WOMEN PRIESTS: MEDIUM OR MESSAGE?
McLuhan, Marshall
runs not out. But this was hardly enough to ripple the calm of a day well and truly spent on the upkeep of civilization against the barbarians. Naturally, in such surroundings, one tends to...
...In this report the issues were pretty well set out, and a call was clearly made for more public discussion, and an opening up of the whole problem to public view...
...but I can't see much hope of our getting one--even supposing that a referendum were altogether a good thing...
...However, there is one advantage that this debate has over the education case: namely that, at some time or other, a decision will have to be made...
...The writer's or performer's public is the formal cause of his art or entertainment or his philosophy...
...It is interesting that Peter Shore, the Environment Secretary, has indicated that he intends to conduct the great debate by invoking a hitherto unused bit of legal machinery, namely a "public inquiry commission...
...An important public report of an expert committew,----the "Flowers report"--was published some months ago...
...The figure~ground relation between writer and public, or between the artist and his making, is an interplay, a kind of intercourse...
...MARSHALL MCLUHAN (~ McLuhan Associates Ltd...
...1977 Commonweal: 709...
...of the priest...
...Doubtless there will be plenty of demands for that...
...It is not yet clear exactly how it will work...
...After all, plenty of other hefty reports by publicly-appointed committees have been gathering dust for the last ten years while quite different policies are formulated elsewhere...
...In such a complex technical, and unpredictable area as this one, can "the public" really take part intelligently...
...A cricket match, after all, is so eloquent, in its leisurely gentleness, of an order that is elsewhere nearly extinct, that it automatically brings the spectator to ponder on the fragility of the remaining human decencies...
...And ought not some sort of "referendum" have to be the culminating act...
...It is, therefore, this inherent sexual aspect of the priesthood that makes the ordination of women impractical and unacceptable to a congregation in their feminine role...
...The congregation is necessarily feminine to the masculine role...
...Everyone knew that fairly soon a decision would have to be taken...
...Perhaps the nature of the decision to be made, and its irrevocableness, will help to focus the public mind...
...Anyway, whatever the motives, the fact is that instead of being faced with a Jait accompli in the autumn, in the shape of a firm decision to begin building the plutonium economy now, the country is shortly to be confronted by a barrage of opposing olbinions and expert assessments: on the reactor-safety question, on the question of threats to civil liberties implied in an immensely security-conscious nuclearized economy, and on the international dangers of any proliferation of weapons-systems...
...But it is certain that in addition to this top-level government-sponsored WOMEN PRIESTS: MEDIUM OR MESSAGE...
...Education is not a question that often issues in a single clear-cut decision: but whether or or not to go nuclear is necessarily a matter of that kind...
...This is characteristic also in medicine, where the surgeon is only exceptionally a woman...
...More physical rather than logical demonstrations...
...I mean the decision to postpone the plan to take Britain into what has come to be called a "plutonium economy" until adequate public discussion of the issues involved has taken place for a sensible and informed policy to be formulated...
...Naturally, in such surroundings, one tends to muse, during the gaps in the action of the cricket, upon the imminent collapse of Western culture...
...Even the pleas of the military for the usual secrecy were discounted to some extent in the interests of greater political awareness and participation...
...This particular sort of inquiry is intended to be conducted when the issues involved are of an exceptionally complex sort, and at the same time are of outstanding general significance for the public as a whole...
...It was therefore with the greatest relief (a relief made doubly memorable by virtue of the situation I have just described) that we read on that very day of a decision by the British government that may turn out to be the best, and most important one they have taken in the past decade or so...
...It was always possible that the government would shelve the report's findings and then go for some advantages in the short run by taking a hasty decision to "go nuclear...
...But it is worth asking the question, what does such a "great debate" really mean...
...There is, as it were, a sexual relation between performer and public which relates specifically to the priest or minister...
...In the milieu of unisex, or electronic loss of private identity, the ordination of women can be conceived as a corporate or group event, not in a sacramental but in a sociological sense...
...This is just a note about the ordination of women which concerns "formal causality," i.e., structural form which is inseparable from "putting on" one's public...
...This interplay is at its peak in all performance before the public, and is characteristic of role-playing in general...
...But perhaps the thirst for great "public debates" has been whetted by the recent attempts by the government to whip up interest in the question of educational standards through the initiation of a "great debate" on that issuewa point I mentioned in another recent Commonweal report...
...Is the process not likely to generate more heat than light...
Vol. 104 • November 1977 • No. 23
