Beyond the Global Culture War

Adam K. Webb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135442590
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

"Beyond the Global Culture War" presents a cross-cultural critique of global liberalism and argues for a broad-based challenge that can meet it on its own scale. Adam Webb is one of our most exciting and original young scholars, and this book is certain to generate many new debates. This timely volume probes many of the key challenges we face in the new millennium. This is essential reading for all students of politics and globalization.

Chapter 1

Ethoses Across Time and Space

I am going to describe a struggle of ethoses in the modern world. The word ethos (êthê in the Greek plural) originally meant the way of life of a people, and the temperament that set them apart from other groups. On an individual level, it could also mean the permanent features of character. Unlike pathos, a momentary state of emotion induced by drama that tugged at the heartstrings, ethos endured beneath any changes. I shall refer in this book to four ethoses—four self-understandings, four images of the ideal character. Each of these ethoses is universal, cropping up repeatedly in different civilizations and eras. As permanent focal points of human culture, they have existed in creative tension with one another. But in modern times, one of those four has gone on the offensive and wrought havoc across the globe.

This account departs from the prevailing way of thinking about what moves people to act politically. Among the global upper-middle class, comfortable at history's end, the whole idea of a history-shaping clash of world-views seems alien. The writing of history has tended to move away from tales of heroic drama, of leaders who decisively alter the path of human events. In the grand sweep of history, most of what happens is now thought to rest on how impersonal forces add up. That more broad-based approach has its advantages, no doubt. Heroes probably do count for less, in the long run, than the trends and pressures that affect millions: commerce, technology, disease, and the like.

But along with the colorful heroism of “history on the surface,” something more important has also been lost in recent decades. No longer do enough educated people take seriously the role of ideas in shaping society. Everything supposedly comes down instead to some interplay of economic interests or power-seeking or institutional design. This way of looking at the world has much to do with the experience of the educated classes in our time. For several reasons, deep ethical commitments and clashing visions do not tend to resonate much with them. Working in a market-driven economy inclines such people toward a certain hard-headedness when it comes to making sense of human motivations. Many think it naive to imagine others are moved by principles rather than by some kind of raw self-interest.

Other versions of this outlook do not ooze suspicion quite so much, but they agree that ethical visions are too often overrated. They say that ideological fervor and clashes between people with different ways of life reflect ignorance of a common human nature. Human beings would get along better if they did not take themselves so seriously, if they put their heated rhetoric aside and met on the terrain of life, peace, and happiness. Now most people who look at the world this way are well-intentioned, to be sure, and some conflict over principles is indeed shortsighted. But it is also obvious that these sentiments reflect a culture that has difficulty relating to deep ethical clashes.

Baldly put, these layers of global society are besotted by consumerism and compromise. Heated struggles in history, principles for which fervent people fought and died, have no parallel in today's experience for the upper-middle classes. Even the ideas to which they themselves subscribe—the ideological core of liberal modernity—are not a matter for bloody-minded struggle. For one thing, their own vision is reigning supreme and seems well on its way to finishing off any rivals. And opponents who hurl moral thunder at them, such as fundamentalists or enthusiasts of equality, are readily dismissed as psychologically warped and in need of a mellowing encounter with “reality.” Liberal culture treats such ethically driven critics either as suffering from a constipation of the conscience, or as having sinister oppressive designs that their rhetoric only obscures. Liberals aspire to a world in which pedestrian souls will docilely split the difference along some yardstick of self-interest. Fervor will be thankfully laid to rest.

These assumptions and hopes are also built into academic social science nowadays. Western (or Westernized) social scientists work in this cultural milieu, and their descriptions of the world are more imprinted by it than they usually acknowledge. Much like the rest of the global upper-middle class, they have thrust ethical visions to the margins. At most they speak of “values”: a catch-all category to dump all human motivations that do not fit into economics or power or biology. Values are then treated as just superficial “preferences.” For many social scientists in recent decades, a persons ideas about virtue have sadly been on a plane with his or her tastes in clothing or soft drinks.

This shortsightedness has many obvious causes. An obsession with easily measurable behavior has let many mainstream social scientists blind themselves to differences in what moves peoples hearts. Far better to measure than to delve inward. Making sense of deep ethical motivations also requires a sensitivity to the self-understandings of people quite unlike oneself. In a global society that does not take inner self-cultivation as seriously as past civilizations did, these skills do not come naturally. Being told that everyone is self-interested, that ideas are masks for interests, and that all human beings are psychologically more or less the same, one might just come to believe it too fully for one's own good.

This book is not just at odds with global liberal culture in its purpose, therefore. It also diverges from how modern liberals—whether mainstream social scientists or ordinary people reflecting on events—now explain the world. My argument will delve deeper than mere “values,” into the realm of comprehensive self-understandings. In taking such things seriously as ultimate forces in politics, it harks back to older approaches. In the early twentieth century, for example, European social theory engaged people's deepest sensibilities more imaginatively. The German sociologist Karl Mannheim and others spoke then of “total” worldviews, rooted in the ideas and experiences of “organic” social groups.¹

When social theorists expressed such views a century ago, of course, they treated each mentality as the product of unique historical circumstances. Most of the European scholars thus focused on Europe's peculiarities as a civilization past and present. Often they were trying to make sense of how that civilization had metamorphosed into the strange modern world around them. Given the issues of their time, they saw no need to outline patterns that cut across cultures and eras. This broader aim, finding what ethoses recur as permanent alternatives, is my point of departure here. The much larger scale of global modernity now allows and inspires this question. Indeed, I think addressing the sweeping challenges of our own time demands it.

Before properly introducing the four ethoses, I should make a few things clear. While I think these basic worldviews often shape social conflict, I realize that other motives can sometimes outweigh them. Economic interests or biological drives, for instance, are real enough. But even when these other motives prevail, ethical ideals still serve as a lens through which people make sense of their motives and how to act on them. This point is obvious to anyone other than those social scientists who assume that a “real,” “hard” motive such as economic self-interest must underlie everything else. Moreover, the intense sentiments that move people to vigorous political action rarely arise from material interests, however weighty. Nor do those sentiments arise simply from the fact that two groups of people differ from one another. The mere existence of different group labels, for example, does not itself lead to conflict apart from the diverging ways of life involved. A civil war between blue-eyed and green-eyed people has yet to happen, for the simple reason that blue-eyed people and green-eyed people have no ethical differences. Conflicts arise over meanings, not facts.

The most intense motives to protest, or repress, or do battle come from knowing that personal ethoses and social visions intersect. Given the chance, people naturally turn their own self-understandings, their own character ideals, into designs on society at large. When poor and rich peasants struggle over land-use customs, they may be doing so for reasons involving both principles and interests; likewise with ethnically different settlers and natives in any number of places. But if a visceral rage explodes between opposing groups, and sets loose mobs with pitchforks, it usually means the immediate issues fit into a larger contest: between rival ways of life and rival self-understandings. A victory for the other side means not just having one's grain yield reduced or ones rent raised, for instance, even if that might be part of the story. It would also mean a triumph for the bearers of an alien mentality.

The four ethoses in this book are mainly group identities, not individual ones. I am not offering a way to classify individuals into “types,” as personality tests do. To be sure, some people's self-understandings are clear-cut enough that we can pigeonhole them quite easily. Some of the thinkers I shall mention are good examples. When I speak of one or another ethos here, however, I am talking mainly about groups whose ways of life reflect such self-understandings overall.

Still, even though ethoses can best be considered on a group level, the issues are deeply personal. Each ethos bridges the personal and the social. If publicly visible, rival ethoses unsettle people because they call into question their own self-understanding. Moreover, each ethos implies a vision of society as a whole. People want their own self-understanding translated into arrangements that reflect it and promote it publicly. When any ethos dominates in the public realm, other ethoses are always somewhat limited in how far their expression can go.

An ethos crystallizes in shared experience. Long ago, the German social theorist Max Weber used the term “status group” to refer to a group of people with its own defining way of life and standards of honor.² In principle, one can point out an almost infinite number of status groups. To speak of four ethoses, as in this book, I must map such variety into a few broad categories. In Weberian parlance, this means creating “ideal-types”—categories that simplify reality. We must step back from the peculiarities of so many status groups, to focus on the much more limited number of underlying character ideals that they reflect. Beneath variety on the surface, a few deeper mentalities can be said to recur.

Importantly, this means that some status groups from different cultures, even if they have no contact, can belong to the same ethos. Time and place do matter, and societies do differ. But those differences are differences of detail, of how the ethos is expressed, rather than of the underlying ethos itself. Inevitably, some detail is lost in painting with a broad brush this way. But that is the price we must pay to start thinking about a universal response to today's universal onslaught.

Let us start with the simplest ethos, which I call demoticism. The classical Greek word demos referred to the common people as a whole, and demot to the member of an ancient township. Demoticism is the simplest ethos because we all know it when we see it. Most people who have ever lived have been demots. In the smallest and most isolated communities, such as jungle villages or nomadic shepherds' camps, demots are the only ethos-bearers around. The demot is the traditional peasant, or the loyal pillar of neighborhood life, or the member of a tightly knit egalitarian brotherhood. Demots take comradeship seriously, and believe in the basic sameness of human nature. In a demotic subculture, styles of life overlap enough to sustain a common experience. Relationships merge several aspects of life: work, kinship, festivities, and so on.

Most demots have been settled peasants, of course, and this is the image that most easily comes to mind. Modern anthropology tells us much about such ways of life, which have often changed little since time immemorial. Still, demots appear in many other settings too. Nomads like the Bedouin often seemed fiercely independent, living off trade and plunder. Yet internally their tribes had little real hierarchy among members, and myths of each tribe's common descent kept loyalty firm. In urban areas, civic associations have often given people the same sort of anchor. In the premodern Middle East, for example, the futuwwah clubs—a kind of militia brotherhood—replicated much of the flavor of rural life in the cities.³ Histories of such groups give us one way to explore the demotic mind.

All these ways of knowing demoticism run into difficulty, however. Society tends to screen a lot of demotic sensibilities from view. Demots usually control very little public space: village councils, kinship networks, festivals, or perhaps even less in some societies. Before modernity, high illiteracy rates also meant that few frank statements of demotic vision passed from one generation to another. Despite their numbers, demots have lived almost invisibly in the public record. Some of these issues have been explored in political scientist James C. Scott's contrast between the “public transcripts” of those in power, and the often starkly different “hidden transcripts” of oppressed groups. He describes how slaves said all kinds of irreverent things out of earshot of their masters, for example.⁴ Of course, demots do not have to be oppressed to be demots. Their ethos is the same whether given full sway or almost none, whether they never encounter another ethos or meet scorn every day. But the fact that conditions have often forced demotic subcultures to hide their true beliefs does make it harder to describe their thinking fully.

Some of the best insights into demoticism come from moments when it has exploded into public view. Before modern times, popular revolts often gave short-lived voice to this current. How demots organized their affairs when in revolt shows something about their latent hopes. In a few very revealing cases, demotic uprisings left behind written statements of their philosophy and aims. We find what looks like a more assertive version of the sensibilities that, under quieter conditions, demots have lived out as best they can in their villages, camps, and clubs. Premodern popular revolts had a range of motives, to be sure, and it would be wrong to cast them just as outlets for demotic philosophy. Many peasants have undoubtedly gone on a rampage just because landlords squeezed them into near starvation. But by looking at the ideas expressed in such uprisings, we do get some sense of the kind of world demots would like.

One good example is the Digger movement that arose in southern England in the late 1640s. It seized a chance for revolt that the English civil war of the time had opened up. The Diggers took over unenclosed land for cultivation in common by poor peasants and landless laborers. The movement rode on longstanding kinship networks, most of its members coming from within a few miles of the “digging” site on a Surrey hilltop. The uprising occurred against a background of pressure by wealthier and more acquisitive neighbors, who had tried to make traditional decencies yield to a harder competition. Parallel circumstances have moved demots to action countless times elsewhere, of course. But the Diggers are an especially good case because their leader, a bankrupt named Gerrard Winstanley, published several tracts expounding on their worldview.⁵ From the record of movements like this, and other histories and anthropological studies, we can piece together an outline of the demotic ethos.

Loyalty and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Ethoses Across Time and Space
• Chapter 2 The Atomist Revolt
• Chapter 3 Pacts, Progress, and Meritocracy
• Chapter 4 Culture Wars and Character at History's End
• Chapter 5 Populace as Peril
• Chapter 6 The Escape from Place and Past
• Chapter 7 Modernity's Malcontents
• Chapter 8 Fortresses Become Prisons
• Chapter 9 The Triple Partnership and the World Commonwealth
• Conclusion Reclaiming History
• Notes
• Index