Togetherness
Dictionaries point to the broader meaning of an extended notion of family-all living in a household-with the root of the word extending to all the servants, as well as to blood relations and descendants of the same progenitor. What is probably missing from such a definition is the understanding of interconnectedness, more specifically, awareness of the role played by agents of connection, among which language, in general, and literacy, in particular, become relevant.
Much has been written concerning the change from animal-like sexual drive to the formation of family; much, too, about the many specific forms of practical experiences through which families were established and maintained. The history of the human family captures the nature of the relations between man and woman, parents and offspring, near and distant kin, and between generations. Natural aspects of production and reproduction, and cultural, social, political, and ethnic elements are also expressed through the family. Its reality extends even to the area of interdependencies between the language of individuals constituting families as viable survival units, and the language of the community within which family is acknowledged. Whether female- or male-dominated, as the pragmatic context afforded, the family ascertains a sense of permanency against the background of need and flux. It is another constitutive practical experience involving the projection of individual biological characteristics in the context of life and work, an experience that progressively extended beyond biology into its own domain of expectations and values, and finally into its own effectiveness.
In search of a family nucleus, we arrive at female, male, offspring. The biological structure is maintained by some bond, probably a combination of factors pertaining to survival (the economy of family), emotions, sexual attraction (which includes psychological aspects), and ways of interacting with the extended family and with other families (social aspects). But beyond this, little else can be stated without causing controversy. Within each family, there is a maternal and a paternal line. In some family types, mother and father together feed the children, introduce them to survival tactics, and train their family instincts. In other cases, only one parent assumes these functions. The implicit linearity of family relations unfolds through new family associations.
Anthropological research reports in detail how families are established. The pragmatic aspect is decisive. In Melanesia, the goal is to acquire brothers-in-law who will join the woman's family in hunting, farming, and other activities. Margaret Mead described the rule of not marrying those one fights. Expressed in language, this rule has a normative quality. Nevertheless, in some tribes in Kenya, enemies marry to ensure that they become friends. The language expressing this strategy is more suggestive than imperative. Research also documents variations from the nuclear model. The Nayar, a population in India, consecrates a family in which children belong to the maternal line; fathers visit. The woman can have as many lovers as she desires. The semiosis of naming children reflects this condition. Rules established over time in some countries are indicative of peculiar pragmatic requirements: polygamy in societies where marriage is the only form of protection and fulfillment for women; polyandry in societies with a high man to woman ratio; uxorilocation (the new couple resides in the wife's home territory), and virilocation (the new couple resides in the husband's home territory).
The scale at which family self-constitution takes place affects its effectiveness. When this scale reaches a certain threshold or critical size, structural changes take place. The family, in its various embodiments, and within each specific pragmatic framework, reflected these major changes in the human scale of mankind at many levels. From the first images documenting families over 25,000 years ago, in the Paleolithic Age, to the paintings at Sefar (Tassili des Ajjer, 4th century BCE), and to many other subsequent forms of testimony, we have indicators of change in family size, the nature of family hierarchy, inheritance mechanisms, restrictions and prohibitions (incest foremost), and above all, change in the family condition when the pragmatic context changes. The testimony extends to cemeteries: It matters who is buried with whom or close to whom; to the evolution of words: What Beneviste called glottochronology; to contracts. Marriage contracts, such as the cuneiform tablet of Kish, dated 1820 BCE, or contracts documenting the sale of land, in which the family tree of the sellers is reproduced as testimony that the entire family accepts the transaction, shed light on the evolution of family. When Aristotle stated "Each city is made up of families," he acknowledged that a stage of stabilized family relations had been reached, well adapted to the stabilizing pragmatic framework facilitated by the new practical experience of writing.
By Aristotle's time, togetherness was designated through a name. The expectation at this scale of human relations was: without a name there is no social existence. Characteristics of sign processes pertinent to self-constitution as members of various family types become characteristic of the family. That is, the structure of family-based semiotic processes and the structure of the family are similar. Rudimentary signs, incipient language, oral communication, notation, and writing are stages in the semiosis of means of expression and communication. The sign processes of family develop in tandem.
The quest for permanency
At the time literacy became possible and necessary, it embodied an idiom of effective relations, both synchronically-at a given instance of those relations-and diachronically-over time, such as from one generation to another, each attached to the same use of language in writing, reading, and speaking. It is precisely the need to achieve efficiency, in every human endeavor, that assigns to the family the function of co-guarantor of tradition. Even before the possibility of literacy, language carried the do's and don'ts transmitting rules, based on the practical experience, that ensured survival through cooperation and new ways to satisfy direct needs and respond to expectations-rules that affected the efficiency of each practical experience.
The family appropriated these requirements, shaping them into a coherent framework for efficient togetherness. Directness, sequentiality, linearity, centralism, cooperation, and determinism marked the family experience as it marked other experiences of human self-constitution. Family members relied directly on each other. As one male assumed the role of provider, and the female, or females, of caretaker, a certain structure of dependence was put in place, resulting in hierarchy and sub- hierarchies. Family activity involved repetitive and sequential phases related to survival: reproductive cycles of animals; the progression of seasons and its relation to agriculture (rainy and dry, cold and hot, long days and short days). The pragmatics of survival seemed determined; there was little choice in method and timing. The family took shape in a world of cause-and-effect, which also determined religious practices.
The source of each rule for successful family life was direct practical experience; the test of validity was the effectiveness appropriate to the specific scale of humanity. The do's changed over time, as experience confirmed their efficiency. They became a body of accepted knowledge from which moral ideals are extracted, laws derived, and political action inspired within the context of literacy. In the industrial equation, output (products, end results, increase or profit) should equal or exceed input (raw materials, energy, human effort). The don'ts, adopted by religion, law, and rudimentary medical praxis, were engraved in language even more deeply. They were encoded together with punishments that reflected the urgency behind preserving the integrity of the family- based pragmatic framework, in the experience of the agricultural and, later on, the industrial model. The association between act and result was continuously scrutinized in a world of action and reaction. In a world of experience mediated through literacy, rules were followed for their own sake; or rather, for the sake of the permanence that literacy embodied.
That at some time sexual relations outside marriage could be the cause of so many prohibitions and dire punishment, mainly for women, does not bear as much significance on the state of morals as upon the pragmatic implications of the act of infidelity and wantonness. These implications refer to lineage, continuity, and inheritance, psychological effects on other family members, health, and status of offspring born out of wedlock. Rules regarding family integrity were encoded in the language of custom, ritual, and myth. Later on they were encoded in the language of religion, philosophy, ethics, law, science, ideology, and political discourse. Eventually, they were recorded in the rules of the market. Filtered over time through a variety of experiences resulting in success or failure, they are acknowledged in culture, and adopted in the language of education, and probably most directly in the language of market transactions. To give birth meant to continue the sequence and enhance the chances of survival; to rear children to adulthood meant to afford new levels of efficiency. More people could be more effective in ensuring survival in a pragmatic framework of direct action and immediacy. Beyond a certain scale, it became effectively impossible to coordinate the complex of families that went into the entire family. City life, even in early cities, was not propitious to extended families. During this period, the strategy of labor division took over undifferentiated, direct execution of tasks.
Over time, as the scale of human experience changed, community expectations were reflected in what used to be the domain of the individual or that of families. The term over time needs some clarification. The first phases to which we refer are of very slow change. From the initial indications of family-like relations up to the establishment of language families, the time span is greater than 15,000 years. From nuclei practicing agriculture to the first notation and writing, the time is in the range of 4,000 to 5,000 years. From then on, the cycles became more compressed: less than 2,000 years to the time religions were established, another 1,000 years to settlement in cities. Each moment marks either progressive changes in the pragmatic framework or radical change, when the scale of human life and work required different means to meet efficiency expectations. Language acquisition, settlement of populations, development of writing, the emergence of philosophy, science and technology, the Industrial Revolution, and the civilization of illiteracy are the six changes in the scale of humankind, each with its corresponding pragmatic framework. Many agents of influence contribute to the change from one pragmatic framework to another: climactic conditions, natural selection, the environment, religions, communal rules, distribution of resources, and the experience of the market. Regardless of the difference in languages, language use is probably the common experience through which natural changes are acknowledged and social differentiation effected.
Exactly what made literacy necessary-the need to achieve levels of efficiency corresponding to the human scale that led to industrial society-made the corresponding type of family necessary. Families reproduced the needed working force and transmitted the literacy required to attain the efficiency of qualified work. Such work was accomplished in a setting fundamentally different from that of immediate, direct, practical experiences with nature (farming, animal husbandry), or small-scale craftsmanship. Literacy was fostered by the family as a means of coordination and as a universal language of human transactions. This is how family fulfills the function of co- guarantor of education. Conversely, among the forms through which the future contract of literacy was acknowledged, family is one. The pragmatic need for permanency reflected in the expectation of the stable family has many consequences inside and outside family life. These can be witnessed in the spirit and letter of contractual obligations people enter under the coordinating power of the literate commitment. Education, law, politics, religion, and art are impregnated with this spirit. As the ultimate family-the homogeneous family of families-the nation asserts its permanency as a reflection of the permanency of its constituent atoms. When deterioration occurs in the conditions that make literacy possible and necessary, many of the permanencies associated with literacy, including the interpersonal relations adapted to it, or the homogeneity of nations, fail. As we entertain the prospect that nations, as definable political entities, might disappear, we automatically wonder whether the family, as a definable social entity, will survive-and if yes, in what form.
What breaks down when family fails?
The downfall of nations and empires has been attributed to the breakdown of the family. The weakening of family has been cited as a cause of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Anti-abortionists and other traditionalists in the United States blame the breakdown in traditional family values for many of the social ills of our day. Now that the royal children in Great Britain are divorced, people wonder how long the monarchy will last.
One of the symptoms of the civilization of illiteracy is the perceived breakdown of family. Simultaneously, other institutions, such as schools, the church, the military, embodying permanency and stability, are undergoing drastic reassessment. In a broad sense, a transition from one way of life to another has been taking place. But things are a little more confusing since what used to be is not always actually replaced by something else, but rescaled, turned into a possibility among many, in a dynamics of ever-expanding diversity and wider choices. Many have argued that the breakdown of the traditional family was inevitable. They bring up cultural, ideological, and socio- economic arguments-from the liberation of women and children to the exhausted model of the patriarchal structure. All these arguments are probably partially right. After previous economies of scarcity and limited means of production, human experience at the global scale has brought about a wealth of choices and means of affluence that question the very premise of the family contract.
In a context of rapid change from the practical experience of authority to the pragmatics of endless choice, subsumed under the heading of freedom, the permanency of the family structure comes under the methodical doubt of our new patterns of praxis. The tension between choice and authority was experienced in family life in the specific context of human relations based on hierarchy and centralism. New questions have a bearing on sexuality, parent-child relations, interactions among families, and the whole social fabric. Likewise, the transition of what was projected as self-control-with elements of self-denial, for the sake of family, a form of internalized authority-to the discovery of new frontiers, and the alternative pursuit of self- indulgence, follows the same path. These new frontiers and alternatives make values appear relative and undermine the spirit of sharing implicit in the traditional experience of family. Sharing is replaced by strategies of coordination and wealth preservation, all involving many mediating elements, such as political power, the legal system, taxation, charity.
It is argued, probably with good reason, that the high rate of divorce-the socially sanctioned breakdown of a family, but probably only relatively indicative of the breakdown-is not meaningful unless put in a broader context: how many people still marry, how many remarry, how much longer people live. The high rate of divorce at the end of World War II is symptomatic of events above and beyond the structural characteristics of family constitution, re-constitution, or breakdown. The rate of divorce in the years following the war, especially in the last 10-15 years, is nevertheless connected to the underlying structure of a pragmatic framework within which permanency, whether that of language, family, values, nations, laws, art, or anything else, becomes a liability because it affects the dynamics of change. One out of two marriages-and the proportion is changing quite fast-ends in divorce. This is, nevertheless, only one aspect of broader modifications making such a rate more of a qualifier than an accident in human pairing.
The dynamics of reproduction-births per marriage, average number of children per family, children living with one parent, infant mortality-is significant from the perspective of one of the most important functions of family. In the pragmatic context of today's integrated world, the need to have many children in order to maintain continuity and viability is different, even in Bangladesh, Afghanistan, or Africa, than at any previous time. The species has practically freed itself from the direct pressure of natural selection. What is at work, even in areas of extreme poverty, is a perverted mechanism of interdependencies echoing what herders in East Africa expressed as: "He who has children does not sleep in the bush." The family has ceased to be the sole source of welfare. Its functions are taken over by the community, the state, even international organizations. The fact that in some parts of the world this structural change is not acknowledged, and very high birth rates are on record, shows that the result of ignoring the pragmatic exigencies of this new age adds to the burden, not to the solution.
Another phenomenon difficult to assess is the single woman who decides to give birth. If individual or social material resources are available, moral and educational needs or expectations still remain to be addressed. Individualism fostered to the extreme partially explains the trend, but cannot satisfactorily indicate the many aspects of this new phenomenon characteristic of the civilization of illiteracy. If one reads the statistics, single parenthood appears like a sure winner in the lottery of poverty and frustration. The problems of children who will be growing up with a mother single by choice will be the source of much sociological and psychoanalytical research in the future. But existence is more than numbers in ledgers, or psychological predicaments. Self-fulfillment, the instinct to nurture and to ensure continuity are all at work in such cases.
The homosexual family
No group has done more in the way of forcing us to rethink the definition and role of family as homosexuals have. Within the civilization of illiteracy, homosexuals assert their identity in the public eye. Gay and lesbian groups fight for the ratification of the homosexual family, which could not even be conceived of within the pragmatics associated with literacy. Their fight corresponds to a practical experience that is not motivated by the self-perpetuation drive of the species, but by other forces. These are economic, social, and political-the right to enjoy the same benefits as members of heterosexual families. Interestingly enough, social principles adopted in the age when pragmatics required that society support childbirth, family nurturing, and education are extended today, under totally different circumstances, in ignorance of the necessities that were reflected in these principles. A tax deduction was an expression of social co- participation, since society needed more people, better educated youth, a stable framework of family life. The economy and the military could not succeed without the fresh flesh of new generations.
Gays and lesbians challenge the traditional notion of family in a context that no longer requires hierarchy and that redefines roles that have become stereotypes and undemocratic. They propose a model on a continuum in which each partner can be provider and assume household duties to any degree. There are no clear-cut roles, no clear-cut hierarchy, and no long-term commitments. Children are not the consequence of sexual relations but of desire and choice. This choice has two aspects of special significance for the pragmatics of our age. One concerns the human desire to form an alliance in the form of family, which seems almost instinctual. It may be difficult to recognize a natural inclination in a context (homosexuality) that negates propagation of the species. It is this threat to survival that caused so many taboos to be placed on homosexuality in the first place. These taboos took on other dimensions when encoded in a literacy that ignored the pragmatics.
The second aspect has to do with the extent to which homosexuals' desire for a family constitutes its own validity in the pragmatic framework of our time. To what extent does the desire to have a family reveal characteristics of human self-constitution in the current context? In a world in which there is a high rate of births out of wedlock, a world in which the traditional family is no guarantee of relationships free of abuse and exploitation, a world with great numbers of children in orphanages or in foster care, any desire to place children in a loving family context is worthy of attention.
What constitutes a family in an age whose pragmatics is not defined by the values perpetuated in and through literacy? The new definition might go along these lines: main provider (the father role); second provider (the mother role), who is also manager of the household. The two roles are not polarized; each provider participates in household work and in salaried work outside the home, as circumstances require. A child is a dependent under the age of 18 years (or 22 years if in college), for whom the providers are legally responsible. A grandparent is qualified through age and willingness to assume the role. Aunt/uncle is someone with fraternal ties to the providers. The definitions can go on. In considering these literate definitions, we can see that they apply to the situation of the current traditional family as well, in which father and mother both work, in which a child may live with and be cared for by a parent's second or third spouse, in which distance from or lack of blood relations calls for ad hoc relatives. The most vital implications concern our culture as it has been passed down over the centuries through literate expression, laden with values that literacy perpetuates and endows with an aura, in defiance of the new pragmatics and the new scale in which humans operate.
The homosexual family and its occasional focus on adopting children reflects the fact that we live in a world of many options, and consequently of very relative values. Their desire for a family, under circumstances that are far from being conducive to family life, is as valid as that of an unmarried woman who wants to give birth and rear a child (the one-parent household). It is as valid as the desire of infertile couples who use every means the market offers to have a child, through costly medical intervention or by hiring surrogates. In the civilization of illiteracy, each person forms his or her own definition of family, just as people form their own definitions of everything else. The only test of validity is, ultimately, effectiveness. In the long run, the biological future of the species will also be affected, one way or another, as part of the effectiveness equation.
To want a child
The new pragmatics ultimately affects the motives behind forming a family in the civilization of illiteracy. Marriage, if at all considered, has become a short-term contract. Its brevity contradicts marriage's reason for being: continuity and security through offspring and adaptation to life cycles. The attitudes with which partners enter the family contract result in a dynamic of personal relations outside of that sanctioned by society. Vows are exchanged more as a matter of performance than of bonding. Natural instincts are systematically overridden through mediating mechanisms for providing nourishment, acquiring health care, and settling conflicts. Child rearing is the result of pragmatic considerations: What does a couple, or single parent, give up in having a child? Can a mother continue working outside the home?
In order to correctly qualify answers to these questions, we would need to acknowledge that many characteristics of the individuals constituting a family, or seeking alternatives to it, are reflected in the family experience, or in experiences that are parallel to it. Economic status, race, religion, culture, and acculturation play an important role. Literacy assumed homogeneity and projected expectations of uniformity. The new pragmatic framework evidences the potential of heterogeneous experiences. Data indicating that the average numbers of divorces, single-parent households, number of partners, etc. vary drastically among groups of different biological, cultural, and economic backgrounds shows how necessary it is to realistically account for differences among human beings.
Let us take a look at some statistical data. But before doing that, let us also commit ourselves to an unbiased interpretation, free of any racial prejudice. Almost 60% of Black children in the USA are living in a one-parent household. Of these children, 94% live with their mothers. It was documented that 70% of the juveniles in long-term correctional facilities grew up without a father. To make any inference from such data without proper consideration of the many factors at work would only perpetuate literacy-based prejudices, and would not lead to a better understanding of the new circumstances of human self-constitution. Our need to understand the dynamics of family and what can be done to effect a course of events that is beneficial to all involved cannot be served unless we understand the many characteristics of the practical experience of self-constitution of the Black family, or of any non-standard Western family.
Under the expectations of literacy, a prototypical family life was to be expected from all. As the expectation of homogeneity is overridden by all the forces at work in the civilization of illiteracy, we should not be surprised by, and even less inclined to fasten blame on people who constitute themselves in ways closer to their authenticity. Multiplication of choice is-let me state again-part of the civilization of illiteracy. Modern, enlightened laws introduced in some African countries prohibit polygamous families. With this prohibition in place, a new phenomenon has occurred: Husbands end up having extra-marital affairs and support neither their lovers nor their children, which they did under polygamy. Paradoxically, activists in the Women's Liberation movement are seriously considering the return to polygamy, as an alternative to the increasing number of deadbeat dads and the misery of abandoned wives and children. There is no necessary relation between the two examples, rather the realization that within the civilization of illiteracy, tradition comes very powerfully to expression.
Children in the illiterate family
Nobody can characterize families of the past (monogamous or polygamous) as unfailingly unified and showing exemplary concern for offspring. Children, as much as wives and husbands, were abused and neglected. Concern over education was at times questionable. The projected ideal of authority and infallibility resulted in the perpetuation of patterns of experiences from which we are still fighting to free ourselves. Notwithstanding these and other failures, we still have to acknowledge that a shift, from individual and family responsibility to a diffuse sense of social responsibility, characterizes the process affecting the status of children. The family in the civilization of illiteracy embodies expectations pertinent to progressively mediated practical experiences: from childbirth-an almost industrial experience-to education; from entering the family agreement, mediated by so many experts-lawyers, priests, tax consultants, psychologists-to maintaining a sense of commonalty among family members; from embodying direct interaction and a sense of immediacy to becoming instances of segmentation, change, and interaction, and instances of competition and outright conflict. The institution of the family must also counteract sequentiality and linearity with a sense of relativity that allows for more choices, which the new human scale makes possible. This new pragmatic framework also allows for higher expectations.
Like any other institution, the institution of marriage (and the bureaucracy it has generated) has its own inertia and drive to survive, even when the conditions of its necessity, at least in the forms ascertained in the past, are no longer in place. In short, the breakdown of the family, even if equated with the failure of the individuals constituting it-children included-is related to the new structural foundation of a pragmatic framework for which it is not suited as a universal model, or to which it is only partially acceptable. This does not exclude the continuation of family. Rather, it means that alternative forms of cooperation and interaction substituting the family will continue to emerge. Just as literacy maintains a presence among many other literacies, the family is present among many forms of reciprocal interdependence, some expanding beyond the man-woman nucleus. To understand the dynamics of this change, a closer look at how the new pragmatic framework of the civilization of illiteracy affects experiences pertinent to family is necessary here.
The history of the family, independent of its various embodiments (matriarchal, patriarchal, polygamous, monogamous, restricted or extended, heterosexual or homosexual), is in many respects the history of the appropriation of the individual by society. The offspring of primitive humans belonged to nobody. If they survived to puberty, they continued life on their own, or as members of the group in which they were born, as nameless as their parents. Children and parents were amoral and competed for the same resources. The offspring of the humans constituting their own identity, and their own universe parallel to that of nature, belonged more and more to what emerged as the family, and by extension to the community (tribe, village, parish). The child was marked, named, nurtured, and educated, as limited as this education might have been. It was given language and, through the experience of work, a sense of belonging. In all known practical experiences-work, language, religion, market, politics-the succession of generations was specifically acknowledged. Rules, some pertaining to the preservation of biological integrity, others to property and social life, were established in order to accommodate relations between generations.
Over centuries, family ownership of children decreased while that of society increased. This is reflected in the various ways church, school, social institutions, and especially the market claim each new generation. In this process, mediation becomes part of family life: the priest, the teacher, the counselor, the language of advertisement, direct marketing, and much, much more is insinuated between children and their parents. The process intensifies as expectancies of better life for less effort become predominant. Responsibilities, procreation included, are distributed from the parents to the practical experiences of genetics. Test tube production of babies is an alternative to natural procreation. More to come. As a matter of fact, both procreation and adoption are dominated by strong selective methods and design procedures. Genetic traits are identified and matched in the genetic banks of adoptable children. Surrogate mothers are selected and contracted based on expectations of behavior and heredity. Sperm banks offer selections from high IQ or high physical performance bulls. Other mediators specify ideal cows, surrogate mothers whose offspring are treated like any other commodity-"satisfaction guaranteed." If the product is somehow unsatisfactory, the dissatisfied parents get rid of it.
Obviously, the language and literacy expected for the success of the biochemical reaction in the test tube is different from that involved in the constitution of the family. It is also different from the literacy involved in the change from instinctual sexual encounters to love, procreation, and child rearing. In each of the procedures mentioned, new languages-of genetics, for example-introduce levels of mediation that finally affect the efficiency of procreation. As nightmarish as some of these avenues might seem, they are in line with the entire development towards the new pragmatics: segmentation-the task is divided into sub-tasks-networking-to identify the desired components and strategies for synthesis-and task distribution. Children are not yet made on the Internet, but if the distinction between matter and information suggested by some geneticists is carried through, it would not be impossible to conceive of procreation on networks.
A new individuality
The process of mediation expands well further. Family life becomes the subject of practical experiences involving family planning, health, psychology, socialized expectations of education, the right to die. The private family owned their offspring and educated it to the level of its own education, or to the level it deemed advantageous, consistent with the progress of literacy. To the extent that this family was involved in other experiences, such as religion, sport, art, or the military, children grew up partaking in them. Once one aspect of the relation between environment, home, family, and work changes-for example, living in the city reshapes the nature of the dependence on the environment, the house is one of several possible, family members work at different jobs-the family is made more and more part of a bigger family: society. In turn, this belonging dissolves into solitary individualism. Nothing any longer buffers the child from the competitive pressure that keeps the economic engine running. Industrial society required centers of population while it still relied on relatively nuclear families that embodied its own hierarchy. The human scale reflected in industrial society required the socialization of family in order to generate an adequate workforce, as well as the corresponding consumption. With networking, children as much as adults are on their own, in a world of interactions that breaks loose from any conceivable constraints. There is no need to fantasize here, rather to acknowledge a new structural situation of consequences beyond our wildest imagination.
Literacy unified through its prescriptions and expectations. It facilitated the balance between the preserved naturalness and the socialized aspect of family. It projected a sense of permanency and shielded the family from the universe of machines threatening to take over limited functions of the body: the mechanical arm, the treadmill. As a human medium for practical experiences involving writing and reading, literacy seemed to represent a means of resistance against the inanimate. It helped preserve human integrity and coherence in a world progressively losing its humanity due to all the factors that the need for increased efficiency put in place (machines, foremost). It eventually became obvious that procreation had to be kept within limits, that there is a social cost to each child and to each mother giving birth. Moreover, family structural relations needed to be reconsidered for the expected levels of efficiency to be maintained and increased, as expectations took over desires. The new pragmatic framework is established as this borderline between the possible and the necessary. The civilization of illiteracy is its expression.
At the family level, the civilization of illiteracy corresponds to increased segmentation, affecting the very core of family life, and mediation. The family can no longer be viewed as a whole by the many mediating entities constituting the market. The market is with us from birth to death. It deals in every aspect of life, and extends the pressure of competition in each moment of our existence. The market segments medical care. It is most likely that each family member sees a different doctor, depending on age, sex, and condition. It segments education, religion, and culture. It is not uncommon that family members constitute their identity in different religious experiences, and some of them in none, as it is not uncommon that their educational needs run the gamut from a modicum of instruction to never-ending study. They live together, or find togetherness on the network matrix-one running a business on some remote continent, the other pursuing solitary goals, and some adapting to foreign cultures (less than to foreign languages).
The market has broken society into segments and the family into parts on which it concentrates its message of consumption. There is not one market entity that views the family as a whole. Children are targeted on the basis of their economic, cultural, and racial background for everything from food to clothing to toys and recreation. And so are their respective natural or adoptive parents, grandparents, and relatives. We can all decry this as manipulation, but in fact it corresponds to the objective need to increase commercial efficiency through narrow marketing. Accordingly, a new moral condition emerges, focused on the individual, not on the family. Part of the broader pragmatic framework, this process stimulates the relative illiteracy of the partners constituting the family. This illiteracy is reflected in varied patterns of sexual behavior, in new birth control strategies, in a different reciprocal relation between men and women, or between individuals of the same sex, and in as-yet undefinable codes of family behavior. The condition of the child in the civilization of illiteracy corresponds to the same dynamics. Children are less and less cared for at home, often entrusted to specialized caretakers, and finally started on their way through the vast machine called the education system.
Discontinuity
It makes no sense to decry the hypocrisy of double (or multiple) standards and the loss of a morality associated with the misery of people obliged to remain together by forces they consider legitimate (religion foremost). In the dynamics of the civilization of illiteracy, forces kept under the control of rules and norms established in the practical experience of literacy are unleashed. It would be difficult to speak about progress where one sees the demise of family, the erosion of private life, the increased number of one- parent households, of early and very early maternity, of incest, rape and increased child abuse, of obsession with contraceptives or ignorance of their use, and the threat of sexually transmitted diseases and drugs. Still, before hurrying value judgments, one would be better advised to consider the entire picture and to assess what makes all these occurrences possible, indeed, what makes them necessary.
It might well be true that what we perceive as the sources of morality and happiness-the family, children, love, religion, work, and the satisfaction associated with all of these-are exhausted. It might well be that fresh sources must be sought, or invented, or at least not eliminated because they do not fit the mold of previous choices. Even the thought that morality and happiness are altogether unnecessary deserves to be considered. They are loaded with the expectation of permanency and universality rendered impossible in the new pragmatic framework of permissiveness, local values, instant gratification, change, and interconnectedness.
The nuclear family of the civilization of literacy has been absorbed in the illiterate dynamics of societal functioning. It is coming out of the experience restructured. On the other hand, socially acceptable patterns of development are encouraged through the public education system, where the chief objective is the socialization of children, not the dissemination of knowledge. Ethnic characteristics are progressively, although timidly, acknowledged. The seemingly losing battle against drugs leads many parents and social researchers to wonder whether legalization would be more efficient than spending immense amounts of money and energy to fight the underground market. In this world of mediation, science and technology make genetic engineering possible in the form of influencing the profile of the offspring, ways to avoid what does not fit the fashionable, ways to induce early in development (almost at the embryonic stage) preferences and cognitive characteristics.
Together with everything pertaining to the human being self-constituted in the framework of the civilization of illiteracy, the family goes public in the stock market of the many enterprises involved in the self-perpetuation and the well being of the species. Its value is no longer a matter of those constituting it, of its goals and means, but of the return on the investment society makes in it. As a competitive unit within the pragmatic framework associated with literacy, the family freed itself from the constraints implicit in literacy that affect its efficiency. It became a contract, one among the growing number, in whose expression literacy gives way to the alternative litigation language of the law, in respect to which, with the exception of lawyers, everyone else is illiterate. Favorable taxation supports children-euphemistically called deductions when they are really additions-but not beyond what is socially expected of them, at least in the USA: to become agents of consumption and increased efficiency as soon as possible. In this sense, the tensions between generations are simply refocused-society is willing to make available social help in the form of transitory family substitutes. The problem is not addressed, only its symptoms. The languages of counseling and psychiatry at work here are another instance of specialized literacy. They substitute for family communication while projecting limited and limiting psychological explanations upon all those involved.
In an age that expects efficiency to lead to satisfaction, if not happiness, the family relies on specialists when problems arise: psychiatrists, counselors, specialized schools. Sometimes the specialists are imposed when society perceives a need to intervene, especially in cases of suspected child abuse. It is reflective of the pragmatics of our time that the elderly receive attention in the market of mediations and specializations on a less obvious level. They are considered only to the extent that they are viable consumers. Once upon a time, and still in isolated cases, such as the Amish and Mennonites in the USA, age was to be honored for its own sake, a value kept alive through literacy. While many elderly enjoy the benefits of better healthcare and economic sufficiency, they effectively divorce themselves from the family in enjoying what the market offers them. Their participation in the family is a matter of choice more than necessity. The success of the Internet among the elderly, in need of communication and support groups, is a very telling phenomenon. Networks of reciprocal support, as nuclei of self-organization, emerge independent of any form of social intervention. Their viability is based on this dynamics.
The struggle between the value of life in the civilization of literacy and that of illiteracy can be seen in hospitals and nursing homes where the aged are treated on machine-based analogies, abandoned or entrusted to specialists in the care of the dying. While aging and death cannot be eliminated, the market provides ways to avoid them as long as we can afford to.
It used to be that the new generation continued the family work-farming, carpentry, pottery, law, business, banking, publishing. This happened in a context of continuity and relative permanence: the work or business remained relatively unchanged. Literacy was appropriate for the transfer of know-how, as it was for the maintenance of family-based values and successive assumption of responsibilities regarding the family, moreover the community. These pragmatic elements no longer exist the way they did.
Today, even within the same generation, the nature of business evolves, and so does the nature of the values around which family is established. In addition, ownership changes as well; businesses are more and more integrated in the market; they become public entities; their shares are traded with no regard to the object those shares represent. The consequence is what we perceive as lack of family continuity and bonding. The new nature of the family contract is such that its basis of affection is eroded. Sequentiality of work is replaced by cycles of parallel activity during which generations compete as adversaries. This is why the family contract is shifted more and more to the market, depersonalized, indexed like one among many commodities. This contract is no longer literacy-bound, but rooted in circumstances of distributed activities of intense competition and networking. Once demythified, family relations are reassessed; continuity is severed. The market acknowledges the segmentation of family-no longer an economic entity in its own right-and in turn accentuates it. The baby business, the infant market, teenagers, and so on to the senior market are well focused on their respective segments as these embody not just age groups, but foremostly expectations and desires that can be met at the level of each individual.
How advanced the past; how primitive the future
No matter how intense the desire to maintain a neutral discourse and to report facts without attaching teleological conclusions to them, it turns out that the language of family, probably more than the language of science, machines, or even art, religion, sports, and nourishment, involves our very existence. Where should somebody place himself in order to maintain some degree of objectivity? Probably at the level of the structural analysis. Here, everything affecting the status of family and the condition of morality appears as a network of changing interrelations among people involved in the practical experiences of defining what a human being is. It seems, at times, that we relive experiences of the primitive past: the child knew only his or her mother; women started giving birth at an early age (almost right after menarche); children were on their own as soon as they could minimally take care of themselves. But we also build an ideal image of the family based on recollections of the less distant past: permanent marriages ("until death"), respect for parents, mother cooking meals for which the whole family sits down, father bringing wood for the family hearth, children learning by participating, assuming responsibilities as their maturity permitted. This idealized image is also the bearer of prejudices: women's subservient role, the authoritarian model passed from one generation to another, frustration, unfulfilled talents.
So the paradox we experience is that of a primitive future: more animality (or, if you want a milder term, naturalness) in comparison to a civilized (or at least idealized) past. There is no cause for worry, especially in view of the realization that despite our success in labeling the world (for scientific and non-scientific purposes), the majority of human behavior is determined (as already pointed out) independent of labels. Taking into account that the notion of permanency is related to relatively stable frames of reference makes it easier to explain why the high mobility of our age results in changes, both physical and psychological, that undermine previous expectations. Losing the discipline of the natural cycle that affected human work for centuries, human beings freed themselves from a condition of subservience, while at the same time generating new constraints reflected in the nature of their reciprocal relations. What does it mean to become used to something-environment, family, acquaintances-when this something is changing fast, and with it, we ourselves?
The Industrial Revolution brought about the experience of labor-saving machinery, but also of many new dependencies. In Henri Steele Commanger's words, "Every time-saving machine required another to fill the time that had been saved." One might not agree with this description. But it would be hard to contradict its spirit by taking only a cursory look at all the contraptions of illiteracy filling the inventory of the modern household: radio, photo camera, TV set, video recorder, video cassette player, WalkmanT, CD player, electronic and digital games, laser disc player, CD-ROM, telephone, computer, modem. The one-directional communication supported by some of these machines affected patterns of interaction and resulted in audiences, but not necessarily in families, at least not in the sense acknowledged in practical experiences of family life. With the two-directional communication, supported by digital networks, human interaction takes on a new dimension. Choices increase. So do risks.
Once the substance of one's experience is substituted by mediations, even the rationale for communication changes, never mind the form. Families separated by virtue of assignments (war, business) at remote locations, or in pursuit of various interests (sport, entertainment, tourism), exchange videotapes instead of writing to each other, or focus on telephone conversations meant to signal a point of reference, but not a shared universe of existence and concerns. They discover e-mail and rationalize messages to a minimum. Or they become a Web page, available to whoever will surf by. All these changes-probably more can be acknowledged-took place concomitant with changes in our expectations and accepted values. With the increased gamut of choice, attachment to value decreases. When all emotions come from soap operas, and all identity from the latest fashion trend, it becomes difficult to defend notions such as sensitivity and personality. When love is as short as the random encounter, and faith as convincing as reading a person's palm or tarot cards, it is impossible to ascertain a notion of reciprocal responsibility or the moral expectation of faithfulness. On the other hand, when the need to achieve levels of efficiency dictated by a scale of humankind never experienced before and by expectations and desires in continuous expansion is as critical as we make it, something is given up-or, to put it the other way around, somebody has to pay for it. With the sense of globality-of resources, actions, plans- comes the pressure of integration of everybody into the global market, and the expectations of consumption attached to it. Many-to-many communication is not just a matter of bandwidth on digital networks, but of self-definition, also.
The family used to reflect the perceived infinity of the universe of existence., despite the family's finite and determined internal structure. With the awareness of limited resources, in particular those of the natural support system, comes the realization that alternative practical experiences of life and cooperation become necessary in order to generate new pragmatic frameworks for increased efficiency and enhanced dynamism. The indefinite expansion of what people want and the progressive incorporation of higher numbers of human beings into the market through which affluence, as much as misery, can be achieved, results in the devaluation of life, love, of values such as self-sacrifice, faithfulness, fairness. The moral literate philosophers of the 19th century-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, William James-thought that the answer lay in our recognition that the world is not only for enjoyment. One can imagine a TV debate (interrupted by commercials, of course) between them and the romantic proponents of the ideology of progress-John Maynard Keynes, Adam Smith, David Hume. It's safe to wager that the audience would zap over their literate debate, while they would enjoy the illiterate 30-second spots. None of the philosophers would establish a Web site, as none would be terribly excited about the discussion forums on the Internet-not a place for intellectual debate. Who would read their elegant prose? To say more at this point would almost preempt the argument: The family in the civilization of illiteracy ascertains new forms of human interaction. It departs from the expectation of conformity for a model that acknowledges many ways to live together and, even more important, how we transcend our own nature in this process. We might, after all, be much more than we know, or trust that we could become.
A God for Each of Us
On the Memetic Algorithms Web page on the Internet, H. Keith Henson illustrates the lifelike quality of memes by recounting an episode from his time as a student (University of Arizona, 1960). Having to fill out a form on which religious affiliation was to be disclosed, he chose the denomination Druid, after having initially tried MYOB (the acronym for Mind Your Own Business). As he stated, "It was far too good a prank to keep it to myself." Replication mechanisms, in addition to a healthy dose of social criticism, soon had the university record almost 20% of the student body as Reform Druids, Orthodox Druids, Southern Druids, Members of the Church of the nth Druid, Zen Druids, Latter-Day Druids, and probably a number of other variations. Once the question regarding religious affiliation was removed from the entry form, the chain of replication and variation was interrupted.
There are many aspects of the relation between religion and language embedded in the anecdote. In some of the themes to be discussed in the coming pages, the humorous aspects will resonate probably less than questions on how religious experiences extend from early forms of human awareness to the current day.
Using, or even inventing, advanced technology, asking the most probing questions, experiencing injustice and pain, being subjected to antireligious indoctrination, or even repression, does not result in the abandonment of religion. Ignorance, primitive living conditions, extreme tolerance and liberalism, the possibility to freely choose one's religious affiliation from the many competing for each soul might lead to skepticism, if not to outright rejection of Divinity. In other words, conditions that seem to support religious beliefs do not automatically lead to practical experiences of human self-constitution as religious. Neither do adverse conditions generate atheists, or at least not the same kinds. There is no simple answer to the question of why some people are religious, some indifferent, and others actively against religion. Enlightenment did not result in generalized atheism; the pressure of the church did not generate more believers. Scientific and technological progress of the magnitude we experience did not erase the verb to believe from among the many that denote what people do, or no longer do, in our day. To believe, and this applies to religion as it applies to all other forms of belief, is part of the practical experience of human self- constitution. It involves our projection in a world acknowledging distinctions that are pragmatically significant and synchronized with the dynamics of life and work.
The world of nature is not one of belief but of situations. We humans perceive the world, i.e., project ourselves as entities, forming images of the surroundings in our mind, through many filters. One of them is our continuously constituted beliefs, in particular, our religious faith. Webster's dictionary (probably as good a source as any reference book) defines religion as "belief in a divine superhuman power or powers to be obeyed and worshipped as the creator(s) and ruler(s) of the universe." Religion today is far less a coherent and consistent practical experience than it was in previous pragmatic frameworks.
The manifold relation between literacy and religion can be meaningfully understood by explaining the pragmatic context of the constitution of religion. Its further development into different theologies, and its embodiment in various churches and other institutions connected to religion, also help in this understanding. The centralized and hierarchic structure of religion, the basic notions around which theology evolves, and the dynamics of change in religion and theology that reflect adaptive strategies or goals of changing the world to make it fit a theology, have a strong bearing on the values that formed and transformed literacy. Truly, language and religion, especially language after the experience of writing, developed practically in tandem. The transition from ritual to myth to incipient religion is simultaneously a transition from primitive expression, still tightly connected to body movement, image, and sound, to a more self- organized system of expression becoming communication. During the process, presented here in compressed form, writing appears as a result of interactions between the experiences of language and religion.
That writing is a premise for pragmatic requirements that will eventually lead to literacy has already been generously explained. It has also been pointed out that with writing emerges the perspective of literacy into whose reality many more practical experiences will eventually crystallize. Literacy and religion are intertwined in ways different from those characteristic of other human practical experiences. In the historic overview to be provided, these peculiarities will be pointed out. Expression, as a practical experience of human self-constitution, interrupts the slow cycle of genetic replication, and inaugurates the much shorter cycles of memetic transmission-along the horizontal axis of those living together, and along the vertical axis in the quickly succeeding sequence of generations. The role of scale of human experience, the relation between religious, ethical, aesthetic, political, and other aspects, the relation between individual and community, and between right and wrong will also be addressed in their context. In addition, logical, historic, and systemic arguments will be employed to clarify what religions have in common.
In anticipation of a short history, it should be clarified that living in a religion of one God (such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam), or of many (as the Hindu world entertains), or of a mixture of pantheism and mysticism (as in the Chinese or Japanese worlds), even living in animism, does not imply identification with its history, nor even with its national or ethnic confines or premises. Islamic enthusiasm and Christian retreat in our day is not a matter of the validity of one religion over the other, but rather a matter of their pragmatic significance. United in accepting Allah as their God, or a broadly defined way of living according to the Koran, Moslims are far less united than the less religious, and less homogeneous, Christians. But in giving up the clear-cut distinctions between right and wrong, and especially involving relativity in the search for options leading to higher efficiency, we constitute ourselves in a framework of vagueness and relativity-different from the transcendental value of Hinduism, or from the clear-cut values of contemporary Islam-which can no longer rely on the certainty embodied in literacy-based praxis, and which leads us to subject human existence to doubt.
In realizing the broad consequences of a pragmatics based on the desire to achieve levels of efficiency appropriate to a given scale of human experience, we can understand why some conflicts involving forces identifying themselves with religions from the past against forces of the present appear as religious conflicts. The most vivid examples can be found in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in the southern republics of the defunct Soviet Union. Through a religious past to which they have lost any meaningful connection, Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, and Muslim Bosnians try to reconnect to the world of experiences to which they traditionally belong. In the Central Asian conflicts, allegiances are confused-Sunni from Tadjikistan align themselves with the Shiites of Iran, while the Uzbeks pursue the hope of a new pan-Turkish empire.
In a different vein, the sanctity of life celebrated in Taoism, as well as in Judaism and Christianity, ends at the doors of the shiny palace of cheap, replaceable values of planned obsolescence, eventually of the human being itself. In hope of redemption, many give their lives, probably not understanding that they close the cycle of potential practical experiences just as drug addicts, suicidals, and murderers do, obviously in different contexts and with different motivations. This might sound too strong, but it is no more extreme than the extremes of existence and faith, or lack thereof.
Friends and foes of religion will agree that, for better or worse, it has played an important role in the history of humankind. The complement to this agreement is less clear: We cannot define what replaced, or could replace, religion. The new world order brought about by the downfall of communism in the Soviet Union and East Europe raises even more questions regarding religion: Are the extremist-not to say fanatical- forms of religion that replace official atheism religion or disguised forms of ethnic or cultural identification? To which extent do they reflect pragmatic reintegration in the global economy or safe isolationism? Practical experiences of religious nature were all affected by a change in their details: different ways of preserving religious doctrine, a different attitude towards authority, a change from self-denial to indulgence, but not in the fundamental acceptance of Divinity.
Characteristics of religions are still in flux. For instance, religious events embedded in various cultures take on a merely ceremonial role in today's world, aligning themselves with the newest in music, imagery, interactive multimedia, and networks. Believers as well as casual spectators have access to religious ceremonies through Websites. Probably even more telling is the appropriation of social, political, and moral causes, as religion ascertains itself in our time as open, tolerant, and progressive, or conversely as the guardian of permanent values, justifying its active role outside its traditional territory. This ascertainment is dictated by the pragmatic framework of the dynamic reality in which religion operates, and not by the memetic replication of its name. This is, of course, the reason for not limiting our discussion to variation and replication, no matter how exciting this might appear.
But who made God?
The variety of religions corresponds to the variety of pragmatic circumstances of human identification. Regardless of such differences, each time children, or adults, are taught that God made the world, the oceans, the sun, stars, and moon, and all living creatures, they ask: But who made God? Trying to answer such a question might sound offensive to some, impossible to others, or a waste of time. Still, it is a good entry point to the broader issue of religion's roots in the pragmatic framework. The commonalties among the majority of religions, to which comparative studies (especially those of Mircea Eliade) point, are significant at the structural level. We have, on the one hand, all the limitations of the individual human-one among many, mortal, subject to illness and defeat, object of passion and seduction, deceitful, limited in understanding of the various forces affecting one's projection as part of nature, and as part of the human species. On the other hand, there is the uniqueness of the immortal, untouchable, impervious, omniscient, entity (or entities) able to understand and unleash forces far more powerful than those of nature or of men, an entity (or entities) upon which depends the destiny of all that exists. Through belief, all the limitations of the human being are erased. It is quite instructive, as well as impressive, how every limitation of the human being, objective and subjective, is counteracted and given a life of its own in the language housing the progression from man to gods or to God, on one side, and to the practice of religion, on the other.
The various gods constituted in the world's religious texts also recount what people do in their respective environment, natural or tamed to some degree. They tell about what can go wrong in their life and work, and what community rules are most appropriate to the pragmatic context. The value of rain in the Middle East, the fine- tuning of work to seasonal changes in the Far East, the significance of hope and submission in the Indian subcontinent, the increased role of animal domestication, the extension of farmland, the role of navigation in other parts of the world are precisely encoded in the various religions and in their books. These books are bodies of explanations, expectations, and norms pertinent to practical experiences, written in very expressive language, ambiguous enough to accommodate a variety of similar situations, but precise in their identification of who is part of the shared religious experience, and who is outside, as foreign and undesirable, or foreign and subject to enticement.
The plurality of religious experiences
What makes religion necessary is a subject on which it would be foolish to expect any degree of consensus. What makes it possible, at least in the forms experienced and documented from ancient times to the modern, is language, and soon after language, writing-although Japanese Shintoism, like Judaism, began before writing-and reading, or more to the point, the Book. For the Judeo-Christian religions, as well as for Islam, the Book is the sufficient condition for their development and persistence. When the Book grew into books, it actually became the center of religious praxis. This is reflected in the nature of religious rituals, an extension of mytho-magical experiences previous to writing. They were all meant to disseminate the Book, and make its rules and prescriptions part of the life of the members of the respective community.
The timeline of the practical experience of religious human self-constitution suggests significant commonalties among the various religions. The way the notion of God was constituted is only one of these commonalties. What separates religion from pre-religious expression (such as animism) is the medium in which each is articulated. The subject is relatively constant. Acknowledgment of forces beyond individual understanding and desire to overcome confusion or fear in facing difficult and inexplicable aspects of life and death go hand in hand. A perceived need to pursue avenues of survival which promise to be successful because of the implied expectation that forces residing in the unknown would be, if not directly supportive, at least not actively opposed, is also discernible.
But when rationalizing the coming of age of religion, one automatically faces the broader issue of the source of religion. Is it given to humans by some perceived superior force? Does it result from our involvement with the environment of our existence and from the limits of our experience? When praxis began to differentiate, mytho-magical experiences proved unadaptable to the resulting pragmatic framework.
Farming and animal husbandry replaced scavenging, hunting, and foraging. Communities started to compete for resources (manpower included). Efficiency of human work increased, resulting in more forms of exchange and leading to accumulation of property. Relations among people within communities became complex to the extent that arguments, attributed to forces outside direct practical experiences, were necessary to instill and maintain order. The process was multi- faceted, and still involved myths, the magical, and rituals. All three-still retraceable in some parts of the world-were carried over to religion, progressively forming a coherent system of explanations and prescriptions meant to optimize human activity. The sequence is known: Practical experiences conveyed by example from one individual to another, or orally from one to several.
Where the unknown forces were ritually conjured in new forms of human practical self-constitution, these practical experiences were progressively unified and encoded in forms apt to further support the new scale achieved in the insular communities around the world. Abraham, accepted almost equally by Jews, Christians, and Moslems, lived at around 2,000 BCE and proclaimed the existence of one supreme God; Moses in the 13th century BCE; the six sacred texts of the Hindus were compiled between the 17th and 5th centuries BCE; Taoism-the Chinese religion and philosophy of the path-came to expression around 604 BCE, and Confucius's teachings on virtue, human perfectibility, obedience to Providence, and the role of the sage ruler shortly afterwards; Buddhism followed within decades, affirming the Four Noble truths, which teach how to exist in a world of suffering and find the path to inner peace leading to Nirvana. This listing is meant to highlight the context in which the practical experience of religious self-constitution was expressed in response to circumstances of life and work that necessitated a coherent framework for human interaction.
The Torah, containing the five books of Moses dedicated to the basic laws of Judaism, was written around 1,000 BCE. It was followed by the other books (Prophets and Writings) and form the Old Testament. The Greeks, referring to all seven books (the Septuagint), called the entire work ta biblia (books). This collection of books is dedicated to the theme of creation, failure, judgment, exodus, exile, and restoration, and introduced prescriptions for conduct, diet, justice, and religious rites. The themes were presented against the broad background in which laws pertinent to work, property, morals, learning, relations between the sexes, individuals, tribes, and other practical knowledge (e.g., symptoms of diseases, avoidance of contamination) were introduced in normative form, though in poetic language.
The pragmatic framework explains the physics of the prescriptions: What to do or not do in order to become useful in the given context, or at least not to be harmful. It also explains the metaphysics: why prescriptions should be followed, short of stating that failure to do so affects the functioning of the entire community. What was kept in writing from the broader oral elaborations that constituted the covenant (testament) for practical experience was the result of pragmatic considerations. Writing was done in consonantal Hebrew, a writing system then still at its beginning, on parchment scrolls, and thus subject to the limitations of the medium: How much text could be written on such scrolls in a size that facilitated reading and portability.
Between these books and what much later (translations notwithstanding) came from the printing presses following Gutenberg's invention, there is a difference not only in size, but also in sequence and in substance. Over time, texts were subject to repeated transcriptions, translations, annotation, revision, and commentary. The book that appeared to be given once and for all kept changing, and became subject to interpretations and scrutiny ever so often. Still, there is a fundamental element of the continuity of its expressed doctrine: life and work, in order to be successful, must follow the prescribed patterns. Hence the implicit expectation: read the book, immerse yourself in its spirit, renew the experience through religious services meant to extol the word.
But since alternate explanatory systems were progressively developed-science not the last-parallel to relative fixed pragmatic frames sanctioned in early religion, a certain separation of religion from practical experience took place. Religion consecutively constituted its own domain of human praxis, with its own division of labor, and its own frame of reference. Christianity, Islam, the Protestant Reformation, and various sectarian movements in China, Japan, the Indian subcontinent (neo- Confucianism, Zen, the Sikh religious movement) are such developments.
We have heard about such expatiations and hear as well about conflicts triggered around them, but fail to put these conflicts in the perspective that explains them. Within a given context, a new growth triggers reactions. Members of the Baha'i religion (a faith that began in the 19th century) are subjected to the repression of Muslims because its program is one of unity of religions, not subordination of some to others. The expectation of universal education, or active promotion of equality between sexes, corresponds to a pragmatics different from that from which Islam emerged, and for that matter, many other religions. The Religious Society of Friends, i.e., the Quaker movement, was a reaction to the corruption of the church as an institution. It spells out a program in line with the requirements of the time: reaching consensus in meetings, doing away with sermons, pursuing a program of education and non-violence. It was also subjected to repression, as each schism was, by the powers that were in place.
These and many other developments mark the long, as yet unfinished, process of transition from religion to theology and church, and even to business, as well as the process of permutation of religion into culture, in particular from religion to secular culture and market. The Book became not only many different books, but also varied experiences embodied in organized religion. Alternative perspectives were submitted as different ways to practice religion within a pragmatic context acknowledged by religion.
And the word became religion
In the circular structure of survival in nature, there was no room for metaphysical self-constitution, i.e., no practical need to wonder about what was beyond the immediate and proximate, never mind life and death. When the practical experience of self-constitution made rudiments of language (the language of gestures, objects, sounds) possible, a sense of time-as sequences of durations-developed, and thus a new dimension, in addition to the immediate, opened. This opening grew as awareness of oneself in relation to others increased in a context of diversified practical experiences. Acknowledging others, not just as prey, or as object of sexual drive, but as associates (in hunting, foraging, mating, securing shelter), and even the very act of association, resulted in awareness of the power of coordination. Thus the awareness, as diffuse as it still was, of time got reinforced. Be-Hu Tung ventured a description of the process: "In the beginning there was no moral or social order. People knew only their mothers, not their fathers. Hungry, they searched for their food. Once full, they threw the rest away. They ate their food with skin and hair on it, drank blood and covered themselves in fur and reeds." He described a world in its animal phase, still dependent on the cycles of nature, perceiving and celebrating repetition.
Myth and ritual responded to natural rhythms and incorporated these in the life cycle. Once human self-constitution extended beyond nature, creating its own realm, observance of natural rhythms took new forms. This new forms were more able to support levels of efficiency appropriate to the new condition achieved in the experience of farming. It was no longer the case that survival equaled finding and appropriating means of subsistence in nature. Rather, natural cycles were introduced as a matrix of work, modulating the entire existence. Once the experience of religion was identified as such, religious praxis adopted the same matrix. In almost all known religions, natural cycles, as they pertain to reproduction, work, celebrations, education, are detailed. Cooperation and coordination progressively increased. A mechanism of synchronization beyond the one that only accommodated natural cycles became necessary. In retrospect, we understand how rules of interaction established in the nature-dominated pragmatic framework turned into the commandments of what would be asserted through written religion.
We also understand how animistic pre-religious practice-embodied in the use of masks and charms, in worship of the untouched natural object (tree, rock, spring, animal), and the employment of objects meant to keep harm away (tooth, bone, plant) took new forms in what can be defined as the semiotic strategy of attaching the religious word (more broadly, the Book) to the life of each member of the religious community. The need to establish the community, and to identify it through action, was so pressing that ceremonies were put in place to bring people together for at least a few times during the year. In Egyptian hieroglyphics, one can distinguish an affection for coordination of effort, expressed in the depiction of rowers on boats, builders of pyramids, warriors. The written word of the Hebrews was inspired by the experience of hieroglyphics, taking the notion of coordination to a more abstract level. This level provided a framework for synchronizing activity that brought ritual closer to religion. This added a new dimension to ceremonies based on natural cycles, gradually severing the link to the practical experience of interaction with nature.