EVOLUTION
Let’s take one quick, final leap into the past, before we turn the page and start talking about the future. Let’s picture a world very different from our own—no cars, no skyscrapers, no sprawling farms, no electric light. Picture a world where conversation is the only means of communication, of building a memory of things, events, situations. Picture a world without books, without newspapers, without text messages or screens, or store signs, or street signs, license plates, billboards, labels. Picture a world ante litteram—or more precisely, before we offend one of my Latin professor colleagues who argues that there’s more than one letter out there, a world ante litteras.
Not exactly an ideal situation, right?
It was most certainly a less intriguing world, before the invention of writing. Communication was possible only in real time. We had to make do with gestures, a whole choreography of hand movements, pointed fingers, furrowed brows. And we had to use our voices, our full-throated voices, simultaneously.
It’s true that thinking about how the world was before an important invention does make that invention look, well, a touch too consequential. An invention does not stand as a watershed between a clearly defined before and after. Inventions don’t come with the immediate awareness that, from that spectacular moment on, the fate of mankind will be forever changed. It’s therefore unlikely that the people of Mesopotamia or Egypt or China had any real sense of just how valuable a thing they’d cooked up. We’re not machines, we’re not clairvoyants, we’re not all that great at seeing the big picture. Wrapping our heads around even just the few billion years that our planet’s been around is nearly impossible, and these watershed moments become so only in retrospect.
It’s looking backward that allows us to connect the dots. Looking forward, on the other hand, we see only the road left to travel. Compared to the earth’s 4.5 billion years, and to the two hundred thousand years that humans have been around, writing is a protozoic microbe, a newborn tadpole. Too recent to be an integral part of our DNA, too recent to factor into the genetic evolution of our cognitive mechanisms.
Writing is an object created by us and transmitted by us. It is not biological, it is not in our genes. It is, in short, a cultural gizmo. As such, no matter what form it is conveyed in, whether it be the alphabet or Chinese or Japanese characters, it must be learned. And this learning process costs us great effort, since it is an artificial, not an innate, instrument. We must learn the rules of its game.
And then, once we’ve mastered it, the game becomes pervasive, it besieges us. Until it becomes a regular extension of our minds. In three words, it becomes natural. We ourselves aren’t even aware of just how important this invention is. Of how heavily the after weighs on us.
Though the question remains: Were we destined, as a species at its most advanced phase, after a millennia-long trial period as hominids, to arrive there naturally, to slam headfirst into the invention of writing? Was it preordained that the evolution of culture would lead, over however long a gestation period, to the day when language would become tangible and material?
The answer is no. There’s nothing inevitable, deterministic, or teleological about the invention of writing.
Yes, several cultures around the world, as it’s now clear, did indeed get there on their own, from separate hotbeds of invention, leaping from their own private springboards. These hotbeds suggest that there must have been something in the soil, predisposing these regions to invention. Something must have paved the way, provided an affordance, an invitation for writing to exist. Where does this invitation come from? We’re now entering the minefield of necessity. We’ve just gotten off the ground, and already there’s turbulence.
NECESSITY
In effect natural selection operates upon the products of chance and can feed nowhere else; but it operates in a domain of very demanding conditions, and from this domain chance is barred.
—Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity
One day man decides to stay put. He discovers that by plowing the fields he can fulfill all his basic nutritional needs as well as produce a rich surplus for his family, his group, and for periods of famine. Man stays put and starts producing so much that he can diversify his production. Man also marks his territory: he creates institutions, the temple, the warehouse, the archive. Man creates bureaucracy to manage his entire magnificent creation. And what is it that he does to secure this advantage over other men, who inevitably, thanks to his shrewd centralization strategy, have become his underlings?
He invents writing, says Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel.
And he creates an empire. Empires, as we know, produce a great number of things. Things that must be overseen, that must be expedited, that must be exchanged. The human brain can only hold so much. And besides, our time is limited, finite, one day we die. And we must keep track of all this, along with heaps of numbers, names of kings, births, harvests, trades, and wars, debts, laws, and taxes.
And so writing is born to fulfill this need, says Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens.
Claiming necessity as the sole cause behind something that doesn’t yet exist is problematic. It offers too finalistic an interpretation. To invent means to find a solution to a problem, to fill a gap, an absence—but if we fail to notice that problem or absence?
There’s no denying that writing did, over time, transform itself into a necessity. Somewhere along the way it became the means to a very precise end: to function as an instrument of celebration and control, a coveted object. It became a system. Over time, as was only inevitable, people came to recognize its utility, to employ it not for a single end but for a variety of ends.
The great institutions of the past, the empires, were of critical importance not so much in the creation process (who knows exactly who, how, and when it was invented!) but in the process of maintaining the invention, of rendering it permanent, durable, of passing it on, spreading it wide. Though we’d be mistaken to look at this culminating moment—visible to us only by glancing thousands of years into the past—as a project, a scheme, the result of a conscious plan.
Almost no invention is born from the force of such a mechanistic aim.
Let’s not mistake cause for effect. Writing isn’t born for this or that motive, for religion, for divination, nor for bureaucracy, nor for (or as) numbers. It isn’t born to do something specific. It’s born to do something much more general. Writing allows us to name ourselves and the things around us, and it conserves them: but this isn’t writing’s aim, it’s an act, a realization. It’s simply what writing does.
Writing is sound made visible and tangible, and as such it interacts intimately with our sensory systems, our ears, our eyes, hands, tongue. Which in no way makes it an innate faculty—quite the contrary. It merely makes it human. Writing is bound to perception, yes, our filter on the world, but also to everything the world is made of. To things themselves: concrete things, created things, the things we see around us, and even abstract, imagined things.
Writing is connected to other human inventions that were already alive and present: art, icons, symbols, abstract signs that had yet to be named. Writing is a natural continuation of these endeavors. It’s no coincidence that all the early scripts arose from a strong, iconographic foundation, already established, already well under way. From paintings, engraved seals, emblems, heraldic symbols. It’s no coincidence that this boiling cauldron of artistic ingenuity was the very same pot from which we fished up the first written signs. In China, Egypt, Mesopotamia, but elsewhere, too, in Crete, the Indus Valley, Easter Island: the list goes on. It’s from there that the first notions of writing arose, from there that we learned to assemble an ordered code.
To have drawn writing forth from what was already there—from art, symbols, abstraction, all of it, but also from our perception of the world, from our ears, our hands, our tongues, our eyes—may well be one of the boldest endeavors that human beings have ever undertaken.
Relying on our unparalleled curiosity to understand what’s not yet understood, experimenting, trying our luck with one approach after another. Writing is the direct result of this curiosity, this intuition, this drive to press just a bit further. If we want to talk about necessity, let’s talk about this necessity: our irrepressible impulse to create, without a thought for what answers we might find.
MEMORY
Time for the coup de grâce: writing is something we could also do without. We know this from the part of our brain that looks like a seahorse and that controls our long-term memory. Before the invention of writing, and even after, in cultures where orality was the only means of communication, populations put their faith in the hippocampus, and trained it well.
Memory is a moldable, selective, specific phenomenon. Our neural synapses are constantly changing and their lives are brief: proteins don’t last long in the brain. Everything in the brain is in flux, especially in the hippocampus, the only area where new neurons form. And yet our memories are not ephemeral; they’re made of durable matter, which resurfaces when we bring those memories up, even if they’re never quite the same as they used to be.
Milman Parry was a pioneer in the study of oral theory. He was one of the first to take note of the Homeric poems’ formulaic character, their repetitive patterns, their recurrent expressions (the rosy-fingered dawn, the wine-dark sea, swift-footed Achilles). In the days of Ancient Greece, narrators would build off this skeleton, throwing in their variations and improvisations. And not just in Greece. Parry traveled to Yugoslavia to listen to and record bards capable of reciting thousands of lines. One of them, Avdo Mededović, could recite more than eighty thousand lines from fifty-eight different epic poems. But not because Avdo had memorized all this word for word. What he’d learned by heart was simply a framework. On top of which he spun his variations on and departures from the theme.
Before Homer, in Greece, on Crete, and in Mycenae, our scribes would never have dreamed of recording poems and epics using the syllables of Linear B. Linear B was a tool for the palaces and their intricate economic transactions. Poetry, on the other hand, was the stuff of singers, of aoidoi, of musicians and dancers. It was the festive spirit of the symposia, the music’s rhythm, the pounding of feet on the earth. No one needed writing to sing and dance. Too bad no trace survives of these “Mycenaean” poems. We assume their existence; we have evidence and it’s plausible (some of Homer’s verses are very ancient, certainly as old as the Mycenaean age).
But these weren’t writings. Transcribing verses, taking up “pen and paper,” wasn’t seen as something necessary. Even though a perfectly viable writing form was already available, rigged and ready. It makes sense, if you think about it: Do we go writing down all the lyrics to every song we listen to? Sure, every once in a while a line or two hits home and you jot it in your diary, or post it on your Instagram, or tattoo it on your arm. Whatever the case, you’re not copying it down so you can learn it—you’ve already learned it, probably by heart. Your hippocampus did the work all on its own.
The power of memory is astounding. Before it, all writing, even the most enigmatic, eye-catching, intriguing script, is nothing more than an appendage, an artificial extension. Even Plato, in his day, was onto the idea. In fact, he was even stauncher in his belief—lurking in the invention of writing he saw the pernicious beginnings of a disease, one that “will implant forgetfulness in the souls of all who learn it. They will cease to make use of their memories, since, relying on what is written, they’ll call things to mind not from within themselves, but from without, by means of external signs.”
Words found in his Phaedrus. A complete condemnation. And yet Plato wasn’t totally off base. Look at us with our cell phones, which have basically become extensions of our brain—we who can hardly even remember our own phone number, saving PINs and passwords in apps to keep from forgetting them. We who can no longer construct the memory palaces erected by civilizations that predate the written word.
Let’s linger a while with the Greeks, who understood a thing or two about memory. In one tale, recounted by Cicero, we hear of the lyric poet Simonides of Ceos, who invents a powerful mnemonic device and employs it to identify the guests at a feast, all of whom were killed when the ceiling collapsed: Simonides digs through his visual memory to recall the position of every invitee at the table, making a mental tracking shot of where they were seated.
Thus is born the “method of loci,” which we still use effectively to this day (Sherlock Holmes is one practitioner, to give you a sense). We link the things we want to remember to precise points in space. Then, to recall them, we revisit this associative path in our mind, the spatial relationship between object and location. Which allows us, like Cicero, to remember what we want to say when we’re giving a speech, what we want to buy at the grocery store, what chores we have that week, what clues we’ve gathered to track down the murderer (in Sherlock Holmes’s case). We’re back to making lists again, in other words, only we’re not writing them down.
This ability of memory to move nimbly through physical space has now been confirmed by modern science. The hippocampus is tied not only to our memory but to our capacity to move through space, and to imagine future experiences. The neuroscientists May-Britt and Edvard Moser (then husband and wife), along with their colleague John O’Keefe, discovered the nerve cells responsible for our spatial positioning system, our internal GPS, which helps us orient ourselves and navigate when we’re on the move. Their work earned them the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
To some degree, we’re still squandering memory’s great potential. We’re still haunted by Plato’s prophecy, already well on its way to coming true—his warning of what happens when we neglect our memories, of the danger that underlies the written word, of forgetfulness, oblivion.
Writing changed the face of the world, that’s undeniable. Though as far as evolution, as far as necessity, as far as the actual mechanics of our memory, we could just as well have made do without it.
Of course I’m playing devil’s advocate here, to an extent, and these provocations remain exactly that: provocations. We all know just how thoroughly writing revolutionized, simplified, accelerated our ability to store data. But this fact does nothing to make writing a more wieldy tool, nor a more agile object, nor, least of all, a more rapidly developing phenomenon. Nor, as some might claim, does it make it the greatest invention in the world.