The Culture of citizenship: Postmodern civic culture

Abstract

KISA ÖZET ŞERİF YILDIZ ŞUBAT 2002 YURTAŞLIĞIN KÜLTÜRÜ: POSTMODERN CİVİL KÜLTÜR Avrupa ve Amerika'nın global hegomonyasını sürdürdüğü dönemde, ekonomik ve politik güçlerinin kültürel aracı Aydınlama nın evrensel ve seküler dünya görüşünü idi. Bu dönemde Aydınlanma' nın mantık ve bilgi konseptleri, batının bomba ve makineleriyle aynı dili konuşuyordu. Batının teknolojik ve askeri üstünlüğünün kendisini hissettirdiği yerde külütürel mordernleşme de beraberinde yayılmıştı. Yine bu dönemde ekonomik ve teknolojik modernleşme en azından Avrupalı ve Ameriklılara göre kültürel modernleşmeden ayrı düşünülemeycek bir olguydu. Modernistist batının rasyonelizminin ve doğalcılığının jargonuna hakim olmak ve bunu benimsemek ve/veya bu dili içselleştirmek ekonomik ve teknolojik gelişmeyle eş anlamlıydı. Kısaca kültürel modernleşmenin bir anlamıda batıdaki şekliyle dayatılan ve bu yönüyle başkaca bir mediyete yaşam şansı tanımayan bir global kültür hareketidir. Ekonomik gelişmenin kültürel modernizasyona bağlı olduğu bu dönem sonlanmıştır. Japonya'nın başını çektiği batılı olmayan tecrübeler göstermiştirki, ekonomik ve teknolojik gelişmenin modern stratejileri tamamiyle eski, batısal olmayan, kültürel değerlere tamamen uyarlanabilir ve onlar tarafından desteklenebilir durumdadır. Kültürel ve medineyet anlamındaki ayrımların günden güne daha olumlu olarak karşılandığı global bir düzende batı kendi kültürel ayrımlarını olumlu bir şekilde yeniden değerlendirmelidir. Böyle bir projinin zorluğu küçümsenmemelidir. Gelişen global bir cemiyet içinde batı, liberal demokrasiye politik bir kurum ve hayat tarzı olarak bağlanmış bir şekilde tanımlanmaktadır. Kavram ve temel değereler bakımından liberal demokrasi hırıstiyan ahlaki değerlerinden ciddi bir şekilde etkilenmiştir. Ancak ilk kuruluşlarından itibaren Kuzey Atlantik Demokrasileri, Aydınlanma 'nın söylem ve dünya görüşüyle birleştirmiştir. Liberal demokrasiler; İngiltere, Amerika ve Fransa'da evrensel ve doğal insan hakları çerçevesi üzerine yerleşmiştir. Bu haklar bütün insanlar için; inanç, etnik, sosyal sınıf, yurttaşlık farkı gözetilmeksizin bütün insallar için olduğu iddiasındadır. Bu tür iddialar liberal ahlaki ve politik ideallerin evrensel geçerliliğe sahip mantık ve doğanın metafizik kavramlarından çıkarılabileceğini gösteren, aktiviteleri ortaya çıkaran modern politik teoriler tarafından da desteklenmiştir.Liberal demokrasinin kendi kavramsal çerçevesi içerisindeki Aydınlamanın dünya görüşü ve söylemlerine olan bağımlılığı, batının kendine has kültürel kimliğini yeniden kazanmasındaki başat zorluktur. Batıya bugünkü çağdaş kimliğini seçkin bir mediyet olarak veren şey; liberal demokrasinin; ahlaki ideal ve politik kurumlarına olan bağlılığıdır. Batı kültürü herşeyden önce liberal demokratik vatandaşlığın kültürüdür. Başlangıcından itibaren bu vatandaşlık kültürü kendisini kültürel ayrımcı inançların ve ahlaki idaellerin kavramsal geçerliliğini red eden evrensel dünya görüşü çerçevesinde kendini tanımlanmaktadır. Bu nedenle batının kendine has kültürel kimliğini yeniden yapılandırma işindeki ana görev liberal demokrasi ve aydınlanmanın dünya görüşü içerindeki bu bağlatıyı kesmek olmalıdır. Aydınlanma sonrası karşılaştığımız soru sudur: Batının kültürel vatandaşlığı ki, üç yüz yıldır aydınlanmanın evrensel metafizik görüşü olarak yorumlanmıştır, bugün diğer kültürler arasında kendi özel kültürel hayat tarzını tanımlayacak şekilde yeniden yorumlanabilir mi? Bu tez bu sorulara/sorunlara cevap bulmaya çalışır. viii

ABSTRACT ŞERİF YILDIZ February 2002 THE CULTURE OF CITIZENSHIP: POSTMODERN CIVIC CULTURE During the period in which Europe and America enjoyed global hegemony, the cultural vehicle of their economic and political power was the universalist and secularist worldview of the Enlightenment. During this period, Enlightenment conceptions of reason and knowledge spoke with the same authority as Western bombs and machines. Where Western technological and military superiority made itself felt, there spread also the influence of the Enlightenment conceptions of nature, freedom and truth that defined cultural modernity. During this period, economic and technological modernization often seemed, at least to Americans and Europeans, inseparable from cultural modernization. It seemed that mastery of the vocabulary of modernist Western rationalism and naturalism was one of the necessary conditions for economic and technological progress. It seemed, in short, that Western conceptions of cultural modernity defined advanced human civilization as such. This period in which economic development seemed linked to cultural modernization is now over. Led by the Japanese, non-western nations have proven that thoroughly modern strategies of economic and technological progress can be adapted to and supported by ancient non-western cultural traditions. For the time being, Western nations still enjoy technological, military and economic superiority over most non-western nations. In the future, this superiority is bound to diminish. But, however this balance of power changes, it seems evident that the modernist cultural world view that Europeans and Americans once viewed as the necessary cultural condition for economic development and technological progress has now become irrelevant in the non-western world. Most of the world has learned that it is no longer necessary, if it ever was, to speak the cultural language of the European Enlightenment in order to prosper in a global market economy. It is time now for the West to make this discovery also. In Europe and America, the worldview of the Enlightenment was never alien to native cultural traditions in the way that it was in non-western nations. It had its roots in traditional European religious and political vocabularies. Yet Enlightenment conceptions of reason and knowledge were no less hostile to those native European cultural traditions from which they sprung than they were to the native religious and political traditions of the non-western world. The cultural vocabulary of the IVEnlightenment was hostile to cultural particularism of all kinds. Its claim was to provide a purely universal language for a universal humanity, a language purged of all perspectives grounded in particularistic religious belief and the accidents of local history. Whatever may have been the advantages to the West that the use of this universalist cultural language once gained, today its continued use in Europe and America increasingly places them at a disadvantage in global economic and political competition. Non-western nations are now beginning to tap the vast motivational resources of native cultural traditions to support strategies of economic development and technological progress. With this new assertion of cultural particularism - movements of `Asianization,` `Hinduization,` `re-Islamization` and so on - a world is emerging whose primary divisions are increasingly cultural and civilizational. To understand, let alone compete, in such a world, Western nations must also begin to recover and to cultivate the particularistic cultural perspectives that make them uniquely Western as opposed to Hindu, Islamic, Japanese or Confucian. The cultural posture of Enlightenment universalism gave cultural particularism a bad name. Enlightenment conceptions of reason and knowledge led many Europeans and Americans to believe that they could and should adopt a universalistic, culture-neutral, value-free standpoint on all cognitive, moral and political matters. This standpoint dictated a neutral, if not an actually hostile, posture toward native Western cultural traditions as well. Ironically, with the growing worldwide assertion of cultural particularism, it has become clear that this universalist cultural posture is itself a form of Western cultural particularism. Even worse, it is a form of Western cultural particularism that produces an alienation from its own sources in specifically Western religious and political traditions. In an emerging global order in which cultural and civilizational particularism is viewed more and more as a positive good and embraced with a good conscience, the West must learn to embrace its own inevitably particularistic native cultural traditions in a positive way. The difficulty of such a project must not be underestimated. As a distinct cultural or civilizational division within an emerging global community of civilizations, the West is currently defined above all by its commitment to liberal democracy as a form of political association and as a way of life. Liberal democracy arose in the West in the early modern period as a modification of classical republican forms of political association. In its conception and basic values, liberal democracy was profoundly influenced by Christian moral ideals. Yet, from their firstestablishment, North Atlantic liberal democracies were wedded to the vocabulary and the worldview of the Enlightenment. Liberal democracies were established in England, America and France in the name of universal and natural human rights. These rights were claimed for all human beings, regardless of their religious beliefs, ethnicity, social class or nationality. Such claims were justified by modernist political theories that produced demonstrations showing how liberal moral and political ideals are deducible from universally valid metaphysical conceptions of nature or reason. This dependence of liberal democracy, in its very self-conception, on the vocabulary and worldview of the Enlightenment is what accounts for the peculiar difficulty involved in the project of recovering the particularistic cultural identity of the West. What gives the West its contemporary identity, as a distinct civilization is its commitment to the political institutions and moral ideals of liberal democracy? Western culture is today above all a culture of liberal democratic citizenship. Yet, from its modern beginnings, this culture of citizenship has defined itself exclusively in terms of a universalist worldview that rejects the cognitive and moral validity of culturally particularistic beliefs and moral ideals. Thus, the task involved in the project of recovering the particularistic cultural identity of the West will be to find some way break this link between liberal democracy and the world view of the Enlightenment - to arrive at a conception of the Western culture of citizenship capable of affirming both its moral validity and its culturally particularistic status. The question facing us in the emerging post-Enlightenment period, then, is this: How can the Western culture of citizenship, after being interpreted for three hundred years in terms of the universalist metaphysical world view of the Enlightenment, be reinterpreted today as defining merely one particularistic cultural way of life among others, a way of life whose norms are valid only for citizens of contemporary North Atlantic liberal democracies? This thesis outlines trying to answering this question.