McLuhan's idea of being discorporeal, or without a body, being only a representation or a symbol pretty much sums up the culture right now. As neutrally as I ca

McLuhan's idea of being discorporeal, or without a body, being only a representation or a symbol pretty much sums up the culture right now. As neutrally as I can manage, that sums up the divide that makes political differences so irreconcilable. More than just being reduced to symbols to each other, the polarization is between people who believe symbols and the represented are the real, and those who believe there exists a real independent of the represented or experienced. We're in the power vacuum created by this discorporeal existence McLuhan predicted, and filling that vaccum is the source of the conflict. I'd take it a step further where the conservative mind is defined by belief in a real (the real) where pursuit and alignment to truth is the highest good, and whereas the progressive understanding is that the real is whatever one represents or experiences it to be over the substrate of a power struggle. They're right about the power struggle, but only because to them everything is a power struggle and we all just happen to be in one caused by this discorporeality from tech. Sort of a stopped-clock waiting for a Marxist moment. Personally, I think it's a materialist understanding that has no belief at all, and it substitutes a system of criticism for the physical experience that produces a sustainable morality. However, while I don't expect them to care, I am very interested in the problem of how to diffuse these conflicts I believe are the roots of the kind of cyclical and generational genocial wars for which our species seems about due. McLuhan was right about a lot of things, and probably was more concrete and useful than the more fashionable ideas of Baudrillard and the other post modernists. McLuhan was also a fairly devout catholic, which might explain how he could riff on the same broad critical themes as the atheistic critical theorists, but with a more right handedness instead of left hand perspective. His conservatism is probably what ultimately caused him to fall out of academic fashion, not unlike Rene Girard, where they both had an almost scientific level of predictive power, but the post-hoc explanatory power of the marxist theorists was ultimately more seductive to undergrad minds. These latter ones asked, "who needs all these other abstract things like good, truth, stability, freedom, when you can just seize the power?" And so we have a generation of politically activated adults who are organizing to rule over the ashes of civilization. A bit abstract for HN, but you post Marshall McLuhan, this is about par. I have a book of his essays on my shelf I thought about revisiting, but it's a bit like reading an engineering manual after the ship has struck the iceberg, where if you're only reading it now, it's probably too late. :)