Major cultural developments include the rise of modern science, the rise of modern capitalism (also known as economic liberalism), the rise of our American representative democracy (also known as political liberalism), the rise of the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of the Romantic Movement in philosophy, literature, and the arts in our Western cultural history.
I contend that Ong implicitly works with this thesis in his massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason - his major exploration of the influence of the Gutenberg printing press that emerged in Europe in the mid-1450s. Taking a hint from Ong's massively researched 1958 book, Marshall McLuhan worked up examples of his own in his sweeping 1962 synthesis The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (for specific page references to Ong's publications about Ramus and Ramism, see McLuhan's "Bibliographic Index" (pp. 286-287]).
Next in Ong's 1977 "Preface," he explains certain lines of investigation that he further develops in Interfaces of the Word. Then he says, "At a few points, I refer in passing to the work of French and other European structuralists - variously psychoanalytic, phenomenological, linguistic, or anthropological in cast" (p. 10).
Ong liked to characterize his own thought as phenomenological and personalist in cast. I have honored those two orientations of Ong's thought in the subtitled of my introductory-level survey book Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication (2000) - which won the Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology, conferred by the Media Ecology Association in June 2001.
Now, back to Ong's 1977 "Preface." On the one hand, Ong's terminology about primary oral culture (and primary orality, for short; and his earlier terminology about primarily oral culture) is sweeping inasmuch as it refers to all of our pre-historic human ancestors.
On the other hand, his cagey remark about sorting out cause and effect does not automatically rule out the possibility that certain changes somehow contributed to the eventual historical development of writing systems and specifically phonetic alphabetic writing (= literacy) as well as to the historical development of human settlement in agriculture (or agrarian) societies and economies.
In any event, Ong generously reviewed McLuhan's 1962 synthesis in an untitled review 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 synthesis is reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (2002, pp. 307-308).
Now, Ong famously coined the terms secondary orality and primary orality to distinguish our contemporary secondary oral culture that features communications media that accentuate sound from primary oral cultures in pre-historic and pre-literate times in human history.
I have written about Ong's account of our contemporary secondary oral culture in my essay "Secondary Orality and Consciousness Today" in the anthology Media, Consciousness, and Culture: Explorations of Walter Ong's Thought, edited by Bruce E. Gronbeck, Thomas J. Farrell, and Paul A. Soukup (1991, pp. 194-209).
However, in my upbeat 1991 essay, I do not explore how the deep resonances of our contemporary secondary orality in the collective unconscious of the human psyche bring archetypal patterns in the human psyche into interactions with ego-consciousness. The Jungian psychoanalyst and Jungian psychological theorist Edward C. Whitmont (1912-1998) discusses some of these archetypal influences in his important 1982 book The Return of the Goddess.
For a Jungian account of the masculine archetypes in the human psyche, see Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette's 1990 book King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine.
In any event, secondary orality is here to stay with us for the foreseeable future. Secondary orality is the matrix in which what Appelbaum refers to as today's contemporary autocracies in the world live and breathe. Consequently, it is important for me to explain how secondary orality is related to the crucial aspects of what Applebaum discusses in here new 2024 book Autocracy, Inc.
Now, primary oral cultures and residual forms of primary oral cultures tend to foster tradition-directed people, and they also tend to foster authoritarianism.
Generally speaking, what Applebaum refers to as authoritarianism in her 2020 book Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, mentioned above, is contrasted with what Ong at one time referred to as the inner-directed person - borrowing the term inner-directed from the Harvard sociologist David Riesman's widely read book The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (1950).
More recently, Ong has come to refer to the inward turn of consciousness - in his most widely read, and most widely translated, 1982 book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (pp. 178-179).
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