The Intellectual Courage of Harold Innis
Emergence and Empire: Innis, Complexity, and the Trajectory of History. John Bonnett. Montreal-Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2013.
It is said that students at the University of Toronto’s Innis College still sing a mocking song on their pub-crawls, “Who the hell is Harold Innis?” Of course, they know perfectly well who Harold Adams Innis is, but the fact such an ironic lyric continues to be sung reflects a conundrum that even now, 60 years after Innis’s death, attaches itself to a scholar who not only shaped how many Canadians see themselves, but can arguably be acknowledged as the godfather of modern media and communications theory.
Between 1924 and his death in 1952, the political economist became one of Canada’s most influential intellectuals, producing a body of work that altered how Canadians thought about their country. Even now, his ideas continue to be studied in graduate schools across Canada, as well as in the United States and Australia. Yet, despite this influence, the man himself remains something of an enigma, and a constant challenge to scholars endeavoring to extract the ideas embedded in his often dense, elliptical and arcane-laden writing. Indeed, in a 1947 review of one of his books, The Economist declared, “Incoherence, indeed, is Professor Inness’ [sic] besetting sin.”
Nonetheless, despite the sinful state of his prose, scholars continue to attempt to make sense of Innis’s thought – Paul Heyer’s concise 1999 biography, Harold Innis, Charles Acland and William Buxton’s 2000 essay collection Harold Innis in the New Century, Alexander John Watson’s 2007 study, Marginal Man: The Dark Vision of Harold Innis, and William Buxton’s 2013 monograph, Harold Innis and the North: Appraisals and Contestations, to name a few. The most recent contribution is John Bonnett’s intellectual history, Emergence and Empire: Innis, Complexity and the Trajectory of History.
Bonnett focuses his study on a handful of Innis’s works: The Fur Trade in Canada, The Cod Fisheries, Political Economy in the Modern State, and two collections of essays, Empire and Communications and The Bias of Communications. While the first three books are still studied by Canadian historians, it is the two latter works have provided something of a seedbed of ideas for communications theorists and media studies scholars both in Canada and around the world.
Bonnett puts it this way: Innis may now be an “obscure figure” known only to academics, but there is an awareness in scholarly circles that “Innis is among the most profound thinkers Canada has ever produced. In his studies of Canada’s economic history and the history of communications technology, Innis’s intent was to explore the nature of social and economic change. And throughout his career, Innis consistently applied a schema of change that is today associated with complex adaptive systems.”
Bonnett provides only the briefest biographical background on Innis – Ontario farm boy, veteran of the First World War and a stellar academic career – but he does acknowledge the shock of the First World War as an abiding influence on Innis’s life that left him deeply pessimistic about the future of western civilization. Small wonder. Innis was sent overseas in the fall of 1916 as a private with an artillery battery in the Canadian Expeditionary Force. A few months later, in July of 1917, one of his legs was ripped open by shrapnel on the corpse-strewn slopes of Vimy Ridge. He came home in March 1918, one of the few students from McMaster University who had enlisted to survive the war.
While still recovering from his wound, Innis completed his Master’s degree with a thesis on “The Returned Soldier.” He did his doctorate at the University of Chicago, where he came under the influence of Thorstein Veblen. In 1920, he took a position at the University of Toronto, returning to Canada, Bonnett argues, with keen interest in how and why civilizations change and eventually collapse.
Innis was always circumspect about his wartime experience, but even so his later writings show just how much the two world wars affected him. In the aftermath of the Second World War he saw the wars, in Bonnett’s words, “as symptomatic of a civilization in decline.”
Bonnett provides a comprehensive account of Innis’s early scholarly work and his efforts to understand how economic and political systems emerge and evolve, more “akin to biological systems than physical systems, displaying patterns of change found in embryology and ecology.”
This ecological modeling can be seen in Innis’s early works, Bonnett contends. For example, in his perhaps most influential work, The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History, published in 1930, Innis challenged the then widely held view that Canada’s political existence was an artificial construct contrary to geographical logic. Innis argued otherwise with his “staples theory” of Canadian history, maintaining that Canada emerged as a political entity because of geography, not in spite of it.
In Innis’s view, Canada’s development flowed naturally from the pattern of river systems that stretched west and north from the St. Lawrence River. These rivers provided the means by which the products of the hinterland could reach the metropolitan centers. Canada’s historical role as an exporter of natural resources – fur, timber, fish, grain, minerals and oil – had, in fact, determined its economic and political development.
Thus, says Bonnett, The Fur Trade was “the first to establish the existence of a distinct economic ecology that could be correlated with Canada’s topography and political boundaries, and which could be rhetorically employed to justify Canada’s existence on ostensibly objective, rational grounds.”
In his later writings Innis extended his staples thesis to communications, asserting that civilizations are “profoundly influenced by communication and that marked changes in communications have had important implications.” According to Bonnett, Innis’s purpose in making this “radical turn” from the study of economic systems to that of cultural systems was “to identify the core problem of the West.” Having seen peaceable societies in Europe and North America go to war twice in the first half of the 20th century, Innis wanted to understand why.
Innis’s efforts to answer this question provide the unifying core of Bonnett’s study. Innis’s work, whether focused on economic or cultural change, is “an attempt to characterize human society as an emergent system” that grows ever more complex over time until, eventually, it collapses.
But why the collapse? Innis’s answer, says Bonnett, is both surprising and simple. “Culture became dysfunctional because they failed in the fundamental task of information management. For Innis, information was a tool to stimulate creativity. When cultures lost control of the information circulating within them, they invariably become rigid or unstable in their thinking, and often turned to violence prior to their collapse.”
Bonnett points out that his best-known communications works, Empire and Communications (1950) and The Bias of Communication (1952), Innis set his study of the history of Western civilization from ancient Egypt to the modern era against a parallel study of the history of communications technology.
“In both, Innis painted the history of the West as a history of constructs of change, constructs stabilized and de-stabilized by the emergence of new communications technologies in the form of script, physical media, or genres of speech,” says Bonnett. For example, Biblical-era pictographs and ideograms ushered in new cognitive structures, says Bennett, summarizing some of Innis’s communications-as-culture insights. “New forms of linguistic script … enabled the Hebrews to transform their theology from one in which divinities were associated with a concrete activity, to monotheism and a universal ethics.” Similarly, the print revolution that began in the 15th century fostered liberal individualism and democratic institutions by tapping the psychology of privacy engendered by the solitary act of reading.
With such examples, among others, Innis presented a correlation between the material property of media and the resulting cognitive biases of the users who appropriated those media, Bonnett concludes. Moreover, “the inherited bias of a given medium would over time become all encompassing, and thus constitute a monopoly of knowledge.” In other words, for Innis, Western thought and the media deployed to spread that thought reflect historically increasingly complex ontologies.
Small wonder then that Bonnett refers to Innis – and rightly so – as a “prescient thinker” who still has much to teach us. As he puts it, “in an era when globalization and new communications technologies are transforming and tasking us, Innis still has much to impart.”
Such a claim arguably justifies Bonnett’s concluding description of Innis’s career as “the practice of philosophy by other means. In his studies of Canada’s economic history and in his communications theories, Innis sought to understand the whys and wherefores of social, political and economic change. And he wanted to find the theoretical means by which a society or a civilization could sustain itself. As Bonnett says: “Innis’s narrative of the history of the West after the collapse of Rome was reduced to a civilizational search for the factors that make for a good society, or, in Innis’s parlance, a balanced one.”
This search for order led Innis to conceptions of balance that included a mix of institutional checks-and-balances, individual self-discipline, the rule of law, economic liberty and free inquiry, Bonnett contends. He found just such a balanced society, however imperfect it might have been, in the British Atlantic World of the late 18th century. “For a time the Second British Empire and the United States were balanced societies,” according to Innis. However, that achievement was short lived thanks to the emergence of steam technology and the commercial press, two innovations that launched the mass circulation of the information age in the West. And here, says Bonnett, Innis noted a crucial dimension of Western culture: “information flows were governed by the same dynamic as commercial exchange – the dynamic of positive feedback or increasing returns.”
This dynamic unbalanced the West. As balanced societies the West enjoyed innovations in politics, economics and culture. As unbalanced societies the West began to display all the pneumopathological symptoms of boom-bust economics, unstable intellectual thinking, and irrational politics.
The question, of course, is what is to be done? And here, Bonnett suggests, Innis falls short: “Innis’s histories never provided a clear sense as to how a culture might move from one (information) bias to another” without great upheaval.
It is a fair judgment, but it points up a particular conundrum about Innis that Bonnett does not specifically address, one that has always puzzled me: Why did Innis’s admittedly radical thinking emerge when and where it did? In other words, how did the context of his thinking inform his thought as a whole?
If there is an image of Innis that addresses this question it has to be this one: In the summer of 1924, Innis, a then 30-year-old academic still seeking the subject that would establish his scholarly credentials, stood on a hill overlooking the wind-lashed waters of Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories. On the shore below, native men and women loaded boats, preparing for a season of hunting and fishing along the Mackenzie River. Innis would join them to follow the river north to the Beaufort Sea. It was the first of many journeys he would take during his 32-year career at the University of Toronto.
I like to think it was these journeys – to the mines of the Yukon, the pulp mills of northern Ontario and Quebec and the fisheries of Maritimes – that fired Innis’s imagination and opened him to his subsequent intellectual revelations. What is notable about all these journeys was how they took place on the frontiers – the margins, if you will – of a particular social and political order, namely Canada. And Canada, as Innis well knew, had itself always existed on the margins of empires, whether French, English or, most recently, American.
For Innis, the duty of a scholar was to seek the patterns of order behind the seeming chaos of history. And he thought those who could do that best were, to borrow a phrase from Watson’s Marginal Man, “peripheral intellectuals” like himself. He thought the restoration of balance to Western civilization might well depend on those thinkers who dwelled on the fringes of that civilization, those, in other words, who lived and thought on the margins of the imperial power centers. Such displaced thinkers might well be the ones to develop those new perspectives to restore balance and order.
Certainly, Innis was not optimistic on this score. He was well aware the margins everywhere were disappearing, that places for independent thought and different perspectives were being assimilated and homogenized under the imperatives of technology and globalization (not that Innis used this latter word). Still, as Bonnett’s book reminds us, Innis was a “brave thinker,” a scholar unafraid to say things that ran counter to the prevailing intellectual consensus.
Such an example of intellectual courage offers some hope the West’s search for order is not terminally in retreat.
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