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Ethan McCoy Rogers's avatar

This is a great article.

One minor complication about the statement that writing first developed from its administrative power:

I think the current interpretation of the emergence of Chinese characters is that they were used in religious practices, most importantly the reception of messages from spirits, before the development of a literate administration. So, by the time the state developed enough to use characters, it had to respect them as sacred objects. I wonder sometimes if this sacredness explains why they put up with a very unnecessarily complicated writing system.

There’s a little bit of an analogy with the way that some people today treat literacy as necessary to communicate with the culture, or with the great thinkers, or however they may put it.

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Mira Kamdar's avatar

I admit to being dragged kicking and screaming and in deep denial into the post-literate age. This helped me -- a highly literate person of a certain relatively advanced age -- to calmly consider what is happening, though it still fills me with despair at what will be lost.

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