EUGENE GOODHEART
99
beginnings of revolutionary change: the industrial revolution for Car–
lyle, the electronic revolution for McLuhan. But the differences between
them are also instructive. Unlike McLuhan, Carlyle wrote and spoke
from a moral point of view. He did not leave his readers in doubt about
where he stood. He was a critic of the industrial revolution, but not a
Luddite. He knew that it was an irreversible and creative force, but he
also knew that it could be destructive unless ways were found to subor–
dinate it to moral and spiritual purposes. He wrote what may be called,
oxymoronically, hopeful jeremiads. His advocacy of a balance between
the mechanical and the spiritual, the outer and the inner life, influenced
almost every major writer of the nineteenth century (Ruskin, Dickens,
Mill, and Morris, among others). In contrast to Carlyle, McLuhan
embraces the technological revolution of his time with few reservations.
He does on occasion have Luddite fantasies about TV, and speaks of
"print" as an antidote, but these are isolated expressions that are never
integrated into his general "argument." In his preferred stance of moral
neutrality, McLuhan effectively abdicated the role of social or cultural
critic.
COMING IN PR:
• Eugene Goodheart
on Elias Canetti
• New French Thought from
Annie
Cohen-Sola I
&
Dominique Schnapper
• Adam Michnik
on Jan Kott
• Ronald Radosh
on Intellectuals
&
Communism
• Elizabeth Dalton
on Rhys's
Wide Sargasso Sea
• Reviews by
Midge Deeter, Sanford Pinsker,
&
Cushing Strout
• Fiction by
Ivo Andric , Arnost Lustig ,
&
Sharona Ben-Tov
• Poetry by
Mary Jo Bang, Sophie Cabot Black,
Kay Ryan ,
&
John Updike
