The alphabet, monotheism, the absolute, and the universal law

With meaningless signs for meaningless sounds, the alphabet required absolute abstraction. Absolute abstraction enabled the abstract absolute.

Monotheism was not merely an arithmetic reduction of the number of gods to one. It was a completely different intellectual and ethical concept. Read more in: Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect.

The birth of One God

Neil Postman recollected that his interest in media was stirred by a “prophet far more formidable than McLuhan, more ancient than Plato.” He refers to the Decalogue, the Second Commandment of which “prohibits the Israelites from making concrete images of anything: ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water beneath the earth’.”[1]

Postman wonders why “the God of these people would have included instructions on how they were to symbolize, or not symbolize, their experience.” He notes that such an ethical instruction assumed a connection “between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture.” He writes:

We may hazard a guess that a people who are being asked to embrace an abstract, universal deity would be rendered unfit to do so by the habit of drawing pictures or making statues or depicting their ideas in any concrete, iconographic forms. The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter a culture.[2]

So, if the First Amendment means to protect media from the government, the Second Commandment meant to protect God from media.

The development of monotheism among the Hebrews was influenced by a combination of many factors. Some prerequisites for monotheism related to the nomadic and seminomadic lifestyle of the Semitic tribes. Normally, the gods were derived from natural forces and attached to certain places or natural elements, which made them specialized in certain activities. This was not the case for nomads. Their deities traveled with them and tended to be attached to the people, not places or elements. People became important enough to be considered “chosen.” As Robert Logan points out, “Their idea of a wandering god, a god of no fixed place, was incorporated into the monotheistic notions of god developed later by Moses under the influence of literacy.” [3]

Nomadism, however, was typical for many tribes and thus could not become the key for developing monotheism. Something else was required. The alphabet, of course.

Moses was educated in Egypt, but he also lived among the Midianites and even married the daughter of their leader. As Logan points out, the biblical Midianites are the very same Seirites who were Sinai miners under the Egyptians and who borrowed phonetic signs form them. Therefore, Moses had to be familiar with both hieroglyphics and the proto alphabet.

Moses went to Mount Sinai and received “two tables of testimony, tables of stone, written with the finger of God” (Ex. 31:18). Logan proposes that these events,

…represent the historic transition of three separate innovations in the cultural and religious life of the Israelites:

1. Their first use of an alphabetic script

2. Their first adherence to a codified system of law and morality

3. Their first acceptance of a true and complete form of monotheism

The concepts of codified law and alphabetic writing were ideas that the Hebrews borrowed from other cultures but the introduction of monotheism at Mount Sinai represents a historic first for all of mankind.[4]

Logan does not insist on a causal link between those three innovations. But he states that their simultaneity was not coincidental; they at least reinforced each other. He supports his view with a quote from Innis:

The written letter replaced the graven image. Concentration on the abstract in writing opened the way for an advance from blood relationship to universal ethical standards, to the influence of the prophets in opposition to the absolute power of kings, and to an emphasis on monotheism.[5]

Thus, the intellectual capacity for abstraction, fostered by the alphabet, facilitated an ethical pattern wherein the prophets’ knowledge of God became true knowledge able to overcome the will of kings. The ethical supremacy of the prophets over kings held significant political implications for the Hebrews, as it could “legitimize” their exodus from slavery. While it may appear unusual today, the transition from slavery to freedom demanded some sort of “legal” validation. If the God of slaves outperformed the gods of the mightiest Earth king, the Pharaoh, then the Hebrews deserved to be free, and the Pharaoh could not demand them back. The universal God-moralist turned out to be mightier then specialized gods, who were essentially mythical craftsmen with certain competencies. The fact that the ever-mightier God promised the Hebrews their own fate and their own land had to be recognized by the Pharaoh and, therefore, by all others. In a sense, the supremacy of monotheism over polytheism bought the Israelites their way out of Egyptian slavery.

Monotheism was not merely an arithmetic reduction of the number of gods to one. It was a completely different intellectual and ethical concept. The multiplicity of gods allowed humans to choose between them for different practical purposes. When you can select a god-patron for various daily needs, the power of such a god and loyalty to him or her are relative. Under polytheism, there is no absolute, and everything is negotiable, including truth. In polytheistic beliefs, it is quite possible that things happen against the will of the gods.

In monotheism, one God becomes the absolute power, the cause of everything. Monotheism automatically brings the concept of absolute and final truth. Being the cause of everything, absolute God demands absolute loyalty. The notion of personal morality emerges, allowing for the development of law as abstract moral guidance rather than simply a set of arbitrary and practical punishments.

What was so special about the alphabet that contributed to the emergence of monotheism? It was that “highest order of abstract thinking” noticed by Postman. A God that does not need representation in any visible form and can be contemplated only through the “invisible” Word must be of superior power. He also can be only one, as he fills in all the space of the divine. Nobody with shared power can possess absolute power; absolute power is non-shareable.

The coding of meaningful words and ideas by meaningless signs representing invisible and meaningless sounds elevated the cognitive faculty of abstraction to the height at which the notion of absolute abstraction had to emerge. Absolute abstraction enabled the abstract absolute. The emergence of monotheism was a peculiar and unique cognitive tweak caused by the alphabet and supported and amplified by the ethnographic and political circumstances.

So, the might of a single God “authorized” the freedom of the Israelites and obliged them with the covenant. “The Ten Commandments are without a doubt a unique element, which created a new level of morality not previously known to humankind” writes Logan.[6] The single and almighty God brought to the Jews and to humankind the utterly abstract concept of the moral absolute, which entailed an entire universe of previously unknown ethical rules and philosophical principles.

The Greeks, who invented the first fully-fledged alphabet, “absolutized” the concept of the absolute and abstraction even more and passed it on to the Romans and eventually to Western civilization.

The alphabet, alienation from Nature, and the disruption of magical (analog) thinking

As the alphabet elevated religious mysticism to the highest possible level of abstraction, the magical connections between the supernatural and the natural were severed, thus completing the detachment of humans from Nature. Prior to that, symbolic practices of early humans were bound to the material world through symbolic resemblances. Magical thinking relied on analogy, where everything acts like something else. Finding the appropriate analogies was the leading “scientific,” ideological, and ethical principle. The true absolute, however, does not require concrete exemplification through analogies. Any analogies would have degraded it and undermined its transcendent universality, the source of its power. The true absolute is solely grounded in itself and encompasses everything else in the world. It also cannot be confined to an image; hence, any reduction of the divine to an image is blasphemy.

Logan connects his analysis of the invention of monotheism by the Hebrews to the search for universal law. He writes:

Before Hebrew monotheism, the law or rule of a god was limited to the geographical zone over which he held sway. With the advent of an omnipresent god whose law applied everywhere, the idea of a universal law developed.[7]

The Hebrews were the first to introduce monotheism, but other cultures found their own paths to the universal principle governing the world. It is perhaps safe to say that the alphabet, as the ultimate abstraction, provided the shortest route. However, writing in general, at the stage of phonetic abstractions, incited abstract thinking anyway. This led to the pursuit of universal laws in all cultures that had advanced sufficiently in their development of writing.

Like the Hebrews after adopting the phonetic elements from the Egyptians, the Greeks directed their intellectual effort to the search of the absolute immediately after adopting the alphabet. Unlike the Hebrews, however, the Greeks had a range of competing universal principles, including atomism or the abstract concept of motion. Among these competing concepts, the notion of Logos, which is closely associated with the idea of a monotheistic god, eventually gained prominence. Logan writes:

Explicit in the systems of Anaximander and Heraclitus and implicit in the other Ionian systems is the notion that nature is ruled by law or Logos: “All things come to pass in accordance with this Logos” (Heraclitus, fragment).

The Hebrews’ God and the Greeks’ Logos were morphologically compatible as an opposition to tribal relativism and the multiplicity of gods. God and Logos, however, had their inner frictions. God was transcendental; the early God often even assumed verification by a miracle, i.e., magical evidence in concrete situations, which was obviously a residue of orality. Logos, on the contrary, was rationally comprehended and knew no miracles; it was a phenomenon of reasoning, not transcendence. Later, in the Age of Reason, Logos rebelled against God and established its power in secular life.

Thinking in universal categories

The other great Axial cultures developed their own universal principles, too, as soon as the major effects of writing came into play. For example, Ong directly connects the emergence of major religions to the “inward turn” enabled by literacy, calling Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam “the great introspective religious traditions” and pointing out that they were made possible by writing and all of them had sacred texts.[8]

In various “introspective” philosophical and religious teachings, the notion of universal law may not be articulated as explicitly as in the Hebrew concept of one God or the Greek concept of Logos. Nonetheless, concepts such as Karma, Nirvana, Samsara, Tao, and others represent the same search for universal principles. Some of these concepts still retain elements of analogy, as seen in Samsara, which represents the cosmic cycle of life common to many mythological systems, or Tao, the concept of the world order that is analogous to a way or path. However, developing concepts like Karma, Samsara, Tao, and others required a level of complexity and abstraction inherent in writing systems that abolished the resemblance of symbols to material objects and themselves developed a significant level of abstraction, for which phonetization is likely a necessary attribute. Most importantly, despite possible vestiges of analog thinking in these concepts, they represent universalism, which is impossible, or rather impractical, in magical thinking.

The transcendental was well-known to oral and magical cultures with all their mysticism, but it was primarily related to sensory perception. The transcendental could be attained through spiritual practices involving specific bodily exercises or the use of substances. However, such transcendence would come from perception, not conception. In oral cultures, the altered state of consciousness was pretty much an altered state of the body. Literacy enabled interaction with the transcendental without altering the physio-chemical processes in the body.

The literate universality directly claims its ultimate level of abstraction, whether it be the Christian God or the East Asian Tao. It may never be fully comprehended, but it calls for cognition. Some spiritual practices, including bodily exercises, may be employed to reach or approach the absolute in a literate culture, but these could be seen as residues of oral spirituality and magical mysticism. The absolute, however, is the subject of contemplating, not experiencing – or, rather, contemplating it is the highest form of experiencing it.

Just as abstraction separates thought from sensory experience, the absolute does not require any involvement of the body. Inner vision, a secluded sense of vision that transcends from the sensory to the cognitive realm while numbing all other senses, serves as a sufficient conduit for an individual towards the absolute. No absolute, whether it be God, scientific truth, or a moral imperative, can depend on an individual’s state of mind or body – they would not be absolute with such a dependence.

The leap of humans to the ultimate edge of abstract thinking and to universal principles were the cornerstones of Karl Jaspers’ concept of the Axial Age. This leap happened in the main Axial regions during the 8^th to 3^rd centuries BCE. As quoted earlier, Jaspers writes:

The Mythical Age, with its tranquility and self-evidence, was at an end. The Greek, Indian and Chinese philosophers were unmythical in their decisive insights, as were the prophets in their ideas of God. Rationality and rationally clarified experience launched a struggle against the myth (logos against mythos); a further struggle developed for the transcendence of the One God against non-existent demons, and finally an ethical rebellion took place against the unreal figures of the gods.[9]

Jaspers did not relate this transformation of thinking to writing, leaving the mystery of the origin of the Axial Age unsolved. However, a view from the media ecological perspective connects these changes in thinking to the development of writing, with a special focus on the affordances for abstraction triggered by phonetization.

The reversal of alphabetic universality to oralist relativity

Print literacy strengthened the absolute through standardization. However, the mass media with their necessity to accommodate the interests of niche audiences, and especially electronic media, initiated the process of the reversal of the absolute. The idea of the absolute began to be undermined when people started applying relativism to everything.

The first who noticed this was Walter Lippmann. In his 1922 Public Opinion, he wrote that the Darwinian theory of evolution coincided with technological progress and became a “general term.” He predicted that the same would happen with the theory or relativity, which gained popularity in science at about that time. He wrote that, “Relativity, like Evolution, after receiving a number of intelligible but somewhat inaccurate popular expositions in its scientific aspect, will be launched on a world-conquering career.”[10] He even predicted that the new phenomenon would be called “relativismus.”

Perhaps, just as Darwinism coincided with industrial progress in the late 19th century, Einstein’s theory of relativity also coincided with something in the first third of the 20th century – namely, the electric age and the rise of the mass media, mass culture, and the “mass man” (Ortega y Gasset) – which eventually contributed to dissolving the idea of the absolute.

Mass culture even produced a caricature of polytheism: the pantheon of superheroes. Comic books represented the antiliterate perversion of print literacy. Unlike ancient gods or Christian archangels and saints (which represented a polytheistic/oral element within monotheistic religion), superheroes did not patronize certain trades or areas of life. But they possessed individual divine attributes in the form of superpowers.

Interestingly, right after his interpretation of the Second Commandment as a cultural and media transition from analog imaging to abstract wording, Neil Postman highlights a cultural reversal incited in the 1980s by television: “People like ourselves who are in the process of converting their culture from word-centered to image-centered might profit by reflecting on this Mosaic injunction.”[11] Comics and TV were image-centered indeed. By reconnecting the world with the emotional expectations of viewers, television undermined the objectivity of abstraction fostered by literacy, and the cultural authority of the absolute with it.

By the time digital media arrived, the relativity of the absolute as a social construct had become conventional wisdom. The absolute, one of the pillars of alphabetic and then print literacy, has lost its power. In highly literate societies, which suffer from digital reversal the most, the absolute is routinely challenged in science and morality; it holds on in religion, but religion itself is weakened, in no small part due to being the main stronghold of the absolute.

Read more in: Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect.

---

See also books by Andrey Mir:

• The Digital Reversal. Thread-saga of Media Evolution (2025)

• The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)

• Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)

• Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization (2020)

• Human as media. The emancipation of authorship (2014)

---

[1] Postman, Neil. (2006 [1985]). Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 9.

[2] Postman, Neil. (2006 [1985]). Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 9.

[3] Logan, Robert. (2004 [1986]). The Alphabet Effect, p. 94.

[4] Logan, Robert. (2004 [1986]). The Alphabet Effect, p. 96.

[5] Innis, Harold. (2008 [1951]). Bias of Communication, p. 39.

[6] Logan, Robert. (2004 [1986]). The Alphabet Effect, p. 99.

[7] Logan, Robert. (2004 [1986]). The Alphabet Effect, p. 116.

[8] Ong, Walter. (2002 [1982]). Orality and Literacy, p. 103.

[9] Jaspers, Karl. (2021 [1949]). The Origin and Goal of History, p. 10.

[10] Lippmann, Walter. (1998 [1922]). Public Opinion, p. 106

[11] Postman, Neil. (2006 [1985]). Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 9.