Michael Erard writes:

Recent scholars of the history of writing describe what was first and foremost an administrative tool. According to their ‘administrative hypothesis’, writing was invented so that early states could track people, land and economic production, and elites could sustain their power. Along the way (their argument goes) writing became flexible enough, in how it captured spoken language, to be used for poetry and letters and, eventually, word games such as Mad Libs and fortune cookies.

The writing/state connection sailed out most recently in Against the Grain (2017) by James Scott, a political scientist at Yale whose goal is to overturn the usual story about how civilisation came to be. In his book, he draws from accumulated archaeological findings to show that large sedentary populations and grain agriculture existed long before the first states in both Mesopotamia and China. These operations came to be coopted by rulers, ruling classes and elite interests. The elite didn’t invent agriculture or urban living but fashioned the oft-told narrative giving them credit for these achievements. In his book, Scott assembles a political counter-narrative to up-end their story of progress and show how people were better off when they weren’t subjects.

This counter-narrative needs villains, and writing serves this purpose brilliantly, because it’s the tool of power that makes subjects subjects. ‘The state is a recording, registering, and measuring machine,’ writes Scott – and a coercive machine that makes lists of names, levies taxes, rations food, raises armies, and writes rules. ‘The coincidence of the pristine state and pristine writing,’ he writes, ‘tempts one to the crude functionalist conclusion that would-be state makers invented the forms of notation that were essential to statecraft.’ Without writing, Scott argues, there could be no state – and without the state, there could be no writing. He seems to be saying that everything that humans would come to write – myths, epic poems, love letters, essays, re-assessments of the history of civilisation – was an epiphenomenon of bureaucratic paperwork.

As far as I am concerned, however, the evidence suggests otherwise. I come to this defence of writing as an unabashed partisan of text, a diehard literate in an age pivoting to video – I barely watch television, which marks me as a philistine these days. Every week seems to bring fresh news of a dimmer future for writing, whether it’s thanks to AI-curated, voice-operated information interfaces or in the hopes pinned on emojis as a universal writing system. So after reading Scott’s book I was moved to throw some gravel at the thinking that rolls along this track: if writing is the offspring of accounting and keeps the powerful in power, then let’s unshackle ourselves and return to purity. [Continue reading…]