Hölderlin's verse, "There was never so much beginning" (So viel
Anfang war noch nie) captures the spirit of our time. It applies
to many beginnings: of new paradigms in science, of
technological directions, of art and literature. It is probably
most applicable to the beginnings in political life. The
political map of the world has changed more rapidly than we can
remember from anything that books have told us. It is dangerous
to generalize from events not really settled. But it is
impossible to ignore them, especially when they appear to
confirm the transition from the civilization of literacy to the
civilization of illiteracy.
People who deal with the development and behavior of the human
species believe that cooperative effort explains the development
of language, if not its emergence. Cooperative effort is also
the root of human self-constitution as political animals. The
social dimension, starting with awareness of kinship and followed
by commitments to non-kin is, in addition to tool-making, the
driving force of human intellectual growth. Simply put, the
qualifiers political animal (zoon politikon) and speaking animal
(zoon phonanta) are tightly connected. But this relationship does
not fully address the nature of political human experiences.
Different types of animals also develop patterns of interaction
that could be qualified as social, without reaching the
cognitive sophistication of the species Homo Habilis. They also
exchange information, mainly through gestures, noises, and
biochemical signals. Tracking food, signaling danger, and
entrance into cooperative effort are documented aspects of
animal life. None of these qualifies them as political animals;
neither do the means involved qualify as language. Politics, in
its incipient forms or in today's sophisticated manifestations,
is a distinct set of interhuman relationships made necessary by
the conscious need to optimize practical experiences of human
self-constitution. Politics is not equivalent to the formation of
a pack of wolves, to the herding tendency of deer, nor to the
complex relations within a beehive. Moreover, politics is not
reducible to sheer survival strategies, no matter how
sophisticated, which are characteristic of some primates, and
probably other animals.
The underlying structure of the activities through which humans
identify themselves is embodied in human acts, be they of the
nature of tool-making, sharing immediate or remote goals, and
establishing reciprocal obligations of a material or spiritual
nature. Changes in the circumstances of practical experiences
effect changes in the way humans relate to each other. That the
scale of human worlds, and thus the scale of human practical
experience, is changing corresponds to the dynamics of the
species' constitution. Incipient agricultural activity and the
formation of the many families of languages correspond to a time
when a critical mass was reached. At this threshold, syncretic
human interaction was already rooted in well defined patterns of
practical experience. The pragmatic framework shaped the
incipient political life, and was in turn stimulated by it.
Politics emerged once the complexity of human interactions
increased. Political practical experiences are related to work,
to beliefs, to natural and cultural distinctions, even to
geography, to the extent to which the environment makes some
forms of human experiences possible. This is why, from a historic
perspective, politics is never disassociated from economic life,
religion, racial or ethnic identity, geography, art, or science.
The underlying structure of human praxis that determined the need
for literacy also determined the need for appropriate means of
expression, communication, and signification. This becomes even
more obvious in politics, which is embedded in literacy-based
pragmatics. Consequently, once the particular pragmatic
circumstances change, the nature, the means, and the goals of
politics should change as well.