Marshall McLuhan, critic of media and culture who famously wrote “The Medium Is the Message,” also said the following in a 1979 lecture:
[T]here are the effects of changes in man himself which result from using his own devices to create environments of service. Any new service environment, such as that created by railways or motor cars or telegraph or radio, deeply modifies the very nature and image of the people who use them. Radical changes of identity happening in very sudden brief intervals of time have proved more deadly and destructive to human values than were wars fought with hardware weapons.
→ And what of human bondage, institutionalized, generationalized slavery where the item of service had come to life? How intoxicating that must have become! How irresistible and utterly essential!
Far more transformative, at least on some base living level, than the Gutenberg press, for that affected (at least at first) only a tiny fraction of the populace, the literate and monied. With the rum triangle, entire foundations of society would have been transformed. The psychology of man would not have been able to incorporate this new level of social terraforming—it would have been a constant shock to the system. I’m reminded of the utopia described by Agent Smith in The Matrix where “entire crops were lost” as the plugged-in biobatteries of humans saw their idealized world as something from which to wake—an obvious fantasy. Then, also, Hunter S. Thompson: “The mind recoils in horror.”
This is beyond ego inflation, beyond monstrosity, because every reward accompanied it, and society itself expanded and sculpted itself to make room for the graft, for the mutation.
And all this, by degrees, gathered thread by thread and transformed through the law as ironclad fact, was achieved through the color line. Such an innocent euphemism, to blame a trick of the light for such entrenched and enduring barbarity. The eye can’t help but see color. If one’s eye offends thee, the Christ counseled, pluck it out.
Slavery is our maelström, in McLuhan’s terms (referencing Poe).
Poe imagines the situation in which a sailor, who has gone out on a fishing expedition, finds himself caught in a huge maelstrom or whirlpool. He sees that his boat will be sucked down into this thing. He begins to study the action of the maelstrom and observes that some things disappear and some things reappear. By studying those things that reappear and attaching himself to one of them, he saves himself. Pattern recognition in the midst of a huge, overwhelming, destructive force is the way out of the maelstrom. The huge vortices of energy created by our media present us with similar possibilities of evasion of the consequences of destruction. By studying the pattern of the effects of this huge vortex of energy in which we are involved, it may be possible to program a strategy of evasion and survival.
If we don’t practice pattern recognition, if we do not leap onto the flotsam in the whirling water, we will be lost. The maw will devour us. To grab onto these artifacts means confronting them, leaping toward them, knowing the past by feel and touch.
To deny the pattern is to go down the funnel. Even now, so many generations removed from the Civil War, we are sinking.
McLuhan continues:
There is a passage in Anthony Storr’s The Human Aggression in which he observes that it is obviously true that most bomber pilots are no better, no worse than other men. The majority of them, given a can of petrol and told to pour it over a child of three and ignite it, would probably disobey the order. Yet put a decent man in an airplane a few hundred feet above a village, and he will kill without compunction. He will drop high explosives and napalm, inflict appalling pain and injury on men, women, and children. The distance between him and the people he’s bombing make them into an impersonal target—no longer human beings like himself, with whom he can identify.
So too does the color line create such distance; and so much worse for the descendents of slavers, the creators of such a service technology, who never considered black skin to cover an actual human being. Skin became a cloak of invisibility of the dignity that lay beneath but that also surfaced. Europeans saw a reverse of their own skin and so reversed their own morality upon glimpsing it.
The act/state of owning another human being, even if that person does not recognize the other as a human being, requires that all morality be able to be shed at moment’s notice. To wield the power of a god, of life and death, means that one must rise above morality as you and I would understand the term. Flinging lightning bolts requires the willingness to smite, and to smite utterly. One cannot be fettered by guilt, or fear, or even hate. Whim is the purview of the almighty. No constraints can exist in that realm.
So it was with the slaver.
And such distance was all in his mind. The sevant lived in one’s house, cooked one’s food, fed and raised one’s children. The intimacy of shared living space was real but denied. The slaver exemplified delusion.
No, the slave was opium. The slave was cocaine. There was no way such a society would give up its most treasured and transformative possession. In the antebellum South, all customs revovled around slavery and the planter’s estate. This min/maxxing of culture perfectly captures the pinnacle and nadir of the slaver’s psychology—full god and complete and absolute zero, a walking reversal of fortune for any unfortunate slave under his command.
What does that power do to the psyche? Can we, at this remove, even being to surmise?
“Quite apart from the use of weaponry at a distance,” McLuhan states,“there are the effects of changes in man himself which result from using his own devices to create environments of service.” Slavery was that device, and the Solid South was that environment of service. That legacy redounds and disfigures those descendants. They are scarred in ways that they never see and can never actually touch.
McLuhan asks,
[O]f any new medium or technology:
- What does the technology amplify, enhance, or enlarge?
- What does it obsolesce?
- What does it retrieve or bring back from a distant past? (Probably something that was scrapped earlier.)
- What does it flip or suddenly reverse into when pushed to its limits?
What of slavery?
- It enlarged the slaver, through a psychic vampirism.
- It obsolesced work by human hands, as the slave was considered infrahuman, subhuman. By the work being made not of human hands, it permitted the surrounding society a chance at perfection, to escape its own natural limitations.
- A Garden of Eden, of sorts. A time before toil.
- Mad Zeus.
