Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/06601_Field_TCUM T166.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 974b | 16 lines

large empires and causes social breakdown. But militarism is a
form of industrialism or the concentration of large amounts of
homogenized energies into a few kinds of production. The
Roman soldier was a man with a spade. He was an expert
workman and builder who processed and packaged the
resources of many societies and sent them home. Before
machinery, the only massive work forces available for
processing material were soldiers or slaves. As the Greek myth
of Cadmus points out, the phonetic alphabet was the greatest
processor of men for homogenized military life that was known
to antiquity. The age of Greek society that Herodotus
acknowledges to have been “overwhelmed by more troubles
than in the twenty preceding generations” was the time that to
our literary retrospect appears as one of the greatest of human
centuries. It was Macaulay who remarked that it was not
pleasant to live in times about which it was exciting to read.