Summer, Buddy Holly, the working folly
Good golly, Miss Molly and boats
Hammersmith Palais, the Bolshoi Ballet
Jump back in the alley and nanny goats
Eighteen wheeler Scammells, Dominica camels
All other mammals plus equal votes…
Reasons to Be Cheerful, Pt. 3
Song by Ian Dury and The Blockheads
Reasons to Be Cheerful, Pt2 (and 3)
In the middle of the fifteenth century a German goldsmith called Gutenberg superseded memory with the printing press. As you will recall from last week, in the earlier oral world which the press helped to destroy, daily life had been intensely parochial. Knowledge and awareness of the continuity of social institutions had rested almost solely on the ability of the old to recall past events and customs. Elders were the source of authority. The need for extensive use of memory made poetry the carrier of most information (imagine that Tiffinians…). In this world all experience was personal: horizons were small, the community was inward-looking. What existed in the outside world was a matter of hearsay. Certainly not a Tiffin community!
Printing, as we shall go into, brought with it a very new kind of isolation, as the communal experience diminished. With printing came the opportunity to exchange information without the need for a physical encounter. As well as this, if knowledge could now be picked up from a book, the age of unquestioned authority was over. A printed fifteenth-century history expressed the new opinion: ‘Why should old men be preferred to their juniors when it is possible, by diligent study, for young men to acquire the same knowledge?’ Knowledge also became something to be tested on an agreed scale, and what was proved, and agreed on this scale, became a ‘fact’. The ‘fact’ as we regard it today, was born, and with it came specialisation and the beginning of a vicarious form of experience common to us all.
One of the very first effects of the printing press was that it made it possible for large numbers of people to own their own copies of the Bible and study it privately without intermediaries. This distribution of the Bible was however not always a completely smooth development. Joachim Furst, Gutenberg’s financial backer, went to Paris with twelve copies of the Bible but was chased out by the book trade guilds, who also took him to court. Their view was that so many identical books could only exist with the help of the devil. They may have had a point.
Despite teething problems in its distribution, it has been argued that it was this increase in the availability of Bibles that largely created the Reformation.
Reading, as we know, fosters a sense of individualism, giving us more time to spend with our own thoughts and therefore away from a sense of being in community. English historian
Diarmaid MacCulloch writes about how, in the years between 1490 and 1517 with the increasing availability of printed books, this new sense of individuality can even be seen in the physical fabric of churches. He explains in Reformation: Europe’s House Divided that as it became easier to acquire a printed Lay Folk’s Mass Book or a Book of Hours, it became more common for lay people to think of the pious life as involving long deep hours of reading and contemplative reflection, rather than communal prayer. At this point, the presence of other worshippers started to seem a distraction from a true relationship with God, and wealthy people began to build enclosed private pews so they could concentrate on their own individual experience of prayer.
On 31st October 1517, Martin Luther, an Augustinian Friar of Wittenberg, reacted to the cynical ecclesiastical involvement with the new technology (primarily their mass production and sale of Papal Indulgences) by producing 95 theses criticising the Catholic church which he then nailed to a notice board in his church in Wittenberg. He also sent a copy of them to his Bishop and one to his friends. Within a fortnight the ‘theses’ were being read throughout Germany. Within a month they were all over Europe. Three years later 300,000 copies of Luther’s works were on the market. Now, we certainly don’t have time to look into the fascinating causes of the Protestant Reformation in any detail, but probably the most important factor in its genesis was the emerging spirit of rebellious, self -determining individualism, and particularly the growing impulse for intellectual and spiritual independence. And printing did that.
During the Reformation, people toppled statues, disagreed viciously, and argued murderously about trans issues – transubstantiation that is. Sound familiar?
The reformation called for ordinary people to develop their own personal relationship with God without intermediaries. And we also live in an age of increasing ‘disintermediation’ – think about for example how you can summon a taxi with an app, book a holiday without a travel agent, do away with the gatekeepers of publication and broadcasting, do your own research about Covid and vaccines, and not rely on ‘experts’ for information. If you wanted.
Institutions that had been doing useful work for many people for centuries, like for example, convents and monasteries, were swept up during the Reformation, in a rush to condemn their failings. Nobody could argue that monasteries were perfect but they had been doing very valuable work, like alms giving, tending to the sick, providing shelter for the poorest and in one case providing a mendicant monk to solve local crime mysteries. Yes, there was corruption, no doubt and abuse of power, but convents for example provided centres of women’s education – something then blocked for centuries. And it was only after the dissolution of the monasteries that England had to introduce laws to deal with vagrancy. Baby, bathwater, thrown. And printing did that.
Once we have access to more and more information, what inevitably seems to happen is that we start to trust ourselves and also focus on our selves more and more. And lo and behold, we then start to come up with our own personal truths and inevitably conflict ensues. Naomi Alderman argues that this deep engagement with sources also creates a vulnerability to a particular kind of rigid fundamentalism.
Walter Ong, who we also met last week, reminds us that the fact that texts cannot change what they are saying means that we have come to prioritise this way that writing works with an increased feeling that it’s somehow admirable or better not to change or modify personal views. And especially certainly not in response to disagreement
Those people over there in their closed off private church pews not only can’t see anybody else in the congregation, they’re also not interested in them either, nor how their fellow passengers to the grave are feeling or reacting. It becomes better not to know what others are thinking or feeling, as this might somehow get in the way, or dilute the purity of the truth of the experience they are privately engaged in. Internet bubble and echo chambers anyone? The move towards individualism can, as we see increasingly today, paradoxically create rigid ‘thinkalike’ communities that brook no opposition.
The Reformation, in part, was also driven by a strong desire to return to some earlier, better way of thinking that was closer to a supposed true origin. This desire could often be thwarted when Scripture was only ever ‘decoded’ by an elite few. With more and more people having access to their own Bibles a space was created where those people began to feel that their own individual interpretation was the true one.
Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook in their The Rest is History podcast pointed out that such a desire to return to a more pure origin is currently happening in two different ways in academia. On the right there are calls to return to traditional values where Shakespeare often stands as a talisman for the more true root of education, while at the same time, more left wing thinkers call for subjects to be decolonised and the curriculum ‘diversified’.
Each in their own way are calling for a perceived taint to be removed from learning, to become closer to what they think of as its origins.
Being concerned about the truth is a good thing though, right? Well, it depends. As more and more ‘truths’ become available to us, it can feel overwhelming and therefore it becomes more attractive to hold on to one of them and decide ‘that’ll do, I don’t need anymore’. As Harry Enfield’s bluff Yorkshireman creation would have it, ‘I know what I like, and I like what I bloody well know!’ And woe betide anyone or any institution which might challenge that truth. The thing about truth however, if these columns have told us anything, is that it’s not as simple as being a thing.
The ancient Greeks, who certainly knew a thing or two, came up with some wonderful stories which are as true as they always were. That’s the thing about real truth, I guess. The closest we get to the truth is via stories, as a wise man once said.
One of those stories speaks of how Zeus didn’t want to give us fire. He was afraid that with fire, humanity would do away with the need for the gods. He wasn’t wrong. He was Zeus after all. Prometheus disagreed with Zeus, stole fire from heaven, gave it to man, and the rest is history. Literally.
Immortal Prometheus got punished by being chained to a mountainside and having his liver torn out by an eagle. Being an immortal liver, it grew back and every day was torn out again until he was rescued by Heracles.
The other punishment was that Zeus and pals created Pandora (the ‘all gifted’) and sent her down as the first woman. She was also given a jar; sometimes called a box after the mistaken Latin translation by Erasmus. Erasmus, translating Hesiod’s pithos, a storage jar for oil or grain into the Latin word pyxis meaning box. It’s easily done. I imagine the font in his newly printed translation was a bit blurred. So anyway, Pandora came to earth if you remember, and she was told that she shouldn’t look into the jar.
She was beautiful, she had everything; all the gifts of all the gods were given to her but she also had a curiosity and, of course, she opened the jar. I’m sure you all know what happened next. With the lid removed, out flew hardship, lies, deceit, murder, pestilence etc. In short, all the ills of the world, and just like that, the Golden Age was over. She slammed the lid back on but one little fairy remained; Elpis or ‘Hope’. In this case, Elpis had not left the building.
The Greeks had this understanding that when we have something that seems to be great, there is no possibility but that it also contains its opposite. Having the impossible amounts of information at our fingertips which printing brought us and continues today in the virtual printing of the interweb, is undoubtedly a great thing but also a very not great thing.
Maybe next time we will talk about the coincidence of opposites. But we have holidays to contend with between now and then. May yours be wonderful and full of magic and enchantment.
Until next time Happy Reading/Finding Elpis.
Director’s Tip #10
Finding it hard to get that sheen on your shoes?
To give brown leather shoes and boots an extra shine, rub them with the inside of a banana skin before polishing them in the usual way. Do the same for black leather by adding a few drops of orange juice to the polish.