Ong still: To see, things must be in front of us. And we can only see the surfaces that are turned to us. Sight is sequential, giving us one thing after another. It is “nonsimultaneous”: “The actuality around me accessible to sight, although it is also simultaneously on hand, can be caught by vision only in a succession of ‘fixes.’” Sounds can call me from behind, can call me to turn ( metanoia ). All the sounds that are around,... Read more
Ong again: He notes that some critters (ants, fish) have a social organization of sorts without sound, but argues that for animals that emit sounds, sound signals establish social relations. This is due to the reciprocal character of sound: “Sounds which I produce tend to evoke responses from outside me in a way that very few of my visible or tangible activities do.” Further, sounds are typically used within a group, forming a sonic community: “animal sound almost always is... Read more
Ong explores how the various senses handle the distinction between inside and outside. Sight “presents surfaces,” depending on reflected light. We can see inside a body only by opening it up. Sight of an interior has to be invasive, surgical; that invasion can be healthy, but it often has the effect of stripping or violation or rape. Smell, he says, deals in “presences and absences,” and hence it tied to memory and to “the attractiveness (especially sexual) or repulsiveness of... Read more
A Good Friday meditation of mine is up at the First Things web site: http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2011/04/christ-and-him-crucified Read more
Ong again: “Sound signals the present use of power, since sound must be in active production in order to exist at all . . . . Sound can induce repose, but it never reveals quiescence. It tells us that something is going on . . . . A primitive hunter can see, feel, smell, and taste an elephant when the animal is quite dead. If he hears an elephant trumpeting or merely shuffling his feet, he had better watch out.... Read more
History of the 20th century: God is dead – Nietzsche. No, God is silent – Buber. Then Pentecostalism. Read more
Walter Ong ( The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (The Terry Lectures Series) ) takes note of the much-remarked primacy of taste in eighteenth-century European culture, but Ong offers an explanation: “The sense of taste is basically a discriminatory sense as the other senses are not . . . . Taste is a yes-or-no sense, a take-it-or-don’t-take-it sense, letting us know what is good and what is bad for us in the most crucial... Read more
In a chapter on the “secularization of labor” in his The Restoration of Perfection: Labor and Technology in Medieval Culture , George Ovitt traces the disruption of “spiritual” and “manual” labor to eleventh-century monastic reforms, tied in with the Gregorian revolution, and a response to dynamic technological and economic change. “One consequence of the power struggle that grew out of the Gregorian Reform,” he writes, “Was the separation of spheres of authority within the church and the division of society... Read more
Not long after independence, the US faced “its first acute foreign threat,” writes Michael Oren in Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present . Not from Britain or France, but from North Africa. John Paul Jones complained that “The Algerians are cruising in different squads of six and eight sail, and extend themselves out as far as the western islands.” Three American ships had been captured, and hijacking and hostages were just beginning. But... Read more
Robert Kagan opens his Dangerous Nation: America’s Foreign Policy from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (Vintage) by observing the contrast between the worries of the world and the self-perception of Americans: “Americans have cherished an image of themselves as by nature inward-looking and aloof, only sporadically and spasmodically venturing forth into the world, usually in response to external attack or perceived threats. This self-image survives, despite four hundred years of steady expansion and an ever-deepening... Read more
Leithart
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