Duluth, MN (OpEdNews) January 17, 2011: My favorite author is the American cultural historian Walter J. Ong, S.J. (1912-2003). When I had the honor of serving as the senior editor of the 600-page anthology of his writings titled AN ONG READER: CHALLENGES FOR FURTHER STUDY (Hampton Press, 2002), I selected his 1962 essay "The Barbarian Within: Outsiders Inside Society Today" to be one of the twenty-eight selections in the book (pages 277-300).
As the title indicates, Ong works with the ancient Greek contrast of Greek/barbarian. Other ancient contrasts involving an in-group and an out-group include Jew/gentile and Christian/pagan. Whenever people organize themselves into a group with a group identity, they set up a contrast between themselves as members of the group and other people who are not members of the group, the out-group, outsiders. Thus for each group formed, there will be an out-group of non-members.
Ong was amused by what he styles "the assembly-line beatnik" (page 280), As he points out, commercial outlets were advertising certain products that Americans could buy so that they could become beatniks, at least in their own imaginations. But beatniks were supposedly the out-group, not the in-group. But Ong does not explore who the members of the in-group were supposed to be, except to note that they were regarded as "squares." So we had the beatniks/squares contrast. By contrast with the squares, the beatniks fancied themselves to be "way out." Thus they imagined themselves to be the out-group. But their way of thinking of themselves as the out-group reverses the more conventional way of thinking in which the ascendant group fancies itself to be the in-group. For example, Greeks defined the outsiders as barbarians (i.e., non-Greeks); Jews defined the outsiders as gentiles (i.e., non-Jews); and Christians defined outsiders as pagans (i.e., non-Christians). But paradoxically, in the 1950s and 1960s, beatniks defined themselves as the outsiders, the out-group. Conversely, they defined squares as the in-group.
Even though Ong continued to publish essays and books almost up to the time of his death at the age of 90 in 2003, he did not return to exploring further the theme of outsiders inside American society as it developed over the 40 years or so after the publication of his essay on this theme in 1962.
As amusing as the assembly-line outsiders seemed to Ong in the early 1960s, the themes of being outsiders supposedly caught on big time among white middle-class Americans. In A NATION OF OUTSIDERS: HOW THE WHITE MIDDLE CLASS FELL IN LOVE WITH REBELLION IN POSTWAR AMERICA (Oxford University Press, 2011), Grace Elizabeth Hale, who is herself a white woman in history at the University of Virginia, shows that across a wide spectrum of white people, it became fashionable for middle-class whites to think of themselves as outsiders. She shows how a wide array of American groups defined themselves as outsiders, as though there were an assembly-line that somehow kept turning out white middle-class outsiders. Of course these supposed outsiders often formed interest groups that competing with one another. Nevertheless, the members of each group nurtured the group's self-identity as outsiders.
For example, in the abortion debate, the anti-abortion people imagined themselves as the outsiders because the 1973 Supreme court ruling in Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in the United States. They were against legalized abortion, so they considered themselves to be the outsiders with the law of the land representing the supposed insiders.
But the defenders of legalized abortion focused on the tradition of patriarchy that the 1973 ruling overturned. For the defenders of legalized abortion, the anti-abortion people represent patriarchy. Thus the defenders of legalized abortion stood outside the patriarchy and so they fancied themselves to be outsiders.
William F. Buckley, Jr., spearheaded the formation of radical conservatives who saw themselves as outsiders against big government as represented by the New Deal. To this day, radical conservatives fancy themselves to be outsiders against big government and New Deal liberalism, even though the deregulation policies they advocate benefit Wall Street insiders and the super rich.
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