Now, more recently, Ong has claimed that our contemporary Western culture has evolved beyond the print culture that emerged after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in Europe in the mid-1450s into what Ong refers to as our contemporary secondary oral culture brough on by the critical mass of communication media that accentuate sound (television, telephone, radio, movies with soundtracks, tape-recording devices, and the like).
The historical emergence of print culture after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in Europe in the mid-1450s was epoch-making in our Western cultural history. Over time, and at different times, print culture was part of our Western cultural mix that led to major cultural developments such as the development of modern science and of modern capitalism and of modern representative democracies such as our American experiment if representative democracy and to the Industrial Revolution and to Romanticism in the arts and philosophy.
Now, in Ong's "Preface" in his 1977 book Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (pp. 9-13), he says the following in the first sentence: "The present volume carries forward work in two earlier volumes by the same author, The Presence of the Word (1967) and Rhetoric Romance, and Technology (1971)." He then discusses these two earlier volumes.
Then, he says, "The thesis of these two earlier works is sweeping, but it is not reductionist, as reviewers and commentators, so far as I know, have all generously recognized: the works do not maintain that the evolution from primary orality through writing and print to an electronic culture, which produces secondary orality, causes or explain everything in human culture and consciousness. Rather, the thesis is relationist: major developments, and very likely even all major developments, in culture and consciousness are related, often in unexpected intimacy, to the evolution of the word from primary orality to its present state. But the relationships are varied and complex, with cause and effect often difficult to distinguish" (pp. 9-10).
Thus, Ong himself claims (1) that his thesis is "sweeping" but (2) that the shifts do not "cause or explain everything in human culture and consciousness" and (3) that the shifts are related to "major developments, and very likely even all major developments, in culture and consciousness."
Major cultural developments include the rise of modern science, the rise of modern capitalism, the rise of representative democracy, the rise of the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of the Romantic Movement in philosophy, literature, and the arts.
In effect, Ong implicitly works with this thesis in his massively researched book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (1958), mentioned above - his major exploration of the influence of the Gutenberg printing press that emerged in the mid-1450s. Taking a hint from Ong's massively researched 1958 book, Marshall McLuhan worked up some examples of his own in his sweeping 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (sic), mentioned above.
Next in Ong's "Preface" in his 1977 book Interfaces of the Word, he explains certain lines of investigation that he further develops in Interfaces of the Word. Then he says, "At a few points, I refer in passing to the work of French and other European structuralists - variously psychoanalytic, phenomenological, linguistic, or anthropological in cast" (p. 10). Ong characterized his own thought as phenomenological and personalist in cast.
Now, please note just how careful and cagey Ong's wording is when he says that his account of the evolution of certain changes does not "explain everything in human culture and consciousness" - or every cause.
On the one hand, Ong's terminology about primary oral culture (and primary orality, for short; and his earlier terminology about primarily oral culture) is sweeping inasmuch as it refers to all of our pre-historic human ancestors.
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, as we in Western culture today continue to undergo the still emerging secondary oral culture brought on us by the communication media that accentuate sound, we should expect the still emerging new developments to be somewhat unsettling to experience and undergo.
Now, the critical mass of communication media that accentuate sound emerged in our contemporary Western cultural history around 1960. Consequently, I see the Second Vatican Council in the Roman Catholic Church (1962-1965) as representing, on the one hand, the marked end of the era of the print culture that emerged in our Western cultural history after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in Europe in the mid-1450s, in the centuries long history of the Roman Catholic Church in our Western cultural history and, on the other hand, also the marked end of the era of the Council of Trent (1545-1563) in the centuries-long history of the Roman Catholic Church.
Thus, with respect to the centuries-long history of the Roman Catholic church in our Western cultural history, I see the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) as marking the end of the era of the Council of Trent (1545-1563).
The Second Vatican Council abolished the longstanding custom of not eating meat on Fridays. In addition, it abolished Latin as the official language to be used in celebrating the Mass in favor of using the vernacular languages in celebrating Mass. However, even today, certain conservative American and European Catholics feel a strong nostalgia for the use of Latin in celebrating the Mass.
Because Philip Shenon often stresses lively debates in the modern church about various church teachings regarding sexual matters in his bleak new 2025 book Jesus Wept, I should point out here that any official changes in church teachings regarding sexual matters would most likely be opposed by certain conservative American and European Catholics.
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