Thanks to Howard Johnson for pointing me to this article/interview.
One thing that struck me fascinating is this train of thought from Key:
What’s interesting is the next thing to look at: What are the non-universals that are particularly interesting and powerful? They were things like agriculture, reading and writing, deductive mathematics, empirical science, equal rights.
And many of them, you can actually track back, quite reliably in history, to find out, more or less, they’re inventions. There weren’t things that came out immediately; we’d been on the planet for a few hundred thousand years. These inventions are almost always harder to learn, because we’re less genetically predisposed.
What’s interesting is, it still takes us really about seven years to learn a language and we are disposed towards language. In fact, children have a bit of a proto-language. That’s been studied with how pidgins create, become Creole languages.
So, throw in another level of invention and all of a sudden, you have to have schools. Schools came about originally for teaching writing. We’ve never been a civilization that’s an oral society, so the interesting question’s why. What is different about writing, given it’s just transliteration from speech, particularly in an alphabetic society? Why were alphabets invented?
And why ask when they’re the most obvious thing?
And the answer is, people are completely unaware that they’re making speech sounds. Because what people actually do is normalize all that stuff and they think they’re just speaking words to each other, right? A natural thing to write down is a word, rather than a speech sound.
Key is talking about how “writing,” in alphabetic form, is “unnatural.” An oral society does not have schools — it is part of the “human universal” that exists in every society. Yet, unnatural though it is, once people are acclimatized to thinking in those terms, “alphabetically,” so to speak, it becomes the normal, semi-natural way of thinking. (and it takes years until it becomes natural — not just at individual level, but at social level — this is what Key means by you can’t just put printing press in a non-literate society.)
But printing press had been placed in, in a sense, non-literate societies before, and they were transformative, just not in a way that we’d like to remember. Robert Darnton had written about the “real” best sellers of the Enlightenment, most of which had now been forgotten. Basically, most of these were mixtures of lowbrow sci fi, conspiracy theories, and pseudosciences. If you will, it’s the story of how Mesmer trumped Lavoisier in 18th century France — at least, the “real” 18th century France that contained far more people than the consumers of the High Enlightenment. The secret of Mesmer’s success was, in a sense, that he catered much more to the “non-literate” aspects of the society even as he was using the printing press. The underlying principles of the Enlightenment was not widely understood. But people knew enough (and these are relatively educated people — France in 18th century was still largely illiterate) that the printing press was magical and special and all that while the Enlightenment, whatever it was, was huge. Mesmer sold them a mixture of magic and crackpot wrapped up in clothes of science and reason and spiced with enough of the flavors that the “non-literate society” was familiar with. (NB: Key has a magical quote, “We can eliminate the learning curve for reading by getting rid of reading and going to recordings.” But a lot of hucksters did and do make fortunes by offering to do exactly that — including M. Messmer.)
The story is familiar to anthropologists because it’s the story of Cargo Cult — give a stone age people radio, and the radio does become transformative, but not because of what it does in a society familiar with its workings, but because radio is powerful “magic,” depending on whatever kind of magic that the society was already familiar with before the arrival of the radio. What Feynman would demand, when seeing a cargo cult, is not blind faith or irrational rejection, but a reasoned skepticism aimed at making sense of the radio. In a sense, this is the story of how Mesmer died rich and happy and how the Revolutionary judge declared the Republic does not need scientists like Lavoisier — because he made no sense to the common man in the Republic, in contrast the great Mesmer who, apparently, spoke to the masses (at least the literate subset thereof). And also, this is, I imagine, why Key is unhappy with technology today — it’s all “magic.” There is no encouragement towards understanding how things work. (I was amused that there is a term called Cargo Cult Programming.)
But cargo cults happen. We don’t reinvent the wheels by thinking through the first principles. Why we use textbooks and teach people formulas is so that they can be good cultists — and hope and pray, while we do it, our cult is not built on “cargo.” But how do we know if our cult is built on truth or idols unless we encourage deeper thinking?
This is a real dilemma. I had noted, just a day or two ago, the profound lesson that I had learned while talking to military officers trying to integrate technology into military: whatever the technology is, it has to be made simple enough to be operable by high-school educated 19-year olds under fire, not by trained engineers who are able to reason through the problem from the first principles. This means the key moving parts all need to be distilled to simple mantras and litany that the recruits must simply “believe in” and repeat precisely when called upon — the very definition of how cults operate. In the Middle Ages, the universities were surprisingly intellectual: Thomas Aquinas was a first rate logician, among other things. But the Church, for the masses, operated as a cult, via rituals memorized without understanding. It was absolutely necessary — because the Bible does not make sense without a lot of complex rationalizing, interpreting, and pondering. Once the Bible was opened to the masses, however, the subtle and sophisticated understandings of its contents, pored over and debated endlessly (and perhaps pointlessly) by theologians went out the window. This is how W. J. Bryan got tripped up at the Scopes trial: he believed that Bible had to make sense to the commonest man, as core part of his political and social faith. But, let’s face it, Bible ain’t that easy to make sense of, and it was easy to trap Bryan in an untenable situation. Yet, the Reformation was difficult to avoid: the churchmen did abuse their bureaucratic privileges. Their position as neutral keepers of the Truth was increasingly untenable due to the eroding trust. (This sadly has another echo today).
Yet, “cults” seem to come about far more naturally — I cannot get a copy of “Human Universals” cheaply enough, so I’ll have to wait on reading it myself — but as I understand it, every society, even very primitive ones, have some form of “cultish” organization, where people subscribe to common faith that they express through shared rituals. So teaching “science” as a cult might even go beyond simple practicality, that the recruits need to learn to do things mechanically and automatically without needing to think. But cults shun people who don’t subscribe to its version of truths, formulas, and textbooks. Should we be looking for another Maylower?