Some of today's political systems are identified as democracies,
and others claim to be. Some are identified as dictatorships of
some sort, which almost none would accept as a qualifier. But no
matter which label is applied, there is an obsession with
literacy in all these systems. "We need literacy for democracy to
survive," says the literacy special interest group. But how do
dictatorships come about in literate populations? The biggest
dictatorship (the Soviet block) was proud of its high literacy
rate, acknowledged by the western world as an accomplishment
impossible to overlook. It fell because the underlying
structural characteristics reflected in literacy collided with
other requirements, mainly pragmatic.
An empire, the fourth in the modern historic succession that
started with the Turkish Empire and continued with the
Austro-Hungarian and British Empires, crumbled. What makes the
fall of the Soviet Empire significant is its own underlying
structure. The former members of COMECON, those East European
countries that, along with the Soviet Union, once formed the
communist block, represent a good case study for the forces
involved in the dynamics of illiteracy. While writing this book,
I benefited from an experiment probably impossible to duplicate.
A rigid structure of human activity, basically captive to a
slightly amended paradigm of the Industrial Revolution, hailing
itself as the workers' paradise, and laboring under the illusion
of messianic collectivism, maintained literacy as its cultural
foundation.
Even the harshest and blindest critics of the system had to
agree that if anything of historic significance could be
attributed to communism, it was its literacy program. Large
segments of the population, illiterate prior to communism, were
taught to read and write. The school system, deficient in many
ways, provided free and obligatory education, much better than
its free medical system. This effort at education was intended
to prepare the new generations for productive tasks, but also to
subject each person to a program of indoctrination channeled
through the powerful medium of literacy. Questioned about his
own ideas for the reform of the orthodox communist system,
Nikita Kruschchev, the maverick leader of the post-Stalin era,
declared: "He who believes that we will give up the teachings of
Marx, Engels, and Lenin deludes himself tremendously. Those who
are waiting for this to happen will have to wait until crabs
learn how to whistle." When, throughout Russia, statues of Lenin
started falling and Marx's name became synonymous with the
failure of communism, people probably started hearing strange
sounds from crustaceans.
The abrupt and unexpected failure of the communist system-an
event hailed as victory in a war as cold as the market can
be-makes for unexpected proof of this book's major thesis. The
breakdown of the Soviet system can be seen as the failure of a
structure that kept literacy as its major educational and
instrumental medium, and relied on it for the dissemination of
its ideological goals inside and outside the block. Literacy, as
such, did not fail, but the structures that literacy entails:
limited efficiency, sequential practical experiences of human
self-constitution in a hierarchic and centralized economy;
deterministic (thus implicitly dualistic) working relations, a
level of efficiency based on the industrial model of labor
division, mediation subjected to central planning without choice
as to the mediating elements; opaqueness expressed in an
obsession with secrecy, and last but not least, failure to
acknowledge the new scale of humankind-in short, a pragmatic
framework whose characteristics are reflected in literacy-all
led to the final result. Indeed, the system acted to counter
integration and globality. It maintained rigid national and
political boundaries under the false assumption that insularity
would allow a controlled and orderly exchange of goods and
ideas, perpetuation and dissemination of an ideology of
proletarian dictatorship, and eventually coexistence with the
rest of the world under the assumption of its progressive
conversion to communist values.
In the doctrine of Marx and Engels, the proletariat appears
endowed with all the qualities associated with Divinity in the
prototypic Book (the Old Testament): omniscience, omnipotence,
and right almost all the time. There is a self-creative moment
in the historic process they described, resulting from political
activism and commitment to change in the world. No one should
lightly discard the Utopian core or the ideal embodied in the
doctrine. After all, nobody could argue against a world of
freedom where each person participates with the best one has to
offer, and is rewarded with everything one needs. Free
education, free medical care, access to art and liberty in a
context of limitless unfolding of talent and harmony with nature,
of shared wealth and emancipation from all prejudices-all this
is paradise on Earth (minus religion).
It should be pointed out that, within the system, the entire
practical human experience related to literacy-and the
accomplishments listed above are literacy- based-was subsidized.
In no other part of the world, and under no other regime, were
so many people subjected to literacy. That the system failed
should not lead anyone to ignore some of the achievements of the
people regimented under a flag they did not care for:
fascinating art, interesting poetry and music, the massive
collection and preservation of folklore, spectacular
mathematics, physics, and chemistry arose from beneath terror
and censorship. To survive as an artist, writer, or scientist
meant to force creativity where almost no room for it was left.
Under no other regime on Earth did people read so much, listen
to music more intensely, visit museums with more passion, and
care for each other as family, friends, or as human beings,
episodes of brutality notwithstanding. It is too simplistic to
accept the line that people read more in East Europe and the
Soviet Union because they had nothing else to do. The pragmatic
framework was set up under the assumption of permanence,
stability, centrality, and universality founded on literacy.
It goes without saying that the misuse of language (in political
discourse and in social life) played its role in the
quasi-unanimous silent rejection of the system, even more in
silent, cowardly complicity with it. When the literate machine of
spying on the individual fell apart, people saw themselves in
the merciless mirror of opportunistic self- betrayal. The records
will stand as a testimony that writing does not lead only to
Solzhenitsyn's novels, Yevtushenko's poetry, Shoshtakovich's
music, and the romantic Samizdat, but also to putrid words about
others, kin included. The opaqueness of literacy partially
explains why this is possible. Something other than the
opaqueness granted by literacy (i.e., complicity established in
society) explains how it became a necessary aspect of that
society. Germans were not better, exceptions granted, than
their fascist leaders; the peoples in the Soviet block were not
better, exceptions granted again, than the leaders they accepted
for such a long time.
But what went relatively unnoticed by experts in East European
and Soviet studies, as well as by governments fighting the Cold
War, is the dynamics of change. The system was economically
broke, but still militarily viable (though overrated) and
over-engaged in security activities-tight control of the
population, economic and political espionage, active attempts to
export its ideology. The structure within which people were to
realize their potential-one of the ideals of communism-had few
incentives. But all this, despite the impact of the yet
unfinished revolution, is only the tip of the iceberg, the
visible side when one looks from the riverbank of the free world
where incentives lead to self-sufficiency and complacency. The
major aspect is that the dynamics of the system was severely
affected by artificially maintaining a pragmatic framework and a
system of values not suited to change. This applies especially to
the major shift-from the industrial model to post-industrial
society, to a context of practical experiences of human
self-constitution freed from the restrictions carried over from
the politics of mind and body control-experienced by the rest of
the western world.
Levels of expectation beyond the satisfaction of immediate needs
(food, clothing, shelter), and of literacy-associated
expectations (education, access to art and literature, travel),
could not be satisfied unless and until levels of efficiency
impossible to reach in the pragmatic context of industrial
societies were made possible by a new pragmatics. Despite the
fact that more writers, more publishing houses, more libraries,
as well as more artists, theaters, opera houses, symphonic
orchestras, research institutes, and more museums than in the
rest of the world were politically and economically supported in
the Eastern Block (almost to the extent that the secret police
was), activities related to literacy had only a short-term
impact on the individuals subjected to or taking advantage of
them. This was proven dramatically by the proliferation of
commercially motivated newspapers and publications (pornography
among them) following the breakdown of the power structure in
various countries of the Block, and followed by an even faster
focus on entertainment television and obsession with consumption.
The main events leading to the breakdown-each country had its own
drama, once the major puppeteer was caught off-guard by events
in the Soviet Union-took place with the nation staring at the TV
screens, seduced by the dynamics of the live transmission for
which literacy and prior literate use of the medium were never
well equipped. The live drama of the hunt for Ceausescu in
Romania, the climax of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the events
in Prague, Sofia, and Tirana continued the spirit of the Polish
tele-drama in the shipyards. It then took another turn, during
the attempted coup in the Soviet Union, practically denying the
literate media any role but that of late chroniclers. The
initial lessons in democracy took place via videotape. Various
networks, from WTN (World-Wide Television News) to CNN, but
primarily the backward technology of the fax machine, which
absorbed essential literacy into a focused distribution of
individual messages, provided the rest. As primitive as digital
networks were, and still are in that part of the world, they
played an important role. Not political manifestos or
sophisticated ideological documents were disseminated, but
images, diagrams, and live sequences. In the meanwhile,
entertainment took over almost all available bandwidth. What the
rest of the world consumed in the last fifteen years (along with
fashion, fast food chains, soft drinks, and consumer
electronics) penetrated the lives of those whose revolt took
place under the banner of the right to consume. Here, as in the
rest of the world, the spiritual and the political split for
good. The spiritual gets alimony; the political becomes the
executor of the trust.
What failed the system was the lack of understanding of all the
factors leading to new productive experiences: the framework for
optimal interaction of people, circumstances of progressive
mediation and further specialized human self-constitution, a
practical context of networking and coordination based on
individual freedom and constraints assumed by individuals as
they define their expectations. Parallel to the literate
structure of a politics that failed is the experience of churches
in the Soviet Block. In a show of defiance towards the political
dictatorship, people attended church, itself a mainstay of
literate praxis (independent of the book or books they adopt for
their basic program). Once religion was able to assert its
literate characteristics through the imposition of
constraints-so like those of the political system just
overthrown- churches began to experience the low attendance that
the rest of the world is already familiar with.
No matter how much more quickly events take place in our age, it
is probably still too early to understand all the implications
of the major political event represented by the fall of the
Soviet empire. For instance, in a context of global economy, how
can one correctly evaluate the emergence of new national states
and forceful national movements when the post-national state and
the trans-national world are already a reality? The question is
political in nature. Its focus is on identity. Identity reflects
all the relations through which people constituted themselves as
part of a larger entity-tribe, city, region, nation-defined by
biological and cultural characteristics, shared values,
religion, a sense of common space and time, and a sense of
future.