Culture promotes emancipation

Following is the last of a two-part transcript of a talk recently given by the Indonesian journalist, poet and intellectual, Goenawan Mohamad, at the Helvetas General Assembly Meeting in Basel, Switzerland.

JAKARTA (JP): In a sense, it is probably not very different from what Clifford Geertz calls "moral double-bookkeeping". Today, a great number of people, while eagerly embracing their new high-tech gadgetry, try to revive once-forgotten symbols, rituals, and structures. They take great pains to construct, and invent, "an uncorrupted source", or "the pure origin", or some kind of primeval paradise. They happily put forward the premise that social groups have essential identities, and that your "culture" is your destiny. This is probably the reason for the upsurge of Islam, Hindu, and Christian "fundamentalism". This is also probably the explanation of the use of Confucianism both to boast of East Asian economic achievements and to discourage democratic change.

What is curious is that this revival of tradition goes hand in hand with the drive for more modernization. Let's take Singapore as an example. In many respects, Singapore is the contemporary paragon of a modernizing Asia. It has one of the most proficient bureaucracies in the world and efficient judicial institutions. It has an excellent environment for international trade and investment -- a perfect milieu to generate consistently strong economic performance. It is essentially a secularized system created to serve a well-defined goal. Seeing Singapore from this perspective, one may wonder whether this is a place of a Weberian modern future, where people live as "specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart". However. this near-perfect modernity also stores up something different. While employing the same political formulas Western countries use, Singaporean government leaders keep banging on about the virtues of "Asian values", particularly of the Confucian variety.

Primarily they do it in resistance of the American and European ideals of human liberty which are often propagated by the media and promoted through political diplomacy. No doubt, there is an element of resentment in this new insistence on traditional values. The Singaporean ruling elite, like many others from other parts of Asia and Africa, are understandably uneasy, even angry, to find themselves living in a world constructed, maintained and judged by others. Hence the show of independence. But there is also another rationale behind the current "neo-traditionalism". Living for many years in an environment signified by both a "disenchantment of the world" and an unabashed pragmatism, the Singaporean view of tradition is more in the nature of strategic action than of a nostalgic exercise. The return to tradition has been a way to legitimize control, and through such control it is deemed feasible to fend off the "side-effect" of modernization. This is a strategy to be exempted from what Daniel Bell calls "the cultural contradiction of capitalism".

Permit me for a while to dwell on Bell's theory. The development of capitalism is driven by military needs, technical innovation, capital accumulation, marketing and managerial productivity, and so forth. Its prerequisites are efficiency, well-organized processes of production, and a rational acceptance of thrift and temporary deprivation. However, following successful economic growth, and the birth of a consumer society, a new hedonism spreads, in the form of "counterculture" lifestyles, modeled on aesthetic modernity. The danger is that this new hedonism, stimulated by mass consumption, will eventually undermine the motivational conditions for a continuing growth of capitalism. But there is a problem. Unhealthy as that hedonism may be, it helps the consumer goods industry to flourish.

To unravel this dilemma, you have to balance the increasing desire for immediate gratification and "the revolution of the rising entitlement" with a good management of human drives and needs. In other words, to maintain the vigor of a modern society, and economic and administrative rationality, you have to regain the kind of consensus tradition to furnish a consensus for common self-restraint.

The issue is, of course, freedom. This may explain why the ruling elites of Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and China, (and South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand before the recent democratizations), have a paradoxical view on society and culture. In their pursuit for social and economic modernity, they are wary of the impetus of cultural modernity. The advance of modernization, as generally described by sociologists, gives birth to an autonomous process of intellectual and aesthetic productions. In no time, this autonomy sets itself against the surveillance of the existing authority -- any kind of authority. It finds it increasingly difficult to accept the willingness to be purposeful and obedient as dictated by religious precepts. It becomes more and more obvious that it cannot just go along comfortably with the strictly guided consensual rubric of tradition and the ruling political directives.

These are all unwelcome symptoms in the eyes of East Asian ruling elites. They want to have the kind of discipline on which an efficient economy, a rational state administration, and, of course, their own power to rule, functionally depend. They find it hard to tolerate anarchistic attitudes, subjectivist life- styles focused on self-experience and self-realization, and other things typical of the new sensibilities of aesthetic modernity. Small wonder they prefer cultural creations without a strong modernist temper, and a political structure that gives them good control over intellectual and artistic expression. In other words, they insist on having control over the social organization of meaning.

Yet the disintegration of the traditional world as well the old global order have generated a cultural creativity that is based upon a certain degree of recognition of the undefinable self. In an age marked by the ubiquity of money and commodification as well as by the emergence of the "self-directed person", the state cannot replace the old cosmological order. Totalitarians can fantasize about a society capable of synchronizing a great number of individuals and all their little projects, but today this fantasy has mostly dissolved into thin air.

The disintegration prevails everywhere. To reintegrate science, morality and art into everyday life in a holistic universe is an impossibility, since there is no holistic universe in the first place. The autonomy and "use" of science and art increasingly come to oppose each other. It has become more and more difficult to create a mediated relationship between science and art or between art and morality.

Perhaps, this is all part and parcel of the emancipatory nature of modernization -- something many modernizing elites like to ignore.

The issue is freedom, as I have said before. Admittedly, there has always been a lingering doubt whether human liberty is what is at stake in the dilemma of the modernizing process in a non- European society. The problem is that in many non-European societies, the individuation process is a precarious thing. It is not always maintained by the institutionalization of separate personhood. A self is a fragile phenomenon, a process in itself, a potential victim of either the powerful gaze of Authority or of any collective project. The question is whether it is desirable to protect and develop its potential. I believe it is, if we share the ideal of human emancipation in our time.

The locus of this affirmation of the self is in the process of production of intellectual and artistic resources. In its present form, it has a "liberal temper" that is receptive to new and old ideas, critical in its outlook and encouraging of dissent. It is commonly perceived as the world of a minority, or a "cultural elite", whom many ideologists, development planners and donors like to denigrate. Yet if art has its moment of revolt, unpredictability, and even anarchy, and intellectuals start calling loudly for free expression, it is a healthy sign that they still insist on calling for non-repressive kinds of order and reason. Order and reason, implied in the quest for modernity itself, tend to trample the indefinable self, by putting it into concepts and categories. As Theodore Adorno would put it, it is always important to see what eludes a concept, so we may not "drown the screams of its victims".

Window:

In an age marked by the ubiquity of money and commodification as well as by the emergence of the "self-directed person", the state cannot replace the old cosmological order.