>The ‘tyranny of literacy’ makes us sceptical of knowledge being retained in oral societies for such a long time
This is actually not what I thought this would be about from the headline: I thought someone would pull the Plato quote from Phaedrus about how literacy was inferior because it forced us to engage with views from dead men who were not able to answer for what they wrote.
It's just making the point that if you have a society that's entirely dependent on memory, it's going to have a better memory. This seems logical; their example about remembering phone numbers is simple and relatable.
And Plato made this point as well: "They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks."
I'd imagine there's a fair amount of motivated reasoning behind rejecting this point.
Not as relevant today, you say? OK, name someone who has memorized a work of similar length.
So, I agree with you. That kind of "long-read" memorization is no longer appreciated and cultivated, and I have no doubt it impacts our brains differently than watching a YT video.
Let's take a modern example. There is a place where the road to it's entrance has changed recently. It's been six months and Google Maps has still not updated the "written record" (Incidenetally this a real situation I'm talking about, not a hypothetical fhough it shouldn't matter.) The only reason people in the vicinity know the correct way is through word of mouth. It's a simple case where the oral record is correct and the written record is false. The truth has propagated orally from the people witnessing the change to the surrounding region.
Another example. The educated member of family of farmers always teases their mother about how she always tells them to use oils extracted from various plants whenever they have different ailments, recommending a specific plant depending on what the ailment is. Since the educated child can't find scientific literature supporting the claim, they often ignore the advice. Big pharma is not incentivised to fund clinical studies on these type of plants since they'd rather create a synthetic form of whatever property of the plant is aiding the healing and patent that synthetic formula instead, so studies like these are not prioritized. Years later, when someone finally gets around to conducting clinical studies on some of the regional plants, they end up supporting their mother's claims.
It should be even more apparent if we use the legal system as an analogy, since everyone now understands that if you are not literate in legal matters or don't have a top notch lawyer you can lose even if you're in the right. People are abused because they are legally illiterate, and it is in fact a type of tyranny. Oral records vs written records have the same problem. It's a very hard problem to solve but it is a problem.
This is a silly myth that "alternative medicine" advocates preach. Big pharma is completely incentivised to fund clinical studies, exactly so they can refine a form of the chemical(s) involved and patent them. Even field research into Archaea species is funded by this.
What they are not interested in doing is saying, "Yeah, well, if you gather a few ounces of this wild plant and make a tea from it's roots, it's 90% likely to do the same thing as our pill."
Written accounts are still vastly superior to oral tradition of course, their accuracy is on another level. But that doesn't mean there is absolutely nothing to glimpse from old myths.
Because they're cherry-picked examples fished out of a sea of nonsense. You can't ignore that the body of oral tradition is almost entirely florid fiction, and claim that a few bits and pieces that vaguely resemble reality are evidence that oral tradition preserves information over long timescales. It's methodologically invalid. That kind of analysis gives the same result ("we found an ancient myth that resembles a fact"), independent of whether the proposition, "oral tradition preserves information", is true or false.
It's a classic fallacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking ("Cherry picking, suppressing evidence, or the fallacy of incomplete evidence is the act of pointing to individual cases or data that seem to confirm a particular position while ignoring a significant portion of related and similar cases or data that may contradict that position.")
People at that time would wander around a lot in their everyday life, and it would be very easy to remember these small stories which are connected to the landscape. A father would tell his son when they were walking past this feature of the landscape, and the son would later tell his son and so on.
Why? Because they didn't have cell phones to scroll on while wandering, or a radio to listen to. And they weren't thinking about their mortgage or about primaries. When you live in a world like this, it is very easy to remember a bunch of unusual stories, and when they're connected to the landscape instead of to people, it is almost a guarantee that they will be passed on for generations.
That is - increasing ease of recording and transmission of cultural artifacts has homogenised that output, and reduced the urge and ability of individuals to preserve and pass on that output.
Used to be, almost everyone learned to play an instrument. Families would play together around the fire, or children who excelled would be invited to perform to entertain at their parents' party.
Sheet music was the "Top 40" of the pre-Edison days, and people made good livings writing it.
OTOH, mixes and remixes, greatly spurred by innovations in rap, have proliferated in the last 30 years. But that's not the same pervasive skill set in society.
There’s a way of knowing something that can be recalled orally from memory that is different and valuable. But we even measure it using a yardstick for written knowledge (accuracy, breadth, etc).
I believe this overemphasis on written knowledge (really, it’s implicitly a denial that any other type exists) is part of what drives the hysteria about LLMs ending the world. LLM doomerism has to believe that written knowledge is at least the most important if not the only necessary form of knowledge.
Superstitions should never be considered "knowledge", the same way that stupidity is not intelligence and noise is not information.
smell, of course, being one of the oldest and strongest senses. And one which incorporates a vast amount of knowledge. True, most of this knowledge is non-verbalizable, but that's true for many many forms of knowledge.
I can think of a number of other things which would also be lost by video, but smell was an obvious choice.
As for practical, let's say I was teaching you to cook, or to hunt, or to practice medicine. Several areas where smell gives really rich information.
I don't know, I'm pretty sure this is in the Historia Augusta.
Many of you may find it shocking or unbelievable, but literacy is slipping in many parts of the US (like Philadelphia). The number of functionally illiterate people is increasing, schools are failing to educate students for a constellation of reasons.
The reality is that we instead suffer from a "tyranny" of illiteracy. I think those folks in their ivory towers, like upenn, should help to address that before starting the pearl-clutching about what has been lost because of widespread literacy.
No talking about Homer or territorial expansion of 1880 for them anymore.
Make it make sense.
My point is that oral tradition requires an unbroken chain and events often conspire to break generational tradition.
The written word is a hedge against the loss of oral history. There’s nothing to say we couldn’t have both.
I feel with the sentiment for the "loss of skill" due to convenience tech.
But hey, these days many people have the choice (meaning the time and money), to keep some of the skills alive. The internet gives you the possibility to find any person teaching the skill set you seek. For more common stuff even Youtube is a trove often for free.
No. A mythology of a demon spiting fire and rocks doesn't help you understand geology, tectonic plaques and volcanoes. We know that an eruption happened 7700 years ago without the need for this "oral traditions" bullshit.
Religious superstitions aren't "as much useful information" as science. That's why they are left behind. Religion is useless because is just a mask for ignorance.
I mean some people think that a 65,000 years old story is true [0] so surely a 2000 years old one is more valid
