Today the military is in control of the most sophisticated technology ever created. It is also becoming an institution of a rather low level of literacy, publicly deplored and politically questioned. This assertion applies less (but it still applies) to the command level, and more to its enlisted men and women. Addressing the topic of language proficiency, Darell Bott provides an interesting portrait of a person who joins the military intelligence unit of the National Guard as a linguist. After training in the Defense Language Institute, the individual loses 25 percent of his language skills and fails to meet language proficiency standards. Every effort is made to change this situation, even before understanding it. Darell Bott's description does not refer to an accidental, individual failure, but to the implicit dynamics of military practical experiences in the civilization of illiteracy. A linguist, of all professionals, does not choose to lose literate language proficiency. This proficiency is just not necessary for attaining the efficiency called for in the military. Not really understanding this structural condition, armies introduce their recruits to weaponry-the majority designed for the illiterate warrior- and to the skills of reading and writing. These skills dispense ideology, religion, history, geography, psychology, and sex education in concentrated doses. The situation is paradoxical: what defines the practical experience of the military today-high technology, division of tasks, networking, distributed responsibilities-conflicts with the traditional expectations of clear lines of command, hierarchy, authority, and discipline. The means that render useless the characteristics stemming from literacy-based pragmatics are welcome, but the human condition associated with them is frightening.
Yes, a literate soldier can be better indoctrinated, subjected to the inherent arguments of literacy, of rules and authorities to be obeyed. But the nature of the pragmatics of war has changed: faster action makes reading-of instructions, commands, messages-inappropriate, if not dangerous. For focusing on targets moving at a speed far higher than that afforded by literacy-based training, one needs the mediation of the digital eye. Conflicts are as segmented as the world itself, since clear- cut distinctions between good and bad no longer function effectively. Centralized military experiences based on structures of authority and hierarchy are counterproductive in actual conflicts of complex dynamics.
The war in Vietnam is a good example of this. During this war, instructions were transmitted from the top of the hierarchy down to the platoons through commanders not adept at the type of war Vietnam represented. Even the President of the USA was effectively involved, more often than not through decisions that proved detrimental to the war effort. The USA forgot the lesson of its own pragmatic foundation in imitating, as it did in Vietnam, the literate wars of Europe in a context of confrontation characteristic of the civilization of illiteracy. Memoirs, published too late (Robert MacNamara's is but one example), reveal how the literate paradigm embodied in the government and the military kept from the public essential information that, in retrospect, rendered the loss of so many human lives meaningless.
The luxury of a standing army and the cost of subjecting soldiers to long cycles of training, literacy included, belong to the previous pragmatic framework. The time of the life-long warrior is over. The experience of war changes as quickly as new weapons are invented. The new scale of humankind requires global levels of efficiency impossible to attain if productive forces are withdrawn from productive experiences. Once upon a time, the military distinguished itself as a separate body in the social texture. The civilization of illiteracy reintegrated the military in the network of assignments and purposeful functions of the pragmatics of high efficiency. From the complete suit of armor worn in medieval Europe (before firearms rendered it ineffective) to the plain-clothes military of today, not only have over 500 years gone by, but, more important, new forms of self-constitution, and hence identification, became necessary and real. Sulfur fumes used over 2,000 years ago in the battle at Delium and the threat of chemical and biological weapons in the Gulf War are superficially related. The same knowledge that goes into producing new chemical and biological means used in high efficiency agriculture and in food preparation goes into chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.
This is not a discourse in favor of efficient armies which are of great help during natural disasters, nor is it a discourse in favor of destructive wars, no matter who justifies them. If it sounds like one, it is because the literate description of the structural background against which, whether we like it or not, the practical experience of the military takes place, bears the stamp of literate praxis. In the civilization of illiteracy, the military has come to acknowledge that there is little that can, or should, be done to restore literacy as its coordinating mechanism. Literacy is not necessarily the best system for achieving optimal military performance at the level facilitated by new technologies. Neither is it, as some would like to believe, a means of avoiding war. The literate human being proved to be a war beast equal, if not superior, to the illiterate who was subjected to impression and conscription, or who enlisted as a mercenary.
Current military research attempts to remove human beings from the direct confrontation that war used to entail. Nothing affects public support for military action more than body-bags. These spoil the fun and games that expensive missiles provide, the reason for which the Gulf War was nicknamed "the Nintendo War." And missiles fare better among the Netizens, despite their reluctance to embrace belligerence for settling disputes. Highly efficient, sophisticated digitally programmed systems do not relate to space and time the way humans do. This aspect gives the machines an edge in respect to the implicit coordination expected in war. The kinds of interaction that military praxis requires makes literacy inadequate for coordinating the humans who constitute today's armies. Time is segmented beyond human perception and control; space expands beyond what a person can conceive and control. Major components of a war machine are placed in outer space and synchronized by extremely time-sensitive devices. The Strategic Defense Initiative (dubbed Star Wars) was the most advertised example. More trivial systems, like those used in orienting troops in the desert, are a matter of routine. The expressive power required for increasing motivation, and for projecting a rational image of irrationality, collides with the requirement for speed and precision essential to accomplishing complex tactical and strategic plans. Coordination of sophisticated information systems machines does not have to rely on a language frequently not precise enough, or fast enough, to accommodate very dynamic processes. At speeds beyond that of sound at which battles are fought with airplanes, rockets, satellites, and missiles, a soldier observing a target would be late in pressing a trigger, not to mention waiting for the command to fire.
The complexity of war machines is such that even their maintenance and repair requires means independent of the language that functions according to the rules of literacy. It should come as no surprise that the electronic book has already appeared in the military sphere of human experience. This book is the digitally stored description of a device, not the printed book that was once the manual describing it. If the device is an airplane, or gun system on the airplane, or equipment on a ship, the weight of manuals needed to explain its functioning, or to support maintenance and troubleshooting, would keep the airplane grounded. Any change in such a complex system would require reprinting of thousands of pages. In its electronic version, the book is a collection of data manipulated by a computer, displayed in visual form when necessary, and programmed to make recognition of the problem and its solution as simple as possible-idiot-proof, in fact. It is not a sequential collection of pages indexed in a table of contents and requiring a linear reading strategy. The electronic book opens to the appropriate page, and every page is generated only as necessary, according to the maintenance or repair requirements of the case. Obviously, the readers addressed by the electronic book are different from the literate. They are at least partially visual literates who know how to look at an image and follow pictographic prompts. Instead of reading, the human operators carry out the required operation, supervised by the system, counting only on the feedback from the machine. Under these circumstances, efficiency expectations make the use of the human being almost a luxury. The paradigm of self-servicing machines, of circuits that can fix themselves (von Neumann's genius at work) is already a reality.
The electronic book-here presented in an application of military relevance, although there is more to it than that-is one example from the many that can be given regarding how our good old verbal literacy is becoming obsolete. Electronic books constituted over networks (wired or wireless) support a wide range of collaborative activities. By their nature, military experiences utilize such activities. Access to resources and to an unlimited array of possible interactions is essential to collaboration. Literate expression cannot fulfill these requirements. Digital formats used in electronic books serve as a medium for sharing and understanding goals. The subsumation of individuality to the goal is probably the only specifically military component that carries over from previous experiences of war. Nevertheless, this subsumation does not follow the patterns of centralism and the hierarchy of literacy. The methods are different in that more initiative than ever before is required from the soldiers. This initiative is embodied in alternate means of expression and communication.
In electronically synchronized instruments, programs of distributed tasks and massive parallel computation replace literacy and literacy-based actions. Today's technology permits flying at low altitude and high speed, but limitations of the human biological system make this dangerous for the pilot. When reaching a certain speed, the human can no longer coordinate movements without which low altitude flying becomes suicidal. But suicide is no alternative to avoiding enemy radar, since there are no words capable of alerting a pilot to the heat detector guided missile. Accordingly, languages addressing machines and vision systems with detection capabilities change the nature of human involvement in military situations. Again, these languages make the participation of literate language less and less significant.
Literacy-based means cannot provide for the expected coordination. Mediation takes place among many distributed, loosely interconnected devices; efficiency increases due to the many resources integrated in such powerful and ubiquitous systems. I give these examples-rudimentary in comparison to the Nintendo war we watched on our television screens a few years ago-from the viewpoint of someone who believes in life, peace, and human understanding, but also as one who sees a progressive discarding of literacy from one of the most language-dependent forms of human interaction and coordination. As with everything liberated from language and literacy, military practice was dehumanized. This consequence is likely to be welcomed in its more general significance-let machines kill machines. Just as in factories and offices, the human being is replaced by programs endowed with knowledge mediated by something other than literacy. What changes the structure of military activity, and language's participation in it, are the new languages embodied in the technology. That computer-game simulations of flight or target-shooting are basically equivalent to the systems of precision and destruction used in the Gulf War need not be repeated. But that players of computer games grow up with skills expected from jet pilots and from operators of extremely productive technology deserves attention and thought.
Do weapons speak and write and read? Do they understand the language of the officer who decides when they are to be fired? Is an intelligent weapon system capable of interpreting whether a legitimate target should indeed be wiped out, even if at the time of its use, circumstances would speak against destroying it on moral grounds? I ask these questions-which can only be answered with a "No"-on purpose. The literate attitude, according to which military praxis is one of command and execution requiring language, presents us with a contradiction. Non-military practical experience is more and more mediated by many languages and synchronized in a vast network of distributed assignments. If military experiences were to remain literacy-based, this would be equal to maintaining different pragmatic structures and pursuing goals of disparate efficiency. It is true that the literacy still involved in the military is reflected in structures of hierarchy, a relative expectation of centralism (in the USA, as in many other countries, the President is the commander-in-chief), and dependency on deterministic models. Nevertheless, the expectation of efficiency makes critical the need to adopt essentially non-hierarchic, self-management structures promoting coordination and cooperative efforts within a distributed network of different assignments. In the partial literacy of the military, a redefinition of the process of goal- setting and the pursuit of assignments other than destruction, such as relocation of refugees or aiding vast populations subjected to natural disasters, continuously takes place. Security is another area of self-constitution that derives benefits from military praxis. The smaller and more distributed wars through which terrorism seeks to accomplish its goals have resulted in small armies of highly trained security personnel to protect the civilian public. Combat is truly global. But as opposed to the small war of the Middle Ages, the illiterate terrorist respects no rules and no higher authority.
No army could have changed the world more than the new system of human relations geared toward achieving levels of efficiency corresponding to numbers of people in pursuit of satisfying their needs, and of others achieving levels of prosperity never before experienced. Armies, as much as schools and universities, as much as the nations they are supposed to defend, as much as the nuclear family, and all the activities related to them and all the products they generate, correspond to the structure of praxis of a loosely connected world with patterns of human practical experiences marked by individual success and dependent on personal performance.
The look that kills
Smaller, more deployable, as efficient as possible-this description sums up the characteristics of new weapons on the wish-list of almost any army in the world. On a more specific basis, defense officials have sketched some research and development objectives. Here are some, obviously all subject to obsolescence:
Worldwide all-weather forces for limited warfare, which do not require main operating bases, including a force that is logistically independent for 30 days
Tracking of strategically relocatable targets
Global command control, communications, and intelligence (C3I) capabilities to include on-demand surveillance of selected geographical areas and real-time information transfer to command authorities
Weapon systems that deny enemy targeting and allow penetration of enemy defenses by managing signatures and electronic warfare
Air defense systems to overmatch threat systems
Weapons that autonomously acquire, classify, track, and destroy targets
Reduction of operations and support resources requirement by 50% without impairing combat capability
Expected are a force powered by electricity (ecological concerns), robotic tanks and aerial vehicles, and-this is not science fiction-bionically enhanced soldiers with embedded chips, able to sleep when commanded, and an exoskeleton system allowing individuals to carry 400 pounds around the battlefield (compared to the mere 100 they carry now). General Jerry C. Harrison even formulated the following order: "Okay guys, let's shoot number 49. Tune in your goggles to see but not be seen." The look that kills (the proud accomplishment of university-based research) becomes reality.
The only comment that can follow such a description is that all the characteristics of the civilization of illiteracy are embodied in the expectations of military efficiency. Globality, interconnectedness, open-ended goals and motivations, reduced human involvement, and many partial literacies are all here, presented in specific expectations. The questionable aspect is the implicit theme of the permanence of the institution of the military, probably the most resilient legacy of the civilization of literacy. What the technology of the civilization of illiteracy requires is the command of the abstractions (the language) driving it, the partial literacy associated with this language, pertinent to military or any other use. As one of the partial literacies of this time, military literacy defines the domain of action and the interpretation of such actions. It is relevant, for instance, that disarmament treaties not be formulated without military language, i.e., without the military experts, the ones we want to release from their functions. Each such treaty either discards a part of the language of weapons and associated technologies, or makes it less relevant, as it opens new avenues for increased military efficiency.
The new organization of the military is one of confronting technologies and associated military literacy. Accordingly, to talk about orders given by an officer, whether a weapon understands such orders, and all similar logocentric examples, means to still look at the military from the perspective of a civilization from which it continuously distances itself. Artificial eyes (radar, vision systems), odor detectors, touch-sensitive devices, speed sensors, and many other digital devices free the human being from confrontation and progressively eliminate death from the equation of war. Those who compare the photographic images of previous wars to animation on computer game terminals compare a condition of direct confrontation, of our own nature, and of the realization of the limited condition of life to that of mediated experiences. The night sky lit up by tracers, the eerie video-game-like actions, the targets seen through remote cameras are of a realm different from that of destruction and blood, where moral concern is triggered. The expectation is pragmatic, the test is efficiency.
The survival of the military institution in its literate structure and the lack of understanding of just what makes literacy unnecessary in the pragmatic framework of today's global world are not the same thing. The first aspect refers to the immense inertia of a huge mechanism; the second involves the difficult task of freeing ourselves, as products of literate education, from ourselves. Recognition of such a fundamental change does not come easy. Universities, bastions of literacy, producing the illiterate technology of war, are caught in the dilemma of negating their own identity, or becoming agents of illiterate action. We hang on to the ideal of literacy, as well as to the so-called necessity of strong defense-which reflects literacy-based values such as national borders in a global world-because we are not yet ready to cope with a new dynamics of change that is not militarily determined, but which results from structural necessities of a socio-economic nature. The political map of the world changed drastically in recent years because factors affecting the pragmatic framework of human practical experience, at the scale we reached today, are at work. Globality is not a dream, a political goal, a Utopian project, but a necessity resulting from this new scale.
The Interactive Future: Individual, Community, and Society in theAge of the Web
Collapse and catastrophe as opposed to hope and unprecedented possibilities- these are the party lines in the heated discussions centered on the dynamics of ongoing changes in which the whole world is involved. Paul Virilio is quite expressive in his formulation of the problem: "An accompanying evil…is the end of writing, as it unfolds through image technology, cinema/film, and television screen. […] We don't read anymore, we hardly write each other, since we can call each other on the phone. Next, we will no longer speak! I'd really like to say: this will indeed be the silence of the lambs!" No less powerful in their assertions are those who see chances for social renewal in interactions not embodied in the rules of literacy. The electronic forum of the European Commission, involved in Project Information Society, lists Ten Bones of Contention from which I chose the following: "The system we are stuck with and frantically trying to fix comes from another time and an entirely different set of circumstances. It is changing massively in front of our noses and needs to be completely rethought and radically overhauled." The statement is less expressive than Virilio's, but no less intolerant.
As discussions continue to bring up extremely important aspects of the conflict marking this time of discontinuity, the billions of people populating our world today constitute themselves through a broad variety of practical experiences. A list of these experiences-from primitive patterns of hunting and gathering food to eye movement command of remote systems and applications driven by voice recognition in the world of nanotechnological synthesis-would only augment the confusion. Given this broad pragmatic spectrum, no one could seriously project the future as one of virtual communities, or of an electronic democracy, without sounding overly naive or directly stupid. We know how far we have come, but we do not really know where we are.
In advancing a comprehensive pragmatic perspective, I chose to undertake an elaboration well beyond the short-breathed argumentation peculiar to this moment in time. The advantage of this approach deserves to be shared. Endorsing one perspective or another, such as the California Ideology-defined by its critics as "global orthodoxy concerning the relation between society, technology, and politics"-or alternatives-the so-called European model, or the transactional structure, or neo- Marxian solutions, to name a few-is not an option. Indeed, the argument of this book is that answers cannot result from infatuation with technology, cultural self-replication, models based on biological mechanisms, unfocused bionomic elaborations, or incessant criticism of capitalism. Affirmations of a deep nature, above and beyond the rhetoric of intellectual controversy and political discourse, must originate from those affirmative actions through which our identity as individuals, communities, and society are established. The metaphor of the interactive future is the expression of a simple thesis: At the global scale, human interaction, as the concrete form of engaging infinitely diverse cognitive resources, is the last available resource on which the future of the species can depend.
Transcending literacy
Transcending literacy takes place in the practical experiences of the pragmatics of high efficiency corresponding to the global scale of humankind. This scale affects the constitution of human communities and the interaction between individuals and community. As has already been mentioned, Bedouins in the Sahara Desert and Indians in the Andes Mountains are no less hooked up to television than people living in technologically highly developed countries. More important, the identities of peoples in less developed societies on the global map of economic and political interdependencies are already subject to the most advanced processing techniques. In the ledgers of the global economy, their existence is meticulously entered with respect to what they can contribute and through what they need and can afford. People constituting virtual communities, in Silicon Valley, Japan, France, Israel, and any other place on this globe, are subject to integration in the global scale through different means and methods.
The expansion of non-literacy based human practical experiences of self- constitution raises legitimate concern regarding the social status of the individual and the nature of community interdependencies. Children, for example, are subjected to more images than language. They have the tendency to perceive time as a continuous present and expect gratification to be as instantaneous as it appears on television, or as easy to achieve as connecting to exciting Web sites. They wind up experts in interactive games and in controlling extremely fast processes. Disconnected from culture and tradition, they are extremely adaptable to new circumstances and in a hurry to ascertain their version of independence. Sex, drugs, rap music, and membership in cults or gangs are part of their contradictory profile. These adolescents are the pilots of the Nintendo wars, but also the future explorers of outer space, the physicists, biologists, and geneticists who create new materials and subject machines of breathtaking complexity to tasks in which every millionth of a second is essential to the outcome. They are also the future artists and record-breaking athletes; they are computer programmers and designers of the future. And they will be the service providers in an economy where change, predicated by the need to swiftly match outcome to ever-increasing demand, cannot be met by means burdened by the inertia and heavy-handedness of literacy.
As data make clear, such individuals are bound to be less involved in community life and less committed to the ethics of the past. Moral absolutes and concern for others do not play a major role in their lives, which are shaped by practical experiences tending towards self-sufficiency, sometimes confused with independence. In view of all these characteristics, which reflect the decreasing role of literacy-based human experiences, the question often asked is how will the relation between the community and extremely efficient individuals, constituted in relatively insular experience, be shaped? Moreover, what will the status of community be? In this respect, it is important to know what forces are at work, and to what extent our own awareness can become a factor in the process.
In our day, many people and organizations deplore the state of urban life (in the USA and around the world), high unemployment, the feeling of disenfranchisement that individuals, and sometimes whole communities, have. Immigrants of all the countries they landed in; guest workers in the European Community; the young generation in Asia, Africa, and the countries that once made up the Eastern Block; the minorities in the USA; the unemployed around the world-each of these groups faces problems reflecting the relation between them as a different entity and the society as a whole. Immigrants are not necessarily welcome, and when accepted, they are expected to integrate. Guest workers are required to work at tasks with which citizens of the host country do not want to dirty their hands. The young generation is expected to follow in their parents' footsteps. One minority group will have problems with another, and with society at large, in which they are supposed to integrate. The unemployed are expected to earn their benefits and eventually to accept whatever job is available. Literacy implied expectations of homogeneity. Immigrants were taught the language of their new homeland so they could become like any other citizen. Guest workers, defined by their status in the labor market, were expected to gradually become unnecessary and to peacefully return to their native countries. Young people, processed through education, and the unemployed, after being offered some short retraining, would be absorbed in the machine called national economy.
In respect to community, the historic sequence can be summarized as follows: individuals loosely connected to their peers; individuals constituting viable entities for survival; transfer of individual attributes (self-determination, choice) to the community; integration in centralized community; distribution of tasks; decentralization. Each step is defined by the extent of an individual's optimal performance: from very high individual performance, essential to survival, to distributed responsibility, until society takes over individual responsibility. Liberal democracy celebrates the paradox of socialized individualism. In this respect, it ends the age of political battles (and, as we hear, the age of history), but opens the age of increased access to abundance. Commercial democracy is neither the result of political action nor the expression of any ideology. Within its sphere of action, the boundaries between the individual and the very unsettled community represent the territory of conflict. Moral individualism succeeds or fails within a framework of adversarial human relations. Since moral individualism is actually the underpinning of liberalism-"Do what's best for yourself"-the liberty it advances is that of competitive access to abundance. Socialized individualism accepts the state only as purveyor of rights and possibilities (when the Hegelian notion of the priority of the state over the individual is accepted de facto), not as moral instance.
The transition to a pragmatics in which individual performance becomes marginal, in view of the many coordinating mechanisms ensuring redundancies that obliterate personal participation, is definitive of this process. The relative significance of malfunctions-breakdown in the legal and social system, for example-as instances of self-awareness and new beginnings, prompted by the need to remedy past practices, is different in each of the stages mentioned. So is the possibility of change and renewal. Creativity in current pragmatics is less and less an issue of the individual and more the result of orchestrated efforts in a large network of interactions. The underlying structure of the civilization of illiteracy supports a pragmatics of heterogeneity, distributed tasks, and networking. Human practical experiences of self-constitution no longer generate uniformity, but diversity. There is no promise of permanency, even less of stable hierarchies and centralism. We face new problems. Their formulation in literate form is deceptive; their challenge in the context of illiteracy, in which they emerge, is unprecedented. This is what prompts concerns about the civilization of illiteracy.
Being in language
The two aspects of human self-constitution through language-individual and community (society)-derive from the basic issue of social interrelationships. One's language is not independent of the language of the society, despite the fact that, in a given society, people identify themselves through noticeable peculiarities in the way they speak, write, read, and carry on dialogue. Elements pertaining to language are integrated in the human's biological structure. Still, language does not emerge, as the senses do, but is progressively acquired. The process of language acquisition is at the same time a process of projecting human abilities related to language's emerging characteristics. Regardless of the level of language acquired, language overwrites the senses. It projects integrated human beings-a unity of nature and language-prone to identify themselves in the culture that they continuously shape.
While nature is a relatively stable system of reference, culture changes as humans change in the process of their various activities. To be within a language, as all human beings are, and in a community means to participate in processes of individual integration and social coordination. Individual language use and social use of language are not identical. Individuals constitute themselves differently than communities do. That in each community there are elements common to the individuals constituting it only says that the sum total of individual practical experiences of language is different from the language characteristic of the social experience. The difference between the language of the individual and the language of a community is indicative of social relationships. A more general thesis deserves to be entertained: The nature and variety of human interactions, within and without practical experiences of self-constitution in language, describe the complexity of the pragmatic framework. These interactions are part of the continuous process of identification as individuals and groups in the course of ascertaining their identity as a particular species.
Acknowledged forms of relationships in work, family life, magic, ritual, myth, religion, art, science, or education are evinced through their respective patterns. Such patterns, circumscribed by human self-constitution in the natural and cultural context, are significant only retroactively. They testify to the human being's social condition and express what part of nature and what part of culture is involved in this condition. The primordial significance of these two phenomena lies in the expression of practical experiences followed, not preceded, by cognition. Active participation of individuals in practical experiences of language acknowledges their need to identify themselves in the patterns of interrelation mentioned. People do not get involved with other people because either party may be nice. Involvement is part of the continuous definition of the individual in contexts of conflict and cooperation, of acknowledging similarity and difference. Any dynamics, in biology or in culture, is due to differences.
People take language for granted and never question its conventions. As a natural, inherited (in Chomsky's view) attribute, rather like the human senses, language is not reinvented each time practical experiences of constitution through language take place. Neither is its usefulness questioned-as happens with artifacts (tools in particular)-each time our practical experience reaches the limits of language. The breakdown of an artifact-i.e., its inappropriateness to the task at hand-suggests the possible experience of crafting another. The breakdown of language points to limits in the human experience, not in its accessories. Malfunctioning of language points to the biological endowment and the ways this is projected in reality through everything people do. This is not true in respect to other, less natural, sign systems: symbols, artificial languages, meta-languages.
What changes from one scale of humankind, i.e., from one situation of matching needs to means for satisfying them, to another is the coefficient of the linear equation, not the linearity as such. A small group of people can survive by combining hunting, fruit gathering, and farming. The effort to satisfy a relatively bigger group increases only in proportion to the size of the group. In the known moments when a critical mass, or threshold, was reached (language acquisition, agriculture, writing, industrial production, and now the post-industrial), the expectation of higher efficiency corresponding to each scale of human experiences triggered changes in the pragmatic framework. The awareness of language's failure derives from practical experiences for which new languages become necessary.
Miscommunication is an instance of language not suitable to the experience. Lack of communication points to limitations of the humans involved in an activity. Miscommunication makes people question (themselves, others) about what went wrong, why, and what, if anything, can be done to avoid practical consequences affecting the efficiency of their activity. Other forms of language malfunction can affect people as individuals or as members of a community in ways different from those peculiar to communication. The failure of political systems, ideologies, religion(s), markets, ethics, or family is expressed in the breakdown of patterns of human relations. We keep alive the language of those political systems, ideologies, religions, and markets even after noticing their failure, not by accident or through oversight but because all those languages are us, as we constitute ourselves as participants in a political process, subjects of ideological indoctrination, religious believers, commodities in the market, family members, and ethical citizens. The inefficiency of these experiences reflects our own inefficiency, more difficult to overcome than poor spelling, etymological ignorance, or phonetic deafness.
The wall behind the Wall
An appropriate example of the solidarity between language experience and the individual constituted in language is provided by the breakdown of the East European block, and even more pointedly by the breakdown of the Soviet Union. Nobody really suspected that once the infamous Berlin Wall came down, the people who lived to the east of it, trained and educated in and for a pragmatic framework whose underlying structure was reflected in their high degree of literacy, would remain captive to it as their legal, social, and economic conditions changed. Despite the common language- German is the language through which national unity was ascertained-East Germans are prisoners of the structural characteristics of the society projected on them through literacy: centralism, clear-cut distinctions, determinism, strong hierarchical structures, and limited choice. The invisible but powerful inner conditioning of the East Germans' literacy-categorically superior to that of their Western brothers and sisters-is not adequate to the new pragmatics attained in West Germany and raises obstacles to East Germany's integration in a dynamic society. The illiterate pragmatics of high efficiency, associated with high expectations that seem to outpace actual performance, was foisted on East Germans by the well intentioned, though politically opportunistic, government from across a border that should never have existed.
Things are not different in other parts of the world-Korea, Hungary, Romania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Croatia, Serbia, etc., where the rhythms of pragmatic developments and social, political, economic, national, and cultural developments are totally desynchronized. The best poetry was written in East Europe; most of the books ever written were read by its people. It is impossible to ignore that the best theater in the world, the most elaborate cinematography, the best choirs and dance ensembles, and even the highest level of mathematical theory, physics, and biology became possible in a context of restriction, oppression, and disregard of individuals and their creativity. It is also impossible not to finally realize that the strength built on literacy-based structures was deceiving and self-deceiving.
In the not-too-distant past, the people of these countries read books, attended concerts and operas, and visited museums. Now, if they are not in misery, they are as obsessed with indulging in everything they could not have before, even if this means giving up their spiritual achievements. Consumption is the new language, even before a basis for efficient practical experiences is put in place, and sometimes instead of it. The old relation between the language of the individual and the language of society displayed patterns of deception and cowardice. The new emergent relation expresses patterns of expectation well beyond the efficiency achieved, or hoped for, in this integrated world of extreme competitive impact. The wall behind the Wall is embodied in extremely resistant patterns of human interaction originating in the context of literacy- based pragmatics. With this example in mind, it is critical to question whether there are alternatives to the means of expression people use and to the social program they are committed to-democracy. The experience of language today is very different from that of the time when the Jacobins asserted a notion of democracy as the general will (1798), under the assumption of a literate background shared by all people.
The message is the medium
Language is a form of social memory. When saying something or listening to some utterance, we assume a uniform use of words and of higher level linguistic entities. As stored testimony to similar practical experiences, language, stabilized in literacy, became a medium for averaging them. The patterns of human relations captured in language make people aware, in retrospect, of the relevance of these patterns to human efficiency. So it seems that we constitute ourselves as our own observations about how we interact. These observations are identified as cognition, because it is through interaction that we know each other and know how, what, and when our immediate and less immediate needs are satisfied. The paradigm of literacy asserts that human self-constitution takes place in language, moreover that it could effectively happen only in language, expressed in written forms and made available through reading. Indeed, knowledge was derived from praxis implying human interaction that integrated language-based exchanges of information. This knowledge shaped political, ideological, religious, and economic experiences, as well as efforts to improve the technology used, and even broaden the scientific perspective. The dimension of future is intrinsic to life, from where it extends to language and literacy, as it extends to artifacts, work, and pragmatic expectations.
The practical experience of language, as any other semiotic practical experience, embodies agreements regarding the nature and condition of whatever is constituted in language, human identity included. The projection of the biological and cultural characteristics on the world of our life and action establishes elements of reference. The ability to see, hear, and smell, and the ability to use tools are acknowledged as humans interact. Ability and performance differ widely. Self-evaluation and evaluation by others in the process of defining and achieving goals of common interest are quite distinct. Language mediates, hence it makes commitments part of the experience. When these are not carried through, language can become a substitute medium for confrontation.
Experiences of agreement and experiences of confrontation are part of the patterns of interrelationship that define how the language of individuals and the language of the community are related. Socialization of language leads to paradoxical situations: humans self-constituted in the language experience perceive their own language as though confrontation is not among themselves, but among their languages. Only a few years ago, we heard about how much Americans and Russians liked each other, although the language of politics and ideology was one of conflict. Now we hear how Ossies (East Germans) and Wessies (West Germans) have strong feelings about each other (one side is described as lazy, the other as arrogant; one side as cultivated, the other as ignoramuses; some as honest, the others as corrupt) although the language they both share is the same (though not quite). Iranians and Arabs, Armenians and Georgians, and Serbs and Croats could add to this subject more than we want to know about the language of prejudice.
Shortly before Malthus issued his equation of population growth in relation to the growth of subsistence means, Rousseau stated a law of the inverse proportion between size of population and political freedom. Rousseau ascertained that the strength of those exercising power over others increases as the number of those subjected to power increases. The inverse proportion has to do with the influence each individual has in the political process-the more people, the weaker each voice. Scale is critical, but so is understanding the relation between the underlying structure of the pragmatics that defines the role of language and how this role is carried out. Practical experiences of power concentration are supported by literacy, whose implicit structure and expectation is centralism and representation. Literacy generates instances of conflict as well as institutions that regulate the nature of agreements and disagreements. Bureaucracy, the expression of these institutions, is the offspring of the incestuous relation between literacy and democracy.
A new scale of humankind, for which literacy-based practical experiences are not adequate, and within which democracy-the power of the people-can no longer be exercised (as Rousseau pointed out), poses many challenges. Among them: What, if anything, should replace literacy? What could replace democracy? How do we free ourselves from the choking grip of bureaucracy? Even before attempting an answer, the notion that the cultural experience of literacy and the social experience of democracy have reached their potential and are due for replacements has to be understood.
In a different vein, the understanding that literacy participates in power, of which people become aware in a given cultural and social context, triggers another reaction: means of expression and communication different from those originating under the aegis of literacy participate in pragmatic processes that result in access to power. It is not what a political leader says, but how. Powerful images, sophisticated directing, and inspired stage design or selection of backdrops become the message itself. This is why "The message is the medium," a not irreverent reversal of McLuhan's famous formula, phrases the altered nature of the relation between language and the world. Interactions in the networked world exemplify this rephrasing even better. The redefined relationship between the many languages of our new practical experiences and reality is expressed in the means and values of the civilization of illiteracy.
Written into the pompous architecture of Mitterand's palaces and monuments in Paris, and into the "new" Berlin reflecting the medieval notion of centralized power-to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars-the message of literacy is turned into the medium of brick-and-mortar. In an age of task distribution and decentralization, the appropriate alternative is virtual environments and an advanced infrastructure for access to cognition. "The message is the medium" translates into the requirement of overcoming infatuation with the past, never mind trying to reinvent it. The statement demands that we create alternative media that support the empowerment of individuals, not the further consolidation of power structures that were relevant in the past but which prevent the unfolding of the future.
From democracy to media-ocracy
Democracy is a domain of expectations. Humans constitute themselves as members of a democracy to the extent that their practical experiences acknowledge equality, freedom, and self-determination. The concept of democracy has varied enormously over time. In ancient societies, it acknowledged equality of the demos, and that free men-not slaves, not women-were entitled to vote. Subject to many emancipations, democracy denotes the right of people to elect their government (based on the general will set forth by the Jacobins, as mentioned above). How this self- government actually works-through direct or indirect representation, in forms of government based on the division of power between the executive and legislative, or under monarchies-is itself a matter of practical experiences pertinent to democracy. The democracy of human misery and neglect is quite different from the democracy of affluence. Equal access to work, education, health care, and art, and equal access to drugs, murder, joblessness, ignorance, and disease are far from being similar. A small town-meeting in Vermont or one in a Swiss canton, effectively governing life in town, is quite different from the forms of political self-governance in countries where the central power effectively overrides any self-governance. The same can be said of the overriding power of other factors-the economy, for instance.
Democracy is a major form of social and political experience. The power of the majority, expressed in votes, is only one of its possible manifestations. When only a minority of the population votes, the so-called majority ceases to be representative, no matter what the formal rules say. We live by democratic practices of delusion, and multiply, enthusiastically, their effect through the literate discourse of democracy. As a domain of expectations, mirroring hope implicit in literacy, democracy conjures meaning only if it is paralleled by democratic participation in social and political experiences. When one of the two terms of this critical equation diminishes-as is the case with participation-democracy diminishes in the same proportion. There are many reasons for decreasing participation. In countries where effective democracy was replaced by democratic demagoguery, changes, such as those brought about by revolutions, revolts, and reforms, initially mobilize the people, almost to the last citizen. We are still observing a phenomenon symptomatic of democracy in East Europe and the republics of the former Soviet Union. From the almost unanimous enthusiasm over renewal, leading to formal conditions for democracy, individual participation in government is slowly diminishing. What are the causes of this phenomenon, which is paralleled by diminishing interest in religion, art, and solidarity?
Many answers are given, and even more hypotheses are advanced: psychological fatigue, lack of democratic tradition, egotism, desire to catch up with affluent societies. From the perspective of the relationships characteristic of an individual's literate language and literacy programs of societies claiming to be democratic, the answer should be sought in the conflict between literacy-based values and the expectations of efficiency characteristic of the new scale of humankind. Efficiency made possible by a pragmatics emancipated from the structural characteristics reified in literacy converted democracy into commercial democracy. People can buy and sell whatever they want. Their equality is one of access to the market of affluence; their freedom is sealed in the mutually acknowledged right to plenty. Democratization, which people believe is taking place all over the world, is a process of absorbing newer and newer groups of people into prosperity, into the superficial culture of entertainment (including sports competition), and into a government that guarantees the right to wealth and consumption.
This description can easily become suspect of moralizing instead of tight analysis. Literacy embodies certain expectations from democratic institutions. Like other institutions, this type is also subjected to the test of efficiency. When the institutions of democracy fail this test, they are, in the language of democracy, diverted to consolidating not democracy, as a practical experience of the people, but the institution. Bureaucracies are generated as a diversion of democracy from its social and political focus in an incestuous love with the language in which its principles are enunciated. Mediation insinuates itself between the people and the institutions of democracy.
Media generalize the role of the literate system of checks and balances and, as mass-media, becomes a participant in the equation of power. Taking full advantage of means that characterize the civilization of illiteracy-the power of images, instantaneous access to events, the power of networking, communicative resources of new technologies-the media play a double role: representative of the people and representative of power. Since their own domain of experiences is representation, the media depend on the efficiency of the practical experiences of people's self-constitution in productive activities. Mass media activity is carried not by its own motivations, but by those of the market, whose locus it becomes. Consequently, the equation of democracy becomes the equation of competition and economic success. The media select and endorse causes and personalities appropriate to the process of marketing democracy. Instead of government, and the responsibilities associated with it, democracy becomes the people's right to buy, among other things, their government and the luxury of transferring their democratic responsibilities to its institutions.
Media bashing is a favorite sport of politicians whenever things don't work the way they expect. It is also practiced by the public, especially in times of economic uncertainty or during political developments that seem out of control (wars, violent mass demonstrations, elections). Bashing or not, criticism of the media reflects the fact that media expanded their participation in power. The practical experience of public relations, an outgrowth of media participation in power, uses the methods of the media to promote causes and personalities as products best suited for a certain need: support hungry children, elect a sheriff, endorse a tax hike or reduction, etc., etc. The domains of competence and ability are effectively disconnected from the domain of representation. Literacy-based methods of establishing hierarchies and influencing choices are enforced by new technologies for reaching targets, even in the most saturated contexts of information dissemination. Advisers committed only to the success of their endeavors use the discriminating tools of the market in order to adapt the message to all those who care to play the muddled game of democracy.
Information brokerage, feedback strategies, symbolic social engineering, mass media, psychology, and event design form an eclectic practical experience. Calling it by a certain name-media-ocracy-is probably tendentious. But the shoe seems to fit. From all we know, the effort of this activity does not go towards promoting excellence or persuading communities that democracy entails quality and defending self-government from corruption. It rather focuses on what it takes to convince that mediocrity adequately reflects the quest for equality, and is the most people can expect if they are not dedicated to the exercise of their rights. The literate and illiterate means used to defend democracy, and the entire political system built on the democratic premise, make it only more evident that democracy, an offspring of language-based practical experiences, is far from being the eternal and universal answer, the climax of history. Indeed, the scale of humankind renders impossible participation in power through the definition of ideals and goals, as well as awareness of the consequences of human actions. Alternative forms of participating in democracy need to be found in the characteristics of the pragmatics corresponding to the new scale. Such alternatives have to embody the distributed nature of work, better understanding of the connection (or lack thereof) between the individual and the community, awareness of change as the only permanence, and strategies of co-evolution, regarding equally all other people and the nature to which humans still belong. Democracy is the offspring of human experiences based on the postulate of sameness. The alternatives derive from the dynamics of difference.
Self-organization
Time, energy, equipment, and intellect have been invested in the research of artificial life. Knowledge derived from this research can be used to advance models of individual and social life. This knowledge tells us that diversity and self-organization, for instance, prompted by structural characteristics and externalized through emerging functions, maintain the impetus of evolution in a living system. Obviously, humans belong to such a system. In the past, we used to focus on social forms of variable organization. Within such forms, iterative optimization and learning take place as an expression of internal necessities, not as a result of adopted or imposed rules of functioning.
The entire dynamics of reproduction that marks today's states and organizations in the business of population control, needs to be reconnected to the pragmatic context. As a result, we can expect that communities structured on such principles are endowed with the equivalent of social immune systems, able to recognize themselves and to counteract social disease. Reconnection to the pragmatic context needs to be understood primarily as a change of strategy from telling people what has to be done to engaging them in the action. All the promises connected to the fast-growing network of networks are based on this fundamental assumption. A social immune system ought to be understood as a mechanism for preventing actions detrimental to the effective functioning of each and every member of the community. Social disease entails connotations characteristic of a system of good and bad, right and wrong. What is meant here is the possibility that individual effort and pragmatic focus become disconnected. Reconnection mechanisms are based on recognition of diversity and definition of unity, means, goals, and ideals.
Adaptability results from diversity; so does the ability to allocate resources within the dynamic community. More than in the past, and more than today, individuals will partake in more than one community. This is made possible by means of interaction and by shared resources. Today's telecommuting is only a beginning when we think of the numbers of people involved and the still limited scope of their involvement. The old notion of community, associated mainly with location, will continue to give way to communities of interests and goals. Virtual communities on the Internet already exemplify such possibilities. The major characteristic of such self-organizing social and cultural cells is their pattern of improvement in the course of co-evolution, which reflects the understanding that political and social aspects of human interaction change as each person changes.
The model described, inspired by the effort to understand life and simulate properties pertinent to life through simulations, applies just as much to the natural as to the artificial. Global economy, global political concerns, global responsibility for the support system, global vested interests in communication and transportation networks, and global concern for the meaningful use of energy should not lead to a world state- not even Boorstin's Republic of Technology will do-but to a state of many worlds. Complexities resulting from such a scale of political practical experiences are such that self-destruction, through social implosion, is probably what might happen if we continue to play the game of world institutions. The alternative corresponds to decentralization, powerful networking associated with extreme distributions of tasks, and effective integrating procedures.
In more concrete terms, this means that individuals will constitute their identity in experiences through which their particular contribution might be integrated in different actions or products. They will share resources and use communication means to optimize their work. Access to one another's knowledge through means that are simultaneously open to many inquiries is part of the global contract that individuals will enter, once they acknowledge the benefits of accessing the shared body of information and the tools residing on networks. Self-organizing human nuclei of diverse practical experiences will allow for the multiplicity of languages of the civilization of illiteracy, freedom from bureaucracy, and more direct co-participation in the life of each social cell thus constituted.
Advanced specialized knowledge, empowering people to pursue their practical goals with the help of new languages (mathematical notation, visualization, diagramming, etc.), usually insulates the expert from the world. If circumstances are created to meaningfully connect practical experiences that are relevant to each other, fragmentation and synthesis can be pursued together. We are very good at fragmentation-it defines our narrow specialties. But we are far less successful in pursuing synthesis. The challenge lies in the domain of integration.
Since human activity reflects the human being's multi-dimensionality, it is clear that nuclei of overlapping experiences, involving different perspectives, will develop in environments where resources are shared and results constitute the starting point for new experiences. The identity of people constituting themselves in the framework of a pragmatics that ensures efficiency and diversity reflects experiences through many literacies, and survival skills geared towards co-evolution, not domination. Co-evolving technology is only an example. From the relatively simple bulletin boards of the early 1960's to the Internet and Web of our day, co-evolution has been a concrete practical instance of the constitution of the Netizen. Michael Hauben, who coined the term, wanted to describe the individuals working towards building a cooperative and collective activity that would benefit the world at large. Conflicts are not erased. The Net community is not one of perfection but of anticipated and desired diversity, in which imperfection is not a handicap. Its dynamics is based on differences in quantity and quality, and its efficiency is expressed in how much more diversity it can generate.
The solution is the problem. Or is the problem the solution?
The inadequacy of literacy and natural language, undoubtedly the main sign system of the human species, is brought more forcefully to light against the background of new forms of practical experiences leading to human self-constitution through many sign systems. Extremely complex pragmatic circumstances, predicated by needs that long ago surpassed those of survival, make the limits of literacy-based language experiences stand out. This new pragmatics demands that literacy be complemented with alternative means of expression, communication, and signification. The analysis of various forms of human activity and creativity can lead to only one conclusion: the patterns of human relationships and the tools created on the foundation of literacy no longer optimally respond to the requirements of a higher dynamics of human existence.
Misled by the hope that once we capture extensions in language-everything people do in the act of their practical self-identification-we could infer from these to intensions-how a particular component unfolds-we have failed to perceive the intensional aspects of human actions themselves. For instance, we know of the diverse components of the practical experience of mathematics-analytic effort, rationality, symbolism, intuition, aesthetics. But we know almost nothing about each component. Some simply cannot be expressed in language; others are only reduced to stereotype through literate discourse. Does the power of a mathematical expression rely on mathematical notation, or on aesthetic quality? How are these two aspects integrated? Where and how does intuition affect mathematical thinking?
The same criteria apply, but more critically, to social activities. Interactions among people involve their physical presence; their appearance as beautiful, or fit, or appropriate; their capability to articulate thoughts; their power of persuasion; and much more. Each component is important, but we know very little about the specific impact each one has. Surprised at how dictators come to power, and even more by mass delusion, with or without television as part of the political performance, we still fail to focus on what motivates people in their manifestations as racists, warmongers, hypocrites, or, for that matter, as honest participants in the well-being of their fellow humans. When the argument is rotten but the mass follows, there is more at work than words, appearance, and psychology. Language has projected the experience involved in our cultural practice, but has failed to project anything particularly relevant to our natural existence. Thus patterns of cultural behavior expressed in language seem quite independent of the patterns of our biological life, or at least appear to have acquired a strange, or difficult to explain, independence.
We must give serious thought to our obsession with invulnerability, easy to conceptualize and express in language. It is, for instance, embodied in the medicine of the civilization of literacy. The abrupt revelation of AIDS, marking the end of the paranoia of invulnerability, might help us understand the ramifications of the uncoupling of our life in the domain of culture-where human sexuality belongs-and our life in the domain of nature-where reproduction belongs. Magic reflected the attempt to maintain a harmonious relation with the outside world. It has not yet been decided whether it is medicine-the reified experience of determinism applied in the realm of individual well being-or a parent's embrace that calms a baby's colic; or whether the psychosomatic nature of modern disease is addressed by the technology of healthcare in our days. What we already know is that populations were decimated once new patterns of nourishment and hygiene were imposed on them. When an attained balance was expelled by a foreign form of balance, life patterns were affected. This happened not only to populations in Asia, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, but also in the native populations of the American continents. Medical concepts resulting from analytic practical experiences of self-constitution-many reified in the medicine of the civilization of literacy-defy the variety of possible balances and embody the suspicion that "The solution is the problem."
Literacy, when applicable, works very well, but it is not the universal answer to humankind's increasingly complex pragmatics. In the fortunate position of not having totally abandoned experiences with sign systems other than language, people have been able to change the patterns of training, instruction, industrial production, modern farming, and healthcare. Patterns of practical understanding of domains which for a very long time were concealed by literacy are also affected: pattern recognition, image manipulation, design. As a result, new methods for tackling new areas of human experience are becoming possible. Instead of describing images through words, and defining a course of action or a goal through a text, and then having the text control the use of visual elements, people use the mediating power of design systems with integrated planning and management facilities. A new product, a new building, and concepts in urban planning are generated while the pertinent computer program computes data pertinent to cost, ecological impact, social implications, and interpersonal communication. The practice of transcending literacy, while still involving literacy, also resulted in the development of new skills: visual awareness, information processing, networking, and new forms of human integration, far less rigid than those characteristic of integration exclusively through verbal language.
There is no need to eliminate literacy, as there is no need to reduce everything to literacy. Where it is still applicable, literacy is alive and well. On the Internet and World Wide Web, it complements the repertory of means of human interaction characteristic of computer-mediated communication. Television holds a large audience captive in one-way communication. The ambition of the World Wide Web is to enable meaningful one-to-one and one-to-many interactions.
The civilization of illiteracy is one of diversity and relies on the dynamics of self- organization. But in order to succeed, several conditions need to be met. For instance, we have not yet developed in appropriate practical experiences of human self- constitution the ability to think in media other than natural language. Like many beginners in a new language, people still translate from one language to another. When this does not work, they look for help in the language they know, instead of formulating questions in the alternative language in which they suspect they can be answered. After intuition was eliminated by rationality and system, only minor effort is made towards understanding how intuition comes about, whether in mathematics, medicine, sports, the arts, market transactions, war skills, food preparation, and social activities.
In the civilization of literacy, people were, and to a great extent still are, able to ignore some forms of human relationships without affecting the general outcome of human practice. Within the new scale and dynamics, human civilization relies on the interplay of more elements. The timing involved in integrating this diversity is much more difficult to accomplish through literacy-based methods, even though timing is critical to the outcome. Literacy captures the rough and linear level of relations. New practical experiences of higher efficiency require finer levels and tools adequate to non- linear phenomena for dealing with the parallel processes involved in the self- constitution of individuals and of society.
From possibilities to choices
If the multiplication of possibilities were not to be met by effective ways of making choices, we would be sucked into the whirlwind of entropy. In practice, this translates into an obvious course of events: allowing for new possibilities, which sometimes take the appearance of alternatives, means to disallow certain known and practiced options of confirmed output. For example, where democracy is taken over by bureaucracy, the town meeting fulfills only a decorative function. There is nothing of consequence in the American President's State of the Union address, or in the conventions where political parties nominate candidates for the Presidency. With the choice of local and national political representation, the possibility to directly participate in power is precluded.
The possibility of using sign systems other than language is far from being a novelty. Even the possibility of achieving some form of syncretism is not new by any means. What is new is the awareness of their potential malfunctioning and of the potential for losing control over forms of praxis that become highly complex. From among the many ways the relation between the individual and the community is manifested, the condition of the legal system is probably the best example. Whether independent, constituting a domain of regulations and checks with its own motivations, or part of other components of social and political life, the institution of justice encodes its typologies, classifications, and rules in laws. This domain parallels one of human interactions where expected values are permanently subjected to the scrutiny of the pragmatic activity. Integrity of the individual and his lawfully acquired goods, the binding nature of commitments, and prohibition of misrepresentation or of rules essential to the well being of the community are rules on which legal experience developed. Right and wrong, once identified under circumstances of direct practical experience through consequences for the community's well being, are now constituted in a domain with a life and rules of its own. Killing, stealing, and misrepresentation are actions well defined in the written texts of the law. But the law itself, anchored in literacy, consequently detached itself from the real world and now constitutes its own reality and motivations. Since this is the case, it is no surprise that legal practice turns out to be nothing more than interpretations of texts and attempts to use language to bring about an outcome based on chimera, not reality.
The legal system reacts to innovation by forcing rules originating in other pragmatic frameworks-the strong evidence of DNA analysis is only one example-to fit its own criteria of evaluation. Instead of constituting a proactive context for the unfolding of the human genius, legal praxis ends up defending only its own interests. The jury system in the USA might appear to many people as an expression of democracy. In the pragmatic context in which the jury system originated, even the notion of peer made sense, since it applied to a reduced and relatively homogeneous community. Today, the jury has become part of the odious equation of the dispute between lawyers. The jury is selected to reflect the lowest common denominator so that its members, mostly incompetent, can be manipulated in the adversarial game of the performance produced under the generic label of justice.
As an extension of literate language, the experience of legal language builds on its own rules for efficient functioning and establishes criteria for success that corrupt the process of justice. It is a typical example of malfunctioning, probably as vivid as the language of politics. Judicial and political praxes document, from another angle, how democracy fails once it reaches the symbolic phase manifested in the bureaucracy of the legal system and of reified power relations.
Coping with choice
Self-definition implies the ability to establish a domain of possibilities. But possibilities do not present themselves alone. In the transition from the civilization of literacy to the new civilization of illiteracy, the global domain of possibilities expands dramatically, but the local, individual domains probably narrow in the same proportion. This happens because what at the global level looks like a multiplication of choices, at the level of the individual appears as a matter of effective selection procedures. As long as there is little to choose from, selection is not a problem.
The primitive family had few choices regarding nourishment, self-reproduction, and health. Choices increased as the practical experiences of self-constitution diversified. Migrating populations chose from among selections different from those available to settled human beings. The first known cities embodied a structure of relations for which written language was appropriate. The megalopolis of our day embodies a universe of choices on a different scale. Within such a domain of possibilities, there are no effective selection procedures. Reduction from practically infinite choices to a finite number of realizations is at best a matter of randomness and exposure. Inversely, the slogan "Act locally, think globally" can easily lead to failure. Many accomplishments that are successful on a local scale would fail if applied globally if they do not integrate awareness of globality from the beginning.
Within literacy, the expectation that literate people receive, by virtue of knowledge of language, good selection procedures-considered as universal and permanent as literacy itself-was part of its multi-layered self-motivation. In the civilization of illiteracy, this expectation gives way to pursuing consecutive choices, all short-term, all of limited scope and value-free, which even seem to eliminate one's own decision. It appears that choices grab individuals. This explains why one of the main drives in the world today is towards greater numbers of people seeking to live in cities. Once a choice is exhausted, the next follows as a consequence of the scale, not as a result of searching for an alternative. This applies as well to professional life, itself subject to the shorter cycles of renewal and change.
The powerful mechanism of social segmentation, the result of the many mediating mechanisms in place, makes the problem of coping with choice look like another instance of democracy at work. Let's consider some of these choices: to distribute, or not to distribute, condoms to high school and junior high school students; to confirm or deny the right to end one's life (pro-choice or pro-life); to expand heterosexual family privileges to homosexual cohabitation; to introduce uniform standards of testing in education. These examples are removed from the broader context of human self-constitution and submitted, through the mechanism of media- ocracy, more to market validation than to a responsible exercise of civic responsibility.
Mediation mechanisms characteristic of the civilization of illiteracy cause the choices that a community faces to become almost irrelevant on the individual level. In the new universe of possibilities, expanding as we speak, human beings are giving up autonomy and self-determination, as they participate in several different communities. They share in the apparent choices of society insofar as these match their own possibilities and expectations. But they often have the means to live outside a society when their choices (regarding peace, war, individual freedom, lifestyle, etc.) are different from those pursued by states. Citizens of the trans-national world partake in the dynamics of change to a much higher degree than do people dedicated to the literate ideals of nationalism and ethnicity.