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.
America finally did away with slavery (as a by-product of the
Civil War). But at the same time, it started undoing some part
of the underlying structure reflected in literacy. The depth and
breadth of the process escaped the full understanding of those
literate Founding Fathers who set the process in motion, and was
only partially realized by others (de Toqueville included). It
clearly affected the nature of human practical experiences of
self-constitution as free citizens of a democracy whose chance to
succeed lay in the efficiency, not in the expressive power, of
ideas. America's industrial revolution took place against a
background different from that of the rest of the world- a huge
island indulging in relative autarchy for a short time. Forces
corresponding to the pragmatics of the post-industrial age
determined a course of opening itself and opening as much of the
world as possible-regardless of how this was to be accomplished.
The process still affects economic development, financial
markets, cultural interdependencies, and education.
"The best of the useful and the best of the ornamental"
Some will protest that over 150 years have gone by and the
American character has been shaped by more than the love of
trade. They will point to the literary heritage of Washington
Irving, Mark Twain, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James. Indeed, 20th century
American writers have been appreciated and imitated abroad.
Faulkner and Hemingway are the best known examples. Today,
American writers of lesser stature and talent are translated
into the various European languages, for the same reasons that
Disneyland was brought to France. Americans will point to
theaters (which presented European plays) and opera houses,
forgetting how late these acquisitions are, instituted when
economic progress was on a sound track. Indeed, the response to
these assertions is simple: the result of other influences is
not a change of course, but a much faster movement in the
direction America pursues.
A good example is given by education. The American colleges and
universities founded in the 18th and early 19th centuries
attempted to follow the traditional model of learning for its
own sake; that is, moral and intellectual improvement through
study of the age-old classics. This lasted until various
interest groups, in particular businessmen, questioned the
validity of an educational program that had little or no
pragmatic value. These schools were in the East-Harvard, Brown,
Yale, Columbia, William and Mary- and the curricula reflected
that of the Old World. In general, only the elite of America
attended them. The newer universities, the so-called Land Grant
colleges, later called state universities (such as Ohio State
University, Texas A & M), established west of the Allegheny
River during the last quarter of the 19th century, did indeed
pursue more pragmatic programs-agriculture and mechanics-to
serve the needs of the respective state, not the nation.
In view of this demand for what is useful, it is easy to
understand why American universities have become high (and
sometimes not so high) level vocational schools, substituting
for what high school rarely provided. Pragmatic requirements and
anti-elitist political considerations collided with the literate
model and a strange hybrid resulted. A look at how the course
offerings changed over time brings clear evidence that logic,
rhetoric, culture, appreciation of the word and of the rules of
grammar and syntax-all the values associated with a dominant
literacy-are relegated to specializations in philosophy,
literature, or written communication, and to a vast, though
confusing, repertory of elective classes, which reflect an
obsession with free choice and a leveling notion of democracy.
Literature, after being forced to give up its romantic claim to
permanency, associates itself with transitory approaches that
meet, with increasing opportunistic speed, whatever the current
agenda might be: feminism, multiculturalism, anti-war rhetoric,
economic upheaval. Human truth, as literary illusion or hope, is
replaced by uncertainty. No wonder that in this context programs
in linguistics and philology languish or disappear from the
curriculum. Economics lost its philosophic backbone and became
an exercise in statistics and mathematics.
When faced with a list of courses that a university requires,
most students ask, "Why do I need...?" In this category fall
literature, mathematics, philosophy, and almost everything else
definable within literacy as formative subject matter or
discipline. Blame for this attitude, if any can be uttered,
should not be put on the young people processed by the
university system. The students conform, as difficult as it might
be for them to understand their conformity, to what is expected
of them: to get a driver's license and a college diploma, and to
pay taxes. The expectation of a diploma does not result from
requirements of qualification but from the American obsession
with equality. America, which revolted against hierarchy and
inequality, has never tolerated even the appearance of
individual superiority. This led to a democracy that opposed
superiority, leveling what was not equal-rights or aptitudes,
opportunities or abilities-at any price. College education as
privilege, which America inherited from the Europe it left
behind, was considered an injustice. Over time, commercial
democracy turned college into another shopping mall. Today,
diplomas, from BA to Ph.D., are expected just for having
attended college, a mere prerequisite to a career, not
necessarily the result of rigorous mental application leading to
quality results. Young adults go to college because they heard
that one can get a better (read higher paying) job with a college
education.
The result of broadening the scope of university studies to
include professions for which only training is required is that
the value of a college diploma (but not the price paid for it)
has decreased. Some say that soon one will need a college diploma
just to be a street cleaner (sanitation engineer). Actually, a
person will not need a diploma, but will just happen to have
one. And the wage of a sanitation worker will be so high
(inflation always keeps pace with demagogy) that a college
graduate will feel more entitled to the job than a high school
dropout. When Thomas Jefferson studied, he realized that none of
his studies would help him run his plantation. Architecture and
geometry were subordinate to a literacy-dominated standard.
Nevertheless, education inspired him as a citizen, as it
inspired all who joined him in signing the Declaration of
Independence.
A context was established for further emancipation. The depth and
breadth of the process escaped the full understanding of those
who set the process in motion, and was at best partially
realized by very few others, de Tocqueville included. It clearly
affected the nature of human practical experiences of
self-constitution as free citizens of a democracy whose chance
to succeed lay in the efficiency of ideas, not in their
expressive power. Inventiveness was unleashed; labor-saving
devices, machinery that did the work of tens and hundreds of men
provided more and more immediate satisfaction than intellectual
exercise did.
Americans do not, if they ever did, live in an age of the idea
for its own sake or for the sake of the spirit. Maintaining
mental faculties or uplifting the spirit are imported services.
In the early history of the USA, the Transcendentalist movement,
of a priori intuitions, was a strong intellectual presence, but
its adherents only transplanted the seed from Europe. Those and
others-the schools of thought associated with Peirce, Dewey,
James, and Royce-rarely took root, producing a flower more
appreciated if it actually was imported. This is not a country
that appreciates the pure idea. America has always prided itself
in its products and practicality, not thinking and vision. "A
plaine souldier that can use a pick-axe and a spade is better
than five knights," according to Captain John Smith. His
evaluation summarizes the American preference for useful over
ornamental.
Paradoxically though, business leaders argued for education and
proclaimed their support for schools and colleges. At a closer
look, their position appears somewhat duplicitous. American
business needed its Cooper, Edison, and Bell, around whose
inventions and discoveries industries were built. Once these were
in place, it needed consumers with money to buy what industries
produced. Business supported education as a right and took all
the tax deductions it could in order to have this right serve
the interests of industry and business. Consequently, in American
society, ideas are validated only at the material level, in
providing utility, convenience, comfort, and entertainment, as
long as these maximize profit. "The sooner the better" is an
expectation of efficiency, one that does not take into
consideration the secondary effects of production or actions, as
long as the first effect was profit. Not the educated citizen,
but the person who succeeded in getting rich no matter how, was
considered the "smart" fellow, as Dickens learned during his
journey through America. Prompted by such a deeply rooted
attitude, Sidney Lanier, of Georgia, deplored the "endless tale/
of gain by cunning and plus by sale." To value success
regardless of the means applied is part of the American
teleology (sometimes in complicity with American theology).
Bertrand Russell observed of Machiavelli that no one has been
more maligned for simply stating the truth. The observation
applies to those who have taken upon themselves the task of
writing about the brave citizens of the free land. Dickens was
warned against publishing his American Notes. European writers
and artists, and visitors from Russia, China, and Japan have
irritated their American friends through their sincere remarks.
Not many Americans refer to Thorston Veblen, Theodore Dreiser,
Henry James, or to Gore Vidal, but the evaluations these authors
made of the American character have been criticized by the
majority of their compatriots whose sentimental vision of
America cannot cope with legitimate observations. Mark Twain felt
that he'd rather be "damned to John Bunyan's heaven" than be
obliged to read James's The Bostonians.