commonplace conveniences represent total changes in culture.

     The Russians, less permeated with the patterns of literate 
culture than Americans, have much less difficulty in perceiving 
and accommodating the Asiatic attitudes. For the West, 
literacy has long been pipes and taps and streets and assembly 
lines and inventories. Perhaps most potent of all as an 
expression of literacy is our system of uniform pricing that 
penetrates distant markets and speeds the turn-over of 
commodities. Even our ideas of cause and effect in the literate 
West have long been in the form of things in sequence and 
succession, an idea that strikes any tribal or auditory culture 
as quite ridiculous, and one that has lost its prime place in our 
own new physics and biology.

     All the alphabets in use in the Western world, from that of