In his last book, “Moses Man and Monotheistic Religion,” Freud argues that the advent of the alphabet marks the transition from prehistory to history, from the primitive unconscious to the consciousness of historical civilization.
For the first time, a human group, the Israelites on Sinai, has technology that enables the entire community (not just a caste of scribes) to write and read rapidly, transmitting for generations and millennia a thought (so can we say an “intelligence”?) and keeping it unchanged.
The first effect of “God’s writing, engraved on tablets,” is precisely ethics. What for Christians is the Bible, for Jews is the Torah, the law. Beginning with the Ten Commandments, it codifies a set of rules, fixed and transmitted thanks to the artificial memory of scripture, that regulates every aspect of life-even the most intimate-of God’s people.
Thus, in a sense, it can be said that the most important ethical code of Western culture, the Bible, is an effect of the invention of a cognitive technique, alphabetic writing.
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