Playboy interview 251 there is actually more room for creative diversity than within the homogenized mass urban society of Western man. PLAYBOY: Are you claiming, now, that there will be no taboos in the world tribal society you envision? McLUHAN: No, I’m not saying that, and I’m not claiming that freedom will be absolute—merely that it will be less restricted than your question implies. The world tribe will be essentially conservative, it’s true, like all iconic and inclusive societies; a mythic environment lives beyond time and space and thus generates little radical social change. All technology becomes part of a shared ritual that the tribe desperately strives to keep stabilized and permanent; by its very nature, an oral-tribal society—such as Pharaonic Egypt—is far more stable and enduring than any fragmented visual society. The oral and auditory tribal society is patterned by acoustic space, a total and simultaneous field of relations alien to the visual world, in which points of view and goals make social change an inevitable and constant byproduct. An electrically imploded tribal society discards the linear forward- motion of “progress.” We can see in our own time how, as we begin to react in depth to the challenges of the global village, we all become reactionaries. PLAYBOY: That can hardly be said of the young, whom you claim are leading the process of retribalization, and according to most estimates are also the most radical generation in our history. McLUHAN: Ah, but you’re talking about politics, about goals and issues, which are really quite irrelevant. I’m saying that the result, not the current process, of retribalization makes us reactionary in our basic attitudes and values. Once we are enmeshed in the magical resonance of the tribal echo chamber, the debunking of myths and legends is replaced by their religious study. Within the consensual framework of tribal values, there will be unending diversity—but there will be few if any rebels who challenge the tribe itself. The instant involvement that accompanies instant technologies triggers a conservative, stabilizing, gyroscopic function in man, as reflected by the second-grader who, when requested by her teacher to compose a poem after the first Sputnik was launched into orbit, wrote: “The stars are so big/The earth is so small/Stay as you are.” The little girl who wrote those lines is part of the new tribal society; she lives in a world infinitely more complex, vast and eternal than any scientist has instruments to measure or imagination to describe. PLAYBOY: If personal freedom will still exist—although restricted by certain consensual taboos—in this new tribal world, what about the