Article: Reflections on Ian Morris' Book About the West and China

But Ian Morris does not discuss many of the historical and cultural details that Walter Ong discusses in constructing his elaborate account of Western cultural development, even though he may be familiar with Walter Ong's most widely read book, ORALITY AND LITERACY: THE TECHNOLOGIZING OF THE WORD (Methuen, 1982; 2nd ed. Routledge, 2002).

Their two independent accounts of the historical emergence of the West can be understood as roughly parallel and complementary.

Nevertheless, their two accounts can also be understood to be competing accounts, especially when we consider which of the two accounts could possibly be used to guide the cultural development in developing countries around the world today.

For example, an estimated one billion people in the world today do not know how to read and write any language. Those people will not be using computers or the Internet. Now, Walter Ong's account of Western cultural development highlights the role of literacy in the West, which suggests that literacy education should be a priority in developing countries today.

But Walter Ong's account of the emergence of modernity in the West also focuses attention on what he styles the quantification of thought in medieval logic, which produced "a new state of mind," as he puts it. That new state of mind inculcated through formal education for three centuries and more contributed to the historical emergence of modern science, modern capitalism, modern democracy, the Industrial Revolution, and the Romantic Movement.

Now, if I correctly understand the import of Sam Dillon's article "Top Test Scores From Shanghai Stun Educators" in the NEW YORK TIMES on December 7, 2010, it looks to me like the Chinese are inculcating the new state of mind that Ong associates with medieval formal logic that was taught for three centuries or more in formal education in the West, into the formal education of children in Shanghai.

In RAMUS, METHOD, AND THE DECAY OF DIALOGUE, mentioned above, Walter Ong discusses the quantification of thought in medieval logic (esp. pages 53-91). But Walter Ong most cogently sums up the import of the quantification of thought in medieval logic in his collection of essays titled THE BARBARIAN WITHIN: AND OTHER FUGITIVE ESSAYS AND STUDIES (Macmillan, 1962) as follows:

"In this historical perspective, medieval scholastic logic appears as a kind of pre-mathematics, a subtle and unwitting preparation for the large-scale operations in quantitative modes of thinking that will characterize the modern world. In assessing the meaning of scholasticism, one must keep in mind an important and astounding fact: In the whole history of the human mind, mathematics and mathematical physics come into their own, in a way that has changed the face of the earth and promises or threatens to change it even more, at only one place and time, that is, in Western Europe immediately after the scholastic experience. Elsewhere, no matter how advanced the culture on other scores, and even along mathematical lines, as in the case of the Babylonian, nothing like a real mathematical transformation of thinking takes place -" not among the ancient Egyptians or Assyrians or Greeks or Romans, not among the peoples of India nor the Chinese nor the Japanese, not among the Aztecs or Mayas, not in Islam despite promising beginnings there, any more than among the Tartars or the Avars or the Turks. These people can all now share the same common scientific knowledge, but the scientific tradition itself that they share is not a merging of various parallel discoveries made by their various civilizations. It represents a new state of mind. However great contributions other civilizations may hereafter make to the tradition, our scientific world traces its origins back always to seventeenth- and sixteenth-century Europe, to the place where for some three centuries and more the arts course taught in universities and para-university schools had pounded into the heads of youth a study program consisting almost exclusively of a highly quantified logic and companion physics, both taught on a scale and with an enthusiasm never approximated or even dreamt of in the ancient academies" (page 72).

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