“All truth is worth knowing. Some truths are more useful, but there are truths that are most worth knowing.” - President Boyd K. Packer, November 6, 2011

Isn't the internet helpful? Not only are summaries of President Packer's talk available in several places already, but there are pictures of the actual event.

But that's not really a subject from this semester of our class.

What I really wanted to talk about was something rather interesting that President Packer said, something that later reminded me of our discussions here about oral and written knowledge. Near the beginning of his talk, he asked us to 'listen' rather than 'take notes'.

He said if all we took away from his talk was what was said, we had entirely missed the point.

The gospel, and more particularly the Holy Ghost, brings an important new aspect to the idea of this comparison of knowledge mediums.

"When a man speaketh by the power of the Holy Ghost the power of the Holy Ghost carrieth it unto the hearts of the children of men." - 2 Nephi 33:1

We know from several sources that the scriptures we have written down are a primary source of personal revelation (Wherefore, I said unto you, feast upon the words of Christ; for behold, the words of Christ will tell you all things what ye should do” (2 Ne. 32:3, emphasis added)). We also know that the words of the modern prophets can, through the spirit touch each of us personally, especially in General Conference, where we are often promised that we can receive through revelation a spiritual message for our circumstance:

"If we teach by the Spirit and you listen by the Spirit, some one of us will touch on your circumstance, sending a personal prophetic epistle just to you." - Jeffrey R. Holland, April 2011 General Conference.

I know that both of these methods are viable and true, since I have received inspiration or revelation through both ways.

So my question at first was why President Packer asked us to listen more than to record, and I think that this has answered it for me - if we merely "parrot" all that he says onto the paper, it might be more of an in-one-ear-and-out-the-other situation. I know that sometimes taking notes during a lecture or a talk or whatever can actually be detrimental to our overall comprehension.

Here's another point: I believe that he wanted us to listen more to the Spirit's voice than to him. That's a sign of a true servant of the Lord, in my opinion. All missionaries learn that it's really not them that converts people to a knowledge of the truth:

"If ye receive not the Spirit ye shall not teach." - D&C 42:14

The Lord knows all things, including which way is best to teach His children. He makes use of both orality and literacy to bring us the knowledge of His gospel, since each has its own separate applications. I think it's very interesting to note, as I mentioned in this post, that the Lamanites lost their written language for a time, and therefore declined as a society - and in their religious beliefs as well, of course. The Lord knew well beforehand that this would happen without a way to preserve EXACTLY certain truths. Oral knowledge, while incredibly applicable to the here and now, can be ephemeral when it is transmitted through the generations.

(In fact, look what some scholars believe happened to the story of Jesus's visit to the Americas, which, while recorded, was lost except in orality to those who became wicked and lost their records. The story changed quite a bit over time: http://www.crystalinks.com/quetzalcoatl.html)

This also relates to what I thought after reading Marc's post about the First Vision. If we'd only had an oral version of that critical event, it might have been altered slightly despite our best efforts.

Therefore, while the Lord knows how critical it is to have written knowledge of the gospel, the orally transmitted knowledge of His modern prophets is also necessary to the functioning of the Church.

And beyond this, a kind of knowledge that we can't really quantify as easily - spiritual knowledge, the kind communicated directly to us by the Holy Ghost. That's the most important of all, and can be facilitated not only by our faith but also by our study of what has been written or what is being spoken to us now. It allows us to know SPECIFICALLY what we need to know for ourselves.

Isn't the gospel great? :)

The Difficulties of Change

Writing now is so common now that we rarely think about a time when it was a sign of high social or intellectual status, something that had to be sought after.

The shift from orality to written knowledge was not a sudden change. In fact, in most cultures, it probably took many years after the invention of written language for their knowledge systems to adapt to the new medium.

Why was this? the initial difficulty of procuring the knowledge needed to communicate through literacy may have been simply because it was a much more difficult medium. Anyone can learn to talk, under normal circumstances. But writing? In these times it was a much different story.

(Much of the information I used in researching this topic came from a paper title "From Clay Tablets to Canon: the Story of the Formation of Scripture", written by Kerry Muhlestein, a professor of ancient scripture here at BYU and my interviewee from my previous post.)

In Egypt specifically, as well as in other regions that made use of logographic or symbolic rather than phonemic characters, the writing system itself was a hindrance to the spread of this new form of knowledge. To quote Dr. Muhlestein, "The greatest prohibition in writing was the writing system itself. In order to write proficiently with either the hieroglyphic or cuneiform script, one had to master thousands of signs" (Muhlestein).

Nowadays, even young children can write many of the signs of our alphabet. But hieroglyphics were much more difficult to master.

A picture of Hieroglyphics, showing a wide range of characters and symbols.

This meant that training a scribe was on the level of training a bard, like we discussed in class - long, labor intensive, and not something just anyone would up and do one day. It was your occupation, along with classes in governmental workings and mathematics, since no other people could write in order to perform the needed functions (Muhlestein). The Rhind papyrus shows a great example of Ancient Egyptain mathematics, compiled, and actually copied from an even older source, by a scribe named Ahmes (source).

Here are two pictures of part of the Rhind Papyrus, clearly showing geometry problems:

Even when there was an opportunity for someone to attend a school of writing, "Generally only the elite could afford to send their children to a scribal school, and many of these probably dropped out" (Muhlestein) because of the strict regimens of the ancient Egyptian schools, which proclaimed to their students, "Do not spend a day in idleness or you will be beaten" (Adolf Erman, ed., The Ancient Egyptians: A Sourcebook of Their Writings (New York:Harper and Row, 1966), 189., as cited by Dr. Muhlestein). This of course further limited the spread of writing, for even those with the chance to learn the art may have been discouraged by the harsh regimen.

There is another aspect that may have been even more influential in slowing the shift from oral to written knowledge systems among the common people. This was the idea that oral communication still held the most authority in the world of communication and learning, and written words were just to keep records of these spoken transactions or decrees, as well as important events or conquests and so on.

"The primary purpose of a scribe was to keep records, not to create great literary works. While some certainly did create such works, the mindset of the societies and their schools was that scribes were primarily functional. In such societies, the locus of authoritative ideas lay in the spoken word, or oral tradition, not the written word" (Muhlestein).

In fact, the verb in Hebrew that is now translated as 'to read' originally meant to 'call out' or 'proclaim' (Francis Brown, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs, eds., A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (London: Oxford University Press, 1906), 894–97. As cited by Dr. Muhlestein).

I apologize for how lengthy this post is becoming, but there's so much pertinent information in this article and elsewhere that I am still going to have to cut it shorter than I could go, just for the sake of my group.

To conclude, the shift from oral to written knowledge systems was not as smooth or speedy as the invention of writing itself - which was itself not a simple thing. The process took time, years of it in many cases, until a greater number of people were able to communicate through writing, and therefore preserve and pass down knowledge through this method for anyone to use. Until then, oral traditions would still hold sway in many areas.

Sources:

Muhlestein, Kerry. “From Clay Tablets to Canon: the Story of the Formation of Scripture”. 2006.

Rock Paintings, Writing, and Education

Much as in Alicia's post last week, I have found that the bushmen of the Kalahari desert have not had a written language until recently, in the past two centuries, where missionaries found the bushmen and began to write their language. There seems to be a connection between oral knowledge, art, and written language.

I agree with Alicia that Art is no substitute for a written language, but it is one step in the "write" direction. Some forms of art can be considered a pre-written language.

Interview about the Kalahari Bushmen

Yesterday, I interviewed Dr. Crandall, who teaches in the anthropology department here at BYU and teaches a class dealing with the Kalahari bushmen. I decided to record this interview instead of taking notes so that I could focus on the aspect of learning orally instead of being distracted by writing. The things I remember from listening to Dr. Crandall were:

1.  The clicking noises in the languages of the Bushmen are just sounds and, although they are interesting to us, they do not mean anything.
2. The Bushmen language is passed down like any other language: it is the language that the children learned while growing up.
3. The current theory about the descent of the Bushmen is that they came from Asia: not all the way from China, but Asia as it used to be known.
4. One way the Bushmen express themselves is through "mood songs". One example of this is a story of a man who's brother-in-law called out to him, but he did not respond. His brother-in-law could not find their camp until the next morning and the man felt so horrible that he wrote a song expressing his feelings.
5. There are more malevolent spirits that good spirits. 
6. The spirits of the dead sometimes stay downwind of their graves. 
7. Jealousy is like a sickness that has to be cured before it can be removed.