The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
Harry Hillman Chartrand
April 2002
Marshall McLuhan and R. K. Logan
ALPHABET,
MOTHER OF INVENTION
Et Cetera, December 1977, pp. 373-383
Index
Left-Right
The Intensification of the Effects of the Alphabet with
Print
The Re-Emergence of the Oral Tradition with Non-Print
Electric Media
* heading added by HHC
If one must choose the one dominant factor which
separates man from the rest of the animal kingdom, it would undoubtedly be
language. The ancients said:
“Speech is the difference of man”.
Opposition of the thumbs and fingers and an erect stature were certainly
key developments in the separation of man from animals, but the great quantum
leap of intellectual capacity took place with speech. The work of Whorf and Sapir shows that
the spoken language structures the way in which man thinks and perceives the
world. It is the medium of both
thought and perception as well as communication.
Until literacy developed, speech was the principal means
of communication. With writing, a
new medium of communication opened up and man’s intellectual development made a
second quantum leap, “contrary to the ancient view that only old things can come
out of change.” 1 In
1926, Breasted noted that: “The
invention of writing and of a convenient system of records on paper has had the
greatest influence on uplifting the human race than any other intellectual
achievement in the career of man.
Carlyle, Kant, Mirabel and Renan believed that writing was the beginning
of civilization.” 2
Harold Innis, the Canadian economic historian, was
perhaps the first to examine the effects of writing in shaping the intellectual,
social, economic and political life of man:
…the art of writing provided man with a transpersonal
memory. Men were given an
artificially extended and verifiable memory of objects and events not present to
sight or recollection. Individuals
applied their
373
minds to symbols rather than things and went beyond the
world of concrete experience into the world of conceptual relations created
within an enlarged time and space universe. . . . Writing enormously enhanced a
capacity for abstract thinking. . . . Man’s activities and powers were roughly
extended in proportion to the increased use and perfection of written
records.
3
Innis observed that writing upon stone and clay created
priestly bureaucracies and gave command over time because of the permanence of
the record. Writing on paper, on
the other hand, created military bureaucracies and gave command over space
because of the ease with which information written upon paper could be
transported and hence provide command at a distance. Innis attributed the fall of
If writing has had the impact that Breasted and Inriis
suggest, then the particular form a writing system assumes plays a crucial role
in shaping the thought of its users. Not only should one expect a major
difference in the thought patterns of literate and pre-literate people, but one
should also expect a comparable difference in the thought patterns of societies
whose writing systems differ significantly.
Innis pointed out the differences that using a
particular medium such as paper, clay, or stone has on the organization of a
society. Of equal importance in
affecting a society’s thought patterns is the way in which the spoken word is
visually coded. There is a vast
difference between ideographic (pictographic) codes, syllabic codes, and the
alphabetic code, and the thought patterns they encourage.
4 Let us compare Chinese and European
culture. Western alphabetic and
Chinese literacy represent the two extremes of writing. The alphabet is used phonetically to
visually represent the sound of a word. Chinese characters are used
pictographically to represent the idea of a word. Consequently, they are less abstract and
less specialized than alphabetic writing. Eastern and Western thought patterns are
as polarized as their respective writing systems.
Western thought patterns are highly abstract, compared
with Eastern. There developed in
the West, and only in the West, a group of innovations that constitute the basis
of Western thought. These include
(in addition to the alphabet) codified law, monotheism, abstract science, formal
logic, and individualism. All of
these innovations, including the alphabet, arose within the very narrow
geographic zone between the Tigris-Euphrates river system and the
374
vided the ground or framework for the mutual
development of these innovations.
The effects of the alphabet and the abstract, logical,
systematic thought that it ,encouraged explains why science began in the West
and not the East, despite the much greater technological sophistication of the
Chinese - the inventors of metallurgy, irrigation systems, animal harnesses,
paper, ink, printing, movable type, gunpowder, rockets, porcelain, and silk.
Credit must also be given to
monotheism and codified law for the role they played in developing the notion of
universal law, an essential building-block of science. Almost all of the early scientists -
Thales, Anaximenes, Anaximander, Anaxagoras and Heraclitus - were both
law-makers in their community and monotheistically inclined. They each believed that a unifying
principle ruled the universe. 5
Phonetic writing was essential to the intellectual
development in the West. No such
development occurred in the East. To understand why the alphabet developed
in the West and not in the East, we need only consider the nature of the spoken
Chinese language. All Chinese words
are monosyllabic. As a consequence
of the limited number of sounds possible for a word, there is an enormous amount
of redundancy in the sounds of Chinese words. There are 239 words, for instance, with
all the same sound, shih. There is little incentive for the
development of an alphabet under these conditions. Western tongues, on the other hand, lend
themselves to alphabetic transcription because they are more
fractured.
All writing systems began as ideographic systems in
which the idea of a word is represented by a sign.
6 The Chinese system never developed
beyond the ideographic stage. The
Sumerian and Egyptian systems which began in 3500 and 3000 B.C. respectively,
evolved into syllabic systems in which the sounds of syllables were represented
by signs. The Egyptians retained
their heiroglyphs and used a mixed system of ideograms and syllabic signs. In addition to these signs, they also
developed twenty-two uniconsonantal signs which could have served as an
alphabet. These signs were
restricted to rendering foreign proper names, however, and, hence, cannot be
considered a true alphabet.
The first primitive alphabet was developed by the
Semitic tribe, the Seirites, who mined copper for the Egyptians in the Sinai
desert. They are referred to in
Scripture as the Midianites, or Kennites, and are the tribe Moses sojourned with
in Sinai. The Seirites adapted the
twenty-two Egyptian consonants to their own Semitic tongue. This primitive “alphabet” was used by
the Phoenicians and Hebrews and spread from the
375
writing operated on the phonetic principle minus a vowel
structure and, hence, fell short of the phonetic alphabet.
The Greeks borrowed the Semitic alphabet from the
Phoenicians and converted it into a truly phonetic alphabet with the inclusion
of vowels. So enriched, the Greek
alphabet spread to other cultures and became the basis of all modern Western
alphabets, including our own. The
alphabet was invented once, and only once, in the history of man, and its
effects, as we shall see, were as unique as the thing
itself.
By including the vowels, the Greek alphabet became the
most sophisticated writing machine developed by man. The impact of the Greek alphabet was
naturally much greater than the impact of the earlier and more primitive
phonetic writing systems such as the Babylonian syllabary or the Semitic
alphabet of consonants only. The
effects of these earlier phonetic writing systems, however, cannot be
ignored.
The Babylonian syllabary, like the alphabet, encouraged
the development of classification. The reform and simplification of the
Babylonian syllabary from 600 signs to 60 signs occurred at the same time that
the Hammurabic legal code was introduced. In addition to organizing the laws in a
systematic manner, the code also promoted uniform and standardized procedure
throughout the Babylonian empire, introducing uniform weights and measures. The Semitic alphabet made its strongest
impact on the Hebrew people. The
effects of classification are seen clearly in the way they codified their law
and also in the systematic way in which they recorded their history, the first
people to do so. The abstraction
which the use of the alphabet encourages expressed itself in the theological
concepts of the Hebrews, the first people to entertain the idea of one, and only
one God. True monotheism begins at
By adding vowels to the Semitic alphabet the Greeks
created the first truly phonetic alphabet which is able to accurately and
unambiguously transcribe the spoken word of any language using only twenty to
thirty signs or letters. “The
original Greek invention achieved the essential task of analysis and it has not
been improved upon. 7
The purely phonetic alphabet had its greatest impact on
the Greeks, the very first people to achieve and to use it. The Greek alphabet first came into use
around 700 B.C. 8 Within
300 years the Greeks had developed from dependence on an oral tradition based on
myths, to a rationalistic, logical culture which laid the foundations for logic,
science, philosophy, psychology, history, political science, and individualism.
How can one account for this rapid
transition from a
376
state of group involvement to individual scepticism?
We believe that the alphabet served
as the operative ground for this rich development which was characterized by the
classification and abstraction of ideas.
The very word idea is indicative of the
revolution in thinking that took place with literacy. This word, which is not to be found in
Homeric Greek, derived from the word eidos indicating “visual image.”
The alphabet had the mysterious and
unique power of separating the visual faculty from the other senses and giving
dominant play to the visual. The
pervasive use of uniform elements, the phonetic letters that the alphabet
entailed, encouraged the additional visual matching of situational elements
which formed the ground for Greek logic, geometry, and rationality. The idea of truth itself, the
correspondence of thing and intellect, is based on matching. At a more popular level, the development
of realistic representation in the arts is identified with the’ Greeks in their
first age of literacy.9
The phonetic alphabet also served as a paradigm for the
process of abstraction, for the written word is an abstraction of the spoken
word which, in turn, is an abstraction from the holistic experience. The word, .when written with the phonetic
alphabet, represents a double level of abstraction beyond the merely spoken
language. First, the spoken word is
broken up into its constituents of semantically meaningless phonemes which, in
turn, are represented by meaningless letters. The use of the phonetic alphabet
encouraged the development of abstractions:
With literacy they (the Greeks) suddenly saw .their
universe as ordered. Their new
world view, however, was in conflict with the vocabulary they inherited from
their oral tradition. Their
conflict produced essential and permanent contributions to the vocabulary of all
abstract thought: body and space, matter and motion, permanence and change,
quality and quantity, combination and separation are among the counters of
common currency now available because pre-Socratics first brought them near the
level of consciousness.
10
Paradoxically, the alphabet enabled .the Greeks to
reduce the massive polyphonies of their oral culture by selecting and logically
(visually) connecting what had been simultaneous and musical. If the Greek means of abstracting and
conceptualizing was by logical connection, the abstract art and science of the
twentieth century proceeds by the contrary, means of pulling out the logical
(visual) connections in space and time. This returns the art and philosophy of
today to musical form. If the Greek
drive to abstraction had been to eliminate the acoustic and musical in favour of
visual and logical connectedness, our nonrepresentational and abstract art and
science assumes a complementary pattern.
377
The Greek alphabet also provided both the model and the
bias for classification, an essential development in Greek analytic thought
during the period from 700 to 400 B.C. - especially for logic, science, and
history. In addition to serving as
a paradigm of abstraction and classification, the alphabet also served as a
model for division and separability. With the alphabet every word is separated
into its constituent sounds and constituent letters. Havelock shows that the Greek idea of
atomicity - that all matter can be divided up into individual tiny atoms – is
related to the use of the alphabet: “… they saw the analogy with what the
alphabet had done to language and likened their atoms to letters…”
11
The Greek capacity for divisiveness
and separation extends way beyond their atomicity of matter. With writing, what is recorded or
remembered becomes separate from the writer, existing in a book or a scroll.
Knowledge takes on objective
identity separate from the knower. The Greek, in this way, developed the
notion of objectivity and detachment, the separation of the knower from the
object of his awareness. This is
the beginning of the scientific method and the source of the dichotomy the
Greeks created between subjective thinking as found in art and poetry, and
objective thinking as exemplified by philosophy and science. In art, percept precedes concept while
in science, method dominates both.
The Greeks invented “nature” (physis) which is
their classification of the objective external world. “Nature” does not include man or any of
his artifacts such as the alphabet, which may explain why the Greeks never
studied the effects, even of their own technology, a radical flaw in
their objectivity. It was the
separation of man from nature, perhaps that allowed Western thinkers to consider
nature as an object to be studied, or a resource to be
exploited.
The Greeks did not study the entelechies or formal
effects of human artifacts, but only those of natural forms, whether of mineral,
flora, or fauna. When Achilles
encounters the ghost Patroclus, he feels frustrated and says: “I see that we do
live on after death, but without entelechies.” The entelechy of anything is, as it were,
the functional vortex of energy and power which it manifests by its action.
The merely visual or logical
connectedness which the phonetic alphabet fosters in the thought and perception
of literate men is quite unable to relate the environmental and structural forms
to their users. Edward T. Hall
spots this peculiar gap in “the edifice of Western thought” when he observes:
“Quite simply the Western view is that human processes, particularly behavior,
are independent of environmental controls and influence.”
12 That which is environmental or
ecologically holistic has an acoustic or simultaneous structure inaccessible to
the lineal forms of
thinking fostered by the alphabet.
378
Another important split in Greek thinking was the
separation of the individual from his society. Plato develops the notion of psyche or
soul from which the notion of an individual developed. In the Republic, Plato “. . .
equipped his reader with the doctrine of the autonomous and identified it as the
seat of rational thought. . . " 13 That the alphabet contributed to this
unique event in the history of man was certainly not recognized by Plato or
Aristotle. Like other literate
Greeks, they avoided the study of the effects of their own
artifacts,
Left-Right
Recent developments in the field of neurophysiology tend
to support the hypothesis that the alphabet produced a situation favorable for
the development of logic, rational thought, and science. Neurophysiologists have determined that
while there is a certain degree of redundancy and overlap between the two
hemispheres of the brain, essentially the left and right hemispheres of the
brain perform specialized tasks. The right hemisphere is the locus of the
artistic, intuitive, spiritual, holisttc, simultaneous, discontinuous or
creative side of our personalities, whereas the left hemisphere controls the
lineal, visual, logical, analytic, mathematical, and verbal activities of our
psyche.
We here suggest that the alphabet created a lineal and
visual environment of services and experiences (everything from architecture and
highways to representational art) which contributed to the ascendancy or
dominance of the left, or lineal, hemisphere. This conjecture is consistent with the
results of the Russian neurophysiologist Luria who found that the area of the
brain which controls linear sequencing and, hence, logic, mathematics, and
scientific thinking, is located in the prefrontal region of the left
hemisphere:
The mental process for writing a word entails still
another specialization: Putting the letters in the proper sequence to form the
word. Lashley discovered many years
ago that sequential analysis involved a zone of the brain different from that
employed for spatial analysis. In
the course of our extensive studies we have located the region responsible for
sequential analysis in the anterior regions of the left hemisphere.
14
Luria’s results show that the expression “linear
thinking” is not merely a figure of speech, but an actual, bona fide activity of
the brain which takes place in the anterior regions of the left hemisphere of
the brain. His results also
indicate that the use of the alphabet, with its emphasis on linear sequence,
stimulates this area of the brain. Luria’s findings provide an understanding
of how the written alphabet, with its lineal
379
structure, was able to create the conditions conducive
to the development of Western science, technology, and
rationality.
The alphabet separated and isolated visual space from
the many other kinds of sensory space involved in the senses of smell, touch,
kinesthesia, and acoustics. This
made possible the awareness of Euclidean space which is lineal, homogeneous,
connected, and static. When
neurophysiologists assign a vague “spatial” property to the right hemispheres
they are referring to the simultaneous and discontinuous properties of
audile-tactile and multiple other spaces of the sensorium. The Euclidean space of analytic geometry
is a concept of the left hemisphere of the brain, while the multi-dimensional
spaces of the holistic sensorium are precepts of the right hemisphere of the
brain.
The Greeks, the first people ‘to develop the totally
phonetic alphabet with its continuous and connected spaces, unwittingly excluded
the .possibility of zero ‘from their culture. One of the great historical paradoxes is
that although the Greeks invented logic and formal geometry, they never
developed the concept of zero, and thus their algebra was only marginal. The Greeks, guided -by Parmenides’ logic,
simply rejected the notion of non-being as being logically inconsistent. Aristotle held that nature abhorred a
vacuum. The Greeks were literally
too inhibited by their logic to entertain or to conceive zero. The Hindus, on the other hand, regarded
non-being as the goal of their spiritual life, the way to Nirvana. The-Hindus in their oral culture, with
almost total disregard for logical rigour but with sheer intuition, invented the
notion of zero and the Arabic-Hindu numerals we presently use. They pioneered all of the present day
calculational alogarithms or methods for addition, subtraction, multiplication,
division, and square rooting, as well develop algebra into a sophisticated
mathematical system. Without the
mathematical ideas developed by the Hindus- and transmitted to
The Intensification of the
Effects of the Alphabet with Print
If the phonetic alphabet had created a ground or
climate favorable to intensified activity of the left hemisphere of the brain,
the printed word reinforced this effect many times both for the individual
reader and by the spread of the reading habit. The very activity of type-setting became
a major paradigm of sequential and segmented organization which fostered the
habit of precise measurement’ so necessary for
380
the development of analytic, experimental technique.
Without the development of the
experimental and observational technique by Tycho Brahe, Galileo and others,
Renaissance scientists would never have broken out of the constraints of Greek
theory with its relative indifference to the imperfections of the physical
world. The effects of precise and
repeatable diagrams in botony and anatomy brought a completely new dimension to
these sciences. Writing on “Early
Science and the Printed Book,” Stillman Drake observed that print made available
texts from the ancient world, so crucial to the renaissance of learning and
science, and made this material available on a much larger scale.
15
Arabic texts transmitting the Hindu
notions of zero, place numeration, and algebra were also more widely circulated
as a result of printing. These
mathematical developments were essential for the “rise of science.” Another effect of printing was to spread
scientific learning beyond the walls of the university where it had been
monopolized and limited by academics.
Most of the breakthroughs in science during the Renaissance were made by
non-academics like Copernicus, Brahe and Galileo.
The Re-Emergence of the Ora1
Tradition with Non-Print Electric Media
If the alphabet and print intensified the lineal
activity of the left hemi sphere of the brain the new holistic and simultaneous
information environments created by electronic technology bring back into full
play the activity of the right hemisphere of the brain. Electricity moves at the speed of light
creating a simultaneous non-lineal, acoustic environment of interface and
resonance rather than connection.
The right side of the brain is specially qualified to deal with this
figure-ground environment of simultaneous information and pattern
recognition. The lineal
segmented causally connected description of nature characteristic of the left
side of’ the brain can no longer cope with the new ecological nuclear
environment
The clock-work universe of
381
In the world of atomic physics the distinction between
particles and waves assumes a complementary character. Light displays the properties of
particles, knocking electrons out of metals (the photoelectric effect),
while electrons are found to behave like waves (electron diffraction). According to the Heisenberg Uncertainty
Principle, one can no longer measure simultaneously the exact position and
momentum of a particle. One is
forced to adopt a probabilistic description of nature, in which particles are
represented by waves of probability. The chemical bonds which hold atoms
together are resonances of these probability waves.
16 The very elementary particles of which
matter is composed are themselves resonating composites of each
other.
The electric service environment of simultaneous
information, as was first exemplified by the telegraph, provided a new social
ground favorable to the rediscovery of oral culture. This was reflected by the interest that
developed in the nineteenth century with folk tales, folk culture, and
anthropology. These, in turn,
relate to the changes that occurred in psychology at the beginning of the
twentieth century. Just as Planck
was ushering in the idea of the discontinuous quantum of energy, Freud was
preparing the demise of the mechanistic psychology that arose during the
Enlightenment under the influence of Newtonian physics and print mentality.
Freud returned medicine to the oral
tradition of curing the sick through the use of words. Lain Entralgo’s studies reveal that as
the ancient Greeks established. their medicine on a firmer scientific ground,
they dropped the verbal
elements of their treatment to concentrate solely on somatic cures. Freud’s psychotherapy represented a
return to. the shamanistic traditions of tribal medicine, and “the therapy of
the word.” 17
Evidence for the revival of oral traditions can also be-
found in the art, music, and literary world of the, nineteenth and: early
twentieth century. Examples include
Mark Twain’s use of local dialect in Huckleberry Finn, the symbolists’
avoidance of ideological connections in their poetry, Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, the
popularity. Of jazz and rock, whose origins are found, deep in. the
rhythms of African music, the dropping of; melodic connections-in atonal music,
and the use of; African motifs, and abstract discontinuity in the paintings of
Picasso and the cubist school.
1.
Mario Bunge, Causality: The Place of the Causal Principle in Modern
Science (New York, Meridian Books, 1970), pp. 203-4.
2. James H.
Breasted, The Conquest of
Civilization (1926). p. 23.
3. Harold Innis, Empire and Communication (Toronto,
University of Toronto Press, 1971). pp. 10-11.
382
4. See H. M. McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962) and Understanding Media (New
York: McGraw-Hill,
1964).
5. R. K. Logan. “The Poetry of Physics and Physics of
Poetry,”
6. See D. Diringer, The Alphabet: A Key to the History of Mankind
(1947) and J. Gelb, Study of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press. 1963).
7. Eric Havclock,
Origins of Western Literacy
(Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies
in Education, 1976), p. 61.
8. R.
Carpenter, “The Antiquity.of the Greek Alphabet.” American Journal
of Archaeology, XXXVII (1933), pp. 8-29; “The Greek
Alphabet Again,” AJ.A. XIII (1938), pp. 58-69.
9. See E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology
of Pictorial Representation (New York: Pantheon Books,
1960).
10. Eric
Havelock, Preface to Plato (Boston: Harvard University Press,
1963).
11.
12. Mildred and Edward
Hall, The Fourth Dimension in Architecture: The Impact of Building on
Man’s Behavior, (Santa Fe, New
Mexico: The Sunstone Press, 1975), pp. 7.
13.
14. A. R. Luria,
“The Functional Organization of the Brain,”
Scientific American, Vol. 22, #3, March,
1910, pp. 66-73.
15. Stillman Drake, “Early Science and the Printed Book: The
Spread of Science Be yond the
Universities”, Renaissance and
Reformation, Vol. VI. No. 3.
1970, pp
43.52:
16. Linus Pauling, The Nature of the Chemical Bond
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1960).
17. Lain Entralgo, The Therapy of the Word in
Classical Antiquity (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1970).
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