TELEPHONE
To say that an invention, like that of writing, emerged from our biological need for novelty is no stretch of the imagination. But writing is not imprinted in our genes: it is a cultural phenomenon, it must be learned and, in order to survive, it must be successfully passed on. And this transmission process comes with its own set of problems.
We are the only truly “cultural” animals on this planet, the only ones to create traditions. Other animals have their practices that they repeat and imitate, like the way certain dolphins use sea sponges to kick up prey from the seafloor, or the way chimpanzees crack open nuts on rocks, but we’re in another league. We are the only ones to operate according to a cumulative framework, to create extended chains of shared habits, practices, and behaviors. I’m not speaking only of social behavior or group habits—the analytical approach in this case is a bit more abstract, since we’re dealing with Culture, which we’re here treating somewhat ham-handedly as if it were an all-in-one package. But the point is this: humans transmit this cultural package (ideas, habits, social propensities, and much more) far and wide, and more so than any other species. And when this transmission process proves successful on a large scale, a tradition is born.
By now we’ve learned that this mechanism doesn’t operate solely on imitation. Any attempt by one individual to precisely imitate another individual’s behavior is doomed to failure—inevitably that behavior will be changed. Traditions are pliant, moldable “objects”: they cannot be transmitted without a certain degree of alteration. A little like the game telephone: we start passing the message around from person to person, and in just a few rounds the errors accumulate and we’re left with a completely different message. So what is it that allows a tradition to stay alive? Why is it that some take root and others end up in the waste bin? What is the key to success? And why is it that certain scripts come and go overnight, and others spread like a virus (that insidious alphabet)?
FLOPS
Successful traditions, the ones with staying power, don’t depend on the faithfulness with which they’re transmitted. In fact, it’s the other way around. Not only does accuracy not matter; there’s no place for it at all, since the original messages change so much by default, as we know from telephone. What counts is the quantity and the radius of distribution. No need for it to spread in a sudden burst, like a viral tweet, everywhere one day and forgotten the next, like this year’s summer jam or beach read. No, these are destined to fade, since they’re not made up of “tradition” but of “episodes.” Here, we’re talking about something much more tangible, more durable, something we pass on from generation to generation. To make a certain phenomenon stick like flypaper to culture, your regular old methods of transmission won’t suffice. It takes something more.
Olivier Morin, an anthropologist and psychologist at the Max Planck Institute in Jena, summed up the secret in three indelible words: repetition, redundancy, proliferation.* The more a tradition is repeated, in great quantity and over a broad territory, the longer it lasts in time. And these tides of transmission must be robust, and insistent, so as to create a continuous wave effect. Think, for example, of the Catholic mass, with its memorization, repetition, proliferation of the canon—and all for centuries and centuries. The result, across Italy and beyond, is that these prayers, whether we believe in them or not, may be the only thing that many of us know by heart, along with a poem or two we studied in middle school.
And it must also have appeal, more so than purpose. The thing being transmitted must have attractive elements. It must give pleasure. Traditions are not like epidemics, which propagate opportunistically and without looking anyone in the face. Selection comes into play, and in this case it’s not natural* but cultural. If a tradition survives, it does so because it’s bound up with cognitive preferences such as attractiveness, or because it benefits from equally high levels of repetition and diffusion.
I’ll give you a random example. People are drawn to the “crime novel” genre because it’s linked to so many things that lie beyond explanation: love, death, mystery, secrets. Its appeal, I’d daresay, is universal. Good table manners, though they have a universal pull, can change according to region: in northern Africa (and not only) you eat with your hands, in South Asia burping is a way of letting the host know you enjoyed your food—which shows you just how widely our ideas of appropriateness and our tolerance thresholds vary.
What is it, then, that sets one script above another? What causes the road to fork between proliferation and oblivion?
I can already hear you starting to say “utility,” but I’ll stop you there. Utility, “having a purpose,” is not always a universal ingredient for success when it comes to a cultural element. We can’t simply say that the alphabet triumphed because it’s useful for something, namely for writing. All scripts are useful for writing, and none, not a single one, does it better than any other. The alphabet triumphed because historical circumstances, along with its swift and agile curves, favored its survival. Not because it’s more useful than, say, the classical Cypriot syllabary.
Like everything, like all of us, scripts, too, are subject to whims, idiosyncrasies, preferences, changes, innovations, cultural revolutions. And writing, more often than you’d think, has suffered the blows of this (let’s call it “fate”) and come to naught.
The tales of our island and city scripts, which lasted for hundreds or thousands of years, are now behind us. All the stories I’ve told up to this point, with a few minor exceptions, have been success stories, stories of scripts that expanded and evolved over time. Even the undeciphered scripts that we looked at are winners, in their own way, since they lasted for a relatively long time and were transmitted from generation to generation.
In five thousand years of writing, longevity, if you take a closer look, has been hard to come by. The number of failed launches is uncountable. Though not all of them are flops. Some are examples of creations that were artfully crafted but only as an end in themselves, others are systems that were intentionally closed off and encoded, and still others are branches that never took root, the so-called scriptae interruptae. Let’s give them a look.