For Ong, the inward turn of consciousness emerged historically in the phonetic alphabetic cultures of the ancient Greeks and the ancients Hebrews. What Ong means by the inward turn of consciousness in those ancient cultures is often conceptualized as the movement from an honor-shame culture to a guilt culture. In Ong's terminology, honor-shame cultures are aligned with primary oral cultures, and with residual forms of primary oral cultures.
But this rudimentary discussion of Ong's terminology brings us to his discussion of the print culture that emerged in our Western cultural history after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in Europe in the mid-1450s.
Now, Ong's pioneering study of print culture is also his pioneering work in media ecology theory, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (1958; for specific page references to the aural-to-visual shift in cognitive processing in our Western cultural history, see the entry on aural-to-visual shift in the "Index" [p. 396]).
I have discussed Ong's thought in his massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue in my OEN article "Walter J. Ong's Philosophical Thought" (dated September 20, 2020).
In addition to calling your attention to Ong's massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason, and to McLuhan's 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man as pioneering studies of the print culture that emerged in our Western cultural history after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in Europe in the mid-1450s, I would also call your attention to three other pioneering studies of print culture in our Western cultural history: (1) Richard D. Altick's The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900 (1957); (2) Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin's The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800, translated by David Gerard; edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and David Wootton (1976; orig. French ed.,1958); and (3) Jurgen Habermas' The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by Thomas Burger, with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (1989; orig. German ed., 1962).
Now, for Applebaum in her 2020 book Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism - and probably also for Riesman - the authoritarianism of Hitler and the Nazis emerged in Germany. But the Gutenberg printing press emerged in Germany as did Luther and the Protestant Reformation - the cultural vehicles for what Riesman refers to as inner-developed characters!
Thus, Hitler and the Nazis in German represent cultural backsliding on a grand scale. As this unfortunately spectacular example shows, cultural backsliding is possible.
Now, because the Roman Catholic Church celebrates its sense of tradition, we should see its celebrated tradition as an expression of its cultural roots in the residual form primary oral culture in our ancient Western cultural history.
However, we may also align the rise of the so-called cafeteria Catholic around the 1960s with what Ong refers to as secondary oral culture. So-called cafeteria Catholics can be understood as, in effect, practicing their own idiosyncratic versions of what T. S. Eliot refers to in another context as "Tradition and the Individual Talent" - to wit, Tradition and the Individual Catholic.
However that may be, I suspect that what Ong refers to as our contemporary secondary oral culture will tend to prompt authoritarian tendencies such as those that we Americans associate with Hitler and the Nazis in Germany and with the Communist Soviet Union and Communist China - and with Trump and the MAGA movement today.
Our American experiment with democracy emerged in what Ong refers to as typographic culture that emerged in our Western cultural history after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in Europe in the mid-1450s.
Now, for my exploratory purposes in the present short essay, I would also call your attention to Ong's fascinating essay "Voice and the Opening of Closed Systems" in his 1977 book Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (pp. 305-341). Briefly, ancient and medieval chirographic culture and then modern typographic culture (also known as print culture) in our Western cultural history tended to favor closed systems, but our contemporary secondary oral culture tends to favor open systems.
Because the history of the Roman Catholic Church encompasses ancient and medieval chirographic culture as well as modern typographic culture and, more recently, our contemporary secondary oral culture, we can also extend Ong's 1977 characterizations of closed-system and open-system thought to church history. Within this large conceptual framework, we can see the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) in the Roman Catholic Church as adopting open-system thought, after centuries of advancing closed-system thought - most notably in the Declaration on Religious Freedom (Dignitatis Humanae) and the Declaration on the Church's Relation to Non-Christian Religions (Nostra Aetate).
For the six key documents promulgated at the Second Vatican Council, see the book Vatican II: The Essential Texts, edited by Norman Tanner, S.J. (2012). In this paperback book, Tanner includes fresh English translations of six key documents of Vatican II: (1) the Constitution on Sacred Liturgy (Sacrosanctum Concilium; pp. 29-78); (2) the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (Dei Verbum; pp. 79-99); (3) the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium, pp. 100-188); (4) the Pastoral Constitution on the Church (Gaudium et Spes; pp. 189-298); (5) the Declaration on Religious Freedom (Dignitatis Humanae; pp. 299-318); and (6) the Declaration on the Church's Relation to Non-Christian Religions (Nostra Aetate; pp. 319-328).
In my judgment, those two crucial Vatican II Declarations are consistent with the principle of human dignity set forth in the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, mentioned above.
In any event, for an informed account of what happened at the Second Vatican Council, see the American Jesuit church historian John W. O'Malley's What Happened at Vatican II (2008).
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