Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/08320_Field_TCGG T85.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 934b | 16 lines

of phonetic letters in shaping our Western world.

     That the Greeks were able to do more with the written
word than other communities such as the Babylonian and
Egyptian was, according to H. A. L. Fisher (A History of Europe ,
p. 19) that they were not under “the paralysing control of
organized priestcraft.” But even so, they had only a brief period
of exploration and discovery before settling into a clichéd
pattern of repetitive thought. Carothers feels that the early
Greek intelligentsia not only had the stimulus of sudden access
to the acquired wisdom of other peoples, but, having none of
its own, there were no vested interests in acquired knowledge
to frustrate the immediate acceptance and development of the
new. It is this very situation which today puts the Western
world at such a disadvantage, as against the “backward”
countries. It is our enormous backlog of literate and