Now, like Brooks, Ong sets up and operationally defines and explains two contrasting key terms -- (1) Greek versus (2) barbarian -- in his subtle 1962 title essay "The Barbarian Within: Outsiders Inside Society Today" in his book The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies (Macmillan, pp. 260-285). Ong's 1962 title essay is reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Hampton Press, 2002, pp. 277-300).
For a work of related interest, see Grace Elizabeth Hale's book A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America Oxford University Press, 2011).
Now, Ong's delineation of the Greek versus the barbarian is somewhat consonant with Brooks' discussion of the forces of civilization versus the forces of barbarians - as I will now proceed to explain.
In any event, in Ong's subtle 1962 title essay "The Barbarian Within: Outsiders Inside Society Today," he says the following: "The very concepts of Greek and barbarian are aids to discrimination. For the Greek-barbarian disjunction cannot be applied to any cultures simply or en bloc. There are no complete Greeks or complete barbarians, only partial ones. There are no total outsiders of any kind. These dialectically related concepts, Greek and barbarian, like other similarly related concepts such as classic and romantic, are useful precisely because they do not fit the whole of a given situation but fit the situation only in part - that is, they are useful largely because of the ways they do not fit. In saying that a culture is Greek, one is forced to say how it is so by contrast with some certain barbarianism, and vice versa, since every culture (like every person) is both Greek and barbarian, so that one is saying nothing until one has worked out a specific ground for a statement involving these terms. If every culture is both Greek and barbarian, nevertheless no two cultures are Greek or barbarian in exactly the same way" (Ong, 1962, p. 276).
Disclosure: If every person "is both Greek and barbarian," then I as a person stand as a barbarian in relation to Ong as a Greek. When I first encountered Ong in the fall semester of 1964 as a junior in his upper division English course Practical Criticism: Poetry at Saint Louis University, I undoubtedly experienced "the awed deference of an inferior to a superior" (Ong, 1962, p. 272). However, as I came to write about his work subsequently over the years, I undoubtedly came to view him "with less deference and more real man-to-man respect" (Ong, 1962, p. 272). End of disclosure.
If every person "is both Greek and barbarian," then how does Ong as a person stand in relation to his fellow American Catholics? For Ong, "a Greek [is] willing to live with acknowledged insecurity" (Ong, 1962, p. 271). But this is not the case for a barbarian. According to Ong, "The barbarian type of insecurity . . . assuages its pangs by finding outside itself an order or integrity by which it can live" (Ong, 1962, p. 270). According to Ong, "There are of course a great many such barbarian Christian minds among us still today - perhaps nowhere more than among American Catholics" (Ong, 1962, p. 270).
Now, because the 1960 presidential campaign of Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts featured manifestations of old anti-Catholic bigotry, we can say that Ong himself stood as a Catholic priest as an outsider, or barbarian, to the dominant white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) culture of American culture, which served as the Greek in the 1960s.
For further discussion of WASP culture in American culture, see Robert C. Christopher's book Crashing the Gates: The De-WASPing of America's Power Elite (Simon and Schuster, 1989).
In Ong's terminology, the now-defunct WASP power elite represented the Greeks - the insiders, not the outsiders.
For all practical purposes, Brooks, in effect, acknowledges the de-WASPing of America's power elite when he says, "Zero-sum thinking is surging on the left as well. A generation of college students has been raised on the dogma that life is a contest between groups - oppressor versus oppressed, colonizers versus colonized."
However that may be, if every culture "is both Greek and barbarian," then exactly in what ways is American culture today "both Greek and barbarian"?
Elsewhere in Ong's subtle 1962 title essay "The Barbarian Within: Outsiders Inside Society Today," he says "Order and discipline, weight, and decorum are matters on which the barbarian, making his way up in the world, is likely to put a high premium. They are the virtues of the bourgeoisie, often taken as typifying the intelligent barbarians within an intellectual culture" (Ong, 1962, p. 273).
This brings me back to Brooks' "What Biden Needs to Tell Us." By the standards that Ong spells out, Brooks is fundamentally urging Biden to take a law and order approach and thereby become the intelligent barbarian in the 2024 presidential election - and also thereby consigning the unintelligent barbarian role to Trump the populist.
In terms of what Brooks says in "What Biden Needs to Tell Us," he does not exactly dwell on what Ong refers to as the Greek position. However, Brooks does allude to our American past experience of the Greek position when he says, "Maybe Biden can reach something deep in every American and revive the optimism that used to be our defining national trait" - before the de-WASPing of America's power elite.
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