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Nadin, Mihai, 1938-

"The Civilization of Illiteracy"

But in order to succeed,
several conditions need to be met. For instance, we have not yet
developed in appropriate practical experiences of human self-
constitution the ability to think in media other than natural
language. Like many beginners in a new language, people still
translate from one language to another. When this does not work,
they look for help in the language they know, instead of
formulating questions in the alternative language in which they
suspect they can be answered. After intuition was eliminated by
rationality and system, only minor effort is made towards
understanding how intuition comes about, whether in mathematics,
medicine, sports, the arts, market transactions, war skills,
food preparation, and social activities.
In the civilization of literacy, people were, and to a great
extent still are, able to ignore some forms of human
relationships without affecting the general outcome of human
practice. Within the new scale and dynamics, human civilization
relies on the interplay of more elements. The timing involved in
integrating this diversity is much more difficult to accomplish
through literacy-based methods, even though timing is critical
to the outcome. Literacy captures the rough and linear level of
relations. New practical experiences of higher efficiency
require finer levels and tools adequate to non- linear phenomena
for dealing with the parallel processes involved in the self-
constitution of individuals and of society.


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