"Sponsorship for a charitable track event. Funds for Third World
countries threatened by starvation sought. Register support
through your donations." And on a nice sunny weekend, many
kind-hearted individuals will run miles around a city or swim
laps in a pool in order to raise funds for organizations such as
CARE, Oxfam, Action Hunger, or Feed the World. Hunger in this
world of plenty, even in the USA and other prosperous countries,
derives from the same dynamics that results in the civilization
of illiteracy. The scale of humankind requires levels of
efficiency for which practical experiences of survival based on
limited resources are ill suited. Entire populations are
subjected to hunger and disease due to social and economic
inequities, to weather conditions or topological changes, or to
political upheaval in the area where they live. Short of
addressing inequities, aid usually alleviates extreme situations.
But it establishes dependencies instead of encouraging the best
response to the situation through new agricultural practices,
where applicable, or alternative modes of producing food.
Seduced by our life of plenty and by the dynamics of change, we
could end up ignoring starving and diseased populations, or we
could try to understand our part in the equation. Living in an
integrated world and partaking in the pragmatics of a global
economy, people become prisoners of the here and now, discarding
the very disconcerting reality of millions living in misery. But
it is exactly the pragmatic framework leading to the
civilization of illiteracy that also leads to the enormous
disparities in today's world. Many forces are at work, and the
danger of falling prey to the slogans of failed ideology, while
trying to understand misery and hunger in today's world, cannot
be overestimated. Starvation in Africa, South America, in some
East European countries, and in parts of Asia needs to be
questioned in light of the abundance of food in Japan, West
Europe, and North America. Both extremes correspond to changes in
human self-constitution under expectations of efficiency critical
to the current scale of humankind.
If human activity had not changed and broadened its base of
resources, the entire world would be subject to what Ethiopians,
Sudanese, Somalis, Bangladeshis, and many others are facing.
Extreme climatic conditions, as well as decreasing fertility of
the land due usually to bad farming practices, can be overcome by
new farming methods, progress in agricultural technology,
biogenetics, and chemistry. Spectacular changes have come about
in what is considered the most traditional practice through
which humans constitute their identity. The change affected ways
of working, family relations, use of local resources, social and
political life, and even population growth. It resulted in a new
set of dependencies among communities that had afforded autarchic
modes of existence for thousands of years. The environment, too,
has been affected probably as much by scientific and
technological progress as by the new farming methods that take
full advantage of new fertilizers, insecticides, and genetic
engineering of new plants and animals.
Motivated by literacy-based ideals, some countries took it upon
themselves to see that people in less developed lands be
redeemed through benefits they did not expect and for which they
were not prepared. At the global levels of humankind, when the
necessity of literacy declines, dependencies characteristic of
literacy-based interactions collide with forces of integration
and competition. What results is a painful compromise. Hunger is
acknowledged and tended to by enormous bureaucracies: churches,
charities, international aid organizations, and institutions more
concerned with themselves than with the task at hand. They
maintain dependencies that originated within the pragmatics of
the civilization of literacy. The activities they carry out are
inherently inefficient. Where the new dynamics is one of
differentiation and segmentation, the main characteristics of
these experiences are those of literacy: establishment of a
universal model, the attempt to reach homogeneity, tireless
effort to disseminate modes of existence and work of a
sequential, analytic, rationalistic, and deterministic nature.
Consequently, where nourishment from the excess attained
elsewhere is dispensed, a way of life alien to those in need is
projected upon them.
Aid, even to the extent that it is necessary, re-shapes biology,
the environment, the connection among people, and each
individual. Diseases never before experienced, behavioral and
mental changes, and new reliances are generated, even in the name
of the best intentions. In some areas affected by starvation,
tribal conflicts, religious intolerance, and moral turpitude add
to natural conditions not propitious to life. These man-made
conditions cannot and should not veil the fact that human
creativity and inventiveness are prevented from unfolding,
replaced by ready-made solutions, instead of being stimulated.
Empowerment means to facilitate developments that maintain
distinctions and result from differences, instead of uniformity.
Would all the populations facing hunger and disease actually jump
from the illiteracy of the past-a result of no school system or
limited access to education, as well as of a pragmatics that did
not lead to literacy-to the pragmatically determined illiteracy
of the future? The pragmatic framework of our new age corresponds
to the need to acknowledge differences and derive from
heterogeneity new sources of creativity. Each ton of wheat or
corn airlifted to save mothers and children is part of the
missionary praxis commenced long ago when religious organizations
wanted to save the soul of the so-called savage. The answer to
hunger and disease cannot be only charity, but the effort to
expand networks of reciprocally significant work. The only
meaningful pragmatics derives from practical experiences that
acknowledge differences instead of trying to erase them. Access
to resources for more effective activities is fundamentally
different from access to surplus or to bureaucratic mechanisms
for redistribution.
Where literacy never became a reality, no organization should
take it upon itself to impose it as the key to survival and well
being. Our literacy-based medicine, nourishment, social life,
and especially values are not the panacea for the world, no
matter how proud we are of some, and how blind to their
limitations. Human beings have sufficient means today to afford
tending to differences instead of doing away with them. In this
process, we might learn about that part of nourishment that was
rationalized away in the process of reaching higher levels of
efficiency. And we might find new resources in other
environments and in the peculiar self-constitution of peoples we
consider deprived-resources that we could integrate into our
pragmatics.