WHAT'S LEFT OF WHAT'S RIGHT, PART 6
LESSONS OF INNIS’ GRAND PENDULATION
For a general introduction to this series, see here.
A couple instalments back, this series brought into the discussion (and probably for the first time introduced many readers to) the much-neglected scholar Karl Polanyi. In this final instalment of the series, I want to revive discussion of another largely overlooked scholar, from the same era. Harold Innis was a Canadian economic historian, lifer at the University of Toronto, who today hardly gets the attention or credit he deserves. He’s maybe best remembered, within the limited circle that is familiar with him, for having been the central source of inspiration for the insights of that other famous University of Toronto professor, Marshall McLuhan.1
However, considering the insights we’ve gained over the course of this series of posts, it seems to me appropriate to end it with some reflection upon the thought of Harold Innis. Not only does his analysis point to the fact that this left-right dynamic long predates the formal constitution of the left, as la gauche (indeed even its apparent intellectual source in the French Enlightenment), but his analysis suggests to me the proper normative lessons to draw from all this. Even if – as I expect – many of you will disagree with me on the latter point, I still think it’s an analysis which you’ll be theoretically richer for having considered.
The analysis I’ll be reviewing is often referred to as the staple thesis. It began in a set of studies concerned with Canada’s purportedly, somewhat unique history. Later in life, though, Innis took the methodology developed in that context and applied it to broad, sweeping study of civilizational dynamics. It was the lessons from his civilizational studies that cast the discussion over this series of posts in an interesting light.
The rough contours of Innis’ staple thesis were established in his influential book, The Fur Trade in Canada. A key theme emerging from this work is the argument that it was the nature of the beaver, the fur pelt of which was in much demand back in Europe, which molded the settlement pattern of New France and eventually Canada. Outposts were created and travel routes established that facilitated the harvesting of an animal with the specific qualities of the beaver.2
This context gave rise to the dramatically different Canadian developmental pattern, compared to the U.S. The latter, driven by people on a mission to create a new kind of civilization – true of both the northern and southern civilizations of the eventual U.S. – spread across the continent in something of a wave, or series of waves. New France (and eventually all the territories that were to become part of early Canada) more resembled an archipelago of forts and settlements stretched out across the St. Lawrence River watershed and, initially, down the Mississippi River. The distinctive qualities of the beaver — as a water adjacent dwelling, but non-migratory, species that required constant expansion along the waterways to find new pelts — gave rise to transportation and communication networks that emerged to exploit its value back in Europe.
It’s worth noting, here, that there has been a tendency to oversimplify Innis’ treatment of the staple thesis in this book. He does provide considerable attention to the diverse interests and incentives of the main player groups in the industry. So, the tendency to reduce Canadian development entirely to the objective qualities of the staple is sometimes overstated by some commentators on the book – especially from those in the communications field who herald it as their fountainhead.3
Nonetheless, there’s no disputing that he was onto a very particular kind of economic analysis and continued to apply it to other essential staples in Canadian history, such as the timber industry and the cod fishery. However, the fullest value and most far-reaching implications of the staple thesis only became clear later in life when Innis applied it in the comparative study of civilizations. By treating historical communication media4 as staples, looking at how their distinctive characteristics affected the civilizations that exploited them for their communications, much like the beaver in Canadian history, he found the developmental nature of those societies, and their civilizations, were dramatically affected by the distinctive characteristics of those staples.
The fertile essays compiled in the two later-in-life volumes, Empire and Communication and The Bias of Communication, identified tendencies within civilizations to rely upon staple-based communication media which imposed a bias toward (as he characterized it) either space or time.5 Space biased media/staples were those that were physically lighter and so able to be more easily moved around. Examples of these spaced biased media were papyrus or paper, media closely associated with the empires of Rome and Britain, respectively. Innis’ argument was that the use of space biased media would give rise to expansive empire, particularly as expressed in emphases upon centralization, administration, and commerce.6
In contrast, other civilizations have relied upon staples as communication media which were biased toward an emphasis upon time. These include clay or stone tablets and parchment. Model cases of such time biased civilizations were early Mesopotamia and the European medieval period, respectively. Because such staples/media were not easily mobilized but were much more capable of weathering the burdensome vicissitudes of time, they produced introspective civilizations characterized by concerns for durability and continuity, reflected in emphases on decentralization, religion, tradition, and history.7
But we can allow Innis to summarize his position for himself:
A medium of communication has an important influence on the dissemination of knowledge over space and over time and it becomes necessary to study its characteristics in order to appraise its influence in its cultural setting. According to its characteristics it may be better suited to the dissemination of knowledge over time than over space, particularly if the medium is heavy and durable and not suited to transportation, or to the dissemination of knowledge over space than over time, particularly if the medium is light and easily transported. The relative emphasis on time or space will imply a bias of significance to the culture in which it is imbedded.
Innis provides anticipatory refutations of those who would accuse him of succumbing to egg-chicken confusions (did the staples/media make the civilization or did the civilization choose the complementary staples/media) by considering the changes in some civilizations, e.g., the Egyptian moving from stone to papyrus, wrought by the adopting of new media with the contrary bias from that which had initially founded the civilization. (Though, at least parenthetically, we should concede the prospect — consistent with observations of others studying civilizations and empires, though neglected by Innis — that there may be natural cycles in civilizational or empire life patterns that move from time to space bias, as different phenotypes are privileged over the course of changing socio-economic conditions intrinsic to such cycles.8)
As you can imagine, specialists sometimes took exception to Innis’ foray into civilizational studies. And undoubtedly, such broad stroked approaches do pose the danger of oversimplification and streamlining of specific and contingent factors. However, it’s also true that the benefit of working with such broad strokes is the ability to recognize comparative patterns which would escape the closely focused specialist. Perhaps missing the forest for the trees?
Whatever risk there may have been of oversimplifying in Innis’ approach, the essays in those two volumes are remarkable reads, which while requiring considerable concentration – associations race by at a fabulous pace – reward the effort with an endless string of surprising and fertile observations. Though reading Innis may not be for everyone, I highly recommend it to those well disposed to such syncretic approaches. However, I didn’t introduce a discussion of Innis’ comparative civilization studies merely for its scholarly contributions. There’s a couple further points I’d emphasis.
First, in case it isn’t yet obvious, the correlation of Innis’ analysis with our own dissection of the left-right divide throughout this series is quite striking. In Innis’ terms, we can describe the attitudes and dispositions of the left as possessing a space bias: focused on administration, centralized control, and commerce. While the attitudes and dispositions of the right can be described as possessing a time bias: focused on organic community, concrete institutions, and tradition.
Considering that, today, both left and right are operating with the same communication media, some interesting questions are raised about what exactly is going on. Was Innis mistaken about causality? That’s certainly possible. Another possibility is that there’s always struggle between certain types of personality, more inclined to (what since the French Revolution we’d call) left or right values, and maybe historically specific communication media privilege actualization of the values of one side over the other. That would raise an interesting question about whether it is something about the present unique qualities of contemporary communications media that gives rise to the stand-off we’re experiencing today. I think there may well be something to such a conclusion, but this isn’t the occasion to go into that topic.
The second point I’d emphasize, in finally bringing this extended series to a conclusion, was maybe Innis’ most fundamental lesson. At least, this is the core lesson I take from his work. Innis never presumed that either space or time bias were intrinsically superior. Each involved their own set of trade-offs. Space bias, which as we’ve seen, was reflected in territorial expansion of commerce and administration, entailed an outward gaze that became all-consuming at the expense of introspective self-insight. Temporal bias, though, reflected in historical durability of culture and community entailed an inward gaze that became parochial at the expense of fecundity. Excessive space bias brought exhaustion, while excessive time bias brought stagnation. Both eventually led to self-destruction. In the words of one of Innis' more cynical moments, “Each civilization has its own methods of suicide.”
This, though, was the worst-case scenario (and let’s face it, all civilizations collapse eventually); but, in fact, Innis was not as cynically fatalistic as this characterization may be taken to suggest. On the contrary, this later phase of his work was continually punctuated by what he called “a plea for time.” Writing in the 1940-50s, he already was disturbed by his civilization’s obsession with space, over-emphasizing military and ideological expansion, administration, and commerce, and called for a recovery of time biased media and institutions. As he acknowledged, nothing was more threatening to the durability of time-biased considerations in our civilization than the risk of nuclear annihilation arising from the competing expansionary empires of the Cold War.9
Translating Innis’ perspective into today’s context, my assessment is that there is no inherent superiority in right wing values and preferences. These are simply, naturally occurring phenotypic differences. Indeed, it’s all too easy to cite historical examples or speculate on theoretical possibilities in which a dominance of right-wing values and preferences would suffocate a culture, society, or civilization, leading to its stagnation and ultimate demise. Some exposure to new ideas and lifeways can be and have been regenerative to societies and civilizations of the past. Complete insulation would inevitably lead to stagnation and demise.
However, that’s not the situation we currently face. Instead, we face a world in which the left’s space-oriented bias threatens us with civilizational exhaustion and collapse. If there are no borders, no identities, no traditions that are not to be uprooted, erased, or turned fluid, we’re left with a world which is hardly human. Evolutionary theory teaches us that we are a deeply social animal. Our communal associations and our pair-bonding practices, our huge brains and distinctively long childhood dependency are all closely tied to our unique sociality.
Our sociality is at the very core of our evolved nature. When our familial or communal bonds and our organic identities are trampled in the interest of producing monadic, deracinated individuals to operate as client cogs of the social engineering state or as consumer processing units of the unfettered market’s relentless commodification of life – the two strategies of the left (though, as we’ve seen, not as discrete as they first might appear) – the exhaustion of our very humanity is at stake.
So, while a bias toward time, and the values and preferences of the right are not, in my estimation, in any universal sense, the correct ones. What matters is that they are the correct ones for right now: for the threats our world faces today. This to me is then the best way to understand Piccone’s call for a new populism. In his call for the new populism to establish itself as a Schmittian existential enemy of the managerial class, with its social engineering and pervasive commodification, Piccone is echoing Innis’ still older “plea for time.” Time as a bias toward civilizational practices that will privilege the preservation and recovery of organic communities, with their concrete institutions, and traditions.
That’s the challenge we face today, and this little blog has made and will continue to make its modest contribution toward that end.
The eminent U.S. communications scholar, James Carey, much influenced by the Canadian school, once observed: “During the third quarter of this century, North American communications theory — or at least the most interesting part of it — could have been described by an arc running from Harold Innis to Marshall McLuhan. ‘It would be more impressive,’ as Oscar Wilde said while staring up at Niagara Falls, ‘if it ran the other way’.”
As Innis summarized it, in his usual understated way: “The trade in staples...has been responsible for various peculiar tendencies in Canadian development.”
For some of the noteworthy early contributions to this literature drawing the connection between the economic history of Canada and the later communications theory: Donald G. Creighton, Harold Adams Innis: Portrait of a Scholar (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978); R Neill, A New Theory of Value: The Canadian Economics of H. A. Innis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972); Arthur Kroker, Technology and the American Mind: Innis/McLuhan/Grant (Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1984); P Heyer, Harold Innis (New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2003). And a number of the papers in W Melody, L Salter, and P Heyer, eds., Culture, Communication, and Dependency: The Tradition of H. A. Innis. (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1981).
Here, I’ll be using the word “media” as does Innis, not as per the common vernacular in which it is a synonym for something like “news” or “journalist” producing outlets, but rather as anything that mediates movement from one place or condition into another. It is the plural of medium.
Again, I’ll be following Innis’ usage: while today’s vernacular understanding of the word “bias” is as a synonym for “prejudice,” Innis is using the word in its original sense, French biais “a slant, a slope, an oblique,” as in a tendency toward something. A misalignment of your car’s steering system may create a veering bias to the driver’s side. So, no ethical judgment is implied.
From the perspective of a renewed understanding of the left-right dynamic, as delineated in this series, Innis’ insight to include both administration and commerce under the same conceptual rubric is strikingly prescient, given our recognition that both are expressions of left strategy (see here).
Perhaps the reader can see then the seminal insight of these observations for McLuhan: as it was the staples/media that determined the deep structure of a civilization — whether it was space or time biased — regardless of the messages flowing through those media, it would be fair to conclude that “the medium is the message.”
A while back, I had a go at trying to tease out the mechanisms and implications for such cycles in a video series which may interest some readers: Twilight of the American Empire. Having produced this series long before reading Michéa, I distinguished between what I reluctantly called “progressive” and “conservative” phenotypes; today, of course, I’d call them left and right phenotypes. (Fair warning: I was feeling somewhat more fatalistic about the collapse when I produced that series.)
Speaking as one who grew up thoroughly immersed in the Cold War, it was amazing to me how completely the threat of nuclear Armageddon seemed to disappear from the popular consciousness over the last few decades. And it’s been at least equally as striking how the nuclear danger has burst back upon popular consciousness with such a vengeance over the course of the past year.