McLuhan on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

One of the few Churchmen that McLuhan credits with having any awareness of media effects was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin whom he credits with having “correctly defined the major change of our age”:[1]

It has been stated over and over again. Through the discovery yesterday of the railway, the motor car and the airplane, the physical influence of each man, formerly restricted to a few miles, now extends to hundreds of leagues or more. Better still, thanks to the prodigious biological event represented by the discovery of electro-magnetic waves, each individual finds himself henceforth (actively and passively) simultaneously present, over land and sea, in every corner of the earth.[2]

That said, however, if McLuhan expressed some kind of enthusiasm towards Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s work during the mid-1950s, it had evaporated by the 1970s. Writing to his close friends, Tom and Dorothy Easterbrook, McLuhan flatly states: “I am not a fan of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The idea that anything is better because it comes later is surely borrowed from pre-electronic technologies.”[3] Similarly, McLuhan notes to Wilhelmsen: “The idea of a Cosmic thrust in one direction … is surely one of the lamest semantic fallacies ever bred by the word ‘evolution’ …. That development should have any direction at all is inconceivable except to the highly literate community.”[4] In short, while seeing that he diagnosed one aspect of the new electric situation correctly, McLuhan appears to have regarded Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, at best, as an exemplar of highly literate man (or “print orientated bastard”), and, at worst, a Manichean.[5]

[1] McLuhan, “The Humanities in the Electronic Age,” in Marshall McLuhan Unbound 7, 12; McLuhan, “The Electric Age – The Age of Implosion,” MS., 3.

[2] Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, cited in McLuhan, “The Humanities in the Electronic Age,” in Marshall McLuhan Unbound 7, 12. Emphasis mine.

[3] McLuhan to Tom and Dorothy Easterbrook, 3 March 1972.

[4] McLuhan to Fredrick Wilhemsen, 28 January 1972. Publicly, however, McLuhan artful avoided making any claims, pro or con. For example, see McLuhan, “Electric Consciousness and the Church,” in The Medium and the Light, 87–88.

[5] “[I] would be grateful if you would suggest to me a bit of reading that might point up the ‘Manichean deviation’ as it manifests itself today. Is it to be found in Teilhard de Chardin with his ‘trust man and trust the world?” (McLuhan to Donald Pikell, 25 October 1971).