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by Bill Geddes
December
2009
Those who live in capitalist communities have, over the
past century, introduced their ways of organising and interacting with
the environment to people throughout the world. In doing so, they have set about
re-organising other communities to conform to the requirements of life in a
capitalist world.
Vast amounts of 'aid money' have been spent in other
communities assisting them to develop capitalist institutions and
practices. Development experts, trained in Western universities, have
dedicated their lives to improving the lot of 'under-developed' and
'less-developed' communities 1. Yet, the consequences of all the
dedication, effort and resources committed to 'Third World development' seem to
have produced very mixed results around the world.
To understand the process of 'development' and its consequences
in non-Western communities, we need to understand the ways in which
people organise themselves and their surroundings.
Human beings are natural model builders. Before they can begin
to interact with their world it must be imbued with meaning and that requires a
set of criteria for categorising and classifying experiences, and for connecting
the classified experiences with each other.
If every individual had, from birth, to invent his or her own
categorizational criteria, human beings would forever be trapped at the
dawning of sentience and meaningful communication between people would be
severely limited. So it should be no surprise that newborn babies are not left
to develop their own criteria for categorising experiences.
Just as human beings teach their young to speak their native
language, so they teach them, from birth, the indigenous criteria for
categorising their experiences and interconnecting those categorised
experiences.
The criteria used in building a community’s categorizational
models are historically determined and so, to the extent that the community is
isolated from other communities, its categorizational models will be unique to
the community (just as a community’s language is unique).
This is one of the reasons why anthropologists recognise that
they should handle apparent similarities between communities with extreme
caution and should never assume that ‘models of kinship’ or any other forms of
social organisation and structure can be applied across communities.
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We will use the generic term ‘Western’ to refer to
communities that have their hegemonic roots in the Western European historical
experiences outlined in History of the Emergence of Capitalism
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Consider, for example, the kinship categorisation between the
elder brother–the younger brother and the presumed relationships between them in
Confucian Chinese families. The categorizational criteria that produce these
related categories of persons are quite different from those that determine the
definitions of older and younger brothers in, say, Anglo-Celtic Australia.
Few people in Anglo-Celtic Australia recognise the kinship
elements ‘elder brother’ and ‘younger brother’ as categorically distinctive,
carrying their own prescribed characteristics and sharing formalised rights and
responsibilities (or reciprocal duties) that are distinctive to those two
categories of persons.
Both sets of communities recognise the existence of older and
younger brothers. After all, brothers, as male siblings of the same parents,
exist in all communities. However, the characteristics they recognise and the
relationships they presume between them are very different. Kalman Applbaum
(1998) sums up the Western understanding of ‘horizontal’ (see Reciprocity and Exchange) relationships:
… [Western] individuals may be seen in relation to other
individuals as free actors, free choice makers, whose unfailing goal of
satisfying primordial needs and achieving the construction of self-identity are
not compromised by such interferences as filial duty or custom.
(Applbaum 1998)
The chief characteristics of such persons are that they are
autonomous, independent and recognise rights and responsibilities as incentives
and constraints channelling the pursuit of their independent ‘needs and wants’.
The focus is on individuals attaining ‘needs and wants’ and the regulatory
structures defining legitimate attainment of them (i.e. in economic terms—or is
it Star Trek terminology?—the ‘rules of
acquisition’). The focus is only secondarily on other persons (whatever their
kinship relationships might be) with whom one might or might not interact in
achieving one’s needs and wants.
The consequences of accepting the centrality of filial and other
forms of reciprocal duty, as in Confucian China, may however, (as Confucius 500
BC (or possibly K’ung Chi, grandson of Confucius) suggested) require that
individuals are not seen as free actors
pursuing individual needs and wants but as interdependent members of a community who
can only understand themselves and ensure their needs and wants through
understanding and accepting their kinship and other communal
responsibilities:
The duties of universal obligation are five and the virtues
wherewith they are practiced are three. The duties are those between sovereign
and minister, between father and son, between husband and wife, between elder
brother and younger, and those belonging to the intercourse of friends. Those
five are the duties of universal obligation. Knowledge, magnanimity, and energy,
these three, are the virtues universally binding. And the means by which they
carry the duties into practice is singleness.
Some are born with the knowledge of those duties; some know them
by study; and some acquire the knowledge after a painful feeling of their
ignorance. But the knowledge being possessed, it comes to the same thing. Some
practice them with a natural ease; some from a desire for their advantages; and
some by strenuous effort. But the achievement being made, it comes to the same
thing.
(Confucius 1893)
If a Western person is not aware of the very different
relational presumptions built into Confucian ideas of reciprocal duty, he
or she is likely to presume that the independent pursuit of needs and wants is
central to involvement in such relationships. Robert Westwood does this when he
sums up the Confucian position from a Western perspective, assuming that all
individuals are ‘free actors’ who ‘lose freedom’ when they are required to
accept super-ordinate or subordinate hierarchical status. It is this that allows
him to speak about relative ‘power’ in hierarchical, interdependent
relationships:
Challenges to authority and the ‘natural’ order are not
countenanced. This is encapsulated in the Confucian precepts of the so-called
‘Five Cardinal Relationships’ or wu lun, which delineate a hierarchical power
structure over key societal relationships. The wu lun are dyadic sets of
unequal, mostly hierarchical relationships between emperor–minister, father–son,
husband–wife, older brother–younger brother, friend–friend.
Although the power structure is differentiated and unequal
(except for the latter), mutual obligations and reciprocities are inherent in
the relationships. The person in the dominant position expects and receives
obedience, deference and compliance, but in return should respect the dignity of
the lower party and provide appropriate care and concern.
(Westwood 1997, p. 459)
Tsui, Farh and Lih, however, sum up the differences in the
following way:
… Chinese often view themselves interdependent with the
surrounding social context, and it is the ‘self in relation to other’ that
becomes the focal individual experience. This view of an interdependent self is
in sharp contrast to the Western view of an independent self.
The latter sees each human being as an independent,
self-contained, autonomous entity who (a) comprises a unique configuration of
internal attributes (e.g. traits, abilities, motives, and values) and (b)
behaves primarily as a consequence of these internal attributes (Markus &
Kitayama, 1991).
This divergent view of self has implications for a variety of
basic psychological processes (e.g. cognition, emotion and motivation) and may
be one of the most fundamental differences between the East and the West in
social relations.
(Tsui et al. 1997, p. 59)
The categorizational models held in different communities not
only have distinctive sets of categories and idiosyncratic placement of elements
within categories, they also have unique combinations and qualities of
relationships through which categories and their elements are interconnected.
It is very easy for a researcher or commentator to apply his or
her own understandings of the nature of relationships to those observed in other
communities, as Westwood (1997) does when he assumes that hierarchical
relationships must involve dominance and subservience, relative power and
powerlessness. These are features of relationships between individuals who
define themselves as ‘free actors’ and who view relationships of dependence in
terms of costs and benefits and degrees of loss of independence.
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For an examination of the historical movement of
Western Europeans from interdependence to independence see Emergence of Capitalism |
The independent self is quintessentially
Western. The interdependent self, in one guise or another, is found in
communities where individuals know who they are through the forms of
relationship they recognise between themselves and other members of the
community. They perceive rights and responsibilities as qualities of the
interactants rather than inhering in the ‘objects’ of interaction (as rules of
acquisition).
In such communities the rights and obligations of individuals in
exchange relationships remain with the interactants rather than being attached
to the objects of exchange. So, the other party in an exchange is the focus,
rather than the needs and wants of the interactants.
In one case, the process of exchange (or interaction) tends to
emphasise the separate identities (and, therefore, motivations) of the
exchangers (leading to a stress on independence). In the other, it tends to
emphasise their relatedness and reciprocal responsibilities (stressing interdependence). The qualities of the
relationships invoked in exchange in the two orientations are very
different.
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The nature of hegemonies (which should not be confused
with neo-Marxist use of the term) is discussed in Subsistence and Status |
Such interactional orientations tend not only to ‘flavour’
recognised relationships between people but permeate relationships connecting
both elements within categories and categories themselves throughout the primary
ideological frames (see next section ‘Primary ideology’) of the communities. Not
only are perceived relationships specific to communities, so too are the
perceived qualities that inhere in relationships.
By definition, two individuals living in different communities
will, therefore, have quite distinctive ‘understandings’ from each other. How
similar their understandings are will largely depend on the nature of the
historical connections that have existed between their communities and the
degree to which the hegemonies of their communities have interacted over time.
Throughout their lives, people in communities are constantly
corrected and disciplined whenever their interactions or their understandings do
not conform to those considered accurate in their community. To quote Confucius,
‘some acquire the knowledge after a painful feeling of their ignorance’ through
a process of ‘teaching and learning’.
In order to understand the ways in
which communities build their categorizational models and then from them
construct models of community organisation and individual interaction, we are
going to address two related sets of structures. These determine how human
beings, in any community, see ‘reality’ and then organise their communities in
the ‘best possible ways’ to make the most of the reality they live in.
The first set of structures is the set of categorizational
models that all members of a community (or set of related communities) hold in
common. If they did not hold these models in common they would find it very
difficult to make sense of each other’s organisation, interaction, behaviour and
communication. We are going to call these fundamental organisational models primary ideology.
Processes of categorisation require frameworks of categories and
rules (in language these would be called ‘grammars’) for both the placement of
elements of experience in those categories and the interconnection of the
categories and of the elements of experience contained in them. The
interconnections are, of course, ‘relationships’.
Not only are the categories and the framework of those
categories unique to a community (or set of related communities), so are the
sets of interactional relations and the ‘qualities’ that are invested in those
relations.
The criteria that produce both the categorizational framework
and its internal categories and relations are primary ideological presumptions. These are
the most basic understandings people have of their worlds, in terms of which
categorisation proceeds. Any attempt to alter these understandings attacks the
ability of people who hold them to think, and therefore to interact meaningfully
with their environments.
Most people, when asked to explain their understanding of
primary ideological presumptions, find it very difficult (just as they find it
difficult to explain why they place words in a particular order in their
sentences or why certain words should always, never or only in certain contexts
appear together).
One of the features of the presumptions is that they are so
taken for granted that those who hold them often find it difficult to identify
their features and usually presume that they are so ‘self-evident’ that they
need no explanation or justification. This makes it very difficult to research
primary presumptions since people, anywhere, will consider questions related to
the definition of the assumptions to be inane. One should not question the
obvious, particularly when the people being questioned find it difficult to
express their understandings or even focus on the issues being raised.
It needs to be remembered, however, that primary ideological
presumptions are not universally held understandings of the world, they are the
understandings that are required by the most basic categorizational models of
the community and so, not only should not be questioned, but cannot easily be
altered. Changes in such assumptions occur over hundreds of years and produce
strains and tensions in communities experiencing the changes (see History of the Emergence of Capitalism).
People in any community inherit the primary ideology of their
community in the same way that they inherit the language of their community. It
is taught to them from birth or as Confucius put it ‘some are born with the
knowledge…’. Every time a child makes inappropriate connections between objects,
people or experiences, those around the child, who feel responsible for its
upbringing, correct the child to ensure that its ‘understanding’ (i.e. its sets
of categories, categorisation within those sets and their inter-relationships)
of the world approximates the understanding of the world held by the responsible
people in the community (members of the hegemony).
All communities develop a range of acculturative processes and
structures squarely aimed at ensuring that the primary ideology of the community
is learned and that people, throughout their lives, live by and conform to the
presumptions of the fundamental categorizational models of their community. Even
minute deviations will be subjected to correction, in much the same way as
people are corrected when their speech patterns deviate from accepted practice
in their community.
Where the models are not held consistently or life is not
organised in ways required by the primary ideology of the community, those
involved are usually defined as socially or mentally defective in some way and
therefore, to one extent or another, in need of re-education or ‘correction’.
Those who do not readily respond to correction are often considered
dangerous—very often isolated from the rest of the community, or even killed
(especially when community cognitive models are under attack and people feel a
need to reassert the fundamental certainties of life, as in the revitalisation movements we will consider
shortly). For some three to four hundred years Western Europeans became
increasingly aware and fearful of the effects of madness, as the fundamental
presumptions of their primary ideologies were challenged and altered (see History of the Emergence of Capitalism). As Laura Nader put
it:
Foucault (1967) demonstrates how changes in the concept of
madness led to changes in diagnosis and treatment of the insane and of social
attitudes toward them. He describes how changing perceptions of madness in parts
of Western Europe from the Middle Ages to the end of the 19th century led to the
separation of ‘mad’ persons from the rest of society, their classification as
deviants, and finally their subjection to social control. He focuses on the
cultural controls that led to the social controls; ideas about madness led to
asylums for the mad.
(Nader 1997, p. 719)
In any community, members are certain that their primary
ideology is not simply a set of categorizational models but is, in fact, the way
the external world is ordered. After all, they have viewed and interacted with
their world through that model since birth. Whenever something in the ‘real’
world seems not to fit their models (i.e. their understanding) they, usually
subconsciously, change it so that it does (this is what Westwood 1997 does in
his description of relationships in Confucian Chinese communities).
There is a constant and continuous ideological management of reality. So,
whenever people in a community investigate the ‘real world’ to see whether it
fits their most basic understandings of life, they, inevitably, find that it
does. As Nader says of the ways in which people understand ‘the body’ in
different communities:
Images of the body appear natural within their specific cultural
milieus.
(Nader 1997, p. 719)
Because the primary ideology of individuals and communities is
fundamental to the way they think and understand themselves and their worlds,
they instinctively apply their primary ideological presumptions in classifying
new experiences and objects. Human beings, in applying their primary
presumptions to new phenomena, inevitably reorganise ‘reality’ to fit their
models rather than reorganising their models to fit ‘reality’ (i.e. they act to
conserve their understanding of their
world and themselves). This is a fundamental problem for anthropological
research, since anthropologists are no less prone to reorganising what they find
in their research communities to fit their own primary ideologies than any other
human beings.
The second set of structures is derived from the common primary
ideology of members of a community. These structures start from the presumption
that the primary ideology is not a subjective set of categorizational models
held by members of the community but is, in fact, the way the external world is
organised, it is ‘objective reality’. The purpose of this second set of
structures, which we will call secondary
ideology, is to spell out the best possible ways of organising community
life, given the constraints of ‘objective reality’.
There can be any number of secondary models in a community. What
they all have in common is that they take the primary ideology and its
presumptions, from which they are built, for granted. It is the unquestioned, organised, backdrop to life. This second
level of model building, as Claude Levi-Straus explained, is not only designed
to ensure that communities are organised and individuals interact in the ‘best
possible ways’, but is also designed to reinforce and perpetuate the fundamental
features of their primary ideologies. According to Levi-Strauss:
[C]onscious models… are by definition very poor ones since
they are not intended to explain the phenomena but to perpetuate them. Therefore
structural analysis is confronted with a strange paradox well known to the
linguist, that is: the more obvious structural organization is, the more
difficult it becomes to reach it because of the inaccurate models lying across
the path which leads to it.
(Levi-Strauss 1963, p. 282)
Many of the ‘explanatory’ models of communities confirm
Levi-Strauss’ observation. They affirm and reinforce the central presumptions of
the primary ideologies of the communities in which they are built (e.g. the
various economic and social exchange models, which are assumed to
explain human interaction but actually reflect and reinforce belief in the
universal validity of the ‘independent self’—the individualistic acquisition of
needs and wants within a regulatory framework).
Since community members ‘instinctively’ understand, and are
cognitively committed to the basic presumptions upon which the secondary models
in their community are built, they can readily weigh up the advantages and
disadvantages of the models available to them and so choose which of the models
they will support and which they will oppose. This, in Western communities, is
known as ‘political’, ‘social’ or ‘economic’ (or any mixture of these)
deliberation, debate or activity. These are the models of which community
members are conscious and about which they enter into dispute with and support
one another.
It is taken for granted by those who espouse a model and
organise life by it that their model is all about organising the real world to
maximise benefits to community members and protect the most important basic
principles of life in their communities (the fundamental presumptions of their
primary ideology). It is the other models, those they do not endorse, which are
defined by them as ‘ideology’. As Philip Williamson explains of the British
conservative movement of the late 20th century:
Conservative politicians, intellectuals and publicists confused
matters by denying they had any such thing, whether ideology, creed or doctrine;
their concern was the real and the practical, ‘ideology’ being an infection
among their opponents which it was their task to resist.
(Williamson 2003, p. 270)
In Western communities, since the collapse of the Soviet Union
in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there is one dominant secondary
ideology—capitalism, with a variety of derived models that offer variations on
the major themes of capitalism (e.g. emphases on the relative responsibilities
of the public and private domains, see Global Forces, Economic Realities).
People in Western communities, convinced that their dominant
secondary ideologies are not ideologies but are the best ways of organising
objective reality, have imposed and continue to impose them, often with
considerable force, on the rest of the world.
This set of imposed Western secondary ideological models
underpins and constitutes the world economy, perpetuated and reinforced by the
almost irresistible hegemonic forces of globalisation. This imposition of
Western secondary ideological models on communities, which have very different
primary ideologies, leads almost inevitably to their disruption. Since human
beings require a primary ideology in order to think and interact with their
worlds, the imposition of secondary models which do not fit their primary
ideological understandings, leads to mental and social confusion.
But, because both those imposing the new models and those on
whom they are being imposed do not recognise the existence of primary
ideological models, both assume that the Western secondary models are the most
efficient and ‘practical’ ways of organising a shared objective reality. So it
is assumed, the problem for the victims of this hegemonic imposition is one of
lack of ‘education’ and/or lack of ‘discipline’. They, therefore, sponsor and
accept educational and restructuring programs (which are based on the primary
ideological understandings of the hegemonic powers) to tackle the burgeoning
chaos. This exacerbates the problems of social and mental confusion in the
receiving communities.
Many communities around the world, suffering the consequences of
enforced reorganisation of their worlds to fit the requirements of capitalism,
are in various stages of disintegration—victims of the globalising forces of
international capitalism. As Wallerstein
(1991) claims, the imposition of economic organisation and activity on the
rest of the world by Western nations is not new.
Since the 16th century Western Europeans (and those
First World countries that have their hegemonic roots in Western Europe) have
become increasingly militarily dominant around the world and have required the
rest of the world to accept reorganisation of their models and understandings.
In doing so they have established and maintained a ‘world economic system’.
To understand the ways in which people live and organise their
lives in the early 21st century we need to understand the nature of
this world economic system. Unless we do, many of the most important
influences on the lives of people in communities we study will be missed or
misinterpreted.
Over the past fifty years there have been many attempts to
explain the presence of this system. As Immanuel Wallerstein (1991) has said:
‘its peculiar feature is that it has shown itself strong enough to destroy all
other [world-systems] contemporaneous to it’. Wallerstein provides a brief
discussion of the nature of the ‘world-system’ as he understands it. His article
is a response to an earlier article by Andre Gunder Frank, which was, itself, a
critical response to a 1990 article by Wallerstein.
Wallerstein says that his 1990 article ‘L’Occident, le capitalisme, et le systeme-monde moderne’ was
written as a rebuttal of the belief that the world-system is an ‘economic
miracle’ of Western industrialism. He says, those who claim this:
believe two things simultaneously: (a) something distinctive
occurred in (western) Europe which was radically new somewhere in early modern
times; (b) this ‘something’ was a highly positive or ‘progressive’ happening in
world history. My position is that (a) was true but that (b) was distinctly not
true.
(Wallerstein 1991)
Capitalism is based on an individualised, status-driven,
open-ended accumulation and consumption of goods and services, requiring
open-ended production. The basis for social status and self-definition in
Western communities is peculiar. Systems of status and self-definition in other
communities are equally peculiar to them.
Feudalism, while unique to medieval Europe, shares many of the
characteristics of patron–client forms of communal organisation and interaction
around the world. It was a territory-based, patron–client system in which those
higher in the hierarchy took responsibility for those below them. They
‘parented’ those who depended on them (i.e. feudal communities presumed an
‘interdependent self’ rather an ‘independent self’). The political organisation
directly mirrored the social system, and councils of people of similar
hierarchical position met to determine affairs of their dependents (see History of the Emergence of Capitalism for more on this).
On the other hand, capitalism is based on individual
independence; the acquisition of an ever-expanding set of needs and wants and
promotion of the individual rather than his or her responsibility for
dependents. Its political frame, therefore, is democracy. If one insisted on a
feudally organised community accepting democracy as its political frame, this
would directly undermine the ‘parenting’ responsibilities of hierarchically
superior members of the community.
Democracy requires communities to be organised in terms of an
‘independent self’, not an ‘interdependent self’. It is no more a universally
applicable model of governance than is feudalism, and when communities are
compelled to reorganise in ‘democratic’ ways, all their other understandings of
life are automatically challenged.
If, in patron–client organised communities, those in superior
hierarchical positions were freed from their parenting responsibilities, those
who depend on them would find the world a very insecure and inhospitable place.
Far from improving the lot of the poor, the imposition of democracy can
disenfranchise them and strip them of those supports that have protected them in
the past. Interdependent relationships are disrupted, redistributive processes
dismantled, and poverty, anomie and violence escalate in their communities.
Thomas More (1516), in his book Utopia, described the consequences of such
disenfranchising of the peasantry of England in the early 16th
century, during the shift from feudalism to capitalism. The hero of his book,
Raphael, was the guest of the ‘Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal, and
Chancellor of England’:
One day when I was dining with him there happened to be at table
one of the English lawyers, who took occasion to run out in a high commendation
of the severe execution of justice upon thieves, who, as he said, were then
hanged so fast that there were sometimes twenty on one gibbet; and upon that he
said he could not wonder enough how it came to pass, that since so few escaped,
there were yet so many thieves left who were still robbing in all places.
Upon this, I who took the boldness to speak freely before the
cardinal, said there was no reason to wonder at the matter since… ‘The increase
of pasture,’ said I, ‘by which your sheep, which are naturally mild, and easily
kept in order, may be said now to devour men, and unpeople, not only villages,
but towns; for wherever it is found that the sheep of any soil yield a softer
and richer wool than ordinary, there the nobility and gentry, and even those
holy men the abbots, not contented with the old rents which their farms yielded,
nor thinking it enough that they, living at their ease, do no good to the
public, resolve to do it hurt instead of good.
They stop the course of agriculture, destroying houses and towns,
reserving only the churches, and enclose grounds that they may lodge their sheep
in them. As if forests and parks had swallowed up too little of the land, those
worthy countrymen turn the best inhabited places into solitudes, for when an
insatiable wretch, who is a plague to his country, resolves to enclose many
thousand acres of ground, the owners as well as tenants are turned out of their
possessions, by tricks, or by main force, or being wearied out with ill-usage,
they are forced to sell them.
By which means those miserable people, both men and women,
married and unmarried, old and young, with their poor but numerous families
(since country business requires many hands), are all forced to change their
seats, not knowing whither to go; and they must sell almost for nothing their
household stuff, which could not bring them much money, even though they might
stay for a buyer. When that little money is at an end, for it will be soon
spent, what is left for them to do, but either to steal and so to be hanged (God
knows how justly), or to go about and beg? And if they do this, they are put in
prison as idle vagabonds; while they would willingly work, but can find none
that will hire them; for there is no more occasion for country labor, to which
they have been bred, when there is no arable ground left. One shepherd can
look after a flock which will stock an extent of ground that would require many
hands if it were to be ploughed and reaped. This likewise in many places raises
the price of corn.’
(More 1516)
A major problem in Third World countries is now not simply the
grinding poverty of the poor, but the continuing costs of the conspicuous
consumption of the rich. The imposition of forms of democracy (based on presumed
independence rather than interdependence) and economic organisation required by
the world economic system have reduced increasing numbers of people in Third
World countries to penury, with diminishing political, economic and social
protection.
It has been responsible for dismantling traditional forms of
land tenure and utilisation; has eroded and disrupted social organisation and
communal support mechanisms and in patron–client systems of governance has
disrupted the parenting responsibilities of hierarchically superior members of
the community. This, in turn, has allowed those in positions of responsibility
to accumulate wealth with less and less acceptance of patron–client
responsibilities for former dependents (i.e. for redistribution of goods and services). 2
There has been a considerable inflation of expectations and a
very great increase in conspicuous consumption amongst some groupings in
non-Western communities. This inflation of the material requirements of status
positions is in many ways, though not all, similar to that which occurred in
Western Europe from the late 15th century with the denial of
hierarchical feudal responsibilities by those who controlled resources (see History of the Emergence of Capitalism).
As the effects of the ‘trickle down’ development policies of the
1960s and 1970s show, it is possible to inflate the requirements of status
positions, which are primarily determined through non-economic criteria but
reinforced by the acquisition and/or consumption of material goods and services.
One of the unfortunate consequences of the ‘trickle down’
policies of Third World Development projects and programs and the
‘globalization’ activities of the past 50 years has been that high-status
people in many Third World communities have had the material requirements of
their positions greatly inflated by the massive injection of capital into their
countries.
Since they were not primarily geared to Western forms of
open-ended production (see Subsistence and Status), the injected capital was diverted
into existing social template activity and those of high status found themselves
able to buy Mercedes Benz cars, live in mansions, have overseas assets, and
engage in many other forms of excessive conspicuous consumption. Over the past
half century the ownership and consumption of these luxury goods has become
institutionalized.
As the injection of outside funds dried up with the failure of
‘trickle down’ policies, those who require these possessions to underscore
status have had to find other sources of funds to obtain them. This has resulted
in a ‘trickle up’ effect. Those of low status, dependent on high-status people
in a variety of ways, have, through lowered wages, decreased returns on produce,
decreased welfare support, and increased pressure on land and other income
generating possessions, borne the brunt of the inflated expectations of elites.
|
The designation of the apex of patron–client hierarchies
as ‘dictatorial’ is ethnocentric, based on presumptions of independence rather
than interdependence.
Most hierarchically organised communities can identify a
person or small group that is at the apex of the hierarchy and therefore, in a
manner similar to feudal kingships in European history, ‘own’ or at least ‘hold’
superior title to all the land and resources available to the communities they
head. That person or group is, by definition, not democratically elected to the
position. |
In many non-Western communities and countries, as a result of
the ‘development’ activities of the past half century, the relationships between
lower and higher ranks of hierarchically ordered systems of status and community
organisation have become severely distorted. By insisting on the
‘democratisation’ of communities run by ‘dictators’, the lowest ranks of
hierarchical systems have effectively been disenfranchised.
In almost all traditional patron–client systems wealth initially
flows from the base (the peasantry in feudal Europe) upward through the
hierarchy, creating concentrations of wealth in the higher reaches of the
pyramid. Patrons, having accumulated wealth, take responsibility for the
well-being of those below them, redistributing goods and services as needed and,
in doing so, ensuring the continued and strengthened interdependence of patrons
and clients in the hierarchy.
When such communities are ‘emancipated’ by Western development
enthusiasts, the land and resources, having been vested in the upper reaches of
the hierarchy, become their possessions and clients find themselves no longer
entitled to the land and resources on which they have always relied. The lowest
rankings of status hierarchies therefore find themselves facing very similar
problems to those faced by the peasantry of Western Europe during the transition
from feudalism to capitalism (see History of the Emergence of Capitalism).
The consequences, in many non-Western regions, of this
impoverishing distortion of status requirements and the erosion of communities,
as their primary ideological presumptions have been challenged and
organisational features of their secondary models dismantled, have been
profound. Increasing numbers of people see the growing problems of their
communities and uncertainties of their individual lives as stemming from
Western-based activities in their countries and involvement of national leaders
in Western forms of organisation, activity and consumption.
More generally, they perceive the breakdown of law and order and
the escalating violence that surrounds them largely as a consequence of Western
intrusion and influence in their countries and communities. Inevitably, as the
perceptions crystallise, resentment of and resistance to Western forms of
organisation and activity mount. This, in turn, is reflected in Western
attitudes and Western peoples become increasingly aware of a world of:
mortal enemies who will seize upon our vulnerabilities to bloody
us, to murder our citizens…
(Hyde 2001).
Having lived through the second half of the twentieth century in
Western countries, with their increasingly hedonistic biases, I am impressed by
the mounting fundamentalism of both
Western and many non-Western communities. When life becomes increasingly
difficult and apparently dangerous, then communities and individuals search for
the reasons and for ways of reasserting order and security in their worlds.
Just as people in the later medieval period in Western Europe
became aware of, and increasingly vociferously denounced corruption and simony
in their communities (see History of the Emergence of Capitalism), leading to the
16th century reformation wars, so very commonly the problem in
non-Western communities is seen as ‘corruption’: the loss of morality and/or
commitment to the central principles of life in their communities.
The answer is seen to lie in determination to ‘reform’ their
communities, to reaffirm and recommit themselves to the most important
fundamental understandings of life, the central presumptions that underpin and
give coherence to their primary ideologies, spelt out in one or more sets of
secondary ideological models.
When those presumptions that are central to people’s lives are
perceived as being threatened, people everywhere reaffirm their commitment to
the values, which they know are necessary to ensure that life remains secure and
ordered. They very readily become involved in activity aimed at reinforcing the
forms of organisation, interaction and understanding that are required by the
fundamental presumptions of their cognitive frames or primary ideologies.
They attempt to revitalise both communal and individual
life. Inevitably, they do so through commitment to and enforcement of secondary
ideological models derived from their primary ideological presumptions. These
models are usually developed and promoted by a charismatic leadership, which demands and
obtains from the bulk of the population unswerving loyalty to the principles of
the espoused secondary ideology.
In writings on the late medieval world of Western Europe, the
revitalisation models and the movements associated with them have been referred
to as ‘The Reformation’. Their leaders were, almost without exception,
identified with religious causes.
In the late 20th and early 21st centuries,
examples of such movements abound in both Western and non-Western communities
and countries: from the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Taliban (identified as
religiously motivated), to George Bush in the United States in its early
21st century commitment to rooting out terrorism around the world and
reaffirming and reasserting Western values wherever they appear to be under
challenge.
The fact that the revitalisation leadership promotes a
particular secondary ideological model means that, however committed the bulk of
the population might be to that leadership and the requirements of the model it
promotes and protects, there will always be opposition from community members
holding alternative secondary ideological frames.
Outside forces can, and do, exploit those minority groups in
attacking the legitimacy of the movement. This, in turn, can result in the
oppositional groups being considered in league with immoral, corrupting external
forces. As Khomeini described of the emergence of factions within Iran, promoted
and supported, he claimed, by foreigners:
[U]nfortunately we see that some differences are created within
the opposition, that is between the secular and the Islamic factions. I must
point out that the origin of these parties which have appeared in Iran since the
beginning of the constitutional revolution, as one understands it, is that they
were, without themselves knowing it, founded by foreigners, and some of them
have served the foreigners…
When the foreigners see that there are people who are useful (for
the country), people who, it is hoped, will be able to reform the country, they
use all their energies to set them against each other; consequently, these
people quarrel with one another, each one’s writings oppose the other’s, and
they reject one another’s ideas. Some of them have done such things knowingly
and were the primary agents of the foreigners, while others were not aware of
what was happening, were not aware that they were being dragged down a road
which went against the interests of their own country.
(Khomeini 1979 - accessed 21 Nov. 2009)
|
See Geddes and Crick 1997, Chapter 9 and Capitalism and Third World Nations for discussion and
illustration of Western imputation of their own commitments onto the Third World
groups they armed and supported in the Cold War
era. |
The ‘Coalition of the Willing’, comprising the United States,
Great Britain and sundry camp followers, in its war against the Taliban in
Afghanistan and the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and in its fomenting of
opposition to the fundamentalist leadership in Iran, has exploited such
dissident groups. However, to conclude that these dissenting groups are
committed to Western secondary ideological principles, as many commentators in
both the United States and other Western countries have, leads to unrealistic
presumptions about the consequences of backing their overthrow of fundamentalist
regimes.
They also build their secondary ideological models from the
basic presumptions of the common primary ideological frame, which informs the
models of the revitalisation movement they oppose. They might, in order to win
and maintain support from outside forces, speak the language of those forces
from which they want support, but it is foolish and naïve to believe that the
rhetoric employed for this purpose is indicative of the principles and models
they are committed to promoting.
This failure to realise that the motivations of opposed factions
within a country are derived from their particular understandings of themselves
and the world is not recent in Western engagements with the rest of the world.
It underlies most Western support of particular warring factions against others
since the dissolution of Western empires following World War II.
A great deal of the Western literature on the Western invasions
of both Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrates the continued presumption by
commentators of commitment by dissident groups within those countries to the
fundamental capitalist principles of the countries they are courting for
support.
Among the many non-Western revitalisation movements of the past
fifty years one must include both the fundamentalist movement led by Ayatollah
Khomeini in Iran from 1979 and the Taliban movement of Afghanistan in the 1990s.
In one of his 1979 speeches Khomeini describes those who supported the Shah and
would try to reintroduce Western ideas to Iran:
Xenomaniacs, people infatuated with the West, empty people,
people with no content! Come to your senses; do not try to Westernize everything
you have! Look at the West, and see who the people are in the West that present
themselves as champions of human rights and what their aims are. Is it human
rights they really care about, or the rights of the superpowers? What they
really want to secure are the rights of the superpowers.
(Khomeini 1979 accessed 15 November 2009)
Revolutionary Iran became an enemy of nations and communities
that have their hegemonic roots in Western European history. The United States,
with Western European and Soviet support, fomented a war between Iran and Iraq,
and supplied both weaponry and military training to Iraqi forces. For ten years
revolutionary Iran endured a prolonged and savage war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq
in which deaths, on both sides, numbered more than a million people.
|
See Ray Takeyh (2002) for a discussion of the process of
routinization of the Iranian revolution over the past 10
years. |
It is the nature of revitalisation movements that they often go
to extremes. Those involved feel deeply threatened by ‘corruption’ within and by
outside forces that promote immoral values and threaten their security and
well-being.
They root out immorality among their own people and introduce
often draconian measures to ensure compliance with the central presumptions of
their moral code. They look for traitors—the enemy inside the walls—and attempt
to weed them out. In the process there is, all too often, great human suffering.
So long as the threat of outside intervention continues to be perceived as real,
hard-line fundamentalists gain a ready audience and strong support from the
populations they lead.
Western leaders are as driven by their understandings of reality
as are the leaders of non-Western revitalisation movements, and are as committed
to protecting and reinforcing what they see as the most important fundamental
principles of life, which are often identified by revitalisation leaders as
forms of corruption against which they must fight. So all-too-often they react
to the extremes and make the perceived threat a reality—as happened to Iran from
1980 to 1989 (and is now happening again) and as happened to the Taliban in
Afghanistan in the first years of the 21st century.
When they do so they ensure the prolongation of the fundamental
extremism they oppose. As the perceived threat from outside forces diminishes
and the revitalisation leaders become increasingly secure in their leadership,
fundamentalist movements tend toward moderation. Max Weber (1947) described this
process as the routinization of charisma.
The ultimate democratisation of Iran is an almost universal
theme in Western literature dealing with the liberalising tendencies in Iranian
society (i.e. the processes of routinization). Nader Hashemi addresses this
widespread belief in the Western press and among Western academics, as he
says:
Robert Dahl: in responding to the question of how a democratic
culture can be created in a non-democratic society, …observed that ...few would
seriously contest [that] an important factor in the prospects for a stable
democracy in a country is the strength of the diffuse support for democratic
ideas, values, and practices embedded in the country’s culture and transmitted,
in large part, from one generation to the next.
(Hashemi 2003, p. 30)
The Western preoccupation with terrorism in the early
21st century is a fundamentalist reassertion of basic Western values.
So is the declared determination to stamp it out by reimposing democratic
principles of social and political life on those countries and communities that
display or encourage anti-Western sentiments. As with all such movements, the
leadership demands loyalty not only from its followers but from all within the
boundaries of its control. Alisa Solomon describes the domestic climate of the
‘war on terrorism’ in the United States:
Like any avalanche, this one started at the top, and likely dates
back to the moment after 9/11 when President Bush warned the world’s nations,
‘Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists’. From Bush on down, in
the months that followed, government officials drew limits around acceptable
speech.
White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer told Americans to ‘watch
what they say’. Such words gained force when the Patriot Act gave the government
extensive new powers to spy, interrogate and detain. When civil libertarians
began to protest the curbing of constitutional rights,
Attorney General John Ashcroft offered a forbidding rejoinder:
‘To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my
message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists’. These kinds of remarks from
our government’s top leaders, says Anthony Romero, executive director of the
ACLU, have granted ordinary people license ‘to shut down alternative views’. The
Administration has fashioned a domestic arm of its new doctrine of
pre-emption.
(Solomon 2003 -accessed 21 Nov. 2009)
An editorial in The
Economist (2003) described the mindset of the neo-conservatives who wielded
considerable clout in the second George Bush presidency, ‘They see the world in
terms of good and evil. They think America should be willing to use military
power to defeat the forces of chaos’. Martin Sieff, in a United Press International (2003) commentary
on the aftermath of the Iraq invasion of 2003, explained the ambition of those
who have championed the ‘war on terror’,
[S]o confident were Office of the Secretary of Defense planners
and their neo-conservative allies of the coming oil bonanza from Iraq that they
openly advocated using it, as Judis wrote in The New Republic ‘to remake the Middle East
in our democratic, capitalist image…’
(Sieff, United Press International 2003)
Neo-conservative leaders of the United States of America, and
their allies in other Western countries, know that capitalism and democracy are not
ideological models, but the way the objective world is (or must be) organised.
They have a duty to ensure that wherever dark, dangerous and irrational forces
are at work, attacking democracy and capitalism, those forces are challenged,
their supporters eliminated (whether going by the name of Taliban, Ba’th Party
supporter, Communist, Islamic Fundamentalist, Al-Qa’eda operative or any other
of the terms that will come to prominence and join the pantheon of evil-doers in
the years to come).
As Western communities feel themselves threatened by the growing
influence of what the United States’ President George W Bush called ‘the axis of
evil’ they know that, at all costs, the evils of anti-capitalism and
anti-democracy must be challenged and beaten back. As Henry Hyde, Chairman of
the US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations said, on
October 3 2001, weeks after the destruction of the twin towers of the World
Trade Center in New York:
Let us begin by accepting there is no single enemy to be
defeated, no one network to be eliminated. Al-Qa’eda is but our most prominent
opponent, but its outlook is shared by many others who are equally committed to
our destruction. If we believe that our safety can be secured by destroying any
one organization or any single person, we will only ensure that we will remain
unsafe and unprepared once again. For we know now that we have permanent, mortal
enemies who will seize upon our vulnerabilities to bloody us, to murder our
citizens, to commit horror for the purpose of forcing horror upon us….
Our strategy, plans, and actions must be comprehensive,
deliberate and formulated for the long-term. We must be prepared not only to
protect ourselves from new assaults, not only to intercept and frustrate them,
but to eliminate new threats at their source. This must be a permanent campaign,
similar to the ancient one humanity has waged against disease and its
never-ending assault upon our defenses.
(Hyde October 3 2001 - accessed 21 Nov. 2009)
In such times, human beings feel the need to reassert and
reinforce those principles that they instinctively know to be central to a
properly ordered and secure world. Equally, they know, beyond any doubt, that
unless they resolutely and uncompromisingly confront the enemy, intent on
destroying it, it will destroy them.
As Henry Hyde (2001) claimed, one of the major terrorist threats
against Western nations at the start of the 21st century has been
perceived as coming from Al-Qa’eda (meaning ‘the base’, its intent: to reaffirm
and reassert the most basic understandings of life as understood by those who
have committed themselves to its goals).
For Hyde and most other Western leaders the organisation is a
network of terror and evil, master-minded by a Saudi Arabian, Sheikh Usamah
Bin-Muhammad Bin-Ladin. Bin-Ladin (in the text cited below) spells out his
reasons for seeing the activities of the United States (and Western countries in
general) as a plague, destructively consuming the resources of his country,
undermining the most important central understandings of life, and threatening
the unity, security and well-being of his people and his world:
The Arabian Peninsula has never—since God made it flat, created
its desert, and encircled it with seas—been stormed by any forces like the
crusader armies now spreading in it like locusts, consuming its riches and
destroying its plantations. All this is happening at a time when nations are
attacking Muslims like people fighting over a plate of food.
(Bin-Ladin 1998 - accessed 21 Nov. 2009)
Just as Henry Hyde insists that the enemies of democracy and
capitalism must be eliminated, so Bin-Ladin insists that those who threaten the
existence of his world must be eliminated. The more threatened people feel, the
more strongly they recommit themselves to those fundamental primary ideological
principles, which they know will reassert order and security within
their communities and lives.
In the West, people during the threatening years of the 1970s
and 1980s recommitted themselves to fundamental economic doctrines. In the early
years of the 21st century, under the fundamentalist leadership of the
second George Bush and his coterie of ‘born again’ believers in the efficacy of
‘Western democratic principles’, Western communities remained committed to
globalisation, privatisation, economic growth; reducing public expenditure;
re-imposing democracy (the political frame of Western capitalism) wherever it
has been weakened or displaced and to eliminating those who most vociferously
oppose their activities.
Because Western people organise their lives through economically
focused social templates, the forms they re-emphasise in times of stress and
threat focus on economic issues and are aimed at rectifying economic processes
and bolstering economic performance on the presumption that this will alleviate
the perceived problems.
In the last decades of the 20th century Western
countries and communities recommitted themselves to the fundamental principles
underpinning free-market capitalism. Since that time they have also recommitted
themselves to ensuring that the fundamental principles of capitalism and its
political frame—democracy—are enforced and reinforced wherever ‘anti-Western’
sentiments seem to be mounting and capitalism seems to be losing its influence.
The first Western leader in the second half of the
20th century to steer her country determinedly toward a Western
fundamentalist future as a means of arresting and reversing the moral decline of
the nation was the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher.
As a prime minister representing the newly energetic right wing
of the Conservative Party (the ‘Dries’, as they later called themselves, as
opposed to the old-style moderate Tories, or ‘Wets’), Thatcher advocated greater
independence of the individual from the state; an end to allegedly excessive
government interference in the economy, including privatization of state-owned
enterprises and the sale of public housing to tenants; reductions in
expenditures on social services such as health care, education, and housing;
limitations on the printing of money in accord with the economic doctrine of
monetarism; and legal restrictions on trade unions.
The term Thatcherism came to refer not just to these policies but
also to certain aspects of her ethical outlook and personal style, including
moral absolutism, fierce nationalism, a zealous regard for the interests of the
individual, and a combative, uncompromising approach to achieving political
goals.
(Encyclopedia Britannica)
The following readings provide an insight into the kinds of
social reorganisation that Western people felt they had to undertake in order to
ensure that life was secure and that the world remained ‘sane’ in the latter
part of the 20th century.
Milton Friedman (with Rose Friedman) (1980), the theoretical
mind behind a great many of Margaret Thatcher’s policies in the early years of
her British government (1979–1990), provides an explanation of the essential
requirements for:
… building a society that relies primarily on voluntary
cooperation to organize both economic and other activity, a society that
preserves and expands human freedom, that keeps government in its place, keeping
it our servant and not letting it become our master.
(Friedman & Friedman 1980)
Stelzer (1992) describes the ‘decline’ of Britain between 1945
and 1979 and gives a very positive summing up of the achievements of the
Thatcher Government in reversing that decline. As Irwin Stelzer says:
It was individual responsibility, rather than reliance on
government, that now became the accepted standard against which to measure
policy initiatives…. Thatcher restored to the UK a sense that appropriate
policies and driving entrepreneurialism can produce steady increases in material
well-being.
(Stelzer 1992)
Stuart Hall’s (1988) analysis of Thatcherism provides a
Marxist perspective on the precursors and consequences of Margaret Thatcher’s
privatisation policies.
As we suggested earlier, within any community of people who
share a common primary ideology, there will be a range of secondary ideological
models. Friedman and Stelzer provide explanation of how the world should be
organised and people interact with each other from the perspective of one set of
Western secondary ideological models, Hall presents an alternative, dissident
way of organising the world. Both perspectives share a common set of primary
ideological understandings. Underlying both neo-conservative (right) and Marxist
(left) emphases and perspectives is a level of common understanding:
-
All share similar understandings of the nature
of time and of the ways in which it should or should not be ‘used’.
-
All accept that there is an economic sphere
or domain or environment within which people interact in order to achieve
greater personal well-being.
-
All accept that the aim of government is to
organise the ‘public arena’ to ensure improved economic organisation and
performance.
-
All assume that there is a ‘private’ realm or
environment within which individuals interact. The disagreements concern the
relative duties and responsibilities of private and public spheres.
-
All assume that human beings are ‘free
actors’ and that human relationships are based on independence not
interdependence.
-
All assume that prime aims in life include
earning a cash income; improving one’s material position; ‘developing’ oneself.
-
All assume that there is a ‘formal’ economy
and that, necessarily, people will interact in terms of that economy in the ways
which are spelt out as ‘legitimate’ and ‘appropriate’.
-
All presume the ‘rule of law’.
Commentators on life in non-Western communities and countries
always have, and always will, be faced with the problem of disentangling
themselves from their own primary and secondary ideological commitments in order
better to understand the primary and secondary ideological presumptions and
commitments of the people amongst whom they are undertaking research.
This has never been more important than it is in the early
21st century. Despite (or, more likely, because of) the driving
commitment of Western communities to globalisation and democratisation in
countries and communities around the world, increasing numbers of people in
non-Western communities are seeing people of the West not as harbingers of good,
but as exploitative, immoral, and intent on destroying the most important
fundamental understandings of life in their communities.
People in the West are certain that their understandings and
forms of organisation and interaction are derived from the nature of objective
reality and provide the most efficient, equitable means of ensuring individual
(and therefore communal) development and well-being. Forces that oppose Western
forms and understandings are therefore irrational and dangerous to the
well-being of human beings everywhere.
So, they are determined, wherever they find ‘fundamentalism’ and
its associated ‘terrorist’ activity to oppose them and finally displace these
evils by those forms of organisation and interaction to which they are
committed. That Western determination to impose their own fundamentalist agenda
on the rest of the world, if the reasoning contained within this discussion
is valid, ensures the perpetuation and deepening of the forces they oppose.
Like it or not, Western people live in a world of diverse
primary and secondary ideologies (which only make sense in terms of the primary
ideologies from which they are derived). Every attempt to impose Western
secondary ideological models on people who do not share Western primary
ideological understandings guarantees the disruption of their communities and
ultimately the emergence of revitalisation movements aimed at reasserting and
reinforcing their own understandings of life.
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Confucius (500 BC), The
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End Notes
1 See How Born Again Christians Rescued Capitalism for the origin of
this.
2
Yet, we must not fall into the trap of imputing too great a set of effects
to the world economic system. It is very easy, when examining the blatant
intrusiveness of the forms of entertainment, education and exploitation, which
come from the West, to assume they are swamping the lives of people everywhere;
turning them into cardboard cut-outs of Western people—with all the aspirations
and acquired ‘needs’ of an affluent capitalist world, while not giving them the
income that is necessary to fulfilling those new demands in their lives.
It is true that the intrusions of the world-system
in the lives of people everywhere are great, and that they are being barraged
with advertisements, soap operas, game shows, manufactured goods, ‘news’,
opinion and ‘documentaries’ of life elsewhere. However, human beings are not
simply slates on which the latest influences can scrawl their graffiti, erasing
the past and eliminating other influences.
Human beings always have to interpret their
worlds, and their interpretations always stem from the primary ideologies of
their communities. Left to their own devices, human beings take what is offered
and translate it in ways that are meaningful to them. In the process, what
Western people think they’re understanding may well be very different from what
is being understood in those communities. Human beings also have the ability to
filter garbage, to impute greater or less significance to events to which they
are exposed.
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