The most one can expect in our time of upheaval and change are provisions for establishing conditions for unhampered human interactions in the market and in other domains of human self-constitution (religion, education, family). Steady globalization means that the health of national economies, education, sports, or art matters just as little as national borders and the theatrics of diplomacy and international relations. One can hear Dostoyevsky's prophetic line: "If it's otherwise not possible, make us your servants, but make us full." It hurts to repeat it, but it will hurt more to ignore it at a time when nothing grows faster than the urge of millions of people to emigrate to any developed country willing to take them, even as second-class citizens, so long as they escape their current abysmal condition.
The dynamics of change in the world is characterized by the acknowledged need of many countries to be integrated in the global economy while preserving or requiring a token of national identity. State sovereignty is self-delusive in the context of commercial, financial, or industrial autonomy that is impossible to achieve. Self- determination, always to the detriment of some other ethnic group, echoes those tribal instincts that make the ideal of constitutional government an exercise in futility. The underlying structure of literacy is reflected in national movements and their dualistic system of values. The logic of the good and the bad, more difficult to define in a context of vagueness, but still pursued blindly, controls the way coalitions are established, migration of populations is handled, and national interests defended, while these very nations argue for integration and free market.
Nevertheless, the language of today's politics is, in the final analysis, shaped by the pragmatic framework. Its sentences are written in the language of ledgers; the freedom it purports to establish is that of commercial democracy, of equal access to consumption, which happens to be the main political achievement of recent history. The fact that the nations forming the European Community gave up sovereignty with respect to the market proves the point. That they still preserve diplomatic representation, defense functions, and immigration policies only attests to the conflict between the politics of the civilization of literacy and the politics of the civilization of illiteracy.
The great documents of the literate past perpetuate the rhetoric of the time of their writing. All the structural characteristics of literacy, valid for the pragmatic framework that justifies them, deeply mark the letter and spirit of these documents. They ascertain politics as sequential, linear, and deterministic. They rejoice in promulgating ideals that correspond to the scale of humankind in which they guarantee the means that result in the efficiency of industrial and productive society. Liberté, egalité, fraternité are shorthand for rights of conscience, ownership, and individual legal status. They are an expression of accepted hierarchy and centralism to the degree that these could be rendered relative as need required. Expectations of permanency and universality were carried over from earlier political experiences, or from religion, even though separation of Church and State was emphatically proclaimed during the French Revolution, and in revolutions that took place afterwards. Amendments required by altered circumstances of human self-constitution in practical experiences not anticipated in the documents render their spirit relative and solve some of the problems caused by the limitations mentioned.
Political documents, such as the ones mentioned above, are still perceived as sacrosanct, regardless of their obvious inadequacy in the pragmatic context of the civilization of illiteracy. It is one thing to establish the sanctity of property in a framework of agricultural praxis, whose politics was inspired by a shared expectation of cycles parallel to natural cycles. Jefferson envisioned the land as a vast agrarian state. "We are a people of farmers. Those who work the fields are the chosen people of God, if He had a chosen people. In their heart He planted the real virtue." It is quite another thing to live in a pragmatic context of new forms of property, some reflecting a notion of sequential accumulation, others an experience of work with machines, of humans seen as commodity. It is a new reality to live in today's integrated world of property as elusive as new designs, software, information, and ways to process it. To apply to this context political principles inspired by a movement that sought independence from England while using slaves brought from Africa is questionable, at least.
Equality of natural rights, deriving from nature-based cycles, is quite different from equality of political rights and responsibilities deriving from a machine-inspired model for progress. Both of these sources are different from the political status of people involved in a pragmatics of global networking and extreme task distribution. One can cautiously make the case that the major political documents of the past were conceived in reaction to an intolerable state of affairs and events, not proactively, in anticipation of new situations and expectations. These documents are the expression of the need to unify, homogenize, and integrate forces in a world of relatively autonomous entities-national states-competing more for resources and productive forces than for markets. The values reflected therein correspond to the values on which literacy is founded and for which literacy-inspired ideologies fought.
But maybe these political documents are exemplary in another way, let's say as an expression of moral standards that we apparently lost in the course of 200 years; or of cultural standards for both society and politicians, standards that can only rarely be acknowledged today, if at all. If this is the case, which is difficult to prove, what this seems to suggest is that the price paid for higher political efficiency is the lost ethics of politics, or its current deplorable intellectual condition. The lack of correlation between political practice and language results from the pragmatic context reflected in the condition of language itself. While in real life, many literacies are at work, Literacy (with a capital L) still dominates the structure of politics. Its rules are applied to forms of human interaction and evaluation that are not reducible to self-constitution in language.
Political activity by and large follows patterns characteristic of the civilization of literacy, despite its own indulgence in non-linguistic semioses: the use of images, film, and video, or the adoption of new networking technologies focused on information exchange. Former expectations that politicians adhere to standards of the civilization of literacy are carried over in new political and practical experiences. The expectation that their literacy should match that of political documents belonging to the political tradition (the Constitution of the United States of America, for instance) is paradoxical, though, since the majority of Americans cannot recall what these political documents state. And they see no reason to find out. Their own practical experience takes place in domains for which the past is of little consequence to their well-being. As things stand now, the political principles required by the dynamics of industrial society are embodied in institutions and laws dedicated to their own preservation.
Free of concern for their own freedom, politically rooted in a prior pragmatic framework, citizens take freedom for granted in their new practical experiences and end up evading the associated civic responsibility. They expect their politicians to be literate for them. We deal here with a strange mixture of assumptions: on the one hand, a notion of political life corresponding to a context of homogeneity and a deterministic view of the social world; on the other, a realization that today's world requires specialized political practical experience, means and methods characteristic of heterogeneous and non-deterministic political processes. The simmering conflict is met with the type of thinking that will not solve the problem because it is the problem.
The coordination of political action through literacy-based language and methods and the dynamics of a new political practice, based on the characteristics of the civilization of illiteracy, simply diverge. As in many other domains of literate condition, it is as though institutions, norms, and regulations take on lives of their own, as literate language does, perpetuating their own values and expectations. They develop as networks of interaction with an autonomous dynamics, uncoupled from the dynamics of political life, even from the new pragmatic context. The tremendous amount of written language (speeches, articles, forms, contracts, regulations, laws, treatises) stands in contrast to the very fast changes that make almost every political text superfluous even before it is cast in the fast eroding medium of print or in the elusive bits and bytes of electronic processing.