The Notion of Roles

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art and the group on 10 November 2015.

Installing folding tops at Ford's Highland Park Plant, 1915

I think we're both touching different parts of the same elephant!

McLuhan blamed industrialization for homogenizing us, and industrialization is a byproduct of the age of print. Print creates centralized government and bureaucracy, but it fragments psychically in that we read alone and in silence, which creates the primacy of the individual instead of group-oriented tribal thought. Industrialization gives us jobs where the tribal mindset gives us roles, and roles allow for greater expression than fragmented jobs. But tribes also live in a state of nearly constant warfare and tend to reject pluralistic viewpoints. Literate man is more open-minded. Literate man overheated is industrial man, who tends to conform. Electronic man tends to position himself in the tribe of his choice, then go to war.

Henry Ford wouldn't partake in the digital retribalizing impulse, but there is definitely a lot of engagement with social Darwinism and the segregation of people into distinct tribes with a goal of pitting them against each other for self-serving ends. There is an element of masterminding group conflict for personal gain that seems lodestoneish to me.

To get back of the idea of roles, these are how the tribe, in McLuhan's terms, express diversity. Belief in tribes is supposed to be orthodox and relational. Beowulf identifies himself as Beowulf, thane of King Hygelac of the Danes, son of Ecgtheow. Odysseus tells Polyphemus his name is Odysseus, King of Ithaca, son of Laertes. If you ask a tribal person why he doesn't steal, he says my people are not thieves. A literate person says I am not a thief. A digital person says I don't feel like it. If I am an eccentric member of the tribe, the tribe finds a role for me, probably as priest, artist, or fool. If I am violent, I'm a warrior. If I'm scholarly, I'm a wise man or advisor. In this regard, everybody can support the same values despite individual charisms, and everyone can value difference. The tribal values are the same; the ways of serving them vary, and everyone depends on the differences in roles. That is a different approach than the industrial vision in which the jobs are the jobs and you conform to them, quit, get fired, or find a new job. It's a sign of change, though, that business keeps on talking about getting everybody on the right seat of the bus; that's a sign that business is embracing the notion of roles.

I agree that social media should probably start leaning more toward the ear. That would explain the ascendancy of video and the archaic feel of email. I think the print aspect of words and images is part relic, partially something closer to the hieroglyph. That would explain the transition from the emoticon to the emoji. I also think the short sentences we get from Twitter thought are like grunts—the little brother equivalent of newspeak. The content tends to polarize, and for McLuhan, the tendency toward polarization would be the form itself—the medium is the message. I see a parallel between the 140-character message, the advertising slogan, and the battle cry.

In some form, if McLuhan is correct, as print becomes obsolete, it should find new life as art. Of course, I'm reminded of Liza's word art.

The Fractious Facebook Feed

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 10 November 2015.

Orestes Pursued by the Furies by William-Adolphe Bouguereau

As far as the fractious Facebook feed, I personally feel this is the last gasps of print literacy and individualism trying to assert itself before it is dragged down into the tribal world of the ear, of the chorus, of the chthonic, of chaos, of chanting, of moira, of ritual, of dithyrambic dance.

When you really look, those exchanges and the resultant fragmentation are still due to the paradigm of print. The fact that this fragmentation is accelerating is due to the extreme anxiety produced by retribalization and the end of 400 years of print literacy. When I ask my students about Snapchat, they have a hard time explaining their enthusiasm for it. But they are largely uninterested in Facebook and increasingly uninterested in Twitter.

If McLuhan was right, we should see new types of social media with an even greater emphasis on the ear. Snapchat has deemphasized print literacy, but it's still visual. The movie Her seems to imagines that social media will go in this direction.

Then again, maybe the fragmentation and fighting is our reacclimating to the levels of conflict present in the tribe.

But Henry Ford would not partake in this tribalizing impulse. This is the full flower of mechanization, specialization, isolation, fragmentation. Tribalizing is the opposite impulse: stay in the same community or village and experience the conflict!

The Homogenized Urban Society

The following is an excerpt from an email sent from Art to Will on 10 November 2015.

Henry Ford with 1921 Model T

My information on McLuhan's view is from an interview: "Print centralizes socially and fragments psychically, whereas the electric media bring man together in a tribal village that is a rich and creative mix, where there is actually more room for creative diversity than within the homogenized mass urban society of Western man."

Maybe this is what you're talking about regarding greater conflict:

The tribe, you see, is not conformist just because it’s inclusive; after all, there is far more diversity and less conformity within a family group than there is within an urban conglomerate housing thousands of families. It’s in the village where eccentricity lingers, in the big city where uniformity and impersonality are the milieu. The global-village conditions being forged by the electric technology stimulate more discontinuity and diversity and division than the old mechanical, standardized society; in fact, the global village makes maximum disagreement and creative dialog inevitable. Uniformity and tranquillity are not hallmarks of the global village; far more likely are conflict and discord as well as love and harmony—the customary life mode of any tribal people.

In other words, he likens the inevitable conflict to that which occurs in a family. Fragmentation and militarism—another kind of conflict—is the kind driven by alphabetic literacy. Arguably, the latter kind of conflict has been the more brutal of the two. Henry Ford's (Don Gilber's?) ambitions seem to fit the "urban conglomerate housing thousands of family" description better.

Here's another awesome one:

Literate mechanical society separated the individual from the group in space, engendering privacy; in thought, engendering point of view; and in work, engendering specialism—thus forging all the values associated with individualism. But at the same time, print technology has homogenized man, creating mass militarism, mass mind and mass uniformity; print gave man private habits of individualism and a public role of absolute conformity. That is why the young today welcome their retribalization, however dimly they perceive it, as a release from the uniformity, alienation and dehumanization of literate society. [italics are mine]

The Lodestone

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 9 November 2015.

I've been trying to deal with how inordinately white our story of Detroit is, and I think I gained some insight into the Lodestone. Reading Beowulf again has helped.

In the days of Scandinavian warriors, the tribes believed in the same gods and the same code. They sang of each other in their songs. Still, they were at war. Why? It would be easy to point to blood feuds and what not, but I say the Lodestone.

The Lodestone tribalizes people, makes life us vs. them. At the end of Beowulf, Beowulf has to fight a monster who is guilty of the worst abuses of warrior culture—it marauds mercilessly in the dark, it exacts too harsh a price in vengeance, it obliterates, it hoards, and it honors no loyalties.

In fighting the dragon, Beowulf dies in a sense for the sins of his culture. I can see Leif's sister on a similar quest. She understands that the Lodestone pits tribe against tribe and risks her own life trying to bury it deep within the earth's core, surpassing Beowulf in bravery by fighting furry dinosaurs along the way. Somewhere along the journey, though, she goes from being like the tribeless man who buried the treasure that the dragon made his nest to the dragon itself. She hoards the Lodestone in the caves of Detroit, disturbed only every few decades by people drawn to the stone's power.

The tribalistic effect of the stone accelerates the American myths of The Law of the Jungle and Social Darwinism. The Lodestone makes Henry Ford create Inkster for black workers and Dearborn for white workers—it tribalizes and spurs conflict and misunderstanding. This lodestone causes uneasy alliances that break into wars, like union conflict and Ford's horizontal monopoly approach to business, so that even peace fuels conflict.

The result on the Witkowskis is that even though they see themselves as enemies of racism and feel solidarity with those who suffer or yearn for better lives, they also "class off." Stan's exposure to the Lodestone causes the Chrysler and the Lodge, which is an unknowing act of tribal warfare. His view of himself as a self-made man makes him like Scyld Scyfing and his descendants like Hrothgars.

Will lacks the empathy skills to put human beings above the acquisition of wealth, power, and fame, and Arthur seeks out a cult to compensate for his inability to break past his princely obligations to the Witkowski tribe. He yearns for a universal brotherhood and sisterhood that the Lodestone works to prevent, and the misexpression of that desire is the cult membership.

There is a motif of very long delays in the fulfillment of quests in our story. The longest of these delays is the Benefactor's.