Essential McLuhan 6 unto the culture’s bosom, the way he seemed to be trashing traditional views of cultural operation. Specialists who had invested everything in isolated figures, specimens in labs, and who neglected contextual grounds were confused and irate when told they were obsolescent. (What he meant by obsolescence was that the hidden archetypal ground was becoming visible and slowly losing its power over the psyche while becoming clichéd.) Educators were recommending specialist approaches just when think tanks were being formed to solve the complex problems emerging from transformative electric pressure. McLuhan stressed environments and the inter-connectedness of things, the ecology of thought, and the pervasive, inescapable power of electric process to change socio- political existence. Stripped of his playful hyperbole, his vision has been borne out by events. IV Literate persons ought to have seen him coming, for he was squarely in the tradition of literary invention that flowed from Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Lewis, and a few others, and he had prepared himself for the battle of the electric mindset by beginning his studies in that other battle between Ancients and Moderns that centred on Harvey and Nashe and that set the grounds for an industrial revolution based on the economics of the Protestant ethic and positivistic science. While he was telling people that books were being pushed aside by electric media, few noticed that this deeply literate man remained on the side of the Ancients. He had simply gravitated to the points of greatest irritation in cultural change. Embattled readers took him to be a traitor to the cause of literacy; others accused him of technological determinism—as if chance had no place in his (or Innis’s) idea of the evolution of communication. McLuhan seemed to many a paradoxical man. The varied interpretive grounds brought in by mass media suggested that things were true and not true at the same time. The world of print and the world of television are realities apart. He often referred to the cultural transformation in which paradox was degraded in the interests of the growing illusion of clarity demanded by the rational biases of Empiricism. In explaining how electric process reinstates paradox, he approved Rosalie Colie’s observation that degradation of paradox is one result of a revolution in thought which valued clarity and exactness above the tricky duplicities of comprehension induced by paradox. In “The Dialogue Concerning the Two World Systems,” Galileo’s Simplicio points to the dangers involved in favoring “words” over “things” as guides to truth: Once you have denied the principles of sciences and have cast doubt upon the most evident things, everybody knows that you may prove whatever you will, and maintain any paradox. (Colie, Paradoxica Epidemica 1966, 508–20) Our world is fraught with new paradoxes scientifically produced: the certitude of the last few centuries has been pressed past the limit of its capability and has reversed into its opposite. Uncertainty and probability and the latter’s statistical approach to truth are now