The civilization of illiteracy is one of diversity and relies on the dynamics of self- organization. But in order to succeed, several conditions need to be met. For instance, we have not yet developed in appropriate practical experiences of human self- constitution the ability to think in media other than natural language. Like many beginners in a new language, people still translate from one language to another. When this does not work, they look for help in the language they know, instead of formulating questions in the alternative language in which they suspect they can be answered. After intuition was eliminated by rationality and system, only minor effort is made towards understanding how intuition comes about, whether in mathematics, medicine, sports, the arts, market transactions, war skills, food preparation, and social activities.
In the civilization of literacy, people were, and to a great extent still are, able to ignore some forms of human relationships without affecting the general outcome of human practice. Within the new scale and dynamics, human civilization relies on the interplay of more elements. The timing involved in integrating this diversity is much more difficult to accomplish through literacy-based methods, even though timing is critical to the outcome. Literacy captures the rough and linear level of relations. New practical experiences of higher efficiency require finer levels and tools adequate to non- linear phenomena for dealing with the parallel processes involved in the self- constitution of individuals and of society.
From possibilities to choices
If the multiplication of possibilities were not to be met by effective ways of making choices, we would be sucked into the whirlwind of entropy. In practice, this translates into an obvious course of events: allowing for new possibilities, which sometimes take the appearance of alternatives, means to disallow certain known and practiced options of confirmed output. For example, where democracy is taken over by bureaucracy, the town meeting fulfills only a decorative function. There is nothing of consequence in the American President's State of the Union address, or in the conventions where political parties nominate candidates for the Presidency. With the choice of local and national political representation, the possibility to directly participate in power is precluded.
The possibility of using sign systems other than language is far from being a novelty. Even the possibility of achieving some form of syncretism is not new by any means. What is new is the awareness of their potential malfunctioning and of the potential for losing control over forms of praxis that become highly complex. From among the many ways the relation between the individual and the community is manifested, the condition of the legal system is probably the best example. Whether independent, constituting a domain of regulations and checks with its own motivations, or part of other components of social and political life, the institution of justice encodes its typologies, classifications, and rules in laws. This domain parallels one of human interactions where expected values are permanently subjected to the scrutiny of the pragmatic activity. Integrity of the individual and his lawfully acquired goods, the binding nature of commitments, and prohibition of misrepresentation or of rules essential to the well being of the community are rules on which legal experience developed. Right and wrong, once identified under circumstances of direct practical experience through consequences for the community's well being, are now constituted in a domain with a life and rules of its own. Killing, stealing, and misrepresentation are actions well defined in the written texts of the law. But the law itself, anchored in literacy, consequently detached itself from the real world and now constitutes its own reality and motivations. Since this is the case, it is no surprise that legal practice turns out to be nothing more than interpretations of texts and attempts to use language to bring about an outcome based on chimera, not reality.
The legal system reacts to innovation by forcing rules originating in other pragmatic frameworks-the strong evidence of DNA analysis is only one example-to fit its own criteria of evaluation. Instead of constituting a proactive context for the unfolding of the human genius, legal praxis ends up defending only its own interests. The jury system in the USA might appear to many people as an expression of democracy. In the pragmatic context in which the jury system originated, even the notion of peer made sense, since it applied to a reduced and relatively homogeneous community. Today, the jury has become part of the odious equation of the dispute between lawyers. The jury is selected to reflect the lowest common denominator so that its members, mostly incompetent, can be manipulated in the adversarial game of the performance produced under the generic label of justice.
As an extension of literate language, the experience of legal language builds on its own rules for efficient functioning and establishes criteria for success that corrupt the process of justice. It is a typical example of malfunctioning, probably as vivid as the language of politics. Judicial and political praxes document, from another angle, how democracy fails once it reaches the symbolic phase manifested in the bureaucracy of the legal system and of reified power relations.
Coping with choice
Self-definition implies the ability to establish a domain of possibilities. But possibilities do not present themselves alone. In the transition from the civilization of literacy to the new civilization of illiteracy, the global domain of possibilities expands dramatically, but the local, individual domains probably narrow in the same proportion. This happens because what at the global level looks like a multiplication of choices, at the level of the individual appears as a matter of effective selection procedures. As long as there is little to choose from, selection is not a problem.
The primitive family had few choices regarding nourishment, self-reproduction, and health. Choices increased as the practical experiences of self-constitution diversified. Migrating populations chose from among selections different from those available to settled human beings. The first known cities embodied a structure of relations for which written language was appropriate. The megalopolis of our day embodies a universe of choices on a different scale. Within such a domain of possibilities, there are no effective selection procedures. Reduction from practically infinite choices to a finite number of realizations is at best a matter of randomness and exposure. Inversely, the slogan "Act locally, think globally" can easily lead to failure. Many accomplishments that are successful on a local scale would fail if applied globally if they do not integrate awareness of globality from the beginning.