Books and Western Civilization go hand-in-hand. Ever since Julius Caesar (maybe) invented the codex, aka the book as we know it, we as a civilization have been in love. This is not to say that books were not important elsewhere (that would just be silly), but I would argue that books have taken on an out-sized role in European culture that has shaped our thought in subtle ways. I want to use India as my counter-example, as it’s the non-Western region I know the most about, and because of certain similarities of thought. I would love to hear from anyone who knows something about the Arabic or East Asian traditions on this topic.
You may be familiar with the idea of an oral tradition and its importance in transferring culture. When I think of oral tradition in the West, I think of Homer, whose works were recited often only in part by traveling bards, creating varied stories that changed over time. The philosophers of old, too, relied primarily on oral teachings, such as the lectures of the Athenian Academy, or of those numerous philosophers who didn’t do much writing, but did a lot of influential teaching. Socrates is the clearest example of this. Those works which were committed to the page often had an oral quality, from Plato’s dialogues, the speeches of Epictetus (written down by a loyal student who made a big deal about trying to preserve his rhetorical style) and numerous others.
Thinking of Indian culture, we can see very similar documents. The Bhagavad Gita is meant to be sung, the Upanishads are often in dialogue form, and the entire Sutra tradition (including Patanjali’s famous work) is structured for maximum ease of memorization. Traditional Indian teaching relies heavily on memorization of texts, key points, and even grammatical rules, even to this day. This is Swami’s style, and I struggle with it, and he knows that I have no intention of methodically memorizing texts. It is however extremely impressive when he rattles off quote after quote in perfect Sanskrit.
While in India oral culture has been essentially unbroken, European oral culture essentially died out during the Dark Ages, as barbarians wrecked the Roman Empire, and learned men wilted from lack of patronage and cloistered themselves in monasteries. Here the book became increasingly important, and as Europe slowly picked itself up and began to rediscover its heritage, the cultural transmission was entirely through the medium of the book. The Greeks and Romans were reintroduced to the West by trade with the Arabic world through Spain, as well by the flight of scholars from (and the pillage of) Constantinople, the last vestige of Rome. These and other rediscovered books contained secrets and mysteries that it seemed no man knew, and they, rather than other men, became the symbol of knowledge. This plays out in myths through the such icons as the cursed book, the Grimoire, Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, and movies like the underrated “9th Gate”. These represent the power of the book to unleash strange and powerful ideas that have the potential to upset the preconceptions of the reader or even the very order of the world. The stark division between the literate and illiterate in medieval Europe must have exacerbated this. In largely illiterate societies, writing has often been associated with magic. In ancient Egypt writing very nearly was magic, and the history of talismans shows the power that strange images and scribbles had upon the imagination. Consulting books and gleaning strange knowledge by merely glancing at obscure and mysterious symbols must have seemed akin to divination at some level, and indeed, there is even a sub-field of divination – bibliomancy – based on this idea.
A natural result of this is the desire to write a great book one’s self. We hear about the quest for the “Great American Novel” or more previously a single unified Metaphysics, such as was attempted by Spinoza, Descartes, and others. An interesting effect of the myth of the book is that, with the printing press, this tradition flooded our culture with books, new and old. I leave it to the historians of science to determine the impact of this on the European scientific revolution, but we can assume a major influence. An increasingly literate culture, with ever-increasing access to information clearly paved the way for the modern age. As an aside, consider the fact that more new books were printed last year than existed in the Great Library of Alexandria by its final year.
There is also a question of authority to consider. It is the habit of every culture to mythologize and give sacred meaning to the past. Anything that is old becomes hallowed eventually, whether as museum pieces or immutable and infallible authorities of traditional culture. The Guru in India certainly fills this role. The guru is the repository of (often memorized, and thereby monopolized) knowledge passed down from hallowed antiquity, and therefore he is worshiped nearly (or actually) as a god. In Europe, it is often the book that is so exalted. The literal adherence to the authority of the Bible, considered literally as "the word of God" even today, speaks to this, but it is not the only example, even if it is the most important. For centuries, the works of Aristotle and Plato, not to mention the more esoteric Corpus Hermeticum, were considered almost infallible in the same way as the Indian guru. The academic tradition (now on the decline, for better or worse) of education by the “Great Books” is another, if later, manifestation of the same instinct.
Strangely, it was the Tea Party movement that inspired this post. I was reading some ridiculous op-ed piece on Fox News (I like to keep tabs on ‘The Enemy’) and I was struck by the sheer fetishism demonstrated towards the U.S. Constitution. The founders, because they’re long dead, are hallowed into Saints, and their main document is near worshiped by the modern conservative movement. Despite the fact that it’s needed to be amended 27 times, it is considered almost infallible to the “strict constitutionalist” type.
You can probably guess my feelings on all this. While I myself am something of a bibliophile (I have a library that I’m proud of and a bookshelf of antique or rare books), I clearly don’t approve of traditions of infallibility regarding any text, ancient or modern. But I’m not really trying to make an argument against such silliness here, which would likely just be me preaching to the choir. Instead, I want to pose some questions. Conservatism, narrow-mindedness, and literalist interpretations appear all over the world, in as many different forms as there are cultures (or people). That said, how much of an influence has the European book tradition had on the particular manifestation of conservatism that we see in this country today? Has our bibliophile cultural inheritance had a part to play in emphasizing the infallibility of texts such as the Bible of the U.S. Constitution?
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