Identity through memory and how we relate to our world
A major theme that bubbled to the top consistently for me throughout this course is the importance for us as humans to forge a personal and collective identity. It seems we've consistently managed to do this by leveraging the power of memory and by building a common cultural discourse using communication tools. We came across this phenomenon from the beginning of the course, as we took in Homer and tried to understand the mechanics and the importance of the poetic tradition as a way to memorize the values and characteristics of that society. As Havelock states in his Preface to Plato,
the post-Homeric Greek, "is required as a civilized being to become acquainted with the history, the social organization, the technical competence and the moral imperatives of his group... this over-all body experience (we shall avoid the word 'knowledge') is incorporated in a rhythmic narrative or set of narratives which he memorises and which is subject to recall in his memory. Such is poetic tradition, essentially something he accepts uncritically, or else it fails to survive in his living memory." (page 198)
This poetic tradition, then, was not a means of creative expression, but rather a means of communicating the normative values of that time as a way to create and nurture a collective identity.
Whizzing past the evolution from oral tradition to literate society and the subsequent development of the dialectic tradition and the dramatization of ideas (I'll come back to this last one later), we find ourselves at what I see as the next major development in the use of communication tools to nurture culture building on a collective identity: the emergence of historical narration. For this we read Thucydides and Herodotus and debated the merits of choosing an 'objective' point of view versus a blatantly subjective point of view in analyzing and documenting a history. It was also interesting to see examples of the formation of "us" versus "the other" in a broader sociopolitical context and as a prelude to the collective identity of what would become the nation state.
Appropriately so, we next came to our class on "Political and Personal Identity," where we tackled the implications of our psychological anchoring of our personal and community identity with the 'family' and the evolution of that anchorage leading to our identity with a nation. Erich Fromm discusses the power of that transformation in the excerpt we read of The Sane Society, where he says,
As we saw later on in the course, this identification structure was furthered along through the standardization of language (thanks, printing press!) and later the standardization of time (thanks, telegraph and railroads!). Both of these transformations embedded us with a sense that we were surrounded beyond localized geographic location with our "imagined community" of nationhood. The nation, as Benedict Anderson tells us in Imagined Communities, is a very powerful construct:
"it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings." (page 7)
To this I would add that through the technologies of mass media, i.e., radio and television, our national collective identity was strengthened even more by the cultural products we began to consume (this relates back to my second-to-last blog post on The Dangers of Fragmentation).
More importantly for our course, in all of these instances the communication technologies that we had at our disposal helped us to make these identity-related connections primarily BECAUSE of the sociopolitical context that existed when they came to be. Which leads me to the next major item: power.
Putting it all in context: power and the future of justice
So far I hope that I've described some milestones of ways in which we have used communication tools, from oral discourse to television, to validate and perpetuate the direction of our social structure. Throughout history, we have done this because it is in our nature to live socially by identifying with each other through common characteristics such as values and culture. At this point I would like to add that it is also in our nature to seek, attain, and retain power AND to seek and attain justice. It should come as no surprise that we have historically used communication tools to seek each of them out, with mixed results: for justice - see the use of the printing press to weaken the authority of the Church; for power - see the use of television to effectively hide via self and explicit censorship political power plays leading up to and throughout the Vietnam war.
In our class, we read Euripides' and Sophocles' renditions of the story of Electra, leading to a discussion about the origins of the notion of justice and what happens when it ignored by the 'official' authority - in essence, we take matters into our own hands. These readings also continued to highlight, as had our reading of Homer, how the telling of stories through drama can influence a society's understanding of shared values. After reading Barnouw, Gitlin, and Marcuse, I am convinced that the power of the dramatization of ideas is as strong, if not stronger, than ever. The use of television to bolster the hegemonic culture of commercialization and consumerism, is for me one of the most blatant examples of the manipulation of communication tools to retain power.
Of course, being an idealist, I have hopes that new technologies like the World Wide Web and the internet have not yet been completely swallowed up by the forces of the hegemonic status quo, and that through the development of disruptive technologies, we can build a better, more just world. After all, thanks to Prometheus blind hope is one of our greatest indicators of humanity and progress!
NOTE: I did not delve into the ongoing tension between Platonic Truth and the Sophists' more pragmatic approach (that would've been another blog post of equal length!) but I will say that I still agree with my earlier sentiment that there is an inherent imbalance of power in the Platonic approach since we are expected to follow 'the few' into the light...