Essential McLuhan 92 In other words, had Rodbertus further explained that different forms of money and exchange structured societies in varying ways, generations of confused controversy might have been avoided. The matter was finally explained when Karl Bucher approached the classical world not from our conventional mode of historical retrospect but from the primitive side. By starting with non-literate societies and moving toward the classical world, “he suggested that ancient economic life might better be understood if viewed from the perspective of primitive rather than modern society.”2 Such a reverse perspective of the literate Western world is the one afforded to the reader of Albert Lord’s Singer of Tales. But we also live in an electric or postliterate time when the jazz musician uses all the techniques of oral poetry. Empathic identification with all the oral modes is not difficult in our century. In the electronic age which succeeds the typographic and mechanical era of the past five hundred years, we encounter new shapes and structures of human interdependence and of expression which are “oral” in form even when the components of the situation may be non-verbal. This question is raised more fully in the concluding section of The Gutenberg Galaxy. It is not a difficult matter in itself, but it does call for some reorganization of imaginative life. Such a change of modes of awareness is always delayed by the persistence of older patterns of perception. The Elizabethans appear to our gaze as very medieval. Medieval man thought of himself as classical, just as we consider ourselves to be modern men. To our successors, however, we shall appear as utterly Renaissance in character, and quite unconscious of the major new factors which we have set in motion during the past one hundred and fifty years. Far from being deterministic, however, the present study will, it is hoped, elucidate a principal factor in social change which may lead to a genuine increase in human autonomy. Peter Drucker writing on “The Technological Revolution” of our time in Technology and Culture (vol. II, no. 4, 1961, p. 348) states: “There is only one thing we do not know about the Technological Revolution—but it is essential: What happened to bring about the basic change in attitudes, beliefs, and values which released it? ‘Scientific progress’, I have tried to show, had little to do with it. But how responsible was the great change in world outlook which, a century earlier, had brought about the great Scientific Revolution?” The Gutenberg Galaxy at least attempts to supply the “one thing we do not know.” But even so, there may well prove to be some other things! The method employed throughout this study is directly related to what Claude Bernard presented in his classic introduction to The Study of Experimental Medicine. Observation, Bernard explains (pp. 8–9) consists in noting phenomena without disturbing them, but: “Experiment, according to the same physiologists, implies, on the contrary, the idea of a variation or disturbance that an investigator brings into the conditions of natural phenomena…. To do this, we suppress an organ in the living subject, by a section or ablation; and from the disturbance produced in the