James Marriott
speaker
547 appearances
7 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 31 Aug
James Marriott’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 5.
Appearances
You're constantly thinking about the past because you need to preserve the past.
And the advent of writing in...
Ancient Greece, it's often argued, was the cause of an intellectual revolution because suddenly you free up so much cognitive space from memory and skills of criticism, skills of analysis become far more important.
And you're no longer limited to the kinds of memorable thoughts that are required to store information in your mind.
So you don't have to...
thing not everything that you know has to be encoded in like a vivid story or proverb you have access to more abstract more kind of boring kinds of information but these boring kinds of information like abstract logic underpin our whole society but you need writing to get there but also if you've got an oral culture which elevates memory that suggests that a kind of reverence for the elderly is a sort of immediate follow-on because the older you are
No, it's totally true.
And I mean, this is a point that was made by people like Walter Ong, and it's also been backed up by...
modern anthropologists.
Jared Diamond has a great book, The World of Yesterday, about hunter-gatherer communities.
And he talks about how they have this intense care and reverence for old people because he says, you know, your old people are like your encyclopedias, your hydrographic charts.
They have the long memories.
And if you lose them, you lose like a whole wealth of information.
It's like someone turning the internet off.
They're the people who remember what you did to get through a famine.
They're the people who remember where the poisonous plants are.
And
When you are no longer reliant on memory and you've got it all written down, old people lose some of their function because you just have it all on a bit of papyrus or a bit of pot shard next to you.
And the emphasis of society, the argument goes, moves towards young people, moves towards like cognitive speed, criticism.
new ways of thinking and the whole kind of like social emphasis of society subtly shifts.
Showing 461–480 of 547 · page 24 of 28
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