[MD] Some historical perspective

[Matt Kundert]

Willblake2 said:
I don't believe the intellect has changed much for many 
thousands of years.  I don't think evolution happens that 
quickly.

Matt:
Well, I don't know.  You made a distinction after that 
between "intellect" and "its expressions," and I'm not 
really sure what to do that, what it means.  On the one 
hand, biological evolution is very slow, yet on the other 
hand, lately humans have shown very rapid changing 
ability in the way they live.

Reading people like Eric Havelock, Walter Ong, and the 
much more famous Marshall McLuhan have led me to 
think that the "intellect," our intellectual patterns, have 
been changing at an exponential rate over the last 2500 
to 3000 years.  The changes to our patterns, both social 
and intellectual, began to quicken around then, and the 
amount of change itself began to quicken, too.  I think 
the "intellect" evolves with "its expression," and I take 
the collapse of that distinction to be one of the huge 
bonuses of Pirsig's not making a distinction between 
intellectual patterns and something that _has_ 
intellectual patterns--we _are_ (in part) intellectual 
patterns.  And our mode of expression has been 
changing rapidly with technological evolution.  To pick a 
few peaks: the invention of the alphabet, the invention 
of the vowel, the printing press, the radio, and the TV.

The reason things can seem slow is partly because the 
technology, we might say, has been _adding_ elements 
to our ability to express, and not taking them away as 
quickly.  Part of evolution means things _dying_, too, 
but when literacy was invented, orality did not die away.  
Literacy transformed earlier patterns, which is a little 
different than what happens most of the time when we 
think of biological evolution.  Even worse, while the first 
three peaks I listed all increased the effects literacy was 
having on our minds, the radio _re_introduced the 
importance of specifically oral modes of expression (e.g., 
the importance of repetition).  And the TV is an even 
bigger mess--it not only functions as an oral reintroducer, 
but it also reintroduces the element of visual-context 
impact, the kind you get when talking to someone in real 
life, but not from the radio (which is an oral abstraction 
from a typical oral utterance's context).  And don't get 
me started on cable news ticker-tapes.

There is a slow moving element in all of the above, I will 
grant you, but the maelstrom occuring on top of the slow 
element is just as important, if not more to understanding 
what's going on in America today (like the rise of Rush 
Limbaugh and neocon news).

Willblake2 said:
While a man was not hunting a mammoth, he was 
probably wondering what he was doing here, what was 
reality, what comprised his inner sense of being.

Matt:
I politely demur on that point.  I think it more likely that 
such questions were a function of the rise of literacy.

Matt

> Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2009 22:26:10 -0700
> From: markhsmit at aol.com
> To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
> Subject: Re: [MD] Some historical perspective
> 
> Hey Matt,
> Yes, there might be selective amnesia in some posts (see below).  I for one
> make sure I know everything before I make sweeping statements, (heh, heh).
> But yes, it is important to keep history in perspective.  I don't believe the
> intellect has changed much for many thousands of years.  I don't think
> evolution happens that quickly.
> 
> Take the Epic of Gilgamesh.  Apart from the gods and stuff, and embellishment
> by the story tellers for gathering a captive audience, it sounds
> like a modern day event.  But it happened 5,000 years ago, give or take.
> While the intellect has not evolved, the complexity of its expression has.
> Once a man had more to do than catch that mammoth, and was
> was thrust into a Sumerian city (around 3000 BC) he had to worry about why
> his wife always dressed so nicely when going to visit the neighbor.  So the 
> complexity of human interaction may have evolved, but not the underlying biology.
> 
> That complexity is still based on the same sensibility as before.
> 
> While a man was not hunting a mammoth, he was probably wondering
> what he was doing here, what was reality, what comprised his inner sense
> of being.  Metaphysical understanding is still doing this.  Perhaps now with
> Quality we can stop asking and get back to business.
> 
> Cheers,
> Willblake2
 		 	   		  
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