Eva Hoffman is a writer and academic who emigrated to Canada from Cracow aged 13. The experience influenced her greatly: ‘Every immigrant,’ she has said, ‘becomes a kind of amateur anthropologist.’ Now living in London, she has received the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Award and an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
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Barbarism, Civilisation, Cultures
Tzvetan Todorov
I would like to approach the subject of cultural relations by specifying, at the start, the meaning of some key words that I would like to use. To start with, the pair formed by the terms ‘barbarism’ and ‘civilisation’. It is well known that the first of these words, barbarism, has a long past in European history, and that it has been used in two distinct ways. One of these meanings is purely relative, and it is adopted both by some Christian authors who have commented on the subject, and by some important secular authors, such as Montaigne. The barbarian in this case is simply the person who is different from us, or who does not speak our language, or who speaks it badly; in a word, the barbarian is the foreigner. I would, however, prefer to keep the other meaning of the word, which is moral and absolute. This second concept of barbarity is equally legitimate and we must be able to draw on it to designate, at all times and in all places, the acts and attitudes of those who, to a greater or lesser degree, place outside of humanity those who are perceived as different, or judge them to be radically unlike themselves, or inflict shocking treatment on them. Treating others as inhuman, as monsters or savages is one form of this barbarity. A different form of it is institutional discrimination towards others because they do not belong to my linguistic community, or my social group, or my psychological type.
If we have one term with an absolute content, ‘barbarian’, the same will be true of its opposite. A civilised person is one who is able, at all times and in all places, to recognise the humanity of others fully. So two stages have to be crossed before anyone can become civilised: in the first stage, you discover that others live in a way different from you; in the second, you agree to see them as bearers of the same humanity as yourself. The moral demand comes with an intellectual dimension: getting those with whom you live to understand a foreign identity, whether individual or collective, is an act of civilisation, since in this way you are enlarging the circle of humanity. In this sense – but in this sense only – scholars, philosophers and artists all contribute to driving back barbarity. In actual fact, no individual, let alone any people, can be entirely ‘civilised’: they can merely be more or less civilised; and the same goes for ‘barbarian’. Civilisation is a horizon which we can approach, barbarity is a background from which we seek to move away; neither condition can be entirely identified with particular beings. It is acts and attitudes which are barbarian or civilised, not individuals or peoples.
People have often pointed out with relish that there is a paradox revealed by the twentieth century: barbarity, they exclaim, sprang from the very heart of European civilisation. But there is not really anything all that paradoxical here, once it is admitted that civilisation cannot be reduced to the production and enjoyment of works of art (with which European civilisation was so closely identified); and that the relationship between these two notions is indeed far from direct. Mankind’s existential, ethical and aesthetic achievements do not depend mechanically on one another, and yet they are all perfectly real. We need to think them in their plurality and not deduce them from each other, nor transform the one into a means for attaining the other, nor indeed consider them as opposites that we need to choose between in an ‘either/or’ way dictated by an exclusivist logic. A first warning – but a powerful one – against the illusions entertained by certain supporters of the Enlightenment is found in their most lucid French-speaking representative, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In his first work, the Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, he was already breaking away from the philosophes and Encyclopaedists who were his friends, and abandoning their belief that the spread of works of art and technological advances will make mankind morally better. Far from contributing to the progress of moral life and an increased benevolence towards others, he declared, the growth of the sciences and arts may become detrimental to moral progress. The vocation of human beings is to live (well) with others, and for that there is no need to accumulate a great pile of knowledge, nor to be what is called ‘a cultivated person’.
Civilisation is the opposite of barbarism. However, the meaning of the first word changes considerably if we put it into the plural. Civilisations no longer correspond to an atemporal moral and intellectual category, but to historical formations that appear and disappear, characterised by the presence of several traits linked both to material life and to the life of the mind. It is in this sense that we speak of Chinese or Indian, Persian or Byzantine civilisation. The two senses of ‘civilisation’, illustrated by the singular and the plural, are independent of each other. To avoid any ambiguity, I am thus choosing to use the word ‘civilisation’ here only in the singular, and to designate the sense of its plural by one of its quasi-synonyms, which in any case bears the same double meaning: this is the word ‘cultures’, in the plural.
For over two centuries now, ‘culture’ has assumed a broader meaning than its usual association with the arts. Anthropologists have largely been responsible for this change. They realised that the societies studied by them, often lacking writing, monuments and works of art, nonetheless possessed practices and artefacts that played an analogous role within them; they called these, in turn, ‘cultures’. This ‘ethnological’ meaning has now gained ascendancy; therefore, ethnology is also called ‘cultural anthropology’. If the word is taken in this broad sense (as descriptive and no longer evaluative), every human group has a culture: this is the name given to the set of characteristics of its social life, to collective modes of living and thinking, to the forms and styles of organisation of time and space, which include language, religion, family structures, ways of building houses, tools, ways of eating and dressing. ‘Culture’ is thus necessarily particular, not universal. In addition, the members of the group – and we should bear in mind that there may be just a few dozen of them, or several million – interiorise these characteristics in the form of mental representations. So culture exists on two closely related levels, that of social practices and that of the images left by the latter in the minds of the members of the community.
It is not their content that determines the identity of ‘cultures’, but their diffusion: culture is necessarily collective. It thus presupposes communication, of which it is one of the results. As a representation, culture also provides us with an interpretation of the world, a miniature model, a map, so to speak, which enables us to find our way around in it; possessing a culture means having at one’s disposal a pre-organisation of lived experience. Culture rests simultaneously on a common memory (we learn the same language, the same history, the same traditions) and on common rules of life (we speak in such a way as to make ourselves understood, we take into account the codes at work in our society); it is, at the same time, turned towards the past and towards the present.
It is no accident if these two concepts of ‘civilisation’ and ‘cultures’, whatever the words used to designate them, entered European thought at the same time – the second half of the eighteenth century – in the wake of the Enlightenment. Several authors were to contrast ‘barbarism’ with ‘civilisation’ and conceive the history of humanity as a one-way process, leading from the former to the latter. At the same time, there was a growing interest in ‘cultures’. This was grafted onto an old tradition, which in France went back to Montaigne, with his insistence on the power of ‘custom’. Pascal said of custom that it was a second nature; he thus prefigured the formulas of later anthropologists. The travels of Europeans to the East, South and West became increasingly frequent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and their protagonists would bring back detailed, sometimes admiring descriptions of the customs an
d manners observed in the countries they visited, even though these customs were far removed from collective European practices. At the same period, there was a new interest in history, and thus in ancient social forms, no longer perceived as arising from a now inaccessible golden age, nor as a mere, imperfect preparation for the present; henceforth, it was deemed that every period had its own ideal and its own coherence.
For a long time, Enlightenment thought served as a source of inspiration for a reformist, liberal current, which fought against conservatism in the name of universality and equal respect for all. As we know, things have changed these days, and the conservative defenders of a higher Western culture have arrogated this idea to themselves, believing themselves to be engaged in a struggle against ‘relativism’ that – they say – emerged from the romantic reaction at the start of the nineteenth century. They cannot do so, obviously, unless they amputate the real tradition of the Enlightenment, which was able to combine the universality of values with the plurality of cultures. This doctrine should be confused neither with dogmatism (‘my culture must impose itself on everyone’) nor with nihilism (‘all cultures are pretty much the same’); placing the Enlightenment at the service of a denigration of others, which gives one the right to subject or destroy them, represents a wholesale kidnapping of the whole Enlightenment project.
The human being is born not only within nature but also, always and necessarily, within a culture. How shall we describe its distinctive features? The first characteristic of one’s initial cultural identity is that it is imposed during childhood rather than being chosen. On coming into the world, the human child is plunged into the culture of its group, which precedes it. The most salient, but also probably the most determining fact, is that we are necessarily born within one language, the language spoken by our parents or the people who look after us. Now language is not a neutral instrument, it is impregnated with thoughts, actions and judgments that are handed down to us; it divides reality up in a particular way, and imperceptibly transmits to us a vision of the world. The child cannot avoid absorbing it, and this way of conceiving reality is transmitted from generation to generation.
Another trait of the cultural affiliation of every individual is immediately obvious: we possess not one but several cultural identities, which may either overlap or else present themselves as intersecting sets. For example, a French person always comes from a particular region – Burgundy, for instance – but from another angle this person also shares several characteristics with all Europeans, and thus participates in Burgundian, French and European culture. On the other hand, within one single geographical entity, there are many different cultural stratifications: there is the culture of teenagers and the culture of retired people, the culture of doctors and the culture of street sweepers, the culture of women and that of men, of rich and of poor. A particular individual may recognise herself as belonging simultaneously to Mediterranean, Christian and European cultures.
Now – and this point is essential – these different cultural identities do not coincide with one another, nor do they form clearly separated territories in which different ingredients are superimposed without remainder. Every individual is multicultural; within each, cultures interact as criss-crossed alluvial plains. Individual identity stems from the encounter of multiple collective identities within one and the same person; each of our various affiliations contributes to the formation of the unique creature that we are. Human beings are not all similar, nor entirely different; they are all plural within themselves, and share their constitutive traits with varied groups, combining them in an individual way. The cohabitation of different types of belonging within each one of us does not in general cause any problems – and this ought, in turn, to arouse admiration: like a juggler, we keep all the balls of our identity in the air at once, with the greatest of ease! We should overcome the habit that links culture primarily to a specific territory.
Another characteristic of cultures, no less easy to identify, is the fact that they are in perpetual transformation. All cultures change, even if it is certain that the so-called ‘traditional’ ones do so less willingly and less quickly than those that are called ‘modern’. There are several different reasons for these changes. Since each culture includes others within itself, or intersects with them, its different ingredients form an unstable equilibrium. For example, granting women the right to vote in France in 1944 enabled them to participate actively in the country’s public life: as a result, French cultural identity was transformed. We also need to take into account the pressures brought to bear by the evolution of other elements that are constitutive of the social order: the economic, the political, even the physical. The most eloquent image of the variability of cultures I can find is that of the mythical ship of the Argonauts, the Argo: each plank, each rope, each nail had to be replaced, since the voyage took so long; the ship that returned to port, years later, was materially completely different from the one which set off, and yet it was still the same ship Argo since it assumed the same function for the sailors, and at the same time allowed each of them to keep the same representation of their ship. Only dead cultures don’t change any more.
If we keep these two characteristics of culture in mind, its plurality and its variability, we see how disconcerting are the metaphors most commonly used to evoke it. We say of a human being, for instance, that she is ‘uprooted’ and we pity her for it; but it is not legitimate to equate human beings with plants, since a human is never the product of just one culture, and in any case the animal world is distinguished from the vegetable world precisely by its mobility. Cultures have no essence or ‘soul’, in spite of the fine works that have been written about these things. Or else people talk of the ‘survival’ of a culture (this time humanising the representations instead of dehumanising mankind); by this they mean its conservation in identical form. Now, a culture that has stopped changing is by definition a dead culture. The expression ‘dead language’ is much more judicious: Latin died on the day it could no longer change. Nothing is more normal, more common than the disappearance of a previous state of culture and its replacement by a new state.
However, for reasons that are easy to understand, members of a group often find this obvious fact difficult to accept. The difference between individual and collective identities is illuminating here. Even if we dream of discovering one day within us a ‘deep’ and ‘authentic’ self, as if it awaited us patiently lurking somewhere in the depths of our being, we are conscious of the changes, wished for or not, that our being undergoes: they are perceived as normal. Everyone remembers the decisive events from his past. We can also make decisions that send our identities off in a new direction, when we change jobs, or partners, or countries. A person is nothing other than the result of innumerable interactions that mark out the stages of a life.
Collective identity works in a completely different way: it is already fully formed by the time the young child discovers it, and it becomes the invisible foundation on which her identity is built. Even if, seen from outside, every culture is mixed and changing, for the members of the community that it characterises, it is a stable and distinct entity, the foundation of their personal identity. For this reason, all change which affects culture can be experienced as an attack on my integrity. One need merely compare the facility with which I agree, if I am capable of it, to speak a new language while on a visit to a foreign country (an individual event); and the disagreeable feeling I have when, in the street where I have always lived, only incomprehensible words and accents can now be heard (a collective event). What we have initially found in the original culture is not shocking even if this in itself is the product of many changes, since this has helped actually to shape the person. On the other hand, what changes by force of circumstances over which the individual has no power is perceived as a kind of degradation, for it makes our very sense of being feel fragile. The contemporary period, during which collective identities are called on to transform themselves mor
e and more quickly, is thus also the period in which groups are adopting an increasingly defensive attitude, and fiercely guarding their original identities.
Cultural identity has to be distinguished both from civic status and from our attachment to specific moral and political values. No one can change his or her childhood, whereas it is perfectly possible to change our civic loyalties without any damage. The state is not a ‘culture’ like others, it is an administrative and political entity with well-established frontiers, and it obviously includes individuals who are the bearers of several different cultures, since in it we find men and women, young people and old, of every profession and every condition, from various regions, indeed origins, and speaking different languages, practising several religions, and respecting different customs. This does not mean that belonging to one specific state is insignificant. It is within the nation that the great social solidarities find a place. It is the taxes paid by all citizens, at least in democratic states that make medical care available to those who cannot afford it. It is the work of the active citizens which enables retired senior citizens to pick up their pensions. It is their contributions, too, which help to supply a fund for the unemployed. It is thanks to national solidarity that all children in the country benefit from a free education. Now, health, work and education all form an essential part of everyone’s existence. However, a democratic state cannot require from its citizens that they love it, only that they remain loyal to it. It is for every individual to look after his or her own affective choices; neither the government nor Parliament have any reason to meddle with them. It is in this respect that our democracy is liberal: the state does not entirely control civil society, and within certain limits each individual remains free. That’s why national cultural identity is independent of the laws, and is made and unmade on a daily basis by the actions of millions of individuals living in this or that country.
The moral and political principles to which we are attached are, on the other hand, both fragile and irreplaceable. It is in the name of these principles, that can be shared by all peoples but which are practised by just a few, and independent of our particular culture as well as of the state whose citizens we are, that – to take a few current examples – we are ready, today, to defend intransigently: the freedom of women to organise their personal lives the way they see fit; or secularism, understood as the separation of the theological and the political, which confines the exercise of faith to the personal sphere alone, the corollary of which is the freedom to criticise religions; or else the banning of physical violence, whether it be domestic or practised illegally in the name of raison d’état, such as torture.
These principles happen to be integrated into the Constitution or the laws and institutions of several countries, but they do not belong to them intrinsically. The dissociation between this set of values and the national frameworks is all the more obvious these days in Europe since the majority of the inhabitants of the European Union demonstrate that they are attached to them, whereas the states themselves preserve their borders and their sovereignty. We can go even further: many of these ideals today feature in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and inspire the legislative systems of other cultural or national traditions; conversely, we must remember that the European heritage contains many elements other than the defence of human rights.
If certain persons living in a European country these days refuse the state of law, oppress women or systematically resort to physical violence, they are to be condemned not because such types of behaviour are foreign to European cultural identity (they are not), but because they transgress the current laws, which in turn are inspired by a core of moral and political values.
How can we distinguish between what is acceptable insofar as it forms part of a tradition, and what is not acceptable insofar as it contradicts the constitutive values of democracy? The answer is in principle not difficult, even if its application in particular cases poses problems: in a democracy, law is higher than custom. This precedence does not affect Western, or European, or even French culture, but constitutes the basis of the values to which each country is faithful. The values of a society find their expression in the Constitution, the laws or indeed the structure of the State; if custom transgresses them, it must be abandoned. The Universal Declaration of UNESCO, adopted in 2001 and confirmed by the UN in 2002, says in article 4: ‘None may invoke cultural diversity in order to attack the human rights guaranteed by international law, nor to limit their effectiveness.’ We could add: ‘nor to attack any of the rights guaranteed by the legal code of a democratic country’. If the law is not broken, this means that the custom in question can be tolerated: it can be criticised publicly, but it should not be forbidden. For example, marriages in which the choice of partner is imposed by the family become a crime only if they are imposed by force; if they are accompanied by the consent of the bride, they may be regrettable, but they cannot be treated as being against the law.
The members of a multicultural society would do well to draw a very clear line between cultural identity and political choices, between forms of spirituality and civic values as embodied in law. It is thanks to distinctions of this kind that other non-Western countries have managed to adopt the principles of democratic government without having to renounce their traditions and customs. The separation between laws and values on the one side, and culture and spirituality on the other, can become (in the West, too) the point of departure for a politics adapted to contemporary society.
On the other hand, in order to submit to the law, we need first to know it. ‘Ignorance of the law is no excuse’ – true, but in practice, there are many adults who are ignorant of the law, and who transgress it unknowingly – something that is especially easy if they are acting in agreement with an ancestral custom. In the contemporary world, it is for the state to ensure that the inhabitants of the country, whatever their origin, have some idea of the great principles on which the laws rest. Basic education should be free and obligatory for all, as it is for the native-born children. And this, in turn, requires a basic knowledge of the country’s language. Pondering how best to respond to these demands, and what might be asked in exchange, could well be the task of a modern liberal state, which is necessarily a multicultural one.
Are we threatened today by a ‘clash of civilisations’? I am personally unable to see in what sense cultural differences are the source of contemporary international conflicts. Thus I don’t believe that the remedy for these tensions will come from a debate on culture. Western countries can help ease these tensions in other ways. Present interactions do not occur in a vacuum, and the centuries of history that have preceded them cannot be erased – centuries in which Western countries have dominated the rest of the world. So we can see what demands can be addressed to the political and intellectual elites in the West, if they desire sincerely to take part. The first requirement here would be that they cease to consider themselves an incarnation of the law, virtue and universality, of which their technological superiority would seem to be the proof; so they should stop setting themselves a priori above the laws and judgments of others even if those seem to violate some of their habits. Moreover, the right to military intervention that certain Western powers have arrogated to themselves is not only without any basis other than force; it risks suggesting that the ideals defended by Westerners – liberty, equality, secularism, human rights – are merely a convenient camouflage for their will to power, and thus are not worthy of any respect. Freedom cannot be promoted by constraint, nor equality by subjection. If our political leaders wish these Western ideals to remain active, for example in the Middle East, they must begin by withdrawing their troops from the countries in which they are intervening (Iraq and Afghanistan), close down illegal prisons and torture camps, and help set up a viable Palestinian state.
Every society is multicultural. The fact remains that, nowadays, the contacts between populations of different origins (especially in the cities), migrations an
d travels, and the international exchange of information, are all more intense than ever before; and there is no reason why this tendency should be reversed. Good management of this growing pluralism would imply not that we assimilate others to the culture of the majority, but that we respect minorities and integrate them into a framework of laws and civic values common to all. That objective is simultaneously important, since it has to do with the life of the whole collective, and accessible, insofar as it does not affect customs adopted in earliest childhood, and constitutive of a basic identity, but concerns rather rules of life that can easily be accepted as varying from one country to another. The clash of civilisations is definitely not our unavoidable destiny.