Hamlet's Mother, Jonah, The Diary of Anne Frank, Sand County Almanac, All Quiet on the Western Front

[Joseph Tracy]

This article is a reasoned response to Plato's questions about writing.   For all practical purposes the argument is long over.  I guess I don't know if I had ever taken Plato's questions seriously; I am a reader for whom writing seems essential.  But last night my mind seemed to want to press this case. Part of the thinking had to do with tribal cultures who operate/d without writing for millennia. Most of what the ownership/ writing based/ hierarchical  societies brought these non-literate societies is highly developed germs,  land theft and cultural genocide .   I am reading Juan Gonzalez's book about the history of race relations as seen in the history of  the press/media in the Americas .  The persistent intensity of race hatred and the urge to conquer one finds here is reminiscent of Islam, the Old Testament and the empires of history. It isn't that writing generates antagonism, but that it exploits organizes and codifies it as an imperial force to exterminate or colonize with laws, courts, military, technology, transportation and mass communication.  

 The massively disseminated and largely accepted argument is that all this is necessary for the universal benefits of a technologically advanced world that improves life for all.  So far that argument has had some credibility despite its employment in every genocide known.  But the failure of a theoretically technological civilization to address the technological reality of carbon fueled  global warming  along with the delusion of  winnable resource wars,  and endless growth and endless discarding of poisons and high energy waste materials is being revealed more as a planetary pathology than an advancement. 

My own feeling is that if humans survive so will writing but with an historic memory that forces us to handle our sounds  products and glyghs with more care.  



On Jan 20, 2013, at 1:04 AM, alice wellintown wrote:

> http://www.csuchico.edu/phil/sdobra_mat/platopaper.html
> 
> On Sun, Jan 20, 2013 at 12:03 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>> Can literature or art in general promote empathy, wisdom, change, or is that just a nice dream we like to entertain ourselves with for a while?
>> Generally people don't want to commit to answer this kind of question, reluctant to choose between the appearance of cynicism and the appearance of naivete' .
>> 
>> Shakespeare seems to bounce between Tragedy and Comedy  with some weight of the tragic integrated  into the Tempest. I'm oversimplifying but  if tragedy is the warning and comedy the art of the happily possible, the presumption is magical, alchemical; we have choices.  And the words that give us those choices, and the correspondences of those words to what is real are important.
>> 
>> Words are alternately inspiring and dangerous but spoken words tend to dissipate, while writing does not. Maybe writing as a technology is inherently antithetical to human harmonics.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>