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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?
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?
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Fuck, do I have a brain tumour or something?
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I could believe that the wider dissemination of printed information encouraged development of more complex ideas of identity and individuality, since it allowed access to a greater and somewhat less culturally filtered range of information. But that's a different thing entirely.
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For centuries the clergy wouldn't let the populace have access to the bible other than what was read at mass. People lived in communities and their minds were guided by the church, the landlord and by extent, the king.
It seems to me that the first parliaments in the Middle Ages/Renaissance (to the exception of the Icelandic Thing) started sprouting round about the time of Nuremberg...
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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"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.
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He talks about this whole debate in LOTS of detail. Am I sure what I think? No. I tend to agree that individual thought is inevitable, with or without language. Each person is unique and his/her view is subjective -- he/she always views things individually, even if it is a pictoral view rather than a vocal one.
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I think assuming people lacked individuality until they could escape into a book is ridiculous, particularly if you consider that until relatively modern times, only a small proportion of the population of (say) Britain, the US and Western Europe were actually literate.
Very easy to say "oh those poor primitive people living in olden times had no chance to explore who they were", rather harder to apply the same to peoples of only a few centuries ago.
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