Written after reading Orality and Literacy by Walter J. Ong

Part 1

- Orality VS Literature:

This book is fascinating. Orality has a huge weight in modern day society. (Howard Rheingold in ‘Smart Mobs’ mentions a certain pager sold way more than any other brand because a simple feature was added; it allowed you to send a heart - <3. When our monkey ancestors climbed down from trees and took to the plains their hands became too busy picking berries to socially interact via flea-picking. Since we are such social creatures we had to find another way of communication: we turned to grunting and hooting. After thousands of years of refinement, our brains became incredibly skilled at detecting and decoding the subtleties of speech. In Orality and Literature, Ong mentions “the sophistication of phenomenal studies – the way language is nested in sound” (5). In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell mentions the studies of Bill Gottman. Gottman “could analyze an hour long [recording] of a husband and wife talking and predict with 95% accuracy whether that couple will still be married in fifteen years” (21). Gottman tried with shorter and shorter times, 15 minutes to 3 minutes to eventually 10 seconds. The high frequency sounds were then removed from the audio clip, rendering the words incomprehensible; all that’s left “is a kind of garble” that keeps “such qualities as warmth, hostility, dominance, and anxiousness,” and one experimenter found that by using only those ratings, she could predict which people would remain wed or become divorced (LOOK UP PAGE). The tone of your voice holds so much weight, even more so than the words spoken. Eddie Izzard mentions that body language combined with a confident tone equate 80% of an interactions worth; the words that are said matter a measly 20%. A physical, oral-based interaction is the most important form of conveying anything; a person’s presence holds such powerful emotional influence. Books have an emotional weight but that weight isn’t as hefty.

Speech is incredibly important. Ong states that literature is a secondary model, born out of the primary model of orality. The message of the book is contained in one sentence: while referencing Robert Wood, Ong says that “memory played a quite different role in oral culture from that which it played in literate culture” (19). However, Ong didn’t stop at memory; he goes on to describe how the change from orality to literature affects your entire world view. Being illiterate completely changes the landscape of the mind, changing the way you interact with the world.

In part two of the documentary “How Art Changed the World” it reveals how the first pictures ever made were created and how it triggered the greatest change in human history (or, to be more precise, human consciousness). Humans gained the ability to perceive images and symbols - 2D representations of objects. That moment in time happened roughly 35,000 years ago. We have been around for about 150,000 years, so that is extremely late in our evolution. For the visually minded, here it is the timeline expressed on some steps. (Orange = ability to comprehend 2D images, Blue = before we had the ability to comprehend 2D images). (a screenshot from the docu).

Many of the cave paintings were painted in the pitch black, in the darkest and narrowest part of the cave; they were almost inaccessible. These cave paintings were made up of dots, lines and shapes. The cave painter drew the outlines of animals and then filled it in with a pattern of spots or lines. Instead of asking why we painted these images, we should ask how we got the ability to create images in the first place. How do you know what a picture is if you’ve never seen one before?

A Turkish man in the 19th century was shown a picture of a horse. The man had no idea what he was looking at – never in his life had he seen a picture before. He was a devout Muslim – extreme Islam forbids images of living creatures. He said he didn’t recognize it was a horse because he couldn’t move around it. If any of us look at a vivid painting of a horse the idea of it being incomprehensible makes absolutely no sense to us. If we look at a child’s attempt draw a horses outline, we can fairly easily guess what it is. We can’t imagine what it would be like to not understand what a picture was. This picture of a horse may look like a work of Jackson Pollack to an eye untrained in 2D symbols; it would appear as a random collection of lines and colours. This parallels fairly well with Ong’s depiction of literature completely changing our brains workings (p24) (although he doesn’t directly address the issue of how we began inscribing language – I recall reading somewhere the oldest inklings of language were found on some super old pots; random symbols were inscribed upon them to indicate what they contained).

San Bushmen in South Africa, living merely a few hundred years ago, depicted scenes that hold a striking resemblance to the oldest of cave paintings. Like the illiterates that were studied by A. R. Luria, (Ong p49) these San Bushmen are the closest living example of an archaic, caveman-perspective. The San’s religion believed that when in a trance (or an ‘altered state of consciousness’) your spirit leaves your body and visit the spirit world. This tradition is still practiced by the San today. Their shaman dances to tribal drum and loses himself in the rhythm – becoming detached from what’s around him. Ong talks about the importance of rhythm in memory recall (p34); this fact is mentioned under the subheading titled ‘Mnemonics and formulas’. I can extrapolate this statement; rhythm directly taps into the workings of the mind. The San’s beliefs explain the paintings; the paintings were about the spiritual experience of trance (33 minutes in).

Prehistoric cave folk painted oxen but ate deer – painting wooly mammoths but ate wide goats. There was little correlation between animals depicted in the drawings and the animals that they ate. Cave paintings weren’t about hunting, but about their spiritual encounters with the animals; paintings generally depicted the most gracious and powerful creatures that the tribes ran into.

Both the Sans paintings in South Africa and the European caveman’s paintings grafted parts of the animal onto the human figures depicted; generally horns and hooves. The cave paintings first found (in France) and the Sans Bushmen’s paintings both show an abstract pattern of dots, grids and zig zags covering the creatures painted. The brains of the people that generated the art created these patterns.

When people go into an altered state the first thing they see is zig-zag lines (Kandinsky), clouds of dots (Monet), and then grids (Mondrian) – they see these because they are hard wired into the human brain. To make this sound less ridiculous – the institute of psychiatry in London can hook you up to a machine that produces a trance like effect on your brain. They stimulate the visual parts of your brain; the users of the device say they see colourful dots with grids of black lines behind them. You can also experience these patterns when too little information gets into your visual system. Someone who is blindfolded, or someone who is in the deepest nook - the darkest crevice of a cave for an extended period would also start to experience these visions. After an incredibly long time spent in a trance, the hallucinations from sensory deprivation start to take the shape of items that hold great emotional importance; the most powerful animals in that cultures vicinity (an Eland for a San Bushman or a Bison for the French cavemen). Visions created a familiarity with a 2D image and so the cavemen could project it onto a wall; it wasn’t a discovery, but a realization of self. They weren’t copying nature but reproducing images from within their heads. Louis Williams had the insight into most of these cave painting facts.

Literacy created a similar event; it gave us a realization of words. It separated words from the inner part of our minds, from our subconscious. ‘Subconscious’ and what is held there changes with each major epoch of human existence. Before literature the words were the event. Now they can exist in our minds as mutually exclusive objects.

Perhaps before cave paints existed, the world (animals, earth etc) and the person could not exist in the mind of the caveman in a mutually exclusive manor. Today a Gaia hypothesis of the earth exists, viewing it as one huge organism (which would likely make current day human a sort of cancer, and global warming its immune system – if we are causing it that is. Sensationalist I know, but it’s the most concise and comprehensible example). A Gaia mindset was likely the view of the prehistoric folk.

The parallels between cave paintings and modern art show that the pendulum of connectedness to mind is beginning to swing back to an inner-view of things. Picasso exclaimed ‘we have learnt nothing’ when he saw the cave paintings. He was wrong; we have learnt a lot about objective, empirical analysis of things (philosophy), but we are re-learning the direct connect with (Heidegger definition of) ‘Being’. The age of reason coexisted with the growth of print culture (first in Europe then in America) for a reason (Everything Bad is Good for you - Steven Johnston p186). We are now (and have been since the transition to modern art) moving away from this age of reason into an age of equilibrium. We shall not marginalize the inner side of our being (as we did when societies absconded an orality-based worldview for one grounded in the lens of literature), and we shall not marginalize the external part of our being (as we did during societies based on orality) (p46/47 Ong).

In illiterate societies ‘walking’ doesn’t pop into anyone’s mind as they walked, they simply did it and the word coexisted with the action. The citizens were ‘being’ without reference to their action, they were simply acting. The Dalai Lama in “The Universe in an Atom” uses a lock and key to explain interconnectedness. A key cannot be described without reference to another part – a lock. Oral societies view every word like this; connected to the action. Members of oral societies grouped the words ‘saw and log’ instead of ‘saw and hammer’. They don’t see ‘tools’ but they see’ how the tool is used’ (p51 Ong). In describing a car the literate folk described it in a flawed way – if they described a key in the same way, “it is made in a factory, it’s a piece of metal with grooves in it” it would be an incredibly stunted description. The illiterate folk, talking about a car, say ‘drive it and see’. They are more connected with the experience, and so they realize that simply describing something will not give someone the experience. Thus, societies based on orality also give a very shallow and ultimately flawed view of what something is. Simply saying ‘drive it and see’ does not help paint a picture of what something is. The two have to exist in a symbiosis for people to fully realize what a car or a key is (although many of us drive cars and use devices that we don’t fully understand the workings of, which makes the experience seem more important than discerning it.)

Although they may have been closer to ‘being’, we are closer to escaping ego-consciousness through objectifying the self. In this empirical view of yourself you can realize ego and transcend it. Ong mentions that Homers epics, Odyssey and Iliad, had graphic violence and acts of swinish heroics (p44). Everything you did in the times of orality was in reference to yourself. That makes for an incredibly self-involved worldview; one that fuels ego (Ong, p45). We can hopefully unify these two approaches to our existence and settle at a happy medium.

The religious gravitas of this switch from orality to literature may have been downplayed by Ong due to his Jesuit Priest status. It wasn’t only a forwarding of man, it was a heightening of consciousness that we can’t fully understand – we can merely view it through our lens (as he did through his lens). Results of this change in worldview, like Pythagoras’s insight into the mathematical governing of events (particularly music), is seen as cold and calculated. It was an extreme swing of an (at that time esoteric) pendulum; it swung from extremely ‘connected’ during orality to being an observer of, and breaking down events during literacy. I don’t think that pendulum’s swing fully permeated society until incredibly recently, perhaps the early 20th century.

Literacy has created a worldview that has wholly removed humanity from this connection to not only our brain but to all things. Orality created a worldview that wholly removed humanity from a world outside of our own experiences; our connection with stimuli via interaction. Once a middle ground is found, we will be forwarded.

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Part Two:

Frameworks for interacting with the world VS interaction with the world outside of frameworks.
These frameworks, a-la Ken Wilber’s mapping of the interior aspects of an individual, are (chronologically, but skipping some):
- Prehension
o The time when animals evolved an organ that was capable of grasping or holding, first seen in the Triassic period (251 to 199 million years ago, which was followed by the Jurassic period).
- Sensation
o A sensory organ experiences something, the sensation is perceived, and a mental state occurs.
- Emotion
o The brain has evolved a limbic system and now capable of emotion.
- Symbols (or image)
o 2D cave paintings and language are under this umbrella.
- Concepts
o This stage was perpetuated in the west by writing and printing. It is defined in cognitive sciences and philosophy of the mind as an abstract idea of mental symbols. Words became concepts when humans started to write.
Literature allows us to record the times. Everything falls under this heading; cultural pastimes, religious goings on, personal experiences. Cultural pastimes generally live on without reference to literature since they are an activity (or an experience); generation after generation partakes and passes it to their children. If religion or philosophy were to become a pastime, an activity (or an experience) it would be carried on in the same way.

In the east, Guatama Buddha (who never claimed divinity – he was a normal human) taught meditation as an activity, as a completely inward technique of self reflection. Everyone who follows his strict guidelines for meditation have a shared experience. Large religious sects were set up to discuss, philosophize, and then dictate the ramifications of this technique (note: Buddha’s original teachings were completely sect-less, non-religious, and put into text about 400 years after his death. They occurred in an oral culture. Richard Dawkins in ‘The God Delusion’ notes that philosophical traditions like Buddhism are not being lambasted by his writings). Buddha taught people Vipassanā; a technique that allows the meditator to see their mind in its ultimate, natural state (which Buddhism would claim is also the natural of everything).

The “Tibetan Book of Living and Dying” by Sogyal Rinpoche claims “we sometimes have fleeting glimpses of the nature of mind.” … “These glimpse could be inspired by a certain exalting piece of music, by the serene happiness we sometimes feel in nature” … “I think we do, sometimes, half understand these glimpses, but modern culture gives us no context of framework in which to comprehend them” (p51). It’s really all about this – the framework with which we perceive the world. In times of orality the framework allowed us to be in the moment – for the words to be our actions. Illiterate folk never try and explain their experiences. Sogyal Rinpoche goes on to say “We know that no one will take us seriously if we try and share [our experiences]. So we ignore what could be really the most revealing experiences of our lives, if only we understood them. This is perhaps the darkest and most disturbing aspect of modern civilization –its ignorance and repression of who we really are.” (p52). Modern civilization isn’t repressing who we really are, but who we really were.

Ken Wilber in “A Brief History of Everything” states the importance of transcending the prior worldview, but not disassociating from it. “[Transcend] and include. As the higher stages of consciousness emerge and develop, they themselves include the basic component of the earlier worldview, then add their own new and more differentiated perceptions.” … “Of course, this doesn’t mean that a ‘higher’ worldview is without its own problems – just the contrary. Wherever there is the possibility of transcendence, there is, by the very same token, the possibility of repression. There higher might not just transcend and include, it might transcend and repress, exclude, alienate, dissociate.” (p67). Western culture completely alienated the way of the illiterate. The west fully accepted and ran away with literature. The invention of the printing press gave the worldview of orality its final deadly blow.

Tibet’s most technologically advanced creation was soap. The people of Tibet created a culture around meditation. The west created a culture around print. The frameworks in which these two cultures process the world are wholly different. As I mentioned, illiterate folk hold the action and the word of the action in the same breath. Literate folk separate the two; they see everything as a projection of the mind, rather than as an experiential action that is one with the body and mind. Isaac Newton focused exclusively on the physical world; if you have an equation describing gravitation that’s all you needed. You don’t need to know the apple falls, only at what rate of acceleration it falls. Modern science is built on this Newtonian ideology. Someone studying energy may write up lots of rules that describe the way energy interacts with its environment; kinetic, thermal, and potential are all types of equations attributed to energy. Einstein realized the most basic of energy’s equation in E=mc². In the same tone, “when ‘mind’ is talked about, what is referred to is thoughts and emotions alone; and they look only at its projections. No one ever really looks into the mind itself, the ground from which all these expressions arise.” In the west we have realized the way the mind interacts with its environment; the most basic classifications are Type A and Type B people (extrovert or introvert / passive or active). The west has not realized the ‘E=mc²’ of mind – the basic properties of it, outside of framework or without reference to interactions.

Buddha contemplated and figured out the mind outside of any given framework, be it oral or literate or otherwise. One of Buddhism’s primary tenants is to reject literature, holding up personal experience and reason above it; the truth of literature should only be accepted once you yourself have realized it. Buddha stated people should not accept his own teachings. “Just as a seasoned goldsmith would test the purity of his gold through a meticulous process of examination, the Buddha advises that people should test the truth of what he has said through reasoned examination and personal experiment.” (p24, Lama).

Words in the east were created to describe specific internalities – languages in the west have very few words to describe aspects of self. Those that do exist were created relatively recently (by Freud and the like) and lack completely capturing the full essence of what the words set out to describe. For example, in the west ego is described as a part of your personality structure. The Tibetan word for ego is “dak dzin, which means a ‘grasping to [a false sense of] a self.” (p121 Rinpoche).

If we directly translated this depiction of ego we would redefine it as “incessant movement of grasping at a delusory notion of ‘I’: and ‘mine’, self and there, and all the concepts, ideas, desires, and activity that will sustain that false construction.” … “Ignorance [has] brought us to identify the whole of our being with ego.” (p121, Rinpoche). Even though the western world has cracked open the door to realizing self, we are way behind other cultures. Fraud brought to light this concept of ego but accepted it as an integral part of being a human. Those in the west that have contemplated the transcendence of ego generally do it with a mindset of rising above it. Buddha doesn’t say we need to rise above it but, rather, regress into a state of mind that existed before the ego was created. “It is important to remember always that the principle of egolessness does not mean that there was an ego in the first place, and the Buddhists did away with it. On the contrary, it means there was never any ego at all to begin with. To realize that is called ‘egolessness’.” (p125, Rinpoche). Much like a regression into pre-literate times can open a refreshing perspective on life, regressing even further back to pre-2D image processing times, and then even beyond that, could open up an even more direct connection to ‘Being’.

The west advanced technologically while the east advanced spiritually. The western world has to accept that eastern philosopher’s descriptions of the internal workings of mind are better than ours, just as the people of Tibet have accepted our superiority in invention.