Because Vice President Kamala Harris will likely become the Democratic Party's 2024 presidential candidate a the August Democratic National Convention, she should read Anne Applebaum's insightful new 2024 book Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.

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Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) July 30, 2024: I do not have a crystal ball - I cannot foretell the future. For example, I cannot foretell if former President Donald Trump will win a second term in the November 2024 presidential election. However, because of his pronounced authoritarian tendencies, I am concerned about the possibility that he might.

My concern prompted me to write my recent related 2,000-word OEN article "Masha Gessen on the Seeds of This Political Disaster" (dated July 22, 2024):

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Now, my concern about the possibility that Trump might win a second term in the November 2024 presidential election has prompted me more recently to take a look at the distinguished - and prolific -- Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and historian Anne Applebaum's new 2024 book Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. Her new 2024 book is a follow-up to her 2020 book Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. Autocracy, Inc. is short and accessible -- and thoroughly depressing to read! It turns out that autocracies also tend to be kleptocracies!

In this connection, Jane Mayer's 2016 book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Radical Right is still relevant background reading for Applebaum's new 2024 book.

Now, according to the Wikipedia entry on her, "Applebaum [born in 1964 in Washington, D.C.] won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 2004 for [her 700-page book] Gulag: A History published the year before." According to Wikipedia, Applebaum holds dual citizenship in the United States and Poland. In addition to English, she speaks Polish and Russian. Her husband is Polish, and they have two children.

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Now, the most efficient way for me to provide you with an overview of Applebaum's new 2024 book Autocracy, Inc. is to tell you its parts:

"Introduction: Autocracy, Inc." (pp. 1-17).

Chapter I: "The Freed That Binds" (pp. 19-42).

Chapter II: "Kleptocracy Metastasizes" (pp. 43-64).

Chapter III: "Controlling the Narrative" (pp. 65-97).

Chapter IV: "Changing the Operating System" (pp. 98-121).

Chapter V: "Smearing the Democrats" (pp. 122-149).

"Epilogue: Democrats United" (pp. 151-176).

"Acknowledgments" (pp. 179-180).

"Notes" (pp. 181-207).

"Text Credits" (p. 209).

"About the Author" (p. 211).

Unfortunately, Applebaum's short new 2024 book Autocracy, Inc. does not come equipped with an "Index."

In the "Acknowledgments," Applebaum says, among other things, "Jeffrey Goldberg and Scott Stossel commissioned and edited the original Atlantic article, 'The Bad Guys Are Winning,' which became the introduction to this book. Dante Ramos edited most of the dozen-odd other Atlantic articles that I drew upon when writing this book as well" (pp. 179-180).

In "Text Credits," Applebaum says, "Portions of this book originally appeared in the following publications." Clearly this book is a synthesis of her recent publications.

In Appelbaum's Chapter IV: "Changing the Operating System," she highlights the role of former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in formulating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (p. 98). Applebaum says, "The Soviet Union voted against the document when it was ratified in 1948, as did several Soviet satellite states. But the majority of the new UN [United Nations] members - Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans, as well as North Americans and Europeans - voted in favor" (p. 99).

Today, unfortunately, the autocrats of the world such as Putin are waging a war of ideas not only against our American-style political and economic liberalism, but also against the ideas and values in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In my judgment, because the Republican presidential candidate infamously admires Putin, it is important that Vice President Kamala Harris, the likely Democratic Party presidential candidate, should read Applebaum's new 2024 book Autocracy, Inc.

Now, bereft, as I am, of a crystal ball for foretelling the future, I often find it useful to review the work of the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian and pioneering media ecology theorist Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D., English, Harvard University, 1955). For my purposes in the present essay, I prefer to start with a brief account of Ong's work.

Ong liked to say that his work is about how and why things are the way they are. But he stopped well short of saying that his work could provide us with a crystal ball for foretelling the future. As I have already indicated, I cannot foretell the future of our American experiment in representative democracy. But I can use Ong's work to indicate the historical cultural conditions in our Western cultural history in which our American experiments in representative democracy emerged.

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 Ong 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 (also known as economic liberalism), the rise of our American representative democracy (also known as political liberalism), the rise of the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of the Romantic Movement in philosophy, literature, and the arts in our Western cultural history.

I contend that Ong implicitly works with this thesis in his massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason - his major exploration of the influence of the Gutenberg printing press that emerged in Europe in the mid-1450s. Taking a hint from Ong's massively researched 1958 book, Marshall McLuhan worked up examples of his own in his sweeping 1962 synthesis The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (for specific page references to Ong's publications about Ramus and Ramism, see McLuhan's "Bibliographic Index" (pp. 286-287]).

Next in Ong's 1977 "Preface," 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 liked to characterize his own thought as phenomenological and personalist in cast. I have honored those two orientations of Ong's thought in the subtitled of my introductory-level survey book Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication (2000) - which won the Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology, conferred by the Media Ecology Association in June 2001.

Now, back to Ong's 1977 "Preface." 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.

In any event, Ong generously reviewed McLuhan's 1962 synthesis in an untitled review in the Jesuit-sponsored magazine America, volume 107, number 24 (September 15, 1962): pp. 743 and 747.

Ong's generous review of McLuhan's 1962 synthesis is reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (2002, pp. 307-308).

Now, Ong famously coined the terms secondary orality and primary orality to distinguish our contemporary secondary oral culture that features communications media that accentuate sound from primary oral cultures in pre-historic and pre-literate times in human history.

I have written about Ong's account of our contemporary secondary oral culture in my essay "Secondary Orality and Consciousness Today" in the anthology Media, Consciousness, and Culture: Explorations of Walter Ong's Thought, edited by Bruce E. Gronbeck, Thomas J. Farrell, and Paul A. Soukup (1991, pp. 194-209).

However, in my upbeat 1991 essay, I do not explore how the deep resonances of our contemporary secondary orality in the collective unconscious of the human psyche bring archetypal patterns in the human psyche into interactions with ego-consciousness. The Jungian psychoanalyst and Jungian psychological theorist Edward C. Whitmont (1912-1998) discusses some of these archetypal influences in his important 1982 book The Return of the Goddess.

For a Jungian account of the masculine archetypes in the human psyche, see Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette's 1990 book King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine.

In any event, secondary orality is here to stay with us for the foreseeable future. Secondary orality is the matrix in which what Appelbaum refers to as today's contemporary autocracies in the world live and breathe. Consequently, it is important for me to explain how secondary orality is related to the crucial aspects of what Applebaum discusses in here new 2024 book Autocracy, Inc.

Now, primary oral cultures and residual forms of primary oral cultures tend to foster tradition-directed people, and they also tend to foster authoritarianism.

Generally speaking, what Applebaum refers to as authoritarianism in her 2020 book Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, mentioned above, is contrasted with what Ong at one time referred to as the inner-directed person - borrowing the term inner-directed from the Harvard sociologist David Riesman's widely read book The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (1950).

More recently, Ong has come to refer to the inward turn of consciousness - in his most widely read, and most widely translated, 1982 book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (pp. 178-179).

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).

Concerning the ongoing interpretation and reception of the documents promulgated at the Second Vatican Council, see The Oxford Handbook of Vatican II, edited by Catherine E. Clifford and Massimo Faggioli (2023). This massive 800-page book includes three useful indices: (1) "Index of Names" (pp. 755-766); (2) "Index of Subjects" (pp. 767-772); and (3) "Index of Vatican II Documents" (pp. 773-777).

For all practical purposes, the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) in the Roman Catholic Church and the papacies of Pope John-Paul II (1978-2005), Pope Benedict XVI (2005-2013), and Pope Francis (2013-) occurred during our contemporary secondary oral culture.

I have profiled the doctrinally conservative Pope Francis in my widely read OEN article "Pope Francis on Evil and Satan" (dated March 24, 2019):

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Even though Pope Francis is undoubtedly conservative doctrinally, he has provoked the wrath of certain conservative American Catholics. The Italian philosopher and papal biographer Massimo Borghesi discusses them in his book Catholic Discordance: Neoconservatism vs. the Field Hospital Church of Pope Francis, translated by Barry Hudock (2021; orig. Italian ed., 2021).

I reviewed Borghesi's 2021 book in my OEN article "Massimo Borghesi's New Book Catholic Discordance" (dated January 5, 2022):

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Now, I will boldly suggest here that the outspoken anti-Francis American Catholics tend to prefer their nostalgic and idealized view of the Roman Catholic Church in the 1950s as a closed system.

Somehow, perhaps in many ways, the doctrinally conservative Pope Francis has prompted them to feel that their nostalgic and idealized view of the church in the 1950s as a closed system is under siege.

Now, I will also boldly suggest here that Trump's most ardent MAGA supporters feel that their nostalgic and idealized view of postwar American culture in the 1950s as a closed system is under siege.

Of course, I hasten to add that I am here, in both cases, adding the specification "in the 1950s as a closed system".

Now, what Ong refers to as our contemporary secondary oral culture engendered by the communications media that accentuate sound appears to be here for the foreseeable future. If I am correct in suggesting that what Ong refers to as open systems thinking is fostered by our secondary oral culture, then those conservative Americans who view the 1950s nostalgically are going to continue to feel under siege for the foreseeable future.

My sobering analysis suggests that many of our fellow Americans will continue to feel under threat for the foreseeable future as long as they cling to their nostalgic views of the 1950s - which means that our fellow Americans who feel so threatened will continue to pose a threat of authoritarianism spring to full bloom in America in the foreseeable future.

Next, I want to turn to Ong's thesis about our Western cultural history. In Ong's "Preface" to 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 Ong 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 (Harvard University Press, 1958) - 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, mentioned above.

Next in Ong's 1977 preface, 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 liked to characterize his own thought as phenomenological and personalist in cast.

Consider also Ong's own modesty in the subtitle of his book The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (1967), the expanded published version of Ong's 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University. His wording "Some Prolegomena" clearly acknowledges that he does not explicitly claim that his thesis as he formulated it in his 1977 "Preface" does "explain everything in human culture and consciousness" - or every cause -- but that the shifts he points out are "sweeping".

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, I have above included both modern science and modern capitalism in my short but significant enumeration of major cultural developments in our Western cultural history. At this juncture, I want to bring in here Ong's significant discussion of what he refers to as the quantification of thought in late medieval logic in Chapter IV: "The Distant Background: Scholasticism and the Quantification of Thought" in his massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (pp. 53-91).

Ong himself has beautifully explained the historical import of the late medieval quantification of thought in the history of logic in an essay that he reprinted in his 1962 book The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies:

"In this historical perspective, medieval scholastic logic appears as a kind of pre-mathemics, a subtle and unwitting preparation for the large-scale operations in quantitative modes of thinking which will characterize the modern world. In assessing the meaning of [medieval] scholasticism, one must keep in mind an important and astounding fact: in the whole history of the human mind, mathematics and mathematical physics come into their own, in a way which has changed the face of the earth and promises or threatens to change it even more, at only one place and time, that is, in Western Europe immediately after the [medieval] scholastic experience [in short, in print culture]. Elsewhere, no matter how advanced the culture on other scores, and even along mathematical lines, as in the case of the Babylonian, nothing like a real mathematical transformation of thinking takes place - not among the ancient Egyptians or Assyrians or Greeks or Romans, not among the peoples of India nor the Chinese nor the Japanese, not among the Aztecs or Mayas, not in Islam despite the promising beginnings there, any more than among the Tartars or the Avars or the Turks. These people can all now share the common scientific knowledge, but the scientific tradition itself which they share is not a merging of various parallel discoveries made by their various civilizations. It represents a new state of mind. However great contributions other civilizations may hereafter make to the tradition, our scientific world traces its origins back always to seventeenth and sixteenth century Europe [in short, to Copernicus and Galileo], to the place where for some three centuries and more the [medieval] arts course taught in universities and para-university schools had pounded into the heads of youth a study program consisting almost exclusively of a highly quantified logic and a companion physics, both taught on a scale and with an enthusiasm never approximated or even dreamt of in ancient academies" (emphasis added; Ong, 1962, p. 72).

In conclusion, secondary orality is here to stay for the foreseeable future. Our American experiment with representative democracy, on the one hand, and, on the other, our modern capitalism - in short, our political and economic liberalism -- emerged in print culture in our Western cultural history after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in Europe in the mid-1450s. As imperfect and flawed as our political and economic liberalism may be, they are systems that we should value and do our best to preserve and pass on to the nest generation - even if we must face and overcome the challenges of authoritarianism, autocracy, and kleptocracy that Anne Applebaum describes in his new 2024 book Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.

Authors Website: http://www.d.umn.edu/~tfarrell

Authors Bio:

Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book WALTER ONG'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO CULTURAL STUDIES: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE WORD AND I-THOU COMMUNICATION (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2000; 2nd ed. 2009, forthcoming). The first edition won the 2001 Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology conferred by the Media Ecology Association. For further information about his education and his publications, see his UMD homepage: Click here to visit Dr. Farrell's homepage.

On September 10 and 22, 2009, he discussed Walter Ong's work on the blog radio talk show "Ethics Talk" that is hosted by Hope May in philosophy at Central Michigan University. Each hour-long show has been archived and is available for people who missed the live broadcast to listen to. Here are the website addresses for the two archived shows:

Click here to listen the Technologizing of the Word Interview

Click here to listen the Ramus, Method & The Decay of Dialogue Interview