In Defense of Manly Virtue: Camille Paglia vs. Walter Ong and David Bakan

 

WALTER J. ONG'S CULTURAL CRITIQUES

 

 

Despite Paglia's stimulating polemics and admirable style as a multi-directional cultural critic, my favorite multi-directional cultural critic is the late Walter J. Ong, S.J. (1912-2003). Trained as a literary critic, he received his Ph.D. in English from Harvard University. Harvard's famous Americanist Perry Miller (1905-1963), author of the pioneering work in American Studies titled The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1939), served as the director of Ong's massively researched doctoral dissertation, which was published in two volumes by Harvard University Press in 1958.

 

However, Ong's book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (1958) did NOT become the kind of big breakthrough book for him that Paglia's book Sexual Personae (1990) became for her. But the wide-ranging topics that Ong discusses in his 1958 book were not as sexy as the topics that Paglia discusses in her breakthrough book.

 

Nevertheless, with his 1958 book Ong established himself as a multi-directional cultural critic, and so he had successfully launched his long and productive academic career as a multi-directional cultural critic. However, in his numerous publications (more than 400, not counting reprintings), Ong never engages in the kinds of polemics that Paglia engages in regularly. Instead of being polemical, Ong is characteristically irenic and contemplative in spirit.

 

In his important book The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (Yale University Press, 1967), the expanded version of his 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University, Ong alerted people to the significant cultural shift that was by the 1960s underway in Western culture.

 

According to Ong, the cultural shift that is underway is a shift from the visual cultural conditioning of print culture to the aural cultural conditioning of the communication media that accentuate sound, including television. Ong had detailed the aural-to-visual shift in print culture in his 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue. Thus in his 1967 book he was exploring the new modification of this earlier aural-to-visual historical shift that was emerging in the 1960s. In theory, the emerging new modification suggested that the earlier aural-to-visual shift was undergoing a re-balancing of the aural and the visual sensory orientations in Western consciousness.

 

Ong's 1967 book was undoubtedly read more widely than his 1958 book about Ramus and Ramist logic had been. However, Ong's 1967 book was NOT the big breakthrough book for him that Paglia's 1990 book was for her.

 

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