You Cannot Go Back

The "conservation" experiments of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget are tried-and-true classics. Show a child of five a short, fat glass of juice; pour the juice into a tall, skinny glass; and suddenly there's more of it. Lay out a row of quarters, then spread the row out. Suddenly . . . more quarters.

It's not magic, it's just the way children that age see and think. (Watch them.) In a few short years they'll be thinking differently. They'll be able to see quantities, and "conserve" them, the way adults do. And--something Piaget never addressed--they won't be able to remember how they used to think.

I became aware of this curious amnesia when I'd describe Piaget's experiments to college freshmen. I was amazed at their amazement. This was a surprise! Yet why should it be? Weren't the students thinking this way just a dozen years before? How could they have forgotten? How could you and I?

It seems that when thoughts are encoded in a new, more complex structure--as they are around the age of six or seven--it becomes impossible to remember the older, simpler one. It's like water from a stream that's absorbed in a river. It cannot go back.

And yet some insist it can. There's a "child within," they say, and you can recover it. If you take a microscope to what they recover, however, you'll find evidence--in their speech or writing, for example--of an adult perspective. Psychiatrist George Vaillant said it best: once a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, it doesn't remember being a caterpillar. It remembers being a little butterfly.

Several weeks ago I listed some of the transitions experienced by sacred stories in the West. They started out being spoken; then they were written, codexed, printed, and placed before a camera. They started out as simple narrative, and then became creed, science, and "objective" history. Knowing of these transformations, one wonders: can we go back? Can we hear the stories the way they were heard the first time, millennia ago, with all the creed, science, and history squeezed out of them?

The answer is clear: not any more than we can recover the eyes of a child. (Try a conservation experiment: can you get yourself to believe there's really more juice in that tall, skinny glass?) You can describe a child's perspective. You can analyze it. You might even explain it. But you can't re-experience it.

When it comes to sacred stories, fundamentalists will say they can. They believe you can get to the "originals within," and they believe they have. But if you look at the history behind the stories, you'll see that what is "fundamental" is often far from what's "original." It's another case of anachronism--of remembering a butterfly when there was only a caterpillar.

You can preserve a tradition's stories but not its earliest eyes and ears. Where, then, is "inspiration"? More important, when is it? At the time of the original speaking? The original hearing? In whatever the stories meant to an ancient mind that is foreign to our own? If that's the case, we're in something of a pickle. We cannot recover those ancient eyes and ears, so we're cut off from inspired text. How, then, do we hear the Word of God?

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Print IT

And though the incident had taken place more than five hundred years before, to the Story of Everything it seemed like yesterday. Closing his eyes, he could still smell the ink lying in wait on rows and rows of metal type, could feel the paper gently blanket him, could hear the great screw twisting down, and then, after the compressing and the lifting (he nearly lost his breath), could see . . . himself, as though he were outside his body, looking down. (from The Story of Everything, Chapter 6)

How has information technology (IT) affected our sense of sacred stories? Here is last week's timeline:

3,500,000,000 years ago. IT in a living cell.
50-100,000 years ago. IT in language.
5,000 years ago. IT in writing.
2,000 years ago. IT in a "codex," a book.

Now we add:

560 years ago. ID in print.
184 years ago. ID in photography.

Print appears 560 years ago (earlier in China and Korea). Johannes Gutenberg puts moveable metallic type, made to look like handwriting, into a converted wine press and produces part of a Latin grammar and then a stunningly beautiful Bible (see it). Fifty years later, in 1500, Europe has 20 million books in 35 thousand editions. It helps that inexpensive paper, invented in China in the second century, has now replaced parchment. (Sheep welcome the development.)

The impact of printing is complex. A decade after Martin Luther nails his 95 theses to a church door in Wittenberg (the year is 1517), 30 printers in 12 cities are publishing his sermons as fast as they can get their hands on them. The Bible is translated into vernaculars; it's now for everyone. More and more, sacred stories become the object of solitary reading and interpretation. Only the written word, not any community, is the source of Revelation. "Sola Scriptura" is the rock on which you stand to oppose a corrupt church.

Printing also leads to modern science. "The scientific revolution followed printing as a more refined way to deal with the exploding amount of information humans were generating," writes Kevin Kelly. "Libraries, catalogs, cross referencing, dictionaries, concordances and publishing of observations all blossomed." Now one can ask of Biblical stories, Are they "science"? Some say yes, some say no. Galileo is one of the latter. He ends up under house arrest, but it could have been worse.

184 years ago. The camera. ID in photographs (see the very first). A modern view of history emerges, emphasizing primary sources, eyewitness accounts, evidence, "objectivity." Leopold von Ranke says the historian is not "to judge the past, nor to instruct one's contemporaries with an eye to the future, but rather merely to show how it actually was." It's hard to believe that this is a new idea but consider: no one talked about "photographic" memory before the invention of the camera. This is "photographic" history.

Once you can imagine such a history, you can ask a new question, Are the Bible's sacred stories photographic? Again, some say yes and some say no. Thomas Jefferson literally slices up the four gospels and keeps only the verses he deems to come from the "historical" Jesus (see the result). In Europe, Enlightenment thinking and higher criticism do essentially the same thing.

What stories go through! In the West, sacred ones start out spoken; then they are written, codexed, printed, photographed, not to mention digitized and internet-ed. They started out as narrative, and then they become (in the eyes of many) creed, science, and history. Today, we wake up to them unaware of all that has happened. What do we do once we know the history?

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What's IT Got To Do With It?

There now passed through the Story's mind all the forms in which he had existed. His life in speech, his life in writing, his life in print, his life in cyberspace. None could compare with the time he had spent in silence (from The Story of Everything, Chapter 6).

I've been writing about sacred stories reclaiming the language of the night and becoming stories again. Just stories. It makes me wonder how they got to be "creed" in the first place. What did information technology (IT) have to do with it?

Here's a timeline:

3,500,000,000 years ago. A bit of enclosed matter--call it a cell--remembers how it was created and makes a copy of itself. For the very first time, information from the past is directed to the future. It's done biologically, in silence.

50-100,000 years ago. IT in language. Stories. "No transition has affected our species, or the world at large, more than the creation of language" writes Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine. Narrative follows and is just as consequential. Down the road, someone, somewhere, tells the first Story of Everything.

5,000 years ago. IT in writing. Clay. Papyrus. Stylus and ink. Scrolls (see one). Text based on pictures, then on sound. Here's where things get interesting. All manner of daily accounting is now remembered accurately, but in the spiritual realm writing seems otherworldly, magical. Can you trust it? At times the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah has his doubts: "How dare you say: 'We are wise, and we possess the law of Yahweh. See how it has been falsified by the lying pen of the scribes!"

The same skepticism appears in India. "People did not believe it was possible to convey a spiritual teaching in writing," writes Karen Armstrong. "You could not, for example, understand the full meaning of the Upanishads simply by perusing the texts." You still needed oral culture--a teacher. Otherwise, the written word would freeze stories, encouraging a "misplaced clarity and certainty about matters that are essentially elusive and ineffable."

2000 years ago. IT in a codex (see). Take a blank scroll, cut it into sheets, fold the sheets in half, sew them together through the folds, cover with two wooden boards. Write on both sides of each "page." You get a codex, or what we now call a book. The technology develops in the first century AD and Christians are quick to adopt it. Small codices grow larger. "Once it was possible to produce and view (or visualize) 'the Bible' under one set of physical covers, the concept of 'canon' became concretized in a new way that shapes our thinking to the present day," writes religious historian Robert Kraft (here and here). Some stories are "in," some are "out."

In the fourth century the emperor Constantine makes a request for 50 of these mega-codices. They may be the first Bibles. Not surprisingly, he also makes sure, in 325, that Christianity produces a uniform statement of belief. Now Christianity's sacred stories exist in a single Book and a single Creed. Before, a few of the Book's texts claimed to be inspired; now the whole collection does. It's all the "word of God."

Fast forward a thousand years. Parchment, made from animal skin, has replaced papyrus as the surface of choice. Books (Bibles among them) are so expensive to produce and so rare that in 1424 the library at Cambridge University contains only 122, each with the value of a farm or vineyard. The creedal value of Christianity's stories matches their IT value. Their nature has been changed irreversibly, in a way impossible for us to fathom.

Next week: The transformation continues with printing. Can we recover the sense of story embedded in speech alone?

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