From Plato’s Phaedrus:

Socrates: At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters.

Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god hiimself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and how his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts.

But when it came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied:

“O most ingenius Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is not an aid to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many thing and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

I was in a Noah’s Bagles today, got a lox sandwich for $6.29 and I gave the clerk a $20 bill. He took my money and stared at it, trying to figure out how much change to give me, and then entered it in the machine to find out, pausing still to figure out in what combination to give me my change. As this was happening, the story of Theuth came to mind, and I thought how much technology has hindered us from using our brains, such that the regular use of calculators and cash registers have, for the most part, made us “retarded” in our ability to count figures or perform otherwise simple memory functions. There are very few, if any, people anymore like Thomas Aquinas who memorized numerous volumes of theological and philosophical commentaries, and dictated his Summa Theologica from memory (even after falling asleep, all the while his secretary continuting to take dictation). Compare that to today, where Bibles are so easy to get a hold of we therefore commit precious little of it to memory. Once, the Bible had no chapter and verses, and now it does, thanks largely to a 16th century French printer who wanted to give a memory aid to it, and yet we don’t bother because of the Bible’s ubiquitousness.

The mind is a muscle that must be exercised daily, and memory is the way we do it. Technological aids are a double edged sword, and in some ways, Thamus was right. Technology has done little to help our memories, but done much to help our reminiscence. The use of technology makes us appear wise, but in some ways is progressively enfeebling us more and more to the point of turning us into intellectual veal.