A Return to The Ethos of Oral Societies

 

There is an age old joke that the Africans and Europeans made an exchange where the Africans gave up their land in exchange for the Bible. Beyond the tongue and cheek, there is a deeper part to this joke that doesn’t involve the Bible in its specificity but the written word in its generality. In a previous blog, titled African women should breastfeed whenever the need to arises, I touch on the differences between oral and literary societies. This blog is a dehiscence from that one and I focus on the darker minatory aspects of the writing medium.

 

The Gutenberg Press was a complete game changer as was the steam engine and the transistor. These technological advancements were just incredible. And I for one having spent a quarter of my waking life reading, the Gutenberg Press has brought me an indispensable pleasure and resource. C.S. Lewis in A Writing Life writes ‘Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege of individuality… In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself.’ Marshal McLuhan writes in his book Understanding Media, ‘For the content of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind’. While the content of the written word has changed my life. It is the medium itself that needs to be paid particular attention to. ‘The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.’ We cannot ignore the darker sides of a medium irrespective of the positive that its content has brought to our lives.

 

Ayi Kwei Armah begins Two Thousand Seasons with the line ‘We are not a people of yesterday’. The ‘We’ he is referring to is the African people. One of the most historical gas lighting events that has taken place against African people, was to make us believe that because we did not have a recorded/ written down history then we didn’t have a history at all; that we were a tabula rasa before European intervention. Of course we did; the major difference being that the history of African people flowed from one generation to the next without needing the permanence of the written word to uphold the culture and history. Everything that was pertinent was passed down orally.

 

In Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu’s The Theory of Man, the protagonist Emil Coetzee (of European descent) thinks ‘He realised that the problem with the African was that there was a lack of permanence in his way of doing things. The African did not build permanent structures: pole and dagha constructions could never withstand the demands of time. The African did not have a writing tradition; all he had was the orality he could carry with him but never leave behind a record. All that the African possessed were his memories, which were destined to forever fade with time.’ Coetzee views this impermanence as a problem but the African people didn’t build permanent structures because they were not a permanent people. They realised that birth and death are two sides of the same coin; they celebrated birth and knew that with their birth, there was already a procession in living making its way to the grave. They knew that in their death, they were simply making way for others to be born. They also understood Mitch Albom’s words when he writes ‘Death ends lives not relationships’ and that they would assume a different role as ancestor beyond the veil. It was based on this impermanence premise that the Western world carried out their various machinations against the African people. The sophisticated logistical systems that became known as the Triangular Trade Route could not have been carried out as effectively as they were without writing as a medium. In Lupe Fiasco’s Unforgivable Youth he raps:

‘Ways and means from the trade of human beings/ A slave labour force provides wealth to the machine/ And helps the new regime establish and expand/ Using manifest destiny to siphon off the land/ From native caretakers who can barely understand/ How can land be owned by another man?/ Warns, “One cannot steal what was given as a gift”/ Is the sky owned by birds and the rivers owned by fish?/ But the lesson went unheeded, for the sake of what’s not needed.’

 

African people have had a clear understanding of their place in nature; as part of the whole and knowing that we are stewards or the word Lupe uses ‘caretakers’ of all that we come in contact with. African people knew that land was not up for grabs as the ‘scramble for Africa’ would like to deceive the world into believing. If land could not be owned then succession was even more of a strange concept than ownership. And one would consequently ask, if we are all doing our best to own and horde land coupled with the fact that the earth is finite; and it is already packed to the rafters with people, where on earth are the people still yet to be born going to live? Which part of the landscape will have escaped the ‘private property and its attached threat’ mark?

 

Mortality Salience is a psychological phenomenon where human beings are aware that they are going to die and it causes anxiety and fear within them. I think it is one of the conditions that came to be as a consequence of the establishment of literary societies. Once man was able to write his individual personal story, it created space between him and his neighbour psychologically (moving from collective societies to individual societies) and he then became obsessed with that personal story like Narcissa, perpetually acting as a servo-mechanism (Marshall McLuhan) for this story and also having to contend with knowing that at some unknown place, time , manner; the story will abruptly end. The stylus will slip off the turnstile and there will be no music playing. The existential insanity of this obsession with the self, the story of the self and not dying is not experienced by just one person (usually a sovereign who searches for the elixir of immortality); this is societal. And as a result the word that governs the doings of the day and of the life is not success but legacy followed by success because it is assumed that the easiest way to leave a legacy is to be materially successful. Legacy is the prime mover. In our pursuit for the attainment of material success, non-bottom line entities like ethics and the environment take a backseat. The shift from collective societies to literary societies have not only alienated people from their neighbours; breeding competition and conflict fuelled by greed but this has placed a very heavy burden on existence. The unrelenting need for everything we do to be measurable; which means it can therefore be attached to a price. We hope we are cutting it according to the success standards of the day; that we are passing the existential Turing test of leaving a legacy when the grim reaper makes an appearance.

 

In his Youtube video, The Mark of Cain, Jonathan Pageau says ‘It is the capacity to see the other human as so completely outside of yourself as to be able to take his life… There is an irreconcilability between the internal and the external man, such that he perceives the external as dangerous and he sees his lack (vulnerability) as needing to be added unto’. Jonathan was describing Cain’s fratricide and Adam and Eve’s condition post-The Fall. I think the consequences of The Fall are in and of themselves allegorical and can then find their applications in a myriad of real-life situations; including the literary man’s current condition. The adoption of the ways of literary societies have produced a separation akin to The Fall. This separation has played out as a separation from everything else (the natural world) and also from other people (they become a danger because we are competing for resources) and also a separation from the self where our vulnerability (mortality) casts a long shadow over our entire lives. It is to live in square houses with high walls flitting from one thing to the next.

 

The Flynn Effect is the tendency of IQ scores to change over time, and specifically the apparent increase in intelligence in the general population evidenced by a steady increase in IQ scores. James Flynn, in his Ted Talk describes the exponential increase in IQ recently and attributed this increase to the ability to think abstractly and this is no doubt due to literacy. Abstract thinking has been heralded as good conclusively. Walter J. Ong writes ‘without writing, the literate mind would not and could not only think as it does, not only when engaged in writing but normally even when it comes to composing its thoughts in oral form. More than any other single invention writing has transformed human consciousness.’

 

Frederica Mathewes-Green in conversation with Jonathan Pageau in his YouTube video ‘How we exist together: Re-enchantment and orthodox’ in discussing A.R. Luria’s Cognitive Development: It’s cultural and social foundations says ‘They (people who live in oral societies) recognised them (the things & people around them) as friends in a sense, as things they already knew, as things that were part of the story of the lives. That they are participating in the story amongst other people and they are enmeshed in all these touchable, tangible things that are around them.’ In his studies Luria would ask the people to select the item that does not fit in with the rest (typical pattern recognition IQ question style) e.g. a saw, hatchet, hammer and a log. Literate people would say the log and the people from oral societies would reply that everything fits together because without the log then what would the point of the existence of the others be. ‘They resisted reducing things to abstraction and I think that’s the sickness that we have.’ Jonathan Pageau adds ‘We understand health through disease; we understand things through their exception. We look at things that don’t work to understand things that do work.’ In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates says writing is bad because it means people will no longer be able to remember things and they will be wholly depended on writing. Writing as any other supplement has given and it has taken away. It’s not that illiterate people didn’t believe in their personal story but saw their story imbedded within that of the collective, intertwined and interwoven to form a bigger story (The logos of the stoics and the Way of the Tao). As a result of competing internecine stories, there is no union, no coming together. I’d compare oral societies to a Christmas tree with a single apex point (the multiplicity at the bottom coming together to form an apex) and literary societies to a thornbush with many points pointing in many different directions (Richard Rohlin). It is because of this separation that we are weak like a single strand of hair and we have to be adding on perpetually by running ourselves ragged on the hedonic treadmill, always adding yet remaining ill at ease because we are on psychological death row. When people in oral societies were asked that typical interview question ‘Who are you?’ or ‘Tell me about yourself’. The people replied with ‘only the people around me who live with me can you tell you who I am’. In literal societies, we are very quick to assert our ‘I’s. The people in oral societies understood the concept of ‘communitas’ and their role in the community. We cannot even accuse them of a lack of self-awareness because according to the book Insight by Tasha Eurich, we are not as self-aware as we think. Who we think we are and how other people see us are usually at odds. Literate people rely on their sight so much that it doesn’t just distract us but misleads us. We are not able to see clearly, our sight provides us a dysmorphic representation of our reality. In A. R. Luria’s The Mind of a Mnemonist, he writes a portentous line ‘perhaps this account of a man who ‘saw’ everything will play some part in the difficult course that lies ahead’. A reminder of Alfred Korzybski’s words, ‘the map is not the territory’.

 

There is a hope however, and it is provided by both Socrates and Phaedrus in Phaedrus. Socrates offers a prayer to Pan, ‘Give me beauty in the inward soul and may the outward and inward soul be at one’ and Phaedrus, ‘Ask the same for me, for friends should have all things in common.’ This is the ethos of oral societies. There is oneness in the interior and exterior man; subsequently with the man and his neighbour and eventually with man and his community, world and universe. Of course there is no going back and besides, I think I speak for many when I write ‘I love books, books, books, books; books I do adore.’ It is time to lay down our arms and dissolve the individual frontier wars and carry out the domino effect of this dissolution to everything else; to transcend according to Scott Kaufman which ‘allows for higher levels of unity and harmony within oneself and with the world’. It is time to take hold of each other’s hands, work together and face this existential eschatological Garmonbozia (David Lynch) together.

 

Marshal McLuhan writes that whenever a new medium replaces an existing one, the existing one becomes art. I think it’s time we enter the museums and remove the implications of oral societies from the walls and reintroduce them into societies; that we may be able to live better, freer, harmonious and sustainable lives. Robert Greene in Mastery quotes Marcus Aurelius ‘keep reminding yourself of the way things are connected, of their relatedness’. David Whyte (The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship) brings us into a more interactive stance. ‘We want to give this meeting of the inner and outer voice in the world. We bring what is inside us into conversation with what seems outside of us. We do this because it is only in this form of created joy and satisfaction that human beings lose their fear of death and disappearances.’