[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Genji and the Printing Press

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (March 18 2009)

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society


The relation of technology to time is a theme that's come up more than
once in these essays, and for good reason. On the one hand, many of the
challenges we face as industrial civilization lurches down the long
curve of its decline and fall come from the mismatch between the short
timeframe that governs so many of our collective decisions and the long
reach the consequences of those decisions so often have.

On the other, a crucial aspect of our predicament just now - though it's
not often recognized as such - is the fact that most of our modern
technologies are very poorly adapted to the long term. Most of the
technologies used by today's industrial societies depend directly or
indirectly on nonrenewable resources that, in the broad scheme of
things, simply won't be around all that much longer. Those technologies
that can't be reworked to use entirely renewable inputs, or that stop
being economical once the costs of renewables has to be factored in,
will go away in the decades and centuries to come, with profound impacts
on human life.

In that light, it's comforting to realize that our species has managed
to come up with a certain number of extremely durable technologies.
Agriculture, despite the assertions of its modern neoprimitivist
critics, is at least capable of being one of those. The rice paddies of
eastern Asia, the wheat fields of Syria and the olive orchards and
vineyards of Greece and Italy, to name only a few examples, have proven
sustainable over many millennia, and will likely still be viable long
after today's idiotically unsustainable petrochemical agriculture has
become a footnote in history books written in languages that haven't
evolved yet.

There are other examples. One in particular, though, plays an important
role in my own hopes for the future, not least because I work with it
every day: the technology of the book.

One volume on my bookshelf right now makes as good an example as any.
It's an English translation of The Tale of Genji, one of the world's
first and greatest novels. It was written by a Japanese noblewoman,
Murasaki Shikibu, at the beginning of the eleventh century for a circle
of friends, and wove together her wry reflections on court life with a
sense of the impermanence of all earthly things. Like so many novels of
an earlier age, it demands more patience than most of today's readers
like to give to fiction; its storyline unfolds at a leisurely pace,
following the path of its decidedly unheroic hero, Prince Genji, through
the social milieu of his time. Think of it as War and Peace without the
war; the political struggles that frame Genji's career, sending him from
the capital into exile and then returning him to the upper reaches of
power, all take place without a hint of violence.

This is all the more striking because the society in which Murasaki
lived was well on its way to a violent decline and fall. Her lifetime
marked the zenith of the age Japanese historians call the Heian period.
Over the next century and a half, the Japanese economy came apart,
public order disintegrated in a rising spiral of violence, and the
government lost control of the provinces where the new samurai class was
taking shape. The civil wars that began in 1156 shredded what was left
of Heian society and plunged Japan into a dark age four and a half
centuries long.

Countless cultural treasures vanished during those years, but The Tale
of Genji was not among them. One of the advantage of books is that,
properly made, they are extremely durable; another is that they have
very little value as plunder, and so tend to get left behind when
looters come through. Both these advantages worked in favor of
Murasaki's novel, and so did the patient efforts of generations of
Buddhist monks and nuns who did for their culture what their equivalents
in Dark Age Europe did a few centuries earlier.

It's not the only volume on my bookshelves that came through the fall of
a civilization intact. A good shelf and a half of Greek philosophy and
mathematics hid out in Irish monasteries while Rome crashed to ruin and
nomads fought over the rubble, and so did an assortment of literary
works from Greece and Rome, including a couple - Homer comes to mind -
that came out of the dark ages before Greece and Rome, and so get extra
credit. The Chinese classics on another shelf went through more than
that; Chinese civilization has immense staying power but its political
systems tend to be fragile, and such seasoned survivors as Lao Tsu's Tao
Te Ching have shrugged off half a dozen cycles of decline and fall.

Still, the granddaddy of them all is next to the Greek classics. The
epic of Gilgamesh was first composed well over five thousand years ago
by some forgotten poet of Sumer, the oldest literate society anybody has
yet been able to find. It's not something most people read in school,
which is ironic, because the epic of Gilgamesh is the kind of story we
most need to read these days: a story about limits. When he first
strides into the story, Gilgamesh is about as far from Prince Genji as a
fictional character can get; superhumanly strong, with an ego to match,
he makes Conan the Barbarian look like Caspar Milquetoast; but his ego
sends him on a long journey through love, loss, and a shattering
confrontation with the human condition that leaves little of his
arrogance intact. It's a story well worth reading even, or especially,
today.

The astonishing thing, at least to me, is that I can take that book from
its place on the shelf today and read a story that had audiences on the
edge of their seats five thousand years ago. Precious little else from
Sumer survives at all; five thousand years is a long time, especially in
a corner of the world where more civilizations have risen and fallen
than just about anywhere else. That's what I mean about the durability
of books as a technology of information storage and transfer. Even
though individual books break down over time, it costs little to
manufacture them and little except time to copy them, and they weather
copying mistakes remarkably well; unlike today's data storage methods,
where a very small number of mistakes can render data hopelessly
corrupt, a book can still pass on its meaning even when the copy is
riddled with scribal errors.

All this bears directly on the predicament of industrial society. Our
age will certainly leave its share of legacies to the far future, but
most of those are the opposite of helpful. (I am thinking especially of
the nuclear waste we are heaping up in "temporary" storage facilities,
which will likely be lethally radioactive dead zones surrounded by cow
skulls on sticks 25,000 years from now.) Of our positive achievements,
on the other hand, the ones most likely to reach our descendants 5000
years from now are the ones written in books.

Thus I'd like to suggest that books, and the technologies that produce
and preserve them, might well deserve a place well up on the list of
useful things that need to be preserved through the long decline ahead
of us. I wish it made sense to count on public libraries, but those
venerable institutions have gotten the short end of the stick now for
decades, and the dire fiscal straits faced by most state and local
governments in the US now do not bode well for their survival. (The
county next to the one where I live, for example, has already shuttered
its entire library system, and handwaving has replaced any meaningful
plan to reopen it.) Like so many other things of value, book technology
may have to be saved by individuals and local voluntary groups, using
their own time and limited resources.

It might come down to copying books with pen and ink onto handmade
paper, but there may well be another viable option. Letterpress
technology is simple enough to make and maintain - the presses that
sparked a communications revolution in Europe in the fourteenth century
were built entirely with hand tools - and brings with it the power to
produce a thousand copies of a book in the time a good scribe would need
to produce one. With printing presses, something like the book culture
of colonial America - with local bookstores, libraries open to anyone
willing to pay a modest subscription, and private book collections -
comes within reach, at least in regions that maintain some level of
stability and public order. This may not seem like much in an age of
internet downloads, but it beats the stuffing out of Dark Age Europe,
when most people could count on living out their lives without turning
the pages of a book.

Now of course there are plenty of people who argue that the age of
internet downloads is worth preserving, or that some other more advanced
technology would be a better place to start. It seems to me, though,
that at least two factors argue against this. The first is that all of
the more complex data storage technologies presuppose an extensive
technological base, supported by plenty of energy and an economy diverse
enough that resources can be diverted from survival to less critical
needs. The crises looming in our future make the secure maintenance of
these conditions something of a gamble against long odds.

These complex technologies, furthermore, are not something that
individuals and local communities can tackle on their own. That makes it
a good deal less likely that anybody will get around to tackling them at
all. As the collective response to the latest round of economic crises
has demonstrated all too well, short-term crisis management and pedaling
in place have elbowed aside any more thoughtful or proactive response to
future needs. A society in which executives are shaking down their
bankrupt corporations for one more round of million-dollar bonuses,
while governments pour money they don't have and credibility they're
rapidly losing down a growing list of ratholes, is not a society in
which the funds and resources to retool much of anything for a
sustainable future will be forthcoming from above. That likely means
that whatever gets done will have to be done by individuals - and the
sort of local, decentralized, individual approach to the survival of
book technology I've suggested in this post might make a workable
template for the kind of strategy that could work for many other things
as well.
_____

John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality
movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books,
including The Druidry Handbook (2006) and The Long Descent: A User's
Guide to the End of the Industrial Age (2008). He lives in Ashland, Oregon.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/03/genji-and-printing-press.html


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