Genes, Alphabet, And An Imagined “God”

Marshall McLuhan, in “Understanding Media”, brings out connections between number(having a “numbing” effect on senses) and the alphabet:

This process of exact repeatability was introduced into our collective consciousness by Gutenberg, with the printing press. McLuhan writes:

“The same Gutenberg fact of uniform, continuous, and indefinitely repeatable bits inspired also the related concept of the infinitesimal calculus, by which it became possible to translate any kind of tricky space into the straight, the flat, the uniform, and the ‘rational’. This concept of infinity was not imposed on us by logic. It was the gift of Gutenberg. So, also, later on, was the industrial assembly line. The power to translate knowledge into mechanical production by the breaking up of any process into fragmented aspects to be placed in a lineal sequence of movable, yet uniform parts was the formal essence of the printing press.”

Before the printing press, with emphasis on standard repeatability came the alphabet, with its linear focus, proceeding from letters, to words, to paragraphs, etc. creating a concept of linear logic in which one thing “follows” from another thing. Sequential cause/effect. This shaped our mental capacities for mechanical thought, with symbols to extend that process. Geometry was merely the spatial extension of this process. Space later defined in the exact repeatability of the calculus, extending from the linear written word, to the exact repeatability of print.
The effect of the written word on “tribal man”, wrote McLuhan, was to take the “corporate” existence of e n and translate it into a process in which;

“He is emotionally free to separate from the tribe and to become a civilized individual, a man of visual organization, who has uniform attitudes, habits, and rights with all other civilized individuals”

With the combination of papyrus and alphabet, “the alphabet spelled the end of the stationary temple bureaucracies and the priestly monopolies of knowledge and power….the alphabet could be learned in a few hours…The easier alphabet and the light, cheap, transportable papyrus together effected the transfer of power from the priestly to the military class.”

As I pointed out earlier, Slater wrote that a mechanical response in the face of danger had no value until men began to make war on each other. McLuhan suggests that the combination of papyrus gave new extensive power and organizational reach to the military class. The introduction of Gutenberg’s printing press imposed an exact repeatability on all social functions. Not only was a man drawn out and “civilized”, he was able to reduce all social structures into a “reductionist” mold, defining all processes in either alphabetic text or the Arabic numbering system.

“In the low definition world of the medieval woodcut, each object created its own space, and there was no rational connected space into which it must fit. As the retinal impression is intensified, objects cease to cohere in a space of their own making, and instead become ‘contained’ in a uniform, continuous and ‘rational’ space.”

As Slater wrote in “EarthWalk”, people begin responding to their “internal circuitry”, the symbol system that represents reality by “containment”, by breaking the most complex systems to irreducible parts. Unfortunately, the world of quantum science tells us that there seem to be no irreducible parts.

McLuhan continues in “Understanding Media”:

“Psychically the printed book, an extension of the visual faculty, intensified perspective and the fixed point of view. Associated with the visual stress on point of view and the vanishing perspective there comes another illusion that space is visual, uniform, and continuous. The linearity precision and uniformity of the arrangement of movable types are inseparable from these great cultural forms and innovations of Renaissance experience.”

As we see in history, and stated by Leonard Shlain in “The Alphabet And the Goddess“, the alphabetic text was used by the ancient nation of Israel, who incorporated their law into a primitive form of alphabet. The oldest alphabetic text was found in the Sinai desert, and we know from biblical history what happened at Sinai. This would suggest that Israel, as a wandering culture, would be able to utilize the simpler symbolism of the alphabet to challenge the older Egyptian priesthood based on the hieroglyph. Not only did the alphabet replace hieroglyph, but it also made symbols connect to sound, so that words were formed by the various connections made possible by the unification of sight and sound. It was easier learned, easier taught, and easier read, so that there was no need for monopolist control by priesthood.

In fact, the images so deeply revered in hieroglyphic text was prohibited by the second commandment of Israel’s alphabetic text. They were not to bow down, create, or serve any kind of image. This command had an “abstract” effect, releasing individuals from “ideograms” as in Egyptian and Chinese writing, and allowed the people to communicate the unification of sight and sound in alphabet. Communication was linear, interchangeable( by re-arrangement of alphabetic letters), and could be creatively created to assemble new words, a definite advantage to the Industrial Revolution.

If the mechanical response in the face of danger had no value until men began to make war on each other, and the use of the alphabet transferred power to the military class, then technology and war became the process by which societies achieved a “shortcut” of social evolution. As Slater writes in “EarthWalk”:

“Historians have long observed that war is the prime progenitor of technological development. Fro m the materialization of the need to coerce, what else can come but discord and destruction?”

War, the machine, and technology were united by the simpler, cheaper, movable forms of the alphabet. The standardization and repeatability of function allowed this process to spread like a cancer worldwide, and the process was incorporated into both government and religion. As McLuhan writes:

“Socially, the typographic extensions of man brought in nationalism, industrialism, mass markets, and universal literacy and education. For print presented an image of repeatable precision that inspired totally new forms of extending social energies. Print released great psychic and social energies….by breaking the individual out of the traditional group while providing a model of how to add individual to individual in massive agglomeration of power.”

Eric Hoffer wrote “The True Believer” , and was able to see the effects of this on the social extensions of man, and was ale to analyze these effects in 1951, probably because he was not educated trough normal social channels. Blinded until he was a teen-ager, Hoffer was completely self educated. He was able to link the process of linear organization that lay behind all forms of nationalism, cults, or mass movements:

“There is a certain uniformity in all types of dedication, of faith, of pursuits of power, of unity and of self sacrifice. There are vast differences in the contents of holy causes and doctrines, but a certain uniformity in the factors which make them effective. He who, like Pascal, finds precise reasons for the effectiveness of Christian doctrine has also found the reasons for the effectiveness of Communist, Nazi, and nationalist doctrine. However different the holy causes people die for, they perhaps die basically for the same thing”.

In 1951 this was a profound insight, since Hoffer didn’t have either McLuhan or Slater to see where this “uniformity” came from. But it was this insight that also led to the realization that it was the form of organization most suitable for what Dawkins calls the “genetic replicative algorithm”. I will explore that in the next essay.