When We Are No More

by Abby Smith Rumsey

  You can imagine the resurrection of classical writers in the Renaissance and their eager adoption by Europeans as a cultural exaptation of sorts. The writings of Stoic and Epicurean philosophers became alive again in the midst of Christian culture in upheaval. They were being used by eager readers in religious and political debates that were wholly alien to the classical world from which they sprung. And yet for the previous thousand years their books were judged to be obsolete, ignorant, even pernicious. They were destroyed or allowed to decay and disappear as the cultures of Christianity and Islam, struggling for survival and dominance, became monocultures. One orthodoxy came to dominate the information landscape by eradicating the natural diversity of beliefs and perspectives. But the texts that nonetheless survived in Byzantine and Islamic centers of learning acquired radically new values with the passage of time.

  As the world globalizes and shrinks, so will the world of ideas. A monoculture of ideas renders us as vulnerable to catastrophic loss and failure as a monoculture in the agricultural world. We want more knowledge, not less, about the multiple ways to be human. We cannot know what the future value of any archaic or seemingly irrelevant body of knowledge may be. Our obligation to future generations is to ensure that they can decide for themselves what is valuable.

  WHEN WE ARE NO MORE

  We are a fortunate species. We see the world not as it is, but as our minds assemble it from memory. We create a richly detailed 4-D diorama of the world that guides our every action. The model changes as we do and as the world does. As we add new details that deepen our understanding of ourselves and others, some memories are modified and strengthened, while others recede in their vividness.

  We are fortunate because we can so readily appropriate the memory of others to aggrandize our mental model with knowledge of worlds altogether foreign to our experience. Private and public, autobiographical and historical, real and imaginary—the whole memory of humanity can claim its place in our mental model. The richer the model, the quicker and keener our grasp of the novel, the faster we recognize the news that does not quite fit into our understanding of the world. We can infer the significance and meaning of what we perceive by finding a categorical or emotional match in our mind’s archive, an archive enriched by the memory of humanity.

  From the time our ancestors first discovered that objects could extend the reach of their thoughts and feelings, we began to accelerate our evolution through self-cultivation. Curiosity and awareness of our mortality, together with our ability to send knowledge forward into the future, have culminated in something truly new. We have gained dominion over land, sea, and skies, remaking Nature in our image. We optimize the biochemistry of plants and animals for our consumption, regulate our bodies and minds with pharmaceuticals, travel across time zones without regard for the circadian rhythms of our bodies. Our voices resound instantaneously across time and space on digital networks. Humanity is, as Milosz says, an elemental force conscious of transcending Nature, for we live by memory of ourselves, that is, in history. We are close to reversing what has long been a defining distinction between humans and all other life. Until now, we have been the sole species able to use nongenetic means to transmit information across time and space. Outsourcing memory has been our strategic advantage for at least forty thousand years. But now, with the ability to alter genetic material and potentially turn that, too, into a medium for human information, we may embed DNA itself with our acquired knowledge and send it forth into the future.

  We have sprung this new world of digital data on ourselves without advance warning. We are now several decades into this uncontrolled (and uncontrollable) experiment, and have yet to catch our breath. We are moving, pushmi-pullyu-like, in opposing directions—quickly adapting and domesticating the digital world, at the same time expanding into unknown territories. The faster we move, the less predictable our path becomes. In 1997, when I saw that we will not have libraries and archives full of hard-copy “rough drafts” of present-day history, it seemed we could not adapt quickly enough to avoid the loss or corruption of the past. But since 1997, the power of our machines to extrapolate a wealth of information from even fragments of the past—from bird specimens and glass plate negatives to broken lacquer discs and ships’ logs—tells a different story. We are beginning to learn how much we can afford to lose and still come to know our own history.

  Today, we see books as natural facts. We do not see them as memory machines with lives of their own, though that is exactly what they are. As soon we began to print our thoughts in those hard-copy memory machines, they began circulating and pursuing their own destinies. Over time we learned how to manage them, share them, and ensure they carried humanity’s conversations to future generations. We can develop the same skills to manage and take responsibility for digital memory machines so that they too outlive us and, like books, “derive from people, but also from radiance, heights.” Whether we do or not is now in our hands.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book was born, like many, in the Library of Congress, and my first and deepest thanks go to Winston Tabb, librarian and friend extraordinaire. He brought me in to the library and gave me license to follow my curiosity where it took me. Above and beyond sharing his profound knowledge of libraries, copyright law and practices, collectors, the Congress, and anything I asked about, he set an example of the finest public service imaginable, when getting the right result always takes precedence over getting credit for doing so. And when I left the library, he gave me his personal copy of Millicent Sowerby’s work on Jefferson’s library, the seed from which this book sprouted.

  Other colleagues at the library, in particular Sam Brylawski, Michael Grunberger, John Y. Cole, and the late Peter Van Wingen, generously and congenially shared their knowledge with me over the years. I am indebted also to two outstanding library leaders: Deanna Marcum, for her uncompromising commitment to the preservation of and ongoing access to our collective memory to advance knowledge, and her steadfast encouragement to advance my own; and Michael Keller, for his fearless dedication to the future of libraries in the digital age. My thanks also to his colleagues, the superb professionals at Stanford University Libraries.

  I have been helped and inspired by Carl Haber of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Brewster Kahle and Wendy Hanamura at the Internet Archive.

  In the making of this book, my thanks go to the incomparable Ike Williams and Katherine Flynn, to Peter Ginna, and to Rob Galloway and George Gibson. Thanks also to Kate Wittenberg, Megan Prelinger, and Cheryl Hurley, who kindly gave me advice when I most needed it—often before I knew I needed it. The responsibility for any and all errors of fact, judgment, and interpretation here is mine alone.

  Above all, my thanks go to David Rumsey, whose map library is the greatest universe of spatial memory—both artifactual and digital—in the world, and who works unstintingly to grow it and make it free to all. He keeps my spirits high and my feet on the ground.

  NOTES

  CHAPTER ONE: MEMORY ON DISPLAY

  1 an average of forty-four days: Preserving Our Digital Heritage, vol. 2, 53.

  2 Square Kilometre Array: Drake, “Cloud computing,” 543. For more information about the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), see skatelescope.org. Construction of the SKA is scheduled to begin in 2018. When complete in 2030, it will deploy one square kilometer of collecting space with antennae in both Australia and South Africa.

  3 from 2.7 billion terabytes to 8 billion: http://cdn.idc.com/research/Predictions12/Main/downloads/IDCTOP10Predictions2012.pdf. Accessed June 8, 2012. (Although this IDC projection was widely cited at the time, this link is no longer live.) “A petabyte is the equivalent of 1,000 terabytes, or a quadrillion bytes. One terabyte is a thousand gigabytes. One gigabyte is made up of a thousand megabytes. There are a thousand thousand—i.e., a million—petabytes in a zettabyte.” Jonathan Shaw, “Why ‘Big Data’ is a Big Deal.” Harvard Magazine, March-April 2014, 33.

  CHAPTER TWO: HOW CUR
IOSITY CREATED CULTURE

  1 a collective form of memory: Many biologists identify imitative and imprinted behaviors among animals as cultural features—chicks that learn bird songs from other birds, chimps that imitate other chimps using sticks to dig up grubs, and so on. The focus here is not on learning through direct physical imitation, but acquiring knowledge from others indirectly through physical objects that carry information.

  2 DNA extraction and analysis: On recent findings in genetic research into the origins of Homo sapiens, see Pääbo, Neanderthal Man; and Tattersall, Masters.

  3 distinctively human behaviors: On disagreement about how to interpret the evidence that argues for attributing these behaviors to Neanderthals, see Appenzeller, “Old Masters.”

  4 long-distance exchange of goods: On objects becoming constituents of the “web of human relations,” see Shryock and Smail, “History and the ‘Pre’,” 724.

  5 thinking with things: Some scientists postulate that toolmaking somehow catalyzed the development of language, and have mapped activity in the brain regions activated by making Paleolithic hand axes that overlap with some required by speech. That said, Neanderthals, who are thought to have made tools, did not have language. The causal relationship between genetic potential and cultural practice remains obscure. See Normile, “Experiments Probe Languages’ Origins.”

  6 occurrences of cave art: Indonesian cave art that looks very much like the paintings in Eurasia has recently been dated to about forty thousand years ago. If these dates hold up, scientists will need to revise the prevailing view on when and how Homo sapiens came out of Africa and settled the globe. See Aubert et al., “Pleistocene cave art.”

  7 early art objects: Clottes, Cave Art, 11ff. The earliest possible art object, found in the Blombos Cave in South Africa, is a “worked and polished hematite stone, decorated with a complex engraved motif of three parallel lines and a series of crosshatches” found in a layer dated to around seventy-five thousand years ago. In 2009, researchers announced they had found thirteen engraved ochre pieces, some dating one hundred thousand years, and identified them as evidence of symbolic thinking. Balter, “Early Start.” Anthropologist Andrew Shryock and historian Daniel Lord Smail point out that the modern human “cultural assemblage” appears, almost abruptly, in Europe around forty to fifty thousand years ago, but was likely assembled more slowly in Africa, whence modern Homo sapiens migrated. “It appears to burst out in Europe only because Africans, that is to say modern Homo sapiens, carried it with them when they migrated into Europe around 50,000 years ago.” Shryock and Smail, “History and the ‘Pre’,” 716.

  8 “you may freely eat”: Genesis, 1:15–17.

  9 libraries as thought experiments: One such library is being assembled by the Long Now Foundation, an organization dedicated to encouraging long-term thinking. The projected library of thirty-five hundred volumes is called the Manual for Civilization. Its scope focuses on four categories: a cultural canon, the mechanics of civilization, rigorous science fiction, and long-term thinking, futurism, and relevant history. http://blog.longnow.org/02014/02/06/manual-for-civilization-begins/.

  10 the Western model of historical thinking: See Smail, On Deep History, 12–39, on what he calls “the grip of sacred history.”

  11 cuneiforms were created before 3300 B.C: By 3200 B.C., Egyptians were using hieroglyphs.

  12 “Man is by nature a cultural animal”: Bidney, “Human Nature,” 376.

  13 our evolutionary niche as generalist: Tattersall, Masters, 228.

  14 writing was invented multiple times: “Cumulative evidence around the world suggests that writing was invented at least three times in the last part of the fourth millennium B.C.E., and at least three more times in different parts of the world in later periods.” Wolf, Proust and the Squid, 47.

  15 over thirty thousand tablets survive: http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/research_projects/all_current_projects/ashurbanipal_library_phase_1.aspx.

  16 “We, and our judgment”: Montaigne, “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” in Complete Works (hereafter cited as CW), 455.

  17 “The clothes I wear”: Milosz, “On the Effects of the Natural Sciences,” in Visions, 21.

  CHAPTER THREE: WHAT THE GREEKS THOUGHT: FROM ACCOUNTING TO AESTHETICS

  1 housed three hundred thousand scrolls: Battles, Library, 8.

  2 the “Great Vanishing” of classical memory: Greenblatt, The Swerve, 86.

  3 Antony pillaged the Library of Pergamum: Ibid., 281. Luciano Canfora, in his book The Vanished Library, draws different conclusions from the same scant evidence: that it was not the library but a dockside depot warehousing assorted cargo (including books) that burned in 48 B.C., and that the story of Antony expropriating books from Pergamum to give to Cleopatra was a “calumny … perhaps intended as a gibe at Antony’s ignorance of literary matters.” See pp. 69–72 and 91ff.

  4 experts on ancient slavery: For a comparative perspective on slavery in the ancient world, see David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), chap. 2, “The Ancient Foundations of Modern Slavery.”

  5 Alzheimer’s disease attacks the hippocampus: Hassabis et al., “Patients with Hippocampal Amnesia,” 1726; Kahana et al., “Neural Activity,” 1726.

  6 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine: Underwood, “Brain’s GPS,” 149.

  7 Cicero on Simonides: Cicero, De Oratore, cited in Yates, The Art of Memory, 17.

  8 palm as a mnemonic device: See the exhibition catalog Writing on Hands: Memory and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, organized in 2000 by the Trout Gallery, Dickinson College.

  9 memory reinforced through physical objects: The special relationship we have with the objects we make is not quite as straightforward as it first appears. Why is it natural for us to make things to think with but not for others species? Some philosophers, espousing the “extended mind theory,” propose that our consciousness essentially appropriates and colonizes the physical world as we come to know it. We create tools and technologies to extend our will into the world. This is different from the extension of self through ownership of property (“my land, my slave, my house, my cat”). The former is found universally among human cultures; the latter is highly variable among cultures. For an overview of the debate, see Clark, Supersizing the Mind.

  10 residential-care regimes for Alzheimer’s patients: Danziger, Marking the Mind, 271.

  11 physical movement and thought: The enhancement specifically of creative thinking while walking versus sitting is reported in Oppezzo and Schwartz, “Give Your Ideas Some Legs.”

  12 interactive timelines, maps, charts, and infographics: The role of visualization in gisting information is the subject of “Learning to See Data” by Benedict Carey, New York Times, March 27, 2015.

  13 going to a library for access to information: Library is a modern word, derived from the Latin word for book, liber. Other modern languages, such as French and Russian, take their word for library from the Greek for book or papyrus, biblos (bibliothèque and biblioteka respectively). Contemporary connotations of the word are broadening beyond books and even texts to mean any collection of content, such as “my music library” (typically in MP3 formats on a computer). This contrasts with “archives,” used to denote a collection on a vastly larger scale.

  14 no useful archaeological evidence: Battles, Library, 30.

  15 essential model for the library in the digital age: In 2002, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, a library, museum, and cultural center built near the site of the original library, opened on the site of the old Mouseion. It houses books and manuscripts relating to the contemporary and historic Mediterranean, many donated from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, along with extensive microfilm and digital collections of manuscripts and rare books.

  16 “For this invention will produce”: Phaedrus, 275a–b. This is actually Plato quoting Socrates, who is quoting the Egyptian Thamus rebuking the god Theuth f
or inventing writing.

  17 muses inspire or prompt the performers: Danziger, Marking the Mind, 28ff.

  18 legacy of classical Greece and Rome: In Byzantium, both lay and clerical elites were taught to read from Homer’s Iliad. “From Homer they went on to the great dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, and then to Demosthenes, Thucydides, Aristotle, and Porphyry.” Carr, “Reading, Writing, and Books,” 181; and for examples of the works they studied, see 192–99.

  CHAPTER FOUR: WHERE DEAD PEOPLE TALK

  1 survived in complicated fragments: Ancient texts seeped into southwestern Europe over the centuries through the Venetian Empire, with close ties to Byzantium; and in the West, through Moorish Spain, with close ties to an Islamic culture of learning.

  2 between 150 and 200 million books: Febvre and Martin, The Coming of the Book, 186.

  3 Montaigne learned to read: His father had somewhat eccentrically decided to raise his son to be fluent in Latin. Imposing his own form of immersion learning on little Michel, his father did not allow him either to speak or hear anything except Latin for the first decade of his life.

  4 two Bibles face each other: On the Giant Bible of Mainz, see http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/bibles/the-giant-bible-of-mainz.html; and on the Gutenberg Bible, see http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/bibles/the-gutenberg-bible.html.

  5 he published and republished volumes: The history of Montaigne’s publishing is hard to untangle. He put out several editions in his lifetime, not only adding new essays but also going back to previously published ones and adding more to them. He published the first edition of his essays in 1580, and in 1582 he published a second. In 1588, he published the third edition, this one greatly expanded with new essays. He was preparing yet a fourth edition when he died in 1592. In 1598, a posthumous edition of his essays appeared, including many of his late changes and additions. All this has provided grist for literary historians over the ages. It is virtually impossible to pick up any copy of Montaigne’s essays that does not include a lengthy introduction by the editor and translator explaining which editions of which essays they chose to include and why.