Category Archives: History

Origin Stories and Being Thrown

by Tim Gorichanaz History, Information, Mahabharata

Humans are storytelling creatures, and some stories have been with us for as long as we’ve been human. Among these are, fittingly, stories of our own origins. It’s futile to try to pin down when such and such story originated—and what’s more, it’s mostly missing the point.

17th century RajasthanI manuscript of the Mahabharata depicting Vyasa narrating the Mahabharata to Ganesha, who serves as the scribe
Detail, 17th century Rajasthani manuscript of Ganesha recording the Mahabharata (Wikipedia)

I’m reading the Mahabharata, in Carol Satyamurti’s retelling, and the opening pages of the epic give a fascinating example of what I mean. The story begins with the story of its own origin, in crystal clear description. Yet by the story’s own story, it’s hard to say how exactly it came about. We are told that Vyasa, a seer, composed the poem, and then he dictated it to Ganesha, who wrote it down. Vyasa then taught the poem to a number of disciples, who recited it to a king to interrupt a sacrifice. Ugrashravas, a poet, was present at that event, and he later told the story to a group of ascetics in a forest. The Mahabharata tells us that the version within its pages is the one told by Ugrashravas—as if Vyasa and Ganesha already knew that Ugrashravas would go to the forest from the start.

So what should be made of this? Why not simplify matters by just saying that we’re reading what was written down by Ganesha? Or why not have Vyasa write it down himself? It’s all as if to suggest that if we are looking for origins we’ll wind up going around in circles.

It may be useful to think about this through the concept of thrownness from phenomenology. The idea is that we humans are “thrown” into our human situation. Part of what this means is that we don’t choose our starting conditions: we don’t pick our family, location and so on. As James Baldwin wrote memorably in Giovanni’s Room, “people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents.”

More deeply, being thrown means that there’s not an objective starting point for our lives. We don’t remember our first moments. Of course we must have started at some point, and certainly we have some impressionistic early memories, but our conscious lives seem to start up already on, sort of like how giraffes are born running.

The phenomenological concept describes human conscious experience as thrown, but it also seems to describe humanity more broadly. Our species evolved from some common ancestor with other primates, indeed with everything else alive today, shaped within and as part of our world… and so there never was a first human. And nor was there ever really a first story. Our stories about our origins seem to have emerged in the same way. Today we are thrown into them.

From register to blockchain

by Tim Gorichanaz Document, History, Technology
Stationers’ Register entry for Arden of Faversham, from Shakespeare Documented

In the early days of print, the Stationers’ Company in London had a monopoly on publishing. The guild created a register (the Stationers’ Register) that documented publishers’ rights to produce particular printed works. This served as a way to check the authenticity of printed works in a time when unauthorized copies were beginning to proliferate—if they didn’t correspond to the line in the register, they were probably illicit. (“Probably,” because, in practice, not all works were duly registered.)

The system worked well enough for some time, though there were some problems. As Adrian Johns writes in Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates, the Crown could supervene the register by way of royal patent—and so the systems of register and patent sometimes were at odds.

Other things that limited the register’s usefulness: It only existed in one place, so it was in practice difficult and costly for people to confirm its contents. And moreover, it was controlled by the Stationers’ Company, and so it could only be trusted to the extent that the company was trusted.

So much for early modernity. As Johns chronicles, concerns about piracy exploded since the time of the Stationers’ Register. And now that we have digital assets, which in principle can be reproduced infinitely, it’s as big an issue as ever.

For any document or piece of information, we need a way to determine whether we can trust it. This stands for both the legitimacy of the document’s production and distribution (as in say, currency and digital music) and its content (as in news stories).

The invention of print led to new forms of and urgency regarding piracy, and the register was one method of dealing with it. Now, with the world wide web, we are seeing this again. And to deal with contemporary piracy (among other issues related to information trust), we’re seeing the rise of a new technology: blockchain.

Blockchain is one of the world’s most exciting new technologies. As the internet revolutionized information sharing and communications, blockchain has the capacity to revolutionize the economy and many of our social systems. You’ve probably heard of bitcoin, which is the first platform built on blockchain technology, and in the coming decades you’re sure to hear of many more. Experts are likening the situation with blockchain to that of the internet protocol, which was invented in the 1970s but didn’t burst through the popular realm until the 1990s—in those terms, some say we’re in 1992.

In brief, a blockchain is a distributed ledger used to record transactions in a verifiable and inalterable way. As described in The Economist‘s briefing, blockchain “is a way of making and preserving truths.” The blockchain is something everyone can refer to, to determine who owns what and where it came from. This goes for digital goods as much as physical ones—the blockchain prevents digital things from being reproduced infinitely. Importantly, when we compare it to the Stationers’ Register, it can be checked for practically no cost, and it doesn’t rely on an external authority as a grounds for trust.

Blockchain is sure to turn any number of industries upside down. If it relies on documentation, change is in the air. The question, though, is in the details. For a smattering, you can check out:

Original texts: Thinking about the Bible and beyond

by Tim Gorichanaz History

I recently read the book Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, by Bart D. Ehrman, on my brother’s recommendation. The book traces the transformations—intentional and otherwise—that gave us the Bible that we have today. Ehrman discusses how copyists over the ages altered the text to, for instance, obfuscate the women and harmonize the accounts of Jesus in the New Testament. The book problematizes the situation for those that favor a literal interpretation of the Bible: If we believe the Bible is God’s word, or at least divinely inspired, then it’s a major challenge that we don’t have any of the original texts.

(As an aside, Ehrman doesn’t seem to appreciate a narrative, pathic reading of the Bible as a tome of mythological force. He himself seems to fall prey to the literal reading of the Bible that he denounces. For a literate, rather than literal, view of the Bible, see Rob Bell’s recent book What is the Bible?)

“The original texts”—what does that mean? While this maybe ought to be a straightforward question, it is anything but. Ehrlman describes how, for example, Paul’s letter to the Galatians (part of the New Testament canon) was most likely originally dictated and immediately existed in multiple manuscript copies that were sent out (to the “Galatians,” which demonym is itself a bit ambiguous) and then copied further. Our earliest version of Galatians is from over a hundred years after these “originals.” Since then, the letter was copied and transformed by any number of hands and cultures, generating a family tree of differences.

The printing press, when it came along in the 15th century, lent some stability to textual reproduction. But even with print, it’s no easier to say what the “original” is. Shakespeare, for instance—there’s the perduring question of the original scripts (and also of pronunciation!). In any printed text, which is the original: is it the first edition, of which there may be many and multiple printings? The printer’s proof? How about the second edition which includes corrections of the printer’s errors? How about the author’s final manuscript (if such a thing exists)?

And today, when many documents are “digital native,” our situation is in many ways more like a scriptorium than a printing house. Getting to the “original” is as devilish a task as ever. Think about quotes we come across that appear with some variation and with attribution to any number of people that we can’t pin down where they actually came from.

All over, we’re reaching for originals. What we don’t seem to ask, is why. Why do we care about the original? It’s sure to be a case-by-case question. In some disputes, discerning what the original document actually said is of central importance. But in cases such as the Bible, I am tempted to conclude that it’s irrelevant.