But both Ong and McLuhan, each in his own way of course, pointed out that we in contemporary Western culture are undergoing a new cultural conditioning deep in our psyches that involves a breakdown in the cultural conditioning of print culture and an emerging breakthrough to something new.
In any event, by, say, 1960, communication media that accentuate sound reached a certain critical mass and influence on our American cultural conditioning.
More recently, our American cultural conditioning by communication media that accentuate sight has undergone further constellation as the result of photocopiers and printers attached to personal computer and the emergence of the Internet.
PUBLIC MORALITY AND RESPECTABILITY
Next, I want to address one of Brooks' favorite arguments about the cultural breakdown from approximately the 1960s onward and its apparent disproportionately negative moral impact on poor Americans.
Historically, well-educated inner-directed white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) dominated the prestige culture in American culture. WASPSs established the broad cultural moral norms regarding respectability and public appearances pertaining to marriage and certain other matters of public morality.
For all practical purposes, virtually all Christian and Jewish Americans publicly conformed to the same public norms that the WASP establishment established.
No doubt that broad public consensus about public norms pertaining to marriage and certain other matters of public respectability and morality impacted and influenced almost all people in American culture, including tradition-directed persons (also known as outer-directed). Perhaps we could say that the dominant cultural juggernaut had a trickle-down impact.
Now, when we turn our attention to the aspects of cultural breakdown that Brooks sees as following the upheavals of the 1960s, we should concede his point to a certain extent. The cultural breakdown did have a seemingly disproportionate impact on pockets of tradition-directed persons (also known as outer-directed) in terms of their conformity to earlier established norms pertaining to marriage and public respectability. Put differently, the earlier dominant cultural juggernaut's trickle-down influence apparently receded, or stopped.
But Brooks and other movement conservatives today nostalgically continue to celebrate the inner-directed persons who dominated the prestige culture in American culture from colonial times down to at least 1960, just as well-educated inner-directed Germans had dominated the prestige culture in Germany down to the time when Adolf Hitler was democratically elected to public office in Germany.
CONCLUSION
No doubt the emerging other-directed persons in American culture over the latter part of the 20th century continue to be works in progress to this day. Thus far, I am not especially impressed with the political-correctness police. My fond hope for them is that they will emerge into something more viable in the near future. In my estimate, as they have evolved thus far, their views are not sustainable.
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