Automation, a curse or a blessing?

At the Vrije Universiteit the Beginning begins of course in John 1, which says the following[21]:

In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God
and the Word was God.
He was with God in the beginning.
Through him all things were made,
without him nothing was made that has been made.

This passage clearly demonstrates that according to the Christian Tradition, the creation starts with a sound3), a primal sound, if you like, in which the entire meaning of creation4) is caught. This idea is not unique for the Christian Tradition, by the way. In other great Traditions, too, this creation appears to be a spoken act. In the books of Moses we find the following statement (Genesis 1, verse 3): ‘And God said: Let there be light! And there was light.’ The Greek Tradition has the Logos, the Indian Tradition has the sacred word of AUM and the Chinese Tradition the unspeakable TAO.

So it was simple in those so-called prehistoric times: listening implied knowledge, understanding and being5). But then there was the script. Plato attributed the invention of the script to the Egyptian god Thoth, who was extremely proud of this feat.

In the myth[22] of Thoth, the latter tells king Thamos of Egypt: ‘This, o king, is the art which shall make the Egyptians wiser and which will sharpen their memories, for this invention is like a magic potion to memory and wisdom!’ King Thamos, however, cleverly remarked that this invention would bring oblivion to the minds of those who use it, for they would not be training their memories anymore. ‘For’, he proceeded, ‘by placing their faith in the script, they are seeking their memories outside themselves, aided by strange signs. You give your pupils the appearance of wisdom, but not the truth. For when they have read many things, they will make the impression of knowing a great deal, while in fact they are ignorant.’6)

The urge to collect facts has proceeded at full speed after Thoth. In his utopian novel The Glass Bead Game[23], set around the year 2200, Hermann Hesse looks back on the ‘serial’ age, the first half of our century. He describes a situation in which around every event, for instance the sale of a famous painting, the auction of a valuable manuscript, an old castle burning down or a scandal in an aristocratic family, many thousands of serials were written, presenting large quantities of facts of various nature, anecdotal, historical, psychological, erotic, et cetera. Upon any current event a storm of writing would break out. Serials, by the way, would also include certain games readers could activate themselves, in which they could unload their surfeited factual knowledge, such as the strange phenomenon of the ‘cross word’. Thousands of people would spend their spare time bent over squares and crosses of letters, which they completed according to certain rules.

This situation, which Hermann Hesse described in 1943, can still be recognised now, fifty years later. The writing of serials has been replaced by the computer-aided generation of all kinds of mostly meaningless factual knowledge by associating everything with everything. Crosswords have been replaced by computer games that slowly but steadily kill every form of creativity.

It seems as if we are becoming more and more addicted to producing texts. For whom? To which end? An avalanche of information, which often springs from the need of the sender to send rather than from the receiver’s desire to know something: the all too familiar ‘missionary syndrome’.

This is the circus in which the computer was born. This is the present state of the world, a society supersaturated with information, in which the process of automation has been started. A development that started with a single word, and that has degenerated into a cacophony in which it is almost impossible to arrive at any insight at all.

And yet we were warned time and again by wise men. Lao Tse[24] tells us: ‘Those who know, do not speak; those who speak, do not know.’

The essence of Krishnamurti’s[25] message is: ‘The description is not that which is described.’7) The universal saying tells us that: ‘Speech8) is silver, silence is golden’.

Even Plato, who produced quite a few texts, would as an older man say when commenting on the matter of plagiarism concerning Dionysios[27], that the Truth cannot be written down. Those who are truly interested are able to make their own discoveries on the basis of small clues. Self-knowledge, after all, cannot be acquired by collecting many facts, not even when they are collected by means of computers. Self-knowledge is acquired by reflecting on words of wisdom that lead back to the Word in the Beginning.