Theuth v Thamus
On judging other people's inventions
Starting with Socrates
In Plato’s dialogue “Phaedrus”, Socrates and Phaedrus discuss love, truth, and rhetoric. Towards the end of the dialogue, Socrates recounts a myth about the origin of writing.
At Naucratis in Egypt there lived a god named Theuth. He invented calculation, geometry, and astronomy, but above all writing. Theuth came to Thamus, the king of Egypt, to show off his various inventions. Thamus expressed approval or disapproval of each in turn. When it came to writing, Theuth was particularly enthusiastic, declaring that he had discovered a sure basis for both memory and wisdom. Thamus, however, was unimpressed. He began with a rebuke to Theuth’s arrogance: “the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practise it”. Thamus’s judgment was that those who practised writing would cease to exercise their memory, and would become forgetful. Nor would they become wise: on the contrary, they would receive a quantity of information without properly understanding it, making them a public menace.
Socrates goes on to expound the superiority of speech over the written word, especially when it comes to teaching philosophy. The written text cannot respond to questions, but can only return the same answer over and over again. By contrast, proper philosophical education is an exercise in dialectic, in which different minds engage in a conversation that leads both of them towards the discovery of truth.
The emphasis on the superiority of the spoken word is at first sight startling, especially to those of us whose spend a great deal of our time reading and writing. On the other hand, over 2,000 years after Plato was writing, our legal system still assumes that there is something of real value in live oral exchanges, either between advocate and witness or between advocate and judge. Modern social media combines the immediacy of the oral exchange with the permanency of speech, but I very much doubt Plato would have approved.
The passage from “Phaedrus” reminds us that writing is an invention, and a relative latecomer; speech predated writing by tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of years. So should we regard writing as a form of technology? It is hard to see why not: if this seems strange, then it indicates that our concept of technology has fuzzy boundaries, and that we are most comfortable when applying the term to the novel and unfamiliar.
Above all, what I find interesting is Thamus’s assertion that the inventor is not the best person to judge the merits of an invention. I find this very encouraging. I want to use this substack to explore some thoughts about how humans relate to technology - especially (but not solely) digital technology. But I am not a computer scientist, or indeed any kind of scientist. In my professional and personal life, I am (at best) an averagely competent user of computer technology. Thamus’s words encourage technological amateurs to think that we might have something useful to say.
What next?
It is still (just about) August, and I am on holiday for the next fortnight. I am catching up on some reading. I have recently finished Elise Bohan’s “Future Superhuman”, a transhumanist polemic. I am now embarking on “Feeding the Machine”, in which James Muldoon, Mark Graham, and Callum Cant discuss the hidden human costs of developments in AI. I am likely to write about both books in due course. I also want to write about the astonishing documentary “Eternal You”, which deals with grief technology (also known as “death capitalism”).
In my day job, I am a barrister at 11KBW Chambers in London. Although I am very interested in legal issues about technology, that’s not going to be the focus of this substack. Instead I want to look at technology through a wider lens, encompassing politics and philosophy, fiction and film. Although some of what I want to write about is a source of dismay, I hope to maintain a stance of curiosity: what is it like to live with early 21st century devices, and how do they shape and reflect our human desires?
I do not expect to post very often - if I manage one post a month I will be doing well. I hope you will find something here that is worth your attention.