The Medium Is the Message

by
William Krehm

Carl Mortished in his column in The Tines of London informs us that “London has been gripped by anxiety over a spate of fatal stabbings of teenagers. A trend in the capital for members of criminal gangs to carry big knives has led to 19 deaths since the beginning of the year. Parents are frightened for their children and the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, promises tough action, sentencing guidelines for knife crime are to be reviewed by government. And, not to be outdone, David Cameron, the Conservative Opposition leader, is demanding mandatory jail sentences for anyone carrying an illegal knife.

“This dangerous contraband is the sort of knife you might find in your kitchen, carried inside coats and through trouser belts by pathetic but dangerous and troubled youngsters. Overall, murder rates among the young are more or less unchanged - death by firearms is down but is compensated by a sharp rise in death from knives.

“That doesnt interest politicians on the stump as they rush to exhibit concern, arouse fear and urge the public to be vigilant and behave with civic fortitude. Politicians adopting Churchill-like postures as they warn about economic hardship and point to a vague threat - Islamic terrorists or knife-wielding teenagers. Parents are frightened for their children and the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, promises tough action. And, not to be outdone, David Cameron, the Conservative Opposition leader, is demanding mandatory jail sentences for anyone carrying an illegal knife.”

The air is full of menace, the specific nature of the threat is less important. It is the purest Marshall McLuhan: “The medium is the message.” And if we seek beyond that message we arrive at a state of society that has little or less of the static tyrannies of yore.

Rather, what we have is a society where there is little that is static as was the case in feudalism or classical capitalism in which exploitation and inequalities were relatively known to the victims from birth to death, but today are constantly deepening and spreading at an ever greater and accelerating pace. Those more static models, no matter how bad, were known to the victims from childhood on. That left room for a belief in a compensation heaven for the virtuous after death. But not to the ever accelerating exploitation speed-up on a globalized, deregulated scale. Everything is new and ever-changing, and must remain so.

There is neither time, space, nor faith left for a peaceful, or even for ivy-covered alternatives even in crime and exploitation. There is then a common feature between criminal kitchen-knife wielding, Muslim or any other political or religious terrorism. It is the mating of the mathematics of the atomic bomb with the rate of financial expansion - a detached feature of the most abstract and ever-changing sort, with its compulsion to increase at the pace of the economic bomb and translated into the relationship gone screechingly wrong between man and his fellow man. It is time, indeed, to light a candle to the memory of the late Marshall McLuhan, not the least of the benign prophets, whose teaching detecting procedures that had barely begun to take over in his day, but have since come to format our fears, woes, and very existence.