(no subject)

[gothwalk]

Here's an interesting blog entry. Quoting one part: "The invention of the phonetic alphabet changed us from a primarily oral culture to a primarily literate culture (starting in ancient Greek times, and accelerated by Gutenberg). The effect of this transition was, among other things, to create private, silent reading (via books), hence private ideas and therefore personal identity and individuality." (The blogger in question doesn't state this, btw, it's a po statement from a class.)

That seems to imply that personal identity and individuality didn't exist before that. While one part of my mind is calling that nonsense, I'm wary of applying modern ideas to history - we have enough trouble these days thinking in a feudal model, let alone older forms. What do people - particularly the history buffs out there - think of the idea?

Comments

[gothwalk.livejournal.com]

To say literacy == individuality is to imply that the illiterate cannot be capable of individual thought.

I think it could be argued that individual thought is engendered by living in a literate society; you wouldn't necessarily have to be literate yourself.

(Not supporting this argument yet, just devil's advocating...)

I'm also not sure what's intended by the term individuality here - it's obvious, I think, that humanity wasn't a hive mind before writing. Perhaps they're talking more about perceived individuality, rather than felt indivuality. That is, we can now speak of Einstein's Theory of Relativity - dealing with the individual Einstein - but not Bartholemew's Theory of Rubbing Two Sticks Together To Get Fire, because nobody remembers who Bartholemew was. So we say "early humans" - not an individual.

Someone might point to legendary heroes as a counterpoint to this, but I think that they are in fact conglomerates, as it were, of several real people. There's a theory knocking around somewhere that Odin was a real man, living somewhere east of Germany in or around the 6th Century, but I don't think all the deeds ascribed to Odin-the-God/Hero can be ascribed to Odin-the-Goth.

(Yeah, I know I'm probably a bit off with the Goth thing, but I couldn't resist).

[iresprite.livejournal.com]

Mm. An idea that occurred to me, similar to teapot_farm, is that a more personal and complex sense of identity flourished because of the printed word.

Certainly, in the early days of Israel, there was very much a sense of corporate identity- the sins of the one would affect everyone. I'm dragging this all from my course in Understanding the Bible, which had an interesting historical perspective on the people who developed this relationship with Yahweh.

I think there has always been a sense of the individual, but the extent to which the individual can isolate him/herself from the rest of the corporate body depends on how dependent (s)he is on the oral medium for the proliferation of ideas.

This last part is me wildly gesticulating and obviously not basing it on anything but good old Gedanken.

[sciamachy.livejournal.com]

Ah, but it could be said that the Jewish religion (and indeed all others) was invented as a way to politically unite a number of disparate tribes with different identities themselves, faced with a technologically superior civilisation (the Philistines). Together, the tribes were stronger & continued to survive in a climate where it was considered normal to wipe out one's enemies to the last man, woman or child (See the Hebrews vs the people of Ai for example). It could be said that without the threat of an angry God making life impossible for them, and the potential rewards of a happy God making their lives easier, they would have reverted to a more common tribal structure.

[iresprite.livejournal.com]

*grins* Many things could easily be said, but we'll never know the full extent of their veracity.

In any case, I don't tend to think religion comes out of politics. I think politics naturally emerges from any group dynamic, and religion is an incubator for that. Religion is the bus stop. Politics is scrambling to get inline so you get on the bus first. Faith is knowing there will always be an open seat for you.

[sciamachy.livejournal.com]

I think the thing is, as far as Historians are concerned, oral traditions are not fully-valid historical documents, being as they are subject to exaggeration; was Fionn Mac Cumhail actually so large he could build a causeway to Scotland, for example.

So individuals and their exploits in an oral society can only every be legendary tales, not necessarily real people. As such they can only really talk about the society itself from its detritus, the things found by archaeologists & so on - they can't talk with much academic rigour about individuals within that society without qualifying their ideas by calling them theories and using the word "probaby" all the time.

For example, Birmingham was probably founded by a Saxon man named Boerm, Birm, Brom, or a variant thereof, and would have been his family's (the Birmings') home or ham. Nothing else is known about him except that he had an outpost, or graf, at Bromsgrove (Boerm's graf).

However, just because historians can only talk about individuals in a literate society, doesn't preclude there having been individuals in a non-literate oral society. If anything individuality may have been decreased by the increase in mass-media started by literacy - to quote NMA's "Deadeye" (and further illustrate the principle myself!): "To the thoughts of the many from the minds of the few". If there's less possibility for memes to transmit from person to person, there's a greater prospect of divergent memes evolving, much as isolated populations of iguanas or birds diverge from their parent species.

[gothwalk.livejournal.com]

However, just because historians can only talk about individuals in a literate society, doesn't preclude there having been individuals in a non-literate oral society.

I'm not saying they weren't there, you see. Just that they became invisible - un-individual - after their deaths, with their ideas and actions being assigned to "the people who were here before us", or to legendary characters.

Today, when we consider an idea, we very often consider as well the individual who came up with the idea. If that person (is rich|is famous|is reliable|has had good ideas before), we're likely, rightly or wrongly, to give the idea more consideration. That's their individuality, there - what we see, not what they feel, because I'm fairly certain that everyone except very small children feels individual. You see where I'm going?

[sciamachy.livejournal.com]

Yes, you're on about our perception of their individuality outside of living memory, and there, you're quite correct. Check out Guy Debord's "Society of the Spectacle":

"In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.

The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart,an object of mere contemplation. The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living. "

- that's the first bit of it. What he's on about throughout the book is that our perceptions have become shaped purely by mediated images, spectacles, he calls them. These spectacles are static images in literature, TV, film, or computer-based media. As such they tell a partial story that is in no way near the completion & truth of the thing itself - like Magritte's "Ceci n'est pas une pomme". Despite this incompletion, we accept the mediated form as the authoritative version, thus if there is no mediated form at all, it as good as never existed. Debord sets himself up as the enemy of this society, seeing the Spectacle as the enemy of all original thought or deeds, a tacit agreement between consumers and producers to accept a lie - and one of the main lies being "You need more of these lies - do nothing yourself; merely consume!" *shudders*

There's a whole book of it, and he's not just on about that - the Spectacle's influence spreads throughout every aspect of modern culture. It makes fascinating reading.