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The Coming Classics RevolutionPart II: Synthesis
COLIN WELLS
On December 4, 1935, the Harvard Crimsoncarried a brief story
under the headline “Parry, Greek andLatin Professor, Killed
Yesterday.” The subject of the story,Milman Parry, was a young
assistant professor of classicswho had been educated at Berkeley
and the Sorbonne beforewinning the position at Harvard several
years earlier. Hisdeath, the campus newspaper reported, “was the
result of anaccidental shooting. . . . Parry, visiting his
mother-in-law inLos Angeles, was unpacking a suitcase in his hotel
bedroomwhen a revolver mixed in with his clothing went off,
mor-tally wounding him. His wife, who was in the next
room,immediately summoned an ambulance, but he died beforereaching
the hospital.”
Parry was only thirty-three years old at the time of hisdeath.
In 1930s America such phrasing was commonly usedto mask suicide,
which left a greater residue of social stigmathan it does now.
Parry was a romantic figure in life, with apenchant for adventure,
a dashing mustache, and an equallydashing writing style.
Speculation about his death continuesto this day, and the question
remains unsettled. One possiblemotive for suicide—entrenched
academic resistance to Parry’srevolutionary ideas—has been commonly
assumed, yet seemsunlikely. After a somewhat rocky start Parry’s
academiccareer was in fact flourishing, contrary to the later image
thatarose of him as a lone genius unrecognized in his time.
The genius part of that image, however, is right on themark. A
couple of decades after Parry’s death, the eminentBritish
classicist H. T. Wade-Gery would call him “the Dar -win of Homeric
scholarship” for the way that Parry’s theo-
arion 23.2 fall 2015
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ries completely overturned previous interpretations of
theancient Greek poet whose epic poems, the Iliad and theOdyssey,
were the first works written down with the alpha-bet and thus
constitute the foundations of Western literature.
Parry journeyed to Yugoslavia in the early 1930s with cratesand
crates of the newest sound equipment to record guslari,the
unlettered native bards who sang epic tales dramatizingthe
long-past deeds of legendary heroes. Parry’s goal was toprove his
shocking thesis: that the epic poems of Homer wereproduced not by a
writer, brilliant or otherwise, but by anentire culture—a culture,
moreover, without writing at all. Intwo trips to Yugoslavia, Parry
recorded thousands of hours oforal verse, demonstrating its
detailed similarities with Homer’spoems and proving his thesis
beyond any doubt.
In short, Parry discovered oral culture and founded the
newdiscipline of orality studies, forever revolutionizing
anthro-pology and much, much more. Parry wasn’t just the Darwinof
Homeric studies. He was the Darwin of culture—or atleast, as I like
to imagine, he would have been had he lived.
Because orality is just the half of it. Building on Parry’swork,
his contemporary and fellow classicist Eric Havelockwould argue
long after Parry’s death that only the ancientGreek invention of
the alphabet has shifted humanity awayfrom oral culture, unleashing
the intellect (including scienceand other forms of rational
inquiry), opening the door to thespread of new ideas, and giving
rise to the first clearly artic-ulated abstract thought. In the few
centuries between Homerand Plato, Havelock maintained until his
death in 1988, theancient Greeks became the first civilization in
the world thatcan be considered truly literate.
Most controversially, Havelock argued that other
writingsystems—Egyptian, Hebrew, Arabic, Indian, and Chineseamong
them—have never been able to equal the alphabet forboth
learnability and readability. Not only was the alphabetthe first
writing that allowed us to produce new ideas andspread them widely,
he asserted, it’s the only kind of writingthat has ever allowed us
to do so.
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These two brilliant thinkers, both classicists, were bornwithin
a year of each other in the early twentieth century.Taken together,
their work suggests a radically new pictureof cultural evolution
that rivals Charles Darwin’s theory ofbiological evolution. But
like Darwin’s theory, this new pic-ture has been highly
controversial and widely misunder-stood, especially Eric Havelock’s
crowning contribution toit. Parry’s orality thesis, though bitterly
contested at first, hasnow been accepted as fundamentally valid.
Havelock’salphabetic thesis, in contrast, continues to be dismissed
orignored, and Havelock himself has been and still is vilifiedand
condemned in the most vituperative terms. He remainsunder an
ideological cloud not just for classicists but forother academics
as well.
Yet Havelock’s central arguments have not been trulyengaged by
his critics, much less refuted. In the first part ofthis essay, I
made the case that Havelock was largely correctand that the
alphabetic thesis calls for a revolution in clas-sics. In this
second part, I’ll suggest that it also calls for a rev-olution of
classics. In other words, classicists aren’t the onlyones who need
to reassess what classics means in light ofParry’s and Havelock’s
work. Scholars of other disciplines inthe humanities and social
sciences do, too.
What follows is an attempt to retell the deceptively famil-iar
story of “Western civilization” from this new perspective.My reboot
of the franchise is admittedly idiosyncratic andincomplete, but I’m
not necessarily trying for completeness.I’m trying to extend the
argument I made earlier into thelarger sweep of history, and to
show that the study of clas-sics must stand at the center of any
adequate understandingof how human culture has evolved globally—and
how it isstill evolving today.
Darwin had the forceful and tenacious Thomas HenryHuxley, known
as “Darwin’s Bulldog,” to champion hisideas to the public. Nearly
three decades after Havelock’sdeath, perhaps it’s time Havelock had
a bulldog, too.
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first impressions
i work at an after-school program in my small town, andwhen the
kids come down we usually spend the first hour orso doing homework.
Among my group are the third-graders,whom I now understand to be
going through a great transi-tion, possibly the biggest of their
whole lives. This is my per-sonal view of third grade. I’m not an
expert on child devel-opment, so take it with a grain of salt. On
the other hand,I’ve spent a lot of time with third-graders. I think
it’s themost important year in a child’s education. It’s the year
whenreading skills are solidified, and children begin to learn
howto handle abstract ideas.
This is not a natural process. Third-graders work very,
veryhard. They don’t get nearly enough credit for how hard
theywork. But as they’ll be the first to admit, to get them to
work,you have to push them, almost all of them, to some degree.Some
more, some less, but virtually no one learns to read with-out at
least some pushing (that’s what homework is, after all).
Over the past decade or so, seeing the transformation thatcomes
as a result of all of this effort, I have begun to graspjust how
deeply our educational system shapes the ways wethink about the
world. So deeply, I believe, that we all takethat sort of thinking
for granted. It’s invisible. We seem totacitly assume, somehow,
that part of being “human” meansjuggling abstractions—good and
evil, right and wrong, fan-tasy and reality—and that thinking
abstractly is a sign ofhigh intelligence and good thinking (or,
conversely, that notthinking abstractly is a sign of low
intelligence and badthinking). It’s not our way of thinking, it’s
just thinking,period. Thinking is abstraction. Or so we think.
In contrast with all the blood, toil, tears, and sweat
overhomework, you never have to push children to tell
stories.Unlike reading and writing, stories and storytelling
undeni-ably are a natural part of being human. Anthropology tellsus
that oral cultures the world over use stories to transmitcultural
information, and those stories are characteristically
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about agents that do things: people, heroes, gods,
monsters,demons, personified aspects of nature, even, but not
abstractideas as such.
Stories are easy to remember, and in cultures without writ-ing
everything is geared toward memory. There are deep con-nections
between memory, story, and concrete thinking,which helps explain,
for example, the personification of nat-ural phenomena in oral
mythologies. Neuroscience suggeststhat the capacity to construct
narratives is hardwired into ourbrains, and the usefulness of
stories is perhaps why, as withsugar and fat, we evolved to love
them so much. So it’s notthat people in oral cultures can’t think
abstractly, but ratherthat they put little stock in doing so,
because clearly definedabstract concepts aren’t much use in telling
a story.“Handsomeness” is slippery and hard to hold. “The hand-some
Prince” is instantly grasped. Oral cultures don’t havedictionaries,
or need them, for the meanings of stories areplain to the listener,
though always implicit not explicit. Itsreliance on implicit
meaning can make oral culture feel“primitive” to the literate, even
when it involves sophisti-cated layers of effects. In the words of
Harvard oralist DavidBynum, “The story and its constituent motifs
are themselvesan elaborate, prefabricated system of general
meaningsready-to-hand for the ‘primitive philosopher,’ who need
onlyhit upon interesting analogies between fable and experienceto
be a thumping success. Philosophy of this kind needs littleor no
abstract reasoning to create prodigies of symbolism.”1
Even in literate cultures if you really want to
remembersomething you weave a story around it, as those who
con-struct elaborate “memory palaces” do. We read novels
forpleasure, and nonfiction publishing retains a sharp
dividebetween “academic” books, which are supposed to be dryand
abstract, and “popular” or trade books, which areexpected to
entertain readers by telling a story. Such prac-tices, I suspect,
are distant echoes of the original distinctionbetween oral and
literate patterns of thought. Stories are fun.Ideas are heavy
going.
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Narratives, of course, are expressed through language,which is
also part of the “natural” human tool kit. All cultureshave
language, and children learn to talk on their own, need-ing only to
hear others talking in order to do so. Their youngbrains are
language sponges. Not so with reading and writing,which are far
from universal in human culture and are onlyacquired through long
discipline and hard work. Scholars esti-mate that only about six
percent of the thousands of lan-guages spoken in human history have
ever been written down.
Writing is also a relative newcomer. For most of human his-tory,
it hasn’t existed at all. As archeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat
has recently shown, the earliest writing emergedfrom shaped tokens
of clay that were widely used in foodstorage and craft industry
throughout the Middle East forthousands of years starting around
8,000 bc, about the timethat people began farming, which makes
sense. Eventually, inMesopotamia, the tokens evolved into symbols
impressedinto clay. At first used for counting, like the tokens
fromwhich they evolved, these symbols were the first writing.
Inancient Sumer, they became the basis of cuneiform, whichwas used
for writing first word-signs and then also syllable-signs.
(Cuneiform itself is not a writing system, but refers tothe manual
technique of impressing signs into clay using awedge-shaped stylus;
Latin cuneus = wedge.)
Since not all syllables can be clearly and
unambiguouslyrepresented—in most languages, there are simply too
manypossibilities—to read syllabic writing required knowingmany
dozens of signs combined with at least some guess-work. And because
the earliest writing was highly limited inscope these cultures
remained largely oral, though in some ofthem cultural and political
authority tended to concentratein the hands of priestly or scribal
elites.
old men with beards
then, around the year 1,000 bc, a Semitic people known asthe
Phoenicians achieved a great breakthrough by paring the
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previous syllabaries down to a manageable 22–30 conso-nants.
Although Phoenician writing had signs for conso-nants, consonants
are not generally pronounced by them-selves. Consonant means
“sounding with,” and what theyare sounded with is vowels, which
comes from the Latinword for voice, vox.
The Phoenician innovation spread remarkably widely. Itwas taken
up by other Semitic peoples and became the basisof the Hebrews’ and
later the Arabs’ writing systems, amongmany others. As I discussed
in more detail in Part I, Semiticwriting like Phoenician and Hebrew
(and later, Arabic) couldget by without specifying vowels because
root meanings inSemitic languages are based on clusters of
consonants, sothat words with similar consonant clusters are
related inmeaning.
Reducing the number of signs made writing much
easier,streamlining the process dramatically. But it didn’t
changethe basic process of reading, which still involved
guesswork,even more so than before. The gain in manageability
wascounterbalanced by the loss in precision. In order to readsuch
texts, you first have to know what they’re saying. So ithelps a lot
to have some familiarity with the message, as in“Ll mn r crtd ql”
or “Nc pn tm thr ws lttl prncss.” Havingrecognized the message, you
decipher the writing by supply-ing the missing vowel sounds.
As a result of its difficulty, early writing was used
almostexclusively as an aid to memory, always the main focus oforal
culture. The few exceptions are brief and predictable inexpression,
like stylized praise or denigration of a student(not too
surprisingly, Mesopotamian scribes have left ascrappy written
record on baked clay of their workaday upsand downs). Such writings
are rendered recognizable toreaders not only by simple,
conventional expression but alsoby being entirely
monolithic—exaggerated praise unalloyedwith even the slightest
criticism, for example, or the reverse.But mostly it’s tax records,
storage records, bills of lading,votary gifts, monumental
commemoration, proverbs, myths
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and legends—one way or another pre-alphabetic writing wasa
nightlight, as opposed to a searchlight: it helped us to nav-igate
familiar territory, rather than to explore strange newlandscapes.
This is the salient—and rather obvious—sharedfeature of all early
writing from Hieroglyphics to Hebrew,from cuneiform to Linear B,
though as far as I have been ableto tell most academic scholars of
writing pass it over com-pletely. I often wonder whether they fail
to see it, or whetherthey see it and fail to remark on it. Either
way, the failurespeaks volumes. It should be front and center.
Instead we’re told over and over how all kinds of earlywriting
allowed every passing thought to be fully expressed,and how each
culture had the kind of writing that workedbest for it, whatever
that means exactly. This anodyne shib-boleth, virtually ubiquitous
in the herd scholarship of theultracorrect 1980s and 1990s, is
still common. Yet how couldit be demonstrated? Or falsified? Or
even understood?2
Two big things are conveniently left out of this happy pic-ture:
the dynamics of reading, and the actual written evi-dence. Yes,
theoretically you could write down your everypassing thought in
Akkadian cuneiform, if you had longenough. The problem is that I
will only be able to read whatyou’ve written if it communicates
language and thoughtsthat I’m likely to have myself. So what we see
in the actualevidence is the mundane or the conventional, and, in
the rel-atively small number of “literary” texts, stories such as
theEpic of Gilgamesh that were already familiar in the oral
cul-ture and were told in simple language with simple
sentencestructure. Similarly, in the largest surviving collection
ofancient consonantal writing, the Hebrew Bible or OldTestament,
along with the culturally familiar material andthe simple sentence
structure we also see the characteristictechnique of repeating the
same basic idea, as if writing itdown once couldn’t be relied upon
to get the idea across.Biblical scholars call this “parallelism.”
(Cursèd shall ye bewhen ye come in, and cursèd shall ye be when ye
go out.Cursèd shall ye be in the morning, and cursèd shall ye be
in
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the . . . can you guess the next word?) Consonantal writingdid
nothing to change the dynamic of reading: you had tounderstand it
before you could read it.
Nor did consonantal writing become broadly based enoughto wrest
literacy from the scribal and priestly elites. Indeed, ithad the
opposite effect. Group consensus was now even morenecessary in
order to resolve unavoidable ambiguities in thetexts, since one
passage could have several possible readings.This tended to
strengthen the grip of scribal or priestlyelites—in practice, old
men with beards—on cultural author-ity in cultures that used
consonantal writing.
the atomic theory of language
greek and phoenician traders were mingling across a widearea
from Cyprus to southern Italy by about the year 800 bc,when Greeks
began establishing their first overseas colonies.The Greek
alphabet, most likely invented shortly afterward,is based on
Phoenician writing but with a revolutionarytwist: the addition of
vowels. Surprisingly, the alphabet wasinvented only once. Every
alphabet in the world is based onthe Greek model.
What made the alphabet truly revolutionary was not somuch the
writing part as the reading part: it literally reversedthe old way
of reading. Uniquely among all the world’s writ-ing systems, the
alphabet allowed readers to read the mes-sage phonetically first,
easily and automatically, and then goon to figure out what it
meant. Finally, you didn’t have tofigure it out first!
By reversing the old way of reading and eliminating guess-work,
the alphabet gave us room to figure out the meaningof strange and
complicated written messages for the firsttime, thereby opening the
door to the spread of new ideasand unleashing humanity’s
intellectual potential. This is why,almost from the beginning,
alphabetic writing has been usedto produce original literature,
unlike all previous scripts. Inother words, the alphabet has been a
searchlight that lets us
Colin Wells 103
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explore new territory, rather than a nightlight that limits usto
familiar horizons (though alphabetic readers, too, love theold
familiar stories, a holdover from our “natural” state oforality,
which we never really shed completely). Ever soslowly and
haltingly, the balance of human culture begins toshift its center
of gravity—from memory to novelty, frompreservation to innovation.
This is the “alphabetic thesis,”which has been put forward over the
past half-century byscholars such as classicist Eric Havelock and
social linguistWalter Ong, whose 1982 book Orality and Literacy
helpedspread Havelock’s ideas to the wider and often
reflexivelyhostile academic world.
Consonantal writing, Havelock argued, works with theconsonantal
roots of Semitic languages as long as the mes-sages are
conventional or familiar. But in Indo-European lan-guages like
Greek (or French, or Russian, or English) rootscan have the same
consonants in the same order and be com-pletely unrelated. Bid is
not related to bud, and neither isrelated to bad or bed. For
Indo-European languages, conso-nantal writing alone would create an
incomprehensible messwith any but the simplest, most familiar
messages. Therewould be attempts by speakers of other Indo-European
lan-guages to address this problem, such as the cuneiform
scriptinvented for Old Persian, perhaps by the Persian King DariusI
himself in the sixth century bc, or the Brahmi script devel-oped
for Sanskrit a few centuries later. Persian cuneiform isoften
described as semi-alphabetic, since among its forty-onesigns are
three vowels, a, i, and u, although other signs stoodfor consonants
plus these vowel sounds. Brahmi script indi-cated vowels by means
of various short strokes added to thesyllabic signs, resulting in a
large number of complicatedsigns.
The great advantage of Phoenician writing was its
man-ageability. Indeed, Havelock cited research suggesting
thattwenty to thirty letters is the optimal number for brains
likeours that evolved to handle spoken, not written, language.To
retain this advantage for an Indo-European language, it
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was necessary to put vowels on an equal footing by givingthem
their own signs—in other words, to separate conso-nants and vowels
conceptually for the first time. It was evenmore necessary for
Greek than it might have been for otherrelated languages, since
Greek is so heavily inflected, withnot just root meanings but
sophisticated verb forms, caseendings, and much else besides, all
reliant on subtle andcomplex arrangements of vowel sounds. Some
commonwords in Greek are composed of vowel sounds
alone—aei,“always,” comes to mind.
So the alphabet began with a single act of analysis. This
iswonderfully appropriate given the Greeks’ almost
immediatefascination with that same pursuit, and given how the
alpha-bet itself would assist them in it.
Tablets, pots, and figurines made of stone, clay, and
metalsurvive today, little artifacts from the eighth century bc
thathave the earliest examples of alphabetic writing scratched
orchiseled into them. Some record offerings dedicated to a
par-ticular god, like a bronze statuette from Thebes inscribedwith
a prayer to Apollo: Mantiklos dedicated me to the far-darter of the
silver bow from the tithe. / Phoebus, do givesomething gracious
back in return. “Far-darter of the silverbow” and “Phoebus” are
common epithets of the godApollo in epic verse; Mantiklos, the man
making the offer-ing, is one of the earliest individuals whose name
we canread without guessing and who was not a legendary hero,
aruler, a palace bureaucrat, or a prophet. Mantiklos was aregular
person, in other words. That little slice of immortal-ity seems
like a gracious return indeed, if not necessarily thesort of thing
he had in mind, exactly.
Other remains mark similarly humble moments in dailylife, as in
the case of the famous Dipylon wine jug found inAthens, which
praises the winner of a dancing contest whoreceived the modest
container as a prize. Whoever now of allthe dancers frolics most
playfully . . . begins the linescratched amateurishly into the
glaze above the geometricdesigns which, according to the scholars
who study such
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things, show that the jug itself was made around 740 bc. Therest
is not easily legible, but it clearly ran something like . . .gets
this wine jug as a prize. If the writing was scratched intothe
glaze shortly after the pot was fired, this jug could be theoldest
surviving “long” example of alphabetic writing (theearliest
securely dated evidence, a pot sherd containing just afew letters
that was discovered in the 1990s, is from about775 bc). But the
writing might have been done years or evendecades after the vessel
itself was made. Another piece ofpottery, a drinking cup from
Ischia, an island off the coast ofsouthern Italy where Greeks had
established their first over-seas trading outpost, proudly
proclaims: Nestor’s good-drinking cup I am: / He who drinks from
this cup straight-way him / Desire shall grip even of
fair-garlanded Aphrodite.This alludes to famous lines from Homer’s
Iliad, in whichthe Greek sage Nestor’s drinking cup is described as
seizingmen with the desire for comradely talk, with words
flowingfreely between them. Our Nestor, however, apparently hopesto
get something else going. As with the Dipylon jug, thewords were
scratched into the finished cup sometime afterfiring.
So although the date of the alphabet’s invention is stillhotly
contested, with some scholars maintaining that theinvention took
place as far back as 1,400 bc, there is noarcheological evidence of
any alphabetic writing beforearound the year 775 bc, and no
evidence of full sentences forat least several decades after that.
Scholars also argue aboutthe purpose of the invention. The two main
strands of expla-nation propose that the new writing was invented
either foruse in trade, or for writing down epic verse like that
ofHomer.
The purpose, however, is far less important than the
con-sequences. If storytelling remains the primary way of
com-municating information orally, alphabetic writers now havethe
option of organizing their discourses in other ways. Ofcourse,
writers still tell stories. But expository prose—anentirely new
mode of writing that focuses on well-defined
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topics, articulates new ideas and new information,
utilizescomplex sentences with subordinate clauses that
delicatelyarrange or qualify the ideas and information, and takes
itsstructure from thematic or logical considerations rather
thanchronology alone—appears first in Greece starting around600 bc
and gradually comes to dominate alphabetically lit-erate discourse
(the oldest surviving book-length work ofprose, the Histories of
Herodotus, dates from about 450 bc).You simply don’t find sentences
like that last one beinguttered in oral cultures, where
vocabularies are much smallerand syntax much simpler.
In ancient Greece, as Havelock explained in his seminal1963 book
Preface to Plato, this led to the first abstractideas in writing
and also to the first intellectuals—thosewho deal in abstract
ideas. Among those ideas are the nowfamiliar concepts we know as
reason (logos, originally “anaccounting” in Greek) and reality
(ousia or ta onta, “being”or “the things that are” in Greek), which
became the basisof science and other forms of rational inquiry.
Othersincluded the distinction between literal and
metaphoricmeaning, which was articulated for the first time by
authorssuch as Plato and Aristotle.
The rise of abstraction as Havelock outlined it has been abit of
a tough chew for more recent scholars, who seemunable to get their
heads around any model that transcendsfuzzy osmosis: “abstract”
letters are vaguely assumed to pro-mote abstract thinking, and so
the scholarly argumentsinvariably come down to whose letters are
more “abstract.”3
But Havelock suggested specific mechanisms by whichabstraction
arose as human cognition was freed from theconfines of narrative.
Orality demands memory, memorydemands story, and story demands
characters who do things.With its unique capacity for novelty, the
alphabet broke thischain, liberating us from the agendas of memory.
TheGreeks’ hackneyed progression from “myth” to “history”(more
accurately reformulated in recent years as frommythos to logos),
like their vaunted “invention of the indi-
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vidual,” may thus be perceived to have come out of a
deepershift, as an oral culture driven by collective tradition
trans-formed itself into an alphabetic one driven, in part at
least,by novelty, originality, and abstraction. I sketched
thisprocess a bit more fully in Part I, including quotations
fromHavelock’s writing.
The shift from memory to novelty was at least as much
lin-guistic as it was intellectual, Havelock insisted, as the
Greeklanguage expanded in ways detectable in the extant
sources.Leading examples are the uses of the definite article to
indi-cate abstraction (as in “the good”) and the copula to
indicateconceptual linkage (as in “truth is beauty”). Such
usages,which English has inherited, are characteristic of literacy
butnot of orality. They went with a general shift in focus fromthe
concrete to the abstract, from narrative to exposition,from
personified agents to impersonal topics, from whatthings do to what
things are. Havelock began this excitingwork, but much remains to
be done.
This same movement, I suggested further, is reflected alsoin new
Greek conceptions of a split between matter andspirit, of natural
versus supernatural causation, of an imma-terial soul, of an
abstract and unitary godhead leading tomonotheism—like the soul, a
Greek and not a Jewish inven-tion—and, ultimately, to religious
“faith” in the form ofChristianity, whose emphases on personal
belief and thesupernatural were also radically new and emerged
onlywithin an alphabetic milieu.
Heady stuff, yes, but as it unleashed the intellect, the
soul,and God, the alphabet also democratized literacy,
allowinghumanity’s first readership to emerge and diffusing
culturalauthority beyond a scribal or priestly elite. This
diffusion inturn exerted further pressure on the language, creating
afeedback loop of expansion and innovation that culminatedin the
language we know as “classical Greek.” A criticalthreshold was
crossed around the late fifth century bc, aseducation, first in
Plato’s Athens and then throughout theGreek and Hellenistic worlds,
became primarily about learn-
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ing to read. Writers are qualitatively different from
priests,scribes, prophets, or palace bureaucrats, but writers
needreaders in a deeper sense than is commonly understood:
areadership expands spoken language by taking up writteninnovation,
Havelock suggested, so that even illiterate speak-ers will
reproduce literate patterns of language and thought.A scribal,
priestly, or bureaucratic elite lacks the traction toexpand
language in this way. Greco-Roman civilization,Havelock said, was
the first “to be founded upon the activ-ity of the common
reader.”4
Now, all this may go down a treat with Western
culturaltriumphalists, but a more liberal sensibility can tend to
rebelat such claims. Mine certainly has, and from time to time
Istill have to force myself to recall the evidence all over
again,rather than giving in to my original, and in retrospect
naïve,gut feeling of what’s fair and proper. We’d like to think of
allwriting as the same, perhaps—but the evidence clearly showsthat
this is not so.
As literate people, many of us automatically assume thatliteracy
is linked to intelligence, and with that unquestionedassumption
firmly in place some of us, at least, then shyaway from the thought
that one national or ethnic popula-tion might be more intelligent
than another. I would say thatrejecting this thought is not just
politically correct, but fac-tually so. The problem lies not in
that egalitarian impulse,but in the prior assumption of a direct
link between literacyand intelligence, which—like Aristotle’s
common-senseassertion that heavier objects fall faster than lighter
ones—isalmost universal yet is also easily refuted once the trouble
istaken to check it against reality. Unfortunately, this
basicmistake is compounded by the fact that those studying writ-ing
and literacy, professors mostly, are themselves highly lit-erate,
and thus especially prone to flattering themselves withwhat
Havelock himself identified as the “literacy bias” link-ing
literacy and intelligence. Hence the common accusationsof
“ethnocentrism” or “Hellenocentrism” or even “anti-Semitism”
against Eric Havelock—for example, one leading
Colin Wells 109
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authority accuses Havelock of suggesting that the “Semiticmind”
was “too dull” to think abstractly. But not only doesHavelock not
say any such thing, he argues explicitly andstrenuously against
such interpretations.5
It’s as if the professors making these accusations didn’t
takethe trouble to read Havelock’s work very closely but
insteadresponded with gut-level revulsion to what they assumed
hemust have been saying. And it is true that scholars of
earliergenerations commonly made or implied such connectionsbetween
the alphabet and mental superiority. How easy toconclude that
Havelock was simply reviving these old chau-vinistic assessments.
But Havelock’s thesis is more radicalthan that. It makes different
claims and rests on differentarguments from previous
interpretations, and I believe thaton questions of literacy the
academic world—the world atlarge, in fact—urgently needs a
Galileo-style reality check.
This does not mean we must abandon our aims of fairnessand
morality. Quite the opposite. True morality lies in per-ceiving the
evidence, not in ignoring it because we find it chal-lenging. As
the historian of science and intersex advocateAlice Dreger writes
in a very similar context, “I have come tounderstand that the
pursuit of evidence is probably the mostpressing moral imperative
of our time. All of our work asscholars, activists, and citizens of
democracy depends on it.Yet it seems that, especially where
questions of human iden-tity are concerned, we’ve built up a system
in which scientistsand social justice advocates are fighting in
ways that poisonthe soil on which both depend.”6 Like science,
history toodepends on evidence, and it’s even more susceptible to
suchidentity-based interference. Writing systems (and the
lan-guages they are generally, if wrongly, perceived as
inseparablefrom) are at least as deeply intertwined with identity
as gen-der and sex roles, but nothing less than the truth is at
stake—and, as I’ll try to show, quite a bit more as well.
As Walter Ong perceived, there were two great classicistsin the
twentieth century, Milman Parry and Eric Havelock,and their work
goes together. Neither was perfect, of course;
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peripheral aspects of both their theories have been contestedand
in some cases refuted. But their central points stand, andtogether
they throw an entirely new light on the significanceof the ancient
Greeks.
For just as Parry and his continuator Albert Lord discov-ered
the principles of oral composition by examining Homer,so did
Havelock’s complementary work discover the princi-ples of
alphabetic literacy by examining Homer’s successors.It’s not a
coincidence that the principles of orality came froman examination
of Homer, rather than (for example) fromthe consonantal texts of
the Hebrew Bible, which Havelocksuggested are blurry snapshots of
more nuanced “oral origi-nals.” Like a high-resolution camera, the
alphabet capturedthe fine details.7 So without the alphabet, we
would haveneither Homer, the very first alphabetic text and one
reveal-ing (because still closely patterned on) oral material in
theservice of memory, nor his successors, writers like Hesiodand
Archilochus who were humanity’s first pioneers on thefrontier of
original literature.
As alphabetic literacy takes hold first in Ionia, the Greekcoast
of what is now Turkey, the earliest science, philosophy,and history
soon follow. Just to take a single example of howthis could work,
for his radical notion that the earth is anobject floating in
space, one Ionian writer, Anaximander, hasbeen called “the first
scientist” (by physicist Carlo Rovelli,who understands the
significance of a new idea better thanmany scholars in the
humanities). Anaximander came upwith this idea around 600 bc, about
two centuries after theinvention of the alphabet. That may seem
like a long time,but consider this: every culture untouched by the
Greek liter-ary tradition that we know of without exception has
con-ceived of the world as a huge plate supported by
variousdivinely-emplaced structures—columns, pillars, turtles,
what-ever. All peoples have studied the sky, yet two
thousand-plusyears of Chinese “science,” for example, never
dislodged theoral conception of a flat earth with heavens above.
Ditto(mutatis mutandis) Egyptian, Babylonian, Mayan.8
Colin Wells 111
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Moreover, as far as we know, Anaximander is the onlyperson who
ever had the idea of the earth as an object float-ing in space on
his own. You and I sure didn’t. We have itnow because Anaximander
wrote it down with the newalphabet and passed it on for further
alphabetic study andimprovement by successors such as Aristotle,
who showedthat the floating earth is a sphere, Aristarchus, who
figuredout that it spins on its axis and revolves around the sun,
andEratosthenes, who ascertained its circumference. Thatincludes,
incidentally, the concept of “space” itself. If anyoneelse ever had
these ideas independently, they left no record.Such is the power of
the alphabet. Yet its very pervasivenesstoday makes it nearly
invisible to us.
Shortly after the founding of Greek science and philoso-phy,
Greeks in Ionia fall under the sway of the mightyPersian
Empire.
the beginning of the end
persia, classical greece’s main antagonist, also plays arole in
our synthesis. Oral cultures share a common, holisticworld view.
The world is a fundamentally ordered place, butits divinely
sanctioned order can be threatened by the forcesof chaos (in
mythology often depicted as serpent monsters).Among ancient
civilizations, order was defended by heroicwarrior-gods. From the
Norse Thor to the Vedic Indra, Indo-European warrior-gods shared
features that reflect a com-mon ancestry, and Semitic cultures in
the Middle East pos-sess a similar set of “combat myths.”
For thousands of years, this was the basic outlook of cul-tures
without writing: we live in a comfortable world oforder, with
unsettling chaos posing a threat from outside. It’sstill the
outlook of the few oral cultures remaining today. Itis not,
however, our outlook, at least not historically. Itsimpact on how
we perceive the world has indeed been thealphabet’s broadest
legacy—though not always necessarily interms Anaximander would
recognize.
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Zoroastrianism, the world’s first “apocalyptic” belief sys-tem,
rises in Persia starting perhaps around 1,300 bc. Theprophet
Zoroaster adapts the combat myth common to oralcultures, moralizing
order and chaos into good and evil pow-ers (dualism) and
incorporating the novel idea that theworld, rather than being
static, is moving toward a greatfinal confrontation in which the
good powers in the worldwill finally repel the invading evil
powers.
The concepts that Judaism and Christianity will later takefrom
Zoroastrianism include salvation, a savior figure,heaven, hell, the
immortal soul, an afterlife, the devil, bodilyresurrection, final
judgment, a last battle, and eschatologicaltransformation of the
world.
But there is one big difference. Zoroastrianism at this timeis
an oral tradition, not a written one, and it does not pres-ent
these “concepts” as abstract ideas. Instead, as in otheroral
traditions, they come to us as concrete features of sto-ries or as
agents who do things in stories. We, the alphabet-ically literate
beholders of them, are the ones who identifythem as “concepts.”
(Zoroastrianism’s sacred text, theAvesta, was passed down through
generations of priests byrigorous memorization; scholars believe it
was not writtendown until the sixth century ad.)
And like other oral traditions, Zoroastrianism doesn’tdraw a
clear boundary between natural and supernatural,matter and
spirit—all conflict between good and evil powers,and indeed all
human and divine activity, takes place exclu-sively in this world.
The good powers are represented by par-ticular plants and animals
(cattle and dogs, for example) andso are the evil ones (wolves and
snakes among them, not sur-prisingly). In taking up the concept of
the End Times, firstthe Jews and then the Christians will each
radically trans-form it in their own ways.
Eventually, the Persians are incorporated into the Assyrianand
Babylonian empires. And, in the sixth century bc, so arethe
Jews.
Colin Wells 113
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captivity and revenge
the persian story continues with Babylonian Captivity of theJews
and the rise of the Persian empire under Cyrus the Great.Persian
Zoroastrianism influences the anonymous Hebrewprophet known only as
Second Isaiah, who prophesies thedownfall of Babylon at the hands
of Cyrus. Second Isaiah’s fer-vent message fuses religious
exclusivity and awesome divinepower into a cosmic revenge fantasy
against the enemies ofIsrael. Like Zoroaster, Second Isaiah
predicts a great future vic-tory in which the world will be utterly
transformed.
The difference is that in Zoroastrianism, as in oral tradi-tion
generally, the world is controlled by the forces of goodand invaded
by the forces of evil. Second Isaiah, seeking toexplain a situation
in which the forces of good have seem-ingly been totally defeated,
reverses the polarity of thisvision, if temporarily. The world is
under the control of theevil power and the forces of good are the
invader. In ourglobal evolutionary story, this reversal of polarity
representsa small but momentous cultural “mutation.”
Plainly sensing this significance yet not quite grasping itstrue
nature, some scholars (such as Norman Cohn, whosebooks about the
history of apocalypticism I have relied uponin my synthesis, though
some of my conclusions about it aredifferent from his) have
presented Second Isaiah as “the firstmonotheist.” Christians have
always sensed it, too, which iswhy the verses of Second Isaiah have
likewise been taken upas preparing the way for Christ. Messiahs
aside, if SecondIsaiah really was pushing monotheism, he certainly
buries thelead. “No god beside me” can be taken as implying an
incip-ient monotheism, or at least it can if we have a strong
motiveto take it that way. But, as others have observed, for a
sup-posedly revolutionary program, one or two such ambiguousphrases
in reams and reams of text seems a little spotty.
My point is not that Second Isaiah could not have enter-tained
the notion of a unitary godhead, but that, even if hedid, his
writing system did not allow him to articulate it
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explicitly in a way that readers could clearly grasp.Mainstream
Jewish sources of the same period acknowledgeother gods by name.
Significantly, Second Isaiah is the onlyprophet later included in
the Hebrew Bible whose name wedon’t know. When circumstances
changed to give his mes-sage traction—in an alphabetic environment
that hadalready explicitly articulated and broadcast the idea of a
uni-tary godhead—his prophecies were lumped in with Isaiah’s,which
is why, when he was identified as a separate author inmodern times,
he was stuck with the name “Second Isaiah.”
Those who still insist on tracing monotheistic faith to
theHebrew Bible (mostly Christian and Muslim believers eagerto
validate the timeless antiquity of their own traditions) arelooking
at the ancient Hebrews through faith-tinted goggles.These “faith
goggles” have remained firmly strapped on inour own modern times.
Even avowedly skeptical observersfind them very hard to remove, and
they end up coloring ourentire perspective on religion. We have
books about “thefaith instinct,” and we commonly refer to other
religious tra-ditions such as Hinduism and Buddhism as “faiths.”
Suchimprecise usage notwithstanding, faith and religion are notthe
same thing, and faith has not been emphasized or evenarticulated in
most religious traditions. Nor is it articulatedin the Hebrew
Bible. After thousands of years, let’s recognizeSecond Isaiah for
what he was: a prophet speaking in thevoice of one particular
divinity, not a theologian makingexplicit statements about the
divine.
Cyrus does indeed defeat the Babylonians and free theJews.
However, when other aspects of Second Isaiah’sprophecy fail to
materialize, he is ignored by the Jewishmainstream. Cyrus does not
destroy Babylon, Jews do notflock back to Israel, and Israel
remains under Persian rule.Second Isaiah’s message seems poised to
fizzle out.
Meanwhile, Cyrus conquers Greek Ionia, and when theIonians
revolt the Persians crush the nascent Ionian enlight-enment. A few
years later they invade mainland Greece itself.
Colin Wells 115
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revenge for the injured gods
conflict between Greece and Persia brings us back to theGreek
world, where early philosophy and science struggle togain a
foothold as Persia looms on the Greek horizon. Forthe first time in
human history, and as a direct result of theintellectual
possibilities opened by alphabetic writing, a firmconceptual
boundary is erected between the natural and thesupernatural—a
barrier that represents the most consequen-tial act in the history
of human thought (or, in evolutionaryterms, another cultural
“mutation” that, as we’ll see, willeventually combine with the one
described in the last sec-tion).
The innovative idea that nature follows regular laws has ahuge
psychological impact, especially on the old holisticgods of nature,
ushering in a radically new tradition of reli-gious skepticism. As
the first materialistic philosophyemerges in alphabetic writing,
the sharp edge of nature’s reg-ularity forever splits the old
holistic world in which matterand spirit are intertwined.
The split between matter and spirit, between “seen” and“unseen,”
will haunt the West forever after. Cultural conflictis taken to a
new level as abstract concepts such as piety, nat-ural causation
and—its inevitable companion—supernaturalcausation begin to
intertwine themselves with identity.Anxiety over skeptical inquiry
soon reveals itself in the infa-mous Diopeithes Decree, which
outlaws astronomy and reli-gious skepticism in Athens soon after
the arrival of the firstphilosophers there in the mid-5th century
bc. The anxiety iseasy for us to dismiss, but the gods uphold human
societyand protect the state. Without them, there can be only
vio-lence and chaos. A couple of decades later, Socrates is
por-trayed as a dangerous radical in the Athenian comedy TheClouds,
which ends with him being whipped off the stage tothe cry, “Revenge
for the injured gods!”
The key to the new literacy, Havelock repeatedly empha-sized, is
an education revolution, as literacy is taken up by
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the educated aristocracy. Elementary education, now andforever,
becomes about learning to read. The old oral
educa-tion—rhythm-based (to aid memorization) and centered onmusic,
dance, and poetry—is replaced by a text-based cur-riculum with the
new art of rhetoric (a hybrid of oral and lit-erate) as its
centerpiece. In Athens, the heir to the Ionianenlightenment, this
shift happens during the lifetime of Plato.
Plato undertakes a sustained effort to systematize the
twoemergent features of alphabetic literacy that will come
tocharacterize intellectual activity (both absent, or largely so,in
cultures without writing): definition and abstraction. Hisstudent
Aristotle focuses instead on systematizing the reali-ties of the
here-and-now, from the cosmos and nature tohumanity in its many
aspects.
This is also the first time that monotheistic ideas are
artic-ulated, that explicit skepticism of the supernatural is
widelycirculated, that belief becomes the ground of cultural
con-flict, that anti-intellectualism shows itself, and that
miraclesbegin to exercise their seductive power on the human
imagi-nation. All these things are connected. They seem normal
tous, but they happened first in classical Greece, and they
hap-pened because of the alphabet.
Science, by its very existence, presents a terrifying glimpseof
a world without any divine or supernatural agency what-soever.
Proof is not the issue—the mere possibility is enoughto create
anxiety, antagonism, and, ultimately, a collective“return of the
repressed” in the form of triumphalist super-naturalism. In
organizing and managing these responses,faith will be religion’s
answer to science’s challenge.
the unitary god
in the newly literate Greek world, the recognition of whatwould
eventually come to be called the laws of nature pushespeople toward
the idea of a single god who is in charge ofeverything. But the
materialistic conception of “nature”leaves no room for the
supernatural. This inner tension has
Colin Wells 117
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always plagued “the god of the philosophers,” from ancientGreek
times to the Watchmaker God of Enlightenment Deistssuch as Thomas
Jefferson. The rationalistic conception of thedivine is just too
dry to satisfy our human thirst for objects ofworship with real
power in the world.
The Jews, exposed to Greek culture since the conquests
ofAlexander the Great, are part of the trend in the Greek
worldtoward both monotheism and a rising fascination with
thesupernatural. Judaism is the crucible in which Greek andPersian
ideas blend together. Because of its unique scripturalbasis,
Judaism already possesses an abstract dimension (noidolatry) to its
conception of the divine that inoculated itagainst the injurious
impact of alphabetic literacy. This maybe why Judaism survived
intact from pre-alphabetic timeswhen paganism did not—although it,
too, had to make sig-nificant accommodations and adapt to the new
alphabeticworld. As in the larger Greek world, temples and
sacrificeswould give way to the new model of group assembly
centeredon prayer that is associated with exclusive monotheism.
a match made in heaven
from the time of Plato on, as people react to the psycho-logical
threat posed by nature’s regularity, miracles assume abigger and
bigger place in the popular consciousness. By Jesus’day,
self-proclaimed miracle-workers are common amongboth Greeks and
Jews, and numerous mystery religions com-pete with each other for
wonder-working credibility.
In the Jewish world, this rising supernaturalism blends with,and
revivifies, the apocalyptic message that earlier seemed onthe brink
of dying out. Woo-woo meets End Times—it turnsout to be a perfect
match. In an almost point by pointresponse to Greek science, Jewish
sources such as 1 Enoch andJubilees depict a world once ordered by
divine will (not natu-ral laws) that has now fallen under the sway
of demonic forces(pagan gods). Apocalypticism finds fertile ground
as Jews con-tend with both hostile Hellenistic monarchs and the
secular,
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rationalistic philosophy against which the authors of 1 Enochand
Jubilees are reacting. But, though influenced by it, main-stream
Judaism never fully embraces the apocalyptic message.When the
Hebrew canon is formalized by the end of the firstcentury ad, 1
Enoch and Jubilees are not in it (though theyremain highly popular
with early Christian writers).
The Pharisees are the perfect illustration of this process(the
name may come from Pharsee, “Persian,” which is whatZoroastrians
who settled in India are still called): the rise ofrabbinic Judaism
reflects accommodation to and reactionagainst the Greek
environment, along with the Zoroastrianinfluence. The Mishnah
introduces theological dogma, aGreek preoccupation completely
absent from the HebrewBible, into Judaism for the first time. It
asserts that threekinds of people will have no share in “the world
to come”:those who deny the resurrection of the dead, those who
denythe divinity of the Torah, and, significantly,
Epicureans—fol-lowers of the materialist teachings of the Greek
philosopherEpicurus, an atomist.
the birth of angst
rising supernaturalism is only one symptom of the tremen-dous
cultural anxiety evoked by the collapse of oral cultureand the
advent of the alphabetic mind. Ancient sources alsoreveal that
broader sense of anxiety and alienation with whichliterate and
partly literate humanity has struggled ever since.Eric Havelock’s
alphabetic thesis thus explains the innocent,pleasure-loving side
that we have always sensed in the ancientpagan world, which
Rousseau romanticized as “the noble sav-age” (oral patterns in
Western European literature were extin-guished only as late as the
Romantic period, which promptlyglorified them out of
nostalgia).
Havelock described the alphabetic origins of “those
slighthypocrisies without which our civilization does not seem
tofunction.” In oral culture, he observed, “there was no war-fare
between body and spirit. The pull between the pleasur-
Colin Wells 119
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able inclination to act in one way and the unpleasant duty toact
in another way was relatively unknown. All this beginsto change
perhaps by the time the fourth century was under-way. . . . A
psychological condition long encouraged by apurely oral culture was
becoming no longer possible.”9
Ultimately, alphabetic literacy introduces an unprece-dented and
unparalleled element of self-consciousness intowhat we believe
about the world, allowing us to identifybeliefs as beliefs for the
first time. Belief, of course, is anabstract idea, so this
self-consciousness was part of the riseof abstraction—but, as it
turns out, a particularly touchypart, given human psychology. The
Greeks were not the firstto try to explain things, but they were
the first to explainhow they were explaining them—and to examine
preciselyhow explanation results in belief.
the revenge of the unseen
the concept of faith evolved to assuage anxieties causedby the
alphabet’s volcanic disruption of the old oral order.“Comfort ye,
my people, saith the Lord.” But comfort canhave a dark side.
Revenge psychology is central to the emerg-ing concept of religious
faith in Late Antiquity. Oral cultures,whether in ancient combat
mythology, Zoroastrian apoca-lypticism, or contemporary tribal
contexts, typically envisiona world of order in which chaos is the
invader. For oral cul-tures, the world is comfortable, although it
needs to bedefended against chaotic forces that threaten it. As
we’veseen, early Jewish apocalypticists starting with Second
Isaiahreversed the polarity of this vision, if temporarily: YHWHhas
allowed evil forces to take over—but only to show theenemies of the
Jews just how mighty he really is underneathan apparent record of
weakness and total defeat. The world,in other words, is
uncomfortable, and comfort can only berestored by annihilating the
enemies of the Jews.
With the advent of alphabetically literate skeptical inquiry,it
is religion itself that grows uncomfortable. Jesus and Paul,
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modern scholarship affirms, both came out of the
Jewishapocalyptic tradition. While Jewish apocalypticism
incorpo-rated grandiose supernatural elements into its revenge
sto-ries, it always remained fixed on the Jews’ worldly
travails.Not for nothing does Christian faith emerge from
anotherstory of worldly defeat and humiliation. But owing to
Paul’sgenius, Christianity picks up on the revenge impulse in
atotally unexpected way. If the old apocalypse targets theJews’
worldly political enemies, the new apocalypse targetsworldly
thinking itself, as embodied in the skeptic, the unbe-liever, and
the Doubting Thomas.
For a clear contemporary example, think of Darwin andthe intense
animosity he and his ideas have inspired, partic-ularly among
rapture-ready true believers of all stripes.Today, we are quite
used to secularism being “public enemynumber one” for enraged
Christian, Muslim, and Jewishfundamentalists alike. Little do we
suspect that this sameimpulse helped spark the very birth of faith
itself.
Paul solemnizes the marriage of supernaturalism and
apoc-alypticism and repackages Christianity in
comprehensivelysupernatural terms that perfectly address the new
alienation ofhumanity from nature and the world. Christianity
succeedsbecause, alone among the many competing religious
tradi-tions, it offers a coherent and emotionally compelling
vindica-tion of all the instincts that science threatens. In this
way,Christianity is a product of the self-same process that
itpushed back against: the hitherto unexamined, even unsus-pected,
historical process of abstraction that will be the mainsubject of
the classics revolution. Christianity exalts not justone particular
supernatural figure, like other mystery cults,but the very concept
of supernatural power itself—and, cru-cially, it offers believers a
share in that power for themselves.Paul holds out the promise of
participation and ownership ina divine supernatural system that can
stand against the emerg-ing (and still relatively shaky) natural
system of science.10
And so the first global franchise is set up on an
anti-sciencebasis. If Jesus is McDonald, Paul is Ray Kroc,
establishing
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the franchise in the name of the founder and issuing
stan-dardizing directives to Romans, Corinthians,
Ephesians,Thessalonians . . .
Paul’s franchise fixes in place the temporary reversal
ofpolarity we see in Jewish apocalypticism: the world, nowseen in a
fallen state, is permanently under the sway of theevil power.
Nature, the realm of science, is demoted and thepagan gods of
nature are literally demonized. The other-worldly pose spreads like
wildfire through the parched spir-itual undergrowth of late antique
society. For Jewish,Christian, and Muslim millenarians alike, the
apocalypsis, or“unveiling” in Greek, comes to stand for the
ultimate pay-back, when the unseen will literally come out of
hiding toannihilate the seen in a final act of cosmic revenge.
All the drama around “the end of the world” tends to hidewhat
apocalyptic thinking has always really been about,starting with
Second Isaiah: the complete and total vindica-tion of those who
feel marginalized. In this respect, the endis just the means, if
you will. That’s why the apocalyptic mes-sages of ISIS, for
example, have exerted such a seductive pullnot only in the
idea-starved Arab world—which has margin-alized itself through its
consonantal writing, with such cata-strophic results—but also among
alienated and psychologi-cally vulnerable young people from
non-Muslim Westernfamilies.11 Such cultural and social
marginalizations resonateso strongly with faith traditions
(including modern “cults”)because faith itself arose from a similar
sense of outrage atthe way science pushed religion aside so
brusquely.
This sense of outrage gave faith its broad appeal after sci-ence
arose and explains how entire cultures could adopt anapocalyptic
outlook, which on the face of it presents a puz-zle. After all, why
would a sense of marginalization resonatewith the mainstream, which
by definition isn’t marginal atall? Well, all cultures have
religion. Apocalypticism’s mes-sage of ultimate vindication for the
marginalized could res-onate with cultural mainstreams because the
inherentauthority of skeptical, naturalistic explanation threatened
to
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discredit religion itself, and religion stands squarely in
thosecultural mainstreams. Science put religion on the
defensive.
From an epistemological standpoint, all believers are
mar-ginalized in this world. In pinning its hopes on the nextworld,
what faith reveals is the ancestral mark of
religion’smarginalization at the hands of reason.
he rules in darkness
the devil gets his due in this part of our synthesis,
whichsuggests how the dualistic outlook, in which a good power
isopposed by an evil power, was passed on fromZoroastrianism
through Judaism to Christianity. (The earli-est trace of Satan can
be found in Jubilees.) Dualism andapocalypticism go together, and
the Essenes also share abelief in the devil with Christians. The
major differencebetween the two traditions is Christianity’s
interest in con-verting pagans.
In popular literature of the early Christian era, saints’
lives(hagiographies) replace secular biographies, which now
dis-appear as a genre for centuries. Christian ascetics such as
St.Anthony, the founder of monasticism, literally wrestle withSatan
and his demons in the desert, using their special pow-ers for good
in waging an epic supernatural battle thatmakes them the comic-book
superheroes of the late antiqueworld. The comparison is not a
casual one; super-nesscounts. Whether in a hairshirt or tights with
underwear onthe outside, it’s all about the transcendence of
nature’s oner-ous laws—supernatural superpowers go with
superheroes.
(Interestingly, Superman’s Jewish creators gave him
theKryptonian surname name El, the Semitic word for “god,”while
giving his arch-enemy the first name of Lex, Latin for“law,” which
shares its root with words for reading such as“legible.” Perhaps we
should not make too much of this, how-ever!)
Like today’s superheroes, each saint has a special set ofpowers
and abilities that sets him or her off from the others.
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But unlike in the comic books, the superhero’s opposition inLate
Antiquity always includes bodily desires for food andsex.
Asceticism is an integral part of resistance to the naturalworld
and its evil ruler, Satan.
the light of love
to argue that faith represents a flight from reality—in
otherwords, fantasy—is not at all to say that faith is a bad
thing.Fantasy has immense power to change the world for the
bet-ter, and the historical record clearly shows that
Christianityhas done so many times. Even for many atheists, the
mostappealing aspect of Christian faith is its emphasis on
love,which was just as much a part of St. Paul’s message as
hissystematization of the supernatural. Indeed, the two are
psy-chologically linked. What is reason, after all, if not
some-thing cold and impersonal?
And yet even Christian love has had a dark side, a shadowimpulse
that has allowed it to be invoked by torturers whoprofess to save
the souls of those they torment as often as bythe comforters of the
downtrodden. Perhaps Christian loverepresents, at least for some,
the common defense mecha-nism that Freud identified as “reaction
formation,” in whichwe conceal unacceptable impulses by affirming
their oppo-sites. In this case, the unacceptable impulse hidden
byavowals of “love” is violent narcissistic rage against the
lim-its imposed by the laws of nature. To some degree, it musthave
been so for Paul, who revealed his violent potential bypersecuting
Christians before his conversion just as clearly ashe revealed his
resentment against Greek philosophy after it.
It is important to recognize, however, that not all
Christianshave reacted this way. For social activists and others
throughouthistory, Christian love has sprung clear and joyous from
theheart. And from Augustine to William Faulkner, the
moralauthority of Christian love, and in particular of faith’s
exaltationof the common and the outcast, has made the Bible the
most fer-tile source of creative inspiration in Western
civilization.
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If anything, history shows us that, contrary to the claimsof
many atheists, religion has inspired as much good as evil.But
there’s a less simplistic—and more productive—way ofthinking about
religion than adding up credits and debits.Instead of focusing on
the supposed consequences of reli-gion, a Darwinian view would also
consider religion andindividual religious traditions as
consequences in and ofthemselves. And if the evolution of religion
is a matter of sci-ence, the evolution of individual religions
falls squarely inthe realm of history. Though a powerful influence,
literacy isonly one aspect of the complex web of circumstances
thatmake up the historical environment.
The idea of religious faith itself emerged in the wake
ofalphabetic literacy, but other sorts of circumstances alsohelped
shape the two largest faith traditions of Christianityand Islam. A
Darwinian historical explanation can accountfor many of the
differences between these two global faiths.It can also explain
why, despite these differences, both haveone big thing in common
aside from their shared exaltationof the supernatural: the
conspicuous presence of internallycompeting and contradictory
messages.
Christianity and Islam began in very different environ-ments and
with very different early messages that provedsuitable to those
environments. Christianity originated in theRoman empire, a
literate, ethnically diverse, and politicallyunified environment
with robust philosophical traditions inwhich military power was
monopolized by a strong centralstate. Islam originated in almost
opposite circumstances—the Arabian peninsula in the lifetime of
Muhammad wasoral, ethnically unified, and politically chaotic, with
militarypower spread among competing and mutually hostile
tribes.The upshot is that if a prominent message of early
Christianshad been, say, “Kill the infidel,” there would not have
beenany later Christians. Conversely, if a prominent message
ofearly Muslims had been, “Love your neighbor,” there wouldnot have
been any later Muslims.
Yet both traditions grew, and as they grew their circum-
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stances changed. In different ways, each successfully
negoti-ated a transition from persecuted minority to
imperialadjunct, and each had to embrace countervailing messages
inorder to attract and keep a wide following (messages, forexample,
that could be mobilized in the service of imperialor other
political agendas, as well as messages that could bedefended on
ethical or moral grounds). In all cultures, thereare people who
want to love their neighbors, people whowant to kill their
neighbors, and people who just want tomake it to bedtime. Many of
us may want to do all three atvarious times, depending on
circumstances. Traditions thatretain a narrow, coherent message
(such as Jainism) remainlimited in their appeal.
From this perspective, religion, including faith, is
neutral,like art or music: violent people have violent faith,
peacefulpeople have peaceful faith. In offering any and all kinds
ofmessages, à la carte, faith renders itself so “meaningful” asto
be meaningless. There is no “essence” to any global faith,or to
faith itself, outside of its basic character as an allergicresponse
to science. There are only competing messages,competing agendas,
and constantly changing circumstances.That goes for history in
general, too.12
Far from being too skeptical, in allowing faith enoughmeaning to
be “evil,” new atheists such as Sam Harris andRichard Dawkins
aren’t skeptical enough. Cherry-pickingtheir own messages from the
à la carte menu of religiousscripture just as the faithful do, they
credulously buy into thepremise that faith has inherent meaning in
the first place.Instead of asking whether faith has a positive or a
negativemeaning, we should dig deeper and question whether it
hasany inherent meaning at all.
getting god’s number
the elaborately monotheistic theology that comes withalphabetic
literacy highlights the primal relationshipbetween writing and
counting that helped give rise to the
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earliest forms of writing in the first place. Unlike
Judaism,Christianity and Islam have always been obsessed with
put-ting a number on God, and the early controversies thatwracked
the Christian church show this clearly.
First, in Late Antiquity, it was the nature of Christ: was
itone, or two, or what? Was Jesus a human, with a singlenature? Was
he divine, with a single nature? Was he a blend oftwo natures? In
the centuries following the conversion of theRoman emperor
Constantine, followers of Arius, Nestor, andother Christian leaders
later branded as “heretical” contestthese issues as the church
struggles to define orthodox belief.
Then, these “Christological” controversies merge into
the“Trinitarian” controversies that followed, as divisions overthe
number of God continue into the Middle Ages. Thefather, the son,
the holy ghost—how do they relate to eachother? Is God one, or two,
or three? Or what? Part and par-cel of faith is the explicit
insistence on unity even whileimplicitly acknowledging
plurality.
It’s hard for us to grasp how high the stakes were in
theseconflicts. Christian Orthodoxy now supports the state
propa-ganda machine of the Roman (later the Byzantine) empire,
andso millions of souls hang in the balance. The fate of the
worldno longer hinges on what you do, as it has in oral
culturesincluding that of the ancient Hebrews, but on what you
believe.
By the end of the sixth century, Christianity has permeatedlife
in the Byzantine empire. The first holy war is foughtbetween
Christian Byzantium and Zoroastrian Persia, anancient conflict
that, rekindled—and carefully watched bythe disunified Arab tribes
to the south—is now fueled for thefirst time with profound
sectarian fervor. Born with thealphabet a millennium earlier,
belief has now become aninstrument of war.
the unitary god redux
islam claims the monotheistic high-ground, “One”-uppingthe
Christians and their Trinity: “God is One,” the Quran
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tells us: “Say not Three.” Like Judaism but unlikeChristianity,
Islam originated within a culture that had notyet directly
encountered the Greek tradition of free inquirybased on alphabetic
literacy. As recent scholarship suggests,Islam’s strict monotheism
can be seen as a reaction instead tothe endless theological
disputes that ensued when the inher-ent complexities of the
Christian god had to be explained.The Arabs looked at the
convulsions wracking the suppos-edly monotheistic Christian church
and said, basically, “Wecan do better.” This is why Islam shares
Christianity’s obses-sion with God’s number.
And yet belief in God is never as simple or straightforwardas it
might seem, or as those who proclaim it might like us tothink. The
Muslims’ reaction to reason was indirect, at leastat first. Like
all other peoples throughout history aside fromthe Greeks, the
Arabs took the idea of monotheism by exam-ple, emulating the
monotheists around them (Jews, Christiansand, depending on one’s
definition of monotheism,Zoroastrians, whose tradition was also
changing), ratherthan evolving it on their own. They encountered
the Greekliterary tradition of free rational inquiry only after
monothe-ism had been firmly established, and it was rational
inquirythat put explicit belief on the table. This is why Islam
tends,like Judaism, to be more focused on practice than on
belief.
Like the Jews, however, the Muslims, too, would bedragged into
the endless tug-of-war between “Athens” and“Jerusalem” that came
with the territory. Arabic writingcoalesces in the Islamic period
and “classical Arabic”remains that of the Quran, which has also
traditionally beenthe yardstick of literacy in the Arab world. As
I’ve alreadysuggested, the meaning of such consonantal scriptures
needsto be continually reinforced by group study and the
unques-tioned authority of old men with beards, which is what
bothJewish and Islamic traditions have always conspicuouslyrelied
on. Not just the interpretation, as in alphabeticChristianity
(which has certainly had its share of old menwith beards, as well
as a Reformation sparked by an alpha-
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betic text multiplied by the new technology of print), but
theactual reading of the language itself needs to be
constantlymaintained by consensus, both oral (as in group study)
andwritten (as in commentaries).
Hence the massive accumulation of written commentary inboth
traditions, which not only dwarfs that on Christiantexts but is
qualitatively different, focusing more on how toread the words and
less on what they mean in spiritualterms—though that, of course,
generally follows the reading.Hence also, perhaps, the rage of old
men with beards insome of these cultures today, whose traditional
control of themessage erodes a bit more every time a courageous
andheroic girl insists on her right to learn to read.
In ninth-century Baghdad, the Abbasid caliphs take advan-tage of
a preexisting literature in Syriac, a linguistic cousin ofArabic
also written in a consonantal descendant ofPhoenician script, and
which has a centuries-long traditionof translation from Greek.
Medieval Arabic science and phi-losophy thus begin as a translation
movement ultimatelyfrom prestigious Greek sources.
Syriac and Arabic scientific literature dramatically
illustratethe power of alphabetic literacy to pull non-alphabetic
writinginto the realm of abstraction. Written languages have
measur-ably larger vocabularies and more complex syntactic
optionsavailable to users than do oral or largely oral ones, and
theArabic language had to be expanded in order to accommodateGreek
scientific and philosophical concepts. A similar examplefrom the
religious sphere is found with the Slavs, whose culturewas strictly
oral before their conversion to OrthodoxChristianity starting in
the ninth century, when the Byzantinemissionary St. Cyril adapted
the Greek alphabet to spokenSlavic. The Cyrillic alphabet may be
familiar, but the leadingmodern authority, Sir Dimitri Obolensky,
argued that Cyril’sreal genius was linguistic, as reflected in his
creation of a vir-tually new liturgical language, Old Church
Slavonic, thatexpanded the Slavs’ oral language in the same ways
(vocabu-lary, syntax).
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Indian syllabic writing, too, captures vowel sounds andcan thus
convey original content, but like Chinese writing ithas so many
complex signs that reading it cannot be said tobe easy or
automatic. It’s not enough to put down a newidea. People also need
to be able to read it, enough of themto form a readership. Because
of the great difficulty of read-ing Indian and Chinese writing,
literacy in these cultures,too, has traditionally been limited to
narrow, highly trainedpriestly (Indian) or bureaucratic (Chinese)
elites, whichlacked the traction to expand the spoken everyday
languagesin the way that a wider readership did in ancient
Greece.Sophisticated, curious, insightful, and often very
profound,by the first millennium ad, Chinese and Indian
literatureincluded recognizable attempts to grapple with
abstractionssuch as reality, time, and space. Abstraction, I
suggested inPart I, is implicit in human thought, so this should
not be ter-ribly surprising. The question is not whether people in
thesecultures were “able” to think abstractly, or even whetherthey
were curious about such notions, but whether they hadthe means to
render such thought efficiently into sustained,explicit, and
nuanced language that could be easily andwidely read by others.
Because literacy remained sorestricted in these cultures, Havelock
argued, neither coulddevote to their inquiries the kind of expanded
languageavailable to writers in classical Greek and Latin.
India’s Brahmi script, the ancestor of later forms such
asDevanagari, appeared in the third century bc, after
India’sexposure to Greek culture during the conquests of
Alexanderthe Great, which the timing suggests may have stimulated
itsdevelopment (like Greek, it appears to be based onPhoenician
writing). There was much give and take betweenthe two cultures
going back at least to the sixth century bc,and Greek philosophy
itself may have been stimulated origi-nally by Indian oral
traditions. Indian and Greek philosophyhave much in common,
although—crucially—the Indiansdid not develop an independent
tradition of secular inquiry.Comparatively undifferentiated, even
when materialistic in
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its interpretations, Indian philosophy (including
science)remained in service of religion and favored story and
verseover prose exposition in its delivery.
Each of these great civilizations, then, represents a
distinc-tive blend of oral and literate cultural patterns, and
many(though certainly not all) of the differences in emphasisamong
them can be explained within that context.
the age of miracles
even alphabetic literacy requires the support of a
solidelementary educational system, which is precisely whatbroke
down in the West during the Middle Ages, when thealphabet, too,
grew restricted to scribes and priests, and oralpatterns reasserted
themselves in Western culture. Readingand writing, Havelock and Ong
tell us over and over, are notnatural acts in the way that talking
is. Children acquirespeech on their own. They acquire reading and
writing onlywith great training and discipline under the best of
circum-stances.
Literacy, Havelock insisted further, is far from being
theindividual accomplishment we commonly take it for. Instead,it is
a social condition—and a fragile one at that. The alpha-bet is
necessary for widespread literacy, in other words, butnot
sufficient. Elementary education is also essential.
It’s safe to say that no civilization has ever been moreobsessed
with miracles than late antique and medievalChristendom. For more
than a thousand years, until theProtestant Reformation, miracles
stood as the unquestionedbenchmark of religious credibility—and
credulity—in theChristian world. The familiar exaltation of the
other-worldlyat the expense of the worldly was expressed with
remarkableconsistency, from the timeless frozen purity of
Byzantineiconography to the writings of figures such as the
VenerableBede—who salts his eighth-century history of the
Englishchurch with thrilling miracles on nearly every page, and
whopraises Caedmon, the first poet to write in English, as
having
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“stirred the hearts of many folk to despise the world andaspire
to heavenly things.” This was, quite simply, the high-est praise a
medieval critic could offer. Medieval society’sinsistent
supernaturalism—enforced by a powerful churchthat constantly
policed the thinking of philosophers and did-n’t hesitate to burn
heretics or unbelievers—amounts to noth-ing less than a wholesale
cultural denial of nature’s regularity.It went hand-in-hand with
the demotion of nature itself. Andneither can be adequately
explained without reference to theoriginal rise of alphabetic
reason in classical antiquity.
We tend to see the Middle Ages as a time when religionruled with
an iron fist, dominating European social andpolitical institutions
and occupying the central place in cul-tural life. Compared with
what came after, perhaps, thismight be true, and even compared with
the advances in sec-ular learning that came before, during the
“first enlighten-ment” of the Classical and Hellenistic ages. Yet,
when wecompare them with the age before reason, the Middle Agestake
on a startling new appearance. The unquestioned andconfident
polytheism that lives in what scholars call “pri-mary” oral
culture, a comfortably holistic world in whichmatter and spirit are
the same, makes the faith of the churchin the Middle Ages come
across as crabbed andoverassertive—often strident, at times even
desperate, in itsinsistent supernaturalism. The real age of
religion hadalready passed with the demise of primary orality.
Faith itself is but a vestigial and epistemologically
insecurerump of that formerly undisputed dominance, one that
pre-vailed in the West as education crumbled, popular
literacyreceded in favor of scribal or craft literacy monopolized
bythe church, and “secondary” oral patterns reasserted them-selves
in popular culture.
the longest war
the struggle between Athens and Jerusalem lastedthroughout the
Middle Ages and beyond. Oral cultures fold
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social control into their orality. Literacy put belief on
thetable, which traditionally means that social control has to
becoupled with thought control. Another word for that is“church.”
Hence the persecution of pagans, Jews, andphilosophers in the West,
Byzantium, and Islam. Alarmed bythe terrifying social implications
of free inquiry, medievalman was a thought-control freak on
steroids. (Medievalwoman, perhaps, not so much.)
If each of these cultures represents its own unique blend oforal
and literate cultural patterns, they illustrate as well howother
factors such as geopolitics and cultural identity comeinto play in
deciding how the clash between faith and reasonplays out within a
culture. In all civilizations that have joinedthe long tug-of-war
between Athens and Jerusalem, bothsides have always had their
militant proponents, who gain orlose traction as changing
circumstances favor or workagainst them. Secular, rational inquiry
has generally flour-ished during “golden ages” of prosperity and
expansion, andthen declined as changing circumstances gave strict
fideiststhe upper hand.
Only in the wealthy and ascendant Arab caliphate,
wherescientific inquiry began as a translation movement fromGreek
sources, was real scientific progress made during theMiddle Ages.
Supported by powerful patrons, scientistsworking in Arabic
accomplished the only original scientificwork of the Middle Ages,
when the collapse of elementaryeducation in the West had pushed
alphabetic writing, like itsconsonantal forebears, into the realm
of what Havelockcalled “craft” literacy, the familiar scribal or
priestly elite.
Yet the Arabs faced huge challenges in capitalizing onthese
advances, which relied on concerted government sup-port rather than
on the work of independent thinkers andwriters as in classical and
Hellenistic Greece. Arabic sciencewas never able to gain traction
in the larger culture, and asthe caliphate declined so did its
spirit of inquiry, whichcould not long outlast its original
manifestation as a gov-ernment-sponsored translation movement.
Medieval Arabic
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intellectual culture had some towering giants, but they lefttiny
footprints that peter out in the sand. In distinct contrastwith
someone like Anaximander, the most original thinkerswriting in
Arabic—the astronomer and geographer AlKhwarizmi, the philosopher
Averroës, and the historiogra-pher Ibn Khaldun come to mind—had few
if any successorsand made little impact until rediscovered in
alphabetictranslations. Writing is one thing. Reading is
another.
The eclipse of Arabic science has always challenged histo-rians.
Many historical circumstances, including the massinvasions of Arab
lands by the Turks and Mongols, no doubtcontributed to the decline
of science in the Arab world, butcommunication technology must be
included among them.Arab astronomical observations pointed to a new
under-standing of the cosmos. But it would take a Copernicus—using
not just efficient Arabic numerals and the Latin alpha-bet but also
the borrowed technology of print—to capitalizeon the Arabs’
observations by achieving, articulating, andspreading that new
understanding.
needham’s question
print technology came to the West from China, whichalso gave us
other technological advances, including gun-powder. But technology
and science are not the same thing,and the Chinese, like the Arabs,
were never able to capital-ize on novelty by conceptualizing it and
spreading that con-ceptualization in written form, directly and
unambiguously.Chinese inquiry shares two other telltale qualities
withArabic science: the presence of concerted state support, andan
associated emphasis on what was “useful.” In contrast, inclassical
times at least, the alphabetic Greeks were independ-ent thinkers
and writers interested in theoretical understand-ing rather than
practical application. The great SinologistJoseph Needham gave an
impressive list of Chinese “scien-tific” accomplishments, but each
one represents new tech-nology, not new understanding.
the coming classics revolution134
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Needham famously asked why the Scientific Revolutiondidn’t
happen in China. By now we’re in a position to sug-gest an answer
to Needham’s question—the same one, infact, that Needham himself
offered: Chinese thought neversplit the world into matter and
spirit, retaining a holistic out-look that braided the two
together. Never having unsettledthemselves with the idea of natural
explanation, the Chinesenever took refuge in triumphalist
supernaturalism; withoutthe threatening presence of free rational
inquiry, Chinadeveloped nothing resembling the Western tradition
ofmonotheistic faith. As I suggested in Part I, we can also
lookdeeper by asking whether the roots of holism in Chinesethought
may lie in the holism of Chinese writing, and even,perhaps, in the
holism of Chinese language.
China has now been alphabetic for more than fifty years.While it
won’t do to ascribe all cultural change in China tothe use of
alphabetic writing, it also seems hard to ignore theconfluence of
the alphabet’s arrival with the rapid changesthat have overtaken
the world’s most populous nation. As inIndia, where difficult
scripts hindered the rise of a nationallanguage and the use of
alphabetic English has cut across lin-guistic boundaries, China’s
economic boom has relied onalphabetic writing in very basic ways.
And also like India,previously multiform and holistic religious
practices havebegun moving towards Western-style monotheism
predi-cated on a split between matter and spirit (as reflected
bothin conversion and in modifications to indigenous
traditions).
critical masses
needham’s question begs a follow-up: why did theScientific
Revolution take so long to happen in the West? AsEric Havelock
perceived, the alphabet had to acquire twopowerful partners,
quantification and replication, beforetruly modern science could
emerge. A place number system(including zero) came to the
alphabetic West from the Arabsin the twelfth century, and the
technique of printing on paper
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came from China in the late fifteenth. (Havelock wasscathing
when it came to the cumbersome Greek system ofmathematical
notation, comparing it unfavorably with othersystems, which gives
the lie to those critics who have accusedhim of “extreme
Hellenocentrism.”)
This part of my synthesis also draws on the brilliant workof
scholar Elizabeth Eisenstein on the impact of print tech-nology,
particularly on the course of the Renaissance, theReformation, the
Scientific Revolution, and theEnlightenment. The new experimental
method in science, forexample, could not have flourished without
the possibility ofwidespread replication of results, which was
simply impossi-ble in the manuscript age. But the mass production
of inex-pensive, identical texts, along with identical maps,
charts,tables, and illustrations has been absolutely essential
tomodernity in all its forms. Only now does rhetoric, that
ven-erable hybrid of oral and literate culture, disappear from
itslong-held place at the center of education, to be replaced bythe
familiar, and more fully literate, print-based array ofindividual
disciplines in the humanities and sciences.
As Havelock and Eisenstein both stressed, for optimaleffect
reading must be automatic, fluid, and unconscious.Handwriting,
however meticulous, is always idiosyncratic.The printing press
enhanced the fluidity of reading immea-surably simply by
standardizing letter-shapes. (Calligraphy isthe enemy of literacy,
Havelock memorably asserted. Thisdoes not make calligraphy less
beautiful or sophisticatedthan print—quite the opposite, in
fact—just less easily read.Havelock argued further that a prominent
calligraphic tradi-tion is a bellwether for narrow literacy, which
would seem tobe borne out by the Chinese and Arabic examples, as
well asby that of the West during the Middle Ages.)
With the possible exception of the Greco-Roman period,most
reading before print was voiced, with people readingout loud to a
group or even to themselves. Print turned read-ing once and for all
into something that happens inside yourhead, opening up new
private, personal vistas for countless
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millions, including growing numbers of women readers, whoformed
the earliest readership for novels. (Men were sup-posed to read
about science, history, and, increasingly, poli-tics, as newspapers
arrived in tandem with that other greatboon to literacy, the coffee
shop.)
The long sweep of Western history since the advent ofprint
reveals a continuing pattern—messy but discernable—of secular surge
followed by religious reaction: Renaissancefollowed by Reformation,
Scientific Revolution byInquisition, Enlightenment by Romanticism,
SecularHumanism by Religious Right. More to the point, with
eachcycle in the pattern, the surges have gained in momentumwhile
the reactions have diminished in momentu