Forsdale: Are you using “backward” with a little bit of irony?
McLuhan: Why, sure. Because the gifted people are all very backward. But our school system has no place for gifted people. And the universities likewise. No place for gifted people; they don’t fit into the courses. They don’t fit into anything.
Forsdale: Let’s back up a little bit. You subscribe to the proposition that we were basically right hemisphere people wandering around the world prior to the phonetic alphabet.
McLuhan: Yes. Mankind for many, many eons was right hemisphere, minus any development of the left. Heaven knows what, well, we do know how the left hemisphere did suddenly get activated. It was by Phoenician businessmen.
