When the ground for existence is a disembodied and discarnate experience, McLuhan also saw that we had entered a great new religious age[1] — one that had in fact been in the offing for some time, since man began living “not by bread alone but by slogans also,”[2] since television,[3] and since the abolition of nature with Sputnik. As McLuhan notes in “The Future of Morality: The Inner Versus the Outer Quest”:
Mirabiliter condidisti, et mirabilius reformasti … This statement has always seemed to indicate that both the Incarnation and the Mass are a profound and total remaking of man and the world. Now in the electronic age, when so much of our world is man made, it becomes easier to understand some of the wonders of this doctrine.[4]
While McLuhan can be seen here developing on the observations of both Joyce and Alexander Pope,[5] as with the weight of McLuhan’s claims, they are not as far-fetched as it might sound to some. He was merely acting as the “antenna of his race,” the “serious” artist,”[6] observing and reporting, in both an empirical and artistic manner, the experiences of his age. In many respects he had to look no further than the horoscopes in the newspaper or the collaboration between Arthur C. Clarke (the “second best” science fiction writer of his day who “predicted” the satellite), and Stanley Kubrick (a pioneer of American cinema).[7] Just prior to the launch of Intelsat 1, the first commercial communications satellite in geosynchronous orbit, Clarke and Kubrick began work on 2001: A Space Odyssey.[8] Reflecting back on the film that is now famous for its development of the themes of metamorphosis, from pre-historic Ape-man to übermensch,[9] and technologies coming “alive” and spinning out of human control, Clarke noted that he and Kubrick had set out with the deliberate intention of creating a myth with an Odyssean parallel:
Quite early in the game I went around saying, not very loudly, “M-G-M [Metro–Goldwyn–Mayer] doesn't know this yet, but they're paying for the first $10,000,000 religious movie.” Nevertheless, it is still quite a surprise to see how many people realized this, and it has been amusing to see how many faiths have tried to stake claims in the finished work.[10]
Having been invited to an advanced, private screening of 2001 by Kubrick,[11] it is little surprise then that we find that McLuhan states in one of his interviews of the period: “[Electric man] … is a very religious man in that he lives in a physical universe that is now spiritual.”[12] Further rationale for his claim is visible in light of his conversations with Pierre Babin. Here McLuhan concludes that while having “no relation to private identity and no relation to natural law,” discarnate man “retains and perhaps intensifies his relation to ‘supernatural law.’”[13] Ergo, discarnate man is not only inclined towards “totalitarian regimes and to acceptance of the state as God,”[14] but in desperate need of religion to hold himself in community:
Since the basis for natural law is unavailable to the TV generation, their only recourse is to supernatural law as a means of cohesion, coherence and meaning. For these reasons we seem to be on the threshold of a great new religious age.[15]
As something of a further side-effect, McLuhan saw that a new state of “civil war,” between the Catholic Church and the forces of the electric media, was in prospect (if it did not exist already) given that he saw no grounds for the coexistence of these two tribal forces:[16]
Discarnate man is not compatible with an incarnate Church … I cannot see that the physical existence of man is compatible with the speed of light. There is no lack of evidence of both physical and metaphysical violence as a response to this situation…[17]
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