When Culture Becomes Politics. Thomas Pedersen
community.30
The position I advocate is inspired by the Russian personalist Berdyaev, who writes i.a. that … “thinking and knowledge are always emotional, and the emotional is the deciding element”.31 Elsewhere he rightly points out that … “there is a tendency in Reason to turn everything into an object from which existentiality disappears”.32 And equally important … “the dispassionate intellectual is a figment of the imagination and a pretence …” Berdyaev talks about “cognitive passion” and argues, rightly in my view, that … “even purely scientific discoveries presuppose passion, inspiration and power of imagination”.33 One does not have to follow Berdyaev all the way to his passionate politics in order to be inspired by his critique of traditional rationalism and utilitarianism.
Truth is not the same as fact, as he also points out. The underlying philosophical premise of integrism is expressed very well by Berdyaev, when he writes that … “the fundamental contradiction in human existence is that man is a finite being possessed of potential infinity and an ambition to strive towards infinity”.34 One can also say that Political Man has a transcendental dimension, which expresses itself in a clamour for political spiritualism. Integrism is thus in part inspired by a nowadays largely overlooked, French-Russian understanding of individualism, which differs from the utilitarian understanding found in much of the Anglo-Saxon literature.
It may be objected that a broad rational ontology with its recognition of cultural politics is incompatible with an agency-oriented ontology. After all, once emotions enter the scene, we tend to assume that reason abdicates, and that it no longer makes sense to talk about human choice. Where the fusion between a strong belief in science and a strong belief in the individual can be seen as in parts of American society, which in many respects has become a “therapeutic society”, the individual tends to be treated as an object. Instinct is not the best place to erect cultural politics. I think a closer look will reveal that voluntarism is indeed compatible with a broad conception of rationality, but this implies a farewell to bio-politics. Shifting the emphasis from instinct to emotion, choice and character is a first useful step in the direction of handing back cultural freedom to human beings.
More than that, to make a sharp distinction between reason and emotion reveals a dualistic way of thinking that does not sit well with recent, scientific debates about emotional intelligence. I think it is possible to talk about such a thing as “affective, political choices” in the sense of political choices motivated by a mixture of reason and emotion. Affective, political choice is likely to be particularly important in polities, where the institutional system is new or evolving or where it is highly complex.
In some respects, integrism represents a rehabilitation of Almond and Verba’s classical work, The civic culture.35 After all, the key message of The civic culture was that the political and non-political attitudes of ordinary citizens are more important than institutions.36 I endorse that view. However, Almond and Verba’s work suffered from several weaknesses. Most importantly, the theory behind the empirical analysis constituted a mixture of holistic and individualistic elements. While the authors rightly drew attention to the “subjective orientations” of citizens as well as to the importance of cognitive, evaluative and affective factors, they also stressed the effects of socialization and posited a reciprocal relationship between political structures and political culture37. Thus while their methodology was individualistic, and technically advanced, Almond and Verba’s ontology was unclear and partly holistic. It is difficult to see, how the different variables in their theoretical framework are to be aggregated. What is the relative importance of e.g. socialization? The useful and promising notion that can be extracted from Almond and Verba is the notion that the cultural characteristics of a population are not homogeneous but in actual fact quite heterogeneous. This can be seen as the first step in the direction of an integrist conception of political culture.
Almond and Verba of course stressed the continuity and stability of some of the Western democracies, notably Britain and the USA, but failed to explore in any great depth the causes of the superior performance of these democracies. These two cases do indicate that some attention has to be paid to the socializing mechanisms and values in society. Yet, in the case of the UK, the very same socializing mechanisms and values that made Britain a staunch defender of democracy during the Second World War, had made it capable of perpetrating atrocities in India and other parts of the third world, albeit on a lesser scale than other European empires. In the case of the USA, involvement in the Second World War was a controversial decision, and the humanity of the American war effort in that war should not lead us to forget the American invasion in Central America earlier in the century under another Roosevelt. Thus once again one is led to emphasize differences; the importance of situational context, and the importance of choice.
A further source of inspiration for the integrist position is found in intercultural thinking within educational studies: Interculturalism advocates … “giving or restoring a place to the subject, to interactions, to context … the intercultural approach thus represents an alternative to human sciences which are still overly riddled by analogies to nature”.38 This implies giving up much of the traditional sociological and anthropological thinking on culture. One is forced in the direction of hermeneutics. As Abdallah-Pretceille points out … “our time is no longer one for nomenclatures or monads, but on the contrary for multicoloured patterns, mixing, crossing over and contraventions, because every individual has the potential to express himself/herself and act not only depending on their codes of membership, BUT ALSO ON FREELY CHOSEN CODES OF REFERENCE”.39 With this emphasis upon individual choice, one is already departing from the social constructivist position.
Integrism has a certain superficial affinity with post-modernism, yet the differences are crucial.40 Post-modernism is a confluence of three related streams of thought: Post-modern Art; post-structuralist philosophy; and post-industrialist social theory. It represents a break with the enlightenment project of rational, progressive change and instead is associated with relativity, anti-realism, reflexivity and de-centring of the subject.41 From the 1970s, post-modernism became associated with deconstruction, concerned with the instability of all discourse, with the slippage of all meaning and with the fading of all grand narratives.42 In this line of thought, science is often presented as a “language game”.
Integrism, while also pluralistic, departs from different assumptions. First of all, I depart from the assumption that the human Self is coherent, not fragmented. Secondly, I assume that the Self forms an extended Self by discovering the deeper identity of duration. Thirdly, integrism is not relativistic, since I subscribe to the view that there are certain universals, and that human beings have natural rights. And finally, integrism is based upon an ontological realism. There is a reality separate from the scholar. Science is not simply a play of words. But clearly the integrist position requires the analyst to also use the methodology of understanding. Integrism does not share post-modernism’s deep scepticism regarding positivist methods, indeed about the very possibility of knowledge. Pauline Rosenau shows little mercy, when pointing out that if post-modernists are to be intellectually consistent they have to admit that their claim to having produced a superior theory is also rather shaky. Of course, the more benign commentator may insert