Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) November 7, 2023: For my 600th OEN article, I am writing to call your attention to my three articles and six reviews volume 3, number 2 of the online journal New Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication, edited by Robert K. Logan (born in 1939), professor emeritus in physics at the University of Toronto and the distinguished author of the book The Alphabet Effect: A Media Ecology Understanding of the Making of Western Civilization, 2nd ed. (Hampton Press, 2004; 1st ed., 1986):
The online journal New Explorations is named in honor of the short-lived print journal in the 1950s Explorations, edited by Marshall McLuhan in English and Ted Carpenter in anthropology at the University of Toronto.
The new issue of New Explorations includes three articles and six reviews (of books by [1] Robert P. Jones, [2] Joseph Henrich, [3] Jeff Jarvis, [4] Sheila J. Nayar, [5] Jonathan Eig, and [6] Richard V. Reeves) that I wrote in which I discuss the work of the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian and pioneering media ecology theorist Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) of Saint Louis University. I hope that one or more of my articles and reviews might interest you.
Now, young Walter Ong entered the Jesuit order in September 1935, the year in which he turned twenty-three at the end of November 1935 - and the end of November 2023 will mark his 111th anniversary of his birth. As part of his lengthy Jesuit formation, young Walter Ong did graduate studies in philosophy and in English at Saint Louis University. At that time, the courses in philosophy for young Jesuits at Saint Louis University were conducted in Latin. As an undergraduate at Rockhurst College (now Rockhurst University), the Jesuit institution of higher education in his hometown of Kansas City, Missouri, Ong majored in Latin.
At the time when young Ong was doing graduate studies in philosophy and in English at Saint Louis University in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the young Canadian recent convert to Catholicism Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980; Ph.D. in English, Cambridge University, 1943) was teaching English at Saint Louis University (1937-1944), while he worked on his Cambridge University doctoral dissertation on the history of the verbal arts of grammar, rhetoric, and logic (known collectively as the trivium) in Western culture from antiquity down to the English Renaissance writer Thomas Nashe (1567-1601) - a contemporary of Shakespeare's.
McLuhan's 1943 Cambridge University doctoral dissertation was published posthumously, unrevised but with an editorial apparatus, as the 2006 book The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time, edited by W. Terrence Gordon (Gingko Press).
In any event, as World War II (1939-1945) raged on, young Walter Ong completed his lengthy Jesuit formation and was ordained a Jesuit priest. Then, after World War II had concluded in 1945, Father Ong proceeded to doctoral studies in English at Harvard University. There, under the direction of Harvard's Americanist Perry Miller (1905-1963), Father Ong undertook a massive study of the French Renaissance logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572) - whose work in logic had emerged as significant in Perry Miller's massively researched 1939 book The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Harvard University Press; for specific page references to Ramus, see the "Index" [p. 528]) - which young Marshall McLuhan had called to the attention of young Walter Ong.
Ong's 1958 book Ramus and Talon Inventory (Harvard University Press) carries the dedication "For / Herbert Marshall McLuhan / who started all this" - acknowledging that young Marshall McLuhan had started young Walter Ong's interest in Ramus and the history of logic and rhetoric.
Ong's 1958 book Ramus and Talon Inventory is a briefly annotated listing of the more than 750 volumes (most in Latin) by Ramus, his allies, and his critics that Ong tracked down in more than 100 libraries in the British Isles and Continental Europe - with the financial assistance of two Guggenheim Fellowships.
Ong was based in a Jesuit residence in Paris from November 17, 1950, to November 16, 1953. During this time, he experienced the breakthrough insight about the aural-to-visual shift in cognitive processing in our Western cultural history that he devoted the rest of his life to elucidating. No doubt living and working abroad enabled Ong to experience his breakthrough insight and thereby stand apart from and evaluate our Western cultural history.
Ah, but how many other Westerners are willing to draw fruit from Ong's breakthrough insight? No doubt the distance that Ong received from living abroad contributed to his openness to receiving and processing his breakthrough insight. In any event, Ong required a measure of distance from his own Western cultural conditioning to stand apart from and evaluate the aural-to-visual shift in cognitive processing in our Western cultural history. To draw fruit from Ong's breakthrough insight, would-be prospective beneficiaries of Ong's breakthrough insight also need to be willing and able to distance themselves from their own Western cultural conditioning and thereby stand apart from and evaluate the aural-to-visual shift in cognitive processing in our Western cultural history.
Now, it is a safe bet that Trump and his MAGA supports are not prepared to draw fruit from Ong's breakthrough insight. In short, they do not have the measure of distance from our Western cultural conditioning that is required in order to stand apart from and evaluate the aural-to-visual shift in our Western cultural history.
Now, as it turned out, Ong's Harvard University doctoral dissertation benefitted immeasurably from the scholarly studies of the history of logic in Western culture that had been published after McLuhan had completed his 1943 Cambridge University doctoral dissertation. For example, Ong discusses the quantification of thought in late medieval logic in his Chapter IV: "The Distant Background: Scholasticism and the Quantification of Thought" in his massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse [in Ancient and Medieval Western Logic and Rhetoric] to the Art of Reason [in Ramist Logic and Rhetoric - and Subsequently in the Age of Reason] (Harvard University Press, pp. 53-91; for specific page references to the aural-to-visual shift in cognitive processing in our Western cultural history, see the "Index" [p. 396]), In that chapter, Ong draws extensively on scholarly studies of the history of logic that had been published after McLuhan had completed his 1943 Cambridge University doctoral dissertation.
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