Ah, but in our contemporary American culture today, would liberals and progressives such as OEN readers be interested in retired U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal's accessible new 2025 book On Character: Choices That Define a Life? That's a good question. I am writing the present OEN article on the assumption that liberal and progressive OEN readers might be interested in reading McChrystal's new 2025 book if I contextualize his book in the context of Ong's account of media ecology.
You see, in media ecology terms, I see American conservatives today as longing for their idealized sense of the lost world of print culture in American culture up to the 1950s - but their idealized sense of the lost world of print culture in American culture in the 1950s is an imaginary idealization.
In media ecology terms, I see American liberals and progressives today as representing American people who are soundly orienting to our contemporary secondary oral culture.
I see the following five books as classic media ecology studies of the print culture that emerged in our Western cultural history after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in the mid-1450s in Europe:
(1) Richard D. Altick's 1957 book The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900 (University of Chicago Press);
(2) Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin's 1958 book in French titled The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800, translated by David Gerard; edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and David Wootton (Verso, 1976);
(3) Walter J. Ong's 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Harvard University Press), mentioned above;
(4) Jurgen Habermas' 1962 book in German titled The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (MIT Press);
(5) Marshall McLuhan's 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (sic) (University of Toronto Press), mentioned above.
I refer to these five books as pioneering studies of the print culture that emerged in our Western cultural history after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in Europe in the mid-1450s, because today there are too many studies of print culture for anyone to undertake a thorough bibliographic listing of them.
However, for a classified bibliography of studies in various languages of ancient and medieval literacy, see Marco Mostert's 2012 book titled A Bibliography of Works on Medieval Communication (Brepols).
Now, in any event, my point here is that American conservatives today hearken back to their idealized imaginary sense of print culture in American culture in the 1950s.
Now, Ong published a generous review of McLuhan's 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy in the Jesuit-sponsored magazine America, volume 107, number 24 (September 15, 1962): pp. 743 and 747.
Ong's generous review of McLuhan's 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy is reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Hampton Press, 2002, pp. 307-308; but also see Ong's 1967 comment about McLuhan's 1962 book on p. 343 ["McLuhan gives a racy survey, indifferent to some scholarly detail, but uniquely valuable in suggesting the sweep and depth of the cultural and psychological changes entailed in the passage from illiteracy to print and beyond"]).
Thus, Ong in 1967 characterizes McLuhan's 1962 book as "racy" and as "indifferent to some scholarly detail" but still "uniquely valuable in suggesting the sweep and depth of the cultural and psychological changes entailed in the passage from illiteracy to print" after the emergence of the Gutenberg printing press in Europe in the mid-1450s in our Western cultural history.
In any event, when I took Father Ong's course Practical Criticism: Prose in the spring semester of 1966 at Saint Louis University, he put McLuhan's 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy on the assigned reading list for one of our quizzes in the course. Ong told us to read it "with a grain of salt." That's good advice - if you have not read McLuhan's 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy but are planning to read it to better understand the tendencies of American conservative today to hearken back to their idealized version of print culture in American culture in the 1950s.
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