In our last episode, we had come to the point in human evolution where the cortex was exploding in growth. Although I discussed the difficulties engendered by this cortical explosion, my only explanation of its causes was confined to a mention of toolmaking. As it happens, sequential thinking had many other manifestations for human adaptability. One of these, probably the most important adaptive trait, lay in more complex social structures, which were able to take on a more complex temporal structure. That is, animals that have simpler brains build their social structures on a here-and-now basis. Mate selection turns on immediately observable traits; social cooperation has no deferred or delayed elements. But hominids were able to build social structures that were more adaptable because they could extend over a longer time period. For example, altruistic behavior can sometimes take the form of deferred reciprocity. I'll give you some of my food today in the expectation that someday, when you have food and I don't, you'll share the favor. Another example comes from leadership; in most ape societies, leadership is assigned on the basis of simple, immediate dominance, but as the hominids developed, they were able to recognize the value of granting leadership to older, more experienced, but physically weaker individuals. Again, this is a reflection of the adaptive utility of extended sequential thinking.
But far and away the most significant factor in the cortical explosion had to be the development of language. Language is the basis of culture and the medium for modulating complex social relationships; its development by humans is the most significant milestone in the advance of human mentation. But we must not think of language development as a single point in the evolution of human mentation, for in fact, the creation of language triggered changes in human society and mind that have reverberated right up until the present day. We are *still* working out the consequences of language, and now at last I can tease you with the promise that this series of essays will culminate in a discussion of where we are going next. Guess what? The computer plays a central role in the next act.
OK, so now we've got humans talking to each other, regulating their social interactions, and developing culture that they transmit through the generations. That's pretty good. The next step is the expansion of languages. Clearly, we didn't jump from "Ook ook gronk" to "The quality of mercy is not strained" in one step; language had to develop from the simple to the complex. Along the way, though, the brain had to expand its capabilities to support ever more complex linguistic structures. First there were problems of parsing complex sentence structures (e.g., "That, sir, is an insult up with which I will not put.") There was also use of indirection via pronouns, as well as indirection through abstraction (e.g., chair - furniture - object or cat - mammal - animal). We also had to to cope with contextually parsed utterances (sentences that make no sense until we add other information, such as "My marriage ended when I came home with lipstick on my collar.") All these elements had the twin effect of extending the power of language while demanding ever more cortical resource. Skulls ballooned, women groaned, and humanity marched onward.
The next measure in this bolero was agriculture and urbanization. Poof, now we've got civilization. But urbanization required food collection and transport, and as anybody who's dealt with the postal service knows, things sometimes get lost in transit. When those things are valuable, they can disappear all the more easily. So here we've got some early Mesopotamian city surrounded by its hinterland of farms. The farms feed the city under some set of social rules (e.g. "Your barley or your life!") How does this system insure that what the farmer sends actually gets to the city rather than the stomachs of the intermediaries?
This was a dumb little problem, one of those bureaucratic stumbling blocks that irritate great minds and delight petty ones. The solution was appropriately small-minded: the bill of lading. Along with the shipment, you sent some device that declared the goods being shipped ("three goats, five bushels of barley, one ox") Then you signed it with some difficult-to-reproduce mark. The recipient checks the consignment against the bill of lading -- well, it's pretty obvious. Initially, that bill of lading can just be a set of pictures with hash marks. After you've done this a few hundred times, though, you start to get sloppy with your artwork. That ox you drew is simplified to an ox head, then simplified to a triangle with projecting horns (that, in fact, is the genesis of our letter "A".)
I won't go into any more details; suffice it to say that writing emerged from this dumb problem. But there was one hitch: writing in those early days was morphemic (each symbol stood for a complete word). There were no alphabets. Which meant that you had to memorize the symbol for every word in the written language. What a pain! Because this process was slow and clumsy, it devolved to an elite group of highly trained scribes, and writing itself was confined to only the most necessary functions: social coordination at a distance, record keeping, and so forth.
Then some Semitic hacker in a garage went and invented the alphabet, and everything changed, because now anybody who could pronounce a word could spell it, and therefore write it. And you only had to memorize a few dozen letters! This was literary anarchism; the scribes sputtered indignantly, clung to their morphemic writing systems, and went the path of IBM, Burroughs, and CDC. Tough luck, guys.
Meanwhile, the scruffy alphabet users weren't exactly burning up the road. Alphabets are nice, but you also have to have something to write those letters on and somebody to write them to. It took a while, but the first society to get all the pieces together was Greece. They swiped paper from the Egyptians, the alphabet from the Phoenicians, and added one element all their own: the expectation that everybody should be able to read and write. Of course, "everybody" in those days didn't really mean "everybody"; after all, slaves and women didn't count. But if you were a man of substance, a participating member of the community, you were expected to be able to read and write.
What a difference that made! Suddenly, with a broad spectrum of people involved in reading and writing, the subjects of writing exploded out from the dull bills of lading, royal chest-thumping, and temple hocus-pocus that dominated other people's writing. (Can you imagine reading that dreck for a living? Gad, it would be worse than programming financial databases for banks! Let's pause for a moment of silence to honor the archaeologists who patiently read through reams of this stuff trying to figure out what they were up to.) But the Greeks started writing to each other about anything they felt like: family gossip, political diatribes, business advice, anything. And that in turn led to something altogether new.
To understand that new something, you must first appreciate one of the fundamental weaknesses of the spoken word. Truth be told, the problem is not in the spoken language itself but rather in the neural circuitry we use to process it. We have all this great dedicated brainmatter that successfully parses complex sentences with astounding speed -- but it seems to be optimized for processing one sentence at a time. It's as if the sentence is the basic chunk of linguistic thought. You can recognize this sentence instantly wrong. But if you link two good sentences together in a non sequitur, the recognition of that non sequitur is all the faster.
(Ahem)
We are all acutely aware of this weakness in our linguistic processing, for many times we use it to our advantage. The colloquial expression for this stunt is "the primrose path". How many times have you entered into a discussion with a person who starts off with a seemingly reasonable proposition, but then leads you down a primrose path, with one seemingly reasonable intermediate conclusion following another, until you reach an endpoint that you find completely objectionable? You've been had! Used car salesmen and politicians are particularly good at this.
Because we've had this done to us many times (and we've done it to others, too), we don't trust the spoken word very far. Sure, I'll trust a short, simple statement, but if you start walking me down a long primrose path, I'll get suspicious. Indeed, the longer the primrose path, the more suspicious I become. It is entirely possible to create verbal analogues of those delightful M. C. Escher drawings in which perspective is spread over such an extended visual area that it can be made to contradict itself in the whole, even while maintaining the logic of perspective in any small portion of the picture. In the same way, any long verbal exposition can microscopically appear perfectly logical, while still contradicting itself in the whole.
Such skepticism is healthy, but it robs us of intellectual depth. If you can only trust me for a sentence or two, then we can't explore ideas very deeply, can we? Consider, for example, Darwinian evolution. If Charles Darwin had been confined to explaining the entire idea verbally, nobody would have understood or believed it -- it's just too long and deep an idea. You can't handle big complicated ideas with the spoken language.
Now let's turn that around and look at it from the other direction. Imagine what happened when the Greeks started writing about things. The written word is subject to more rigorous analysis than the spoken word, for the simple reason that you can go back and cross check sentences against each other. If someone leads you down the primrose path, you can go back and reread the exposition, examining it critically for the sloppy logic or the tricky wording that permits the deceptive shift in meaning.
Because of this, you can have more confidence in the reliability of the written word. You can trust it more because it's subject to accountability. And this greater level of confidence permits writers to make longer logical forays, to explore ideas more deeply, to journey further into the world of ideas.
This was the basis of the cultural and intellectual explosion that was classical Greece. Have you never wondered why the Greeks seem to have started everything? I believe that it's because they had the first long-range intellectual tool: writing. The Greeks did to ideas what Henry the Navigator did to oceans.
You can see it in the Platonic dialogues. They all have the same pattern: there's Socrates and his straight man. Socrates starts off with a proposition that the straight man challenges. Socrates then leads him down the primrose path, asking the straight man to verify the correctness of each step in the process. The straight man's contribution to the process is never more than a sequence of affirmative responses to Socrates' requests for confirmation. When they reach the end of the primrose path, the straight man always slaps his forehead and exclaims, "Golly gee, Socrates, I would never have thought that, but you sure proved it! What a surprising result!"
What strikes me about these dialogues is the giddy sense of excitement at the intellectual discoveries being made. Plato really gets full of himself sometimes, all but congratulating himself on his cleverness. Clearly, this was new territory to the Greeks, and they revelled in the discovery.
The other striking observation is the merely exploitative nature of subsequent work. The Romans added a bit to the Greek cultural heritage, but the Roman contribution really looks like little more that tidying up, filling in some loose details. We were well past the Renaissance before we started to make fundamental additions to the Greek foundations.
Thus, writing changed the way we thought. Don't think of it as a means of recording ideas, think of it as an instrument for exploring and examining ideas. Western civilization grew from the heady exploitation of this instrument of thinking. Indeed, the written page can be thought of as "artificial cortex", a technological means of augmenting the expansion of the sequential-processing portions of the brain. We humans were so impatient to grow more cortex, we went ahead and concocted an artificial version: paper and ink.
A sidebar on Western misogyny sheds additional light on the nature of the revolution. All of the civilizations of that era placed women in a secondary role, but Western civilization added an edge to the relationship. Was it due to some special nastiness on the part of Greeks and Romans? I think not, for Western misogyny survived Greco-Roman culture. The Christian church in the first few centuries approached gender issues with something like benign neglect, but the later church showed sharper anti-female prejudices. Why?
I think that the answer lies in the Western exaltation of reason. Recall from earlier parts of this extended essay my observation that there are two fundamentally different types of thinking, the pattern-recognizing style of the earlier brain, and the sequential style of the outer cortical regions of the brain. Remember, writing was an extension of this sequential processing system. And sequential processing was the underlying cause of the explosion of Western civilization. It therefore makes perfect sense that the people behind that explosion would elevate sequential reasoning to the highest possible status. You can see it in their philosophical writings. I can quote most readily from Erasmus, but many of his comments echo the classical philosophers. Erasmus' writings bristle with demeaning comments about women, yet when called upon to address women specifically, he demonstrates sensitivity, sympathy, and a remarkably "liberated" attitude. I had long struggled to understand the contradiction between his occasional declared respect for women and his frequent disparaging potshots. But there is a pattern: Erasmus the woman-hater always refers to women in terms of their anti-rational behavior. He mentions that somebody is "no better than an unreasonable woman", "just a silly woman", "possessed of a more-than-female irrationality". It's not women that Erasmus is disparaging, it's anti-rational behavior; he just uses women as the personification of such behavior.
Female social roles have long emphasized the interpersonal universe, where male roles tend more toward the physical universe. The vast complexity of social interaction exceeds our capacity for reasoned analysis; hence the pattern-recognizing style of thinking is more utilitarian in social settings. But the physical universe is more readily understood with sequential logic. Thus, men in Western civilization tend to emphasize sequential thinking where women are stronger in pattern-recognizing thinking. But remember, the underlying cause of Western success is sequential reasoning. If we exalt such reasoning, we concomitantly demean women. By celebrating our greatest successes, we trashed women. Oops.
Yet, the exaltation of sequential thinking was the crucial step in the development of Western civilization. Our forebears had a fight on their hands; the human inclination is to rely on an ill-defined combination of sequential and pattern-recognizing thinking. The central value of Western civilization is the belief in a disciplined adherance to sequential thinking. It took a lot of hard PR work, but it worked.
By the way, the exaltation of sequential thinking also shows up in the common theme of "the contempt of the world" so often appearing in religious and philosophical writings. At first glance, this appears to be a spiritual rejection of material wealth and comfort, but when examined closely, the mental state that is rejected is the satisfaction of the "baser" sensory and pattern-recognizing desires. The mental state that is held up for emulation in such writings is a "pure" attitude that, lo and behold, emphasizes the rarefied intellectual -- read "sequential" -- aspect of human thinking.
So now we've come to the Renaissance. The developments that I recognize as important are all extensions of the process of writing: the invention of the printing press, of course, but also the creation of more elaborate punctuation, the use of italics, the whole concept of scholarly collaboration through publication of ideas. Later on came the creation of secondary forms of writing: arithmetic notation, the use of Arabic (actually, Hindu) numerals, and even later the creation of musical notation. All these innovations extended the intellectual power of the writing instrument. And ideas began piling up on each other.
Which brings us to the present. It would seem that, after 2500 years, writing is pretty much a stable technology. But hold onto your hats -- we're all set for another roller coaster ride almost as giddy as the Greek explosion. And all because of the computer.