Orient. The ultimate conflict between sight and sound, between 
written and oral kinds of perception and organization of 
existence is upon us. Since understanding stops action, as 
Nietzsche observed, we can moderate the fierceness of this 
conflict by understanding the media that extend us and raise 
these wars within and without us.

     Detribalization by literacy and its traumatic effects on 
tribal man is the theme of a book by the psychiatrist J. C. 
Carothers, The African Mind in Health and Disease  (World 
Health Organization, Geneva, 1953). Much of his material 
appeared in an article in Psychiatry  magazine, November, 
1959: “The Culture, Psychiatry, and the Written Word.” Again, 
it is electric speed that has revealed the lines of force operating 
from Western technology in the remotest areas of bush, 
savanna, and desert. One example is the Bedouin with his