The Civilization of Illiteracy Part 39

Others were external, expressed in the nature of the relation between the military and society: symbolic status, partic.i.p.ation in power, expectations of recognition.

Evolution of the military resulted in changes in the language involved in defining and modifying the interactions characteristic of military practical experience. This language became progressively more adapted to the goal-win the war-and less coordinated with civilian language, in which the discourse of motivations leading to the conflict occurred.

Correspondingly, relations with the outside world-future members of the military, social and political inst.i.tutions, cultural establishments, the church-took place in what appeared to be a different language.

Changes in the structure of the practical experience of human self-const.i.tution, as well as changes resulting from a growing scale, had an influence both inside and outside the military.

When the individuals making up the world const.i.tuted themselves as literate, the functioning of the military a.s.sumed the expectations and characteristics of literacy. What would emerge as military academies were probably established at this time.

Von Moltke's ideas of changing the nature of relations with subordinates just predated the many modern advances in war technology: the use of steam-powered warships (by the j.a.panese in their war against the Russians in 1905); the introduction of radio, telephone, and automotive transportation (all tested in Word War 1); and even the articulation of the concept of total war (by Erich Lindendorf). All these correspond to a pragmatic framework within which literacy was necessary, and literacy's characteristic reflected upon new practical experiences. The total war is of the same nature as the expectation of universal literacy: one literacy replaces all others. There is to the military inst.i.tution of the civilization of literacy an expectation of permanency, embodied in rules and regulations, in hierarchies, and centralized structure, similar to that of state, industry, religion, education, science, art, and literature.

There is also an expectation of centralism, and thus hierarchy and discipline. These characteristics explain why almost all armies adopt similar literacy-based structures. Guerrilla wars, in their early manifestations (skirmishes during the American Revolution) and in their current forms in South America, for example, are illiterate in that they are not based on the conventions of literacy. They unfold in a decentralized manner, and are based on the dynamics of self-organizing nucleii. This is why military strategists consider them so dangerous today.

Patterns of military action and the language recurrences a.s.sociated with these patterns express att.i.tudes and values pertinent to the pragmatic framework. England, at the height of its literate experience, had a highly structured, almost ritualized way of carrying out war. One of the main complaints during the American Revolution was that the colonials did not fight according to the rules that literate West Europe had established over the centuries. Under circ.u.mstances of change, as those leading to the end of the need for a generalized, all-encompa.s.sing literacy, these att.i.tudes and values, expressed in language and in patterns of military activity, are exhausted, except where they are carried over to other forms of praxis, especially to politics and sports.

As is the case with many literacy-based inst.i.tutions, the military became a goal in itself, imposing rules on social and political circ.u.mstances, instead of adapting to them. Following World Wars I and II, the military took control of many countries under the guise of various political and ideological justifications. Military, or military-supported, dictatorships, displaying the same characteristics of centralized rule as monarchy and democracy under presidents, sprang up where other modes of government proved ineffective. This happens today in many parts of the world that are still dedicated to economic and political models of the past, such as in South America, the Middle East, and Africa, for example.

From the literate to the illiterate war

The last war fought under the sign of literacy was probably World War II. The very fact that the last world war came to its final end after the atomic bomb was deployed is indicative of the fact that once one aspect of human practical experience is affected by a change of scale, others are affected as well. While the millions of victims (the majority of whom were raised in the expectations of the civilization of literacy) might make us reluctant to mention literacy, in fact, war's systematic cruelty and extermination power are the result of literacy characteristics implicit in the effective functioning of the war machine and in the articulation of war goals. In the history of World War II, the chapter about language is probably as enlightening as the chapters devoted to the new weapons it brought about: the precursors of modern rocket systems, in addition to the atomic bomb. Each of the powers involved in this large-scale war understood that without the integrating force of literacy, exercised in and around the conflict, the enemy could not succeed. Many books were written about the escalation of hostility through the language of political and ideological discourse. Many prejudices a.s.sociated with this war were expressed in exquisitely literate works, supported by formally perfect, logical arguments. On the other hand, some writers pointed out the weaknesses of literacy. Roland Barthes, for example, studied its fascist nature. Others mentioned the inadequacy of a medium bound to fail because it was so opaque that it covered thoughts instead of revealing them, validated false values instead of exposing them for what they were.

The language of politics extended truly into the language of the conflict. Thanks to radio and newspapers, as well as the rhetoric of rallies, it was able to address entire nations. The industrial establishment, upon which the war machine was built, still embodied the characteristics of the pragmatic framework of literacy. It was based on the industrial model of intense manufacturing. Millions of people had to be moved, fed, and logistically supported on many fronts. The war involved elements of an economy in crisis, affording much less than abundance.

Germany and its allies, having planned for a Blitzkrieg, threw all their limited resources into the preparation and execution of the war. Europe was coming out of the depression resulting from World War I. The people were promised that victory would bring the well deserved recompense that had eluded them the first time around. Against this background, literacy was mobilized in all the areas where it could make a difference: education, propaganda, religious and national indoctrination, in the racist discourse of justifications and in articulating war goals.

Ideological purposes and military goals, expressed in literate discourse, addressed equally those on the front lines and their families. Literacy actively supported self- discipline and restraint, the acceptance of centralism and hierarchy, as well as the understanding of extended production cycles of intense labor and relatively stable, although not necessarily fair, working relations.

All these characteristics, as well as a self-induced sense of superiority, were reflected in the war. Advanced levels of labor division and improved forms of coordination of the parties involved in the large scale experience of factory labor marked the military experience. The war entailed confrontations of huge armies that practically engaged entire societies. It combined strategies of exhaustion (blockades, crop destruction, interruption of any vital activities) and annihilation. Millions of people were exterminated. The structure of the army embodied the structure of the pragmatic framework. Its functioning was reflective of industrial systems designed to process huge quant.i.ties of raw material in order to ma.s.s-manufacture products of uniform quality.

What made literate language use essential in work and market transactions made it essential, in forms appropriate to the goal, to the prosecution of the war. From this perspective, it should become clear why major efforts were made to understand this language. Efforts were also made to get information about tactics and strategy embodied in it, as much ahead of time as possible, and to use this literate knowledge to devise surprise or counter-strategies. This is why language became a main field of operation. Enemies went after military code (not a different language, but a means of maintaining secrecy) and did not spare money, intelligence, or human life in their efforts to understand how the opposing forces encoded their plans. The brightest minds were used, and strategies of deceit were developed and applied, because knowing the language of the enemy was almost like reading the enemy's mind.

At the risk of dealing with the obvious, I should state here clearly that the language of war is not the same as everyday language; but it originates in this language and is conceived and communicated in it. Both are structurally equivalent and embodied in literacy. To dispose of the enemy's use of language means to know what the enemy wants to do and how and when. In short, it means to be able to understand the pragmatics of the enemy as defined under the circ.u.mstances of war, as these extended the circ.u.mstances of life and work. Since language projects our time and s.p.a.ce experience, and since wars are related to our universe of existence, understanding the language of the enemy is actually integrated in the combat plan and in a society's general war effort. Climbing hills to establish a good offensive position, crossing rivers in a defensive move, parachuting troops behind enemy lines in a surprise maneuver are human experiences characteristic of the pragmatic context of literacy, impossible to relate to the goal pursued without the shared conventions implicit in language. Some people still believe that the master coup of World War II was the breaking of the ciphers of the Enigma machines used by the Germans, thus making the function of language, in such an effort of millions of people, the center of the war effort. Polish cryptoa.n.a.lysts and the British operation, in which Alan Turing (the father of modern computing) partic.i.p.ated, succeeded in deciphering, reconstructing, and translating messages that, re-enciphered in Allied codes (the ULTRA material), decisively aided the war effort.

By the end of the war, the world was already a different place.

But within the framework of war, and in direct connection to the changes in practical human self- const.i.tution, a structural shift to a different dynamics of life and work had started. Various aspects related to the determinism that eventually resulted in the war started to be questioned through new practical experiences: the need to overcome national interests; the need to transcend boundaries, those boundaries of hate and destruction expressed in the war; the need to share and exchange resources.

Visionaries also realized that the incremental increase in world population, despite the enormous number of deaths, would result in a new scale of human experiences that could not be handled within a rigid system with few degrees of liberty.

The recent illiterate war in the Arabian Gulf, and the never-ending terrorist attacks all over the world, can be seen, in retrospect, as the progeny of the war that brought down the civilization of literacy. The concept of Blitzkrieg and the dropping of the A-bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a foretaste of the quick, efficient, illiterate war.

The Nintendo war (a clich revisited)

Military all over the world disposes of the highest technology.

Even countries that can afford to maintain outmoded large armies-because of population density, relatively low salaries, and the ability to draft the entire population-seek the latest weapons that scientific discovery and technological progress can offer. The weapons market is probably the most pervasive of all markets. Among the numerous implications of this state of affairs, none is more disconcerting than the fact that human genius serves the cause of death and destruction. In some countries, food reserves barely cover needs beyond a season or two; but the military has supplies to cover years of engagement.

Today the military is in control of the most sophisticated technology ever created. It is also becoming an inst.i.tution of a rather low level of literacy, publicly deplored and politically questioned. This a.s.sertion applies less (but it still applies) to the command level, and more to its enlisted men and women.

Addressing the topic of language proficiency, Darell Bott provides an interesting portrait of a person who joins the military intelligence unit of the National Guard as a linguist.

After training in the Defense Language Inst.i.tute, the individual loses 25 percent of his language skills and fails to meet language proficiency standards. Every effort is made to change this situation, even before understanding it. Darell Bott's description does not refer to an accidental, individual failure, but to the implicit dynamics of military practical experiences in the civilization of illiteracy. A linguist, of all professionals, does not choose to lose literate language proficiency. This proficiency is just not necessary for attaining the efficiency called for in the military. Not really understanding this structural condition, armies introduce their recruits to weaponry-the majority designed for the illiterate warrior- and to the skills of reading and writing. These skills dispense ideology, religion, history, geography, psychology, and s.e.x education in concentrated doses. The situation is paradoxical: what defines the practical experience of the military today-high technology, division of tasks, networking, distributed responsibilities-conflicts with the traditional expectations of clear lines of command, hierarchy, authority, and discipline. The means that render useless the characteristics stemming from literacy-based pragmatics are welcome, but the human condition a.s.sociated with them is frightening.

Yes, a literate soldier can be better indoctrinated, subjected to the inherent arguments of literacy, of rules and authorities to be obeyed. But the nature of the pragmatics of war has changed: faster action makes reading-of instructions, commands, messages-inappropriate, if not dangerous. For focusing on targets moving at a speed far higher than that afforded by literacy-based training, one needs the mediation of the digital eye. Conflicts are as segmented as the world itself, since clear- cut distinctions between good and bad no longer function effectively. Centralized military experiences based on structures of authority and hierarchy are counterproductive in actual conflicts of complex dynamics.

The war in Vietnam is a good example of this. During this war, instructions were transmitted from the top of the hierarchy down to the platoons through commanders not adept at the type of war Vietnam represented. Even the President of the USA was effectively involved, more often than not through decisions that proved detrimental to the war effort. The USA forgot the lesson of its own pragmatic foundation in imitating, as it did in Vietnam, the literate wars of Europe in a context of confrontation characteristic of the civilization of illiteracy.

Memoirs, published too late (Robert MacNamara's is but one example), reveal how the literate paradigm embodied in the government and the military kept from the public essential information that, in retrospect, rendered the loss of so many human lives meaningless.

The luxury of a standing army and the cost of subjecting soldiers to long cycles of training, literacy included, belong to the previous pragmatic framework. The time of the life-long warrior is over. The experience of war changes as quickly as new weapons are invented. The new scale of humankind requires global levels of efficiency impossible to attain if productive forces are withdrawn from productive experiences. Once upon a time, the military distinguished itself as a separate body in the social texture. The civilization of illiteracy reintegrated the military in the network of a.s.signments and purposeful functions of the pragmatics of high efficiency. From the complete suit of armor worn in medieval Europe (before firearms rendered it ineffective) to the plain-clothes military of today, not only have over 500 years gone by, but, more important, new forms of self-const.i.tution, and hence identification, became necessary and real. Sulfur fumes used over 2,000 years ago in the battle at Delium and the threat of chemical and biological weapons in the Gulf War are superficially related. The same knowledge that goes into producing new chemical and biological means used in high efficiency agriculture and in food preparation goes into chemical and biological weapons of ma.s.s destruction.

This is not a discourse in favor of efficient armies which are of great help during natural disasters, nor is it a discourse in favor of destructive wars, no matter who justifies them. If it sounds like one, it is because the literate description of the structural background against which, whether we like it or not, the practical experience of the military takes place, bears the stamp of literate praxis. In the civilization of illiteracy, the military has come to acknowledge that there is little that can, or should, be done to restore literacy as its coordinating mechanism. Literacy is not necessarily the best system for achieving optimal military performance at the level facilitated by new technologies. Neither is it, as some would like to believe, a means of avoiding war. The literate human being proved to be a war beast equal, if not superior, to the illiterate who was subjected to impression and conscription, or who enlisted as a mercenary.

Current military research attempts to remove human beings from the direct confrontation that war used to entail. Nothing affects public support for military action more than body-bags.

These spoil the fun and games that expensive missiles provide, the reason for which the Gulf War was nicknamed "the Nintendo War." And missiles fare better among the Netizens, despite their reluctance to embrace belligerence for settling disputes. Highly efficient, sophisticated digitally programmed systems do not relate to s.p.a.ce and time the way humans do. This aspect gives the machines an edge in respect to the implicit coordination expected in war. The kinds of interaction that military praxis requires makes literacy inadequate for coordinating the humans who const.i.tute today's armies. Time is segmented beyond human perception and control; s.p.a.ce expands beyond what a person can conceive and control. Major components of a war machine are placed in outer s.p.a.ce and synchronized by extremely time-sensitive devices. The Strategic Defense Initiative (dubbed Star Wars) was the most advertised example. More trivial systems, like those used in orienting troops in the desert, are a matter of routine. The expressive power required for increasing motivation, and for projecting a rational image of irrationality, collides with the requirement for speed and precision essential to accomplishing complex tactical and strategic plans. Coordination of sophisticated information systems machines does not have to rely on a language frequently not precise enough, or fast enough, to accommodate very dynamic processes. At speeds beyond that of sound at which battles are fought with airplanes, rockets, satellites, and missiles, a soldier observing a target would be late in pressing a trigger, not to mention waiting for the command to fire.

The complexity of war machines is such that even their maintenance and repair requires means independent of the language that functions according to the rules of literacy. It should come as no surprise that the electronic book has already appeared in the military sphere of human experience. This book is the digitally stored description of a device, not the printed book that was once the manual describing it. If the device is an airplane, or gun system on the airplane, or equipment on a ship, the weight of manuals needed to explain its functioning, or to support maintenance and troubleshooting, would keep the airplane grounded. Any change in such a complex system would require reprinting of thousands of pages. In its electronic version, the book is a collection of data manipulated by a computer, displayed in visual form when necessary, and programmed to make recognition of the problem and its solution as simple as possible-idiot-proof, in fact. It is not a sequential collection of pages indexed in a table of contents and requiring a linear reading strategy. The electronic book opens to the appropriate page, and every page is generated only as necessary, according to the maintenance or repair requirements of the case. Obviously, the readers addressed by the electronic book are different from the literate. They are at least partially visual literates who know how to look at an image and follow pictographic prompts.

Instead of reading, the human operators carry out the required operation, supervised by the system, counting only on the feedback from the machine. Under these circ.u.mstances, efficiency expectations make the use of the human being almost a luxury. The paradigm of self-servicing machines, of circuits that can fix themselves (von Neumann's genius at work) is already a reality.

The electronic book-here presented in an application of military relevance, although there is more to it than that-is one example from the many that can be given regarding how our good old verbal literacy is becoming obsolete. Electronic books const.i.tuted over networks (wired or wireless) support a wide range of collaborative activities. By their nature, military experiences utilize such activities. Access to resources and to an unlimited array of possible interactions is essential to collaboration. Literate expression cannot fulfill these requirements. Digital formats used in electronic books serve as a medium for sharing and understanding goals. The subsumation of individuality to the goal is probably the only specifically military component that carries over from previous experiences of war. Nevertheless, this subsumation does not follow the patterns of centralism and the hierarchy of literacy. The methods are different in that more initiative than ever before is required from the soldiers. This initiative is embodied in alternate means of expression and communication.

In electronically synchronized instruments, programs of distributed tasks and ma.s.sive parallel computation replace literacy and literacy-based actions. Today's technology permits flying at low alt.i.tude and high speed, but limitations of the human biological system make this dangerous for the pilot. When reaching a certain speed, the human can no longer coordinate movements without which low alt.i.tude flying becomes suicidal.

But suicide is no alternative to avoiding enemy radar, since there are no words capable of alerting a pilot to the heat detector guided missile. Accordingly, languages addressing machines and vision systems with detection capabilities change the nature of human involvement in military situations. Again, these languages make the partic.i.p.ation of literate language less and less significant.

Literacy-based means cannot provide for the expected coordination. Mediation takes place among many distributed, loosely interconnected devices; efficiency increases due to the many resources integrated in such powerful and ubiquitous systems. I give these examples-rudimentary in comparison to the Nintendo war we watched on our television screens a few years ago-from the viewpoint of someone who believes in life, peace, and human understanding, but also as one who sees a progressive discarding of literacy from one of the most language-dependent forms of human interaction and coordination. As with everything liberated from language and literacy, military practice was dehumanized. This consequence is likely to be welcomed in its more general significance-let machines kill machines. Just as in factories and offices, the human being is replaced by programs endowed with knowledge mediated by something other than literacy. What changes the structure of military activity, and language's partic.i.p.ation in it, are the new languages embodied in the technology. That computer-game simulations of flight or target-shooting are basically equivalent to the systems of precision and destruction used in the Gulf War need not be repeated. But that players of computer games grow up with skills expected from jet pilots and from operators of extremely productive technology deserves attention and thought.

Do weapons speak and write and read? Do they understand the language of the officer who decides when they are to be fired?

Is an intelligent weapon system capable of interpreting whether a legitimate target should indeed be wiped out, even if at the time of its use, circ.u.mstances would speak against destroying it on moral grounds? I ask these questions-which can only be answered with a "No"-on purpose. The literate att.i.tude, according to which military praxis is one of command and execution requiring language, presents us with a contradiction.

Non-military practical experience is more and more mediated by many languages and synchronized in a vast network of distributed a.s.signments. If military experiences were to remain literacy-based, this would be equal to maintaining different pragmatic structures and pursuing goals of disparate efficiency. It is true that the literacy still involved in the military is reflected in structures of hierarchy, a relative expectation of centralism (in the USA, as in many other countries, the President is the commander-in-chief), and dependency on deterministic models. Nevertheless, the expectation of efficiency makes critical the need to adopt essentially non-hierarchic, self-management structures promoting coordination and cooperative efforts within a distributed network of different a.s.signments. In the partial literacy of the military, a redefinition of the process of goal- setting and the pursuit of a.s.signments other than destruction, such as relocation of refugees or aiding vast populations subjected to natural disasters, continuously takes place. Security is another area of self-const.i.tution that derives benefits from military praxis.

The smaller and more distributed wars through which terrorism seeks to accomplish its goals have resulted in small armies of highly trained security personnel to protect the civilian public. Combat is truly global. But as opposed to the small war of the Middle Ages, the illiterate terrorist respects no rules and no higher authority.

No army could have changed the world more than the new system of human relations geared toward achieving levels of efficiency corresponding to numbers of people in pursuit of satisfying their needs, and of others achieving levels of prosperity never before experienced. Armies, as much as schools and universities, as much as the nations they are supposed to defend, as much as the nuclear family, and all the activities related to them and all the products they generate, correspond to the structure of praxis of a loosely connected world with patterns of human practical experiences marked by individual success and dependent on personal performance.

The look that kills

Smaller, more deployable, as efficient as possible-this description sums up the characteristics of new weapons on the wish-list of almost any army in the world. On a more specific basis, defense officials have sketched some research and development objectives. Here are some, obviously all subject to obsolescence:

Worldwide all-weather forces for limited warfare, which do not require main operating bases, including a force that is logistically independent for 30 days

Tracking of strategically relocatable targets

Global command control, communications, and intelligence (C3I) capabilities to include on-demand surveillance of selected geographical areas and real-time information transfer to command authorities

Weapon systems that deny enemy targeting and allow penetration of enemy defenses by managing signatures and electronic warfare

Air defense systems to overmatch threat systems

Weapons that autonomously acquire, cla.s.sify, track, and destroy targets

Reduction of operations and support resources requirement by 50% without impairing combat capability

Expected are a force powered by electricity (ecological concerns), robotic tanks and aerial vehicles, and-this is not science fiction-bionically enhanced soldiers with embedded chips, able to sleep when commanded, and an exoskeleton system allowing individuals to carry 400 pounds around the battlefield (compared to the mere 100 they carry now). General Jerry C.

Harrison even formulated the following order: "Okay guys, let's shoot number 49. Tune in your goggles to see but not be seen."

The look that kills (the proud accomplishment of university-based research) becomes reality.

The only comment that can follow such a description is that all the characteristics of the civilization of illiteracy are embodied in the expectations of military efficiency. Globality, interconnectedness, open-ended goals and motivations, reduced human involvement, and many partial literacies are all here, presented in specific expectations. The questionable aspect is the implicit theme of the permanence of the inst.i.tution of the military, probably the most resilient legacy of the civilization of literacy. What the technology of the civilization of illiteracy requires is the command of the abstractions (the language) driving it, the partial literacy a.s.sociated with this language, pertinent to military or any other use. As one of the partial literacies of this time, military literacy defines the domain of action and the interpretation of such actions. It is relevant, for instance, that disarmament treaties not be formulated without military language, i.e., without the military experts, the ones we want to release from their functions. Each such treaty either discards a part of the language of weapons and a.s.sociated technologies, or makes it less relevant, as it opens new avenues for increased military efficiency.

The new organization of the military is one of confronting technologies and a.s.sociated military literacy. Accordingly, to talk about orders given by an officer, whether a weapon understands such orders, and all similar logocentric examples, means to still look at the military from the perspective of a civilization from which it continuously distances itself.

Artificial eyes (radar, vision systems), odor detectors, touch-sensitive devices, speed sensors, and many other digital devices free the human being from confrontation and progressively eliminate death from the equation of war. Those who compare the photographic images of previous wars to animation on computer game terminals compare a condition of direct confrontation, of our own nature, and of the realization of the limited condition of life to that of mediated experiences. The night sky lit up by tracers, the eerie video-game-like actions, the targets seen through remote cameras are of a realm different from that of destruction and blood, where moral concern is triggered. The expectation is pragmatic, the test is efficiency.

The survival of the military inst.i.tution in its literate structure and the lack of understanding of just what makes literacy unnecessary in the pragmatic framework of today's global world are not the same thing. The first aspect refers to the immense inertia of a huge mechanism; the second involves the difficult task of freeing ourselves, as products of literate education, from ourselves. Recognition of such a fundamental change does not come easy. Universities, bastions of literacy, producing the illiterate technology of war, are caught in the dilemma of negating their own ident.i.ty, or becoming agents of illiterate action. We hang on to the ideal of literacy, as well as to the so-called necessity of strong defense-which reflects literacy-based values such as national borders in a global world-because we are not yet ready to cope with a new dynamics of change that is not militarily determined, but which results from structural necessities of a socio-economic nature. The political map of the world changed drastically in recent years because factors affecting the pragmatic framework of human practical experience, at the scale we reached today, are at work.