In the fourteenth century a really wealthy College at Oxford might have twenty books, each of them chained to the wall, and a full-time Librarian to watch over them. If you wanted a book, you had to get permission to copy it by hand.
In that age, someone who had READ books was in a class by himself. A surgeon who had learned his trade on a battle field was a common laborer. He was scum compared to a University Doctor who could quote Galen from having read that Roman book HIMSELF.
We all know that the introduction of movable type caused several revolutions. Movable type had been invented in China, but no one can find the slightest effect it had there.
The reason that printing had such a great effect here was because an astonishingly large percentage of Europeans could read. The class that could read was a class by itself but it was a class consisting of several percent of the population. Never before, in Egypt or Mesopotamia or China, was it common to find a village that had a single person who could read and write.
In any village, the reeve and others had to read and write. Many village priests could.
The usual response I get when I point out how printing revolutionized the West but didn’t cause a whisper in China is that the Chinese script was so complex it didn’t lend itself to printing. That’s what Mommy Professor told them, and they never think beyond it.
But WHY were Chinese and hieroglyphics so complex? Wasn’t it probably BECAUSE only professional scribes used it?
Writing was a bit like BUGS. We boil things down here because in our society, new concepts are possible.
All you have ever heard Mommy Professor talk about was how FEW people could read in Medieval Europe. But compared to the percentage who could read in the “highest civilizations” outside the West, that percentage was astronomical.
Graffiti on the Pyramids has been written for thousands of years. Always it was a scribe, “he of the clever fingers,” who wrote the graffiti until the Romans and Greeks got there.
We find actual graffiti on the walls in Pompeii, written by people who were able to write but were definitely not pros. That is what historians are comparing Medieval Europe to.
There were professional FEMALE novelists in Europe long before there was printing. One famous painting shows a female novelist giving a copy of her book to a queen.
Which indicates the queen read, not for money, but for pleasure. Unless her job as queen didn’t pay enough and she had a job on the side as a scribe, a piece of history that would REALLY be worth knowing.
If Medieval society had been as illiterate as any society outside the West, which includes Rome and Greece, printing would have been invented and forgotten the way it was in China.
#1 by James C on 12/21/2010 - 10:44 am
You can’t get this perspective anywhere other than BUGS.
The anti-white professors never miss an opportunity to denigrate our race, and they are never called on it. The means of communication is usually unidirectional (books, “documentaries”, and the like), but that’s another issue.
Having the ammunition to slap down anti-white myths is useful as long as we don’t allow ourselves to be dragged into an “is the white race the greatest ever?” argument and away from the topic of white geNOcide.
It’s tempting to argue about how great our race is (especially when you’re RIGHT) but our job is to stay focused on making the case that will eventually hang the enemy, and that takes DISCIPLINE.
#2 by Simmons on 12/21/2010 - 11:13 am
This James C. character has hit the ground running, perfect BUGS logic on his first post.
The word we are looking for is “Responsibility” that notion focuses the mind like no other.
Mommy Prof. and Big Momma Lib thrive by saying feel good things of the PC nature, but if held responsible they hide and then try to erect another level of PC, “we don’t discuss such things anymore.”
Try it sometime on a Mommy or Momma, “you are responsible.”
#3 by Dave on 12/21/2010 - 11:17 am
There is a new form of literacy spreading and that is the literacy of Mantra thinking.
The world is undergoing rapid transformation because of the Internet and to Mommy Professor’s dismay very valuable instruction is being offered to all comers, regardless of language, on a “no-charge” basis.
Now here is the irony: Recognition is emerging that the problems of racial and ethnic conflict are not solvable.
This is a sea change in world view and it is the very thing the Establishment is incapable of coming to grips with.
The intellectuals instead prefer to focus on monetary economics, the very thing that the Establishment IS CAPABLE of coming to grips with.
This kind of misdirection is entirely to be expected. It confirms what is really going on.
A world that has ceased to believe that there is a solution to the problem of race relations is truly a new world.
It is a world that BUGS, and only the people at BUGS, has accurately anticipated.
#4 by BGLass on 12/21/2010 - 1:28 pm
Simultaneously, Mommy Profs sum up the whole thousand years of middle ages as Chaucer and since students ARE reading him, it does make it funny. Reminds me of writing, generally, the curiosity of how jews held onto this idiot scribe thing in the ‘Sofer Torah’ interpretation of Deuteronomy 31: 19 “write for yourselves this song and teach it to the Israelites to sing…” —For Orthodox jews, this actually means one must COPY the “Torah” oneself by hand, word for word, or else PAY somebody, (always in their conception, it is just as good to pay someone as doing something ONESELF and you get credit from God if you pay a servant, instead of doing work personally; this is the 613th mitzvot. (So, encoded in the rote-copied torah that every jew must do religiously, is the idea that if some employee does it, you did it and take full credit for what the other did, the imbedded meme of which, of course, makes co-option of others’ things very easy in life).
PERSONAL writing (versus the jews copying word for word) is so key to Protestant mentality, by contrast. Their “writing” must be personal testimony; why the Southerner –the Bible Belter– is first and foremost, a storyteller, and story is judged by bearing witness, and precisely NOT COPYING —NEVER EVER COPYING– but to examine how one’s own specifics INTERSECT with the Eternal. (Thus being “born again”—to intersect personal and eternal, and this is one’s testimony to the congregation, so memory is important (as one must obviously remember many specifics from one’s personal life in order to do this). (So telling stories is actually a religious act, in a sense.)
Scribes (sofer) literally COPY—EVEN TO THIS DAY. So, the “left’s” pink rabbit academic co-option of the whole lingo of “voice,” bearing witness, the narrative of the victim, etc., is funny. It really worked on blacks (victim narrative) b/c it was conflated with Protestantism, which they’d been trained in, as far as that went—but the testimony for atheist communists CANNOT EVER really be the intersection with Living Law. Where the scribes wanted to reiterate Jesus, the Protestants wanted to BE Jesus, as in living law. And so they all had to read the book for themselves —“Bible based”— not the Rote Authority. This is what they’re told.
In wn circles, Presbyterian W Galey Simpson (in Which Way Western Man) has a good chapter on this Living (Writing) Jesus. Jew Wilhelm Reich ripped Simpson off, imo, when he wrote The Murder of Christ, just like Ghandi is the name on passive resistance, no matter how much he took from white Russians, just b/c he’s non-white.
Anyway, Horus is right in saying some white rabbits truly do not care if they even die! Their gods always have to defy death; So it can be hard to make some white people care about dying, especially the protestants, maybe. (Catholic leadership drums it in that suicide is a sin, to offset this more, and have the repeater jesus died FOR others). Instead of “you must die LIKE jesus.”
Death defying gods are a double-edged sword when it comes to this genocide. Hopefully, more protestants (who MUST read the book themselves and NEVER COPY) will soon get that there is a difference between stupid suicide and sacrificing oneself in order expose all the sin of others before the eyes of god— and in this case it’s just false martyrdom not the real thing, the way they’re supposing, and so they play right into the hands of an anti-god enemy. It’s just a trick, not real martrydom.
Anyway, this whole rote-copy thing in Judaism and the fact that they actually do this, seemed very strange to the northwest mind–when i was studying all that. Copying out the words of the god, not even needing to know the language to do the “commandment.” Just to repeat with no understanding. Copying the god-words by rote is the highest thing—one of the great 613 commandments.
Literacy, in the way of thinking, is everything. Not rote, but the byplay of personal and eternal—each the incarnation in the present. but christians can get tricked into suicide (thinking it’s martrydom). Jews have martyrs, so they say, but in reality, in classes, there IS MUCH SAID ABOUT SAVING ONES LIFE AT ALL COST. One can lie, or whatever. In fact, the holocaust stories are used to teach this, also. Things are justified due to extremity. One can sin to save one’s life, and this is a core difference in teachings. When it comes to people apprehending genocide, this can be a stumbling block in understanding.
#5 by Epiphany on 12/21/2010 - 6:21 pm
I really wonder sometimes about all of this. After all, from whose POV is most of the History Documentaries from, in any event?