The Civilization of Illiteracy

by Mihai Nadin

As a country formed by unending waves of immigration, America can be seen, superficially though, as a civilization of many parallel literacies. Ethnic neighborhoods are still a fact of life. Here one finds stores where only the native language is spoken, with newspapers printed in Greek, Hungarian, German, Italian, Ukrainian, Farsi, Armenian, Hebrew, Romanian, Russian, Arabic, Japanese, Mandarin, Korean. Cable TV caters to these groups, and so do many importers of products reminiscent of some country where "food tastes real" and goods "last forever." All of these carried-over literacies are, in final analysis, means of self-constitution, bridges between cultures that will be burned by the third generation. In practicing the literacy of origins, human beings constitute themselves as split personalities between two pragmatic contexts. One embodies expectations characteristic of the context that relied upon literacy- homogeneity, hierarchy, centralism, tradition. The other, of the adopted country, is focused upon needs that effect the transition to the civilization of illiteracy- heterogeneity, horizontality, decentralism, tradition as choice, but not way of life.

Aspects of immigration (and in general of human migration) need to be addressed, not from the perspective of parallel literacies, but as variations within a unifying pragmatic framework. The de-culturization of people originating from many countries and belonging to many nations is probably a unique feature of America. It impacted all aspects of life, and continues to be a source of vitality, as well as tension. Immigrants arrive as literates (some more so than others) only to discover that their literacy is relatively useless. That things were not always like this is relatively well documented. Neil Postman reported that the 17th-century settlers were quite literate in terms characteristic of the time. Up to 95 percent of the men were able to read the Bible; among women the percentage reported is 62. They also read other publications, some imported from England, and at the beginning of the second half of the eighteenth century supported a printing industry soon to become very powerful.

In importing their literacies, the English, as well as the French and Dutch, imported all the characteristics that literacy implies and which went into the foundation of the American government. Over time, in the successive waves of immigration, unskilled and skilled workers, intellectuals, and peasants arrived. They all had to adapt to a different culture, dominated by the British model but moving farther away from it as the country started to develop its own characteristics. Each national or ethnic group, shaped through practical experiences that did not have a common denominator, had to adapt to others. The country grew quite fast, as did its industry, transportation system, farming, banking, and the many services made possible and necessary by the overall economic development. To some extent, literacy was an integral part of these accomplishments. The young country soon established its own body of literature, reflecting its own experience, while remaining true to the literacy of the former mother country. I say to some extent because, as the history of each of these accomplishments shows, the characteristics inherent in literacy were opposed, under the banner of States' rights, democracy, individuality, or progress.

With all this in mind, it is no wonder that Americans do not like to hear that they are a nation of illiterates, as people from much older cultures are sometimes inclined to call them (for right or wrong reasons). No wonder either that they are still committed to literacy; moreover, that they believe that it represents a panacea to the problems raised by fast technological cycles of change, by new modes of human interaction, and by circumstances of practical experiences to which they have to adapt. Educators and business-people are well aware, and worried, that literacy in the classical sense is declining. The sense of history they inherited makes them demand that effort and money be spent to turn the tide and bring America back to past greatness, or at least to some stability. Probably the nature of this greatness is misunderstood or misconstrued, since there is not much in the history of the accomplishments of the United States that could rank the country among the cultural giants of past and present civilizations.

Throughout its history, America always represented, to some degree, a break with the values of the old world. The Europeans who came to the Dutch, French, and English colonies had at least one thing in common: they wanted to escape from the pragmatics of hierarchy, centralized political and religious domination, and fixed rules of social and cultural life representing a system of order that kept them in their place. Freedom of religion-one of the most sought after-is freedom from a dominant, unified church and its vision of the unconditionally submissive individual. Cultivating one's own land, another hope that animated the settlers, is freedom from practical serfdom imposed by the landowning nobility on those lower on the hierarchy. John Smith's maxim that those who didn't work didn't eat was perhaps the first blow to the European values that ranked language and culture along with social status and privilege.

Most likely, the immigrants, highborn and low, did not come with the intention of overthrowing the sense and morals prevailing at the time. The phase of imitation of the old, characteristic of any development, extended from religious ceremonies to ways of working, enjoying, educating, dressing, and relating to outsiders (natives, slaves, religious sects). In this phase of imitation, a semi-aristocracy established itself in the South, emulating the English model. In protesting the taxes and punitive laws imposed by King George III, the upper-class colonials were demanding their rights as Englishmen, with all that this qualifier entailed. Jefferson's model for the free United States was that the agrarian state best embodied the classic ideals that animated him. Jefferson was himself the model of literacy-based practical experiences, a landed aristocrat who owned slaves, a man trained in the logic of Greece and Rome. His knowledge came from books. He was able to bring his various interests in architecture, politics, planning, and administration in focus through the pragmatic framework for which literacy was adequate. Although Jefferson, among others, rejected monarchy, which his fellow citizens would have set up, he did not hesitate to exercise the almost kingly powers that the executive branch of government entailed. His activity shows how monarchic centrality and hierarchy were translated in the new political forms of emerging democracies, within which elective office replaced inherited power. In the history of early America, we can see how literacy carries over the non-egalitarian model as it advanced equality in people's natural rights and before the law, the power of rules, and a sense of authority inspired by religion, practiced in political life, and connected to expectations of order.

Just as new trees sprout from the trunk of an old tree, so new paradigms take root within an old one. People immigrated to America to escape the old models. Challenged by the need to provide a framework for their own self-identification, they ended up establishing an alternative context for the unfolding of the Industrial Revolution. In the process, they changed in more ways than they could foresee. Politically, they established conditions conducive to emancipation from the many constraints of the system they left. Even their patterns of living, speaking, behaving, and thinking changed. In 1842, Charles Dickens observed of Americans that "The love of trade is assigned as a reason for that comfortless custom…of married persons living in hotels, having no fireside of their own, and seldom meeting, from early morning until late at night, but at the hasty public meals. The love of trade is a reason why the literature of America is to remain forever unprotected: 'For we are a trading people, and don't care for poetry: though we do, by the way, profess to be very proud of our poets.'" Dickens came from a culture that considered literacy one of the highest achievements of England, so much so that, according to Jane Austen, Shakespeare could be particularly appreciated by the English alone (cf. Mansfield Park). She gave cultivation of the mind the highest priority. Literature was expected to assist in defining values and pointing out the proper moral and intellectual direction. France was in a very similar position in regard to its culture and literature; so were the German lands and Holland. Even Russia, otherwise opposed to acknowledging the new pragmatic context of industrial production, was affected by the European Enlightenment.

De Toqueville, whose journey to America contributed to his fame, made his historic visit in the 1830's. By this time, America had time and opportunity to establish its peculiar character, so he was able to observe characteristics that would eventually define a new paradigm. The associated emerging values, based on a life relatively free of historic constraints, caught his attention: "The Americans can devote to general education only the early years of life. […] At fifteen they enter upon their calling, and thus their education generally ends at the age when ours begins. If it is continued beyond that point, it aims only towards a particular specialized and profitable purpose; one studies science as one takes up a business; and one takes up only those applications whose immediate practicality is recognized. […] There is no class, then, in America, in which the taste for intellectual pleasures is transmitted with hereditary fortune and leisure and by which the labors of the intellect are held in honor. Accordingly, there is an equal want of the desire and power of application to these objects."

Opinions, even those of scholars of de Toqueville's reputation, are inherently limited in scope. Sent by the French government to examine prisons and penitentiaries in the New World, he wound up writing a study of how a highly literate European understood America's social and political institutions. Many of the characteristics of the civilization of illiteracy were emerging during the years of his visit. He highlighted the shortness of political cycles, the orality of public administration, the transience of commitments (the little there is of writing "is soon wafted away forever, like the leaves of the sibyl, by the smallest breeze"). Severance from the past, in particular, made this visitor predict that Americans would have to "recourse to the history of other nations in order to learn anything of the people who now inhabit them." What we read in de Toqueville is the expression of the surprise caused by discontinuity, by change, and by a dynamics that in other parts of the world was less obvious.

The New World certainly provided new themes, addressed and interpreted differently by Americans and Europeans. The more European cities of the Northeast- Boston, New York, Philadelphia-maintained cultural ties to the Old World, as evidenced by universities, scholars, poets, essayists, and artists. Nevertheless, Washington Irving complained that one could not make a living as a writer in the United States as one could in Europe. Indeed, many writers earned a living as journalists (which is a way of being a writer) or as civil servants. The real America-the one Dickens so lamented-was taking form west of the Hudson River and beyond the Appalachian Mountains. This was truly a world where the past did not count.