Carl Jung, perhaps the most notable psychologist of the 20th century and an unmatched interpreter of the unconscious mind, warned us that today’s extreme rationalism is guiding us toward disaster.
“Our unconscious personality still exists and occasionally erupts in an uncontrolled fashion. Thus we are capable of relapsing into the most shocking barbarism, and the more successful we become in science and technology, the more diabolical are the uses to which we put our inventions and discoveries.”
We can see this trend today with the rise of MAGA, which dismisses expertise in favor of half-baked theories spread on social media. It has peaked during the second Trump administration, with its harsh and bloody deportation policies, topped off just last week by Trump’s unprovoked and destructive war in the Middle East.
Liberals are also bemoaning the extreme rationality of the modern age: voices like Wendell Berry, who longs to return to older, traditional ways of life, and Paul Kingsnorth, who wrote a current bestseller, raging against the machine of modernity.
Jung arrived at his conclusion by studying primitive cultures. Not to be outdone, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong and Joshua Meyrowitz, an emeritus professor of communication at UNH, have arrived at a similar conclusion through the study of mass media. This whole topic is examined in an insightful essay by Derek Thompson in The Atlantic.
These media theorists have shown how different communication methods that have evolved throughout history — from oral transmission to writing, print and now electronic media — have caused fundamental shifts in human consciousness and culture.
They argue that the invention of the alphabet and the rise of literacy were among the most important events in human history. These developments shifted communications from an age of orality — in which all information was spoken and all learning was social — to an age of literacy, in which writing could fix words in place, allowing people to develop ever more complicated ideas that would have been impossible to memorize.
The age of orality was an age of social storytelling and flexible cultural memory. The age of literacy made possible a set of abstract systems of thought — calculus, physics, advanced biology, quantum mechanics — that form the basis of all modern technology. In a nutshell, literacy literally restructured our consciousness, and the demise of literate culture — the decline of reading and the rise of social media — is again transforming what it feels like to be a thinking person.
By retreating from the modern age back toward an oral society, we are moving once again toward a more participatory, situational, tribal-like society that relies on redundant thinking to remember rather than on the written word.
To the extent this is true, who is our most prominent public figure who most embodies this trend today? It’s none other than Donald J. Trump, according to Joe Weisenthal, an enthusiastic proponent of this orality theory and co-host of the “Odd Lots” podcast:
“But my theory, which I can’t prove, is that the original bards who composed Homer were probably Trump-like characters. So rather than saying Trump is a Homeric character, we could say that the people who gathered around and told these ancient stories were probably the Trump-like characters of their time. Colorful, very big characters, people who were loud, who could really get attention, who would captivate people when they talked.”
Trump sure fits the bill!
He is an over-the-top big talker who reacts to the situation at hand rather than analyzing the big picture. He also habitually repeats himself, a textbook example of redundant thinking. He perfected his shtick by serving as an apprentice for 14 years, performing on a TV show of the same name.
Media theorist Walter Ong has a great quote, illustrating this point: “Human beings in primary oral cultures … do not ‘study.’ They learn by apprenticeship — hunting with experienced hunters, for example — by discipleship, which is a kind of apprenticeship, by listening, by repeating what they hear, by mastering proverbs and ways of combining and recombining them … not by study in the strict sense.”
Sadly, to the extent we have reverted to an oral culture, Donald Trump is our king.
Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jstim.substack.com.