Many economies have undergone, or realize they must undergo, profound restructuring. Massive down-sizing, paralleled by flatter hierarchies and smoother quality control, have affected economic performance. But very little of this has touched the sacrosanct centralized state institutions. In the USA alone, 14 departments, 135 federal agencies employing more than 2.1 million civilians and 1.9 million military personnel account for $1.5 trillion in yearly expenditure. If the economy were as inefficient as political activity is, we would face a crisis of global proportion and consequences that are impossible to anticipate.
This is why today, some citizens would write a Declaration of Independence that begins with the following line: "We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore." But this would not mean that they would vote. When five times more people watch Married with Children than vote in primaries, one understands that the morality and intellectual quality of the politician and citizen correspond closely. Cynical or not, this observation simply states that in the civilization of illiteracy, political action and criteria for evaluating politics do not follow the patterns of political practical experiences peculiar to the civilization of literacy. Multiplied to infinity, choices no longer undergird values, but options that are equally mediocre.
The issue of literacy from the perspective of politics is the issue of the means through which political practice takes place. A democracy resting solely upon the contribution to political life in and through literate language is at the same time captive to language. The experience of language resulted from developments not necessarily democratic in nature. Embedded in literacy, past practical experiences pertinent to a pragmatic context appropriate to a different scale of humankind are often an obstacle to new experiences. So are our distinctions of sex, race, social status, space, time, religion, art, and sport. Once in language, such distinctions simply live off the body of any new design for political action. Language is not politically neutral, and even less so is the literate practice of language. Various minority groups made a very valid point in stating this. Power relations, established in political practice, often become relations in the literate use of language and of other means, as long as they are used according to literacy expectations. It is not that literacy prevents change; literacy allows for change within the systematic domain of practices relying on the literate practical experiences of language. But when literacy itself is challenged, as it is more and more in our day, it ends up opposing change.
Discrepancies between the language and actions of politics, politicians, and political institutions and programs result from the conflict between the horizon of literacy and the dynamics for which the literate use of language is ill equipped. If the formula deterioration of moral standards corresponds to the failure of politics to meet its constituency's expectations, the most pessimistic views about the future would be justified, because politicians are not better or worse than their constituency. But as with everything else in the new pragmatic context, it is no longer individual performance that ensures the success or failure of an activity. Integrating procedures ascertain a different form of cooperation and competition. Such processes are made possible by means characteristic of high efficiency pragmatics, that is, task distribution, parallelism and reciprocal testing, cooperation through networking, and automated procedures for planning and management. They are meaningful only in conjunction with motivations characteristic of this age. If, on the other hand, the romantic notion that the best become leaders were true of today's political experience, we would have cause to wonder at our own stupidity. In fact, it does not matter which person leads.
Political processes are so complex that the industrial model of successful stewardship no longer makes sense. Political life in society does not depend on political competence, people's generosity, or self-motivation that escapes institutional, religious, or ideological coercion. The degree of efficiency, along with the right ascribed to people to partake in affluence, speaks in favor of political experiences driven by pragmatic forces. Such forces are at work locally and make sense only within a context of direct effectiveness. But short of taking these forces for granted, we cannot escape the need to understand how they work and how their course can be controlled.
Crabs learned how to whistle
Some of today's political systems are identified as democracies, and others claim to be. Some are identified as dictatorships of some sort, which almost none would accept as a qualifier. But no matter which label is applied, there is an obsession with literacy in all these systems. "We need literacy for democracy to survive," says the literacy special interest group. But how do dictatorships come about in literate populations? The biggest dictatorship (the Soviet block) was proud of its high literacy rate, acknowledged by the western world as an accomplishment impossible to overlook. It fell because the underlying structural characteristics reflected in literacy collided with other requirements, mainly pragmatic.
An empire, the fourth in the modern historic succession that started with the Turkish Empire and continued with the Austro-Hungarian and British Empires, crumbled. What makes the fall of the Soviet Empire significant is its own underlying structure. The former members of COMECON, those East European countries that, along with the Soviet Union, once formed the communist block, represent a good case study for the forces involved in the dynamics of illiteracy. While writing this book, I benefited from an experiment probably impossible to duplicate. A rigid structure of human activity, basically captive to a slightly amended paradigm of the Industrial Revolution, hailing itself as the workers' paradise, and laboring under the illusion of messianic collectivism, maintained literacy as its cultural foundation.
Even the harshest and blindest critics of the system had to agree that if anything of historic significance could be attributed to communism, it was its literacy program. Large segments of the population, illiterate prior to communism, were taught to read and write. The school system, deficient in many ways, provided free and obligatory education, much better than its free medical system. This effort at education was intended to prepare the new generations for productive tasks, but also to subject each person to a program of indoctrination channeled through the powerful medium of literacy. Questioned about his own ideas for the reform of the orthodox communist system, Nikita Kruschchev, the maverick leader of the post-Stalin era, declared: "He who believes that we will give up the teachings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin deludes himself tremendously. Those who are waiting for this to happen will have to wait until crabs learn how to whistle." When, throughout Russia, statues of Lenin started falling and Marx's name became synonymous with the failure of communism, people probably started hearing strange sounds from crustaceans.
The abrupt and unexpected failure of the communist system-an event hailed as victory in a war as cold as the market can be-makes for unexpected proof of this book's major thesis. The breakdown of the Soviet system can be seen as the failure of a structure that kept literacy as its major educational and instrumental medium, and relied on it for the dissemination of its ideological goals inside and outside the block. Literacy, as such, did not fail, but the structures that literacy entails: limited efficiency, sequential practical experiences of human self-constitution in a hierarchic and centralized economy; deterministic (thus implicitly dualistic) working relations, a level of efficiency based on the industrial model of labor division, mediation subjected to central planning without choice as to the mediating elements; opaqueness expressed in an obsession with secrecy, and last but not least, failure to acknowledge the new scale of humankind-in short, a pragmatic framework whose characteristics are reflected in literacy-all led to the final result. Indeed, the system acted to counter integration and globality. It maintained rigid national and political boundaries under the false assumption that insularity would allow a controlled and orderly exchange of goods and ideas, perpetuation and dissemination of an ideology of proletarian dictatorship, and eventually coexistence with the rest of the world under the assumption of its progressive conversion to communist values.