Almost as if done deliberately to demonstrate mental incapacity, I recently found myself making a connection that was staring me in the face for years but that I never recognized. Surely, scads more sit waiting in plain view, yet will never be smoked by me as long as I live.

In this case, several overt clues tried waving it in my face, but I remained oblivious. I feel like my former best-buddy cat who was always mesmerized by water, never tiring of watching it slosh, splash, and splatter. My wife and I once took the cat(s) on a reluctant car trip passing along the coast of northern California. The road came right up on the beach, and I stopped with the idea that I would show the ocean to him, which would surely captivate his attention and blow his mind. We were so close that the ocean and waves dumping on the beach were almost all that could be seen out the window. I held him up to take in the sight, but in his squirming state—questioning what new cruelty I was subjecting him to on top of this already-heinous and interminable car ride—he somehow managed to completely fail in ever noticing the ocean. But it was right there in front of him! You can lead a cat to water…

Oh—I should get to the point? A couple weeks back, the post on Spare Capacity mentioned the outsized detrimental impact written language has had. I know. Here I am still using it. But like my cat, I failed to notice what kept filling my field of vision.

Writing is Bad?

A brief synopsis of the premise is that written language is a central load-bearing pillar supporting modernity and by association a sixth mass extinction. Early-stage modernity relied quite heavily on writing to effect accounting, money, law, religious scripture, and complex political discourse. Science extensively rests on written documentation. On the heels of agriculture, written language elaborated the ecological dangers of this untested mode of planetary living—cementing concepts and practices in a formal and rigid manner.

The very aspect we celebrate most about writing is also what makes it dangerous: we lock in accumulated knowledge in a sort of external and more permanent “brain,” greatly amplifying our innate capacities, sweeping us out of our original ecological context, and putting us on unvetted evolutionary ground.

The central question becomes: would the sixth mass extinction now underway have been possible without writing? Okay, maybe it’s possible that agriculture alone without writing, money, science, or fossil fuels could have managed the sixth mass extinction in due time, but it’s also clear that writing made it extraordinarily more efficient and likely. Less clear is whether an agricultural way of life could have trundled along without ever developing writing. The only evidence we have suggests that one promptly follows the other.

Missed Opportunity: Earth Abides

Several impressionable and related recognitions had danced across my neurons previously, but without full effect. The first was in the sometimes hokey but still worthy piece of fiction from 1949 called Earth Abides, by George R. Stewart. Holy crap! It’s now been made into a TV series of six episodes. I’ll bet it’s terrible. Anyway, the main character, Ish, is a PhD student at (presumably) Berkeley when a devastating epidemic wiped out nearly all of humanity in very short order. It was Ish’s dream to rebuild modern society, banking on preservation of the now-sacred campus library containing basically all the knowledge needed to restart.

Ish was determined to educate the next generation of kids that came along (born post-epidemic), teaching them to read. They tolerated the lessons out of politeness and deference, but most of the kids really wanted nothing to do with it—as irrelevant as it was to daily life when so much more could be learned by hunting and gardening and foraging and observing. In the end, Ish’s ambitions were not satisfied, yet the kids grew up healthy, strong, and happy without written language.

The book made a big impression on me as a lesson that one generation’s sacred cows can be completely rejected by the next—especially in the face of major disruption. As modernity crumbles, I expect the pre-transition generations to cling and advocate for restoration of glories past, while the young will be more-than-justified in ignoring such backward-looking blubbering babble.

So, in this story, the role of written language (and its subsidence) was front-and-center, yet it never caused me to ask what role the advent of written language played in shaping the terminal predicament in which we now find ourselves ensnared.

Missed Opportunity: My Ishmael

In preparing an upcoming treatment of Daniel Quinn’s My Ishmael, I stumbled on something that I had failed to register in previous readings, characterizing written language as: “our culture’s powerful invention (after totalitarian agriculture and locking up the food).” How many other crucial insights fly right through my brain multiple times before catching on a neuron?

Missed Opportunity: Cunk

The Cunk on Earth series consistently tickles my funny bone. In clever/subtle ways, it really pokes fun at human supremacy, our mythologies, and our arrogance. It exemplifies the “genius of dumb.” As a (former) academic “expert,” I relish the talent that Diane Morgan exhibits in tripping up pundits, while still allowing them to come off as likable creatures.

Anyway, the Philomena Cunk character at one point asks a bushy-bearded academic showcasing a relic of early writing if he thought writing was legitimately a big deal, or just some flashy fad. Even that failed to engage my meat-brain in assessing just how important writing may have been in facilitating our drive toward a sixth mass extinction.

The overwhelmingly positive value of writing was beyond question, given my cultural context.

Missed Opportunity: River Tributary

For the post called Our Time on the River, I clearly put more than passing thought into all the various contributions to our present state on the raging river of modernity. The ride started with agriculture, promptly joined by tributaries of settlements, possessions, surplus, armed force, property rights, division of labor, patriarchy, hierarchy, classes, the state, and on and on. Yet one of the biggest developments of the era—written language—did not garner a mention.

Again, this is not because it lacked sufficient importance, but simply that I failed to appreciate that something so close to my heart might have such profoundly negative impacts in terms of accelerating our now-perilous river experience. And writing isn’t the only missing piece: money is another enormous influence inexplicably finding no place on my diagram.

Suitcases on the Slow Train of Thought

Given that I repeatedly missed opportunities to spot the obvious, it may be instructive to retrace the steps along the way that finally allowed it to click.

I was musing on the idea of spare capacity in our brains: that all our awareness in thought amounts to an extraordinarily slow and modest capability barely scratching the surface of all the real-time processing that goes on among neurons. The part that we directly experience is therefore the slimmest fragment of a much more elaborate complexity beyond our detection capabilities.

It was in considering the impossibility that we could pin down our experience of awareness (i.e., what we call consciousness) from first principles that led me to think about suitcases. That’s right: suitcases. For those of us living in houses, various rooms store furniture, clothing, food, vehicles, tools, etc. We also have a bit of “spare” storage in the form of suitcases, but typically this is a small fraction of the total, and usually kept empty.

Anyway, trying to fit a multi-layer process as complex and mysterious as our experience of consciousness into the spare capacity of our already-tiny meat-brains is asking far too much. As a member of a consumer-based culture, I somehow jumped to the mental image of trying to cram a shopping mall’s worth of clothing into a single suitcase. It ain’t gonna fit, no matter how hard you push.

But here’s the trick we employ: we buy a lot of suitcases. We pack each one, label it, put it on a shelf, index it so we can connect it to others at leisure, and keep going. In this way, we accumulate a lot of “thinking” that doesn’t fit into our brain all at once. We call it writing.

By writing stuff down (or drawing diagrams or other forms of thought preservation), we offload useful/relevant thoughts into a safe place that can later be reloaded and connected to other stored pieces. It’s very clever and powerful. The technique leverages our spare capacity into something quite dramatically roomier.

Excusably Dumb

So anyway, I was a bit of a slow coach in recognizing written language as one of the major factors responsible for accelerating our path to modernity and giving us the power to wreck the world. All those suitcases come to no good, as proud as we might be of each one in isolation, or of the whole idea of knowledge preservation beyond oral tradition.

In my defense, we’re all (collectively) slow to recognize novel elements, especially when swimming against strong cultural currents. I mean, I’m not sure I had ever encountered anything but effusive praise for the development of writing. Look what it enables us to do! (Exactly, say the extinct—if they could.)

Yet the whole time, the dark side of written language was hiding in plain sight. The writing was on the wall.

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