IN PRAISE OF ILLITERACY - Big Foot Union High School

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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 wellinformed;
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 socalled
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.