Interactive Social Ordering and Other Civilizations

In cross-cultural comparisons, especially in regard to social structures and social change, it is good to keep in mind that social reality is built on differential systems and positions. Herskovits wrote on the respect of difference in social life,

The very core of cultural relativism is the social discipline that comes of respect of differences -- mutual respect.

Emphasis on the worth of many ways of life, not one, is an affirmation of the values in each culture. Such emphasis seeks to understand and to harmonize goals, not to judge and destroy those that do not dovetail with our own [Herskovits 1948: 77].

The total destruction of traditional elements and of conventional features of social systems in different cultural areas of the world is, however, seen by many as a necessary condition to modernize countries with non-Western civilizations. Modernization includes industriali-zation, social mobilization following the Western pattern, purposive-instrumental rationality, and commercial or gratification-oriented mentalities, which would (or is so imagined) automatically be accompanied by secularized and universal norms: progress, democracy, and freedom. This view is essentially based on two assumptions: first, that the transitional phase of transformation toward a Western-type society has to follow comparable and similar patterns whatever the cultural environment should be, forgetting that social reality is culturally defined; and, second, that once some important institutional frameworks are established, irreversible structural and organizational developments will follow and a sustained growth in all social spheres will be initiated in accordance with a common evolutionary orientation, even if cultural and social-psychological foundations are not adapted.

In addition to these characterizations of developmental and modernization processes, many others have been discussed in the various social sciences, such as the important difference emphasized by Mead between "primitive" and "civilized" societies, concerning the position of the individual. He refers to the fact that traditional societies offer much less scope to the individual and to his creative and innovative capabilities. On contrast, modern societies, in his view, developed as a result of the "progressive social liberation of the individual self" [Mead 1934-1938, Vol. 1: 221] leading to general human progress. The individual in traditional societies had to perfectly copy a definite social type, given and exemplified in the

4 (Giesen, Bernard, "The Temporalization of Social Order: Some Theoretical Remarks on the Change in 'Change'" in Haferkampf and Smelser, eds. [1992]: 308).

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– Part Two. Disjunction Between the Western and Other Cultural Worlds – Chapter Five. Interactive Social Order and Contemporary Society -

reigning worldview and lifeworld; that is, he had to conform to the social conduct prescribed for particular situations. In modern society, on the contrary, the individual can mould his personality and behavior more freely, and modify stereotypes generally applied by society. But, in accordance with Mead's whole "social self" theory, even in highly evolved human societies, the individual is never freed from its concrete relations to the social collectivity it belongs to; he reflects in his self or personality the overall pattern of experience and the features of the organized behavior of the social whole of which he is "a creative expression or embodiment" [ibid. 222].

All descriptions of social evolution are based on a simplistic evolutionary model of unilinear development, excluding pluralistic choices. An attempt to conceptualize this trend was made by Talcott Parsons in his theory of "evolutionary universals." He also calls them "structural innovations" that substantially increase generalized adaptive capacities and put those species not inventing them at a definite disadvantage, from the point of view not of survival, but of further developmental opportunities.

The evolutionary universals whose appearance Parsons cannot explain but by random mutation include, first of all, an explicit cultural legitimation of differentiated social functions and a well-developed system of social stratification. Parsons designates these two as the most important in the fundamental change from primitive to modern societies. Others include markets and the invention of money, bureaucracy, a universal legal system, and democratic political organization. The six evolutionary universals are complemented by four pre-requisites of socio-cultural development: religion, communication through language, kinship organization, and technology. The ten enumerated features of evolution are expected to facilitate the diffusion of the Western model to other civilizational areas.⁵

In the same vein, Habermas tried to apply Piaget's stages of cognitive development characterized not as modifications of content, but of structural levels of learning ability. He distinguishes between mythical, religious-metaphysical, and modern modes of thought, and suggests that the transition between them implies the categorical devaluation of the former stage ("devaluation shifts") [Habermas 1984-1989, Vol. 1: 68].

In opposition to the Parsonsian conceptualization of the evolution of society, Etzioni refers to a neo-evolutionist model. This assumes that there is certain directionality in social change, and that genetic processes select one of a limited number of theoretically-determined available options; he calls this model the sequential-option model [Etzioni 1968: 572]. Such a sequential-option model of socio-cultural evolution appears to be much closer to reality, as selection among the options available is made, in addition to genetic processes, by cultural orientations and related information systems.

Among the opponents of undue generalization of the limited historical experience of the modern West were Freud [Freud 1961: 36 and 88-89] as well as Max Weber. The latter cautioned against the use of ideal-types [Weber 1949: 101] which, through exaggeration and simplification, could lead to an underestimation of the role played in European evolution by kinship ties and communities. Weber also thought that kinship and community allegiance may be compatible with modernization in other areas of the world, and, most importantly, he pointed out that it is not necessary that all people should reach modernization in the same way, or be modernized or "developed" at all [Bendix 1977: 394-395].

Weber's presentation of the problems related to modernization acquired a special importance today, after thirty five years of developmental efforts which tried to ignore the influence of traditions, and people's inherent, culturally conditioned desire not to abandon their lifeworld and community for an atomized, individualist society. Jacques Ellul complemented his scathing attack against the modern civilization of technocratic society and gave a particular insight into problems of modernization. He was convinced that technique already eliminated humanism from Western civilization in which it completely dominates man's destiny, and that technological development will completely transform all countries on the earth's surface by annihilating their culture, their particular features, and their specific social structures. This seemed all the more ineluctable, as every culture is a whole; technique imposes changes in some of the spheres of a particular culture, the whole structure will crumble. Referring to the experience of the West, Ellul insists on the evident truth that technical advance does not bring mental equilibrium, therefore, civilizations encountering external impulses to follow the path of technical progress and atomization of society may escape from a complete disequilibrium through preserving their traditional values for as long as possible [Ellul 1964: 122 and 126].

5(Parsons, Talcott, "Evolutionary Universals in Society." American Sociological Review, Vol. XXIX, [1964], No. 3.

VICTOR SEGESVARY : INTER-CIVILIZATIONAL RELATIONS AND THE DESTINY OF THE WEST

– Part Two. Disjunction Between the Western and Other Cultural Worlds – Chapter Five. Interactive Social Order and Contemporary Society -

If we compare descriptions of interactive social ordering in the West through the phases of segmentation and stratification to the immense complexity of a functionally differentiated society, the principal question to be answered is whether all such analyses have any practical relevance for non-Western societies. What are the pre-requisites of social change? What are the characteristics of the manifold ways in which change occurs? It is certain that change in a society must simultaneously be spatial and temporal; it means a spatial juxtaposition of varying patterns and structures, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, a movement, a sequence of events marking off turning-points or occurrences in a transition toward a more stable position.

The most important characteristic of change is independent from the spatio-temporal modifications and denotes a clear difference as between patterns and structures, or put differently, change takes place when a novel cultural pattern is created or a previous pattern appears in a completely new relational context.

It seems the most appropriate method in dealing with inter-civilizational differences, whether they consist of converging tendencies or conflicts, is the pattern analysis set forth by adherents of the institutional school and, in particular, by Kaplan, Diesing, Wilber, and Harrison. The justification of such an opinion is the great number of factors to be considered as well as their relational nature, which influences their evolution toward functional differentiation [Wilber-Harrison 1978: 85]. As Diesing [1971: 137] pointed out "the holist standpoint includes the belief that human systems tend to develop a characteristic wholeness or integrity." In opposition to the covering law model of the natural sciences, pattern analysis is uniquely suited to the study of social phenomena. A process of change is always inherent in social interaction, a process not mechanical (as believed following the Newtonian paradigm in physics), but shaped by human intentionality and by the cultural conditioning of society. Therefore a holistic and evolutionary analysis of pattern relations is only able to resolve problems inherent in sociocultural changes [Kaplan 1964: 71] through the inclusion of "validated hypotheses or themes" into a pattern or network reflecting the multiple interconnections of parts and of the whole. Pattern analysis leaves open a range of possibilities of occurrences; this is crucial in view of the fact that only ex post facto can be established which possibility has actualized.

It is essential to remember here Giddens' insistence that structural properties (or institutionalized features of social systems) are simultaneously enabling and constraining because the dualistic nature of human agency is related to time-space distanciation. Human societies would not exist without human agency which, in a continuous praxis, produces and transforms them through interaction with other members of society. In addition to structural constraints, there are internal structural contradictions (distinguished from conflicts which denote struggle between individuals and collectivities); these contradictions are due to constitutive factors. Primary contradictions involve social totalities centered on the state; secondary contradictions follow from the effects of the primary ones.

Giddens describes tribal societies as not only consisting in an order of co-presence following the rhythms of nature, but also as cognitively integrating the natural world in their lifeworld. He considers, following Lévi-Strauss, that mythic worldviews establish "homologies" between natural and social conditions, or an equivalence between fundamental contrasts or disruptions in the natural and human worlds, and concludes therefore that "myths mediate existential contradiction cognitively" [Giddens 1984: 194]. It is consequential to this conceptualization that in tribal societies, the reason for their resistance to change is not their lack of adaptation to nature, but exactly the opposite, their direct proximity, their all-embracing and immediate cognitive identification with it. Existential contradictions are lived through the kinship system and resolved in accordance with tradition which inserts the finitude of human existence into the perspective of moral timelessness. The segmentation of the social system, which is at the same time a de-centering into multiple entities, excludes, by its nature, structural contradictions.

The appearance of cities, and of the corollary phenomenon of the state, signals the corresponding appearance of structural contradictions. Existential and structural contradictions co-evolve; the lifeworld of the city is alienated from nature with attitudes and symbolic systems detached from natural elements and events. At first, the power of the state is based on the symbiotic-antagonistic relation of the city and the countryside (a thesis not yet convincingly established); the state prefers the ahistorical character of the culture of tribal societies and maintains a continuously ambivalent relationship with tradition, despite the consolidation of its power. At this moment of social evolution no secondary structural contradictions yet exist. These only appear when, using Giddens' expression, the era of "state-based" societies greatly modifies social relationships across a wide space and time spectrum [ibid. 196]. The era of nation-states is characterized by an even more pronounced opposition between urban centers and the countryside, given the artificial nature ("created environments") of urban conglomerations.

The most important consequence of the domination of society by nation-states is that existential and structural contradictions are completely separated, and one could say that the total disjunction of society's ______________________________________________________________________________________

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– Part Two. Disjunction Between the Western and Other Cultural Worlds – Chapter Five. Interactive Social Order and Contemporary Society -

organized life (though not of the lifeworld) from nature results in a sort of collective schizophrenic state in the collective psyche. Nature becomes a means of production and a subject of exploitation for the satisfaction of man's needs. Existential contradictions continue to exist in the lifeworld underlying the structural conditions that appeared in modernity. Therefore, the most fundamental juxtaposition and opposition develop between the existential and structural contradictions, between lifeworld and "created" reality and environment. The secondary contradiction of the contemporary evolution of society is the internationalization of economic activities much beyond the boundaries of sovereign states, though the development of the economic sphere was conditioned by the power of the nation-state.

In contrast to Giddens's notion of contradictions, structural and existential, the concepts of crisis proposed by Claus Offe which apply to the modernization crises in other civilizations [Offe 1984: 131-134]. Offe calls crises processes in which structures of a social system are called into question, or in which the identity of the system is jeopardized or even destroyed. He then distinguishes between three types of crisis-concepts.

First, sporadic crises are caused by events outside the boundaries of the system, unforeseeable, acute and eventually catastrophic, but confined to a certain period of time. They cannot be structurally explained because not engendered by internal weaknesses of the system. Second, the concept of crisis refers to mechanisms producing successive events; they are abnormalities appearing in social processes that develop inside the system. They are therefore not contingent, but linked to structural configurations or malfunctions. The system initiates in itself counteracting tendencies and, consequently, the outcome of such a crisis is unpredictable. Third, the system-crisis describes crisis-prone developments in societal totalities, designated here as civilizational crisis.

Culture patterns, such as ordered clusters of significant symbols, traditions, institutions, and shared values, are very different in other civilizations; through them men make sense of their lifeworld and, indeed are the elements constitutive of it. As Melville Herskovits noted, there are no "objective criteria of permanence and change." Simultaneously present features of culture, like universal patterns in locally manifested forms, motivated, make the analysis of contradictions of cultural and social forms all the more difficult [Herskovits 1948: 15-20]. However, as culture is an action-oriented information system from the evolutionary perspective, it is natural that certain patterns and certain relationships among patterns may recur in different civilizations, that is, that they are common or represent similar configurations in various groups of the species, though frequently with different content [Benedict 1959: 207].

In exploring the possibility of a dialogue between civilizations, it is not indispensable to identify these common or similar cultural patterns existing in different cultural worlds. It is rather crucial to pin down the major disjunctive factors between them, in order to understand the fundamental divergence between their respective social evolution and orientations toward change. It is not enough to refer to the inquiring nature of modern man regarding choices and his basic allegiance to rationality (defined in a rather autonomous way by each group or individual), but one has to find the essential points of differentiation in their historical path.

The opposition is neither of Apollonian (classical) or the Faustian (modern and rational) types, nor of Dionysian (frenzied illumination) to the Apollonian (classically measured and conscious), as Spengler defined them [Spengler 1986, Vol. 1: 183-216], because the contradiction and incommensurability between Western culture and other contemporary civilizations are of a completely different nature. It is neither a question of acculturation, cultural innovation, or drift, nor of socialization for those of other civilizations to grow into the modern cultural framework; it is a displacement or rebirth, mentally and culturally, because of the gulf created by the advent of Western modernity, as Ellul's example of technical domination or Gellner's example of generalized education clearly indicate.

Thus, the phenomenon of cultural diversity studied is, in Herskovits' terms, a culture-change, the total disappearance of an old and the acceptance of a completely new cultural world. It has nothing to do with selective borrowing from the West. It is all or nothing, or, at least, it appears to be an uncompromising deal.

Borrowing in whatever sense does not represent a solution for the people of non-Western civilizations. A good example of this is given by Dumont, who refers to the replacement of hierarchy in traditional societies, by modern ideals of democracy and equality. If hierarchical ranking disappears and if equality and identity are fused into the concept of the individual, the natural difference of human groups and their status may be reasserted by somatic or religious characteristics, by racism or communalism [Dumont 1980: 16]. In fact, such borrowings ignore the dialectical interplay of patterns of meaning and of the forces and events of the lifeworld. They also ignore that, in the Giddensian sense, these patterns of meaning which lead to societal changes are themselves the product of changes and upheavals.

Instead of problems of borrowing, it is more useful to speak in terms of secondary socialization. Primary socialization is, of course, important, as childhood rearing gives the fundamentals for a man's whole life.

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– Part Two. Disjunction Between the Western and Other Cultural Worlds – Chapter Five. Interactive Social Order and Contemporary Society -

Secondary socialization conceived of as either the internalization of the institutional order or "institution-based 'sub-worlds'" [Berger-Luckmann 1966: 127], or the acquisition of role-specific knowledge and vocabularies in a modern, differentiated world is of the utmost importance for the problem of development and modernization. If people went through a secondary socialization process different from the one necessary in modern society, they have to make severe adjustments to it, or to go through still another socialization in a new institutional sub-world, a very difficult enterprise with ineffective, unpredictable results.

For the younger generations, even if their secondary socialization process adapted them to the new institutional order, they would still at risk not to be adapted to it because their primary socialization gave them a worldview that is incompatible with the modern institutional sub-world. Discrepancies between primary and secondary socialization processes, on the one hand, and between the secondary socialization process and the inevitable social changes toward a more complex and differentiated society, on the other, may lead to situations where individuals "internalized different realities without identifying with them" [ibid. 158]. The reality internalized does not become their reality, but a reality useful in specific life-situations, or to be used for specific purposes in roles from which they remain distant and detached.

As a final result, the social institutional order will not be but a system of reciprocal manipulations behind which another more real order looms. Incommensurable socialization requirements and processes are also frequently the sources of incomprehension and hostility between people raised in the orbits of non-Western civilizations and people in technical assistance programs who were socialized in the West but who want to help, through furthering social and economic modernization, in terms of their own secondary socialization.

The above analysis of interactive ordering of society and, especially, of functional differentiation shows that in the West, a functionally highly differentiated and extremely complex society did develop in the last three centuries. In other cultures, societies are segmented and in many of them, though they are stratified, no real functional, but only structural differentiation took place, Japan being the only exception to this statement. In some societies of the Far East such as China, Korea, Taiwan, or Singapore, the transition to a completely functionally- differentiated society appears not yet complete. If one wants to apply Parsons' value-pattern combinations to non-Western societies, all of the above can be used for classificatory purposes in characterizing these societies except the first, the universal-achievement pattern which prevails in the West. The universalistic-ascriptive pattern is close to the organization of Indian society, the particularistic-achievement pattern can be taken as describing the ancient Chinese society (as Parsons himself qualified it), and, finally, the particularistic-ascriptive pattern reflects well the situation on the African continent. However, one should not consider all these cases corresponding to different Parsonsian patterns as clear-cut, but as representing different shades of transition between different patterns, and that one should look at social development in different parts of the world as a sui generis evolution which must respect the congruence of given cultural and evolving social patterns.

As far as Western civilization is concerned, structural and functional differentiation is generally considered today as the inevitable outcome of the society's evolution, as if condemned to the "eternal recurrence of the same" or further functional differentiation, although the disastrous results, in the shape of an atomistic society, are already undeniable. It can only be hoped that through dialogue with other civilizations, the Western path can deviate from the present ever-increasing differentiation (if this is still possible), in order to re-discover an integrative force which can save it from total disintegration. Other civilizations will, at the same time, hopefully realize to what extent their supposedly inevitable social differentiation is possible and necessary in congruence with their own cultural background, thus permitting them to adopt the West's technological innovations and, consequently, to achieve its economic and material successes.

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