The Information (6 page)

The writing system at the opposite extreme took the longest to emerge: the alphabet, one symbol for one minimal sound. The alphabet is the most reductive, the most subversive of all scripts.

In all the languages of earth there is only one word for
alphabet
(
alfabet
,
alfabeto
,
). The alphabet was invented only once. All known alphabets, used today or found buried on tablets and stone, descend from the same original ancestor, which arose near the eastern littoral of the Mediterranean Sea, sometime not much before 1500 BCE, in a region that became a politically unstable crossroads of culture, covering Palestine, Phoenicia, and Assyria. To the east lay the great civilization of Mesopotamia, with its cuneiform script already a millennium old; down the shoreline to the southwest lay Egypt, where hieroglyphics developed simultaneously and independently. Traders traveled, too, from Cyprus and Crete, bringing their own incompatible systems. With glyphs from Minoan, Hittite, and Anatolian, it made for a symbolic stew. The ruling priestly classes were invested in their writing systems. Whoever owned the scripts owned the laws and the rites. But self-preservation had to compete with the desire for rapid communication. The scripts were
conservative; the new technology was pragmatic. A stripped-down symbol system, just twenty-two signs, was the innovation of Semitic peoples in or near Palestine. Scholars naturally look to Kiriath-sepher, translatable as “city of the book,” and Byblos, “city of papyrus,” but no one knows exactly, and no one can know. The paleographer has a unique bootstrap problem. It is only writing that makes its own history possible. The foremost twentieth-century authority on the alphabet, David Diringer, quoted an earlier scholar: “There never was a man who could sit down and say: ‘Now I am going to be the first man to write.’ ”
^♦

The alphabet spread by contagion. The new technology was both the virus and the vector of transmission. It could not be monopolized, and it could not be suppressed. Even children could learn these few, lightweight, semantically empty letters. Divergent routes led to alphabets of the Arab world and of northern Africa; to Hebrew and Phoenician; across central Asia, to Brahmi and related Indian script; and to Greece. The new civilization arising there brought the alphabet to a high degree of perfection. Among others, the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets followed along.

Greece had not needed the alphabet to create literature—a fact that scholars realized only grudgingly, beginning in the 1930s. That was when Milman Parry, a structural linguist who studied the living tradition of oral epic poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina, proposed that the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
not only could have been but must have been composed and sung without benefit of writing. The meter, the formulaic redundancy, in effect the very poetry of the great works served first and foremost to aid memory. Its incantatory power made of the verse a time capsule, able to transmit a virtual encyclopedia of culture across generations. His argument was first controversial and then overwhelmingly persuasive—but only because the poems
were
written down, sometime in the sixth or seventh century BCE. This act—the transcribing of the Homeric epics—echoes through the ages. “It was something like a thunder-clap in human history, which the bias of familiarity has converted into the rustle of papers on a desk,”
^♦
said Eric
Havelock, a British classical scholar who followed Parry. “It constituted an intrusion into culture, with results that proved irreversible. It laid the basis for the destruction of the oral way of life and the oral modes of thought.”

The transcription of Homer converted this great poetry into a new medium and made of it something unplanned: from a momentary string of words created every time anew by the rhapsode and fading again even as it echoed in the listener’s ear, to a fixed but portable line on a papyrus sheet. Whether this alien, dry mode would suit the creation of poetry and song remained to be seen. In the meantime the written word helped more mundane forms of discourse: petitions to the gods, statements of law, and economic agreements. Writing also gave rise to discourse about discourse. Written texts became objects of a new sort of interest.

But how was one to speak about them? The words to describe the elements of this discourse did not exist in the lexicon of Homer. The language of an oral culture had to be wrenched into new forms; thus a new vocabulary emerged. Poems were seen to have
topics
—the word previously meaning “place.” They possessed
structure
, by analogy with buildings. They were made of
plot
and
diction
. Aristotle could now see the works of the bards as “representations of life,” born of the natural impulse toward imitation that begins in childhood. But he had also to account for other writing with other purposes—the Socratic dialogues, for example, and medical or scientific treatises—and this general type of work, including, presumably, his own, “happens, up to the present day, to have no name.”
^♦
Under construction was a whole realm of abstraction, forcibly divorced from the concrete. Havelock described it as cultural warfare, a new consciousness and a new language at war with the old consciousness and the old language: “Their conflict produced essential and permanent contributions to the vocabulary of all abstract thought. Body and space, matter and motion, permanence and change, quality and quantity, combination and separation, are among the counters of common currency now available.”
^♦

Aristotle himself, son of the physician to the king of Macedonia and an avid, organized thinker, was attempting to systematize knowledge. The persistence of writing made it possible to impose structure on what was known about the world and, then, on what was known about knowing. As soon as one could set words down, examine them, look at them anew the next day, and consider their meaning, one became a philosopher, and the philosopher began with a clean slate and a vast project of definition to undertake. Knowledge could begin to pull itself up by the bootstraps. For Aristotle the most basic notions were worth recording and were necessary to record:

These are statements not about experience but about the uses of language to structure experience. In the same way, the Greeks created
categories
(this word originally meaning “accusations” or “predictions”) as a means of classifying animal species, insects, and fishes. In turn, they could then classify ideas. This was a radical, alien mode of thought. Plato had warned that it would repel most people:

For “the multitude” we may understand “the preliterate.” They “lose themselves and wander amid the multiplicities of multifarious things,”
^♦
declared Plato, looking back on the oral culture that still surrounded him. They “have no vivid pattern in their souls.”

And what vivid pattern was that? Havelock focused on the process of converting, mentally, from a “prose of narrative” to a “prose of ideas”; organizing experience in terms of categories rather than events; embracing the discipline of abstraction. He had a word in mind for this process, and the word was
thinking
. This was the discovery, not just of the self, but of the
thinking
self—in effect, the true beginning of consciousness.

In our world of ingrained literacy, thinking and writing seem scarcely related activities. We can imagine the latter depending on the former, but surely not the other way around: everyone thinks, whether or not they write. But Havelock was right. The written word—the persistent word—was a prerequisite for conscious thought as we understand it. It was the trigger for a wholesale, irreversible change in the human psyche—
psyche
being the word favored by Socrates/Plato as they struggled to understand. Plato, as Havelock puts it,

Taking the next step on the road of abstraction, Aristotle deployed categories and relationships in a regimented order to develop a symbolism of reasoning: logic—from
,
logos
, the not-quite-translatable word from which so much flows, meaning “speech” or “reason” or “discourse” or, ultimately, just “word.”

Logic might be imagined to exist independent of writing—syllogisms can be spoken as well as written—but it did not. Speech is too fleeting to allow for analysis. Logic descended from the written word, in Greece as well as India and China, where it developed independently.
^♦
Logic turns
the act of abstraction into a tool for determining what is true and what is false: truth can be discovered in words alone, apart from concrete experience. Logic takes its form in chains: sequences whose members connect one to another. Conclusions follow from premises. These require a degree of constancy. They have no power unless people can examine and evaluate them. In contrast, an oral narrative proceeds by accretion, the words passing by in a line of parade past the viewing stand, briefly present and then gone, interacting with one another via memory and association. There are no syllogisms in Homer. Experience is arranged in terms of events, not categories. Only with writing does narrative structure come to embody sustained rational argument. Aristotle crossed another level, by seeing the study of such argument—not just the use of argument, but its study—as a tool. His logic expresses an ongoing self-consciousness about the words in which they are composed. When Aristotle unfurls premises and conclusions—
If it is possible for no man to be a horse, it is also admissible for no horse to be a man; and if it is admissible for no garment to be white, it is also admissible for nothing white to be a garment. For if any white thing must be a garment, then some garment will necessarily be white
^♦
—he neither requires nor implies any personal experience of horses, garments, or colors. He has departed that realm. Yet he claims through the manipulation of words to create knowledge anyway, and a superior brand of knowledge at that.

“We know that formal logic is the invention of Greek culture after it had interiorized the technology of alphabetic writing,” Walter Ong says—it is true of India and China as well—“and so made a permanent part of its noetic resources the kind of thinking that alphabetic writing made possible.”
^♦
For evidence Ong turns to fieldwork of the Russian psychologist Aleksandr Romanovich Luria among illiterate peoples in remote Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia in the 1930s.
^♦
Luria found striking differences between illiterate and even slightly literate subjects, not in what they knew, but in how they thought. Logic implicates symbolism directly: things are members of classes; they possess qualities,
which are abstracted and generalized. Oral people lacked the categories that become second nature even to illiterate individuals in literate cultures: for example, for geometrical shapes. Shown drawings of circles and squares, they named them as “plate, sieve, bucket, watch, or moon” and “mirror, door, house, apricot drying board.” They could not, or would not, accept logical syllogisms. A typical question: