Books are the Preferred Medium, Even for the Gods

By Ooi Kee Beng, Penang Monthly August 2023 editorial

“BEST PRACTICES” is quite a clever term. I had trouble accepting it at first, trained to be relativistic as I am by the social sciences. I had to ask questions like: Who decides such things? Who decides that a practice is “best”?

Over time, I came to see the need for that expression — and the usefulness of it — in almost any field of human endeavour. I came to realise that the term does not need to imply anything ideological or egoistic, and is most appropriate when understood anthropologically.

Any activity carried out over a substantive period of time will evolve effective practices and habits, if the conditions for that activity — and the goals of it — remain stable enough.

This may sound strange at first reading, but I think the format of the Book is actually a best practice, a human creation that has reached a maximally evolved state. And that is one of the most impactful universally.

Books started with speech. We learned to communicate with utterings, and after millennia, we began to “write”, to make drawings and signs — on sand at first, on cave walls, and on anything that offered a useable surface.

More complicated early writings tended to be religious in different ways, and these were often carved onto bronzes, stamped onto pottery and chiselled onto pillars in palaces and temples. But be that as it may, they almost always told tales.

This telling of tales was an instinctive need in the human ape, satisfied through the development of language, and, later, the innovation of scripts.

Communicating with those around you may be satisfying, but the impact is very limited. What if what you say can be written down, captured on a medium that can last? What if that medium is also mobile? What if it can be mass produced?

Long story short, that line of challenges simplifies the development of script, of print and of books within human civilisation. Most interestingly, inter-civilisational inspiration was quite central to the global history of language, script, paper and printing. The Book, seen in that way, is a best practice developed for human communication over the centuries.

Humans do not live by bread alone; in fact, stories, tales, narratives are their sustenance.

Chatting, Communing and Coercing

But, of course, when humans communicate, they also manipulate. They make things up, be it for entertainment value, to ease remembering or for mind control.

Apart from stories that provided a basis for common knowledge, grand narratives that “made sense” of natural events, of societal events and of existence itself evolved. Power had to be understood and justified, life and death had to have meaning, and the generations had to be linked to heighten individual worth and position.

Religions developed, philosophies spread and ideologies appeared. Narratives glued humans together, justified power and anchored a society’s place in time and space. The Book is simply the best practice developed to facilitate all these ambitions.

Historically, access to books was limited in different ways. Learning to read, not to mention to write, was mainly reserved for those with the luxury of time and resources. Priests and princes kept libraries; books were precious and interpretation was divine.

Making reading and writing a common skill is a modern phenomenon. The novel is new, the newspaper is new. Today, anyone can be a reader and a writer. Anyone can create new stories, retell old ones and read old texts anyway they like.

The depth to which the impact of books go can be recognised most easily in the following way. Those who believe that gods (or God, if you prefer) are obsessed with a need to inform humans about eternal laws and the meaning of life will have to agree that even these higher beings, after gaining experience over immortal time and endless space, finally also chose “The Book” as the best format for communication with us mortals.

Spreading scriptures and casting spells, giving commands and announcing decrees were all well served by the many practices that went into producing books; first singularly and then as mass production.

Those who do not entertain the existence of mentoring immortals will consider it simply to be the doings of mortal prophets, philosophers and propagandists, who, through the ages, recognised books to be the “best practice” for messaging across time and space.