I came across a recent blog post lamenting the loss of rote learning of the Catechism in the Episcopalian Church. It seemed a fairly nostalgic piece but It got me thinking: how good was rote learning? What was the point? And so I made a quick mental list of the things I can remember remembering by heart.

• Book 4 of Xenophon's Anabasis in Greek
• Mark's Gospel in Greek
• Aristophanes' The Frogs
• Various Shakespeare speeches
• Keats' Ode to Autumn
• The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner (highlights)
• Sketches by Monty Python (by mistake)
• the lyrics of scores of pop songs, but never the second verse
• various orders of worship, Christian and Buddhist
• some Psalms

These days kids learn things by heart because they want to. Last week I asked my daughter’s friends if they could say how many chapters there are in all seven volumes of Harry Potter. I thought that would stump them. Instead they worked it out, then recited the chapter names. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, the first sentence of each chapter. You could tell they were winging it a bit, but on the whole it was pretty impressive.

The last chapter of Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451 has haunted me since I read it. The hero, Montag, whose job has been to burn books, is on the run when he comes across a small group of outlaws who are preserving the culture through this new Dark Age. How do they do it? They have memorised small chunks of literature. Montag is told there are many such people and when they get together a whole book will coalesce in the retelling.

Me, I feel this underestimates the value of a purely oral culture, at the same time as praising a partially oral culture. But all the same, it’s a poignant scene.

So here’s my question:

what have you learnt by heart, and do you feel it has been ‘worthwhile’ (as defined by you)?

The book is a relative newcomer in western society. It began its career in the mid-15th century and its future is no longer certain, threatened as it is by new inventions based on different principles.’

These words come from Lucien Fevre’s preface to The Coming of the Book, published in French in 1958.  I’m reading them sixty years later, sitting on a train using a portable computer, with the aid of a repository of electronically scanned volumes, which makes instantly available an unreadable number of published works, not to mention millions of pages of ‘unpublished’ electronic texts.

The irony of this situation is remarkable.

The book endures

The first irony is that the computer I am using is called a notebook. That is, conceptually the new invention is not ‘based on different principles’ but explicitly pays homage to the old, even as it radically undermines it. Now that the netbook craze is upon us, we are doing the same thing. The striking thing about the new cut-down mini-notebooks such as the Asus eee PC and now the Dell Inspiron 910 is that they are trying very hard indeed to be the same size and weight as a paperback book (remember that the paperback was the new reading technology of the 1930s). And we seem to be desperate to keep calling them books. As with the last major shift - from scroll to codex – it seems that while the technology may change, the name remains the same. If we call it a book, even though a netbook, does it remain one?

The scribes endure too

The second irony is that mindful of legal considerations the electronic repository in question – Google Books – has artificially hobbled a piece of already existing technology that would effortlessly allow copying of the text. The result is that when I want to reproduce a quotation, as above, I need to copy it out by retyping it manually, letter for letter, word for word, in a manner strongly reminiscent of the working practices of the monastic scribes who dominated the book industry before the coming of the printing press, let alone the coming of the computer. Now, through the use of the reCAPTCHA security process, this activity of scribal rewriting has been massively distributed, so that every time someone spends ten seconds verifying they are human, they contribute to digitally transcribing the equivalent of one hundred and fifty printed books per day. (according to Luis Von Ahn of Carnegie-Mellon University).

Appearing to arrive

Third, it’s easy to overlook the ambiguity of the original French title. Translated as the ‘coming’ of the book, the original French word is ‘l’apparition’, which can equally be translated ‘appearance’ and which has a double meaning in both languages. Does the e-book you hold on your lap actually amount to a real book which has almost magically ‘arrived’ inside your computer, or does it only have the ‘appearance’ of a book?

So who’s imagining whom?

Is the netbook a book just because we say it’s a book? Perhaps, conversely, there is something so compelling about the concept of a book in our culture that it simply refuses to lie down and die, transmuting instead into something very different, but eerily the same. As James Wood says,

‘a good proportion of reality consists of what we freely imagine; and then, less happily perhaps, we discover that that reality has imagined us—that we are the vassals of our imaginings, not their emperors or archdukes.’

References

Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: 1450-1800. Trans. David Gerard. London: Verso, 1984)

James Wood, ‘The Unforgotten. Aleksandar Hemon’s fictional lives’. The New Yorker 28 July 2008 Accessed at http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/07/28/080728crbo_books_wood?currentPage=all

I’m planning to attend a public debate on religion, organised by Intelligence Squared. The motion is ‘We’d be better off without religion’, and the speakers include Victor Stenger, who wrote God, the Failed Hypothesis - How Science Shows that God does not Exist. I checked this out recently.

The blurb about Professor Stenger says:

Stenger maintains that plausible natural explanations exist for for all observable phenomena and there is strong scientific evidence against anything mystical or supernatural in the universe.

Not only does the universe show no evidence for God, it looks exactly as it would be expected to look if there is no God.

I’m not disagreeing with Stenger. It isn’t that there are two different types of evidence, that used by atheist scientists such as Stenger, and the evidence used by believers. It’s actually all the same. I think Stenger would agree with this. He seems to think the existence of God should be empirically observable as a series of  anomalies in the laws of physics. Many theists would agree with this. For example, miracles, by definition, are things that don’t normally happen, and are not explicable using scientific explanations that exclude the divine. What differs between this kind of believers and non-believers is not the available evidence, but the interpretation. Using a materialist framework of interpretation, Stenger can show how there is nothing supernatural and how the very category is suspect. Using a different framework of interpretation, believers can show how the existence of God is credible, especially if categories such as Faith are considered. So the disagreement is about different approaches to interpretation at least as much as it is about the evidence itself. Stenger seems to be of the opinion that there is only one valid method of interpretation and that is the scientific method. This is clearly untenable, since all sorts of human activity depend on non-scientific frameworks of interpretation (eg love, revenge, ethics, etc).

Although some scientists would probably dispute Stenger’s claims that there is no scientific evidence for the existence of God (or of anything supernatural), I am prepared to take his view seriously. Since he has been involved in identifying quarks and gluons, he probably knows something about physics.

I think, though, that his definition of God, while admittedly one used by many believers, is contestable. Is it necessary for God to be doing anything different from the laws of physics? Stenger thinks it is. If God’s existence is a scientific hypothesis then according to Stenger it fails.

But there is a different type of believer/non-believer. This type doesn’t regard God as a scientific hypothesis, but as a human creation, analogous to a work of art or an artistic practice. On this view God exists because humans created him. There are many non-believers in this kind of God, including most theists. It seems Stenger would agree with them, since he, like them, would probably regard this kind of God as no God at all. So Stenger has a great deal in common with the religious believers after all. The more he tries to distance himself from them, the closer they move together.

There’s a summary of Stenger’s argument here.