Essential McLuhan 86 distracted by the 90 per cent area of problems. He went straight to the 10 per cent core of opportunity and sought insight into the causes that underlay the whole situation. For example, he writes: “We are perhaps too much a part of the civilization which followed the printing industry to be able to detect its characteristics. Education in the words of Laski became the art of teaching men to be deceived by the printed word.” (p. 139) Once Innis had ascertained the dominant technology of a culture he could be sure that this was the cause and shaping force of the entire structure. He could also be sure that this dominant form and all its causal powers were necessarily masked from the attention of that culture by a psychic mechanism of “protective inhibition” as it were. At a stroke he had solved two major problems that are forever beyond the power of the “nose-counters” and of statistical researchers. First, he knew what the pattern of any culture had to be, both physically and socially, as soon as he had identified its major technological achievements. Second, he knew exactly what the members of that culture would be ignorant of in their daily lives. What has been called “the nemesis of creativity” is precisely a blindness to the effects of one’s most significant form of invention. A good example of this technological blindness in Innis himself was his mistake in regarding radio and electric technology as a further extension of the patterns of mechanical technology: “The radio appealed to vast areas, overcame the division between classes in its escape from literacy, and favoured centralization and bureaucracy.” (p. 82) Again: “Competition from the new medium, the radio involved an appeal to the ear rather than to the eye and consequently an emphasis on centralization.” (p. 188) This is an example of Innis failing to be true to his own method. After many historical demonstrations of the space- binding power of the eye and the time-binding power of the ear, Innis refrains from applying these structural principles of the action of radio. Suddenly, he shifts the ear world of radio into the visual orbit, attributing to radio all the centralizing powers of the eye and of visual culture. Here Innis was misled by the ordinary consensus of his time. Electric light and power, like all electric media, are profoundly decentralizing and separatist in their psychic and social consequences. Had he not been hypnotized by his respect for the pervasive conventional view on this question, Innis could have worked out the new electric pattern of culture quite easily. What is rare in Innis occurs in his mention of the views of Wyndham Lewis: “Wyndham Lewis has argued that the fashionable mind is the time-denying mind.” He is referring to Time and Western Man which is devoted to a denunciation of the obsession with time as a religious mystique in the work of Bergson, Alexander, Whitehead, and others. Because of his own deep concern with the values of tradition and temporal continuity, Innis has managed to misread Wyndham Lewis radically. Earlier, in the same essay, “A Plea for Time,” he raises an issue that may bear on the occasional miscarriage of his own structural method of analysis. Speaking of the unfortunate effects of the extreme impact of