In 1775, the city of Leipzig banned a novel. It also banned the clothes. Goethe's 'The Sorrows of Young Werther' had appeared the year before, and young men across Europe had taken to dressing as its hero in a blue jacket and a yellow waistcoat. Denmark and Italy prohibited the book outright. Goethe added a cautionary verse to the second edition, which tells you something about the pressure a twenty-six-year-old novelist was under.
\n\nAnybody who has read a recent study linking reading to a lower risk of dementia will struggle to place this. The habit now arrives pre-approved, recommended by doctors and schools and the sort of column that lists what successful people do before breakfast. For most of its history it arrived with a warning attached.
\n\nPlato's 'Phaedrus' has Socrates tell the story of Theuth, the Egyptian god who presents writing to King Thamus as a remedy for memory. Thamus declines the compliment. The invention, he says, will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who learn it, because they will trust external marks instead of remembering from within.
\n\nThe objection concerns what a technology does to the person using it, and it is recognisably the same objection later…
Original source: https://www.timesnownews.com/lifestyle
