The spread of religions, parallel to military conquest, resulted in the spread of the respective religious books, and of the letters that the books were written in. This is not necessarily the same as the spread of literacy. Religion established its own state, the Holy Roman Empire (which is now down to the size of Vatican City) that transcended national boundaries and languages, and was considered universal. In the language of Islam, umma is the world community of Moslems, while wattan is the Motherland. The Moslem armies, defeated at Poitiers by the Catholic Charles Martel, were also disseminating the religion, language, and culture of the world community they envisioned. The Crusades, in turn, and the religious wars that plagued Europe did not spread literacy as much as they attempted to defend or establish the dominance of a way of living meant to ensure an order that promised eternal life.
In the scale of today's human practical experience, efficiency in general is almost independent of individual performance. It is independent of the degree of faith, ethical behavior, family status, and other characteristics of what religion calls good, and which ethics appropriates as a desired set of social expectations. Within a small scale of existence and work, things belong together: the practical and the spiritual, politics and morals, the good and the useful. Religion is their syncretic expression. The need for specialization and mediation changed the nature of pragmatic relations. Various realms of human practical experience are severed from each other. As this takes place, the religiously grounded system of values based on unity and integration-after all, this is what monotheism, in its various embodiments, represents-is submitted to the test of new circumstances of human self-constitution.
Among the many explanations of the events of the late sixties, at least the phenomenon of the attraction exercised by the various churches of meditation and their gurus is reflective of the crisis of monotheism, and of the culture that grew around it. An increasing number of esoteric, exotic, scientific, or pseudoscientific sects today bear witness to the same. The difference is that these sects are no longer isolated, that almost the entire religious dimension of people is connected to some sect, be it even one that used to be a dominant church.
Religion-based values or attitudes are carried over into the new segmented practical experiences of work, family, and society, and thus into the realm of politics, law, and market relations. Originating from sexual drive, love is one of the experiences from which family, friendship, art, and philosophy derived over time. Once written in the Book as a different form of love, once ascertained as a practical experience, it bridges between its natural biological basis and its cultural reality as a characteristic of a framework of human interaction in which individuals project their biological and cultural identity. Written about in religious books, love starts a journey from naturalness to artifact. Expressed as intelligence, temperament, appearance, or physical ability (our natural endowment), love is subjected, in conjunction with the experience of writing the Book, to a set of expectations expressed as though they originated from outside the experience.
In this process, there is no passive participant. The written word is permeated by the structural characteristics of the act of preferring somebody to somebody else, one course of action from among many, and, more generally, something over something else, according to religious values. The implicit expectation of permanency (of faith, love, or ownership) results from the pragmatic reasons acknowledged by the Book(s). A consensus essential for the survival and well being of the community is reached by acknowledging forces from outside, and accepting their permanent and quasi-universal nature. In a universe of immediacy and proximity, change other than that experienced in natural cycles is not anticipated.
Divinity makes sense only if constituted in practical experiences from which a notion of eternity and universality result. The written words exalting unity, uniqueness, eternity, and the promise of a better future are the result of the practical experience, since in the realm of nature only the immediate and the proximate are acknowledged. Forever marked by this experience of time and space beyond the immediate, the written language of religion, together with the written language of observations connected to the awareness of natural cycles (the moon, the seasons, plagues), remains a repository of the notion of permanency, universality, and uniqueness, and an instrument for hierarchical differentiation.
Whenever constituted in activities related to or independent of religion, language, as a product of and medium for human identification, projects these structural characteristics upon whatever the object of practical experience is. Once written, the word seems to carry into eternity its own condition. With the advent of literacy, as this is made possible and necessary by a different scale of human praxis, literacy itself would appear as endowed with the quality of eternity and universality, triggering its own sense of exaltation and mission, lasting well into our day. For millions of citizens from countries south of Russia, who once gave up their roots to show allegiance to the Soviet Empire, to return to Arabic writing after being forced to adopt the Cyrillic means rediscovering and reconnecting to their eternity. That some of them, caught in the geo- political confrontation of their neighbors, adopt the Roman alphabet of their Turkish Moslem brothers, does not change the expectation.
Religion and efficiency
In the literate forms of language experiences, not only religion, but also science and the humanities, literature, and politics are established and subjected to the practical test of efficiency. Each projects a notion of permanency and universality, which is influenced by the practical experience of religion, sometimes in contradiction to the archetypal experience resulting in the notion (or notions) of God (or gods). Now that the pragmatic framework of the very ample scale of human practice makes permanency and universality untenable, the tendency to escape from the confines of religion becomes evident. There is a strong sense of relativism in science, an appropriate self- doubt in humanistic discourse, and an appropriate understanding of the multiplicity and open-endedness in almost every aspect of our social and political life.
This was not achieved through and in literacy, but in disregard of it, through the many partial literacies reflecting our practical self-constitution. The reality of the global nature of human experience, of interconnectedness, of its distributed nature, and of the many integrative forces at work, renders the centralism implied in the Book(s) obsolete for many people. At the same time, let it also be noted that this reality makes the Book even more necessary than ever for many, and at different levels of their practical life. The many religious literacies of these days-promoting permanent modes of life, exotic and less exotic codes of behavior, ways of eating and dressing, hopes for a happy future or some form of afterlife-maintain dualistic schemes of good and bad, right and wrong, sacred and secular in a world of extremely subtle and painfully vague distinctions. The question whether love and reason can undergird community awareness, social action, political activism, and education if, as seems to be the case, their connection to faith continues to decline, belongs to the same dualistic perspective. This perspective is common to both partisans and enemies of religion. It used to be the backbone of the ideology of religious suppression-either under communism, or wherever a dominant religion takes upon itself the eradication of any other religion. And it is becoming the argument of the many emancipatory movements promoting the religions of atheism and agnosticism as a substitute for religion. The subject is ultimately one of faith, concerning very intimate aspects of individual self-assessment, but not necessarily the institution of creed. Still captive to dualism, brought about and nourished by experiences constitutive of literacy, we have problems coping with a world where the enemy is us and where religion is different from what it was at the time of its inception, or the time we were first were exposed to it.