Environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which are invisible. The groundrules, pervasive structure, and over-all patterns of environments elude easy perception. Anti-environments, or countersituations made by artists, provide means of direct attention and enable us to see and understand more clearly.
-Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage
Like the fish inundated by liquid, and therefore forgetful of its existence and affects, we find ourselves in environments that ‘elude easy perception.’ McLuhan says repeatedly that it is primarily artists (including, and perhaps mainly, poets and writers) who point our attention to these invisible realities. I would like to think that there are still Christian preachers who do the same.
G.K. Chesterton made much the same point decades before McLuhan:
…If we see what is the real trend of humanity, we shall feel it most probable that he was stoned for saying that the grass was green and that the birds sang in spring; for the mission of all the prophets from the beginning has not been so much the pointing out of heavens or hells as primarily the pointing out of the earth.
Religion has had to provide that longest and strangest telescope – the telescope through which we could see the star upon which we dwelt…
This is the great fall, the fall by which the fish forgets the sea, the ox forgets the meadow, the clerk forgets the city, every man forgets his environment and, in the fullest and most literal sense, forgets himself…It is a strange thing that men…have actually spent some hours in speculating upon the precise location of the Garden of Eden. Most probably we are in Eden still. It is only our eyes that have changed (Introduction to the Defendant, from In Defense of Sanity, p. 2).
