Sunday, January 15, 2012

Burning Newspaper

I've been reading an amazing book, The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt. It's an account of the recovery at the dawn of the Renaissance of a copy of the ancient Roman philosopher-poet Lucretius' poem On the Nature of Things, a beautiful work that was considered the definitive Roman version of Epicurean philosophy. Epicureanism was a common-sense but at the time revolutionary take on life that combined prescient opinions of how the physical world works – including Darwinism and atomism – with atheism (or at least "the gods don't care about you-ism"), a philosophy of moderation and a belief that "the pursuit of happiness" is the aim of human life.

Epicureanism – along with much of pre-Christian Greek & Roman culture, Judaism, competing Near East cults, etc. – was viewed as a critical threat to the early Church, and as Christians increased in numbers and power in the Roman Empire in the first centuries of the common era books were burned, authors were slandered, intellectuals were murdered by mobs, and the vast Roman libraries that dotted the major cities of the Empire disappeared through both overt destruction and neglect. As the centuries wore on, even worse damage was wrought by non-human agents: fire, decay, overuse & especially the hungry microscopic insects known as “bookworms” swallowed up the vast majority of ancient literature without a trace.

The early Christians were no worse than most others. One need look no further than the destruction wrought by the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Chinese government during the Cultural Revolution, or American bombs in Berlin and Baghdad to know that each fragment of our collective ancient heritage is a tenuous little miracle.

1000+ years after the triumph of Christianity in ancient Rome (and Rome’s subsequent destruction), a new breed of “humanist” scholars began to roam continental Europe’s monasteries, ruins & private collections in search of the odd surviving ancient Greek or Roman manuscript. What they recovered was invaluable, but they didn’t come up with much. Neither have we in the intervening 500+ years. A great quote from the Greenblatt book puts the totality of the destruction of the previous civilization into perspective:

“Apart from [a few] charred papyrus fragments recovered in Herculaneum, there are no surviving contemporary manuscripts from the Ancient Greek and Roman world. Everything that has reached us is a copy, most often very far removed in time, place and culture from the original. And these copies represent only a small portion of the works even of the most celebrated writers of antiquity. Of Aeschylus’ 80 or 90 plays and the roughly 120 by Sophocles, only 7 each have survived…

These are the great success stories. Virtually the entire output of many other writers, famous in antiquity, has disappeared without a trace…At the end of the 5th Century CE an ambitious literary editor known as Stobaeus compiled an anthology of prose and poetry by the ancient world’s best authors: out of 1,430 quotations, 1,115 are from works that are now lost. “


-- Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve

What’s even more shocking is that many archaeologists think that our current civilization and its literature & documents will fare no better. I’m in the process of ripping all of my CDs into digital format & placing them on the cloud, then throwing them away – so I’m especially sensitive to this argument right now. Several generations of disk drive technologies have already been rendered obsolete, and a mere 10-20 years later data on their disks can be rendered only by hard-to-find computer antiquarians. A floppy disk drive from the late 1980s might as well be written in hieroglyphics before the Rosetta Stone. If this is what happens in 10-15 years, what will happen in 1000?

Even in the absence of technological obsolescence, file corruption occurs rapidly in digital formats, even faster than the physical decay of papyrus from the ancient world. Constant curation and backing up of files is necessary on a consistent basis to ensure non-corruption of data. Further challenge comes from encryption technologies, which are growing increasingly prevalent and render data untranslatable without appropriate salts & passcodes.

To the ancient Roman living in a major city of the Empire, the permanence of civilization’s great libraries & body of literature seemed obvious and eternal. It’s highly unlikely that they could have envisioned the incineration of their entire literary output. It’s unthinkable to us too, but it’s probably going to happen. Were it to follow previous patterns, one might expect a half-dozen Shakespeare plays to survive due to their massive circulation, perhaps a half-dozen Bibles & Korans, plus a random assortment of a couple dozen or so other texts.

It's moderately reassuring that in defiance of the annihilation of much of ancient culture Lucretius' poem was able to have profound influence on America's founders, and even left a fingerprint on the Declaration of Independence.

But how strange to think that our entire civilization, with its omnipresent glut of information, is in the long run as disposable as a fast food flyer left on the hood of a car in a parking lot.

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