Information Technology and Its Discontents
From Nicholas Ostler’s Empires of the Word:
Reliance on language in its written form was seen as crippling, and not giving true control over linguistic content. Hence this proverb:
[…some Sanskrit here…]
Knowledge in a book — money in another’s hand.
In this ancient India was like many cultures as widely divided as the Druids of Gaul in the first century BC and modern Guatemala (where Mayans remark that outsiders note things down not in order to remember them, but rather so as not to have to remember them). Even Socrates recalled a story that when the god Thoth first offered the craft of writing to the king of Egypt, the king was not impressed: “it will set forgetfulness in the minds of learners for lack of practice in memory”. The doyens of Indian learning took this undeniable side effect of book learning very much to heart.
Even though the language had undergone a full phonological analysis by the fifth century BC, which was even incorporated into the official order of letters in the alphabet, reliance on written texts for important (especially spiritually important) documents was decried. Hence another saying:
[…more Sanskrit here…]
The sellers of the Vedas, the misreaders of the Vedas,
the writers of the Vedas, all go on the path to hell.
Nothing really to add. Just throwing this into the mix of “do computers make us dumb?” arguments.
Yes, absolutely: Sanskrit is the most lovely and complex of languages, capable of incredible nuance and depth. But as a written language it is a complete ungodly bear: the Mahabhasya gives you, “language is a crutch for the obtuse.” So when they write it, the script actually tries to mimic the sandhi, so you may think you know your vocab: but good luck identifying the words in situ.
— Sanjay · Sep 25, 11:01 AM · #
In the 1920s I forget who did a study of illiterate poets in the Balkans, and how they were able to not only recite from memory but riff around huge, Iliad-length works of metrical, rhymed verse. And basically nobody who was literate could do it.
— Noah Millman · Sep 25, 11:05 AM · #
Yeah. I’ve sat with preists who could recite the Vedas (syllabically) backwards.
But I think they were literate….
— Sanjay · Sep 25, 11:18 AM · #
It sounds like Noah is talking about the work of Milman Perry, who put forward the hypothesis, based on studies of oral poetry in the Balkans, that the Homeric poems were composed in an oral tradition, not just handed down by oral tradition (which is an undisputed fact known since antiquity). After an early death (1935) his collected papers were published under the title “The Making of Homeric Verse,” and though I’m not an expert, I have to think it’s the most influential book of Homeric scholarship in the 20th century — although even today (I think) many Homer scholars are not “oralists.”
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milman_Parry ]
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeric_scholarship#Oral_Theory ]
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeridae ]
Odd that he didn’t remember the name MILMAN Perry…. Is there a word for this relationship? It’s not really an eponym.
About the substance of the post, I remember having similar thoughts about the secondary / partly malign status of book-learning in education, about 15 or 16 years old, and being very pleased to discover the “myth of Thoth” section in Phaedrus. Don’t know whether I’d agree now — I haven’t thought about that for years.
— Paul · Sep 25, 12:13 PM · #
Actually, I’m sure now I disagree. As I recall, my reason (as a teenager) for disparaging education from books went something like this. All real learning must ultimately be the product of thinking for one’s self, or perhaps via personal relationship with a teacher (as in Socratic dialogue / elenchus); in other words, as concretely part of an intellectual community. Books preserve, extend, make more accessible or otherwise facilitate this process, but they are merely derivative and, to they extent they hinder or obscure “true” education, they have a bad effect. (Okay, so maybe this doesn’t make sense, but I was only fifteen.)
But this ignores the immense benefits of intellectual tradition — e.g. the tradition of Aristotelian philosophy (a la Alasdair MacIntyre); the tradition of English poetry; scientific inquiry; Homeric scholarship — which are necessarily slowly cumulative, and are only possible through writing.
P.S. More about Milman Perry. Perry’s thesis was elaborated & popularized after his death by his student Albert Lord in a book called “The Singer of Tales.” Also, the Homeridae were only the most famous bardic singers of Homer. In general, epic bards were called rhapsodes.
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singer_of_Tales ]
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhapsode ]
— Paul · Sep 25, 01:04 PM · #
Paul: thank-you!
— Noah Millman · Sep 25, 01:11 PM · #
I know of someone who has the entirety of Paradise Lost memorized. But he learned it by reading it.
— Freddie · Sep 25, 01:49 PM · #
This is a common cross-cultural concept, from Plato’s pharmekon to al-Ghazali’s da/dawa.
Writing is both the disease and and the cure.
— matoko_chan · Sep 25, 02:51 PM · #
Sanjay, that is true of most oral tradition languages.
In arabic, there are 77 different words for love.
— matoko_chan · Sep 25, 02:53 PM · #
I have been thinking a lot about this in the context of photochemical vs digital photography. There is no doubt that digital photography has vastly expanded the reach of photography, but it is also (I think) altered the way we think the world looks; ie a noisy, poorly exposed snap from a cameraphone posted to twitter is “reality”, a 4“x5” chrome is artifice.
Aaton recently came out with a 2-perf 35mm camera called “Penelope” (2 perf 35mm lets you shoot 2.23 on spherical lenses.) A friend asked me to go halves on one and go to Beirut to shoot some war footage, the premise being that people think that war is what they see when it’s shot on a DVX100 (or similar) and some nice juicy technoscope footage would blow people’s minds.The tools we use matter, and no doubt something has been lost in trading speaking/listening for writing/reading as our primary method of creating, warehousing, and transmitting ideas. But I don’t think computers are making us dumber any more than I think digital tools are making us poorer photographers. It is making for a lot more bad photos, but that’s a different problem.
— Tony Comstock · Sep 25, 03:31 PM · #
The thing the interwebs have done, is destroy the need for “traditional wisdom”, and the concept of the “sage”.
That is why old people had stature in tribal society.
Now google can make anyone a sage.
But like Tony points out, there are probably more bad sages (like bad photos) now, but this a function of proportionality.
— matoko_chan · Sep 25, 03:57 PM · #
Sanjay,
Identifying the sandhi is easy — as long as you’ve memorized the grammatical sutras.
— Jaldhar · Sep 25, 04:12 PM · #
“But like Tony points out, there are probably more bad sages (like bad photos) now, but this a function of proportionality.”
Mostly, but not only.
— Tony Comstock · Sep 25, 04:19 PM · #
It should be noted that alongside the distrust of writing in Hindu culture, there are some traditions explicitly based on the written word. Currently it is the festival of Navaratri dedicated to the Goddess Durga. The ritual of this festival involves a text called the Devi Mahatmya. At the moment I am hand writing a copy with a special ink, quill and arrangement of the words on the page. (If I had any artistic skills it would be illustrated too.) When the manuscript is complete it will become an object of worship, considered to be the living presence of the Goddess.
— Jaldhar · Sep 25, 04:26 PM · #
Not always, Jaldhar — in fact it’s not infrequently intentionally ambiguous; there’s a whole art form to that (Tamil kind of sort of has the same form but the sandhi is less ambiguous). It doesn’t help that the liasons are made explicit and that initial -a can be removed based on what precedes (so, for example, in the Vishnu Sahasranama you have “unblinking” — eyes always watching — in a way that could as easily be read “eyes closed” — meditative (nimishas/ animishas for the in crowd here).
— Sanjay · Sep 25, 04:26 PM · #
Jaldhar, we Iyengars might disagree as to whether Navaratri is nine days for Parvati. Besides, most people will explicilty worship [Devi as] Gayathri for Vijaya Dasami: you’ll see everybody bringing schoolbooks to the kovil.
— Sanjay · Sep 25, 04:29 PM · #
Sanjay,
Point taken about the intentional ambiguous use of sandhi. This playful misuse of formal rules reminds me of obfuscation as an art form amongst programmers. But in most cases applying sandhi is straightforward if you know the underlying principles.
Btw I’m Gujarati and Smarta so our Navaratri customs are no doubt quite different to yours,
— Jaldhar · Sep 25, 05:05 PM · #
“it’s not infrequently intentionally ambiguous; there’s a whole art form to that”
This becomes less tenable when meaning is parsed by machines.
— Tony Comstock · Sep 25, 05:25 PM · #
A Literary Excursion: from Kutath by C.J.Cherryh:
Humans, he had observed, recalled things in time-ahead. Imagination, they called this trait; and since they committed the insanity of remembering the future—Suth had been tempted to laughter when he first comprehended this insanity—the whole species was apt to irrational actions. The future, not existing, was remembered by each individual differently, and therefore they were apt to do individually irrational things. It was terrifying to know this tendency in one’s allies—and worse yet not to know it, and not to know how it operated.
They might do anything. The mri suffered from similar future-memory. Presumably two such species even thought they comprehended one another… if two species’ future-memories could possibly coincide in any points; and that possibility threatened to unbalance a sane mind.
This was one most profound difference between regul and human, that regul remembered only the past, which was observable and accurate as those who remembered it. Humans accustomed to the factual instabilities of their perceptions, even lied, which was to give deliberate inaccuracy to memory, past or future. They existed in complete flux; their memories periodically purged themselves of facts: this was perhaps a necessary reflex in a species which remembered things that had not yet happened and which falsified what had occurred or might occur.
Disrespect of temporal order; this was the sum of it. Anytihng might alter in them, past, present, future. They forgot and wrote things on paper to remember them; but they might not always write the truth; and the possibility that they might accurately imagine the truth… Suth backed his mind from that precipice, refusing the leap.
Humans had not experienced disorientation in the killing of a regul reverend with the accumulated experience of nearly three hundred years. It was as if they could forget all this information, not valuing it—perhaps because they could change whatever they pleased, or imagine backward as well as forward.
— Marshall · Sep 27, 12:31 AM · #
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