With the emergence of phonetic alphabetic writing came the various written texts in the anthology of texts known as the Hebrew Bible (which has been incorporated into the Christian Bible as the so-called Old Testament). However, according to Ong, both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible are anthologies of texts that represent, for the most part, primary oral thought and expression transcribed and written down in texts. These various texts manifest the world-as-event sense of life.
However, with the historical emergence of the vowelized phonetic alphabetic writing system of ancient Greek around 750 BCE, human thinking interacted with Greek writing to gradually produce distinctively literate forms of thought and expression as exemplified in the philosophical works of Plato and Aristotle. According to Ong, this distinctively literate philosophical thought and expression manifested the world-as-view sense of life.
But Plato and Aristotle themselves and ancient and medieval thinkers in the Greek tradition of philosophy, including Christian thinkers in Catholic theology, were often able to have the two senses of life -- the world-as-event sense of life and the world-as-view sense of life -- co-existing in their lives and their individual consciousness.
Now, according to Ong, the historical emergence of the Gutenberg printing press led to a gradual deepening of the visual shift that started in ancient Greek philosophy and was advanced over the centuries by ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and subsequently also by the historical emergence of medieval Christian theology.
But according to Ong, the cultural conditioning of print culture in the centuries after the emergence of the Gutenberg printing press in the 1450s led in time to the unprecedented dominance of the world-as-view sense of life in Western culture, or at least in educated people in the prestige culture in Western culture.
However, according to Ong, the communication media that accentuate sound reached a certain critical mass by the 1960s. According to Ong, the cultural conditioning of the communication media that accentuate sound are producing a form of cultural conditioning that is different from the long-established cultural conditioning of print culture.
We in Western culture today are living through this tectonic shift in our cultural conditioning. This is why we are experiencing our culture wars.
In conclusion, as I said above, I agree with Mike Huckabee that Phil Robertson is expression a traditional Christian view of homosexuality -- crudely. But that traditional Christian view is being challenged in our ongoing culture wars, because our cultural conditioning is shifting as a result of the impact and influence of the emerging cultural conditioning of communication media that accentuate sound.
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