Point to ponder

[avevale_intelligencer]

It is a truth universally acknowledged that no-one will ever be in need of a writer.

Discuss, taking care to distinguish between "need" as we might externally perceive it from our civilised standpoint, and need as it would appear to people whose primary concern is survival.

Comments

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Well, it's arguable that the mental escape hatch afforded by fiction is made both necessary and possible by our advanced civilisation, which gives us time for leisure and stresses us out the rest of the time, and which has raised our expectations so that now we think we're entitled to waste time doing things that aren't concerned with survival.

[jahura.livejournal.com]

(original comment)
I suppose if that postulate were to be verified we wouldn't have a need for a mental escape hatch and therefore bookstores, libraries, and Amazon-dot-com wouldn't have any purpose at all.

Sorry about that...I was trying to edit and *poof* it was gone!

Anyway, said escape hatch is a necessity for higher life forms in much the same way a cat has a need for a branch or a piece of twine as a diversion or a bird will build a nest even with no potential mate for miles. But if you're talking the very basics, food sleep and shelter, namely, then no. There isn't need for a writer any more than there is need for companionship or clothing or fire.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

"Anyway, said escape hatch is a necessity for higher life forms"

So non-literate people are not "higher life forms"? I agree that higher life forms do generally need some form of non-work activity to keep sane, but people through millenia have managed to do that without books or writing. People were making music and telling stories long before either was written down.

Yes, a complex social structure is easier to manage if things are able to be kept in permanent form, and information is easier to spread. But that doesn't necessarily mean writing (unless you also define visual and auditory arts as writing). Indeed, many parts of current society seem to be slipping away from the written form as other forms of communication and storage of information become easier and cheaper.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

I'm sure you know that that was not the intended meaning. Let's keep the rhetorical daggers peace-bonded, please.

[jahura.livejournal.com]

Okay...complex life forms. As opposed to amobae, bacteria, and anything that has no brain or central nervous system. Please forgive my snobbery as I will work on considering E-coli to be on the same evolutionary scale as whales and dolphins. ;)

If the point is pure survival, you can survive without any artistic stimulation. It may make for a short and uncomfortable existence if previously exposed, but it is possible.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

In general, people can survive without external artistic stimulation because they can make it themselves and get it from others without needing writing. That's my point, all through history most of the people have survived without forms of written entertainment. No bookstores, no Amazon.*, no libraries, for most of the people most of the time. They sing, they tell each other stories, they may get the occasional wandering bard or a preacher who tells them stories about some religion. Or for the lucky few they had captive entertainment employed by the local aristocracy. And if they are all alone they can still think and dream (and find 'art' in nature).

Access by the general population to written fiction, or to written materials at all, is a very recent thing. For most of the time it has been the province of the rich and those they favour. And for much of the world this is still true.