Love and Communication

Love and Communication. Paddy Scannell. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2021.

 

Paddy Scannell’s new thought-provoking book is a sort of intellectual and scholarly testament. He even suggests this when he claims in his introduction that Love and Communication was written after a great deal of thought. “I am writing this book because now, as I head into deep old age” he confesses, “I find myself looking back and trying to make some sense of my life, and more generally.”[1] It is quite evident in the book that within it life and scholarship form a thoughtful synthesis. And so this profound study is a great deal more than merely a summary of a prominent communications scholar’s research and reflections. He also feels forced to explore hitherto largely ignored territory: “What I am writing is a mixture of what you could call religious and philosophical thinking, the new ingredient being ‘religion’.”[2] Part of him seems not altogether happy with this mixture. Indeed he qualifies his religion, since he admits despite his Catholic upbringing he is no longer a believer, just like he qualifies love, through his amendment of the theological virtues of faith, hope and love from the latter in the sense of agape to love in the sense of “trust.” Scannell processes the theological virtues into an “algorithm of love” of f(aith)/h(ope) +  t(rust) which significantly “can be understood  . . . as [both] a divine gift, or [after Heiddeger] a human care structure.”[3] The latter is fashioned into a secular version of his understanding of the virtues. He also claims with a degree of pathos that God is receding from our world, yet despite this and his personal qualifications he nonetheless feels that “love, communication, and God go together.”[4]

What we have in this sense is to no small degree what theologian David Tracy has termed the analogical religious imagination, or in more popular terminology Andrew Greeley calls the Catholic imagination. Among other things the latter scholar argues that those brought up as Catholics remain affected by this even when they turn away from their faith, primarily through an implicit sacramental—or enchanted—vision of reality that has been instilled within them.[5] Scannell himself points out in the personal musings that punctuate his book that his “elders” told him early on that “once a Catholic always a Catholic.” He does not disagree, but certainly his religious philosophy is his own and is integrated with his thinking on communication. Like when he frames his reflections on communication in biblical terms: and so our primeval parents left paradise, i.e. God’s world, to create their own—and their quest for knowledge was an elimination of God from their world, which among other things led to the sin of “technological determinism.”

According to Scannell communication is what makes us human. The author insists learning to talk is learning to be human, but he stresses communication even precedes language. This is fairly clearly demonstrated in the so called Still Face Experiment (SFE) in which a child confronts its mother’s face that was expressionless for a time which forced it to desperately attempt to gain a response, and led to despair when this was to no effect. This attempt on the part of the infant showed the repertoire of communicative skills it already had before it could utter a single word.

The whole question of language and communication raises a crucial issue in Scannell’s thought. He cites an anonymous reviewer of his manuscript who points out: “Writing is a technological achievement, while talk is a human achievement.”[6] This raises the fundamental question of the direction we are headed in this “human” world we have created with the aid of communication. The author creates a focus for his exploration through a formula of three worlds of communicative relationships: part of us is in a fundamental human><human world, in which communication begins, but we have become engaged in a human><machine world, which at the most basic level is the world of writing and language together with their further technological iterations, while we are facing the challenges of a machine><machine world, that is the world of “Turing machines”—a reality dominated by mathematics and science.

Naturally this formula is fleshed out in the body of his study—quite richly so. For instance, in his chapter on live television he relies heavily on Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology, which he personalizes in his argumentation. The philosopher’s phenomenology places us in a world essentially without religion. And although Scannell lets us know he is not particularly interested in Heidegger as a person the fact that he once knocked over a teacup while watching a soccer game is quite significant for his explanation of the emotional impact of the live coverage of sporting events.

The culmination and heart of the book—rational argument and emotion work closely together throughout the study—is in the eponymously titled chapter “Love and Communication.” Scannell begins with the reiteration of his review of John Durham Peters Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea  of Communication of 1999, a book he claims had a seminal influence on how he himself understands communication and continues to inspire him. Basically, in his imaginative version of the dynamics of communication throughout its history, Peters concentrates on its contrasting modes of insemination and dissemination. To illustrate the power these two paradigmatic modes he uses the models he claims were developed by Socrates and Jesus. Interestingly, neither of them wrote down anything and their works were passed on by disciples: Plato on the one hand, the apostles on the other hand. Socrates’ model is what we usually think of as an ideal of communication since it concentrates on dialogue with another. The philosopher was famously against writing since he considered it impersonal. Jesus, on the other hand, preached to anonymous masses, often through parables. His parable of the sower that scatters seeds indiscriminately with various effect preached to a crowd “makes explicit the significance of communication as mass dissemination or broadcasting.”[7] Significantly, before it became associated with mass media broadcasting was in fact an agricultural term for the distribution of seeds. Peters claims that from Socrates perspective insemination is more virtuous than dissemination since it is more direct and personal, while dissemination is impersonal and considerably wasteful. However, the twentieth century scholar comes to a different conclusion. As Scannell summarizes Peters’ argument:

The parable of the sower makes manifest, in its form as much as in its message, that the love of God (agape) is indiscriminately available for all, not just the few, the chosen ones, who are open to and receptive to the Word. Broadcasting is a fundamentally democratic form of communication.[8]  

The problem with the argument that Scannell currently sees is that in as much Peters’ thesis could be defended in the twilight of the twentieth century modes of communication, in the twenty first century it is no longer valid. It is personally attractive for him primarily since he still feels a citizen of the last century. He confesses “[m]y communicative longing is . . . for a world in which God is in His heaven, and thus all’s well with us mortals who dwell below on middle-earth.”[9] Much of the final section of the book is devoted to his struggle to justify this desire in contrast with how he perceives the actual communicative world.  He proposes a final version of his three worlds of communicative relationships, modified along the lines of Raymond Williams’s tripartite model of culture that describes the present for all of us as made up of its dominant culture, as well as receding and emergent cultures. In Scannell’s version we have God’s world of the past, the human world of today, and the machine world of the future.

Scannell wisely declines the role of prophet, so the final machine world that he senses as a major part of the new axial age of communication emerging—and not only of communication, one might add—is barely hinted at or reflected upon. The problem of what will be the world of communication that follows in relation to machines that think is the key issue. As he phrases it, “The question for the future is whether we are stumbling toward a future more defined by Turing machines.”[10]

This is indeed a crucial question for all of us. The dominance of the internet and new media are certainly a step in the direction of such a world. A seminal matter that we already witness is that even in democracies such media are often controlled by a meritocracy that at times uses their inherent power to the fullest for its own ends. As Niall Ferguson succinctly puts it, “it turns out you don’t need a Communist party in charge to have censorship of the internet: just leave it to the big tech companies, which now have the power to cancel the President of the United States if they so choose.”[11] And if Scannell writes about God leaving the world of history, that is a rather poetic way of expressing what is more frequently occurring in that the meritocracy drives Him out in the selective and crude belief that religion does more harm than good.[12] But what they often serve us in return is, to say the least, of a rather dubious nature that offers little or no hope, not to mention misplaced faith in virtually endless human malleability and primarily promoting self love. And that is barely the beginning.

If the above does not leave us optimistic about the new world of machine dominated communicative relationships it is worth remembering a rather parallel political experiment implied in Ferguson’s claim that the West is approximating the Chinese system. The Soviet empire was also supposed to be dominated by mathematics and science: “scientific socialism,” as the communists put it, with a command economy at the base of society. And civil society was suppressed, fostering distrust—eliminating social trust, the love that fosters the common good. God was also to be eliminated so religion was suppressed. But, famously, God rescued the people trapped in this “worker’s paradise” through His crucial support of the Solidarity worker’s revolution in Poland that was the beginning of the end of the nightmarish experiment. There are, of course, enormous differences between that experiment and what is going on today,[13] and history rarely repeats itself, but it does offer some hope.

 

Notes

[1] Paddy Scannell, Love and Communication (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2021), 13.

[2] Scannell, Love and Communication, 12.

[3] Scannell, Love and Communication, 118.

[4] Scannell, Love and Communication, 13.

[5] Andrew Greeley, The Catholic Imagination (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2000), 7 and passim.

[6] Scannell, Love and Communication, 10.

[7] Scannell, Love and Communication, 108.

[8] Scannell, Love and Communication, 109.

[9] Scannell, Love and Communication, 115.

[10] Scannell, Love and Communication, 114.

[11] Niall Ferguson, “The China model: why is the West imitating Beijing?,” The Spectator, May 8, 2021, accessed: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-china-model-why-is-the-west-imitating-beijing

[12] See Rupert Shortt, Does Religion Do More Harm Than Good? (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2019).

[13] Although some members of Solidarity experience a degree of déjà vu with what is currently going on. See, e.g. Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies (New York: Encounter Books, 2016).