>I tried to read Kirkpatrick Sale's _Human Scale_ with great
>expectations. By the time I gave up on the sodden mess, my thought:
>It sure would've been beautiful had that book been small.
Sale's wife (ex? dunno if they're still together) is a prominent literary agent, but in this interview with Kevin Kelly, he declares literacy, like civilization, a disaster.
<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/saleskelly_pr.html>
[...]
Kelly: No, the point of technology is to make higher-quality and more diverse products than we can make by hand.
Sale: No, quantity, quantity. We have a mass society, a mass market, and mass production. Mass quantity is why we have computers.
Kelly: We have technology not just to make mass things but to make new things we could not make other ways.
Sale: I regard that as trivial.
Kelly: OK, then you tell me. What was the effect of printing technology? Did the invention of printing just allow us to make more books? Or did it allow new and different kinds of books to be written? What did it do? It did both.
Sale: That wasn't mass society back then, but what it eventually achieved was a vast increase in the number of books produced; and it vastly reduced forests in Europe so as to produce them.
Kelly: I don't think so. The forests of Europe were not cut down to create books for Europe. Printing allowed several things. It increased literacy. And it allowed more varieties of books to be written - and faster. It allowed better communication.
Sale: Literacy does go hand in hand with industrialism, but at the same time, it destroys orality. No oral traditions and no oral abilities.
Kelly: There's no doubt that technology obsoletes many things.
Sale: Right. So, let's not simply say how wonderful is literacy, without saying what the price is for this literacy, without asking what is it that we are now reading with all of this fancy literacy. The truth is that we are reading little of merit.
Kelly: I would say that in oral traditions, there was very little of merit said. There is this tendency to think that the old things, the old times, the oral traditions, the tribal traditions, were somehow more lofty, that people of those times used things more judiciously, that they didn't gossip, that they didn't use good things for trash. This is complete nonsense.
Sale: Sure, people gossiped, and sure, people said nasty things. At the same time, these oral traditions were what kept these societies together for eons. If we lose oral tradition and all that goes with it, we lose a due regard for nature and the preservation of nature. The successive empires that have driven civilizations for the last 6,000 years have had, almost uniformly, no regard for nature. That's why they were as short-lived as they were: in addition to having very little regard for the majority of their own population, they had no regard for the rest of the living world. That is essential to the peril we're in today.
Kelly: Do you see civilization as a catastrophe?
Sale: Yes.
Kelly: All civilizations?
Sale: Yes. There are some presumed benefits, but civilizations as such are all catastrophic, which is why they all end by destroying themselves and the natural environment around them.
[...]