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Thirty years ago this past summer Herbert Marshall McLuhan published Understanding
Media: The Extensions of Man, and within a matter of months the book acquired the
standing of Holy Scripture and made of its author the foremost oracle of the age. Seldom
in living memory had so obscure a scholar descended so abruptly from so remote a garret
into the center ring of the celebrity circus, but McLuhan accepted the transformation as if
it were nothing out of the ordinary, nothing more than the inevitable and unsurprising
proof of the hypothesis that he had found in the library at the University of Toronto. He
was fifty-two years old at the time, Canadian by birth and a professor of English
literature. As enigmatic as he was self-preoccupied, he had about him the air of a man
who believed that it was the business of prophets to bring prophetic news, and if he had
peered into the mist of the future and foreseen the passing of the printed word, well, he
had done no more than notice what was both obvious and certain.
Ivan Illich’s radical critique of our modern certitudes resonates loudly amid today’s crises.
extract:
It is a fundamental tenet of neoliberal mindfulness, that the source of people’s problems is found in their heads. This has been accentuated by the pathologising and medicalisation of stress, which then requires a remedy and expert treatment – in the form of mindfulness interventions. The ideological message is that if you cannot alter the circumstances causing distress, you can change your reactions to your circumstances. In some ways, this can be helpful, since many things are not in our control. But to abandon all efforts to fix them seems excessive. Mindfulness practices do not permit critique or debate of what might be unjust, culturally toxic or environmentally destructive. Rather, the mindful imperative to “accept things as they are” while practising “nonjudgmental, present moment awareness” acts as a social anesthesia, preserving the status quo.