"Ask for the Truth:" The Medium and the Light by Marshall McLuhan
What the media won't tell you about the famous media theorist.
Justin Murphy
August 19, 2023
Welcome to today’s issue of Other Life. If you received this from a friend, subscribe here. If you love the newsletter, become a member.
Two quick things:
The next cohort of our writing accelerator will start on Monday, September 11. Radically increase your focus in life, improve the quality of your thinking in general, and increase your writing output in particular, in our friendly and inspiring community of readers and writers. If you’re on the fence, book a short call with me and I’ll help you decide whether you’d be a good fit. If you’re ready, enroll here.
We’re currently reading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, to finish before our seminar on the book this Monday. Harold Bloom called McCarthy “the worthy disciple of Faulkner and of Melville,” and said that no other living American novelist “has given us a book as strong and memorable as Blood Meridian.” RSVP here, or from the Events channel of the community, and come say hi on Monday.
Marshall McLuhan is most famous for his pithy mental models about mass media, but he was also a brilliant theorist of religion.
Few know that he converted to Catholicism and he expressed his religious convictions within the same conceptual tapestry as his media theories. The Medium and the Light (1999) collects McLuhan’s religious writings. I find these writings more intriguing right now than his works about the media, which might be slightly overrated at this point.
As he explains, he was just researching religion, and he wanted to understand the different denominations in their own terms. He did nothing more than seek the truth, and here is what happened:
"I had no religious belief at the time I began to study Catholicism... I did set to find out, and literally to research the matter, and I discovered fairly soon that a thing has to be tested on its terms. You can't test anything in science or in any part of the world except on its own terms or you will get the wrong answers. The church has a very basic requirement or set of terms, namely that you get down on your knees and ask for the truth… I prayed to God the Father for two or three years, simply saying ‘show me.’ I didn't want proof of anything. I didn't know what I was going to be shown because I didn't believe in anything. I was shown very suddenly. It didn't happen in any expected way. It came instantly as immediate evidence, and without any question of its being a divine intervention. There was no trauma or personal need. I never had any need for religion, any personal or emotional crisis. I simply wanted to know what was true and I was told… Wham! I became Catholic the next day."
When he is advised to "get down on your knees and ask for the truth," all this means is to first be humble, and then just do your best to be open to what is ultimately true. First, acknowledge the fact that no human being has yet determined how to ground ultimate truths (several philosophical obstacles on this front remain to be solved by even our most sophisticated philosophers) and yet we nonetheless seek ultimate truth, which factually puts us all "on our knees," in a sense.
Marshall McLuhan
Whereas others are implicitly "on their knees" despite an arrogant posture of knowing, McLuhan acknowledges the unflattering reality and chooses to make the implicit explicit. From one's knees, one begins to understand that the rational human mind cannot tell you everything you wish to know. But in your continued desire for the ultimate truth, from your knees, the truth has a strange way of filling itself out. Not in a way that you can necessarily prove (although who knows what one day will, or will not, be proven), but in a way that somehow becomes more clear to you.
It is likely that contemporary Western man greatly overvalues the role of the rational mind in the pursuit of truth. In another great section, McLuhan writes:
“It is not brains or intelligence that is needed to cope with the problems which Plato and Aristotle and all of their successors to the present have failed to confront. What is needed is a readiness to undervalue the world altogether.”
Perhaps it is enough to merely ask for the truth.