Imagine a lover of history who wants to brush up on their Lincoln. Close at hand they have the Library of America’s excellent two-volume collection of the 16th president’s “Speeches and Writings.” Wishing to skip the early railsplitting days and proceed directly to classics like the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural, our hypothetical reader starts with the second volume of the essential Lincoln.
The very first speech our reader encounters, right there on page 3, is a lecture on “Discoveries and Inventions” delivered in Jacksonville, Illinois, in February 1859. A bit like his contemporary Emerson (though on a less renowned plane as late as 1859), Lincoln could draw a crowd by speaking on any number of subjects. In remarks he presented on more than one occasion, Lincoln addressed what today we would call technology.
That day in Jacksonville the future president called writing “the great invention of the world.” If all writing everywhere on Earth disappeared tomorrow alongside all memory of such things, Lincoln wondered how long it would take us to invent “the letter A with any adequate notion of using it to advantage.”
In Lincoln’s telling, words are sounds formed through innate human capacity. Conversely written words are a miracle of technology.
When we remember that words are sounds merely, and we shall conclude that the idea of representing those sounds by marks, so that whoever should at any time after see the marks, would understand what sounds they meant, was a bold and ingenious conception, not likely to occur to one man of a million, in the run of a thousand years.
By the 20th century Lincoln’s kernel of thought was being picked up, researched, amplified, extended, articulated, and broadcast far and wide by what came to be known as the Toronto School of communication theory. The Toronto School’s emblematic figures were Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan.
In the words of my great teacher James W. Carey, Innis “ransacked experience without regard to discipline.” Like Lincoln, Innis pondered the downstream and potentially revolutionary effects of printing (or, by the 20th century, broadcasting) words as opposed to uttering them in person as had been done for millennia. A proud Canadian born in 1894, Innis was by the late 1940s sounding the alarm on encroaching cultural hegemony from his nation’s southern neighbor. In the later remembrance of one colleague: “As a patriot he thought he saw his native country’s forests being destroyed to make a moment’s shallow reading on a New York subway.”
McLuhan was almost two decades younger than Innis and the two of them overlapped for a moment at the University of Toronto after the Second World War. Innis wrote in a manner that, even in the estimation of an admiring Carey, tended toward the “maddeningly obscure, opaque, and elliptical.” By contrast McLuhan was epigrammatic: “The medium is the message.”
Most memorably, McLuhan was prominent enough as a public intellectual to make a cameo appearance as himself in an Oscar-winner for Best Picture.
The oracular mystique of Innis and the sheer prevalence of McLuhan quite rightly established both as paradigmatic figures in communication theory. Carey himself wrote of a time when the “most interesting part” of the field, at least in its North American manifestation, “could have been described by an arc running from Harold Innis to Marshall McLuhan.”
Possibly with the benefit of 2020s hindsight we may now redefine that arc to include Eric Havelock and, no less, Carey himself. (To say nothing of Lincoln.)
Havelock was British by birth, Scottish by upbringing, Canadian by training, and, ultimately, American by choice. He was employed at the University of Toronto before even Innis and researched ancient Greece there until 1947.
When Harvard then lured Havelock south of the border, the deans in Cambridge doubtless believed they were getting a classicist par excellence. So they were, but having studied pre-Socratic philosophers Havelock was fascinated with what he came to call the Greek literate revolution. It was a revolution made possible by a new alphabet, of course, but in Havelock’s account writing very soon outstripped mere transcribing.1 “The use of vision directed to the recall of what had been spoken (Homer) was replaced by its use to invent a textual discourse (Thucydides, Plato) which seemed to make orality obsolete.”
In the early 1960s Havelock published Preface to Plato at virtually the same moment that McLuhan hit bookshelves with The Gutenberg Galaxy. “Marshall McLuhan had drawn attention to the psychological and intellectual effects of the printing press,” Havelock would later write. “I was prepared to push the whole issue further back, to something that had begun to happen about seven hundred years before Christ.” Both Toronto School theorists narrated revolutions in communication. Six decades ago the audience for such histories believed they too were living through one such epoch with the rise of television.
Havelock and McLuhan, on the other hand, felt they were children of an earlier new order in radio and its particular tumults and displacements. Havelock would one day recount one scene he saw at that revolution.
At some time in October 1939 (I think it was then, soon after Hitler had completed his conquest of Poland, but memory is uncertain) I recall standing on Charles Street in Toronto adjacent to Victoria College, listening to an open air radio address. We all, professors and students, as by common consent had trooped out to listen to the loudspeaker set up in the street. It was broadcasting a speech from Hitler, with whom we in Canada were, formally speaking, at war. He was exhorting us to call it quits and leave him in possession of what he had seized. The strident, vehement, staccato sentences clanged out and reverberated and chased each other along, series after series, flooding over us, battering us, half drowning us, and yet kept us rooted there listening to a foreign tongue which we somehow could nevertheless imagine that we understood. This oral spell had been transmitted in the twinkling of an eye, across thousands of miles, had been automatically picked up and amplified and poured over us.
These technologically meditated gestures to an earlier oral spell would later be termed “secondary orality” by Walter J. Ong, a former student of McLuhan and self-described intellectual heir of Havelock.
Shortly before his death in 1988, Havelock summarized a lifetime of research in The Muse Learns to Write, the rare work that’s elegantly lean and readable yet no less brilliant. “Narrative along with rhythm had been the necessary means of supporting the oral memory and was now no longer needed.”
Narrative along with rhythm live on in the catchy hits from our youth that we never forget. The oral memory never disappears, it instead coexists with literacy. “Prose became the vehicle of a whole new universe of fact and theory. This was a release of mind as well as of language.”2
Lincoln and Havelock each in their way made the case that the literate revolution was the one true, defining, and catalytic technological big bang, after which all else has been a sequel. While such revolutions are of course now exponentially more rapid in their diffusion, the lessons of this first great upheaval are perhaps comforting. We’ve learned to live with literacy. Maybe we’ll work out a modus vivendi with AI too.
The alphabet represented “a visual representation of linguistic noise that was both economical and exhaustive: a table of atomic elements which by grouping themselves in an inexhaustible variety of combinations can with reasonable accuracy represent any actual linguistic noise.”
“Did ethics like physics have to be invented, and did the invention depend upon the substitution of literacy for orality?”