Now, our contemporary communications media that accentuate sound stir deep resonances in what C. G. Jung and his followers refer to as our collective unconscious. Jung and his followers claim that the collective unconscious in each person's psyche is separate and different from the personal unconscious in each person's psyche. In my estimate, the psychodynamics of the collective unconscious are surfacing and manifesting in certain mental health issues reported by Siegel.
Unfortunately, I now have to subject you to a deep dive. We can pose a question: Did people in primary oral cultures work out any ways to escape from their perpetually threatening environment and gain a bit of psychological relief from it? In my estimate, they did, as Mircea Eliade shows in his dense book The Myth of the Eternal Return, translated from the French by Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon Books, 1954; orig. French ed., 1949) and other books. Briefly, primary oral people escaped the terrors of time by constructing the myth of eternal return (i.e., cyclic time versus historical time [also referred to by Ong as linear time and evolutionary time).
For Ong, Plato's Ideas represent a distinctively literate way to escape from the terrors of history that Eliade writes about to escape into the static thought-world of Plato's Ideas. However, for Ong, there is no escape from the terrors of history that Eliade writes about.
But I now have to undertake another deep dive into Ong's thought about our Western cultural history. As I have already hinted, for Ong, distinctively literate thought in Plato and Aristotle and the entire subsequent Western tradition of philosophical thought tends to escape into a static thought-world, which Ong aligns with visualist cognitive processing. Initially, this visualist cognitive processing emerged in ancient Greek philosophical thought (for example, in Plato and Aristotle). However, with the emergence of the Gutenberg printing press in the mid-1450s, visualist cognitive processing and a concomitant static thought-world expanded exponentially in Western culture.
Flash forward now to the critical mass of communications media that accentuate sound and the emergence of what Ong refers to as secondary oral culture in contemporary Western culture. After centuries of cultural conditioning under the influence of the Gutenberg printing press, educated people in Western culture were deeply conditioned in visualist cognitive processing and the concomitant static thought-world.
However, literally centuries of deep cultural conditioning in visualist cognitive processing and the concomitant static thought-world is now being deeply challenged in our psyches by the communications media that accentuate sound.
For a deep dive into Ong's first major exploration of visualist cognitive processing and the concomitant static thought-world, see his massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Harvard University Press).
Ong succinctly sums up his thoughts about visualist cognitive processing and the concomitant static thought-world in his article "World as View and World as Event" in the journal the American Anthropologist, volume 71, number 4 (August 1969): pages 634-647. It is reprinted in volume three of Ong's Faith and Contexts, edited by me and Paul A. Soukup (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995, pages 69-90).
Later, Ong sums up his thoughts about visualist cognitive processing and the concomitant static thought-world using the terminology of systems analysis in his essay "Voice and the Opening of Closed Systems" in his 1977 book Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Cornell University Press, pages 305-341). His essay is reprinted in volume two of Ong's Faith and Contexts, edited by me and Paul A. Soukup (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992b, pages 162-190).
For further bibliographic information about Ong's 400 or so publications, see Thomas M. Walsh's "Walter J. Ong, S.J.: A Bibliography 1929-2006" in the 2011 book Language, Culture, and Identity: The Legacy of Walter J. Ong, S.J., edited by Sara van den Berg and Thomas M. Walsh (New York: Hampton Press, pages 185-245).
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