(Synopsis of a paper given at The Festival of Life 1978)

	Marshall McLuhan

The theme of the Conference is clear -- the concern about the attack on 
human life, the demand for the right to kill.  I am going to approach it 
from the point of view of factors that are not up at the level of 
consciousness, via the "hidden ground" or the subliminal factors that 
create or shape the situation that we confront in respect to the current 
danger to human life.  By way of illustration, I will tell you a funny 
story or two, because in every funny story there is a hidden ground of 
grievance which makes it funny.  The first story concerns a Newfie who 
was waiting for a plane at Kennedy airport and got into a conversation 
with a man who was sitting beside him.  During the course of the 
conversation, the man asked:  "What do you do?"  The Newfie replied:  
"I'm a rancher, and I have forty acres of diversified ranch activity and 
it's a very satisfactory set- up.  What do you do sir?"  The man 
replied:  "Well, I'm a Texan, and I have a ranch too."  The Newfie 
asked:  "And how big is your ranch?"  The man said:  "Well, if we got 
into my car now and drove until sunset, we'd still be on my ranch".  The 
Newfie looked very consoling and very sympathetic, and said:  "I had a 
car like that once!"

Now, if you laughed at that story, you had to respond to two hidden 
grievances; first, there is the grievance relating to the boastful Texan, 
and secondly, the grievance relating to the inadequate but complacent 
Newfie.  But in order for a joke to be humorous, there has to be an 
abrasive or hidden ground of grievance.

Here is another illustration:  A mother was trying to get her son up to 
go to school.  She said "Son, you simply have to go to school.  It's 
absolutely necessary."  The son replied:  "Mother, I'm not ever going to 
go to school again.  They laugh at me and throw things at me.  You just 
give me two reasons why I should go to school!"  The mother replied:  
"Well, son, the first reason is that you're forty-three, and the second 
reason is, you're the principal!"

As mentioned earlier, it is the hidden ground of grievance which makes 
all jokes possible.  (It is very difficult, by the way, to translate a 
joke into another culture because the hidden grievance is never the same 
when it is translated into another context.)  At this point I would like 
to further discuss the subject of "hidden ground", and one way to 
approach it is to mention the phrase "grey at three".  In the TV age, a 
three-year-old has been around the world and has seen many human 
situations.  He is much older at three than Methuselah ever was in terms 
of human experience.  This is a hidden ground of information which alters 
the character of children.

Another hidden ground of an entirely different kind is Sputnik.  In 1957 
Sputnik put the planet inside a man-made environment for the first time 
in human history.  When Sputnik went around the planet, creating a new 
information environment, the planet was transformed and Nature ceased to 
exist.  The planet then became an art-form, and to use Bucky Fuller's 
phrase it became "Spaceship Earth" where everybody is a crew-member and 
there are no passengers.  Now, Spaceship Earth has to be totally 
programmed.  The word "ecology" suddenly became pervasive at the moment 
of Sputnik.  The idea that everything on the planet must be controlled 
and programmed was born at the moment of Sputnik, and this manifested a 
new hidden ground of information which has transformed the figure of the 
planet.  This is what I have referred to as a "hidden ground".  These 
artificial man-made environments such as Sputnik not only transform the 
image we have of ourselves but also the image we have of other people.  
Although they transform the nature of the human situation, nobody takes 
responsibility for this, because nobody is especially aware that it has 
happened.

You have heard of the "generation gap" which exists between children and 
parents, and also between post-literacy and pre-literacy, which makes a 
gap of some 2400 years.  Literacy was born when the phonetic alphabet was 
devised and implemented by the Greeks in the 4th Century B.C.  The effect 
of the phonetic alphabet on the Greeks was revolutionary.  It transformed 
them into private goal-oriented individuals, the first group of human 
beings on the planet to have individual identities and goals.  They 
became intensely competitive, which led to the break-up of the whole 
pattern of the old Greek way of life, the matter of Greek tragedy.  They 
destroyed the tribal bonds that had held them together for many centuries 
and became a highly specialist, visual and logical culture -- the first 
civilized people, in the sense of having a written code of laws before 
which all were equal.  This event completely transformed the human 
condition in Greece, and later in Rome.  It created the private 
individual who had never existed anywhere in the world before.  And 
today, with television, we are experiencing the advent once more of the 
tribal or group-man, and the gap between the TV generation and the 
origins of individual identity and responsibility is 2400 years.  That is 
quite a generation gap, and it is the first time that any such gap ever 
happened in human affairs.

The new information environment which now dominates our lives is 
instantaneous and simultaneous; and it is global or planetary in scope.  
One of the effects is that the entire Western world is psychically moving 
eastward, and the entire Orient is moving westward, at very high speed.  
That is, in our time we are accustomed to living through literally 
centuries of human evolution and development in a few decades.  At the 
speed of light, which is the speed of electric information, the 
transformations in human affairs and conditions take place at a speed 
unknown to previous generations, so we literally compress centuries of 
human development and history in a mere lifetime.  This scope and scale 
of instant information has effects which no one has experienced before, 
and for which adaptation is practically impossible, since nobody can 
psychically adapt to the speed of light.  At the speed of light, by the 
way, we do not have bodies.  When you are "on the air", or "on the 
telephone", you do not have a physical body.  This is one of the hidden 
effects or a hidden ground of an environment of electric information.  
Such an environment deprives us of our physical bodies.  On the 
telephone, you can be everywhere in the world at the same moment, and on 
the air, you are everywhere at the same moment, without a body.  I am 
asking you what might be the effects on our private identity of having no 
body?  Actually, the lessening or the diminishing of private identity by 
the discarnate condition has proven to be extraordinary.  When people 
don't have bodies, they are like people in a dream who just move in and 
out of each other like fantasy.  James Joyce said about Finnegans Wake,  
"I put the language to sleep so that words could move back and forth 
through each other like a dream".

At the speed of light, the people on the planet, minus their bodies and 
minus their identities, move back and forth through each other in forms 
we have come to call "newscasts".  This kind of hidden environment of 
service information has effects which have never been explored or 
discussed, even in theology or science; yet the problems of discarnate 
man in relation to an incarnate church may be expected to create a storm.

One of the effects of television is to make the group supreme.  The new 
simultaneous information environment tends to push the right hemisphere 
of the brain up into dominance for the first time in 2400 years.  I am 
now referring to the newly broached theme of the right and left 
hemispheres of the human brain which modern surgery has revealed.  The 
hemisphere matter is not a psychological theory; it is based on empirical 
experiment in the world of neurosurgery; and the general pattern which 
has been revealed is that the human being has two hemispheres in his 
brain, each of which have quite different characteristics, yet are 
interrelated by the corpus callosum.  Everything that we relate or 
conceive to be part of our educational or political establishment has 
long been related to the left hemisphere of the brain.  This hemisphere 
depends for its dominance upon a visual environment of lineality, e.g., 
roads, assembly lines, print.  The neglected right hemisphere, which is 
little used in the West, is intuitive, holistic, emotional, musical, 
acoustic and simultaneous, and it is now experiencing an enormous 
increase of activity because of the new electric environment of 
simultaneous information.  Instant information creates a new kind of 
environment of services which pushes the right hemisphere up into 
compelling dominance.  Suddenly we find our legal institutions, our 
morality, our educational and political institutions considerably out of 
phase.  Everything that we have long (in the Western world) called 
"private responsibility", "private identity", and "personal morality" -- 
all of these things relate to the functions of the left hemisphere.  By 
contrast, the right hemisphere is tribal and corporate, creating group 
man, not private individual man.  In the TV programme Roots, Mr. Hailey 
represented a Westernized black, endowed with private identity, seeking 
nostalgically for his group identity back in Africa.

The nostalgic quest for roots on the part of a private man looking for 
his tribal identity is a peculiar pattern of our time, as in Star Wars.  
It is a great paradox that individuals in the United Sates should be 
seeking to discover, not their private identity, but their group identity 
-- in Africa.  I should mention that the Third World (China, Africa, 
India, and many smaller areas) exists entirely in relation to the right 
hemisphere of the brain.  Now the Third World is moving toward the left 
hemisphere as fast as possible, and is setting up the means of achieving 
private identities and material and quantitative goals of achievement.  
The left hemisphere is the world of jobs, and the right hemisphere is the 
world of role-playing.  Today, in the electric age, job-orientation is 
getting very, very weak and role-playing is becoming more and more part 
of our experience.  Women's Lib is one small aspect of this change, or 
flip.  Women are natural role-players, having been experienced in that 
for many generations.  A mother does not have a job, she has a hundred 
jobs, that is, a role.  Increasingly, the executive of our electric time 
does not have a job, but role.  Under electronic conditions of 
information, the executive also ceases to be a mere job-holder and 
becomes a role-player.

World affairs are increasingly characterized by right-hemisphere 
role-playing rather than repetitive, specialized job-holding.  The entire 
work situation is altering, and the structure of work and jobs is 
changing very rapidly in a direction of role-playing, meaning multiple 
jobs.  It's a world, in other words, where women would find themselves 
very much at home.  Men, on the other hand, increasingly find themselves 
alienated from this new right hemisphere world.  Having been accustomed 
to private job-holding and repetitive work for a long time, men find that 
their habitual specialism is out of phase and they, too, are now expected 
to switch into role-playing, at which women are very much better than 
they are.  Women's Lib in other words, is part of this hidden ground of 
changeover to the new group identity.

I think it was Rose in Upstairs, Downstairs who was once asked during a 
TV interview if she ever got confused when switching from one part to 
another in many different dramas.  She replied:  "No.  When you are in a 
role, you cannot make a mistake."  When you are in a role, you are 
infallible.  When Hudson is playing his role as butler, he cannot make a 
mistake.  As Mr. Jackson, outside of his role, he might make many 
mistakes, but as Hudson he cannot make a mistake.  Now, this draws 
attention to a peculiar characteristic of tribal or group man who has no 
private identity, but he is infallible when he is in his role.  Tribal 
societies offer a place to everybody, but nobody can make a mistake in a 
tribal society.  Everybody knows exactly what has to be done, and he does 
it.  However, in our kind of left-hemisphere world we can make many 
mistakes.  Somebody was once asked:  "Have you learned from your 
mistakes?"  He replied:  "I certainly have.  I can repeat every one of 
them!"  The problem is that when history repeats itself, the charge goes 
up and up!  In fact, the price for replays is too high.  The educational 
structure of our classrooms and our curricula are entirely left 
hemisphere with their specialisms and their different little classified 
compartments of knowledge.  In a tribal or electronic world there is no 
place or no need for such specialism.  Ivan Illich, of course, simply 
says:  "You can close your schools now.  The answers are outside in the 
cities, or in the community at large."  If the answers are outside, then 
why not put the questions inside?  Why not really begin to look at the 
situation?  Answers are easy -- questions are hard.  Our Western schools, 
with their highly competitive goal- oriented curriculum, have exactly no 
relation to the electronic world where people are now experiencing a new 
non-competitive role-playing pattern of involvement in communal 
processes.  Even the word "involvement" is a reminder of how much things 
have changed.  Instead of detachment and objectivity, on which educated 
people have prided themselves for centuries, we are now invited to become 
totally subjective and to involve ourselves in depth in the situations we 
confront.

Apropos the right to life, I don't think I need stress that when people 
become group-oriented and have lost their private identities, it is not 
easy to convince them about the right to individual or private life.  
People without identity are not easily convinced that private identity 
means anything.  Mass, or electronic, man is not concerned about the 
private right to life.  That indifference is the new hidden ground that 
we're all up against, suddenly flipping over into a tribal society which 
has much concern with the group and very little concern with the private 
individual.  In the world of the data-bank and social services, the 
individual becomes a statistic.  He is part of a computerized program, 
and his private identity is meaningless.  He is a replaceable bit in a 
computer programme.  That is the world we have created.  I'm not talking 
about Star Trek, or some fantasy, but a world we have actually created, 
and with whose subliminal, hidden consequences, we are now faced.  At the 
speed of light the unconscious tends to surface and to move up into 
consciousness, so that what Freud set out to do in 1900 in The 
Interpretation of Dreams, has now been pretty well accomplished.  In the 
1970's the unconscious has surfaced, and we are now confronting it as our 
new consciousness of group responsibility.

In relation to the right to life, I am inviting you to think about the 
problems of maintaining individual rights in a trendy world which has 
gone completely group-tribal-collective.  It is a frightening prospect to 
confront such a technological revolution that has taken place so recently 
and so fast that we have had no time to adapt, and very little time to 
recognize what was happening.

Let me illustrate how, from a political standpoint, some of these new 
effects manifest themselves.  One of the normal features of information 
speed-up is de-centralizing.  One of the political consequences of 
extreme de-centralizing and the negating of legalistic and logical bonds, 
is separatism.  Separatism is not something peculiar to Canada.  It is 
actually very much present in the United Kingdom and in France.  The 
Scots, the Welsh, and the Irish want to separate from England.  There is 
not a single part of the world in which there is not a huge separatist 
movement.  This is a consequence of the hidden ground of electric 
information.  When you live in a simultaneous world, the constitutional 
bonds, moral bonds and legal bonds, become tenuous.  The separatist 
territories like Scotland, Wales and Ireland are oral rather than 
literate in their bias and in their cultural preference.

Oral cultures have great difficulty living with literate, written 
cultures.  The American South wanted out of the Union in 1860.  They 
found it very hard to live with the fragmented, literate, industrial 
North, because the Southern culture is strongly musical, oral, tribal and 
simultaneous.  The deep South is the land of rock-and-roll and jazz and 
old-fashioned English.  All music comes out of oral cultures.  The highly 
civilized cultures, the ones with the dominant left hemisphere, do not 
produce music readily.  So the right hemisphere people are the ones who 
produce the music, and in Canada the Quebecois are the music-makers:  
they are the artistic people.  The business people, the industrial people 
of the left hemisphere are not music-makers, but money- makers.

One of the peculiarities of politics under the electric hidden 
information environment is that parties and policies become very 
unimportant, and the image of the leader becomes all-important.  
"Charisma", a term that came into politics with TV, means looking like a 
lot of other people.  Richard Nixon did not look like a lot of other 
people -- he looked like Richard Nixon, therefore he had no charisma, and 
no capacity for remaining in his role.  President Jimmy Carter, on the 
other hand, has huge charisma -- the "Huck Finn" man who is a born leader 
because he has this group quality.

The First World is the world of the left hemisphere, the world of goals 
and objectives.  The Second World, e.g., Russian Socialism, is a kind of 
maverick world where an oral culture is being subjected to a high-speed 
industrialization.  The Third World is a world that does not have the 
alphabet, or a visual, Euclidean culture.  We, in the First World, are 
moving very rapidly toward Third World conditions.  The TV generation is 
Third World, and the parents are First World.  As I have mentioned 
previously, the gap is at least 2400 years.

There is a Fourth World, that is, the electric information represented by 
Sputnik and our other electronic services which goes around the entire 
planet and includes everybody.  All of us are now included in that 
information environment of the planetary type.  Now, just what are our 
prospects, and what are our obligations?  If that is the hidden 
environment against which we must move and have our being, if that is the 
environment in which we are confronted with the problems of the right to 
life, how do we diagnose it?  How do we confront it?

I am not pretending to have the answers.  I simply suggest that until you 
know the hidden ground of this new information environment, you are not 
in a very good position to prescribe or to act.  The question of morality 
under conditions of tribal group-orientation is a very confusing one.  
The Catholic Church has manifested that confusion on a massive scale 
since Vatican II.  The Catholic Church is itself a right-hemisphere 
institution that is completely tribal; the body of Christ is a tribal, 
simultaneous institution or thing that includes everybody; but the 
Catholic Church opted for literacy and left hemisphere Graeco/Roman 
culture from the very first century right up to the present time.  Now 
that left hemisphere church finds itself in a right hemisphere world 
without any guidelines.  This issue was not broached at Vatican II.  At 
the Council of Trent, nobody noticed that it was Gutenberg who made all 
the problems, and at Vatican II, nobody mentioned the hidden ground of 
electric information which has created all the moral and theological 
problems of our time.

I am not offering panaceas or solutions.  I am merely suggesting that if 
we know the situation we are working in, we might well be in a position 
to do a better job.