The English writer whom Cameron, in dialogue 24, names as the early source of one of McLuhan's abiding convictions: that the Middle Ages held "a better accord between serious thought and social order than there is today." Cameron dates the transmission to around 1930, when Chesterton's picture of an essential unity in the medieval experience reached the young McLuhan — the seed of the electric "retrieval" of tactile unity McLuhan would later hope for, alongside Gilson.
Across the dialogues
Enters as the early conduit — the writer who brings the young McLuhan, around 1930, the idea of an essential unity in the medieval experience
Chesterton is the early conduit — the medieval-unity idea that McLuhan and Gilson shared reaches McLuhan through Chesterton around 1930, well before the media work, framing the Middle Ages as a standard the electric age might retrieve.
"that was one of the ideas that Chesterton actually brought to McLuhan around 1930 already."
Connections
Cameron dates the medieval-unity idea in McLuhan to Chesterton, around 1930.