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166Дж.Ч. Александер
МОРАЛЬ КАК КУЛЬТУРНАЯ СИСТЕМА: О СОЛИДАРНОСТИ ГРАЖДАНСКОЙ И НЕГРАЖДАНСКОЙ
J.C. Alexander
Morality as a cultural system: On solidarity civil and uncivil1
Solidarity is a central dimension of social order and social conflict, yet it has largely been absent from influential theories of modern society. Most of the big thinkers, classical, modern, and contemporary, have conceived prototypi-cally modern relationships as either vertical or atomised. Modernization is thought to have smashed affectual and moral fellow-feeling: Because of com-modification and capitalist hierarchy (Marx), because of bureaucracy and individualistic asceticism (Weber), because of the growing abstraction and impersonality of the collective consciousness that allows egoism and anomie (Durkheim). Postmodernity is typically seen as liquefying social ties and intensifying narcissistic individualism (Bauman); or as creating new forms of verti-cality, for example the disciplinary cage (Foucault).
It might be objected that none of these influential modern and postmodern thinkers actually wanted to dispense with solidarity, and that each saw it as something that some future order might be able to restore, or at least should try. But their sociological contributions, the concepts they created and the empirical picture of modernity they painted, pointed towards and explained the dissolution of solidarity, not its maintenance and creation.
It would, of course, be foolish to deny the modern forces that dissolve solidarities. Classical, modern, and postmodern theorists have identified destructive tendencies. Any effort to theorize contemporary social systems must give them their dangerous due.
1 Presented at the ASA meetings in Las Vegas, 23 August 2011, at a Special session inaugurating the new section on «Altruism, morality and social solidarity». The session and the section were organized by Vincent Jeffries.
It would be equally wrong-headed, however, to accept the idea that solidarity has disappeared as a fundamental dimension of social life. As such Prag-matist theorists as Cooley demonstrated, «primary» groups continue to provide intimate associations inside modernity. The face-to-face associations are the bread and butter of the ethnographic sociological tradition that emerged from the Chicago school, which demonstrates the continuing vitality of centrality of solidarity, without, however, usually evoking that term.
This American ethnographic tradition, however, is almost entirely micro-sociological. Neither the phenomenon of solidarity nor the intellectual idea of it can be found in the macrosociological traditions that, for better and often for worse, have withstood the test of time. This is not to say that there are not conceptual strands of it floating around, like an intellectual version of junk DNA. As Durkheim began to appreciate primitive religion, as he struggled to break free from the constraining yoke of modern rationalism, he spoke about «le plai-sur d'associer» (see J-C Filloux, Durkheim et le socialism'), and even in his earliest work of macrosciology, The Division of social labor, he famously evoked the term. Parsons actually tried to make solidarity into one of his four boxes, but he identified too closely with social integration and rule following, suggesting the I-subsystem created not values but norms.
I have discussed the dearth of solidarity in our theoretical legacy from a critical point of view, implying that solidarity's presence in contemporary social life can hardly be doubted. My 2006 book, The civil sphere2, makes the case that solidarity remains a central dimension of cultural, institutional, and interactional life in contemporary societies. The book is a systematic theory of civil solidarity, but it is also a polemic against how so much of contemporary social theory has tried to make solidarity disappear.
Solidarity should indeed be given new attention as a sociological concept, along with the morality and the possibilities for altruism the idea of solidarity implies. But my warning is this: We cannot make solidarity into an easy idea. We must «think the hell out of it». We must explore the weaknesses that are betrayed in traditional ways of thinking about solidarity, and face the real moral dangers that solidarity often poses in the world today.
We might begin by recognizing the «psychologizing» that discussions of altruism and morality often imply. From ancient times until today, altruism and morality have typically been understood as individual qualities, as issues of virtue and character (see Vincent Jeffries's scholarly piece on the virtue tradition). The idea is that people need to feel and think in an altruistic and moral manner. The implication is that moral individuals make moral societies.
But it seems to me that the very essence of sociology is to challenge such a suggestion. There is a micro-reductionism at work here, a failure to recognize the emergent properties of collective social organization. How far into the col-
1 Filloux J.-C. Durkheim et le socialisme. - Genève: Droz, 1977.
2 Alexander J. C. The civil sphere. - Oxford: Oxford univ. press, 2006.
lective and with what social organizational strength does moral «motivation» extend? Individuals can be altruistic to their friends and family, and immoral to members of other, less intimate and immediate circles. To what others among the innumerable others whom the scope of our actions effect do we extend the umbrella of our personal moral principles?
This is a critical philosophical issue. The communitarian tradition doesn't see extending micro, or local, morality as a major problem. But it is the very heart of Rawls' moral philosophy. In his famous thought experiment, the test of morality is not whether you are kind and generous to your friends, but what you would do once you wrap the «veil of ignorance» around your eyes, such that you enter into the «original position» where you know nothing about who you are, what your identity is, or what your interest is. What is moral is what is just: What demonstrates respect for the autonomy of every single individual in society, no matter what their position, virtue, or character.
Durkheim became the founding father of moral solidarity theory because he clearly understood this micro-macro distinction. Rather than being the communitarian avant la lettre that so many have tried to make of him, Durkheim sociologized Kant's analytical argument for universalism, speaking not of moral principles, virtues, or character but of social morality.
If there is a single take away message from Durkheim on morality, it is that morality is society writ large. If religion is a mirror in which the social is reflected, so is morality. Morality expresses social solidarity. It is composed of social values, organized around totemic symbolic figures like teachers and leaders, and energized by periodic social rituals.
The problem is that, while Durkheim follows Kant in his identification of moral principles with autonomy and rationality, he provides no way of distinguishing the kind of social morality organized around these principles from others. We can be moral and altruistic to one another when we share the same totem and participate in the same rituals, but these sociological processes can create horrific particularism, an insiders' morality that allows people, even compels them, to act immorally to those outside the restricted circle of the we.
We are back to our earlier problem. To emphasize the centrality of morality, altruism, and solidarity is either not enough or too much. We need a macro-theory that differentiates between different kinds of morality and solidarity. Sociologists know all about how societies are stratified and fragmented along every conceivable line. Each of these fragments sees itself as moral and others as not. This is provincial morality. What we are looking for is cosmopolitanism.
I have two propositions here: 1) A more universalizing and cosmopolitan morality depends on significance. The wider range of «others» that a society can make significant, the more stretched, universal, and inclusive our morality. 2) Significance is a function of signification: What is the nature of the symbolic discourse that circulates in society? How are moral signifiers extended to different classes of social signifieds?
All sorts of powerful symbolic discourses are primordially restrictive, inspiring rituals that simultaneously inflate solidarity while narrowing its scope. Think of racial and gender discourses, and civilizational and religious chauvinism. Think Samuel Huntington, but also some celebrations of difference politics on the liberal side.
What makes this ritualistic narrowing of solidarity particularly difficult to understand is that it is almost always intermixed with more expansive moral forms.
• Think about the ante-bellum Southern states, whose elites practiced respectful democracy among themselves, and often included white yeomen, while bestializing and excluding non-whites.
• Think of Apartheid South Africa, where whites treated one another in quite a universalistic way that exhibited democratic morality, even as they criminally subordinate blacks and Asians.
• Or supposedly modern Germans, whether conservative or socialist, and their horrendous treatment of their Jews. Or the very democratic and modern Swiss who pass laws against building mosques.
• Or the socialist French and British who propose laws to prevent Muslims from wearing religious clothing. Think of the racial othering in which liberal Americans engage, despite their best moral principles, in their streetwise life of the everyday.
• Think of the wars against one another that enlightened Western nations have waged and their colonization of non-Western peoples. The rationale has been: We are moral, they aren't. It is our moral duty to dominate the other so that we can make them moral, which often involves killing them as a result.
The idea of morality equating with solidarity and altruism is not correct. It must be complicated so that the stigmatized «other» can be brought back in, so that othering can be understand as intrinsic to morality as a cultural system.
We need to be able to see, and to study, how acting badly is morally compulsive, how people can, in everyday language, be moral and immoral at the same time. In order to do this, we must make the semiotic shift. Morality cannot be essentialized. From the sociological point of view, it is only not a normative order but a cultural system. Cultural systems are semiotic languages. Like every other meaningful sign system, moral principles are defined relation-ally. Moral meanings are binary: the good is defined by the bad, and vice-versa. Evility is part of morality every bit as much as the good. Yes, morality and solidarity are symbiotically connected. Understanding that morality is a binary, however, allows us to see that social rituals gain energy by polluting others as profane, not only by identifying «us» with the sacred.
This is why in my own work I have spoken about civil and uncivil solidarities. Since the beginning of the early modern nation-state, the history of the civil sphere has been a long and winding road. From religion, from the Enlightenment, from socialist and democratic movements, even from the idea of the nation itself there emerged the utopian idea that everybody, no matter who or
what they were, could be members of a broad, encompassing, and universalizing «civil» sphere. The hope was that a sphere of solidarity could be sustained that would be relatively independent of the restrictive solidarities and moralities that flourished alongside it, such as class arrogance, religious restriction, ethnic prejudice, regional antagonism.
Yet, while the civil spheres of modernizing Western nations did have significant democratic effects, they also supported incredibly inhumane restrictions and exclusions. The moral discourse of civil society is binary. It is just as concerned with defining anti-civil evil as civil good. It defines the virtues required for civil participation and the qualities that disqualify groups from civil membership. It excludes the latter on the moral grounds of protecting civil society itself.
• For centuries, it was inconceivable - on moral grounds - that putatively intemperate, uneducated workers could become active citizens. The same held true for supposedly irrational and diffident women and of course, even more harshly, for non-whites, who were thought to border on the animalistic. If you were not Christian, you were also out of luck.
• It's important to understand that these suppressions were carried out in the name of morality and solidarity.
• Read Kant's remarks on the moral and emotional incapacities (and that is putting it mildly) of Blacks and «Orientals» in his essay on The origins of the beautiful and sublime. It is depressing to see the thinker who represented the highest values of Enlightenment moral philosophy feeling he has to draw the line between civilization and barbarism. At the same time, one must acknowledge that Kant's essay on cosmopolitanism represented the first great challenge to the idea that civil morality could be restricted to the boundaries of the nation state.
Let me conclude by noting that the expansive reach of civil morality not only marks democratic boundaries of institutions but inspires radical social movements. In a democratic uprising, civil solidarity moves from abstract discourse to concrete enactment. I document exactly this kind of civil performance in my new book, Performative revolution in Egypt: An essay in cultural power1. The winter uprising overthrew Mubarak not because of material resources as the result of its cultural power. It gained this power by drawing into its ranks the widest possible gender, ethnic, religious, political, and religious representation. Civil solidarity became a reality for the first time, and the pulsating performances in Tahrir Square presented a democratic utopia in microcosm.
Exactly the same can be said for the «protest camps» that have been set up throughout Israel during the later weeks of summer, 2011. Young and old, women and men, settlers and peacenicks, secular and religious, and people from every social class - they have gathered together in the hundreds of thousands, organizing themselves democratically, to protest against the destruction inequal-
1 Alexander J.C. Performative revolution in Egypt: An essay in cultural power. - L.; N.Y.: Bloomsbury academic, 2011.
ity that is undermining civil solidarity in Israel. This movement is not more moral or more altruistic than other movements. The settlers and the religious right are deeply moral, and altruistic to their own kind. What distinguishes the protest camps is the civil nature of their morality and their utopian hopes for expanding solidarity.
There is, however, another, more ominous moral element shared by these radical social movements in Egypt and Israel. While calling for more altruism and civil solidarity inside of their nations, each has had much more ambiguous orientations to other national solidarities outside. Democratizing Egypt has already given clear signs of pushing its foreign policy in a decidedly anti-Israel direction. For its part, Israel's protest camp movement has conspicuously failed to cite slogans from the peace movement. To maximize internal solidarity, it has included groups who support settlements and oppose trading land for Palestinian peace. Even the most expansive efforts to establish a more civil solidarity cannot escape from the binaries that define morality as a cultural system.
