This Has Killed That*

This Has Killed That* HAROLD INNIS I have not been able to suggest a title sufficiently broad to cover the material I propose to put before you but the title of the famous chapter in Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris, "This has killed that," will probably cover it more adequately than any other. Some of you may remember that he discusses the impact of printing on architecture. "During the first six thousand years of the world...architecture was the great handwriting of the human race.'' But the book destroyed the edifice and, in the French revolution, not only did it destroy architecture but the fabric of human institutions as well. The last sentence of Victor Hugo's chapter is: "It is the second tower of Babel of the human race''; and this may well serve as the subject of this paper. It suggests questions which occupy at one time or another the minds of all of us and which are of particular concern to those of us immediately connected with universities - questions of freedom and power. From the period in which universities emerged from monastic institutions there has always been before them the problem of freedom and of power. I do not intend to trace the relations of the universities to the problems of freedom but to suggest that over long periods they have been compelled to make peace with various institutions of power. In the Middle Ages the Church became a highly centralized institution which led scholars to resist it in the University of Paris and finally to escape from France to such centres of freedom as Holland and England. When the church lost its control of the modern world the state came in * 1:his is a slightly edited version of an unpublished, undated address ?ehver~d by Harold Innis sometime during the Second World War. It is published here for the first time, and with the kind permission of the Innis family, because it offers a succinct expression of a number of themes which preoccupied Innis, especially in his later years. His comments on the role of the media in stimulating national and cultural particularism are of particular interest at this moment in Canadian history, as are his familiar views on the role of the university. The reader should remember that these are lecture notes intended for oral ~eli~ery and were never edited or revised by Professor Innis for pubhcat1on . A few short passages or quotations have been deleted and some punctuation has been added in order to clarify the meaning. R.R.H. Journal ofCanadian Studies to take its place. Nationalism became the great centre of power and again the scholar was compelled to insist on his position or to escape to North America. Whether it has been church or state, the scholar has found himself compelled to consider the dangers of centralized power. His interests coincide with those of such instruments of centralized power so long as they are essential to the maintenance of order and the suppression of fanaticism and license. Freedom cannot exist without order....With the outbreak of force during the present century it has become clear that we have been unable to find a solution to the problem of freedom and order. We have resorted to force rather than persuasion and to bullets rather than ballots. In attempting to suggest the background of this collapse of modern civilization we may well ask what has happened which brought to an end about a century of comparative peace from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the outbreak of the first Great War. Are there any signs within the last twenty-five years before the outbreak of the first Great War which point to the dangers of collapse? There were certain developments which were unmistakable and I propose to discuss only one or two of the most obvious, namely those involving communications. Within about a quarter of a century before 1914 newsprint began to be manufactured on an enormous scale from wood, and its price declined sharply to about 1900. Lowering of the price of newsprint was accompanied by the development of the · newspaper press to the point where enormous...