Unless you spent time at graduate school a few decades ago studying the humanities, you likely will not have heard of George Steiner. But while he was alive he was surely one of the handful of true geniuses on the planet. Or at least true scholars. Though he wanted us all to speak many languages and read The Iliad in the original Greek, as he did when he was six, he knew that “the humanities do not humanize.”
His name came up a few nights ago at my dinner with Roger who, as I said, can recite whole reams of poetry from memory.
Once home I watched a few of Steiner’s lectures. (I was happy to find them on YouTube.) In this one —a defense of the book, really—he says at least two remarkable things. First, about seven minutes in, he reports on his time in South Africa during the apartheid era. While there he complained to one of the leaders of ANC that they ought to be able to able to kill more of their oppressors, as even the Jews, who did not have nearly the numerical advantage black South Africans enjoyed, managed to do in Germany.
As Steiner recounts it, the answer he got from the ANC leader went this way:
‘You Jews you have your Talmud, your Midrash, your Mishna. Communists among us, who are few, we have the Capital. Christians have their gospel. The Muslims among us have a Quran. We have nothing. Africa has not produced a book.’
Steiner goes on:
It was an enormous answer. Think of it. We do not have a single foundational classic by which we could come to rally around an image ourselves. It needs a lot of thinking to grasp the full power and depth and scruple of that answer: We have no book.
After this Steiner talks about the value of memorizing literature, “by heart” and speaks of political prisoners in the Soviet Union who kept themselves alive during imprisonment because of their ability to recite whole books from memory. “They can’t take it from you. Can they? What you have by heart the bastards cannot touch.”
I listened to all that and thought of the fact that more and more the humanities is an ignored major at university and that globally memorization of any kind is, thanks to the internet, essentially a dead skill, the
Later in the lecture, Steiner says: “A culture decays in precise proportion to its neglect or suppression of memorization.”
Think he’s wrong? What can you bring to the argument that unlike me (and like Roger), you do not need to look up?
What I find stunning is that Steiner accepts this answer, an answer rife with contradiction and just plain untrue in the way that any conflation of a people and a continent is untrue. For me, the tastier question is what makes a clearly brilliant humanist so likely to ask such a question and then accept such an answer that on just about any other subject he would require a higher standard? Quite simply: white supremacy. There are no people without a story—whether that story is memorized and passed down verbally or in writing. In other words, there are no people without a book. There are many many stories and many many peoples. But the ideology of white supremacy has been so successful that even a black ANC member from 40 years ago found himself describing the peoples of Africa by the metric of a propaganda that conflates color with culture, written ideology — no matter how narrow or how widespread— with humanness, and violence with rationality. I’m sure Steiner was a brilliant lecturer and there is surely goodness to be had from memorization. The question worth asking now (if we don’t want to descend into nostalgia for the good old days and all of the chauvinism that is part of that and if we take for granted the value of memorization) is what things do young people around the world memorize today and what beautiful thing about humanity do the specificity of their endeavors reveal?