as “governed and conceived on highly social lines.” For nothing 
can exceed the automatism and rigidity of an oral, nonliterate 
community in its non-personal collectivity. As Western literate 
communities encounter the various “primitive” or auditory 
communities still remaining in the world, great confusion 
occurs. Areas like China and India are still audile-tactile in the 
main. Such phonetic literacy as has penetrated there has 
altered very little. Even Russia is still profoundly oral in bias. 
Only gradually does literacy alter substructures of language 
and sensibility.

     Alexander Inkeles in his book on Public Opinion in Russia  
(p. 137) gives a useful account of how the ordinary and 
unconscious bias, even of the Russian literate groups, has a 
direction quite counter to anything a long-literate community 
would consider “natural.” The Russian attitude, like that of any