لنستخرج كنوزا من المعرفة و الإبداع و العلم و الأفكار
The millennium approaches, and with it an intensified awareness that humanity is on the threshold of a new era for which there has been too little preparation and reflection. In part, this sense of discomfort as the deadline approaches is that the end of the Cold War did not produce that major relaxation in tensions everyone seemed to have expected. The disintegration of the Soviet Union was followed almost immediately by the Gulf War, which, in my opinion, is a major milestone in world history. That conflict forcefully clarified the role of the United States as the single remaining superpower and dramatised the range and extent of its military, as well as economic, power. Its recent lawless behaviour in Afghanistan and Sudan still more dramatically informs the world that it alone can do what it wants.
A whole spate of theories in the West have sprung up to explain what George Bush called the New World Order, but each has either enjoyed a brief vogue and then disappeared, or it has alarmed more people with a vision of greater problems and violence than before. Fukuyama's "end of history" stayed around for perhaps two years, then it melted into a cloud of smoke, never to be heard from again. Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilisations" is one of the more recent entries into the ring; it, too, seems designed for oblivion, though not without stirring up feelings about dangers to the West -- its uniqueness, technological and spiritual leadership, moral pre-eminence -- from various other civilisations, of which Islam and Confucianism are supposedly the most dangerous. Like Fukuyama, Huntington assumes the superiority of Western achievements over all others and, like Fukuyama's, his work is in effect an attempt to re-cycle the old us-versus-them dichotomy from the Cold War into the present.
On the other hand, it would be invidious not to acknowledge that cultural or civilisational conflicts do exist and seem to have intensified since the end of the Cold War. The recital of names and places where this has occurred is a bloody one, of course, but it serves to emphasise the futility either of schemes of partition (as in former Yugoslavia and Palestine) or of grandiose and rather outmoded concepts of globalising synthesis. The problem seems to be that the world is in some ways getting more heterogeneous, less homogenous, and more fractious, as forgotten, suppressed or subordinate voices quite rightly demand a hearing.
A serious difficulty, however, occurs when we ask "a hearing for what reason, and in the name of what?" Certainly it is true that Western European countries like France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and the Scandinavian states have large non-European immigrant communities in their midst for the first time in history. The result is that no culture, civilisation or nation can truly separate itself into a pure and an impure, or hybrid culture; there are no insulated cultures or civilisations, nor have there ever been. Any attempt now made to separate them into the water-tight compartments described by Huntington does damage to their variety, to their diversity, their sheer complexity of elements, and their radical hybridity.
For this reason, then, it would seem that we are living through a period where definitions of cultures and societies themselves are highly volatile, extremely contentious matters. This is certainly true in the Islamic world, where an extraordinarily energetic debate has been taking place from Morocco to Iran as to what Islam is, what it can be interpreted as, and where it might be going. This is routinely overlooked in the West, where a traditional Orientalism maintains its hegemony and overrides the dynamic of cultures and the diversity of what is within them. What has remained is an atrophied image suggesting that Islam is in the grip of a wave of unyielding fundamentalism: this is very far from the truth.
Much the same debate is taking place in the United States, which has always been a country of immigrants at whose hands the Native American community was more or less exterminated, its lands taken from it and its remnants confined to reservations. A symptom of the current malaise in the United States is the discussion about the various images of America that have gone through a large number of transformations and sometimes dramatic shifts.
As I was growing up, the Western film depicted the native Americans as evil devils, to be destroyed or tamed; they were called Red Indians and, insofar as they had any function in the culture at large -- this was as true of films as it was of the writing of academic history -- it was to be a foil to the advancing course of white civilisation. Today, that has changed completely. Native Americans are seen as victims, not villains, of the country's Western progress. There has even been a change in the status of Columbus. There are even more dramatic reversals in the depictions of African Americans and women. Toni Morrison has noted how it is that, in classic American literature, there is an obsession with whiteness, as Melville's Moby Dick and Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym so eloquently testify. Yet she says the major male and white writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, men who shaped the canon of what we have known as American literature, created their works by using whiteness as a way of avoiding, curtaining off and rendering invisible the African presence in the midst of our society. The very fact that Toni Morrison writes her novels and criticism with such success and brilliance now underscores the extent of the change from the world of Melville and Hemingway to that of black writers like W E Dubois, Baldwin, Langston Hughes and Toni Morrison herself. Which vision is the real America, and who can lay claim to represent and define it? The question is a complex and deeply interesting one, but it cannot be settled by reducing the whole matter to a few clichés.
There is a similar debate inside the Islamic world today which, in the often hysterical outcry about the threat of Islam, Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism that one encounters so often in the Western media, is often lost sight of completely. Like any other major world culture, Islam contains within itself an astonishing variety of currents and counter-currents, most of them undiscerned by Orientalist scholars for whom Islam is an object of fear and hostility, or by journalists who do not know any of the languages or relevant histories and are content to rely on persistent stereotypes that have lingered in the West since the 10th century.
Iran today -- especially after the recent presidential election -- is in the throes of an energetic debate about law, freedom, personal responsibility and tradition that is simply not covered by Western reporters. Charismatic lecturers and intellectuals -- clerical and non-clerical alike -- carry on the tradition of Shariati, challenging centres of power and orthodoxy with impunity and, it would seem, with great popular success. In Egypt, two major civil cases involving intrusive religious interventions in the lives of a celebrated film maker and intellectual respectively have resulted in the victory of one over orthodoxy and the loss of the other (I refer here to the cases of Youssef Chahine and Nasr Hamed Abu Zeid). I myself have argued in a recent book (The Politics of Dispossession, 1994) that, far from there being only a surge of Islamic fundamentalism, as it is reductively described in the Western media, there is a considerable amount of secular opposition to it, in the form of various contests over the interpretation of sunna in matters of law, personal conduct, political decision-making and so on.
The official culture is that of priests, academies, and the state. It provides definitions of patriotism, loyalty, boundaries, and what I have called belonging. It is this official culture that speaks in the name of the whole, that tries to express the general will, the general ethos and idea which represents the official past, the founding fathers and texts, the pantheon of heroes and villains, etc. and excludes what is foreign or different or undesirable in the past. From it come the definitions of what may or may not be said, those prohibitions and proscriptions that are necessary to any culture if it is to have authority.
But it is also true that, in addition to the mainstream or official or canonical culture, there are dissenting or alternative unorthodox, heterodox cultures that contain many anti-authoritarian strains in competition with the official culture. These can be called the counter-culture, an ensemble of practices associated with various kinds of outsiders -- the poor, immigrants, artistic bohemians, workers, rebels, artists.
Unfortunately, all known systems of education today are still covertly or implicitly nationalistic. To some extent this is an exigency of language, context and existential reality: if you are French, for example, you must learn the national language, learn the country's history, understand its society in order to live in it. In less liberal societies, there is an even greater urgency to teaching young people that their language and culture are pre-eminent and, by inference, that others are either less important or in some way so foreign and undesirable as to become an unattractive Other.
I wish I could say that more recent general schemes for education and cultural development inspire one with great enthusiasm, but alas they do not. Take as a case in point the massive, and massively well-intentioned, Report of the World Commission on Culture and Development, published in part under the auspices of UNESCO in l995. Its authors and sponsors are a remarkable array of brilliant men and women, with several Nobel prize winners, leading scientists, poets and social theorists in their ranks. The title of the work -- Our Creative Diversity -- aptly characterises the emphasis they wish to place on pluralism, multi-culturalism, creativity in education. For them, development is not merely economic, but human and cultural; maximising the artistic and cultural spheres. The list of topics explored is a comprehensive one: a new global ethics; a commitment to pluralism; creativity and empowerment; challenges of a media-rich world; gender and culture; children and young people; cultural heritage for development; culture and the environment; rethinking cultural policies.
Reading through all 300 pages of this enlightened work, one finds oneself nodding in agreement at each juncture. Yes, we must attend to pluralism and diversity; yes, we must take gender issues into account, and we must remove inequities; yes, culture cannot be practised in a shrinking or degraded natural environment, and so on. The report calls for resources, imaginative thinking, lots of participation, originality and liberation. All well and good and, I am afraid to say, very much in the spirit of good-thinking international committees whose reports are, in the final analysis, about making consensus and good feeling, not about truly radical thought.
What I find completely missing from the Report is that dimension which is so essential to democracy, namely how education can encourage people to think for themselves, to think against authority and orthodoxy, to think in terms not of acquiescence and agreement but in terms of scepticism and dissent. The World Commission of Culture and Development sees culture entirely in affirmative terms, and allows no room whatever for the realm of the negative. This is a tremendous shortcoming. Nearly everything around us in this age of massive electronic communication and global capitalism is designed to win consent, if not actually to create it. One model for development left unchallenged by the World Commission is the free market, or capitalist model, as if there are no alternatives to it, as if, with the triumph of the market, history had come to an end (as argued by Fukuyama). There is now the danger of an ideological saturation so great as to crowd out the possibility of an aesthetic sphere, for example, which is not directly controlled by economic and political power.
Corporate thinking on globalisation has won over consciousness to such an extent that, in my opinion, it ought to be the role of education to foster a spirit not of conformity but of resistance, of individual agency rather than of collective determinism. How else can we encourage our students to distinguish between justice and injustice, between orthodox ideas of democracy and real, participatory democracy? Above all, how can we stimulate a sense through education that human beings make their own history, and that history itself is a contest over fundamental moral questions that include power, authority, and the moral sense? Let me try now to give an alternative view to the conventional one that is to be found in the World Commission's report.
There is a line that has haunted me for many years in an essay on Leonardo da Vinci by the great early-20th-century French poet Paul Valéry. Describing Leonardo's mind in its power and elegance, Valéry says that the Italian artist could not but think of a bridge whenever he thought of an abyss. Metaphorically speaking, an abyss is the equivalent of what is presented to us as immutable, definitive, impossible to go beyond. No matter how deep and problematic the scene that presented itself to him, Leonardo always had the capacity to think of some alternative to it, some way of solving the problem, some gift for not passively accepting what was given to him, as if the scene that Leonardo imagined could always be envisioned in a different, and perhaps more hopeful, way.
Of course, Leonardo was a genius and in every conceivable way he was not an average person. Few of us would dare to compare ourselves with him. Yet I do think that one of the advantages of education is that, quite apart from giving us methods and skills for dealing with areas of experience like medicine or law or the humanities, it also gives us the opportunity to see things differently, and to try in our own way to construct bridges across the abyss. Not that education isn't supposed to be about acquiring knowledge -- of course it is. But there is more to knowledge, I believe, than the mere amassing of information. Jean-Paul Sartre once said about a friend who had studied at France's greatest scientific college, the Ecole Polytechnique: "My friend is really incredibly brilliant. He knows everything. But that is all he knows."
One of the hardest things for me to do as a teacher is to give my students everything I know about a subject, to try to interpret it as fully and as thoroughly as I can, and then also to make them feel dissatisfied about what I said, or at least sceptical about it. It is much easier for a teacher to try to communicate a sense of his or her authority than to suggest scepticism and a little doubt about what is being said. Far from being a kind of automatic rejectionism, that scepticism is the first step in trying to build a structure across an abyss. If you can't inspire your students to do that, if you can't somehow move them to grasp that education is really self-education and not the unquestioning acceptance of what in the end authority says, then I feel that you have committed them to intellectual and ultimately moral servitude.
There is nothing about our time now, as we approach the millennium, that is more dispiriting than intellectual servitude and docility. Look at what our television screens present -- the pre-packaged news, the endlessly boring talk shows, the routinised sports programs, the relentlessly present sensation of the hour (like the death of Diana) -- and what you see is an apparatus for putting the potentially critical mind to sleep, forcing it to accept that there is an abyss beyond what is being presented and we can do nothing about it. Alas, the situation is similar even in most academic and intellectual discussion, where fashion, and a steady diet of received ideas, compel most people into acceptance of the status quo as proclaimed by one authority or other. What I am talking about is the opposite of that, namely intellectual restlessness: you refuse to accept what orthodoxy or dogma or received ideas tell you is the truth, and seek in your way to understand things so as to change them, to make them yours.
Anyone who has had the experience of serious illness will tell you that one of the most terrifying prospects you face at such an extremity is not just the sadness of physical disablement, but the loss of your power to think clearly. Ernest Jones, the biographer of Sigmund Freud, says about Freud that when he became severely ill and in great pain because of cancer in the jaw, he refused to take even an aspirin for fear that it might dull the critical edge of his mind, take away some of the sharpness of his thought. What is it that makes Stephen Dedalus, the hero of James Joyces's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, so compelling if it is not his motto, non serviam -- I will not serve? "I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland or my church." What does it really mean not to believe? It means no longer being able to think the way others do, no longer being able just to go along with things as they are.
The fundamental paradox of education is that you must serve and submit to authority -- the authority of tradition, of learning itself, of the scholars and scientists who went before you and in a sense made you possible -- and, at the same time, you must somehow remain critical, even defiant. And what makes you defiant, what makes it possible for you to build a bridge across the abyss that so many people are defeated by, is hope and a belief in a great idea, the ideal of justice, the idea of emancipation, the idea of enlightenment, which of course is where the bridge leads you. There are great risks here, risks of unpopularity, of being isolated, of being reviled. Pamina, in Mozart's opera The Magic Flute, at the moment of greatest danger, sings "I must say the truth, the truth, even if it were a crime."
But in the final analysis, I think, there is nothing more noble than to risk all those things in order to be able to build that bridge. It is the genius of the school and university that they provide a place and a few years in which to try, and try, and try. Of course one may not fully succeed, but one realises also that it is the everlasting effort to find a way, build a bridge, imaginatively and critically, that keeps us alive intellectually and democratically.
