Essential McLuhan 344 built itself to a large extent upon the ruins of the basic communities which had persisted until the end of the ancien régime, but which the individualism of the philosophy of the Enlightenment inevitably helped to dissolve. One cannot deny, on the other hand, that there was a close connection between this fact and the devitalization of religion which occurred in the same period. But the industrial revolution, at least during the first part of the nineteenth century, was destined to play a part in considerably aggravating this tendency—to a large extent, moreover, under the influence of a liberalism which on the economic plane (as we know all too well) was destined to engender the most inhuman consequences, the individual being reduced to a more and more fragmentary condition, under the cover of an optimism which seems to us today to have been the height of hypocrisy. Marcel occasionally entertains the possibility of considering existence not as a classification or category, but as a total environment: The profound justification of the philosophies of existence has perhaps consisted above all in the fact that they have brought out the impossibility of considering an existent being without taking into consideration his existence, his mode of existence. But regarding this very existence, the words rational animal furnish us no genuine enlightenment. But in general he is aware of the futility of history. In the electric age, however, history no longer presents itself as a perspective of continuous visual space, but as an all-at-once and simultaneous presence of all facets of the past. This is what T.S.Eliot calls “tradition” in his celebrated essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Eliot’s concept seemed quite revolutionary in 1917, but it was in fact a report of an immediate and present reality. Awareness of all-at-once history or tradition goes with a correlative awareness of the present as modifying the entire past. It is this vision that is characteristic of the artistic perception which is necessarily concerned with making and change rather than with any point of view or any static position. The bourgeois nineteenth century referred only to those faces and features which were most strikingly visual in their tidiness and order. That world now persists in some degree in suburbia with the Educational Establishment as its sustaining bulwark. Antithetic to suburbia is the beatnik world, which in the nineteenth century was Bohemia. This is a world in which visual values play a very minor role. One hippie was heard to say, “I have no use for this Cromwell character. I’m a Cavalier!”