The Pattern

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates stood in ancient Athens and said writing would destroy memory. The fear was reasonable, and he was partly right; the whole reason we know of this moment is because Plato wrote of it, after all. We also know the moment scripts became standard, the art of memorizing epic verse trailed off. The aoidoi singer-poets who once held the Iliad in their skulls, more than fifteen thousand lines of poetry nested and cross-referenced and alive, became obsolete. (A hell of a context window)

Their ancestors became scribes and readers, not orators.

Something died.

But Socrates couldn't see what grew in writing's wake. You cannot build cumulative knowledge, shared knowledge, on memory alone. Writing was a prerequisite for cross-cultural exchange and the reliable inheritance of intricate ideas in law and science and, yes, the humanities. Writing is why we know so much of what we know, and written script increased the capacity we had for understanding, retention, and learning.