What failed the system was the lack of understanding of all the factors leading to new productive experiences: the framework for optimal interaction of people, circumstances of progressive mediation and further specialized human self-constitution, a practical context of networking and coordination based on individual freedom and constraints assumed by individuals as they define their expectations. Parallel to the literate structure of a politics that failed is the experience of churches in the Soviet Block. In a show of defiance towards the political dictatorship, people attended church, itself a mainstay of literate praxis (independent of the book or books they adopt for their basic program). Once religion was able to assert its literate characteristics through the imposition of constraints-so like those of the political system just overthrown- churches began to experience the low attendance that the rest of the world is already familiar with.
No matter how much more quickly events take place in our age, it is probably still too early to understand all the implications of the major political event represented by the fall of the Soviet empire. For instance, in a context of global economy, how can one correctly evaluate the emergence of new national states and forceful national movements when the post-national state and the trans-national world are already a reality? The question is political in nature. Its focus is on identity. Identity reflects all the relations through which people constituted themselves as part of a larger entity-tribe, city, region, nation-defined by biological and cultural characteristics, shared values, religion, a sense of common space and time, and a sense of future.
A world of worlds
"We have made Italy, now we have to make Italians," declared Massimo d'Azeglio during the first meeting of the Italian Parliament. A little over 100 years old, the nation-state was the most tangible product of the political practical experience in the pragmatic context whose underlying structure is so well reflected in literacy. Together with the nation-state, the modern notion of nationality was defined and became a major force of political life. As part of the political consciousness in the age of industrial production, national consciousness played a very precise role, ultimately expressed in all forms of nationalism. It unified all those whose similarities in biological characteristics, language, lore, and practical experiences were constituted in a framework of shared resources and political goals. Germany came into existence through a unifying language (Hoch Deutsch) and was consolidated through its literacy. Italy went through a similar process. In other instances, nations were born as a result of voluntary political acts: the United States, the nations declared independent after the fall of the Soviet Union, Croatia, Macedonia, some of the Arab countries, and a number of African nation-states, once colonial powers could no longer afford to resist the force of change. As with everything pertaining to politics, national politics entails expectations corresponding to past phases (the basic passions that once made up tribal solidarity), to instances of human interaction well overhauled by the new realities of the integrated world.
What, if any, explanation can one find in the dissolution of Yugoslavia? Against the background of conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina, this question has divided many well intentioned intellectuals (not only in France) inclined to solve an absurd situation of genocide. Intellectuals questioned what appeared to be irreducible religious contradictions between Catholic and Orthodox Christians, or between Christians and Moslems. The old conflict between the pro-fascist Croatian Ustash and the Serbian Chetniks dedicated to the vain goal of a greater Serbia was also on their minds. They also wondered what the chances of the new nation-states of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia, and many of the autonomous regions and republics of the former Soviet Union were. How will the Commonwealth of Independent States function once goals and purposes of nation-states take over those assumed in a nebulously defined commonwealth? And how can one explain the enormous discrepancy between the attempt to constitute a broad European Community (actually, the United Markets of Europe), while other parts of Europe break into small nation-states? How much of the underlying tribalism, or provincialism, or religious adherence, or how much of the functions of literacy at work can be read in the political fervor of nationalistic activism of our day? One answer, no matter how encouraging, cannot address a full paragraph of questions. These questions suggest that the politics of nations is so multifaceted that understanding it requires not so much rehashing the past but focusing on the broad picture of its dynamics.
Between the old city-state, the early empire (Roman, Byzantine), the medieval world of local attachments (pertaining to shared space used mainly for agriculture, and under the firm grip of the Papacy), and today's world of mass immigration and human displacement (for political, economic, religious, or psychological reasons), we find inserted the settled universe of nation-states and their respective literacies. In this universe, literacy and religion undergird the legal system. Politics defines national identity, subsuming language, ethnicity, ways of working, culture, superstitions, prejudice, art, and science. Within the nation-state's borders, citizens are subjected to a political practical experience of homogeneity, centralism, and uniformity, required by the efficiency expectations of the Industrial Revolution. The ideal of cosmopolis, the all- embracing empire of reason declared by the Stoics, runs counter to the ideal of the nation-state, which celebrates national reason and willingness to compete with others.
When the pragmatic circumstances leading to today's global economy started exercising their action, an all-embracing empire of a different nature resulted. The new statement says that Christians, Moslems, Jews, Buddhists, animists, even atheists, although bearing a national identity, are part of the global economy. Not surprisingly, political action and economic integration each run its own course. Commerce, with all its imbalances and unfairness, the almost uncontrollable financial dynamics, and migration of industries take more and more frequently what appears as the necessary path of globality. Politics, even when it acknowledges globality, focuses on national definitions. To an outside observer, a nation's politics appears insignificant, powerless in comparison to economic forces, although it claims to control these forces through monetary policies, labor laws, and trade regulations. The trans-national world has its own impetus. It continues to evade political constraints, ascertaining its own life. It was described from the perspective of its financial and economic condition as The Borderless World (the title of Kenichi Ohmae's book), within which nationality counts only marginally. This is yet another reason for the low interest in public life on the part of the wealthy in our days.
When the new southern republics freed by the breakdown of the Soviet Union debate which form of writing they should adopt-Arabic, Cyrillic, or Roman-and how to define their respective nations, they still look for national identifiers. Turkmanis and Uzbekistanis, Latvians and Estonians, Ukrainians and Georgians, Hungarians and Romanians, and enterprising Poles comb their territories in search of business opportunities. The same takes place in many other countries, whose citizens are obsessed more with prosperity than with sovereignty, with access to financial means more than with self-determination, and with cooperative effort, even involving traditional enemies, more than with a constitutional foundation or universal protection of human rights. Interestingly enough, while national identity is more and more superseded by people's a-nationality, many new countries, emerging as a result of the asserted right to self-determination, face as their first task not the future but the past: definition of their national identity. Nevertheless, the civilization of illiteracy does not promise that Italians can be made for all these new countries. Rather, these nations will become, in not necessarily satisfying ways, a-nationals, citizens of the world economy. Many of them will make up the new immigrant populations settled in ethnic neighborhoods where access to consumption will arouse a nostalgia for some remote homeland.
No one can or should generalize. Many prejudices still heat the furnaces of hatred and intolerance. Enough citadels from the past pragmatic framework maintain hopes for expansion and cultivate a politics appropriate to ages long passed. But regardless of such unsettling developments, the nation-state enters an age of denationalization, absorbed into a world of economic globality, less and less dependent on the individual and thus less and less subject to political dogma.
Of tribal chiefs, kings, and presidents
Changes in the condition of human practical experiences effect changes in the self-identification of the individual and of groups of people. Emphasis is less and less on nature and shared living space, and more on connections free of arbitrary borders, even of elements pertaining to culture and history. New political experiences, still subjected to expectations carried over from the past, do not actually continue the past. Accordingly, the nature of political experiences changes. Assumptions regarding leadership, organization, planning, and legality are redefined. Tribal chiefs might well have turned, through the centuries, into the kings of the Middle Ages, and, with the advent of a new society, into presidents. There is, nevertheless, no reason to believe that in a universe of distributed tasks and massive parallelism, a need for political centralism and hierarchy will remain. The president, for instance, is the king of the civilization of literacy; and his wife becomes the queen, in defiance of all the literate documents that justify presidency. Executive power, in conjunction with the legislative and judicial branches, implements ideals of liberal political democracy as these became essential to the pragmatics of industrial society. But once new circumstances emerge, the underlying structure reflected in the power structure undergoes change as well.
In the spirit of the dynamics of change, one should notice that, in a framework of non-hierarchic structures, there is no legitimate need for the presidency. Theoretic arguments, no matter how rigorous, are after all irrelevant if not based on related facts. New circumstances already made the function of president strictly ceremonial in many countries. In other countries, a president's ability to exercise power is impeded by laws that make this power irrelevant. Economic cycles, affecting integrated economies, turn even the most visionary heads of states (when they happen to be visionary) into witnesses to events beyond their control. Politics does not happen at levels so remote from the individual that individuals disconnect themselves from the political ceremonial. It happens closer and closer to where ideals and interest crystallize in the form of new human interactions.
Who would represent the country if the function of head of state were abolished? How can a country have a consistent political system? Who would be responsible for implementing laws? Such questions originate, without exception, within literacy's system of expectations. The extreme decentralization that is made possible by the new means of the civilization of illiteracy requires, and indeed stimulates, different political structures. Instead of the self-delusion and demagoguery triggered by an idealized image of the politically concerned citizen, we should see the reality of citizens pursuing goals that integrate political elements. Literacy resulted in a politics of representation that ended up in effectively excluding the citizen from political decision-making. Rationalized in the structures of democracy, political ideals are now a matter of efficient human interaction. A president's performance is totally irrelevant to the exchange of information on networks of human cooperative effort. Agreements relevant to the people involved, executed in view of reciprocal needs and future developments, result more and more outside political institutions, for reasons having little to do with them.
The majority of political functions, as they apply to presidents, congresses, or other political institutions, still originate in forms characteristic of past political experiences. They are based on allegiances and commitments contradicted by the pragmatics of today's world. The fact that heads of states are also heads of the military (commander-in-chief) comes from the time when the strongest man became the leader. But in the modern world of growing emancipation, women are valid candidates as heads-of-state all over the world. However, sexual bias has kept women from gaining the military competence that a commander-in-chief is expected to have. Another example: What is the reason for a president to be at the funeral of a deceased head-of- state? Blood ties used to bond kings and nobility more strongly than political arguments, long before fast transportation could carry a monarch to the deceased in less time than it took for decay to set in. A farewell wished today at the funeral of a Japanese emperor, a Moslem ruler, or an atheistic president belongs to the spectacle of politics, not to its substance. The expensive, and delusive, literate performance of state funerals, oath-taking, inauguration, parades, and state visits is more often than not an exercise in hypocrisy. These spectacles please only through their cynical pandering to the people's desire for circus. Pragmatically relevant commitments are no longer the privilege of state bureaucracies. When the historic necessity of states winds up to be no more than the expression of remote tribal instincts, the literate institution of state becomes superfluous.
Political idolatry, commercial nationalism, and ethnic vanity affect politics at many levels. Nationalism, emerging as a form of collective pride and psychological compensation for repressed instincts, celebrates gold medals at Olympic games, the number of Nobel Prize laureates, and achievements in the arts and sciences with a fervor worth a better cause. Borders of pride and prejudice are maintained even where they have de facto ceased to exist. No scientist who achieved results in his or her field worked in isolation from colleagues living all over the world. The Internet supports the integration of creative effort and ideas, beyond borders and beyond national fixations, often expressed as military priorities rather than as cooperation and integration. Art is internationally nurtured and exchanged.
Rhetoric and politics
Political programs, very much like hamburgers, cars, alcohol, sports events, artworks, and financial services, are marketed. Success in politics is valued in market terms rather than in the increasingly elusive political impact. The expression "People vote their pocketbooks" bluntly expresses this fact. But are they voting? Poll after poll reveals that they are not. Illiterates used to be excluded from voting, along with women, Blacks in America and South Africa, and foreigners in a large number of European countries.
In an ideal world, the best qualified would compete for a political position, all would vote, and the result would make everyone happy. How would such an ideal world function? Words would correspond to facts. The reward of political practical experience would be the experience itself, satisfying the need to best serve others, and thus oneself as a member of the larger social family. This is a Utopian world of perfect citizens whose reason, expressed in the language of literacy, i.e., made available to everyone and implicitly guaranteed to be a permanent medium for interaction, is the guardian of politics. We see here how authority, of the thinking human being, is established and almost automatically equated with freedom. Indeed, the doctrine of individual conformity to rational necessity was expressed in many pragmatic contexts, but never as forcefully as in the context that appropriated literacy as one of its guiding forces.
In the horizon of literacy, the expectation is that the experience of self- constitution as literate makes people submit their own nature to the rationale of literacy and thereby find fulfillment. In short, the belief that to be literate makes one respect his word, respect others, understand political expectations, and articulate one's ideas is more of an illusion. Moreover, if political action could result in having everyone accept the values of literacy and embody them as their second nature, conflicts would vanish, people would all share in wealth and, moreover, would be able to abide by the standards of democracy. It even follows that the literate need to feel the obligation of inculcating literacy in others, thus creating the possibility of changing patterns of human experiences so that they reflect the demands of reason associated with literacy. Isaiah Berlin, among others, noted that the belief in a single encompassing answer to all social questions is indefensible. Rather, conflict is an overriding feature of the human condition. This conflict develops between the propensity to diversity (all the ends pursued) and the almost irrational expectation that there is one answer-a good way of life-worth pursuing and which can be attained if the political animal acknowledges the primacy of reason over passion, and freely chooses conformity to widely shared values over chaotic individualism.
Under the pragmatic circumstances of the civilization of illiteracy, the literate expectation of unanimous or even majority vote is less than significant. Voting results are as good an indicator of a society's condition as seismographs are of the danger of an earthquake. On election days, the results are known after the first representative sample makes it through the voting mechanism. Actually, the results are already at hand days before the election takes place. The means within our reach are such that it would suffice to commit a short interval of telephone time so that people who want to vote-and who know why they vote- can, and without having to go our of their way. Any other connection, such as the generalized cable infrastructure, connected to a central data processing unit outfitted for the event, would do as well. Such a strategy would answer only one part of the question: making it easy for people to vote. The second part regards what they are asked to vote for. The political process is removed from the exciting practice of offering authentic choice. Literacy-based political action is opaque, almost inscrutable. Accordingly, the citizen has no motivation for commitment and no need to express it through voting. There is a third part: the assumption that voting is a form of particpating in the power of democracy. No one aware of the dynamics of work and life today can equate the notion of majority with democracy. More often than not, efficiency is achieved through procedures of exception.
Under the circumstances of a global economy of fast change and parallel practical experiences, no president of a country, no matter how powerful, and no central political power can effectively influence events significant to the citizen. The civilization of illiteracy requires alternatives to centralism, hierarchy, sequentiality, and determinism in politics. It especially entails alternatives to dualism, whether embodied in the two- party system, the legislative and executive opposition, and lawfulness vs. illegality, for example. This implies a broad distribution of political tasks, in conjunction with a politics that takes advantage of parallel modes of activism, networking, open-ended policies, and self-determination at meaningful levels of political life. Political fear of vagueness can only be compared to the fear of a vacuum that once upon a time branded physics and political doctrines. Faster rhythms of existence and the acknowledged need to adapt to circumstances of action never before experienced-scale of politics, globality, scale of humankind-speak against many of the literate expectations of politics as a stabilizing form of human practice. Politics, if true to its call, should contribute to speeding up processes and creating circumstances for better negotiations among people who have lost their sense of political adherence, or even lost their faith in law and order.
In this global world, where scale is of major importance, politics is supposed to mediate among the many levels at which people involved in parallel, extremely distributed activities, partake in globality. Apportionment of goods, as much as the apportionment of rights pertaining to creative aspects of human practical experiences, on a scheme similar to auctioning, follow the dynamics of the market more closely than rigid regulations. Awareness of this apportionment is a political matter and can be submitted to the concerned parties in forms of evolving opinions. Politics has also to address the new forms of property and their impact on political values in the new pragmatic framework. For instance, the real power of information processing is in the interaction of those able to access it. One should not be forced to apply rules originating from the feudal ownership of language, or from the industrial ownership of machines, to the free access to information, or to networks facilitating creative cooperative efforts. The challenge is to provide the most transparent environment, without affecting the integrity of interaction. A specific example in this regard is legislation against computer hackers. Such legislation, as well as the much publicized Communication Decency Act, only shifts attention from the new pragmatic context-unprecedented challenges arising from very powerful technologies-to one of routine law enforcement. Administrative reaction is the consequence of the built-in dualism, based on the clear-cut distinction between good and bad, characteristic of literacy-based politics.
A positive course of events can originate only from political experiences of individual empowerment. Wider choice and broader possibilities involve specific risks. Hacking is by no means an experience without precedent in past pragmatics. The German war code was hacked, and nations are very eager to confer honor upon other hackers of distinction: scientists who break the secrets of genetic codes, or spies who discover the secrets of the enemy. Examined from a literate political perspective, hacking, as a peculiar form of individual self-constitution, can appear as criminal. In a political experience coherent with the pragmatics leading to the civilization of illiteracy, hacking appears on a continuum joining creativity, protest, invention, and non- conformity, as well as criminal intention. The answer to hackers is not a code of punishment of medieval or industrial inspiration, but transparency that will, in the long run, undermine possible criminal motivations. A society that punishes creativity, even when relatively misdirected, through its policies and laws punishes itself in the long run. Someone who works at his terminal for a company producing goods all over the world, and pursuing social and economic programs that effectively touch citizens of many cultures, different faiths, race, political creed, sexual preference, different history and different expectations, participates in the politics of the world more than the institutions and the bureaucrats paid for functions that they cannot effectively fulfill. It is again pragmatics that makes us citizens of our small village or town, that integrates all of us, Netizens included, in the global world.
Judging justice
This short parenthesis in the discussion of politics can be justified by the fact that justice is the object of both politics and law. The practice of law is the practice of politics on a smaller stage. Political action, involving a new concept of law and justice, closer to the environment of industrial work, established not only that all (or almost all) were equal in respect to the law, but also that justice would take its own course. In the course of history, the various moments of change in the pragmatic framework were also moments of change in regard to the justice system. In incipient political praxis, rulers administered the law. Even today, a governor or president is the court of last resort in some legal cases. And law, like politics, relies on rhetoric, on language as the mediating mechanism of concepts.
In the course of history, the various moments of change in the pragmatic framework were also moments of change in regard to what today we call justice. The more powerful applied their own ideas of law under circumstances of incipient human practical experiences. It was the role of the appointed leader, whether in the magic of ritual, in tribes, in religion, in forms of settlement, to judge matters under dispute. Law focused on agreements, commitments, and integrity of the human body, of property, of goods, and of exchange. In time, the distance between what was done, affecting the balance of people's rights and obligation, and the reaction to it increased. A whole body of mediating elements, religion included, governed action and reaction. Just as myth and ritual did in their ways, major religious texts testify to how rules of living together and preserving life were established and implemented. The scale of society, reflected in the nature of the pragmatic context, played a crucial role in the process in respect to what was considered a crime, the type of punishment, and the swiftness of punishment.
What is of concern here is the change from the legal code elaborated in the framework of literacy and legal experience in the civilization of illiteracy. The institution of law and the professions involved in it embody expectations of justice under assumptions of efficiency pertinent to human practical experiences. New lands were discovered, new property was created, and machines and people made higher productivity possible. Rights were fought for, access to education opened, and the world became a place of new transactions for which the law of the land, inspired by natural right, no longer sufficed. It was in this context that literacy stimulated both the practice of legality and the inquiry into the nature of human rights and obligations. But it is also in this context that the language of legal practical experiences commenced its journey into today's legalese that no ordinary person can understand. Raskolnikov, in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, criticized the "legal style" of those educated as lawyers. "They still write legal papers that way." Though he remarks that the writing had "a kind of flourish to it…, yet look how illiterate his writing is." The criticism could be glossed over, due to its context, if it were not for an interesting remark: "It's expressed in legal language and if you use legal language, you can't write any other way." Trying to cope with ambiguity in language forces the lawyer to look for precision.
The equivocal condition of the practice of justice is that law originates in the realm of political experiences, but needs to be implemented free of politics, i.e., regardless of who is in power. The blindfolded goddess holding the scales of justice is expected to be objective and fair. The separation between judicial and governing entities is probably the highest achievement of the political system based on literacy. But it is also the area where, under circumstances of practical experiences different from those based on the underlying structure of literacy, the need to change is critical. This applies to new means of maintaining a just system for people less affected by the subjectivity of those holding the balance of power, and more by the ability to process information relevant to any object of dispute. The blindfolded goddess already uses X- ray vision in order to substantiate claims and counterclaims. Modeling, simulation, expert genetic testimony, and much more became part of the justice routine. Each party in a trial knows in advance what type of jury best serves its interests. The context for all these changes sheds light on their political meaning. If the practical experience of politics and justice are disconnected, the effectiveness of both suffers.
Politics stimulated change in respect to the perception of democracy, civil rights, political authority, and welfare. It demystified the origin, function, and role of property, and introduced a generalized level of relativity and uniform value. Law, on the other hand, supposed to protect the individual, should therefore be less inclined to trade off fairness for the lowest common denominator. Comparing this ideal to real legal practice is an exercise in masochism. The ever increasing, and fast increasing, human interaction via market mechanisms was followed by instances of conflict and expectations of negotiation. Without any doubt, the most pervasive mediating role is played in our day by legal professionals.
Due to its own self-interested dynamics, the legal profession insinuates itself in every type of practical experience, from multinational business to relations between individuals. Lately, it is involved in finding a place for itself in the world of new media, involving copyright laws and private rights versus public access. So one cannot say that law, as opposed to politics, is not proactive. The problem is that it is so in a context bound to literacy, and in such a way that style transcends substance. Latin, reflecting the origin of the western legal experience, used to be the language of law. Today, few lawyers know Latin. But they are well versed in their own language.
Legalese is justified by the attempt to avoid ambiguity in a given situation. There is nothing wrong with this. What is wrong is when legal language and the procedures encoded in legal language do not meet the pragmatic expectation, which is justice. Law and justice are not the same thing. A good case in point is the recent case of the State of California vs. O. J. Simpson. The spectacle of the legal procedure showed how a literate practice ended up convoluting justice. In fact, literate law is not meant to serve justice. Its purpose is to use the law to acquit a client. Allan Derschowitz claimed that the lawyer's duty is to his or her client, not to justice. This statement is far from the expectation that each member of society has. Therefore law loses its credibility because it undermines the notion of the social contract.
Some might say that this state of affairs is nothing new. Even Shakespeare criticized lawyers. Far from being a wholesale attack on the profession, the description I have given deserves to be contrasted to the possibility of effective judicial mediations in the civilization of illiteracy. Since changes occur so rapidly, the law of yesterday rarely applies to new circumstances created today. It used to be, people often find themselves reminiscing, that laws and rules (the Ten Commandments, at least) were expected to last and be respected, in their letter-which was carved in stone-and spirit, forever. No one will argue that justice is not an eternal desideratum. But achieving it does not necessarily mean that laws and the methods of lawyers are eternal. Some actions that society once accepted-child abuse, sexual harassment, racial discrimination-are now considered illegal, as well as unjust. Other crimes (whistling on Sundays, kissing one's spouse in public, working or operating a business on Sunday) might still be in some legal books and locally observed, but they are no longer considered instances of law- breaking. The result of changes brought about by changing pragmatics is the realization people have that there is no stable frame of reference, either for morality (as it is subject to law and law enforcement) or for legality.
Did lawyers create this situation? Are they a product of new human relations required by the new pragmatics? Who judges the legal system in order to determine that its activity meets expectations? There is no simple answer to any of these questions. If justice is to affect human practical experiences, it has to reflect their nature and participate in defining its own perspective in respect to the rights that people integrate in new practical experiences of self-definition. It is all well and good for the legal system to use non-literate means, such as DNA evidence, videotapes, and access to legal information from around the world via Internet. But if they are then subjected to literate pettifogging, all this effort is to no avail.
The programmed parliament
Politics in action means not elections but the daily routine of hard work on matters of interest to the people represented. Party affiliation aside, in the end the common good is supposed to be maintained or improved. Legislative political work continues a tradition that goes well beyond literacy. Nevertheless, effective legislation became possible only within the pragmatic framework that made literacy necessary. Once literacy itself reached its potential, new means for the political legislative practical experience became necessary. The driving force is the expectation that the legislative process should reflect practical needs emerging in a context of rapid change over shorter patterns of recurrence. As within the entire political practical experience, forces at work continuously collide.
Although literacy-based perspectives and methods for political legislation are no longer appropriate in handling issues and concerns stemming from a pragmatics that invalidates the literate model, politicians seem to be unwilling to realize the need for change. They find it more useful, and easier to defend, to legislate improved literacy- based education, for example, instead of rethinking education in the context of its necessity. They accept the mediating power of specialized knowledge, the generalized network of information, use all means for disseminating their own programs, but work within constraints originating in the literate practice of politics. It is hard to believe that in an age of limitless communication, speakers, mainly in the USA, arguing for the most intricate programs, will perform before an empty room in Congress. It is also hard to believe that a language rooted in experiences established a long time ago, and many times proved ineffective, is maintained. Procedures, testifying more to the past than the present, govern the activity of many legislative bodies (not only in Great Britain, where this legacy translates into a dress code as outmoded as the British monarchy). As with the executive political experience and the infatuation of justice, symbolism overtakes substance.
Nevertheless, under the pressure for higher efficiency, major changes are taking place. Legislative practical experiences, as disconnected as they are from new human practical experiences, are less and less an exercise in convincing writing or in formal logic. They increasingly reflect the expectations of globality and often apply mediation, task distribution, and interactivity. Electronic modeling is applied, simulation methods are tried out. The new methods of accessing information free the legislative politician from the time-consuming task of accumulating data. Consultants and staff members make use of powerful knowledge filters in order to involve in the political process only information pertinent to the subject. Politicians know that knowledge, at the right time and in the right context, is power. Their new experience, as members of computerized parliaments of many countries can testify, is that everyone has the data, but only few know how to process it effectively. In fact, political parties develop competitive processing programs that will give politicians pursuing their goals more convincing arguments in a public debate, or in discussions leading to legislative vote. The transparency brought about by means in the civilization of illiteracy ensures public access to the debate. The competitive edge is provided by the intelligent use of data. Power, that elusive aspect of any political activity, comes from the ability to process, not from the amount of information stored.
All this, kept at a minimum in this presentation, might sound like anticipation, or dreams for the politician of the future. It is not. The process is probably still at the beginning, but unavoidable. It will sooner or later affect such components as time in office-permanence of a representative reflects literacy-based expectations- procedures for public evaluation, candidacy, and voting. It will also require a rethinking of the relation between politicians and constituents. Rethinking the motivations and methods of legislation, even its legitimacy, are goals worthy of being pursued. Increased mediation affects the connection between facts and political action. Unless balanced by the use of the new means of communication that allow personal interaction with each voter, it will continue to alienate politics from the public. Mass-media politics is already a thing of the past-not because television is overridden by the Internet, but because of the need to create a framework for individual motivation for political action. Political efficiency is based on human interaction. What counts is not the medium, as this will continue to change, but what is accomplished through the medium.
To create a legislative framework that reflects the new nature of human relations and is appropriate to the pragmatic context means to understand the nature of the processes leading to the civilization of illiteracy. Consolidation of bureaucracy is as counter-indicative of this understanding as is the continuation of the monarchy and the House of Lords in Great Britain. Both these phenomena are as convincing as the mass generation of electoral letters that report on how the political representative best served his or her constituency. A sense of the process, as it involves the need to overcome models based on sequentiality, dualism, and deterministic reaction, can be realized only when the political process itself is synchronized with the prevalent pragmatics.
A battle to be won
As a practice of building, changing, and destroying coalitions, politics today is a summation of human practice. Professional politicians design strategies for coalition implementation and identify the most effective interactions for a certain policy. They develop their own language and criteria for evaluating the efficiency of their specialized practice and of their mediating function in a society of many and varied forms of mediation.
The obsession with efficiency, whether applied to politics or not, is not imposed by forces outside ourselves. The tendency to transfer responsibility does not result in some curse spoken by a disappointed politician, philosopher, or educator. The shorter political cycles that we encounter correspond to the dynamics of a human practical experience focused on the immediate within the framework of a global existence. It seems that the transition is from the small communal life striving for continuity and permanence, to a global community of interacting individuals, whose identity itself is variable, prepared to experience discontinuity and change. Coordinations of actions in this universe are no longer possible through large integrative mechanisms, such as language and bureaucratic institutions. Small differentiating operations, in the nature of coalitions tested through polling or electronic balloting, and modified in accordance with the rapid change of political roles, represent an alternative.
Monarchies embodied the eternity of rule; treaties among monarchs were supposed to outlast the monarch. The 15-minute access to political power, far from being a metaphor in some parts of the world, is as relevant as any other form of celebrity (Warhol's included), since political processes and power relations are more and more uncoupled from each other and disconnected from the obsession with universality and timelessness. A 15-minute coalition is as critical as access to power, and as useful as the new principles accepted by the people involved. Instead of the top- down model of politics, we can experience a combination of bottom-up and top-down procedures. Under these circumstances, the making and unmaking of coalitions remains one among very few valid political functions. The centers of political power- economics, law, interest groups-constitute poles around which such coalitions are established or abandoned.
One should ask whether such coalitions do not come into being in the universal language of literacy. Literacy is defended with the argument that it is some kind of common denominator. What is not accounted for is the fact that coalitions are not independent of the medium of their expression. Literacy-based coalitions pursue and further goals and actions consistent with the pragmatic framework that requires them. Needs characteristic of a pragmatic context incompatible with the structures imposed by literacy-based practical experiences require other means for establishing coalitions. When the leaders of the most advanced industrial states agree on indexing the value of their currency, or when friend and foe establish a political coalition against an invasion that could set a precedent and trigger consequences for the global economy, the means in place might take the appearance of literacy. In fact, these means are freed from words and literate articulations. They emerge from data processing and simulation of behavior in financial markets, virtual reality scenarios turned into actions for which no script could provide a description in advance. While politicians might still perform their script in a literate manner, the centers of power choose the most efficient means for evaluating each new coalition. As a consequence, and this is a distinguishing element, there is little connection between the authority of political institutions, as it results from their literate premise, and the dynamics of coalitions, reflecting the pragmatics of the civilization of illiteracy.
The sense of beginning experienced in our day goes well beyond the new states, new political means, beyond the science (or art) of coalition making. It is basically a beginning for the new zoon politikon, for a political animal that has lost most of its natural roots and whose human nature is probably better defined in terms of political instincts than cultural accomplishments. Culture is by and large discarded. People simply cannot carry culture with them, but neither can they negotiate their existence without political means appropriate to a social condition structurally different from that experienced in the past. The self-centered individual cannot escape relating to others and defining himself in reference to them. "We Am a Virtual Community" is not merely a suggestive title (conceived by Earl Babble) for an article on Internet interaction, but a good description of today's political world. The specific forms of relations, the We Am faction among them, are subject to many factors, not least to the biological and cognitive redefinition of the human being. When everything, literally everything, is possible and indeed acceptable, the political animal has to find new ways to make choices and pursue goals without facing the risk of losing identity. This is probably the decisive political battle that the humans have yet to win.
"Theirs not to reason why"
High precision electronic eyes placed on orbiting satellites picked up the firing of the rocket and the launch parameters. Data was transmitted to a computer center for information processing. The computed information, specifying angles, firing time, and trajectory, was relayed to antirocket missiles programmed to intercept enemy attack. The system-consisting of a vast, distributed, highly interconnected configuration- incorporates expertise from electronic vision devices, knowledge encoded in software designed to calculate rocket orbits (based on launch time, position, angle, speed, weight, meteorological conditions), fast transmission networks, and automated positioning and triggering devices.
This integrated system has replaced literacy-based modes of practical experiences pertinent to war. Instead of manuals describing the many parameters and operations that military personnel need to consider, information is contained in computer programs. These also eliminate the need for long training cycles, expensive practical exercises, and the continuous revision of manuals containing the latest information. Distributed knowledge and interconnectedness have replaced the structure of top-down command. The system described above contains many mediating components that allow for highly efficient wars.
Examples similar to the relative annihilation of the infamous (and ineffective) Scud missiles can be given from other episodes of the Gulf War, including the 100 hours of the so-called ground battle. This battle displayed the deadly force of artillery and tanks, the power of modeling and simulation, and major planning and testing methods independent of literacy-based military strategy and tactics. The enemy consisted of an army structured on the principles derived from the pragmatic framework of literacy: centralized line of command, rigid hierarchy, modern military equipment integrated in a war plan that was essentially sequential and deterministic, and based on a logic of long-term encounters.
The first war of the civilization of illiteracy
An earlier draft of this chapter-introductory lines excepted-was written when no one anticipated a conflict involving American troops in the Arabian Gulf. During this war, theoretic arguments regarding the institution of the military in the civilization of illiteracy were tested in the flesh and blood of confrontation, probably well beyond my, or anybody's, expectations or wishes. The Gulf War reported by the media resembled a computer game or a television show. As I watched, I felt as though someone had lifted part of my text and sent it through the news wires. The story made for great headlines; but out of context, or in the context of a reality reduced to the TV screen, its overall meaning was obscured. In many ways, the armed conflict ended up trivialized, another soap opera or spectator sport. Other reports related the frustration of the troops with the limited number of phone lines. The reports also commented on the replacement of the traditional letter by videotape as the preferred method of communication. We also heard about an almost magical device, called CNX, used to help orient each person involved in the vast desert theater of war. And we saw or heard about the exotically named preprocessed and prepackaged food, about the pastimes of the troops.
The context started coming into focus. This was to become the first war of the civilization of illiteracy: a highly efficient (the word takes on an unintended cynical connotation here) activity that involved non-sequential, massively parallel practical experiences. These required precise synchronization (each failure resulted in victims to what was euphemistically called "friendly fire"), distributed decision-making, intense mediation, advanced specialization, and task distribution. These characteristics embodied an ideology of relative value disengaged from political discourse, and even more from moral precepts. Nobody expected this war to reinvent the bow and arrow (documented shortly after human self-constitutive experiences in language), or even the wheel (originating in the practical experience of populations whose home was the territory where the fighting took place). It is possible that some of the military personnel had heard about the book entitled The Art of War (written by Sun Tzu in 325 BCE or earlier), or about the books, some of undisputed notoriety, filling the libraries of military academies and the better research libraries. But this was not a war fought for the Book, in the spirit of the Book (Koran or Bible), or in the way books describe wars. In a way, the Gulf War was truly the "mother of all battles" in that it rewrote the rules on war-or did away with them.
All the characteristics of the civilization of illiteracy are retraceable in the practical experience of today's military: highly mediated praxis through electronic information storage and retrieval; transition from an economy of wartime scarcity to a war of affluent means of defense and destruction; shift from war based on the positivist notion of facts (many requiring incursions into enemy territory) to a relativistic notion of image, and the corresponding technology of image processing; shift from a hierarchical structure of rigid lines of authority and command to a relatively loose line of context dependent on freedom of choice extended almost to the individual soldier; a discipline of austerity and isolation from the non-military (conditions accepted in the past as part of a military career) replaced by expectations of relaxation and enjoyment, derived from the permissiveness and drive for self-satisfaction of society at large. That some of these expectations could not be fulfilled was criticized, but not really understood. The hosts of the American army live by different standards. Muslim law prohibits alcohol consumption and certain forms of entertainment, as well as burial of dead infidels in a land claiming to be holy.
The Gulf War, on its various fronts, was not a conflict of irreducible or irreconcilable religions, morals, or cultures. It was a conflict between an artificially maintained civilization of literacy, in which rich reserves of oil serve as a buffer from efficiency requirements in all aspects of life, and another civilization, one that entails the illiteracy of a society and an energy-hungry, global economy that reflects a dynamics of high efficiency.
It might well be that the final attack reminded experts in war history, military strategy, or evolution of tactics of the surprising maneuver tried by Epaminondas, the Theban commander (371 BCE) in the battle of Leuctra: instead of a frontal assault, an attack on one flank. General Schwartzkopf is not Epaminondas. He succeeded in his mission by allowing for task distribution in an international army-more of a pain than a blessing-that resulted in many flanks. Helmuth von Moltke, in the exhausting Franco- Prussian War (1870-1871), changed the relation to his subordinate commanders by letting them operate under broad directives. The generals and commanders of the many armies involved in the Gulf War took advantage of the power of networking in order to orchestrate an attack that tested extremely efficient, and costly, annihilation technology under a plan that today's computers have simulated many a time over.
But once I confessed that I wrote much of this chapter three years before the Gulf War, the reader might question whether I looked at the war through the spectacles of my hypothesis, seeing what I wanted to see, understanding events as they fit my explanatory model. I asked myself the same questions and concluded that presenting the argument as it stood before the war would shed light on the question and ultimately qualify the answer.
War as practical experience
"War is a sheer continuation of politics with other means," wrote Carl von Clausewitz (On War, 1818). It is difficult to argue against this; but a paraphrase, intended to put the line in historic perspective, might be appropriate: War is the continuation of the practical experience of survival in the context of a society trying to control and adjudicate resources. Accordingly, combat follows the line of other practical experiences. The practical experience of hunting-formerly combat with non-human adversaries-required the weapons eventually associated with war. These were the tools that primitive humans used to wrest food for their survival and the survival of their community. Future aspects of these activities, and the associated moral values, make us sometimes forget that the syncretic nature of human beings, i.e., projection of their natural endowment in the practical act, is expressed in the syncretism of the tools used. This syncretic condition evolved under the need for labor division, and one of the main early demands of labor division resulted in the establishment of the semi-professional and professional warrior.
As the tools of the martial profession diversified more and more from working tools, a conceptual component (tactics and strategy) became part of the praxis. The conceptual component set forth a sequence to be followed, a logic to be used, and a method for counteracting enemy maneuvers in order to achieve victory. Von Clausewitz was the first to explicitly point out that war continues politics, while other writers on the subject, living centuries before he did, perceived war as a practical effort. Two Byzantine emperors, Maurice (539-602) and Leo, called the Wise (886-911), tried to formulate military strategy and tactics based on the pragmatic premise. They stipulated that the pragmatic framework defined the nature of the conflict and the actual condition of the battle, weapons included. Indeed, every known change in military materiel in a society has been synchronized to changes in the status of its practical experience. The invention of the stirrup by the Chinese (600) improved the ability of men riding horseback. It opened the avenue to wars where the backbone of battle formation was no longer composed of foot soldiers but of warriors on horses. Mechanical contraptions (e.g., the Trebuchet, acknowledged at 1100, based on releasing a heavy counterweight) for throwing large stones or missiles, opened the way to what would shift superior defensive capabilities (through fortifications, city walls, castles built before the 14th century) to superior offensive power. This was also the case with the cannons that the Turks used to conquer Constantinople (1453). But it is not military practice per se that concerns us here, but rather the implications of language, in particular literacy.
At a very small scale of human activity, with many autarchic groups composed of few people, there was little need for organized combat or specially trained warriors. Incipient, rudimentary military practical experience, in its basic functions of aggression and defense, became desirable at a larger scale of human activity. This experience was simultaneous with the establishment of language, especially writing. Sun Tzu's book, as well as many earlier testimonies to battles (mythology, religious writings, epic poetry, and philosophy), can be mentioned here. This military practice integrated the means and skills of survival, such as hunting and safeguarding the territory from which food was obtained.
Awareness of resources corresponded to awareness of scale. The scale of human activity in which the constitution of community member-warrior took place corresponded to increased settlement of populations, increased demand for resources, higher productivity, and accumulation of property-all reflected in the need to expand the practical experience of language beyond the immediate characteristic of orality. The efficiency of work and combat was at about an equal level. In a sense, wars lasted forever; peace was merely respite between conflicts. The notion of prisoner (usually sold into slavery) confirmed the importance of human labor and skill for consolidating a community, producing wealth for those in power, and subsistence for everyone else. The social constitution of the military was not excepted from pragmatic requirements of efficiency and mediation, i.e., of ensuring the highest efficiency within the given scale of human experience, as needs and expectations corresponding to this scale were manifested. While it is true that combat efficiency was spelled out in units of intentional destruction or preservation (of life and various artifacts relevant to human self- constitution), combat efficiency also referred to defenders whose goal was to make destruction by the enemy less possible (even impossible).
While individual conflicts did not require the intervention of language more than orality could provide, conflicts between larger groups made the need for a coordinating instrument clear. Human language, through new words and constructs, testified to the experience of conflicts and the associated mytho-magical manifestations. Through language, this experience was projected against the background of many different forms of human praxis. As a general rule, armies of all types, under every type of government, acquired a special status in society due to the function they fulfilled. Written language did not generate armies; but it served as a prerequisite (even in its most rudimentary notation forms) for the institution of the military. Writing introduced many elements that influenced the combat experience: a record of means and people, a record of actions, an instrument for planning, a record of consequences. All the components of the military institution objectify the purpose of war at a particular time. They also objectify the relations between a society at war and, during times of peace, between society and its warriors. Language is the medium through which objectification takes place. The sequentiality of writing and the need to express sequences pertinent to conflicts are consubstantial. Von Clausewitz's line encompasses the extension in language of the many aspects of wars.
"Did Gideon know how to read Hebrew? Did Deborah?" some people might ask, referring to leaders of decisive battles documented in the Old Testament. Others would refer to examples from the same time that are accounted for in Greek epics and the chronicles of the Middle East. Roman mythology and the testimony of Islam do not tell us whether all their warriors wrote or read. These documents do inform us of the pragmatic circumstances that led to the institution of the army as a body constituted in continuation of syncretic practical experiences, progressively constituting its own domain of existence and its own reason for being.
From face-to-face conflicts that required almost no language, and which resulted in the victory of the stronger, to the conflicts between humans in which much technology-requiring little language-was also involved, changes parallel to the levels of literacy occurred. Under the circumstances of wars fought by armies facing each other, language was the medium for constituting armies and coordinating action. In order to define goals, to share plans for achieving victory, and to modify plans in response to changing conditions, language was as important as the number of horses, quality of swords and shields, and quality of ammunition. The profession of warrior, as much as the profession of hunter, was based on the ability to attack and defend, and on the skills needed to adapt means to goals within a changing balance of power. The first wars, and probably the majority of them, were fought before generalized literacy. The major warriors-the Egyptian pharaohs Tuthmose III in the battle for Meggido (1479 BCE), Ramses II battling the Hittites at Kadesh (1296 BCE), Nebuchadnezzar and Darius, the Spartans under Leonidas (480 BCE), Alexander the Great (conquering Babylon in 330 BCE), Julius Caesar (49-46 BCE) and Octavian (31 BCE), and the many Chinese warriors of this period and later-did not need literacy for their battles as much as for their politics. Their strategies resulted from the same expectations and pragmatic requirements that gave rise to the experience of written language.
Wars were fought on terrain well chosen, by armies composed of men who carried out orders selected from a limited set of possibilities. To paraphrase the terminology of generative grammars, it was a limited war language, with not too many possible war sentences. Once improved means of work and production became the means of carrying on war, those in command could write more war texts, more scripts. As war efficiency increased, so did the possibility of a breakdown of the effort due to lack of integration and coordination. The military structure reflected the characteristics of the human praxis that fostered written language and, much later, literacy: relatively limited dynamics, centralized, hierarchical organization, low level of adaptability, a strictly sequential course of action, a deterministic mentality. David Oliver convincingly described the process: "Mechanics is the vehicle of all physical theory. Mechanics is the vehicle of war. The two have been inseparable." He refers to the practical demands of warfare in the context that led to the science of mechanics and eventually to the beginnings of projectile ballistics. By 1531, Nicolo Tartaglia of Brescia overcame his disdain for war and devised the gunner's square, which was perfected 100 years later by none other than Galileo. In 1688, the French introduced the socket bayonet on their muskets, which occurred simultaneous to changes in tools used at the time, i.e., the tools that allowed for manufacturing the bayonet.
The framework that created conditions for the ideal of literacy affected the pursuit of war not only in technology, but also in the way wars were played out. The advancing line of exposed troops were involved in a dynamics of confrontation that reflected linearity, a phenomenon prevalent in the practical experience of civilian life. Destructive power was added until the enemy was destroyed. Row by row, soldiers stopped to fire platoon volleys, then continued onto the decisive bayonet charge. The structure of writing (sequences, hierarchy, accumulation, closure) and the structure of this particular military engagement were similar. Literacy as such was registered rather late as a qualifier of the warrior. But once integrated in the practical experience of military self-constitution, literacy changed the nature of making war and enabling higher levels of efficiency corresponding to the new scale of war. These were no longer skirmishes among feudal warlords, but major conflicts between nations. These conflicts diminished in number but grew in intensity. Their duration corresponded to the relatively long cycles of production, distribution, and consumption characteristic of literacy-based practical experiences.
Under the pressure of many types of necessity embodied in human pragmatics, war was submitted to rules. It was civilized, at least in some of its aspects. The Catholic Church, preserver of literacy during the Dark Ages, when many little wars between feudal lords were carried on, took the lead in this direction. In order to avoid destruction of crops and lives in the barbarian societies of Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, the only viable hierarchy tried to tame warriors with the literate rules that the Church preserved. With their own pragmatic considerations in mind, rulers accepted these prescriptions. It took a millennium for people to discover that wars never have final results. But they also learned that the experience of war creates knowledge-for example, of means used, weather patterns, territory, characteristics of the enemy-and creativity-what is called the art of war. Resulting in death and destruction, wars are also instances of self-education in one of life's most unforgiving schools.
The institution of the military
"The draft is the legitimate child of democracy," as Theodor Heuss defined it. Obligatory military service was introduced during one of the first modern revolutions- the French levée en masse (conscription) of 1793. The citizen-soldier replaced mercenaries and professional soldiers. The call "Aux armes, mes citoyens" that became a stanza of the French national anthem, glorified the expectations of the moment. Prussia followed suit almost immediately, motivated by economic reasons: cheap manpower for war. During the prolonged process of becoming an institution, the military enlisted the support of the state it defended or of those private establishments (church, landowners, merchants) that needed its services.
Feeding off the means generated by society, the military institution integrated the practical experience of the people in its structure and actively pursued courses of action meant to increase its efficiency. At every juncture of humankind's continuous change, the military had to prove levels of efficiency that justified its own existence as a factor in the active defense of resources. When it was no longer efficient and weighed too heavily on the socio-economic foundation, it was eventually overthrown, or the society supporting it stagnated, as we see happening time and again in military dictatorships.
As one of the many highly structured environments for human interaction, the military identified itself, as did all other social mechanisms, through repetitive actions. Each action could be further seen as a set of tasks, or orders, connected to motivations or justifications, which anticipate or follow practical experiences specific to the military. Some were connected to life within the organization, such as the possibility to advance in the hierarchy and affect future activity. These were internal in the sense that they were affected by the implicit rules adopted by the institution. Others were external, expressed in the nature of the relation between the military and society: symbolic status, participation in power, expectations of recognition.
Evolution of the military resulted in changes in the language involved in defining and modifying the interactions characteristic of military practical experience. This language became progressively more adapted to the goal-win the war-and less coordinated with civilian language, in which the discourse of motivations leading to the conflict occurred. Correspondingly, relations with the outside world-future members of the military, social and political institutions, cultural establishments, the church-took place in what appeared to be a different language.
Changes in the structure of the practical experience of human self-constitution, as well as changes resulting from a growing scale, had an influence both inside and outside the military. When the individuals making up the world constituted themselves as literate, the functioning of the military assumed the expectations and characteristics of literacy. What would emerge as military academies were probably established at this time. Von Moltke's ideas of changing the nature of relations with subordinates just predated the many modern advances in war technology: the use of steam-powered warships (by the Japanese in their war against the Russians in 1905); the introduction of radio, telephone, and automotive transportation (all tested in Word War 1); and even the articulation of the concept of total war (by Erich Lindendorf). All these correspond to a pragmatic framework within which literacy was necessary, and literacy's characteristic reflected upon new practical experiences. The total war is of the same nature as the expectation of universal literacy: one literacy replaces all others. There is to the military institution of the civilization of literacy an expectation of permanency, embodied in rules and regulations, in hierarchies, and centralized structure, similar to that of state, industry, religion, education, science, art, and literature. There is also an expectation of centralism, and thus hierarchy and discipline. These characteristics explain why almost all armies adopt similar literacy-based structures. Guerrilla wars, in their early manifestations (skirmishes during the American Revolution) and in their current forms in South America, for example, are illiterate in that they are not based on the conventions of literacy. They unfold in a decentralized manner, and are based on the dynamics of self-organizing nucleii. This is why military strategists consider them so dangerous today.
Patterns of military action and the language recurrences associated with these patterns express attitudes and values pertinent to the pragmatic framework. England, at the height of its literate experience, had a highly structured, almost ritualized way of carrying out war. One of the main complaints during the American Revolution was that the colonials did not fight according to the rules that literate West Europe had established over the centuries. Under circumstances of change, as those leading to the end of the need for a generalized, all-encompassing literacy, these attitudes and values, expressed in language and in patterns of military activity, are exhausted, except where they are carried over to other forms of praxis, especially to politics and sports.
As is the case with many literacy-based institutions, the military became a goal in itself, imposing rules on social and political circumstances, instead of adapting to them. Following World Wars I and II, the military took control of many countries under the guise of various political and ideological justifications. Military, or military-supported, dictatorships, displaying the same characteristics of centralized rule as monarchy and democracy under presidents, sprang up where other modes of government proved ineffective. This happens today in many parts of the world that are still dedicated to economic and political models of the past, such as in South America, the Middle East, and Africa, for example.
From the literate to the illiterate war
The last war fought under the sign of literacy was probably World War II. The very fact that the last world war came to its final end after the atomic bomb was deployed is indicative of the fact that once one aspect of human practical experience is affected by a change of scale, others are affected as well. While the millions of victims (the majority of whom were raised in the expectations of the civilization of literacy) might make us reluctant to mention literacy, in fact, war's systematic cruelty and extermination power are the result of literacy characteristics implicit in the effective functioning of the war machine and in the articulation of war goals. In the history of World War II, the chapter about language is probably as enlightening as the chapters devoted to the new weapons it brought about: the precursors of modern rocket systems, in addition to the atomic bomb. Each of the powers involved in this large-scale war understood that without the integrating force of literacy, exercised in and around the conflict, the enemy could not succeed. Many books were written about the escalation of hostility through the language of political and ideological discourse. Many prejudices associated with this war were expressed in exquisitely literate works, supported by formally perfect, logical arguments. On the other hand, some writers pointed out the weaknesses of literacy. Roland Barthes, for example, studied its fascist nature. Others mentioned the inadequacy of a medium bound to fail because it was so opaque that it covered thoughts instead of revealing them, validated false values instead of exposing them for what they were.
The language of politics extended truly into the language of the conflict. Thanks to radio and newspapers, as well as the rhetoric of rallies, it was able to address entire nations. The industrial establishment, upon which the war machine was built, still embodied the characteristics of the pragmatic framework of literacy. It was based on the industrial model of intense manufacturing. Millions of people had to be moved, fed, and logistically supported on many fronts. The war involved elements of an economy in crisis, affording much less than abundance. Germany and its allies, having planned for a Blitzkrieg, threw all their limited resources into the preparation and execution of the war. Europe was coming out of the depression resulting from World War I. The people were promised that victory would bring the well deserved recompense that had eluded them the first time around. Against this background, literacy was mobilized in all the areas where it could make a difference: education, propaganda, religious and national indoctrination, in the racist discourse of justifications and in articulating war goals. Ideological purposes and military goals, expressed in literate discourse, addressed equally those on the front lines and their families. Literacy actively supported self- discipline and restraint, the acceptance of centralism and hierarchy, as well as the understanding of extended production cycles of intense labor and relatively stable, although not necessarily fair, working relations.
All these characteristics, as well as a self-induced sense of superiority, were reflected in the war. Advanced levels of labor division and improved forms of coordination of the parties involved in the large scale experience of factory labor marked the military experience. The war entailed confrontations of huge armies that practically engaged entire societies. It combined strategies of exhaustion (blockades, crop destruction, interruption of any vital activities) and annihilation. Millions of people were exterminated. The structure of the army embodied the structure of the pragmatic framework. Its functioning was reflective of industrial systems designed to process huge quantities of raw material in order to mass-manufacture products of uniform quality.
What made literate language use essential in work and market transactions made it essential, in forms appropriate to the goal, to the prosecution of the war. From this perspective, it should become clear why major efforts were made to understand this language. Efforts were also made to get information about tactics and strategy embodied in it, as much ahead of time as possible, and to use this literate knowledge to devise surprise or counter-strategies. This is why language became a main field of operation. Enemies went after military code (not a different language, but a means of maintaining secrecy) and did not spare money, intelligence, or human life in their efforts to understand how the opposing forces encoded their plans. The brightest minds were used, and strategies of deceit were developed and applied, because knowing the language of the enemy was almost like reading the enemy's mind.
At the risk of dealing with the obvious, I should state here clearly that the language of war is not the same as everyday language; but it originates in this language and is conceived and communicated in it. Both are structurally equivalent and embodied in literacy. To dispose of the enemy's use of language means to know what the enemy wants to do and how and when. In short, it means to be able to understand the pragmatics of the enemy as defined under the circumstances of war, as these extended the circumstances of life and work. Since language projects our time and space experience, and since wars are related to our universe of existence, understanding the language of the enemy is actually integrated in the combat plan and in a society's general war effort. Climbing hills to establish a good offensive position, crossing rivers in a defensive move, parachuting troops behind enemy lines in a surprise maneuver are human experiences characteristic of the pragmatic context of literacy, impossible to relate to the goal pursued without the shared conventions implicit in language. Some people still believe that the master coup of World War II was the breaking of the ciphers of the Enigma machines used by the Germans, thus making the function of language, in such an effort of millions of people, the center of the war effort. Polish cryptoanalysts and the British operation, in which Alan Turing (the father of modern computing) participated, succeeded in deciphering, reconstructing, and translating messages that, re-enciphered in Allied codes (the ULTRA material), decisively aided the war effort.
By the end of the war, the world was already a different place. But within the framework of war, and in direct connection to the changes in practical human self- constitution, a structural shift to a different dynamics of life and work had started. Various aspects related to the determinism that eventually resulted in the war started to be questioned through new practical experiences: the need to overcome national interests; the need to transcend boundaries, those boundaries of hate and destruction expressed in the war; the need to share and exchange resources. Visionaries also realized that the incremental increase in world population, despite the enormous number of deaths, would result in a new scale of human experiences that could not be handled within a rigid system with few degrees of liberty.
The recent illiterate war in the Arabian Gulf, and the never-ending terrorist attacks all over the world, can be seen, in retrospect, as the progeny of the war that brought down the civilization of literacy. The concept of Blitzkrieg and the dropping of the A-bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a foretaste of the quick, efficient, illiterate war.
The Nintendo war (a cliché revisited)
Military all over the world disposes of the highest technology. Even countries that can afford to maintain outmoded large armies-because of population density, relatively low salaries, and the ability to draft the entire population-seek the latest weapons that scientific discovery and technological progress can offer. The weapons market is probably the most pervasive of all markets. Among the numerous implications of this state of affairs, none is more disconcerting than the fact that human genius serves the cause of death and destruction. In some countries, food reserves barely cover needs beyond a season or two; but the military has supplies to cover years of engagement.