Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/06600_Field_TCUM T165.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 932b | 16 lines

not only abandons the concept of enlargement as a criterion of
real growth of society, but states: “More often geographical
expansion is a concomitant of real decline and coincides with a
‘time of troubles’ or a universal state—both of them stages of
decline and disintegration.”

     Toynbee expounds the principle that times of trouble or
rapid change produce militarism, and it is militarism that
produces empire and expansion. The old Greek myth which
taught that the alphabet produced militarism (“King Cadmus
sowed the dragon’s teeth, and they sprang up armed men”)
really goes much deeper than Toynbee’s story. In fact,
“militarism” is just vague description, not analysis of causality
at all. Militarism is a kind of visual organization of social
energies that is both specialist and explosive, so that it is
merely repetitive to say, as Toynbee does, that it both creates