More on EBSCO Knowledge Advantage: Walter J. Ong

We’re interested in the intersection between the spoken word and the written word.

Find the original article and much more at: https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/biography/walter-j-ong.

Biography

Throughout his career, Walter Jackson Ong concerned himself with the interrelationships between technologies of communication and changes in human consciousness. He was born on November 30, 1912, in Kansas City, Missouri, the son of Walter Jackson Ong and Blanche Eugenia (Mense) Ong. He studied at Rockhurst College, a small Catholic school in Kansas City run by the Jesuit Order. After receiving his B.A. from Rockhurst in 1933, he spent two years in newspaper and business positions before entering the Missouri Province of the Society of Jesus in 1935. He then went through the traditional course of studies for Jesuits, spending two years in a novitiate where he studied Latin and Greek and where he underwent rigorous ascetic training, including a thirty-day retreat based on the sixteenth century Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola.

In the late 1930’s, Ong studied philosophy at Saint Louis University, a Jesuit institution since 1828 and one with which he became closely associated. He received his Ph.L. (licentiate in philosophy) in 1940 and his M.A. in 1941. During regency, a period of practice teaching for Jesuit scholastics, he was an instructor for two years in English and French at Regis College in Denver. In 1944, he began his theological training at Saint Louis University, and during his first three years of studies, he also taught English. He was ordained a priest in 1946, and after another year of theology he received his S.T.L. (licentiate in sacred theology).

In the early 1950’s, Ong studied at Harvard University, where he came under the influence of Perry Miller and began his important work on the logician Petrus Ramus. This sixteenth century educational reformer made Ong aware of the revolutionary shift in sensibility brought about by the development of typography. Ramus simplified and modernized the old logic of Aristotle by concentrating on logic’s practical use as an instrument of discovery rather than as a tool of scholastic disputation. Ong used Ramism to illustrate the transformation that brought Western societies to react to words less as sounds and more as items in space, less as parts of a temporally successive oral argument and more as elements in a printed pattern.

This is complex and dense, so we’ve broken it into sections. More next Monday.

In his early works, Ong was primarily concerned with revealing the importance of writing and print in understanding the evolution of modern consciousness; in Fighting for Life, he analyzed the place of the word in causing human dissension. Ong had recognized the biological complement to human consciousness in his earlier writings, but he now made more extensive use of the Darwinian concept of struggle for existence. Ong was attracted to evolution’s sense of the present as growing out of the past. In Fighting for Life, he probed how competition is embedded in various levels of culture. He also showed how agonistic structures are present in educational, religious, and political institutions, and how adversary procedures have shaped social, linguistic, and intellectual history. Orality and Literacy is a summary of Ong’s work on the historical technologizing of the word. In this book, Ong makes clear that he belongs to no school of interpretation and that humanity’s progress into a new age will be mainly through a return to the unifying energy of orality. In 1986, Ong returned to the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the English Jesuit poet about whom he had written so insightfully early in his career. In Hopkins, the Self, and God, he portrays Hopkins as a product of the Victorian age and his Jesuit education. He sees an evolutionary view of time in Hopkins’s poetry, but he also argues that the Jesuit poet’s faith was deepened rather than threatened by nineteenth century scientific ideas.

In his retirement years, after he became professor emeritus at Saint Louis University in 1984, Ong continued to develop the ideas that had preoccupied him throughout most of his scholarly life, especially his analysis of how humans use various technologies in gathering and communicating their knowledge. Many of his essays on these themes were collected, under the title Faith and Contexts, in four volumes and published as part of the American Academy of Religion’s Religion and Social Order series. During his eightieth birthday celebrations, as he reflected on his life as priest and scholar, Ong saw a unity in the great variety of his contributions, since everything in the world “hangs together” because “God made it all.”

Ong’s reputation has derived from the insights he developed in dwelling intellectually in several contrasting milieus: the religious and secular, the Renaissance and modern, the scientific and humanistic. In particular, his career centered on the interface of word and culture, and one of his most influential themes was the evolution of the word from oral to script to print to electronic. Some of his analyses show similarities to those of Marshall McLuhan, for whom the medium was the message, but Ong’s work probed more deeply than McLuhan’s and was grounded with more thorough scholarship, and thus he has had a much more lasting influence among literary intellectuals.

In his early works, Ong was primarily concerned with revealing the importance of writing and print in understanding the evolution of modern consciousness; in Fighting for Life, he analyzed the place of the word in causing human dissension. Ong had recognized the biological complement to human consciousness in his earlier writings, but he now made more extensive use of the Darwinian concept of struggle for existence. Ong was attracted to evolution’s sense of the present as growing out of the past. In Fighting for Life, he probed how competition is embedded in various levels of culture. He also showed how agonistic structures are present in educational, religious, and political institutions, and how adversary procedures have shaped social, linguistic, and intellectual history. Orality and Literacy is a summary of Ong’s work on the historical technologizing of the word. In this book, Ong makes clear that he belongs to no school of interpretation and that humanity’s progress into a new age will be mainly through a return to the unifying energy of orality. In 1986, Ong returned to the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the English Jesuit poet about whom he had written so insightfully early in his career. In Hopkins, the Self, and God, he portrays Hopkins as a product of the Victorian age and his Jesuit education. He sees an evolutionary view of time in Hopkins’s poetry, but he also argues that the Jesuit poet’s faith was deepened rather than threatened by nineteenth century scientific ideas.

In his retirement years, after he became professor emeritus at Saint Louis University in 1984, Ong continued to develop the ideas that had preoccupied him throughout most of his scholarly life, especially his analysis of how humans use various technologies in gathering and communicating their knowledge. Many of his essays on these themes were collected, under the title Faith and Contexts, in four volumes and published as part of the American Academy of Religion’s Religion and Social Order series. During his eightieth birthday celebrations, as he reflected on his life as priest and scholar, Ong saw a unity in the great variety of his contributions, since everything in the world “hangs together” because “God made it all.”

Ong’s reputation has derived from the insights he developed in dwelling intellectually in several contrasting milieus: the religious and secular, the Renaissance and modern, the scientific and humanistic. In particular, his career centered on the interface of word and culture, and one of his most influential themes was the evolution of the word from oral to script to print to electronic. Some of his analyses show similarities to those of Marshall McLuhan, for whom the medium was the message, but Ong’s work probed more deeply than McLuhan’s and was grounded with more thorough scholarship, and thus he has had a much more lasting influence among literary intellectuals.

Kareem’s Daily Quote

All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent
— often attributed to Thomas Jefferson

This is not a quote by Thomas Jefferson, though Google would have you believe it is. Google tends to be a poor teacher, in that it’ll list the most popular answer, not necessarily the most accurate. In fact, Jefferson’s Monticello estate (Monticello.org) lists the quote as “spurious”—not found in his letters, speeches or papers. But whoever said it or didn’t, it’s not half bad. And we know, from simply having lived our lives, that it’s mostly true.

The idea behind the quote isn’t complicated. Bad things don’t usually happen because a huge number of people want them to. Bad things happen because enough people look the other way. People who know better—or should—decide it’s safer, easier, less messy, or less exhausting to stay quiet. People also don’t act because, frankly, we have other interests, other concerns. We might have a family member who is not well, or conflicts with a spouse. We might have financial difficulties. Or maybe an ice storm is coming our way, and we’re not prepared. When our choice is whether to pay a healthcare bill or the electric bill, it’s hard to focus on much else.

Silence, in other words, is not simply a failure to engage because “we won’t look.” It’s also that our national government plays itself out in a city far, far away, while we have immediate concerns much closer to home. Far, far away may as well be another galaxy and will just have to wait. Then, when our immediate concerns pass, other immediate concerns quickly replace them.

Besides, most of us have already done our duty. We voted. We voted so that senators and congresspeople that we put in power could fight for us. Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to work? Why lay the guilt on us when it’s the system that’s breaking or broken?

Those in power depend on the fact that, in general, people won’t act unless they’re personally affected by a change or a law. And even then, it usually takes a small avalanche of negative changes before people realize they’re in it up to their necks. By that time, it takes a lot of effort and suffering to dig our way out.

We’re living in a time when trust in our representatives is low, misinformation spreads faster than we can stop or contradict it, and people are exhausted by constant conflict, most of it starting from the top. It’s awfully tempting to wash our hands of it, to tune out. It’s tempting to assume that someone else will speak up, someone with a perfect life and no personal problems to contend with. Instead, we should remember that we’re all dealing with personal difficulties, and that those cannot distract us from looking at the bigger picture. Because the only “trickle-down theory” that actually works is this: “A fish rots from the head down.”

The ancient Greeks had a version of this quote. So did the ancient Chinese, the ancient Egyptians, and the ancient Romans. It’s been true, in other words, for five thousand years. We don’t have to be heroes or experts. A healthy society isn’t built by perfect people with perfect lives. It’s built by people with messy, difficult lives who—when the fish starts to stink—refuse to pretend they can’t smell it.

Kareem’s Daily Quote

All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent
— often attributed to Thomas Jefferson

This is not a quote by Thomas Jefferson, though Google would have you believe it is. Google tends to be a poor teacher, in that it’ll list the most popular answer, not necessarily the most accurate. In fact, Jefferson’s Monticello estate (Monticello.org) lists the quote as “spurious”—not found in his letters, speeches or papers. But whoever said it or didn’t, it’s not half bad. And we know, from simply having lived our lives, that it’s mostly true.

The idea behind the quote isn’t complicated. Bad things don’t usually happen because a huge number of people want them to. Bad things happen because enough people look the other way. People who know better—or should—decide it’s safer, easier, less messy, or less exhausting to stay quiet. People also don’t act because, frankly, we have other interests, other concerns. We might have a family member who is not well, or conflicts with a spouse. We might have financial difficulties. Or maybe an ice storm is coming our way, and we’re not prepared. When our choice is whether to pay a healthcare bill or the electric bill, it’s hard to focus on much else.

Silence, in other words, is not simply a failure to engage because “we won’t look.” It’s also that our national government plays itself out in a city far, far away, while we have immediate concerns much closer to home. Far, far away may as well be another galaxy and will just have to wait. Then, when our immediate concerns pass, other immediate concerns quickly replace them.

Besides, most of us have already done our duty. We voted. We voted so that senators and congresspeople that we put in power could fight for us. Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to work? Why lay the guilt on us when it’s the system that’s breaking or broken?

Those in power depend on the fact that, in general, people won’t act unless they’re personally affected by a change or a law. And even then, it usually takes a small avalanche of negative changes before people realize they’re in it up to their necks. By that time, it takes a lot of effort and suffering to dig our way out.

We’re living in a time when trust in our representatives is low, misinformation spreads faster than we can stop or contradict it, and people are exhausted by constant conflict, most of it starting from the top. It’s awfully tempting to wash our hands of it, to tune out. It’s tempting to assume that someone else will speak up, someone with a perfect life and no personal problems to contend with. Instead, we should remember that we’re all dealing with personal difficulties, and that those cannot distract us from looking at the bigger picture. Because the only “trickle-down theory” that actually works is this: “A fish rots from the head down.”

The ancient Greeks had a version of this quote. So did the ancient Chinese, the ancient Egyptians, and the ancient Romans. It’s been true, in other words, for five thousand years. We don’t have to be heroes or experts. A healthy society isn’t built by perfect people with perfect lives. It’s built by people with messy, difficult lives who—when the fish starts to stink—refuse to pretend they can’t smell it.