Things fall apart

Reading is one of my favorite pass times. I think that the ability to pass on knowledge from one person to another over hundreds of years is one of the crowning glory's of the human race. The ability to continually streamline the spread of information has fueled the increasing pace of its advancement since the first crude ledgers. If once humans worshiped the forest, or the earth, or the sun, we now worship the letter and this great store of knowledge we have amassed. If I don't know something I can tap into this store of knowledge and find out about it. I can find out about something that happened 20 minutes ago or 20,000 years ago. This reverence of words, ideas, and knowledge is the prejudice that Things Fall Apart must overcome before it can show us a conflict between orality and literature.


To this effect Chinua Achebe spends the first hundred and sixty seven pages of his book showing us the humans behind orality. He shows us a culture through the lens of Okonkwo. Okonkwo is a flawed man, but not in a inhuman way. He shares the same flaws that many of us see in our friends and ignore in ourselves. He lives in a rich and wonderful world utterly devoid of writing. I am hitting that point on the head now but it is utterly ignored in the book. We see him grow and prosper, over come trials, folly, and grieve all without lifting a pen or reading a letter. At times I found myself disgusted by some of the terrible things that happened everyday, and at other times I marveled at the laws and order that existed without writing. It is hard not to rally behind someone who works so hard for what they want in life.

After a hundred and sixty seven pages of normal life Achebe introduces a new force into our oral world. This new force is not evil or malevolent but is just there. In this new force, the church and government, we see all the things we left behind shortly after opening the book. We see a thirst for the spread of knowledge, a respect for new ideas, and a sure stubbornness in the idea that the written way is the only way. As the story carries on, you come to see the government and the church as cold and uncaring. They have laws to tell them what they should do so why bother feeling passion about something? The closest you come to seeing an emotion in the forces of literature is when Reverend James Smith is tempted to run in fear in the face of the village spirits.

All in all when I put the book down I marvel at a story, delivered through literature, that is able to non-aggressively question its own medium. As I sit here, communicating to all who read this, in a room by myself I think back to part of the book. At his departure fest from his motherland one of Okonkwo's kinsmen saws "When we gather in the moonlit village ground it is not because of the moon. Every man cans see the moon from his own compound. We come together because it is good for kinsmen to do so". I wonder if now as humans we spend to much time watching the moon alone? Did we give up our humanity for letters, and if so was it worth it?

Ong Second Half

Midway through chapter four Ong discusses how even after a culture has had language for a significant amount of time they still tend to have an oral mindset. He illustrates his point with and example having to do with customs dues and the port of Sandwich. He says the dispute was settled by getting some of the oldest and most trustworthy people from the two different locations and having them recount how it had always been done as far back as they can remember. The idea that these people counted spoken word above written language seems almost incomprehensible to me. I buy most things off the internet anymore and I read what I need to know about a product before I buy it. The idea of settling a discrepancy on the word of someone else over a law or something written down seems ridiculous. One of the biggest reasons I like to buy things online is because I don’t have to go in and have a face to face meeting with a sales clerk. I feel like if I go in and look at something in person and ask questions it somehow obligates me to buy the item. In short when there is so much face to face interaction it makes me very uncomfortable. I know that person would like nothing better than for me to buy whatever it is I is looking at and so they would be more willing to bend the truth. Human character seems so much more motivated than writing. Because writing seems so un human it seems more trustworthy.
This is probably one of the thing Plato was warning about. Often times it is difficult to see the motivation behind writing quite so clearly as it can be seen in talking to someone. I think the more writing we are exposed to in our lives the easier it become to forget that at some point someone had to write it and they wrote it for a reason. There have been a lot of new stories lately about companies faking customer reviews of their products on Amazon and other major web retailers. Even knowing that there is a good chance that one of the reviews I read could be fake I still trust them more than a sales clerk. I have realized that there is no magical universal other out there writing these reviews, that these are people with something to gain at some point, and still I feel like they are more objective about it than anyone in person would be. In this respect I feel like I have come very far from humanities oral roots. I trust what I read precisely because I see it as non-human and as such freed from human flaws such as greed and malice.
While this is all true of shopping for me, when I take on the greater responsibility of shopping for solutions at work I feel like I need to speak to a human being. I work in computer securities and feel like a product is not good unless I can talk to someone who has used it, or experience it firsthand. I don’t want to read reviews but rather talk to someone. I feel like while a sales clerk at a store has no trouble lying to me to make the sale, a sales rep who is selling me software he will then have to support is much less likely to lie. His involvement goes beyond the sale. When talking about big important purchases that affect the people on the network I am securing as well as myself I want human interaction. I cannot really explain why that is but I think part of it is if something goes wrong I have someone to go back to and say “look this is not how you said it would be”. So I think even as we move forward as humans the really important problems still call for that oral interaction.

Thoughts on Ong Chapters 1-3

While reading through these chapters I really got a chance to maul over a concept that had not ever occurred to me previously. The idea that the thought of humans could be altered so much by the mediums they use to communicate in their daily lives. I have always figured that thought is though and it goes about the same for everyone. Some people are able to think more quickly and by doing so are able to approach a problem form more angles and come up with an answer to a problem first. I always assumed that given enough time everyone would eventually work their way to an answer. Ong is saying that there is a distinct break in think between those who are from primary oral cultures and those from literate cultures. This point is illustrated with a series of interviews that I found to be very convincing. I felt that the idea that many of those from oral communities saw little point in trying to describe something like a tree to someone who had never seen one. It did a really good job of showing how much these people lived in the current. There were trees where they lived and you could see them any time you please so why would you want to tell someone what a tree looked like. I could see how this break in thought process between literate cultures and oral cultures could seem like different manners of cogitation. However I think the idea is taken too far when discussing how people from non oral communities would here some of their internal thoughts as external guidance and made them more likely to believe in divine powers. I feel like there is a contestant push to feel like those who came before us were not as smart or as capable as we are now. I don’t think this is the case. Writing has given us the ability to store knowledge and pass it along in a much simpler fashion so that many individuals in literate societies now are taught a whole host of facts and figures. This allows us to look back to the achievements of the past, such as crop rotation, and minimize those achievements. Everyone knows that now so the people who “discovered it” must not have been as smart as we are now. While in actuality individual human intelligence has remained static for some time while human knowledge as a whole has grown. I would say that this growth in human knowledge has a lot to do with writing and the ability to save our knowledge efficiently from one generation to another. Before writing there a lot more that had to be remembered all the time just to survive. Now we don’t need to pass along information like which plants are poisonous or which neighbors might be likely to attack us in our sleep. We accept that that information is already part of human knowledge and somewhere along the line someone is checking current events against this store of human knowledge. As this body of human knowledge grows our time in school is spent less and less on learning knowledge and more on learning how to access the knowledge that is already stored. We start by using the same simple patterns to learn the basics that oral cultures use to pass along all information. The ABC song is a great example of this. It is used to teach kids who cannot yet read all the letters they will need. It is patterned and rhymes making it easy to fit into the natural cognitive process of humans. Once this is learned we advance to reading and then to discerning what is worth reading and finally how to use the body of human knowledge to form new knowledge and add back to the body of knowledge. It makes me wonder what the next step will be. Many science fiction books, such as Battlefield earth, suppose that the next logical step is to cut reading out of the equation. Instead of reading we will develop a method to beam information directly into our heads. It is impossible to imagine how this will affect the way we think but it will shake up the world in the same manner writing did. Those people who have devoted their lives to being the gardeners who care for the tree of human knowledge, Scholars and PhD’s, will seem to have wasted their lives. I wonder if we will seem as primitive with our writing to future peoples as past peoples and their memorization seem to us.

In addition to this I think it is extremely funny when Ong refers to your mom jokes as competitions in which "one opponent tries to outdo the other in vilifying the others mother" I think this is the best definition I have ever heard.