the coming classics revolution part ii: synthesis · 2016. 1. 19. · stood, especially eric...

The Coming Classics RevolutionPart II: Synthesis

COLIN WELLS

On December 4, 1935, the Harvard Crimsoncarried a brief story under the headline “Parry, Greek andLatin Professor, Killed Yesterday.” The subject of the story,Milman Parry, was a young assistant professor of classicswho had been educated at Berkeley and the Sorbonne beforewinning the position at Harvard several years earlier. Hisdeath, the campus newspaper reported, “was the result of anaccidental shooting. . . . Parry, visiting his mother-in-law inLos Angeles, was unpacking a suitcase in his hotel bedroomwhen a revolver mixed in with his clothing went off, mor-tally wounding him. His wife, who was in the next room,immediately summoned an ambulance, but he died beforereaching the hospital.”

Parry was only thirty-three years old at the time of hisdeath. In 1930s America such phrasing was commonly usedto mask suicide, which left a greater residue of social stigmathan it does now. Parry was a romantic figure in life, with apenchant for adventure, a dashing mustache, and an equallydashing writing style. Speculation about his death continuesto this day, and the question remains unsettled. One possiblemotive for suicide—entrenched academic resistance to Parry’srevolutionary ideas—has been commonly assumed, yet seemsunlikely. After a somewhat rocky start Parry’s academiccareer was in fact flourishing, contrary to the later image thatarose of him as a lone genius unrecognized in his time.

The genius part of that image, however, is right on themark. A couple of decades after Parry’s death, the eminentBritish classicist H. T. Wade-Gery would call him “the Dar -win of Homeric scholarship” for the way that Parry’s theo-

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ries completely overturned previous interpretations of theancient Greek poet whose epic poems, the Iliad and theOdyssey, were the first works written down with the alpha-bet and thus constitute the foundations of Western literature.

Parry journeyed to Yugoslavia in the early 1930s with cratesand crates of the newest sound equipment to record guslari,the unlettered native bards who sang epic tales dramatizingthe long-past deeds of legendary heroes. Parry’s goal was toprove his shocking thesis: that the epic poems of Homer wereproduced not by a writer, brilliant or otherwise, but by anentire culture—a culture, moreover, without writing at all. Intwo trips to Yugoslavia, Parry recorded thousands of hours oforal verse, demonstrating its detailed similarities with Homer’spoems and proving his thesis beyond any doubt.

In short, Parry discovered oral culture and founded the newdiscipline of orality studies, forever revolutionizing anthro-pology and much, much more. Parry wasn’t just the Darwinof Homeric studies. He was the Darwin of culture—or atleast, as I like to imagine, he would have been had he lived.

Because orality is just the half of it. Building on Parry’swork, his contemporary and fellow classicist Eric Havelockwould argue long after Parry’s death that only the ancientGreek invention of the alphabet has shifted humanity awayfrom oral culture, unleashing the intellect (including scienceand other forms of rational inquiry), opening the door to thespread of new ideas, and giving rise to the first clearly artic-ulated abstract thought. In the few centuries between Homerand Plato, Havelock maintained until his death in 1988, theancient Greeks became the first civilization in the world thatcan be considered truly literate.

Most controversially, Havelock argued that other writingsystems—Egyptian, Hebrew, Arabic, Indian, and Chineseamong them—have never been able to equal the alphabet forboth learnability and readability. Not only was the alphabetthe first writing that allowed us to produce new ideas andspread them widely, he asserted, it’s the only kind of writingthat has ever allowed us to do so.

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These two brilliant thinkers, both classicists, were bornwithin a year of each other in the early twentieth century.Taken together, their work suggests a radically new pictureof cultural evolution that rivals Charles Darwin’s theory ofbiological evolution. But like Darwin’s theory, this new pic-ture has been highly controversial and widely misunder-stood, especially Eric Havelock’s crowning contribution toit. Parry’s orality thesis, though bitterly contested at first, hasnow been accepted as fundamentally valid. Havelock’salphabetic thesis, in contrast, continues to be dismissed orignored, and Havelock himself has been and still is vilifiedand condemned in the most vituperative terms. He remainsunder an ideological cloud not just for classicists but forother academics as well.

Yet Havelock’s central arguments have not been trulyengaged by his critics, much less refuted. In the first part ofthis essay, I made the case that Havelock was largely correctand that the alphabetic thesis calls for a revolution in clas-sics. In this second part, I’ll suggest that it also calls for a rev-olution of classics. In other words, classicists aren’t the onlyones who need to reassess what classics means in light ofParry’s and Havelock’s work. Scholars of other disciplines inthe humanities and social sciences do, too.

What follows is an attempt to retell the deceptively famil-iar story of “Western civilization” from this new perspective.My reboot of the franchise is admittedly idiosyncratic andincomplete, but I’m not necessarily trying for completeness.I’m trying to extend the argument I made earlier into thelarger sweep of history, and to show that the study of clas-sics must stand at the center of any adequate understandingof how human culture has evolved globally—and how it isstill evolving today.

Darwin had the forceful and tenacious Thomas HenryHuxley, known as “Darwin’s Bulldog,” to champion hisideas to the public. Nearly three decades after Havelock’sdeath, perhaps it’s time Havelock had a bulldog, too.

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first impressions

i work at an after-school program in my small town, andwhen the kids come down we usually spend the first hour orso doing homework. Among my group are the third-graders,whom I now understand to be going through a great transi-tion, possibly the biggest of their whole lives. This is my per-sonal view of third grade. I’m not an expert on child devel-opment, so take it with a grain of salt. On the other hand,I’ve spent a lot of time with third-graders. I think it’s themost important year in a child’s education. It’s the year whenreading skills are solidified, and children begin to learn howto handle abstract ideas.

This is not a natural process. Third-graders work very, veryhard. They don’t get nearly enough credit for how hard theywork. But as they’ll be the first to admit, to get them to work,you have to push them, almost all of them, to some degree.Some more, some less, but virtually no one learns to read with-out at least some pushing (that’s what homework is, after all).

Over the past decade or so, seeing the transformation thatcomes as a result of all of this effort, I have begun to graspjust how deeply our educational system shapes the ways wethink about the world. So deeply, I believe, that we all takethat sort of thinking for granted. It’s invisible. We seem totacitly assume, somehow, that part of being “human” meansjuggling abstractions—good and evil, right and wrong, fan-tasy and reality—and that thinking abstractly is a sign ofhigh intelligence and good thinking (or, conversely, that notthinking abstractly is a sign of low intelligence and badthinking). It’s not our way of thinking, it’s just thinking,period. Thinking is abstraction. Or so we think.

In contrast with all the blood, toil, tears, and sweat overhomework, you never have to push children to tell stories.Unlike reading and writing, stories and storytelling undeni-ably are a natural part of being human. Anthropology tellsus that oral cultures the world over use stories to transmitcultural information, and those stories are characteristically


about agents that do things: people, heroes, gods, monsters,demons, personified aspects of nature, even, but not abstractideas as such.

Stories are easy to remember, and in cultures without writ-ing everything is geared toward memory. There are deep con-nections between memory, story, and concrete thinking,which helps explain, for example, the personification of nat-ural phenomena in oral mythologies. Neuroscience suggeststhat the capacity to construct narratives is hardwired into ourbrains, and the usefulness of stories is perhaps why, as withsugar and fat, we evolved to love them so much. So it’s notthat people in oral cultures can’t think abstractly, but ratherthat they put little stock in doing so, because clearly definedabstract concepts aren’t much use in telling a story.“Handsomeness” is slippery and hard to hold. “The hand-some Prince” is instantly grasped. Oral cultures don’t havedictionaries, or need them, for the meanings of stories areplain to the listener, though always implicit not explicit. Itsreliance on implicit meaning can make oral culture feel“primitive” to the literate, even when it involves sophisti-cated layers of effects. In the words of Harvard oralist DavidBynum, “The story and its constituent motifs are themselvesan elaborate, prefabricated system of general meaningsready-to-hand for the ‘primitive philosopher,’ who need onlyhit upon interesting analogies between fable and experienceto be a thumping success. Philosophy of this kind needs littleor no abstract reasoning to create prodigies of symbolism.”1

Even in literate cultures if you really want to remembersomething you weave a story around it, as those who con-struct elaborate “memory palaces” do. We read novels forpleasure, and nonfiction publishing retains a sharp dividebetween “academic” books, which are supposed to be dryand abstract, and “popular” or trade books, which areexpected to entertain readers by telling a story. Such prac-tices, I suspect, are distant echoes of the original distinctionbetween oral and literate patterns of thought. Stories are fun.Ideas are heavy going.

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Narratives, of course, are expressed through language,which is also part of the “natural” human tool kit. All cultureshave language, and children learn to talk on their own, need-ing only to hear others talking in order to do so. Their youngbrains are language sponges. Not so with reading and writing,which are far from universal in human culture and are onlyacquired through long discipline and hard work. Scholars esti-mate that only about six percent of the thousands of lan-guages spoken in human history have ever been written down.

Writing is also a relative newcomer. For most of human his-tory, it hasn’t existed at all. As archeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat has recently shown, the earliest writing emergedfrom shaped tokens of clay that were widely used in foodstorage and craft industry throughout the Middle East forthousands of years starting around 8,000 bc, about the timethat people began farming, which makes sense. Eventually, inMesopotamia, the tokens evolved into symbols impressedinto clay. At first used for counting, like the tokens fromwhich they evolved, these symbols were the first writing. Inancient Sumer, they became the basis of cuneiform, whichwas used for writing first word-signs and then also syllable-signs. (Cuneiform itself is not a writing system, but refers tothe manual technique of impressing signs into clay using awedge-shaped stylus; Latin cuneus = wedge.)

Since not all syllables can be clearly and unambiguouslyrepresented—in most languages, there are simply too manypossibilities—to read syllabic writing required knowingmany dozens of signs combined with at least some guess-work. And because the earliest writing was highly limited inscope these cultures remained largely oral, though in some ofthem cultural and political authority tended to concentratein the hands of priestly or scribal elites.

old men with beards

then, around the year 1,000 bc, a Semitic people known asthe Phoenicians achieved a great breakthrough by paring the


previous syllabaries down to a manageable 22–30 conso-nants. Although Phoenician writing had signs for conso-nants, consonants are not generally pronounced by them-selves. Consonant means “sounding with,” and what theyare sounded with is vowels, which comes from the Latinword for voice, vox.

The Phoenician innovation spread remarkably widely. Itwas taken up by other Semitic peoples and became the basisof the Hebrews’ and later the Arabs’ writing systems, amongmany others. As I discussed in more detail in Part I, Semiticwriting like Phoenician and Hebrew (and later, Arabic) couldget by without specifying vowels because root meanings inSemitic languages are based on clusters of consonants, sothat words with similar consonant clusters are related inmeaning.

Reducing the number of signs made writing much easier,streamlining the process dramatically. But it didn’t changethe basic process of reading, which still involved guesswork,even more so than before. The gain in manageability wascounterbalanced by the loss in precision. In order to readsuch texts, you first have to know what they’re saying. So ithelps a lot to have some familiarity with the message, as in“Ll mn r crtd ql” or “Nc pn tm thr ws lttl prncss.” Havingrecognized the message, you decipher the writing by supply-ing the missing vowel sounds.

As a result of its difficulty, early writing was used almostexclusively as an aid to memory, always the main focus oforal culture. The few exceptions are brief and predictable inexpression, like stylized praise or denigration of a student(not too surprisingly, Mesopotamian scribes have left ascrappy written record on baked clay of their workaday upsand downs). Such writings are rendered recognizable toreaders not only by simple, conventional expression but alsoby being entirely monolithic—exaggerated praise unalloyedwith even the slightest criticism, for example, or the reverse.But mostly it’s tax records, storage records, bills of lading,votary gifts, monumental commemoration, proverbs, myths

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and legends—one way or another pre-alphabetic writing wasa nightlight, as opposed to a searchlight: it helped us to nav-igate familiar territory, rather than to explore strange newlandscapes. This is the salient—and rather obvious—sharedfeature of all early writing from Hieroglyphics to Hebrew,from cuneiform to Linear B, though as far as I have been ableto tell most academic scholars of writing pass it over com-pletely. I often wonder whether they fail to see it, or whetherthey see it and fail to remark on it. Either way, the failurespeaks volumes. It should be front and center.

Instead we’re told over and over how all kinds of earlywriting allowed every passing thought to be fully expressed,and how each culture had the kind of writing that workedbest for it, whatever that means exactly. This anodyne shib-boleth, virtually ubiquitous in the herd scholarship of theultracorrect 1980s and 1990s, is still common. Yet how couldit be demonstrated? Or falsified? Or even understood?2

Two big things are conveniently left out of this happy pic-ture: the dynamics of reading, and the actual written evi-dence. Yes, theoretically you could write down your everypassing thought in Akkadian cuneiform, if you had longenough. The problem is that I will only be able to read whatyou’ve written if it communicates language and thoughtsthat I’m likely to have myself. So what we see in the actualevidence is the mundane or the conventional, and, in the rel-atively small number of “literary” texts, stories such as theEpic of Gilgamesh that were already familiar in the oral cul-ture and were told in simple language with simple sentencestructure. Similarly, in the largest surviving collection ofancient consonantal writing, the Hebrew Bible or OldTestament, along with the culturally familiar material andthe simple sentence structure we also see the characteristictechnique of repeating the same basic idea, as if writing itdown once couldn’t be relied upon to get the idea across.Biblical scholars call this “parallelism.” (Cursèd shall ye bewhen ye come in, and cursèd shall ye be when ye go out.Cursèd shall ye be in the morning, and cursèd shall ye be in


the . . . can you guess the next word?) Consonantal writingdid nothing to change the dynamic of reading: you had tounderstand it before you could read it.

Nor did consonantal writing become broadly based enoughto wrest literacy from the scribal and priestly elites. Indeed, ithad the opposite effect. Group consensus was now even morenecessary in order to resolve unavoidable ambiguities in thetexts, since one passage could have several possible readings.This tended to strengthen the grip of scribal or priestlyelites—in practice, old men with beards—on cultural author-ity in cultures that used consonantal writing.

the atomic theory of language

greek and phoenician traders were mingling across a widearea from Cyprus to southern Italy by about the year 800 bc,when Greeks began establishing their first overseas colonies.The Greek alphabet, most likely invented shortly afterward,is based on Phoenician writing but with a revolutionarytwist: the addition of vowels. Surprisingly, the alphabet wasinvented only once. Every alphabet in the world is based onthe Greek model.

What made the alphabet truly revolutionary was not somuch the writing part as the reading part: it literally reversedthe old way of reading. Uniquely among all the world’s writ-ing systems, the alphabet allowed readers to read the mes-sage phonetically first, easily and automatically, and then goon to figure out what it meant. Finally, you didn’t have tofigure it out first!

By reversing the old way of reading and eliminating guess-work, the alphabet gave us room to figure out the meaningof strange and complicated written messages for the firsttime, thereby opening the door to the spread of new ideasand unleashing humanity’s intellectual potential. This is why,almost from the beginning, alphabetic writing has been usedto produce original literature, unlike all previous scripts. Inother words, the alphabet has been a searchlight that lets us

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explore new territory, rather than a nightlight that limits usto familiar horizons (though alphabetic readers, too, love theold familiar stories, a holdover from our “natural” state oforality, which we never really shed completely). Ever soslowly and haltingly, the balance of human culture begins toshift its center of gravity—from memory to novelty, frompreservation to innovation. This is the “alphabetic thesis,”which has been put forward over the past half-century byscholars such as classicist Eric Havelock and social linguistWalter Ong, whose 1982 book Orality and Literacy helpedspread Havelock’s ideas to the wider and often reflexivelyhostile academic world.

Consonantal writing, Havelock argued, works with theconsonantal roots of Semitic languages as long as the mes-sages are conventional or familiar. But in Indo-European lan-guages like Greek (or French, or Russian, or English) rootscan have the same consonants in the same order and be com-pletely unrelated. Bid is not related to bud, and neither isrelated to bad or bed. For Indo-European languages, conso-nantal writing alone would create an incomprehensible messwith any but the simplest, most familiar messages. Therewould be attempts by speakers of other Indo-European lan-guages to address this problem, such as the cuneiform scriptinvented for Old Persian, perhaps by the Persian King DariusI himself in the sixth century bc, or the Brahmi script devel-oped for Sanskrit a few centuries later. Persian cuneiform isoften described as semi-alphabetic, since among its forty-onesigns are three vowels, a, i, and u, although other signs stoodfor consonants plus these vowel sounds. Brahmi script indi-cated vowels by means of various short strokes added to thesyllabic signs, resulting in a large number of complicatedsigns.

The great advantage of Phoenician writing was its man-ageability. Indeed, Havelock cited research suggesting thattwenty to thirty letters is the optimal number for brains likeours that evolved to handle spoken, not written, language.To retain this advantage for an Indo-European language, it


was necessary to put vowels on an equal footing by givingthem their own signs—in other words, to separate conso-nants and vowels conceptually for the first time. It was evenmore necessary for Greek than it might have been for otherrelated languages, since Greek is so heavily inflected, withnot just root meanings but sophisticated verb forms, caseendings, and much else besides, all reliant on subtle andcomplex arrangements of vowel sounds. Some commonwords in Greek are composed of vowel sounds alone—aei,“always,” comes to mind.

So the alphabet began with a single act of analysis. This iswonderfully appropriate given the Greeks’ almost immediatefascination with that same pursuit, and given how the alpha-bet itself would assist them in it.

Tablets, pots, and figurines made of stone, clay, and metalsurvive today, little artifacts from the eighth century bc thathave the earliest examples of alphabetic writing scratched orchiseled into them. Some record offerings dedicated to a par-ticular god, like a bronze statuette from Thebes inscribedwith a prayer to Apollo: Mantiklos dedicated me to the far-darter of the silver bow from the tithe. / Phoebus, do givesomething gracious back in return. “Far-darter of the silverbow” and “Phoebus” are common epithets of the godApollo in epic verse; Mantiklos, the man making the offer-ing, is one of the earliest individuals whose name we canread without guessing and who was not a legendary hero, aruler, a palace bureaucrat, or a prophet. Mantiklos was aregular person, in other words. That little slice of immortal-ity seems like a gracious return indeed, if not necessarily thesort of thing he had in mind, exactly.

Other remains mark similarly humble moments in dailylife, as in the case of the famous Dipylon wine jug found inAthens, which praises the winner of a dancing contest whoreceived the modest container as a prize. Whoever now of allthe dancers frolics most playfully . . . begins the linescratched amateurishly into the glaze above the geometricdesigns which, according to the scholars who study such

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things, show that the jug itself was made around 740 bc. Therest is not easily legible, but it clearly ran something like . . .gets this wine jug as a prize. If the writing was scratched intothe glaze shortly after the pot was fired, this jug could be theoldest surviving “long” example of alphabetic writing (theearliest securely dated evidence, a pot sherd containing just afew letters that was discovered in the 1990s, is from about775 bc). But the writing might have been done years or evendecades after the vessel itself was made. Another piece ofpottery, a drinking cup from Ischia, an island off the coast ofsouthern Italy where Greeks had established their first over-seas trading outpost, proudly proclaims: Nestor’s good-drinking cup I am: / He who drinks from this cup straight-way him / Desire shall grip even of fair-garlanded Aphrodite.This alludes to famous lines from Homer’s Iliad, in whichthe Greek sage Nestor’s drinking cup is described as seizingmen with the desire for comradely talk, with words flowingfreely between them. Our Nestor, however, apparently hopesto get something else going. As with the Dipylon jug, thewords were scratched into the finished cup sometime afterfiring.

So although the date of the alphabet’s invention is stillhotly contested, with some scholars maintaining that theinvention took place as far back as 1,400 bc, there is noarcheological evidence of any alphabetic writing beforearound the year 775 bc, and no evidence of full sentences forat least several decades after that. Scholars also argue aboutthe purpose of the invention. The two main strands of expla-nation propose that the new writing was invented either foruse in trade, or for writing down epic verse like that ofHomer.

The purpose, however, is far less important than the con-sequences. If storytelling remains the primary way of com-municating information orally, alphabetic writers now havethe option of organizing their discourses in other ways. Ofcourse, writers still tell stories. But expository prose—anentirely new mode of writing that focuses on well-defined


topics, articulates new ideas and new information, utilizescomplex sentences with subordinate clauses that delicatelyarrange or qualify the ideas and information, and takes itsstructure from thematic or logical considerations rather thanchronology alone—appears first in Greece starting around600 bc and gradually comes to dominate alphabetically lit-erate discourse (the oldest surviving book-length work ofprose, the Histories of Herodotus, dates from about 450 bc).You simply don’t find sentences like that last one beinguttered in oral cultures, where vocabularies are much smallerand syntax much simpler.

In ancient Greece, as Havelock explained in his seminal1963 book Preface to Plato, this led to the first abstractideas in writing and also to the first intellectuals—thosewho deal in abstract ideas. Among those ideas are the nowfamiliar concepts we know as reason (logos, originally “anaccounting” in Greek) and reality (ousia or ta onta, “being”or “the things that are” in Greek), which became the basisof science and other forms of rational inquiry. Othersincluded the distinction between literal and metaphoricmeaning, which was articulated for the first time by authorssuch as Plato and Aristotle.

The rise of abstraction as Havelock outlined it has been abit of a tough chew for more recent scholars, who seemunable to get their heads around any model that transcendsfuzzy osmosis: “abstract” letters are vaguely assumed to pro-mote abstract thinking, and so the scholarly argumentsinvariably come down to whose letters are more “abstract.”3

But Havelock suggested specific mechanisms by whichabstraction arose as human cognition was freed from theconfines of narrative. Orality demands memory, memorydemands story, and story demands characters who do things.With its unique capacity for novelty, the alphabet broke thischain, liberating us from the agendas of memory. TheGreeks’ hackneyed progression from “myth” to “history”(more accurately reformulated in recent years as frommythos to logos), like their vaunted “invention of the indi-

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vidual,” may thus be perceived to have come out of a deepershift, as an oral culture driven by collective tradition trans-formed itself into an alphabetic one driven, in part at least,by novelty, originality, and abstraction. I sketched thisprocess a bit more fully in Part I, including quotations fromHavelock’s writing.

The shift from memory to novelty was at least as much lin-guistic as it was intellectual, Havelock insisted, as the Greeklanguage expanded in ways detectable in the extant sources.Leading examples are the uses of the definite article to indi-cate abstraction (as in “the good”) and the copula to indicateconceptual linkage (as in “truth is beauty”). Such usages,which English has inherited, are characteristic of literacy butnot of orality. They went with a general shift in focus fromthe concrete to the abstract, from narrative to exposition,from personified agents to impersonal topics, from whatthings do to what things are. Havelock began this excitingwork, but much remains to be done.

This same movement, I suggested further, is reflected alsoin new Greek conceptions of a split between matter andspirit, of natural versus supernatural causation, of an imma-terial soul, of an abstract and unitary godhead leading tomonotheism—like the soul, a Greek and not a Jewish inven-tion—and, ultimately, to religious “faith” in the form ofChristianity, whose emphases on personal belief and thesupernatural were also radically new and emerged onlywithin an alphabetic milieu.

Heady stuff, yes, but as it unleashed the intellect, the soul,and God, the alphabet also democratized literacy, allowinghumanity’s first readership to emerge and diffusing culturalauthority beyond a scribal or priestly elite. This diffusion inturn exerted further pressure on the language, creating afeedback loop of expansion and innovation that culminatedin the language we know as “classical Greek.” A criticalthreshold was crossed around the late fifth century bc, aseducation, first in Plato’s Athens and then throughout theGreek and Hellenistic worlds, became primarily about learn-


ing to read. Writers are qualitatively different from priests,scribes, prophets, or palace bureaucrats, but writers needreaders in a deeper sense than is commonly understood: areadership expands spoken language by taking up writteninnovation, Havelock suggested, so that even illiterate speak-ers will reproduce literate patterns of language and thought.A scribal, priestly, or bureaucratic elite lacks the traction toexpand language in this way. Greco-Roman civilization,Havelock said, was the first “to be founded upon the activ-ity of the common reader.”4

Now, all this may go down a treat with Western culturaltriumphalists, but a more liberal sensibility can tend to rebelat such claims. Mine certainly has, and from time to time Istill have to force myself to recall the evidence all over again,rather than giving in to my original, and in retrospect naïve,gut feeling of what’s fair and proper. We’d like to think of allwriting as the same, perhaps—but the evidence clearly showsthat this is not so.

As literate people, many of us automatically assume thatliteracy is linked to intelligence, and with that unquestionedassumption firmly in place some of us, at least, then shyaway from the thought that one national or ethnic popula-tion might be more intelligent than another. I would say thatrejecting this thought is not just politically correct, but fac-tually so. The problem lies not in that egalitarian impulse,but in the prior assumption of a direct link between literacyand intelligence, which—like Aristotle’s common-senseassertion that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones—isalmost universal yet is also easily refuted once the trouble istaken to check it against reality. Unfortunately, this basicmistake is compounded by the fact that those studying writ-ing and literacy, professors mostly, are themselves highly lit-erate, and thus especially prone to flattering themselves withwhat Havelock himself identified as the “literacy bias” link-ing literacy and intelligence. Hence the common accusationsof “ethnocentrism” or “Hellenocentrism” or even “anti-Semitism” against Eric Havelock—for example, one leading

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authority accuses Havelock of suggesting that the “Semiticmind” was “too dull” to think abstractly. But not only doesHavelock not say any such thing, he argues explicitly andstrenuously against such interpretations.5

It’s as if the professors making these accusations didn’t takethe trouble to read Havelock’s work very closely but insteadresponded with gut-level revulsion to what they assumed hemust have been saying. And it is true that scholars of earliergenerations commonly made or implied such connectionsbetween the alphabet and mental superiority. How easy toconclude that Havelock was simply reviving these old chau-vinistic assessments. But Havelock’s thesis is more radicalthan that. It makes different claims and rests on differentarguments from previous interpretations, and I believe thaton questions of literacy the academic world—the world atlarge, in fact—urgently needs a Galileo-style reality check.

This does not mean we must abandon our aims of fairnessand morality. Quite the opposite. True morality lies in per-ceiving the evidence, not in ignoring it because we find it chal-lenging. As the historian of science and intersex advocateAlice Dreger writes in a very similar context, “I have come tounderstand that the pursuit of evidence is probably the mostpressing moral imperative of our time. All of our work asscholars, activists, and citizens of democracy depends on it.Yet it seems that, especially where questions of human iden-tity are concerned, we’ve built up a system in which scientistsand social justice advocates are fighting in ways that poisonthe soil on which both depend.”6 Like science, history toodepends on evidence, and it’s even more susceptible to suchidentity-based interference. Writing systems (and the lan-guages they are generally, if wrongly, perceived as inseparablefrom) are at least as deeply intertwined with identity as gen-der and sex roles, but nothing less than the truth is at stake—and, as I’ll try to show, quite a bit more as well.

As Walter Ong perceived, there were two great classicistsin the twentieth century, Milman Parry and Eric Havelock,and their work goes together. Neither was perfect, of course;


peripheral aspects of both their theories have been contestedand in some cases refuted. But their central points stand, andtogether they throw an entirely new light on the significanceof the ancient Greeks.

For just as Parry and his continuator Albert Lord discov-ered the principles of oral composition by examining Homer,so did Havelock’s complementary work discover the princi-ples of alphabetic literacy by examining Homer’s successors.It’s not a coincidence that the principles of orality came froman examination of Homer, rather than (for example) fromthe consonantal texts of the Hebrew Bible, which Havelocksuggested are blurry snapshots of more nuanced “oral origi-nals.” Like a high-resolution camera, the alphabet capturedthe fine details.7 So without the alphabet, we would haveneither Homer, the very first alphabetic text and one reveal-ing (because still closely patterned on) oral material in theservice of memory, nor his successors, writers like Hesiodand Archilochus who were humanity’s first pioneers on thefrontier of original literature.

As alphabetic literacy takes hold first in Ionia, the Greekcoast of what is now Turkey, the earliest science, philosophy,and history soon follow. Just to take a single example of howthis could work, for his radical notion that the earth is anobject floating in space, one Ionian writer, Anaximander, hasbeen called “the first scientist” (by physicist Carlo Rovelli,who understands the significance of a new idea better thanmany scholars in the humanities). Anaximander came upwith this idea around 600 bc, about two centuries after theinvention of the alphabet. That may seem like a long time,but consider this: every culture untouched by the Greek liter-ary tradition that we know of without exception has con-ceived of the world as a huge plate supported by variousdivinely-emplaced structures—columns, pillars, turtles, what-ever. All peoples have studied the sky, yet two thousand-plusyears of Chinese “science,” for example, never dislodged theoral conception of a flat earth with heavens above. Ditto(mutatis mutandis) Egyptian, Babylonian, Mayan.8

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Moreover, as far as we know, Anaximander is the onlyperson who ever had the idea of the earth as an object float-ing in space on his own. You and I sure didn’t. We have itnow because Anaximander wrote it down with the newalphabet and passed it on for further alphabetic study andimprovement by successors such as Aristotle, who showedthat the floating earth is a sphere, Aristarchus, who figuredout that it spins on its axis and revolves around the sun, andEratosthenes, who ascertained its circumference. Thatincludes, incidentally, the concept of “space” itself. If anyoneelse ever had these ideas independently, they left no record.Such is the power of the alphabet. Yet its very pervasivenesstoday makes it nearly invisible to us.

Shortly after the founding of Greek science and philoso-phy, Greeks in Ionia fall under the sway of the mightyPersian Empire.

the beginning of the end

persia, classical greece’s main antagonist, also plays arole in our synthesis. Oral cultures share a common, holisticworld view. The world is a fundamentally ordered place, butits divinely sanctioned order can be threatened by the forcesof chaos (in mythology often depicted as serpent monsters).Among ancient civilizations, order was defended by heroicwarrior-gods. From the Norse Thor to the Vedic Indra, Indo-European warrior-gods shared features that reflect a com-mon ancestry, and Semitic cultures in the Middle East pos-sess a similar set of “combat myths.”

For thousands of years, this was the basic outlook of cul-tures without writing: we live in a comfortable world oforder, with unsettling chaos posing a threat from outside. It’sstill the outlook of the few oral cultures remaining today. Itis not, however, our outlook, at least not historically. Itsimpact on how we perceive the world has indeed been thealphabet’s broadest legacy—though not always necessarily interms Anaximander would recognize.


Zoroastrianism, the world’s first “apocalyptic” belief sys-tem, rises in Persia starting perhaps around 1,300 bc. Theprophet Zoroaster adapts the combat myth common to oralcultures, moralizing order and chaos into good and evil pow-ers (dualism) and incorporating the novel idea that theworld, rather than being static, is moving toward a greatfinal confrontation in which the good powers in the worldwill finally repel the invading evil powers.

The concepts that Judaism and Christianity will later takefrom Zoroastrianism include salvation, a savior figure,heaven, hell, the immortal soul, an afterlife, the devil, bodilyresurrection, final judgment, a last battle, and eschatologicaltransformation of the world.

But there is one big difference. Zoroastrianism at this timeis an oral tradition, not a written one, and it does not pres-ent these “concepts” as abstract ideas. Instead, as in otheroral traditions, they come to us as concrete features of sto-ries or as agents who do things in stories. We, the alphabet-ically literate beholders of them, are the ones who identifythem as “concepts.” (Zoroastrianism’s sacred text, theAvesta, was passed down through generations of priests byrigorous memorization; scholars believe it was not writtendown until the sixth century ad.)

And like other oral traditions, Zoroastrianism doesn’tdraw a clear boundary between natural and supernatural,matter and spirit—all conflict between good and evil powers,and indeed all human and divine activity, takes place exclu-sively in this world. The good powers are represented by par-ticular plants and animals (cattle and dogs, for example) andso are the evil ones (wolves and snakes among them, not sur-prisingly). In taking up the concept of the End Times, firstthe Jews and then the Christians will each radically trans-form it in their own ways.

Eventually, the Persians are incorporated into the Assyrianand Babylonian empires. And, in the sixth century bc, so arethe Jews.

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captivity and revenge

the persian story continues with Babylonian Captivity of theJews and the rise of the Persian empire under Cyrus the Great.Persian Zoroastrianism influences the anonymous Hebrewprophet known only as Second Isaiah, who prophesies thedownfall of Babylon at the hands of Cyrus. Second Isaiah’s fer-vent message fuses religious exclusivity and awesome divinepower into a cosmic revenge fantasy against the enemies ofIsrael. Like Zoroaster, Second Isaiah predicts a great future vic-tory in which the world will be utterly transformed.

The difference is that in Zoroastrianism, as in oral tradi-tion generally, the world is controlled by the forces of goodand invaded by the forces of evil. Second Isaiah, seeking toexplain a situation in which the forces of good have seem-ingly been totally defeated, reverses the polarity of thisvision, if temporarily. The world is under the control of theevil power and the forces of good are the invader. In ourglobal evolutionary story, this reversal of polarity representsa small but momentous cultural “mutation.”

Plainly sensing this significance yet not quite grasping itstrue nature, some scholars (such as Norman Cohn, whosebooks about the history of apocalypticism I have relied uponin my synthesis, though some of my conclusions about it aredifferent from his) have presented Second Isaiah as “the firstmonotheist.” Christians have always sensed it, too, which iswhy the verses of Second Isaiah have likewise been taken upas preparing the way for Christ. Messiahs aside, if SecondIsaiah really was pushing monotheism, he certainly buries thelead. “No god beside me” can be taken as implying an incip-ient monotheism, or at least it can if we have a strong motiveto take it that way. But, as others have observed, for a sup-posedly revolutionary program, one or two such ambiguousphrases in reams and reams of text seems a little spotty.

My point is not that Second Isaiah could not have enter-tained the notion of a unitary godhead, but that, even if hedid, his writing system did not allow him to articulate it


explicitly in a way that readers could clearly grasp.Mainstream Jewish sources of the same period acknowledgeother gods by name. Significantly, Second Isaiah is the onlyprophet later included in the Hebrew Bible whose name wedon’t know. When circumstances changed to give his mes-sage traction—in an alphabetic environment that hadalready explicitly articulated and broadcast the idea of a uni-tary godhead—his prophecies were lumped in with Isaiah’s,which is why, when he was identified as a separate author inmodern times, he was stuck with the name “Second Isaiah.”

Those who still insist on tracing monotheistic faith to theHebrew Bible (mostly Christian and Muslim believers eagerto validate the timeless antiquity of their own traditions) arelooking at the ancient Hebrews through faith-tinted goggles.These “faith goggles” have remained firmly strapped on inour own modern times. Even avowedly skeptical observersfind them very hard to remove, and they end up coloring ourentire perspective on religion. We have books about “thefaith instinct,” and we commonly refer to other religious tra-ditions such as Hinduism and Buddhism as “faiths.” Suchimprecise usage notwithstanding, faith and religion are notthe same thing, and faith has not been emphasized or evenarticulated in most religious traditions. Nor is it articulatedin the Hebrew Bible. After thousands of years, let’s recognizeSecond Isaiah for what he was: a prophet speaking in thevoice of one particular divinity, not a theologian makingexplicit statements about the divine.

Cyrus does indeed defeat the Babylonians and free theJews. However, when other aspects of Second Isaiah’sprophecy fail to materialize, he is ignored by the Jewishmainstream. Cyrus does not destroy Babylon, Jews do notflock back to Israel, and Israel remains under Persian rule.Second Isaiah’s message seems poised to fizzle out.

Meanwhile, Cyrus conquers Greek Ionia, and when theIonians revolt the Persians crush the nascent Ionian enlight-enment. A few years later they invade mainland Greece itself.

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revenge for the injured gods

conflict between Greece and Persia brings us back to theGreek world, where early philosophy and science struggle togain a foothold as Persia looms on the Greek horizon. Forthe first time in human history, and as a direct result of theintellectual possibilities opened by alphabetic writing, a firmconceptual boundary is erected between the natural and thesupernatural—a barrier that represents the most consequen-tial act in the history of human thought (or, in evolutionaryterms, another cultural “mutation” that, as we’ll see, willeventually combine with the one described in the last sec-tion).

The innovative idea that nature follows regular laws has ahuge psychological impact, especially on the old holisticgods of nature, ushering in a radically new tradition of reli-gious skepticism. As the first materialistic philosophyemerges in alphabetic writing, the sharp edge of nature’s reg-ularity forever splits the old holistic world in which matterand spirit are intertwined.

The split between matter and spirit, between “seen” and“unseen,” will haunt the West forever after. Cultural conflictis taken to a new level as abstract concepts such as piety, nat-ural causation and—its inevitable companion—supernaturalcausation begin to intertwine themselves with identity.Anxiety over skeptical inquiry soon reveals itself in the infa-mous Diopeithes Decree, which outlaws astronomy and reli-gious skepticism in Athens soon after the arrival of the firstphilosophers there in the mid-5th century bc. The anxiety iseasy for us to dismiss, but the gods uphold human societyand protect the state. Without them, there can be only vio-lence and chaos. A couple of decades later, Socrates is por-trayed as a dangerous radical in the Athenian comedy TheClouds, which ends with him being whipped off the stage tothe cry, “Revenge for the injured gods!”

The key to the new literacy, Havelock repeatedly empha-sized, is an education revolution, as literacy is taken up by


the educated aristocracy. Elementary education, now andforever, becomes about learning to read. The old oral educa-tion—rhythm-based (to aid memorization) and centered onmusic, dance, and poetry—is replaced by a text-based cur-riculum with the new art of rhetoric (a hybrid of oral and lit-erate) as its centerpiece. In Athens, the heir to the Ionianenlightenment, this shift happens during the lifetime of Plato.

Plato undertakes a sustained effort to systematize the twoemergent features of alphabetic literacy that will come tocharacterize intellectual activity (both absent, or largely so,in cultures without writing): definition and abstraction. Hisstudent Aristotle focuses instead on systematizing the reali-ties of the here-and-now, from the cosmos and nature tohumanity in its many aspects.

This is also the first time that monotheistic ideas are artic-ulated, that explicit skepticism of the supernatural is widelycirculated, that belief becomes the ground of cultural con-flict, that anti-intellectualism shows itself, and that miraclesbegin to exercise their seductive power on the human imagi-nation. All these things are connected. They seem normal tous, but they happened first in classical Greece, and they hap-pened because of the alphabet.

Science, by its very existence, presents a terrifying glimpseof a world without any divine or supernatural agency what-soever. Proof is not the issue—the mere possibility is enoughto create anxiety, antagonism, and, ultimately, a collective“return of the repressed” in the form of triumphalist super-naturalism. In organizing and managing these responses,faith will be religion’s answer to science’s challenge.

the unitary god

in the newly literate Greek world, the recognition of whatwould eventually come to be called the laws of nature pushespeople toward the idea of a single god who is in charge ofeverything. But the materialistic conception of “nature”leaves no room for the supernatural. This inner tension has

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always plagued “the god of the philosophers,” from ancientGreek times to the Watchmaker God of Enlightenment Deistssuch as Thomas Jefferson. The rationalistic conception of thedivine is just too dry to satisfy our human thirst for objects ofworship with real power in the world.

The Jews, exposed to Greek culture since the conquests ofAlexander the Great, are part of the trend in the Greek worldtoward both monotheism and a rising fascination with thesupernatural. Judaism is the crucible in which Greek andPersian ideas blend together. Because of its unique scripturalbasis, Judaism already possesses an abstract dimension (noidolatry) to its conception of the divine that inoculated itagainst the injurious impact of alphabetic literacy. This maybe why Judaism survived intact from pre-alphabetic timeswhen paganism did not—although it, too, had to make sig-nificant accommodations and adapt to the new alphabeticworld. As in the larger Greek world, temples and sacrificeswould give way to the new model of group assembly centeredon prayer that is associated with exclusive monotheism.

a match made in heaven

from the time of Plato on, as people react to the psycho-logical threat posed by nature’s regularity, miracles assume abigger and bigger place in the popular consciousness. By Jesus’day, self-proclaimed miracle-workers are common amongboth Greeks and Jews, and numerous mystery religions com-pete with each other for wonder-working credibility.

In the Jewish world, this rising supernaturalism blends with,and revivifies, the apocalyptic message that earlier seemed onthe brink of dying out. Woo-woo meets End Times—it turnsout to be a perfect match. In an almost point by pointresponse to Greek science, Jewish sources such as 1 Enoch andJubilees depict a world once ordered by divine will (not natu-ral laws) that has now fallen under the sway of demonic forces(pagan gods). Apocalypticism finds fertile ground as Jews con-tend with both hostile Hellenistic monarchs and the secular,


rationalistic philosophy against which the authors of 1 Enochand Jubilees are reacting. But, though influenced by it, main-stream Judaism never fully embraces the apocalyptic message.When the Hebrew canon is formalized by the end of the firstcentury ad, 1 Enoch and Jubilees are not in it (though theyremain highly popular with early Christian writers).

The Pharisees are the perfect illustration of this process(the name may come from Pharsee, “Persian,” which is whatZoroastrians who settled in India are still called): the rise ofrabbinic Judaism reflects accommodation to and reactionagainst the Greek environment, along with the Zoroastrianinfluence. The Mishnah introduces theological dogma, aGreek preoccupation completely absent from the HebrewBible, into Judaism for the first time. It asserts that threekinds of people will have no share in “the world to come”:those who deny the resurrection of the dead, those who denythe divinity of the Torah, and, significantly, Epicureans—fol-lowers of the materialist teachings of the Greek philosopherEpicurus, an atomist.

the birth of angst

rising supernaturalism is only one symptom of the tremen-dous cultural anxiety evoked by the collapse of oral cultureand the advent of the alphabetic mind. Ancient sources alsoreveal that broader sense of anxiety and alienation with whichliterate and partly literate humanity has struggled ever since.Eric Havelock’s alphabetic thesis thus explains the innocent,pleasure-loving side that we have always sensed in the ancientpagan world, which Rousseau romanticized as “the noble sav-age” (oral patterns in Western European literature were extin-guished only as late as the Romantic period, which promptlyglorified them out of nostalgia).

Havelock described the alphabetic origins of “those slighthypocrisies without which our civilization does not seem tofunction.” In oral culture, he observed, “there was no war-fare between body and spirit. The pull between the pleasur-

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able inclination to act in one way and the unpleasant duty toact in another way was relatively unknown. All this beginsto change perhaps by the time the fourth century was under-way. . . . A psychological condition long encouraged by apurely oral culture was becoming no longer possible.”9

Ultimately, alphabetic literacy introduces an unprece-dented and unparalleled element of self-consciousness intowhat we believe about the world, allowing us to identifybeliefs as beliefs for the first time. Belief, of course, is anabstract idea, so this self-consciousness was part of the riseof abstraction—but, as it turns out, a particularly touchypart, given human psychology. The Greeks were not the firstto try to explain things, but they were the first to explainhow they were explaining them—and to examine preciselyhow explanation results in belief.

the revenge of the unseen

the concept of faith evolved to assuage anxieties causedby the alphabet’s volcanic disruption of the old oral order.“Comfort ye, my people, saith the Lord.” But comfort canhave a dark side. Revenge psychology is central to the emerg-ing concept of religious faith in Late Antiquity. Oral cultures,whether in ancient combat mythology, Zoroastrian apoca-lypticism, or contemporary tribal contexts, typically envisiona world of order in which chaos is the invader. For oral cul-tures, the world is comfortable, although it needs to bedefended against chaotic forces that threaten it. As we’veseen, early Jewish apocalypticists starting with Second Isaiahreversed the polarity of this vision, if temporarily: YHWHhas allowed evil forces to take over—but only to show theenemies of the Jews just how mighty he really is underneathan apparent record of weakness and total defeat. The world,in other words, is uncomfortable, and comfort can only berestored by annihilating the enemies of the Jews.

With the advent of alphabetically literate skeptical inquiry,it is religion itself that grows uncomfortable. Jesus and Paul,


modern scholarship affirms, both came out of the Jewishapocalyptic tradition. While Jewish apocalypticism incorpo-rated grandiose supernatural elements into its revenge sto-ries, it always remained fixed on the Jews’ worldly travails.Not for nothing does Christian faith emerge from anotherstory of worldly defeat and humiliation. But owing to Paul’sgenius, Christianity picks up on the revenge impulse in atotally unexpected way. If the old apocalypse targets theJews’ worldly political enemies, the new apocalypse targetsworldly thinking itself, as embodied in the skeptic, the unbe-liever, and the Doubting Thomas.

For a clear contemporary example, think of Darwin andthe intense animosity he and his ideas have inspired, partic-ularly among rapture-ready true believers of all stripes.Today, we are quite used to secularism being “public enemynumber one” for enraged Christian, Muslim, and Jewishfundamentalists alike. Little do we suspect that this sameimpulse helped spark the very birth of faith itself.

Paul solemnizes the marriage of supernaturalism and apoc-alypticism and repackages Christianity in comprehensivelysupernatural terms that perfectly address the new alienation ofhumanity from nature and the world. Christianity succeedsbecause, alone among the many competing religious tradi-tions, it offers a coherent and emotionally compelling vindica-tion of all the instincts that science threatens. In this way,Christianity is a product of the self-same process that itpushed back against: the hitherto unexamined, even unsus-pected, historical process of abstraction that will be the mainsubject of the classics revolution. Christianity exalts not justone particular supernatural figure, like other mystery cults,but the very concept of supernatural power itself—and, cru-cially, it offers believers a share in that power for themselves.Paul holds out the promise of participation and ownership ina divine supernatural system that can stand against the emerg-ing (and still relatively shaky) natural system of science.10

And so the first global franchise is set up on an anti-sciencebasis. If Jesus is McDonald, Paul is Ray Kroc, establishing

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the franchise in the name of the founder and issuing stan-dardizing directives to Romans, Corinthians, Ephesians,Thessalonians . . .

Paul’s franchise fixes in place the temporary reversal ofpolarity we see in Jewish apocalypticism: the world, nowseen in a fallen state, is permanently under the sway of theevil power. Nature, the realm of science, is demoted and thepagan gods of nature are literally demonized. The other-worldly pose spreads like wildfire through the parched spir-itual undergrowth of late antique society. For Jewish,Christian, and Muslim millenarians alike, the apocalypsis, or“unveiling” in Greek, comes to stand for the ultimate pay-back, when the unseen will literally come out of hiding toannihilate the seen in a final act of cosmic revenge.

All the drama around “the end of the world” tends to hidewhat apocalyptic thinking has always really been about,starting with Second Isaiah: the complete and total vindica-tion of those who feel marginalized. In this respect, the endis just the means, if you will. That’s why the apocalyptic mes-sages of ISIS, for example, have exerted such a seductive pullnot only in the idea-starved Arab world—which has margin-alized itself through its consonantal writing, with such cata-strophic results—but also among alienated and psychologi-cally vulnerable young people from non-Muslim Westernfamilies.11 Such cultural and social marginalizations resonateso strongly with faith traditions (including modern “cults”)because faith itself arose from a similar sense of outrage atthe way science pushed religion aside so brusquely.

This sense of outrage gave faith its broad appeal after sci-ence arose and explains how entire cultures could adopt anapocalyptic outlook, which on the face of it presents a puz-zle. After all, why would a sense of marginalization resonatewith the mainstream, which by definition isn’t marginal atall? Well, all cultures have religion. Apocalypticism’s mes-sage of ultimate vindication for the marginalized could res-onate with cultural mainstreams because the inherentauthority of skeptical, naturalistic explanation threatened to


discredit religion itself, and religion stands squarely in thosecultural mainstreams. Science put religion on the defensive.

From an epistemological standpoint, all believers are mar-ginalized in this world. In pinning its hopes on the nextworld, what faith reveals is the ancestral mark of religion’smarginalization at the hands of reason.

he rules in darkness

the devil gets his due in this part of our synthesis, whichsuggests how the dualistic outlook, in which a good power isopposed by an evil power, was passed on fromZoroastrianism through Judaism to Christianity. (The earli-est trace of Satan can be found in Jubilees.) Dualism andapocalypticism go together, and the Essenes also share abelief in the devil with Christians. The major differencebetween the two traditions is Christianity’s interest in con-verting pagans.

In popular literature of the early Christian era, saints’ lives(hagiographies) replace secular biographies, which now dis-appear as a genre for centuries. Christian ascetics such as St.Anthony, the founder of monasticism, literally wrestle withSatan and his demons in the desert, using their special pow-ers for good in waging an epic supernatural battle thatmakes them the comic-book superheroes of the late antiqueworld. The comparison is not a casual one; super-nesscounts. Whether in a hairshirt or tights with underwear onthe outside, it’s all about the transcendence of nature’s oner-ous laws—supernatural superpowers go with superheroes.

(Interestingly, Superman’s Jewish creators gave him theKryptonian surname name El, the Semitic word for “god,”while giving his arch-enemy the first name of Lex, Latin for“law,” which shares its root with words for reading such as“legible.” Perhaps we should not make too much of this, how-ever!)

Like today’s superheroes, each saint has a special set ofpowers and abilities that sets him or her off from the others.

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But unlike in the comic books, the superhero’s opposition inLate Antiquity always includes bodily desires for food andsex. Asceticism is an integral part of resistance to the naturalworld and its evil ruler, Satan.

the light of love

to argue that faith represents a flight from reality—in otherwords, fantasy—is not at all to say that faith is a bad thing.Fantasy has immense power to change the world for the bet-ter, and the historical record clearly shows that Christianityhas done so many times. Even for many atheists, the mostappealing aspect of Christian faith is its emphasis on love,which was just as much a part of St. Paul’s message as hissystematization of the supernatural. Indeed, the two are psy-chologically linked. What is reason, after all, if not some-thing cold and impersonal?

And yet even Christian love has had a dark side, a shadowimpulse that has allowed it to be invoked by torturers whoprofess to save the souls of those they torment as often as bythe comforters of the downtrodden. Perhaps Christian loverepresents, at least for some, the common defense mecha-nism that Freud identified as “reaction formation,” in whichwe conceal unacceptable impulses by affirming their oppo-sites. In this case, the unacceptable impulse hidden byavowals of “love” is violent narcissistic rage against the lim-its imposed by the laws of nature. To some degree, it musthave been so for Paul, who revealed his violent potential bypersecuting Christians before his conversion just as clearly ashe revealed his resentment against Greek philosophy after it.

It is important to recognize, however, that not all Christianshave reacted this way. For social activists and others throughouthistory, Christian love has sprung clear and joyous from theheart. And from Augustine to William Faulkner, the moralauthority of Christian love, and in particular of faith’s exaltationof the common and the outcast, has made the Bible the most fer-tile source of creative inspiration in Western civilization.


If anything, history shows us that, contrary to the claimsof many atheists, religion has inspired as much good as evil.But there’s a less simplistic—and more productive—way ofthinking about religion than adding up credits and debits.Instead of focusing on the supposed consequences of reli-gion, a Darwinian view would also consider religion andindividual religious traditions as consequences in and ofthemselves. And if the evolution of religion is a matter of sci-ence, the evolution of individual religions falls squarely inthe realm of history. Though a powerful influence, literacy isonly one aspect of the complex web of circumstances thatmake up the historical environment.

The idea of religious faith itself emerged in the wake ofalphabetic literacy, but other sorts of circumstances alsohelped shape the two largest faith traditions of Christianityand Islam. A Darwinian historical explanation can accountfor many of the differences between these two global faiths.It can also explain why, despite these differences, both haveone big thing in common aside from their shared exaltationof the supernatural: the conspicuous presence of internallycompeting and contradictory messages.

Christianity and Islam began in very different environ-ments and with very different early messages that provedsuitable to those environments. Christianity originated in theRoman empire, a literate, ethnically diverse, and politicallyunified environment with robust philosophical traditions inwhich military power was monopolized by a strong centralstate. Islam originated in almost opposite circumstances—the Arabian peninsula in the lifetime of Muhammad wasoral, ethnically unified, and politically chaotic, with militarypower spread among competing and mutually hostile tribes.The upshot is that if a prominent message of early Christianshad been, say, “Kill the infidel,” there would not have beenany later Christians. Conversely, if a prominent message ofearly Muslims had been, “Love your neighbor,” there wouldnot have been any later Muslims.

Yet both traditions grew, and as they grew their circum-

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stances changed. In different ways, each successfully negoti-ated a transition from persecuted minority to imperialadjunct, and each had to embrace countervailing messages inorder to attract and keep a wide following (messages, forexample, that could be mobilized in the service of imperialor other political agendas, as well as messages that could bedefended on ethical or moral grounds). In all cultures, thereare people who want to love their neighbors, people whowant to kill their neighbors, and people who just want tomake it to bedtime. Many of us may want to do all three atvarious times, depending on circumstances. Traditions thatretain a narrow, coherent message (such as Jainism) remainlimited in their appeal.

From this perspective, religion, including faith, is neutral,like art or music: violent people have violent faith, peacefulpeople have peaceful faith. In offering any and all kinds ofmessages, à la carte, faith renders itself so “meaningful” asto be meaningless. There is no “essence” to any global faith,or to faith itself, outside of its basic character as an allergicresponse to science. There are only competing messages,competing agendas, and constantly changing circumstances.That goes for history in general, too.12

Far from being too skeptical, in allowing faith enoughmeaning to be “evil,” new atheists such as Sam Harris andRichard Dawkins aren’t skeptical enough. Cherry-pickingtheir own messages from the à la carte menu of religiousscripture just as the faithful do, they credulously buy into thepremise that faith has inherent meaning in the first place.Instead of asking whether faith has a positive or a negativemeaning, we should dig deeper and question whether it hasany inherent meaning at all.

getting god’s number

the elaborately monotheistic theology that comes withalphabetic literacy highlights the primal relationshipbetween writing and counting that helped give rise to the


earliest forms of writing in the first place. Unlike Judaism,Christianity and Islam have always been obsessed with put-ting a number on God, and the early controversies thatwracked the Christian church show this clearly.

First, in Late Antiquity, it was the nature of Christ: was itone, or two, or what? Was Jesus a human, with a singlenature? Was he divine, with a single nature? Was he a blend oftwo natures? In the centuries following the conversion of theRoman emperor Constantine, followers of Arius, Nestor, andother Christian leaders later branded as “heretical” contestthese issues as the church struggles to define orthodox belief.

Then, these “Christological” controversies merge into the“Trinitarian” controversies that followed, as divisions overthe number of God continue into the Middle Ages. Thefather, the son, the holy ghost—how do they relate to eachother? Is God one, or two, or three? Or what? Part and par-cel of faith is the explicit insistence on unity even whileimplicitly acknowledging plurality.

It’s hard for us to grasp how high the stakes were in theseconflicts. Christian Orthodoxy now supports the state propa-ganda machine of the Roman (later the Byzantine) empire, andso millions of souls hang in the balance. The fate of the worldno longer hinges on what you do, as it has in oral culturesincluding that of the ancient Hebrews, but on what you believe.

By the end of the sixth century, Christianity has permeatedlife in the Byzantine empire. The first holy war is foughtbetween Christian Byzantium and Zoroastrian Persia, anancient conflict that, rekindled—and carefully watched bythe disunified Arab tribes to the south—is now fueled for thefirst time with profound sectarian fervor. Born with thealphabet a millennium earlier, belief has now become aninstrument of war.

the unitary god redux

islam claims the monotheistic high-ground, “One”-uppingthe Christians and their Trinity: “God is One,” the Quran

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tells us: “Say not Three.” Like Judaism but unlikeChristianity, Islam originated within a culture that had notyet directly encountered the Greek tradition of free inquirybased on alphabetic literacy. As recent scholarship suggests,Islam’s strict monotheism can be seen as a reaction instead tothe endless theological disputes that ensued when the inher-ent complexities of the Christian god had to be explained.The Arabs looked at the convulsions wracking the suppos-edly monotheistic Christian church and said, basically, “Wecan do better.” This is why Islam shares Christianity’s obses-sion with God’s number.

And yet belief in God is never as simple or straightforwardas it might seem, or as those who proclaim it might like us tothink. The Muslims’ reaction to reason was indirect, at leastat first. Like all other peoples throughout history aside fromthe Greeks, the Arabs took the idea of monotheism by exam-ple, emulating the monotheists around them (Jews, Christiansand, depending on one’s definition of monotheism,Zoroastrians, whose tradition was also changing), ratherthan evolving it on their own. They encountered the Greekliterary tradition of free rational inquiry only after monothe-ism had been firmly established, and it was rational inquirythat put explicit belief on the table. This is why Islam tends,like Judaism, to be more focused on practice than on belief.

Like the Jews, however, the Muslims, too, would bedragged into the endless tug-of-war between “Athens” and“Jerusalem” that came with the territory. Arabic writingcoalesces in the Islamic period and “classical Arabic”remains that of the Quran, which has also traditionally beenthe yardstick of literacy in the Arab world. As I’ve alreadysuggested, the meaning of such consonantal scriptures needsto be continually reinforced by group study and the unques-tioned authority of old men with beards, which is what bothJewish and Islamic traditions have always conspicuouslyrelied on. Not just the interpretation, as in alphabeticChristianity (which has certainly had its share of old menwith beards, as well as a Reformation sparked by an alpha-


betic text multiplied by the new technology of print), but theactual reading of the language itself needs to be constantlymaintained by consensus, both oral (as in group study) andwritten (as in commentaries).

Hence the massive accumulation of written commentary inboth traditions, which not only dwarfs that on Christiantexts but is qualitatively different, focusing more on how toread the words and less on what they mean in spiritualterms—though that, of course, generally follows the reading.Hence also, perhaps, the rage of old men with beards insome of these cultures today, whose traditional control of themessage erodes a bit more every time a courageous andheroic girl insists on her right to learn to read.

In ninth-century Baghdad, the Abbasid caliphs take advan-tage of a preexisting literature in Syriac, a linguistic cousin ofArabic also written in a consonantal descendant ofPhoenician script, and which has a centuries-long traditionof translation from Greek. Medieval Arabic science and phi-losophy thus begin as a translation movement ultimatelyfrom prestigious Greek sources.

Syriac and Arabic scientific literature dramatically illustratethe power of alphabetic literacy to pull non-alphabetic writinginto the realm of abstraction. Written languages have measur-ably larger vocabularies and more complex syntactic optionsavailable to users than do oral or largely oral ones, and theArabic language had to be expanded in order to accommodateGreek scientific and philosophical concepts. A similar examplefrom the religious sphere is found with the Slavs, whose culturewas strictly oral before their conversion to OrthodoxChristianity starting in the ninth century, when the Byzantinemissionary St. Cyril adapted the Greek alphabet to spokenSlavic. The Cyrillic alphabet may be familiar, but the leadingmodern authority, Sir Dimitri Obolensky, argued that Cyril’sreal genius was linguistic, as reflected in his creation of a vir-tually new liturgical language, Old Church Slavonic, thatexpanded the Slavs’ oral language in the same ways (vocabu-lary, syntax).

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Indian syllabic writing, too, captures vowel sounds andcan thus convey original content, but like Chinese writing ithas so many complex signs that reading it cannot be said tobe easy or automatic. It’s not enough to put down a newidea. People also need to be able to read it, enough of themto form a readership. Because of the great difficulty of read-ing Indian and Chinese writing, literacy in these cultures,too, has traditionally been limited to narrow, highly trainedpriestly (Indian) or bureaucratic (Chinese) elites, whichlacked the traction to expand the spoken everyday languagesin the way that a wider readership did in ancient Greece.Sophisticated, curious, insightful, and often very profound,by the first millennium ad, Chinese and Indian literatureincluded recognizable attempts to grapple with abstractionssuch as reality, time, and space. Abstraction, I suggested inPart I, is implicit in human thought, so this should not be ter-ribly surprising. The question is not whether people in thesecultures were “able” to think abstractly, or even whetherthey were curious about such notions, but whether they hadthe means to render such thought efficiently into sustained,explicit, and nuanced language that could be easily andwidely read by others. Because literacy remained sorestricted in these cultures, Havelock argued, neither coulddevote to their inquiries the kind of expanded languageavailable to writers in classical Greek and Latin.

India’s Brahmi script, the ancestor of later forms such asDevanagari, appeared in the third century bc, after India’sexposure to Greek culture during the conquests of Alexanderthe Great, which the timing suggests may have stimulated itsdevelopment (like Greek, it appears to be based onPhoenician writing). There was much give and take betweenthe two cultures going back at least to the sixth century bc,and Greek philosophy itself may have been stimulated origi-nally by Indian oral traditions. Indian and Greek philosophyhave much in common, although—crucially—the Indiansdid not develop an independent tradition of secular inquiry.Comparatively undifferentiated, even when materialistic in


its interpretations, Indian philosophy (including science)remained in service of religion and favored story and verseover prose exposition in its delivery.

Each of these great civilizations, then, represents a distinc-tive blend of oral and literate cultural patterns, and many(though certainly not all) of the differences in emphasisamong them can be explained within that context.

the age of miracles

even alphabetic literacy requires the support of a solidelementary educational system, which is precisely whatbroke down in the West during the Middle Ages, when thealphabet, too, grew restricted to scribes and priests, and oralpatterns reasserted themselves in Western culture. Readingand writing, Havelock and Ong tell us over and over, are notnatural acts in the way that talking is. Children acquirespeech on their own. They acquire reading and writing onlywith great training and discipline under the best of circum-stances.

Literacy, Havelock insisted further, is far from being theindividual accomplishment we commonly take it for. Instead,it is a social condition—and a fragile one at that. The alpha-bet is necessary for widespread literacy, in other words, butnot sufficient. Elementary education is also essential.

It’s safe to say that no civilization has ever been moreobsessed with miracles than late antique and medievalChristendom. For more than a thousand years, until theProtestant Reformation, miracles stood as the unquestionedbenchmark of religious credibility—and credulity—in theChristian world. The familiar exaltation of the other-worldlyat the expense of the worldly was expressed with remarkableconsistency, from the timeless frozen purity of Byzantineiconography to the writings of figures such as the VenerableBede—who salts his eighth-century history of the Englishchurch with thrilling miracles on nearly every page, and whopraises Caedmon, the first poet to write in English, as having

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“stirred the hearts of many folk to despise the world andaspire to heavenly things.” This was, quite simply, the high-est praise a medieval critic could offer. Medieval society’sinsistent supernaturalism—enforced by a powerful churchthat constantly policed the thinking of philosophers and did-n’t hesitate to burn heretics or unbelievers—amounts to noth-ing less than a wholesale cultural denial of nature’s regularity.It went hand-in-hand with the demotion of nature itself. Andneither can be adequately explained without reference to theoriginal rise of alphabetic reason in classical antiquity.

We tend to see the Middle Ages as a time when religionruled with an iron fist, dominating European social andpolitical institutions and occupying the central place in cul-tural life. Compared with what came after, perhaps, thismight be true, and even compared with the advances in sec-ular learning that came before, during the “first enlighten-ment” of the Classical and Hellenistic ages. Yet, when wecompare them with the age before reason, the Middle Agestake on a startling new appearance. The unquestioned andconfident polytheism that lives in what scholars call “pri-mary” oral culture, a comfortably holistic world in whichmatter and spirit are the same, makes the faith of the churchin the Middle Ages come across as crabbed andoverassertive—often strident, at times even desperate, in itsinsistent supernaturalism. The real age of religion hadalready passed with the demise of primary orality.

Faith itself is but a vestigial and epistemologically insecurerump of that formerly undisputed dominance, one that pre-vailed in the West as education crumbled, popular literacyreceded in favor of scribal or craft literacy monopolized bythe church, and “secondary” oral patterns reasserted them-selves in popular culture.

the longest war

the struggle between Athens and Jerusalem lastedthroughout the Middle Ages and beyond. Oral cultures fold


social control into their orality. Literacy put belief on thetable, which traditionally means that social control has to becoupled with thought control. Another word for that is“church.” Hence the persecution of pagans, Jews, andphilosophers in the West, Byzantium, and Islam. Alarmed bythe terrifying social implications of free inquiry, medievalman was a thought-control freak on steroids. (Medievalwoman, perhaps, not so much.)

If each of these cultures represents its own unique blend oforal and literate cultural patterns, they illustrate as well howother factors such as geopolitics and cultural identity comeinto play in deciding how the clash between faith and reasonplays out within a culture. In all civilizations that have joinedthe long tug-of-war between Athens and Jerusalem, bothsides have always had their militant proponents, who gain orlose traction as changing circumstances favor or workagainst them. Secular, rational inquiry has generally flour-ished during “golden ages” of prosperity and expansion, andthen declined as changing circumstances gave strict fideiststhe upper hand.

Only in the wealthy and ascendant Arab caliphate, wherescientific inquiry began as a translation movement fromGreek sources, was real scientific progress made during theMiddle Ages. Supported by powerful patrons, scientistsworking in Arabic accomplished the only original scientificwork of the Middle Ages, when the collapse of elementaryeducation in the West had pushed alphabetic writing, like itsconsonantal forebears, into the realm of what Havelockcalled “craft” literacy, the familiar scribal or priestly elite.

Yet the Arabs faced huge challenges in capitalizing onthese advances, which relied on concerted government sup-port rather than on the work of independent thinkers andwriters as in classical and Hellenistic Greece. Arabic sciencewas never able to gain traction in the larger culture, and asthe caliphate declined so did its spirit of inquiry, whichcould not long outlast its original manifestation as a gov-ernment-sponsored translation movement. Medieval Arabic

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intellectual culture had some towering giants, but they lefttiny footprints that peter out in the sand. In distinct contrastwith someone like Anaximander, the most original thinkerswriting in Arabic—the astronomer and geographer AlKhwarizmi, the philosopher Averroës, and the historiogra-pher Ibn Khaldun come to mind—had few if any successorsand made little impact until rediscovered in alphabetictranslations. Writing is one thing. Reading is another.

The eclipse of Arabic science has always challenged histo-rians. Many historical circumstances, including the massinvasions of Arab lands by the Turks and Mongols, no doubtcontributed to the decline of science in the Arab world, butcommunication technology must be included among them.Arab astronomical observations pointed to a new under-standing of the cosmos. But it would take a Copernicus—using not just efficient Arabic numerals and the Latin alpha-bet but also the borrowed technology of print—to capitalizeon the Arabs’ observations by achieving, articulating, andspreading that new understanding.

needham’s question

print technology came to the West from China, whichalso gave us other technological advances, including gun-powder. But technology and science are not the same thing,and the Chinese, like the Arabs, were never able to capital-ize on novelty by conceptualizing it and spreading that con-ceptualization in written form, directly and unambiguously.Chinese inquiry shares two other telltale qualities withArabic science: the presence of concerted state support, andan associated emphasis on what was “useful.” In contrast, inclassical times at least, the alphabetic Greeks were independ-ent thinkers and writers interested in theoretical understand-ing rather than practical application. The great SinologistJoseph Needham gave an impressive list of Chinese “scien-tific” accomplishments, but each one represents new tech-nology, not new understanding.


Needham famously asked why the Scientific Revolutiondidn’t happen in China. By now we’re in a position to sug-gest an answer to Needham’s question—the same one, infact, that Needham himself offered: Chinese thought neversplit the world into matter and spirit, retaining a holistic out-look that braided the two together. Never having unsettledthemselves with the idea of natural explanation, the Chinesenever took refuge in triumphalist supernaturalism; withoutthe threatening presence of free rational inquiry, Chinadeveloped nothing resembling the Western tradition ofmonotheistic faith. As I suggested in Part I, we can also lookdeeper by asking whether the roots of holism in Chinesethought may lie in the holism of Chinese writing, and even,perhaps, in the holism of Chinese language.

China has now been alphabetic for more than fifty years.While it won’t do to ascribe all cultural change in China tothe use of alphabetic writing, it also seems hard to ignore theconfluence of the alphabet’s arrival with the rapid changesthat have overtaken the world’s most populous nation. As inIndia, where difficult scripts hindered the rise of a nationallanguage and the use of alphabetic English has cut across lin-guistic boundaries, China’s economic boom has relied onalphabetic writing in very basic ways. And also like India,previously multiform and holistic religious practices havebegun moving towards Western-style monotheism predi-cated on a split between matter and spirit (as reflected bothin conversion and in modifications to indigenous traditions).

critical masses

needham’s question begs a follow-up: why did theScientific Revolution take so long to happen in the West? AsEric Havelock perceived, the alphabet had to acquire twopowerful partners, quantification and replication, beforetruly modern science could emerge. A place number system(including zero) came to the alphabetic West from the Arabsin the twelfth century, and the technique of printing on paper

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came from China in the late fifteenth. (Havelock wasscathing when it came to the cumbersome Greek system ofmathematical notation, comparing it unfavorably with othersystems, which gives the lie to those critics who have accusedhim of “extreme Hellenocentrism.”)

This part of my synthesis also draws on the brilliant workof scholar Elizabeth Eisenstein on the impact of print tech-nology, particularly on the course of the Renaissance, theReformation, the Scientific Revolution, and theEnlightenment. The new experimental method in science, forexample, could not have flourished without the possibility ofwidespread replication of results, which was simply impossi-ble in the manuscript age. But the mass production of inex-pensive, identical texts, along with identical maps, charts,tables, and illustrations has been absolutely essential tomodernity in all its forms. Only now does rhetoric, that ven-erable hybrid of oral and literate culture, disappear from itslong-held place at the center of education, to be replaced bythe familiar, and more fully literate, print-based array ofindividual disciplines in the humanities and sciences.

As Havelock and Eisenstein both stressed, for optimaleffect reading must be automatic, fluid, and unconscious.Handwriting, however meticulous, is always idiosyncratic.The printing press enhanced the fluidity of reading immea-surably simply by standardizing letter-shapes. (Calligraphy isthe enemy of literacy, Havelock memorably asserted. Thisdoes not make calligraphy less beautiful or sophisticatedthan print—quite the opposite, in fact—just less easily read.Havelock argued further that a prominent calligraphic tradi-tion is a bellwether for narrow literacy, which would seem tobe borne out by the Chinese and Arabic examples, as well asby that of the West during the Middle Ages.)

With the possible exception of the Greco-Roman period,most reading before print was voiced, with people readingout loud to a group or even to themselves. Print turned read-ing once and for all into something that happens inside yourhead, opening up new private, personal vistas for countless


millions, including growing numbers of women readers, whoformed the earliest readership for novels. (Men were sup-posed to read about science, history, and, increasingly, poli-tics, as newspapers arrived in tandem with that other greatboon to literacy, the coffee shop.)

The long sweep of Western history since the advent ofprint reveals a continuing pattern—messy but discernable—of secular surge followed by religious reaction: Renaissancefollowed by Reformation, Scientific Revolution byInquisition, Enlightenment by Romanticism, SecularHumanism by Religious Right. More to the point, with eachcycle in the pattern, the surges have gained in momentumwhile the reactions have diminished in momentu

the coming classics revolution part ii: synthesis · 2016. 1. 19. · stood, especially eric...

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