Regarding the article by Wagar and symposium of commentary
published as Article 2, comments and reponse In JWSR, Volume 2,
Number 2, 1996,
http://csf.colorado.edu/wsystems/jwsr.html
ISSN 1076-156X
In "TOWARD A PRAXIS OF WORLD INTEGRATION", W. Warren Wagar writes
(quoted text pp.1-3 [electronic page markers embedded in quoted
text]):
________________________________________________________________
>
> The theme of the 90th annual meeting of the American
> Sociological Association is "Community of Communities:
> Shaping Our Future." The program asks three leading
> questions: must the plurality of communities now
> identifying themselves throughout the world "along ethnic,
> racial, gender, religious, and other lines...be blended away
> to ensure civility? Or, can we have a society of vying
> tribes without shared bonds and values? Or can there be a
> shared framework in which many colorful elements find a new
> place...[in] a community of communities?"
>_______________________________________________________________
Wagar will claim to be presenting a fourth question, but he is
really going to answer (1): the plurality of communities now
identifying themselves throughout the world along ethnic (etc...)
lines must be blended away to ensure civility. So if these were
leading questions in the sense of framing to bias preferences
toward (3), it didn't work on W. Warren Wagar.
But to be fair, these questions are leading questions in one
way or another, and they lead toward selecting (3), and W. Warren
Wagar does not want to select (3), as one wouldn't if one wants to
answer (1). So he criticizes the questions by parable:
________________________________________________________________
>
> The authors of the program might just as well have
> asked--transferring these questions to the realm of [Page
> 1] domestic relations--whether husband and wife should fuse
> into some kind of fabulous androgynous quadruped, go their
> separate ways, or form an interdependent partnership
> respecting the rights and values of each.
>_______________________________________________________________
Now the analogy is fairly loose. The first option, the one
that W. Warren Wagar is going to adopt below, is turned into a
fantastic absurdity in the analogy, which diverts attention from
the fact that he will select it -- in its original form, of
course, and not in the form of the fantastic analogy. The second
is quite obviously *not* a society of vying tribes without shared
bonds and values. If the tribes *could* go their seperate ways,
there wouldn't be nearly the problem of the tribes *vying*. In
fact, I have seen that as a stronger assertion:
More than five millenia ago, when the tribes *could* go their
seperate ways, they *did* go their seperate ways rather than
have to deal with the problem of power. Civilization happened
because we ran out of unoccupited, prime real estate.
And the third alternative that is posed is dispensed with by
pretending that it is utopic. Real communities exist. Real
communities do not rely exclusively on "mutual respect for the
rights and values of each". They rely as well on institutions,
rules regarding approved, permitted, and proscribed behavior, and
rewards and sanctions enforcing the rules. And therefore, unless
the term is explicitly redefined, we can presume that a community
of communities will also have to rely on institutions, rules
regarding approved, permitted, and proscribed behavior, and
rewards and sanctions enforcing the rules. So in transforming the
third alternative into a utopian fantasy, W. Warren Wagar evades
addressing it as it was posed, and replaces it with an alternative
that is much easier to dismiss.
________________________________________________________________
>
> ... Obviously these
> are not serious questions. No attempt is made to
> problematize the issues at stake. The authors offer only
> one "right" answer, the third path of partnership, of
> mutualist multiculturalism, a future in which radical
> feminism, fundamentalist Islam, populist libertarianism,
> militant Hinduism, Marxian socialism, born-again
> Christianity, megacorporate capitalism, Bosnian nationalism,
> Serbian nationalism, and all the other colliding forces at
> work in our whirling world somehow lie down together like
> lions and lambs in the New Jerusalem and agree to eat grass,
> or better yet, develop the capacity to feed themselves by
> photosynthesis. It is a profoundly "nice" answer. It is
> also profoundly wrong, at least for the 1990s.
>_______________________________________________________________
And so the parable was only paving the way for recasting the
"community of communities" alternative explicitly as a utopian
fanatasy. It may well be that case that some proponents of the
third alternative engage in sloppy thinking about it. It would
not, in fact, be surprising if many proponents for each of the
three alternatives presented engage in sloppy thinking about their
favored alternatives. However, in casting the third alternative
in the terms presented, only poorly thought through versions of
the third alternative have been addressed. It should be obvious
that a wishful-thinking community of wishful-thinking communities
is not a serious alternative, and W. Warren Wagar's argument here
lies on that obvious observation. However, since it is clearly an
unfair reading of the third alternative, the possibility of a
real-world community of real-world communities is not addressed by
the argument.
________________________________________________________________
>
> My own answer is to ask a fourth (and also leading)
> question. "Should our society of vying tribes be
> transformed into a single planetary civilization that
> strives to make all people equal and free?" In other words,
> should our system of predatory global capitalism flourishing
> in a political environment of competing sovereign states be
> replaced by a democratic, liberal, and socialist world
> commonwealth?
>_______________________________________________________________
And it is at this point that I would be prepared to argue that
W. Warren Wagar has simply decided to select alternative 1,
masking that fact by at the same time specifying some of the
content that he wishes to impose on the uniform civilization. But
I don't have to argue this, since W. Warren Wagar admits it in the
nvery next paragraph:
________________________________________________________________
>
> If you say yes, please note that you are not giving a
> multiculturalist response. Your response implies, and
> indeed requires, the acceptance by the great mass of
> humankind of a common secular culture derived from the
> intellectual revolution of the late 17th and 18th centuries
> in Western Europe--from the Enlightenment and its sequels in
> the 19th century. That common secular culture obviously has
> roots deep in human history, but it happened to flower first
> in one [Page 2] place and at one time. For many of the
> same reasons, having nothing to do with race or gender,
> Western Europe was also the cradle of the capitalist world-
> economy. Because of the place and the time, those who
> articulated the culture of the Enlightenment and its
> sequels, from John Locke to Karl Marx, were almost entirely
> Caucasian males. Is this a problem? No doubt. But it is
> not a problem that will go away by chanting multiculturalist
> mantras.
>_______________________________________________________________
Again, defending the position he is proposing by posing a
sloppy version of an opposition position, and then pointing out
the weakness of that version of that position.
Well, I don't buy it. The Enlightenment secular culture is
particularly important as a progressive force because it is a
tradition of more or less progressive thought from within the
societies that had the means to impose their nasty old capitalist
system[1] best guns and armies and ships. If the enlightenment
had happened in Europe while the cradle of the capitalist world
with the means to impose it on the rest of the world had been in
East Asia, or East Africa, or South Asia, or Central America, it
would have been the progressive tradition within the dominant
culture that would have been important, except perhaps for some
radical independence movements in Europe that drew on the
enlightenment to show that Europeans had an indigenous progressive
tradition.
But that's not the most serious reason not to buy it. The
serious reason not to buy it is that the solution proposed is so
predictably the same old solutions magnified for the world stage.
Form a political party, pursue a twin-track progressive front and
underground subversion strategy, and grab the reigns of power.
Habits of thought that lead along these lines is part of the
problem, and so applying them on a world scale is the solution.
The most constructive use I see for W. Warren Wagar's argument
is as a challenge to elaborate the praxis of developing a
community of commuities, as opposed to both alternative 1, the
authoritarian solution W. Warren Wagar proposes to work toward
(and an authoritarian solution will be the only way to impose a
'democratic world commonwealth' national government on a
world-wide level), and alternative 2, the vying tribes, as we've
seen for the last five millenium.
Virtually,
Bruce R. McFarling, Newcastle, NSW
ecbm@cc.newcastle.edu.au
[1] Yeah, this part is a bit tongue in cheek. Figuring out how
much is left as an exercise for the reader. 8-)#