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0 pointsdalbasal5y ago0 comments

Re: history.

I agree on the power of text as a technology, and the role it played. China & the Roman Republic/Empire are good examples of this.

But.... I think it's worth remembering that we lost something as we gained something. We tend to severely underestimate oral "technologies." Scholarship existed before writing. History, geography, etc. Text spent centuries or millennia as a peripheral media. It was mostly used for accounting in Mesopotamia & the Levant for thousands if years. Sometimes for religious, magical or political reasons. It wasn't a major medium for philosophy, storytelling, history or such until much later... So writing didn't really play much of a "knowledge accumulation" role until pretty late in the game.

I suspect that it developed so slowly because oral traditions were hard to beat. They had their own advantages. A song was an efficient way to learn history.

An important, if subtle, fact is that mediums are not just for communication. They're modes of thought. Text and speech will yield different ideas. Mathematics are a huge example. Ways of conveying mathematical concepts (eg negative numbers) enables us to conceive of mathematical concepts. If you write an essay, the ideas/conclusions you will have will be different. Even the difference between a scroll and a codex (book) can make a big difference. That difference is evident if you compare the modern practice of Judaism (scroll tradition) to Islam and Christianity (book traditions).

Socrates/Plato give us a nominally dividing line between the oral and written approaches. Socrates may have even been illiterate, but either way, his main medium was oral. In fact, most Greek philosophy came from the "mostly oral" period. This is why Plato, Aristotle, (Diogenes?) and others of that generation become so important. They're the link. They wrote down ideas created by oralists. This is how they could be accessed by macedonians, Romans and such.

I wonder if the charming, curious style we associate with the likes of Socrates or Diogenes is inherent to oralism. Compare them to later, literary philosophers... The literalists are far more grim. Senecca comes to mind. Even Aristotle. He's not as grim as roman philosophers, but he is a lot more serious. The oralists were playful... and greek/roman philosophy (imo) declines as writing overtakes oral traditions.

Socrates' thoughts "On the Forgetfulness that Comes with Writing" are recorded (tellingly) by Plato. It's not Plato's best piece, but very relevant to our times. If you memorise instead of using text, all your knowledge is inside your head. On paper, ideas are lifeless. Living ideas inside your head interact with each other, refine, create new ideas. When we convey them to one another, we can ask questions, read expressions, etc.

We don't just have books, we have the internet and pocket computers to access it. Socrates' point applies even more now.

One relevant example relevant to our times is "shades of uncertainty." Say you read an article about the economy, GDP growth, unemployment & such. A lot of that information is uncertain, either inherently or at this point in time. There may be dissident positions. That's usually lost in text but not in conversation.

I definitely think a short conversation about this year's economic data is more informative and deep than an article by that same economist.

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jimbokun5y ago

> We tend to severely underestimate oral "technologies." Scholarship existed before writing.

This comes up a lot in Bible scholarship.

Many modern people assume the words of Jesus, for example, were lost to a game of telephone before being written down years later in the form we have today.

But conveying the teachers words with true fidelity to what he said was very important to a rabbi's students, and they had a culture and techniques to make sure they did this with high reliability.

dalbasalOP5y ago

I agree on the principle, but not the example :)

Year 0 in Judea (and Rome, Damascus...) was a pretty literate period and literacy was (the story of jesus confirms) already a religious requirement... bar mitzva or an ancestor of that custom. Bar mitzva translates roughly to "eligible to uphold commandments." You need to read for that, or so the custom implies.

I'm sure that most of the religious/rabbinical tradition was still oral, and that rabbis did a lot of oral teaching. But, I think high fidelity oral "technology" was already heavily diluted, especially in judaic culture. Scriptural worship starts very early. It's hard to say when exactly, but it had to have happened while hebrew/canaanite was still spoken in the region. Aramaic had overtaken hebrew circa 400-500 BC. From that point, high fidelity transmission was done with writing.

Also, the multicultural/multilingual/multiregional context makes it unlikely that a high fidelity oral tradition existed in early christianity. IMO, the new testament was almost certainly compiled from earlier written sources... and oral telephone. I mean, the new testament isn't even in the same language as the sermons.

The same can be said about mishnah/talmud... the jewish contemporary to the new testament. Traditionally, it is seen as a compilation of jewish oral traditions, received at mount sinai and maintained with fidelity for two thousand years. Realistically, there were earlier written versions of (eg) Rabbi Hillel's teachings available to the scribes who compiled the Mishnah.

The traditional reasoning for writing the "oral torah" (resulting in talmud/mishna) was that oral traditions were dying, and that writing was necessary for fidelity. Multiregionalism, multilingualism and such were to blame... and the christians would have had even more of those problems. Fewer, more dispersed. No institutions. No common language. No old traditions. It's possible that there was a tradition of reciting Jesus' sermons, but that would be kind of culturally out of place. I think it's pretty unlikely. If there was, I think the new testament would have been compiled in aramaic.

Also... there are quite a few convergences between new testament stories and other (broadly termed) rabbinical accounts from the period. John the Baptist has his own religion, for example, and in their books you get some of the same stories, but with John in the Jesus role. I suspect there were many others, but have no modern adherents.

Judaism of that period aggressively trimmed out any new or recent "revelatory" writings. New prophets, new conversations directly with god. That's what many of the "apocrypha" are. From then on, religious scripture needed to be wisdom received from oral traditions, old sages and stuff. No revelation.

These, to me, strongly suggests late 2nd temple judaism was no better at oral tradition than us. That said, you can have conceptual fidelity without having word-by-word fidelity. When Jesus paraphrased Hillel, he was reaching across 400 years of oral (probably/mostly) tradition. Christians doing the same thing 200 years later probably had that level of fidelity.

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