DawgNotes

Michael Walzer points out that since Hegel, "the words [global civil society] have been known to the knowers of such things but they have rarely served to focus anyone else's attention" (8). He goes on to discuss the resurgence of global civil society as a concept among eastern European intellectuals. This comparison raises a point I find compelling: the notion of civil society that has emerged, developed, and existed in the post-Hegelian western European/North American world has been centuries in the making. Such a system can't just be laid wholesale over an existing state apparatus and expected to flourish. This is true in the same way that democracy can't simply be "applied" to a country and expected to work. In both cases, an appropriate infrastructure has to be developed. Baynes highlights this in his mention of Habermas's notion of democracy – a deliberative politics where the process of opinion forming is just as important as the actual vote (126-7). That process occurs when there are a range of voices in a public arena each trying to inform and persuade others to a particular point of view. This type of debate, increasingly shut down in the United States and completely foreign to whole generations in other countries, is the realm I think of when I think of civil society.

Walzer also observes that civil society is associative and pluralistic. Just as individuals have different interests that cause them to form different associations, so no one structure can define civil society. The role of the state is important not only for stability, but also for protection against unequal distributions of power within the social sphere. So far, so good. But if taken across the range of these essays, across the cultures of Islam and Confucianism and whatever else we didn't read from these anthologies, this plurality starts to hit some bumps. In western states with governmental structures based on the rule of law and a Judeo-Christian heritage, the abstraction of the individual subject separates moral from legal forces. By this, I simply mean that what might be "legal" isn't always morally right, and in the absence of the moral imperative, the law can only protect so much. That moral imperative has historically come from the associations that make up civil society, including the family and religion. But in a culture that does not have the same heritage, doesn't have the "rule of law" in the same way or the same abstraction, the imperatives are different. In Nosco's discussion of Confucianism, expectations of moral goodness allow for the power of shame to order the social structure. This reminded me of Vine DeLoria's talk here a couple of years ago. He talked quite a bit about the power of shame within the Indian community, and particularly noted the loss of that tool in shaping the character of younger Indians. It's again a moral quality, the formation of socially acceptable ways of being that come from care for and respect for others.

In these readings, the commonalities I see in the various systems include: protection of basic human needs – food, shelter, freedom from violence; respect for the ideas and opinions of others; equality before the law; balance of power between the state and the people (or between the ruler and the people, or between the strong and the weak; moral goodness in leaders (leading to serve and help others rather than just to gain power). It seems that these ideas came up in Confucianism, in Islam, and in the goals of the western Enlightenment tradition. There are, therefore, points of commonality to build on. Here's where the dialectic gets involved:

• thesis - what one group thinks is "the good life"
• anti-thesis - what another group thinks that is different from the first group
• synthesis - when those two groups are able to discursively work to a synthesis of their ideas to the end of what constitutes the good life for all of them.

That combined group, or either part of it, then moves outward to connect with yet another group, renegotiating along the way, and so on. In this model, global civil society is the space that allows for the discursive sharing of ideas and coming to synthesis, but it will look different in different places because there will be different forms of resistance depending on the differing governing structures (i.e., where religions oppress other ideas, then the discourse has to take place outside of that arena, but where a totalitarian type state exists, then the religious environment might be the place where the discourse takes place.)

The thing about global civil society is that is has to be something universal enough to allow all inhabitants of all states/nations/societies to have access to the discourse at some level, but particular enough that the access is appropriate to their particular governing or dominant structure.

I've blogged about David Weinberger's notion of the 100 lb. backpack of default philosophy before, in a similar vein. For civil society to be truly global, it seems to me, the first bunch of folks that have to be willing to let go of their backpacks are those who have the most wealth and privilege (world as a whole considered). The Sarvodaya Movement, discussed in the same post, is about working in communities to build communal sensibility. That movement, and others like it, are necessary if GCS is to happen, but they must also be at work within the borders of the United States, and not just raising money "here" to do work "there," but doing the same work "here" as well.

If GCS can be conceived as a system, and I think it has to be in the context of the question of its existence, then Watts's questions about emegence apply. He asked,

the particular manner in which [individuals] interact can have profound consequences for the sorts of new phenomena--from population genetics to global synchrony to political revolutions--that can emerge at the level of groups, systems, and populations. As with the cascade in the power grid, however, it is one thing to state this and quite another matter altogether to understand it precisely. In particular, what is it about the patterns of interactions between individuals in a large system that we should pay attention to?

The answer, Watts says, will come from the new science of networks. This new science has numerous and interesting overlaps with the theorizing about global civil society. John Keane called GCS the project that doesn't end, and why Walzer called it the project of projects. I've been seeing little links and overlaps between these two seemingly unrelated courses all semester, and with this entry as background, will try to capture more of them in the days ahead.

Works Cited:
Baynes, Kenneth. "A Critical Theory Perspective on Civil Society and State." Civil Society and Government, eds. Nancy L. Rosenblum and Robert C. Post. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. 123-145.

Walzer, Michael. "The Concept of Civil Society." Toward a Global Civil Society, edited by Michael Walzer. New York: Berghahn Books, 1995. 7-27.

Watts, Duncan. Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2003.