Contest, Sexuality and Consciousness: Present Issues and the Life of a Culture

In the final installment of this series, we look at how the difference between men and women affect four areas of society and walk through Ong's understanding of the life cycle of a culture.

81. Contest, Sexuality and Consciousness: Present Issues and the Life of a Culture

This is the fourth and final of an ongoing series which take an extensive look at Walter Ong’s “Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality and Consciousness.” You can find parts one, two and three here:

What Is a Man? Introducing the Idea of "Contest"

Boys Will Be Boys: Facing the Contest

Educating Boys: or Why Latin Disappeared

In the final chapters of Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality and Consciousness, Walter Ong looks at a number of 20th century cultural phenomena and briefly explores how changes in the relationship between men and women have affected things like sports, politics, business and the Christian life and worship before closing out with some larger meta issues, outlining a theory of cultural development based on the kinds of changes we see in society as it moves from infancy to maturity. This is the question he asks:

“As women move more and more into areas previously more or less reserved to men and marked by a distinctly male ceremonial combative style, what is the effect on this style and/or women’s and men’s behaviour?”

For example, success today often correlates more with one’s “work mastery,” that is, being good at your job, than it is with your competitiveness. And, if you are good at something, does being competitive bring you only a marginal benefit in terms of career success? Does competitiveness undermine your career today? As we saw, the intellectual world used to be marked by highly agonistic competition and a strong hierarchy. But today, is that same combativeness an advantage, or is it seen as dangerous and threatening to others, and thus to your career? The whole nature of political correctness seems antithetical to that older, oral, male and more adversative form of education. As we have seen, one of the main differences between men and women is in terms of their competitiveness. Men are simply way more competitive than women.

Spectator Sports

It is common place these days to bang on the whole “sports ball” thing, that is, competitive sports as a media event. But Ong notes that all societies engage in some form of athletic competition and in all of them there are spectators. What was new in the 20th century was that this became a phenomenon of mass culture through mass media. What is interesting about this, says Ong, is that as other male only contexts have disappeared from our society due to the forced presence of women in almost all areas of life, bringing about the feminization of almost everything, that watching mass sports is an almost exclusively male activity. As is talking about sports. It is a unique feature of male discourse in the technological age. Very few women talk about sports in the ways that men do.

As agonism has disappeared in other areas of life, competition on the sports field has increased. In some ways, sports has become the focal point of male combativeness. The language of sports is almost all violent in nature. The role of the woman is to be a cheerleader for the men. You might counter that women play sports. Women compete. True, but no one cares. They really don’t. Because sports is, at its heart, a form of combat and a ritualized contest, the very essence of the various sporting activities is masculine. And it is not just men who don’t care about women’s sports. Women don’t watch them either.

That said,

“The male television sports watcher…is a product of a highly feminized culture: no earlier oral-agonistic age could have produced this abstract half-disinvolvement with the agonia of the arena. You need a writing-and-print world to bring about the effect and a computer world to mature it.”

In this regard, while sports watching is a distinctly male phenomenon, it has taken the form it currently has because of the gradual feminization of our culture beginning primarily with the introduction of the printing press.

Politics

Trying to document all of the changes in the realm of politics due to the feminization of our culture would be challenging. At its heart, “the political” is an agonistic activity centering around “us” and “them,” “friend” and “enemy,” and so forth. Globally, as the technological society has overtaken us, with its shift to the feminine, there is perhaps one change that has stood out among all of the others. In an older, oral world, that is in a world dominated by male conflict and contest, the political is clearly about good guys and bad guys, the friend and the enemy. It is about loyalty and care towards one’s friends, and it is about establishing boundaries against and protection from one’s enemies. The whole of society is oriented around this distinction between friend and enemy.

But in a chirographic society, one in which the written word dominates, whether that is by hand, print or electronic, the changes which the written word brings to human consciousness also then affect the realm of the political. The written word allows knowledge to be separated from memory, facilitating greater abstraction, and allows for less agonistic forms of learning. In the older, more oral, context, learning was done through contest, through verbal sparing. You learned and fixed knowledge into memory by debating it. As the world became shaped by the typographic use of language, it also “objectified” politics. The notion of friend and enemy slipped to the background while an emphasis on solving problems began to move to the foreground. With the new changes in thinking brought about by the printed word, “issues” come to dominate the public discourse. Various problems are identified, abstracted, discussed, and then the question of how to solve these social issues begins to move to the forefront. Issues based politics is a feature of the gradual feminization of politics facilitated by the printing press.

Along these lines, there was a shift in discourse from that of the oral debate and the use of verbal sparing, to that of written speeches facilitated by tools like the teleprompter. One of the things that makes a figure like Donald Trump threatening to many in this print centric world, is that he speaks off the cuff. His speeches are mostly extemporaneous. This harkens back to the older agonistic world of verbal sparing. In this sense, the fact that he speaks without a manuscript, irrespective of any content, makes his presentation seem more adversarial and thus more threatening to those who have embraced the mindset of the administrative state.

In this transition from a hierarchical society dominated by the masculine, to a society which is organized around the idea of “the state,” with its emphasis on sound administration, that is on the feminine, there is also a change in the very nature of accountability. In the older, oral, masculine, hierarchical forms of governance, accountability meant holding specific people accountable. If something is going wrong, you punish people and change the people who are in charge. In the newer forms of governance, based on writing and print, and more feminine in character, people are no longer held to account. Instead, the system is the problem. We must hold the system to account. Accountability in this environment means that we work to continually improve the systems through better knowledge and better policy related controls. The older is direct, oral, combative, male. The newer is indirect, written, irenic, feminine.

Writing and print have a democratizing effect on society. When wisdom is oral and possessed by a few, held in memory, wisdom is a source of power. It is this way with all skills and knowledge held in memory, either individually or in some guild like community. This personal, closely held knowledge, is one of the primary sources of value and political power. When knowledge can be committed to writing, can be abstracted from its organic context where it is learned first hand and held in memory to then be submitted to the process of abstraction and rationalization, this democratizes all knowledge, stripping people of the value and power of their learned skills. It shifts power to those who are good at manipulating language and symbols. Wisdom ceases to be the property of persons and becomes the possession of all. While wisdom may now be in the possession of all, taken up into the system of knowledge, it at the same time strips society of anyone who might be a true “authority.” This process was useful in transferring power and wealth from the old aristocracy to the merchant classes, to the breaking of the power of guilds and other trades, but the cost was that society now no longer has true authorities to whom it can turn in a crisis. If all knowledge is democratized then there can be no authorities. This is also why the idea of the person of authority is seen as a “scary” figure in this female coded environment, because they harken back to the older, masculine world with its focus on the combative, on struggle and contest.

Business

The world of business and commerce is a world that is often in conflict with itself. The ideas of combat and competition are central elements to the laissez faire understanding of the market. At the same time, business is very much an “objective” activity that must be focused on the numbers and data. Businessmen are essentially all book keepers. They must be writing focused. They need written records and accounts. And even though business can be competitive and combative at times, successful businessmen are not usually gifted jousters or debaters.

We generally think of writing as something associated with the priestly class, that it developed to serve religious purposes, but this is not the case. It is true that when you look at cultural development that the warrior class upon which a civilization is established and built generally eschews writing, but the first group to make use of writing and embrace it was not the priests, but the merchants. Historically, writing develops in order to record business transactions and contracts. The earliest religious material is almost always oral: stories, songs and poetry that live in memory long before they are committed to paper. The earliest examples of writing we have found are Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets, and they were used primarily for keeping track of inventory, trades and contracts.

Schooling originally existed to service the needs of the nobility and the priestly class. Thus it was primarily focused on rhetoric, logic, dialectics, philosophy, and theology. As society’s power matrix shifted towards the merchant class and the use of the printed word, the core of education adapted to the new requirements of merchants, shifting towards reading, writing and arithmetic. In a classical education, things like arithmetic were thought of more as useful for practical purposes like those of the trades, the merchants and even for housewives in charge of the household. This older way of thinking actually comes through in our language for doing of business. The word “economy” has its roots in the Greek: οἰκονόμος (oikonomos — “household”) and οἰκονομία (oikonomia — “management, administration, the job of administration”). In this sense, from the point of view of language development, the activity of merchants and the activities that make up what we today would call “the economy” were seen as connected to the household, to the world of women. When someone like Bill Clinton says, “It’s about the economy, stupid,” he is not speaking to men, but to women. And while men generally like to point to the competitive side of business and that the technical side of business seems suited to male patterns of thinking and thus bemoan women in the workplace, women really only ended up in the business world after “the household” was destroyed and its activities were moved into the factories during industrialization. Women in the workforce is largely a process of them reclaiming an activity that was historically theirs, the “management” of the private world of the household, but now doing it outside the home in the public realm of the business world.

The rise of commerce, says Ong, meant the ascendency of “household” issues. As the merchant mindset overtook society, the more masculine feudal system, with its emphasis on honor and combat, declined. When commercial centres and towns began to grow and emerge onto the scene in Europe, in order to operate freely they had to receive special exemptions from participation in the old feudal world. For a period, the Hansiatic League ruled as extra feudal commercial territories in a parallel relationship to the older hierarchical order. In London, for example, the king had to ask special permission from the mayor to enter the central part of “the City.” As the church was deeply tied into feudalism, it struggled to adapt to the changing reality of the new commercial interests— for example, it largely rejected the charging of interest as a sin, that of usury. The Reformation, in part, occurred as a means to adapt the Christian faith to the new commercial world and in the process effectively subordinated it to money and commercial interests as well as the new political forms that were also taking shape. The Reformation helped democratize the faith. Modern parliamentary democracy emerged in these new commercial centres, aided by the changing religious landscape. And as the Christian faith adapted itself to this new commercial environment, it also began the process of the feminization of Christianity.

The rise of the commercial class had a profound effect on society overall, changing everything. It undermined feudalism with its reliance on personal loyalties and fighting prowess. Both the physical and verbal combat associated with the hereditary nobility were part of a whole system of masculine ritual combat. This whole world could not survive in a commercial context. Even when managed by men, the emerging commercial reality was far less “macho.” There was a move away from direct competition to more indirect, objective and less personal means of evaluation and competition. You may feel like you are in a battle over your grades in school or how much money you have but you are not actually in direct combat with another. You are not being pitted directly against each other but are measured by “objective” criteria. These indirect means of evaluation are more feminine in nature. Now you have evidentiary trials as opposed to trial by combat. You try to evaluate things based on the facts of the case. Its all outside of the person, objective and does not involve direct confrontation.

And while manufacturing and machines seem masculine on the surface, and men like to design, make them, operated them and fix them, the actual process of manufacturing has its origins in the household, in the world of women and the world of the family business. In this environment the man of the house was the front facing public side of the family concern’s affairs, while the woman managed things the behind the scenes, that is the “economy” of the household business. Industrialization directly, and often intentionally, undermined the guild structure with its power centred in tight knit kin groups. Most guilds operated like a large extended family or clan. They were tribal in nature. When an apprentice was taken in from outside, they were often married into the family, ensuring loyalty and building the fabric of inter-guild relationships.

Much of the substance of commerce has always been in direct contact with the world of women. Many of the goods produced are “household” products, things for the home. This long standing connection with the household gives commerce and the business world a decidedly feminine cast. Because women tend to bias themselves towards the establishing, maintaining and deepening of relationship bonds, the business world, attached as it is to the household, tends to take on the non-agonistic character of female interactions. And while wars might be fought for commercial reasons, even in wartime, business requires an umbrella of peace to operate at its best. The business world is essentially feminine in nature and is a feminizing influence in our culture. Ong says it this way:

“Even when its managerial population is all but entirely male, as it was until recent years, the business world, it appears, in significant ways, works more for the feminization of culture than the masculinization of culture.”

Christian Life and Worship

Ong dwells on a few major thoughts of importance to us here in reference to this tension between the masculine and the feminine with regards to the church. He says this:

“The Christian church is not a body of doctrine or an institution but a community with a shared memory. ‘Do this in remembrance of me,’ were Jesus’ words at the institution of the Eucharist.”

And:

“The church came into being through witnessing — the sharing of memories — of those who had known Jesus of Nazareth.”

What Ong is trying to say here in these quotes is that there is a strong oral component to the Christian faith. It is something that is supposed to live in memory and in community. As we have seen, this oral nature also tends to bias the masculine in society over the feminine. It is only with the coming of the printing press and the rise of the merchant class, that society takes on a more feminine disposition.

“Memory lives. It lives in real time. It constantly reinterprets itself, relates to the present. Otherwise it is no more.”

The point of the liturgy, the sacraments and the preaching of the Word is to keep the memory of the gospel alive within the community.

Additionally, Christianity lives within a constant adversarial relationship. There is an implicit friend/enemy distinction between God and the evil one. Satan is named the “Adversary.” The inherent dynamic of spiritual realities in a fallen world is agonistic and predominantly male coded. The spirituality of the Christian faith is an embrace of the understanding that the community of believers is on a constant war footing. “Spiritual warfare” is a distinctly male spirituality.

With this in mind, we should properly understand Christ’s sacrifice on the cross and the sacrifice of the martyr as agonistic events. They are combat situations. This is where a proper understanding of “meekness” is vital. Meekness is violence that is restrained or not acted upon. Meekness is the knowledge that one could be violent, but chooses in self-possession, not to be violent. The struggle of the martyr is to remain fully and completely upright and obedient to Christ in the face of attack. It is a struggle, a contest, one that is won through loving sacrifice, by restraining oneself from a violent response. It is not an act of weakness, but rather a declaration that one refuses in this moment, for the sake of Christian witness, to not be pulled into the violence of the sinful world, but instead to reveal the way of sacrifice. It is an act that at once seems nonsensical to a world steeped in sin and violence, while at the same time saying that this world has no power over the martyr, that the martyr reveals a different reality, bearing witness to the sacrifice of Christ for mankind. Martyrdom is in this sense a fully masculine act, but one transformed by Christ.

Contest and Interiorization: a Theory of Cultural Development

While men always to some degree remain men and thus have agonistic drives, we must understand that agonistic behaviours are more than merely instinctual, as they are in animals. We are shaped by our culture. Also, combat is something for which we train. When we engage in contests as men, if we wish to do well, we must practice. This means that the male potential for violence and his need for contest is something shaped by culture and its development. Ong argues that cultures, over time, as they grow from infancy to maturity make a shift during that maturing process from one of grappling with externalities, to one that is generally more inward and self-reflective. This mirrors the process of personal development. For example, notes Ong, in the maturation of God’s people, it begins with externalities, a focus on ritual and law, and matures with a more interior faith in Jesus. He emphasizes that it does matter what goes into a man’s mouth, but rather what is important is what comes out of his mouth from within. Also, the physical act of adultery is interiorized with the declaration that a man need only look at a woman lustfully to have committed adultery with her in his heart. This inward turn also results in a moderation and reduction of agonistic behaviours, but not necessarily in feminization. There is also the move from early orality which can only live in collective memory, to becoming a people of the book, to the silent reading of the scriptures which one can do on one’s own.

Ong proceeds to lay out a general process of the life of a culture. He argues that all cultures begin in the soil, attached to the earth. From this initial beginning, the society moves into its heroic period, breaking from a simple attachment to the land. This is the culture’s oral phase where all the great mythic stories are formed and the great epic poems are composed. This is the most culturally productive time. Because it is centred on the masculine and specifically the warrior, it is also the most violent period in the life of a culture. As the culture develops and solidifies its existence there is the growth of towns and with towns comes writing and with writing there is a softening of the culture. Writing makes the culture more interior and interiority is more of a feminine quality. There is a move from great deeds, to a question of how one feels. This is the time in which women begin to participate in storytelling, often with the development of their own literature. In the west, we can see this with the rise of the troubadours as well as the proliferation of courtly literature. As writing takes greater hold of a society, especially with the addition of print, it takes a new turn and there is the introduction of the novel, a fully interior form of communication. The novel is particularly suited to the feminine disposition. In the west you get works by someone like Jane Austen, or in the east like the Tales of Genji by Lady Morasaki Shikibu.

We can see the effects of this inward turn in the west in its scholarship. With Hegel, history becomes Geistesgeshichte, the history of ideas; and with Freud the emergence of psychoanalysis. Introspection itself becomes a form of philosophy with phenomenology. The early histories are “male” because they are composed of heroic deeds. The emphasis is on action and combat and the speeches they make, and not on the examination of inward psychological subtleties. As knowledge develops, the oral and combative nature of learning becomes less necessary with the introduction of writing. Taking one’s thoughts and placing them onto paper allows for the development of more complex ideas as you can fix them in place and return to them again and again. As the culture unfolds, this greater sophistication, combined with a better technical control of the environment that writing helps facilitate, there is a reduced need across society to struggle against the environment for survival. This reduces the need for struggle and combat overall. The fact of civilization makes it inherently less combative overall. Writing and then print allow for increasing complexity and nuance in ideas, both theoretical and practical. This shift towards problem and solution that writing facilitates, also reduces the need to cast everything in terms of friend and enemy. The move is from a simple binary of friend and enemy to the examination of the “deep structures” of society. This inward turn in the west was marked by the Romantic Movement with its emphasis on the mysterious, the obscure, the hidden, the interior of man’s depths. With this we have psychoanalysis and its focus on the shadow side of man, his subconscious. Even the physical sciences are transformed. They too are interiorized, focusing on the observing subject as an integral part of any observation. Society as a whole is now obsessed with personal relations, personal fulfillment, personal interactions, all within a civilizational context which is now deeply depersonalizing and alienating.

All of these observations about men and women, the masculine and the feminine and their role and place in culture, suggests that the price we pay for civilization and all of its benefits, the wealth, the technology, all of it, can only be realized by means of a gradual feminization of the society. In large part this is due to the changes that the written word effect in people who make great use of it. Perhaps there is some ideal sweet spot that allows certain benefits of writing to be accrued, while maintaining a healthy balance between the sexes, allowing for a healthy masculinity and femininity in a culture. At minimum, such a society would have to be pre-industrial in its organization and composition, with something like the “household” — part family, part business concern — forming the basic unit of social organization. For those that see “feminization” as real problem in our society — I am one of them — there is no way for us to “fix” the problem while keeping what we have come to know as “modernity.” The feminization of our society was a necessary price for making it what it is today. The science, the technology, the economic prosperity, the political forms, all of it demanded a gradual move to the feminine. And because our society has pushed so many of these foundational activities to their very limits, we are at the same time pushing the feminization of our culture to its very limits. And while the resulting problems continue to accumulate, we have to recognize that there is no way that we could have realized the benefits without embracing these changes as a society. The tradeoff for the hyper-success of the west has been its feminization.