Part 2. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein Knows Something that Changed the World

Elizabeth L. Eisenstein is currently professor emerita at the University of Michigan. She’s a brilliant thinker and has the awards and experience to prove it. Her initial work, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, is a sizeable (2 vol.), scholarly work that described the change that accompanied the “shift from script to print”. In it she evaluated the impact of the printing press on Western thought, and ultimately on the Protestant Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Renaissance. An abridged version in paperback is called, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, latest ed. 2005, Cambridge University Press, 1983.

The Gutenberg Printing Press was a technology that truly changed the world. Eisenstein focused on the spread of printed information which changed the way “literate elites” in the West thought about and contributed to the body of knowledge of their time. She thinks of printing as an agent of change, certainly not the only one. She is not primarily interested in the movement from oral to literate tradition, but the changes in thinking that occurred as people moved from “one kind of literate culture to another.”

In terms of access, the Gutenberg Press was to the world of its time what digital text and image communications are to us.

If you want to know and think and ponder these realities, you have a fine companion in Elizabeth Eisenstein who truly gets it. She has recently published Divine Art, Infernal Machine, U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.

Imagine the differences in data collection, storage, access, and retrieval caused by the early proliferation of printing! One could not separate a printing press from its content. We can’t separate our devices from the Internet and i-content either. Without the content, the device is a paperweight (or a doorstop). Beware the tyrant with the keys to the content – the device becomes a propaganda machine.

In those days, the propaganda machine might not have had much competition. Think about worldview again. Let’s say that scribes are pretty slow, and expensive, so there aren’t many copies of anything. So even if you might have been literate, you might not have a copy of your own Bible, because it was simply not available.

Up until the point that people actually got a chance to learn to read, and then read the Bible for themselves, few people knew what the Bible really said. Thus their worldview was limited. But, even literate people had little access to the Bible before the Bible was printed and made available more widely. Some people who did have access to the Bible desired to control it.

People in power (Henry VIII, for example) had interpreted the Bible for other people, and, in may ways, to suit themselves. Reproducing information was costly, time-consuming, and, as a result, unavailable to most people. The Catholic Church did not object to printing itself, only to people who printed “heresy” based on how the Church interpreted heresy. Eisenstein cites a case in which a French king attempted to ban printing altogether, but failed. As is often the case with closely-held, personally valuable information, people were actually not told things that were in the Bible that might cause them to think the status quo could or should change.

Kings and tyrants, even today, find uneducated peasants much more tractable than educated ones. Literacy and access to information is a great liberator.

Each copy of one of those Gutenberg books was exactly the same. Amazing! People even thought it was magic! Consistency was the key! One could trust that what was on the page was the same in every copy made – they compared them to the originals. It was revolutionary – they had the Word of God, just alike, in their home and their church – not chained to the pulpit – right there on a table. The growth of public knowledge and individual thought began to produce change in many aspects of life.

Eisenstein’s most recent work has a chapter entitled, “Printing as a Protestant Weapon.” It was not just the sheer volume of published material that did the number on culture, it was the fact that anyone at all could put their thoughts out there – crazy or sublime, thoughtful or clueless –
ideas proliferated and culture changed. The “common man” as thinker was a radical, culture-warping phenomenon. Truth was out there for all to see.

I would submit that much the same thing happened when print became so commonplace that everyone could read what was happening around the world. Communism and socialism were revealed to be the deceptive, culture-eroding, primitive, death-dealing traps that they are. People read the truth in so many places that the truth could not be denied. They saw photos. They heard speakers. The individual man could see for himself that his family was in mortal danger!

Here in the United States we read, and listened on the radio. We read our newspapers and later watched on television. And we realized something, without many people telling us. The
words were true: what communism had, what Nazi-ism had, what socialism had, what Islamic
terrorists had was inferior to what WE had.

We’d better fight for what we believed or our lives would change immeasurably for the worse. So we fought WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf Wars I and II, and Afghanistan.

Old, wretched, even demented worldviews can only persist when deception replaces truth. Having the Word and words in one’s hand is a miracle every time. If we have truth, and we don’t share it, and we won’t read it, and we don’t use it, then we are clearly unequipped to deal
with falsehood.

There were leaps and bounds of technology, and it changed and grew. The printed word mattered, and its format was familiar, and suited to the capabilities of the time. We rode to
victory on our newspaper headlines!

Part 3: Steve Jobs and the i-World tomorrow.