Civilisations indeed need goals. I doubt anyone sensibly would
disagree with that per se, yet within recent historical memory those goals
typically have not gone beyond increased consumption (however broadly
defined) and liberation of the individual to pursue purely personal aims
upon which the larger society must remain agnostic. Such a mentality--
which throughout most of human history most assuredly would have been
judged a pathological negation of the social--pervades even mainstream
Marxist thought. Marx himself--as much as one can glean since he almost
never wrote directly about Communism--remained quite vague about the
eventual moral flavouring of "hunting in the morning, fishing in the
afternoon, etc." Such a murky vision gives rise to two critiques.
First, it confuses means and ends by suggesting that technological
advancement and universal prosperity will create unprecedented freedom to
create the social anew, without indicating what the larger guiding values
of that creation are to be. In other words, what is the point of
mercilessly clearing out "the old curiosity shop" when one attaches little
importance to what new wares will occupy the refinished space?
Second and more central to my argument, however, is that it
perpetuates the mercantile subjectivism that put us in our present
historical pickle in the first place. It seems distressingly obvious that
the "progressive" position on individual liberation could only emerge
from liberal capitalist notions of consumer sovereignty, moral relativism,
freedom from public moral projects, negation of the social anchor, etc.
that have become so widely accepted that even would-be revolutionaries
fail to identify them with a particular social system. Even such
otherwise wholly admirable thinkers as Karl Polanyi succumb to this
baggage when they throw around phrases such as "unprecedented freedom" to
describe the future utopia.
I fail to see how anyone can profess to be "antisystemic" when
their ideological position represents an evolution, a refinement with the
harsh competitive edges softened, of precisely the abhorrent social system
they wish to overthrow, rather than a synthesis based on as broad a view
as possible of how that social system contrasts with all other
alternatives. I am not arguing a bandwaggon theory of history--that all
previous civilisations have been different, so the present one is
necessarily wrong--but I consider that the historical record does give
rise to a burden of proof that very few "radicals" are treating with
corresponding seriousness.
Is my less than condemning view of "fundamentalisms" as "chilling"
as suggested? I have heard much more vitriolic adjectives, although not
that exact one until now. I have two levels of response. First, I do not
quite have the Taliban, the Hindu-nationalist mosque-burners, or the North
American fringe in mind (no movement of that sort strikes me as
particularly thoughtful or universalisable), more something along the
lines of Shariati, Mariategui, Gandhi, Nyerere, etc. (although each has
shortcomings). I would use the word "moderate," but that has too much
baggage; half the time it means writers such as An-Naim who bastardise a
philosophical system not from any great effort at critical insight but in
order to render it palatable according to a hegemonic yardstick. Of
course any tradition is in need of reinterpretation to distinguish its
underlying principles from the ways in which those principles were
expressed under previous social formations, and to contribute to a new
synthesis of global revolutionary relevance. Khomeini has little to say to
Aymara-speaking peasants near Lake Titicaca, or to pork-eating shantytown
dwellers in Chongqing; Shariati might. And every civilisation has multiple
socially rooted philosophical currents engaged in timeless clashes with
one another. I submit that one can match up the best corresponding
currents across civilisations as part of the synthesising process.
"Tradition" is never simply a vague "harmony," but different types of
harmony, different models of individual excellence, different types of
solidarity, giving us many options and many hard choices to confront.
Such choices go well beyond the "optimising" that is all that is demanded
of technocrats in the present unimaginative epoch. The notion that
constructing an alternative social order is ever an easy task with
unchallenged assumptions to guide it would receive well-deserved guffaws
from the historical pantheon.
My second level of response: what exactly is "chilling," and why
does this "slippery slope" strike such terror in the hearts of sensible
people? In other words, such apprehension demands an explicit
justification in terms of "progressive" ultimate values, as well as an
explication of how "progressive" ultimate values genuinely differ from the
hegemonic ones. Any value system has a slippery slope, and the slope of
individual liberation seems at least as well greased as any other--and
filthier at the bottom by present indications. One has every right to
condemn the Taliban if one sees fit, but at least do it as if one is
trying to reason with people who do not buy into every assumption
regarding humanity's inevitable march to the glorious anomic end-state.
The most interesting critique of particular distasteful "traditional"
practices, in my view, is to take the ultimate values they purport to
uphold and examine whether in fact there is a necessary and sensible
means-ends rationality. It may not occur to either "progressives" or
"reactionaries" that the historic "sages" of any given social system might
very well recognise the suitability of adaptations to modernity--not
because modernity abhors principle and thus requires "pragmatism" (a
horrible word and the slipperiest of all slopes), but because it opens up
opportunities for a fuller and more direct realisation of the timeless
ideals that they did their best to express under the constraining
conditions of their era.
Lastly, I want to respond to the suggestion about
"neo-corporatism." That model, to put it bluntly, is all structure and no
content. No doubt the orthodox Marxists on the list would condemn me for
being insufficiently structural, but that is another matter. While I have
a high opinion of Wiarda's scholarship on Latin America, somehow I have
reservations about putting the WTO and the administrative organs of
Swedish social democracy in quite the same category as the "corporatist"
units of a mediaeval township. The former is a structure by which anomic
individual units relate to each other for purely functional purposes; the
latter is a collective identity that becomes a dimension of its members'
being. One is a mode of interest representation and has no organic
intensity whatsoever, the other a set of principles that inform modes of
interest representation. No institution is ever, in itself, a philosophy.
Means and ends, means and ends....
Regards,
--AKW
===============================================================================
Adam K. Webb
Department of Politics
Princeton University
Princeton NJ 08544 USA
609-258-9028
http://www.princeton.edu/~akwebb