Fareed Zakaria%2C Peabody Awards %282012%29 %28cropped%29.
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Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) March 31, 2024: The seasoned Indian American journalist, commentator, and author Fareed Zakaria (born in Mumbai in 1964; Ph.D. in government, Harvard University, 1993) has published a timely new book, Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present (W. W. Norton, 2024), about the print culture that emerged in Western culture after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in Europe in the mid-1450s (Zakaria refers to the printing press, pp. 35, 43, and 217-218).
On the back cover of Zakaria's new 2024 book, we find the generous advance praise for it by Walter Isaacson.
In Zakaria's new 2024 book Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present, he revisits many themes that he explored in his 2003 book The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, in which he refers to "the new printing presses [that had emerged]" (W. W. Norton, p. 39).
On the back cover of Zakaria's 2003 book, we find the generous advance praise for it by Samuel P. Huntington, Henry Kissinger, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Richard Holbrooke, and Nicholas Lemann.
Now, the following five books are pioneering studies of the print culture that emerged in Europe after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in Europe in the mid-1450s:
(1) Ohio State University's Richard D. Altick's 1957 book The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900 (University of Chicago Press; second edition, Ohio State University Press, 1998).
(2) Saint Louis University's Walter J. Ong's massively researched 1958 book Ramus [1515-1572], Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Harvard University Press).
(3) the French historians Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin's 1958 book The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800, translated by David Gerard; edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and David Wootton (Verso, 1976).
(4) the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas' 1962 book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by Thomas Burger with assistance of Frederick Lawrence (MIT Press, 1989).
(5) the University of Toronto's Marshall McLuhan's widely read and widely translated 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (University of Toronto Press).
In Zakaria's new 2024 book Age of Revolutions, he refers to Altick's 1957 book The English Common Reader (p. 340n.122).
Now, in Ong's "Preface" in his 1977 book Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Cornell University Press, pp. 9-13), he says that his media ecology thesis "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).
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.
I have discussed our contemporary secondary orality 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 (Sage Publishing, 1991, pp. 194-209).
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