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Born to a devout Roman Catholic family in Kansas City in 1912, Ong spent his early youth working for newspapers and printers before joining the Society of Jesus in 1935. In 1938, while pursuing a master's degree in English at St. Louis University, Ong met Marshall McLuhan, a young professor from Canada who had converted to Catholicism the previous year. Meeting McLuhan was perhaps the single most important event in Ong's intellectual life.
McLuhan would later become famous as a media guru—widely celebrated and reviled in the 1960s as a prophet of the death of books and the rise of television. Yet this popular image does a great disservice to McLuhan, a complex thinker who fruitfully linked the study of technology with the humanist concerns of literary criticism and broad spiritual questions.
In his early years as a teacher, long before his rise to fame, McLuhan was supremely gifted as a mentor. He excited the imagination of bright young students like Ong by confidently linking together disparate phenomena, ranging from modernist art to neo-Thomist theology, into a single worldview. Around himself in these years McLuhan gathered a circle of fledgling scholars, largely but not exclusively Roman Catholics, who were eager to join in his quest to make sense of the modern techno-communication landscape (what we now, thanks in part to McLuhan, call "the media").
Aside from Ong, McLuhan's circle included Hugh Kenner, who would go on to become the most sure-footed explicator of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and literary modernism generally, and—from a slightly younger generation—Neil Postman, later to gain fame as a penetrating cultural critic. As it happened, Ong, Kenner, and Postman all died last year, marking the end of the first generation of McLuhan-influenced studies. In some ways, McLuhan's students outdid their master. The critic Guy Davenport once described McLuhan as a "half-made genius … one of those strange figures whose brilliance can be articulated by others though not by themselves." Davenport has a strong point, since the best evidence of McLuhan's intellectual merit can be found in books by Ong and Kenner, both superbly clear writers who made fruitful use of their mentor's ideas.
Looking back to his time as a student at St. Louis University in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Ong recalled that one of the innovations McLuhan practiced as a teacher was his willingness to bring to the study of popular culture "the sophistication once reserved for the study of high culture. … The techniques used by anthropologists in addressing so-called primitive peoples were being used to study the societies in which the anthropologists had grown up." Ong went on to argue that McLuhan's willingness to see culture as a whole derived from his Catholic faith: "He took for granted that everything in creation hangs together through all levels and that probing all connections is worthwhile." Ong followed McLuhan's lead and in the late 1940s wrote one of the earliest academic studies of comic books.
Ong's earliest essays on popular culture were harshly critical, as were similar essays in the same period by McLuhan and Kenner. In 1941, Ong claimed that Mickey Mouse ("Mr. Disney's West-Coast rodent") was an example of "a secularism which has eaten the marrow out of our national culture by isolating religious and moral consideration from everything except the most private departments of each individual's life. And our being so taken with Mickey's vacuous existence is a tacit acknowledgement of our own weakness." In 1945, Ong argued that Superman and other superheroes appealed to fascistic power fantasies—an argument McLuhan would echo in his first book, The Mechanical Bride (1951).
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