A FEW years ago I read a 1971 text about the Canadian intellectual, Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), although the work itself has been penned by the vociferously hostile and obnoxious liberal, Jonathan Miller, a man who, far more than most, has done an enormous amount to both undermine and destroy English culture.

One thing in his book that struck me as rather interesting, however, is the fact that Miller – whose analysis is extremely disparaging towards McLuhan’s own neo-agrarian philosophy on communications technology – mentions, by way of a footnote, that McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) advanced the notion that during the so-called Cold War the Russians and their American counterparts were divided into two distinct camps based on what he described as ‘sensory emphasis’. As Miller explains, and I shall quote at length,

“in order to support this contention he sets up an unintentionally comic contrast between the espionage techniques employed respectively by the Russians and Americans [and] suggests that the Soviet preoccupation with ‘bugging’ arises from the fact that Russia has always been an ‘ear’ culture. The United States’ preference for high-flying spotter planes betrays a characteristic American emphasis on the eye. In his enthusiasm for a theory that sets the eye against the ear, McLuhan has simply ignored the geo-political facts. For example it’s a great deal easier to launch aerial missiles around the frontiers of Russia when airstrips can be stationed on friendly territories nearby. The aerial surveillance of the island continent of America is a much riskier proposition altogether, entailing a dramatic violation of airspace from which there is no immediate escape. Anyway, since The Gutenberg Galaxy was published, the growth of satellite technology has abolished this strategic inequality, and for all their supposed prejudice against the eye, the Russians have not been slow to pocket their ears in favour of the snapshots they can now obtain from orbiting spacecraft. And as for bugging, it was, after all, the CIA and not NKVD who perfected the microphone concealed in the olive of an executive Gibson.” [pp.46-47]

Now, I did warn you that Miller was very hostile, but it’s rather curious, don’t you think, that whilst McLuhan employed a rather unusual style of discourse to illustrate what he interpreted as a type of sensory dualism between the two competing superpowers of the early-1960s, the notorious political butterfly, Alexander Dugin, a former National Bolshevik who has more recently been pillaging (and perverting) the work of Martin Heidegger to make his vacuous ideas sound half-interesting, also divides Russia and the West into two camps; something he likes to grossly over-simplify as a struggle between the land-based ‘Eurasianists’ and their seagoing ‘Atlanticist’ adversaries.

Not only was Dugin’s father a high-ranking officer in Soviet military intelligence, a subject which, as we have seen, was discussed by McLuhan in the form of espionage, but Dugin himself also borrowed his Eurasianist-Atlanticist dichotomy from the Romanian writer, Jean Parvulesco (1929-2010). The latter, in his 1994 novel – Star of An Invisible Empire – conjures up a geopolitical scenario in which the world is divided between the forces of Aquarius and those of Atlantis Magna.

Unlike Dugin, there are a lot of positive things to be said about Parvulesco, but it seems clear that the former’s spurious ideology – and one which, as he admitted in a Russian interview, calls for the racial miscegenation of Europe – owes a huge debt, not merely to Parvulescu’s science-fiction, but also to Marshall McLuhan’s 1962 work, The Gutenberg Galaxy.