Q:  People sometimes talk about his ego, or 
paranoia, or how he’d have ideas like lasers and 
get right to the point of something, while other 
ideas seemed almost mad. What was he like? 

A:  I think that one of the problems of McLuhan 
arose from his strengths. His strong points had a 
flip side. As a Catholic he was influenced by the 
official philosophy of the Church, which was still 
the St. Thomas Aquinas view of things—basically 
which says that the universe is intelligible. In other 
words, our senses and our reason working 
together give us a basically trustworthy account 
of the universe, we’re not being mislead. This, by