It was a commonplace in Scholasticism that God created two books: the world & the sacred Scriptures. Life was thought to follow the format of the book & the book became the organizing principle for all experience.

Even as a written manuscript, the book served as model for both the machine & bureaucracy. That is, it encouraged a habit of thought that divided experience into specialized units & organized these serially & causally. Translated into gears & levers, the book became machine. Translated into people, it became army, chain of command, assembly line, etc.

By organizing society in the format of the book, the ancients organized specialists into elaborate social machines capable of building pyramids or colonizing conquered lands.

The book served as model & impetus for many of Western man's most basic thoughts. Certainly the book was ideally suited for presenting a number of these. "History," says George Steiner, "is a language-net thrown backwards." More specifically, history is a book.

Theories of evolution & progress belong, almost exclusively, to book culture. Like a book, the idea of progress was an abstracting, organizing principle for the interpretation & comprehension of an incredibly complicated record of human experience. It arranged events in a line, causally: the individual was thought to move along that line, like the reader's eye, toward a desired goal.

Nearly all experience, all reality, it was thought, lay within the confines of language. Language, in turn, was structured by the book. Thus, nearly the whole of Western culture was organized around one sense: the eye; expressed in one medium: language; and structured according to one model: the book.

The all-seeing eye of God, believed to control all celestial bodies & all life, was really the eye of literate man. Western civilization synchronized nearly all experience, all perception to this single model & organized the universe according to the book.

Literate man lived in a universe, not a bi-verse or a multi-verse, but a verse obedient to a single drummer. "Whether in the Amazonian forest or on the ridge of the high Andes," wrote Alexander von Humboldt, the great geographer, "I was ever aware that one breath, from pole to pole, breathes one single life into stones, plants and animals and into the swelling breast of man."

Monotheism in religion & uniformity in classical science were mild dictatorships compared to the dictatorship of the eye. In fact, both may have been by-products of it. Alfred North Whitehead said science could have come only out of the strict monotheism of Christianity, but it seems more likely the primary source was literacy, not religion.