For those who are interested in the evolution of consciousness, or really even the various transformations our mind has undergone through the millennia, Marshall McLuhan is a major thinker in this
regard. His work aligns with lesser known theorists like Jean Gebser, and like Gebser his prophetic ideas about the "global village" pertain more to our times than ever before. Like many other theorists this century, he saw the decline of the West (Oswald Spengler) as a turning of the age into a new planetary, or global civilization, as compared to Western/Industrial civilization that's now coming to a close. His ideas are important because, like Gebser, he takes a look at important details: how language's evolution transformed the way we perceive the world (the shift from oral to literate culture shifts the dominant sense from holistic "ear" to Descartes neutral "eye.") Now as we move away from linear thinking, we're returning to a holistic form of consciousness, or so says McLuhan, the return of "tribal man" on a global scale. Like Gebser, McLuhan describes this new human as an "integral" person, one who has regained a form of integrity and wholeness that, for all the way we've come with civilization, we have lost long ago.
