Alphabetic Literacy

I believe the most efficient way to understand ourselves and the world around us involves looking at situations in the simplest way possible. By this I mean ridding ourselves of superfluous traditions, conventions and confusions and plainly assessing the situation at hand. Anybody is capable of doing this. One does not have to be conventionally educated for such a task.

In the literate Western world, alphabetic literacy provides a pervasive basis and criterion for all our other modes of communication. Instructions on how to use a computer, telephone or television, for example, will all be communicated through alphabetic literacy. All our academic and reflective work is expressed through this medium. Much of our day to day communication, such as emailing, texting and letter writing, is done through this medium. Alphabetic literacy structures our lives. It structures how we think and relate to the world around us. By psychologically internalising this medium, we have gained impressive abilities, but have also lost certain other abilities.

The markings of Chinese character writing are different from alphabetic units, or phonemes. Chinese characters resemble objects in the physical world. Phonemes visually represent sounds. Alphabetic writing captures the complex dynamics of speech and reduces it to a visual and particularly abstract medium.

To clarify, the effects I am about to describe can be applied to literacy in general, but are heightened, taken to a more intense level, with alphabetic literacy, particularly the Greek-developed vocalic alphabet, which Walter Ong describes as "the most radical of all writing systems" (37).

The intense abstraction of experience and reality that occurs with the application of alphabetic writing significantly leads to an intense separation of thought from action, of psychic meanings from physical experiences. This allows us to consciously reflect on reality. Alphabetic literacy sets up a world of complex abstract meanings and concepts that appear to be divorced from direct physical experiences and actions. This apparent divorce or separation has led to civilisation as we know it.

"One of the most generalizable effects of writing is separation" (Ong, 36). In the process of separating thought from action, psychic meaning from physical experience, alphabetic literacy encourages the impression that we are detached from the world around us. Alphabetic literacy leads to Descartes’ cogito, a purely conceptual isolated subject, an autonomous neutral entity experiencing objects and forces that are external to it. Our very identity tends to be solely equated with this abstract entity, this "ego", that has no physical validity or meaning. Unfortunately, this notion that we are separate from each other and the world around us can lead to very negative consequences. For example, I believe it is this notion that allows us to blindly destroy our natural world, as opposed to work in harmony with it. If we realised that we are an extension of everything around us and that the health of nature is equivalent to our own health, then we would instinctively treat nature with more respect. In order to solve many of our great societal problems, we need to understand the psychological effects of our technologies.

By fixing acoustic information at a certain point in space, in a particularly abstract form, alphabetic writing enables a divisive and linear way of processing of information, as opposed to the simultaneous and immersive processing of information that occurs with speech. Alphabetic literacy consequently encourages the conception that time itself is linear, and that moments in time, like phonemes or individual words, are separate and autonomous. In reality this is not the case. "The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion" (Albert Einstein). Similarly, Quantum Physics has shown us that space is not divisible and that even our notion of locality is an illusion. Thus, by looking deeper into physical reality, modern physics has led to the same conclusion as mystics who looked deeper into their own minds. This conclusion: We are all one.

The fact that it is so pervasive and ubiquitous means, perhaps unexpectedly, that alphabetic writing very often eludes analysis and recognition. It is a powerful technology that has led to conceptual thought, concentrated conscious awareness and, as a result, modern civilisation.