The Civilization of Illiteracy Part 9

Humans are not born free of experience. Important parts of it are pa.s.sed along in the biological endowment. Others are transmitted through ever new human interactions, including those of reciprocal understanding. Neither are humans born free of the evolutionary cycle of the species. The relative decline of the olfactory in humans was mentioned some pages ago. With the relative loss of sensory experience, knowledge corresponding to the respective sensorial perception diminishes. Linguistic performance is the result of living and practicing language, of existence as language. Relating oneself to the world in language experience is a condition for knowing and understanding it. The language of the natural surrounding world is not verbal, but it is articulated at the level of the elementary sensations (Merleau-Ponty's partic.i.p.ative perception) that the world occasions, when human beings are engaged in the practical attempt to const.i.tute themselves, or instance, by trying to change or to master their world. They perceive this world, after the experience, as stabilized meanings: clouds offer the hope of rain; thunder can produce fire; running deer are probably pursued by predators; eggs in a nest testify to birds. The complexity of the effort to master the world surrounding us increases over time. Tasks originating in the context leading to literacy are of a different degree of complexity than those faced in industrial society and than those we a.s.sume today.

Between the senses and speech-hence between nonverbal and verbal languages-numerous influences play a role. Words obviously have a cognitive condition different from perceptions and are processed differently. Speech adds intellectual information to the sensorial information, mainly in the form of a.s.sociations, capable of reflecting the present and the absent. Interestingly enough, we do not know everything that we understand; and we do not understand everything that we know. For instance, we might know that in non-Euclidean geometries, parallels meet. Or that water, a liquid, is made up of oxygen and hydrogen, two gases. Or that the use of drugs can lead to addiction. Nevertheless, we do not necessarily understand how and why and when.

Within the civilization of literacy the expectation is that once we know how to write something, we automatically know and understand it. And if by some chance the knowledge is incomplete, inconsistent, or not maintained, if it loses its integrity through some corruption, it can be resuscitated through reading or can be made consistent by comparing it to knowledge acc.u.mulated by others, and eventually redeemed. As writing has failed us repeatedly within practical experiences that transcend its characteristics and necessity, we have learned that the relative stability of the written is a blessing in disguise. Compared to the variability of the speech, it is more stable. But this stability turns out to be a shortcoming, exactly because knowledge and understanding are context dependent. Within relatively stable contexts this shortcoming is noticed only at rare intervals. But with the expectation of higher efficiency, cycles of human activity get shorter.

Increased intensity, the variability of structures of interaction, the distributed nature of practical involvement, all require variable frames of reference for knowledge and understanding. As a result of these pragmatic characteristics, we witnessed progressive use of language in equivocal and ambiguous ways. Acceptable, and even adequate, in the practical experience of poetry, drama and fiction, of disputable relevance in political and diplomatic usage, ambiguity affects the literate formulation of ideas and plans pertinent to moral values, political programs, or scientific and technological purposes.

The same pragmatic characteristics mentioned above make necessary the integration of means other than language and its literate functioning in the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge.

This addresses concerns raised in the opening lines of this section. Fast-changing knowledge can be acquired through means adapted to its dynamics. As these means, such as interactive multimedia, virtual reality programs, and genetic computation, change, the experience of accessing knowledge becomes, in addition, one of understanding the transitory means involved in storing and presenting it. Many practical experiences are based on knowledge that no other means, literacy- based means included, could effectively make available. From advanced brain surgery at neuronal levels to the deployment of vast networks, which support not only e-mail but also many other meaningful human interactions-from s.p.a.ce exploration to memetic engineering-focused understanding and a whole new gamut of highly efficient practical experiences, involving knowledge never before available, make up the pragmatic framework of the civilization of illiteracy.

Univocal, equivocal, ambiguous

At least 700 artificial languages are on record. Behind each of these there is a practical experience in respect to which natural language functions in a less than desirable manner.

There is a language on record that addresses left-hand/right-hand biases. There is one, auth.o.r.ed by S. H.

Elgin, in which gender biases are reversed (Ladan). And there is Inda, a language constructed like a work of art. There are exotic languages written for certain fictional worlds: J.R.R.

Tolkien's Elvish, or the language of the Klingons of Star Trek fame, or Anthony Burgess's Nadsat, the language of the yobbs in A Clockwork Orange. And there are scientifically oriented attempts to structure a language: James Cooke Brown invented Loglan to be a logic language. Sotos Ochado (almost 100 years before Brown) invented a language based on the cla.s.sifications of science. Some artificial languages of the past correspond to obvious pragmatic functions. Ars Magna, designed by Ramon Llul (celebrated in history books dedicated to precursors of the digital age), was to be a language of missionaries. Lingua Ignota, attributed to the legendary Abbess Hildegard, is a language of practical monastic experiences extended well beyond the performance of the liturgy.

When we acknowledge these languages we implicitly acknowledge attempts to improve the performance of language functions. In some cases, the effort is driven by the goal of transcending barriers among languages; in others, of getting a better description of the world, with the implicit hope that this would facilitate mastery of it. Awareness of the fact that language is not a neutral means of expression, communication, and signification, but comes loaded with all the characteristics of our practical endeavors, prejudices included, motivated attempts to generate languages reflecting an improved view of the world.

Regardless of the intention, and especially of the success they had, such languages allow us a closer look at their cognitive condition, and hence at their contribution to increases in the efficiency of human practical activities.

Increased expressive power, as in the artificial languages invented by Tolkien and Burgess, or in the language of the Klingons, is an objective relatively easy to comprehend.

Propagated by means of literacy and within the literate experience, such languages are accepted primarily as artistic conventions. Precision is the last quality they aim for; expressive richness is their goal. These are languages of sublime ambiguity. Those seeking precision will find it in Loglan, or better yet in the languages of computer programming.

Disseminated by means contradicting and transcending the a.s.sumptions of literacy, and within a pragmatics requiring means of higher efficiency, programming languages, from Cobol and Fortran to C, C++, Lisp, or Java, are accepted for their functionality. They are not for poetry writing, as the family of expressive artificial languages are not for driving a computer or its peripherals. These are languages of never-failing univocality. With such languages, we can control the function, and even the logic of the language. These languages are conceived in a modular fas.h.i.+on and can be designed to optimally serve the task at hand. Among the functions pursued are provability, optimization, and precision. Among the logics that can be used are cla.s.sical propositonal logic, intuitionistic propositional logic, modal logic, temporal logic, and others.

Reflecting human obsession with a universal language, some artificial constructs advance hypotheses regarding the nature of universality. Dedicated, like many before him, to the idea of a universal language, Franois Sondre (1827) invented a language based on the a.s.sumption that music comes the closest to transcending boundaries among various groups of people. Imagine a theory expressed as a melody, communication accomplished by music, or the music of the law and law enforcement. There is in such a language enough room for expression and precision, but almost no connection to the pragmatic dimension of human self-const.i.tution. If time is, as we know, encoded in music, the experience of s.p.a.ce is only indirectly present. Accordingly, its functioning might address the universality of harmony and rhythm, but not aspects of pragmatics which are of a different nature.

A category of so-called controlled languages is also establis.h.i.+ng itself. A controlled language is a subset (constrained in its vocabulary, grammar, and style) of a natural language adapted to a certain activity. Artificial languages are products inspired and motivated by the functioning of our so-called natural language. Their authors wanted to fix something, or at least improve performance of the language machine in some respect. In order to understand the meaning of their effort, we should look into how language relates the people const.i.tuted in the language to the world in which they live. Let's start with the evolution of the word and its relation to the expression of thoughts and ideas, that is, from the univocal (one-to-one relation to what is expressed) to the ambiguous (one-to-many relation).

Systems of univocal signs partic.i.p.ate in the production of ideas only to a small degree. As an outgrowth of signals, initial signs are univocal. Feathers are definitely not from fish or mammals; blood stains are from wounds; four-legged animals leave different marks than biped humans. Polysemy (more than one meaning a.s.signable to the sign) is a gradual acquisition and reflects the principle of retroaction of meaning on the carrier: words, drawings, sounds, etc. A drawing of an animal points to what is depicted, or to things a.s.sociated with the animal: the softness of fur, savage behavior, meat, etc.

Philosophy and literature (and the arts, in general) became possible only at a certain level of language development brought about by the practical experience of society confronted with new tasks related to its survival and further evolution. The philosopher, for example, resorts to common speech (verbal language) but uses it in an uncommon way: metasemically, metaphorically, metaphysically. Ancient philosophy, important here for its testimony regarding language and literacy, is still so metaphoric that it can be read as literature, and actually was enjoyed as such. Modern philosophy (post-Heidegger) shows how relations (which it points out and dwells upon) have absorbed the related. As a formalized argumentation, freed of restrictions characteristic of literacy, but also so much less expressive than the philosophy of the written word and the endless interpretations it makes possible, philosophy generates its own motivations and justifications. Its practical consequences, within a pragmatics based on different forms of semiotic functioning than those of literacy, diminish constantly.

The distance between the verbal and the significance of the idea is itself a parameter of the evolution from nature to culture.

Words such as s.p.a.ce, time, matter, motion, become possible only after experience in writing. But once written, there is nothing left of the direct, probably intuitive, human experience of s.p.a.ce and time, of experience with matter in its various concrete forms, or of the experience of motion (of the human body or other bodies, some flying, some swimming, running, falling).

Visual representations-other forms of writing-are closer to what they report about: the Cartesian coordinates for s.p.a.ce, the clock for a cyclical perception of time, etc. They express particular instances of relations in s.p.a.ce or time, or particular aspects of matter or motion.

The word is arbitrary in relation to the idea it embodies. The idea itself, getting its life in instances of activity, is knowledge practically revealed in the order of nature or thought. In expressing the idea, rational rigor and expressiveness collide. Synthesizing ideas is an instance of the self-const.i.tution of the human being. Ideas express the implicit will of the human being to externalize them (what Marcuse called "the imperative quality" of thought). Once written, words not only defy the ephemerality of the sounds of speech, but also enter the realm of potentially conflicting interpretations.

These interpretations result from the conversion of the way we use words in different pragmatic contexts.

To be literate means to be in control of language, but it also means acceptance and awareness of being hostage to the experiences of the past in which its rules were shaped. When spelling, for instance, is disa.s.sociated from the origin of the word, a totally arbitrary new realm of language is established, one in which transitory conventions replace permanency (or the illusion of permanency), and the appearance of super-temporality of ideas is questioned. Each idea is the result of choices in a certain paradigm of existence. Its concrete determination, i.e., realization as meaning, comes through its insertion in a pragmatic context. When the context changes, the idea might be confirmed, contradicted (it becomes equivocal), or open to many interpretations (it becomes ambiguous). To give an example, the idea of democracy went through all these stages from its early embodiment in Greek society to its liberal application, and even self-negation, in the civilization of illiteracy. It means one thing- the power of people-but in different contexts, depending on how people was defined and how power was exercised. It means so many things in its new contexts that some people really wonder if it actually means anything at all anymore.

Literacy made communication of ideas possible within a scale of humankind well served by linear relations and in search of proportional growth. But when ideas come to expression in a faster rhythm, and turn in shorter cycles from the univocal to the ambiguous stage, the medium of literacy no longer does justice either to their practical function or to the dynamics of an individual's continuous self-const.i.tution. Moreover, it seems that ideas themselves, as forms of human projection, are less necessary under the new projection of pragmatic circ.u.mstances we examine. What once seemed almost as the human's highest contribution impacts today's society less and less. We live in a world dominated by methods and products, within which previous ideas have, so it seems, cultural significance, at most.

Knowledge is reduced to information; understanding is only operational. Artificial languages, which keep multiplying, are more and more geared towards methods and products. In the interconnected world of digitally disseminated information, we do not need Esperanto, but rather languages that unify the increasing variety of machines and programs we use in our new experiences on the World Wide Web. Efficiency in this world refers to transactions which do not necessarily involve human beings. Independent agents, active in business transactions of what emerges as the Netconomy, act towards maximizing outcome.

Such agents are endowed with rules of reproduction, movement, fair trade, and can even be culturally identified. Even so, the Netconomy is more a promise than a reality. The functioning of such agents allows us to see how the metaphor of language functioning reverts to its literal meaning in the civilization of illiteracy.

Making thoughts visible

At a minimum, the object for which the written sign-the word, sentence, or text-stands is the sign of speech. But writing came a relatively long way before reaching this condition. In prelinguistic forms, graphic representation had its object in reality-the re-presentation of the absent. What is present need not be represented. The direction impressed on visual representation is from past to present. What must be retained is the originating tendency of distancing in respect to the present and the direct, what I called the alienation of immediacy.

Initial representations, part of a rather primitive repertory, have only an expressive function. They retain information about the absent that is not seen (or heard, felt, smelled) for future relations.h.i.+ps between human beings and their environment. The image belongs to nature. That which is communicated is the way of seeing or perceiving it, not what is actually seen. The execution of the written sign is not its realization as information, as is the case with pictographic representations, some leading to the making of things (tools, artifacts). What matters is not how something is written, but what it means. A relatively small number of signs-the alphabet, punctuation and diacritical marks-partic.i.p.ate in the infinite competence of writing.

No matter how we conceive of human thought, its stabilization comes about with that of writing. The present captured in writing loses its impact of immediate action. No written word has ever reached the surface without being uttered and heard, that is, without being sensed. The possibility of meaning (intended, a.s.signed) stems from the establishment of language within human praxis. It is not accidental (cf. Leroi-Gourhan) that spatial establishment (in village-type settlements) and the establishment of language in writing (also spatial in nature) are synchronous. But here a third component, the language of drawings, no matter how primitive, helping in the making of things related to shelter and to work, needs to be acknowledged, too.

This is the broader context leading to the great moment of Greek philosophy in the temporal context of alphabetization, and the cultural context of all kinds of forms of craftsmans.h.i.+p, architecture probably in the lead. Socrates, as the philosopher of thinking and discovering truth through dialogue, defended oral culture. Or at least that is what Plato wanted us to believe when he mentioned Socrates' opposition to writing. The great artisans of Socrates' time shared this att.i.tude. For building temples, conceiving tools, creating all kinds of useful objects, writing is not a prerequisite. Heuristics and maieutics, as methods of questioning human choices, those of craftsmen included, and generating new options, are essentially oral. They presuppose the philosopher's, or the architect's, physical presence. Not too much has changed since, if we consider how the disciplines of design and engineering are taught and exercised. But a lot is changing, as design and engineering practical activities rely more and more on digital processing.

Computational practical experiences, as well as genetic engineering or memetics, are no longer in continuation of those founded on literacy.

Alphabet cultures and a lesson from aphasia

The history of culture has recorded numerous attacks against writing, culminating, probably, in Marshall McLuhan's philosophy (1964): alphabetic cultures have uniformized, fragmented, and sequentialized the world, generating an excessive rationalism, nationalism, and individualism. Here we have, in a succinct list, the indictment made of Gutenberg's Galaxy. Commenting on E. M.

Forster's A Pa.s.sage to India, McLuhan remarked: "Rational, of course, has for the West long meant uniform and continuous and sequential. In other words, we have confused reason with literacy, and rationalism with a single technology." That McLuhan failed to acknowledge the complementary language of design and engineering, with its own rationality, is a shortcoming, but does not change the validity of the argument.

The consequences of these attacks-as much as they can be judged from the historical perspective we have since gained-have nevertheless not been the abatement of writing or of its influence. In the same vein, the need to proceed to an oral-visual culture has been idealistically suggested (Barthes'

well known plea of 1970 can be cited).

There is no doubt that all the plans devised by architects, artisans, and designers of artifacts belong to a praxis uniting oral (instructions to those transposing the plan into a product) and visual cultures. Many such plans, embodying ideas and concepts probably as daring as those we read in ma.n.u.scripts and later in books, vanished. Some of the artifacts they created did withstand the test of time. Even if the domination of the written word somehow resulted in a relatively low awareness of the role drawings played over time, experiences were shaped by them and knowledge transmitted through them. Drawings are holistic units of a complexity difficult to compare to that of a text.

The meaning conferred by the intermediary of writing is brought about through a process of generalization, or re-individualization: What is it for the individual reading and understanding it? It inversely travels the route that led from speech to writing, from the concrete to the abstract, from the a.n.a.lytic to the synthetic function of language. At any given time, it looks as though we have, on the one hand, the finite reality of signs (alphabet, words, idiomatic expressions) and, on the other, the practically infinite reality embodied in the language sequences or ideas expressed. In view of this, the question arises regarding the source of ideas and the relation between signs (words, in particular) and their a.s.signed meanings, or the content that can be communicated using the language. Meaning is conjured in Western culture through additive mechanisms, similar to those of mixing pigments. In Eastern culture, meaning is based on subtractive mechanisms, similar to those of mixing light.

Alphabetic writing, although more simple and stabilized, is really more difficult than ideographic writing. The experience from which it results is one of abstraction. Henceforth, it subjects the readers of the alphabetic text to the task of filling the enormous gap separating the graphic sign from its referent with their own experience. The a.s.sumption of the literate practical experience is that literacy can subst.i.tute for the reference through history or culture. Readers of ideographic texts have the advantage of the concreteness of the representation. Even if Chinese characters stand for specific Chinese words, as John DeFrancis convincingly showed, the experience of that writing system remains different from that of Western alphabets. Since every language integrates its own history as the summary of the practical activity in which it was const.i.tuted, reading in a language of a foreign experience means that one must step- by-step invent this writing.

Research undertaken in the last 15 years shows that at a certain stage, aphasia brings on a regression from alphabet to image reading as design, as pictographic, iconic reading. Letters lose their linguistic ident.i.ty. The aphasic reader sees only lines, intersections, and shapes. Ideas expressed in writing crumble like buildings shaken by an earthquake. What is still perceived is the similarity to concrete things. The decline from the abstract to the concrete can be seen as a socio-cultural accident taking place against the background of a natural (biological) accident.

In our days we encounter symptoms similar to those described above, testifying to a sort of collective aphasia in reverse.

Indeed, writing is deconstructed and becomes graffiti notation, shorthand statements freed of language, and defying literacy. For a while, graffiti was criminalized. Later on it was framed as art, and the market absorbed the new product among the many others it negotiates. What we probably refused to see is how deep the literacy of graffiti goes, where its roots are, how wide the extensions, and how much aphasia in its writing and reading.

After all, it was not only in the New York subway that trains were literally turned into moving papers or moving books, issued as often as authority was circ.u.mvented. Much of the public hated graffiti because it obliterated legitimate communication and a sense of neatness and order that literacy continuously reinforced. But many also enjoyed it. Rap music is the musical equivalent of graffiti. Gang rituals and fights are a continuation of these. Messages exchanged on the data highways-from e-mail to Web communication-often display the same characteristics of aphasia. Concreteness is obsessively pursued.

:) (the smiley) renders expressions of pleasure useless, while (: (the grince) warns of being flamed. On the digital networks of today's furious exchange of information, collective aphasia is symptomatic of many changes in the cognitive condition of the people involved in its practical experiences. Neither opportunistic excitement nor dogmatic rejection of this far-reaching experience can replace the need to understand what makes it necessary and how to best benefit from it. More private languages and more codes than ever circulate as kilo- and megabytes among individuals escaping any form of regulation.

On the increasingly rewarding practical experiences of networking, literacy is challenged by transitory, partial literacies. Literacy is exposed in its infatuation and emptiness, although not discarded from among the means of expression and communication defining the human being. It is often ridiculed for not being appropriate to the new circ.u.mstances of the practical and spiritual experience of a humankind that has outgrown all its clothes, toys, books, stories, tools, and even conflicts.

A legitimate follow-up question is whether the literate experience of the word contributes to its progressive lack of determination, or the change of context affects the interpretation, i.e., the semantic s.h.i.+ft from determinate to vague. Probably both factors play a role in the process. On the one hand, literacy progressively exhausts its potential. On the other, new contexts make it simultaneously less suited as the dominant medium for expression, communication, and signification of ideas. For instance, the establishment of a vague meaning of democracy in political discourse leads to the need for strong contexts, such as armed conflicts, for ascertaining it. In the last 10 years we have experienced many such conflicts, but we were not prepared to see them in conjunction with the forces at work in facilitating higher levels of efficiency according to the new scale that humankind has reached.

There is also the attempt to use language as context free as possible-the generalities of all demagogy (liberal, conservative, left or right, religious or emanc.i.p.ated) can serve as examples. But so can all the crystal ball readings, palm readings, horoscopes, and tarot cards, revived in recent years against the background of illiteracy. None of these is new, but the relative flouris.h.i.+ng of the market of vagueness and ambiguity, reflective of a deviant functioning of language, is.

Together with illiteracy, they are other symptoms of the change in pragmatics discussed in this book.

These and other examples require a few more words of explanation regarding changes in the functions of language. It is known that the oldest preserved cave drawings are marks (indexical signs) of an oral context rather than representations of hunting scenes (even though they are often interpreted as such). They testify more to those who drew them than to what the drawing is about.

The decadent literacy of mystified messages does the same. It speaks about their writers more than about their subject, be this history, sociology, or anthropology. And the increased oral and visual communication, supported by technology, defines the post-literate condition of the human cognitive dimension. The transition from speech to writing corresponds to the s.h.i.+ft from the pragmatic-affective level of human praxis to the pragmatic-rational level of linear relations among people and their environment. It takes place in the context of the evolution from the syncretic to the a.n.a.lytic. The transition from literacy to literacies corresponds to the pragmatics of non-linear relations, and results from the evolution from a.n.a.lytic to synthetic. These affirmations, at least as far as the civilization of literacy is concerned, apply to the universe of European cultures and their later extensions. The cultures of the Far East are characterized by language's tendency to present, not to explain. The a.n.a.lytical structure of logical thought (which will be discussed in another chapter) is actually formed in the sentence structure of speech, which is fundamentally different in the two cultures mentioned. The imperative energy of the act of expressing confers on the Chinese language, for example, a continuous state of birth (speech in the act). The preeminence of the act in Oriental culture is reflected by the central position the verb occupies. Concentration around the verb guides thought towards the relations.h.i.+p between condition and conditioned.

The experience of logic characteristic of European cultures (under the distinctive mark of cla.s.sical Greek philosophy) shows that the main instrument of thinking is the noun. It is freer than the verb (tied to the forms it specifies), more stable, capable of reflecting ident.i.ty, invariance, and the universal.

The logic founded on this premise is oriented toward the search for unity between species and genus. European writing and Oriental ideographic writing have each partic.i.p.ated in this process of defining logic, rhetoric, heuristics, and dialectics.

From a historic perspective, they are complementary. Recalling the history of knowledge and history per se, we can say that the European Occident achieved the meaning of knowledge and world control, while the Orient achieved self-knowledge and self-control. It would seem utopian (and with vast historical, social, ideological, and political implications) to imagine a world harmoniously uniting these meanings. However, this would imply, as the reader can easily surmise, changes in the status of literacy in both cultures. This is exactly the direction of the changes we witness, as languages function towards convergence in the two cultures mentioned.

Literacy is not only a medium of exchange between cultures; it also sets boundaries among them. This holds true for both Western and Far Eastern (and any other) civilization. j.a.pan, for instance, despite the spectacular effort of a.s.similation and development of new technologies, maintains inside its national boundaries a framework quite well suited to its traditional literacy. Outside, it a.s.similates other literacies. In different ways, this holds true for China. It is willing to build its internal network (Intranet) without connecting it to the all-encompa.s.sing net (Internet) through which we experience some aspects of globality.

The organization of hierarchy, which made the object of many studies telling the West why j.a.pan succeeds better in economic terms, is centered around the unity semmai-kohai, i.e., senior-junior. Within the pragmatic framework of a literacy different from that of the Western world, a logic and ethics pertinent to the distinction mentioned evolved. The moral basis of the precedence of the senior over the junior is pragmatic in nature. The Chinese formula (cho-jo-no-jo) results from a practical experience encoded not only in language but also in the system of ranking. In fact, what is acknowledged is both experience and performance, expressed by the j.a.panese in the categories of kyu, referring to proficiency, and dau, referring to c.u.mulative results. The system applies to economic life, calligraphy, wrestling (sumo), and flower arrangement (ikebana), as well as to social rank. In the dynamics of current changes, such systems are also affected.

From the viewpoint of language functions, we notice that national language can serve for insulation, while adopted language-English, in particular-can serve as a bridge to the rest of the world. Nevertheless, j.a.panese society, like all contemporary societies, is more and more confronted with the world in its globality, and with the need to const.i.tute appropriate means for expression, communication and signification pertinent to the global world. While j.a.pan is an example of many literate prejudices at work, rigidly hierarchic, discriminating against women and foreigners, dogmatic, it also exemplifies the understanding of changing circ.u.mstances for human practical experiences of self-const.i.tution as j.a.panese, and as members of the integrated world community as well. Consequently, new literacies emerge within its h.o.m.ogeneous cultural environment, as they emerge in countries such as China, Korea, and Indonesia, and in the Arab nations. As a result, we experience changes in the nature of the relations between the cultures of the Far East, Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and the West. The process expands, probably more slowly than one might expect, to the African and South American continents.

Global economy requires new types of relations among nations and cultures, and these relations need to correspond to the dynamics of the new pragmatic framework that has emerged against the background of the new scale of human activity. The ident.i.ty urge expressed in the multiculturalism trend of our days will find in the past its most unreliable arguments. The point is proven by the naive misrepresentation of past events, facts, and figures through the activists of the movement. Multiculturalism corresponds to the dynamics of the civilization of illiteracy: from the uniqueness and universality of one dominating mode to plurality, not limited to race, lifestyle, or cultures. Whoever sees multiculturalism as an issue of race, or feminism as one of gender (against the background of history), will not be able to design a course of action to best serve those whose different condition is now acknowledged. A different condition results in different abilities, and thus different ways of projecting one's ident.i.ty in the practical experience of self-const.i.tution. The past is irrelevant; emphasis is always on the future.

Language and Logic