II 1.5.2 Empire and Communications

"...the power of the spoken word."

In 1950, Harold Adams Innis (1894–1952) argued in Empire and Communications that the properties of dominant media shape civilizations, biasing them toward either time or space [[i]].

Time-biased media, such as stone inscriptions, architecture, monuments, clay tablets, parchment manuscripts, and ritualized oral traditions, are durable and resistant to decay, fostering continuity, memory, religion, and social hierarchy, but they are difficult to transport and to produce in volume, limiting political reach and administrative scale.

Space-biased media, such as papyrus, paper, print, and later electronic communications, are lightweight and easily reproduced, enabling administration across vast territories, supporting trade, bureaucracy, and imperial expansion, yet they tend to weaken historical consciousness and favor short-term control over long-term cultural stability.

Innis maintained that civilizations flourish when these biases are held in balance and decline when one dominates. Excessive space-bias produces overextended, shallow empires. Excessive time-bias yields culturally rich but politically fragile societies.

Figure 1.21: One of the five paintings in “The Course of Empire” by Thomas Cole (1801–1848): “The Savage State” [[iii]].

To paint the Course of Empire with Innis’s broad brush, the Mesopotamian civilizations (3,100–539 BC): Sumerians, Akkadians, and Babylonians, relied on clay tablets with cuneiform as their dominant media, which were strongly time-biased, leading to durable legal and religious traditions such as law codes, but limiting imperial scale, and resulting in long-term cultural persistence without long-term territorial unification.

Stone and hieroglyphs anchored Ancient Egypt (3,150–30 BC) in time, creating exceptional cultural and religious stability. Papyrus and the relative ease of river transportation enabled unified administration throughout the space of the Nile valley for millennia. “The Nile acted as a principle of order and centralization, necessitated collective work, created solidarity, imposed organizations on the people, and cemented them in a society” [[ii]]. Egypt endured behind the barrier of geographic isolation until a more dynamic empire achieved an equilibrium between space-based and time-based media at a higher level.

Classical Greece (600–146 BC) rested on a foundation of Homeric poetry. This time-based oral tradition provided cultural continuity and made them less susceptible to outside cultural influences. “Greek civilization was a reflection of the power of the spoken word” [[iv]]. Plato describes the transition to the dominance of writing in Phaedrus where Socrates (~470–399 BC) describes a conversation in which the Egyptian god Amon admonishes the god Thoth, the inventor of letters, saying:

“…this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality” [[v]].

“Socrates worked through the spoken word…” explained Innis. “He was the last great product and exponent of the oral tradition” [[vi]].

Figure 1.22: One of the five paintings in “The Course of Empire” by Thomas Cole (1801–1848): “The Arcadian or Pastoral State” [[vii]].

Plato’s dialogues “were developed as a most effective instrument for preserving the power of the spoken word on the written page” [[viii]]. Writing was the subversive medium by which the philosophers transcended the time-based oral tradition, supplanting it with a more flexible, dynamic, space-based alternative. “After Aristotle, ‘the Greek world passed from oral instruction to the habit of reading’” [[ix]].

The Greeks took over the conventional Phoenician Semitic consonantal alphabet and the Cypriote syllabary and adapted them to the demands of a rich oral tradition possibly as late as the beginning of the seventh century…. The earliest Greek inscriptions dated from about the middle of the eighth century and writing was used for public inscriptions from about the seventh century. An alphabet of twenty-four letters which represented consonants to Semitic peoples proved exportable and adaptable to Greek demands [[x]].

The time-based stability of the Greeks’ magnificent sculpture and architecture, as well as their long oral traditions gave them enormous cultural power. Their relative isolation promoted high intellectual creativity and political pluralism.

Figure 1.23: One of the five paintings in “The Course of Empire” by Thomas Cole (1801–1848): “Consummation” [[xi]].

As papyrus became more available and the space-based medium of writing achieved dominance, the Greeks and their cultural brilliance exploded across the classical world before falling victim to their own success.

The Roman Republic (~509–27 BC) rose through a relative balance between time-biased and space-biased communication. In the beginning, the vaunted Roman legal code was oral.

Equipped with trained memories a series of juristic oligarchies applied all the principles by which disputes were settled. The task of maintaining a body of law was met through the oral tradition by reference to rules of conduct, information, conclusions converted into slogans, axioms, and doggerel verse [[xii]].

Such writing as was used served the primary purpose of binding through time, not space. “Treaties were engraved on bronze or stone and stored in the Capitoline Temple…” [[xiii]].

Having dispensed with kings, the ruling families adopted an aristocracy under which the Senate ruled and selected a pair of Consuls to divide executive power. The power of the Plebians or lower classes, having been weakened by the removal of the king, was restored through their ability to select tribunes and veto the actions of the Senate. The balance of Monarchical, Aristocratic, and Democratic elements that so impressed Polybius and the Roman’s deep respect for their laws and equitable treatment of their allies and conquests served them well.

Durable legal and social traditions (e.g. oral legal codes, terse writing optimized for engraving in stone or bronze, monumental architecture, etc.) culturally anchored the Roman Republic in time. “Blunt sentences” sufficed for such orders and records needed to hold the Republic together throughout the space of its modest Italian domain.

Like Greece, Rome was a victim of its own success.

Rising to the challenge from their neighbors, expanding to face the external threats from the Gauls and Carthage and Greece, they conquered their rivals. As Rome began to exercise political dominion over the Greeks, Rome faced a Greek counteroffensive on Roman culture.

Opposition to Greek culture favoured an emphasis on Latin prose which had been confined to blunt sentences adapted to the economy of stone writing in laws, treaties, and official records. Cato [Cato the Elder (234–149 BC)] protested that Greek literature would be the ruin of Rome and in his polemics helped to lay the foundations for a dignified versatile language. In 161 B.C. the Senate empowered the praetor to expel all teachers of rhetoric and philosophy and in 154 B.C. expelled two disciples of Epicurus. The spread of Greek metaphysics and psychology was probably checked, but Greek teachers and grammarians enhanced the popularity of Hellenistic ideals in literature in the second half of the second century [[xiv]].

Roman traditionalists resisted, but ultimately the allure of Greek culture proved too strong.

In an edict of the censors of 92 BC, Licinius Crassus (140–91 BC) attempted to discourage Latin schools of rhetoric, but its influence was evident in the development of prose as a finished product to its climax under [Marcus Tullius] Cicero (106–43 BC). Broken speech was converted into a literary instrument with ‘concentration and surcharge, magnificent sonority andarchitectonic sentence building’. Written speech became almost the equal of oral speech. Following the models of [the Greek rhetorician] Isocrates (436–338 BC), Cicero dominated the history of belles-lettres in Europe. Latin became a philosophical language and his widely read books and compilations were vehicles for the spread of Stoicism [[xvii]].

“Until the time of Cicero, laws and precedent were kept to a large extent in the memories of men and the results of the oral tradition were evident in the achievements of jurists” [[xviii]].

Figure 1.24: The Tusculum portrait, also called the Tusculum bust, is the only extant portrait of Julius Caesar (100–44 BC) which may have been made during his lifetime [[xv]], left, and bust of Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC) [[xvi]], right.

“The spread of writing contributed to the downfall of the Republic and the emergence of the empire” [[xix]]. Julius Caesar (100–44 BC) conquered Gaul between 58–50 BC, using military success, personal patronage, and published written commentaries (Commentarii de Bello Gallico) to secure wealth, loyal legions, and unmatched political prestige, which alarmed the Senate and his former ally but now rival, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (Pompey, 106–48 BC). When the Senate ordered Caesar to surrender his command, he “crossed the Rubicon” in 49 BC, triggering civil war. Conflict ended with Caesar’s victories (notably, Pharsalus, 48 BC), Pompey’s death, and Caesar’s assumption of sole power as dictator, a settlement that ended the Republic in practice even before conspirators assassinated Caesar in 44 BC.

Figure 1.25: One of the five paintings in “The Course of Empire” by Thomas Cole (1801–1848): “Destruction” [[xx]].

The “Second Triumvirate” of Gaius Octavius (Augustus) (63 BC–AD 14), Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony) (83–30 BC), and Marcus Aemilius Lepidus (~89–12 BC) succeeded Julius Casar. Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC) opposed the rise of military autocracy and backed the Senate against Caesar’s heir, Gaius Octavius (Augustus) (63 BC–AD 14), executed Cicero in 43 BC. Cicero became a symbolic casualty of the Republic’s final collapse. Renewed civil wars culminated in the victory of his heir Gaius Octavius (Augustus, 63 BC–AD 14) over Marcus Antonius (83–30 BC) at Actium in 31 BC.

The media and cultural systems adequate for the Republic when it stretched across the Italian “boot” of the Apennine peninsula could not hold her together once the Republic encompassed the Mediterranean and stretched from the Atlantic mists of Londinium in the west to the sunbaked markets of Syria in the east. A more dynamic space-biased regime of writing, supported by the broader availability of papyrus, sustained imperial cohesion while simultaneously facilitating the dissemination of new ideas and an emerging religious worldview that challenged the Empire’s foundations.

Figure 1.26: One of the five paintings in “The Course of Empire” by Thomas Cole (1801–1848): “Desolation” [[xxi]].

Science is a cultural achievement, not a permanent state to be taken for granted. Greek science arose in a context of creative competition between independent poleis with a diversity of perspectives. Science in particular and culture in general languished under the central control of empires, Egypt being the prime example. Theoretical speculation throve in ancient Greece, where it was intimately connected to philosophical speculation despite being disconnected from applications. The Romans excelled at practical engineering, while largely ignoring theory. Archimedes demonstrated how spectacular advances were possible when theory meets practice. An environment of rapid, space-biased communications speeds transmission of ideas while threatening depth, continuity, and reflection. The classical world’s struggle to cope with the disruptive power of writing casts a long shadow over the societal effects of immediate and pervasive digital communication today.

The spectacular success of Greek science as well as the ultimate decline of Greece and its Roman successors were due to a complex mixture of social, cultural, and political factors we would be wise to try to understand so we can emulate their successes while avoiding their tragic outcomes.

That’s all for now. Remember always to keep calm, and make physics great again.

See you next week,

Hans

P.S. Pick up your copy of Fields & Energy Book I: Fundamentals and Origins of Electromagnetism, if you haven’t already:

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Next time: II 1.5.3 Case Study: Carthage - Carthage Must Be Destroyed. Do You Know Why?

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References

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[[i]] Innis, Harold A. (1894–1952), Empire and Communications, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, Publishers, 2007, originally published 1950. See: https://amzn.to/48TEg1g

[[ii]] Innis, Harold A. (1894–1952), Empire and Communications, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, Publishers, 2007, originally published 1950, p. 32. See: https://amzn.to/48TEg1g

[[iii]] Cole, Thomas, (1801–1848) “The Course of Empire: The Savage State,” 1836. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Course_of_Empire_(paintings)#/media/File:Cole_Thomas_The_Course_of_Empire_The_Savage_State_1836.jpg

[[iv]] Innis, Harold A. (1894–1952), Empire and Communications, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, Publishers, 2007, originally published 1950, p. 78. See: https://amzn.to/48TEg1g

[[v]] Plato, The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters, Edith Hamilton and Huntington Caine, eds., Princeton: University Press, 1961, p. 520. Phaedrus, 275a-b.

[[vi]] Innis, Harold A. (1894–1952), Empire and Communications, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, Publishers, 2007, originally published 1950, p. 78. See: https://amzn.to/48TEg1g.

[[vii]] Cole, Thomas, (1801–1848) “The Course of Empire: The Arcadian or Pastoral State,” 1836. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Course_of_Empire_(paintings)#/media/File:Cole_Thomas_The_Course_of_Empire_The_Arcadian_or_Pastoral_State_1836.jpg

[[viii]] Innis, Harold A. (1894–1952), Empire and Communications, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, Publishers, 2007, originally published 1950, p. 78. See: https://amzn.to/48TEg1g.

[[ix]] Innis, Harold A. (1894–1952), Empire and Communications, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, Publishers, 2007, originally published 1950, p. 80. See: https://amzn.to/48TEg1g.

[[x]] Innis, Harold A. (1894–1952), Empire and Communications, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, Publishers, 2007, originally published 1950, p. 81. See: https://amzn.to/48TEg1g.

[[xi]] Cole, Thomas, (1801–1848) “The Course of the Empire: The Consummation,” 1836. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Course_of_Empire_(paintings)#/media/File:Cole_Thomas_The_Consummation_The_Course_of_the_Empire_1836.jpg

[[xii]] Innis, Harold A. (1894–1952), Empire and Communications, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, Publishers, 2007, originally published 1950, p. 107. See: https://amzn.to/48TEg1g.

[[xiii]] Innis, Harold A. (1894–1952), Empire and Communications, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, Publishers, 2007, originally published 1950, p. 110. See: https://amzn.to/48TEg1g.

[[xiv]] Innis, Harold A. (1894–1952), Empire and Communications, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, Publishers, 2007, originally published 1950, p. 110. See: https://amzn.to/48TEg1g.

[[xv]] Tusculum portrait. Bust of Julius Caesar. A member of the triumvirate. Gautier Poupeau from Paris, France – César. Exposition au Grand Palais (Paris), “Moi, Auguste, empereur de Rome” (19 mars 2014-13 juillet 2014) Vers 44 av. JC Marbre blanc. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tusculum_portrait#/media/File:C%C3%A9sar_(13667960455).jpg

[[xvi]] Bust of Cicero (1^st-cent. BC) - Palazzo Nuovo - Musei Capitolini - Rome 2016; José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro. See: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8a/Bust_of_Cicero_%281st-cent._BC%29_-_Palazzo_Nuovo_-_Musei_Capitolini_-_Rome_2016.jpg

[[xvii]] Innis, Harold A. (1894–1952), Empire and Communications, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, Publishers, 2007, originally published 1950, p. 110. See: https://amzn.to/48TEg1g.

[[xviii]] Innis, Harold A. (1894–1952), Empire and Communications, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, Publishers, 2007, originally published 1950, p. 122. See: https://amzn.to/48TEg1g.

[[xix]] Innis, Harold A. (1894–1952), Empire and Communications, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, Publishers, 2007, originally published 1950, p. 122. See: https://amzn.to/48TEg1g.

[[xx]] Cole, Thomas, (1801–1848) “The Course of Empire: Destruction,” 1836. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Course_of_Empire_(paintings)#/media/File:Cole_Thomas_The_Course_of_Empire_Destruction_1836.jpg

[[xxi]] Cole, Thomas, (1801–1848) “The Course of the Empire: Desolation,” 1836. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Course_of_Empire_(paintings)#/media/File:Cole_Thomas_The_Course_of_Empire_Desolation_1836.jpg