Language is the instrument through which political practical experience takes place. To reconstitute past succeeding political experiences therefore means to reconstitute their language(s). The task is overwhelming because politics is mingled with every aspect of human life: work, property, family, sex, religion, education, ethics, and art. It is present even in the interrelations of these aspects because politics is also self-reflective. That is, the identity of one entity is related to the identity of others in relation to which self-identification takes place. The variety of political experiences corresponds to the variety of pragmatic circumstances within which humans project their identity.
Individual existence resulting from interaction with others extends to the realm of politics and is embodied in the recurrent patterns that make up expectations, goals, institutions, norms, conflicts, and power relations. The individual is concealed in all these. In some ways, politics is a social-educational practice resulting in the integration of instinctive actions (a-political) and learned modes of practice with social impact. What constitutes politics is the dynamics of relations as they become possible and as they unfold as openings towards new relations. One of the concrete forms of such relations is the propensity to coalition building. Politics is contingent upon subjects interacting. Their past (ontogeny) and present (pragmatics) are involved in these interactions. To a certain extent, it is a learned form of practice requiring means for interaction, among which language has been the most important. It is also a practice of investigation, discovery, and social testing.
The manifold of political languages corresponds to the manifold of practical experiences. There are probably as many political tongues as there are circumstances of self-identification within a society. But against the background of this variety is the expectation that word and deed coincide, or at least that they do not stray too far from each other.
The advent of writing changed politics because it attached written testimony to it, which became a referential element. As Socrates and Plato noticed, this was a blessing in disguise. Since the time writing entered the political sphere, the practical argument shifted from the fact, argued and eventually settled, to the record. It became itself a practical experience of records (of property, law, order, agreements, negotiations, and allocations for the good of society). The institutions that emerged after the practical experience of writing operated within the structure of and in accordance with the expectations brought about by writing. And soon, as relative as soon can be, political self-consciousness was established parallel to political action and pursued as yet another practical experience.
The many languages of political experience multiply once more in the new languages of political awareness. Where values were the final goal of politics, the value of the political experience itself became a subject of concern. Many political projects were pursued at this self-reflective level: conceiving new forms of human cooperation and political organization, advancement of ideas concerning education, prejudices, emancipation, and law. This explains, too, why in the sequence of political practical experiences, expectations did not nullify each other. They accumulated as an expression of an ideal, forever moving away from the last goal attained. Without a good understanding of the process, nobody could account for the inner dynamics of political change. The same applies to accounting for the role played by political leaders, philosophers, and political organizations involved, by virtue of their own goals and functions, in political life.
Politics in the civilization of illiteracy is not politics out of the blue sky. Along the continuum of political practical experiences, it entails expectations generated under different pragmatic circumstances. And it faces challenges-the major challenge being the efficiency expected in the new scale of human experience-for which its traditional means and its inherited structure are simply not adequate. Political discontinuity is always more difficult to accept, even understand. Revolutions are celebrated only after they take place, and especially after they successfully establish a semblance of stability.
Can literacy lead politics to failure?
In our time, much is said regarding the perception that the language of politics and the political practice it seems to coordinate are very far apart. People's mistrust of politics appears to reach new heights. The role and importance of political leaders and institutions apparently have changed. The most able are not necessarily involved in politics. Their self-constitution takes place in practical experiences more rewarding and more challenging than political activism. Political institutions no longer represent the participants in the political contract, but pursue their own goals, survival included. Law takes on a life of its own, more concerned, so the public perceives, with protecting the criminal, in the name of preserving civil rights, than upholding justice. Taxes support extravagant governments and forms of social redistribution of wealth, more often reflecting a guilt complex over past inequities than authentic social solidarity. Instead of promoting meaningful human relationships and addressing the future, they keep fixing the past. Everyone complains, probably a phenomenon as old as any relation among people involved in a sui generis give-and-take interaction. But fewer and fewer are willing to do something because individual participation and effort appear useless in the given political structure.
The majority of people look back to some prior political experience and interpret the past in the light of books they have read. They fail to realize that the complexity of today's human experience cannot be met by yesterday's solutions. They are convinced that if we are faithful to our political heritage, all problems, credibility and corruption included, will be solved. They also believe religious systems and their great books contain all that is needed to meet all imaginable present and future challenges. Even the very honorable conviction that the founders of modern democracies prepared citizens to cope with this unprecedented present cannot go unchallenged. The Constitution of the United States (1787) as well as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in France (1789) reflect the thinking and the prose of the civilization of literacy. Similar documents are on record in Latin America, Europe, India, and Japan. They are as useless as history can be when new circumstances of human self- constitution are totally different from the experiences that gave birth to these documents. Revisionism will not do. The new context requires not a static collection of admirable principles, but dynamic political structures and procedures of the same nature as the pragmatics of shorter cycles of change, non-determinism, high efficiency, decentralization, and non-hierarchical modes of operation. As the world reinvents itself as interwoven, it breaks loose from prescriptions of local significance and traditional import.
Although the number of emerging nations has increased-and nobody knows how many more will emerge-we know of no political documents similar to those articulated in 1776, 1789, 1848, or even 1870. Nothing comparable to the Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, even the Communist Manifesto (no matter how discredited it is at present), whether in substance or style, has accompanied current political movements. The reason why no such document can emerge can be connected to the inadequacies of literacy-based politics. This civilization is no longer one of ideas, religious or secular. It is characterized by processes, methodologies, and inventions expressed in various sign systems that have a dynamics different from that of language and literacy. The ideas of the civilization of literacy address the mind, soul, and spirit.