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permits separation of verbal thought from action. Carothers concluded that
individuals in a society cannot be actually capable of thinking independently, “of
being potentially unique at the level of ideation and of will” until verbal thought is
seen as potentially independent of action. 64
Anthropologist Jack Goody demonstrated that literacy had a major
influence on both an individual’s cognitive processes and on society’s major
institutions. Both the means of communication and the control of such
communication are important. While he notes that he is “not attempting to put
forward a simple, technologically determined sequence of cause and effect, there are
too many eddies and currents in the affairs of men to justify a monocausal
explanation of a unilinear kind,” he also rejects the tendency to neglect such
technological changes for fear of such techno-determinism. He sees literacy (and
the availability of print culture) as shifting thought patterns toward
“abstractedness.” Oral cultures, according to Goody, tend toward a cultural
homeostasis, while written cultures tend toward more revolutionary changes. 65
Applying these ideas helps make sense of the revolutionary changes in eighteenth-
century Virginia. An increasing influence of print helped to transform culture,
society, and political power in Virginia.
Economic historian Harold Innis discovered that changes in communication
profoundly influenced western civilization, and that each new medium (such as clay
tablets or paper) emphasized time and space in varying ways. These changes, he
64 J. C Carothers, “Culture, Psychiatry, and the Written Word,” Psychiatry 22, no. 4 (Nov.
1959): 308-312.
65 Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1977), 10. These definitions of thought and logic are, of course, replete with western biases.
Goody noted that Claude Lévi-Strauss's division of mind and thought into domesticated and
savage was too simplistic. These theories—from the point of view of a literate culture—may also
undervalue oral cultures. What is critical here is not a comparative worth, but rather the
transformational characteristics.