The Media Institution as an Obstacle to Civilization's Resilience: Part I
Marshal McLuhan (1911-1980)
Media is plural for medium, the substance in which information is stored or through which it is delivered. Marshal McLuhan called a medium “any extension of ourselves.”[i] Less broadly, the media is thought to be the tools and technology of communication—amphitheaters, cuneiform, and the clay tablet, the printed type of books and newspapers, the electronic world of telegraph, radio, television, and the internet. Each is a medium—like the air in which sound waves travel—through which information is transmitted.
The media have adaptive value for the same reasons information naturally has for all social creatures, whether it is the information being transmitted through the waggle dance of the honeybee, the feelings of comfort, trust, and love communicated through a mother chimpanzee’s soft cooing sounds, or the spiritual mysteries that are painted on the walls of Paleolithic caves at Lascaux, Kakadu, and Maros.[ii] In the egalitarian world of the early foragers, information was a power shared by the collective. As a society grew less equal, so did access to the media, and consequently so did access to high quality information. A medium tends to amplify one’s voice; it provides access to a larger audience. And so it confers the power of persuasion and to influence the cultural worldview, and, from an economic and political perspective, to control more resources.
Historically, each new medium transformed increasingly concentrated forms of energy into a means of reaching more people. Human somatic energy could project only as far as the voice carried or as the eye could see. The audience usually numbered in the dozens, rarely in the thousands. Progressively, horseback, wind, water, and the burning of biomass moved information farther, faster, and to larger audiences.[iii] By the early 19th century, coal-burning, steam-powered printing presses produced books and pamphlets that reached hundreds of thousands of European readers.[iv] And today the dense energy stored in fossil fuel and uranium blasts electronic information across entire continents and flings satellites around the planet, reaching billions of people simultaneously. In a positive feedback loop, assess to material resources and assess to the media reinforce each other.
If access to the media confers power, control of it provides virtually absolute power. According to the media analyst Edward Herman, “Control over definitions of reality, the agenda that people are allowed to think about, the ability to reiterate messages and manipulate symbols are basic ingredients of power.”[v] Those in control of the media sit at the top of the human food chain. In the early empires of Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, the Indus, and Central and South America, the media was in the hands of the kings and priests.[vi] They used the media for purposes of propaganda; that is, to influence the opinions and attitudes of the community. And surely it must have taken a constant and concentrated effort to convince the general population to accept conditions and behave in ways that were contrary to billions of years of natural selection. Against their personal interest, people were persuaded to work long, hard hours, to subordinate themselves, to give their freedom and the fruit of their efforts to their supposed superiors, to even sacrifice their lives in war for them. To this end, the views of the political and religious institutions—in the form of kings and priests—were propagated through every medium available: pottery, monuments, story-telling, town criers, couriers, and heralds; through dance, theatre, sculpture, art, and architecture; even by way of stories told from one settlement to the next of the ghastly savagery of an invading or marauding army.[vii] Whether it is a pyramid, ziggurat, coliseum, cathedral, ritual, logical treatise, or threat of mutilation and death, media have been the mouthpieces for the ruling minority. The media served to propagate the minority position and to shape the worldview of the larger community.
credit: https://www.shutterstock.com/video/search/king-and-queen
David Hume (1711-1776)
Clearly, their propaganda has worked. For, as David Hume noted, “Nothing appears more surprising… than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers.” [viii] Especially when “force is always on the side of the governed.” So, what keeps people from realizing this? What keeps them from rising up and overthrowing their masters? Hume concluded that the rulers control opinion, a “maxim that extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and popular.” What Hume found for government extends to all the institutions (especially the main institutions—the business, religious, military, and media itself). They require the control of information (and so, the media) to persuade the multitudes of viewpoints that serve the minority interests.
This is even more important in “democratic” governments, where coercion is less of a threat. Or as Noam Chomsky with characteristic wit phrased it: “Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”[ix] As Chomsky has spent the last few decades demonstrating, the elite of the “democratic” countries have managed rather well to keep their populations ignorant of the inequality and suffering perpetrated by their elite, often in the name of the people. In the United States, this would include the many assassinations, military incursions, funding of dictators and militaries, incarcerations within our own borders, oil spills, chemical contaminants, and so forth. It does cost government and business some time and money, but obviously it pays proper dividends.
Kissinger and Pinochet meeting (Image by Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores de Chile, Wikimedia Commons). "Make the Economy Scream": Secret Documents Show Nixon, Kissinger Role Backing 1973 Chile Coup, according to Democracy Now!
In 1928, Edward Bernays published a short, candid book entitled, simply enough, Propaganda, extolling the virtues and methods of propaganda in a democratic society during peacetime. In a clear, unapologetic manner, he explained why and how an educated, well-intentioned elite must control “the herd” if we “are to live together as a smoothly functioning [democratic] society.” Called the “father of modern public relations,” Bernays was listed among Life magazine’s 100 most influential Americans of the 20th century. Highly successful in both government and business propaganda, his innovations included the clever use of press releases, “tie ins,” and the third party technique (where for example we hear that: “Four out of five dentists recommend sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum”). Among his many achievements, he has been credited (or implicated, depending on one’s point of view) for being instrumental in convincing an ambivalent, isolationist American public into entering World War I on the side of the British; for raising cigarette sales by changing a cultural norm against women smoking in public; for helping Alcoa to profit from the sodium fluoride wastes of aluminum production by convincing an American public to fluoridate their drinking water; and for helping United Fruit and the U.S. government to overthrow the democratically elected Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz Guzman.[x] In all these, he exploited the megaphone of the media and the authority that we attribute to it. He conflated information and misinformation, fact and fiction, news and fancy. According to Bernays, propaganda provides the leadership with a mechanism “to mold the mind of the masses” so that “ they will throw their newly gained strength in the desired direction.”[xi] This process of “engineering consent,” he said, is the very “essence of the democratic process.”[xii]
It is through the media’s bullhorn that the propaganda of the few becomes the worldview of the many. As media evolved—from the ephemeral, low tech oral and visual media to its concretization in script, print, radio, television, online—they have all come in service of elite propaganda. Napoleon Bonaparte’s success has been attributed as much to his mastery of the newspapers and other media as to his military genius.[xiii] The power of the media was unmistakable in Nazi Germany as Adolf Hitler’s voice, broadcast through radio, transfixed what has been up to that point the most literate, civilized nation on Earth.[xiv] In Roosevelt’s “fireside chats” and Churchill’s oratory masterpieces, too, the radio reached audiences as the press never had, immediately en masse, and emotionally, personally, as well as intellectually. The electronic medium could now capture and broadcast the deeply embedded familiarity of the spoken word, the oldest medium, to millions simultaneously, each in the security of their own home. Then, with television and the Internet came a confluence of all the media, plus the sheer power of continuous iteration, of enveloping people—individually, one at a time, within the powerless space of isolation—in a deep, cold, relentless and multi-sensory medium. In these, the medium thoroughly and simultaneously expresses and fabricates the culture. From product placement, to the consumerist worldview, to the isolated, powerless individual with a head filled with fantasy, the screen projects a world that alienates the many for the benefit of the few.
REFERENCES
[i] McLuhan, M. (1964:23) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McGraw-Hill, New York. However, to quibble, air is a medium through which the sound waves of oral communication pass. In this instance, air is an extension of ourselves, but not a technology.
[ii] For the fascinating and lesser well-known Maros caves in Sulawesi, see Roebroeks, W. (2014) Art on the Move. Nature, v. 514, pp. 170-171.; and Aubert, M., Brumm, A., Ramli, M., Sutikana, R., Saptomo, E.W., Hakim, B., Morwood, M.J., van den Bergh, G.D., Kinley, L., and Dosseto, A. (2014) Pleistocene Cave Art fromSulawesi, Indonesia. Nature, v. 514, pp. 223-227.
[iii] Weber, J. (2006) Strassburg, 1605: The Origins of the Newspaper in Europe, German History, v. 24(3), pp. 387-412.
[iv] Weber (2006), Buringh, E., and van Zanden, J.L. (2009) Charting the “Rise of the West”: Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, A Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries, The Journal of Economic History, v. 69(2), pp. 409-445.
[v] Herman, E.S. (1989) An interview by R.W. McChesney (1989, January) The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Monthly Review.
[vi] Taylor, P.M. (2003) Munitions of the Mind: A history of propaganda from the ancient world to the present day, Manchester University Press, Manchester, UK..
[vii] Taylor (2003:19-48).
[viii] Hume, D. (1777) On the First Principles of Government, in Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects In Two Volumes, Volume 1. Thanks to Noam Chomsky for his analysis of this passage in Chomsky, N. (1999) Profit Over People, Seven Stories Press, New York..
[ix] Chomsky, N. (2002a:20) Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda, 2nd Edition, An Open Media Book, Canada.
[x] World War I—Bernays, E. (1928/2004) Propaganda, Ig, Brooklyn, NY. Smoking—Brandt, A.M. (1996) Recruiting Women Smokers: the Engineering of Consent. American Medical Women’s Association, v. 51(1-2), pp. 63-66.. Fluoride—Foulkes, R.G. (2004) Public Deception on Fluoride: Book Review Editorial, Fluoride, v. 37(2), pp. 55-59.; Freeze, R.A., and Lehr, J.H. (2009:135-137) The Fluoride Wars: How a Modest Public Health Measure Became America’s Longest Running Political Melodrama. Wiley, New York. Guatemala—Klump, S. (1996) The CIA, Carlos Castillo Armas, and Communism in Guatemala, The Wittenberg History Journal, v. 25, pp. 1-8.; Kirsch, S.J. (2011) PR Guns for Hire: The Specter of Edward Bernays in Gadhafi’s Libya. Present Tense, v. 2(1), pp. 1-8.
[xi] Bernays (1928/2004:47).
[xii] Bernays, E. (1947:113) The Engineering of Consent. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, v. 250. pp. 113-120.
[xiii] Hanley, W. (2005) The Genesis of Napoleonic Propaganda, 1796-1799, Columbia University Press, New York.
[xiv] Shlain, L. (1998:404) The Alphabet versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image, Penguin/Compass, New York.
