However, print culture is not the end of the story, as it were. According to Ong, our contemporary communications media that accentuate sound (oral culture 2.0) had reached a certain critical mass by about 1960 and were deeply impacting Western cultural conditioning over against the visual cultural conditioning in Western culture after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in the 1450s.
Now, Ong expressed hope that the possibly positive influence of the cultural conditioning of the communications media that accentuate sound. He came to express hope as a result of working with the aural-visual opposition that he borrowed from Lavelle. But of course the aural-visual opposition is another example of a constructed dichotomy of opposites. In the subtitle of Jung's book about alchemy, mentioned above, we note that he hints that the separation of psychic opposites oftentimes leads to a synthesis of the opposites. According to Ong's account of our Western cultural history, there was an earlier separation of visually dominated culture from aurally dominated culture in ancient and medieval culture in Western culture, a separation that was accentuated in print culture after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in the 1450s in Western culture. Hopefully, the communications media that accentuate sound (oral culture 2.0) will condition the psyches of people in contemporary Western culture to move toward a synthesis in their psyches.
Now, the aural sensibility dominated the psyches of our pre-historic and pre-literate human ancestors for centuries - long before the visual sensibility emerged in ancient Greek philosophic thought. But the pre-historic and pre-literate aural sensibility was effectively suppressed in the prestige culture in print culture after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in the 1450s in Western culture. For highly circumstantial account of our pre-historic and pre-literate human ancestors, see Erich Neumann's books The Origins and History of Consciousness and The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype. Ong discusses The Origins and History of Consciousness in both his 1971 book Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (10-2 and 18) and his 1981 book Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (18-9, 25, 92, 100, 111, 125, and 148).
Now, in print culture in Western culture, the pre-historic and pre-literate aural sensibility was effectively suppressed in the realm of the psyche that Jung refers to as the "shadow." According to Jung, people in the second half of life need to undertake to integrate the "shadow" realm of their psyches with their ego-consciousness. But he makes it abundantly clear that this is not easy to do. No doubt the communications media that accentuate sound (oral culture 2.0) resonate deeply in the human psyche of people in Western culture, whose "shadow" carries the stored memory of the aural sensibility of our pre-historic and pre-literate human ancestors.
After Ong delineated certain infrastructures in Western cultural history in Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (1958), he discussed them a bit further in his 1962 book The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies. Thereafter, Ong shifted his attention from print culture in Western culture to the aural sensibility of our pre-historic and pre-literate human ancestors inasmuch as it was possible for him to do this. Even so, he never stopped talking about the contemporary communications media that accentuate sound. However, inasmuch as it was possible for him to undertake to do this, Ong was effectively leaving the domain of Western philosophical thought and moving into pre-philosophical thought. In Plato's dialogue the Republic and elsewhere, we learn about the opposition of philosophic thought to poetry, a form of pre-philosophic thought.
In the 1963 book Preface to Plato, a book that Ong never tired of referring to, Havelock argues cogently and convincingly that the oral poetry in the Homeric epics was the target. In terms of the aural-visual opposition that Ong borrowed from Lavelle, the oral poetry in the Homeric epics represents the aural sensibility. By contrast, ancient Greek philosophic thought exemplified by Plato and Aristotle represents the visual sensibility, as does the entire subsequent Western tradition of philosophic thought.
Now, this brings me to Timothy Mark Chouinard's critique of Ong and Havelock in his Ph.D. dissertation T. S. Eliot: A Philosophy [Model] of Communication for Literature and Speech. On pages 147 to 154, Chouinard discusses Havelock's 1963 book Preface to Plato - a book that Ong never tired of referring to. On page 150, Chouinard says, "But we must not be naà ¯ve enough to suppose that something entirely new is entering the historical scene when this self-complication is precipitated by literacy." So if Havelock and Ong thought that "something entirely new is entering the historical scene when this self-complication is precipitated by literacy," then each of them is "naà ¯ve" according to Chouinard. For Chouinard, there is nothing new under the sun, eh? Now, in Chouinard's bibliography, he lists the two most important books published by Lonergan. As noted above, in his 1957 book Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, Lonergan famously mocks what he refers to as naà ¯ve realism - over against which he articulates what he refers to as critical realism. So Chouinard's use of the term "naà ¯ve" is not without precedent in his own bibliographic sources.
However, I can switch gears a bit here and suggest that Chouinard could have used Lonergan's 1957 philosophical masterpiece to argue in support of his position that there is nothing new under the sun. For a sketch of how Chouinard could have argued in support of his position, see the Canadian Jesuit Frederick E. Crowe's 1965 essay "Neither Jew nor Greek, but One Human Nature and Operation in All," which is reprinted, slightly revised, in the anthology Communication and Lonergan: Common Ground for Forging the New Age (89-107).
But if Chouinard were to use Lonergan's thought to support his own position that there is nothing new under the sun, then he would have to deal with the fact that Lonergan himself mocks what he refers to as naà ¯ve realism by characterizing it as involving "taking a good look" (rather than exercising circumspect judgment, as his critical realism advocates) - a position that is compatible to the strong position that both Havelock and Ong take about visualist cognitive processing.
Incidentally, the Canadian Jesuit literary scholar Geoffrey B. Williams perceptively uses Lonergan's philosophical thought (known as critical realism, which is distinct from the Hegelian idealism of Bradley and Eliot) in his book The Reason in a Storm: A Study of the Use of Ambiguity in the Writings of T. S. Eliot. Williams discusses Eliot's literary works in far greater detail than Chouinard does.
Now, in the last half century or so during which the communications media that accentuate sound (oral culture 2.0) have reached a certain critical mass around 1960, we have seen a superficial interest in Native American spirituality arise in American popular culture, as Philip Jenkins shows in his 2004 book Dream Catchers: How Mainstream America Discovered Native Spirituality. Historically, Native American spirituality represented the aural sensibility (oral culture 1.0), not the culturally conditioned visual sensibility in the prestige and dominant culture in Western culture. However, even though Native American spirituality has caught the imagination of a certain number of Americans, it remains an open question as to how deeply their imaginations have processed the aural sensibility of Native American spirituality.
But in the last half century or so in American culture, we have also seen movement conservatism arise as the tsunami of a backlash against the yeasty 1960s, as Jenkins shows in his 2006 book Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America. After Dr. King was assassinated in 1968, riots and violence broke out in certain American cities. In part, the backlash was an understandably reaction to the riots and violence. But certain conservatives capitalized on the understandable reaction against the riots and violence to promote movement conservatism. To this day, movement conservatism has not yet been counter-acted in American culture.
No doubt the serious practice of spirituality taps into the aural sensibility (oral culture 1.0) to one degree or another, or at least aims to do so. No doubt profound mystical experiences involve the aural sensibility. No doubt a profound experience of the resurfacing aural sensibility involves the imagination - and the entire psyche - and a concomitant reorientation of the culturally conditioned visual sensibility. But the reorientation of the visual sensibility in certain persons may strike others who have not yet had the reorienting experience as threatening. To them, the prospect of the reorienting experience may seem like a breakdown, not as a breakthrough.
Now, the anti-60s conservatives represent the centuries-old culturally conditioned visual sensibility in the prestige and dominant culture in American culture. To this day, the end of their anti-60s backlash is not yet in sight. No doubt the imaginations of anti-60s conservatives are ill-equipped to cope with changes arising from the resurfacing of the aural sensibility in the 1960s due to the influence of the cultural conditioning of the communications media that accentuate sound. The visual sensibility of their ego-consciousness is like a portable prison-cage they carry around wherever they go.
In my estimate, however, Ong's massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue is of crucial importance for understanding his mature thought about our Western cultural history. No doubt our American experiment in representative democracy is a product of Enlightenment philosophical thought. But it has been said that all of Western philosophy is a footnote to Plato. Figuratively speaking, we Americans are living footnotes to Plato.
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