(One of the fun things about Chinese characters)
Li Huimin｜Text
In the first book in my upcoming "Creatures on a Mission" sci-fi series, Seeding the Earth, I set the meme of people's determination to master writing as almost impossible because there is no writing. lead to a massive riot.
Only when human civilization emerges can it be considered that it has truly stepped out of the ignorant stage of companionship with animals, and has thus entered the top of the earth's biological chain.
Then, how to judge whether a society or an ethnic group has civilization? In other words, what are the standards of civilization?
From the perspective of archaeology, there are currently three internationally recognized civilization standards: one is the formation of cities, that is, the development of human groups to a relatively large scale, and there are specific standards for this scale, There must be more than 5,000 people; the second is the appearance of characters; the third is that this society has ceremonial buildings; the so-called ceremonial buildings are places similar to ancestral temples. Obviously, this standard means that ethnic groups should have common beliefs. Later, some people felt that these three criteria were too harsh, and proposed that as long as there is writing and one of the other two criteria, it can also be called civilization. However, Oriental scholars believe that these three criteria are not enough, and this society must also have metallurgical skills and be able to manufacture bronze ware.
It can be seen that no matter how the standard of civilization is set, "writing" is recognized as an indispensable condition. In other words, a society cannot be called civilization if it does not have writing.
In my opinion, these three criteria can be summed up in one sentence: Civilization is a large-scale human society with writing and common beliefs.
Some people may be surprised: almost everyone can read and hyphenate characters now, don’t they think words are so useful? In fact, this feeling is the same as people who don't think air and water are so great in daily life. It is a kind of blindness.
Why is writing the most important factor for a society to move towards civilization? I think there may be two reasons: first, with writing, human wisdom and achievements can be passed on and accumulated from generation to generation; second, writing is a necessary means for implementing unified administrative management. If only by word of mouth, it is difficult for a regime's decree to reach the area under its jurisdiction accurately and completely. Because relying on memory alone, it is difficult to prevent the instructions and information to be conveyed from being out of shape, isn't it? A sentence, when it reaches the tenth person's ear, may become a completely different meaning. Many of us have played similar information passing games, right? Therefore, if there is no writing, it will be difficult for human beings to progress, and it will be impossible to form a large-scale unified regime.
Human beings without writing are like birds without wings, and they are destined not to have a bigger world. Therefore, writing is the capillary for the development and growth of civilization.
I once had an idea that in a certain period in the future of human beings, just like when Qin Shihuang unified China and implemented "books with the same text" so that the Chinese nation has a unified and standardized writing, with the With the continuous development and upgrading of human civilization, countries on the earth will disappear, and the writing of all mankind may be unified into one, and the last "earth writing" is very likely to be Chinese characters. It's just that the unification of the final earth characters into Chinese characters may not be mandatory, but a common choice of mankind! why? Please see the next issue of "Why Chinese Characters Are So Special".
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