Symmetry isn’t causality; it’s poetry
Brian Rotman quotes Victor Hugo: “Human society, the world, the whole of mankind is in the alphabet.” After adding the caveat that much of humanity uses other writing systems than the alphabetic ones, Rotman offers his assent: “for Western civilization each of the two originating worlds, Judaic and Greek …. was indeed created out of an encounter with a system of alphabetic writing.” Many thinkers note that writing’s pattern seem to echo throughout cultural and social forms of civilization. For Eric Havelock and Walter J. Ong, this resonance is a force that shapes civilization, determining structures of governance, modes of narrative and argument, even consciousness itself. Does Western civilization really look like the alphabet? And if it does, is that because writing forces us into alphabetized boxes? Similarity doesn’t imply causality—although perhaps it points to deeper causes. Writing didn’t create our impulses to order, to compare, and to taxonomize; it built upon these inclinations, and brought them to flower. That many cultural forms—from music to architecture to politics—participate in such flourishing doesn’t point to the reign of the alphabet, but to more profound and rudimentary dispositions that evolved over the millennia prior to writing’s emergence. Different writing systems engage other evolved impulses. The rhyming cultural forms of civiization don’t evince the overweening power of writing, but the fundamental wellsprings of human orginality—itself a trait that evolved. Ordered political structures, the column and the arch, patterns in weaving, music, and storytelling—they’re like butterflies with eyespots on their wings, or orchids that evoke the sexual structures of insects. Mimicry, convergence. But we can take heart from this. For patterning, symmetry, and economy aren’t only the stuff of evolution, but of poetry as well.
