While it is true that just as many different curves can be drawn
through a finite number of points, consistent observations can
be subsumed under various explanations. Observations regarding
the role and status of literacy might result in explanations
that put radically different glosses on their results, but they
cannot escape confirming the sense of change defined here. This
change ultimately concerns the identity humans acquire in
illiterate experiences of self-constitution.
Progressively abandoning reading and writing and replacing them
with other forms of communication and reception, humans
participate in another structural change: from centralization to
decentralization; from a centripetal model of existence and
activity, with the traditional system of values as an attraction
point (religious, aesthetic, moral, political values, among
others) to a centrifugal model; and from a monolithic to a
pluralistic model. Paradoxically, the loss of the center also
means that human beings lose their central role and referential
value. This results in a dramatic situation: When human
creativity compensates for the limited nature of resources
(minerals, energy, food supply, water, etc.), either by producing
substitutes or by stimulating efficient forms of their use, the
human itself becomes a disposable commodity, more so the more
limited its practical self-constitution is.
Within the pragmatics characteristic of the underlying literacy,
machines were changed less often; but even when changed, the
human operator did not have to be replaced. A basic set of
skills sufficed for lifelong activity. Engineering was concerned
with artifacts as long lasting as life. The pragmatic framework
of illiteracy, as one of rapid change and progressively shorter
cycles, made the human more easily replaceable. At the new scale
of human activity, the very large and growing commodity of human
beings decreases in value: in its market value, and in its
spiritual and real value. The sanctity of life gives way to the
intricate technology of life maintenance, to the mechanics of
existence and the body-building shops. In the stock market of
spare parts, a kidney or a heart, mechanical or natural, is
listed almost the same way as pork bellies and cement, van
Gogh's paintings, CD players, and nuclear headscrews. They are
quoted and transacted as commodities. And they support highly
specialized work, compensated at the level of professional
football or basketball.
Projected into and among products of short-lived destiny, the
human beings working to make them project a morality of the
disposable that affects their own condition and, finally, the
dissolution of their values. As a result of high levels of work
efficiency, there are enough resources to feed and house
humankind, but not enough to support practical experiences that
redeem the integrity of the individual and the dignity of human
existence. Within a literate discourse, with an embedded ideology
of permanency, the morality of the disposable makes for good
headlines; but since it does not affect the structural
conditions conducive to this morality, it soon gets lost in the
many other literate commentaries, including those decrying the
decline of literacy.
The broader picture to which these reflections belong includes,
of course, the themes of disposable language. If basic skills,
as defined by Harvard professor and Secretary of Labor Robert
Reich, Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor
Lester Thurow, and many educators and policy-makers, become less
and less meaningful in the fast-changing world of work, it is
easy to understand why little weight can be attached to one or
another individual. Under the guise of basic skills, young and
less than young workers receive an education in reading and
writing that has nothing to do with the emergent practical
experiences of ever shorter cycles. Companies in search of cheap
labor have discovered the USA, or at least some parts of it, and
achieve here efficiencies that at home, under labor laws
originating from a literate pragmatics, are not attainable.
Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Porsche, and many Japanese companies train
their labor force in South Carolina, Mississippi, Arkansas, and
other states. The usefulness of the people these companies train
is almost equal to that of the machine, unless the workers are
replaced by automation.
The technological cycle and the human cycle are so closely
interwoven that one can predicate the hybrid nature of
technology today: machines with a live component. As a matter of
fact, it is interesting to notice how progressively machines no
longer serve us, but how we serve them. Entirely equipped to
produce high quality desktop publishing, to process data for
financial transactions, to visualize scientific phenomena, such
machines require that we feed the data and run the program so
that a meaningful output results. In the case in which the
machine might not know the difference between good and bad
typography, for example, the human operator supplies the required
knowledge, based on intangible factors such as style or taste.