Now, taking various hints from Ong's work, I have discussed our contemporary secondary oral culture in our Western cultural history in my essay "Secondary Orality and Consciousness Today" (1991).
Now, Fareed Zakaria and Ezra Klein have nothing to say about the first two of the four periods that I discuss in my fourfold media ecology account of our Western cultural history and of the history of the Roman Catholic Church in my 12,700-word OEN article "Philip Shenon on the Last Seven Popes."
Now, I tend to see Russia even today and China today as residual forms of what Ong refers to as primary oral cultures - that is, residually oral in the way in which ancient and medieval manuscript culture in our Western cultural history were.
I have interpreted our Western cultural history in terms of Ong's work in my article "The West Versus the Rest: Getting Our Cultural Bearings from Walter J. Ong" in Explorations in Media Ecology (2008).
Now, primary oral cultures and residual forms of primary oral culture tend to produce what Harvard sociologist David Riesman described as tradition-directed personality types in his classic 1950 book The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. Yes, ancient and medieval Christians were tradition-directed personality types - and to this day, Roman Catholics honor their sense of Roman Catholic tradition. The inner-directed personality type that Riesman clearly favors emerged in our Western cultural history in ancient and medieval times and became widespread during the print culture that emerged after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in Europe in the mid-1450s.
Ong (1957) briefly discussed Riesman's three personality types (pp. vii and 39). Ong may have even used Riesman's term inner-directed occasionally in some of his 400 or so distinct publications. In any event, what Riesman referred to as the inner-directed personality type involved what Ong (1982) came to refer to as the inward turn of consciousness (pp. 178-179).
For an historical study of the rise of the inner-directed personality type in the Renaissance in our Western cultural history, see Harvard's Stephen Greenblatt's book Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1980).
Now, for all practical purposes, despite their frequent references to Putin and Russia and to China, Fareed Zakarian and Ezra Klein discuss "Trump's Foreign Policy" primarily in terms of the print culture that emerged in our Western cultural history after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in Europe in the mid-1450s.
In my 12,700-word OEN article about Philip Shenon's bleak new 2025 book Jesus Wept, I discuss the print culture that emerged in our Western cultural history after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in Europe in the mid-1450s. In it, I call attention to the following five pioneering studies of print culture:
(1) Richard D. Altick's The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900 (1957);
(2) Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin's The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800, translated by David Gerard; edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and David Wootton (1976; orig. French ed. 1958);
(3) Walter J. Ong's Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (1958);
(4) Jurgen Habermas' The Structural Transformation of the Public Square: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (1989; orig. German ed., 1962);
(5) Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962; for specific page references to Ong's publications about Ramus and Ramism, see the "Bibliographic Index" [pp. 286-287]).
I refer to these five book as pioneering studies of print culture because there are far too many scholarly studies of print culture, in various languages, in our Western cultural history for anyone to compile a classified bibliography of them comparable in scope to Marco Mostert classified bibliography of ancient and medieval studies of manuscript culture, in various languages, in our Western cultural history in his 650-page 2012 book A Bibliography of Works on Medieval Communication.
Now, in Fareed Zakaria's 2024 book Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present, mentioned above, all of the revolutions in Western culture took place after print culture emerged in our Western cultural history after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in Europe in the mid-1450s.
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