Fire and Knowledge

Morality is an essential soil for free and democratic governments. A people addicted to instant gratification through the vicarious (and sometimes not so vicarious) enjoyment of mindless violence and brutal sex is unlikely to produce such a soil. A population whose mental faculties are coarsened and blunted, whose emotions are few and simple, is unlikely to be able to make the distinctions and engage in the discourse that democratic government requires…. [O]nly a public morality, in which trust, truth-telling, and self-control are prominent features, can long sustain a decent social order and hence a stable and just democratic order.
—Robert Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline, p. 142.

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
• John’s Second Response [you are here]
• My Final Response

Josh,

Thanks again for your response. You’ve done an excellent job at demonstrating why verbal language (here and elsewhere I use “verbal language” to include both the spoken and written word) is important for all people to master and should not be expected to disappear any time soon. Like Postman, you are concerned to stave off any trend which would lead to the neglect of literacy.

I don’t believe I am proposing a deprecation of reading and writing. It was never my goal to argue that visual language could replace verbal language. Rather than offering an either-or, I am submitting for your consideration a both-and: that both verbal language and visual language may have their uses. And while certain forms may preclude certain kinds of content, in my experience ideography is extremely flexible. Even very abstract concepts are rather easily encapsulated in it. I’ll provide an example later which I hope will help to demonstrate this further.

All the same, my contention really isn’t that we start doing philosphy in visual language. Rather, it’s that we begin to think about where ideography might have some use. Verbal language, after all, carries with it both advantages and disadvantages—the intersection of which render it very well fit for some uses, and perhaps less well fit for others. Certain kinds of discourse, therefore, may lend themselves as much to visual, or ideographic, language—which also has its good and bad points.

What kinds of ideas might recommend themselves to the ideographic form? As a general rule, I feel images are better than verbal words at depicting connections and relationships. Thus it is very hard to describe the relative locations of the cities of France in words, but quite easy to understand them from a map. Family trees quickly show us how members of a family relate to each other, data charts show us differences in quantity or change over time, and so on.

Thus, the ideographic form might prove superior to verbal language in cases where the idea that needs to be conveyed includes concepts such as levels of importance, nearness and remoteness, differing quantities, changes over time, causes and their effects, and so on.

These are speculations only; however, what I hope to show by this is that I do not see the differences between verbal and visual language as being ones of caliber, but of kind. It’s not that one language is superior to the other, or affords superior discourse. It’s rather that each lends itself to certain uses that the other does not; while for some uses, both may be equally well-suited. There is a lot of thinking and practice that would have to be done if we were to take seriously the challenge of working out which form was best suited to any particular use.

In the meantime, though, I am content to argue for a rather more limited point: that visual language has a syntax, and is therefore capable of conveying propositional truth. I’m glad to see you coming around on the issue of visual syntax. If you can also agree that images are capable of representing wide classes of objects—that is to say, they are capable of abstraction—then the possibility of propositional truth seems almost a foregone conclusion. A reliable syntax combined with abstract signifiers seems to me to be, if not an incontrovertible guarantee of propositional capability, at least a very persuasive case for it.

Let’s bring this closer to home with an actual example, which will hopefully add weight to my assertions as well as show up the strengths and weaknesses of ideographic language.

I asked my wife for an example of a verbal sentence, in order to translate it into visual ideography. The construction she came up with was, “The purpose of education is the cultivation of virtue.” That’s a pretty lofty sentence, no? It’s full of abstractions and intangible meanings. But watch how easily it’s translated into a series of verbal metaphors:

As I’ve said before, ideography often works through metaphor. The pasteboard is a familiar representation of all things educational; the gear is an accepted symbol for “action” or “work”; the equals sign needs no introduction; the hoe is my own suggestion for “cultivation”; and the man with a halo is obviously not too bad a guy.

The first thought you probably had was, “There’s no way that image would get translated into the original sentence!” That’s true—this is a translation from one language to another, and translations are never exact. However, this is also representative of the beauty of ideography. What we’ve encapsulated is not the English words, but the ideas they stood in for. So “reading” the image back, we might say any of the following:

“The work of education is the growth of a good person.”

“The application of schooling equals the production of goodness.”

“The activity of learning is nothing other than the development of a complete individual.”

Every one of which, we can see, is implicitly contained in the original English; especially if we realize that “virtue” originally meant something like “mannishness” or “that quality of being fully and completely human in the best way.”

This is why I am not much worried about your concern over misinterpretations of an icon. If you think of interpretation in this context as drawing out the represented ideas and their relationships, then one only needs to be familiar with a few (already mostly well-known) symbols and a bit of the language’s syntax to understand what the author is trying to convey. If, on the other hand, you mean “interpretation” in the sense of translating the ideography into English, then there are a number of excellent options available to us; and one almost cannot go wrong.

Of course, there is always a danger of unsympathetic interpreters—those who have some axe to grind with you or your ideas and will perform every hermeneutical contortion in order to present your ideas in the worst possible light. However, there is as much a danger of this in speaking and writing. Words can always be twisted. In fact, the printed word may be the most susceptible to this kind of antagonistic pedantry. Whereas the spoken word sounds out and is gone, the written word is a permanent and precise record of one’s argument. The skeptic can pore over it with a fine-toothed comb and draw out every apparent contradiction, every questionable generalization and every neglected counterexample.

This is because the written word is often more precise than we ourselves wish to be. It can be useful, of course, to impose on oneself the rigors of the orthographic form; but often the writer finds himself taking special pains to protect himself from hostile pedantry when he would rather just say what he means and be done with it. He must read his work with the critic’s eye because he knows the medium renders him vulnerable.

Ideography may prove itself better suited to the ambiguities of human thought and intuition which the written word resists, precisely because ideographic interpretation is less determinate. This, I admit, remains to be seen; and it will be both a good and bad thing if true.

At the same time, it may be that in the near term ideographic constructs will need a little verbiage to help them along. This may lead us to think that the verbal is somehow more primary or essential than the visual. However, words themselves were never exempt from such an evolution of usage. There was most likely a time when anyone using or hearing the word “sincere” had to actively bring to mind an image of a marble statue made “without wax” in order to understand the metaphorical reference. At some point that word-picture was abstracted away through usage, and now most of us use the word without any thought as to the metaphor originally behind it. If ideography must get along on similar “training wheels” for a while, it is only following in the footsteps of other languages before it.

That, in a nutshell, is my real claim: that we are witnessing a new form of language (really a variation on an old form) starting out “on training wheels.” I mostly feel it will catch its stride whether some of us choose to help it along or not. I am simply trying to provide an account of the phenomena to those, like yourself, for whom this might be a worrying trend.

***

Finally, I want to address your points about Jesus and the second Commandment.

I feel that you understate the corporeal significance of the Incarnation somewhat. You say that Jesus has given us a book; I would argue that what He gave us was his body. The book is a record of the Incarnation; it is much less a thing than the Incarnation itself—though, naturally, important for preserving and transmitting the account of it.

The Incarnation is no small thing for Christianity—it is its primary defining characteristic, compared to all other religions. It demonstrates to us that the body is not evil; that matter can have spiritual significance (we operate under this assumption every time we take of the Lord’s Supper or administer baptism); that God relates to his people as whole beings; and that the redemption plan extends to the whole created order. In fact, this sacramental significance is brought out in every part of the Word—with Genesis, Leviticus, the gospels and Revelation merely containing some of the most strikingly earthy examples.

Sadly, Protestantism never quite grew past its original iconoclasm and we still find it impoverished in the area of sacramentalism today. This is part of why many Christians are finding themselves drawn back into Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.

When we read of Christ “being the brightness of [God’s] glory, and the express image of his person” (Hebrews 1:3, KJV), we cannot miss the author’s exorbitant declaration. Jesus came to us, in a profound and fundamental way, as God’s own image. He was more than that, it’s true—but he was certainly not less. And if God is willing that the ultimate Word should be captured in the form of an Image, then I am emboldened to do it for many much lesser words.

The fact of the Incarnation must also inform how we interpret the second Commandment. God prohibits the Israelites from ever making “carved images, or any likeness” of things in the created order, and they are not to “bow down to them.” I think there are only two ways to take this command. Either we are not to make images of anything at all; or we are merely not to make carved images, such as likenesses of natural things, in order to worship them as idols.

The first interpretation is problematic—if for no other reason than that God orders the temple artisans to craft many creaturely likenesses (pomegranates, cherubim, almond flowers) in the construction of his own temple.

Neither interpretation, however, says anything about God preferring to be referred to by verbal language instead of visual language. After all, he himself gave us an “express image of his person.” So I think Postman and Hunt are wrong to take this commandment so far. Certainly God does not want to be confused with any idol, and certainly he is not like any created thing. However, there are a number of symbols which do a fine, abstract job of communicating “triune God” and do it without breaking the second Commandment. They’ve also been in use among Christians for hundreds of years.

(Borrowed from here)

I don’t consider such symbols to be any more blasphemous than uniting the letters G O D in a line.

God, in his pleasure, has decided that his primary way of being known in our time is through Christ’s body on earth—the church. We experience this body in many ways: through hearing the words it preaches, certainly; but also in encountering the good works and concern of its people, and in experiencing its sacramental observances with our senses. None of these parts can say to another part, “I don’t need you.” In the same way, I don’t believe proponents of a purely verbal society can say to those experimenting with visual language, “We don’t need you.” If the visual word is indeed in the ascendency, they may soon need us more than ever.

Culture is made by the fiat of a majority of nine lawyers and forced upon the nation. . . . Contrary to the plan of the American government, the Supreme Court has usurped the powers of the people and their elected representatives. We are no longer free to make our own fundamental moral and cultural decisions because the court oversees all such matters, when and as it chooses. The Founders built into our government a system of checks and balances, carefully giving to the national legislature and the executive powers to check each other so as to avoid either executive or legislative tyranny. The Founders had no idea that a Court armed with a written Constitution and the power of judicial review could become not only the supreme legislature of the land but a legislature beyond the reach of a ballot box. Thinking of the Court as a minor institution, they provided no safeguards against its assumption of powers not legitimately its own and its consistent abuse of those powers. Congress and the President check and balance one another, but neither of them can stop the Court’s adventures in making and enforcing left-wing policy.
—Robert Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline, pp. 108-109.

Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost writes a good synopsis of why the daily news cycle makes us dumb by having no difference from gossip and/or trivia by not fitting into a broader narrative or having inherent permanance.

[Hat tip: JT]

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

Colorization Using Optimization

This is incredible. A few color markings on a b&w image or video and you get a result in full color. Photographers will love this.

Television: The Cyclops That Eats Books

An insightful lecture on the dangers of television. Thanks to JT at Between Two Worlds for pointing this article out to me. Here are some “highlights”:

What is destroying America today is not the liberal breed of one-world politicians, or the IMF bankers, or the misguided educational elite, or the World Council of Churches; these are largely symptoms of a greater disorder. If there is any single institution to blame, it is, to use the cozy diminutive, “TV”…. One of the most disturbing truths about TV is that it eats books. Once out of school, nearly 60 percent of all adult Americans have never read a single book, and most of the rest read only one book a year. Alvin Kernan, author of The Death of Literature, says that reading books “is ceasing to be the primary way of knowing something in our society”….

Recent surveys by dozens of organizations also suggest that up to forty percent of the American public is functionally illiterate; that is, our citizens’ reading and writing abilities, if they have any, are so seriously impaired as to render them, in that handy jargon of our times, “dysfunctional”. The problem isn’t just in our schools or in the way reading is taught: TV teaches people not to read. It renders them incapable of engaging in an art that is now perceived as strenuous, because it is an active art, not a passive hypnotized state…. TV eats books. It eats academic skills. It eats positive character traits. It even eats family relationships. How many families do yo know that spend the dinner hour in front of the TV, seldom communicating with one another? How many have a television on while they have breakfast or prepare for work or school?

I would like to present to you my new child: NeilPostman.org. It has been simmering in my mind for a couple months now and I have been working on it occasionally as I have had the time. There are few resources of Postman’s on the Internet, and sites that compiled them seemed to be outdated or plagued by bad links (or both!). So, I went ahead and complied all the helpful information I could find and included some of my own information. I hope that this will be helpful to those who are looking for more information about this man and his work.

The design is purposely minimal. It is “text-heavy” because Postman focused so very much on the written word. The only images I included are ones that I thought would be helpful—his bio picture and book cover images. I have attempted to balance this with an attractive organization and layout, but visitors will judge if I am successful or not.

Now go buy all his books, read them, and see what you have been missing!