Writing and permanence

1. The flesh was made word

In Karen Blixen's book Out of Africa she tells of an occasion when a local man, Jogona Kanyagga, needed a written account of some events in his life for a legal case. She says that she wrote down what he wanted and read it back to him. She then explains how he saw the status of the document at the point where she got to his name:

"I had created him and shown him himself: Jogona Kanyagga of life everlasting. ... Here was something which Jogona Kanyagga had performed, and which would preserve his name for ever: the flesh was made word and dwelt among us full of grace and truth."

Blixen goes on to say that this is what happened with the gradual introduction of writing as a routine act performed by people generally, and not just by professional letter writers. She adds that it appeared to have been much the same when writing spread in Denmark a century earlier. She identifies a phenomenon shared across humanity, not one specific to Africa or to colonies.

2. How is permanence possible?

The occurrence of natural events, the existence of people, and the performance of deliberate actions, will leave traces. By "traces" we shall mean not merely consequences, but consequences from which facts about the past might be discerned.

These traces will decay in time, lapsing into mere consequences from which facts about the past can no longer be discerned. Detail is lost, connections with other traces that provided important context are broken, and so on. Sometimes the time is very long. Witness how far back geologists and palaeontologists can go. But their accounts of the distant past are sketchy. They cover some major events, which is not surprising because such events are more likely to leave substantial traces. (This is however not to equate being major with leaving substantial traces long after the event.) But most minor events, and some major ones, will be omitted from accounts written now. And any given trace is bound to decay eventually.

Writing, on the other hand, can preserve traces for as long as there are intelligent beings. The materials used will decay, like everything else physical, but recopying is in principle always an option. The option may not be exercised. Plenty that has been written down has been lost for ever. But the option is there.

Writing is special in this respect because the significance of marks on a medium is given by rules of syntax and semantics that are abstract, that latch on to a limited range of features of marks on media, and that are separate from the documents that rely on them. Moreover, while the rules are written down in various places, their content is not only in practice accessible independently of any particular instantiation but logically independent of all extant instantiations.

It is a tricky question whether the rules would be accessible in practice without any instantiations. It has been possible to recover at least some of the rules for writing in lost languages, but there is likely to be some connection with preserved languages, as when Linear B was decoded on the basis that it was a form of Greek. And what is recovered is unlikely to be a comprehensive set of rules.

We do not claim that even a comprehensive set of rules would suffice to pin down the precise meaning of every text. (Pinning down might for example be defined operationally by an ability to translate faultlessly from one language to another, or at least faultlessly to the extent not prevented by a lack of perfect synonymy between expressions in the two languages.) But that is not what matters for the purpose of the mere endurance of texts. What matters is that the rules are applied to a limited range of features of texts, and other features would not need to be copied. A copy will be an exact copy, so far as the meaningful content goes, because the features that need to be the same in order for a copy to be exact are for a given language limited in advance by a finite upper bound on their number. (One would not need to establish a least upper bound for this to hold, although one might happen to do so.) Typically what matters is the selection made of letters drawn from a finite alphabet. The font and the spacing may change when copies are made, but such changes are in many languages irrelevant to the meaning. And in languages where they do matter, one can define the artistic features that matter and take care not to change them, while being free to change other artistic features.

What about visual art, such as paintings? It would certainly be possible to make copies indistinguishable to the human eye. But there might be changes indistinguishable from one copy to the next in a chain which led to an example late in the chain being easily distinguishable from one early in the chain.

Writing also differs from visual art in the clarity and the stability of conventions of interpretation. Syntax and semantics are much better defined, and much more stable, than the conventions by which messages may be conveyed by works of art. So even exact copies of works of art could come to convey different messages over time much more easily than would be the norm for writing.

As we have just noted, even a comprehensive set of rules might not suffice to pin down the precise meaning of every text. Conventions of interpretation of writing are not guaranteed to be perfectly stable. Even if the rules of syntax and semantics are recorded in exactly the same form over time, the interpretation of those very rules could change. If the interpretation of the rules never changed, nor would interpretation of records of the rules because it would be under those very rules. But such a self-supporting circle would be no guarantee that there would never be change.

Moreover, sometimes one would make mistakes by interpreting a single sentence in isolation. Knowledge of context, including the rest of a relevant piece of writing, a wider corpus of writing, and the nature and history of the relevant society, may be required in order to get the semantics right. Hermeneutics is not an easy task.

Having said that, one may have a degree of confidence in permanence of meaning alongside permanence of the catalogue of features that matter to the preservation of meaning, typically the sequence of letters but not the font or the spacing. Straightforward descriptions of a person's ancestry, place of upbringing, and everyday actions would only change their meaning if syntax and semantics changed fairly radically, something that would not be likely to happen over the kinds of period of endurance from event to reading of the document about which human beings would care in any more than an academic sense of caring. And the period of endurance would often also suffice for the academic purposes of reading unvarnished reports of actions and events which did not engage in significant interpretation.

Would such limited permanence of meaning, without any guarantee of immortality, be enough to sustain the magic of writing that Karen Blixen describes? It could be. After all, while the duration would be limited, it would still be likely to be a good deal longer than that of interesting and complex natural phenomena (the phenomena themselves rather than traces of them) such as people, because of the difficulty of sustaining any complex entity in the face of entropy. So Jogona Kanyagga could be confident that he had achieved the permanence he required for practical purposes, including any practical purposes of the next couple of generations of his descendants.

3. Truth and permanence

There is a tendency to believe that which is written, unless there is reason to suspect deceit. After all, would someone have committed to a permanent statement on some perhaps uncertain or contentious matter without having full confidence in what he or she wrote? Writing is a more solemn and serious act than speaking, so one might expect people to be more careful about it.

Belief of even a single written source may carry a low risk of error when text concerns scientific matters, the author is an expert, and the specific area of the relevant science is free of scope for reasonable contention (for example nearly all of those parts of physics and chemistry that are far from the cutting edge of research and most of those parts of biology that are likewise distant from the cutting edge, but rather less of environmental sciences or psychology). Economic and political matters are however different. And while it may be safe to believe historical accounts that stick to chronicling events, texts that interpret are a different matter, especially when the history of the relevant time and place remains a matter of political controversy. Texts that merely chronicled events in an individual's life, such as the document that Karen Blixen wrote for Jogona Kanyagga, might likewise be reasonably safe. But when reading texts commissioned by individuals that are about themselves, one would have to be wary of the risk of deception to suit the purposes of the individual concerned.

None of this is to say that texts should be disbelieved by default. But belief without at least a little prior thought would also be unwise. Maybe the written word is on the whole more reliable than the spoken word. But that would not be enough to justify automatic belief.

This is not a serious issue for sensible people. It is easy to avoid being gullible in relation to individual texts. But there is another danger. Suppose that one has an inclination to believe unless stopped by something that comes up in the course of prior thought. And suppose that this prior thought leads one not to disbelieve a statement made in a particular text, but only to hesitate. Then some closely related statement which could give support to and receive support from the first statement comes up in a second text. Again one stops and thinks, but only hesitates. More related statements are found in a few more texts. An easy conclusion would be that while one or two of the different texts might mislead, it is unlikely that they all would, so the gist of the collection of statements as a whole should be believed. The fact that the statements were in writing would facilitate reaching such a conclusion for two reasons. The first would be a general belief that people think carefully before they write. The second would be that one could go back and forth over the statements, in a way that would not be possible with spoken statements, and notice the relations of mutual support.

The easy conclusion that the collective gist should be believed might however be unwise. Especially in political and economic matters, people tend to gather together in echo chambers. Then the different statements would not be independent. Their mutual support might well derive not from the authors having studied the world independently and in slightly different ways, but from a disposition of the authors to consult one another's work.

4. The benefits of permanence

Once thoughts are in an enduring form, some obvious benefits follow. The thoughts are available as starting points for the thoughts of other people, so intellectual progress can be cumulative. The comparison of thoughts is easier if they are recorded in permanent form. This facilitates the formation and application of general concepts. And commerce is greatly facilitated once orders for goods can be sent over long distances and accounts can be kept. Without writing, civilization would not have advanced anywhere near as far as it has.

There is another benefit in relation to records of human actions and their consequences. A written record that has been copied widely is hard to expunge, making it difficult to amend records of the past for political purposes in the way that is portrayed in George Orwell's novel 1984. This benefit is lost when records exist only in a centralised electronic database. But the existence of copies of files in many places, or of archives that record the original versions of pages which might get edited or deleted on the servers that first held them, may give some protection.

5. Plato and the disadvantages of permanence

The benefits of the permanence of writing far outweigh the disadvantages. But there are some disadvantages. Plato identifies two of them in the Phaedrus (274c-277a). He first uses a tale of Egyptian gods to argue that writing undermines memory. Then he contrasts the silent written word, which will not respond to questions, with the living word of speech which can adapt itself to the listener and enter into dialogue.

We may disregard concern over the weakening of memory. It is not that memory has ceased to matter in a world of libraries and web servers. We still need to hold in our heads enough to know where to look for information, and the more we hold in our heads, the more creatively we are likely to think. Rather, the wide availability of a huge range of information stored in books and online means that it is easy to build up the contents of our minds in whatever ways we please, filling in gaps as we notice them. This will in turn assist memory. When we have more information in our heads, we have more ways to connect new information to what we already know. That will aid retention. The written word has turned from being a threat to memory to being an improver of it.

The point about the living word is more serious. There would be a serious loss to humanity if all communications were both in writing and one-way (rather than a dialogue by instant messenger service), so that ideas did not evolve rapidly through interaction and those who sought merely to learn could not quickly clear up their points of doubt or confusion.

6. The moving finger writes

Among the best-known words in the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám are these:

The Moving Finger writes, and, having writ,  
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit                                                 
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,                                                
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

(Quatrain 51, the Edward FitzGerald translation)

The topic is not the permanence of writing but the immutability of the past. And a piece of writing can be washed out, so long as one can track down and destroy all of the copies.

Writing that survives is however always traceable. Documents may be mislaid in archives, but it would be possible to search archives thoroughly so as to find them. The content of a document is preserved on a specific sheet of paper or in a specific computer file, and it is all there unless it has been edited. The physical past, by contrast, cannot cease to exist but may still disappear from view irrevocably. It cannot be changed, and it will have effects that will endure, but it may become impossible to reconstruct past events from their long-term effects or attribute any specific effects to any particular past events.

So the past endures longer than pieces of writing are guaranteed to do. But the past may fade from view in a way that a piece of writing will not, save when all copies are destroyed or the writing becomes unintelligible because the relevant language is lost. What lies behind this contrast?

The endurance of the past, in the sense of its immutability, is given by nature. The progressive inaccessibility of the past is given by a combination of nature as it works between the past and the present, and the powers of discernment we have (another aspect of nature, although this includes nature as it determines the capacities of our scientific instruments). The continued accessibility of that which is written is given by human conventions. And it is very much in our interests to keep those conventions stable, so that information can be kept accessible.

And yet, there is a cost. Data last longer than the timespan over which they should dictate value judgements. We have seen in recent times how people can be attacked, be denied new employment, and even lose their current jobs, for things they wrote years earlier. The mob may attack even if what was written was entirely unobjectionable at time of writing. It is the modern equivalent of a charge of heresy, with punishments that are lighter than in the past but are still severe.

The solution to this problem is for people not to take other people to task for views they expressed in the past. One might take people to task for their past actions. And sometimes expressions of views may count as acts of aggression against specific people, for which it may be reasonable to take people to task. But apart from such cases, a simple renunciation of views should suffice to put a stop to attacks on those who have expressed them, even if there is no tearful apology. And if the views are not renounced, one should stop to ask whether there may actually be something in the views.

If such a solution is adopted, there should be no difficulty in honouring the permanence of writing by acknowledging that the views in question were once expressed, perhaps without that giving rise to any difficulty at the time, and no need to distort our appreciation of intellectual history by seeing aspects of the past through the lens of current objections.

Nor should there by any urge to distort current debate on the relevant issues by identifying views, past or current, which are to be denied dissemination by refusal to publish them or by making them hard to find in online fora. Such denials of dissemination attack the integrity of the corpus of written words, and thereby strike at one of the sources of writing's magical power. Its power rests not just in the permanence of individual pieces of writing, but in the permanence of the corpus. This permanence will never be perfect because there will be continual losses of individual pieces, but it is nonetheless important. One piece of writing can lead the reader on to other pieces, greatly enhancing the benefit of access to the first piece. And when the function of writing is to preserve and pass on knowledge, a stable corpus is clearly vital. One academic paper will mean little in isolation, but the value of a corpus can be immense.