Historic time lags

The history of religions is a vast fascinating domain of on-going research. The notion that thinking, dreaming and hallucinating are immaterial activities distinct from the physiological processes of the body, suggests the existence of a spirit unbound by material laws. Over the ages, this simple idea led to a great variety beliefs. One was that immaterial entities communicated with those who were receptive and gave them guidance. Another was that the spirit did not, could not die, and stayed around, was reborn or went on to another more or less perfect place. Yet another was that other world beings could and did “incarnate” as minerals, vegetables, animals and humans. In the Eastern Mediterranean, the encounter of Hellenic and Aramaic societies jumbled these ideas together and produced the syncretic Christian faith. That is, a god in human form who had gone back to his own dimension, who stayed in contact by visions and promised a hereafter paradise. Alexander’s conquests brought Greek mythology and philosophy into contact with other cosmological constructions, in Egypt, Persia, Babylon and Judea. The Old World from the Nile to the Euphrates was Hellenised, but a century and a half after the Macedonian rampage, the Maccabean rebellion gave birth to the Hasmonean kingdom, from the Jordan to the sea and from Seleucid Syria to Ptolemaic Egypt. About the same time Rome was destroying Carthage and beginning to impose its dominion in the West. A hundred years later, Pompey and Cesar were fighting each other for control of the empire and in 27 BC, according to the Gospel calendar, Octavian was made Augustus. About the same time, in Galilee, Samaria, Judea and Edom Herod the Great was king.

The new message of love for humanity, equality and eternity was successful at a time when life was short and slaves were treated like or worse than animals. And, notwithstanding strong competition and official repression, the Christian faith finally dominated the others and became a pillar of the Roman Empire. A state religion needs precision in ritual and dogma. So Christianity was expurgated. Gnosticism, Arius, Pelagius, Donatus, Mani, etc. were firmly condemned. The numerous gospels were reduced to four. And the Saviour’s miraculous birth and ignominious death were celebrated, Xmas and Easter were the trees that hid the subversive forest of His teachings. The Roman legions had conquered the occidental and oriental worlds. Constantine had adopted a syncretic religion to unify the empire. But the geographic, historic and cultural differences between East and West would soon divide church and empire in two. The church’s schism was over the nature of Jesus of Nazareth. Could a god become human and lose his godliness? Two traditions clashed and split. In the East were the Orthodox, the Nestorians, the Copts and all their patriarchs. In the West was the Roman pope. This dogmatic unity was maintained during the Middle Ages and the crusades, but oriental wealth and influences, and a series of schismatic popes brought decline and provoked the Reformation.

Along with gold, silk and magnificence, crusaders brought back gun-powder, paper, woodcut prints and Greek philosophy, a very potent mixture that would transform Western society. Guns put an end to chivalry, paper made books more accessible, woodcuts led to movable type, while Greek authors renewed humanist ideals and suggested change. Reform of the church accompanied Renaissance in the arts, from literature to war. Soon new forms of government were being experimented, protected by canons and halberds. Republics were proclaimed and Christendom became a patchwork of national idiomatic faiths. The traditional diptych of sword and pen was replaced by a gun and a printing press. Knights and clerics were replaced by lay commoners. The uniformity and repeatability of the printed page inspired the uniformity of armies and of nations. Feudal allegiances were coerced into centralised states. And millions of controversial books and pamphlets were circulated throughout Europe. Printing made books available and spread literacy as never before. It gave tools to both control and subversion, it introduced mass production and the industrial concept, it changed the course of history and, with the new fire power, laid the foundations of European supremacy. Egyptian papyrus and the Greek alphabet had sparked off a similar process, that shift from weighty stone and clay to light scrolls, from time to space, described by Harold Innis (1), but movable type printing on paper was a much greater accelerator.

Reform, Renaissance and vernacular literature did not spring up everywhere. The printing revolution of the 15^th century was a European event. China, where explosives, paper and printing had originated from, learnt to make guns, but its writing was too complex for movable type and was only simplified in modern times. Japan used the same signs and was similarly held back. Korea adopted Hangul – a 28 sign writing later reduced to 24 – and was printing with movable metal type at about the same time as Gutenberg. The country was continuously being ravaged by its two powerful neighbours, but their distinctive writing helped the Koreans to survive as a nation, while the advantages of universal literacy gave them a head’s start in the global industrial competition. India was and still is a mosaic of languages and only a few were written using Sanskrit or Arab letters. Wood cut printing was widespread but movable type was a late colonial introduction. The Ottoman Empire used the Arab alphabet, and the primacy of calligraphic effects slowed down the passage to printing and the diffusion of literacy. This persisted in Iran and Arabic speaking nations, whereas Turkey’s Mustapha Kemal opted for Latin letters in 1928. The native nations of America, Australia and Africa were at best on the threshold of writing. For them printing was a part of the military and cultural dominion imposed by European invaders.

Writing, even alphabetical writing, does not lead automatically to movable type printing, mass produced books and general literacy. Innis developed another distinction between West and East. In the Greek theogony, gods were engendered by Gaia and Uranus, by earth and sky. In Egypt, Babylonia and Judea, gods engendered the material world by naming it. If words are a god’s pronouncements, they tend to stay stuck in the mystical domain. The Greeks did not have a god-written text and could write their own laws and literature. In Athens, and later in Rome, words were not the voices of gods. And the Christian syncretism of East and West did not change this attitude. The official and apocryphal gospels were testimonials, not the horse’s mouth. When paper and print began circulating an increasing number of books, Bibles and saintly lives were in greater demand than the pagan authors of Antiquity. But authors writing the vernacular would change that.

The Reformation began as a quarrel among clerics. The reformers preached fundamentalism, a rejection of pomp and glory, a return to the simplicity of the early church and the practice of gospel teachings. However, the movement was soon involved in social conflict and nationalism. Müntzer (executed 1525) in Germany and Zwingli (killed 1531) in Switzerland installed theocratic republics, not unlike the earlier attempt by Savonarola (executed 1498) in Florence. Henry VIII severed the ties with Rome by the Act of Supremacy (1534). Frederic III supported Luther to oppose the emperor Charles V and to reunite Saxony. And William of Orange may have sincerely converted to Calvinism, but his essential goal was Dutch independence from the Spanish crown. During the religious wars and massacres that racked Europe for over a century, political power and national contours were the real motive forces. And by the mid-17th century, the religious pretext for violence and dominion was no longer necessary. War was for conquest and expansion.

The mass circulation of books brought uniformity of language, grammar and spelling. This in turn gave precision to nations and their frontiers. And the spread of literacy facilitated administration from a far off centre. Uniformity of language implied uniform thoughts and beliefs, and was the result of considerable violence. Spain expelled some of its Arab and Hebrew speaking population and forced the remainder to assimilate under the scrutiny of zealous inquisitors. English kings subjected Wales and Ireland, and the Act of Union with Scotland constituted a united kingdom. The French monarchy based in Paris was surrounded by foreign languages. As well as the North/South division of “oc” and “oïl”, the kingdom’s borders cut through or encircled several linguistic groups. To the West were Celtic Bretons, in the South-West Basques and Catalans, and to the East lived Flemish and German speakers. The royal decree of 1539 imposing French instead of Latin for official documents was the first step towards a definition and general usage of standard French. German was spoken in a number of separate states, and Luther’s plethoric writings had given it a model. But protracted wars – 30 years (1618-48) and another seven (1756-63) – fought largely on German territory put off political unity until the 19^th century. Italy had a similar linguistic unity and Dante had structured the vernacular, but political divisions and perpetual conflict resulted in the same national calendar as Germany.

Printing and circulating the spoken idiom does not constitute a political nation without the action of centralised intent and power. At the beginning of the 20^th century the industrial nations of Europe were constituted and fighting over their respective expansions. The idea of uniformity within a defined space, as suggested by the printed page, reached its ultimate realisation during the two world wars, when millions of undistinguishable units were ordered to kill each other, and those who did not fit the mould were destroyed. The fury of the killing abated somewhat after 1945 for several apparent reasons. The primary consideration was probably that only two heavyweight contenders remained and both were war weary. Another is that empires cannot have the uniformity and geographic precision of nations, and consequently their confrontations have less intensity. But the new medium of television may have been even more decisive. To the abstract uniformity of print and the tribal sound of radio was added the visual appearance of things. So that descriptive information no longer went through the transformation process of words. Of course pictures had communicated ideas since prehistoric times, long before writing, but the mass diffusion of TV was without precedent.

Western European thinking moved from an oral memorial transmission, aided by rime and rhythm, to written prose and to mass produced print. Sound returned with radio and images with TV. Then, quite suddenly, the mass production of identical ideas was confronted by the mass production of different ideas. Instead of somebody writing, talking, showing and gesticulating for or to the masses, the masses were doing the same things for anybody. The effect of this reversal is hard to predict, but internet’s multimedia interconnections have turned the world upside-down. In other parts of the world some nations kept apace or caught up with Europe, the US even took the lead, but many missed out on the printing stage. They went directly from oral to audio and video electronic transmissions. They have not passed the grind-stones of Reformation and Renaissance, of printed vernacular and nation building. Most of these languages have been kept out of modernity by colonial forces and have vocabularies that cannot express all aspects of to-day’s world. Many will survive in song, legend and humour, but only as oral appendages of more universal tongues.

The printing press circulated the written vernacular and the idea of national uniformity. The printing process was the model for identical mass production. The first to print were the first to industrialise. The first to form nations were the first to conquer empires. The elements of this evolution had come from the Middle East, where they had arrived from China. At the time, Bagdad and Damascus were great commercial metropolises and centres of arts and science. They were richer and more cultivated than contemporaneous European cities but, having almost expelled the crusaders, the region was ravaged by the Mongols in the mid-13^th and late 14^th centuries, which opened the path for domination by Ottoman Turks and Mamelukes. Turkish became the language of officialdom and law, while Arabic was relegated to the theological domain and went into a long sleep.

Arabic print is in its early stages and was concomitant with audio and video. The local particularities of speech and the tribalism of oral societies had not been neutralised by the soundless page, and were revitalised by electronic media. The nationalism and uniformity of the printed word had very little precedence over the multiple communities and individualities of radio, TV and internet, and both structures are joined to a still lively oral culture of myth and memory. Societies everywhere are struggling to come to terms with the transformation of space and time that is a consequence of the multimedia web. Hearing about something, reading about it and seeing it used to be disconnected and haphazard, or else demanded intent and perseverance. Voice, print and picture can now be brought together instantaneously anywhere. But this ubiquitous information cannot have the same impact on largely literate societies as it does on largely illiterate ones. Sounds and images carry far more emotion and identity than does abstract print. Writing and printing symbolise the spoken word, dehumanise it and allow it to detach itself from reality in totalitarian Newspeak (Orwell) and Lingua Tertii Imperii (Klemperer). But these conventional signs on a page can also conjure up sounds and images, and set off unpredictable imaginative processes.

The Arabic speaking nations are facing the religious and political upheavals of generalised literacy, with the constraints of borders drawn on maps a century ago by colonial powers and the topsy-turvy internet configuration. They have to juggle with the 16^th, 19^th and 21^st centuries. Looking back at history shows how painful the passage to print, literacy and nation was for the populations of Europe (not to mention all those they subjected). Looking around shows how difficult it is to convert from a mechanical to an electronic society and to change from a centre-out, one-at-a-time experience to an interconnected simultaneous one. A new view does not obliterate all aspects of the old one. It puts it in perspective inside a wider vision. Mechanical power and power in general have lost their primacy, “small is beautiful”, the microchip has replaced nuclear fission in the prospective future. However, institutions, habits and privileges always cling on to the past, so that fundamental change is always a slow occurrence.

The industrial empire is balking at the new configuration of informative circulation, hoping to ward off the fatal outcome. The fear is that an interconnected society has no need of central command and control, of oligarchic power and wealth, and that organised collaboration is possible without a leader. When everyone can communicate with everyone, the structures of hierarchy lose their utility. The flow of information and finance towards the centre and the counter-flow of legislation and finance seem obsolete and costly. They are the heritage of writing and print, and they have to evolve so as to accommodate a connected society. But this heritage is not universal, and in many parts of the world the flows and counter-flows produced by print have yet to replace the arbitrary rule of spoken words. These pseudo-nations are trying to bypass the long formative period of print and embrace multimedia, unfettered by centuries of habit. It may be, however, that written transmissions are an essential part of the whole. Printed vernaculars and widespread literacy compete with the tribal sounds of an oral culture. They give a wider picture and the sense of belonging to a larger national group. The worldwide connections expand those visions and sensations with sounds, images and pidgin that transcend the partitions of language. If the opening up to the scale of a nation by printed vernacular is absent, the global opening of internet may be ineffective or result in a contrary effect.

1. Harold A. Innis, Empire and Communications, 1950.