When Cultures Elide
Ah, the Internet, the possibility of total satisfaction of any desire that doesn’t actually require the physical presence of another person. After the “he,” “we,” “me,” and “gee” generations, the “e” generation.
What is culture? Culture is that which binds a people together. Culture is the framework, the structure, the multiple dimension of detail, ritual, history, technology, the themes and memes by which a people recognize their members.
The means of transmission of culture is a large element of the culture itself. Oral cultures have existed since language was invented, and still exist today, cultures in which the young learn what it means to be a member by listening to the stories told by their parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents and friends. The Sumerians were probably still an oral culture, even though they invented writing. The Akkadians recorded some of the mythology of the fertile crescent, but only the scribes knew how to read and write, so everyone else had to learn it by ear.
The written word was, however, more amenable to control by the powers, since the tribal leaders, whether religious or political, were the ones in control of the scribes, and could insist that their version (the one in which they figured most prominently) was the only one recorded and subsequently read out to the eager or sullen hoi polloi.
If the switch from gatherer/scavenger/hunter to farmer/herdsman was the beginning of the end for matriarchy, the invention of writing was certainly its death knell, for having taken control, by strength of arms, of the means of production, the patriarchy, through control of the means of understanding, took control of the culture itself. The understanding that if you tell a lie often enough it becomes the truth was a reality that had been grasped long before the invention of the printing press.
Dry marks in wet clay gave way to wet marks on dry papayrus, and the era of “the word” was born.
Is it only a curious coincidence that the most famous and widely copied book of religious literature begins with the idea of “the word?” The word was god, and word was with god. Prior to that god was fairly sparing of words, having at his most voiciferous moment given only ten commandments, and those on a set of impossibly heavy china plates. When papayrus, and then finely stretched calf skin made the scene, the stage was set for the blossoming of the written word, and of course, the most powerful cultural force must needs be in control of it.
Where god had appeared often enough before in various forms, he was hereafter to be the source and sink for all things written. God became the word.
The Old Testament saw the gestation of this new literate god. The New Testament was his birth. After that a long adolescence followed until maturity was achieved in the most famous wordsmith of them all, Guttenberg.
While the Bible was only being copied by hand there was still some wiggle room. Guttenberg changed all that. The Kings of Sumer had control of the scribes, and the Kings of Commerce took control of the printing press. King James to be precise.
Ah, the written word. The King James Bible became the foundation of the literature of Western European culture. If you hadn’t studied the bible you hadn’t been educated. If the hermaneutics couldn’t trace your metaphor to the chapter and verse, you were obviously an uneducated slob and couldn’t be counted on to have anything interesting to say.
In her introduction to Sieze the Day, Cynthia Ozick points out the beginnings of the breakdown of Western Culture’s dependence on the Bible as the source of all the linking metaphors that had informed Western literary culture. Ezra Pound, in The ABC of Reading, suggests the course that should be followed should you have the ambition to become a Reader, particularly a Reader of Ezra Pound. First, learn Greek, then read all the important Greek authors in their original language (which, by the way, includes the earliest existing texts of the Bible). Then learn Latin, and read all the important products of the Glory of Rome (which, by the way, includes the first “official” texts of the Bible) in their original language. Then read everything else written in Engilsh (which, of course, you should learn first if it happened not to be your first language, poor you). Then you may have the chance, if you’ve been good, to read dear Ezra’s deeply hermaneutical poetry.
Ah, bliss.
By the time the 20th century rolled around, the volume of words that had been written, even those that were agreed to be canonical, had become a rather unwieldy burden. In the Renaissance the extent of “knowledge” was still sufficiently manageable that a reasonably intelligent person could encompass enough of it to be proficient in all the important fields of the day. Thus, the Renaissance Man: poet, philosopher, engineer, and politician.
There are no more Renaissance men. And there are no more Readers, not by Ezra’s definition. If it takes your life time to have read enough to understand what was written yesterday, there will be no tomorrow in which to write your response.
If the Reader was going the way of the Renaissance Man, along with him was going the whole edifice of cultural linkages that formed the common literature of the Western world. God didn’t die from lack of interest, but from a surfeit of words. The more there was to read, the less likely folks were to read the Bible. Of course there was the Reader’s Digest Condensed version, but that does not give you any entry into the deeply convoluted world of metaphorical cross-reference that forms the web of Western literary life. The Bible is the spider at the center of the web, and the fringes had just gotten too wide for her to keep control of all the strings.
There may be no agreement about which straw broke the back of the biblical camel on which Western culture had been threading the eye of the needle, but it is clear that the World Wide Web, that great, fully distributed, uncontrollable network of electronics is its winding sheet.
The Internet put culture directly into the hands of the encultured. And whither then…
Did you get the reference? Or does the road, in fact, fail to go on and on?
Bilbo’s road ended on the White Ships. We know whither he has gone. The Lord of the Rings may be the last literary effort to have been read by enough people to form the basis for a last gasp of the Western Literary tradition. Perhaps not. The Beatles, with, perhaps, the marginal additions of Michael and Madonna, are probably the end of “worldwide” musical phenomena.
The era of the “big,” the era of the major cultural theme is rapidly closing. The WWW is enabling the ultimate, the total fragmentation of culture. The medium is no longer the message. In the future there will be only one linking metaphor, and that will be the medium itself. It will become the source and sink of all expression, enfolding into itself the sum and total of all interpersonal interaction. And it will disappear into the background. It will become the invisible force, the unmoved mover, the ultimate source, a god with no soul, no meaning, no commandments, nothing to say for itself - the ultimate codependant enabler of all the neuroses of every individual on the planet.