{"id":194246,"date":"2026-06-20T22:33:10","date_gmt":"2026-06-21T06:33:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=194246"},"modified":"2026-06-20T08:39:28","modified_gmt":"2026-06-20T16:39:28","slug":"walter-j-ong-and-the-technology-of-the-word","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=194246","title":{"rendered":"Walter J. Ong and the Technology of the Word"},"content":{"rendered":"

Walter Jackson Ong<\/a> (1912-2003) was an original Catholic intellectual of the twentieth century, and his career joined vocations that most scholars keep apart. He was a Jesuit priest, a literary historian, a philosopher of communication, and a founder of the field now called media ecology<\/a>. Across five decades he pursued a single question through many disciplines: how the technologies by which men speak, write, print, and broadcast reshape the mind that uses them. Long before networked computing and the rise of social media, Ong argued that speech, script, print, and electronic media are not neutral containers for the transmission of information. They alter how men think, remember, imagine, and understand themselves, and his work carried that claim into rhetoric, literary studies, education, theology, anthropology, communications, and intellectual history.<\/p>\n

He was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on November 30, 1912, the son of Walter Jackson Ong and Blanche Eugenia Mense Ong. He graduated from Rockhurst High School in 1929 and entered Rockhurst College<\/a>, where he studied Latin and founded a chapter of the Catholic fraternity Alpha Delta Gamma. After earning his bachelor’s degree in 1933 he spent roughly two years in printing, publishing, newspapers, and business before entering the Missouri Province of the Society of Jesus<\/a> in 1935. Those early years inside the trade left a mark on the scholar he became. Few students of communication had handled the physical apparatus of print whose cultural consequences they would later try to read, and Ong had set type and watched newspapers come off the press before he ever theorized about them.<\/p>\n

His Jesuit formation reached unusually wide. He took licentiates in philosophy and in sacred theology while completing a master’s degree in English at Saint Louis University<\/a>, and he was ordained a priest in 1946. He kept his pastoral and spiritual work close to his scholarship for the rest of his life. For decades he said Mass at St. Francis Xavier College Church in St. Louis and led others through the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola<\/i> (1491-1556). Where many academics happen also to hold a faith, in Ong the priesthood and the scholarship formed a single vocation, since his questions about language, presence, community, and the human person rose directly out of theology.<\/p>\n

At Saint Louis University he came under the influence of a young professor named Marshall McLuhan<\/a> (1911-1980). Ong’s master’s thesis examined the sprung rhythm of Gerard Manley Hopkins<\/a> (1844-1889), another Jesuit whose writing stayed with him across his career. McLuhan urged his student toward the sixteenth-century French educational reformer Peter Ramus<\/a> (1515-1572), a suggestion that redirected the course of Ong’s intellectual life. What began as a piece of historical inquiry grew into a sweeping account of the tie between communication technologies and consciousness.<\/p>\n

Ong went to Harvard for doctoral work under the intellectual historian Perry Miller<\/a> (1905-1963). He finished his dissertation on Ramus and earned his Ph.D. in English in 1955. The result stands among the more remarkable scholarly achievements of the postwar humanities. His Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue<\/i> (1958) appeared alongside the Ramus and Talon Inventory<\/i>, a vast bibliographical catalog of more than seven hundred and fifty Ramist works. Together the two volumes set Ong among the leading historians of Renaissance thought.<\/p>\n

The Ramus project reached well past intellectual history. Ong argued that Ramus helped recast Western habits of thought by fitting education to the openings that print created. Medieval learning had turned on oral disputation, dialogue, memory, and public debate. Ramus organized knowledge instead through visual diagrams, charts, classifications, and outlines, so that logic took on a spatial form and knowledge moved from the spoken exchange of ideas to the arrangement of concepts on the printed page. For Ong this shift went deeper than schooling. It changed the shape of the mind. Visualized thought encouraged the modern picture of the mind as an interior space holding mental objects, and it fed the abstract, detached, visual reasoning that men came to associate with Ren\u00e9 Descartes<\/a> (1596-1650) and Isaac Newton<\/a> (1642-1727). Print, on this account, did more than spread ideas. It helped make new ways of thinking.<\/p>\n

After the doctorate Ong returned to Saint Louis University and stayed for roughly three decades of teaching and writing. He held the William E. Haren chair in English and a professorship of humanities in psychiatry. His courses became known for crossing the lines between literature, philosophy, psychology, theology, history, and communications, and students are said to have called them “Onglish.” His own scholarship showed the same refusal to honor the borders between fields.<\/p>\n

Through the 1960s and 1970s he produced a steady run of books, among them Frontiers in American Catholicism<\/i> (1957), American Catholic Crossroads<\/i> (1959), The Barbarian Within<\/i> (1962), The Presence of the Word<\/i> (1967), In the Human Grain<\/i> (1967), Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology<\/i> (1971), Why Talk?<\/i> (1973), and Interfaces of the Word<\/i> (1977). Many began as lecture series before a broad educated public. The Terry Lectures<\/a> at Yale became The Presence of the Word<\/i>, and the Messenger Lectures<\/a> at Cornell became Fighting for Life<\/i>. Ong belonged to a generation of public intellectuals who worked out major theoretical claims in front of a room.<\/p>\n

His most widely read book came in 1982 with Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word<\/i><\/a>, which became a standard text across the humanities and social sciences. Ong argued that societies built on oral communication differ from societies shaped by writing. Oral cultures lean on memory, repetition, formula, narrative thinking, and communal participation, since knowledge cannot be stored outside the mind and so must be held there. Speech in such cultures tends to run rhythmic, redundant, and warm. Writing changes the situation. It moves memory outside the body, invites abstraction, allows analytical reflection, and builds up the sense of an inner self. Print presses these tendencies further by standardizing texts, settling knowledge into place, and rewarding systematic order. Literacy, on this reading, works not as a simple tool but as a technology that restructures consciousness.<\/p>\n

One of his lasting contributions was the line he drew between primary and secondary orality. Primary orality belongs to cultures that have never known writing. Secondary orality describes the electronic environment built by radio, television, the telephone, and later by digital media. Secondary orality recalls oral culture in its taste for immediacy, participation, conversation, and shared experience, yet it rests on literacy, on machinery, and on large institutions, and so it remains a different thing. The distinction anticipated the world of social media by decades. Ong saw the approach of an electronic life that would revive forms of collective participation resembling oral culture while staying technologically mediated, and the point sits near the center of present arguments about online communication.<\/p>\n

Readers often pair him with McLuhan, but the two worked from different premises. McLuhan held that the medium is the message and treated media as extensions of the human senses. Ong fixed his attention on the technologizing of the word and on the ways communication practice reshapes consciousness. The men stayed close, and McLuhan leaned on Ong’s early research for The Gutenberg Galaxy<\/i><\/a> (1962), yet their paths parted as Ong reached for a more historically grounded and psychologically careful account of media change. He also kept clear of a crude technological determinism. Communication technologies carried great weight in his account, but they did not stamp out cultural results on their own. They worked through social institutions, religious traditions, schools, and human psychology, and the outcome often surprised.<\/p>\n

Another side of his thought surfaced in Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness<\/i> (1981), where he traced the place of conflict in human culture. Oral societies, he argued, often build social life around contests, verbal combat, ritual insult, heroic story, and the public display of skill, and this agonistic<\/a> habit reflects deep biological and anthropological ground, since men fix identity through difference, competition, and struggle. Literacy and print, he suggested, slowly tamed many of those public contests. Conflict moved from spoken confrontation toward silent reading, private reflection, and written argument, so that a change in communication technology altered not only how men traded information but how they met conflict, status, and identity.<\/p>\n

Beneath the whole project lay theology. As a Jesuit, Ong took communication to belong to the structure of reality. The Judeo-Christian tradition opens with divine speech, for God creates through His spoken word, and Christianity rests on the Incarnation<\/a>, the belief that the divine Word became flesh in Jesus Christ. Communication, in this light, was no side activity of human life. It was woven into existence. The theological frame shaped his reading of media history. He declined to treat the movement from speech to writing to print to electronic media as a plain story of progress or of decline, and he read it instead as part of the long growth of human self-awareness and community. Each technology brought losses with its gains, yet across the whole he saw a fuller realization of man’s capacity for relationship and shared understanding. The view helps explain his guarded hope for secondary orality. Where many critics read electronic media as engines of fragmentation, Ong thought they might feed new and wider forms of human community, and though he never turned utopian, he held that technologically mediated communication might draw men into larger and more inclusive bonds.<\/p>\n

His reach extended past his books. He served on President Lyndon Johnson’s<\/a> (1908-1973) White House Task Force on Education from 1966 to 1967. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences<\/a> in 1971. He led the Milton Society of America as its president and the Modern Language Association<\/a> as its president in 1978. The French government named him a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Palmes Acad\u00e9miques<\/a> in 1963 for his Renaissance scholarship, and Saint Louis University gave him the Sword of Ignatius Loyola in 1993.<\/p>\n

He stayed at work into old age. His last major article, “Digitization Ancient and Modern” (1998), set the invention of writing beside the arrival of computing and read both within the long history of communication. The essay later took the Media Ecology Association’s<\/a> Walter Benjamin Award. By his death in St. Louis on August 12, 2003, Ong had published more than four hundred and fifty pieces, among them roughly sixteen books, hundreds of articles, and more than a hundred reviews. His work has been translated into many languages and still moves through scholarship in several fields, and the Walter J. Ong Center for Language, Media, and Culture at Saint Louis University carries his name.<\/p>\n

Histories of the field now place Ong among the founders of media ecology and among the central theorists of communication in the modern age. The labels catch only part of him. He was a scholar of consciousness. By following the lines among speech, writing, print, electronic media, culture, and religion, he tried to say how men come to be the kind of creatures they are, and few writers have taken up that question with his depth, range, or historical imagination.<\/p>\n

‘A Big Misunderstanding’<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

In Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (1981), Ong described the agon at the base of oral culture: contest, verbal combat, ritual insult, the public display of skill, identity fixed through competition and struggle. A Jesuit named the hierarchical, coalitional primate in 1981, with care. He saw the animal.
\nOng’s arc says that literacy and print tamed the contest, that conflict moved out of the shouting match and into silent reading and written argument, and that the long history of communication trends toward fuller self-awareness and a wider, more inclusive human community. Pinsof reads the same sequence and reaches the opposite end. The contest did not soften. It changed venue and weapon. Written argument, the citation, the endowed chair, the learned society, the prize from a foreign government are the new ground for the old fight. The presidency of the Modern Language Association is a trophy. The Palmes Acad\u00e9miques is a trophy. What Ong narrated as domestication, Pinsof narrates as the same primate fighting with quieter tools. The spear becomes the footnote, and the footnote draws blood at less risk to the man who throws it. Ong supplied a redemption story on top of a competition he had already described with accuracy. He got the diagnosis and then talked himself out of it.
\nThe optimism about secondary orality runs the same way. Ong hoped that electronic communication might draw men into larger and more inclusive bonds, a wider consciousness. Pinsof would answer that the attention economy is zero-sum competition for eyes, and that men take up electronic media because it serves status and coalition, not communion. The hope of a wider bond is the sweet stated goal laid over the actual one. And the hope flatters its author by the logic Pinsof flags. If communication carries men toward self-realization and toward God, then the scholar of communication, the priest of the Word, studies the very substance of salvation. That is a central seat for a man to assign the work he gave his life to. The misunderstanding myth here wears a theological dress: not “if only men understood” but “if only men communicated more fully,” with the student of communication standing at the door.
\nSo Pinsof keeps Ong’s description and cuts Ong’s teleology. The agon is the engine; the communion is the mission statement.<\/p>\n

The Great Delusion<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities<\/em><\/a>, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:<\/p>\n

\nMy view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism\u2014everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights\u2014and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. \u201cHuman rights,\u201d Samuel Moyn notes, \u201chave come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities\u2014state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.\u201d
\n[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mearsheimer’s central charge against liberalism is that it mistakes the atomistic, rights-bearing, reasoning individual for human nature, when man is social first and reasons last. Ong hands Mearsheimer a genealogy for that error. The bounded interior self, the mind as a private space holding its own objects, the detached reasoner who weighs and chooses, is not the human default. It is a deposit left by writing and print, recent and local, mistaken by liberals for the universal man. So liberalism’s error runs double. It overrates reason, as Mearsheimer says, and it takes a print-made experience of selfhood for the nature of the species. Ong, read through Mearsheimer, becomes the media historian of the liberal delusion. The two reinforce each other.
\nNow the part that dies, and it is Ong’s hope. Ong looked at secondary orality and saw the chance of a wider, more inclusive human community, a fuller communion carried on electronic wires. Mearsheimer reads that hope as the same universalism he spent the book attacking. Man is tribal at the core, embedded in the group because embeddedness is how he survives, and the group does not dissolve when the channels of contact widen. More communication arms the tribe and breeds new tribes in competition. It does not melt parochial attachment into one human family. Ong’s global consciousness belongs to the family of liberal dreams, the dream that some universalizing force, rights for the liberal and the word for the priest, overcomes the social and tribal floor of human life. On Mearsheimer’s account, the floor holds. The dream does not.
\nThe taming thesis in Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (1981) weakens along the same line. Ong saw the agon at the base of oral culture and then argued that literacy and print domesticated it, moving conflict into silent reading and written argument. Mearsheimer would keep the agon and drop the domestication. The competitive, group-bound, sacrifice-for-the-tribe man does not get tamed by a change of medium. He carries the same core under whatever technology of the word he happens to inherit. The contest goes quiet on the page. It does not leave.
\nThe frame then turns on Ong. Mearsheimer says a man has limited choice in his moral code, since so much of it arrives through inborn sentiment and through the social group before he can think for himself. Ong is a clean case. Born Catholic, formed by the Church and then the Society of Jesus across the long childhood and the longer Jesuit training, he received his moral code more than he reasoned his way to it, and his theology of communion, the Word made flesh, men bound to one another and to Him through the act of communication, is the value infusion of his group raised to a metaphysics. Mearsheimer would not call this a flaw. He would call it the human condition working as it always works. Ong’s sense that human community reaches toward God is, on this reading, the sacralized form of a fact, that the lone wolf dies and the embedded man lives, so men band together and their children learn to love the band.
\nIf Mearsheimer is right, Ong’s anthropology stands and even gains, because it tells Mearsheimer how socialization does its work and where the liberal individual was manufactured. Ong’s teleology falls, because the tribal and social core does not yield to a wider word. And Ong’s faith, which he held as the truth about reality, becomes for Mearsheimer one more instance of the rule that a man’s deepest commitments come to him from his group before he is in any position to weigh them. The two men agree that we are social to the bone. They part over whether anything, the word or the rights of man, can carry us past the bone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Walter Jackson Ong (1912-2003) was an original Catholic intellectual of the twentieth century, and his career joined vocations that most scholars keep apart. He was a Jesuit priest, a literary historian, a philosopher of communication, and a founder of the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27596],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-194246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t