Sacred Texts

I am told that Socrates thought that writing was a thoroughly bad idea, and he certainly did not commit that error himself. Neither did Jesus, nor Buddha. The omission does not seem to have reduced their influence on the world. Rather the reverse, if anything. Socrates felt that it would perpetuate lies, and give lazy people a way to avoid seeking the truth.

The advantage of writing won out, though, and I do not contest it. By writing something down we turn it into a concrete thing that we can share, knowing that we are all looking at the same thing. We can revise it and make it better in a way not possible with improvised speech. By writing we can make complex mathematical procedures concrete, perfect a poem, notate a symphony.

And the tendency to canonize certain written documents is easy to understand too. Suppose you did get to hear Jesus or Buddha or one of those, and the value and superiority of what they were saying was absolutely clear to you, but you didn’t feel quite clever enough to be entrusted with the message to humanity yourself. Suppose, moreover, that you traversed mountain ranges and canyons to bring the message to people who had never met the great leader, and were unfamiliar with his style. Perhaps, when you tried to explain your enthusiasm, your audience might completely misunderstand you, or argue from a point of view you hadn’t thought of, and leave you confused, fearing that the central message was being lost. What to do?

A written orthodoxy would be a great insurance against the corruption and drift of the idea. You could write down the great sayings of the teacher, and then, when the conversation seemed to lose direction and focus, or when your memory failed you, or even after you had died and someone who never met the GT had to carry on, there would be something to go back to. The teaching, the art work, could be transmitted authentically down through the ages. The Four Noble Truths; we could go back to them when confronted with a dilemma such as whether it was OK to trade a camel you didn’t actually own yet, but felt sure you would when delivery was due. A fixed form of words could be the harbor to go back to when we seemed to have lost our bearings, or entered an area the great teacher never specifically addressed.

But the danger is already apparent; if the sacred text was created to preserve one thing, and we search it for answers to quite another, we are simply looking in the wrong place. But if we use the text precisely because we have no other source for the original teaching, or none that we trust, then how can we know whether we are looking in the wrong place? Perhaps we just did not understand the book deeply enough. And even if we suspect we might be looking in the wrong place, where else should we look? Once we, the book-wielding guardians of the truth, start saying “Ur, I don’t know. Never thought of that. Don’t think Jesus ever told us what sort of car he would drive,” then our authority is suspect, and there is no real reason to pay attention to us when we try to correct the heterodox by telling them to return to scripture.

The tendency to over-stress the importance of the book also arises because of what I call the “Ladder of Disbelief.” I think this is most simply shown by a series of pronouncements in the first person, followed by reports of them in the third. Thusly:

I am totally certain that this is true.
He believes it. But I am not sure why.

I believe that this is true.
He thinks it is true, but suspects it might not be.

I really do think that this is true.
He obviously has doubts about it.

I think, on balance, this is probably true.
He clearly doubts it.

I suspect this may not be true.
He doesn’t think it is true.

I don’t think this is true.
He seems sure it is not true.

Definitely not true.
He denies it. I wonder why.

Goddam it. It’s a total lie!
He did it.

At every level, people who hear you, or who report you, add a level of skepticism to what they claim you said. How, then, can you convince them of the utter truth, certainty, and importance of the thing you are so certain about? How can you overcome the ladder of disbelief, the inevitable doubt by transmission?

It’s a toughie, and many ways have been tried over the ages. One of the most effective, simple, common and convenient is simply to announce that the Book is the Word of God, and then kill anybody who says otherwise. Other, slightly less drastic methods are to shout at people, intimidate them, threaten them, bore them to death, jump up and down like TV evangelists in fake ecstasy, trying to argue by outrageous emotional displays what you cannot get across by logic.

The corollary of the “Word of God” technique, of course, is to denounce anybody who disagrees with you as a mouthpiece of the devil, whom other people need to kill in the event that you yourself do not have time. These techniques all work pretty well as far as appearances are concerned. Killing people who say they disagree drastically reduces the number of people who say they disagree, and most of them don’t actually have to be killed. Since the ladder of doubt arises in the first place because we have nothing but appearances to go by, then the appearance of agreement would seem to be enough to claim success.

But we all know it isn’t. The text, in the first place, was a makeshift solution to the problem of how to fix truth in a world that flows, and how to avoid corruption and error in a world that is always disputatious. Nobody, at the beginning, thought of the book as the Truth Itself, merely as a practical gadget to make the truth transmissable and preservable. Jesus didn’t write, and decades had gone by since he died/disappeared/ascended/whatever, and history did not wait, and the people who remembered him had to get something down, both to remember, and to be sure of what they agreed about, pooling what their memories had in common. And so the Gospels were written, obviously not to be Idols to be Worshipped in themselves, (that would be, and is, idolatry), but to gather together the wisdom that was in danger of fragmenting. And so the authors wrote down the important bits, the things that made as clear as they could the things that they thought most important. And to keep it comprehensible, if you were such an author, you would try to keep it consistent and simple. You’d say Christ’s life was perfect, and wouldn’t go into the incident when he was 15 behind the ass shed with Rachel. It wasn’t relevant anyway.

Move on a generation, and we have no eyewitnesses left; the Book is all we have. Then it becomes an object of veneration in itself, and the “death if you disagree” policy puts a lot of pressure back onto this book, in a sort of feedback loop. You have to back up such draconian policies with some pretty outrageous claims for a bit of writing. You have to proclaim not just that it is right, but that it is without fault, and that it is complete. All truth is contained in it. All questions that can be asked can be answered by reference to your book.

You might think that I wrote this to object to the Gospels. Not at all. I just think that is a place to start where the danger and the damage done throughout centuries by the mere notion of the “sacred text” is so obvious that it can hardly be denied. After that it will not seem so far-fetched, in later postings, when I move in to attack my real quarries: the American Constitution and electoral college, and the pedantic respect demanded for scores of musical compositions.

In particular, my goal is to attack, at the very source, the whole philosophy of musical performance as put forward by Gunther Schuller in his book “The Compleat Conductor” where he proclaims that his guiding principle is to regard the score of, say, Beethoven’s 5th, as a sacred text.

God help us, say I. A score is no more than a makeshift solution to a practical problem. It is a reductive document that reduces a piece of music to a catalog of the notes that need to be played to realize it. Claim that all, and exhaustive, truth lies therein and you are, I submit, dead wrong.

Bet you didn’t see that coming three paragraphs back, huh?
I shall continue, jumping up and down ecstatically to prove how right I am.
©2004 AJM

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