Article: Reflections on Ian Morris' Book About the West and China

As is well known, the British colonists in Massachusetts Bay Colony started Harvard College in 1636. In THE NEW ENGLAND MIND: THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY (Harvard University Press, 1939), Perry Miller of Harvard University reports that he found only one self-described Aristotelian in seventeenth-century New England. Most educated New Englanders, who had been educated at Cambridge University, were self-described Ramists, followers of the French logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572).

When John Milton (1608-1674) was a student at Cambridge University, Peter Ramus' work was lionized there. Later in his life, Milton wrote a textbook in logic in Latin titled in English translation A FULLER COURSE IN THE ART OF LOGIC CONFORMED TO THE METHOD OF PETER RAMUS, translated by Walter J. Ong and Charles J. Ermatinger, in Yale's COMPLETE PROSE WORKS OF JOHN MILTON: VOLUME VIII: 1666-1682, edited by Maurice Kelley (Yale University Press, 1982, pages 206-407). Ong's historical introduction (pages 139-205) is well worth reading.

In any event, Perry Miller did his best to understand Peter Ramus' work. However, in the end Perry Miller called for somebody to undertake a more thorough study of Peter Ramus' work. About a decade later, Walter Ong stepped forward to undertake such a study as his doctoral dissertation in English at Harvard University under Perry Miller's direction. In 1958, Harvard University Press published Walter Ong's massively researched dissertation, slightly revised, in two volumes: (1) RAMUS, METHOD, AND THE DECAY OF DIALOGUE: FROM THE ART OF DISCOURSE TO THE ART OF REASON and (2) RAMUS AND TALON INVENTORY. In the latter volume Ong lists and briefly describes more than 750 volumes by Peter Ramus and his followers and his critics that Ong tracked down in more than 100 libraries in the British Isles and continental Europe.

Walter Ong characterizes Ramist method for composing a speech as monologic in spirit, because Ramist method in principle did not explicitly take up and respond to real or imaginary adversarial positions. Ramist method led authors and speakers to concentrate on presenting their own line of thought, in theory not discussing real or imagined adversarial positions. Thus if you followed Ramist method in composing your line of thought, the result would appear to be irenic in spirit. But traditionally in Western culture, rhetoric and dialectic involved explicitly acknowledging and responding to real or imagined adversarial positions, as Thomas O. Sloane of Berkeley discusses in his book ON THE CONTRARY: THE PROTOCOL OF TRADITIONAL RHETORIC (Catholic University of America Press, 1997). As is well known, Thomas Aquinas famously sets forth real or imagined objections and then responds in turn to each one time and again in his introductory survey textbook SUMMA THEOLOGIAE. Thus in the Western tradition, both rhetoric and dialectic were programmatically polemical and agonistic, especially compared to the results of following Ramist method. The agonistic spirit is found today in modern science's practice of formulating hypotheses and testing them.

RAMUS, METHOD, AND THE DECAY OF DIALOGUE was Walter Ong's first and most detailed big-picture account of Western cultural history. But not his last. His fifteen other books can also be described as big-picture accounts of Western cultural history. Once he got on the big-picture wave-length, he never got off it. As a result, we might ask, "What good is the big-picture of Western culture?" Walter Ong himself has suggested that we need both closeness (proximity) and distance (what I am here referring to as the big picture) in order to understand something.

Walter Ong himself has also suggested in effect that we can get our culture bearings today by considering the big picture of Western cultural history. For all practical purposes, Ian Morris is also in effect suggesting this in his book.

By happy coincidence, the emergent dominance of the West that Ian Morris discusses roughly parallels the dominance of the West that I discuss in my article "The West Versus the Rest: Getting Our Cultural Bearings from Walter J. Ong" in the journal EME: EXPLORATIONS IN MEDIA ECOLOGY, volume 7, number 4 (2008): pages 271-282.

Not surprisingly, Walter Ong does not discuss in his 400 or so publications many of the historical and cultural details that Ian Morris discusses.

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