Marshall McCluhan is a name not many people know, though he is recognized, within the circles of media communication, as one of if not the best philosopher of communication ever. McCluhan proposed that the first great revolution in communication was the introduction of the first alphabet, somewhere between 1700 and 1900 BCE. Prior to that, humans communicated with each other orally instead of in writing. McCluhan suggests that:
“Before the invention of the phonetic alphabet, human beings lived in a world where all the senses were balanced and simultaneous, a closed world of tribal depth and resonance, an oral culture structured by a dominant auditory sense of life. The ear, as opposed to the cool and neutral eye, is sensitive, hyper-aesthetic and all-inclusive, and contributes to the seamless web of tribal kinship and interdependence in which all members of the group existed in harmony. . . .. Audile-tactile tribal people partook of the collective unconscious, lived in a magical integral world patterned by myth and ritual, its values divine and unchallenged, whereas literate or visual people created environments that are strongly fragmented, individualistic, explicit, logical, specialized and detached.”
– Marshall McCluhan, 1968
In the oral cultures McCluhan describes, people told stories around a campfire or a hearth, and the stories were interconnected to underpin the cultures in which people lived, worked, learned and played. Questions for the storyteller came at the end of the story, after the interconnected parts of the story formed the context of the questions. The transformation from an oral to a written culture changed all that, and now people listen to a portion of the story, the focus is not on the story but the paragraph, and it is in this context that I want to reflect on Dietrich Bonhoeffer and one of his earliest works, from 1933, called Creation and Fall. Bonhoeffer says that the original sin was not the disobedience of Eve and Adam, but rather the crafty question of Satan, “did God say?” By asking this question, sin entered into the world by disconnecting the integral world in which we experienced creation with all our senses. In this new, analytical world of symbols standing for reality and words taking the place of real things, we are tempted into understanding creation as separate and disconnected from each other.
For Bonhoeffer, critical analysis of the Word of God was not only acceptable but necessary. But he refused to criticize the paragraph until he understood the story and knew the interconnected whole of creation. The unified understanding of who God is and how God works in the world weaves its way through all of Bonhoeffer’s work, leading him to actively resist the Nazi movement and ultimately to the gallows at Flossenburg. Bonhoeffer said that as Christians we were free to look at the Word of God, but never behind the word of God. Asking “did God say?”, which was the serpent’s sneaky way of looking behind the word, disconnects the goodness of the Creator from the Creation and leads to a falling away from communion and community with God into the individualistic and narcissistic approach found in so much of our modern world. We have, paraphrasing Paul, exchanged the whole truth of God for the lies that lead us to worship the individual parts of creation, including ourselves, instead of the wholeness, the interconnectedness, the goodness of the Creator and the Creation.
My hope is that, in this new electronic world of visual and auditory communication through Tik-Tok, Instagram, YouTube and others, with the written word taking a back seat, that the tribal communication which was, quoting McLuhan, implicit, simultaneous, and discontinuous will return as our primary way of communicating. The problem I see, though, is that the implicit values present in our societies hundreds of years ago are not present now because of the fracturing nature of written communication.
Using visual and auditory communication, however, may help with creating common sense. I had a supervisor when I worked in New Mexico named Orv, and as I lamented my perception that people did not have any common sense, he said “common sense comes from common values.” Perhaps we should really focus in our auditory and visual communication on the values in which we believe. We should tell stories of hope, of success, as well as stories of despair and failure.
The most powerful books ever written contain no charts, no footnotes, no theorems. The Bible, the Quran, the Upanishads, the Tripikata, the Mahabharata, and the oral traditions of indigenous cultures all use storytelling as the way to build common sense through common values. In the work I do as a behaviour support trainer, I use stories to illustrate and explain concepts and techniques, wrapped within a relational framework in which all of us, regardless of our roles, are equal in worth and value.
It is my hope that in these disruptive times, we can offer an alternative vision of healing and hope to a wounded world by telling the stories of how Jesus brings hope and healing in our lives.
