Before a culture adopts the use of writing, when its knowledge is transmitted exclusively through oral means… — Ted Chiang
Before a culture adopts the use of writing, when its knowledge is transmitted exclusively through oral means, it can very easily revise its history. It’s not intentional, but it is inevitable; throughout the world, bards and griots have adapted their material to their audiences and thus gradually adjusted the past to suit the needs of the present. The idea that accounts of the past shouldn’t change is a product of literate cultures’ reverence for the written word. Anthropologists will tell you that oral cultures understand the past differently; for them, their histories don’t need to be accurate so much as they need to validate the community’s understanding of itself. So it wouldn’t be correct to say that their histories are unreliable; their histories do what they need to do.
p. 226Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
More from this book
Humans have lived alongside parrots for thousands of years, and only recently have they considered the possibility that we might be intelligent.
I suppose I can’t blame them. We parrots used to think humans weren’t very bright. It’s hard to make sense of behavior that’s so different from your own.
p. 233
Let me always be inquisitive, but never be suspicious.
p. 249
When the public interest is involved, finding out what actually happened is important; justice is an essential part of the social contract, and you can’t have justice until you know the truth.
p. 190
