In the previous post, I wrote about the role of information according to Harari, discussing the idea that information unites people through myths and creates intersubjective realities. Click here — #raufnexus
Today, about how humanity came to document stories and the complexities encountered along the way. The text is long, pour yourself some coffee.
The book mentions a great example of the importance of stories with the Ramayana, which was previously unknown to me — an ancient Indian epic, familiar to roughly a billion Hindus (and probably unknown to everyone else). It has 24,000 verses (originally, in Sanskrit, 480,002 words — about one quarter of the text of the “Mahabharata,” which is four times larger than the “Iliad”), spread across seven books and 500 songs. And somehow, generations of Hindus memorized all of this. So, in India, they made a film adaptation (not the first and probably not the last time) — a series of 78 episodes. This series was shown in 55 countries and gathered a total audience of 650 million viewers. During a re-airing (from March 24 to April 18, 2020), it reached 2.5 billion views in just 25 days, becoming the most popular Indian television series by a long shot and one of the most-watched series globally.
Understandably, few now try to memorize all the twists and turns of the Ramayana plot, but overall, the series served as a “document, packaging knowledge in a very audience-friendly form.
Today’s notes logically continue this theme: Harari reveals how written documents, and then bureaucracy, became the next step in the evolution of information networks.
I’ll start with the second part because it’s filled with more intriguing moments. About errors in documentary transmission of ideas.
Harari rightly asserts that the entire evolution is built on the fact that errors exist. They are also a central part of human experience, from mythology to bureaucracy. Indeed, the whole evolutionary process is based on errors in DNA replication.
Religions aimed to eliminate human fallibility, presenting their teachings as given by divine forces. In practice, however, it always required trusting human interpreters: prophets, priests, clergymen. The creation of religious institutions was an attempt to regulate divine revelations, but it remained dependent on people.
How to prevent uncontrolled changes in what these institutions considered the only correct version? Harari here compares the spread of Bible copies to blockchain 🙂 Basically, friends, it was all invented before you.
Like blockchain, where each new transaction is verified by a network of decentralized nodes, sacred texts were preserved in unchanged form thanks to numerous identical copies in different communities. This guaranteed the democracy and security of the text: even the most influential leaders could not alter the sacred words, because any discrepancies would become obvious.
It’s clear that errors could creep in at three levels — one misunderstood, then incorrectly recorded, and another misinterpreted what was first recorded. Then the cycle closed. Through many such cycles, you get something like the game of “Chinese whispers.”
But how did sacred writing as a book come about? This is quite an interesting topic.
During the 1st millennium BC, Jewish prophets, priests, and scholars created many texts: stories, prophecies, prayers, poems, and chronicles. A bunch of them even contradicted each other. And of course, during biblical times, there was no such thing as the Bible.
Harari provides many examples of how stories from original sources are greatly distorted by the time they are canonized. In the early centuries of Christianity, there were many texts claiming sanctity, including different Gospels, epistles, and apocalypses. In the 4th century, Christian leaders began the process of selecting “canonical” texts. This process concluded at the councils in Hippo (393 AD) and Carthage (397 AD), where a list of 27 books of the New Testament was established. Moreover, the texts themselves are often contradictory, and it meant a lot which ones were included in the Canon. Many texts were rejected as heretical (e.g., Gnostic gospels) or dubious in origin.
Jews do not recognize the New Testament, and when they say “Bible,” they mean the Old Testament, as well as the Mishna and Talmud. But for the Christian Bible, as Harari writes, Jews don’t even have a word 🙂
For example, the Bible includes 1 Timothy, where it mentions “Let a woman learn in silence with full submission; I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing, provided they continue in faith and love and holiness, with modesty.” Harari writes that contemporary scholars, as well as some ancient Christian leaders like Marcion, considered this epistle a 2nd-century forgery, attributed to Saint Paul but actually written by someone else.
In contrast to 1 Timothy, in the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th centuries AD, there were important Christian texts that regarded women as equals to men and even allowed them leadership roles, such as the Gospel of Mary and The Acts of Paul and Thecla. The latter text was written around the same time as 1 Timothy and for a time enjoyed enormous popularity. It tells the adventures of the apostle Paul and his disciple Thecla, describes how Thecla performed numerous miracles, baptized herself with her own hands, and often preached. Throughout the centuries, Thecla was regarded as one of the most venerated Christian saints and served as proof that women could baptize, preach, and lead Christian communities.
Before the Councils of Hippo and Carthage, it was not clear that 1 Timothy had greater authority than The Acts of Paul and Thecla. However, by including 1 Timothy in the recommended text list and rejecting The Acts of Paul and Thecla, the assembled bishops and theologians shaped the Christian attitude towards women, which persists to this day. One can only wonder what Christianity might have been like if the New Testament included The Acts of Paul and Thecla instead of 1 Timothy. Perhaps, alongside the “fathers of the church,” such as Athanasius, church history might have featured “mothers,” and misogyny would have been condemned as a dangerous heresy, distorting Jesus’ message of universal love.
So although sacred books became the foundation of Christianity, the real power was concentrated in the hands of church leaders interpreting the texts. Canonization has always been a human process, despite claims of divine inspiration.
About interpretations. The sacred book, for example, says you must not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk (Exodus 23:19). Some people interpreted this literally: if you have killed a young goat, do not cook it in the milk of its mother. However, cooking it in the milk of another goat or a cow is perfectly acceptable. Others interpreted this prohibition much more broadly, arguing that meat and dairy products should never be mixed, so, for instance, you cannot drink a milkshake after eating fried chicken. As strange as it might sound, most rabbis decreed that the broader interpretation is correct, even though chickens do not produce milk.
Or about the Sabbath. Here, the sacred scripture prohibits work on the Sabbath, and rabbis asserted that pressing an electric button counts as “work,” since electricity is akin to fire, and lighting a fire has long been considered “work.” Does this mean that elderly Jews living in multi-storey buildings in Brooklyn must climb hundreds of steps to reach their apartments and avoid work on the Sabbath? It turns out that Orthodox Jews even invented the “Sabbath elevator,” which automatically moves up and down the building, stopping at each floor, so you don’t need to perform any “work” by pressing a button.
Harari adds that with the advent of artificial intelligence, this story has taken a new twist. A facial recognition system allows AI to quickly send the elevator to your floor, not making you violate the Sabbath. Is this work or not?
If myths inspire and unite, then documents and bureaucracy organize and manage.
Bureaucracy includes various lists, tax records, budgets, property inventories. They are terribly boring to remember (because the brain isn’t designed for this), but critically important for management. And the invention of documents in general (including clay tablets) helped scale this process. There’s actually a lot of this organizing bureaucracy—we just don’t think about it. For example, universities divide knowledge into faculties, which limits interdisciplinary understanding, as in the study of pandemics (biology, history, mathematics).
Then there are reflections on what freed thought from the influence of the church—the process took quite a while, and Harari asserts that the invention of the printing press here played not a major role.
An interesting fact: In the 13th century, the library of the University of Oxford consisted of only a few books, stored in a chest under the Church of Saint Mary. In 1424, the library of Cambridge University had only 122 books. So when you hear “medieval library,” you can’t imagine shelves packed with books.
Above are some theses only about documenting religious stories and norms, but the topic there is much broader, but that’s a lot for one post.
I can write more if interested. Write if needed
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 