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THOMAS R. EDWARDS
considerably less cautionary, and a strangely tentative moment may
suggest why:
One of the consequences of electronic environments is the total
involvement of people in people. . . .
Here perhaps my own religious faith has some bearing. I think of
human charity as a total responsibility of all, for all. Therefore, my
energies are directed at far more than mere political or democratic
intent. Democracy as a by-product of certain technologies, like
literacy and mechanical industry, is not something that I would
take very seriously. But democracy as it belongs very profoundly
with Christianity is something I take very seriously indeed.
There have been many more religious men than I who have not
made even the most faltering steps in this direction. Once I began
to move in this direction, I began to see that it had profound reli–
gious meaning. I do not think it my job to point this out. For ex–
ample, the Christian concept of the mystical body - all men as
members of the body of Christ - this becomes technologically a fact
under electronic conditions. However, I would not try to theologize
on the basis of my understanding of technology. I don't have a
background in scholastic thought, never having been raised in any
Catholic institution. Indeed, I have been bitterly reproached by
my Catholic confreres for my lack of scholastic terminology and
concepts.
This dismissal of political democracy as historical by-product smacks of
the
National Review
brand of Catholic conservatism - typographical
America figures as the old liberal state, with its concerns for those poli–
tical and social definitions of human reality that Benjamin DeMott and
Harold Rosenberg wish McLuhan could take more seriously.
If
the
global village is the mystical body of Christ, then its tensions and
animosities are only necessary ephemera, strains of discordance that
must be
felt,
however painfully, if one is ever to make out the ultimate
harmony; order is not linear regularity but the simultaneous presence
and relation of unlike things, as in old images of the divine economy.
Remembering the fate of Titus Oates, I stop short of charging that
McLuhan is engaged with Father Ong, Hugh Kenner and the Fordham
School of Communications in some sinister Popish Plot against secular
consciousness. But his Catholicism does structure his more hopeful moods,
as DeMott suggests in twitting him for setting up as "the constituted
pardoner of this age - a purveyor of perfect absolution for every
genuine kind of modern guilt."
It may
be
that the age can use a few pardoners, people who both
recognize its guilts and preserve enough intellectual detachment to deal
with them sanely. I am not inevitably outraged by someone who wants
