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Johan Leman, 14 May 2022

At the end of his 1962 book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, Marshall McLuhan predicted that in the very near future, new technologies would supplant the printed word and the culture that followed it. Sound and moving images would define the new world. He predicted a world that would become a “global village”, in which “the medium will become the message” and “change will become the fate of man”. As so often with scientific predictions, they are partly realised (“the medium will become the message”, “change is the fate of man”) and partly not (the world as a “global village”… well, a “village” in which there is a lot of fault lines). McLuhan also predicted something else, namely that rationality was typical of the age of the printed word, but that emotion would thoroughly define the new world. Emotion would push depth and logic from the forefront.

I was reminded of this when I heard that the salvation of the political parties consisted in putting great communicators in charge, or even… that a politician who does not get his message emotionally packaged today, preferably with instant emotion, has little chance of breaking through, let alone even of being invited to a TV studio. Anyone who looks at the facts must conclude that this is true.

But if this is true, it means that depth and rationality in society will increasingly have to be found elsewhere. It will not be in religions, because by definition they too mobilise largely through emotion. That leaves the administration and the organised civil society. And yes, I shouldn’t forget science… It is probably one of the greatest tasks of contemporary civil society to survive, to maintain its dynamism, to remain itself and to guarantee critical mass within an emo-society that promotes ‘change’ as ‘the fate of man’ as supreme happiness.

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