Once Upon a Time

After reading Walter J Ongs analysis of oral versus literate cultures I felt fully satisfied at last with the Homeric question– but what about the Shakespearian one?

I feel like an answer to the evolutionary dynamics of memetic artefacts might be available. In fact I have just given the game away– by applying biological concepts to cultural artefacts, we can see parallels that illuminate the dynamics we observe.

Lets briefly review some questions and tentative answers.

Homer

How could a poem written in antiquity remain for thousands of years a high-water mark of the genre?¹

The phenomenon referred to as Homer is hypothesized to be something like the following: there was a rich culture of poetry in some region of the world. Doubtless the poems took on many forms and had many subjects, with the Homeric rhythm and the martial content being only one of them. There was a technological shift that made cultural artefacts much longer-lived, and this shift started preserving the Homeric works. By the time this technological shift was finished, Homeric works were no longer created in their original form– the existing Homeric works dominated the available cultural niche.

Let me unpack this a little. In the environment that Homer grew up in², spoken poetry likely consisted of a significant fraction of all communication, and it is possible that all communication from that time would qualify as poetic in some sense. Individuals grew up speaking in poetry and thinking in poetry and communication in poetry.

The development of writing was part of a packet of cultural change that appeared and formed a self-reinforcing cycle of change. During this time, the works of Homer were transcribed somehow. After that, society was quite different, more organised and rule-following and a scholastic tradition evolved in which children learned to memorize Homers poetry in school– but they apparently were not raised speaking it fluently.

Why not? Walter J. Ong suggests that the nature of the writing they developed– the ability to create material representations of abstract speach acts– changed the nature of literature and culture and human thought in a fundamental manner. It became harder and harder for people to produce Homeric works as the transition progressed. The forced memorization of poetry in schools might be a sort of cargo-cult for the dying culture.

Furthermore, whatever need people had for Homeric poetry could be satisfied with the poems of Homer directly. When it stopped being necessary to reinvent the wheel with every generation, people simply stopped doing so.

Society in Homers day was in some sense centered on those poems, they contained all the cultural knowledge that made the society function, their agricultural practices, their martial practices, their marital practices etc. How can we understand this in biological terms? What makes a biological niche? There is an environment which affords certain things, there is a shifting balance of spaces where life has left slack. An animal that exploits these spaces can survive and change the balance of its environment.

Similarly, mental spaces (the psychosphere) afford certain things. There are spaces in peoples belief system and their behaviours. These will forma shifting pattern of slack within the fabric of society, and a cultural artefact that exploits those moments while also increasing the fitness of the environment (the society it is active in), will flourish. But only one is needed, and once writing has been developed this niche can be filled almost permanently.

Shakespeare

To have SBF put it:

I could go on and on about the failings of Shakespeare . . . but really I shouldn’t need to: the Bayesian priors are pretty damning. About half the people born since 1600 have been born in the past 100 years, but it gets much worse than that. When Shakespeare wrote almost all Europeans were busy farming, and very few people attended university; few people were even literate—­probably as low as ten million people. By contrast there are now upwards of a billion literate people in the Western sphere. What are the odds that the greatest writer would have been born in 1564? The Bayesian priors aren’t very favorable

Needless to say, I’m sure we are all grateful that he has been permanently incarcerated. But rebutting the point is still a worthy challenge.

A series of Black Death plagues reduced the European population low enough that some generations grew up with good wages and abundance. The cultural legacy that they left behind stays with us to this day in everyday half-remembered motifs of wealthy peasants exploring the forest. British culture stayed in this rich state for a long time also because they lacked a vernacular– the language was also in a state of flux.

The phenomenon referred to as Shakespeare is hypothesized to be something like the following: there was a rich store of cultural artefacts generated during this era of peasant abundance. They found in Shakespeare the first writer capable of expressing their interactive liveliness³ in a fixed form. If this is true, it means that it isn’t simply the writing-down– after all, writing had already been invented by Shakespeare’s time. It is the creation of a form that is capable of containing the artefact in some appropriate manner.

After Shakespeare (and Burton and Spencer) English creativity and imagination languished– they had their Homer, the commons were dominated for hundreds of years by these works.

Disney

History hasn’t been long enough for the Disney question to stand as tall as the other two. We can frame it something like this:

is it really likely that a maker of childrens cartoons should go on to dominate the cultural landscape for a century?

Perhaps the dominance of Disney will pass, but while we are still under its thrall, lets see if we can understand it in the same way.

The phenomenon referred to as Disney is hypothesized to be something like the following: there was a rich store of cultural artefacts that existed outside of mainstream literature and music, namely fairy tales and folk tales, from which culture drew but didn’t dominate. The invention of animation allowed for the fixation of these cultural artefacts– and this fixation was reinforced by copyright law. Perhaps Disney should be seen as spearheading two technological shifts, that the fixation of cultural artefacts into the amber of copyright is a separate transition. In any case, Disney now aggressively dominates all the available cultural niches it can fill.

Happily Ever After

What comes next? Well, culture will evolve. If one niche is closed off by an ossified artefact, other niches become active. After Homer, smaller poetic works such as those of Sappho or Catullus grew in popularity, and indeed there were many cultural forms in the newly invented technology of writing that were still highly active– the philosophical meditation, the history, the mythos, early forms of the novel.

After Shakespeare I can’t think of much, but this might be because the British psyche was so busy with the industrial revolution– the activity didn’t stop, but all the creative energies where channeled into natural philosophy, thermodynamics, botany, geology. Perhaps the invention of the modern novel, perhaps it wasn’t until the time of Victor Hugo that literature made its next steps.

And after Disney? They did so well dominating the market for so long, but with the rise of the internet we are seeing some alternatives. One one side, there is the cultural artefact of the meme. It is very telling that the meme is uncopyrightable. Culture will try to escape copyright again as long as it is encaged there. On the other side you have Netflix, which is successfully playing Disney’s game, pumping out copyrighted schlock on a mass scale.

But the beauty of the contest with Netflix and more and more of the rest is, they are demonstrating the impossibility of copyright. They are manually– at immense cost– generating all the possible permutations of character and story. AI will just accelerate this. New forms will emerge in the cultural niches that are not dominated by aggressive cultural artefacts.

Footnotes

1. The cynic would reject the premise, possibly with some reference to western cultural hegemony.
   I belive that taking it seriously has much more interesting implications. Plus the Homeric question remins interesting if you tone it down a bit, and just ask how did this poet write such good poetry so early?

2. The question of the individuality of Homer is made somewhat moot by this solution– a great deal of emphasis is placed on the cultural mileu, it was in no sense an individual work, it was drawn from a pool of poetic resources. There were by definition individuals involved in the process, and it is convenient to call one of them Homer.

3. It is worth seriously thinking about the nature of the artefacts, and if they would have resisted expression in anything less than theater. The artefacts were not of the same kind as those in Homers day.