In the United States today, with our contemporary secondary oral culture produced by communications media that accentuate sound, all Americans undoubtedly experience resonances of primary orality and its kind of imagistic thinking in their/our collective unconscious.
Now, in 1999, Sussex Academic Press published a new edition and translation of Teilhard's key book as The Human Phenomenon, translated by Sarah Appleton-Weber.
In 2015, the doctrinally conservative Pope Francis (born in 1936; elected pope in March 2013), the first Jesuit pope, published his widely read eco-encyclical Laudato si' (it is available in English and other languages at the Vatican's website). In Chapter 2: "The Gospel of Creation" (numbered paragraphs 62 to 100), Pope Francis says, "The ultimate destiny of the universe is in the fullness of God, which [ultimate destiny] has already been attained by the risen Christ, the measure of the maturity of all things" (numbered paragraph 83). In the accompanying endnote 53, Pope Francis says, in part, "Against this horizon we can set the contribution of Fr. [Pierre] Teilhard de Chardin."
Also in Chapter 2 of Pope Francis' eco-encyclical, he makes certain other remarkable statements.
In Paragraph 79, the pope says the following: "In this universe, shaped by open and intercommunicating systems, we can discern countless forms of relationship and participation. This [discernment] leads us to think of the whole as open to God's transcendence, within which it develops. Faith allows us to interpret the meaning and the mysterious beauty of what is unfolding. We are free to apply out intelligence towards things evolving positively, or towards adding new ills, new causes of suffering and real setbacks."
In Paragraph 81, the pope says the following: "Human beings, even if we postulate a process of evolution [as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin does], also possess a uniqueness which cannot be fully explained by the evolution of other open systems. Each of us has his or her own personal identity and is capable of entering into dialogue with others and with God himself. Our capacity to reason, to develop arguments, to be inventive, to interpret reality and to create art, along with other not yet discovered capacities, are signs of a uniqueness which transcends the spheres of physics and biology. The sheer novelty involved in the emergence of a personal being within a material universe presupposes a direct action of God and a particular call to life and to relationship on the part of a 'Thou' who addresses himself to another 'thou.' The biblical accounts of creation invite us to see each human being as a subject who can never be reduced to the status of an object."
In the categorization system of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis' 2015 eco-encyclical is part of the category known as Catholic Social Teaching. The English lay theologian Anna Rowlands specializes in Catholic Social Teaching. See her 2021 book Towards a Politics of Communion: Catholic Social Teaching in Dark Times (T&T Clark; for specific page references to Pope Francis, see the "Index" entry on Francis [p. 309]).
Also in Pope Francis' 2015 eco-encyclical, he inveighs against what he refers to as the technocratic paradigm (Paragraphs 101, 109, 111, 122, and 189).
What the pope refers to as the technocratic paradigm is essentially what New York University' Neil Postman refers to in his 1992 book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (Knopf).
Disclosure: Before I retired from teaching at the university of Minnesota Duluth at the end of May 2009, I regularly taught a reading-intensive introductory-level liberal arts survey course on Literacy, Technology, and Society. In it, two of the non-fiction books that I required the students to read were Postman's 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, mentioned above, and his 1992 book. For further information about my course, go to my UMD homepage and click on the prompt for "Courses" and look at the drop-down menu for the course number 1506: www.d.umn.edu/~tfarrell End of disclosure.
Now, concerning open systems, mentioned by the pope in Paragraph 81, quoted above, see Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi's 2014 book The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision (Cambridge University Press).
Ong uses systems terminology in the title of his 1977 book Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Cornell University Press) and especially in his culminating essay "Voice and the Opening of Closed Systems" (pp. 305-341).
Ong's 1977 essay "Voice and the Opening of Closed Systems" is reprinted in volume two of Ong's Faith and Contexts, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Scholars Press, 1992b, pp. 162-190).
In Ong's "Preface" in his 1977 book Interfaces of the Word (pp. 9-13), he states that "from the time of my studies [in the 1950s] of Peter Ramus [1515-1572] and Ramism, my work has grown into its own kind of phenomenological history of culture and consciousness" (p. 10). Ong also states that the thesis that he has worked with is relationist, not reductionist (p. 9). He claims that his earlier works "do not maintain that the evolution from primary orality through writing and print to electronic culture, which produces secondary orality, causes or explains 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 [from one another]" (pp. 9-10; I have added the boldface here).
For my purposes in the present essay, I am not making any claim about a major development in culture and consciousness. That is, I am not concerned here with the label "major."
Major development or minor, television sets emerged as common household items by the 1960s. In saying this, I am just paraphrasing what Ong means by secondary orality (i.e., the orality inculcated by communications media that accentuate sound - including television). However, in the relationist spirit of Ong's relationist thesis, I also see television sets as related to certain cultural developments in the 1960s, perhaps including many cultural developments that Dr. Doris Kearns Goodwin recounts in her new 2024 book about the 1960s.
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