Time Traveling With Erasmus

By Paul Roberts

One quick glance, and my computer tells me it is Saturday, March 9, 2024. 8:52 pm. Thirty-four degrees with a chance of light rain or snow. Move the cursor to a corner and up pops the 7 day forecast, along with a reminder that I need to “spring ahead” for daylight savings time. Headlines - sports/politics/economics - they all beg for my attention. And I can’t help but wonder, “What would Erasmus think of this?”

It’s crazy the amount of information that lies at my fingertips each day. Crazy enough that there are times when I try to imagine what life was like before the Internet…or computers…or daylight savings time…or calendars. Whoa, that’s too far back. Let’s bring that time machine forward again to, say, the early 1500’s, shortly after the first several decades of the Gutenberg Revolution…you know, the early days of the publishing industry.

Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus was a Dutch Christian humanist, Catholic theologian, educationalist, satirist, philosopher, and prolific writer. I came across Erasmus last week in my early morning “purely for pleasure” reading time. I’m glad that author Walter Stephens threw together a few thoughts on How Writing Made Us Human, 3000 BCE to Now, and turned it into 400 pages of fascinating history.

Right around 500 years ago, Erasmus spent a little time bemoaning the state of “print publishing” in the western world, complaining about, in Stephens words, the “slovenly and cynical shortcuts, false economies, and greed…causing a flood of grossly inaccurate texts.” Erasmus himself deplored “those common printers who reckon one pitiful gold coin in the way of profit worth more than the whole realm of letters…how little is the damage done by a careless or ignorant scribe, if you compare him with a printer!” Stephens observes that printshops were “in a race to the bottom” supporting the idea with Erasmus’s concern that there had never been “any more portentous source of textual confusion than the entrusting of so sacred a responsibility to obscure nobodies and ignorant monks and lately even women…is there anywhere on earth exempt from these swarms of new books?”

My favorite paragraph in this section of his book is Stephens’ thought that “Erasmus’s words anticipate our times, when commercialized, unregulated, deceptively ‘individualized’ media…provoke the most portentous forecasts of societal decay…Who can say what Erasmus would think of ‘social media,’ with their capacity to spread disinformation and ‘fake news,’ or even of ‘self-publishing’ through vanity presses, e-books, and blogs?” 

That’s a fascinating, fun question Professor Stephens.

I want to take my time machine back 500 years to spend 24 hours with Erasmus, observing the social upheaval brought about by the uncontrolled wildfire spread of ideas that he saw in his time because of the written, printed word. Then I want to bring Erasmus to 2024 and let him observe us and our “publishing industry” for a while. (I am assuming Amazon can deliver my time machine and my Star Trek Universal Translator at the same time). 

Then, just for fun, if Erasmus and I can pull off that previous bit of scientific sleight of hand, we’re going to take one more 500 year trip, into the future this time. Somehow, I think mankind is going to survive the onslaught of humanity’s creative writing and AI generated content the next several centuries is going to bring, and I really want to see what that world is going to be like.

What an excellent adventure that would be.

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Care to join me on my time traveling trip? Share your thoughts with our Grow Me a Story community.

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