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⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-03)
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First, thanks for the fascinating article - I had no idea such a treasure trove existed, and I really enjoyed the conclusions you drew from it - especially those regarding the prevailing narrative trends about literacy.
I have a fact, if not a favourite fact, about spiders: they use their webs as a tool of thought. Part of this is obvious - it is a sensory prosthetic - the vibrations draw them to prey. A more subtle part is the way in which the web filters and processes information, using variable tension to concentrate and dissipate focus in specific places or at specific weights, and how the structure itself encapsulates instructions for further web-building.
I'm aware there are a lot of nuance and muddiness here, a lot of it generated by the porous boundary between perception and cognition, but the basic concept of a natural tools of thought seems an easy sell to me. Brains are calorie monsters. Any prosthetic that provides even the most moderate reduction in the required braininess to perform a given task is something that would absolutely increase fitness.
Part of what I find compelling about this idea is that it mirrors so well the way we use writing as an enabling notation, a tool that not only allows our thoughts to become asynchronous, but also larger, more rich, and more complex than our brains and voices allow.
In Plato's Phaedrus, writing is invented as a pharmakon for the memory - a medicine-poison, given by the God Thoth to the people of Egypt - and in the Phaedrus, he has Socrates thoroughly lambast writing, as a source of a sort of ersatz, pod-person philosophy, that would supplant true wisdom with its mere semblance.
It's a deeply weird and ironic passage, not least because Plato was such a terrific writer, so there are some immediate questions about what on earth he was doing presenting such an argument - and how serious he was about the conclusions Socrates was delivering. I would hazard that the almost absent voice of Plato himself amply demonstrates something that writing does beyond preserving speech - it allows for texts without an author, where the writer themself is so close to invisible that they become a phantasm, and where the author cannot be questioned for their final verdict on the content.
The thing that interested me here was how the passage demonstrates, even in its most straightforward read, that writing opens up new options for a thinker. Even if you think, like Socrates, that writing opens up only bad options, it still offers tools for the thinker who wants people to have their ideas maltreated, tumbled about, misunderstood, and abused.
Both in this, and the story about the spider, we have the idea that thinking is a sort of synthetic process, that happens between brain and machine, constantly in engagement with the world, and partly composed of the world - where there is nothing more natural than writing, and nothing more artificial than pure thought, and rather than the lonely individual of Rouseau's pre-historic imaginary, living alone and looking down on the world from above, you get an image of humans being one of a rather long line of thinking, tool-using animals, an animal whose natural pursuits include math and poetry.
Returning to the bark-birch, the intuition that writing is an artificial product, generally only available through foreign imposition, is one that follows from Rosseau's story. In that story, all social and technical goods are innovations, essentially alien to nature. In the opposing story, where humans are naturally a tool-using, finger-counting kind of beast, the question would be more, why is it so many people in history were illiterate? What on earth went wrong?