Mende Nazer

The movie I am Slave is as good as the book, from scenes of wild destruction as Arab horsemen seize 12-year-old Mende Nazer from her home in the Nuba Mountains, to the slave market in Khartoum, to her days of captivity in London. The story of a plucky young woman breaking away from years of Sudanese servitude to recreate herself as a free UK citizen is inspiring: we wish her well. It also provides a dramatic glimpse of one of the stranger fruits of British multiculturalism — a slave-trade that has brought hundreds of captive African youngsters into the land of William Wilberforce and Granville Sharp. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mende_Nazer)

This historic development is very odd. In fact it is so odd that it deserves the attention of someone who has thought long and hard about slavery, a person of broad culture and widely read, and ideally both of African background and a moral philosopher too. With such requirements it might seem hard to imagine anyone likely to qualify — hard even to know where to look. Yet there’s a man in the USA who exactly fills the bill: Kwame Anthony Akroma-Ampim Kusi Appiah. Born in London in 1954 before growing up in Ghana, Professor Appiah is a well-known Cambridge-educated figure who has in the past “published widely in African and African-American literary and cultural studies,” but is now, we are told, mainly concerned with “the philosophical foundations of liberalism” and “the connection between theory and practice in moral life.”

The Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton, Appiah is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Advisory Board of the United Nations Democracy Fund, is currently Chair of the Board of the American Council of Learned Societies, and even a cursory look at his long list of achievements reveals a serious mover and shaker in the U.S. liberal establishment today.  (http://appiah.net/biography/)

Slavery in theory and practice

Originally from Ghana, now focused on “the connection between theory and practice in moral life”, could anyone be more suitable for bridging the gap between surreptitiously smuggled African slave-children and higher academic thought? If anyone can explain to the Mende Nazers of the world what it is that happened to them so violently and painfully in Africa, and why it is still happening to African children today, surely Kwame A. Appiah is the man. Though in the 2007 book Buying Freedom one soon discovers that the theory and practice of liberating slaves is no simple matter. Professor Appiah co-authored the Introduction, and his own essay toward the end — “What’s Wrong with Slavery?” — is one of a dozen contributions mainly concerned with the moral and economic perplexities of redeeming slaves by paying cash to slave-traders.

Those like Baroness Cox, in the UK, who forthrightly accept the practice, are opposed by others who claim that paying cash drives up the price of slaves, and increases slave-raiding. Paying cash should have that effect in theory, but whether it really does no-one is sure. Buying Freedom is a book with economic articles about the mathematics of “efficient competitive equilibrium,” on the one hand, and contributions from moral philosophers using words like “deontology” and “consequentialism” on the other. One might hope that despite the fancy vocabulary there’s something here to help Africa’s slaves. But that is uncertain. Deontologically speaking, it seems we are duty bound to buy a slave’s freedom if we can; though some argue that this “commodifies” the human subject, while others point to a whole cascade of undesirable unintended effects. A prudent man might just leave his hands in his pockets and keep walking.

As for Appiah’s own contribution, with its provocative title, we learn that as a boy in Ghana he was at first told very little about the importance of slave trading to the traditional Asante (Ashanti) economy. Only later did he learn that “the suppression of the slave trade began the period of Asante imperial decline, which was to end with final conquest by the British at the start of the twentieth century.” What he calls “the central moral questions” about liberating slaves are the author’s main concern, and he agrees that freedom comes first. But according to Appiah “freedom is not enough”. After the act of liberation we also have a duty to guarantee every freed slave respect, self-esteem, and dignity. While these are all good things, they seem to reflect the idealistic world of academic philosophy rather than the needs of actual slaves themselves. You don’t read much of Mende Nazer’s story without realizing that her own priority was liberty — it’s right there in the title of the successful 2010 stage play about her life: “Slave: A Question of Freedom.”

*    *    *

After this Appiah goes off on a long divagation about the relative status of different kinds of Asante slaves. It seems there were five degrees of enslavement in the Asante Empire, hierarchy being the leading feature of a social milieu where minute grades of status make the Russian nomenklatura seem half-hearted. It’s hard to know exactly what Appiah makes of this fact. Does he admire the overall complexity of the social system as if complexity were good in itself? Or regard an elaborate bureaucracy as something prestigious? Not all students of government feel this way. The world of the old-time Asante he describes is in fact a classical system of aristocratic rank and authority where everyone has a place and everyone is expected to keep it — a quasi-medieval system where what we might call “respect on demand” is vigorously enforced.

Appiah himself emphasizes that if you were lucky enough to be a Grade One Slave you couldn’t be sold, which is good. Then he describes another degree in which the slave was really a kind of pawn — “but then a pawn was not strictly a possession either”, going on to claim that the relationship between slave and slave owner, though unequal, was better seen as “reciprocal” and that the slave had clear rights against his master. Only at the end of what reads like the usual anthropological apologia do we descend to the inglorious level of the Grade Four and Grade Five Slaves, war captives and criminals whose fate was to be used for human sacrifice — though they might have to wait some weeks cooling their heels “until such time as it was deemed religiously auspicious to kill them.”

Human sacrifice

Latinate English is always useful for neutralising disagreeable facts, or veiling ugly realities, and the phrase “religiously auspicious” is a good example of this. In “What’s Wrong With Slavery?” Professor Appiah smoothly invites us to contemplate a world where sacrificial slaves uncomplainingly accept their fate as little more than a social convention. The scene portrayed is calm, formal, orderly, and safely ritualised. With a little imagination you might even be able to hear the victim imploring the executioner, “if His Majesty deems it religiously auspicious please take my head off now — delay is unnecessary.” Yet visitors to the region in days gone by (days as recent as the year 1900 in Appiah’s Ghana) suggest it wasn’t quite like that in the violent kingdoms of old West Africa, where capital punishment was a casual event and severed heads were part of the everyday scene.

In the nearby kingdom of Dahomey, in 1772, Robert Norris found the viceroy passing sentence on a woman who had accidentally started a fire in the market. “I requested that her life might be spared”, wrote Norris, and offered to purchase her as a slave. But the king had firmly made up his mind. Her head was to be “cut off and fixed upon a stake.” The victim’s small daughter ran up to her at this point, unaware of her mother’s situation, causing a brief diversion before the distressed woman was bludgeoned to death.

Also unmentioned by Professor Appiah are the disagreeable preliminaries Thomas Bowdich described. Bowdich was in the Asante kingdom for five months in 1817 and is usually regarded as a reliable, accurate, and racially unbiased observer. He was favourably impressed by much that he saw — the majestic deportment of the Asante king, the color and magnificence of ceremonial life, the elegance of the women, and a style of dancing where “the man encircles the woman with a piece of silk…supports her round the waist, receives her elbows in the palms of his hands,” the two then performing “a variety of figures approximating, with the time and movement, very close to the waltz.”

Less attractive were the sacrifices immediately following. “The drums announced the sacrifice of the victims… The executioners wrangled and struggled for the office: the nearest executioner snatched the sword from the others, the right hand of the victim was then lopped off, he was thrown down, and his head was sawed rather than cut off.” Bowdich writes of a typical victim en route to execution that “His hands were pinioned behind him, a knife was passed through his cheeks, to which his lips were noosed like the figure of 8; one ear was cut off and carried before him, the other hung to his head by a small bit of skin; there were several gashes in his back, and a knife thrust under each shoulder blade; he was led with a cord passed through his nose…the feeling this horrid barbarity excited must be imagined.”

Appiah’s quasi-ethnographic depiction of traditional Asante slavery, with sacrifices culturally authorised and occurring only when “religiously auspicious,” shows, some might say, a proper scholarly detachment. And perhaps it does. But it also shows an unreal legalism where forms are mistaken for facts. When he tells us that reciprocity prevailed and that the luckier slaves even had “rights” against their owners, you would never guess that he is talking about a preliterate society without books, or writing, or written laws, or constitutional guarantees; a world with no independent judiciary, and no rational adversarial procedures for obtaining and testing evidence (though plunging the accused’s hand into boiling oil was thought a useful test); a world — if truth be told — perpetually subject to the whims and passions of powerful chiefs who ruled as much by terror as by consent. In the benign environment of Princeton it may seem plausible that the formal rights of West African slaves against their owners might actually have been enforceable. But you wouldn’t want to push your luck. My guess is that an Asante slave who stood on his rights would not be standing long.

“Moral revolutions” and slavery

According to the title of a recent book by the amiable Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal we live in The Age of Empathy, something he attributes to our warmly social hominid instincts. Also just published is a book by Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, arguing that the modern era has been one of moral progress accompanied by a steady decline in violence. It seems that what Norbert Elias called “the civilizing process” is nowadays on many minds, and Kwame A. Appiah’s 2010 book, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen, might be seen as broadly in the same vein. Taking an idiosyncratic view of moral and social progress, he sees national and social honor playing a key role in the outlawing of the duel, in the abandonment of Chinese foot-binding, in the abolition of slavery, and in the ongoing struggle by enlightened men and women in Islamic lands against the horror of “honor killings”. All these changes are what he calls “moral revolutions.”

Here we are only concerned with the slavery issue and Appiah’s treatment in Chapter Three, “Suppressing Atlantic Slavery” — a title that reveals a lot. Bear in mind that we’re dealing here with a persistent African problem, wondering how a prominent American liberal trying to bring theory and practice together might have something useful to tell a woman like Mende Nazer about how and why she was enslaved in the early 1990s. The judiciously inserted “Atlantic” however makes it clear that the endemic African slavery that led to her ordeal in Khartoum, and then saw her trafficked to England, is not on the author’s agenda. Regarding slavery his eyes are firmly on the past.

Nor does this moral philosopher feel obliged to comment on the inexplicably violent and cruel attitude to life and limb still found in many parts of the continent, something as grossly visible in the atrocities of the Lord’s Resistance Army as in the sickening events shown in the 2008 French docudrama Johnny Mad Dog. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/oct/22/johnny-mad-dog-review) Then when he defines slavery as “the subordination of one race by another”, entailing “the systematic subjection of black people to dishonour”, a self-serving assumption is exposed. It appears that the centuries-old enslavement of black people by black people, among the very West African societies he grew up in and presumably knows best — the same West African societies that started the “Atlantic” slave trade on its hideous course back in the 15^th century — will not be discussed.

On not being dissed

The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen is a curious book, hard to make sense of unless one radically changes the title. Appiah says he found the work of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend “fascinating” and that’s where he got the word revolution from. Lots of people have been fascinated by the word revolution — many still are — but it is not always appropriate, and is in this case downright misleading. The end of dueling, the end of foot-binding in China, the abolition of slavery, came from the incremental development of moral sentiments and legal reforms, as indeed is perfectly obvious from what Appiah writes about them himself. In fact the word revolution adds nothing but a false glamor to his argument. As for what we now see in Islamic lands regarding “honor killings”, the agonizingly slow process by which large male populations between Damascus and Kabul are discouraged from raping and murdering young women is so far from being “revolutionary” that one wonders how any thoughtful man could use the term.

But it is the word “honor” that is most confusing here. Historically it often denoted noble sentiments rather than ignoble, acts and feelings toward the courageous end of the semantic spectrum. But right from the first it is clear that this is a book more about fear than about courage, more about chronic status anxiety than about positive and helpful beliefs, and that a better title might be Face-Saving: an Aspect of Moral Conduct — or more to the psychological point, The Importance of Not Being Dissed.

In a definitive statement on page 175 he writes, “Here, then, is the picture: Having honor means being entitled to respect. As a result, if you want to know whether a society has a concern with honor, look first to see whether people there think anyone has a right to be treated with respect.” Surely most cultures treat most of their law-abiding members most of the time with respect. But indiscriminate respect is withheld because the distinction between good and bad behavior is the foundation of any social order at all. Respect is accorded when deserved; esteem and dignity are won when socially acknowledged. That is how Mende Nazer’s Nuba in the Sudan order their lives, as do hundreds of tribal peoples. That is also how modern civil society allows free individuals to autonomously win distinction — autonomy, by the way, being a major theme in much of Appiah’s writing. But what he is on about here is something else, a kind of ethical overreach to be enforced by a benevolent state. In the utopia he envisages, respect, dignity, and esteem are to be incorporated into a set of legal entitlements defined as political rights.

The contrast between the academic view and the ex-slave’s view is illuminating. While Appiah and others with status grievances appear to require state intervention (for unless respect on demand is made mandatory how exactly is it to be achieved?) you can’t see this keeping Mende Nazer awake at night. A figure of great resource and unmistakable distinction, she needs nobody else to claim respect or dignity on her behalf. Appiah has been anxious to let us know his connections with the Kumasi upper crust of high chiefs and grandly titled kings. It seems to be this aristocracy he feels most comfortable with. I can’t help wondering if he might have obtained a more realistic view of the ordinary human lot by spending some time, like Mende Nazer, as a slave.

“Morality is not enough”

The author of The Honor Code has written novels, and one way of trying to make sense of his book is to regard it as a highly digressive intellectual roman à thèse. The thesis is that “honor” is just as important in moral conduct as firm convictions about right and wrong, and should be preferred to both Christian commandments and Kantian imperatives. Appiah notes on page 181 that Kant himself said that honor “is not worthy of the highest respect, even where it happens to coincide with the common interest and with duty.” Appiah disagrees, but Kant is surely right. The reason being that honor is fundamentally atavistic, a part of our competitive animal nature shared with rutting stags and bellowing elephant seals. For that unhappy reason we find that right across the range of zoological behavior it is inseparably associated with bloodshed and aggression. A psychological aspect of defensive pride, it is often found with unmanageable levels of amour propre, and that’s why it erupts in violence nearly everywhere. In human affairs honor belongs in the touchy, unstable, and tumultuous world of the “dissed”, as they resentfully look for signs of not receiving the respect that is their due.

We may agree that honor is a moving force that prompts men to act, and that can be harnessed to moral goals. But it is entirely relativistic, and what it honors is sometimes very ugly indeed. The honor of a camorra boss in Naples may lead him to massacre an innocent family; the honor of an Islamic father may lead him to kill his own daughter; the honor of the Crips may require them to slaughter a bunch of rival Bloods at the smallest sign they’ve been “dissed”. From which the sensible conclusion is surely that honor is largely indifferent to moral conduct per se — other perhaps than the deeply ambiguous virtue of “solidarity” shared by tribes, sects, cricket teams, medieval nobility, and American street gangs. Indeed, one is bound to point out to Professor Appiah, in Princeton, that the most conspicuous sociological example close at hand is in Los Angeles, where honor and a fierce determination not to be dissed leaves the streets in some areas daily stained with gore. If you want to see the living social universe of honor, where “morality is not enough” and where the passion for face-saving goes perpetually unassuaged, the territory of the Bloods and the Crips is where to look.

Not that Appiah is unaware of the conflict between a safe social morality and his theory. Far from it. Much of The Honor Code can be read as a perverse intellectual struggle between two schemes of moral guidance that he well knows are often opposed. Item: “Honor and morality are separate systems: they can be aligned… but they can easily pull in opposite directions”… Item: “Both recognition respect and esteem can be distributed by honor codes without any regard for morality…” Item: in Pakistan we are bound to “confront one of the dark sides of honor”. And so on. But although on one page he can be found freely admitting the paradoxes within his thesis he invariably manages to ignore them on the next. An entire chapter on Islamic “honor killings” is presented, with gratuitously long novelistic sections about rape, violence, murder, and “murderous families”, all in the name of honor, without it seeming to be seriously understood, amidst all the confusion, that the implication of the very usage itself — “honor killings” — represents not merely “the dark side” of the phenomenon, it tends to make an oxymoronic absurdity of the general argument.

How did Appiah’s moral revolutions really happen?

The phrasing of Appiah’s title — The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen — implies universality. Honor is presented as a psychological constant in human affairs, and it follows from this that its unvarying action must also produce, universally, “moral revolutions” everywhere. Why doesn’t he pursue the implications of this view? Surely it is demeaning to the Rest (some might even say racist) to suggest that a universal process so necessary to the moral improvement of mankind failed to occur outside the West? Shouldn’t we also look be looking for it in Teheran, in Tokyo, in Ouadougou? In Moscow or Beijing? In Khartoum as well as the author’s Ghanaian home-town of Kumasi?

Yet his vaunted moral revolutions never began in any such places. And the reason is blindingly obvious to even a casual reader of the book. Despite colorful examples culled from a wide range of historical and literary sources, far and away the most powerful impulse driving the moral and legal reforms he discusses has come from Western Europe, sometimes embodied in the historic teachings of the Catholic Church, sometimes prompted by the efforts of Christian missions in foreign lands, and invariably driven today by the challenging cultural example of the humanitarian tradition in Western Civilization as a whole. In this humane tradition honor killings are not acceptable. Although it seems he would rather die than admit that the West was ahead of the Rest, or give credit where credit is exclusively due, Appiah’s own pages present all the evidence we need.

The duel, he says, was preceded by something called “judicial combat”, a contest in which “gentlemen of the rank of squire and above could settle legal disputes by passage of arms.” The Church opposed this as early as the ninth century, in the person of Pope Nicholas I, and in 1563 the Council of Trent denounced “the detestable custom of duelling…” The author doesn’t push his argument about national or social honor being the real factor that brought the duel to an end (his last pages on the subject contain airy literary references to Disraeli, Yeats, and Evelyn Waugh). But surely an obvious question must be asked: isn’t it more likely that the sense of honor that so impresses this moral philosopher, and which is found so widely among the touchy and the dissed, has in fact served to perpetuate duelling — just as it perpetuates the grim world of homicidal affray among the Bloods and Crips today?

*    *    *

What about foot-binding? In deference to Chinese ethnic susceptibilities the author tries to make the most of whatever evidence exists of a native revolt against the practice. Because he declines to state outright that Western influence was the primary source of resistance to foot-binding, Appiah feels bound to try and find an explanation that flatters the moral insight and revolutionary potential of the Chinese people themselves. He points to the social role of an aroused late-19^th-century urban literati, and it is suggested that a 1828 novel by Li Ruzhen, Flowers in the Mirror, amounts to an early critique of foot-binding by a member of this class. Yet on the next page Appiah all-too-typically reverses direction, admitting that “despite these early critics, the organized resistance begins only after the intrusions of the missionaries.”

Christian schools for girls began to be opened in the 1860s in many parts of the country. In Hangzhou, in the Yangtze River delta, the Church Mission opened a school for girls in 1867, which required “from the first,” as Mrs Archibald Little wrote, “that the feet of the girls should be unbound, and that they should not be compelled to marry against their own consent…” Similarly, when the Methodists opened a girl’s school in Beijing, they required all the girls to have their feet unbound.

Comment on the so-called moral revolution that abolished the slave trade is surely superfluous. The evangelical convictions of Wilberforce were fundamental, as were the activities of numerous other church groups, from the Quakers to Wesley’s Methodists to the Clapham Sect that devotedly fought to abolish the slave trade after 1750. But enough: from his own documentation it is amply clear that Appiah’s long-winded examination of honor as a source of his supposed “moral revolutions” is superfluous, distracting, and a largely academic exercise. The more pages one turns the more obvious it becomes that whatever interest it may have in the psychology of moral action, both as motive and consequence honor exists on a decidedly lower plane than whatever ethical principles it may occasionally serve. As Kant understood very well.

Fine words not nearly enough

Of course it took more than the activities of church groups to abolish the slave trade. And more than the eloquence of parliamentarians and preachers. It took concerted military action on land and sea — though you won’t find much about that in Appiah’s account. The author of The Honor Code may have no taste for war, and have never held a gun, but he must know that the only reason West African slavery and human sacrifice were stamped out is that European colonial armies went in, conquered kingdoms incurably given to these practices, and brought them forcefully to an end.

Appiah makes occasional disapproving references to Sir Garnet Wolseley, and given his African background this is understandable. Wolseley was a soldier who didn’t mess about, and his 1874 campaign against King Kofi Kakari was ruthless in crushing the Asante armies, displacing the king, and burning the “charnel house” of the city of Kumasi to the ground. Not for a moment would we claim that his main motive was idealistic and uplifting, or that he intended purely and simply to stamp out Asante slavery and human sacrifice. As elsewhere in the region, the invasion of this West African kingdom was meant to open it to trade with the coast, and to undercut such tribal peoples as the Itsekiri, “middlemen between the early European traders and the inhabitants of the hinterland”, a campaign that had gone on intermittently for many years. But you don’t need a degree in deontology to recognise that the result changed barbarism for the better.

Or does Appiah think the customs of Old Ashanti should have been kept as a living museum, pristine and untouched? Does he imagine that if the Christian missions had been kept out, if Sir Garnet had never existed, if a sufficiently determined Anthropological Preservation Society had opposed all change — then internal war, slave raiding, cannibalism, and human sacrifice, might each have been kept going all the way down to the Age of Empathy and the International Court of Justice in the Hague?

The “reluctant cannibal” and moral theory

Whether or not it’s true that “there are no jokes in Islam” (a line attributed apocryphally to the Ayatollah Khomeini), there is certainly little humor in Appiah’s world of respect on demand and instant dignity. So let’s try and lighten things up. It seems to me that as moral philosophers the British comedians Michael Flanders and Donald Swann look pretty good alongside the Ivy League professor, and when they sing their song about the “reluctant cannibal” who independently decides that “eating people is wrong” they raise serious issues for Appiah’s moral theory.

Recall first his dogma that “morality is not enough.” That individual convictions about right and wrong won’t cut it. And that both the collective reinforcement of shared beliefs and a sense of honor is needed before genuine moral progress can be made. Looking at our reluctant cannibal (let’s call him Jim) we see a man who has on his own moral initiative taken a view opposing his anthropophagous fellows. They think eating people is entirely normal. The steaks evidently taste good and they have even developed an appealing cuisine for human flesh. But when they invite Jim round, offering a dish with his favorite sauce, all he does is lecture them on their sins and pull back from the table in disgust. Jim thinks differently, feels differently, and most important of all has radically different moral convictions.

His tribal companions indignantly assure him that they have always eaten people and that there’s nothing wrong with the practice. Indeed, (and in accord with Appiah’s view of the social psychology of honor) they go further. They tell him that eating people is honorable, and that by not eating them he will bring his family into the worst kind of social disrepute. But Jim is not one of those who live in fear of being dissed. Not one of those fearful of the collective disfavour that looms so large in Professor Appiah’s scheme. Jim’s self-esteem is secure; he takes it for granted that the rule “thou shalt not eat people” is both good enough for him and good enough for everyone. He thinks that “the only thing that deserves full respect is doing the right thing because it is the right thing to do” — as Appiah ridicules the Kantian procedure he disapproves. But such ridicule has no effect on Jim. The right thing to do is embodied in a simple rule: Don’t Eat People. Jim is a Kantian through and through.

*    *    *

There must be a thousand books about Wilberforce and Granville Sharp, and whole libraries devoted to the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. We hardly need more. What we need now — and which we cordially propose as Professor Appiah’s next project — is an explanation of why the moral revolution against slavery never happened in Africa. It may be this will require setting aside our admiration for exotic cultures, and our romantic enthusiasm for ways of life and being not our own. But diplomatic evasion can’t go on forever; looking African facts squarely in the face will have to be done sooner or later if we are to make sense of Mende Nazer’s world; and as we’ve already explained, nobody is better qualified for the task than Professor Appiah himself.

It happens that in 1826 a British governor on the Gold Coast, Sir Charles MacCarthy, was defeated by the Asante, who cut out his heart, ate it, and made his skull into a much admired drinking vessel for the king back in Kumasi. This was only seven years before the abolition of slavery in Britain. Did nobody in Ghana think this was wrong at the time? Where were Africa’s moral revolutionaries when they were needed? If ever there was a place where a thorough overhaul of values was called for it was West Africa in the 19^th century — and in the noble figure of the reluctant cannibal Flanders and Swann imagine a potentially heroic revolutionary figure for the times.  In Kumasi he might even have been a conscience-stricken Asante of moral sensitivity like Appiah himself. So why didn’t it happen? Why was there no Kumasi Anti-Slavery Convention led by the Appiah clan? No Benin Bill of Rights? No Dahomey Declaration of the Rights of Man? If a biographical history of the last fifty kings of Kumasi were written, would the phrase “human rights” even appear in the index?

As Flanders and Swann showed, all of this makes good comic material. Yet it is no trivial matter. It is largely because such things never did happen in Africa that the exact reverse of the civilizing process described by Norbert Elias — what amounts in fact to an uncivilizing process — is now flourishing on Europe’s fringes at the present time. For that is what the modern slave trade represents — the trade that trapped Mende Nazer in the Sudan and has doomed hundreds more African children from elsewhere.

The king of the Asante is said to have been surrounded by wise counsellors. But were they wise enough? Is it because there was no black William Wilberforce to stand up among the king’s counsellors in Kumasi and tell him forcefully that Slavery Is Wrong, that more than 200 years after the British abolition of the slave trade, Africa still practices slavery? This also relates directly to Appiah’s respectful anthropological account of the numerous grades of domestic servitude and patriarchal subordination in traditional West African society, grades blandly euphemised by numerous apologists as “our regional family culture,” and that all too easily collapse into subjection and brutality. Books take time to write, and no doubt we shall have to wait a year or two. But we look forward to learning from Professor Appiah why there was no spontaneous African push for abolition. It will certainly be of interest to the hundreds of Mende Nazers smuggled from Africa into England today.

Note: This essay is an expanded version of “The Slave Girl and the Princeton Professor,” first posted here on 22 October 2011.

Sources

Link for play about Mende Nazer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWLBxvl_yss
Mende Nazer website: http://www.mendenazer.org/
Slave, by Mende Nazer and Damien Lewis. Perseus USA 2003
The History of Dahomy, by Archibald Dalzel. Frank Cass UK 1967 (1793)
Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee, by T. Edward Bowdich. John Murray UK 1819
Buying Freedom, edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Martin Bunzel. Princeton USA 2007
The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen, by Kwame Anthony Appiah. Norton USA 2010
The Fall of the Asante Empire, by Robert B. Edgerton. The Free Press USA 1995

New ways of trying to understand the Middle East are being wheeled out almost every day. From Francis Fukuyama comes Praetorian Realism, an acknowledgment of Samuel Huntington’s scenario for imposing order on civil chaos in modernizing lands. (“Political Order in Egypt”, The American Interest, May/June 2011.) From Robert Springborg and Clement M. Henry comes Matrix Realism, similarly emphasizing the army’s role in the institutional arrangements of the Arab states. (“Army Guys”, The American Interest, May-June 2011.) In this expansive intellectual climate, with its growing range of options, perhaps there’s room for one more. Let’s call it Tribal Realism, the aim being to bring anthropological insights to bear on our political prospects abroad.

Tribal Realism should have a number of practical applications, but its immediate goal would be to vet Western political speeches carefully deleting all references to “the people” of Libya, or Iraq, or Afghanistan. It will then try to decompose this popular collective noun into its actual constituent parts. Admittedly, removing such a warmly democratic term as “the people” will make a sizeable hole in the prevailing rhetoric, exposing speech-writers for assorted presidents and prime ministers to a pressing need for workable replacements, but the benefits should outweigh the costs.

For one thing, it will expose the enemy too. From his Bedouin tent Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has said he wouldn’t dream of harming “his people” — let alone shooting and shelling them — and he undoubtedly means it. Correctly understood, however, Gaddafi’s people are, first, his family consisting of his wives and children; next, his clan; then, his tribe; and finally, by a no doubt deplorable process of geographical attenuation, those tiny insignificant figures in the direction of Benghazi who hardly count at all.

Once this meaning of “the people” of Libya is grasped, we will see that Gaddafi is telling the truth. In the Colonel’s ethical universe those who deserve his exclusive concern are the men and women he regards as kin: in contrast, that unruly rabble further east may legitimately be hunted down, wherever they’re hiding, and mercilessly killed. That is what desert chieftains have historically done when they could. That is what men like Gaddafi see it as their duty to do. And that is what his numerous dependents — “his people” — expect him to do.

We might reserve the role of resident Tribal Realist and vetter of speeches for Robin Fox, University Professor of Social Theory at Rutgers, and a man who has made the study of kinship, clans and the mental world of tribalism a lifetime speciality. His newest book, The Tribal Imagination: Civilization and the Savage Mind (Harvard, 2011) is an exciting synthesis of earlier work like the anthropological classic Kinship and Marriage (1967) and his latest wide-ranging thoughts. In a way reminiscent of the breadth of Charles Hill’s recent masterpiece Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order, Fox ranges from a discussion of the Ten Commandments to an analysis of the great warrior epics and Sophocles’ King Oedipus, from incest taboos and the myth of Isis and Osiris to the ambiguous nature of “human rights,” from the plot of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights to Karl Popper’s thoughts on the desirability of “open” rather than “closed” societies. But his most topical and provocative comments are found in a chapter entitled “The Kindness of Strangers: Tribalism and the Trials of Democracy.”

Unkind Strangers

Fox begins this chapter by describing New York Times columnist John Tierney’s bafflement, in September 2003, upon discovering that the lavish weddings regularly taking place in his Baghdad hotel were mostly marriages of first cousins who were the children of brothers. Questioned about this practice, the young people told Tierney, “Of course we marry a cousin. What would you have us do, marry a stranger? We cannot trust strangers.” That, as others might have told him, is what marrying in low-trust cultures lacking effective central authority often entails. After presenting a similar example from Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather, Fox writes of a scene in David Lean’s 1962 movie Lawrence of Arabia. A British agent tells the tribal chieftain Aouda that he should attack the Turks in Aqaba for the sake of “the Arabs.” “Who are these Arabs?” the chieftain asks. After reciting the names of some of the tribes he knows, Aouda demands to be told exactly what tribe “the Arabs” consist of that he should risk his men’s lives on their behalf. Fox comments, bringing all this to bear on Iraq today, “Thus some of the sheiks in Anbar province will ally with the Americans against al-Qaeda and its allies if it suits them. But their and Aouda’s sole concern is with their tribal advantage. This was Aouda’s highest moral imperative.”

Fox knows what Tierney and most other educated Americans apparently do not: that tribal communities are the default system of human social nature. Humanity evolved that way for millennia after leaving behind the hunting-and-gathering band stage of social life. Many of the world’s diverse societies have since moved on toward becoming modern states, but not all of them have. And even for those that have, the shadowy emotional residues of the distant past remain; we never lose anything in evolution but instead add new developments to older ones. That is Fox’s central idea and the theme running through The Tribal Imagination.

It is also a truth, he believes, that we ignore at our peril as we go stumbling about in strange far away places where tribes rule with an authority denied the more-or-less absent state. And the pride and latent violence of groups of mutually suspicious kindred must be the starting point, Fox says, for anyone venturing into this political landscape. Such men and women are not the free individual citizens of a recognized territorial jurisdiction; nor are they people with clearly defined and defensible legal rights vis-à-vis the state — whether in Libya or Iraq or Afghanistan.

This truth, Fox argues, sheds a harsh light on instances when our leaders make claims about human nature and the natural state of human society as justifications for political action, armed intervention included. These leaders, he suggests, simply refuse to understand the essentially tribal nature of the lands they hope to remake. They are reluctant to grasp that:

there is no ‘Iraqi People’. The phrase should be banned as misleading and purely rhetorical… What is not understood is that Iraq, like the other countries of the region, still stands at a level of social evolution where the family, clan, tribe and sect command major allegiance. The idea of the individual autonomous voter, necessary and commonplace in our own systems, is relatively foreign.

Numerous unforeseen events during the Iraq occupation have demonstrated the priority of tribal authority. When men came out and stole copper wire connecting hospitals to the electricity grid, indignant US soldiers tried to make the thieves see that their actions would hurt “the Iraqi People.” True to form, the thieves responded just as Aouda had a hundred years before. Who were these “Iraqi people,” they wanted to know, whose claims outranked the claims of their own needy relatives? The thieving clansmen felt no responsibility for some mythical collectivity called “the people” that, as far as they knew, didn’t include them, and that had been invented by foreigners without their approval. In contrast, they were absolutely bound to help their kin: those cousins who were also, in some cases, their own spouses.

To realistically understand the world of kinship obligations and tribal authority, Fox argues, one must first understand both history and social evolution. The domestication of homo sapiens and his living arrangements has been a very drawn-out affair, and requires a better grasp of tribal life than whatever the parents of a Baghdad bride or bridegroom might say to a passing journalist: namely, that strangers are not to be trusted, and that it is considered the only safe way of obtaining a virgin bride. While these passing remarks do tell us something, a deeper understanding of parallel-cousin marriage must be historical.

Fox writes that in the Middle East this institution probably originated in the desert-nomad stage of Semitic society when the patrilineal and patrilocal (descent through males, residence with the father) bands of Arab Bedouin wandered isolated in the desert, and when all other bands were potential enemies. They married within their own band, their own clan, their own tribe. Even among the settled Bedouin this was maintained, because it kept wealth and property inside the lineage. Outsiders were unmarriageable. This social arrangement represented a form of tribalism, moreover, that protected the individual “from the worst ravages of both neighbors and strangers. This includes the ravages of the predatory state organization that exists only for its own benefit and thrives on the plundering of its subjects.”

Social Evolutionist

Passionate, restless, curious, and intellectually driven, Robin Fox was born in 1934 in West Yorkshire. His soldier father was decorated for service in India on the North West Frontier, and the strong Empire, King, and Country sentiments of his parents helped make him some kind of conservative from an early age — the story is told in his autobiographical Participant Observer. This background may also have stimulated an interest in kinship well before settling into anthropology as a vocation. When contrasting social theories about incest taboos came up in conversation, most people he met at the time favored Freud over Westermarck, the late-19^th-century Swedish-speaking Finn and pioneer of social evolutionary thought. Fox adopted Westermarck’s theory because it was more commonsensical (a natural aversion underlined by a cultural rule) and because it put him squarely in opposition to the majority. Checking out the full range of theoretical solutions that had been suggested for the subject, he says it took him “only a few Popperian minutes to dump the lot.” It seemed self-evident even then that Westermarck was right, not Freud.

At the London School of Economics he joined the students’ Conservative Society at a time when Hayek was there, and Karl Popper, and Michael Oakeshott as well. In the 1950s the ethos of the LSE after Harold Laski still remained one of “determined, earnest, Fabian socialism.” As a student Fox hugely enjoyed being against all that. The year 1956 brought political distractions. He briefly found himself allied with the Left on Suez, chanting “No war in Egypt! Eden must go!” at a demonstration, and tangling with police. Soon after this fugitives from Hungary arrived, among them a student from some grey Institute for Marxism-Leninism, and Fox helped relocate him in England. The young man explained that his previous study had been “Proletarian Philosophy.” Asked what he wanted to do now he was in England he replied “Go to Oxford University.” Asked next what he wanted to study at Oxford he said “Bourgeois Philosophy.” No worries, thought his British interviewer, he’d do fine…

“God bless the USA! So large, so friendly, and so rich!” So sang the English poet W. H. Auden en route to California, and Robin Fox felt much the same way alighting in his own academic Promised Land. An ethnographic foray into New Mexico got him thinking about matrilocal marriage (where men moved in to live with their wives’ families) and he was pleased to meet members of an actual Fox clan in Cochiti. But maths was always a worry and when he attended a seminar on the componential analysis of Zuni kin terms, and was asked by the Chairman of Harvard’s Department of Social Relations, Clyde Kluckhohn, if he would like to comment, he said “No. I didn’t understand a word of it.”

There was a silence, a collective gasp, then a spontaneous burst of laughter and a round of applause. No-one in the thirty-year history of the lecture series had ever made such an admission… You never said you didn’t understand: this was status death.

Even harder to understand than componential analysis was the American infatuation with anthropological “culture”. In America culture was king. There were presumably at least some Americans who understood Darwin’s remark “Origin of man now proved… He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke”, but they were thin on the ground at Harvard. There, understanding human behavior meant understanding the kaleidoscopic variety of cultural rules. Whole courses (whole degrees and entire careers) could be built around minutely interpreting exotic details of ritual, conduct, and belief. But as for taking seriously a systematic comparison of the social behavior man shares with his fellow primates, or the universals we share behind all the cultural dazzle, forget it.

Of course the anatomical evolution of all those apes was recognized and accepted: the shared skeletal elements were inescapable. But Fox noted that human social behavior, especially its more tribal aspects, was somehow exempted from this rubric. Anthropological “culture” was in the USA a sanctified, autonomous, and purely human invention. Out of the air (not the genes) a numinous cloud of symbols and meanings and shapes to be delightedly scrutinised according to this or that intellectual scheme. In contrast, Fox saw human society as biosocial, and human social behavior as indissolubly linked to the social behavior of our primate kin. Back in England for a while he got to know Desmond Morris (author of The Naked Ape and “a chubby, balding, ebullient, bright man — a kind of animated Humpty Dumpty”) who was curator of mammals at the London Zoo. Morris encouraged Fox to take on the whole topic of inbreeding/incest and its controls, both among mammals generally and in human society.

Then Fox met Tiger. Intellectually it was a marriage made in heaven. Lionel Tiger said that “male bonding” was a behavioural inheritance from the days when our early ancestors made the evolutionary transition to hunting. You had to have this bond to successfully hunt and fight; it was part of “the biological substrate of human behavior.” From the day of their meeting the two anthropological soul-mates hunted together, drank together, and sometimes wrote together. Their arrival at Rutgers after the department of anthropology was relaunched by Fox in 1967 planted fresh and challenging ideas in American academic soil, some of them for the first time. In 1970 The Imperial Animal, by Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox, became an intriguing title in university catalogues.

Lévi-Strauss and Ernest Gellner

The Tribal Imagination: Civilization and the Savage Mind is dedicated “to the memory of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) and Ernest Gellner (1925-1995). The Gellner dedication is to a man whose ideas about social and political evolution are broadly congruous with Fox’s own. The Lévi-Strauss dedication is more complicated, since the French sage’s The Elementary Structures of Kinship is dogmatically opposed to Fox’s evolutionary account, and indeed to any kind of historical explanation at all. On page 142 Lévi-Strauss forthrightly asserts that “We have been careful to eliminate all historical speculation, all research into origins, and all attempts to reconstruct a hypothetical order in which institutions succeeded one another.” Westermarck’s “familiarity” explanation for human incest avoidance was anathema to Lévi-Strauss: agreeing with Freud, he was convinced that we are all sexually attracted to close kin.

Lévi-Strauss went even further — he believed that Culture is to Nature as Rules are to Chaos. According to Lévi-Strauss the rules prohibiting incestuous relations were not only an “intrusion into nature”: by saying “no” to nature (in accord with his view that we are naturally sexually attracted to close kin and really want to say “yes”), they are foundational. For Lévi-Strauss incest taboos established the Nature/Culture distinction as not only basic but sacred.

But is animal behavior chaotic? Are there no regularities to be found among other primates that both anticipate and parallel our cultural rules, including the incest taboo? Fox thought there were, and his 1983 The Red Lamp of Incest became an authoritative study. He had by then already argued for some time that Lévi -Strauss confused rules with order. It was, he said, a re-run of an older muddle. “If you’re going to make that kind of mistake you are back to the old ‘law of nature’ and ‘law as edict’ confusion again.”

Chimps did not have rules. But they did have order — the regularities observed by primatologists. From a comprehensive 2008 study by Bernard Chapais (Primeval Kinship, described by Fox in The Tribal Imagination as “a brilliant recent account of incest avoidance, in-laws, and social origins”), it is clear that whatever Lévi -Strauss and his followers may have thought, Westermarck’s ideas have finally won the day. In some anomalous or pathological circumstances incest can occur (Egyptian royal marriage; enslavement in an Austrian cellar), but for most of humanity most of the time it doesn’t. Nor are legal edicts required. Sometimes discussed under the psychological rubric of “imprinting”, Westermarck’s theory suggested that close and prolonged childhood association led to spontaneous sexual aversion in adulthood. Fox agreed: “Familiarity did not only breed contempt, it did not breed at all.”

Back to the Baghdad Hotel

On this matter Lévi -Strauss was perverse, but his surpassing brilliance wins him the honor of being a dedicatee in The Tribal Imagination all the same. His exposition of the way human kinship rules work to ensure we marry out of the natal group powerfully stimulated Fox’s own interpretation. The distinguished member of the Académie Française was wrong to think there was no continuity between Nature and Culture. But he was right to emphasize an important difference between the behavioural routines of apes and men — a difference encapsulated by Fox as follows: while primates have kin, they do not have in-laws.

Unpacking this highly condensed formulation reveals a whole range of connected evolutionary phenomena: the dispersal of animal populations, the need for genetic variability, and the origin of language, the last enabling social structures to form in time and space among men and women who have never seen each other and in some cases never will. Other primates don’t do this, and here Lévi-Strauss was dead right. The uniquely human cultural fact that arose was something new: not (as he thought) the avoidance of incest — that was widespread among primates — but “the enduring relationship between natal kin separated by marriage but linked by kinship, by descent from a common ancestor…”

All mammals ensure genetic variability through population dispersal. Fox argues that this goes all the way back to “the emergence of self-replicating matter, and the crucial revolution that produced sex to replace cloning”. Sexual reproduction, plus dispersal, spontaneously produces the genetic variability natural selection needs to work on. If mammalian populations did not disperse, “close inbreeding resulted in a loss of such variability, hence mechanisms evolved to avoid it.” At the same time too great a dispersal — so great that separated bands lost contact with each other — meant that beneficial features might be lost. So it is that “organisms breed out to avoid losing variability, but not so far out that they dissipate genetic advantages.” Not too close, but not too far; that was the evolutionary Golden Rule.

Which brings us back to what was going on in that Baghdad hotel. In human terms, the Darwinian imperatives of dispersal, variability, and natural selection eventually produced a social world in which marriage with cousins was preferred. Historically, that’s how it has been in most traditional preindustrial societies until quite recently. And for Fox it is an integral part of the tribal default system of humanity everywhere.

Civilized men, tribal minds

The true originality of The Tribal Imagination lies in the author’s exploration of the historical and literary consequences of these facts. For the stories mankind tells itself about its own origins in creation myths repeatedly echo a primeval conflict between the bonds uniting kin, on the one hand, and the evolutionary need to marry out on the other — to divide the primal unity, to socially separate, to genetically disperse. Often the original bonded creators were brother and sister, like Osiris and Isis. “For the Egyptians, as for the Greeks and Teutons, a series of sibling marriages characterized the early history of the gods.” For ordinary mortals this was forbidden. But although brothers and sisters cannot marry (a near-universal human rule), their children not only can but often should. And in the commonly prescribed marriage of a brother’s daughter and sister’s son (more common than the Arab union of brother’s daughter and brother’s son) the centrifugal tendency of parents marrying “out” is balanced by the centripetal tendency of children marrying “in.”

This is the original atom of kinship from which a wide range of marital, procreative, and residential patterns throughout the world derive. It is also a source of continually repeated tensions and conflicts that humanity dramatises in its myths, legends and art — conflicts originating in the one between the illegitimate primordial pair of brother and sister and the legitimate outsiders (those strangers always regarded with suspicion) as marriage partners. Fox’s analysis of literary narratives leads to conclusions that are often surprising: What was the true sin of Oedipus? (Was it really incest?) What was the real conflict in Thebes involving Antigone? (Was it really individual vs. state?) “How do the descendants of Adam through Seth foretell the problem of democracy in Iraq and question the Westermarck effect? Does the story of Lot and his daughters reflect a demographic problem in evolution?” These questions are answered in successive chapters — ‘Tribal Norms and Civilized Narratives,’ ‘Ancient themes in Modern Literature,’ and ‘Tribal Bonds in Warrior Epics.’

But it was in his powerful reinterpretation of Sophocles’ Antigone that Fox had earlier set out the problem we face today, when a dose of Tribal Realism is sorely needed — the problem of clashing systems of authority and allegiance: of kinship versus the state. In “The Virgin and the Godfather: Kinship Law versus State Law in Greek Tragedy and After” (Reproduction and Succession, 1989) he radically alters our usual understanding of the play. And he begins with a quotation about the clash of kinship and authority from his own book Kinship and Marriage that is worth reproducing here:

The war between kinship and authority is alive in legend. In story and fantasy kinship struggles against bureaucratic authority, whether of church or state. It undermines, it challenges, it disturbs. The Mafia constantly fascinates because ‘the family’ demands total loyalty and provides total security. When the state fails to protect, people look longingly at the certainty of kinship.

Fox regards the European habit of viewing society as a loose aggregate of autonomous individuals as a barrier to understanding. It prevents us seeing the truth of Ernest Gellner’s argument in Muslim Society that under Islam “the individual acts toward the state essentially through the mediation of his kin group.” It equally prevents us seeing that in Ancient Greece (meaning the Greece of legend that long preceded the reforms of Cleisthenes and the rationalistic speculations of Plato and Aristotle), both autonomous individuals and the state itself were problematic.

To illustrate the point, Fox contrasts Sophocles’ dramatization of the issues with the issues themselves. In the play, the figures of Antigone and Creon individuate what are essentially collective matters. As Greek drama increasingly emphasized character, and the merely histrionic, the theatrical roles of individuals became inflated. But this should not deceive us as to the political point and meaning of the enterprise overall. In Antigone, Fox argues, the leading roles of Antigone and Creon are synechdochic: they stand for issues much larger than themselves. In the case of Antigone it is the inescapable kinship obligation to bury her brother the dead Polynices; in the case of Creon it is his demand that the body instead be left exposed.

Those who see this as a conflict between a passionate individual conscience and the state, says Fox, mistake style for substance. What is at stake for Antigone are divinely ordained sacred claims of kinship, eternally linking her ancestors to the born and the unborn for generations to come. What is at stake for Creon is more like an arbitrary municipal ordinance issued by a local chief whose amour propre seems to be running out of control. Creon almost hysterically invokes his “will” as if this alone were a self-sufficient certificate of legitimacy. But is he even a bona fide ruler? Or are his actions those of the chiefly leader of an embryonic and still insecure state formation where he may indeed call himself a king, but is perhaps better seen as the apex of an unstable confederation of tribes? And doesn’t all this sound familiar? Not unlike, indeed, the code of pashtunwali standing against the pretensions of the Kabul Karzais.

[Originally in The American Interest, July/August 2011 www.The-American-Interest.com]

(Encounter, October 1980)

Note

An article with the title “The Politics of Oxymoron” appeared in the Summer 2003 issue of The New Criterion. A study of the linguistic damage done by anthropology to the concept of “culture” over the years, it suggests that Samuel D. Huntington’s plural use of “civilizations” could have much the same effect. The essay in which this general process was originally examined, linking the thought and usages of Herder, T. S. Eliot, and Raymond Williams, first appeared almost a quarter century ago. With minor changes here is the original text.

Anthropology’s semantic legacy

For more than a hundred years anthropology has been spreading sweetness and light. And now that the results are in—now that even the strangest customs from the remotest places have been recognized as truly human and entirely natural—it is plain that the popular verdict has been an enthusiastic assent. Its ethical understandings are widely regarded as benign. Its politics are as congenial to the liberal imagination as they are to the radical mind. Its broader implications have been sympathetically received by a wide range of people who have gladly melded its doctrines with their own. And if there is any one thing which explains this congeniality and appeal it is the persuasive conception of ‘culture’ which anthropology has bestowed upon the world.

No other notion has proved so irresistible. It beguiled T. S. Eliot thirty years ago, while the polemical advantages it offered soon drew the attention of Raymond Williams. It made its most explosive literary impact in Sir Charles Snow’s declaration that “the scientific culture really is a culture, not only in an intellectual but also in an anthropological sense”, and it received its most subtle literary interpretation in Lionel Trilling’s essay warning against the excesses of “the cultural mode of thought”. It provided a rationale for some of the arguments of Frantz Fanon, while the same cultural relativism which fortified Fanon encouraged Paul Feyerabend to claim that science and witchcraft are more similar than university men had previously dared suppose.1

For 62 years after its introduction into English in Sir Edward Burnett Tylor’s book Primitive Culture (1871), and for 40 years after the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, the anthropological meaning of ‘culture’ was not admitted to the OED, and the narrower evaluative use once common in the humanities—the Arnoldian use which Raymond Williams declared “hostile” and “embarrassing” and which he was pleased to see eclipsed—was much more popular. But that is now a thing of the past. Today the anthropological conception of culture reigns supreme.

The proof is everywhere—as any regular reader of Encounter knows. Quite aside from the argument presented by C. P. Snow, the distinctively anthropological plural form in the very title of that celebrated piece twenty years ago, The Two Cultures, in itself announced a change, and since then both plurals and compounds have multiplied apace. Not long ago in these pages we saw what was once simply described as despotism appearing in a political discussion of despotic cultures, a phrasing which more adequately conveyed the enduring incorrigibility the author had in mind.2

From a different quarter, blindness and inertia have been proposed as ‘cultural’ features of our political life by Alasdair MacIntyre: he said recently that there are some things which “our political culture cannot allow us to admit.”3 Again, what we had become inured to as a treacherous waywardness endemic in intellectual life, “the alienation of the intelligentsia”, now receives, as adversary culture, a formulation more menacing and more fixed.4

These usages are generally pessimistic in tone. But the anthropological conception lends itself to more optimistic interpretations too. Business culture, for example, attractively glosses the cash nexus. An editorial in The Times for 22 Nov ember 1979 concerning the Cambridge Apostles tells us that “theirs was a largely homosexual culture, with necessary dependence on ties of friendship”, and one feels that in this case the word culture confers a fraternal benevolence and a sense of belonging which mere sexual idiosyncrasy lacks. After riots in Bristol in 1980 a 15-year-old girl offered the explanation that “the police don’t understand the way we live. They’ve got their culture, we’ve got ours”. In this analysis the ‘two cultures’ of the police and the rioters are treated as on a par. Each is incompatible, irreducible, and is somehow envisaged as having a legitimacy which transcends mere national law.

All of which should make one thing fairly clear. And this is that what has now passed into public understanding as the anthropological conception of culture is not quite the innocently ‘descriptive’ term its academic connections might suggest. If in even its most comical associations it can be used to legitimize and redeem (punk culture comes to mind); if its ideological ‘holism’ was as attractive to Eliot as it was useful to Raymond Williams; if a phrase like despotic culture can make despotism rather worse than it did before, and a revolution on behalf of culture can make revolution sound rather better (nobler, more deeply necessary than economic or political necessity itself)5; if it directly suggests a normative order which is self-sufficient, and which is proudly upheld by its members in terms of Mein Kultur right or wrong—then it’s fairly obvious that the anthropological conception of culture in general use is a lively verbal weapon which blames or praises just as much as it neutrally describes.6

Descriptive or normative?

Yet this is widely denied. In A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn’s Culture,7 the most authoritative professional survey of the term culture and its meanings carried out by anthropologists to date, it is implied throughout that whatever else it may be or do or mean (and some 130 possibilities are supplied) a characteristic which distinguishes the anthropological conception is that it is neutral, non-evaluative, and scientific. It is only the humanistic conception which commends, judges, and prescribes. And much the same distinction can be found in the most erudite and authoritative writings in both literature and the fine arts. Directly addressing this question in his In Search of Cultural History (1969), Sir Ernst Gombrich notes that

“the usage of anthropologists exemplified by Burnett Tylor . . . has spread to social scientists, especially on the other side of the Atlantic. In this sterilised meaning it has come into vogue again in such terms as ‘working-class culture’ or even C. P. Snow’s ‘two cultures’ of unhappy memory. These are purely descriptive terms, stripped, it is often claimed, of any so-called ‘value judgement’ . . .” (Italics added)

One detects a certain hesitation. The deliberate “it is claimed” in the last sentence suggests, perhaps, that Gombrich is not entirely convinced by such arguments—and may even feel somewhat ambivalent about the matter. If this is so his ambivalence is fully justified. After all, it is precisely because Snow’s use of the anthropological concept was anything but “sterilised”, was in fact correctly seen to be a claim on behalf of the Sciences to an equal legitimacy and prestige in the affairs of the nation as a whole, that it provoked such a fiery response from F. R. Leavis.

Yet in setting down his opinion that the anthropological concept is somehow, despite everything, sterilised and value-free, Gombrich is expressing a view which is regularly found in literature and the arts. In the case of Eliot, G. H. Bantock found a continual wavering between descriptive and prescriptive usages.8 And when, in 1972, Bernard Bergonzi discussed the Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, he identified one of the main sources of confusion in similar terms.9 The troubles of Eliot’s arguments, he said, derived from his ambiguous use of two mutually exclusive meanings, the Anthropological-Descriptive and the Arnoldian-Evaluative:

T. S. Eliot falters

“In principle, he is concerned with culture in the broad or anthropological sense, rather than the narrow or Arnoldian sense: that is to say, the whole way of life of a society, all its inherited manners, customs, and styles of living; as opposed to ‘the best that has been tought and said’ and the cultivation of the fine arts. In practice, however, Eliot slides from one sense of culture to another in a quite disconcerting way. The anthropological use of the word is descriptive and value-free . . . “ (Italics added)

Close inspection of the Notes suggests that more than merely this may be involved. Yet a sliding from sense to sense is certainly part of the problem, and in the very passage where T. S. Eliot’s commitment to anthropology is most explicit10 (the second half of the paragraph below, starting at Now . . . ) there is a perfect example of what Bergonzi has in mind.

“By ‘culture’, then, I mean first of all what the anthropologists mean: the way of life of a particular people living together in one place. That culture is made visible in their arts, in their social system, in their habits and customs, in their religion. But these things added together do not constitute the culture, though we often speak for convenience as if they did. These things are simply the parts into which a culture can be anatomised, as a human body can. But just as a man is something more than the assemblage of the various constituent parts of his body, so a culture is more than the assemblage of its arts, customs, and religious beliefs.

These things all act upon each other, and fully to understand one you have to understand all. Now there are of course higher cultures and lower cultures, and the higher cultures in general are distinguished by differentiation of function, so that you can speak of the less cultured and the more cultured strata of society, and finally, you can speak of individuals as being exceptionally cultured. The culture of an artist or a philosopher is distinct from that of a mine worker or field labourer . . . but in a healthy society these are all parts of this same culture; and the artist, the poet, the philosopher, the politician and the labourer will have a culture in common, which they do not share with other people of the same occupations in other countries.” (Italics added)

Where else have those little words now and so been used so ambitiously? Whatever may have been the case in 1910, when Eliot immersed himself in anthropology, it has been a very long time since any American member of the profession spoke of higher or lower cultures, though to speak of social evolution as involving differentiation of function was once a sociological commonplace; as for the non sequitur which immediately follows, this heralds even more vexatious problems:

“so that you can speak of the less cultured and the more cultured strata of society, and finally, you can speak of individuals as being exceptionally cultured.”

There is alas only a tenuous connection between what the old-time social evolutionists meant by their descriptive higher cultures and what the Arnoldians mean by various degrees of personal cultivation. The first is a necessary, but certainly not a sufficient condition, of the second. In fact the very suggestion that it could be anything more might have provoked from Ortega y Gasset a rather sinister laugh, for the differentiation which Eliot finds in the ‘higher cultures’ is only specialisation under another name; and such specialisation, Ortega argued long ago, was precisely what made impossible the “exceptional cultivation” of individuals which Eliot rightly admired.11

Description or prescription?

All of which clearly illustrates Eliot’s tendency to blur and blend the descriptive and prescriptive meanings. What is one to make of it all? For his part Bergonzi sees correctly that a crudely binary either/or (either Eliot is talking about Anthropological Description or he is talking about Arnoldian Prescription) does little to explain “holistic or organicist” views of this kind. But is there, he wonders, a third and different sense of culture which Eliot has all-too-vaguely in mind?

That seems to be the only possible conclusion. In Eliot’s anatomical passages about the social body, leading to an endorsement of organic social wholes, Bergonzi tells us that Eliot is “attempting to move toward a third sense of culture which will go beyond the other two.” Yet because it is “the other two” which are used to explain this mysterious third sense, and because this is something they plainly cannot do, it is Eliot who is said to be confused. He is, we are told, “aware of the ambiguity”—i.e., between description and prescription—“though the subtleties and circumlocutions of his prose do little to resolve it.”

Bergonzi adds that these ambiguities then reach some sort of climax in “an extraordinarily tortured paragraph” on the subject of the unity of culture and religion, “a passage [which] illustrates the frequent tendency in Eliot’s prose for meanings to collapse and merge into each other as a result of excessive qualification . . .” and which helps to demonstrate, at least for Bergonzi, that “Eliot’s notion of culture as the incarnation of religion is not wholly intelligible.”12

We must agree that it isn’t intelligible—or not in the terms supplied. But if we firmly set aside the either/or of the more neutral usages of science on the one hand, and the evaluative usage of Matthew Arnold on the other; if we concentrate instead upon the conception of culture which has come down so little changed from Johann Gottfried von Herder (and was lucidly expounded by Isaiah Berlin13); and if we bear in mind Herder’s highly evaluative notion that each distinctive culture is to be prized as a self-sufficient totality, a totality embodied in its language, its arts, and its religion, so that “in order to understand one you have to understand all”—then what Eliot is saying presents no difficulty. It may also help to listen to the voices of the mullahs in the Holy City of Qom, whose arguments on behalf of Islamic culture serve now to justify theocratic rule, not to mention examples from even further afield.

For instance, if one listens to the rhetoric of Black Ethnicity in places like Australia, then not only is “the notion of culture as the incarnation of religion” wholly intelligible, it becomes hard to distinguish from the notion of culture which has become one of the most persuasive political doctrines in the world today. Strange though it may seem, when the philo-European Eliot writes that “there is an aspect in which we can see a religion as the whole way of life of a people, from birth to grave, from morning to night and even in sleep, and that way of life is also its culture”, his sentiments would be warmly applauded along Australia’s Arnhem Land coast.

What is more, the word often now used by Aboriginal political leaders in these areas is the English word ‘culture’, and it is used with the political meanings deriving from German Romanticism. It serves to defend the uniqueness of tribal life against the assaults of civilization: culture is invoked against the mining engineers, the sacredness of rocks and lagoons is asserted against the jaws of the excavators and the bulldozer’s steel blades, by a people who have discovered both the terminology and the ideological force of the “cultural mode of thought”.

Eliot and ‘what the anthropologists mean’

This may seem surprising, but Kulturgeschichte is evidently full of surprises. And the juxtaposition of Eliot’s thinking with the political language of Aboriginal leaders in Australia will only seem strange to those who have never noticed a significant element in his thought.

“What the anthropologists mean” by culture led him to idealise the possibilities of tribal life. This is conspicuous in The Idea of a Christian Society, a book written in 1939 in direct response to what he saw as the totalitarian tribalism then threatening Europe. The solution he proposed embraced a kind of Christian primitivism, a ‘positive culture’ which would above all be unitary. “The unitary community should be religious-social … a state of affairs which is no longer wholly realised except in very primitive tribes indeed.” Again,

“without sentimentalising the life of the savage, we might practise the humility to observe, in some of the societies upon which we look down as primitive and backward, the operation of a social-religious-artistic complex which we should emulate upon a higher plane.”

To Eliot, in 1939, the alternatives facing England were dire—totalitarianism; or a pitiful, apathetic decline. And to those repelled by such a prospect he said:

“one can only assert that the only possibility of control and balance is a religious control and balance; that the only hopeful course for a society which could thrive and continue its creative activity in the arts of civilisation, is to become Christian. That prospect involves, at least, discipline, inconvenience and discomfort: but here as hereafter the alternative to hell is purgatory.”14

Subtle minds may well object to all this. It will be said that several clearly distinguishable things are being hopelessly mixed: that the anthropological concept of culture is one thing, and the term which expresses it is quite another; that the varying concrete reference of the term must also be taken into account, and that whether or not anyone uses the term for this or that ideological purpose is something else again.15

To some extent I agree. The term culture is but a clue to the wider subject of the concept itself. Still, it’s the best clue we have. And what does seem remarkable is the stability of the concept and its ideological use over the past 200 years, so that what Herder was talking about would be instantly understood by political leaders today, and in some cases would not even need translation, whether they lived in northern Australia or the theocracy of Iran.

Others may also object to the suggestion that the ideological mode of culture theory owes anything to anthropology. It is of course true that professional usage is ordinarily neutral. When Clifford Geertz tells us that “the concept of culture I espouse … is essentially a semiotic one”, there is no reason to think that the attachment to his ‘spouse’ involves more than the conditional loyalty owed to any explanatory scheme.

And though it is also true that the minds of a whole generation of Americans who read anthropological popularisations were shaped and kneaded (or Benedict and Meaded) by relativistic theory, it might still be argued that this has nothing to do with the recent revelation of culture as faith and doctrine. According to this view the real origin of the ideological use of the term in the West was in another time, another place, and another country.

It was in Germany around the time of World War 1 that Kultur was being loudly promoted as the German alternative to ‘civilisation’—Kultur being warm, populist, and creative, both the prime source of identity and a linguistically unique possession of the chosen Volk; civilisation (on which the French and the English seemed to have a hold) being cold, arrogant, and paralysing, a universal misfortune propagated by rootless polyglots.

No doubt there is something to this argument. Yet an inquiry into the ideological use of the term culture—into culturism, so to speak— besides leading back to German Romanticism, tends to strengthen rather than weaken the anthropological connection. And it is surprising how shy Kroeber and Kluckhohn were about discussing such matters in 1952. Their tone and manner when they dealt with Kultur und Schrecklichkeit was itslf revealing. It was with an air almost of pained surprise that they found themselves having to admit that in the invectives of the dispute over Kultur and civilisation “the word culture had a popular meaning essentially identical to that with which anthropologists use it.”

What this points to is that the “sterilised, purely descriptive” meaning which is so widely regarded as the anthropological sense of the word par excellence, is in fact a somewhat insecure latecomer. Moreover, it is a latecomer precariously derived from a very powerful and active ideological conception which social science has tried—rather somnambulistically, one feels—to pacify, to neutralise, and to disarm. The success of this manoeuvre is constantly threatened, and the actively ideological potential of the term culture is ever ready to revive, whenever the neutral mode of usage is not stiffened by the professional discipline of anthropology, or sustained by the ideal of objectivity. And all too plainly, neither of these restraints are nearly as strong as they were.

As for the sources of culture theory as ideology, and their relevance today, it is impossible to overemphasise the importance of Alfred G. Meyer’s appendix to the Kroeber and Kluckhohn book, “Historical Notes on Ideological Aspects of the Concept of Culture in Germany and Russia.” Noting that “ for Kant and other representatives of 18th-century enlightenment in Germany, the enlightenment itself, the growth of rationalist and utilitarian philosophy . . . represented Kultur”, he went on to identify a second, opposing, and eventually dominating view of the matter:

“The other ideological strand tended to regard Kultur as a complex of qualities, achievements, and behaviour patterns which were local or national in origin and significance, unique, non-transferable, non-repetitive, and therefore irrelevant for the outsider. Herder’s relativism did much to pave the way for this conception of Kultur.

The stress on such unique culture patterns as against the economic, political, scientific, or philosophical achievements of Western civilisation can be regarded as an attempt to compensate for a deep-seated feeling of inferiority on the part of German intellectuals once they had come in contact with the advanced nations. Similarly, Russian cultural nationalism can easily be traced to such a feeling of inferiority; quite fittingly, Russian cultural nationalism developed in the measure as Russian contacts with the West intensified.”

These Kultur theories, then, are a typical ideological expression—though by no means the only one—of the rise of backward societies against the encroachments of the West on their traditional culture. They consist in asserting the reality of something which is just about to be destroyed.” (Italics in original)

[Note: The 24 years which have passed since I quoted this passage from Alfred G. Meyer (RS) have only made it more strikingly relevant to our present discontents. Ninety percent of the ideology of multiculturalism does indeed derive from a fear that certain ethnic realities “are just about to be destroyed”. What was not clear to Meyer, but is very clear to most of us today, is that this has seldom become a central issue in modern politics because of any genuine fear on the part of ethnic groups themselves. Whether we are talking about Indian untouchables in Calcutta, or farmers in Thailand, or peasants in Spain, all of these people want to enter the modern world and are usually quite happy to jettison the crippling cultural baggage which holds them back. Instead, the ideological defence of local and backward cultures—the promotion of the doctrine of “my culture, right or wrong”—has overwhelmingly been undertaken by radicalised western middle-classes, on behalf of an ethnic clientèle which may or may not approve their efforts, driven by a masochistic contempt for their Western heritage, and almost as often for the lands of their birth as well.]

Raymond Williams—destroyer

If culture as ideology is found at its most sympathetic among Australia’s Aboriginal political leaders, and at its most paradoxical in the speculative proposals of T. S. Eliot, it is found at its ugliest and most destructive in Raymond Williams. As anyone who has sampled his prose will concede, it has not always been easy to see what he was driving at. But a recent book16 helpfully clarifies a number of things. Forthrightly interrogated by his own followers, he was asked why, in Keywords (1976) and in Marxism and Literature (1977),

“the partisan aspect of what you are saying is largely concealed from the reader … You remarked that you have always tried to keep the mainstream of bourgeois culture in your sights—a combativity we very much admire. In Marxism and Literature you know whom you are aiming at—but do you tell your readers?”

It’s a good question. To which might be added “and if not, why not?” Certainly these are the questions which come forcefully to mind when one looks at the way Williams has used the anthropological conception of culture down through the years. In Keywords (p.82) he has this to say:

“It is interesting that the steadily extending social and anthropological use of culture and cultural … [has] … either by-passed or effectively diminished the hostility and [the] unease and embarrassment.”

What hostility and unease can this be? Evidently it is Williams’s personal response to any conception of culture entailing claims to superior knowledge by superior people. Certainly this itself is interesting, along with what he sees as the advantages of the anthropological sense of the word. But when we read of the anthropological usage “steadily extending” we seem to see an irresistible semantic tide; and the uninformed would never imagine that Williams had anything to do with the tide himself.

This could be sheer modesty—yet a decidedly uncandid way of putting things has marked his public relation to the anthropological conception of culture from the first. Twenty years ago we find the deliberate extension of meaning presented as a form of historical inevitability, as a force over which we have little control. F. R. Leavis’s concept of culture, he thought, was plainly to narrow. Musing on this problem Williams wrote that

“the difficulty about the idea of culture is that we are continually forced to extend it, until it becomes almost identical with our whole common life.17

But this so-called “difficulty” is his—not ours. The effect of the “we” is to compel the complicity of his readers in what is patently an uninvited extension of his own. When this practice of limitlessly pushing the holistic concept of culture as “a whole way of life” was pointed out by Ian Gregor in Essays in Criticism—where he noticed the oddity of regarding the Trades Union Congress as a form of creative art—Williams was quick to administer a rebuke.18 But now that he has been so fiercely interrogated by Perry Anderson et al (p. 155 in Politics and Letters) we find the following revelation:

“Q. What specific advantages did you see in the term culture for socialist theory?

A. There are two answers to that. The single most shocking thesis to established liberal opinion in Culture and Society, including people who liked the book in other ways, was that I did not define working-class culture as a few proletarian novels . . . but as the institutions of the labour movement. That was the gain of talking about culture as a whole way of life.” (Italics added)

And here we see the fatal outcome of Eliot’s initiative. What attracted Williams to the anthropological conception was its sheer political scope. What could possibly be larger than a whole way of life? That’s what the anthropologists said the term ‘culture’ really meant, according to Williams. And if this strategic terminological weapon in the class war were to be wrested from those at Cambridge who had misappropriated it for their own effete and exclusive uses, then the extension proposed by social science should be pushed to the limit. If T. S. Eliot was going to define culture as eating Wensleydale cheese at Henley to the sound of Elgar, then Raymond Williams was free to add a few amendments of his own: why not “mixed farming, the Stock Exchange, coal-mining, the London Transport”?19

On anthropological grounds there could be no objection whatever. The anthropological conception also suggested the possibility of a fruitful political marriage between cultural and historical relativism. As Williams saw it, the educational advantages of “The sense of ‘culture’ as ‘a whole way of life’ [which] has been most marked in twentieth-century anthropology and sociology” involved a most satisfactory merging of interests:

“There have been two main results in ordinary thinking. First, we have learned something new about change: not only that it need not terrify us, since alternative institutions and emphases of energy have been shown to be practicable and satisfying; but also that it cannot be piecemeal—one element of a complex system can hardly be changed without seriously affecting the whole.”

Two lessons, both useful for historical relativism, could be learnt from this. One need not bother to defend existing institutions when they are threatened or attacked, because others (unspecified, as usual in such prognoses) will prove just as “satisfying.” At the same time the holistic conclusion suggests that piecemeal reform is largely a waste of time. Ergo, in any programme of social change, the entire institutional complex must go.

The revelations of ‘Marxism and literature’

Today Raymond Williams tells us, in Marxism and Literature, that not only institutions will have to go. Literature must go too. With a zeal which makes even his most loyal sympathisers blench,20 the now insatiable desire for “a whole way of life” purged of the last remnants of exclusiveness, privilege, and superiority has led to the declared belief that literature itself may have to be “cleared away”.

In retrospect, what is poignant about this development is that when T. S. Eliot gloomily foresaw an epoch so debased that it would be “possible to say that it will have no culture”, Williams accused him of sliding away from the anthropological conception. After all, “no culture”, anthropologically speaking, would mean no life, no social forms, nothing at all. And this was clearly absurd and unthinkable. But what was yesterday treated as an absurdity in Eliot’s social thought is perilously close to what Raymond Williams today proposes as a likely outcome along the way ahead. Now that in Marxism and Literature he is far advanced into what his admirers call his “ultra-left radical” phase, even his interviewers can be seen drawing back in anxiety and alarm. As they tell him,

“One theme of the work is a frontal attack on the very idea of literature as such. In effect, you denounce it as an elitist elevation of certain forms of writing to a special status—the ‘literary’—a category which you say possesses the same kind of reactionary spell today as that of the ‘divine’ in feudal society … [You argue that] since all forms of writing are by definition creative, it is reactionary and exclusivist to privilege some as literary, thereby tacitly or explicitly devaluing others … Doesn’t your current position, if it were strictly maintained, lead to a complete relativism in which it becomes effectively impossible to discriminate between different forms of writing or types of work at all?

Williams: Well, this is difficult. What I would hope will happen is that after the ground has been cleared of the received idea of literature, it will be possible to find certain new concepts which would call for special emphases.”21

The ideologized conception of culture

So there it is. When the ground has been cleared—the usual cleansing preliminary—certain new concepts (unspecified) will be found. Then we can make a fresh start. First the deluge—after that, we’ll see.

What in fact we see, looking at the not inconsiderable range of societies which have been most systematically cleared in our time, is that when everything imaginable has been incorporated into the apparatus of the state, literature remains one of the only sources of independent opinion and ideas. Passed from hand to hand, often copied and circulated under the most trying conditions, steadfastly opposed to the single way of seeing required by “the cultural mode of thought”, it fulfils the critical destiny which the Arnoldian conception of culture once prescribed.

But these self-destructive Marxist literary manoeuvres are a side issue. It is in a larger context than this that the ideologized conception of culture belongs. When the legitimacy of institutionalised authority is everywhere in question, the prospect of a social order depending largely on a “shared sense of identity” bestowed by a common culture has strong appeal. Since it assumes that social harmony arises fundamentally from like-mindedness, it projects a vision of corporate life magically freed from the arrogance of power, the insolence of office, and the perplexities of legislation and revenue.

Externally, it legitimates extra-territorial yearnings. Thus Mr Bani-Sadr, now President of Iran, could argue (against the Soviet view) that Turks, Arabs, and Baluchis “have been living a common life for centuries and have a common culture” (Guardian, 18 January 1980). Internally, it legitimates secession. From the ‘counter-culture’ (on the one hand) to the Basques (on the other), it rejects the claims of the state. Its libertarian rhetoric is attractive, since in contrast to the ideal of individual liberty, the claims of cultures cannot so easily be reduced to personal selfishness.

It may be that the doctrine of “my culture, right or wrong” is to the morality of collective action what the doctrine of “authenticity” tried to be in the morality of the private life—an ultimate legitimation turned to when the institutionalised sources of authority have lost their power to persuade.

1 Lionel Trilling, “The Leavis-Snow Conroversy”, in Beyond Culture (1966). Frantz Fanon, “Racism and Culture”, in Toward the African Revolution (1970). Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (1975). In the second of last year’s Herbert Spencer Lectures, delivered at the university of oxford on 2 November 1979, Hilary Putnam of Harvard, alluding to Feyerabend and to T. S. Kuhn, described the relativistic ‘cultural norms’ approach derived from anthropology as one of the two most influential paradigms in contemporary philosophy of science.

2 Robert Conquest, “The Role of the Intellectual in International Misunderstanding”, Encounter, August 1978.

3 Alasdair MacIntyre, “Alasdair MacIntyre claims that new dark ages are impending”, The London Review of Books, 20 December 1979.

4 Irving Kristol, “The Adversary Culture of the Intellectuals”, Encounter, October 1979.

5 “President Bani-Sadr of Iran yesterday proclaimed the start of a Cultural Revolution. He gave notice that he would mobilise the masses against anyone who threatened ‘the oneness and unity’ of the country after a night of violence between left-wing students and Muslim fundamentalists at Teheran University . . . Inside the now heavily guarded university, the President said the meaning of the Cultural Revolution was that he was able to ask the 36 million people of Iran to defend the unity of their country.” The Guardian, 23 April 1980, p.6.

6 A detailed sociological study of some of the matters mentioned here may be found in J. P. Merquior’s “Remarks on the Theory of Culture”, in his The Veil and The Mask (Routledge, 1979)

7 A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: a Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions, Papers, Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Vol. 47, 1952. Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s assertion regarding the delayed entry of the anthropological meaning is not strictly true, as one may find in definition number 5 of the entry under culture in Vol. 2, Part 2 of The New English Dictionary (1893), later and more familiarly “the OED”:

“5. The training, development, and refinement of mind, tastes, and manners . . . “

This is appropriately illustrated by Arnold’s “the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world”, and the other examples all fit the definition. At this point, however, serious confusion begins. Under 5b we have a definition closely related to (5) above for which the examples given are strikingly unsuited, and which are in fact anthropological:

“5b (with a and pl.) 1867 Freeman Norm. Conq. (1876) I. Iv. 150 A language and culure which was wholly alien to them. 1891 Spectator 27 June, Speaking all languages, knowing all cultures, living among all races.”

It is surely clear that what both Freeman and the author of the piece in the Spectator meant had little or nothing to do with the refinement of mind, tastes, and manners, but instead denoted a social form. Somewhat surprisingly, this does not appear to have been recognised by those who wrote the original dictionary entry.

8 G. H. Bantock, T. S. Eliot and Education (1970)

9 Bernard Bergonzi, T. S. Eliot (1972), p. 156.

10 T. S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), p. 120.

11 Not that Eliot failed to notice this problem in other contexts. He gives much attention to it when criticising “the departmentalisation of elites.” T. S. Eliot, Notes . . ., p. 36.

12 Bernard Bergonzi, T. S. Eliot, pp. 157-159.

13 Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder (1976).

14 T. S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), pp. 29—30, 62, 23—24.

15 There is a loose correspondence between these distinctions and those made by Quentin Skinner in his “The Idea of a Cultural Lexicon”, Essays in Criticism, July 1979.

16 Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review. By Raymond Williams. Interviews conducted by Perry Anderson, Anthony Barnett and Francis Mulhern. New Left Books.

17 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (1958, Penguin Books, 1977), p. 229.

18 Ian Gregor, comments in Essays in Criticism, Vol. IX, No. 4, p. 425—430.

19 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, p. 230.

20 “This annihilating insight [that some day there will be no literature] is extraordinarily difficult for a literary critic, even a Marxist literary critic, to come to terms with.” From a review by John Sutherland of Marxism and Literature, New Statesman, 19 August 1977, pp. 248-249. See also Terry Eagleton’s similar insights as reported by Bernard Bergonzi:

“Given a profound enough historical shift there is no reason in principle why Shakespeare should not fall into the ranks of the unemployed.”

As Bergonzi notes, this is a prospect which Mr Eagleton evidently looks forward to with relish. See “Literature and politics Now”, Critical Quarterly (Vol. 20, No. 4) p. 53.

21 Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters, p. 325.

Contents

• Dreamland
• New Harmony and Robert Owen
• Authority, rules, and Aristotle
• John Humphrey Noyes and Oneida
• Perfectionism
• The perils of polygamy
• Accommodation in the Kibbutz
• Life at Cold Mountain Farm
• Atavism with Ezra at Rockridge
• Crime and confession
• Rousseau and the General Will

Everybody wants out. City dwellers want out to the suburbs, suburbia wants out to the country, and tourists can’t go far enough searching for exotic locations and wide open skies. In America a recent strand of radical libertarianism takes this escapism to a new political level. It proposes autonomous islands in the sea, beyond the jurisdictional writ of the state — or any state you’ve ever heard of — where true individual liberty will be preserved on what appear to be decommissioned ocean-going oil rigs. Anyway that’s what the “seasteads” described by Patri Friedman look like to me. Some even suggest they’re a new kind of nautical commune.

Maybe.

But I have to say that a floating housing estate as big as a rig resembles anything previously known as a commune like a battleship resembles a canoe. Most communes in the past have been agricultural plots where poor and hairy dreamers try to scratch a living from the land — even when most of them have never seen a plow, or an axe, and can barely tell one end of a cow from the other.

“When men complain of loneliness, what they mean is that nobody understands what they are saying: to be understood is to share a common past, common feelings and language, common assumptions, and the possibility of intimate communications—in short, to share common forms of life.” — Isaiah Berlin

What Berlin here calls “common forms of life” are much the same as what anthropologists call “cultures”; while the craving for shared understanding, language, feeling, and intimacy he so eloquently describes underlies our all but universal longing for forms of communal order—family, clan, or tribe — especially as a way of escaping modern life today. And if you don’t have a satisfactory family or tribe then you just invent one of your own: such is Designer Tribalism.

These longings often combine with broadly socialist visions of life and labor. In France in the 18^th century the Abbé de Mably proposed a community where

“all are equal, all are rich, all are poor, all are free, and our first law is that nothing is to be privately owned. We should bring to the public storehouses the fruit of our labours: that would be the Treasury of the State and the inheritance of every citizen. Every year the fathers of families would elect the stewards, whose duty it would be to distribute the goods according to the needs of each individual, and to instruct them as to the work required of them.”

Sounds good. Communes being communal, they are invariably seen as uniquely virtuous, fair and compassionate forms of association. Yet they rarely turn out that way. Discipline and authority are always a problem. A year 2000 Web prospectus for “Dreamland” in the USA began with encouraging talk about friendship and harmony, but closed by warning potential recruits that “thieves, liars, users and violent people will be dealt with harshly. I’m not a sucker, and I’m not going to build a charity mission or a soft target for crooks”.

Dreamland

The guy at Dreamland was looking for like-minded spirits to join him in a cooperative community. He’d had enough of “normal American life” and wanted a “meaningful existence” instead. Romantic primitivism usually comes from a reaction against the ordinary world, and this came through strongly. He knew exactly what he hated: the work ethic, abusive bosses, obnoxious co-workers, invasion of privacy and feelings of fear and inappropriate guilt, along with “blame, accusation, yelling, insults and threats”.

He and his wife were going to escape from all that, form a commune, and “get their dream off the ground”.

At one time he’d thought of being a hermit like Thoreau. But solitary life in the woods was too austere and he couldn’t take the plunge. “Call me superficial or materialistic if you want, but I’ve come to really appreciate things like electric lighting, working toilets, and access to many of the niceties of modern industrial culture like libraries and hardware stores, powered vehicles and medical care when I need it.” Which of course presented a problem. Primitivism demands simplicity. But common sense told him that radically simple living was no longer possible. He also wanted to live without blame, accusation, and yelling. But this goal was likely to be even harder to achieve—or not without a lot more insight into himself and others than this Chief Tribal Designer appeared to have.

Yet he’d learnt a few things along the way. He knew that recent history showed clearly that communism doesn’t work, that the ideal of economic self-sufficiency is a delusion, and that creating a new society from scratch was entirely beyond him — what Isaiah Berlin called “the crooked timber of humanity” was just too crooked for the task. Having learnt these lessons he was better prepared for his project than Robert Owen two hundred years ago.

New Harmony and Robert Owen

By his early forties Owen had made a fortune as a British cotton manufacturer. He was famous for influential factory reforms. Throughout his plants working hours were reduced, conditions improved, and the employment of children under ten was banned. Then around 1813 his mind filled with much grander revolutionary plans. After writing a book setting out A New View of Society he urged his countrymen to reject the industrial revolution and go back to the land.

This attempt to throw everything into reverse was to start in Britain. There he called for the setting up of Voluntary and Independent Associations —“villages of unity and mutual cooperation”—which were to become a vast system of cooperative socialism all over the globe. Each association would be a group of from 800 to 1200 people where everyone would live in communal housing amiably together. How his people were going to spend their working days was rather less clear. Owen said vaguely they would “hold property in common” and do some farming, but he didn’t bother to spell out the details.

If romantic primitivists dream of communities that never were and never will be (something freely admitted by Rousseau) then Owen’s case fits this description pretty well. Turning violently against the world he knew, he embraced a vision of rural life—and farming was something he knew nothing about at all. Countless people imagine alternative lifestyles pictorially, nicely colored and composed like tourist brochures; it was as if Owen himself had fallen in love with a painting of trees and fields, or a pastoral poem of Arcadian reverie.

He seemed to think trudging behind a plow was morally worthy in itself — the aching arms and the sweat on the farm-worker’s brow were signs of virtue. But there was no connection between his pictured images of old-style rural life and the very real practical problems of personnel and incentives and organization he faced on the ground. This soon became clear when he got to America.

“I am come to this country”, he announced at the launch of New Harmony on the Wabash in 1826, “to introduce an entire new system of society, to change it from an ignorant, selfish system to an enlightened social system which shall gradually unite all interests into one, and remove all causes for contest between individuals”.

He spoke vaguely about cultivating the land in common. Communal land would be an essential moral step away from selfishness. But he had no idea what it meant. According to the diary of his son William Owen, he told his associates only four days before signing the purchase papers for the land

“that it had occurred to him only this morning, that, perhaps, if he purchased Harmonie (the old Rappite name of the settlement) the community might rent the houses and land from him and cultivate the land in common . . . Mr Clark wished to know what become of their present property. Mr (Robert) Owen thought if the soil was wet it might be laid down in grass, if dry in cotton or farmed for the private benefit of the individuals of the society”.

The historian A. E. Bestor comments that however incredible it may seem, Owen was about to sink his fortune in an experiment without any notion as to whether the recruits who had flocked to New Harmony were to be employees, or almsmen, or partners, or tenants. And whatever they were, who was going to till the soil?

The membership was top-heavy with wordy thinkers who knew a good idea when they heard one, but had never so much as seen a plow. Only after a committee had met, and more than once, were some farm implements put into the fields. But by then Owen had left and gone back to England for five months, leaving control of the “Preliminary Society” in the hands of his 23-year-old son William.

Authority and rules

What I call Designer Tribalism has limitless faith that the right rules will produce the right results. If the setting is rural, and communal ownership is ordained, then once private ownership is abolished the remaining problems should look after themselves. That seems to have been Owen’s view. In addition to this it’s assumed that as long as people agree on their ultimate goals, communal government can be taken for granted too.

But it can’t. Old-time traditional authority needs deeply lived-in institutions and rules, and they don’t exist in tribes invented yesterday. The habits of respect are missing. Rational authority needs enough like-minded folk to agree on laws, not an anarchy of opinionated talkers. Charismatic authority demands the ever-present dominating force of an inspiring leader—and time and again this is the primitive solution to problems of authority and governance which communes end up with. Charismatic leadership can certainly hold things together for a while, and perhaps New Harmony might have lasted a bit longer if Owen had stayed. But he didn’t. He sailed away back to England, and in May 1827, less than two years after it began, the whole enterprise fell in a heap.

John Humphrey Noyes’ “Inquest on New Harmony” of 1870 is not without a certain disagreeable gloating, but he was right about some of its flaws, including Owen’s optimistically generous way of getting recruits. On one estimate nine-tenths of the membership was useless. They included “scores of whom the world is quite unworthy—the conceited, the crotchety, the selfish, the headstrong, the pugnacious, the unappreciated, the played-out, the idle, and the good-for-nothing generally”.

But could better people have saved New Harmony? With so much being handed out free, what motive did anyone have for working? Or was there a much deeper fault than the quality of the recruits — a flaw in the communal dream itself? Introducing an “enlightened social system which shall gradually unite all interests into one, and remove all causes for contest between individuals” was easy enough for Owen to say. But after private property had been abolished who would care for the communal property, and what incentives would ensure that work got done?

Aristotle made some useful observations on these matters long ago. Individual ownership, he said, had the advantage that “when the care of things is divided among many, men will not complain of one another, but will rather prosper the more as each attends to his own property”. But for some reason, he complained, although it was obvious that men who looked after their own property thrived and prospered, alienated Athenian intellectuals couldn’t resist the appeal of communal schemes.

Day after day they came running up to him in the agora and pressed advertisements for Greek Dreamlands and New Harmonys upon him — places where private ownership would be abolished and everyone would go around hugging everyone else. Men readily listen to such utopian speculations, he continued,

“and are easily induced to believe that some wonderful love of everybody for everybody will result—especially when someone denounces the evils which now exist as a consequence of the fact that property is not owned in common, for example lawsuits for breach of contract, trials for perjury, and flattery of the rich.

But none of these evils are due to the absence of communism. They are due to wickedness, since we see those who jointly own or possess things quarrelling a great deal more than those whose property is separate . . .

Justice requires that we state not only any evils from which those under communism will be free, but also those benefits of which they will be deprived; and when this is done, life under such a system is seen to be utterly impossible”.

John Humphrey Noyes and Oneida

Abolishing private property is usually Designer Tribalism’s number-one goal, and the Abbé de Mably’s vision of a world in which “all are equal, all are rich, all are poor, all are free, and our first law is that nothing is to be privately owned” is typical.

But the inspiring hope of new sexual arrangements runs it close. Plato long ago proposed that an ideal society would “hold women in common”, and the 18^th-century exploration of the South Pacific produced a bright-eyed renewal of interest more recently. Bougainville’s reports of agile nymphs sportively climbing over his ship’s bulwarks in Tahiti, Melville’s golden Marquesans in Typee, and Margaret Mead’s youthful vision of lovers slipping home at dawn  “from trysts beneath the palm trees” all helped to keep the vision alive.

Back in New York State in the 1840s, however, there was a man who needed no literary stimulation to warm his desires. His drive was urgent. His imagination was strong. And his Bible furnished all the text he needed. This was John Humphrey Noyes.

After attending the Divinity Schools of Andover and Yale, Noyes began around 1846 with a small group of family members. With this nucleus there would not be the leadership problems which destroyed New Harmony. His clan held him in awe, his domination was absolute, and for over thirty years the community always knew who was in charge.

Noyes took passages from the Bible about the Primitive Church, and by scriptural interpretation devised sexual arrangements for his New York community which in some ways resemble those of Australia’s Arnhem Land Aborigines, in others seem modelled on the polyandrous arrangements of Ladakh, while others again bring to mind the customs of polygynous Dahomey.

Noyes might have been surprised if someone pointed this out to him, but it’s hard to say. He might just have retorted “So what?” Because although the Bible was important as a guide, for all truly charismatic leaders it can never be more than a guide. Far more important is a strong belief in one’s own inspiration, and in the case of John Humphrey Noyes a complete and unblinking certainty as to what was natural and right overruled God’s word when required.

As M. L. Carden writes, “he taught that one should follow only the inspired spirit of the Bible, not the letter of the law. For him there were no absolute standards of morality. What is right for one time is wrong for another: it is a higher form of ethics to be responsible to oneself than to an external set or rules. In less specifically religious terms, although not without religious justification, he insisted that life is supposed to be happy. Men, and women too, should cultivate and desire the joys of all experience—including the joys of sexual intercourse. With regard to matters ranging from religion to sex, this nineteenth-century prophet rejected the conventions of his day and often anticipated more than a century of change.”

This sounds uplifting. Carden plainly sees Noyes’ sexual agenda as heralding good things to come. But though the oddities of the Oneida Community had compensating virtues, it has to be said that for the most part these were the virtues of God-fearing New England at large — order, work, thrift, cleanliness, and the punctilious paying of bills. They had nothing to do with polygamy. Such values belonged in another ethical universe entirely from those governing the sexual regime of the community’s last days in 1879. By then a small number of old men had privileged access to a harem of nubile females (some as young as ten) one of whom was obliged to service her creaky elders up to seven times a week.

Perfectionism

Describing John Humphrey Noyes as a tormented spirit is an understatement — but it suggests the tensions wracking the man. It all began at a revival meeting in 1831. He was 20. From that point his religious obsession steadily grew until in 1834 he arrived at “an unshakeable conviction that the Kingdom of God could and would soon literally be realized on earth”.

The Millennium was nigh — but how nigh, and how would you know? Intensive reading convinced him that faith, not works, was the chief requisite for salvation, and that a man who was close to “perfect” would probably be saved. He next claimed to have achieved this rare condition himself — only to be ridiculed by those who thought him deranged, to have his license to preach revoked, and to be driven into the spiritual solitude of “three emotionally devastating weeks in New York City in May 1834, during which he plumbed the depths of suffering and came to the brink of mental collapse”.

Wandering the streets day and night he preached to vagrants and prostitutes, visited brothels, drank ardent spirits and wildly added cayenne pepper to his food, and in the midst of these excitements recklessly concluded that the entire sexual basis of society had to be changed. The doctrine he formulated was Perfectionism, and the chief article of Perfectionism was “communism in love”. Noyes based his arguments on his study of the early Christian church, and were doubtless clever. But it is hard to see the main aspects of his teaching as anything more than the rationalization of a shy man, intensely religious, disappointed in love and unable to approach women directly, who showed a remarkable determination to rewrite the book on sex.

Next he announced a divine commission to implement the Kingdom of God on earth. First the marriage laws had to be revoked: “The law of marriage ‘worketh wrath’” he wrote. “It provokes to secret adultery, actual or of the heart. It ties together unmatched natures. It sunders matched natures. It gives to sexual appetite only a scanty and monotonous allowance, and so produces the natural vices of poverty, contraction of taste and stinginess or jealousy.”

The scanty sexual allowance of monogamy would be enlarged by what he called “complex marriage”. Pair marriage would be replaced by love of the entire community — group marriage or “multigamy” if you like. Women were expected to change their sexual partners often, and surviving records show that in one case conception could have resulted from any of four different encounters the previous month.

A man might approach a woman directly, or through a third party, and she was free to accept or refuse. Anyway that was the theory. But what woman would be bold enough to refuse a man representing the Almighty? Noyes himself supervised arrangements for intercourse, and the preferred relationships brought together the more spiritual and older residents who had reached a higher level of fellowship with the younger ones who still had a way to go.

What then resulted was an all-too-visible hierarchy. The most perfect Perfectionists comprised a privileged nobility of bearded old men, whose sexual claims ranked well above a collection of disesteemed minor figures of less perfection, less physical appeal, and less clout.

An unusual feature of Oneida was that reproduction was prohibited. Given that there was a high level of sexual activity at Oneida, what attempt was therefore made at birth control? A procedure was followed which supposedly ensured “male continence”, and which one writer has called “celibate intercourse”. Technically known as coitus reservatus, this involved full penetration without ejaculation. It seems to have worked, however, since very few births were recorded for twenty years. In a discussion of Oneida in his 1981 book Religion and Sexuality Lawrence Foster says judiciously that “Whatever one’s opinion of ‘male continence’ . . . the practice certainly did require male self-control”.

Indeed.

But whatever the frustrations of the community’s adult membership, children at Oneida grew up much the same as children everywhere—or at least this can be said of the boys. To be sure, they were raised together in a large communal “children’s house” meant to restrict the influence of parents. But they romped as infants, got into scrapes at a later age, and though the contact of children with their mothers was severely restricted, it is obvious from Pierrepont Noyes’ memoir My Father’s House that they were happy and well-adjusted on the whole.

Nevertheless after thirty years this unusual society did break up. “On the 23^rd of June 1879,” wrote Pierrepont Noyes, “something happened so unthinkable, so perturbing, that the very framework of life seemed falling about me, as the timbers of a house are torn apart and scattered by a cyclone. My father disappeared; departed secretly from Oneida and no one seemed to know whither he had gone. I saw tears in my mother’s eyes. She would not discuss with me the cause of this startling event or its probable results, saying only, ‘I don’t know. We’ll not talk about it, Pip, until we know.’” From the author’s account his mother may or may not have known—evidently Pierrepont himself did not—that John Humphrey Noyes had fled to Canada to avoid charges of statutory rape.

The perils of polygamy

This ended an instructive sequence of events. Disputes over power and sexual privilege are common in communes. Despite the disapproval of competition for wealth at Oneida, and the community’s vaunted egalitarianism, it is obvious that the sexual regime reserved the most delectable pieces of pie for Noyes’ himself. So-called complex marriage “disguised what was, in fact, something fairly close to a polygynous system dominated by the leader and a few of the older men who had preferential access to the young more nubile girls, while the young men were encouraged to consort with older postmenopausal women”.

And there was another privilege the old men enjoyed too. This was the right to introduce nubile females in the community to complex marriage — to take their virginity from an early age — a right increasingly demanded by Noyes himself. This so-called right to be first husband was nothing more than a primitivistic revival of the medieval jus primae noctis, or right of a feudal lord to the first night with his vassal’s bride. It is said of this medieval practice that it was never truly a legitimate right confirmed by law, but occurred when it did as an abuse of power.

Blatant abuse of power was involved when Noyes tightened control while increasing his privileges. Long interested in selective breeding, he now introduced eugenic reproduction — on his terms. These overwhelmingly favored the genetic princes of the realm . . .  the most perfectly perfect of the Perfectionists themselves. Yet he was shrewd enough not to completely bar commoners from having children. In Pierrepont Noyes’ recollection, “My memory, running over the roster of Community members, notes that almost every man had one child, but that, aside from the preferred ‘stirps’ (or legitimate breeders), they had only one”. (Emphasis in original.)

The Designer Tribe at Oneida instituted one of the most sensational primitivist projects ever. But the rules Noyes drew up are fully supported by anthropology. The Australian Aborigines of Arnhem Land were not only polygynous but gerontocratic as well. There the sexual monopoly of young girls enjoyed by toothless and senile elders has been a source of high tension for years.

Among small groups like the Bushman of southern Africa or the Yanomamo of Venezuela, strong leaders might keep up to ten women for their use. Polynesian chiefs traditionally kept up to a hundred women, while — as in the old-time West African kingdom of Dahomey — thousands and even tens of thousands of women were made available to the leaders of ancient empires like Mesopotamia and Egypt, or India and China, not to mention Aztec Mexico or Inca Peru. And who knows how many children the leading Saudi chieftains have today?

Anyone reading about Oneida will soon notice how indulgently Noyes is treated in most accounts. The attitude is liberal and admiring; the tone is respectful; he is even mentioned as a “Yankee Saint”. You will search in vain for any mention of civil rights. So far as I am aware, no book has yet been written from the perspective of a thoroughly intimidated sexually abused ten-year-old girl, unable to escape from the sanctimonious “culture” of Oneida, and having no-one to turn to, with a bearded religious fanatic climbing into her bed night after night.

Accommodation in the Kibbutz

Romantic primitivism comes from western intellectuals dreaming about the tribal world—and one of their more disturbing dreams is a longing to impose communal housing on everyone else. The more alienated they are, the more they admire extended families, and the more obsessed they are with barracks accommodation. It must be hard for anyone who has not read the sociological literature, and especially the attack on the nuclear family waged by progressive thinkers for the last 100 years, to understand this preoccupation with jamming lots of people together under one roof.

Research in France showed long communal houses dating from the Dark Ages in Western Europe. But it was Eastern Europe which really fired the imagination. “Learn from the Balkans” was the slogan (and learn from Serbia especially) as reams of paper were expended on the glories of the Zadruga, a common household in which fathers and sons, brothers and uncles and nephews, all lived together in unalienated Serbian bliss. Engels had launched this with a warm endorsement. “The South-Slavic Zadruga provides the best existing example of such a family community” he announced — although he reserved his greatest enthusiasm for the Haida Indians where “some households gather as many as seven hundred members under one roof”.

This let everyone know the standard for domestic density tribalism had set, and the writer Rebecca West was one who learnt her lesson. It is typical of the romanticising of something this author herself would find personally intolerable, that she devotes an admiring paragraph to the Zadruga in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. There the claustrophobic pleasures of Serbian housing are contrasted with the dreariness and solitude of English country life. Arrangements in east European peasant households were usually more complicated than they seemed. But misty misunderstandings fed socialist imaginings for years—especially in the Israeli kibbutz.

Back-to-the-land designer tribalism was ingrained in kibbutzim from the start. Most of the immigrants to Israel were patriarchal, capitalistic, and both modern and urban. In contrast the kibbutz was meant to be egalitarian and socialist, and to embody a Jewish version of the pastoral dream. For the new men and women of the kibbutz collective living was mandatory, and the communal nature of child care was spelled out as early as 1916: “Child care is not only the responsibility of the mother, but of all the women. The essential thing is to preserve the principle of co-operation in everything; there should be no personal possessions, for private property hinders cooperative work”.

Collective care also required communal housing:

“For several decades most kibbutzim raised their children in age-segregated ‘children’s houses’. Small groups of eight to twelve children, within a year or so of each other in age, slept, ate, played and went to school in a single building, under the supervision of three adults (almost invariably women). Each kibbutz had ten or twelve large and well-appointed houses, catering for tightly knit little groups of children who changed house from year to year as they grew up, but retained their integrity as a group. . . In effect, each children’s house was a miniature boarding school, which catered to a single grade, from the infant nursery through the primary school grades.”

This was supposed to reduce parental influence. Perhaps if the kibbutzniks had read Pierrepont Noyes they might have saved themselves some trouble. In a chapter about his mother he describes a rare treat he remembers, the day she was allowed to arrange a birthday party for him. He was six.

“There were only two at the party, Dick and I, but it was a real party and we had cake. I think my mother got even more pleasure than I did out of that party. The Community system was harder on mothers than on their children. Whenever I was permitted to visit my mother in her mansard room—once a week or twice (I have forgotten which)—she always seemed trying to make up for lost opportunity, lavishing affection on me until, much as I loved her, I half grudged the time taken from play with those toys which she had—I think somewhat surreptitiously—collected for my visits.”

Kibbutz mothers had an easier time than the mother of Pierrepont Noyes: they could see their children daily. But they still kept trying to make up for the lost opportunity of too much time apart. At first they could only see their children for a short time in the evenings; then after 1964 mothers were also permitted contact during the “hour of love”—a 30-minute period each morning when they took their children out of the children’s houses to play and walk. As the kibbutzim became more prosperous the mothers more assertively tried to get separate houses of their own: they wanted their children with them overnight.

By 1955 a majority of kibbutz women supported family housing, though only 40 percent of the men agreed. Ten years later the gap between men and women had widened. In 1965, in the more liberal kibbutzim where the pressure for change was strongest, 75 percent of women supported nuclear family arrangements, while men’s support rose to 53.6 percent.

The most doctrinaire collectivists were always men. They warned that a more individualistic system would burden the women, and they were right. When children stayed home overnight it was their mothers who had to take them each morning to school in the children’s houses—their fathers were by then at work in the fields. Nuclear households also gave mothers more domestic work. But none of this weakened their determination to get houses for themselves. Their answer to every objection was the same: “We don’t mind, we’re ready to do anything to have our children with us during the night.”

Life at Cold Mountain Farm

Engels announced the coming demise of the bourgeois family in the nineteenth century. It had to go if any serious progress was to be made, and during the high tide of communalism in the 1960s and 1970s feminists said much the same thing. In 1971 Eva Figes wrote that “until marriage is either abolished completely or has become a hollow sham, I am afraid women are going to make far too little effort to improve their own positions”. The following year anthropologist Eleanor Leacock declared: “it is crucial to the organization of women for their liberation to understand that it is the monogamous family as an economic unit, at the heart of class society, that is basic to their subjugation”.

Views of this kind were common among the Designer Tribes of the time. Laurence Vesey’s account from the glory days of the counterculture, The Communal Experience, reports on a 1960s project at Cold Mountain Farm in Vermont. The woman in charge was Joyce Gardner. Like the rest of her team she looked forward to the abolition of marriage, monogamy, class society, and all other obstacles to self-realization. The location was right — Putney in Vermont had been the original home of Noyes’ Perfectionists — and the site chosen was an inaccessible farmhouse without electricity “set in a secluded valley surrounded by an attractive rim of hills”.

The hills were important. Twelve months later they must have been the only attraction left, since the Cold Mountain farmers knew even less about what they were doing than Robert Owen. They bought a tractor which soon broke down. They waited for good weather to sow their seed under the impression that planting only takes place when the sun is shining, and that farmers suntan while they work. Meanwhile the time for planting passed by. There were personnel problems because some of the residents regarded disruption as a right. People drifted in and drifted out. A few chose to work stark naked, a gesture the neighbors found picturesque but unnecessary.

Though summer was passing nobody could be bothered cutting wood for their winter fires. Gardens went unweeded, a hepatitis epidemic struck them down, autumn chilled their spirits, and as falling snow deepened in the leafless woods the last surviving colonists vamoosed.

Vesey says the main difficulties of the community “came from within”, meaning that their utopian fantasies fell too far short of reality. This is putting it mildly. In an account she wrote around 1970 Gardner tells how she dreamed of “a family of incestuous brothers and sisters” sharing everything and everyone, a family “where energies would flow among and between everyone, and all relationships would be voluntary”, a warm community of people “whose love of life and of each other would give us an almost superhuman strength for survival”.

Many synthetic designer tribes call themselves families. But what exactly is a family of incestuous brothers and sisters? Gardner plainly wanted the best of two worlds. On the one hand she wanted the intimacy and caring associated with the sort of family where there are children. On the other hand she wanted the more demanding intimacy of incestuous sex. But the two things are not compatible — and one notices that as usual in fantasized sexuality, no fathers and mothers are mentioned, and no children, and certainly no daily routine of child care. What we have instead is the immature guilt-free sexutopia of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The naked savages roaming Cold Mountain Farm included only brothers and sisters horizontally related in time. This had effects on social structure. They were not linked to any generation before, or to any generation after, because generation had nothing to do with it. As a form of human association the community was both logically and biologically sterile — a strange family indeed. The people at Cold Mountain Farm were being, not generating, pursuing the narcissistic ideal of self-development, self-fulfilment, self-realization—and if self-realization didn’t result, what reason would a resident have for staying on?

Sexual bonds are not strong enough on their own to hold a group together. But it is unclear what other rationale than sex the Cold Mountain Farmers had. “We didn’t become NEW people—we just became physically healthy people”, Gardner concluded. “We weren’t ready yet to put the blade to our own skins and expose the raw, tender, inner flesh inside; to plant the seeds of the people we wished to become; to grow new and beautiful skins from the inside out; to rediscover our tribal consciousness, our human brotherhood…”

Atavism with Ezra at Rockridge

The xenophobia which is the other side of “human brotherhood” can be found in abundance at Rockridge. The leader of this New Mexico outfit is Ezra, and in 1971 his view is thoroughly apocalyptic: the “outside” is plainly heading for catastrophe, and salvation lies only through strict adherence to the “inside” principles of Rockridge itself. Described as a tall and broadly built man of 42, Ezra’s dark hair is short and parted, and he has the general aspect of a construction foreman or perhaps a farmer: “He is no hippie.”

His southern drawl is “rich, deep, full of masculine energy, always the instrument of his purpose, even when he shouts in rage”. There’s a lot of shouting at Rockridge because it has a government of men rather than laws — for to put it frankly Ezra is the government himself. And here we might look back for a moment at that announcement for Dreamland on the Web. The bitterest complaints of its author have to do with surveillance, power, and control. What he finds intolerable about America is the “invasion of privacy and personal life whether by drug or polygraph testing, or other means that result in a culture of suspicion and feelings of fear and inappropriate guilt… camera surveillance and access cards or time-clocks that your ‘betters’ use to monitor your every move and to subordinate or humiliate you”. All this gives rise to “blame, accusation, yelling, insults and threats against your job and livelihood”.

At Dreamland, he says, all this will be banished forever. The author has learnt his lesson from Waco and Jonestown: “I intend to retain some authority over the place, but I hope for the place to be very libertarian. I most emphatically do not intend to become the charismatic ruler, or anything like that.”

No doubt he sincerely meant this. Maybe Ezra himself began with similar good intentions 30 years ago. Perhaps even the Rev Jim Jones of Jonestown did too, though it didn’t prevent around 800 people getting killed. The trouble is that in the absence of separate roles for law-making, legal inquiry, and the impartial judgement of independent courts, men yelling insults is what communes always seem to get.

Ezra and other Designer Tribalists could learn a lot from Montesquieu: “When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty… Again, there is no liberty if the judiciary power be not separated from the legislative and executive. Were it joined with the legislative, the life and liberty of the subject would be exposed to arbitrary control, for the judge would then be legislator. Were it joined to the executive, the judge might behave with violence and oppression.”

Each day at Rockridge showed how important these wise cautions are. Absence of liberty, arbitrary punishment, hectoring and humiliation, were all routine. This was because legislative and judicial and executive power were joined in the one unmanageable personality of Ezra himself. The larger community of Oneida had witnessed similar public humiliations a century before. But despotism at Oneida was softened by discussions in which various men and women, high and low, young and old, expressed their thoughts; and although Noyes’ opinion always counted most, gross injustice was generally avoided.

At Rockridge the situation was far worse. It was not just that happiness depended on Ezra’s smile, one’s very existence depended on it. As a result his followers would do almost anything to ensure his approval and goodwill — including false confession if required.

Crime and confession

It happened that a woman lost a wheel off her convertible driving into town. And the man who had changed the wheel at the commune (let’s call him Tom) had failed to tighten the wheel nuts properly. Vesey was present at the “court proceeding” to be recounted, and so far as he could tell there was no reason to believe the “crime” involved anything more than simple negligence. But in synthetic tribalism, as in real tribalism itself, misfortune cannot be explained by anything so simple. There is no such thing as an innocent injurious act.

In primitive societies there is a world beyond the veil of appearances, and it is the task of supernatural explanation to search in this world for malignant motives. Ezra said secret motives lay behind the loose nuts on the wheel—and Tom would have to confess to having them.

After placing the wheel on the dinner table as a centre piece Judge Ezra accused Tom of trying to kill the girl in the car. He said Tom secretly hated her, hated all women in fact. Ezra then attacked Tom’s upper-class Protestant background, said that it was because the girl was Catholic that he had not tightened the wheel, that it wasn’t an accident, it was sabotage, that deep down Tom was driven by homicidal impulses and that if the truth be told it was a combination of religious and class motives, plus his dislike of women, which had led him to attempt murder.

“What followed next”, writes Vesey, “was from an outsider’s standpoint truly remarkable. Tom tearfully accepted the idea of his deliberate intent, without the slightest sign of resistance”.

But this wasn’t enough. Ezra said Tom was holding something back, and demanded dramatic evidence of how Tom “really felt”—now was the time for Tom to bring out all his lurking inner resentments, to finally rid himself of his need to kill. At this point the accused seized a glass water jug from the table and smashed it against a wall. Later, all passion spent, a process of rehabilitation took place, and the “criminal” was reunited with the community. Ezra invited Tom to come and read them his favorite William Blake poems. Group solidarity, the summum bonum of cultural primitivism, was again restored.

Rousseau and the General Will

Why did something more typical of the world of witches and sorcerers occur spontaneously in an Arizona commune in 1971? On one interpretation this represents a theatrical showdown between the claims of the group and the individual. Coerced public confession demonstrates that the right of the collective to assign guilt completely outweighs the right of the accused to defend himself. At the same time it dramatically denies the value of objective truth.

In the political theory Rousseau developed in The Social Contract the rights of the group and of the state flow from the General Will, which is infallible, and where the General Will conflicts with an individual will the latter must yield. In totalitarian politics this principle is important — it involves the authority of the state — and the striking parallels from Soviet Russian history and the Moscow Show Trials of 1938 are plain to see. As they were fully intended to demonstrate at the time, nothing shows the majestic authority of a regime more than the willingness, on the part of those it accuses, publicly to confess to things they did not do and to crimes they did not commit.

In a book from around the same time as Vesey’s, Rosabeth Kanter’s Community and Commitment, the author argues revealingly that when humiliation is imposed on an individual it serves the purpose of group therapy. “In communities . . . the use of mortification is a sign that the group cares about the individual, about his thoughts and feelings, about the content of his inner world. The group cares enough to pay great attention to the person’s behavior, and to promise him warmth, intimacy, and love . . . if he indicates that he can accept these gifts without abuse. Mortification thus facilitates a moral commitment on the part of the person to accept the control of the group, binding his inner feelings and evaluations to the group’s norms and beliefs”.

This statement deserves to be framed and hung on the wall. Seldom can the process of collective intimidation, humiliation, and thought control, with all its indifference to legal process and its potential for unhinged sadism, have received such an upbeat academic defense — and from Harvard too. But Kanter does indeed throw light on the tribal process which elevates solidarity above truth. If the group says black is white, then the willingness to agree that black is white vividly testifies to an individual’s acceptance of “group norms”.

Vesey also describes after-dinner exorcism procedures at Rockridge. As several women cried “out! Out! While breathing with the rising involuntary rhythm that one associates with sexual climax, I began to think I was eavesdropping on pure and simple hysteria of a kind which might even suggest Salem in 1692.”

But this was not pure and simple hysteria. What Vesey witnessed, in 1971, in New Mexico USA, was the deliberate reinvention of belief in supernatural evil by a marginal psychopath working the romantic primitivist vein, using the whole thaumaturgical box of tricks including irrational guilt, devils, and the ritual casting out of spirits.

The article above is a redaction of Chapter Two of The Culture Cult: Designer Tribalism and Other Essays, Westview Press 2001.

Books referred to include Backwoods Utopias by A. E. Bestor, Oneida by Maren L. Carden, Religion and Sexuality by Lawrence Foster, My Father’s House by Pierrepont Noyes, Women in the Kibbutz by Lionel Tiger and Joseph Shepher, The Communal Experience by Laurence Vesey, and Commitment and Community by Rosabeth M. Kanter.

[A shorter version of this article appeared on the website of The American in March 2009.]

Two museum exhibits

The two exhibits stood side by side in adjacent halls. One room, lofty and spacious, displayed Pergamon’s Great Altar and various associated sculptures — the other was mainly given over to Babylon’s Ishtar Gate.

Athena

The ruins of both the Altar and the Gate took years to excavate, and in the early decades of the 20th century they had taken Berlin’s most famous archaeologists even longer to reconstruct. Though to me it was a comparison of cheese and chalk, or caviar and brickwork perhaps. Because while the Pergamon display with its statue of Athena represented Hellenism and the light of Greece, the Ishtar Gate symbolised Mesopotamia’s long dark age before the light — an age that some might say has yet to end.

But the zeitgeist is of course hostile to such a view. It says demandingly that Babylon’s time has come and that today the east should receive its proper due. For too long has Hellenism been uncritically exalted in the west — that’s the political story. Now is the time for the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome to stand aside so that we can gaze upon the je ne sais quoi that was Mesopotamia. For that reason the combined resources of the British Museum, the Louvre, and Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, had prepared a travelling exhibition called Babylon: Myth and Reality. Though as for Babylon itself, what exactly was it? Imperial majesty? Architectural folly? A voluptuary paradise? Or just oriental despotism of the usual kind?

Mesopotamia

The Ishtar Gate

That remained to be seen. As I discovered while visiting Berlin in 2008, entry to the Mesopotamian exhibit was through the Ishtar Gate, a permanent display first opened to the public about 1930. If you find the fortresses of kings impressive — the Tower of London for example — then you’ll certainly be impressed. A towering affair in glazed bricks nearly 15 meters high and 16 meters wide, its walls ornamented with tiers of bulls and dragons and surmounted by crenellated ramparts, it had been the entrance to a palace where supplicants prostrated themselves at the Great King’s feet.

But once past that intimidating entrance-way the exhibition was rather less impressive. The museum hall requisitioned for the Babylon show had been divided into narrow winding ways, and in the heat of July, with indifferent air conditioning, Berlin felt like Baghdad. In packed discomfort hundreds of us moved slowly past scores of glass cases containing horoscopes, cylinder scrolls with royal braggadocio, magical arcana, topographical maps, and cuneiform tablets of baked clay — terra cotta evidently being Mesopotamia’s main industrial product.

Creation of the World

One tablet told of Babylon’s creation epic. Another contained a magical spell. The most significant declaimed the illimitable power of kings, and to accompany the tablets were rigid lifeless busts thought to show this royal or that. There was an oracular object the shape of a dogfish, and stamp seals from the 7th and 6th centuries BC. There was a crude 6th century clay statue, 15.5cm tall, of a god with a horned headdress. Students of ancient middle-eastern languages were not neglected: those who felt up to the challenge were invited to read a “remarkable tablet from 500 BC” showing “interaction between the age-old syllabic cuneiform writing used for the Akkadian language and the new alphabetic Aramaic that ultimately displaced it.”

Now and then something stood out. The dragons of the Processional Way outside the gate were striking, and a seven-foot-high black basalt stone on which Hammurabi’s Code was written around 1750 BC was a useful reminder that law and civilization are inseparable. Good for Hammurabi: it’s something people forget. But another stone raised more questions than it answered — especially at an exhibition designed to demonstrate that Mesopotamia’s achievement should be taken as seriously as that of Greece. About 60cm by 50cm and dating from Nebuchadnezzar’s reign (605-562 BC), its four columns of early cuneiform script were described as “a masterpiece of archaising Babylonian epigraphy” — and no doubt they are.

East India House Inscription

But what is inscribed? What royal ruminations are here set down that might claim our attention, diverting it from things Greek? We were told it “memorialises Nebuchadnezzar’s building operations in stone. After quoting his royal titles and describing his personal piety, it describes the decorating of the chapels of Marduk, Zarpinitu and Nabu; the reconstruction of the processional boat of Marduk, the rebuilding of the Akitu house, the restoration of the Babylon temples…” and so on. Peggy Lee’s disenchanted question has no doubt been overworked, yet it was difficult to emerge from those claustrophobic museum corridors without gasping “Is that all there is?” What literary evidence is there from antiquity of a polity and a culture meriting as much attention as ancient Greece?

The route through the exhibits wound on; the scrolls and tablets and sticky heat continued; and it was a huge relief to at last escape out through the Ishtar Gate to the world beyond. Since the Jewish captivity, one feels that Babylon must always have been a good place to leave. As you walked back into the rival hall of the Great Altar of Pergamon with its flanking statues of Athena and Poseidon a sense of oppression lifted. It was like taking off from a barren desert airstrip and landing in Paris. Once more there were faces of human scale with human emotions — gods like men and men like gods. In the Telephos Frieze, young and elegant figures were clothed in drapery arranged with all the delicacy of civilized feeling and all the art that gifted sculptors can bestow. Exploring in the nearby Greco-Roman collection I found, instead of the cold faces of despots, the statue of a young girl playing knucklebones.

Discovering Pergamon

A German engineer named Carl Humann discovered the Great Altar back in the 19th century. A cultivated man, he was working in Anatolia at the time, and had heard there were remarkable ruins high on a hilltop above the Caicos River — an entire Acropolis in fact. So he decided to take a look. Perhaps he’d also read the single literary reference to the site that we have from antiquity. This appears in a 3rd century AD work by the Roman Lucius Ampelius where he writes: “At Pergamon is a great marble altar, 40 feet high with remarkable statues, and the entire is surrounded by a Battle of the Giants.”

Great Altar, Pergamon

What Humann found among the weeds and grasses on top of the hill were the Pergamon Altar’s massive foundations. What he also found was an ominously smoking limestone oven where local peasants were pulverising the remains of the spectacular 2nd century BC altar frieze to make fertilizer for their fields. Though to be fair to men and women whose priorities understandably differed from his own, destruction of one kind or another had been going on for centuries. Under Byzantium much of the altar was torn down and its masonry used to build a retaining wall. Anyway, like Lord Elgin before him, Carl Humann arrived at the 11th hour.

Back in Germany he got the support of Alexander Conze, director of the sculpture collection of the Royal Berlin Museums; Conze got Bismarck’s backing; and around 1878-1879 the Turks, who at the time didn’t much care what happened, formally authorised the rescue of surviving relics and their transport to Germany. Humann had been planning this for years, and once excavation started the work went quickly. By April 1880, according to a museum catalogue by Max Kunze, “97 relief panels of the Gigantomachy and 2000 fragments, with 35 panels from the Telephus Frieze and 100 fragments, as well as numerous free-standing statues, busts, inscriptions and architectural elements had been excavated.”

What Pergamon stood for

The Giant Alkyoneus

These were the surviving relics of a major Hellenizing endeavour. In the 3rd century BC, writes Kunze, “not only had Pergamon set about becoming the new cultural and scientific center of the Greek world, but also the successor and legitimate heir of fifth and fourth century Greek culture which at that time was considered the Classical age.” In brief, Pergamon stood for everything that Babylon did not. This capital of the Attalid empire, opposite the island of Lesbos, with its 200,000-scroll library and its sculptures and theater and Greek temples, defiantly asserted 5th-century Athenian cultural ideals on the shores of Asia. That’s why the Hellenizing Attalids (281-133 BC) built Pergamon. That was their empire’s rationale. Extending at its height across much of Anatolia, it was a Greek gauntlet flung in the teeth of the enemy, as if to spite the Mesopotamians to the east.

Aphrodite from Myrina

The spirit of 5th century Athens also flourished elsewhere in the region. Nearby lay Myrina (Smyrna), and around the time the Great Altar was built, in the middle of the 2nd century BC, an unknown sculptor produced a figure of Aphrodite described as “one of the finest works made in workshops in Asia Minor at the height of the Hellenistic period”. The sculpture is worth both study and introspection, bringing to mind the deep traditions of art and thought that lie behind it, the uniqueness of the Greek achievement overall, and the virtuosity of the anonymous sculptor. Much smaller than the better-known Venus de Milo, and standing only 37.6 cm tall, it is made of terra cotta. Humble stuff. The same as all those baked clay tablets. But nothing remotely like this figure came out of Mesopotamia in three thousand years.

Academic fashions

The war in Iraq and events at the Baghdad Museum provided one motive for the Babylon exhibition — a concluding chapter in the British Museum’s English-language catalogue says as much. But the underlying academic reasons go deeper than that. For much of the past thirty years admirers of classical Greece have been on the defensive, while easternizing admirers of Mesopotamia — a region including the Assyrians of the 9th to 7th centuries BC, the 6th century BC Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar, and the Persians who took over under Cyrus in 539 BC — have been on the attack. Darius and Co have been talked up; Pericles and Herodotus and Co have been talked down.

That distinguished and venerable classicist Peter Green apologised for having been too keen for freedom in his 1970 book Xerxes at Salamis. Revising it in 1996 under the new title The Greco-Persian Wars he regretted embracing so enthusiastically “the fundamental Herodotean concept of freedom-under-law (eleutheria, isonomia) making its great and impassioned stand against Oriental Despotism.” What he called “the insistent lessons of multiculturalism” had forced all classical scholars “to take a long hard look at Greek ‘anti-barbarian’ propaganda, beginning with Aeschylus’s Persians and the whole thrust of Herodotus’s Histories.”

George Cawkwell, the Oxford author of the 2003 The Greek Wars, told us in a short preface that he was proud to be part of a scholarly movement that aims “to rid ourselves of a Hellenocentric view of the Persian world.” Much of the first three pages of his introduction then proceeded to ridicule and discredit Herodotus, who, he wrote, showed “an astounding misapprehension” concerning the Persians, whose stories were sometimes delightful but were certainly absurd, and who “had no real understanding of the Persian Empire.”

But if Herodotus didn’t get it right, who exactly did? Obviously some nameless Persian equivalent to Herodotus might have had “a real understanding of the Persian Empire”, but who was he and where is his narrative? What book by which contemporary Persian historian provides an alternative account of Achaemenid manners and customs, institutions and political thought, imperial policy and administration and ideals? The courts of Cyrus the Great, Darius the Great, not to mention Xerxes, King of Kings, employed numerous chroniclers recording royal achievements and military victories. Is it conceivable that whole decades of the new research referred to recently by both Peter Green and Tom Holland (author of the 2005 book Persian Fire) reveal no Persian literary endeavours to compare with the achievements of the Greeks?

Alas, that seems to be the case. Even the Oxford don so jeeringly hostile to Herodotus admits that though the evidence of past Persian glories “is ample and various, one thing is lacking. Apart from the Behistun Inscription which gives an account of the opening of the reign of Darius 1, there are no literary accounts of Achaemenid history other than those written by Greeks.” Moreover, he admits, such literacy as existed in the Persian Empire was largely Greek; and such writing as took place was mainly done by Greeks.

NOTE A further article provisionally titled The Assyrian Puzzle will continue this discussion. It looks at a curious anomaly — the London decision to make no use of the British Museum’s famous reliefs from Nineveh in the Babylon: Myth and Reality exhibition, despite their being described by the BM itself as “among the most magnificent artistic creations from ancient Iraq.” Was the decision organizational? Diplomatic? Or perhaps PC? Watch this space.

Robin Fox

In slightly different form this essay appeared as a contribution to a symposium on The Culture Cult in the journal Social Science and Modern Society (May/June 2008). It is also expected to become a chapter in a forthcoming book. Sandall’s contribution to the symposium is here: The Culture Cult Revisited.

At the London School of Economics in the early 1950s, in the building that housed the student bar (The Three Tuns) and the student newspaper (Beaver), there was tucked away a small tearoom run by Mrs Popper. She was no relation to the great philosopher, but the coincidence was too good to overlook.

Karl Popper’s devotees gathered there for tea and scones and discussions of The Open Society and Its Enemies, and the logic of scientific method. The School’s Marxist students from time to time demanded a cooperative tearoom run by the Student Union. Their demands were always resisted. The students may have been predominantly Left, but they weren’t stupid. The notice on the tearoom door read:

MRS. POPPER’S
SOCIETY
ALWAYS OPEN

Open : Democracy :: Closed : Tribal

Those of us who were pupils, then colleagues, and, insofar as it was possible, friends of Karl Popper, will be delighted with Sandall’s rehabilitation. For the reasons he so eloquently states, current anthropology is not friendly to Popper, sunk as it is in cultural relativism and fashionable neo-primitivism. But then it never was. As a student of both Popper and Raymond Firth in the early 1950s, I was considerably torn. Firth and the social anthropologists taught that Popper’s version of “tribal society” in The Open Society and its Enemies was seriously flawed.

His views on the “rigidity” of tribalism were, we were told, a sight too rigid. Sentiments like “…taboos rigidly regulate and dominate all aspects of life… The right way is always determined… it is determined by taboos, by magical tribal institutions which can never become the objects of critical consideration” (Open Society 152), and much more in this vein. Theirs was not a relativist horror of comparing the worth of the two kinds of society; they just thought he had the facts wrong.

Clearly, Firth argued, although Popper might have met a few acculturated Maori during his time in New Zealand, he knew nothing of actual tribal peoples. Firth had lived with the Maori as a Malinowskian “participant observer” and written a book about their economic behavior: The Primitive Economics of the New Zealand Maori. Firth had shown that their economic behavior was fundamentally “rational”: they weighed consequences, made sound investment decisions, calculated returns etc., just like their “civilized” counterparts. We were pointed to Bronislaw Malinowski, Firth’s mentor only recently gone from the LSE, and his demonstration that the Trobriand Islanders used “science” when lagoon fishing and only resorted to “magic” when faced with the uncertainties of the open sea (Magic, Science and Religion.)

Even there magic was only an adjunct to the rational arts of canoe design and navigation. For purposes of an essay on the subject I dredged up Paul Radin’s Primitive Man as a Philosopher, for examples of skeptical questioning by taboo-ridden savages. Popper, it was held, sailed too close to the wind of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s La mentalité primitive: to the notion of the savage lost in a state of pre-scientific “mystic participation.” Indeed Popper saw mysticism as a characteristic of the closed society (p. 265).

Lévy-Bruhl and Lévi-Strauss

At the same time that Popper was writing The Open Society (1945), Claude Lévi-Strauss was struggling with the same problem of “primitive mentality.” He opposed Lévy-Bruhl, Freud and Piaget in rejecting the idea that the thinking (or feeling) of savages was essentially that of children, and asserted the universality of rational thinking. His “elementary structures” (Les structures éleméntaires de la parenté, 1949) were not elementary because of the simple-mindedness of savages. The savage’s schemes of classification were based on the same rational (binary) logic as that of modern science. To think otherwise was part of “The Archaic Illusion.” Thus for the social anthropology of the fifties, Popper was reflecting an out-of-date idea of primitive mentality stemming from the social evolutionists of the nineteenth century rather than from modern ethnographic information.

But for me, this rehabilitation of the savage mind seemed to miss Popper’s point. He was not talking about different mental types but about different social types: different kinds of society. He did not doubt that tribal people could act rationally, or that contemporary Western thinking was not to some extent still magical and taboo ridden. But a radical break had occurred in the West in the 6th century BC in Athens, and after that a different kind of society from the tribal became possible.

In the closed society the social order was “natural” — part of nature. It was a given, set down in the dreamtime or by the gods or the ancestors. It was familial: the tribe was a family writ large and family loyalties were the model for morality. It changed, but change was not of its essence. Change was not welcomed; it was actively resisted. The rules and values of the society, which set a life’s course, were not the result of rational choice and deliberation, but were the givens of the culture. Within this framework means could be rational but ends were not questioned. Above all, the idea of individual moral responsibility, as opposed to loyalty to kin, clan and tribe, was absent.

The ‘open society’ as an ideal type

It is easy to criticize Popper’s picture by demonstrating the rationality of tribal people, but I think we must view his “closed” and “open” societies as Weberian ideal types. Depending on their degree of contact and their stage of social evolution, “tribal” societies might have degrees of openness. The great civilizations of India and China, for example (which Popper does not discuss), while being absolute theocratic despotisms, did have some open features. Confucius could travel around China peddling his ideas of good government to the tribal despots, and while he was not very successful, he was not persecuted.

Prince Siddartha could develop his ideas of personal responsibility for salvation within collectivist Hinduism where caste determined everything. Rome under the Republic and during the Pax Romana under Augustus was religiously tolerant to a fault. On the other hand, as Popper readily recognizes, our Western liberal democracies have many “closed” features, including, in his view, the English Public Schools and men’s clubs (p. 267). He could certainly have added the regimental system in the army and the behavior of sports fans, to say nothing of Grateful Dead concerts.

The open society must in fact be an ideal that actual societies strive to achieve. No society could be completely open, determining everything by rational decision. Most of the ends pursued at any time will have to be givens — established practices, or there would be no stability. Society would be like a person without habits and dispositions. It would be like the self-conscious centipede that had to think about each leg’s movement; it would be paralyzed.

But in the society aspiring to be open, the ends can be challenged and changed by “piecemeal social engineering.” To try to replace the bad old ends by new ends designed to be just as rigidly followed in order to achieve perfection, is to fall into the trap of “utopian social engineering.” It is to return to the tribalism of the closed society. It is for Popper the fatal weakness of doctrinaire socialism and Marxism in particular, and of all historicist philosophies of history that claim to know the inevitable process of change and therefore to predict the future and act on those predictions. Thus Popper appealed equally to moderate Tories who believed in muddling through, and to Fabian socialists who were for gradual pragmatic reform.

The strain of civilization

What Popper saw clearly (as Sandall points out) was “the strain of civilization” that afflicted the open society. The open society was difficult to achieve. It was not “natural” to us; we had to work devilish hard to make it succeed. Popper agreed with Freud that, as the latter would have put it, the burden of the super-ego was too great. Popper would have said the burden of individual moral responsibility. Too many of us too much of the time were only too happy to have some absolutist doctrine, some sacred text, or some charismatic leader take the burden of responsibility from us: to return us to the familial comfort of closed, tribal society, where it was all decided for us.

Above all there is a fear of the uncertainties of change — particularly rapid change. What is closed in the closed society is the future, either because it is thought to eternally repeat the present, or to recycle fixed ages, or to change in completely known and fixed ways. The closed society seeks to ignore, deny, and arrest, or to predict and hence totally control, social change. The open society accepts the unpredictable reality of change and deals with it.

This contrast was present from the start in the great conflict between democratic Athens (potentially open but with a heavy burden of closed features) and tribal Sparta (completely and utterly closed): the subject of Popper’s first volume (The Spell of Plato). Athens had passed consciously from a tribal society to a democratic city-state, which in turn morphed into a maritime empire. (Curiously, Popper, while making much of Solon and Pericles, does not mention the reforms of Cleisthenes which were critical to the change.)

Athens struggled to maintain its democratic openness, both against outside opponents and against inside forces. By becoming an empire it threatened its own democracy. The old order of tribal families, which Cleisthenes had tried to break down, hated democracy and conspired with Sparta, the archetypal closed tribal society, which just as consciously arrested change as Athens had embraced it. Many of the Athenian intellectuals took the pro-Spartan side. Plato, Popper’s nemesis, led the intellectual justification for a Spartan-style society in The Republic and The Laws. Plato’s relatives were active in the council of The Thirty Tyrants who conspired with Sparta and led a reign of terror in Athens.

If all this sounds very contemporary, then Popper has made his point. It is not just the gullible mob and the crypto-aristocrats who are ready to betray the open society: its own intellectuals are often in the forefront of the stampede. Why, asked Popper, were his intellectual contemporaries so bewitched by Fascism and Communism, just as Plato was by Spartanism?

Tribalism and bureaucracy

The sinister appeal of the closed society to even the best minds haunted Popper. The Western democracies are the most open societies yet achieved, but they too tend to become, or try to become, empires. Their growing complexity makes harsh demands on our capacity for rationality and individual moral responsibility. The “perennial appeal of tribalism” (my phrase not Popper’s), both to the masses and the elites, is often overpowering. When things are looking bad for us we cry out for a savior — a doctrine and a leader to return us to the safety of tribal society and the tribal mentality.

Max Weber was just as bothered as Popper by this. But he added an important point. He saw that charismatic leadership had an innate appeal, but he also saw that the growth of giant bureaucracies — indeed the very bureaucratic principle itself — added a new and dangerous variable to the equation. This was the most “rational” of rational social developments, and yet it had no inherent moral impulse. It could serve a vicious tyranny with the same amoral efficiency as it served a beneficent welfare state. Indeed it was the perfect instrument for totalitarianism.

Popper misses this. The Soviet Union under Stalin, and the Fascist dictatorships, were nightmares of bureaucracy as much as nightmares of tribalism. The tribal elements were the more spectacular (Nuremburg), but the bureaucracy got the totalitarian job done (Eichmann). The Soviet system eventually broke down because this form of government became perilously inefficient. The result of the breakdown is not the free enterprise democracy that was our hope, but a resurgence of Russian tribalism.

George Orwell is of course the great fabulist of this new-old phenomenon, and he portrayed dramatically the ruthless mix of tribal and bureaucratic elements in the reign of Big Brother and The Party. The Islamic dictatorships on the other hand (which, as Sandall notes, Popper does not consider) are predominantly tribal, with poorly developed bureaucracies precisely because they are tribal still in mentality. They are societies that have never opened. Most of the mistakes we make with them result from not appreciating this fact, and assuming that if offered the choice they will choose to be good individualistic liberal democracies. We saw what happened when the Athenians offered the model of democracy to Sparta. It was called the Peloponnesian War.

The unnaturalness of openness

The open society and its corollary of liberal democracy, contrary to some modern opinions on the subject, is not the inevitable end product of social evolution. It is not natural to us, and we live constantly on the edge in trying to maintain it. And as Sandall acutely notes, Popper never deals with the paradox that although the use of force is inimical to the ideal open society, without that force we cannot defend it against the forces of the closed societies — the totalitarianisms that threaten it. The only recourse I suppose is that we should use force sparingly and wisely. One out of two is not bad.

Sandall mentions Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Her courageous book Infidel records in plain and moving prose one person’s journey from the inside of the most closed of tribal societies, clan-dominated Somalia, to the openness of almost painfully super-open Holland. It is a personal journey that recapitulates the whole development that Popper (and most other sociologists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) has traced for society as a whole. To those of us who take our openness, however tarnished, too much for granted, it is a rebuke and a warning. And it illustrates for us our great paradox: how tolerant can an open society afford to be of intolerance? In our open concern with not intruding on “religious freedom” or even of offending “religious sensibilities” are we letting the opponents of the open society fester and grow in our midst?

Holland and the rest of Europe are caught in a web of self-delusion on the issue; there is no easy answer. Miss Ali is under threat of death from the agents of the closed society. A fanatic has already murdered her colleague, filmmaker Theo van Gogh, and the Dutch government, in its moral confusion, has withdrawn her protection. Friends of the open society, and of the human decency (Orwell’s favorite value) on which it must ultimately depend, should rally to her support. This is not an irrelevant footnote. The question of the survival of the open society is not simply an issue for academic discussion in journals. It is a life and death matter and we are all burdened with that individual moral responsibility for it that Popper saw as being at its heart.

Perhaps the most serious footnote to Popper’s argument is the objection that the distinction he draws is too stark. To say that Fascism and Soviet Communism are relapses to “tribalism” is to miss the point that both had elements of mass salvation religion about them, elements which, while certainly not open, were not tribal either.

As I have already pointed out, the road from tribal to open is long and complex and a major intervening stage is that of the growth of trans-tribal, trans-national religions, like Hinduism (to some extent), Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam (Judaism remained tribal, with the proviso that it would accept converts.) Among these, Roman Christianity and the Islamic Caliphate depended on large and complicated (and celibate) bureaucratic organizations to run their transnational governments, and all needed literate clergy. This was the thin end of the wedge. Despite their mysticism and totalitarianism, therefore, these religions were also the basis for developing education and critical thought.

The route in the West was from Magic and Mysticism, through Metaphysics and Scholasticism, to the Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment, to Positive Science and the modern world. This was a move beyond “tribalism” even though tribal elements remained strong throughout and always exercised their peculiarly human appeal. Thus for me the “closed” society can have elements that move well beyond the tribal, yet are not fully “open.” When we revert, it is to these elements: the savior, the doctrine, the assurance of meaning, the even greater assurance of salvation — in this world (Fascism and Communism) or the next (Islam, Evangelicalism), as much as to the raw tribal elements, that we turn to in our fear of freedom (pace Fromm.) Islamic societies are fundamentally tribal and closed in that sense, but they are also the product of a salvation religion which moves beyond the tribe and seeks to incorporate the world.

What Popper misses

This is perhaps what Popper misses. The salvation religions can be as decidedly opposed to tribalism as they are to the open society itself. The great churches in fact often seek to subvert completely that loyalty to the family and kin on which tribalism depends; they want the individual worshippers to be loyal directly to the church. They rarely succeed entirely because of the fundamental appeal of tribalism we have already canvassed.

Islam is an interesting and effective balance in which the religion has drawn on the energy of the tribe and clan in its success. But it is not a good formula for producing democratic societies, as we are discovering. Thus while I think Popper’s “open vs. closed” distinction holds, he was perhaps overly influenced by the Athens vs. Sparta contrast in his eagerness to refute Plato. He was therefore perhaps misleading to equate “closed” totally with “tribal.” Closed society is more complicated than that, or it would be easier to deal with.

This is therefore perhaps the place to note briefly that Popper never meant us to assume that a tribal society was an unreservedly grim place to be. Such societies when large and warrior dominated, could be truly savage places, but the small ones could be warm and supportive and in many ways very satisfying to their members. The Eskimo, he admits, seem to be a happy people. (Thus I have sung the virtues of the “Paleoterrific”—the old stone-age societies like those of Lascaux which Sandall does not want to admit as civilizations—technically correct; see The Search for Society.)

More open societies on the other hand, as de Tocquevelle noted for America, can be riven with anxiety and uncertainty, with alienation, anomie and angst. This was the point about the “burden of civilization.” It is why the closed society had its powerful attraction for us, even the intellectuals. There was a cost to maintaining an open system, but it was worth it. The alternative was the modern version of the closed society, which was inevitably totalitarian and repressive.

Culture:Kultur :: Folk: Volk

The argument between the two meanings of “culture” that Sandall discusses, Mathew Arnold’s version of “high culture” (“the best that has been thought and said and written”), and the anthropological notion of culture as the general life-ways of a people, might also seem like a purely academic matter. But insofar as the distinction affects our behavior in the real world, and it does, it is equally a matter of moral concern. I pretty much agree with what Sandall says, so I will here add some notes on the history of the idea of culture that might reinforce his admirable stand.

I might note that back in those balmy intellectual days at the LSE (see my Participant Observer: Memoir of a Transatlantic Life) the first essay students had to do in social anthropology was always on the idea of “culture.” We read Malinowski’s article of that name in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, and were expected to grasp thoroughly the difference between the Arnoldian and popular idea of culture as high thinking and aesthetics—”playing the piano, reading Byron and taking ballet lessons” as Firth used to put it, and the anthropological notion of culture as the total integrated way of life of a community. It was usually E. B. Tylor’s “enumerative descriptive” definition that was quoted then: “That complex whole which includes…” pretty much everything (Primitive Culture).

It is a measure of change in our own culture that this emphasis is now reversed and the anthropological meaning now dominates. No one now claims to be “cultured” or to have “cultivated” tastes. It sounds offensively elitist. Students find it hard to imagine a time when this was not true.

Anthropology and Kultur

The anthropological idea of culture is fundamentally German: Kultur. It would be hard for such an idea to arise in Anglo-Saxon thinking, basically utilitarian, empiricist and individualist. The German strain — Kantian, idealist and collectivist is much more open to it. It is interesting that the continental Pole, Malinowski, always thought of culture as his subject matter (A Scientific Theory of Culture), and thought it should be analyzed in terms of how it answered human needs. In this he was not followed by even his most immediate followers. They preferred A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (A Natural Science of Society), and called themselves “social anthropologists” (as Sandall notes.) They saw “society” or “social structure” as their subject matter (essentially following Emile Durkheim). But note the continuing insistence that what they were doing was “science.”

In this they took issue with Willhelm Dilthey’s (1833-1911) absolute and influential separation of Naturwissenschaften, the “nature sciences,” from Geisteswissenschaften, the “spirit sciences.” The first searches for causes (the model is physics), the second rather for patterns (the model is history). The methods of the one, Dilthey claimed, cannot be applied to the subject matter of the other. This debate runs through anthropology, with the issues of anthropology as science or history, and the recent popular upsurge of anthropology as a humanity as opposed to a science.

The Germans in American anthropology, Boas, Kroeber, Lowie, Sapir etc., and their students (Mead, Benedict, Kluckhohn, Linton, and latterly Geertz) tended always to favor the humanistic or historical side against the scientific. Franz Boas, who taught them all — and who started as a physicist in Germany — had learned profoundly from Dilthey, Humboldt, Wundt, Bastian and Frobenius and his thought was suffused with their ideas.

The non-Germans in America, deriving from Lewis Henry Morgan (Ancient Society) and his social evolutionism, tended to stick with materialist science, as in Leslie White (The Science of Culture), and G. P. Murdock (Social Structure), or Julian Steward (Theory of Culture Change), or Marvin Harris (Cultural Materialism: The Search for a Science of Culture). But they all shared the same idea of culture, differing only in how to analyze it.

The idea of Kultur in this anthropological sense, as Sandall observes, goes back to Johann Herder (1744-1803). It gets immediately entangled with Herder’s other basic notion of the Volk. This was the beginning both of German romantic nationalism, and of the anthropological concept of culture. Herder distinguished Volk—the people, from Reich—the state. (The Nazis conflated the two: “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer!“) The state was, for Herder, destructive of the organic spirit (Geist) of the people — essentially the unspoiled peasants and rural villagers who enshrined the true, ancient soul of the people, which was lost in the cities.

The Volksgeist

The Geist of each Volk (the Volksgeist) was unique and produced its distinctive Kultur, which, being specific and organic and a ding-an-sich, could not be judged by the values of other cultures. Dilthey himself was a German romantic nationalist, and his insistence on the autonomy of the human sciences (which gave rise to “hermeneutics”) was part and parcel of protecting the uniqueness of the Geist of the German Volk. Dilthey and Herder were thus attacking the whole Enlightenment project of universal history and universal values, as enshrined in British empiricism, French materialism and Scottish evolutionism.

The concept of the uniqueness and superiority of the Kultur of the Volk has an interesting and wayward history. Academically it was reflected in Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie (Folk Psychology), and Bastian’s Völkergedanke (Folk Ideas), and Frobenius’ Kulturkreislehre (Culture Area Theory.) All this was transposed to American anthropology, largely by Boas. But in the wider world it fueled the fires of passionate romantic nationalism throughout Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Brothers Grimm began the collection of “Folktales” which preserved the Spirit of the Folk. Hans Christian Andersen, Andrew Lang and Lady Gregory among many others collected “Folklore” from the peasants. Aarne and Thompson produced a massive and definitive Anatomy of the Folktale. “Folk languages” previously ignored or suppressed by the state began to be revived: Welsh, Irish, Scots Gaelic, Basque, Romansch, Breton, Provençal, Macedonian, Catalonian. The independent Irish government in 1922, as one of its first acts, appointed official “Folklore Collectors” in the Irish-speaking districts.

The German language was purified of foreign, particularly Latin, loanwords: producing Kinderwagen for perambulator or Fehrnsprechenmädchen for long-distance operator. (And we must not forget, Volkswagen.) Composers collected “Folksongs” and other “Folk Music,” and incorporated them into their nationalistic compositions: Dvorak, Liadov, Borodin, Canteloube, Grieg, Bartok, Vaughan Williams in England, Copeland in the USA.

National organizations like The English Folk Song and Folk Dance Society (of which I was once a member) were organized by Cecil Sharpe and his counterparts in other countries. “Folk Museums” sprang up: Boas started his anthropological life at the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin. (Two of my earliest publications were in Ulster Folklife — published by the Ulster Folk Museum, and The Journal of American Folklore.) An American Folk Life Center was established in the Library of Congress. “Folk Costume” rapidly became “national costume” with the canny Scots textile industry inventing “clan tartans” from scratch to meet the demand.

A huge scholarly effort on philology and mythology got underway—to get the “essential spirit” or “ethos” (the Geist) of the Folk. “Folk Heroes” were discovered and created and we still use the term (Bruce Springsteen). Norse myths were collected and translated and Wagner rendered them into a grand musical expression of the Nordic Kultur of the Nordic Volk. Among other things this nationalist movement helped to import studies of the peasantry wholesale into anthropology, since all this “Folk Culture” was essentially that of the peasants. This was very useful since tribal, or as they were then called “primitive” societies — the accepted subject matter of the discipline, were vanishing as fast as anthropology was growing.

From Right to Left

But a funny thing happened to the Folk concept on the way to modern life. The movement had originally been unabashedly romantic, bourgeois, scholarly and profoundly nationalistic (the glorification of the nation), and centered on the rural peasantry. But the USA was a young culture with no deep folk traditions—certainly not uniform national ones. Above all it had no ancient peasantry that enshrined the folk values. It tried to invent a Folk as it went along, starting with the sturdy New England farmers, moving on to the frontiersmen, taking in the Cajuns and the hill folk of Appalachia, and then the pioneers, and especially the cowboys (totally products of the capitalist beef industry), and even the outlaws.

In some versions it is even the “family farmers” of the Midwest who embody the genuine folk values. (These, like the New England farmers, are a version of the “yeomen” of England, which were that country’s folk-substitute for an ancient peasantry.) But this ragbag of candidates emphasized the American problem: if you were going to glorify the Folk, who were they?

Sometime in the thirties, in the USA, with the Great Depression and the rise of Fascism and Communism, while remaining romantic, the Folk Movement turned sharply leftward and became a movement of the urban and rural proletariat, the labor unions, and generally of radicalism and protest. The nationalism was abandoned and a proletarian universalism substituted. The basic idea was still the superior virtue of the Folk, but it was more the Folk as in The International Workers of the World than the unique national Folk of the unique national Culture. Labor songs, protest songs, Dixieland and blues: the folk music of Huddie Ledbetter, Woody Guthrie, Burl Ives, Pete Seeger, and the whole panoply of jazz, soul, country, rock merging into hip-hop, rap and all the others.

The theme of only the culture of the proletariat, the downtrodden and the marginal, being genuine and virtuous, was revived during and after the Vietnam War with the “counter culture”: anti-war, the youth movement, hippies and dropouts. Bob Dylan was its hero; Woodstock was its grand festival, derivatives of threadbare work clothes were its uniform.

But note how easily the whole Folk Movement after its lurch leftward became hijacked by capitalist consumerism. Essentially a phenomenon of the US Depression era, it was globalized by the record industry, and by film and television, into a multi-billion dollar commercial enterprise. Elements of the “purity of the folk” continue to have commercial success in the New Age Movement, and the passions for alternative (i.e. folk) medicine, organic (read folk) foods and farming, anti-globalization and anti-GMF movements: all organized and funded, as were the original nationalistic folk movements, by the idealistic urban bourgeoisie.

The purity-of-the-folk doctrine, and its corollary of the superior virtue of the dispossessed and marginal, has many sources: St. Francis of Assisi, Rousseau, Tolstoy and the Narodniki, American populism and Yahooism, proletarianism and the Wobblies. In that London of the nineteen fifties, young upper-middle class socialists would routinely go off and try to live working class lives because for them only the proletariat was “authentic.” But within anthropology there is no doubt about the influence of the German nationalist ideas, however strange a twist the leftist lurch gave them.

The dominance of culture

We do not have to offer up the history of American “cultural anthropology” from Boas onwards, to see how it was part and parcel of the Folk Movement. It adopted its language, its ideas and its relativist and nativist values wholesale. Sandall tells the story very well. But if American cultural anthropology was a bastard child of German romantic nationalism, so of course was Nazi Fascism, which is its immediate cousin. (We could even say its “cousin-german,” but the pun would probably be lost on a modern audience.) What they held in common was the idea of the superiority of Culture/Kultur over the individual, and the doctrine of the uniqueness of each Folk Culture, and hence a strict relativism. (Mussolini was perhaps the most eloquent defender of cultural relativism ever.)

Where they parted company was in the Nazi insistence on the superiority of the particular culture of a particular race: the Herrenvolk (The “Noble Folk” or “Master Race” as we translate it). This had always been a part of the German romantic nationalist creed. Boas violently rejected the idea of the racial basis of culture, and certainly of the cultural superiority of any one race/culture, and anthropology generally followed him. But they persisted in their own Germanic cultural determinism, and substituted it for the racial determinism they abhorred.

A. L. Kroeber’s “absolute dominance of culture” over the individual, and the whole “culture and personality” movement (an offspring of “national character” studies) and the Sapir-Whorf linguistic determinism of the “language and culture” school, all were children of the German nationalist idea that the Geist of the Volk which creates its Kultur, is superior to the individual who is shaped by its demands. See Sapir’s “Genuine and Spurious Culture” — pure Herder — or the Benedictine search for the ethos of cultures, which was consciously indebted to Oswald Spengler.

In Germany it reached its metaphysical heights in the idealism of Hegel, which was rendered in materialist form by Marx: the proletariat became the true Volk and the bearers of revolution leading to the end settled-state of Communism. In its latest manifestation among anthropologists it is the doctrine of the “cultural construction” of reality. This is combined with an anti-scientism that would have warmed Dilthey’s heart, and is largely a borrowing from muddled European philosophers who never seem to have read Popper.

The superior virtue of the oppressed

Contemporary American cultural anthropologists would, if they knew about it, no doubt be horrified by Popper’s preference for open over tribal societies. This offends their basic cultural relativism. But consistency is not their strong point. In effect they reverse the process and preach their own doctrine of the superiority of the Folk. Margaret Mead greatly influenced the trend with her not too hidden admiration for the socialization practices of the Samoans.

Today, self-described “cultural anthropologists” universally embrace the doctrine of the wickedness of Western capitalism and its evil products, colonialism and globalization. (“Neo-liberalism” gets in there too. I think it means laissez-faire capitalism and free trade.) In this doctrine, virtue lies not with the “free world” but with the tribes and peasants, the urbanized poor and dispossessed (especially the Palestinians), and the indigenous peoples of the third world, however enamored these might be of the virtues of the closed society. The doctrine of multiculturalism asserts the superiority of folk cultures over their host societies, while the “indigenous peoples” movement does the same for “indigenous knowledge” over science.

Since it is culture that matters over individuals in this scheme, the result is “identity politics” where one’s fate is totally wrapped up in “race, gender, class and ethnicity.” The dominance of the interests of these collectivities and their “rights” over the individual is a useful formula for the closed society.

This doctrine pervades the whole culture. It is hard to find an independent movie these days in which the superior wisdom and virtue of the marginalized and the oppressed, and even the ignorant and simple minded, is not the central theme. The book market — via Oprah — is saturated with autobiographies of the lame and the halt and the homosexual. If you have not overcome poverty or a serious disease, survived a brutally abusive family, or triumphed over addiction or homophobia, then forget about publishing your life story. You will be rewarded not because of how well you write, but because of how much you have suffered. Stories of literate and articulate people leading interesting lives are regarded as simply quaint.

They belong to that Arnoldian world of “high culture” that multiculturalists see as their duty to belittle and bring down. The cultural anthropologists do not see themselves of course as attacking the open society. They see the result of their activities as greater “equality,” as a righting of “injustice,” rather than as a dumbing down of culture generally. The cure of inequality for them is not to raise up the depressed to participate in “high culture,” but to invert the Arnoldian hierarchy and make “low culture” the repository of virtue. And if the low cannot be raised, then at least their self-esteem can.

Sandall describes the dismal process very well. As to the pernicious influence of Isaiah Berlin, I don’t know. I always knew Berlin as a preacher of tolerance. What I know about Herder I learned from his Vico and Herder. As an assimilated continental Jew (like Popper: they were both eventually knighted) Berlin welcomed the benign pluralism of England. In any case, if he did have a great influence it was really only in England itself. I do not hear him much mentioned by the culture cult in the USA.

La trahison des clercs

But Sandall is right to link the neo-primitivism of the cultural anthropologists with the treason of the intellectuals that Popper so feared. Anthropology today more resembles one of Anthony Wallace’s “revitalization movements” than it does an academic discipline. It borrows all the appurtenances of academe—journals, research, footnotes, references, conferences etc., but it uses them in the way clever creationists use the same cover: to preach a doctrine. They do not see it this way of course. They are working for greater inclusiveness (they tend to say “inclusivity”) and “diversity”: they want to include more people in the open society.

To this end they passionately support “affirmative action” which again elevates the contingency of skin color over individual worth. Melanin matters more than merit. But they do not want to include more “oppressed” people at the cost of “assimilation.” They refuse to equate their open society with the high culture of the Western tradition, including its canon and including its science. This involves them in a paradox and no little guilt, since their whole enterprise, and their system of rewards, is derived from that high culture.

Their other paradox is that they attack “growth” on the Western economic model as inimical to the survival of indigenous cultures. But the only way to promote the welfare of these cultures (or rather the people in these societies) is through growth, and we have seen that postcolonial governments in the third world cannot manage this, that aid is largely wasted, that socialism always fails, and that the corruption of authoritarian politics leads to a reversion to tribalism. (Watch Kenya.) Their only hope lies with the unprejudiced globalizing economy that knows no barriers of race or tribe or nationality, or even “gender,” but only knows markets and profits. Many of the particularities of culture will disappear in this process, and it will be a bumpy road, but it is the only way to prosperity for the dispossessed of the world.

I said that most of the fathers of social science basically agreed that there was universal progress through lower to higher stages of what they called “society.” I have listed them so often I will forebear, but they shared Popper’s vision of something like the open society as the end product. They did not doubt that the shift was for the better. Tylor himself saw anthropology as a “reformer’s science” whose business it was to identify “survivals” of that closed society the better to sweep them away.

James Frazer mounted a massive scholarly effort aimed at replacing religion with science. Henry Maine saw the emergence of the idea of individual contract (open) as an unqualified improvement on the law of status (closed.) Tönnies might have been nostalgic for the security of Gemeinschaft, Redfield wistful about The Folk Cultures, and Durkheim might have feared the anomie of his state of “organic solidarity” — but they all, led originally by Comte and Spencer, saw the progression as generally upwards, and generally a good thing.

Popper’s optimism

Popper was a progressive and an optimist. At the LSE (again) I was secretary of the Rationalist Society, and we invited Popper to be our honorary president for one year, which involved him in giving a presidential address. He gave us a talk on “Moral Progress: Confessions of an Optimist” — a piece he later published (in Conjectures and Refutations).

He saw, as his predecessors at the LSE, L. T. Hobhouse (Morals in Evolution) and Edward Westermarck (The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas) had seen, that we were as a species moving towards a greater “inclusiveness” in that we progressively include more and more people, regardless of those irritating distinctions, in the circle of those to whom we had moral obligations: moving to the world as an open society. He saw in the United Nations, for example, with all its problems, a struggle towards this ideal.

But he also saw the extreme vulnerability of his open society. The continuing existence of “nations” at all, was the closed society fighting back. Angst and alienation dogged our civilized footsteps. If I had known then what I learned later I would have put it to him that human beings were in essence “closed” in mentality. They were in that essence no different from the cave-painters of Lascaux. Their brains, forged in the upper-Paleolithic, had not changed. They were evolved to be “by nature” tribal people, although these very brains were capable of so much more. They therefore preferred to live in relatively closed societies with perhaps experimental open elements.

That is why constitutional monarchies work so well and some of the most open societies prefer them (Scandinavia, Holland, Belgium, UK and latterly Spain.) Popper probably would not have disagreed (I did discuss this with him later) but he was nostalgic for Socrates and democratic Athens. The Athenians had given us a choice, and we still had to choose between them and Sparta. The whole history of the West was the history of this struggle to him. And it was now our task to give this choice to the world, even if the world was at heart Spartan not Athenian.

The least the intellectuals could do was to remind us of the choice: to advocate Pericles over Plato, Cicero over Caesar, Mill over Marx; to support the individual over culture, the content of character over the color of skin, citizenship over ethnic identification. It does not look good for the open society right now, but for me at least there is always the memory of Mrs. Popper’s Tea Shop and the bright spirit that presided over the scones and strawberry jam, and all the elevated and brilliant talk. That was high culture. Arnold would have approved.

Robin Fox is University Professor of Social Theory at Rutgers, where he founded the department of anthropology in 1967. His books most relevant to this topic are The Search for Society (Rutgers UP), Conjectures and Confrontations, The Challenge of Anthropology, and Reproduction and Succession (all from Transaction). See also his article “The Kindness of Strangers” in SOCIETY, vol. 44, no. 6 (2007). Personal recollections of Karl Popper can be found in Participant Observer: Memoir of a Transatlantic Life (Transaction).

The journal Social Science and Modern Society published a symposium on The Culture Cult in its May/June 2008 issue. Below is the discussion paper that was circulated summarising the book’s argument. This was followed by commentaries from Robin Fox, George Crowder, Peter Wood, Daniel Chirot, Brian Turner, David Stoll, and Joseph E. Davis. Fox’s essay can be found here: Open Societies and Closed Minds

Introduction

The claim that “open societies” are now increasingly threatened would probably meet with little argument. But what is the nature of the threat, and what are its roots? Here less agreement might be found. Some would say an essentially religious clash of civilizations is the main cause, and point to the growing struggle between Islam and the West.

Others might point to Russia under President Putin, finding evidence of a long-standing political tradition that owes relatively little to the Russian Orthodox Church, but has always found liberty odious.

And then there’s a third and troubling possibility — that from an evolutionary perspective, taking a long view of our historic and prehistoric origins, open societies where voluntaristic principles prevail are new forms of human association only recently arrived from the distant tribal past, and in the more violent trouble spots around the world they never arrived at all.

The Open Society

That third possibility is pretty much how Karl Popper saw the matter. His 1945 The Open Society and Its Enemies started out from the contrast between closed autarkic Sparta and free-trading protean Athens, and used it to illuminate the conflict between Fascism and Communism on the one hand, and Western democracy on the other. With this in mind he concluded that the enemies of the open society comprise a bunch of awkward atavisms that humanity has never managed to transcend.

The revolt against civilization in both Germany and Russia could be locally explained in a number of ways — Prussian nationalism; the old communal obshchina tradition in Muscovy — but a general nostalgia for the tribal past was ultimately reducible to the strain of trying to adapt to the constant changes of modern life. “I suppose what I call the ‘strain of civilization’”, Popper wrote in one of the footnotes to The Open Society, “is similar to the phenomenon which Freud had in mind when writing Civilization and its Discontents.” Thinking about the intellectual attraction of Nazism and Communism he asked:

Why do these social philosophies support the revolt against civilization? And what is the secret of their popularity? Why do they attract and seduce so many intellectuals? I am inclined to think that the reason is that they give expression to a deep-felt dissatisfaction with a world which does not, and cannot, live up to our moral ideals and to our dreams of perfection… the revolt against civilization may be… a reaction against the strain of our civilization and its demand for personal responsibility.

We live in an age of semantic high anxiety, when words like “atavism” and “tribe” are thought unsuitable for tender ears. It is therefore interesting that in the key chapter of a book that is arguably the most significant 20th century contribution to political thought in our time — Chapter Ten, presenting Popper’s main argument and bearing the same title as his book itself — the noun “tribe” and its adjectival derivatives “tribal” and “tribalistic” occur over forty times, while his discussion of related matters using identical terminology continues in voluminous footnotes at the end of the book.

In Popper’s view, what Hitler, Stalin & Co represented were forms of “arrested tribalism”, and the more he considered the matter the more he saw a yearning for the past—closed, pre-rational, taboo-ridden, undemocratic, militaristic, and fearful of liberty—as equally ubiquitous and malign.

Neo-Primitivism

In general terms that is also the argument of The Culture Cult, a humble footnote to The Open Society that appeared in 2001. But the problem I saw and tried to write about was rather different. Where Popper was looking at political structures and the struggle between those that were “open” and those that were “closed”, I was more interested in questions of moral psychology.

The explanation Popper offered for the movements of the 1920s and 1930s was understandable in the political terms he proposed: both Fascism and Communism could be seen as violent reactions against individualism, gathering force through the late 19th century, in which dynamic enterprises and free men would be forcibly fixed and frozen by the state.

But in the year 2000, with Fascism and Communism both discredited, why, I wondered, were so many turning back toward Rousseau? What was the attraction of romantic primitivism? How had ethnic culture become a beau ideal? Cities certainly have their problems, but why did New Yorkers see tribal societies as exemplary and tribespeople as paragons of social virtue? Especially — and inexplicably — tribal societies whose hardships and bloody cruelties no pampered urbanite could possibly endure.

A 1935 book by Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas suggested where to look for answers, or where to begin. Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity was about “the unending revolt of the civilized against civilization”, and contained a chapter almost one hundred pages long on “The Noble Savage in Antiquity”.

Scores of names both of peoples and classical sources are described, the authors reporting that from the fourth century BC onwards “the Scythians apparently were to the ancients what the North Americans were to the primitivists of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in modern Europe”, and going on to note that “in an ironic form the theme (of primitive wholesomeness and virtue, RS) appears in the comic writers, e.g. in Antiphanes, a poet of the Middle Comedy:

Are not the Scythians very wise, who give to new-born babes the milk of horses and cows to drink, but admit among them no evil-minded wet-nurses or schoolmasters?

Primitivism and the Human Comedy

Antiphanes, alas, points to a literary problem for anyone dealing with this potentially risible subject: it’s difficult for an author to keep a straight face. And if a writer of comedy in the 4th century BC felt that the tendency of his fellow Athenians to romanticise the milk-drinking Scythians was faintly ridiculous, and if an occasional grin peeps through Arthur Lovejoy’s prose, how should the rest of us respond to this sort of thing? Fascism and Communism are no laughing matter, and Karl Popper’s treatment of political atavism is appropriately grave. But what is one to say about the sentimental atavism of the Culture Cult—its compulsion to admire and imitate primitivity in every form?

Is it possible to write about the Oneida Community and John Humphrey Noyes, whose polygynous gerontocracy unknowingly mimicked the Australian Aborigines of Arnhem Land, without a smile? Even Noyes’s final expulsion from the community by the frustrated younger males who rebelled against his sexual monopoly has close Australian parallels.

Must one regard the exciting adventures of Lawrence of Arabia, all dressed up riding camels and blowing up trains with a bunch of Arab cut-throats, without a boyish grin? And what is one to say about the American actor/model Ms Lauren Hutton, who in 1996 enlightened her children by visiting the Maasai in Africa and forcing them to witness the sacrifice of a cow, and whose little boys were deeply shocked by the grisly spectacle? One of them burst into tears.

Plainly, something odd had been going on. And at the center of the confusion was a word that had been turned on its head—the word “culture”. In England the generic term employed in the comparative study of human social forms and sociability was for many years the neutral word “society”. Societies had different forms and structures, and comparing them, especially from an evolutionary standpoint, could tell you a lot.

But what was this new term “culture”? How had it come to be used sociologically? Wasn’t it more than a little tendentious, trailing mystical Germanic clouds and dangerously nationalistic sentiments, right from the start? Yet before long, first in America and then all over the English-speaking world, both word and thing became sacralized and placed beyond criticism on a pedestal in a political shrine.

The Two Cultures

The earlier Arnoldian sense of culture in English — a sense that would have been understood one hundred years ago by Bergson and Berdyaev, by Henry and William James, by Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell and H. G. Wells, and indeed any educated person you care to name — was in many ways synonymous with “civilization”. Matthew Arnold’s ideal of “the best that had been thought and said and written” was singular, universal, prescriptive, exclusive, hierarchic, and deeply concerned with judging both aesthetic and moral values on a scale of better and worse.

The singularity of Mozart was established by deeply considered and highly evolved aesthetic norms showing how clearly he stood head and shoulders above Salieri, while the exclusiveness of western music as a whole could be seen by exploring the rationalistic foundations of polyphony and counterpoint that Max Weber discussed and explained.

Then something happened: the English word “culture” in the sense employed by Matthew Arnold in his 1869 Culture and Anarchy got both anthropologized and Germanised — and anthropological culture was the opposite of all that. It meant little more in fact than a social system. As such, a “culture” (singular) included manners, customs, values, institutions — everything any organized human group might consist of, good, bad, or indifferent. It had nothing to do with aesthetics or higher thought, or indeed “higher” and “lower” in any form at all. Instead it was pluralistic, parochial, descriptive, and generously inclusive. Instead of being hierarchic it was promiscuously horizontal, while its aesthetic understanding both began and ended with the statement that all cultures were equally beautiful and true.

Ethnic Authority — Culture is King

Arnoldian culture, as the British Marxist Raymond Williams complained, had been hurtfully snobbish: it made people upset and resentful, especially sensitive men like himself, whereas anthropological culture was reassuringly democratic, was bravely indifferent to all questions of quality, and cheerfully subsumed manners, customs, habits, cuisine, ablution, handkerchiefs, nose-picking, and the shape and use of chamber pots (in which, as many of us would soon discover and as I hope I shall be forgiven for saying in these pages, most “cultural studies” may well belong).

Once this meaning took hold in America in the 1950s no evaluative ordering of humanity’s highly unequal social and artistic achievements was allowed. For the value of anthropological culture was not contingent upon knowledge, skill, beauty, or excellence: it was good by definition. No culture was better than another. No culture was worse. All were equal.

And this sprawling conception soon carried a philosophical rider that made the significance of the word altogether momentous: anthropological culture was no mere collection of traits free men might pick or choose among, accept or reject, approve or dismiss, love or hate. The rules imposed on its human membership were both collective and binding. It had a transcendent authority. Culture was king.

Berlin and Herder

How did this change come about? In America it was initially a curricular phenomenon. Built around an educational admiration for books like Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture and Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa, it was propagated in high schools and departments of anthropology throughout the land.

But at a higher philosophical level, and starting out in England, it owed more to the energetic publicising of Herder’s ideas by the Oxford celebrity Sir Isaiah Berlin — ideas of irresistible appeal to the post-Marxist and post-religious liberal mind. From what Berlin tells us, the social thought of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), an 18th century Prussian enemy of the Enlightenment, enshrined some very Germanic dogmas.

These were that each national culture draws its inspiration from the spirit of the Volk and is a quasi-sacred thing; that the traditions of the Volk are unique, incomparable, incommunicable, and incommensurable; and that trying to assimilate ethnic or national particularity to the higher ecumenical world of universal civilization is wicked and should be stopped.

Herder also thought that each Völkisch political unit had a right to freely grow and fulfill itself without interference from anyone else. Rather oddly, and perhaps indicating an unfamiliarity with political thought, he doesn’t seem to have considered the possibility that the glorious self-fulfilment of Culture X might logically lead it to annihilate Cultures Y and Z: cultural autonomy and cultural assertiveness were felt to be straightforwardly good things in themselves, and quite unproblematic.

Culture versus Human Rights

This chauvinistic Germanic component was disturbing enough. But in Berlin’s exposition of Herder there was also an eastern collectivistic feel about everything wholly inimical to individual liberty and modern citizenship. For example, it was clear that you belonged to your culture more than it belonged to you: your relation to it was subordinate, and its relation to you was proprietorial. Your culture owned you, as a Russian serf was ultimately owned by the Czar. The rights of the collectivity trumped all individual rights.

It followed from this that an individual and his culture were expected to form an indivisible organic whole. Just as ominous was the conclusion that for an individual to be separated from his culture was spiritual death. By the beginning of the 21st century, “culture” in its anthropological acceptation was the existential source of individual identity, and without it—so devotees of the Culture Cult would reason—you barely existed at all.

Now I don’t want to be misunderstood. The Culture Cult as a book stands opposed to this organic and proprietorial concept of culture. I regard the influence of the Latterday Church of Multicultural Saints and its 18th century prophet as extremely unfortunate — in the context of modern civil society Herder’s message is divisive, backward-looking, disruptive, and malign. But the value of various contributory national streams to the civilization of the Western world is abundantly clear, and nobody privileged to have lived in the USA can doubt that America’s ethnic mix has made it much richer than it might be otherwise — more intellectually dynamic, more open to human talent and aspiration, more sensibly humane, and generally more politically balanced, than any civilization hitherto.

The world has seen nothing like the passage from Ben Franklin to the Wright brothers to Steve Jobs. It may indeed never see another Abe Lincoln — something like Divine Grace is needed for that. All this, however, required that countless immigrants accept the secure and permanent foundation of American laws, customs, and civil and civilized behavior, making their own traditions a secondary concern. In other words it required assimilation — the very thing both Herder and Isaiah Berlin argued against.

Multiculturalism and Ressentiment

Here the twists and perplexities of moral psychology must be examined. Multiculturalism presents itself as the very embodiment of political virtue — sensitive, compassionate, and humane. But what is the ill-concealed underlying motive of the intellectuals who promote it? One immediately notices that anthropologizing the term “culture” meant first of all pulling down high standards, destroying distinction, demeaning excellence and anything else the aggrieved Welshman Raymond Williams felt to be hurtfully snobbish, and replacing all this with a flat educational plain where chamber music and chamber pots enjoy equal prestige.

Now, resentment of qualitative distinction is central to the Culture Cult (its main emotional dynamic being the exaltation of ethnic “culture” above “civilization”), a fact strikingly illustrated by the 18th century father of the doctrine, Johann Gottfried Herder himself. What follows must alas bring ressentiment into the equation — but without this ugly motive it is impossible to understand either Herder or the neo-primitivist demiurge.

Herder’s ethnic nationalism was the obverse of his resentment of civilization: that is why civilization had to be demeaned and denounced. And Isaiah Berlin obligingly provides the evidence. He reports that Herder was agitated and unbalanced, “by all accounts a deeply divided, touchy, resentful, bitter, unhappy man, in constant need of support and praise, neurotic, pedantic, difficult, suspicious, and often insupportable… Goethe said that he had in him something compulsively vicious — like a vicious horse — a desire to bite and hurt.”

But what made him like this? What galled his self-esteem? It appears that at the age of 25 this gauche and touchy provincial went to France, and then to Paris, the acknowledged center of civilization. But he failed to make an impression on the philosophes, and consequently — these are Berlin’s words — “suffered that mixture of envy, humiliation, admiration, resentment and defiant pride which backward peoples feel towards advanced ones, (and) members of one social class feel towards those who belong to a higher rung in the hierarchy.”

Here all too clearly we see the underlying animus that many people bring to multiculturalism today. For (if I may paraphrase page 96 of The Culture Cult), the modern attack on the achievements of Western civilization by Herder’s romantic heirs, on academic standards, on parliamentary government with its tiresome uncertainties and delays, on judicial impartiality, and along with this the claim that all cultures are “incommensurable” and must never be compared — all this flows naturally from a neurotic need to pull down whatever impairs one’s self-esteem.

It grows precisely from ressentiment and defiant pride, and as a social philosophy it most strongly appeals to those gripped by such emotions. Resentment is the natural by-product of the strain of trying to meet high standards (one of the strains of civilized life pointed to by Popper, Hayek, and Freud), while as any reader of Mein Kampf will quickly find, wounded pride compounded with populist rage is what ressentiment politics are all about.

The Open Society and its Vulnerabilities

Since 2001 at least some western intellectuals have had second thoughts about the intrinsic virtue of tribalistic culture and the intrinsic wickedness of civilization. As a state of mind romantic primitivism has usually preferred people who are remote, poor, and ill-organised; but when well-organised and very well-funded Middle Eastern ressentiment crashed planes into skyscrapers and blew up trains, turning the very openness of western civilization against itself and killing thousands of ordinary men and women, it was time for a reality check.

Such events disclosed a serious weakness in Karl Popper’s thinking. Is an ‘open society’ also supposed to be an ‘open polity’ with open borders? Médecins sans Frontières is all very well: but states cannot be run on such lines. Popper’s is a theory of society, not a theory of the state—and it seems to me that his book offers no clear account of the wider political preconditions that enable ‘open societies’ to both flourish and defend themselves. A minimal state of the kind Hayek advocated is steadily implied, but never adumbrated. Is there a Coast Guard? Are the borders secure? What role should the army play? Without these no open society can survive.

Popper more than once appeals to the stirring oration in which the Athenian leader Pericles proudly boasted that “Our city is thrown open to the world; we never expel a foreigner…” But what happens when you throw your city open to the world, only to find that the foreigners you have proudly refused to expel not only decline to assimilate, but defiantly form subversive cells in order to destroy it? When these same people have been given all the rights of law-abiding citizens—including the privilege of being hostile to their host? When the relation of a number of sinister enclaves to the open society around them is a conspiratorial blend of dissimulation and treachery?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Curiously, there seems to be no mention of Islam in The Open Society, and no indication whatever that Islamic resentment might emerge as one of the enemies of open societies in the years ahead. But that was before oil suddenly made small backward Arab chieftains into big international players. The Somali-Dutch-American Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author of Infidel, says she is planning to discuss this and other matters in a study that will bring The Open Society and Its Enemies up to date.

That sounds a very good idea. She is uniquely qualified to do so. As Robin Fox says in his own symposium contribution, her book Infidel documents her own journey “from the inside of the most closed of tribal societies — clan-dominated Somalia — to the openness of almost painfully super-open Holland. It is a personal journey that recapitulates the whole development that Popper (and most other sociologists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) has traced for society as a whole.”

It is a pity Karl Popper and Ayaan Hirsi Ali did not meet. They would have found much to talk about. The Viennese philosopher might have expanded on his vision of the world of Pericles. While Ms Hirsi Ali could usefully have deepened Popper’s understanding of the conflict between individual, tribe, and nation, by offering vivid personal impressions of modern East Africa.

Anyway I think there can be little doubt that Popper would have recognized what is now happening in several places around the world. Metastasizing cells of stubbornly unassimilable jihadis, often united by language and nationality, many belonging to close-knit clans, galled by western modernity and feeling the strain of civilization in their bones, driven by a fanaticism more concerned to kill than convert — this surely represents arrested tribalism today.

Culture Matters :: Culture Counts

In recent years two books have appeared with very similar titles: Culture Matters, and Culture Counts. They deal however with very different subjects. The collection of essays edited by Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington in 2000, Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Processes, automatically assumes that its readers will take the anthropological sense of the term culture to be meant. (Had its title been Anthropology Matters it would have conveyed much the same thing.)

A discussion of the problems of economic development and social change, it starts from the broadly Weberian proposition that beliefs and values, if not paramount, are causally important in economic affairs. Huntington recollects how Ghana and South Korea began from comparable levels of per capita GNP in 1960, but because each social system was driven by contrasting values and attitudes (affecting work, thrift, education, etc) only South Korea advanced. Essays from a range of distinguished authors develop this observation in different ways drawing on their own experiences—among them David Landes, Francis Fukuyama, and Seymour Martin Lipset.

Roger Scruton’s Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged, is something else. Anyone in a bookshop moving casually along the shelf from one title to the other might imagine that it too dealt primarily with social systems, and that was the sense of culture the title implied. Scruton’s book does have a sociological side; but its main purpose is redemptive and ultimately religious, concerned to reinforce western and Christian self-belief in the face of the external physical challenge of radical Islam, and the internal moral solvent of multiculturalism.

One might easily have said that it was also designed to reinforce the morale of a besieged Western Civilization; but the case is more complicated, since Scruton broadly accepts the vision of Oswald Spengler, who himself accepted Herder’s understanding: namely, that naturally vital things called “cultures” and an unnatural devitalized thing called “civilization” stand permanently opposed.

According to Herder, Spengler, and to a surprising degree Roger Scruton himself, it is the invariable fate of intrinsically virtuous “cultures” to be destroyed by the morally ambiguous principles of “civilization”— the latter emphasizing quantity over quality, and reason, science, and secularisation over the realm of feeling and intuition. (If this intellectual debt to the Great Doomsayer seems implausible, readers should consult the essay on Spengler in Scruton’s book The Philosopher on Dover Beach where it is fully set forth.)

High Culture

On the positive side, Scruton’s defence of what he distinguishes as “high culture” is admirable, his assertion that this involves “issues of judgment” is unassailably true, and the following statement is one I fully endorse. He writes that high culture “is supplied with its monuments and its durable styles by unceasing comparisons and choices, from which a canon of masterpieces emerges not as the object of a single collective choice, not even a choice that must be made anew by each generation, but as the by-product of myriad choices over centuries.”

Whether he is discussing humor as a form of judgment, the distinction between leisure and distraction, the moral paradox that highly cultivated people may also be worthless citizens (“aesthetes in jackboots”), or the need for sound educational principles, he always has something interesting to say. It is nice to see his recommendation that “Memorizing the classics of lyric poetry, reading aloud from the epics, performing the plays of Shakespeare: such ought to be the first steps in a literary education.” Not reading Harry Potter or the collected works of Maya Angelou.

Scruton and Spengler

Difficulties arise, however, precisely where one would least expect them in such a writer — namely, where logical rigor and scrupulous terminology are most required. This being in the use of the terms “culture” and “civilization” themselves. Time and again Scruton shifts uneasily between the concept of culture as social system, on the one hand, and the contrasting achievements of cultivation on the other — of the unique products of refined traditions of art, literature, and thought.

With all due respect, it seems to me that throughout his book there is a decided unwillingness to face up to the radical incompatibility of the horizontal/descriptive/value-neutral anthropological sense of “culture”, and the hierarchical/ prescriptive/aesthetic sense of the term. That this confusion comes from the Spenglerian assumptions underlying Scruton’s argument is likely — indeed, that alone can explain the statement that “there are as many cultures as there are civilizations”. By my estimate there have been only about a dozen major world civilizations, whereas the annals of anthropology contain thousands of cultures.

As for the oxymoron on page two that the art to be seen at Lascaux represents a “stone-age civilization”, one feels bound to say that efforts to assimilate the Upper Paleolithic to anything even notionally connected with civilization must fail. The entire etymological constellation involving civility, civilians, civilized conduct and civil society itself is meaningless in the context of even the most appealing stone-age paintings on the wall of a cave.

Funny word, “tribe”. Karl Popper used it a lot but you don’t hear it much today. Around 1960 the feeling arose in progressive circles that it was denigratory, and it fell into disuse, probably in relation to developments in Africa and the winning of independence by many African states. (See Terminological Note below.)

Yet there is now an aggressive effort to redefine the Native Hawaiian population as a “tribe”. Whether the Akaka Bill with its attempt to break up Hawaii by introducing positive apartheid for “natives” will founder on the floor of the Senate, or will lead to political independence and Hawaii’s secession from the Union, remains to be seen. Suffice to say that to many people it looks like a new and spectacular demand for special privileges in the name of race-based ethnic separatism.

What privileges? There is to be a special autonomous Native Hawaiian Governing Entity alongside existing governmental structures. How much autonomy it will have is unclear, but it raises the prospect that anyone having “one drop” of native blood will not have to pay state or federal taxes. At the same time, while avoiding the obligations of their fellow citizens, Native Hawaiians will continue to enjoy all the benefits of national defense, public health, education and welfare.

A critical commentary by Senator Jon Kyl describes the Akaka Bill as authorizing race-based government for Native Hawaiians “by shoehorning the Native Hawaiian population, wherever located, into the federal Indian law system and calling the resulting government a ‘tribe’”. He then points out that the Supreme Court has held that “Congress cannot simply create an Indian tribe. Only those groups of people who have long operated as an Indian tribe, live as a separate and distinct community (geographically and culturally), and have a pre-existing political structure can be recognized as a tribe. Native Hawaiians do not satisfy any of these criteria.”

Yet Hawaii’s Governor Linda Lingle, the legislature, and congressional delegation, all support the bill, and this despite the jurisdictional chaos and heightened social tensions that its passage is more than likely to bring about. There appears to be widespread sentiment that those able to claim any Polynesian descent whatever, being related by blood to the original occupants of this island territory, deserve special compensatory status apart from and above its other inhabitants. DNA will no doubt be used to establish that the one drop of blood required is present.

Tribalism in ‘the open society’

The attempt, in 2005, to redefine a heterogeneous people of mixed ancestry in the middle of the Pacific as a “tribe”, let alone an Indian tribe, a people moreover who have known little but modern American institutions for at least a hundred years, might seem surprising. But one man who would not have found it surprising is the author of The Open Society and Its Enemies, for the persistence of tribal yearnings in the midst of the modern world was the underlying theme of Karl Popper’s important 1945 book.

The words ‘tribe’, ‘tribal’, and ‘tribalistic’ occur forty-two times in the chapter that presents his main argument—Chapter 10—and his discussion of related matters continues in voluminous footnotes at the end of the book.

Popper’s main purpose in writing The Open Society was to try and explain the whole political, intellectual, and emotional phenomenon of Nazism. What Hitler represented was “arrested tribalism”, and the more Popper thought about the matter the more he saw an atavistic yearning for the past—closed, pre-rational, taboo-ridden, undemocratic, militaristic, and fearful of liberty—as something deeply menacing.

“Arrested tribalism” in political life was the same as “arrested development” in the life of an individual; it indicated a failure to grow, adapt, and deal maturely with a changing world. Change, as Heraclitus said long ago, is something we just have to put up with, like it or not: but the Nazis wanted to turn back the clock. And in order to understand the phenomenon of Nazism historically, it was also necessary to understand the deep roots it had in the past, and to see it in terms of a persistent reaction against social change that has been continually with us since the conflict of Athens and Sparta in classical Greece.

The shock of the new

As Popper told the historical story, in the 5^th and 6^th centuries BC the tribal world of the old-time Greeks was breaking down. Everywhere there was change and decay—or change that looked like decay. And it is the anxiety and distress felt by men and women in this situation that leads them to try and freeze all change and return to the tribal past. He thought Plato’s thinking exemplified this. Disturbed by the way Socrates had shaken the world’s foundations, suffering personally “under the political instability and insecurity of his time”, Plato recommended in The Republic and The Laws “the arrest of change and the return to tribalism.” According to Plato “all social change is corruption or decay or degeneration.”

In Greece old ways of life were dissolving, old legends were disbelieved, old authorities were treated with contempt, and it was the fear of these trends getting out of hand that drove Sparta to “attempt to retain and to arrest tribalism by force.” In the account presented in The Open Society Sparta was seen as a proto-totalitarian state in antiquity. But perhaps the most succinct statement of Popper’s argument appears on his opening page where the unending historic conflict between ‘tribalism’ and ‘civilization’ is set forth. His book, he wrote,

sketches some of the difficulties faced by our civilization—a civilization which might be perhaps described as aiming at humaneness and reasonableness, at equality and freedom; a civilization which is still in its infancy, as it were, and which continues to grow in spite of the fact that it has been so often betrayed by so many of the intellectual leaders of mankind.

It attempts to show that this civilization has not yet fully recovered from the shock of its birth—the transition from the tribal or ‘closed society’, with its submission to magical forces, to the ‘open society’ which sets free the critical powers of man.

It attempts to show that the shock of this transition is one of the factors that have made possible the rise of those reactionary movements which have tried, and still try, to overthrow civilization and to return to tribalism. And it suggests that what we call nowadays totalitarianism belongs to a tradition which is just as old or just as young as our civilization itself.

Popper’s terminology

But what exactly did Popper mean by “tribalism”? While the term contained a lot of what anthropologists study under the rubric of culture, and a lot of what most of us mean if or when we use the term, it also contained much more. It was in fact half of a global dichotomy—with “tribalism” on the one side and “civilization” on the other—and was therefore very loose and inclusive.

If civilization “set forth the critical powers of man”, tribalism included whatever opposed this development. At its most general it contained everything from taboo to hereditary chieftainship, from human sacrifice to the divine right of kings, from sorcery to papal infallibility.

As a philosopher Popper naturally placed great emphasis on the life of the mind: the closed society is primarily unacceptable because it submits man’s reason to “magical forces”. Yet this intellectual submission is part of an inescapable pattern of social and political subordination too.

In his account of Heraclitus, a philosopher whose motto was “everything is in flux, and nothing is at rest”, Popper claims that the very idea of ubiquitous change was “revolutionary”. At the time, hardly anyone thought of culture in this way, especially given “the stability and rigidity of social life in a tribal aristocracy.” Where hierarchic settings of this sort prevailed, everything “is determined by social and religious taboos; everybody has his assigned place within the whole of the social structure; everyone feels that his place is the proper, the ‘natural’ place, assigned to him by the forces which rule the world; everyone ‘knows his place’”.

It might be useful to point out that this exactly fits every Polynesian culture ever known, including that of old-time Honolulu. Before the retribalization of Hawaii gets much further its advocates should perhaps take a look where they’re heading. But joking aside, the fact is that an intense conservatism regulated and controlled an entire hierarchic social order, just as Popper said it did, and because of this social change took place very slowly—and rarely as a result of rational discussion. True, change did sometimes occur, but “the comparatively infrequent changes have the character of religious conversions or revulsions, or of the introduction of new magical taboos.”

He thought there was something of this quasi-religious character to be seen in the rise of Nazism and Communism too. Both grew from the same socio-psychological roots as the political theorising of men like Plato over two thousand years ago—the “strain of civilization”, a generalised anxiety about the drift of events, a feeling that cultural breakdown is imminent, that familiar things are disintegrating, that everything known and valued is about to collapse and we won’t be able to stop it.

“I suppose that what I call the ‘strain of civilization’”, Popper wrote in a footnote, “is similar to the phenomenon which Freud had in mind when writing Civilization and its Discontents.” Thinking about the intellectual attraction of Nazism and Communism he asked:

Why do all these social philosophies support the revolt against civilization? And what is the secret of their popularity? Why do they attract and seduce so many intellectuals? I am inclined to think that the reason is that they give expression to a deep-felt dissatisfaction with a world which does not, and cannot, live up to our moral ideals and to our dreams of perfection… the revolt against civilization may be… a reaction against the strain of our civilization and its demand for personal responsibility.

Personal responsibility

Personal responsibility was important. Whereas individual responsibility in a world of individuals is central to modern ethics, the blurry environment of old-time communal life provided a thousand excuses for evading responsibility. Sometimes this took the form of hiding behind the mysteries of causation. In the traditional Polynesian world, for example, there was no clear place for personal responsibility when things went wrong—culpable acts could always be explained away by sorcery, witchcraft, or fate. At other times group solidarity was invoked. A malefactor would be shielded by his family, his clan, his tribe, his confederation, always on the solidary basis that as “one of us” he could do no wrong.

At the ethical center of both tribalism and totalitarianism was the ideal of unity, of conformity, of groupthink carried to a point where the interests of the individual barely existed. In his discussion of “totalitarian justice” Popper pointed out that for both Plato and modern totalitarians there was only one ultimate standard—the interest of the state. “Everything that furthers it is good and virtuous and just; everything that threatens it is bad and wicked and unjust. Actions that further it are moral; actions that endanger it immoral… This is the collectivist, the tribal, the totalitarian theory of morality: ‘Good is what is in the interest of my group; or my tribe; or my state.”

This so-called morality would be enforced by state officials, which was another way of saying that a citizen’s conduct would be more a matter for the police than a matter of conscience. Those who advocated such a program “apparently do not see that this would be the end of the individual’s moral responsibility, and that it would not improve but destroy morality. It would replace personal responsibility by tribalistic taboos and by the totalitarian irresponsibility of the individual.”

In contrast to both tribalism and totalitarianism, in free societies modern men and women are held personally accountable for their acts—while sorcery is regarded as deeply implausible. As Popper put it, “In our own way of life there is, between the laws of the state on the one hand and the taboos we observe on the other, an ever-widening field of personal decisions, with its problems and responsibilities; and we know the importance of this field”. Throughout his book, he added,

the magical or tribal or collectivist society will also be called the closed society, and the society in which individuals are confronted with personal decisions, the open society.

Uncompromising on assimilation

Is there anything to be said for tribes and tribalism? Popper’s deep suspicion of the entire collectivist project meant that he could rarely think of anything to be said in their favor. This does not mean that he was entirely untouched, at least intellectually speaking, by the emotional plight of those distressed by the break-up of the communal world. He wrote with sympathy of those affected by “the strain of civilization” induced by the inner conflicts those still drawn to collective life had to endure.

In Volume 2 he wrote that a fact “which raises grave political and institutional problems is that to live in the haven of a tribe, or of a ‘community’ approaching a tribe is for many men an emotional necessity (especially for young people who… seem to have to pass through a tribal or ‘American Indian’ stage).” Grownups however should put such childish things behind them and become critical rationalists in a rationally critical world. To the dismay and disgust of many Jews his assimilationist creed was entirely uncompromising with regard to Judaism too.

“Aside from the early Greeks,” writes Malachi Hacohen in his biography, Popper believed “the Jews were the tribe par excellence.” As a result he thought “Zionism was a colossal mistake, and Israel a tragic error (that) retarded solution of the Jewish question and incited a national conflict between Jews and Arabs.” Elsewhere Hacohen writes:

He regarded the Hebrew Bible as the fountainhead of tribal nationalism. Oppressed and persecuted, he said, Jews in the Babylonian exile created the doctrine of the ‘Chosen People’, presaging modern visions of chosen class and race. Both Roman imperialism and early Christian humanitarianism threatened the Jews’ tribal exclusivity. Jewish orthodoxy reacted by reinforcing tribal bonds, shutting Jews off from the world for two millennia. The ghetto was the ultimate closed society, a ‘petrified form of Jewish tribalism’” (The Open Society, Vol 2, Chapter 11, n.56)

To Hacohen it was shocking that Popper, of Jewish background himself, should hold such views and should have argued so intransigently for assimilation. But it was consistent with Popper’s overall view of the need for a transcendent cosmopolitanism in modern life.

Open borders too?

So an ‘open society’ was everywhere and always superior to either petrified or arrested tribalism. But is an ‘open society’ also supposed to be an ‘open polity’ with open borders too? Popper’s is a theory of society, not a theory of the state—and his book offers no clear account of the political entity in which an ‘open society’ can both flourish and be properly defended too. A minimal state of the kind Hayek advocated is steadily implied, but never adumbrated. Is there a Coast Guard? Are the borders secure? What role should the army play?

We can all be glad we live in nations that are commercially prosperous, cosmopolitan, and democratic. We can agree that a free-trading nation in a free-trading world, with representative government, an independent judiciary, and liberty of thought, association, and expression, is a very fine thing indeed. Popper more than once appeals to the stirring oration in which the Athenian leader Pericles proudly boasted that “Our city is thrown open to the world; we never expel a foreigner…”

But what do you do after you have thrown your city open to the world, only to find you have let in enemies who not only decline to assimilate, but want to destroy it? When these same destroyers have been given all the rights of law-abiding citizens—including the cultural right to be as disagreeably hostile as they wish? When the relation of a number of sinister tribalistic enclaves to the ‘open society’ around them is a conspiratorial blend of dissimulation and treachery?

It is a curious fact that there is no mention of Islam in The Open Society, and no indication whatever that it might emerge as one of the ‘enemies’ of open societies in the years to come. But Popper would have had no trouble recognising what is happening in Europe now. Metastasising cells of unassimilable jihadis, often united by language and ethnicity, driven by irrational resentments, galled by their failure to cope with modern life and feeling “the strain of civilization” in their bones, hating an imagined exclusion and fearing a suspected inferiority, inspired by a debased fundamentalism more concerned to kill than convert, fortified by prophecy, and aggressively promoting a sacred text containing all one needs to know… this manifestly represents “arrested tribalism” in its current form today.

Terminological note

Since “tribalism” is such a fraught term in public discourse today some questions might be asked about the emphasis it bears in The Open Society. Why did Popper use such a controversial word? How did a major work of social philosophy get published without it being editorially softened or euphemized? It seems to me the answers to these questions are roughly as follows.

When he arrived in New Zealand as a German-speaking refugee from Austria in 1937, Karl Popper was largely a stranger to the English-speaking world, and also to the nuances of English itself. One must assume that the concept of an antithesis to civilization had been clearly in his head in German for a long time. Then, at Canterbury College, writing in English, he seems to have struck upon the English word ‘tribalism’ as the blanket term he wanted, and those who helped him with English in New Zealand saw no reason to change it. (These were an economist, Colin Simkin, and an assistant in both Classics and English, Margaret Dalziel.)

It is well known that Popper had a bitterly hostile relationship with his senior colleague in New Zealand, I. L. G. Sutherland, a man always identified as a psychologist. Sutherland had certainly qualified in psychology. He did indeed lecture in psychology. But his main interests had for many years been anthropological, and he was especially concerned about the welfare of the Maori people. If, as is possible, Popper assumed a stark dichotomy between ‘tribalism’ and ‘civilization’ when talking to Sutherland, the first condemned as Bad and the second applauded as Good, it would certainly have antagonized the latter. The differences between the two men are usually described as personal, not intellectual; but on this issue I think rather more was involved.

As to how the text of The Open Society could have appeared with its heavy negative emphasis on tribalism unaltered, the reasons are two. At the time, in 1945, the words “tribe” and “tribalism” were only beginning to be shadowed by a suspicion of insensitivity. They would have therefore seemed uncontroversial to the editors. Secondly, those who saw the manuscript through to publication were far removed from the world of ethnic revivalism, anthropology, or identity politics. Two of them were scholars in the field of art: Herbert Read and Ernst Gombrich. The other was an ex-Austrian economist whose general outlook was similar to that of Popper himself—Friedrich Hayek.

* * *

It was only after the 1950s that reference to the word “tribe” became risky in polite company. And after 1960 especially. That was the year in which many African states became independent, and the overwhelming question in many minds was this: could they function as modern states at all, or would “tribalism” undermine any attempt to organize their political and economic life at a higher and more inclusive level?

Not only about Africa was this question being asked. Would Burma make a viable polity? And what about the Middle East? Whether “tribalism’ was a discussable subject in the post-colonial period became a classic instance of the clash between idealists and realists. In the case of the idealists on the Left they did what they so often do—unable to change the world, they forcefully altered the language in which we talk about the world. If tribalism was an uncomfortable reality, then by vetoing the words “tribe” and “tribalism” you might at least relieve the discomfort. And you could pretend that nothing else needed to be changed.

For their part the realists maintained that tribalistic loyalties would tend to destroy any wider political entity. You could build Houses of Parliament and Congressional Assembly Halls throughout Africa. You could erect air-conditioned Ministries of Trade and Foreign Affairs in every capital city from Lusaka to Abidjan. You could have elections, and appoint ministers and secretaries and under-secretaries… But the whole thing would tend to be a kind a charade, a Potemkin false front, a theatrical presentation behind which membership of tribe or clan would ultimately decide the distribution of wealth and power.

History has yet to prove the realists wrong.

Bureaucracies of virtue and power

You can’t keep a good idea down. You can be gently derisive and hope it will go away. You can make things hot for True Believers by exposing their ideas to ridicule and scorn. Or adopting a more serious approach, you can research and write and publish two mighty volumes of overwhelming argument printed in several editions over a period of forty years, which make vividly clear the intellectual error of Platonic politics, the practical folly of using them as a guide to action, and the numberless vices which invariably ensue.

But naught availeth. If enough people in high places come to believe the Utopia of their dreams should be run by a New Class specially chosen and trained in universities, a class which miraculously unites “goodness and power” (as Professor Gouldner puts it in The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class) or telos and techne (as Professor Szelenyi puts it in The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power) then there’s really no way of preventing the Guardians from taking over.*

[*Alvin Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, NY Seabury Press. 1979. George Konrad and Ivan Szelenyi, The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power. Harvester Press. 1979. Gouldner's book consists of sixteen numbered “theses”, and the bracketed numerals appended to quotations refer to these. Szelenyi's book was written in Hungary in collaboration with George Konrad. When given the opportunity to leave Hungary and go into exile, Konrad stayed. For his part Szelenyi left, eventually taking a post at Flinders University where the manuscript of the book caught up with him. Because of his public association with it in the West, and because he has subsequently published on the same subject as sole author, I have taken the lilberty of referring to The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power as if Szelenyi (now at the University of Wisconsin) had written it on his own. It should be remembered however that this is not the case.]

Now I don’t want to be misunderstood. Professors Gouldner and Szelenyi are democrats—at least if a distaste for Stalinism is any guide. It may be true that the late Max Weber Research Professor of Social Theory at Washington University was a swashbuckling sort of a fellow who, in his last years, styled himself a Left Hegelian Marxist Outlaw. But there is no evidence to suggest that Alvin Gouldner actually walked the campus with pearl-handled dialectical six-guns on his hips, and we are all indebted to him for explaining the historic mission of the New Class as clearly as he has.

It is equally true that Professor Szelenyi represents one of Hungary’s most distinguished academic exiles; that he and his collaborator wrote their book about the power of the intellectuals in East Europe as a form of samizdat; and that a main reason for writing it at all was that the authors “came to realise that the dictatorship of the proletariat is a myth, an ideology which legitimises the power of an oppressive new social force.” If men as clear-headed as this should occasionally appear to favour a

Platonic social order, and if they should refer in a rather indulgent way to guards and guardians… well, perhaps we should be fair to writers—even sociological writers—and allow them their metaphors without complaint.

But I am not entirely convinced. For the fact is that we live at a time when custodianship is very much in the air and when a new generation of thinkers on the Left is happily anticipating a period of unprecedented intellectual hegemony over our lives and thought. In these circumstances the arresting spectacle of Plato’s Guardians insinuating themselves into the pages of New Class sociology does rather catch the eye.

For example, Szelenyi finds it natural to characterise Hungary’s thought controllers as “the guardians of doctrine”, and speaks in a similar way about the Communist Party itself. To the Party, he says, falls the responsibility for “standing guard over socialism’s finest achievement, the political co-ordination of the economy and the consequent integration of individual bureaucracies.” (pp236–161; my italics)

In the striking passage which stands at the head of Popper’s text, Plato urges as a general principle that a man “should get up, or move, or wash, or take his meals … only if he has been told to do so” — advice which bears an uncanny resemblance to Szelenyi’s account of the responsibilities of New Class intellectuals in the East: “In redistributive society order must prevail, and keeping order is the business of the intellectuals: Thus we might summarise most succinctly the ethos of the intellectual class. One may argue, while still remaining within the logic of the system, about who should tell people where they can build houses — the ministry, the planning office, or the municipality — but no one can question that somebody has to tell them where they can build without betraying the whole class ethos.” (p 62;italics in original)

Fastidious scholars might say that Szelenyi’s political Platonism is a minor and barely visible theme in his discussion, something only a critic would introduce. But Gouldner is a man who has written a book on Plato and knows whereof he speaks. And when his account of the pretensions of the New Class recalls the Athenian origins of rationalist aspiration, it is certainly by no slip of the pen:

The New Class believes its high culture represents the greatest achievement of the human race, the deepest ancient wisdom and the most advanced modern scientific knowledge. It believes that these contribute to the welfare and wealth of the race, and that they should receive correspondingly greater rewards. The New Class believes that the world should be governed by those possessing superior competence, wisdom, and science — that is, themselves. The Platonic Complex, the dream of the philosopher king, is the deepest wish-fulfilling fantasy of the New Class. (11.15)

Most of us have wish-fulfilling fantasies at one time or another. But according to Gouldner the New Class is unique in that it has mastered the art of getting its fantasies fulfilled. It has been to university and acquired “the Culture of Critical Discourse” — an essential attribute for all ambitious Guardians today. At its best this is simply the Western tradition of rational enquiry, while at its worst it is all that is destructively antinomian in modern culture. But the main thrust of Gouldner’s argument is that this language, this procedure, this antinomianism, has now been captured by one social class above all, an elite which is making it the instrument of its domination and control.

The culture of discourse of the New Class seeks to control everything, its topic and itself, believing that such domination is the only road to truth. The New Class begins by monopolising truth and by making itself its guardian. (14.4; my italics)

Ministries of truth and love

With the Ministry of Truth around the corner, can the Ministry of Love be far behind? Yet it is surely right and proper that Gouldner and Szelenyi should depict the destiny of the New Class in Platonic terms, and are to be found occasionally writing about it as the guardian of truth, or of doctrine, or of “socialism’s finest achieve­ment”. This is because both authors are ambivalent toward their subject matter, and the word “guardian” precisely expresses this attitude.

Guardianship is first of all legitimate authority. But in ordinary usage the legitimacy of guardianship is qualified by our sense that too much protective custody offends the liberty of free men. For this reason the notion of a guardian’s authority is something we simultaneously concede and resent. And one possible explanation for the uneasily ironic tone and attitude often found in these authors is that they are driven by the logic of their arguments to concede a degree of power to the New Class which they know in their bones to be wrong.

It might easily be thought that the first requirement of an ambitious New Class would be a New Classroom with a New Curriculum — along with a brigade or two of ideological shock troops to get the message across. In recent years the more pessimistic Marxist critics, such as Herbert Marcuse and Louis Althusser, certainly felt that nothing less than an all-out effort of this kind was needed to break the sinister grip of conservatism on the schools.

But Gouldner disagrees. Why worry about new class­rooms when the existing ones are doing such an excellent job? Already the members of the Old Class (the old property-owning middle classes) are “unable to reproduce their values in their own children”, and are equally powerless to prevent their children being converted to New Class causes and programs. Both of these developments prove (contra Marcuse and Althusser) that schools and universities have now become the primary agents for radicalising capitalist society.

Of course the New Class (composed of technically credentialled “cultural capitalists”) is helped in this by the visible disorders and delinquencies of Old. Class family life — in itself the cause of numerous defections. But whatever the predisposing influences in any particular case, it is in the schools that Old Class parents part company with their children, handing them over to lower-echelon New Class Guardians whose task (Gouldner explains) is to undertake the process of “linguistic conversion” by which “the Culture of Critical Discourse” discredits and supplants the common tongue.

7.1 The necessary institution for the mass production of the New Class and its special culture of critical discourse is the historically unique system of “public education”, whether at the secondary or tertiary levels. This system is characterised by the fact that (a) it is education away from the home and thus away from close parental supervision;(b) it is education mediated by a special group of New Class, “teachers”, whose role requires them to take the standpoint of the collectivity as a whole, and who train students to believe that the value of their discourse does not depend upon their differing class origins, that it is not the speaker but the speech that is to be attended, (c) All public schools, therefore, are schools for a linguistic conversion, moving their charges away from the ordinary languages of their everyday lives and moving them toward the CCD (ie, the culture of critical discourse). (Italics in original)

There is much here which is familiar, and some which is obviously true. Specialised educational institutions are found in all advanced societies. And struggles over curricula have frequently, and rightly, required teachers to take a standpoint differing from that of either the family circle or the government in power. To a much greater degree than art, the heritage of science is a necessarily cosmopolitan heritage which rejects local habitations as too constricting and recognises no national home.

But this very cosmopolitanism was liberating precisely because it disclaimed absolute truth and disowned rigid doctrine: what will be the consequences of academic teaching when it is conducted by men and women who see it as their mission to “monopolise truth” and to “guard doctrine”, and who are temperamentally inclined to do just that? But Gouldner’s sixteen “theses” are widely separated, there are many pages and many thoughts between theses 7.3 and 14.4, and the darker side of the dialectic is the least of his worries as he dwells appreciatively on the positive benefits of “linguistic conversion to the CCD”. Once a student has successfully learnt the tricks of the dialectical trade

all authoritative claims are now potentially open to challenge … A grounding is established for the training of members of the New Class and for their alienation from the Old Class. Colleges and universities are the finishing schools of the New Class resistance to the Old Class. (7.2; italics in original)

Once the training of the New Class recruits is concluded, and their emotional alienation from the Old Class is complete, they go forth into the world—very often the world of the unemployed. Gouldner’s account of the intellectuals may lack the civilised fatalism of a Schumpeter or the historical detachment of an Irving Kristol—but it does have statistics. His figures for the overproduction of educated manpower in the US, drawn from labour economics, strongly suggest that a good deal of resentment and hostility toward the Old Class would be floating around whether or not the academic Guardians had done their damnedest to create it.

Too much educated manpower

As long ago as 1973 the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education predicted that the supply of educated manpower would soon outrun demand, and that although about half the college-age cohort would have gone to college, half of these in turn would either find themselves unemployed or would be “working at jobs requiring less education than they have, and less interesting than they sought”.

The social science departments in Australian CAEs are crowded with such people; and since no university department with any sense of self-preservation would dream of voluntarily reducing its intake, a growing population of over-qualified resentfuls will be distributed more and more widely as the years go by.

Soured hopes, unfulfilled expectations, the problem of what sociology calls “blocked ascendance”, these are a potent cause of alienation world-wide. Two years after the Carnegie Commission’s report was issued, a labour economist estimated in the Winter 1975 US Occupational Outlook that between 1972 and 1985 the number of job openings for PhDs would be 187,000, while the available supply in the same period would be 580.000.

By 1985 more than twice as many PhDs would be available for work in PhD-type jobs as there are jobs … in physics, the supply would be about half again more than the demand; in mathematics, only about one-eighth more. In contrast, projected supply may be twice as high in life science or social science and psychology; three times in arts and humanities; 4 times in education; and 8 times in business and commerce. (11.18)

Now I am sure Gouldner would have agreed that it is vital to take a dialectical view of the matter. As capitalism stumbles blindly along its contradictory course, benevolently overproducing a super-abundance of PhDs which then resentfully bite its hand, we must look further down the road and try to see what the long-term future holds. Let us suppose the New Class is fully established in power—”hegemonic power”, as they say. How will all these academically credentialled folk conduct themselves then? What is their Utopia going to look like in operation?

It is at this point that the East European picture presented in The Intellectuals On the Road to Class Power is helpful, for by a singular stroke of good fortune Professor Szelenyi has already answered these questions for us. “The interests of the socialist intelligentsia”, he writes, “are quite different from those of the intellectuals in market economies.”

They are bound up with a defence of the value of the university diploma, which leads to restrictions on the number of degrees that can be obtained. Thus the number of university admissions is limited by administrative means, and the competition on the entrance examinations for the limited number of places remaining is so intensified that ten applicants may appear for each place; for the only legitimate way to rise in society leads by way of the university.

Moreover, highly disagreeable sanctions are applied to ensure that the New Class maintains a proper exclusiveness:

If someone with a degree accepts a lower-ranking job he is made the object of general social disapproval, and such deviants can expect punishment from a number of quarters, ranging from the press to the public prosecutor’s office. (pp26-27)

This picture of the press dealing out punishment in league with the public prosecutor’s office is instructive. Perhaps it should be seen as the logical extension of present trends—of the moralising censoriousness of New Class journalism. In East Europe the administrative obligation to keep the intellectuals themselves in line makes journalists not merely Guardians, but the Guardians of the Guardians, a vocational fulfilment which some of our more ambitious Left media pundits might find hard to resist.

The difference in the journalistic enterprise, East and West, is gradually reducing itself to this: in places like Hungary the media function to defend the privileges wrested (in the name of the proletarian revolution) from the Old Class by the New. While in the West this battle has yet to be won: here the intellectuals still see it as their main duty to discredit and destroy the Old Bourgeoisie— the enfeebled obstacle still standing in their path.

Resentful tertiary spillage

Gouldner’s figures for the growing surplus of educated manpower should be borne in mind in any account of New Class media performance, for it is the world of journalism which provides a hospitable refuge for countless academics manqués. Indeed, it would be hard to understand the rancour, the tendentiousness and the ceaseless moralistic whine of so much “current affairs” without taking into account the resentful spillage from mass tertiary education.

The more literate of this overflow ends up in the print media. But hundreds more drift into TV news and documentary programs where an inability to spell usually goes unnoticed. In any case a rather different talent is required. As numerous “documentaries” show. and numerous victims will testify, the ability to crucify one’s political adversaries by tricks of interviewing and editing is what is most in demand. This may seem a far cry from the rarefied world of the Culture of Critical Discourse, but as Gouldner indicates, the translation of academic “critique” into the ordinary malice of daily journalism is just one of those things which was bound to happen along the way:

4.4 Short of going to the barricades, the New Class may harass the old, sabotage it, critique it, expose and muckrake it, express moral, technical, and cultural superiority to it. and hold it up to contempt and ridicule. The New Class, however, does not seek struggle for its own sake. No class does. It is concerned simply about securing its own material and ideal interests with minimum effort. Class struggle is only one device in a larger repertoire with which the New Class pursues its interests. No class goes to war without first seeing what it can secure through negotiation or threat.

What it can secure by threat is in fact impressive: and Gouldner’s discussion of the process (though for rather different reasons) almost equally so. Like others who have watched the New Class over the years, he sees the drive to increase its share of the national product as a “fundamental New Class objective”, along with an ability “to appropriate privately larger shares of the incomes produced by the special cultures they possess”.

To do all this they need to control some other things as well — the terms and conditions of their own employment being high on the list. And the key to it all is sufficient political power to put the seal of public approval on the whole package. “The struggle of the New Class is, therefore, to institutionalise a wage system, ie, a social system with a distinct principle of distributive justice: ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his work’, which is also the norm of ‘socialism’ “. (5.7)

Tenure—the goal of all employment

As art aspires to the condition of music, so employment aspires to the condition of academic tenure—especially all bureaucratic employment. It may well be that the privileges of tenure were originally devised to guarantee the unimpeded movement of the mind, to secure a safe environment for scholars, and to underwrite the conditions of impartial research.

But in today’s bureaucratic context (when this can be distinguished from the academy proper) tenure can be more easily seen to guarantee that if movement can be impeded, it will be; to secure a safe environment for personal incompetence and economic inefficiency; and to underwrite a large quantity of highly partial research— a veritable deluge of self-sponsored, self-serving reports designed to justify the expansion of government departments in such a way as to do for the New Class exactly what Gouldner says it does: “to increase its own share of the national product”.

What all this has to do with institutionalising the principle of “from each according to his ability” etc may not be immediately obvious. But it becomes clearer as we go along, especially when the economic philosophy underlying the New Class’s ambitious income claims is spelled out. Gouldner presents this in Thesis Five: The New Class as a Cultural Bourgeoisie, where the Old Class with its property advantages (the Old Bourgeoisie) is distinguished from its modern challenger, the New Class of culturally and educationally advantaged.

Like a number of other neo-Marxists who have found Marx’s own conception of capital too restrictive, he speaks of the specialised training and professional credentials of the New Class as “cultural capital”, and then proceeds to lump everything together in a “general theory of capital” according to which “Education is as much capital as are a factory’s buildings or machines”. Indeed:

5.14(4) Anything is capital when it serves as the basis olf enforceable claims to the private appropriation of incomes legitimated for their contribution to the production of economic valuables or wealth. Capital differs, then, from fraud, force, violence or domination that are used to extort wealth as ransom, loot, booty, or tribute. Capital is neither theft nor extortion but acknowledges the norm of reciprocity, claiming that it is entitled to what it gets because of what it has contributed. (Italics in original)

A generalisation of this scope necessarily contains some truth. But when we come to consider the “enforceable income claims” of the modern public servant — some Therapeutic Bureaucrat of The Age of Discontent — it becomes obvious that it also contains a very large untruth. In a market economy the returns on money capital are not guaranteed. It may of course be true that it is implicit in the theory and practice of investment that the investor is entitled to some share of the returns on whatever has been invested. And if Gouldner or anyone else .wishes to call this a “norm of reciprocity”, then so be it. What is noticeable is the way he then proceeds to obfuscate the crux of market legitimacy: that if there is no contribution to the production of social wealth, there can be no legitimate claims.

But a denial of the rule “no returns, no claims”, is exactly where his argument is leading. And in only a few more lines we are invited to consider situations (situations Gouldner regards with equanimity) where without any increase in productivity at all the power of the New Class is so great that its position becomes “a form of ‘domination’ where incomes are extracted by the threat or use of force or violence” (5.15) whether or not the capital increases productivity. Some of us would regard this as a not unfair description of the state of Australian industrial relations today. Should this procedure become the model for similar claims by a hegemonic New Class on the Left we can all look forward to exciting times. From this assumption—that there is no necessary relation between incomes and productivity, and that there need not be—policies follow which must bankrupt any state.

Economics supersedes politics

Irving Kristol once observed that the New Class “tries always to supersede economics by politics—an activity in which it is most competent, since it has the talents and the implicit authority to shape public opinion on all larger issues”. As the “hegemonic bloc” of Left Guardians materialises, and its political influence develops into a “form of domination”, it becomes increasingly important for us to know what sort of politics these will be. Under the prefigured form of domination is there going to be any room for an opposition? Will there be only one party? Or will we be allowed to have two? For his part Gouldner emphasises that a communist dictatorship offers the New Class significant advantages (in what follows I have replaced ‘socialist’ with ‘communist’ throughout, since that is what in fact he means).

4.6 A ‘welfare’ state and a ‘communist’ state are both political strategies of the New Class. An essential difference is that in a communist state the hegemony of the New Class is fuller, its control over the working class is greater.

These advantages are fully confirmed by Szelenyi in a section which discusses “the meaning of the dictatorship of the proletariat under rational distribution” (ppl7l-172) and which describes the combined exegetical and political functions of the Party as follows: “It makes certain that economic and technical decisions will always be primarily political decisions and that these politicised decisions will always be correlated with a unitary socialist ideology … The leaders’ speeches provide a running exegesis of the classic Marxist texts which changes constantly yet is the only valid and authoritative one at any given time. The Party is above the parts, the Party is above parties; it is not one factor in the political mechanism, it is the political mechanism… That is why it cannot recognise any legitimate political alternative to itself and its policies, and cannot submit to any popular representative body. Even if it comes to power through parliamentary elections it must shake off parliamentary control as soon as it is in power.” (p 162)

I repeat: Professors Gouldner and Szelenyi are democrats. They clearly prefer societies in which there is personal liberty and the vote, to societies in which there is neither—or in which voting is purely ceremonial. Professor Szelenyi is not celebrating the Guardianship of the Party in the passage quoted above—and least of all when he talks about that doctrinal exegesis “which changes constantly yet is the only valid and authoritative one at any given time”. The tone may be unfamiliar, but it is a recognisable species of East European humour—political gallows humour, black, thin-lipped, and cynical.

Nor does Gouldner whole-heartedly endorse the march to power of the New Class he so vividly portrays: it would be truer to say that he half-heartedly endorses it instead. He is not without some sympathy for the Old Class which is being inexorably displaced, but in his eyes it is beyond salvation—partly because it is incapable of effective self-defence. It has lost to the New Class the decisive symbols of legitimacy in the modern era: science, technology, professionalism, and morality.

As the Old Class helplessly begets its New Class children—professionals, technicians, scientists and intellectuals to a man—each child pits his own chosen symbol of legitimacy against the faded proprietorial assumptions on which the parental home was built. As regards morality, even if the New Class were not busily making careers out of their public destruction, the private conduct of many of the Old Class elite is unappealing, That of the Miami Kimberlys and Pulitzers, for example, might well have cast a shadow over their senatorial prospects in ancient Rome.

Analysis without prognosis

But this is really beside the point. The point is that the sociology of these books leads inevitably to political conclusions. And one would like to know exactly what political dispensation and what constitutional arrange­ments Gouldner sees replacing the world we know. Like a thousand critics of similar views, on this question he is silent.

We are told that Marx got his classes wrong; that he backed a loser in the proletariat; that instead it will be the New Class which succeeds to power—”hegemonic power” being the favoured phrase for describing this long-anticipated apotheosis of the intelligentsia. But what institutions will restrain this power? Again one asks: Will there be two parties? Or is it in the nature of “rationality” to permit only one? What will guarantee the personal liberty which Professor Gouldner so comfortably assumes, and which Professor Szelenyi had to go into exile to discover?

Regarding these important questions the authors have nothing constructive to say. Hegemony cometh: the constitution of liberty will have to look after itself. For his part Szelenyi minutely lists the daily degradations which a political system unable to “submit to any popular representative body” necessarily inflicts upon its citizens. But at the end of it all he has no concrete suggestions to make beyond the fond hope that his book will contribute “to the theory of a new, self-managing socialism—‘a free association of direct producers’ … ” For my part I can only wish Szelenyi the joys of a tenured professorship in a prominent American university, and enough time to spin out his theories until retirement.

In The Future According to Alvin Gouldner, on the other hand, we shall all have to place our trust in that miraculous guidance system, the Culture of Critical Discourse. When it’s working properly it is a very paragon of civic virtue—”reflexive”, watchful, self-disciplined, orderly, and circumspect … All of them things which rationalism hopes for in human life; all of them things which rationalists have told us we need more of if we are to survive.

But then comes an unpleasant revelation. It now appears that the CCD doesn’t always work properly, and that sometimes it doesn’t work at all. It is even admitted to have vices. And these vices are all the things which Professor Oakeshott has warned against and argued that we need less of in any polity worth the name, and certainly in any polity which is to remain sane and bearable.

Our university-educated Critical Discoursers, the “embodiment of societal rationality” who “claim the right to sit in judgment over the actions and claims of any social class and all power elites” may also (on their off days) be “inflexible” and “dogmatic”. Worse still — much, much worse: “Political brutality, then, finds a grounding in the Culture of Critical Discourse; the new rationality may paradoxically allow a new darkness at noon.”

Nice word, “paradoxical”. Could the paradox of universal scepticism collapsing into universal dogmatism have any relation to the unwisdom of discussing “society” in a political vacuum? Or the dangers inherent in a rationality stripped of institutional restraints?

In Frank Parkin’s excellent Marxism and Class Theory, he drily remarks that “the political theory of liberty in the classless society or in the transitional socialist state is not to be found ready made in classical Marxism or its offshoots. Nor for that matter have latterday Marxists given it the prominent place it might be thought to deserve in a program ostensibly designed with human emancipation in mind.

Despite the avowed responsiveness of Marxism to the lessons of history there is still no general schema of a socialist political system that indicates how power should be distributed, how conflicting interests should be represented and resolved, how abuses to socialist legality should be checked, and so on. There are no principles or guidelines of even the most general kind pertaining to the conduct of political life under the dictatorship of the proletariat, nor any attempt to systematise Lenin’s own scrappy remarks on the subject. Miliband’s judgment that the exercise of power under proletarian dictatorship is the ‘Achilles heel of Marxism’ is in no obvious danger of becoming outdated by current theory or practice.” (p178)

It can safely be said that Miliband’s judgment is in no danger of being outdated by these books. The exercise of power under “the hegemony of the New Class” is the new form of an old problem, and like a long line of Marxist predecessors these authors choose to ignore it. But it would be wrong to underestimate their significance, for in the history of Marxist revisionism they may well represent an important turning point.

This is the point when disenchantment brings the abandonment of the millenarian vision, the abandonment of any hope of that bright dawn when a “universal class” will establish universal equity, and the abandonment of that age-old religious dream of a world freed of alienation. It is a stage which many have reached before — and have then turned aside to do more useful things. The remarkable feature of these books (but more especially Gouldner’s) is that although the religious goal is now admitted to be absurd, the effort to subvert, displace, or even to violently overthrow the 0!d Class is in no way discouraged — is indeed implicitly upheld as a still desirable and appropriate goal, whatever the consequences.

Total cynicism and totalitarian goals

Marxism since Lenin has always been tactically opportunistic. But however distasteful their day-to-day manoeuvres, neither in their writings nor in their characters could Marx, or Lenin, or Trotsky, be accused of seeking power simply for the sake of the material benefits power brings, or for the mere pleasure of exercising it. On the interpretation set before us in these books, however, these are the motives which largely account both for the rise of the New Class in the West and for its unbudgeability in the East.

More remarkable still, this is not seen to require a wholesale reconsideration of political goals. Gouldner tells us that Marxism is “the false consciousness of radicalised cultural bourgeoisie”, but thinks little the worse of it for that. It is rather as if Raymond Aron, having pronounced Marxism to be “the opium of the intellectuals”, were then to commend opium addiction on the ground that it might still have exciting results.

Stripped of its religious goals, Marxism has the makings of a very cynical creed indeed. When the Knights of Totality no longer believe their own liberationist rhetoric, when the Guardians have come think that their hegemonic power is a necessary feature of socialism whatever the result, then “demystified” Marxist politics have arrived with a vengeance.

In the East they arrived some time ago. Szelenyi’s account represents the ultimate fulfilment of the trends Gouldner describes. And what his account portrays is a political organism deprived of its original moral rationale, a structure in which the old egalitarian impulse is exhausted, but which persists for the very good reason that the material benefits accruing to the dominant class provide it with a sufficient motive for hanging on to power (as in Poland) come what may.

One remembers Weber’s epitaph for the Protestant Ethic, as he contemplated a devitalised bourgeoisie spiritlessly tending the petrified mechanism their ancestors had raised. Adapted, without apology, it might also be used to depict that petrified Utopia of the New Ruling classes of the East:

Rulers without honour, administrators without heart, priests without conviction, this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilisation never before achieved.