Fundamental Religion as a Return to Orality

(Updated below)

Fundamentalists are an example, under secondary orality, of an instance when a literate tradition succumbs to an electronic influence. As an organized religion, fundamentalists present a paradox. They wish to interpret "literally" the recorded residue of oral culture storytelling. But in doing so, they betray the influence of a pre-literate and/or secondary orality world view. Lévi-Strauss noted that a difference in world views between pre-literate and literate cultures is a difference between a synchronic or a diachronic view of existence.

For a pre-literate culture, there is no real history. There is the "before" time and the "now." Time is not a line, it is a circle, with the current people in its center. When ask to explain the existence of a ritual, an animal species or a belief, pre-literate peoples will describe a before time when an ancestor brought about a change to the way things have been ever since. That is a synchronic world view.

Writing and printing allow for concise record keeping, create archives, provide artifacts from times other than our own and therefore encourage the view that time is linear, with a past, present and future. There is a history, a logical sequence of events, and a realization that certain documented causes have led to certain discernable effects. Things that exist now have evolved over time, perhaps a very long time, and have been subject to historical and natural influences. This is a diachronic world view.

In our electronic culture the speed of transmission encourages a return to a synchronic world view. When fundamentalists tell us the world is only as old as the Bible says, approximately 6000 years, they are attempting to bend history to a synchronic viewpoint. Archeological evidence is not important. The scientific demonstration of the mechanism of evolution over millions of years is only a "theory." By denying historical evidence, fundamentalists are attempting to redefine time as circular, with themselves at its center.

That is why fundamentalists appear to be more tolerant of other religions. The distinction they draw is between a synchronic and a diachronic world view, and not between the any particular religious doctrines

Update

The following critique was posted concerning the above discussion:

I think you are entirely wrong on this point. The conflict is between two diachronic viewpoints, one that dates creation 6000 years, and one that pushes it back into the billions. It is the very existence of a diachronic worldview that makes this disagreement possible. That one side is based on scientific fact as it appears in print media, and the other on religious fact as it appears in the book of Genesis, is besides the point. both groups have a historical view. From a synchronic perspective, the moment of creation exists outside of historical time, it's a sacred time that all times connect to rather than a profane time (as per Eliade), and therefore the profane counting of years just would not matter. That's why fundamentalism is a literate phenomenon. Oral cultures are homeostatic and flexible, not rigidly adhering to a fixed text.

Point taken. I think a good case could be made that fundamentalists have abandoned a diachronic, historical perspective in favor of a faith-based synchronic one. There is an old "Beyond the Fringe" skit where a group of unlikely characters gather on a mountaintop to witness the end of the world. They chant "Now is the End. Perish the World!" and nothing happens. As they're leaving one of them says, "Same time tomorrow? One's of these days we'll get it right."

Even though the stories of the Bible can be placed in historical time, adherence to the Bible as a historical chronology effectively removes fundamentalists from historical time and places them in sacred time. The Bible discusses a creation and delineates the descent of mankind from Adam and Eve. Some fundamentalists would claim that within the Bible is the prediction of the "Rapture" and the end of times. This is not history as I understand it, and therefore does not represent a diachronic viewpoint.

Lévi-Strauss states:

"I have suggested elsewhere that the clumsy distinction between 'peoples without history' and others could with advantage be replace by a distinction between what for convenience I called 'cold' and 'hot' societies: the former seeking, by the institutions they give themselves, to annul the possible effects of historical factors on their equilibrium and continuity in a quasi-automatic fashion; the latter resolutely internalizing the historical process and making it the moving power of their development.

....

It is tedious as well as useless, in this connection, to amass arguments to prove that all societies are in history and change: that this is so is patent. But in getting embroiled in a superfluous demonstration, there is a risk of overlooking the fact that human societies react to this common condition in very different fashions. Some accept it, with good or ill grace, and its consequences (to themselves and other societies) assume immense proportions through their attention to it. Others (which we call primitive for this reason) want to deny it and try, with a dexterity which we underestimate, to make the states of their development which they consider 'prior' as permanent as possible." (The Savage Mind, 1966, pp. 233-234)

What I find fascinating in all this is whether we, being ourselves in a transition period between literacy and secondary orality, can draw parallels between pre-literate societies (where there was no possibility of literate influences) and post-literate societies (where literate influences can be assumed). Can the definitions and characterizations Claude Lévi-Strauss assigned to the "savage" mind (what we would call "oral" or "pre-literate") provide guidance to the nature of this transition? Is the "secondary orality" mind "savage" or not?

McLuhan's Debt to Lévi-Strauss

I came across this very interesting reference to Claude Lévi-Strauss in a letter Marshall McLuhan sent to the Journal of Technology and Culture in 1975. In it he credits Lévi-Strauss (and Ferdinand de Saussure) with providing the structural basis for the development of his Laws of the Media.

Very interesting!

From Technology and Culture, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Jan., 1975), 74-78

Communication
McLuhan's Laws of the Media

Marshall McLuhan

To the Editor:

I have been experimenting with developing a series of "Laws of the Media," which I submit herewith for comment and discussion by the readers of Technology and Culture. My purpose is to invite criticism, directed not at me or at my rhetoric, but rather at the substance and contents of my thoughts. It seems to me that historians of technology–and kindred students of the sociology and philosophy of technology, economists, practicing engineers, and the like–might enjoy and profit from attempting to disprove my "laws."

So, cognizant of the seeming paradox that a "scientific hypothesis is one that can be disproved," I have put my "Laws of the Media" in a "disprovable" form, hoping that in the course of disproving each of them, many new discoveries might occur.


How did I arrive at these "Laws of the Media"? By a structural approach. The structuralists, beginning with Ferdinand de Saussure and now Lévi-Strauss, divide the approaches to the problem of form into two categories: diachrony and synchrony. Diachrony is simply the developmental, chronological study of any cultural matter; but synchrony works on the assumption that all aspects of any form are simultaneously present in any part of it. Although I have used the simultaneous approach in arriving at these Laws of the Media, any one of them is susceptible to the diachronic approach for filling in the historical background and details.


Since electric speeds of information constitute a sort of simultaneous structuring of experience, synchrony, representing all directions at once, is, as it were, acoustic; whereas the diachronic, representing one stage at ta time, is visual in its analytical pattern. Few People seem to be aware that visual space and order are continuous, connected, homogeneous, and static. In these regards, visual space is quite different from any other kind of space, be it tactile, kinetic, audile, or osmic (smell). Visual space alone can be divided.


You will note that, although these are called Laws of the Media, only a few of them deal with communications media narrowly conceived. Instead, I am talking about "media" in terms of a larger entity of information and perception which forms our thoughts, structures our experience, determines our views of the world about us. It is this kind of information flow–media–which is responsible for my postulation of a series of insights regarding the impact of certain technological developments. I call them "laws" because they represent, as do scientific "laws," an ordering of thought
and experience which has not yet been disproved; I call them "laws of the media" because the channel and impact of today's electronic communication systems provide the informational foundation upon which we order, or structure, these experiential perceptions.

In formulating these laws, I have utilized what is sometimes called the "scientific method." That is, I have proceeded by induction, even though in the process of induction one discovers many things that could not be merely inducted. The Laws of the Media have been shaped by studying the effects of the media, so there is always
a hidden ground upon which these effects stand, and against which they bounce. That is, the law of the medium is a figure interplaying with a ground. As with a wheel and an axle, there must be an interval between the two in order for the play to exist.

Even if the readers of Technology and Culture might not agree with my underlying structure, approach, and methodology, I hope they will examine these sample apothegms for their validity on a historical basis. I am not primarily a historian, so my reference base in not historical. However, I should like to test the validity of my
laws in terms of history. In other words, do my Laws of the Media–derived from my inductive approach to synchronous form–correspond to historical data as viewed from the vantage point of historians of technology? Does the history of technology "prove" or "disprove" my postulates?

I should appreciate hearing from readers of Technology and Culture in response to the above questions. They might write me directly, or they might address me through the pages of this journal. Perhaps in this way we can get a dialogue going, from which we might all profit greatly.

A sample of my proposed “Laws” of the media follow (the four steps of the process are named in the first “law” and assumed for the rest):

I. Cable TV

a. Amplifies quality and diversity of signal pickup.
b. Obsolesces diffusion broadcasting
c. Retrieves early transmission broadcast pattern of point-to-point (ship to shore)
d. Reversal is flip to home broadcasting

(Other examples clipped)

Marshall McLuhan, Director
Centre for Culture and
Technology
University of Toronto,
Toronto 5, Canada

Claude Lévi-Strauss's Contribution to Media Ecology

Here is my quick take on Lévi-Strauss's contribution to Media Ecology:

His approach to the interpretation of so-called "primitive" cultures revealed the complex patterns of thought that went into the development of systems of myth and kinship. His notion that "primitive" intellectual activities were equal to our "modern" systems of knowledge, just applied to differing objects, put the entire body of anthropological writings, going back to James Fraser's Golden Bough into a new perspective. Lévi-Strauss's work, building on the linguistic structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure and the evolutionary approach to cultural studies of Franz Boas, revealed the biases in the use of terms such as "primitive" and "modern" (even though Lévi-Strauss himself used these terms), and paved the way for Walter Ong's distinction between orality, literacy and secondary-orality as more appropriate explanations for differing cultures.

Lévi-Strauss discovered and demonstrated connections between seemingly disparate mythic stories, and offered explanations for seemingly random elements of those stories. His methodology can be used as model for ways to interpret the products of contemporary culture, which, while seeming to be unrelated, actually constitute a system (or systems) of symbolic meanings.

I find the tools Lévi-Strauss provides useful in a number of ways. I also think that his notion of "things that are good to think with" as powerful as Postman's question regarding a new technology: "What problem does it provide a solution to?"

I like Lévi-Strauss's idea that a myth is not a "false" story or idle tale, but rather a dynamic technique which members of a culture use to address cultural discrepancies. To me, this is a compelling explanation for why myths persist in a culture. It may also explain how, if we know where to look, we can identify the mythic systems of our own culture that provide us with a coherent world view in the face of constant change and turmoil.

Myths cannot be considered singly. One must absorb the entire canon of a culture to understand all the connections and interactions. That may be why we can't analyze Greek mythology properly. Too little of it has come down to us, and the versions we read have undergone so many revisions that they may not truly represent the originals.

I know that structuralism has been somewhat in eclipse in academic circles lately; that Lévi-Strauss has been accused of a binary focus that, being Hegelian in origin, cannot apply to current thinking about media. I think that to write off Lévi-Strauss's methodology as a thesis/antithesis/synthesis intellectual game misses the subtlety of his analysis. A closer reading of all 2200+ pages of his Mythologiques shows that, while he may begin an analysis by identifying polar opposites, this is only a starting point. The analysis of a mythic system must account for far more that just a pair of opposites. In the course of his analysis of the myths of the Tupi Indians, Lévi-Strauss moves spiral-like through multiple mythic variations and multiple opposing pairs and by proceeding A to B and B to C, etc., demonstrates internal consistencies within the mythic system that aren't immediately apparent to an outside observer. In other words, Lévi-Strauss provides a useful tool for analysis regardless of whether you wish to extrapolate the function of the method to the deeper structures of the human mind or not.

I also find Lévi-Strauss's methodology completely compatible with McLuhan's Laws of the Media. Where McLuhan, via the Tetrad asks us to consider what a technology or medium enhances, obsolesces, retrieves and reverses into, Lévi-Strauss will start with a pair of opposites "A" and "B", but in the course of his analysis will present examples of what he calls " A' " (A prime) and " B' " (B prime) as recursive iterations of the original pair. Perhaps someone will someday conduct a Lévi-Straussian analysis of McLuhan's system of myths.

Lévi-Strauss is also compatible with Ong's notions of primary orality. Ong discusses how different human thought processes must be without text. Lévi-Strauss gives example after example of exactly how these thought processes work. I don't recall Lévi-Strauss discussing the poetry of the Tupi Indians as a means of perpetuating the culture, but he does demonstrate how interconnected myths can act as intellectual place holders for a non-literate population to help them consider complex systems of thought.

Our current system of myths is not only presented verbally, but also via images, in print, and even in interplay of biases amongst all of our competing media. Since we may be relearning this manner of thinking as we move deeper into secondary orality, Lévi-Strauss provides us with a map of where we may be headed.