Political programs, very much like hamburgers, cars, alcohol,
sports events, artworks, and financial services, are marketed.
Success in politics is valued in market terms rather than in the
increasingly elusive political impact. The expression "People
vote their pocketbooks" bluntly expresses this fact. But are they
voting? Poll after poll reveals that they are not. Illiterates
used to be excluded from voting, along with women, Blacks in
America and South Africa, and foreigners in a large number of
European countries.
In an ideal world, the best qualified would compete for a
political position, all would vote, and the result would make
everyone happy. How would such an ideal world function? Words
would correspond to facts. The reward of political practical
experience would be the experience itself, satisfying the need
to best serve others, and thus oneself as a member of the larger
social family. This is a Utopian world of perfect citizens whose
reason, expressed in the language of literacy, i.e., made
available to everyone and implicitly guaranteed to be a
permanent medium for interaction, is the guardian of politics.
We see here how authority, of the thinking human being, is
established and almost automatically equated with freedom.
Indeed, the doctrine of individual conformity to rational
necessity was expressed in many pragmatic contexts, but never as
forcefully as in the context that appropriated literacy as one of
its guiding forces.
In the horizon of literacy, the expectation is that the
experience of self- constitution as literate makes people submit
their own nature to the rationale of literacy and thereby find
fulfillment. In short, the belief that to be literate makes one
respect his word, respect others, understand political
expectations, and articulate one's ideas is more of an illusion.
Moreover, if political action could result in having everyone
accept the values of literacy and embody them as their second
nature, conflicts would vanish, people would all share in wealth
and, moreover, would be able to abide by the standards of
democracy. It even follows that the literate need to feel the
obligation of inculcating literacy in others, thus creating the
possibility of changing patterns of human experiences so that
they reflect the demands of reason associated with literacy.
Isaiah Berlin, among others, noted that the belief in a single
encompassing answer to all social questions is indefensible.
Rather, conflict is an overriding feature of the human
condition. This conflict develops between the propensity to
diversity (all the ends pursued) and the almost irrational
expectation that there is one answer-a good way of life-worth
pursuing and which can be attained if the political animal
acknowledges the primacy of reason over passion, and freely
chooses conformity to widely shared values over chaotic
individualism.
Under the pragmatic circumstances of the civilization of
illiteracy, the literate expectation of unanimous or even
majority vote is less than significant. Voting results are as
good an indicator of a society's condition as seismographs are of
the danger of an earthquake. On election days, the results are
known after the first representative sample makes it through the
voting mechanism. Actually, the results are already at hand days
before the election takes place. The means within our reach are
such that it would suffice to commit a short interval of
telephone time so that people who want to vote-and who know why
they vote- can, and without having to go our of their way. Any
other connection, such as the generalized cable infrastructure,
connected to a central data processing unit outfitted for the
event, would do as well. Such a strategy would answer only one
part of the question: making it easy for people to vote. The
second part regards what they are asked to vote for. The
political process is removed from the exciting practice of
offering authentic choice. Literacy-based political action is
opaque, almost inscrutable. Accordingly, the citizen has no
motivation for commitment and no need to express it through
voting. There is a third part: the assumption that voting is a
form of particpating in the power of democracy. No one aware of
the dynamics of work and life today can equate the notion of
majority with democracy. More often than not, efficiency is
achieved through procedures of exception.
Under the circumstances of a global economy of fast change and
parallel practical experiences, no president of a country, no
matter how powerful, and no central political power can
effectively influence events significant to the citizen. The
civilization of illiteracy requires alternatives to centralism,
hierarchy, sequentiality, and determinism in politics. It
especially entails alternatives to dualism, whether embodied in
the two- party system, the legislative and executive opposition,
and lawfulness vs. illegality, for example. This implies a broad
distribution of political tasks, in conjunction with a politics
that takes advantage of parallel modes of activism, networking,
open-ended policies, and self-determination at meaningful levels
of political life. Political fear of vagueness can only be
compared to the fear of a vacuum that once upon a time branded
physics and political doctrines. Faster rhythms of existence and
the acknowledged need to adapt to circumstances of action never
before experienced-scale of politics, globality, scale of
humankind-speak against many of the literate expectations of
politics as a stabilizing form of human practice. Politics, if
true to its call, should contribute to speeding up processes and
creating circumstances for better negotiations among people who
have lost their sense of political adherence, or even lost their
faith in law and order.
In this global world, where scale is of major importance,
politics is supposed to mediate among the many levels at which
people involved in parallel, extremely distributed activities,
partake in globality. Apportionment of goods, as much as the
apportionment of rights pertaining to creative aspects of human
practical experiences, on a scheme similar to auctioning, follow
the dynamics of the market more closely than rigid regulations.
Awareness of this apportionment is a political matter and can be
submitted to the concerned parties in forms of evolving opinions.
Politics has also to address the new forms of property and their
impact on political values in the new pragmatic framework. For
instance, the real power of information processing is in the
interaction of those able to access it. One should not be forced
to apply rules originating from the feudal ownership of
language, or from the industrial ownership of machines, to the
free access to information, or to networks facilitating creative
cooperative efforts. The challenge is to provide the most
transparent environment, without affecting the integrity of
interaction. A specific example in this regard is legislation
against computer hackers. Such legislation, as well as the much
publicized Communication Decency Act, only shifts attention from
the new pragmatic context-unprecedented challenges arising from
very powerful technologies-to one of routine law enforcement.
Administrative reaction is the consequence of the built-in
dualism, based on the clear-cut distinction between good and
bad, characteristic of literacy-based politics.
A positive course of events can originate only from political
experiences of individual empowerment. Wider choice and broader
possibilities involve specific risks. Hacking is by no means an
experience without precedent in past pragmatics. The German war
code was hacked, and nations are very eager to confer honor upon
other hackers of distinction: scientists who break the secrets
of genetic codes, or spies who discover the secrets of the
enemy. Examined from a literate political perspective, hacking,
as a peculiar form of individual self-constitution, can appear as
criminal. In a political experience coherent with the pragmatics
leading to the civilization of illiteracy, hacking appears on a
continuum joining creativity, protest, invention, and non-
conformity, as well as criminal intention. The answer to hackers
is not a code of punishment of medieval or industrial
inspiration, but transparency that will, in the long run,
undermine possible criminal motivations. A society that punishes
creativity, even when relatively misdirected, through its
policies and laws punishes itself in the long run. Someone who
works at his terminal for a company producing goods all over the
world, and pursuing social and economic programs that
effectively touch citizens of many cultures, different faiths,
race, political creed, sexual preference, different history and
different expectations, participates in the politics of the world
more than the institutions and the bureaucrats paid for
functions that they cannot effectively fulfill. It is again
pragmatics that makes us citizens of our small village or town,
that integrates all of us, Netizens included, in the global
world.