Alan Saunders: Since the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan famously avoided taking what he called a 'moralistic' stance on the goodness or badness of electronic media. But close readers of his major writings are in for a surprise. What emerges is distinctly conservative: tribalistic, stringently moralistic and opposed to the liberal, individualist age of modernity. And it's got something to do with the agrarian American South, the states of the old Confederacy.

So this week, The Philosopher's Zone's contribution to the McLuhan project is an investigation into McLuhan the right-wing postmodernist.

Our guest is Grant Havers, Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Trinity Western University in Canada and the author of an essay on the right-wing postmodernism of Marshall McLuhan. He joins us now from Vancouver. Grant, welcome to The Philosopher's Zone.

Grant Havers: Thanks for having me.

Alan Saunders: To begin with, how important do you think McLuhan is today?

Grant Havers: I think he's still very important, even though he died in 1980. His influence is still very strong within the study of media and communications. In fact he practically invented media studies. I think his influence and many of his prophecies are being vindicated today.

Alan Saunders: Now, McLuhan, as I said, did not directly take a political position on mass media, did he, or even what he called a 'moralistic' stance?

Grant Havers: That's true of his work from the 1960s onwards when he made that claim that he had no fixed point of view, which he thought was impossible in an age of technological change. That contrasts with his earlier work in the 1950s, particularly his first book The Mechanical Bride which is full of moralising judgements on mass advertising. But by the 1960s he claims to have abandoned that earlier moralising approach to technology.

Alan Saunders: Come the sixties, he had a curious position didn't he? Some on the left thought that he was an apologist for capitalism, sort of addressing businessmen about mass media and so on. While on the right, it was assumed that all this talk of constant social upheaval in the technological environment and indeed of the global village was pandering to the counterculture.

Grant Havers: That's kind of an old perception of McLuhan. I think the Left in the '60s saw McLuhan as a kind of corporate lackey because he seemed to spend more time addressing corporate audiences than teaching in the classrooms of the University of Toronto. And of course the Right thought that he pandered to the counter-culture, to the most anti-conservative forces of western society. I think what both sides missed is a kind of latent conservative logic or agenda which reflects his strong ultra-right wing Catholic faith.

Alan Saunders: Well it was impossible to ignore wasn't it, the fact that religiously he was a conservative Catholic?

Grant Havers: Yes that's because he was a convert to Catholicism and converts tend to be more zealous than people who are brought up as cradle Catholics. He was definitely a pre-Vatican II Catholic; he believed in traditional natural law theory, very sympathetic with the Thomistic approach to Catholic philosophy. He was very interested in restoring kind of a medieval approach to Catholic conservatism which he thought was threatened by Vatican II and its more liberalising approach to Catholicism.

Alan Saunders: And interestingly, converted as a result of reading the English writer GK Chesterton whose belief in not just traditional religious values but traditional community values, somewhat resembles the views that McLuhan was eventually to espouse.

Grant Havers: Yes when he converted to Catholicism as a graduate student in Cambridge in the 1930s he became very enamoured with kind of a pre-modern Catholic conservatism that emphasises organic community and it's very hostile to liberalism, to individualism and of course to Protestantism, all of which seem to be mutually dependent upon each other, at least from a right-wing Catholic perspective.

Alan Saunders: Now from 1937 to 1944 he taught English at Saint Louis University in Missouri. Now Missouri actually counts as the mid-west, though I don't think it was one of the states of the old confederacy. But there he could have been exposed to a romantic, agrarian tradition. These were southern thinkers who saw the old South as a traditional society defeated by the industrial capitalistic North.

Grant Havers: Yes there's always been kind of a romantic movement in the post-civil war American South, which celebrates, in a very mythologising way, the southern society that existed before the civil war, which of course was based on slavery and a feudal hierarchy, and at the same time was suspicious of the liberal capitalism that came out of the North and ultimately destroyed that southern way of life.

So yes, McLuhan at that time in Missouri was exposed to the southern agrarianism, kind of a collection of intellectuals who were suspicious of and opposed to the rapid industrialisation of the South especially in the 20th century and fearful that it would destroy the old southern values like honour, propriety, chivalry and so forth. Of course the irony is that that old South was inhospitable to Catholics, it was overwhelmingly Protestant but I don't think that bothered McLuhan terribly much.

Alan Saunders: And what this all reminds us is that conservatism doesn't necessarily mean a support for capitalism. Certainly not for industrial capitalism.

Grant Havers: No, in fact in North America, conservatism for the most part has more to do with Lockean individualism and is very pro-capitalist, committed to individualism and a very absolute notion of property rights. But in a European context, conservatism or the old right, usually meant not an embrace of capitalism but an embrace of feudal hierarchy which gave enormous power to the Catholic Church to supervise the moral education of society. And at the same time this old European Right which is really a pre-modern Right which has nothing to do with John Locke, tried to hold back the forces of modernity which included liberalism capitalism and the Protestant reformation.

Alan Saunders: As you imply it would be difficult to find this sort of thing in the United States, but what about Canada? In his book on McLuhan, Jonathan Miller says that there was an agrarian tradition in Canada, particularly associated with the prairies which was where McLuhan came from, and that the agrarian political parties actually held power in Canada in a way that wasn't happening in other places.

Grant Havers: Yes, there are different kinds of conservatism at play in Canadian history and it's likely that the populist tradition which is important in the history of Alberta, the province in which McLuhan was born in 1911, probably played some influence although the Catholic conservatism that he ultimately embraced is very anti-populist because essentially it's anti-modern and populism tends to be a modern phenomenon. In fact it emerged out of the French Revolution.

I would think in the Canadian context, the old Quebec, our French speaking province of Quebec... if you look at the history of that province, before the 1960s it was certainly shaped by a very conservative version of Catholicism which McLuhan believed would perhaps be the best source of opposition to modernising changes in the 20th century. He was very interested in Quebec as a possible source of opposition to everything that he detested about the modern mentality.

Alan Saunders: What about other possible influences, on him, like the English literary critic and painter Wyndham Lewis, who seems to have been pretty hostile to Jews, homosexuals, lesbians and other minorities?

Grant Havers: Yes he struck up a friendship with Wyndham Lewis when he was teaching at a Catholic college in Windsor, Ontario during World War II. Wyndham Lewis of course was a famous or infamous literary critic who is probably best described as a crypto-fascist. In fact he wrote a book in praise of Adolf Hitler in the late 1930s. He probably regretted that later. But there's no question he was far to the right in his politics. I don't think McLuhan was quite as right-wing as Lewis, I don't think anybody was. As you said, Lewis was quite opposed to Jews and to other enemies of Nazism and fascism. I don't think McLuhan ever went that far nor did he admire the agrarian South because of its commitment to slavery but he liked Wyndham Lewis's anti-modernism which amounted to a hostility to capitalism, to the dehumanising effects of industrialism. And kind of a lament for the lost medieval period in which there was order and natural hierarchy and organic community and virtue... of course all of this is heavily mythologised but McLuhan found some of those sentiments in Lewis's works.

Alan Saunders: So the commanding notion here, the effect of all these influences is a great stress in McLuhan's thought on the importance of community in his vision of society.

Grant Havers: Yes, of course what's paradoxical, if not weird, about McLuhan's thought is that even though he considered himself a good Catholic conservative, he also looked to the least conservative of all forces, that is, electronic technology, in order to restore this pre-modern Catholicism. So yes, he was in favour of restoring this organic community but on a global scale which I think would have surprised Catholic counter-revolutionaries from the 18th century who in fact were opposed to social engineering of any kind. But McLuhan, even though he considers himself a conservative Catholic, is a rather exotic one, because he looks to technology, especially television and the computer to restore this kind of conservatism.

Alan Saunders: On Radio National, The Philosopher's Zone is the medium and the message this week is from Grant Havers of Trinity Western University in Canada, who's talking about the right-wing postmodernism of Marshall McLuhan. Now, Grant, let's home in on that phrase, you call his position 'right-wing postmodernism'. What did you mean by that?

Grant Havers: Well he's right-wing in the sense that he is a conservative Catholic who wants to restore the old medieval version of Catholicism. But it's postmodern really for two reasons, because, one he's an anti-modern, he's against the liberal individualism and bourgeois capitalism of the modern age. But he's also in favour of using technology in order to displace the modern age and especially the print media or print mentality that characterises the modern age. So he's an anti-modern conservative who wants to use technology to restore a pre-modern age. I mean there's something very paradoxical about that.

Alan Saunders: So the central idea here, is that the print media encourage detachment and objectivity, which leads to private, individualist, even fragmented behaviour. Television, by contrast, encourages involvement, which is much more communitarian.

Grant Havers: Yes, that was McLuhan's way of distinguishing between the two. He put it in a very simple way: when you sit down to read a book you have to isolate yourself from the world, it's a very private individualistic experience which then underscores his point that print media and individualism go hand in hand. That doesn't mean that print media is without the pressure of conformity, it certainly encourages a kind of conformity to be an individual in a bourgeois protestant sense. But as for TV, that's a postmodern technology, because it's a collective experience; you don't have to watch TV on your own. In fact, as he put it, you don't simply stand back and watch TV, you are in it, you are involved with it, it involves you with the rest of the world, the global village. And it puts tremendous pressure on you to take up kind of a public image -- especially if you are in politics -- which resonates with as many people as possible, so it's a very anti-individualistic medium.

Alan Saunders: One of the things that makes him postmodernist is a rejection of the hard and fast modernist distinction between truth and myth and McLuhan himself was by no means averse to myth was he?

Grant Havers: No, in fact he went so far as to say that Christianity was richly mythical or should be treated as myth. Now he quickly cautioned that he thought Christianity was true myth but it was myth nonetheless.

Alan Saunders: And one of the things that makes him postmodern is that unlike those people who were myth-making about the old American South, he actually does recognise that his myths really are myths.

Grant Havers: Yes he does recognise that they are myths, that they are necessary myths, that they are justified if they preserve the values that he considers worthy of preservation in a rapidly changing way through technology. But at the same time it sounds odd for a traditional conservative to call this myth. I would think that some harsh critics might accuse him of being a Grand Inquisitor who doesn't necessarily believe in these myths per se but believes that they are necessary for ignorant or vulnerable people who are trying to make sense of this confusing technological age.

Alan Saunders: Let's look at another aspect of the myth, which is McLuhan's hope for a sort of revival of tribalism. How does that work?

Grant Havers: Well he believed that tribalism was experiencing a revival thanks to the rise of television which has created this global village, this interconnected world that would, for the first time since pre-history, reactivate all five senses of humankind and at the same time create a human family and even realise the body of Christ on a global basis. It's not that McLuhan believed that all the effects of tribalism were necessarily good or favourable. In fact the move from the print age to tribalism was extremely violent in his view but ultimately he believed that the rise of tribalism was liberating because of its unifying function in bringing human beings together and getting them involved in each other's lives.

Alan Saunders: And you didn't have to be prehistoric to enjoy this vision of the world. He says, with somewhat antique phraseology, that the 'white man' is well aware that the 'Negro and the Indian,' -- I presume that means the North American Indian -- ' . . . are actually physically and socially superior' to the fragmented and alienated man of Western civilization.

Grant Havers: Yes that's from the interview he gave to Playboy magazine in 1968, which by the way is not a very traditionally Catholic magazine. In any case, those are very provocative passages. I suspect that he meant to compliment the Aboriginal and African-American peoples that he's referring to in that interview, by praising their superior sensory awareness in contrast to the distorted or dehumanised print mentality of the white man.

Personally I think it's kind of a strange argument, it almost sounds like McLuhan is resorting to the noble savage myth; that people who have escaped the social contract that was dominated by print media are somewhat more alive and more liberated, but they're still primitive in some sense. I don't think everybody would consider McLuhan's praise to be necessarily real praise. It may be a backhanded compliment on his part.

Alan Saunders: It's interesting that McLuhan anticipates the return of a rich and creative retribalised society free of the fragmentation and alienation of the modern age, but he also does say -- you've already alluded to this -- that the transition to this new period is going to be traumatic and that he says he has nothing but distaste for the process of change.

Grant Havers: Yes that's right and during the 1960s, during the heyday of his popularity he was very troubled by the race riots, the political upheaval of that time. But ultimately I think he looked towards an outcome that would emanate out of that process which would unify the human family as never before. And therefore he even called for the abolition of schools and universities which he dismissed as feudal dungeons for the young. He believed that the young should continue to embrace electric technology and abandon reading altogether. Unfortunately many youth have taken that to heart. Having taught many university students for the past 25 years, unfortunately I see year after year the confirmation of McLuhan's prophecy that print media are on their way out. They're going the way of the dodo bird and they are being replaced by technologies that he thought encouraged creativity. But which to my mind encourage a new kind of conformity based on a lack of literacy.

Alan Saunders: That's interesting, you talk about a uniformity encouraged by a lack of literacy; we should remember that by training McLuhan was a literary critic. Did he see the retribalised world -- the world in which we are immersed in the media rather than sitting alone with a book -- did he see it as conducive to an engaged critical approach?

Grant Havers: I think he hoped for that and of course he believed that even an austere conservative morality would come out of this retribalisation made possible by electric technology. Personally I just don't see that. But he did make that point in the Playboy interview of 1968, that ultimately this rapid technological change would turn us all into reactionaries or conservatives.

Alan Saunders: Well yes, but McLuhan did anticipate that the rich retribalised society of the future would in certain ways be more morally stringent than the liberal print age, didn't he?

Grant Havers: Yes, he did. Again, I don't see much evidence for this. Most American youth voted for Barak Obama in 2008 who by no means is a conservative. He's certainly not a pre-Vatican II Catholic conservative. So I think McLuhan might have been indulging in some wishful thinking there. At the same time, without denying that he saw some destructive side-effects to the death of the print age, nevertheless, he did believe that the print age was generally a destructive period, that the individualism and capitalism and Protestantism that came out of it were all destructive to the human spirit. And at the same time like you said, he looked forward to a new age of creativity and individualism coming out of retribalisation. But personally I think the conformity of our time is even more stifling than the conformity demanded of the print age within the 19th century.

Alan Saunders: Finally Grant, how are we to see McLuhan's conservatism? Is it in fact the dominant feature of his thought?

Grant Havers: I think it's important to understand it as the underlying logic of his thought. Whenever he claimed that he had no fixed point of view or he has no agenda because that's impossible in an age of change, personally I would take that with a megaton of salt because he never abandoned his Catholic principles. He was always committed to that conservative Catholicism even if he didn't always advertise it in his most popular works in the 1960s. But if there is any kind of defining, enduring position in his thought it is that. Otherwise it's simply a chaos of impressions and observations that probably don't make too much sense.

Alan Saunders: This week, I've been examining the myths of Marshall McLuhan with Grant Havers. Grant, thank you very much for being with us.

Grant Havers: Thank you.

Alan Saunders: Grant Havers is Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Trinity Western University in Canada and you can find a link to his essay on 'The Right-wing Postmodernism of Marshall McLuhan' on our website, abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone.

The show is produced by Kyla Slaven, Charlie McCune is the sound engineer. I'm Alan Saunders. Back next week.