From Essays After Montaigne
A rhetorician of ancient times said that his trade was to make small things appeare and seeme great. It is a shoemaker that can make great shooes for a little foot. Had hee lived in Sparta he had doubtlesse been well whipped for professing a false, a couzening and deceitful art... And the Athenians, perceiving how pernicious the profession and use thereof was, and of what credit in their Citie, ordained that their principall part, which is to move affections, should be dismissed and taken away, together with all exordiums and perorations. It is an instrument devised to busie, to manage, and to agitate a vulgar and disordered multitude; and is an implement to be employed but about distempered and sicke mindes, as Physicke about crazed bodies... Eloquence hath chiefly flourished in Rome when the common-wealths affaires have beene in worst estate and that the devouring Tempest of civill broyles, and intestine warres did most agitate and turmoil them.
Marshall McLuhan, who usually spoke most effectively in aphorisms, made a career out of his recognition that changes in the technology by which people project themselves (that is, media) fundamentally change how people communicate and interact, especially en masse. According to McLuhan, the development of electronic media over the past century has been the first major change in media, and thus in human interaction, since Gutenberg's invention of movable type. He predicted that this development will return us to a pre-textual culture, but one in which the multitude of small, intimate societies will be replaced by a single "global village," and in which:
The future of the book is the blurb.
In such a world, the rational power of logical thinking supported by the linear nature of print will lose influence to the intuitive power of emotional thinking supported by the illustrative nature of electronic images:
At the speed of light, policies and political parties yield place to charismatic images.
Up to Montaigne's time, verbal rhetoric would have been the foremost persuasive media. After Montaigne, that role was assumed by pamphlets, broadsides, and treatises. How much influence would the ideas of, say, Luther, Darwin, or Marx have had without the printing press? Where verbal rhetoric relied on the personal emotional impact of eloquence, textual exhortations rely on the rational impact of logic. The Renaissance and the Enlightenment were spurred in part by the invention of the printing press. Since the beginning of the last century, electronic images--from the horror of Triumph of the Will to the spectacle President Kennedy telling a massive crowd of Germans that he was a jelly doughnut; and from Governor Dukakis in a tank to President Bush in a flight suit--have become increasingly prominent. These images mark a return to emotional rather than logical discourse. Montaigne would have condemned them, just as he condemned verbal rhetoric, as instruments devised to busy, manage, and agitate a vulgar and disordered multitude.
Rationality is a liberal (in the classic Enlightenment sense) value, whereas the appeal of conservatism is the emotional drive that Freud identified as Thanatos. In this sense, liberals seek to convince by understanding and explaining, and conservatives seek to convince by appeals to our wish to preserve and protect. Or, stated negatively, conservatism doesn't make sense and liberalism is frightening. And because it's possible to think one thing and feel another, our public policy is influenced by both of these impulses at the same time. There are many different political movements active at a given moment, so any attempt to discern larger policy movements is a fool's errand. But one may be emerging. More and more, the right is using the power of images to move public policy against the precepts of reason, and the left is baffled by their ability to do so. Even when it's behaving irrationally, the left uses logic to explain its actions, so it can't understand or adequately respond to an opposition that dispenses with logic altogether. Historically, conservatives may have been correct to attribute a liberal bias to the media, but it wasn't based on views of the individuals in the media. Because the most politically influential media had been print, the media was better suited to conveying liberal messages. As the political power of the media shifts from print to electronic media, the bias of the media--the message that it will be best suited to conveying--is becoming conservative. That is what I think McLuhan meant by "the medium is the message."
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