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06627_Field_TCUM T192.txt
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1996-04-10
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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