THOMAS J. FARRELL
COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA DULUTH
Getting Our Bearings about Western Culture and Islamist Terrorism Today:
Walter J. Ong versus Sayyid Qutb as Guide
In retaliation for the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, George W. Bush has declared a comprehensive war on terrorism, aimed primarily at Islamist terrorists. In addition, he declared a “preventive war” against Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and he has announced that he wants to plant a modern form of democracy in Iraq, a Muslim country that has never had a modern form of democracy. There is no credible evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved directly in the attacks on the United States, so the war against him is not a defensive war, but a “preventive war.” But “preventive war” is a form of state-sponsored terrorism. How many innocent Iraqi civilians have been killed as so-called collateral damage in this “preventive war”? In his speech on September 11, 2006, President Bush has indicated that we Americans are today engaged in an enormous ideological battle with Islamist terrorists, a battle in which our (idealized) modern Western values must struggle with and presumably defeat their (idealized) medieval Islamic values and their entrenched ways of life.
Never before have so many Americans been summoned to battle against such a small number of Islamist terrorists, some of whom are media savvy. Or are we Americans being summoned to battle to win over the hearts and minds of the billion or so Muslims throughout the world? If so, what are we supposed to be winning them over to – modern democracy, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, free assembly? And just how are we Americans supposed to work on winning over more than a billion Muslims to all these things – by setting up an example of a modern democracy in Iraq? Why don’t we Americans use our influence to help establish a Palestinian state?
Of course President Bush has probably never studied media-ecological thought. But when we situate this enormous ideological battle of values in the context of media-ecological thought, we notice that this is a battle of values associated with modern print culture versus values formulated in a medieval residual form of primary oral culture. However, does this media-ecological framework help us understand exactly what, if anything, is at stake in this enormous ideological battle?
The ideological views of the Islamist terrorists have been amply studied in Gilles Kepel’s Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (2002), Michael Scheuer’s Through Our Enemies’ Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America (2002; 2nd. ed. 2006), Scheuer’s Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror (2004; 2nd ed. 2005), Mary Habeck’s Knowing the Enemy: Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror (2006), Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006), and numerous other books and articles. In large measure, the Islamist terrorists are influenced by Sayyid Qutb’s critique of 1950s American culture. His critique is based in part on sexual puritanism of a certain sort and on a genuine religious sensibility reacting to American materialism. But American culture has been subjected to numerous critiques from a great variety of viewpoints. We even have a genre of critiques known as American jeremiads. So add Qutb’s critique to the list. But his critique of American culture is only part of his work that has captured the imagination of Islamist terrorists. He captured their imaginations with his extended multi-volume meditations on the riches of the Islamic tradition of thought, In the Shade of the Quran. He also wrote a manifesto entitled Milestones in the hope of forming a vanguard of followers who would carry forward his vision of Islam. Qutb’s basic argument resembles the position of the Deuteronomistic historian(s): Be faithful to God, and you will prosper; be unfaithful, and you will suffer. But being faithful to God for Qutb also includes rejecting many values associated with Western modernity on the grounds of materialism. (For a recent critique of American materialism in which Qutb is not even mentioned, see Peter C. Whybrow’s American Mania: When More Is Not Enough [2005].)
In light of Qutb’s critique of materialism in favor of a more spiritual orientation toward life, it would be worthwhile to consider the features that Walter J. Ong, S.J., a religious thinker who works with a media-ecological orientation, discusses as contributing to Western modernity. Like Qutb, Ong holds out for a non-materialist sense of life and the affirmation of a transcendent divine ground of being. However, unlike Qutb, Ong is not given to setting forth a critique of apparent materialism. Instead, he calls for a renewal of personal spirituality, as does Qutb. But whereas Qutb envisions a worldwide Islamic nation, Ong does not envision a worldwide Christian anything. Ong hints that a worldwide spiritual renewal may emerge as the result of the cultural conditioning by modern communication media that accentuate sound. But the cultural conditioning is so widespread that it influences not only most Christians but also most Muslims and almost everybody else as well.
Today Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and other Islamist terrorists constitute the Islamist vanguard that Qutb envisioned. Because the Islamist terrorists have given themselves permission to kill people indiscriminately, as the United States did when it dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Islamist terrorists are dangerous, as is the United States (many Iraqis civilians have been killed as so-called collateral damage in George W. Bush’s “preventive war” in Iraq). The Islamist terrorists will have to be killed or imprisoned. They are extremists who cannot be appeased. But they are waging their terrorist campaigns to win over the hearts and minds of more than one billion Muslims in the world today, most of whom are not likely to become terrorists themselves. But the terrorists hope to replenish their ranks with more suicide bombers. In addition, the terrorists hope to inspire ordinary Muslims to support the Islamist cause of a worldwide Islamic nation. So there we have one side of this enormous ideological battle, and they are aiming their efforts primarily at their fellow Muslims in the world today.
On the other side of this enormous ideological battle, we have George W. Bush, who has, as mentioned above, initiated not only a war of Islamist terrorism but also a “preventive war” on Saddam Hussein in Iraq. But many innocent Iraqi civilians have been killed as so-called collateral damage; thus the “preventive war” in Iraq can be seen as a form of state-sponsored terrorism against Iraqi civilians. President Bush is known as a practitioner of management by objectives. His announced objective is to establish a modern democracy in Iraq, which can be seen as a form of cultural imperialism advanced by war. Even though he and his administration have made notable headway in the war of terror, his war in Iraq does not appear to be going well as I write this. Nevertheless, it is important to examine modern democracy and related values of modernity in the framework of media-ecological thought, because the war on Islamist terrorism will continue regardless of what happens in the war in Iraq.
In the context of media-ecological thought, this enormous ideological battle that George W. Bush has launched can be seen as a battle between two religious thinkers: Ong versus Qutb. Both of these thinkers offer a way to understand modernity and a way to look toward the future. If we choose Qutb’s views, we might support Osama bin Laden and his Islamist friends. But if we choose Ong’s views, we might support George W. Bush’s efforts to kill or imprison Islamist terrorists. However, we might also challenge the American people to rise to a new level of personal spiritual development and abandon the idea of “preventive war” because it is a form of state-sponsored terrorism. The American people are going to have to master their fears and muster their inner resources, rather than pursue the dangerous and expensive policy of “preventive war.”
Media-Ecological Thought
When we turn our attention to considering the world today in the context of media-ecological thought, many fascinating questions arise. Has the time come for a world government to emerge at long last, a prospect that Dante long ago envisioned? If so, should the world government be Islamist, or should it explicitly avoid being aligned with any one religious tradition – thus being basically secular is spirit? As the sole remaining superpower, the United States has recently been tempted to play the role of world policeman in Iraq, however inadequately. Perhaps this tendency to play world policeman shows the need for a world government to emerge. But can the sole remaining superpower give up its evil ways of using atomic bombs against Hiroshima and Nagasaki and of starting a “preventive war” against Iraq and threatening nuclear war against other supposed powers of evil in the world today such as Iran and North Korea? Can the Great Satan, as the Ayatollah Khomeini has dubbed the United States, give up its evil ways, so that a world government might emerge in the world in the near future, a world government in which the United States would be a subsidiary in its governance, just as state governments in the United States are subsidiary to the federal government?
Or has the time come for the president of the United States to become king of the world as it were -- on the order of a World Controller envisioned by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World or on the order of Big Brother envisioned by George Orwell in 1984 – as George W. Bush seems at times to imagine himself to be? He is very impatient with national leaders who defy him, as though he is not somebody who can be defied. Or has the time come for the American Republic to give way to the American Empire as the Roman Republic gave way to the Roman Empire? Is George W. Bush the counterpart of Julius Caesar in foreshadowing the American Empire of the near future? As is well known, Julius Caesar and Octavian sponsored games for the Romans at unprecedented levels, and the Romans enjoyed being amused by the games so much that they were willing to give up the old republican form of government in favor of the emerging empire. In Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Television (1985), Neil Postman points out how Americans are turning their backs on the tradition of rational exposition that led to the founding of this country, in favor of being amused by television and other forms of entertainment, just as the Romans were amused by all the games sponsored by Julius Caesar and Octavian and subsequent emperors. When Edward Bellamy envisioned the future of the United States in his utopian novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887, he had no serious qualms about dispensing with the American political system, provided that the economy was functioning well.
But has the time come when enough Americans are willing to give up their amusements and comfortable lifestyles so that they can take up posts such as District Commissioners and the other bureaucratic posts of the British Empire that Chinua Achebe portrays so tellingly in the background events in his novels Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease? Enough Americans are probably not ready to take up the posts abroad to staff an American Empire, so perhaps the world can relax on this score. But the world cannot relax about the designs of American presidents and their foreign policies, especially not the Islamic world, as George W. Bush’s “preventive war” in Iraq shows. Or has the time come for the American people to start paying more attention to the foreign policies of their presidents? Why was there not more quality debate in the lead up to President Bush’s “preventive war” against Saddam Hussein, a small-scale brutal dictator who could have been dealt with by a policy of containment just as the far more formidable Soviet Union had been during the Cold War? Are the American people so amused that they no longer know how to raise intelligent questions about questionable foreign adventures? Few Democrats raised serious objections to the “preventive war” theory. Few reporters raised cogent questions about the so-called intelligence used as a pretext for initiating the “preventive war.” Only a small remnant of the American voters expressed reservations about initiating the war for no good reason. The lack of large-scale debate before the war is surely one of the low points in recent American history.
Islamist terrorists got the attention of Americans and the world through the attacks of September 11, 2001. Like the Ayatollah Khomeini, Islamist terrorists regard the United States as the Great Satan. But didn’t he and those Islamist terrorists watch enough Hollywood movies about World War II to know that we Americans think we are the “good guys” in the world? Where do they get off thinking of us as the Great Satan? Or has the time come for the United States to play the role of Great Satan again as we did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and by declaring “preventive war” on Iraq and other countries in the so-called “axis of evil,” a role foreshadowed on a more limited geographical scale by Orwell’s warmongering Big Brother, who is forever at war with some other power in the world? The United States is still the only country in the world to have ever used atomic bombs -- against Hiroshima and Nagasaki; as a result, the United States rightly deserves to be considered the Great Satan in the world today, even though there are still small-scale evil dictators like Saddam Hussein in the world today. In light of past precedent, the United States today or in the near future could use nuclear bombs to level perceived threats in Iran or North Korea and thereby once again play the role of Great Satan that we played in bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Or has the time come for the United States to give up playing the role of the Great Satan and to stop initiating “preventive wars” in Iraq and elsewhere?
Is there a “logic” to media-ecological thought? In The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962), Marshall McLuhan works with the terminology of detribalization and retribalization, which clearly implies a “logic” of some sort is at work. Consider, for example, the following syllogism based on Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985). Major premise: According to Postman, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the Bill of Rights emerged in print culture and embody qualities of thought specifically fostered in print culture. Minor premise: But according to Postman, the Age of Television is eviscerating major features of thought favored in public discourse in print culture. Conclusion: The cultural framework of print culture that produced the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights is being eviscerated in public discourse in the Age of Television; therefore, it is time to move on from the Age of the Republic to something else. After all, Rome moved from a monarchy to a republic and then to an empire. Our colonial period can be seen as parallel with the Roman monarchy, because the colonies were under the English monarchy. Thus our experiment with a republic parallels the Roman Republic. Therefore, as a result of the Age of Television, it is time to proceed to something else. So why are we trying to plant democracy in Iraq when it may be time to scuttle democracy at home in favor of something else – Big Brother or brave new world? Of course Postman himself does not explicitly draw such a disturbing conclusion. Nor does McLuhan. On the contrary, Postman urges us to value certain features of print culture that he sees as praiseworthy, rather than allowing them to be superceded without a proper defense. But some of Postman’s critics think that he protests too much about the deleterious impact of the Age of Television, so his call to arms about the dangers of the Age of Television has produced no concerted counter-revolution thus far. Nor have McLuhan’s warnings about retribalization, whatever that may be.
As noted above, Ong also works with a media ecology orientation, and he does suggest something more like a “logic” in media ecological thought in The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena in Cultural and Religious History (1967), the published version of his 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University School of Divinity. In his 1958 masterwork Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason, Ong sets forth certain significant features of print culture. Then in The Presence of the Word he steps back and surveys the development of print culture in the broader context of Western culture from pre-historic times onward, with special reference to homo religiosus as studied by Mircea Eliade and others. Even though Ong does not happen to mention the expression “the disenchantment of the world” that Max Weber has made famous, we can use variations on this terminology to construct the “logic” or movement of Ong’s account of media ecology in Western culture: enchantment of the world, disenchantment of the world, re-enchantment of the world. Major premise: Primary oral culture and residual forms of primary oral culture produce the cultural conditioning characterized as the enchantment of the world – homo religiosus, whether in an animistic, polytheistic, or monotheistic traditions. Minor premise: But modern communication media that accentuate sound produce a new cultural conditioning that resembles the cultural conditioning of pre-historic, ancient, and medieval times. Conclusion: Ong only hints at a conclusion when he expresses a cautious hopefulness about a potential renewal of the religious or spiritual dimension of life. He stops well short of using Weber’s terminology to predict something like the re-enchantment of the world, just as he stops well short of using McLuhan’s terminology to predict something like retribalization. In The Gutenberg Galaxy McLuhan at times makes retribalization sound inevitable. But he never explains in detail what it will be like, so the term just sounds like something ominous, but not something good. However, by the end of The Presence of the Word Ong does manage to sound hopeful about the future, as though something good could come from this new cultural conditioning. But like McLuhan, Ong never explains in detail what the new developments might be.
As noted, Weber made famous the idea of speaking of modernity as involving the disenchantment of the world. But the disenchantment of the world presupposes an earlier enchantment of the world. Enchantment had to come first before there could have been any disenchantment. Even though the term enchantment is not widely used to characterize pre-modern people, it has been used recently in the title of a posthumously published collection of pieces by R. G. Collingwood, The Philosophy of Enchantment (2005).
In Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity (2003), Robert L. Moore makes an observation about modernity that we need to consider alongside Weber’s characterization about the disenchantment of the world: “When you become truly modern psychologically and culturally, you cannot find the center anymore” (66). By the center, he means what Mircea Eliade refers to as the axis mundi in The Myth of the Eternal Return (2nd ed. 2005), a book frequently cited by Ong. In Moore’s estimate, the practice of prayer is required for truly modern people to rediscover the axis mundi in their lives. It strikes me that one goal of making a 30-day retreat following the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order to which Ong devoted his adult life, is to discover the axis mundi in one’s life. When you cannot find the axis mundi in your life, you probably are going to be a rather disenchanted person, to play on Weber’s terminology.
But can we say anything further about this supposed earlier condition of enchantment? Is this condition one that cuts across religious traditions – for example, Judaism and Christianity and Islam and paganism? In effect, Ong claims that it does, although he does not use the terms enchantment or disenchantment or re-enchantment. His name for this cultural condition that was prior to the rise of Western modernity is oral culture.
But Judaism and Christianity and Islam are religions of the book – they have written scriptures. Ong considers those scriptures to be written transcripts of oral thought and expression. By contrast, the kind of thought that arose in ancient Greek philosophy, especially in Aristotle’s treatises on formal logic, Ong identifies as distinctively different from the preceding kinds of oral thought and expression, and so he labels the distinctively different kind of thought (roughly philosophic thought) literate thought. But distinctive literate thought is not to be confused with oral thought and expression that is written down in religious scriptures and elsewhere in ancient and medieval texts.
Even though Ong does not use the term re-enchantment, we do find him writing an essay calling on people today to develop a new “mystique” toward life in Frontiers in American Catholicism (1957: 121-25). This term seems to be reminiscent of the term “participation mystique” that has been used at times to characterize pre-modern people, so Ong here seems to be calling for the rebirth of something like the condition of homo religiosus in pre-modern times. We should consider what Ong appears to be calling for in connection with Sayyid Qutb’s critique of American materialism, as he styles it. Moreover, when Henry G. Bugbee’s The Inward Morning: A Philosophical Exploration in Journal Form was first published in 1958 (reissued in 1999), Ong wrote both a book review about it in the Modern Schoolman 37.1 (1959-1960): 67-69 and a review article about in the Kenyon Review 21.2 (1959): 297-304, which he reprinted in The Barbarian Within (1962: 233-41). The idea of trying to re-capture something of the spirit of pre-modern people has been expressed in books such as Morris Berman’s The Reenchantment of the World (1981), Thomas Moore’s The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life (1996), and David Brown’s God and Enchantment of Place: Reclaiming Human Experience (2004). The aim of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola is to find the axis mundi in life and to emerge from the experience in the condition Bernard Lonergan describes as being-in-love, which is the condition of homo religiosus, so making a 30-day retreat following the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius could be one way for post-modern people today to discover the axis mundi in their lives.
The problem with McLuhan’s term retribalization is that it sounds like a done deal, a fait accompli. All we need to do is to stay tuned and watch it happen. As a result of this apparent implication, McLuhan has at times been characterized as a media determinist (and as a technological determinist), and the implications of a supposed retribalization as a done deal contribute to this impression. In the context of media-ecological thought, the term “re-enchantment” could also seem deterministic, in the sense that it is going to happen so just stay tuned. But Ong senses that the communication media that accentuate sound are simply providing cultural conditioning. This cultural conditioning may play a determinative role yet, but it stands primarily as potency or potential that needs to be activated. So something like a re-enchantment of the world may emerge, but if it does, it will probably be not only similar to the earlier enchantment but also different from it, which is why the term re-enchantment might be misleading. Then again, perhaps nothing of the kind will emerge.
But what kinds of religious and spiritual developments have actually emerged since Ong first started writing about these matters in the 1950s and the 1960s? In recent decades we have seen a widespread renewal of Islam that has produced Islamist terrorists, some of whom are very media savvy in their efforts to reach the minds and hearts of Muslims throughout the world. In recent decades we have also seen fundamentalist Protestants devouring novels (printed books) about the liftoff to heaven in the end-times, and we have seen so-called New Age spirituality enjoy an unprecedented boom. These and other religious and spiritual phenomena can be understood as providing some supporting evidence for Ong’s sense in the 1950s and the 1960s that some kind of religious renewal might emerge from the cultural conditioning of communication media that accentuate sound. However, regardless of whatever has emerged thus far, we should not see any of these religious or spiritual trends of our times as representing the full potential of what might emerge from our new cultural conditioning.
In any event, the United States and the modern world in Western culture are the products of print culture. But the juggernaut of print culture is undergoing a sea-change from within due to secondary orality and the computer revolution, which can be understood as a visualist byproduct of secondary orality. As evidence of the sea-change that Western culture is currently undergoing, I would point to the non-violent cultural revolutions represented by the black civil-rights movement and the women’s movement of the 1960s and onward in the United States. In the title essay of The Barbarian Within (1962: 260-85), Ong calls attention to the relative easing up of age-old psychological polarities in the Western psyche, which easing up enabled these massive cultural revolutions to proceed in relatively non-violent ways (except of course for the murderous violence done to the unborn through abortion on demand). Even though these two significant cultural movements were desirable correctives, some academics in these movements have made careers out of being antiracist and antisexist in arbitrary and capricious ways. No doubt much bashing of dead white males has been self-serving and has usually involved throwing out the bath water with the baby. But most people interested in media ecology have avoided the extremes of political correctness, which is one reason for championing the study of media ecology, especially as this approach to study is exemplified in the work of Ong and of Postman.
Ong and McLuhan were pioneers in the development of media ecological thought. When the University of Chicago Press reissued in 2004 Ong’s 1958 Harvard University Press book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason, somebody wrote copy for the back cover stating that “Ong enjoys the status of honorary guru among technophiles.” He may be the only past president of the Modern Language Association of America to enjoy such status among technophiles today. But it should be noted that his technophilia grows out of his spirituality, especially his understanding of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. According to this doctrine, materiality was good enough for God to use in incarnating the divine spirit in a human body. By extension, this makes materiality, including forms of material technology, good enough for Ong. But he insists on the primacy of the human person. We should avoid thinking of ourselves or of others as machines, as the advertising people did who are mocked by McLuhan in the title of his 1951 book taken from an advertisement, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man . Because Ong was deeply rooted in the Western philosophic tradition of thought, he often characterized his media ecology account of Western culture as phenomenological and personalist. By this, he meant theistic personalist thought such as Martin Buber’s or Gabriel Marcel’s, not atheistic personalist thought such as John-Paul Sartre’s.
As noted above, Ong, like Qutb, is not a materialist. On the contrary, Ong holds out for a non-materialist philosophic position. Thus, while he holds a very positive view of materiality as such and in general of various forms of technology, he holds out for the over-riding concern for human values. As mentioned above, this concern is nicely expressed in the sub-title of his 1952 review article about McLuhan’s 1951 book The Mechanical Bride: The Folklore of Industrial Man: “The Mechanical Bride: Christen the Folklore of Industrial Man.” Clearly Ong is addressing his Roman Catholic coreligionists when he urges them to “Christen” or somehow make Christian the technological culture in which they live. By extension, other people could be urged to bring the values of their religious traditions to bear on the technological culture of our time. Of all authors writing about technology, Ong is committed to the position that human values should be strong in technological culture.
But how might individual persons live their lives so as to make their values play a strong role in their lives? Even though Ong does not explicitly address this question, he implicitly answers it in his discussion of decision making in Jesuit spirituality. The Jesuits are known for using the Latin expression Ad majorem Dei gloriam (For the greater glory of God). As Ong understands this expression, it is to serve as a touchstone and directive of a sort in the context of decision making. When one is making a decision, one should consider various possible alternative actions one could realistically take in the context in which the decision is being made. As one weighs the various possible good courses of action that one could take, one should consider the alternatives in terms of the expected glory each one might give to God. Such a way of making a decision might not lead one to decide in favor of the decision that would advance one’s economic interests. Thus such a way of making a decision requires generosity and magnanimity, greatness of spirit.
Print culture for Ong includes modern science, modern capitalism, modern democracy, the Industrial Revolution, the Romantic Movement. In Interfaces of the Word, Ong explains his relationist approach to accounting for various major social developments in Western culture:
[My] thesis . . . is sweeping, but it is not reductionist, as reviewers and commentators, so far as I know, have all generously recognized: [my] works do not maintain that the evolution from primary orality through writing and print to an electronic culture, which produces secondary orality, causes or explains everything in human culture and consciousness. Rather, [my] thesis is relationist: major developments, and very likely even all major developments, in culture and consciousness are related, often in unexpected intimacy, to the evolution of the word from primary orality to its present state. But the relationships are varied and complex, with cause and effect often difficult to distinguish. (Interfaces 9-10)
He is not discussing some kind of simple-minded efficient causality – or even what Aristotle would call instrumental efficient causality, such as the causality exemplified by turning the light switch to different positions. When I turn the light switch to different positions, the position in which I turn it is the instrumental efficient cause for the light going on or off, whereas the flow of electricity in the circuit is the efficient cause. Instead of discussing either efficient causality or instrumental efficient causality, Ong is discussing contributing social conditions, which could be styled as contributory causality, as distinct from either efficient causality or instrumental efficient causality. Because some critics have accused Ong of either media determinism or technological determinism, it is important to get clear that he is not discussing any kind of straightforward determinism that would approximate efficient causality or even instrumental efficient causality. Contributing conditions can be said to be determinative to a certain degree. We do not try to quantify the specific degree. Instead, we say that print, for example, is a necessary condition or necessary cause, not a sufficient condition or a sufficient cause, for other major social developments to emerge. But this kind of claim that Ong styles relationist is not determinism in any strict sense – neither media determinism nor technological determinism -- because he allows for the role of human freedom and creativity in determining how major social developments actually emerge. Copernicus and Galileo, for example, receive due credit for their contributions to the development of modern science.
Because the passage quoted above happens to accentuate the technologizing of the word first in writing and later in printing and more recently in secondary orality (in sound-amplified speeches and radio and television and movies in scripted uses of the sounded word and in telephone and audiotapes in unscripted technologizing of the sounded word), we should be careful to note that Ong’s relationist account of cultural developments in Western culture includes other factors as well: the history of logic, including the quantification of thought in medieval logic; the history rhetoric and its role in the unfolding of consciousness; visualist thought in Western philosophic thought; oral residue in the history of rhetoric down to the latter part of the eighteenth century; cyclic thought in primary orality and even in Plato; linear or evolutionary thought in the Judeo-Christian tradition; polemic or agonistic tendencies; religious faith, with special attention to Christianity; and other themes as well. Ong’s relationist thesis about major developments in Western culture means that Western culture is a package deal; certain factors in Western culture are significant enough that they contribute to various developments. His relationist approach to understanding developments in Western culture is not based on a simple-minded account of efficient causality, but on a sense of causality as involving a number of key factors that contribute to the development.
In various ways Ong has amplified and supported his relationist thesis in his most widely known books: Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (1958), The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (1967), Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (1971), Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (1977), Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (1981), Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982), and Hopkins, the Self, and God (1986). But Ong also works with this thesis often in his less widely known collections of essays: Frontiers in American Catholicism (1957), American Catholic Crossroads (1959), The Barbarian Within (1962), In the Human Grain (1967), Faith and Contexts (4 vols., 1992-1999), and An Ong Reader (2002) -- and elsewhere in other essays that have not yet been published in collections of his essays. Even though he did publish five important book-length studies that establish major dimensions of his thought, he further amplified his relationist thesis about cultural developments in Western culture in scores of essays, which should be taken into account in any holistic approach to his thought. As the essays in An Ong Reader show, he devoted far more time and attention to writing about oral-aural tendencies than to further delineating visualist tendencies that he highlights in Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue. Even so, it is extremely important to note that visualist tendencies of thought have been immeasurably strengthened through the development of computers, the Internet, and email.
In addition, Ong studied the history of the formal study of logic from Aristotle down to Peter Ramus (1515-1572) in Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason. Ong identifies the important medieval educational program in logic that he says contributed strongly to the emergence of modern science. But by saying this, he is not detracting any importance from the work of individuals such as Copernicus and Galileo. Here is the relevant passage that I read aloud as the students read along in the handout I have given them:
In this historical perspective, medieval scholastic logic appears as a kind of pre-mathematics, a subtle and unwitting preparation for the large-scale operations in quantitative modes of thinking that will characterize the modern world. In assessing the meaning of scholasticism, one must keep in mind an important and astounding fact: In the whole history of the human mind, mathematics and mathematical physics come into their own, in a way that has changed the face of the earth and promises or threatens to change it even more, at only one place and time, that is, in Western Europe immediately after the scholastic experience. Elsewhere, no matter how advanced the culture on other scores, and even along mathematical lines, as in the case of the Babylonian, nothing like a real mathematical transformation of thinking takes place – not among the ancient Egyptians or Assyrians or Greeks or Romans, not among the peoples of India nor the Chinese nor the Japanese, not among the Aztecs or Mayas, not in Islam despite promising beginnings there, any more than among the Tartars or the Avars or the Turks. These people can all now share the same common scientific knowledge, but the scientific tradition itself that they share is not a merging of various parallel discoveries made by their various civilizations. It represents a new state of mind. However great contributions other civilizations may hereafter make to the tradition, our scientific world traces its origins back always to seventeenth- and sixteenth-century Europe, to the place where for some three centuries and more the arts course taught in universities and para-university schools had pounded into the heads of youth a study program consisting almost exclusively of a highly quantified logic and companion physics, both taught on a scale and with an enthusiasm never approximated or even dreamt of in the ancient academies. (Barbarian 72)
For all practical purposes, the new state of mind that Ong refers to here is the state of mind that helped produce what Postman refers to in Technopoly (1992) as technocracy – that is, technocracy is the shorthand term for the technocratic mind (or mentality). This new state of mind also helped produce what has also been referred to as modernity or the modern world. Following Ong’s relationist approach to cultural developments, we can formulate the following claims: no alphabetic phonetic writing in ancient Greece, no formal study of logic; no formal study of logic in ancient times, no quantification of logic in medieval culture; no printing press, no widespread dissemination of Ramus’s printed books about logic; no printing press, no modern science; no printing press, no modern capitalism; no printing press, no modern democracy; no printing press, no Industrial Revolution; no printing press, no Romantic Movement. In other words, Ong’s relationist approach requires us to take into account certain factors that were contributing factors in certain major social developments; had the factors involving the technologizing of the word not been in the mix of factors in play in Western culture, then the major social developments would not have emerged historically as they did.
As is well known, medieval Islamic culture inherited and advanced the Greek tradition of learning in mathematics, astronomy, and medicine. However, even though Islamic culture had the lead in science for centuries, modern science emerged in Western culture. In Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, Ong has detailed the quantification of thought in medieval logic (53-91, 184, 262, 263) that he considers significant in establishing the new state of mind represented by modern science.
In order to understand the new state of mind that emerged in modernity, we should note that the history of imagistic thinking associated with pre-modern orality is traced from ancient through medieval times in Eric A. Havelock’s Preface to Plato (1963), Havelock’s The Greek Concept of Justice: From Its Shadow in Homer to Its Substance in Plato (1978), Havelock’s The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences (1982), Hans Belting’s Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art (1994), Yates’s The Art of Memory (1966), mentioned above, Mary Carruthers’ The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (1990), Caruthers’ The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200 (1998), Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski’s edited collection The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures (2002), Marielle Hageman and Marco Mostert’s edited collection Reading Images and Texts: Medieval Images and Texts as Forms of Communication (2005), and Lina Bolzoni’s The Gallery of Memory: Literary and Iconographic Models in the Age of the Printing Press (2001). For studies of Protestant iconoclasm, see John Phillips’ The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England, 1535-1660 (1973) and Joseph Leo Koerner’s The Reformation of the Image (2004).
To be sure, there had been iconoclastic movements before the Gutenberg printing press or the Protestant Reformation. Even so, we do need to consider the complex interaction of historical events associated with the iconoclastic tendency in the Protestant Reformation. In Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology (1971: 104-12), Ong praises Frances B. Yates for characterizing Ramism as a kind of inner iconoclasm, which of course was accompanied by outer iconoclasm in certain Protestant and Puritan circles where Ramism was very popular. Peter Ramus and his followers published their fare share of printed books (in his Ramus and Talon Inventory [1958], Ong lists and briefly describes more than 750 volumes by Ramus and his followers), in which they were fond of using diagrams that we would call flow charts, not images usually. Of course in terms of content Ramus and his followers were favoring dialectical thought, which is, shall we say, a step removed in the direction of abstraction from imagistic thought. For their part, the Roman Catholics remained committed to the Aristotelian tradition of dialectical thought. During the heyday of Ramism we find Protestants spreading Ramist thought through their schools. About the same time, the Jesuits were going through a heyday of their own founding schools throughout Europe. In short, formal education spread like wildfire after the Gutenberg printing press made printed books readily available to people who could read them. But in the case of the Jesuits, the emphasis in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola on imagistic thinking appears to have helped prevent them from iconoclastic tendencies that were popular in some circles at the time.
In the spirit of further contextualizing modernity, I would also call attention to the development of what David Riesman in The Lonely Crowd (1950) styles inner-directedness, a quality that Ong associates with the historical development of literacy and literate modes of thought and especially with print culture. Recent studies show how inner-directedness emerged and developed in Western culture down to and beyond the time of St. Ignatius: Bernard Williams’s Shame and Necessity (1993), Philip Cary’s Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist (2000), Ineke van ‘t Spijker’s Fictions of the Inner Life: Religious Literature and Formation of the Self in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (2004), Denis Renevey’s Language, Self and Love: Hermeneutics in the Writings of Richard Rolle and the Commentaries on the Song of Songs (2001), Anthony Low’s Aspects of the Subjectivity: Society and Individuality from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare and Milton (2003), Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare’s: The Invention of the Human (1998), and Erich Kahler’s The Inward Turn of Narrative (1973). The attentive reader may have noticed that Cary’s title seems to answer Bloom’s hyperbolic title about Shakespeare. But Cary does not appear to have done this self-consciously. However, taken together, these various works clearly show that Bloom’s title is hyperbolic. Shakespeare comes after a long tradition of cultivating inner-directedness.
When we combine the point about imagistic thinking with the point about cultivating inner-directedness, we note a certainty irony in this dialectic of history: The mode of thought associated with primary orality (preliterate orality) is used to help cultivate a quality that Ong associates with literacy and the interiorization of literate modes of thought. But we should also note that the trend toward developing inner-directedness comes with a price. As inner-directedness develops, ego consciousness is further removed from the archetypal level of the psyche.
In order to understand the spirit of jihad in Islamic tradition, we should further take into account its Western counterpart, the long history of the figure of Satan in the Christian imagination as traced in Elaine Pagels’ The Origin of Satan (1995), Jeffrey Burton Russell’s The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity (1977), Russell’s Satan: The Early Christian Tradition (1981), Russell’s Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages (1984), Russell’s Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World (1986), and Neil Forsyth’s The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth (1987). For further studies of the psychodynamics of adversativeness in Western culture, see Eric Neumann’s The Origins and History of Consciousness (1954), John Huizinga’s Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1950), G. E. R. Lloyd’s Polarity and Analogy: Two Types of Argumentation in Early Greek Thought (1966), and Ong’s Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (1981).
One of Ong’s great achievements is his circumstantial discussion of polemic or agonistic behavior. In The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (1967), the published version of his 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University, Ong uses the term polemic (from the Greek polemos, struggle, war), but in Fighting for Life: Contesting, Sexuality, and Consciousness (1981), the published version of his 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University, Ong favors the term agonistic (from the Greek agon, contest, struggle).
In Plato’s Republic, the interlocutors discuss three parts of the human spirit (psyche, soul): logos, thumos (or thymos), and eros. When our bodies become corpses, logos, thumos, and eros exit the body. Lonergan discusses logos and eros in enormous detail. But as far as I know, he does not explicitly thematize thumos in his writings.
Ong does not explicitly thematize the term thumos, nor does he happen to advert to the discussion of thumos in Plato and Aristotle. However, I would say that what Ong styles at times polemic and at other times as agonistic behavior involves the outward manifestation of thumos, a Greek term that is usually rendered in English as spiritedness (as in fighting spirit). Thumos is probably a dynamism that is separate from the dynamism of desire. In Plato and Aristotle, the virtue associated with thumos is courage. They conceive of courage as the mean between the extremes of brashness and cowardliness. In the gendered language of ancient Greece, the same word was used to refer to courage and manliness: andreia. There may have been courageous women in ancient Greece. But the Greek word andreia clearly indicated that there was an expectation for men to be courageous. If a man was not courageous, then he was not man enough to be self-respecting or respected by others. There is something to be said for having such an expectation of men -- and of women as well.
We might pause here and reflect on the Jesuit calling that Ong himself responded to. What exactly is the Jesuit calling that it requires such an elaborate training? In The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus (here translated by George E. Ganss, S.J., 1970), Ignatius sets forth the Jesuit calling:
Whoever desires to serve as a soldier of God beneath the banner of the cross in our Society, which we desire to be designated by the name of Jesus, and to serve the Lord alone and the Church, his spouse, under the Roman pontiff, the vicar of Christ on earth, should, after a solemn vow of perpetual chastity, poverty, and obedience, keep what follows in mind. He is a member of a Society founded chiefly for this purpose: to strive especially for the defense and propagation of the faith and for the progress of souls in Christian life and doctrine, by means of public preaching, lectures, and any other ministration whatsoever of the word of God, and further by means of the Spiritual Exercises, the education of children and unlettered persons in Christianity, and the spiritual consolation of Christ’s faithful through hearing confessions and administering the other sacraments. (Constitutions 3: pages 66-67)
As the passage continues, Ignatius enumerates further activities Jesuits might undertake. When Ignatius refers to soldiers in this passage, he was not thinking of the United States Marines. He was probably thinking of soldiers like Chaucer’s Knight and Shakespeare’s Othello. But Ignatius was not setting out to found an order similar to the Knights Templar. By the time he wrote this passage, he had made the famous gesture of giving up his sword. No doubt he thinks of Jesuits as soldiers who also give up their swords. In today’s parlance we might say that he wants Jesuits to be soldiers of non-violence. But at the same time also soldiers in some real sense of the term. This involves mustering one’s inner resources and courage, which is what the tradition of jihad in Islam helps Muslims to do as well.
Breaking the Spell of Mass Media
As the passage about Ong’s thesis that was quoted above shows, Ong considers television and other relative recent communication media that accentuate sound – telephone, phonograph and other forms of audiotapes and videotapes and the like, sound amplification systems, radio – to be significant factors in the ongoing technologizing of the word. Shouldn’t we now expect to see some major new societal developments emerge as a result? Shouldn’t these new factors help contribute to new social developments in Western culture, just as first writing and later printing contributed to the emergence of moderns science, modern capitalism, modern democracy, the Industrial Revolution, and the Romantic Movement in Western culture? Ong prudently makes no specific predictions. But he intimates that what he styles secondary oral culture establishes the social conditioning out of which new social developments might emerge.
Unlike Huxley who envisions no one in Brave New World beating the system, not even John the Savage, Ong does envision people beating the system if they can overcome their social conditioning by the media and learn how to read and respond to quality literature – and thereby cultivate their own unique personhood.
[I]t may well be that until we can make students break through the press-movie-radio-television barrier in their own lives, they cannot react intelligently to language at all. Until they can replace the undiscriminating hypnotic response to these media in which they have been trained from infancy with a discriminating response, they remain impervious to any communication or thinking other than the crudest sort. My own experience has been that persons undiscriminating in their reaction to these mass media are undiscriminating in their thinking and speaking, and that a person unaware of the way in which advertisements and Hollywood movies work is incapable of responding to a good contemporary poem or to any first-rate literature. (Barbarian 162)
For this reason, McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride is still an excellent book for college students to study carefully, provided that they understand the points of his critiques rather than getting distracted by the specific examples. To be sure, John the Savage reads and responds deeply to quality literature. But in the end even he does not beat the social system around him – the system beats him. To beat the system, he would have to strengthen his loving resistance to it, as Postman puts it (Technopoly 181-99). Loving resistance coupled with deep understanding of literature and Western philosophy (which Postman mentions) may help certain individuals beat the system. I like to use Postman’s expression “loving resistance fighter” to declare that the problem with Ted Kaczynski and Osama bin Laden and Islamist terrorists is that their violence makes them patently unloving. However, even though Postman holds out the prospect of a few good persons beating the system, the educational program that he outlines is not likely to be implemented. Education in the United States is extremely decentralized, and most faculty are highly individualistic persons, not the kind of persons who might agree to implement Postman’s big ideas. But apart from the unrealistic note in Postman’s prescriptions, one could wonder how much his prescriptions might benefit people like Bernard Marx and Winston Smith.
But is there any hope for a social movement that might help a larger number of people read and understand quality literature and philosophic thought well enough to beat the system with one another’s help? For all practical purposes, this was the goal of the religious order to which Ong devoted his adult life, the Society of Jesus (known informally as the Jesuit order). For all practical purposes, this was also the goal of the Benedictine order, the Dominican order, the Franciscan order, and other religious orders in the Roman Catholic Church. These different religious orders exemplify how people can ban together to help one another develop one’s personal spirituality. The religious vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience can be understood as a way for certain individual persons to cultivate the warrior energies within their psyches, as Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette have described warrior energies in King, Warrior, Magician, Lover -- and thereby serve as God’s warriors. As Charlene Spretnik has suggested in The Resurgence of the Real: Body, Nature, and Place in a Hypermodern World, the antidote to materialistic modernity is the cultivation of spirituality. Of course the cultivation of personal spirituality does not mean that everybody needs to become a member of a religious order and voluntarily take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. But the cultivation of one’s personal spirituality probably should involve voluntary self-discipline such as fasting and almsgiving, and the cultivation of one’s personal spirituality is probably best undertaken with the help of a spiritual director. Jesuits, for example, learn as part of their training how to take turns in providing one another spiritual direction, so many Jesuits and certain members of other religious orders are experienced spiritual directors who are available to serve as spiritual directors upon request.
No doubt Islamists in the world today want to cultivate their personal spirituality against materialistic modernity. But Islamist terrorists today have abandoned Postman’s position of being loving resistance fighters and have taken an extremely unloving approach to resistance to modernity. Even so, Islamists who are not terrorists and many other Muslims are free to cultivate their personal spirituality. They have a wonderful anti-materialistic mantra to guide them in the pursuit of their personal spirituality: there is no god but God. As I understand this mantra, it is remarkably akin in spirit to the ancient and medieval Christian understanding of humility.
Now, to make a long story short, Ong’s account of the communication media that accentuate sound in our world today can be related to Moore’s account of the energy resources available in the archetypal level of the human psyche. For more than a half century, we in Western culture have been experiencing the cultural conditioning of communication media that accentuate sound. By Ong’s reckoning, the cultural conditioning in sound conditions our psyches today, so that our psyches today are closer to the cultural conditioning of the psyches of the people studied by Victor Turner. This means that we in Western culture today are now in a better position to have liminoid and liminal experiences under the right circumstances. In 1969, Ong addressed a national convention of liturgists meeting in Minneapolis and called their attention to his work. In my estimate liturgists would top the list of people who should be paying attention to Ong’s work and Moore’s work as well, followed by clergy, people who participate in liturgical services, spiritual directors (spiritual direction is a ritual process), people who participate in spiritual direction, psychotherapists (Moore contends that psychotherapy is a ritual process), and people who participate in psychotherapy. At the very least, more people should join Moore and the St. Louis Jesuits and Jean Houston and others in experimenting with a variety of ritual processes in group rituals. The more people who have liminoid experiences, the better. As for the poor, they, like everybody else, would welcome liminoid experiences in their lives, because liminoid experiences are animating and strengthening. For the same reason, more people today should undertake making a 30-day retreat following the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius than just Jesuits, because 30-day retreats following the Spiritual Exercises can be enormously animating and strengthening. Indeed, they can enable people to find the axis mundi in their lives, an experience that will give them their bearings for life, a sense of direction and purpose. Let me now explain these claims.
Coda: Robert L. Moore’s Thought
Robert L. Moore received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago School of Divinity. His first book was a Freudian study of John Wesley, but then he went through training to receive an Adlerian diplomate and then further training to receive a Jungian diplomate. Moore styles himself a neo-Jungian to differentiate himself from James Hillman who styles himself a post-Jungian. In addition to being a Jungian psychotherapist in Chicago, Moore is Distinguished Service Professor of Psychology, Psychoanalysis, and Spirituality at Chicago Theological Seminary – and a big fan of Paul Tillich’s work. With Douglas Gillette, Moore co-authored five books about the four archetypes of masculine maturity in the early 1990s.
But Moore is probably most widely known to this day for getting men in the 1990s to engage in drumming. I do not plan to take up drumming, nor do I plan to recommend it here. But we should step back from this particular example and consider the larger context of what Moore was trying to do. He was trying to create a ritual context through the use of drumming, because he is quite interested in Victor Turner’s The Ritual Process (1969). In Western culture today, we are not as skilled in constructing effective ritual process as were the people Turner studied, so Moore got men drumming in the spirit of experimenting with ritual process. The St. Louis Jesuits also experimented in improving ritual process by composing songs for liturgical services. No doubt we should continue to experiment with ritual process.
In The Archetype of Initiation and The Magician and the Analyst, Moore calls attention to the distinction that Turner works with in The Ritual Process, the distinction between liminoid experience and liminal experience. Both of these kinds of experience can strengthen a person, but the liminal experience, when it occurs, can be dramatically transformative. An example of liminal experience would be the conversion experience of Ignatius, specifically his experience as he recuperated from the wound he received in battle in Pamplona. The psychiatrist W. W. Meissner, S.J., discusses Ignatius’s conversion experience at great length in Ignatius Loyola: The Psychology of a Saint (1992: 29-65). An example of liminoid experience would be the experience I myself had making a 30-day retreat, which was undoubtedly a strengthening experience for me. I imagine that many other people have had liminoid experiences. But I have not had the kind of transformative liminal experience that Ignatius had, nor have I met anyone who claims to have had such an experience. But such an experience is in the realm of the possible, as the example of Ignatius shows.
As surprising as it may sound to some people, Moore sees person-to-person psychotherapy as a ritual process. He develops this view in The Magician and the Analyst(2002). But if person-to-person psychotherapy is a ritual process, then making a 30-day directed retreat following the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius is also a ritual process, and so is an eight-day directed retreat. In Moore’s terminology, directed retreats provide ritual process (e.g., living at a retreat house), ritual humiliation (maintaining silence during the retreat, except for the daily conferences with the retreat director), and ritual containment (the daily conferences with the retreat director). But so what? Why does Moore attach such significance to these aspects of what he refers to as ritual process?
This brings us to Moore’s rather elaborate discussion of the archetypal level of the human psyche. Drawing on works by a variety of scholars, Moore amplifies C. G. Jung’s account of the archetypal level of the psyche. Moore builds his account on basic insights provided by Jung, which is why Moore styles himself and his work neo-Jungian. Moore claims that there are archetypes (structures) of maturity that are sources of energy at the archetypal level of the human psyche. In the series of five books that he co-authored with Gillette, Moore refers to four archetypes: (1) the King/Queen, (2) the Warrior (Plato’s and Aristotle’s thumos, with the virtue of courage), (3) the Magician (Plato and Aristotle’s logos, with the virtue of prudence), and (4) the Lover (Plato and Aristotle’s eros, with the virtue of temperance). The cardinal virtue of personal justice as conceived of by Plato and Aristotle can be understood as the virtue associated with the King/Queen quadrant.
But does courage arise from a separate dynamism within our psyches that is separate from the dynamism of desire, which is the subject of Connor’s book? In Plato’s Phaedrus, we find the famous imagery of two horses (eros and thumos) pulling a chariot (the body) guided by the charioteer (logos). This imagery indicates that thumos is a dynamism alongside the dynamism of eros. Of course it is entirely possible that we moderns do not feel the drive of thumos as strongly in our psyches as Plato and Aristotle did. However, if we take a hint from Ong about agonistic or contesting tendencies, then we would have to note that contesting behavior in the form athletic contests and professional sports receives an enormous amount of attention today, especially among boys and men. Contesting behavior is built into our law courts (prosecution versus defense), formal pro-and-con debate of motions in legislative assemblies and elsewhere, political contests known as elections, and an enormous range of economic contests. Contesting behavior abounds. But thumos is not thematized by modern philosophers such as Lonergan as it was by Plato and Aristotle.
However, Lonergan draws on Aristotle to speak of the desire to know. This sounds like a combination of eros and logos, which makes it sound like logos is a third dynamism, a third horse as it were. As a matter of fact, Moore suggests not just a third dynamism but also a fourth. He suggests that we think in terms of four quadrants, each of which is a dynamism, a source of energy, in the archetypal level of the human psyche. Of course the term “quadrants” is just a figure of speech for referring to something in the psyche, just as the horses and charioteer and chariot are in Plato.
The elaborate thrust of the Spiritual Exercises is to get the retreatant to reflect carefully on his or her life, and the cultivation of this kind of introspective reflection is related to Moore’s Magician quadrant. In the grand story of Christian tradition, Jesus is imagined as returning in the end-time as the triumphant Warrior/King leading the forces of good against the forces of evil associated with Satan. The imagery of Christ the King is central in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, so we have two of Moore’s four quadrants represented. The Meditation on Two Standards cultivates our Warrior energies, as do the meditations on Three Classes of Persons and on Three Ways of Being Humble in different ways. The meditation known as the Principle and Foundation and the culminating exercise called the Contemplation to Attain Divine Love represent Moore’s Lover quadrant. Retreatants are supposed to use a systematic technique known as Application of the Senses; this is Jung’s sensory function being put to use – and Moore’s Lover quadrant and Lonergan’s empirical level of consciousness and Havelock’s imagistic thinking.
Moore urges people to cultivate ways of drawing on archetypal energies. One way is by using what Jung refers to as active imagination. His various remarks about active imagination have been gathered together by Joan Chodorow in the handy volume Jung on Active Imagination (1997). As Moore understands, Ignatian meditation requires the use of what Jung refers to as active imagination, and Ignatian directed retreats provide ritual process, ritual humiliation, and ritual containment. So instead of getting men to engage in drumming, Moore should be telling men to go to Jesuit retreat houses and make 30-day directed retreats following the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius under experienced retreat directors.