The Orality Theory of Everything

theatlantic.com · Feb 22, 2026 · Collected from GDELT

Full Article

The world is full of theories of everything. The smartphone theory of everything argues that our personal devices are responsible for the rise of political polarization, anxiety, depression, and conspiracy theories—not to mention the decline of attention spans, intelligence, happiness, and general comity. The housing theory of everything pins inequality, climate change, obesity, and declining fertility on the West’s inability to build enough homes. If you treat theories of everything as literal theories of everything, you will be disappointed to find that they all have holes. I prefer to think of them as exercises in thinking through the ways that single phenomena can have large and unpredictable second-order effects.My new favorite theory of everything is the orality theory of everything. This theory emerges from the work of mid-20th-century media theorists, especially Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan. They argued 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 write alone, read alone, and 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. But that’s not all, Ong and his ilk said. 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.The most enthusiastic modern proponent of the orality theory of everything that I know of is Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal, the co-host of the Odd Lots podcast. We discussed orality, literacy, and the implications for politics, storytelling, expertise, social relations, and much more. The following transcript has been edited for clarity, brevity, and the goal of making both speakers sound a bit smarter.Derek Thompson: The return of orality: Why do you think it explains everything?Joe Weisenthal: I don’t think it explains everything. I think it only explains 99 percent of everything.I believe that human communication is becoming more oral. And by that I don’t just mean that people are talking more with their mouths, although I do think that is the case. It’s more that communication in general, whether in the spoken form or in the digital form, has the characteristics of conversation. And it truly harkens back to a time before, really, the written word, or certainly before mass literacy.In 2016, during the presidential election, I started reading the work of Walter Ong. He was a Jesuit priest. He studied with Marshall McLuhan. He was at Saint Louis University and wrote this really incredible book called Orality and Literacy. The gist is that humans [in oral cultures] fundamentally think differently when they’re in this world that you can’t write anything down, that you can’t look anything up. For most of human history, there was no way to look up anything at all. There was no reference material and so forth. And as such, people had to optimize their communication for the conditions of that time.Through a lot of study of Homer and other ancient epics, people realized that there were certain patterns of communication. People spoke with rhythm and rhyme and musicality, because it helps people memorize things. Certain phrases just get repeated over and over again. Repetition, communication, and information were optimized for memorability, in packets, and what we would call “going viral.” When I started reading this book, I was like, Look, this has a lot of explanatory power. These things that characterize the Homeric times—the way society prioritized and packaged information—greatly resemble what we see today. My big thesis is that as communication becomes more of this back-and-forthness, it’s changing the way that we communicate and the way we think.Thompson: To drill down on why the shift to literacy was so important for the way we think, for the way we transmit knowledge, for the way we build institutions, I want to quote two great scholars here. The first is Joshua Meyrowitz, an emeritus professor of communication at the University of New Hampshire. He writes in No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior:The break from total reliance on oral communication allows people to become more introspective, rational, and individualistic. Abstract thought develops. From the circular world of sound with its round huts and round villages, people move, over time, toward linear, cause and effect thinking, grid-like cities, and a one thing at a time and one thing after another world that mimics the linear lines of writing and type.The second is from another great scholar named Joe Weisenthal:Many of the things that modern institutions are built on—enlightenment thinking, formal logic, reason, meritocracy, examining the evidence—are downstream from the ability to contemplate the written word at a distance.Why don’t you expand on either quote?Weisenthal: People can probably feel this. When you’re in a conversation, online or offline, what are you doing? You’re often trying to impress someone. You might be trying to one-up someone. Maybe if there’s a few people there, you’re trying to put someone down to look cool for the other person. These are all things that occur that don’t occur when you’re in solitude. A solo interaction with language can only be done really with the written word. Even setting aside the logical arguments for the connection between the alphabet and left-to-right thinking and linear thinking, most people, I think, could intuitively understand that interactive environments foster different priorities.Adam Kirsch: Reading is a viceWhen you’re writing a letter, or certainly, let’s say, you’re writing a book as you have, you don’t necessarily have the reader in mind at that exact moment. In fact, you have the luxury of writing and not having to think about what the reader is going to be doing at this moment. These are all luxuries that occur in the context of literacy—the written word—that are separate from a conversation. And so the written word creates all kinds of new opportunities to think through these things, to take time, to not respond right away.Thompson: Thinking used to be something that had to be done socially. It was impossible to learn The Odyssey on your own. It was transmitted to you from a person. You would rehearse it with someone else. The mode of information transfer was necessarily social. Books are written alone, and books are typically read alone. And so this age of literacy gave rise to this privilege of solitude and interiority that I think is really, really important.Walter Ong, our mutual hero, has a great quote that I want to throw to you and then get your reaction to, because it goes right to this point. He said: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.I’m very interested in a phenomenon that I call the antisocial century, the idea that for a variety of reasons, we are spending much more time alone. And that is having a bunch of second- and third-order effects. And it really is interesting to me, as I was going deeper into this project, to think that it’s the age of literacy that in many ways allowed us to be alone as we learned, and to prize a certain kind of interiority.Weisenthal: Marshall McLuhan had this observation: The alphabet is the most detribalizing technology that’s ever existed. It speaks to this idea that prior to the written word, all knowledge was, per se, communal. It had to be in a group. If you have multiple texts in front of you, then you trust the one that feels most logical. But you don’t have that luxury when all knowledge is communal. Being part of the crowd has to be part of learning.The ear and the eye are very different organs. You can close your eyes, which you can’t do with your ears. You can get perspective from your eye and establish perspective in a way you can’t do with your ears. So it’s like you go into a room and you can stand back at the corner so you can make sure that you can see everything going on in the room. The ear is very different. We’re at the center of everything constantly. You can’t close it. The ear continues to work while we’re sleeping. There’s an evolutionary purpose for the fact that we can still hear when we’re sleeping, because if there’s an intruder or a wild animal or something, it wakes us up and we can run.So the ear, McLuhan said, is inherently a source of terror. It feels very digital. Even though we do look at the internet, there is this sense in which we can never remove ourselves from it. Even if we’re reading the internet, it almost feels more like we’re hearing it. There’s an immersiveness in contemporary digital discourse that I think is much more like hearing than it is about seeing. So I think there’s all kinds of different ways that we are sort of returning to this realm.Thompson: We had the age of orality, which was the age of the ear. Then we had the high-water mark of literacy, which is the high-water mark of the age of the eye. And now we’re in this messy third stage where it’s like there’s some human facial organ that’s an eye and an ear mashed together, because we have TV and radio and social media and TikTok. And what’s interesting about these technologies is that they are