know mine is no mine is. And that is the point of fragmentation. And you can see it in the movements that we have today, whether it's occupy wall street. And granted, there may be in a lot of the big movements that tend to fragment. You often hear about how those groups we're purposely fragmented by provocateurs.
Do you know what you mean by that? Like someone in power will we'll get into the group and then subvert it. However, regardless if that's an organic process or if it is subversion, the process of fragmentation in the battle of ideas, it was cancerous, right? It takes away the ability for large groups to mobilize. And So that, that is the downfall of the left hemisphere.
It can only take, it is so far before the logical conclusion is fragmentation. However, if you're going to go strictly on the right side and you can eat easily changed from what is your kill off? All these people are going to fight until the end. We should get, remember the rape of Ning camp, Nan King. When the Japanese soldiers went into just slaughtered and raped pillaged, all the Chinese people are like that's OK. And then the very next day we are sorry, our bad.
What do you mean do do that? But they genuine. They genuinely means it in the West, who will look like if you don't mean that you just f*****g did that yesterday. You still hate all of those people. C we can't comprehend, right? The ability for a culture to turn on a dime and be like, okay, we think this is how we think that. But why do you think that? Because our grand Supreme, religious dictator leader said it, if you think about, you know, if you think about the emperor of Japan, is he really that different then the emperor of North Korea?
Not really, not in, not in the Western mind. You could say one is a better person in Leeds. His people better But to the Western mind. He was like, yeah, you're still under an emperor. One of them, if they're, if they are both from God, you know, whatever there, it was probably, it probably sounds pretty ignorant for me because I don't truly understand the culture. However, it does seem like a valid point from the left hemisphere.
They were both emperors. One of them likes to start off they're people. And one of them likes chrysanthemums that's very, that's silly. There's way more to it than that. Just trying to be funny. They're so please don't take that out unless you want to. Then I probably deserved it. Well, that's what I got for today. You guys it's, it's been a pleasure. It's been a pleasure. And an honor, it's been a pleasure on her hanging out with you guys today.
I hope you have a brilliant Friday. I hope you've got something planned for the weekend is gonna make your life. I am hopeful. My friends that all of you fall like rays of sunshine through a series of openings, inside a cave so that the darkness can be punctuated with the beams of light. I should write that down. That's really pretty. If you can do that many, 9% of the time, you will be successful in your relationships.
So what I did there or did the whole left brain, right? Brain metaphor, analytical thing, try it. It works. I love you have a great weekend.