Recorded 6 January 1977
Transcribed from the CBC tape no. 770220-14 by Monika Lee. Dated by an entry in Frye’s daybook for 1977 for an interview with Carol Bishop of the CBC. “The Future Tense,” broadcast 20 February 1977, was part of the Special Occasions series produced by the CBC Radio news department regarding the future of Canada and the dangers Canadians would face before the end of the century.
[Marshall McLuhan asserts that a major change, an apocalypse of sorts, has occurred because of the electronic media. The Eastern world is becoming more Western and the Western more Eastern. The left hemisphere of the brain, which rules logic, has traditionally dominated in the West, but is now being pushed back by the right hemisphere of the brain, which rules creativity. Meanwhile the East, traditionally a right-brained culture, seeks to become logical, individualist, goal-oriented, and with consumer values. The electronic world threatens organized existence in the West and has, in fact, ended it. All that remains of the Western world is its monuments. He states that this view of human history is not gloomy, but objective. The change we are undergoing is so drastic as to be apocalyptic, a “simultaneous, instantaneous smash.”]
NARRATOR: As Northrop Frye says, Mr. McLuhan’s vision of apocalypse is worth thinking about. But there’s another side too.
FRYE: The possibility of a smash is something that we would be foolish to dismiss. I think that our minds go in a kind of manic-depressive, up-and-down rhythm between feeling that we’re all going to be wiped out by the atomic bomb, which is the depressing one, and feeling that we’re going to move into an Age of Aquarius where everything will be wonderful and lovely, which is the manic side.1 I don’t believe in either the manic peak or the depressive depth. I think that the human race somehow or other manages to stagger on between the two.