Political idolatry, commercial nationalism, and ethnic vanity affect politics at many levels. Nationalism, emerging as a form of collective pride and psychological compensation for repressed instincts, celebrates gold medals at Olympic games, the number of Nobel Prize laureates, and achievements in the arts and sciences with a fervor worth a better cause. Borders of pride and prejudice are maintained even where they have de facto ceased to exist. No scientist who achieved results in his or her field worked in isolation from colleagues living all over the world. The Internet supports the integration of creative effort and ideas, beyond borders and beyond national fixations, often expressed as military priorities rather than as cooperation and integration. Art is internationally nurtured and exchanged.
Rhetoric and politics
Political programs, very much like hamburgers, cars, alcohol, sports events, artworks, and financial services, are marketed. Success in politics is valued in market terms rather than in the increasingly elusive political impact. The expression "People vote their pocketbooks" bluntly expresses this fact. But are they voting? Poll after poll reveals that they are not. Illiterates used to be excluded from voting, along with women, Blacks in America and South Africa, and foreigners in a large number of European countries.
In an ideal world, the best qualified would compete for a political position, all would vote, and the result would make everyone happy. How would such an ideal world function? Words would correspond to facts. The reward of political practical experience would be the experience itself, satisfying the need to best serve others, and thus oneself as a member of the larger social family. This is a Utopian world of perfect citizens whose reason, expressed in the language of literacy, i.e., made available to everyone and implicitly guaranteed to be a permanent medium for interaction, is the guardian of politics. We see here how authority, of the thinking human being, is established and almost automatically equated with freedom. Indeed, the doctrine of individual conformity to rational necessity was expressed in many pragmatic contexts, but never as forcefully as in the context that appropriated literacy as one of its guiding forces.
In the horizon of literacy, the expectation is that the experience of self- constitution as literate makes people submit their own nature to the rationale of literacy and thereby find fulfillment. In short, the belief that to be literate makes one respect his word, respect others, understand political expectations, and articulate one's ideas is more of an illusion. Moreover, if political action could result in having everyone accept the values of literacy and embody them as their second nature, conflicts would vanish, people would all share in wealth and, moreover, would be able to abide by the standards of democracy. It even follows that the literate need to feel the obligation of inculcating literacy in others, thus creating the possibility of changing patterns of human experiences so that they reflect the demands of reason associated with literacy. Isaiah Berlin, among others, noted that the belief in a single encompassing answer to all social questions is indefensible. Rather, conflict is an overriding feature of the human condition. This conflict develops between the propensity to diversity (all the ends pursued) and the almost irrational expectation that there is one answer-a good way of life-worth pursuing and which can be attained if the political animal acknowledges the primacy of reason over passion, and freely chooses conformity to widely shared values over chaotic individualism.
Under the pragmatic circumstances of the civilization of illiteracy, the literate expectation of unanimous or even majority vote is less than significant. Voting results are as good an indicator of a society's condition as seismographs are of the danger of an earthquake. On election days, the results are known after the first representative sample makes it through the voting mechanism. Actually, the results are already at hand days before the election takes place. The means within our reach are such that it would suffice to commit a short interval of telephone time so that people who want to vote-and who know why they vote- can, and without having to go our of their way. Any other connection, such as the generalized cable infrastructure, connected to a central data processing unit outfitted for the event, would do as well. Such a strategy would answer only one part of the question: making it easy for people to vote. The second part regards what they are asked to vote for. The political process is removed from the exciting practice of offering authentic choice. Literacy-based political action is opaque, almost inscrutable. Accordingly, the citizen has no motivation for commitment and no need to express it through voting. There is a third part: the assumption that voting is a form of particpating in the power of democracy. No one aware of the dynamics of work and life today can equate the notion of majority with democracy. More often than not, efficiency is achieved through procedures of exception.
Under the circumstances of a global economy of fast change and parallel practical experiences, no president of a country, no matter how powerful, and no central political power can effectively influence events significant to the citizen. The civilization of illiteracy requires alternatives to centralism, hierarchy, sequentiality, and determinism in politics. It especially entails alternatives to dualism, whether embodied in the two- party system, the legislative and executive opposition, and lawfulness vs. illegality, for example. This implies a broad distribution of political tasks, in conjunction with a politics that takes advantage of parallel modes of activism, networking, open-ended policies, and self-determination at meaningful levels of political life. Political fear of vagueness can only be compared to the fear of a vacuum that once upon a time branded physics and political doctrines. Faster rhythms of existence and the acknowledged need to adapt to circumstances of action never before experienced-scale of politics, globality, scale of humankind-speak against many of the literate expectations of politics as a stabilizing form of human practice. Politics, if true to its call, should contribute to speeding up processes and creating circumstances for better negotiations among people who have lost their sense of political adherence, or even lost their faith in law and order.
In this global world, where scale is of major importance, politics is supposed to mediate among the many levels at which people involved in parallel, extremely distributed activities, partake in globality. Apportionment of goods, as much as the apportionment of rights pertaining to creative aspects of human practical experiences, on a scheme similar to auctioning, follow the dynamics of the market more closely than rigid regulations. Awareness of this apportionment is a political matter and can be submitted to the concerned parties in forms of evolving opinions. Politics has also to address the new forms of property and their impact on political values in the new pragmatic framework. For instance, the real power of information processing is in the interaction of those able to access it. One should not be forced to apply rules originating from the feudal ownership of language, or from the industrial ownership of machines, to the free access to information, or to networks facilitating creative cooperative efforts. The challenge is to provide the most transparent environment, without affecting the integrity of interaction. A specific example in this regard is legislation against computer hackers. Such legislation, as well as the much publicized Communication Decency Act, only shifts attention from the new pragmatic context-unprecedented challenges arising from very powerful technologies-to one of routine law enforcement. Administrative reaction is the consequence of the built-in dualism, based on the clear-cut distinction between good and bad, characteristic of literacy-based politics.
A positive course of events can originate only from political experiences of individual empowerment. Wider choice and broader possibilities involve specific risks. Hacking is by no means an experience without precedent in past pragmatics. The German war code was hacked, and nations are very eager to confer honor upon other hackers of distinction: scientists who break the secrets of genetic codes, or spies who discover the secrets of the enemy. Examined from a literate political perspective, hacking, as a peculiar form of individual self-constitution, can appear as criminal. In a political experience coherent with the pragmatics leading to the civilization of illiteracy, hacking appears on a continuum joining creativity, protest, invention, and non- conformity, as well as criminal intention. The answer to hackers is not a code of punishment of medieval or industrial inspiration, but transparency that will, in the long run, undermine possible criminal motivations. A society that punishes creativity, even when relatively misdirected, through its policies and laws punishes itself in the long run. Someone who works at his terminal for a company producing goods all over the world, and pursuing social and economic programs that effectively touch citizens of many cultures, different faiths, race, political creed, sexual preference, different history and different expectations, participates in the politics of the world more than the institutions and the bureaucrats paid for functions that they cannot effectively fulfill. It is again pragmatics that makes us citizens of our small village or town, that integrates all of us, Netizens included, in the global world.
Judging justice