But free expression reaches nobody, has little weight in the real world of authorship and the circulation of ideas, if not written or read. If slavery is the lack of choice, then illiteracy enslaves. Everyone has the right to have access to adequate housing. Bonds, leases, bank loans, housing subsidy forms the entire apparatus of conveyancing and of low cost housing all this is a world of words in which the illiterate must depend upon others who can read. Everyone has the right to freedom of movement.
Every citizen is free to make political choices.
But you rely on gossip and hearsay if you cannot read the newspapers yourself and critically. This is why, from the first Emperor of China, who sought to destroy all records of the Chinese civilisations before his own, to Hitler and apartheid censorship in our own century let alone the sacking of Rome and the burning of the library at Alexandria tyrants everywhere have warred against the written word. Hitler fancied himself an artist, and Martin Heidegger was a great philosopher and yet a Nazi fellow traveller, whilst Verwoerd was a Professor of Sociology. So it cannot merely be that art, that literature, that writing are edifying in and of themselves or that evil and illiteracy are one. If that were so, democracy itself, in a context of mass illiteracy like ours, would fall into question.