I first met Marshall McLuhan in 1974 at the Coach House on the campus of St. Michael’s College, the University of Toronto. I was a professor of physics carrying out research in theoretical elementary particle physics, lecturing undergrad and grad courses and supervising grad students. In addition to these straight forward duties of a physics prof I was also teaching a seminar course, The Poetry of Physics and the Physics of Poetry. The objective of the seminar course was to introduce humanities students to physics without making use of mathematics (i.e. the poetry of physics) and integrating it with a study of poetry and other forms of literature that were related to physics (i.e. the physics of poetry). I started the course in 1971 because I felt that too many bad decisions were being made by politicians and business people who had no basic understanding of science.
When I came up with the idea of the course I had no idea it would change my life, but it did because it became my ticket for meeting Marshall McLuhan and my subsequent collaboration with him. In 1974 after returning from spending three months studying and collaborating with the futurist Ivan Illich in Cuernavaca Mexico I organized a future studies seminar at New College known as the Club of Gnu. The name was a portmanteau of the New College mascot, the gnu and the Club of Rome, a prestigious NGO of futurists that had just commissioned the study The Limits to Growth. I recruited different professors to join the Club of Gnu from different departments in the University. Among them was Arthur Porter, the Chairman of the Industrial Engineering Department and as I later learned the Associate Director of McLuhan’s Centre for Culture and Technology. I visited Porter in his office. He enthusiastically signed on to the project and immediately called his friend and colleague Marshall McLuhan asking him to join the Club of Gnu. When he mentioned my name, McLuhan asked “is that the Bob Logan who teaches the Poetry of Physics course?” Porter answered in the affirmative and McLuhan said send Logan over to the Coach House. I want to have lunch with him and talk to him. That conversation over lunch led to the start of my collaboration with Marshall McLuhan which lasted until the time of his passing in 1980.
We lunched at the faculty cafeteria at St. Michael’s College and as soon as we sat down with our trays, McLuhan immediately asked me what I had learned by teaching “The Poetry of Physics.” I explained that I was fascinated by the problem posed by Joseph Needham in his book the Grand Titration of why abstract science began in the West, despite the fact that so much of technology originated in China. I proposed that since monotheism and codified law were unique to the West, and that together they gave rise to a notion of universal law, that this might explain the Needham paradox. The Chinese are spiritual but not monotheistic and they have laws but they are not codified. McLuhan nodded approvingly at my explanation and then asked me pointedly, “Bob, what else do we have in the West that is not present in China.” I was totally intimidated by McLuhan, who seemed to be talking to me at 100 miles per hour. I was unable to think and finally I said, “I give up.” He smiled and said, “The alphabet, of course.”
I let out a very loud groan, because I immediately saw where he was going as I recalled that he had shown the connection of the alphabet with abstract science and deductive logic in The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media. It all became so obvious – the alphabet serves as a model for analysis, classification, coding and decoding. To use the alphabet to write, one must analyze each word into its basic phonemes and then represent each phoneme with a meaningless visual sign, a letter of the alphabet. So, writing with an alphabet is coding sounds into visual signs and therefore requires breaking down every word into its basic phonemes, an exercise in analysis. And reading an alphabetic text is decoding the visual signs back into sounds. As far as classification goes, the alphabet allows every word and every name to be ordered alphabetically as is the case in a dictionary. The alphabet is totally abstract as there is no connection between the letters representing the word and what the word represents, which is not the case with pictographs or Chinese characters.
During the remainder of that lunch we sketched out our first paper together, Alphabet, Mother of Invention (McLuhan and Logan 1977). We basically suggested that codified law, the alphabet, monotheism, abstract science and deductive logic created an environment for their mutual development.
Taken altogether the alphabet promotes abstraction, codification, classification and analysis, the basic skills needed for abstract science and deductive logic. Realizing that our independent explanations for the rise of abstract science in the West complemented and reinforced each other. We combined our ideas and developed the hypothesis that the phonetic alphabet, codified law, monotheism, abstract science and deductive logic were ideas unique to the West originally and that they reinforced each other’s development.
We concluded that all of these innovations, including codified law in Mesopotamia, the alphabet in the Sinai, monotheism in Israel, science and logic in Greece, arose within the very narrow geographic zone between the Tigris-Euphrates river system and the Aegean Sea, and within the very narrow time frame between 2000 B.C. and 500 B.C. We did not consider this to be an accident. While not suggesting a direct causal connection between the alphabet and the other innovations, we would claim, however, that the phonetic alphabet (or phonetic syllabaries) played a particularly dynamic role within this constellation of events and provided the ground or framework for the mutual development of these innovations.
The effects of the alphabet and the abstract, logical, systematic thought that it encouraged explain why science began in the West and not the East, despite the much greater technological sophistication of the Chinese, the inventors of metallurgy, irrigation systems, animal harnesses, paper, ink, printing, gunpowder, rockets, porcelain, and silk. Credit must also be given to monotheism and codified law for the role they played in developing the notion of universality, an essential building block of science. Almost all of the early scientists, Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Anaxagoras and Heraclitus, were both lawmakers in their community and were monotheistically inclined. They each believed that a unifying principle ruled the universe.
Right then and there at our first meeting in the faculty cafeteria, we decided to write up these ideas and publish them as a research article. During this whole conversation I was taking notes while McLuhan was talking. At a certain point in our discussion he said to me, “Please write up these ideas so we can discuss them further.” As soon as I left that luncheon I went home and wrote up the ideas we had discussed. I remember being very nervous as I wrote up our ideas, because I was not sure how McLuhan would take to the notion that the phonetic alphabet had helped the Hebrews to conceive of the notion of monotheism and the existence of God. I was worried this might offend McLuhan’s Roman Catholic sensibilities. I needn’t have worried. He was fine with the idea and basically accepted the paper largely as I had written it and as we had discussed at our luncheon. As I read it to him the next day, he would ask me to change a phrase here and a word there. He amplified a couple of points that were being made in the paper, but basically accepted the document as I had read it to him. He also suggested the title, “Alphabet, Mother of Invention” (McLuhan & Logan 1977).
Once he was finished making his suggestions, he asked me to give the hand-written manuscript with his additions to his secretary, Marg Stewart, to be typed up. When I returned to the Coach House a couple of days later I asked what had happened to our paper. Oh, he said, I send the paper to Neil Postman, the editor of Etcetera, the journal of the International Society of General Semantics. Neil Postman wrote back two weeks later saying the paper was accepted and it was the best paper McLuhan had written from a left-brain point of view. I had written up our paper that first night after our luncheon discussion as though I was writing a physics paper, hence the left-brain bias. And that was how I met Marshall McLuhan and began our six-year collaboration.
Reference
McLuhan, Marshall and Robert K. Logan. 2007. Etcetera 34: 373-83.
Edna Pasher
How I met Bob Logan
I was a PhD candidate at NYU obliged to participate in the now legendary fall and spring conferences led by my mentor Neil Postman.
In one of them Bob Logan inspired me with his talk on The Poetry of Physics. As a liberal arts undergraduate and a social science graduate, I had always respect for my friends who studied physics and mathematics – they seemed so much smarter to me – and here comes Bob and combines poetry and physics! I was fascinated! Then for many years I lost him till we reunited in a Knowledge Management conference at McMaster university in Canada. Luckily for me – since then – we have stayed in touch!
Thank you dear Bob for being such a great friend and a source of inspiration! Congrats and good luck for this new online hub!