Plato's Warning

Plato's warning

"The mind has lost its cutting edge, we hardly understand the
Ancients," Gregoire de Tours, 600 A.D.

Many people are aware that the ancients were more connected to the
natural rhythms of life and the Earth than we are today. Modern
life can be stressful and alienating, partly because we now live in
ignorance of these pulses of life, and out of touch with the
natural world. However, another major difference between the way we
think today and the way the ancients thought is that one of our
main methods of acquiring and passing on knowledge is through the
written word; for the ancients, the spoken word was far more
important.

Plato understood this transition from an oral to a written culture.

Plato was a Greek philosopher, born almost 500 years before Christ.
In his youth he was a pupil of Socrates, and later his life he
founded an academy of learning in Athens which lasted almost 900
years. And whose pupils included Aristotle.

In many ways Plato is the link between the 'modern' history of the
last 2500 years from which we have many written records, and the
vast ancient past, from which we have fewer written records. Plato
passed on a warning from others who came before him that the
invention of writing would dull the mind.

The absence of writing results in an oral culture where knowledge
and wisdom is passed down through stories, poetry and song.
Knowledge becomes a living thing, a part of life that is always
passed on directly from person to person, and not in a dry,
abstract way like the written word. "Information," says computer
scientist Jaron Lanier, "is just alienated experience." The oral
culture is not alienating, it is personal and alive.

The problem, of course, is that much information from thousands of
years ago is lost to us now, and much of it that has reached us has
changed through time. Yet scholars are now starting to take the
world's myths seriously, not just as an interesting form of
entertainment, but as a source of real knowledge about ancient
history.

One key feature of the ancient way of thinking was that everything
was connected. All forms of knowledge where part of one beautiful
whole. One central hub of this whole was mathematics, as it was
connected to music, to poetry, to architecture, to the movements of
the planets, and hence to astrology and Human affairs.

Another central hub was myth. This connected stories to knowledge
of history, of the cycles of the natural world (including natural
disasters), and of the vast wealth of knowledge that our ancient
ancestors had built up over thousands of years.

The written word has many benefits to it, and does enable
information to be passed down through time intact. But I wonder how
much information we lost in the transition from an oral to written
culture? I suspect it was vast. Only by studying the ancient myths,
and understanding the differences in thinking of an oral culture
will we begin to hear the long lost whispers of our distant
ancestors.