Volume Introduction: Notes on Catholic Media Ecology

Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 proclamation that “the medium is the message” has long been considered properly for what it is: a prophetic statement. McLuhan’s insight that the world, because of its “electrically computerized dossier bank” had become “one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early mistake” certainly was observable in the late 1960’s; but few could have predicted how fully operative, just 60 years later, this worrisome observation would be. [1] His prescient warnings of an imminent crisis born of the “Electric” (soon to be “Digital”) age outline a host of spiritual, cultural, and intellectual problems, most having to do with fragmentations in personal and social presence—of attending to ourselves, attending to one another, and, in the spirit of Simone Weil, attending to God.[2]

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Of course, this kind of fragmentation has been an ascendent social phenomenon, particularly since the dawn of the industrial age. But the arrival of the digital age, particularly with its dizzying traffic lanes of cyber life and its wide social reach of “infliuencer culture,” has spun fragmentation into new and increasingly deleterious forms—eroding already fragile states of community and impeding our abilities to discern our purpose, to think reasonably and imaginatively, and to be present in care for one another.

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McLuhan is an important figure in this issue of Nexus not only because of his deft insight about how electronic media interacts with the human person—so much so that it becomes an extension of our central nervous system (a negotiation that changes substantively how we feel, think, and interact with the world)—but also because he knew that these encounters and quiet convulsions create new media ecologies, social biospheres, and spiritual states.  

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As McLuhan observed, “the older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions—the patterns of mechanistic technologies—are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electric information retrieval.”[3] The result of the collisions of these “methods,” the likes of which are exploding today as we enter the Age of Artificial Intelligence, were predicted by McLuhan and are of implicit interest to the authors and features of this issue. They are also of implicit interest of both Pope Francis and Pope Leo as both Laudato si’ (2015) and Magnifica humanitas (2026) take up in various ways the social and spiritual gravity of the technocratic paradigm, that is, the paradigm begotten by the ecologies of assembly line mechanism consorting with the excarnate entities of digitalization (and runaway forms of capitalism)—and the new forms of power that come with it.

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Influencers

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While McLuhan’s observations about the new media age are indispensable and well documented, what remains less well known is his formation and identity as a Catholic intellectual. McLuhan, a figure from a long line of “intellectual converts” that characterized so many pilgrim scholars of the 20th Century, was received into Catholic Church in 1937.  McLuhan’s becoming a Catholic was influenced primarily by two popular Catholic writers, G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), who became a Catholic in 1922, and Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) who was a cradle Catholic, more or less. McLuhan was drawn to Chesterton and Belloc not only for their theological insight but because of their the wit, humor, and and embodied passion with which the engaged the world. He muses on this influence in his letters: “You see my ‘religion-hunting’ began with a rather priggish ‘culture-hunting,” McLuhan recounted, “I simply couldn’t believe that men had to live in the mean, mechanical, joyless, rootless fashion that I saw in Winnipeg…it was a long time before I finally perceived that the character of every society, its food, clothing, arts, and amusements are ultimately determined by its religion—It was longer still before I could believe that religion was as great and joyful as these things which it creates—or destroys.” [4]

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While McLuhan’s journey Catholicwards owes much to the influence of the famous “Chesterbelloc,” a fabulating, almost mythical creature that shaped so many late modern modern Catholics, McLuhan’s formation was fundamentally derived from the intellectual accountabilities that came with his exposure to the realist philosophy and theology of St. Thomas Aquinas—and how the intellectual habits and methods of St. Thomas could be reframed to speak to late modern culture. In fact, McLuhan reserved his highest respect and praise for the major Neo-Thomist thinkers of his day, Etienne Gilson (1884-1978), founder of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, and Jacques Maritain (1882-1974), arguably the most influential Catholic philosopher of the 20th Century. After teaching for eight years at the Jesuit St Louis University, McLuhan arrived at St. Michael’s College, Toronto, in 1946—with the explicit hope of engaging both Gilson and Maritain in discussion. These encounters took place and they were deeply formative—even if McLuhan was not always public about them in his later work. For his part, Maritain was most supportive of McLuhan’s early forays into media studies, particularly the experimental project that would become The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951)[5]. Gilson, too, recognized the originality of McLuhan’s thought, but quite humorously mused that he needed a book to predict the end of books [6]. McLuhan responded in kind to all of these counsels.

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Following Belloc, perhaps, and Belloc’s warning of the rise of government aided corporatism in his 1913 book The Servile State, McLuhan was extremely concerned about the ways that media extends into the veins of the human person and then into the ecologies of culture. He was crystal clear about the corrosive effects of not only print culture, but also, to follow Belloc, the unavoidable servility entailed by a slavish relationship with media monoculture and the strange power of the influence clergy of the Digital Age. But as worried as he was about media phenomenon and the auto-exploitative concessions of our making machines that, in the end, will make (or end) us, McLuhan was most fundamentally a theological  “perceiver” who was endowed with a social and spiritual imagination that both paid attention to the present moment and that could see over the next hill.[7]  On the one hand, McLuhan could be described as nearly utopian about the technological future; and on the other, he could be equally dystopian, channelling the the cries of the Luddites of the 19th century and anticipating the advent of today’s “tech pessimists” who decry our AI future.  

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Realists

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But perhaps the most fitting way to understand McLuhan is a certain type of "realist, one who understands that holding up two unlike things at once and proceeding as if they are not opposite is the essence of the theological realism he claimed. This is to say that McLuhan was well aware of the complex of opposites that constitute and form reality and that, as a good Thomist, truth resides in and generates from such dynamic tensions. Famously musing back about his conversion to Catholicism on the Feast of the Annunciation in 1937 (at the age of 25), McLuhan emphasized his core thinking on theology: “By the way, faith is not a matter of concepts,” he observed, faith is “a matter of immediate reality.” 

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To fully extrapolate the brilliance of such a simple sentence would take a deep dive into St. Thomas Aquinas, a host of scholastic thinkers, and modern philosophers exactly like Maritain and Gilson. Cultivating a healthy realism in the excarnate age of digitalization and AI is the focus here. Let us utilize the latter thinker, Etienne Gilson, and his superb Methodical Realism: A Handbook for Beginning Realists (1936) to summarize the brilliance of McLuhan’s insight: “as used today, the word ‘realism’ means in the first place the opposite to ‘idealism’ when it claims that it is possible to pass from the subject to the object.” [8] Rather than submitting to the dominance of airy concepts, for Gilson realism is “...a doctrine in which the real existence of the object is taken for granted, either because one denies there is a problem to be solved here, or because one is as yet unaware of such a problem.” McLuhan, who insisted on the necessity of pattern recognition in the modern age, concurs. He was attuned to the perception of effects as his academic pursuit more than the creation of “concepts” (even if the popular version of his career is precisely as someone who kept inventing new “ideas.”) Again, in contradistinction to a shallow read of McLuhan, Gilson’s definition of the pursuit of realist philosophers describes the depth to which a self conscious Catholic media ecology is trying to be attentive—an objective that  the writers in this issue of Nexus understand as a premise.

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“What we must do first of all,” says Gilson, “is free ourselves from the obsession with epistemology as the necessary precondition for philosophy. The philosopher as such has only one duty: to put himself in accord with himself and other things.”  McLuhan, through his attempts to probe reality and to propose what may seem like off-kilter questions (through things like his “tetrad of media effects”), may have come off as naive or self-referential, or even naval gazing. But as his “Mosaic method” attempted to do, his thrust was not to ponder concepts for their own sake, but to shake the sleepy idealist in all of us and to awake us to the realities of the media conditions we all inhabit. What Gilson says of the scholastic philosopher is also true of McLuhan: “So there was nothing naive about [them]; it was the realism of the traveler with a destination in view who, seeing that he is approaching it, feels confident he is on the right road."[9]

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Neighbors

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Realism plays a distinct and foundational theme throughout the considerations of this volume. On one hand, metaphysical realism and its necessary “middle position” are alluded to explicitly or implicitly in multiple essays. Furthermore, certainly the attempt to portray “things as they are” in the technological environment we find ourselves pervades the imagination and language of the various writers.

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However, it is of special note that many of the essays in this edition of Nexus employ or consider deeply the metaphors we use in order to appreciate our digital reality on the ground. Metaphor may seem to some the proper field of the ideal or symbolic, but one only has to think of “realist poets” like Robert Frost to see how natural descriptions of environments give rise to the most profound metaphors, or conversely how other similar poets like Richard Wilbur employ metaphor to create a more realistic impression of a scene. It is our contention that the attention and sensitivity to metaphor in this collection of essays serves as a similar commitment to realism when considering the digital array. 

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Therefore, it seems only fitting that we would employ a governing metaphor ourselves for this collection. And while it is impossible to ignore the broad use of “digital continent” as a persistent image in Catholic discourse, we would employ a special metaphor of a different stripe. Taking the aspect of “the cloud” seriously when it comes to the digital array, we imagine the digital environment best described as a fog. It pervades everything, but seems hard to grasp, pin down, or even look at squarely. Attempts to shed light on the fog merely diffuses the beams into various directions, often making things worse. What is one to do on a continent covered so?

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It is in these conditions that sight takes a back seat, and hearing enjoys a pride of place, something McLuhan himself always associated more with Faith— following St. Paul’s view that faith, the divine Word, comes by hearing. Here, it is the figure of the  bell that affords one more direction than the lantern. Here, one must be receptive to the tolling resonance of sound as to sight as the refracting environment of foggy digital terrain makes the usual penetrating powers of sight untrustworthy.

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The following essays operate in such a bell-like manner, tolling in and through the fog of our current media confusions. Their messages individually and together ring out a telos, a goal, a final end, asking: where must we arrive in our digital wonderings and wanderings? Each has its own unique tone and timbre, but their overlapping song provides those with ears to hear assurance along the way through the disorientation of our low and refracted light environment. Led on in sonorous hope, perhaps we might walk together as neighbors, rather than being nudged blindly along the deformed and confused labyrinth of algorithmic slop. By such clarion callings, the Incarnational truth rings again and again in our ear, [10] that “the flesh of the Word touches our flesh and in him God becomes our neighbor.” [11]