«Our Only Hope is Apocalypse»: Marshall Mcluhan, Catholic Antimodernism, and 1960s Education Reform

The Canadian thinker Marshall McLuhan is widely recognized as one of the great theorists and commentators on modernity in the post-1945 period. Yet he himself was not a modernist in any simple sense of that word. He consistently engaged with modernity, but did so in order to undermine it in favour of a pre-modern conception of the world inspired by his intense relationship with Catholicism. McLuhan was, in fact, an arch antimodernist, which makes his preeminent role as an «expert» on modernity and education within the self-consciously progressive 1960s Ontario (Canada) Department of Education a deeply ironic one. This paper uses that paradoxical relationship to bring out the full complexity of McLuhan’s interconnected ideas on modernity, antimodernity, Catholicism, and school reform, while shedding light on his unique status as a public intellectual during Canada’s 1960s.