blog: true stuff from old books

Previously, I shared a curmudgeonly 1889 article about the menace of electricity and the telephone and its spiritual cousin, a fifteenth-century screed lamenting the printing press. I’m collecting data here in service of a hypothesis that progress is universally despised, that the “get off my lawn you whippersnappers” feeling that we all occasionally experience is more tied to our makeup as humans than the technology and the changes themselves. These feelings, I posit, are universal, and perhaps make us feel disconnected — we see others doing things differently, and experiencing life in a different way, and we can’t understand it, or all we can see is what they’re missing. If only they would realize! But those people are not bad — they are simply native to the next thing, perhaps, and they experience the world slightly differently. And so the world turns.

When I mentioned that I supposed this curmudgeonly sentiment against progress was common all throughout history, some commenters pointed me to the Phaedrus, a Socratic dialogue of around 370 B.C.

In it, Socrates recounts to Phaedrus the Egyptian legend of Theuth, the god who invented “numbers and arithmetic and geometry and astronomy, also draughts and dice, and, most important of all, letters.” Theuth presents the Egyptian king Thamus with his many inventions, and Thamus

…said many things to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts, which it would take too long to repeat; but when they came to the letters, “This invention, O king,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.”

But Thamus replied, “Most ingenious Theuth, one man has the ability to beget arts, but the ability to judge of their usefulness or harmfulness to their users belongs to another; and now you, who are the father of letters, have been led by your affection to ascribe to them a power the opposite of that which they really possess.

“For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.” (Phaedrus 274c-275b)

To which Phaedrus calmly replies: “Socrates, you easily make up stories of Egypt or any country you please.”

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In our recent discussion regarding the menace of the telephone (and electricity, and progress in general), I mentioned that there surely existed an exhortation against even the printing press, just as there seem to be curmudgeonly railings against every form of progress, in every generation. And the commenters came through!

“Yoyo” mentions the fifteenth-century abbot Johannes Trithemius, author of the work De laude scriptorum manualium — “In Praise of Scribes.” (And yes, he grudgingly had to consent to get the tract printed in order to get people to read it.) Trithemius, a lexicographer who was also deeply interested in cryptography and steganography (the art of hiding messages), understood the benefits the printing press could bring to the scholar and the layman alike, but didn’t want it to replace the work that monks and scribes were doing, or become an excuse for monks to become lazy and neglect the devotional aspect of their work.

In that day, books (codices) were artifacts. They were large, and tremendously expensive and laborious to create, and made to be durable and to last forever. Fifteenth-century monastic scribes were the latest in a long line of clergy and learned-types sharing a bibliophile tradition stretching back to the Greeks, Persians and Romans of the pre-Christian era. And when books are rare and expensive, a library becomes no different from a cathedral slathered in gold and bedecked with stained glass: the bigger and more elaborate the collection, the more impressive. And a good library was a physical testament to the character of the collector. Trithemius was definitely on the side of books in general.

But in his tract, he homes in on the hand-writing of manuscripts in specific and meaningful ways. For example, much like a painter must begin his training by copying the masters, it is only by the act of copying the Scriptures can a scribe become truly in touch with the Word of God:

[The writer,] while he is writing on good subjects, is by the very act of writing introduced in a certain measure into the knowledge of the mysteries and greatly illuminated in his innermost soul; for those things which we write we more firmly impress upon the mind…While he is ruminating on the Scriptures he is frequently inflamed by them.

Plus, it was okay that the act of copying was hard. It built character, in Trithemius’ opinion, the same way as chopping wood (though to this “interior exercise,” i.e. exercise of the spirit, he assigned far more importance). For monks, labor was part and parcel of devotion, and if you weren’t good at writing, you could do binding, or painting, or for heaven’s sake practice. And it goes even further: the labor of manuscript writing was something for monks to do — for there was no greater danger for the devout soul than idleness.

For among all the manual exercises, none is so seemly to monks as devotion to the writing of sacred texts.

And this is really the crux of Trithemius’ argument.

He does spend some time talking about practical reasons that printed books weren’t anything to get bothered about: their paper wasn’t as permanent as the parchment the monks used (he even advocates the hand-copying of “useful” printed works for their preservation); there weren’t very many books in print, and they were hard to find; they were constrained by the limitations of type, and were therefore ugly. All perfectly functional reasons considering the circumstances of the time.

But the real kicker for him is what it means to hand-write a book even in the age of printing.

In a way, there’s a nobility to this. I can appreciate the tactile, artifact qualities of a book, or work of art that is hand-wrought even though machinery exists to create it. The idea that we as a culture place a giant premium on an item’s difficulty of creation has always been fascinating to me.

Think about it in terms of plagiarism: If I write an article that’s perfectly interesting, but you later learn that I plagiarized it, you don’t value the article anymore. You care less about the content of the article than you care about how I didn’t do the work.

People make the exact same argument about modern art: “My kid could do that!” If something doesn’t seem difficult, it doesn’t have worth.

Trithemius applies this as a gauge of devotion:

He who ceases from zeal for writing because of printing is no true lover of the Scriptures.

In other words, the way it has always been done is better, and the harder you have to work to keep doing it the old way, the more it proves you really care.

And I say that sentiment makes him a curmudgeon. Do you agree?

Quotes taken from The Abbot Trithemius (1462-1516): The Renaissance of Monastic Humanism by Noël L. Brann

Next week: Socrates vs. the written word itself!

The first magazine I ever subscribed to was Smithsonian. As a kid, I devoured secondhand copies of Air & Space — and one of them featured a subscription card for Smithsonian, a sister publication. “Would you like to read articles on the following topics?” it read, and as I looked at the list of topics, I found myself saying “Yes. Yes, I would.”

I was too young to have had a bank account, so I pestered my folks and I think even gave them the $20 or whatever for a subscription. And so, off and on for the past 15 years or so, I’ve read Smithsonian — overall I think it’s a neat magazine.

But it’s definitely for old people. The ads (for cruises, specialty bow ties, and Jitterbug phones) tell you all you need to know about the magazine’s demographic — and some superficial research pegs a surveyed demo as well into the 60+ age bracket. So I wasn’t entirely surprised to read this curmudgeonly article in the October 2010 issue, on the “humorous back page” section…

My Big Hang-Up in a Connected World
One man’s rage against the communication revolution and the dying of civility

[…] Like me, my mother was not quite ready for the communication revolution. As a teacher of journalism, I tell myself that all this connectedness is the link that joins the Family of Man. But in my quieter moments (of which there are now not many), I see we’ve created a nation of zombies—heads down, thumbs on tiny keyboards, mindless millions staring blankly, shuffling toward some unseen horizon. To them, the rest of us are invisible. Not long ago, a colleague was startled to see a young woman approaching; she had been too absorbed in her texting to notice the words “Men’s Room” on the door. For one brief shining moment, she was at a loss for words.

These days, I, too, carry a cellphone clipped to my belt, hoping the pod people (er…iPod people) will mistake me for one of their own. But I rarely turn it on. Judging from all the urgency around me, I alone seem to have nothing to say, nothing that demands I communicate that instant. I await no call, text or e-mail of such import that it couldn’t be served as well with a stamp and a complete sentence, both of which seem destined for history’s dustbin…

The most remarkable finds in my “True Stuff from Old Books” series have been the articles and anecdotes that prove the good-old-days weren’t any different from the here and now, in terms of what sorts of things scare people, and excite people, and challenge people; what sorts of emotions are perhaps simply human, more than a reaction to something specific in the culture. Human beings are uncomfortable with change; no more or less now than ever before.

Now I think so, but is that true? I challenged myself to find an absolutely equivalent sentiment about the dehumanizing menace of all this durn-blasted newfangled technology from at least 100 years ago.

It took me about three minutes in Google Books.

From the journal Nature, November 1889 issue, comes this article titled “Nature’s Revenge on Genius.” (Emphases and paragraph breaks are mine.)

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