For many, the survival of religion is itself a miracle. For many
more, it is indicative of human aspects not sufficiently
accounted for in science, art, or social and political life. Its
role in a new pragmatic framework of fast change, mediated
activity, alienation, decentralization, and specialization, is
obviously different from that it played in the time of religious
constitution and in a reduced scale of humankind. Religion did
not start out to deceive, but to explain. Its practices, while
seeming violent, empty, extreme, demagogic, cunning, or even
ridiculous at times, fulfill a purpose deemed pragmatic at the
inception. The old and familiar are reassuring, if only by resort
to endurance. The promise of redemption and paradise gain in
attraction the more people face change and uncertainty. While
the original purpose of religion was modified over time, the
practice is kept up precisely because novelty and progress,
especially in their radical form, are difficult to cope with.
Once old values are questioned in the light of succeeding
pragmatic circumstances, under new patterns of
self-constitution, the result is complacency and deception, if
there is no alternative. Religion and literacy ultimately find
themselves in the same predicament.
Religious diversification reflects each new scale at which human
practical experience takes place. Changes in the pragmatic
framework in which people constitute themselves as religious
result in tension between the variability of the elements
involved in work or new aspects of social life and the claims of
the eternal. This tension triggers numerous rethinkings and
consequent rewritings of the books, as well as the generation of
numerous new books of new forms of faith. Christianity and Islam
are revisions; within them other revisions (schisms) took place,
such as the Roman and Orthodox churches, the Sunni and Shiite.
Other sects and religions, schisms, and reformations and
protestations (movements claiming to reconstitute the original
status, whatever that means), are to a great extent rewritings
based on acknowledging new contexts-that is, new pragmatic
requirements. Once upon a time, the Book was supposed to address
everyone in the small community in which it came to expression.
Over time, many books addressed their own
constituencies-adherents to certain teachers, to particular
saints, or to some subset of the religious doctrine-within a
larger community. The success of these sub-groups grew in
proportion to the diversification of human praxis and to the
function of education exercised on a broader and broader scale.
From the religion of small-scale human activity to the churches
of universal ambitions, many modifications in the letter and the
spirit of the respective books occurred. They ultimately reflect
alterations of values that religious institutions had to adapt
to and justify. The tribes that accepted the Book as a unifying
framework- embodiment of tradition which became law-as well as
the followers of the prescriptions in the Hindu scriptures of
Veda and Upanishad, the followers of the Enlightened One
(Buddha), the practitioners of Taoism and Confucianism, also
acknowledged a sense of community. It is the same sense of
community held, at a different scale and with different goals,
by the nation-state.
The spread of religions, parallel to military conquest, resulted
in the spread of the respective religious books, and of the
letters that the books were written in. This is not necessarily
the same as the spread of literacy. Religion established its own
state, the Holy Roman Empire (which is now down to the size of
Vatican City) that transcended national boundaries and
languages, and was considered universal. In the language of
Islam, umma is the world community of Moslems, while wattan is
the Motherland. The Moslem armies, defeated at Poitiers by the
Catholic Charles Martel, were also disseminating the religion,
language, and culture of the world community they envisioned.
The Crusades, in turn, and the religious wars that plagued Europe
did not spread literacy as much as they attempted to defend or
establish the dominance of a way of living meant to ensure an
order that promised eternal life.
In the scale of today's human practical experience, efficiency in
general is almost independent of individual performance. It is
independent of the degree of faith, ethical behavior, family
status, and other characteristics of what religion calls good,
and which ethics appropriates as a desired set of social
expectations. Within a small scale of existence and work, things
belong together: the practical and the spiritual, politics and
morals, the good and the useful. Religion is their syncretic
expression. The need for specialization and mediation changed
the nature of pragmatic relations. Various realms of human
practical experience are severed from each other. As this takes
place, the religiously grounded system of values based on unity
and integration-after all, this is what monotheism, in its
various embodiments, represents-is submitted to the test of new
circumstances of human self-constitution.
Among the many explanations of the events of the late sixties, at
least the phenomenon of the attraction exercised by the various
churches of meditation and their gurus is reflective of the
crisis of monotheism, and of the culture that grew around it. An
increasing number of esoteric, exotic, scientific, or
pseudoscientific sects today bear witness to the same. The
difference is that these sects are no longer isolated, that
almost the entire religious dimension of people is connected to
some sect, be it even one that used to be a dominant church.
Religion-based values or attitudes are carried over into the new
segmented practical experiences of work, family, and society,
and thus into the realm of politics, law, and market relations.
Originating from sexual drive, love is one of the experiences
from which family, friendship, art, and philosophy derived over
time. Once written in the Book as a different form of love, once
ascertained as a practical experience, it bridges between its
natural biological basis and its cultural reality as a
characteristic of a framework of human interaction in which
individuals project their biological and cultural identity.
Written about in religious books, love starts a journey from
naturalness to artifact. Expressed as intelligence, temperament,
appearance, or physical ability (our natural endowment), love is
subjected, in conjunction with the experience of writing the
Book, to a set of expectations expressed as though they
originated from outside the experience.
In this process, there is no passive participant. The written
word is permeated by the structural characteristics of the act
of preferring somebody to somebody else, one course of action
from among many, and, more generally, something over something
else, according to religious values. The implicit expectation of
permanency (of faith, love, or ownership) results from the
pragmatic reasons acknowledged by the Book(s). A consensus
essential for the survival and well being of the community is
reached by acknowledging forces from outside, and accepting
their permanent and quasi-universal nature. In a universe of
immediacy and proximity, change other than that experienced in
natural cycles is not anticipated.
Divinity makes sense only if constituted in practical experiences
from which a notion of eternity and universality result. The
written words exalting unity, uniqueness, eternity, and the
promise of a better future are the result of the practical
experience, since in the realm of nature only the immediate and
the proximate are acknowledged. Forever marked by this
experience of time and space beyond the immediate, the written
language of religion, together with the written language of
observations connected to the awareness of natural cycles (the
moon, the seasons, plagues), remains a repository of the notion
of permanency, universality, and uniqueness, and an instrument
for hierarchical differentiation.
Whenever constituted in activities related to or independent of
religion, language, as a product of and medium for human
identification, projects these structural characteristics upon
whatever the object of practical experience is. Once written, the
word seems to carry into eternity its own condition. With the
advent of literacy, as this is made possible and necessary by a
different scale of human praxis, literacy itself would appear as
endowed with the quality of eternity and universality, triggering
its own sense of exaltation and mission, lasting well into our
day. For millions of citizens from countries south of Russia,
who once gave up their roots to show allegiance to the Soviet
Empire, to return to Arabic writing after being forced to adopt
the Cyrillic means rediscovering and reconnecting to their
eternity. That some of them, caught in the geo- political
confrontation of their neighbors, adopt the Roman alphabet of
their Turkish Moslem brothers, does not change the expectation.