In Rabbi Sacks' 2014 essay "Shame and Guilt Cultures" (pp. 33-34), he says of "a great anthropologist, Ruth Benedict" that "It was she who taught that distinction between shame cultures like ancient Greece, and guilt cultures like Judaism and Christianity" (p. 33).
"They both teach people how they ought to behave, but they have very different approaches to wrongdoing. In shame cultures what matters is what other people think of you [= David Riesman's other-directed people]: the embarrassment, the ignominy, the loss of face. Whereas in guilt cultures it's what the inner voice of conscience tells you [= Riesman's inner-directed people]. In shame cultures, we're actors playing our part on the public stage. In guilt cultures, we're engaged in inner conversation with the better angels of our nature" (p. 33).
"The biggest difference is that in shame cultures, if we're caught doing wrong, there's a stain on our character that only time can erase. But guilt cultures make a sharp distinction between the doer and the deed, the sinner and the sin. That's why guilt cultures focus on atonement and repentance, apology and forgiveness. The act was wrong, but on our character there's no indelible stain" (pp. 33-34).
For Ruth Benedict's terminology, see her classic study The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (Houghton Mifflin, 1946).
For David Riesman's terminology, see his classic study The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (Yale University Press, 1950). Rabbi Sacks uses Riesman's terminology (pp. 347 and 348), but without mentioning him by name and without referencing his widely read 1950 book.
Ong discusses Riesman's three terms - (1) outer-directed (also known as tradition-directed); (2) inner-directed; and (3) other-directed - in his 1957 book Frontiers in American Catholicism: Essays on Ideology and Culture (Macmillan, pp. vii and 39), where he critiques Riesman's account of other-directed people in contemporary American culture.
For Ong, what Riesman refers to as inner-directedness gained paramount ascendancy in the print culture that emerged in Europe after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in the mid-1450s - many centuries after inner-directedness had first emerged in ancient Hebrew culture and in ancient Greek culture, after the phonetic alphabet had emerged in them.
In Ong's 1982 book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, mentioned above, he does not refer to Riesman's terminology; instead, he refers to the inward turn of consciousness (pp. 178-179).
Now, in Rabbi Sacks' 2011 essay "The King James Bible" (pp. 13-14), he commemorates the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible. He says, "What had happened centuries ago, was the invention of a new form of information technology - printing, developed by Gutenberg in Germany and Caxton in England. This suddenly made books cheaper and opened up, to whole populations, knowledge that previously had been the prerogative of an elite" (p. 13).
That knowledge tended to be available to an elite who knew Latin, the lingua franca of Europe for centuries after it had ceased to be a mother tongue and after the vernacular languages had emerged. Even though the New Testament had emerged in antiquity when the Roman Empire was still strong and Latin was still a mother tongue, almost all the texts in the New Testament were written in ancient Greek, not Latin. The Hebrew Bible was, of course, written in ancient Hebrew. However, in the Middle Ages, the Christian Bible had emerged in a standard Latin version.
In England, William Tyndale pioneered translating the Bible into the vernacular. But "Tyndale was arrested and put to death" (p. 13). It remained for King James to convene a learned group of translators to produce what then became known as the King James Bible in English.
Rabbi Sacks also calls attention to "new information technologies - the internet, smartphones and social networking software" at work today (p. 14). He concludes, "In the beginning was the word, and whether spread by printing or the internet, it still calls us to create the freedom that honors all equally as the image of God" (p. 14).
Ong's pioneering media ecology study of print technology is his massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason [in the Age of Reason] (Harvard University Press). It is about the French Renaissance logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572) and the history of the verbal arts of logic (also known as dialectic) and rhetoric.
At Harvard University, Perry Miller in English had served as the director of Ong's massively researched doctoral dissertation. Years earlier, Miller had published his massively researched book The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Harvard University Press, 1939), in which he discusses Ramus' work to the best of his ability (for specific page references to Ramus, see the "Index" [p. 528]).
No doubt the most famous Ramist in the English-speaking world is the English Renaissance poet John Milton (1608-1674). He studied Ramist logic in Latin at Cambridge University. Later in his life, he composed a textbook in Ramist logic in Latin. After he had become famous, he published it in 1672. Ong and Charles J. Ermatinger published a translation of Milton's textbook in logic in volume eight of Yale's Complete Prose Works of John Milton: 1666-1682, edited by Maurice Kelley (Yale University Press, 1982, pp. 139-407). Ong supplied the "Introduction" (pp. 144-207). Ong's "Introduction," slightly shortened, is reprinted as "Introduction to Milton's Logic" in volume four of Ong's Faith and Contexts, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Scholars Press, 1999, pp. 111-142).
Unfortunately, Rabbi Sacks shows no evidence of being familiar with Miller's massively researched 1939 book or with Ong's massively researched 1958 book. Nevertheless, Rabbi Sacks feels free to endorse Max Weber's view that Calvinism "in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries transformed Holland, Scotland, England of the Revolution and America of the Pilgrim Fathers" (p. 347) in some magical way that "Max Weber attributes to the spirit of capitalism" (p. 347).
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