Do we need to be literate in order to deal with the future?
Reciprocally: Is history, as many believe, the offspring of
writing? Moreover, is it a prerequisite for understanding the
present? These are questions that resonate loudly in today's
political discourse and in the beliefs of very many people. Let
us start with the future, as the question raises the issue of
what it takes to deal with it.
Pre-sensing (premonition) is the natural form of diffuse
perception of time. This perception can be immediate or less
immediate. It is extended not from now to what was (stored in
one's memory or not), but to what might be (a sign of danger in
the natural environment, for instance). The indexical signs
participating in these representations are footprints, feathers,
bloodstains. Speech makes premonition and feeling explicit, but
not wholly so. It transforms accumulated signs (past) into the
language of the possible (future). In fact, in the practical
experience of re-constituting the past we realize that each past
was once a future.
Still, as we want to establish some understanding of the
unfolding of the present into the future, we come to realize
that while possibilities expand, the future becomes less and
less determined in its details. Try to tell this to the champions
of technology who predicted the paperless office and who now
predict the networked world. Alternatively, tell this to those
who still constitute their identity in literacy-dependent
practical experiences: politicians, bureaucrats and educators.
Neither of the two categories mentioned seems to understand the
relation between language and the future expressed in it, or in
any sign system, as plans, prophecies, or anticipations.
An idea is always representative of the practical experience and
of the cognitive effort to transcend immediate affection.
Monoarticulated speech (signaling), as well as ideographic
writing, result from experiences involving the
pragmatic-affective level of existence. One cries or shouts, one
captures resemblance in an image when choices are made and
feelings evoked. There are no ideas here, as there is very little
that reaches beyond the immediate. Ideas extend from experiences
involving the pragmatic- rational level. Speech can serve as the
medium for making plans explicit. Drawings, diagrams, models,
and simulations can be described through what we say. Indeed,
before writing the future, human beings expressed it as speech,
undoubtedly in conjunction with other signs: body movement,
objects known to relate to danger and thus to fear, or
successful actions associated with satisfaction. When finally set
in clay tablets or papyrus, the language regarding the future
acquired a different status-it no longer vanished, as the sounds
or gestures used before. Writing accompanies action, and even
lasts past the experience. This permanency gave the written word
an aura that sounds, gestures, even artifacts, could not
achieve. Even repetition, a major structural characteristic of
rituals, could not project the same expectation of permanency as
writing. Probably this is what prompted Gordon Childe to remark
that "The immortalization of a word in writing must have seemed
a supernatural process; it was surely magical that a man long
vanished from the land of the living could still speak from a
clay tablet or a papyrus roll."
Within the context of religion, the aura shifts from the
mytho-magical- transmitted clues for successful action-to the
mystical-the source of the successful clues is a higher
authority. Even social organization, which became necessary when
the scale of humankind changed, was not very effective in the
absence of documents with a prescriptive function. Recognized in
ancient Chinese society, this practical need was expressed in
its first documents, as it was in Hindu civilization, in the
Hebrew and the Greek, and by the civilizations to follow, many
taking an obvious cue from the Roman Empire.
Language use for prescriptive purposes does not necessitate or
even imply literacy. This holds true as much for the past as for
the present. There was a time, corresponding to increased
mobility of people, when only those foreign to a land were
supposed to learn how to write and read. The requirement was
pragmatic: in order to get used to the customs by which the
native population lived, they had to gain access to their
expression in language. Nevertheless, once promises are made-a
promise relates structurally to the future-the record becomes
more and more written, although quite often sealed by the oral,
as we know from oath formulae and from oath gestures that
survived even in our days. In all these, linear relations of
cause-and-effect were preserved and projected as the measure,
i.e. rationality, for the future.
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.