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.
Now, because Ong himself describes his sweeping thesis about cultural history as relationist, we may wonder exactly what all this may mean for him. It surely does not mean that he does not contest the views advanced by certain other scholars. In this respect, his own relationist spirit is not entirely irenic, even though it may not involve framing his contesting spirit as an explicit polemic.
We can see that Ong's own contesting spirit is alive and well in his 1981 book about the spirit of contesting, Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (Cornell University Press), the published version of his 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University. In it, Ong aims to articulate an alternative to E. O. Wilson's 1975 massive book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press). In the "Preface" to Ong's 1981 book (pages 9-12), he claims that he is advancing his own new synthesis that he refers to as noobiology (formed from the Greek word nous, noos, mind).
Similarly, in my own contesting spirit, my flexibly relationist essays that I have published online through the University of Minnesota's digital conservancy, I have called attention to Ong's mature thought as still posing challenges for further inquiry.
In addition, I have called attention to the challenges for further inquiry posed by his mature thought in the 600-page 2002 anthology An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press), mentioned above.
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