Re: Levels of Consciousness

Martin Cohen (mcohen@UCLA.EDU)
Wed, 2 Oct 1996 15:49:07 -0700

In message <199610021027.GAA25958@sumter.awod.com> Jesse S. Cook III writes:
>
> It came to my attention yesterday, through a book I am reading, that
> Marshall McLuhan's "quips and aphorisms were not simply wiscracks about the
> media, they were expressions of a theory of the evolution of consciousness.
> At each stage...a new medium of communication comes forth...We begin with
> the origin of language...and we end up with...the Internet. For McLuhan,
> there were five evolutionary stages or quantum jumps:
>
> 1. Oral
> 2. Script
> 3. Alphabetic
> 4. Print
> 5. Electronic

So how does this allow for the differentiations you have made? The Serbs
at clearly at 5. We were at 5 during Desert Storm, and the Nazis were at
at least 4.5? Yet, to quote you previously:

>>Modern *history* has included all those horrors, but modern *consciousness*
>>has not. Your consciousness, for all its lack of clear thinking, is a
>>modern consciousness. Those responsible for such horrors did not have a
>>modern consciousness.

Why, because you don't want them too?

Martin Cohen