Walter Ong's major study of the historical emergence of modernity is RAMUS, METHOD, AND THE DECAY OF DIALOGUE: FROM THE ART OF DISCOURSE TO THE ART OF REASON (1958). In my estimate, this is Walter Ong's first major book in which he works with the kind of approach that he later came to characterize as his "relationist" thesis (his explicit term). He states and explains his relationist thesis in the preface to INTERFACES OF THE WORD: STUDIES IN THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND CULTURE (1977, see esp. pages 9-10). However, in her book RELATIONAL REALITY (2011), Charlene Spretnak does not happen to mention Walter Ong's relationist thesis, which he worked out in several book-length studies and numerous articles.
From the 1960s onward, Walter Ong turned to studying oral culture and residual forms of oral cultures, or pre-modern cultures. His most widely known book is ORALITY AND LITERACY: THE TECHNOLOGIZING OF THE WORD (1982). I want to draw on Walter Ong's 1982 book to discuss the contrast with which Charlene Spretnak works in her new book.
In her rage against modernity, Charlene Spretnak works with the contrast between a deeply relational sense of life and modernity. She characterizes modernity as favoring decontextualized thought over against a more conspicuously contextualized thought-world, which she styles relational. Let me be clear here about my position. In the final analysis, I also have no serious problem with Walter Ong's relationist approach; as a result, in the final analysis, I have no serious problem with Charlene Spretnak's claim that reality is relational. However, in the final analysis, I have no serious problem with decontextualized thought, because we decontextualize our thoughts as a way to examine them more carefully; as a result, I do have a serious problem with Charlene Spretnak's targeting modernity and decontextualized thought as her way of proceeding to champion her cause. In other words, she works with an either/or approach, but I want to hold out for a both/and approach.
On page 191, Charlene Spretnak claims that as a girl she asked the question, "Who thought this up?" meaning who thought up the decontextualized thought-world of modernity. What a remarkably precocious girl she was!
Walter Ong attributes the historical emergence of decontextualized thought to writing and the spread of writing systems. Written words represent decontextualized thought, decontextualized, that is, from the context of live conversations in which questions may be asked and responses given. With the advent of the Gutenberg printing press, the decontextualized thought-world of writing spread, and so did formal education. As a result, modernity emerged historically in Western culture after the emergence of the Gutenberg printing press.
Because the trend of raging against modernity had been well established by the time Walter Ong published his major study of the emergence of modernity in the 1950s, how come he did not join in with other Catholics at the time in raging against modernity? In all honesty, I do not know why he did not. It never occurred to me to ask him why he did not. But he did not.
The rage of the Catholic popes and Charlene Spretnak against modernity is best understood, I would suggest, as rooted in abandonment feelings such as the abandonment feelings that Susan Anderson ably discusses in her fine book THE JOURNEY FROM ABANDONMENT TO HEALING (2000). If we follow Susan Anderson's advice, then the only effective way to deal with rage due to abandonment feelings is for us to work our way through the rage we feel by allowing ourselves to feel its full force and experience its full force and express its full force by crying out in non-violent ways, as Charlene Spretnak does in her new book.
However, for the sake of discussion, let us consider how we might feel when our rage due to abandonment feelings has lifted and we are ready to move on. In his fine book THE DUALITY OF HUMAN EXISTENCE: AN ESSAY ON PSYCHOLOGY AND RELIGION (1966), David Bakan defines and explains two central tendencies in our human nature: (1) agency and (2) communion. In her big survey textbook THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENDER, 3rd ed. (2009), Vicki S. Helgeson works with David Bakan's two terms rather skillfully. However, both David Bakan and Vicki Helgeson point out that we can overdo either of these tendencies. We can overdo agency, and we can overdo communion. In short, we should cultivate a certain measure of each, rather than overdo one or the other.
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