LEON BOTSTEIN
405
the tradition of the originators of science and learning, of the idealists
of
Wissenschaft,
but the tradition of the
epigones,
the bureaucrats of
ideas and intellectual skills who dominate the modern professoriate.
It
is ironic that the new model of literacy as functional technique
is found among our most highly educated. The sense of language use
implied by the word literacy as understood by the perhaps romantic
elite social reformers of the nineteenth century or by the revolutionaries
of Russia and China has vanished.
In
earlier days, people "without
grammar" or "wi thou t alphabet" (as foreign words for illiteracy
denote) were somehow humanly incomplete. They were deprived of an
instrument of progress.
Despite our twentieth-century potential for psychological domina–
tion and the recent history of moral camouflage through the manipula–
tion of bureaucratic language evident in Nazi Germany, mass literacy
must remain a social goal because of its potential role in the acquisi –
tion and maintenance of freedom. True literacy may still be the major
social obstacle to LOtal political domination. This possibility helps
continue to make illiteracy synonymous with underdevelopment and
backwardness. Yet, in the most developed nation, in America, the least
backward in the terms of economic development, precisely the patterns
of economic development, the techniques of rational modern progress,
have overpowered the ear lier romantic ideal of literacy. The new
emergent literacy is, from the vantage point of those who define
literacy in the old way, a prime instrument of subjugation, of passivity,
of domination and spiritual ens lavement. Literacy has been turned on
its head, so to speak, as a political and social objective. Literacy has lost
its independent humanistic role. Not only is our world dominated by
impersonal, faceless, and obedient bureaucracies and centralized and
impenetrable private and public institutions, our careers defined more
and more along narrow substantive and institutional lines; but now
our speech and writing, our grammar of expression, our words and
therefore our thoughts have become the final victims of standardized
function. The changing role of language reflects the triumph of the
bureaucratic compartmentalizing of our lives in the name of profes–
sionalism, the demise of human individuality on a large scale, and,
last, the admission of personal powerlessness and insignificance.
It can be argued that the facts and implications of modern life are
so terrifyingly complex that in order to survive the individual must
resort to a protective, superficial, but functional means of expression.
To accept this rationalization for the changing nature of literacy is to
give up on the belief that language and discourse are essential for any
continuity of the traditional personal and political values of the West.
