Fire and Knowledge

Here is my second response to John Marstall’s previous response.

For those just jumping in, here are the previous links:

• John’s Article: A Word Wrapped in Light
• My First Thoughts on His Article
• John’s Comment and My First Response
• John’s First Response
• My Second Response [you are here]
• John’s Second Response
• My Final Response

John,

Thank you for your clarifying and thoughtful response. Discussing these topics with you has sharpened my thinking regarding visual imagery and the ideal way to communicate information to an audience. I appreciate you taking the time to correspond with me regarding it.

I also appreciate you bringing Jesus into the discussion, which I believe will be helpful in thinking about these issues. He is, as you mentioned, the logos (the Word), and that brings in a helpful foundation to my argument that I did not discuss in my previous response. I will give treatment to it in this response, but not quite yet.

I believe you when you say you are sympathetic with Postman’s emphasis on the written and spoken word. I think your statement “As you point out, we could not be having this discussion in icons; at least, not with the present state of visual language being what it is” shows where we mainly disagree, however. I simply don’t think a conversation of this caliber is possible with icons. You could, of course, replace each word (or at least words for objects that can be conveyed visually) with a symbol, but that seems amazingly backwards and inconvenient.

It would be like the children’s books that have a paragraph with words in it, but is often broken up by an icon of an animal instead of the word for it. A child mainly reads books with pictures. An adult mainly reads books with words. That has been the definition of an adult for about 400 years—one who has access to “secret knowledge” by books that children do not have access to intellectually. Therefore, a child spends years in education in order to understand how to receive that “secret knowledge,” and once he can he is labeled as an adult. That mode of thinking has waned a little in the last decades, but from shortly after the printing revolution until recently that has been the distinguishing quality of an adult (this is one of the arguments Postman puts forth in The Disappearance of Childhood and I apologize that I cannot do the full argument justice).

Regardless, I think this is our main point of disagreement, and please correct me if I am wrong: while I believe that iconography can convey information, I do not believe that even if the “syntax” of iconography developed for 1,000 years it would never be able to convey the complexity of information that the written word can. The only exception to this would be that if iconography developed more and more into shorthand for letters and eventually became a language itself—which would then be the written word, and not iconography.

I think that is our main point of departure. Icons can certainly convey information like you have argued in the last paragraphs of your last response, but I am not convinced it is possible for them to do more than the simple representations they are currently used as. Street signs, yes. Philosophic discourse, no. Computer interfaces, yes. Epic poems, no. Postman talks about how different mediums are made for certain types of communication, and one example he gives is that of smoke signals:

[F]orms of public discourse regulate and even dictate what kind of content can issue from such forms. To take a simple example of what this means, consider the primitive technology of smoke signals. While I do not know exactly what content was once carried in the smoke signals of American Indians, I can safely guess that it did not include philosophic argument. Puffs of smoke are insufficiently complex to express ideas on the nature of existence, and even if they were not, a Cherokee philosopher would run short of either wood or blankets long before he reached his second axiom. You cannot use smoke to do philosophy. Its form excludes the content. (Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death, pp. 7-8)

That is what I am trying to say about icons: its form excludes the content. You cannot do philosophy in smoke signals or icons.

Regarding innate reason, you wrote:

Reason is not a product of any communication medium or technology; it is something innately human, and I would want to believe that thoughtful individuals in pre-literate societies were every bit as capable of forming and comprehending arguments as any professor of literature is today. . . . I expect you would probably agree with this; I am simply adding a clarification to your claim.

I would like to believe this as well, but I do not think it is right. In my last reply I wrote, “Without a foundation of typography … people are not as rational and intellectual as they would be if they had a strong foundation of typography.” I stand by that statement. I do believe reason is innately human, but there are degrees of reason. The person in a pre-literate society could not reason in such a complex manner as someone who has had the benefit of being transformed by reading and writing. I believe this is one of Postman’s main points that he is trying to drive home in most of his books. The written word changes the minds of the culture in such a way that it changes the entire culture—from a more primitive society, to a more advanced society.

This can be easily seen in a study of what happened in medieval Europe when common literacy was lost and craft literacy was set up (the “dark ages”). Arthur Hunt has a good summary:

Literacy faded. Education faded. Civility faded. Superstition seeped in…. One was twice as likely to be murdered than to die by accident … and your murderer faced only a one in a hundred chance of being brought to justice. Roving gangs, sometimes composed of renegade knights, waited in the woods to fall on the lone traveler…. Thankfully, life was short. Half the population died before their thirtieth birthday. Manchester says a woman who reached this age might be called an “Old Gretel” since her life expectancy was only twenty-four. Girls traditionally received a fine piece of cloth from their mothers on their wedding day that could be made into a frock; six or seven years later it could be used as a shroud. If the villain in the forest, daily labor, or childbirth did not kill you, then perhaps a pandemic would….

For five hundred years the ability to read and write was practically unknown, not only to the average layperson, but also to kings and emperors. This is not to say that no one could read or write; rather, these skills were restricted to a privileged class. In other words, medieval Europe possessed only craft literacy. (The Vanishing Word, p. 63)

A frightening time indeed! These people were not as civil, not as educated, and simply could not reason as well as we (hypothetically) can. Why could they not see the blatant errors all around them that they were susceptible to? Because most of them did not have the capacity to. Those with knowledge had power over them and kept them stupid. The Reformation did not come from peasants—no, it came from the highly educated Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin. Erasmus helped contribute as well and he was extremely well-educated. And what was one of Luther’s main goals? Widespread literacy.

Now I would like to address your argument regarding Jesus and imagery. I am not sure if I agree with your conclusions drawn from Jesus coming as “an image”. Yes, Jesus came as an image. But he is not just an image. He is a person. A person has personality, speech, body language, a mind of his own—an icon has none of these. Curiously enough, Jesus did not leave us with any image of himself. He left us with words. He gave us a book! He has not given us a video. He has not given us photographs. He has not given us paintings. He has certainly not given us icons. Why? The form excludes the content! They are not fit for the message God has for man. But language does, because it is the best medium for abstract thought. He knew that simply an image of Jesus could not convey the depth of what a book could.

I do, however, agree with your statement:

Jesus proposed a way of life in the way that he lived. Intentionally or not, I do this for my own friends and for my children. You are doing it every day for the people around you.

That is true, but I would argue that simply living your life is not the same as living your life while talking/writing. If that were the case, we could have a pantomime Jesus who never spoke. I am thankful we had one that did not just act, but left us with words.

I believe thinking about how images can be worshipped would be helpful here as well. Take, for instance, Deuteronomy 34:5-6:

So Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the Lord, and he [God!] buried him in the valley in the land of Moab opposite Beth-peor; but no one knows the place of his burial to this day.

This verse says much about why we have a book written by (and about) Moses and not drawings and a grave for him. I think this also applies to Jesus—there is no body, no drawings or paintings left, not even detailed descriptions left so that we can reproduce something like him. I believe one of the reasons God buried Moses in an unknown place is because the people would have worshipped Moses’ body and his burial ground. This can be seen in a contemporary context with Jesus in many Catholic churches. They have images of Jesus everywhere, and people often worship them instead of him. This has also been the case historically with such gimmicks as saint’s relics and such.

Strongest of all arguments, perhaps, is in the ten commandments (Exodus 20:4): “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” Postman says about this:

It is a strange injunction to include as part of an ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms of communication and the quality of a culture. We may hazard a guess that a people who are being asked to embrace an abstract, universal deity would be rendered unfit to do so by the habit of drawing pictures or making statues depicting their ideas in any concrete, iconographic forms. The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter a culture. People like ourselves who are in the process of converting their culture from a word-centered to image-centered might profit by reflecting on this Mosaic injunction. (pg. 9)

Arthur Hunt, in The Vanishing Word, says regarding this:

It should be noted that two of the three establishing commandments deal directly with how God wanted Himself to be symbolized. God was saying to the Hebrews, “Do not signify Me with a store likeness; and when you do signify Me, be very careful about it.”

When God took the initiative to reach down to mankind, it was not a mistake that He purposefully chose the medium of writing to make Himself known. The Ten Commandments, and the entire Bible for that matter, did not come to use through an oral tradition or through pictures. To the contrary, the message delivered to Moses was written with the finger of God. The very notion of divine revelation, the communication of truth that cannot otherwise be known, demands a method of documentation and preservation that goes beyond orality, pictorial representation, dance, or smoke signals. If one believes that revelation is “God-breathed” (cf. 2 Timothy 3:16), that each word of Scripture originates from the mind of God, then writing is the obvious choice, for no other medium possesses the objectivity and permanency needed to tell the old, old story. (Hunt, Arthur W. The Vanishing Word: The Veneration of Visual Imagery in the Postmodern World, p. 35)

People have a tendency to worship images. It can even be seen today with the pervasiveness of TV, movies, and visual imagery. However, God did not want to be known as an image. He was to be known by the word. So I think if you were to make an icon for “God” that would be extremely degrading and possibly blasphemy.

You mentioned, “The early church, after all, did quite well in its limited literacy.” I would say they did, even though it was a struggle! My 38 volume Early Church Fathers set (Ante-Nicene, Nicene, and Post-Nicene) speaks quite well regarding the amazing energy the early church poured forth into the written word, giving us an amazing legacy to stand on. Even with their limited literacy, they knew the importance of the written word. If all we had were icons and drawings and photographs from them, we would be at quite a loss. But instead of having icons and drawings we have epistles, liturgies, the Seven Ecumenical Councils, letters, treatise, and eight entire volumes dedicated to the mighty Augustine. We would be very poor without these works in written form.

I do not dispute your example of the icon mix-up. I entirely agree that those two different icons can communicate two different things, simply by making the representation of the person larger/smaller. Perhaps I am wrong to say that icons/images have no syntax whatsoever. They can communicate ideas, so perhaps I could agree they contain some kind of syntax. But I cannot agree, as I stated before, that they have the same capacity for communication as words. It is like Postman’s smoke signals analogy—perhaps smoke signals have syntax as well, but I’d hate to see someone try to communicate the Gettysburg Address through them!

I believe your icon for “truth” adds strength to my argument. To be truthful (and perhaps to my shame), I did not understand your visual representation for truth until you explained it to me. Now that you have explained the icon to me in propositional form, I understand what you were attempting to communicate with the icon. But even though I recognized and knew various definitions of truth, the icon did not convey the idea of truth to me. Perhaps it was, as you put forth, articulated badly. But I don’t think so. I believe that is probably the best one could do with an icon. Abstract thought cannot be communicated with icons unless you already know what it is you are communicating, unlike words.

Worse, perhaps, is that it is incredibly easy to “misinterpret” an icon. A sentence has fixed meaning and grammar, but an icon has none of this. I could put forth that your icon means that one triangle is more important than another (somewhat like your person + document icons), because one is bigger. Or perhaps it means the earth is really a triangle with a moon as a triangle. What would you refute this with? Sure, you meant something else, but you can’t prove it from syntax. However, with a sentence you can say, “No, look at my syntax, it has vocabulary and grammar that you can look up for yourself.” But how could this effectively be done with icons? I do not believe it could be, and even if it could, it would be so complex and crazy that nobody would want to use it. “Okay, the 312th pixel from the bottom is #F2F9E2, so that means it is constructing an argument from the previous pixels.” Perhaps that is over the top, perhaps not. I do not know how one could make complex propositions in icons without such pedantry.

Well, I hope this is somewhat worthy of your reply! Thanks again for taking the time out to dialog about these issues with me. It has been helpful and interesting!

Joshua Sowin