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IN PRAISE OF ILLITERACY by Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Can we dispense with the written word? That is the question. Anyone who

poses it will have to speak about illiteracy. There’s just one problem: the

illiterate is never around when he is the subject of conversation. He simply

doesn’t show up; he takes no notice of our assertions; he remains silent. I

would therefore like to take up his defense.

Every third inhabitant of our planet manages to get by without the art of

reading and without the art of writing. This includes roughly 900 million

people, and their numbers will certainly increase. The figure is impressive

but misleading for Humanity comprises not only the living and the unborn

but the dead as well. If they are not forgotten, then the conclusion

becomes inevitable that literacy is the exception rather than the rule.

It could occur only to us, that is, to a tiny minority of people who read and

write, to think of those who don’t as a tiny minority. This notion betrays an

ignorance I find insupportable.

I envy the illiterate his memory, his capacity for concentration, his

cunning, his inventiveness, his tenacity, his sensitive ear. Please don’t

imagine that I am speaking not about romantic phantoms but about

people I have met. I am far from idealizing them. I also see their narrow

horizons, their illusions, their obstinacy, their quaintness.

You may ask how it comes about that a writer should take the side of

those who cannot read. But it’s obvious: it was illiterates who invented

literature. Its elementary forms—from myth to children’s verse, from fairy

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tale to song, from prayer to riddle—all are older than writing. Without oral

tradition, there would be no poetry; without illiterates, no books.

"But" you will object, "what about the Enlightenment?" No need to tell me!

Social distress rests not only on the ruler’s material advantages but on

immaterial privilege as well. It was the great intellectuals of the eighteenth

century who discerned this state of affairs. The people had not come of

age, they thought, not only because of political oppression and

economic exploitation but also because of their lack of knowledge. From

these premises, later generations drew the conclusion that the ability to

read and write belongs to any existence fit for a human being.

However, this suggestive idea underwent a succession of noteworthy

reinterpretations in the course of time. In the twinkling of an eye the

concept of enlightenment was replaced by the concept of education. "In

terms of the education of the populace," according to Ignaz Heinrich von

Wessenbergm, a German schoolmaster in Napoleon’s time, "the second

half of the eighteenth century marks a new epoch. The knowledge of

what was accomplished in this regard is joyous news to any friend of

mankind, encouraging to the priests of culture, and highly instructive for

the leaders of the commonwealth."

As far as the project of literacy goes, we’ve made great strides. Here, it

seems, the philanthropists, the priests of culture, and the leaders of the

commonwealth have scored triumphantly. By 1880, the illiteracy rate in

Germany had fallen below one percent. The rest of the world has also

made enormous progress since UNESCO raised its flag in the fight against

illiteracy in 1951. In short: Light has conquered darkness.

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Our joy over the triumph has certain limits. The news is too good to be true.

The people did not learn to read and write because they felt like it, but

because they were forced to do so. Their emancipation was controlled by

disenfranchisement. From then on learning went hand in hand with the

state and its agencies: the schools, the army, the legal administration. The

goal pursued in making the populace literate had nothing to do with

enlightenment. The friends of mankind and the priests of culture, who

stood up for the people, were merely the henchmen of a capitalist

industry that pressed the state to provide it with a qualified workforce. It

was not a matter of paving the way for the "writing culture", Let alone

liberating mankind from its shackles. Quite a different kind of progress was

in question. IT consisted in taming the illiterates, this "lowest class of men,"

in stamping out their will and their fantasy, and in exploiting not only their

muscle power and skill in handiwork, but their brains as well.

For the unlettered human to be done away with, he had first to be

defined, tracked down, and unmasked. The concept of illiteracy is not

very old. Its invention can be dated with some precision. The word

appeared for the first time in a French publication in 1876 and quickly

spread all over Europe. At about the same time, Edison invented the light

bulb and the phonograph, Bell the telephone, and Otto the gasoline

motor. The connection is clear.

Furthermore, the triumph of popular education in Europe coincides with

the maximum development of colonialism. And this is no accident. In the

dictionaries of the period we can find the assertion that the number of

illiterates "as compared with the total population of a country is a

measure of the people’s cultural condition." And they do not fail to

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instruct us that "men stand on a level higher, on the average, than

women.”

This is not a matter of statistics, but a process of discrimination and

stigmatization. Behind the figure of the illiterate we can discern Hitler’s

concept of der Untermensch, the subhuman who must be eliminated. A

small, radical minority has reserved civilization for itself and now

discriminates against all those who will not dance to its tune.

Today we find that the illiteracy we smoked out has returned. A new figure

has conquered the social stage. This new species is the second-order

illiterate. He has come a long way: his loss of memory causes him no

suffering; his lack of will makes life easy for him; he values his inability to

concentrate; he considers it an advantage that he neither knows nor

understands what is happening to him. He is mobile. He is adaptive. He

has a talent for getting things done. We need have no worries about him.

It contributes to the second-order illiterate’s sense of well-being that he

has no idea that he is a second-order illiterate. He considers himself well-

informed; he can decipher instruction s on appliances and tools; he can

decode pictograms and checks. And he moves within an environment

hermetically sealed against anything that might infect his consciousness.

That he might come to grief in this environment is unthinkable. After all, it

produced and educated him in order to guarantee its undisturbed

continuation.

The second order illiterate is the product of a new phase of

industrialization. An economy whose problem is no longer production but

markets has no need of a disciplined reserve of an army of workers. The

rigid training to which they were subjected also becomes redundant, and

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literacy becomes a fetter to be done away with. Simultaneous with the

development of this problem, our technology has also developed an

adequate solution. The ideal medium for the second-order illiterate is

television.

The educational policy of the state will have to align itself with the new

priorities. By reducing the library budget, a first step has already been

taken. And innovations are to be seen in school administration as well.

You can go to school now for eight years without learning German, and

even in the universities this German dialect is gradually acquiring the

status of a poorly mastered foreign language.

Please do not suppose that I would want to polemicize against a situation

of whose inevitability I am fully aware. I desire only to portray and, as far

as I can, explain it. It would be foolish to contest the second-order

illiterate’s raison d etre, and I am far from begrudging him on the

pleasures or his place in the sun.

On the other hand, it is safe to say that the project of the Enlightenment

has failed: the slogan "Culture for Everyone" begins to sound comical. And

a classless culture is even further from view. On the contrary: we can look

forward to a situation in which cultural castes will become more and more

distinct. But these castes can no longer be described by using the

traditional Marxist model, according to which the ruling culture is the

culture of the rulers. Indeed the divergence between economic position

and consciousness will continue to grow.

It will become the new rule to see second-order illiterates occupying the

top positions in politics and in business. In this connection, it is sufficient to

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indicate the current president of the United States and the current

chancellor of the Federal Republic. On the other hand, you can easily

find whole hordes of cabdrivers, newspaper hawkers, manual laborers,

and welfare recipients whose thoughtfulness, cultural standards, and

wide-ranging knowledge should have taken them far in any other society.

But this kind of comparison falls short of portraying the true state of affairs,

which admits of no clear analysis. For even among the unemployed you

can find zombies; even in the presidential office there are people who

can read and write and even think productively. But this also means that

in questions of culture social determinism has become obsolete. The so-

called privileges of education have lost their fearfulness. If both parents

are second-order illiterates, even the wellborn child has no advantage

over the worker’s son. One’s cultural cast will henceforth depend on

personal choice, not origin.

For all this I conclude that culture in our country has come to an entirely

new situation. As for the perennial claim that culture provides a common

denominator for all people—that we can simply forget. The rulers, mostly

second-order illiterates, have lost all interest in it. As a result, culture

cannot, and need not any longer, serve the interests of a ruling class. It no

longer legitimates the social order. It has become useless—but there is a

kind of freedom in that. Such a culture is thrown back on its own resources

and the sooner it realizes this, the better.

Where does all that leave the writer? For some time now it has not been a

class privilege—or requirement to be concerned with literature. The

victory of the second-order illiterate can only radicalize literature. When it

has lost its value as a status symbol, as a social code, as an educational

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program, then literature will be noticed only by those who can’t do

without it.

Whoever wants to can bemoan all this. I have no such desire. Weeds

have always been a minority, and every city gardener knows how hard it

is to do away with them. Literature will continue to thrive as long as it

commands a certain agility, a certain cunning, a capacity for

concentration and a good memory. As you recall, these are the features

of the true illiterate. Perhaps he will have the last word, since he requires

no other media than a voice and an ear.