Literacy and its discontents

I turned the radio on yesterday and caught a snippet of someone speaking on Democracy Now. I'm not a fan of this program since it generally seems utterly paranoid, but this caught my attention and I was able to find out from their site today that the speaker was Buckminster Fuller. He said, "When humanity is primarily illiterate, it needs leaders to understand and get the information and deal with it. When we are at the point where the majority of humans themselves are literate, able to get the information, we’re in an entirely new relationship to universe. We’re at the point where the integrity of the individual counts and not what the political leadership or the religious leadership says to do. It’s a matter now of humanity getting to the point where it’s now qualifying to make some of its own decisions in relation to its own information. That’s why we’ve come to a new moment of integrity." This awareness of the importance of literacy clicks with the issues I've been struggling regarding Episcopalians' approach to Scripture and authority, as well as the current presidential campaigns. What do we really want in a leader? I have probably noted before that St. Jonah's is conflicted to the marrow about this. We desperately want it both ways. We really want a leader who supports and affirms what we already think and feel, and maybe pushes us just a teensy bit further in that direction (and pushes those who aren't there a whole lot further in that direction). Which is why I think more and more that the very idea of a congregation choosing its own pastor is ill-founded and we should return to the idea of the hierarchy appointing people (I hear even the Methodists do this). But why, I ask myself, am I so ready to believe a hierarchy, a magisterium, is going to be more capable than we are? Aren't I just longing for pre-literacy days when us folks just had to listen to authority with humility and obedience? Isn't it natural that those two virtues would fade away now that we are all empowered to read and learn? And yet, and yet, this is no longer really the era of literacy that Fuller heralded. It is the post-literate era. No, that doesn't mean that fewer people can process letters and words in a textual form, and it doesn't just mean that fewer people choose to do so, particularly outside of the internet. It means that we now realize that each and every one of us derives a different meaning from those letters and words, and even one person derives a different meaning at different times. Yes, big revelation: that's the message of Derrida et al. and has been subsumed into the general postmodernist view, and all I'm really doing here is calling it the postliterate reality, because I think that is a more accurate term (and calling anything an accurate term in this context is, I suppose, an exercise in futility). Yet, it sheds a ray of light that reveals things are not really so different after all from the pre-literate era. Maybe now, more than ever, we need a magisterium.