Recorded 1967
From the tape in the United Church Archives. Frye was interviewed early in 1967 for a series of short programs with the general title “Breakthrough: Into Tomorrow” arranged by the Anglican and United Churches during Canada’s centennial year on the theme of life in the future. The programs were distributed to radio stations across Canada. A letter from the United Church notes that Frye’s interviews were used in three of the programs; in his reply Frye says, “My only regret is that I did not succeed in making a more intelligible comment on the subject of life on other planets, which is of course, to put it mildly, not my field” (letter of 27 June 1967; NFF, 1988, box 8, file b22). In the completed programs, his recorded remarks are interspersed with the comments of others, the actual question asked not always being apparent.
[At the start of the segment on life on other planets, astronomer Helen Hogg comments that it is likely that superior civilizations exist in the universe.]
NARRATOR: If life is discovered on other planets, and if that life is superior to ours, how might that affect us?
FRYE: I don’t feel that the existence of superior intelligences in other worlds has much effect on us. Men have believed in many centuries in angels, but it hasn’t affected human behaviour profoundly. We remember the philosopher Montaigne, who said that he found himself entirely unable to make any impression whatever on his cat, who insisted on continuing to live as a cat without reference to his wisdom.1 It seems to me we’re in exactly that position in regard to any superior intelligence.
[In the segment on communication and media, the narrator remarks that the verbal art is used in many ways.]
FRYE: Politics and advertising and so on are applied verbal arts. Literature is the pure verbal art, and then there are a great number of areas of verbal technology, like law and teaching and business and so on. Our mass media have a great deal to do with these applied technologies.
[Later, the narrator comments that an educated imagination is able to distinguish between what is valuable and what is not.]
FRYE: Advertisers are very well aware that man participates in society through his imagination, and consequently advertising is addressed entirely to what you might call a passive imagination: that is, its statements are so outrageous that they stun and numb the reason. Then they slide into the mind on an unconscious level so that you accept them without realizing that you’ve done so; whereas everything to do with education has to do with making the imagination both active and a source of the individual’s freedom.
[The question turns to politics and the prevalence of “image.”]
FRYE: Man makes up his mind on how to vote not on rational issues but on things like TV personalities, and on impressions about personalities and about issues and events that he’s picked up really through his imagination. * * * Man belongs to something before he is anything; that is, he’s a member of a society before he’s an individual, and consequently all your life long you exist in a certain context of other people. Communication is merely what makes that context possible.
[In the segment on religion and its future, Frye’s voice is heard along with that of Virginia Dobson, a director of Christian education.]
NARRATOR: What happens to religion as man discovers more about himself and the universe? Where are we now?
FRYE: I think we’re in a revolutionary time in religion. The church has been struggling along as a social institution, founded very largely on two things which are now visibly cracking up: one is the morality which is centred on sexual anxiety, and the other is a belief in individual survival in another world. Those traditional conceptions are very soon going to be in the ashcan. * * *
NARRATOR: As man becomes more sophisticated in a scientific and technological world, what significance will the Bible have?
FRYE: It will be read increasingly as a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, the way it always was traditionally read. It’s no good claiming that there’s some special virtue in believing something which is contradicted by the plainest evidence of history or science. To me the Bible is a single and definitive myth. * * *
NARRATOR: In tomorrow’s world, will different religious beliefs grow together or further apart?
FRYE: Different religions have been growing more closely together. I think one can see that within Christianity, where the Roman Catholic Church is now Protestant to a degree that would have been unthinkable a couple of generations ago, while the Nonconformist churches have been Catholicized to a degree which would have horrified their grandparents. ***
It is the duty of humanity to kill whatever gods can die. The god that seems to me to be dead is the god “out there”; that is, the god of time and space, the first cause of the order of nature. That god is dead because he was never alive. The god of human life who is at the centre of Christianity is the god that man always tries to kill if he can ever catch him, but he’s also a god that refuses to die.