In contemporary society, the language characteristic of the past is used as a decorum. Global scale and social complexity are no longer efficiently served by linear relations. Subsequently, means for formulating ideas regarding the future make literacy not only one of the many languages of the time to come, but probably an obstacle in the attempt to more efficiently articulate ideas for the future. Keep in mind that almost all people dedicated to the study of the future work on computational models. The outcome of their effort is shorter and shorter on text, which is replaced with dynamic models, always global in nature. Linearity is effectively supplanted by non-linear descriptions of the many interlocking factors at work. Moreover, self-configuration, parallelism, and distributive strategies are brought to expression in simulations of the future.
As far as history is concerned, it is, whether we like it or not, the offspring of writing. Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders state bluntly: "The historian's house is on the island of writing…. Where no words are left behind, the historian finds no foundations for his reconstructions." Indeed, history results from concern with records that are universally accessible, hence within the universe of those sharing in literacy. We never know whether a grammar is a summary of the history of a language, or its program for the future. Grammars appear in various contexts because people recognize the need to verify the voices within a language. Histories appear also, motivated by the same stimulus, not so much to do justice to some army, general, king or party, but to maintain coherent records, make them speak in one and only one voice, and probably link the records to recreate the continuum from which they emerge.
While the future and the self-constitution of the human being in new pragmatic contexts are directly related, the past is connected to human practical experiences in indirect ways. The unifying element of the various perspectives of the future is in the new experience. In the absence of such a unifying perspective, writing history becomes an end in itself, notwithstanding the power exercised by examples. From the beginning of the Middle Ages, the written record and the analytic power of language sufficed for constituting history and shaping historic experience. But once the methods of historic research diversified, probably as much as the pragmatics of human existence did, new perspectives were introduced. Some of these have practical implications: What were the plants used in primitive societies? How was water supply handled? How were the dead disposed of? Other perspectives had ideological, political, or cultural ramifications. In each of these pragmatically determined instances, history started escaping the prison of literacy.
Linguistic archaeology, anthropological and especially paleoanthropological history, computational history, are only some of the post-literate forms of practical experiences constituting a new domain of history. This domain is characterized by the use of non-traditional tools, such as genetics, electronic microscopy, computational simulation, artificial life modeling, and inferences supported by artificial intelligence. Memetics, or the life of ideas and awareness of them, pertains no less to the past than to the present and future. It sprang from genetics and bears the mark of an implicit Darwinian mechanism. Its focus on ideas made it the catch phrase of a generation feeling dangerously severed from its relation to history, and no less endangered by a future falling too fast upon this generation. Technological extensions of memetics (the so-called memetic engineering) testify to expectations of efficiency which history of the literate age never seemed to care about or even to acknowledge.
Based on the awareness thus gained, we would have to agree that the relative dissolution of literacy and the associated ideals of universality, permanency, hierarchy, and determinism, as well as the emergence of literacies, with the resulting attitudes of parochialness, transitoriness, decentralization, and indeterminacy are paralleled by the dissolution of history and the emergence of specialized histories. Hypertext replaces sequential text, and thus a universe of connections is established. The new links among carefully defined fields in the historic record point to a reality that escapes the story (in history), but are relevant to the present. The specialized historian reports not so much about the past, but about particular aspects of human self-constitution from the past that are significant in the new frame of current experience. It sometimes seems that we reinvent the past in patches, only to accommodate the present pragmatics and to enforce awareness of the present. The immanent sequentiality and linearity of the pragmatic framework within which languages emerged and which made, at a later juncture, literacy and history necessary, is replaced by non-sequentiality and non-linear relations better adapted to the scale of humankind's existence today. They are also better adapted to the complexity of the practical process of humankind's continuous self-constitution. In addition, primitive, deterministic inferences are debunked, and a better image of complexity, as it pertains to the living subject, becomes available.
As an entry in a database (huge by all means), the past sheds its romantic aura, only to align itself with the present and the future. The illiterate attitude, reflected, for instance, in the ignorance of the story of the past, results not from lack of writing and reading skills. It is not caused by bad history teachers or books, as some claim. Decisive is the fact that our pragmatic framework, i.e. our new practical experiences of self-constitution, is disconnected from the experiences of the past.
Knowing and understanding
Probably one of the most important aspects of current pragmatics is the connection between knowing and understanding. We are involved in many activities without really understanding how they take place. Our e-mail reaches us as it reaches those to whom we send messages, even though most people have no idea how. The postal system is easier to understand. We know what happens: letters are delivered to the post office, sorted, and sent to their destinations by bus, train, plane, or boat. Determining the paths of an e-mail message is trivial for a machine, but almost impossible for a human being. As the complexity of an endeavor increases, chances that individuals constituting themselves in the activity know how everything works and understand the various mechanisms involved decrease. Still, the efficiency of the experience is not diminished. Moreover, it seems that knowledge and understanding do not necessarily affect efficiency.
This statement is valid for an increasing number of practical experiences in the pragmatics of the civilization of illiteracy-not for all of them. We can conceive of complex diagnostic machines; but there is something in the practical experience of medicine, for example, that makes one physician better than another. We can automate a great deal of other activities-accounting, tax preparation, design, architecture-but there is something implicit in the activity that will qualify a certain individual's performance as above and beyond our most advanced science and technology. There are managers who know close to nothing about what their company produces but who understand market mechanisms to such an extent that they end up winners regardless of whether they head a bank, a cracker-producing factory, or a giant computer company. These managers constitute themselves within the experience of language- the language of the market more than the language of the product. Therefore, it is useful to examine the evolution of knowledge and understanding within succeeding pragmatic frameworks, and the role language as a mediating element in each of these frameworks.
The sign of language represents the contradictory unity of the phonetic and semantic units. Within a limited scale of experience, literacy meant to know what is behind the written word, to be able to resuscitate it, and to even give the word new life. As the scale increases, literacy means to take for granted what is behind the written word. This implies that dictionaries, including personal dictionaries, as they are formed in constituting our language, are congruent. Learning language is not reducible to the memorization of expressions. The only way to learn is to live the language. With knowledge acquired and expressed in language comes understanding.