Notation evolving into the written word was still the domain of the very few. Accordingly, religious reminders were strongly visual, as well as aural, a state of affairs that continued in the religions that sprouted from Judaism and established themselves after the fall of the Roman Empire. The populations adhering to these religions were largely illiterate, but derived important characteristics from religions based on the written word-the Word that was equated with God. Nailed to the doorways or inscribed over portals, converted into many types of charms, the words of a religious creed became elements of the synchronizing mechanism that religion embodied in the pragmatic framework of its constitution. Prayer punctuated the daily routine, as it continues to do in our day. The seasons and the cycles of nature, embodied in the mytho-magical, were reinterpreted in religious celebrations, which referenced the natural cycle, and appropriated pre-religious rituals. Cycles of activity aimed at maintaining and increasing the outcome of work for survival were thus confirmed. A community's well-being was expressed by its ability to satisfy the needs of its members and achieve a pattern of growth. Still heavily dependent upon natural elements (rain, floods, wind, insects, etc.), as well as subjected to attacks from neighbors, communities developed strategies for better use of resources (human included), storage, and defense mechanisms. These strategies were carefully encoded in the respective religious covenants.
The religions that have survived and developed seem to gravitate around a core of very practical writings and associated visual reminders of the power they invoke in connection to the pragmatic identity of the community. The book was the standard; those who constituted the organization of religion-the priesthood-could usually read the book. Scribes, even some of the priests, could write and add to the book. The majority listened and memorized, resorting to better memory than we exercise today, memory that their practical experience required. They subscribed to religious patterns, or carried out rituals on a personal or communal level.
It is helpful to keep in mind that religious involvement was facilitated by the fact that religion is not only pragmatically founded, but also pragmatically ascertained and tested. Rules for farming, hunting, preparing food; rules for hygiene and family relations; rules for conducting war and dealing with prisoners and slaves were expressed against the background of an accepted supreme reference, before evolving into future ethical rules and legal systems. Those rules which were not confirmed, progressively lost authority, were "erased" from the people's memory, and ceased to affect the rhythm of their lives. The written word survived the oral, as well as the living who uttered it or wrote it down. This word, abstracted from voice, gesture, and movement, and abstracted from the individual, was progressively assigned a more privileged place in the hierarchy. The writings seemed to have a life of their own, independent of the scribes, who were believed to be only copiers of everlasting messages entrusted to them.
Written words express the longing for a unified framework of existence, thought and action. Within such a framework, observance of a limited number of rules and procedures could guarantee a level of efficiency appropriate to the scale at which human activity took place. This is a world of human practical experiences transcending natural danger and fear. It is a universe of existence in which a species is committed to its further self-definition in defiance of nature while still dependent upon it. Religion as a human experience appears in this world as a powerful tool for the optimization of the effort involved, because it effectively constitutes a synchronizing mechanism. In the practical experience of religious writing and the associated experience of reading or listening to a text, the word becomes an instrument of abstraction. Accordingly, it is assigned a privileged position in the hierarchy of the many sign systems in use. Memetic replication appropriately describes the evolution of religious ideas, but not necessarily how these ideas are shaped by the pragmatic framework.
Tablets, scrolls, and books are blueprints for effective self-constitution within a community of people sharing an understanding of rules for efficient experiences. The outcome is guaranteed by the implicit contract of those self-constituted as believers in the supernatural from which the rules supposedly emanate. In search of authority, this world settled for unifying motivations. The rules of animal, and sometimes even human, sacrifice, and those of religious offerings were based on the pragmatics of maintaining optimal productivity (of herds, trees, soil), of entering agreements, maintaining property, redistributing wealth, and endowing offspring. The immediate meaning of some of the commitments made became obscured over time as scale changed and the association to nature weakened. The rules were subsequently associated with metaphysical requirements, or simply appropriated by culture in the form of tradition. To ensure that each individual partook in the well-being of the community, punishments were established for those violating a religious rule. Immediate punishment and, later, eternal punishment, although not in all religions, went hand in hand as deterrents.
The involvement of language, in particular of writing and reading, is significant. As already stated, the individual who could decipher the signs of religious texts was set apart. Thus reading took on a mystical dimension. The division between the very few who wrote and read and the vast majority involved in the religious experience diminished over a very long time. More than other practical experiences, religion introduced the unifying power of the written word in a world of diversity and arbitrariness. Under the influence of Greek philosophy, the Word was endowed with godlike qualities, implicitly becoming a god. Seen from a given religious perspective, the rest of the world fails because it does not accept the word, i.e., the religion. The irreligious part of the world could be improved by imposing the implicit pragmatics that the religion carried; it could submit to the new order and cease to be a threat. At this time, religion entered the realm of the abstract, divorced from the experience with nature characteristic of religions originating in the oral phase of human self-constitution. It is at this time that religion became dogma.
All over the globe, in the worlds of Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism, Judaism, Christianity, and later Islam, the conflict between communities embracing a certain creed and others, in pre-religious phases or dedicated to a different religion, is one of opposing pragmatics in the context of increased differentiation. In other words, a different religious belief is a threat to the successful practical self-constitution of one group. To get rid of the threat is a pragmatic requirement, for which many wars were fought. Some are still going on. With each religion that failed, a pragmatic requirement failed, and was replaced by others more appropriate to the context of human self- constitution. That these conflicts appeared under the aegis of conflicting deities, represented by leaders regarded as representatives of divinity, only goes to show how close the relation is between the underlying structure of human activity and its various embodiments.
In a world of unavoidable and even necessary diversity, religion maintained islands of unity. When interaction increased among the various groups, for reasons essentially connected to levels of efficiency required for current and future practical experiences, patterns of common activity resulted in patterns of behavior, increased commonalty of language, accepted (or rejected) values, and territorial and social organization. The commonalty of language, as well as the commonalty of what would become, during the Middle Ages, national identity (language and religion being two of the identifiers), increased steadily.
From among the major changes that religion underwent, the most significant are probably its reification in the institution of the church and the constitution of vast bodies of discourse regarding its intrinsic logic, known as theology. Once asserted as an institution, religion became the locus of specific human interaction that resulted in patterns based on the language (Latin, for some in the Western Christian world, and Arabic in the Islamic East) in which religion was expressed. Religious practical experience progressively distanced itself from the complexities of work and socio- political organization, and constituted a form of praxis independent of others, although never entirely disconnected from them. The organization of religion concerns the pattern of religious services at certain locations: temple, church, mosque. It concerns the institution, one among many: the military, the nobility, guilds, banks, sometimes competing with them. It also concerns education, within its own structure or in coordination, sometimes in conflict, with other interests at work.
A multitude of structural environments, adapted to the practical aspects of religious experience appear, while religion progressively extricated itself, or was eliminated, from the pragmatics of survival and existence. The institution it became dedicated itself to pursuing its own repetitive assignments. At the same time, it established and promoted its implicit set of motivations and criteria for evaluation. In many instances, the church constituted viable social entities in which work, and agriculture in particular, was performed according to prescriptions combining it with the practice of faith. Rules of feudal warfare were established, the day of rest was observed, education of clergy and nobility were provided. From the Middle Ages to the never abandoned missionary activity in Africa, Asia, and North and South America, the church impacted community life through actions that sometimes flew in the face of common sense. The effort was to impose new pragmatics, and new social and political realities, or at least to resist those in place.
Whether in agreement or in opposition, the pattern of religious experience was one of repeated self-constitution of its own entity in new contexts, and of pursuing experiences of faith, even if the activity as such was not religious. In this process, the church gained the awareness of the role of scale, and maintained, though sometimes artificially, entities, such as monasteries, where scale was controllable. Autarchy proved decreasingly possible as the church tried to extend its involvement. The growing pragmatic context had to be acknowledged: increased exchange of goods, reciprocal dependencies in regard to resources, the continuous expansion of the world-a consequence of the major discoveries resulting from long-distance travel. In recent years the challenge has come from communication-in particular the new visual media-requiring strategies of national, cultural, social, and even political integration.
From the scrolls of the Torah and from the sacred texts of the Rig Veda and Taoism, to the books of Christianity, to the Koran, to the illuminated manuscripts copied in monasteries, and to the Bible and treatises printed on the presses of Fust and Schöffer (Gutenberg's usurpers) in Mainz, Cologne, Basel, Paris, Zurich, Seville, and Naples-over 4,000 years can be seen as part of the broader history of the beginning of literacy. This history is a witness to the process, one of many variations, but also one of dedication to the permanency of faith and the word through which it is reified.
Replications of all kinds mark the memetic sequence, and so religion appears in retrospect as propagation of a special kind of information, generated in the human mind as it started labeling what we know, as well as what is beyond our direct understanding. What did not change, although it was rendered relative, is the acknowledgment and acceptance of a supreme authority, known as God, or described through other names such as Allah and Myo-Ho-Ren-Ge, and the nature of the practical experience of self- constitution as believer. If Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Confucius, and the Japanese and Indian religious leaders were alive today, they would probably realize that if religion had any chance, it could no longer be founded on the written text of the Book or books, but in the practical experiences of the civilization of illiteracy. By no accident, the first category on one of the Web sites dedicated to religion is entitled Finding God in Cyberspace.
The educated faithful-a contradiction in terms?
The pragmatic requirement of optimally transmitting experience essential to a group's permanency was recognized as one of the main functions of language. It should come as no surprise that education was carried out, if not exclusively then at least to a high degree, in religion. Neither should it surprise that religion appropriated literacy as one of its programs once the scale of human activity that made literacy necessary was reached. In the context of nation-states that adopted religion as one of their identifiers, the entire history of the relation between society and religion can be seen in a different light. As we know from history, the quest for power frequently brought state and religion into conflict, although one needed and relied on the other. In the unifying pragmatic framework of industrial society, their alliance was sealed in literacy programs. These were simultaneously programs for higher efficiency and for the maintenance of values rooted in religious belief, as long as these did not adversely affect the outcome of work or of market transactions.
Parallel to the initially dominant religious view of life, change, origins, and future, alternative views were expressed as the result of self-observation and observation of the outside world. Philosophy, influenced by religion and by religious explanations of the world, of men, of society and its change, is one example. Sciences would diverge from philosophy, multiplying alternate models and explanatory contexts. These were usually carefully construed so as not to collide with the religious viewpoint, unless they bluntly rejected it, regardless of the consequences of such an attitude. There were also heresies based on an individual's notions, or holdovers from past religions. During the Renaissance, for instance, such holdovers derived from studies of the Bible, which led to the Reformation. Ideas not rejected as heresy were usually within the scope of the church. These ideas were expressed by men and women who founded orders. They were put into practice by religious activists or made into new theologies.
There is no religion that does not go through its internal revisions and through the pain of dividing schisms. On today's list of religious denominations, one can find everything, from paganism to cyberfaith. The rational explanation for this multiplication into infinity is not different from the explanation of any human experience. Multiplication of choices, as innate human characteristic, applies to religious experiences as it does to any other form of pragmatic human self-constitution. The practical experience of science, diverging more and more from philosophy and from religious dogma, also followed many paths of diversification. So did the unfolding of art, ethics, technology, and politics. The unifying framework offered by the written word, as interpreted by the monolithic church, was progressively subjected to distinctions that the experience of literacy made possible. When people were finally able to read the Bible for themselves-a book that the Catholic church did not allow them to read even after the Reformation-protest started, but it started after the Renaissance, when political entities were strong enough to defy the papacy with some degree of success.
The illiterate warriors of centuries ago and the sometimes illiterate, at least unlettered, worshipper and military insurgent of today belong to very different pragmatic frameworks. The former did not have to be able to read or write in order to fight for a cause superficially (if at all) related to the Book. One had only to show allegiance to the institution guarding souls from hell. In the scale characteristic of these events, individual performance was of extreme importance to the community, as we know from the stories of King Frederick, Joan of Arc, Jan Hus-or, to change the reference, from the story of Guru Nanak (the first guru of the Sikhs, a religion prompted by the Muslims' persecution of Hindus at about the time Columbus was on his last expedition to the New World), Martin Luther, George Fox (founder of the Quaker movement), and many others. The educated faithful of the past probably obtained access to the established values of culture and to the main paradigms of science as these confirmed the doctrine defended by the church. An educated faithful in contemporary society is torn between accepting a body of knowledge ascertaining permanency, while experiencing change at a pace for which no religion can prepare its followers. Indeed, from the unity of education and faith-one meant to reinforce the other-the direction of change is towards their contradiction and disparity. The secular web is not only that of the Internet infidels, but also of a broad segment of the population that has no need for either.
Challenging permanency and universality
For many, the survival of religion is itself a miracle. For many more, it is indicative of human aspects not sufficiently accounted for in science, art, or social and political life. Its role in a new pragmatic framework of fast change, mediated activity, alienation, decentralization, and specialization, is obviously different from that it played in the time of religious constitution and in a reduced scale of humankind. Religion did not start out to deceive, but to explain. Its practices, while seeming violent, empty, extreme, demagogic, cunning, or even ridiculous at times, fulfill a purpose deemed pragmatic at the inception. The old and familiar are reassuring, if only by resort to endurance. The promise of redemption and paradise gain in attraction the more people face change and uncertainty. While the original purpose of religion was modified over time, the practice is kept up precisely because novelty and progress, especially in their radical form, are difficult to cope with. Once old values are questioned in the light of succeeding pragmatic circumstances, under new patterns of self-constitution, the result is complacency and deception, if there is no alternative. Religion and literacy ultimately find themselves in the same predicament.
Religious diversification reflects each new scale at which human practical experience takes place. Changes in the pragmatic framework in which people constitute themselves as religious result in tension between the variability of the elements involved in work or new aspects of social life and the claims of the eternal. This tension triggers numerous rethinkings and consequent rewritings of the books, as well as the generation of numerous new books of new forms of faith. Christianity and Islam are revisions; within them other revisions (schisms) took place, such as the Roman and Orthodox churches, the Sunni and Shiite. Other sects and religions, schisms, and reformations and protestations (movements claiming to reconstitute the original status, whatever that means), are to a great extent rewritings based on acknowledging new contexts-that is, new pragmatic requirements. Once upon a time, the Book was supposed to address everyone in the small community in which it came to expression. Over time, many books addressed their own constituencies-adherents to certain teachers, to particular saints, or to some subset of the religious doctrine-within a larger community. The success of these sub-groups grew in proportion to the diversification of human praxis and to the function of education exercised on a broader and broader scale.
From the religion of small-scale human activity to the churches of universal ambitions, many modifications in the letter and the spirit of the respective books occurred. They ultimately reflect alterations of values that religious institutions had to adapt to and justify. The tribes that accepted the Book as a unifying framework- embodiment of tradition which became law-as well as the followers of the prescriptions in the Hindu scriptures of Veda and Upanishad, the followers of the Enlightened One (Buddha), the practitioners of Taoism and Confucianism, also acknowledged a sense of community. It is the same sense of community held, at a different scale and with different goals, by the nation-state.
The spread of religions, parallel to military conquest, resulted in the spread of the respective religious books, and of the letters that the books were written in. This is not necessarily the same as the spread of literacy. Religion established its own state, the Holy Roman Empire (which is now down to the size of Vatican City) that transcended national boundaries and languages, and was considered universal. In the language of Islam, umma is the world community of Moslems, while wattan is the Motherland. The Moslem armies, defeated at Poitiers by the Catholic Charles Martel, were also disseminating the religion, language, and culture of the world community they envisioned. The Crusades, in turn, and the religious wars that plagued Europe did not spread literacy as much as they attempted to defend or establish the dominance of a way of living meant to ensure an order that promised eternal life.
In the scale of today's human practical experience, efficiency in general is almost independent of individual performance. It is independent of the degree of faith, ethical behavior, family status, and other characteristics of what religion calls good, and which ethics appropriates as a desired set of social expectations. Within a small scale of existence and work, things belong together: the practical and the spiritual, politics and morals, the good and the useful. Religion is their syncretic expression. The need for specialization and mediation changed the nature of pragmatic relations. Various realms of human practical experience are severed from each other. As this takes place, the religiously grounded system of values based on unity and integration-after all, this is what monotheism, in its various embodiments, represents-is submitted to the test of new circumstances of human self-constitution.
Among the many explanations of the events of the late sixties, at least the phenomenon of the attraction exercised by the various churches of meditation and their gurus is reflective of the crisis of monotheism, and of the culture that grew around it. An increasing number of esoteric, exotic, scientific, or pseudoscientific sects today bear witness to the same. The difference is that these sects are no longer isolated, that almost the entire religious dimension of people is connected to some sect, be it even one that used to be a dominant church.
Religion-based values or attitudes are carried over into the new segmented practical experiences of work, family, and society, and thus into the realm of politics, law, and market relations. Originating from sexual drive, love is one of the experiences from which family, friendship, art, and philosophy derived over time. Once written in the Book as a different form of love, once ascertained as a practical experience, it bridges between its natural biological basis and its cultural reality as a characteristic of a framework of human interaction in which individuals project their biological and cultural identity. Written about in religious books, love starts a journey from naturalness to artifact. Expressed as intelligence, temperament, appearance, or physical ability (our natural endowment), love is subjected, in conjunction with the experience of writing the Book, to a set of expectations expressed as though they originated from outside the experience.
In this process, there is no passive participant. The written word is permeated by the structural characteristics of the act of preferring somebody to somebody else, one course of action from among many, and, more generally, something over something else, according to religious values. The implicit expectation of permanency (of faith, love, or ownership) results from the pragmatic reasons acknowledged by the Book(s). A consensus essential for the survival and well being of the community is reached by acknowledging forces from outside, and accepting their permanent and quasi-universal nature. In a universe of immediacy and proximity, change other than that experienced in natural cycles is not anticipated.
Divinity makes sense only if constituted in practical experiences from which a notion of eternity and universality result. The written words exalting unity, uniqueness, eternity, and the promise of a better future are the result of the practical experience, since in the realm of nature only the immediate and the proximate are acknowledged. Forever marked by this experience of time and space beyond the immediate, the written language of religion, together with the written language of observations connected to the awareness of natural cycles (the moon, the seasons, plagues), remains a repository of the notion of permanency, universality, and uniqueness, and an instrument for hierarchical differentiation.
Whenever constituted in activities related to or independent of religion, language, as a product of and medium for human identification, projects these structural characteristics upon whatever the object of practical experience is. Once written, the word seems to carry into eternity its own condition. With the advent of literacy, as this is made possible and necessary by a different scale of human praxis, literacy itself would appear as endowed with the quality of eternity and universality, triggering its own sense of exaltation and mission, lasting well into our day. For millions of citizens from countries south of Russia, who once gave up their roots to show allegiance to the Soviet Empire, to return to Arabic writing after being forced to adopt the Cyrillic means rediscovering and reconnecting to their eternity. That some of them, caught in the geo- political confrontation of their neighbors, adopt the Roman alphabet of their Turkish Moslem brothers, does not change the expectation.
Religion and efficiency
In the literate forms of language experiences, not only religion, but also science and the humanities, literature, and politics are established and subjected to the practical test of efficiency. Each projects a notion of permanency and universality, which is influenced by the practical experience of religion, sometimes in contradiction to the archetypal experience resulting in the notion (or notions) of God (or gods). Now that the pragmatic framework of the very ample scale of human practice makes permanency and universality untenable, the tendency to escape from the confines of religion becomes evident. There is a strong sense of relativism in science, an appropriate self- doubt in humanistic discourse, and an appropriate understanding of the multiplicity and open-endedness in almost every aspect of our social and political life.
This was not achieved through and in literacy, but in disregard of it, through the many partial literacies reflecting our practical self-constitution. The reality of the global nature of human experience, of interconnectedness, of its distributed nature, and of the many integrative forces at work, renders the centralism implied in the Book(s) obsolete for many people. At the same time, let it also be noted that this reality makes the Book even more necessary than ever for many, and at different levels of their practical life. The many religious literacies of these days-promoting permanent modes of life, exotic and less exotic codes of behavior, ways of eating and dressing, hopes for a happy future or some form of afterlife-maintain dualistic schemes of good and bad, right and wrong, sacred and secular in a world of extremely subtle and painfully vague distinctions. The question whether love and reason can undergird community awareness, social action, political activism, and education if, as seems to be the case, their connection to faith continues to decline, belongs to the same dualistic perspective. This perspective is common to both partisans and enemies of religion. It used to be the backbone of the ideology of religious suppression-either under communism, or wherever a dominant religion takes upon itself the eradication of any other religion. And it is becoming the argument of the many emancipatory movements promoting the religions of atheism and agnosticism as a substitute for religion. The subject is ultimately one of faith, concerning very intimate aspects of individual self-assessment, but not necessarily the institution of creed. Still captive to dualism, brought about and nourished by experiences constitutive of literacy, we have problems coping with a world where the enemy is us and where religion is different from what it was at the time of its inception, or the time we were first were exposed to it.
In view of these developments, we wonder how the rules and values established in the original religious framework are to survive. If the literacy through which these rules come to us is seen only as a vessel, a means of expressing values and criteria for evaluation, then any other means could perform the same function. The Crystal Cathedral of television fame, no less than the Web sites of many churches, proves the point.
Since we are our language, and we constitute ourselves as spiritual and physical entities in the experience of language, writing cannot be seen as a passive medium, nor reading as a mechanical rendition. Accordingly, the medium through which religion is expressed affects the religion, changes its condition. Applied to contemporary religious experience, this argument is confirmed again and again. From the entire practical experience of religion, what survives is the liturgy, transformed into a performance of limited cathartic impact.
Merchandising completes this new condition of faith. For millennia, a community considered its priests vital to its survival. In the civilization of illiteracy, the situation is reversed. Ministers, and to some extent priests, depend on a community for their survival. Ministers are in the business of selling themselves as much as they are in the business of selling their church or even God. Some evangelists remain independent in the sense that they package their own programs for presentation to large crowds in tents, in auditoriums, or on television. These religious enterprises create a vast business empire around a persona. As long as the enterprise can deliver what the preacher promises-through his performance act and the merchandise he sells to the faithful-then the tele-congregants-no less fascinated by celebrity than the rest of society-will buy him.
A newer phenomenon is less personality dependent and more message- oriented, but the goal is the same: ministers need to make a living. Relying on information polled from hundreds of middle-class non-churchgoers, some enterprising ministers came up with a product bound to please: nothing boring or aggressive; cost- efficiency; comfortable seating; no organ. According to a study by the Harvard Business School, the resulting church was the embodiment of the phrase "knowing your customers and meeting their needs." Church attendance grew by relying on customer recommendation. Soon, the ministers franchised their operation in localities with a target market: 25-to-40-year-old seekers ("a growing market"), with middle to upper middle class salaries.
Other seekers look in different directions. Almost anyone with a message can establish a religion, and sometimes entire sects are based on just a few words from the Bible (the Seventh-Day Adventists, for example, or the snake handlers of the Appalachians, or the Pentecostals). Participatory forms of worship are another trend. They may derive inspiration from the book, but they aim to involve avenues of perception not bound to literacy: song, dance, meditation, the inhaling of aroma, touching minerals. Some religions hark back to nature, animism, and what can be called neo-paganism, as in the Wikka religion. No matter how far back some of these religions claim to go, they are religions of the civilization of illiteracy. They do not repeat the original pragmatic framework but respond to today's framework of self-constitution and the individual needs or desires of the people who constitute themselves as religious through these new manifestations.
While observations made in language can be subjected to confirmation, religious assumptions are expressed through the inner reality of language, and are only subject to language correctness. It is impressive how language houses concepts for which there is no referent in practical experience, but which are constituted exactly because some aspects of practical experience cannot be otherwise explained. In the history of how ideas, generalities, and abstractions are formed, the experience of religion is of particular interest. Values and beliefs that cannot be submitted to the physical senses, but can be comprehended through language-written, read, sung, danced, and celebrated-are transmitted through religion.
Many assume that the new status of religion in our day is due not only to market pressure and obsession with consumption, but also to the advancement of science. Supposed to debunk the rationality of faith and offer its own rationality as the basis of new ways of understanding the origin of life, the role of human beings, the source of good and evil, and the nature of transcendence, science introduces a positivist conception of facts, irreconcilable with that of the relativity of religious images. Research in artificial intelligence discovered that "97% of human activity (is) concept- free, driven by control mechanisms we share not only with our simian forebears, but with insects." If this is indeed true, the role of rationality, religious or scientific, in our practical experiences of self-constitution has to be revisited. The various manifestations of religion subtly address this need because they recognize dimensions of human experience that cannot be reduced to scientific explanations and logic, or cannot be explained without explaining them away in the process. One interesting tendency in the civilization of illiteracy is less to assimilate the new science and technology-as was the case only 20-30 years ago-and more to subject it to what religion considers right.
Fundamentalism of any kind corresponds to the dynamics of this illiterate society, in the sense that it promotes a very limited and limiting subset of the language of religion, in a world segmented into more religious denominations than ever before. If over 350,000 registered churches serve the religious needs of the population in the USA, and almost as many meeting places are available to small groups of believers, nobody will seriously argue that people are less religious, rather that they are religious in a different way, often integrating the latest in science and technology. Among the most active Internet forums, religion maintains a presence supported by the best that technology can offer. With each new scientific theory unveiling the deeper structure of matter, more subtle forms of interconnectedness among phenomena, new sources of creativity, and new limits of the universe, the need for religion changes. To cope with complexity means either to have a good command of it-which seems less and less possible-or to accept a benevolent underwriting. The challenge of complexity generates its own need for creed. Social, economic, and political realities are not always encouraging. Integration based on pragmatic motives increases, as does individual anxiety. No matter how much we learn about death, we are still not free of its frightening randomness. Realistically speaking, the belief in an afterlife and the dedication to cryonics are less far apart than they seem at first glance.
Religiosity in the civilization of illiteracy
Some will argue, probably with good reason, that religion in the civilization of illiteracy is but another form of consumerism, or at least of manipulation. No matter what the religious occasion, and if it is still indeed of religious motivation, the market celebrates its highest results in anticipation of holidays (the former holy days). The 40,000 car dealerships, many designed as car cathedrals, and almost 35,000 shopping malls get more visitors during the holiday season than do churches. In addition, even ceremonies whose significance is fundamentally different today than during previous periods, generate more business than religious awareness. The language of ceremonies is entrusted to consultants in marriage, confirmation, baptism, bar mitzvah, and death. Texts related to circumstances of practical experiences different from those of our day are written and read, or, to be more precise, performed without either understanding what kind of pragmatics made them necessary or realizing the discrepancy between past and present pragmatics. This is why they ring so hollow in our day.
When permanence is exalted, faithfulness promised, acceptance of biblical or other precepts (of the Koran, of Far Eastern pantheistic religions) ascertained, literacy and religion are only mimicked. Talaba, the 100 rubles (or whatever the currency of choice) per month paid by Shiite missionaries from Iran, brings many Tadjiks, Uzbeks, and Turkmenians to the new religious schools of Islam. Chances are that a higher bidder from another religion would spoil the game. Under the new pragmatic circumstances of human self-constitution, change, variety, self-determination, individualism, negation of authority, divine or secular, and skepticism are decisive for reaching the levels of efficiency demanded by a dynamic scale of existence.
Today's world is not one of generalized atheism. It is, rather, one of many partial religious literacies, sharing in some basic symbolism, although not necessarily in a unifying framework for its consistent interpretation. Many do not believe, for reasons of science or convenience, in the religious explanation of the origin of the universe and life. Or they do not care for the message of love and goodness embedded in almost every current manifestation of faith. They see in every religious book the handwriting of some groups who, in order to impose their values, invented the image of a supreme force in order to achieve, if not authority, at least credibility.
We live in an environment of compromise and tolerance, infinite distinctions, fast sequences of failure and success, challenged authority and generalized democracy. In today's huge and ineffective social mechanism, in the integrated and networked world, individual failure does not affect the performance of the system. Illiteracy, while dangerous under circumstances characteristic for the pragmatic of the recent past, only marginally affects the levels of efficiency reached. Religiosity, of consequence in the same pragmatic framework, plays no role whatsoever in the illiterate practical experiences of human self-constitution. Calling such assessments heresies, as some might be inclined to do, does not really answer the question of whether religious law can still serve, alone or together with other laws, as the binding tie of community-as it does not address the broader issues of whether literacy can serve as the binding tie of community. Because of their pragmatic nature, characteristics of religion and structural characteristics of language are fundamentally similar. If we want to understand the condition of religion today, we have to specifically address the pragmatic circumstances of self-constitution within the civilization of illiteracy.
In the events of tele-evangelism there is no place for literacy. But the video church, and computer-aided religion, the bible on CD-ROM, or CD-I, the vacation village for believers, and religious tourism are mainly forms of entertainment. Their validity is divorced from the concept of the exalted individual, critical in the context of a small- scale community. Consequently, the religious dimension of transcendence is annihilated. Ours is the time of the eternal instant, not of some vague eternity promised as reward after the present. Partially banalized through abuse of the word, concepts such as dignity, decency, and human values have become the clichés of the video church, with as many gospels as there are preachers. Religiosity today differs from the religiosity of previous pragmatic frameworks insofar as it corresponds to the accentuated insularity of the individual.
As long as the viewer is only a digit away on his or her remote control from a pornography channel, from the latest quote on the stock market, of from a commercial message-for denture adhesive, gastric relief, and home pregnancy tests-it is difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between sanctity and triviality, righteousness and venality. The global community of tele-viewing is splitting into smaller and smaller groups. And TV, as a pulpit of missionary activity, reveals itself as only syntactically different from the missionary work of advertisement. Mass religion proves to be as impersonal as the market. In effect, it severs the relations between religion and the mysterious, still unexplained aspects of human existence. A virtual reality package can be as good as the performance of having the blind see, and the cripple leave the wheelchair to enter the 100-meter dash. The virtual cathedral, the stadium, and the mass audience addressed in front of the camera are themselves of a scale inadequate to both the teaching disseminated and the nature of religious experience, no matter how far the effort to change the vocabulary goes.
The language of the books is rooted in experiences to which the tele-viewer no longer has a direct relation. They cannot be substituted in a medium adapted to change and variety. The categories that religious discourse centers on-faith, goodness, transcendence, authority, sin, punishment-were established in a pragmatic framework totally different from that of the present. Today, existence offers variety, immediate satisfaction, and protection from the whims of nature. The sense of danger has changed. The equity accumulated by the church in these categories may be enough to entitle claims of ownership, given people's inertia, but not to maintain them as effective means of affecting current practical experiences. It might well be true that three out of five Americans now believe there is a hell, and that people in other countries share the same assumption, but this has no bearing on their self-constitution in the world of quickly changing scenarios for fulfillment outside faith. Networking and distributed work are better synchronized with the pragmatics of high efficiency of our day. Software for interactive multimedia keeps track of a person's religious patterns, and provides prayer and interpretation integrated in the same package.
In its attempt to adapt to a new framework of human activity, religion adopted social causes (renouncing its metaphysics), scientific terminology (renouncing agnosticism), or the means of entertainment (renouncing its asceticism). With each step outside the boundaries of religion, the transcendental dimension is sacrificed. This dimension is embedded in the medium of literacy through which religious practical experience became a fixture in society. When the word does not satisfy, believers resort to other means of expression, some older than religion. It is not unusual to have a religious celebration during the day in some Catholic churches in Brazil, and at night, on the same altar, a chicken sacrificed to Yemenyá. The literate celebration, of European import, and the illiterate sacrifice to which a different group of believers connects, are impossible to reconcile. In this framework, freedom of choice, as vulgar or trivial as those choices might be, takes precedence over authority. In Brazil, "Graças a Deus!" is paired with the practice of African cults (Candomblé, Umbanda, Macumba), just as "Allah-hu-akbar" is with shamanistic or Buddhist celebrations in Azerbaidjan and Kazakstan. These are particular expressions of religion in the civilization of illiteracy, as much as TV evangelism is. For as much as religion was submitted to the word, performance always seems to get the upper hand.
To blindly ascertain permanence against the background of change would only further undermine religious practice. This is why the new religions focus on the immediate and produce the reward as fast as it is expected. The continuous proliferation of new religious denominations, soon to be as many as there are people who constitute the networks of human interaction in today's pragmatic context, reflects also the ability of the church to adapt. But this was not religion's reason for being in the first place, and will not represent more than what actually happens when we all wear the same shoes, or shirts, or hats but read a different label on each, when we all eat the same food that is only packaged differently, when we all vote for the same politics (or lack of same) while maintaining party affiliations. When each has his or her own god, God ceases to exist.
With the end of the civilization of literacy, partial religious literacies emerge, developing their own languages, their own organizations, their own justification. The heterogeneity of the world, its intrinsic relativity, and its dynamics of change mark religious practical experiences in ways not dissimilar to those of scientific, artistic, political, educational, moral, and many other experiences. Consumption of the language of religion in ceremonies and holidays that promote the expectation of more and cheaper, on which the quest for unlimited satisfaction of needs and desires is based, does not qualify anyone as religious or literate. Neither does secularism for that matter, no less illiterate, and no less subjected to the same expectation of high efficiency which undermines the core of any religion.
Secular religion
In our day of increased secularism, the extent to which religion permeates people's lives, whether faithful, indifferent (neutral), or actively antireligious, is probably difficult to assess. The separation of church and state is powerfully anchored in constitutions and declarations of independence, while new presidents, kings, emperors, state officials, and members of the judiciary still swear on the books of their religious faith, invoke their respective gods as the ultimate judge (or help), and openly, or covertly, participate in the rituals inherited from theological practical experiences. The dominant symbolism of our day has a religious aura. It seems that both the faithful and the secularists of all nuances entered a mutual agreement in sanctioning what came to be known as civil religion. People pledge allegiance to the flag, get emotionally carried away when the national anthem is played, and partake in the celebration of holidays, never questioning their justification. These elements of civil religion come to us in perverted forms, divorced from the pragmatic context within which they were constituted. To swear on the Bible was specifically prohibited ("You are not to swear at all, not by heaven, for it is God's throne, nor by earth, for it is his footstool…" Matthew 5:33-36). Swearing-in ceremonies take place in the open in order to make them manifest to the gods. In some countries a window is still opened when an oath of office is recited. Holidays, meant as occasions of religious recollection, or to instill a sense of solidarity, remain only what each person makes of them. Even more, in countries making a point of avoiding the domination of one religion over another, the holidays of the dominant religion become the holidays of the entire nation, enjoyed foremostly as market celebrations.
To notice the contradictory nature of the presence of religion in contexts of secular practical experiences, some directly contrary to religious beliefs, means to notice how some of the motivations of religion expatiate in a context contradicting the legitimacy of the theological experience in our day and age. This became clear even within the particular circumstances of revolutions whose stated goal was to eradicate religion through state oppression or by education. The French Revolution discovered, soon after the king and other members of the power elite were decapitated, that the authority of its ideals, embodied in the call for liberty, equality, fraternity, was not enough, despite being housed in the same body of literacy as religion was, to substitute for the higher authority of Divinity.
The Soviet Revolution hoped that theater or cinematography would substitute for religion, or at least for church. Some of its ideologues experimented with a secular god- building strategy, inventing a sui generis higher force to which people could relate, and on which hope could be placed. They tried, very much in the spirit of the utopian Marx, to deify the collective force of the working class in order to inspire a religious sense of community. Enormous energy was invested in designing new rituals. Many of the atheist artists of the Russian avant-garde served the cause they thought opened the gates of artistic freedom and universal love. Their own escape from the realm of literacy into the realm of imagery-intended to replace the confining texts of religion and ideology-should have warned them about the impossibility of the task at hand. Disappointed by their own naiveté, but incapable of acknowledging failure, some of them wound up embracing the new civic religion of gods and holidays, as shallow as the theology around which they were built.
What we identify in all these elements is the continuation of structural characteristics pertinent to religion and to the medium of its expression, i.e., literacy in a fundamentally different context. The encompassing principles of tolerance, equality, and freedom contradict the spirit on which religion and literacy were based. They weaken our convictions of what is right and efficient in view of the desired end, and of endurance as a group. The decline of morals in a context in which moral behavior does not affect efficiency is not due to the decline in religiosity, but to the general perception, justified or not, that morality and religion do not count; or that they play no role in making people happy. The sanctity of life gone, there is little sanctity left in forms of celebrating it: birthdays, communions, marriage, funerals. Between birth and death, the audience at our rites of passage diminishes painfully. We know that death is very personal, but communities, for pragmatic reasons, used to confront death and its consequences, many related to inheritance, not relegate it to specialists in the various aspects of dying. Death is reduced to a biological event leading only to biochemical decomposition: No fun, no direct practical significance for others, except in the inheritance process, a market event for funeral parlors and pushy clergy.
Appropriation of life events in the civilization of illiteracy equals the structuring of small languages of post-literate celebrations, taken over by baptism, communion, and marriage consultants, all alienated from the religious meaning they had, moreover from the initial pragmatic motivation. Literacy stood as the rulebook for all these direct, integrated, sequentialized, deterministic occurrences. The illiterate celebrates the randomness and the relative and makes everything a festival of randomness-crime, deadly disease, a riot, a bargain, a love affair.
Religion and church tried to instill permanency. Baptism was the initiation rite that opened the cycle. Confirmation entailed acceptance in the community. Marriage, once and forever, introduced a sense of unity and continuity. The last rites freed one from life for an afterlife in which the deceased still watched over the living faithful. Today, each of these moments is associated with a civil ritual: birth is recorded in the town or city hall. The child must have a social security number by the age of two. At age five, children must enter school. Children no longer join the community as responsible members at the age of 12 or 14 years, but they are given rights that they sometimes cannot handle. Marriage and the establishment of family come much later than in earlier pragmatic contexts. Extracted from the religious context, family life is a strange mixture of biological convenience and contractual obligations. Death, always the focus of religion, is defined in terms of its effects on efficiency. The fine distinction between clinical death and total death only shows how priests, the final witnesses to the end of a life, are replaced by the technologists who keep the heart beating under the alibi of "sanctity of life." Life ends as it begins, as an entry in the record books, for tax purposes.
Japanese parents-to-be might still consult an ekisha (a sort of fortune teller) in order to choose the proper name for a newborn infant, already thinking about the marriage (names should fit in order to ensure harmony); others will have difficulty in understanding the similarity between choosing a name and the observance of agricultural cycles, as both were religiously encoded in minute rules centuries ago. These people will even cringe at the discourse in a monastery where the priest might indulge in the discussion of the unity between inner order (of the individual) and outer order. The fact that mandala, traded all over the world, once represented that order escapes their personal experience.
Religions distinguished between nature and cosmos. Whether explicitly stated or not, nature was seen as earthbound, the source of our existence, the provider. Cosmos, beyond our reach, should not be interfered with. The experience of extraterrestrial research expanded the notion of nature. In today's integrated world, resources and environmental concerns also contribute to the expanded notion of nature pertinent to our activity and life. Our worries about pollution of earth, oceans, and skies are not religious in nature. Neither is the distinction between what is feasible and what is desirable. The Ten Commandments tell us what we should not do, while the devil called desire whispers into our ears that nothing is forbidden unless we really do not care for it. The relation between the wholeness of the being and its parts is subject to maintenance, just as the automobile is. Once gods were described as jealous and intolerant. Now they are presented as accommodating a world of diversified experiences and heterogeneous forms of worship, including Satanism. Our pragmatic context is one of generalized pluralism, embodied in the many choices we pursue in the practical experience of self-constitution. When the pragmatics of self-constitution can be based on rationality, the churches of the civilization of illiteracy are houses of secular religion.
A Mouthful of Microwave Diet
Have you ever ordered a pizza over the Internet? It is an experience in illiterate cooking. The image on the screen allows clients to prepare the most individualized pizza one can think of: they decide what the shape, size, and thickness of the crust will be; which spices and how much; what kind of cheese; and which toppings. They can arrange these the way they want, layer them, and control how much tomato sauce, if any, should be used. Done? Ask your children, or your guests, whether they want to correct your design. The on-line chef is open to suggestions. All set? The pizza will be delivered in 20 minutes-or it's free. The entire transaction is illiterate: selection is made by clicking an image. With each choice, prices are automatically calculated and listed. Addition is as error-free as it can get. Taxes are calculated and automatically transferred to the IRS. A voice announces over the Internet, "Food is ready! Thank you for your order. And please visit us again."
No, this is not fantasy. Pizza shops and hamburger joints figure visibly on the Internet (still in its infancy). Their structure and functioning, as well as the expectations connected to them, are what defines them as belonging to the civilization of illiteracy. But the picture of what people eat and how their food is prepared is more complicated than what this example conveys. This chapter will describe how we arrived at this point, and what the consequences of the fundamental shift from the civilization of literacy in our relation to food are.
Food and expectations
How does one connect food to literacy? In the first place, how we eat is as important as what we eat and how we prepare it. There is a culture of dining, and an entire way of viewing food-from obtaining raw ingredients to preparation and to eating-that reflects values instilled in the civilization of literacy. Food and eating in the civilization of illiteracy are epitomized not only by the pizza outlet on the Internet, by McDonalds, Burger King, and the frozen dinner waiting to be thrown into the microwave oven, but also by the vast industry of efficient production of primary and secondary foodstuffs, the anonymous, segmented processing of nutrition. It is not an individual's literacy that characterizes the meal, but the pragmatic framework in which people emerge and how they project their characteristics, including dietary and taste expectations, in the process.
The hunger-driven primitive human and the spoiled patron of a good Italian restaurant have in common only the biological substratum of their need, expressed in the very dissimilar acts of hunting and, respectively, selecting items from a menu. Primitive beings are identified by projecting, in the universe of their existence, natural qualities pertinent to the experience of feeding themselves: sight, hearing, smell, speed, force. Restaurant patrons project natural abilities filtered through a culture of eating: taste, dietary awareness, ability to select and combine. These two extremes document a commonalty of human self-constitution. Nevertheless, what is of interest in the attempt to understand food and eating in the civilization of illiteracy are actually differences. The nuclei of ancient incipient agriculture, which were also the places of origin for many language families, are distinct pragmatic frameworks relevant also to the experience of cooking. Within agriculture, absolute dependencies on nature are changed to relative dependencies, since more food is produced than is needed for survival. The food of this period is cause for some of the rituals associated with the elements involved in producing it. The layers between animal hunger and the new hunger, filter new experiences of satisfaction or illness, of pleasure or pain, of self-control or abuse. Symbolism (concerning fertility, agriculture, power) confirms patterns of successful or failed practical experiences against the background of increased awareness of the biological characteristics of the species. Notation and writing contribute to the change of balance between the natural and the cultural. But the difference between the primitive eater and the person who awaits his dinner at a table derives from the distinctive conditions of their existence.
In the pragmatic framework that constitutes the foundation for literacy, expectations regarding food were already in place: slow rhythm, awareness of the environment, environment and natural cycles, labor division according to sex and age (the female was usually the homemaker and cook). Food preparation was characterized by its intrinsic sequentiality, by linear dependencies among its variables. Cooking was inspired and supported by the sequence of seasons, local stock, and relative immediacy of needs, affected by weather conditions, intensity of effort, and celebration pertinent to seasons or special events. In short, the relation to food was governed by the same principles that notation and writing were.
In the civilization of illiteracy, personal attitudes towards preparing food and eating, whether at home or in a restaurant, are affected by a different pragmatic framework. Probably more is known about food in the civilization of illiteracy than at any other time in the history of agriculture and cuisine. But this knowledge does not come from the direct experience of the food, i.e., how it is grown and processed. Human beings in the civilization of illiteracy know better why they eat than what they eat. It is not what is in the food that concerns many people, but what the food is supposed to do for them: maintain and service the body through the proper balance of vitamins, minerals, and protein; help people cope with residue; and, eventually, conjure meaning as a symbol in a universe of competing symbolisms. Fashion extends to food, too!
People feed themselves today according to expectations different from those of primitive human beings-hunters, farmers, craftsmen, and workers involved in pre- industrial experience. Needs are different, and food resources are different. Many layers of humanity stand between an individual projecting animal hunger in a world of competing animals and an individual expressing desire for French cuisine, in its authentic variations, in its snobbish form, or in its fast food versions, fresh or frozen, regular or dietetic. Pizza, spaghetti, falafel, sushi, tortillas, cold cuts, and egg rolls figure no less on the list of choices. Many filters, in the form of various taboos and restrictions, as well as personal tastes, are at work. Meaning is incidentally elicited as one chooses the recipe of a celebrity cook, or decides on a certain restaurant.
The hungry primitive human, the human beings working the land in the agricultural phase, the farmers, craftsmen, soldiers, and scholars of the pre-industrial age expected only that food would still their hunger. More is expected from the eating experience today, and some of these expectations have nothing to do with hunger. People take it for granted that they can buy any type of food from anywhere in the world, at any time of the year. Globality is thus acknowledged, just as the sequence of seasons is ignored. In between these two extremes is the literate eating experience, with its own expectations.
The experience of eating reflected a way of life, a way of self-constitution as civilized, progressive, literate. Here are the words of Charles Dickens, recorded during his visit to the United States in 1842. He gave a vivid summary of American eating habits west of the big eastern cities (Boston, New York) as he observed them on steamboats and in inns where stagecoaches stopped for the night in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Missouri. I never in my life did see such listless, heavy dulness [sic] as brooded over these meals: the very recollection of it weighs me down, and makes me, for the moment, wretched. Reading and writing on my knee, in our little cabin, I really dreaded the coming of the hour that summoned us to table; and was as glad to escape from it again as if it had been a penance or a punishment. Healthy cheerfulness and good spirits forming part of the banquet, I could soak my crusts in the fountain with Le Sage's strolling players, and revel in their glad enjoyment: but sitting down with so many fellow-animals to ward off thirst and hunger as a business; to empty each creature his Yahoo's trough as quickly as he can, and then to slink sullenly away; to have these social sacraments stripped of everything but the mere greedy satisfaction of the natural cravings; goes so against the grain with me, that I seriously believe the recollection of these funeral feasts will be a waking nightmare to me all my life. Dickens was the epitome of the literate experience, and he was addressing a literate audience that had literate expectations in the experience of dining: what time meals were held, who sat where and next to whom, the order in which certain foods were served, how long a meal should last, what topics could be discussed. Literate characteristics persist in the literate frameworks of political and formal dinners: hierarchy (who sits where), the order in which food is presented, the types of dishes and eating utensils.
Fishing in a videolake
Many questions come to mind with respect to how, and what, and when, people eat and drink. Human beings still project their reality in the environment through biological characteristics-the ability to see, smell, taste, move, jump, etc.-but some in unnatural ways. Not only do we help vision with glasses and hearing with aid devices, but even taste and smell are helped through the appropriate chemistry, in order to buffer some odor and enhance others. From odorless garlic to tofu smelling of pork chops, everything is within the possibility of biochemistry. At the extreme, nutrition is altogether removed from the context of nature. This is the case not just with people who are fed artificially, through tubes, pills, or special concoctions.
What does this have to do with literacy? How is it influenced, if at all, by the increased illiteracy of the new condition of human activity? The answers are far from being trivial. An editorialist from Germany, a country of solid, if not necessarily refined, eating instincts, went to great lengths to explain the alienation of nourishment in our age. The final scene he described is comic and sad at the same time. Some artificially obtained nutritive substance, molded in the shape of fish, is fried and served to a video- literate who eats the food while watching a videotape about fishing. The ersatz experience of tele-viewing is probably disconnected from the experience of river, trees, sunshine, and fish biting the hook, not to mention the taste of fresh fish. Dwindling stocks of fish is one reason why we can no longer afford the nourishment that results from direct involvement with nature. Not everyone can or wants to be a hunter, a fisherman, or a farmer. The romanticism of literacy, and of the utopian ideologies it helps express, would lead some to believe that this is possible, even desirable. But maybe not, since the new scale of humankind does not go unnoticed, even by those still clinging to the continuity and permanency embodied in literacy.
Values, rules, and expectations such as health considerations, efficiency, and taste are embodied in programs and procedures for which machines are built, new substances designed, and waste reprocessed. It might make some people shiver, but about 50% of a person's average caloric intake is the result of artificial synthesis and genetic engineering. Louis de Funés (in a 1976 French film directed by Claude Zidi) almost wound up as part of the food processed at Tricatel, a new factory that produces tasteless food based on the rules and looks of French cuisine, which the factory effectively undermines. The comedian, performing as a food inspector, has to decide what the real thing is and what is the fake. Competing with this burlesque, a national program, Awakening of Taste, under the aegis of the Minister of Culture, was set up to encourage French students in primary schools to rediscover the true national cuisine. That such a program parallels the effort of the Académie Française to maintain the purity and integrity of the language is a convenient argument concerning the interdependence of the ideal of literacy and that of haute cuisine.
The movie satirizes the human being's relation to food and technology. Eating something reminiscent of a fish, whether farmed or synthetically produced, while having video nostalgia for fishing is not an exception. In the mental gardens we plant each spring, when magazines and television shows present images of the beautiful tomatoes we might enjoy in a few months, there is a virtual space for every practical experience we gave up in order to satisfy our desire for more at the lowest price. The tomato in the civilization of illiteracy, hydroponic or garden grown, ripens faster, is perfect in form, and tastes almost like we think it should.
Irony and science fiction aside, we are indeed engineering proteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, and minerals. They are designed to optimally maintain the human being and enhance his or her performance. This can be seen as a new phase in the process of transferring knowledge pertinent to nourishment from the encompassing and dominating medium of literacy to the many partial literacies- chemical, biological, genetic-of the civilization of illiteracy. Having in mind the image of where we currently stand and the direction in which we are heading, we can trace human self-constitution with the practical experience of food.
Language and nourishment
The relation between what people eat, how they prepare their food, how they serve and how they eat it, is accounted for in language, especially in its literate use, in many ways. Experiences of our continuous constitution through work, personal life, habits, defense, and aggression are expressed through language and other manifestations of our nature and culture. The same holds true for such peculiarities as the way people eat, entertain, dress, make love, and play. Language, as one among many expressive means, is a medium for representation, but also for diversifying experiences. It supports the research of new realms of existence, and participates in the maintenance of the integrity of human interdependencies as they develop in work, leisure, and meditation.
When the question "Why are there fewer alcoholics in China, Korea, Japan, and India?" was asked, answers were sought in culture. Reformulated as "Why can't Asians tolerate alcohol?" the question shifted the focus from what we do or do not do- the filters of exclusion or preference-to biology. Environmental, cultural, social, psychological, and cognitive characteristics can be acknowledged once the biological substratum is brought to light. Many people of Asian origin display an intolerance to alcohol that is due to a metabolism peculiar to their race. The intolerance to alcohol is associated with the lack of a catalytic enzyme, which under normal circumstances does not affect the functioning of the body. Only when alcohol is consumed do unpleasant symptoms appear: the face becomes flushed, skin temperature rises, the pulse quickens. Europeans, black Africans, and North American Indians are not affected in the same way. But they are subject to other genetically determined food sensitivities. For example, lactose intolerance is highest in Blacks.
The example given above tells us that the projection of biological characteristics into the universe of people's existence results in the image of differences among various groups of people and among individuals. People noticed these peculiarities before science existed in order to explain them. Relating the effect to a cause-a certain food or drink-people incorporate this relation into their body of experiences. Established connections become rules that are intended to ensure optimal individual and group functioning. Rules pertaining to food and ways of eating were eventually encoded and transmitted through literate means.
In short, patterns of work and life are affected. They point to various levels at which human practical experiences and the experience of nourishment are interconditioned. A first level regards nourishment and our biological endowment. A second level is nourishment and the environment-what we can afford from the world surrounding us. A third level is nourishment and self-consciousness-what best suits our life and work. Over time the interdependency changes. And at moments when the scale of mankind reaches a threshold, it is drastically redefined-as in our times, for instance.
On a larger scale, food- and drinking-related instances prompt vast servicing activities and the establishment of networks of distributed tasks. Today, diet engineers, caterers, geneticists, nutritionists, are set up to provide whatever fits the occasion, the guest list, dietary prescriptions, and astrological or medical recommendations. A formal dinner can become a well mediated activity, with many prefabricated components, including table manners-if the commissioning party so desires. Associated or not to the menu, a preparatory seminar in what to wear, how to use utensils (if more than plastic spoons and knives are used), what kind of conversation with the entrée, and which jokes before, or after, or instead of the wine, educates for the event. In fact, the buffet, a configuration from which each can assemble his or her menu, not unlike the on-line order form for the Internet pizza, is more and more preferred. It is less confining than the literacy-based sequence of the three-course meals-structured as introduction, thesis, and conclusion, known under the labels appetizer, main entrée, dessert.
Sequence and configuration revisited
With writing and reading, the experience of feeding oneself and one's family expanded to partaking in the experience of food preservation and sharing. French Assyriologist Jean Bottero read recipes, in cuneiform writing on clay tablets from around 1700 BCE, for food cooked at important occasions for people in power. That this was "cuisine of striking richness, refinement, sophistication, and artistry" should not necessarily impress us here. But the description of the ingredients, some no longer known or in use, of the sequence, and the context (celebration) deserve attention: "Head, legs and tail should be singed. Take the meat. Bring water to boil. Add fat. Onions, samidu, leeks, garlic, some blood, some fresh cheese, the whole beaten together. Add an equal amount of plain suhutium." This is a stew of kid, a meal for an exceptional occasion.
The pragmatic framework that made this cooking possible also made writing possible and necessary. Over time, this connection became even closer. Between the experiences of language and that of eating and drinking, a continuum of interactions can be noticed. Language distinctions pertinent to the practical experience of cultivating plants, taking care of animals, processing milk, and seasoning food expanded from satisfying needs to creating desires associated with taste. New knowledge is stimulated by experiences different from nourishment, such as new forms of work (cooking included), use of new resources, new tools, and new skills. And so is the expression of logic in the act of preparing, serving, and eating the food. On reading a book of recipes from the Tiberian era of the Roman Empire-De Re Culinaria (The Art of Cooking, attributed to Gaelius Apicius) and De Re Rustica (by Cato)-one can discern how things have changed over 1600 years. Apicius expressed many distinctions in foods and in ways of cooking and eating. He also expressed a certain concern for health. "Digging one's grave with one's teeth," as the expression came to life in connection with gluttony (crisp tongues of larks, dormice marinated in honey, tasty thighs of ostrich are listed), was replaced by elaborate recipes to relieve an upset stomach or to facilitate digestion. The books do not say what everyone ate, and there are reasons to believe that there was quite a difference between the menu of slaves and that of their owners. Advances in identifying plants and in processing food go in tandem with advances in medicine. Writings from other parts of the world, especially China, testify to similar developments.
It was already remarked, by no other than Roland Barthes, that the two basic language systems-one based on ideographic writing, the second on the phonetic convention-put their characteristic stamp on the menus of the Far Eastern and Western civilizations. A Japanese menu is an expression of a configuration. One can start with any of the dishes offered simultaneously. Combinations are allowed. Eating is part of the Japanese culture, a practical experience of self-constitution with strong visual components, refined combinations of odors, and participation of almost all senses. It also reflects the awareness of the world in which the Japanese constitute themselves. Japanese food is focused on what life on an island affords, plus/minus influences from other cultures, resulting from the mobility of peoples. The more concrete writing system of the Far East and the more down-to-earth nourishment, i.e., the closeness to what each source of nutrition is (raw fish, seaweed, rice, minimal processing, strict dietary patterns based on combinations of nutritional ideograms), are an expression of the unity of the pragmatic framework within which they result.
A Western menu is a sequence, a one-directional linear event with a precise culmination. Eating proceeds from the introduction to the conclusion, "from soup to nuts." A meal has a progression and projects expectations associated with this progression. Within the language of our food, there are well formed sentences and ill- formed sentences, as well as a general tendency experience gastronomic pleasure. A literate society is a society aware of the rules for generating and enjoying meals according to such rules. The rules are based on experiences transmitted from one generation to the next, not necessarily in written form, but reflecting the intrinsic sequentiality of language and its abstract writing system. Goethe fired his cook (Lina Louise Axthelm) because she could not realize the distinction between healthy meals and the more sophisticated art of preparing them according to rules of literacy and aesthetic distinction.