Furthermore, writing relieves the burden of memorization that preliterate societies had to bear. The rationale for poetic verse, for example, was that it was easier to memorize epic stories if they rhymed (although free-verse took thousands of years to develop after the necessity for rhyme had been removed by the technology of writing). Writing took the pressure off our retention capabilities, and in a sense it was a technological shortcut to greater memory capacity, not just for individuals, but for the species.

Writing was relatively new to the Greeks when, in 400 BC, in Plato’s Republic, Plato declaimed writing (and writers) as those who “maim the thought of those who hear them,” and that writing is “an imitation of imitations, even farther removed from the ideal.” Literacy, for Plato, was a step backwards, a crutch that led to mental laziness. (There is something of Plato in our modern skepticism about the effect of computers on literacy today.) But, Luddites aside, written language supported the second greatest leap in our collective, technological evolution as a species – it allowed the seeds of crucial ideas to survive and to migrate across time and geography until they found fallow earth. The interlaced threads of ideas and knowledge contained in the world’s written literature is the fountainhead of human progress and the ultimate source of our eventual transformation into what we will become.

Christopher Dewdney
Christopher Dewdney, widely known as a communication philosopher, has published over ten books of poetry, including Predators of the Adoration and Radiant Inventory, both of which were nominated for Governor General’s Awards. A first-prize winner of the CBC Literary Competition, he also received a third Governor General’s Award nomination for The Immaculate Perception, a non-fiction book of popular essays about consciousness, language, and dreams. His most recent book is Acquainted with the Night: An Hour-by-Hour Celebration of the Art, Science, and Culture of Nighttime.