Communication is essential to all living creatures and is most developed in humans, but it exists only when information is transmitted, received and is understood by a recipient. The earliest written forms are inscribed clay tablets (Cuneiform script) from Babylonia. We also have the characters and hieroglyphs of the ancient Chinese and Egyptians. Even when papyrus was invented, these scripts were still cumbersome and so were simplified. Even then, they were not easy to read because they did not contain individual words, more a depiction of an event, action or idea. This meant that the reader had already to have a previous understanding of what the characters were likely to represent.
However a radically different system was invented by the Phoenicians and what we now call the alphabet was developed further by the Greeks and others into a digitised system whereby spoken sounds were broken down to single letters. These letters did not themselves have any meaning but, because they enabled sounds to be put together into different ways that meant that words could be organised (punctuated) further into phrases, sentences and paragraphs.
Digitisation and the ‘chip’ now makes it easy to combine numerous forms of communication into one space, with the result that our senses now have to cope with assaults by simultaneous sounds, moving images, gaudy colours, flashing words and flickering news flashes. Even the sense of touch can now be replicated by a gloved hand. It used to be said that we suffer because there is not enough communication. Today’s problem seems to be that there is too much.
Getting that balance right is important as I know from personal experience when, in a life which has been active, I have been generally criticised more for where I have failed to communicate rather than for any benefits my efforts might have gained.
Some say, a picture is worth a thousand words and I recall in the early seventies when there was much talk of population growth. TV celebs said that there was no problem because one hundred thousand people could easily fit into Wembley Stadium. It just so happened that a few days earlier we had spent an afternoon at the Iron Age Encampment at the top of Crickley Hill, and from there it was easy to see the impact on the landscape of the one hundred thousand folk who, at that time, each lived within the towns of Cheltenham and Gloucester. The picture I have in my mind is an awful lot bigger than two Wembley Stadiums. I realised then, that the pictures we hold in our mind are crucial in giving us a sense of proportion. The TV Celebs saw a stadium of about 500 acre’s as being the impact of a population increase, I saw a more factual 36080.
I remember things like this an early mentor (Ernest Mapperson) was keen to help me see ‘the big picture.’ He did this to ensure my mind did not get stuck in one place because, as he said, ‘If anybody’s mind dwells on one thing for too long a mole-hill becomes a mountain, and all sense of proportion goes out of the window.” It was his big picture that helped me to see that every single creature from bacteria upwards has a role in creation, and that at the bottom of the hierarchy their role is to eat the waste of those above them.
This continues right up the food chain until we too are broken down into the minerals and elements from which we are made. This process was even set to music in the Yorkshire folk song ‘On Ilkley Mooar baht’at, where its’ closing verse triumphantly relates how we ‘Get our Owen back’ when we eat the ducks which have eaten the worms which ate the bacteria at the bottom of the food chain.
Like any sensible Yorkshireman, I came to see that there is no vice or virtue about this natural creative recycling process and therefore no cause for human arrogance in the process of life. This simple truth then led me to conclude that we humans should be mindful of our limits. And not, as do some, promote the notion that lower species have the same sensibilities and capacities as humans, nor, as do others, strive to select or create perfected specimens of humanity.
Maybe this hierarchy was in the mind of St Matthew as he recorded the words. “Blessed are the humble for they shall inherit the earth” and was also behind the later, more personal, quotation, “Do not think too lowly or too highly of yourselves.”
This latter thought prompts the question. Could an excess of lowly humility paradoxically lead to high feelings of self-righteousness? And I wonder if this topic was discussed at the group who meet in a Community Centre in Dakota County, Minnesota. Outside of which the notice board reads:
The Low Self-Esteem Support Group will meet on Thursday at 7 PM.
Please use the back door
View from the Pew 