The Coming Classics Revolution Part I: Argument COLIN WELLS Over the past half-century, scholars in a variety of disciplines have drawn new attention to the cognitive and historical implications of alphabetic literacy. They include media critic (and darling) Marshall McLuhan, classicist Eric Havelock, social linguist Walter Ong, and anthropological historian Jack Goody. McLuhan became well known to the general public for oracular tags such as “the medium is the message” and for his famous cameo appearance in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. His work on the consequences of communications technology included the impact of print starting in the fifteenth century, as well as the arrival of electronic media in the twentieth. Walter Ong and Jack Goody both made important contributions to our understanding of the alphabet’s consequences, along with Ian Watt. More than anyone else, however, it was Eric Havelock who put together the revolutionary new understanding of the alphabet’s origins and impact that goes under the name “the alphabetic thesis.” Havelock took alphabetic literacy back to its beginning, which lies in the classics, and which gives the study of classics a dynamic future, if one to which classicists have yet to awake.1 A British scholar who worked in North America, Havelock was at the University of Toronto with McLuhan, which is why they and their U. of T. coworkers on literacy, including McLuhan’s teacher Harold Innis, are often collectively referred to as “the Toronto school.” (McLuhan taught Ong at the University of St. Louis, bringing Ong into the Toronto fold intellectually.) Havelock also worked in the United States, where he chaired the classics departments of first Harvard and then Yale. He died in 1988, by which time, I arion 22.3 winter 2015 would argue, his work on the alphabet had done for the social sciences no less than what Darwin did for biology or Einstein for physics. It swept away previous theories of cultural evolution and replaced them with a coherent new explanatory model that accounts for the evidence from numerous disciplines, revealing deep connections among a wide range of apparently disparate phenomena. Moreover, the alphabetic thesis is entirely falsifiable. Among other things, it asserts that only the alphabet has allowed us to articulate new ideas and to spread them widely, and so the existence of a single revolutionary idea that has been articulated and widely spread without the alphabet would effectively refute it. Yet it has not been falsified, and there does not appear to be any such idea. Havelock’s achievement and its sweeping implications have cut sharply against the grain of academic fashion, and this is an unfinished revolution. Still, the alphabetic thesis has begun inching across the social sciences in a way that emboldens me to make a couple of predictions here. Within a few years, the orality-literacy continuum will consolidate its place as the go-to metric for those who are interested in contextualizing cultures and civilizations. Along the way, this process will put the classics—and, willy-nilly, classicists —where they rightly belong: at the center of how we study humanity. There are scattered signs this is already happening , starting with Walter Ong’s influential 1982 book Orality and Literacy, which did much to spread Havelock’s findings to the wider academic world.2 Yet despite these gains, there is still a long way to go in Havelock’s rehabilitation , and he remains under an ideological cloud for many academics, not least classicists themselves. Scholars still tend either to dismiss him without argumentation or to ignore him ostentatiously.3 I believe that this resistance is based on an inadequate understanding of Havelock’s ideas. Nobody, I suspect, has ever angered classicists of all political stripes quite as much as Eric Havelock, although he was one of their own. On the one hand, his insistence on what was the coming classics revolution 38 seen at the time as an unacceptably late date of around 750–700 BC for the invention of the alphabet, building on the work of Rhys Carpenter, popped the balloons of traditional highbrow conservatives, his elders, because it meant that the “Greek miracle” had sprung directly from a non-literate background. (The meaningful distinction...
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Jan 1, 2015
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