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Diversity, Acculturation and Cultural Alliance

Dr. Fathi Triki(*)

Many are the studies and researches dealing with the conception of cultural and civilizational dialogue. All of them attempt to transcend the conflicting relations that mark the international community. There is no doubt about the importance of these researches which, in spite of their ideological feature, could offer humanity many forms of cohabitation and spare it some troubles of violence and clashes. It is not our concern in this regard to express our point of view or to criticize some widespread theses and their corollaries. Our main concern, rather, is to shed light on the way cultures interact in terms of dialogue and alliance with a view to alleviating the plight of violence, combating extremism, and uprooting the causes of narrow-mindedness and dogmatism.

For this reason, we will try to the concept of acculturation and subject it to scrutiny and analysis. The derivation form of acculturation suggest common exchange, which supposes the acceptance of cultural diversity as an obvious fact for modernism and communication between cultures, as a means for achieving mutual cohabitation and interaction without hegemony. This mutual formula, expressed through the said derivation, has an institutional meaning as it will shift discussions about this question to a general theoretical level.

How is this communication articulated? What is its anthropological value? Does it have any effect on society? Is there any basis for this conception? Does this cultural diversity pose any constant threat to cohabitation?

To answer these questions, I will first elucidate this phenomenon by determining its components and analysing the way it works in reality. Then, I will cast a moral vision and a political commitment on this issue, in order to base it on standardised rules. Finally, this approach will subject acculturation to radical criticism so that we can determine whether cultural diversity falls into line with globalization which lays the basis for human communication.

1- Cultural diversity

The general perspective of international cultural diversity is primarily connected to the clashes of relations at national and international levels. The last century was the bloodiest ever in human history. In fact, the wars, which become globalized, have often seen many scenes of mass executions, detention and concentration camps, and all kinds of ethnic and racial cleansing, in addition to despair and hopelessness, neo-colonialism, invasion and barbarism. The beginning of this century is not better either. The number of victims and the scale of destruction defied imagination. Humanity is living nowadays an extremely difficult life, pervaded by wars, ethnic clashes, terrorism, instability, and violence, driven by the desire to consolidate a new economic and political system. The diplomacy of violence, the threats to use force and to impose a unilateral hegemony have become common place and a daily reality all over the world.

Therefore, it is no wonder that we experience the emergence of a “new communicability” based on military terminology, such as terrorism, “the axis of evil”, nuclear threat, and so on. Actually, the war itself becomes a means of communication as confirmed by the German philosopher, Hegel(1), who stressed its necessity in order to give the nation its true meaning.

This catastrophic vision of the world has been crystallised in a time when the movement of people, materials, and ideas becomes increasingly easy, and the world teeming with a variety of beliefs and divergent ideologies, which makes of it a large space of cultural diversity. This multiplicity is the result of reasserting cultural diversity and doing justice to the oppressed identities in an open world displaying an ever-increasing constructive diversity. Monocultural society, marked by a strong unity, (national, linguistic, racial, and religious unity and so on...) could be gradually substituted by a multicultural one, exemplifying a typical model of the Nation-State to assign a multidirectional meaning to the identity.

However, we notice, in this regard, that the evolution of cultural identities and the emergence of nations have largely contributed to temporary instability, during the post Second World War. For this reason, intellectuals and ideologists tried to promote a solution inspired from the Canadian experience. This solution combines assimilationnism(2) and differentialism(3). The discussion has ultimately taken a political dimension, suppressing any expression of difference within the circle of private life, on a large scope, in democratic countries. The decision makers may coerce people, through the available technological means, into adopting a specific ideology and agreeing on a particular project and on specific form of ideological and cultural unity, whether it is weak or powerful: a unity that in fact attempts to lay the emphasis on social integrity by reducing all differences.

The cultural diversity does not only include multi-ethnic societies and anthropological changes of rich countries, the societies that experienced the presence of many cultures and groups with a great diversity in their life style. It also increasingly includes monocultural(4) societies owing to the rapid movement of people, products, information, ideas, principles, and ideologies. At this point, the comprehensive intellectual components become invalid in these societies, especially when these components attempt to maintain a solid integrity of human relationships(5).

Therefore, this kind of cultural diversity comes from the globalization of ideas and its results, such as the return of identities and the confirmation of the frame of reference of ethnic and religious communities. Nevertheless, in this regard, a contradiction in the logic of globalization should be pointed out: while Europe is opening its borders for Europeans, the Schengen conventions close them in the face of non-Europeans. We are heading toward a gap or a break within humanity itself. A humanity which is, on the one hand, free from pressures and borders; on the other hand, another humanity which accepts these pressures and therefore becomes alien in the world, travelling with visas, concerned with authorisations, expressing its views under censorship, and living under the yoke of segregation and slavery. We are witnessing the emergence of a new form of human beings that can be called “the stranger”(6), through the globalization of the inhabitants’ movement that becomes very wide(7) in recent years. In globalization, “the stranger” is legally controlled by the West, which imposes visas in order to classify him and make a distinction between the strangers who are “righteous” and those who are “clandestine”, “dishonest”, “terrorist”, “polluter”, “refugee”(8), “political asylum seeker”, etc..

When we delve deeply in the meaning of diversity, we come to a conclusion that this term is not only used to express the material diversity within societies, but it also refers to an intellectual principle that is increasingly expanding. In the late seventies, we attempted in our book “readings in the philosophy of diversity” to clarify its basis and its scientific, philosophical, and ideological dimensions, as well as its different applications. As an example, we took the philosophy of Ibn Khaldoun and other philosophical ideas that were available at that time. In all cases, this intellectual conception of diversity is worth being a subject of discussion and theorization so that we can determine its background and all its dimensions.

Does the challenge reside in determining whether humanity is capable to preserve its customs and various cultures while aspiring to “live together” with dignity?

Actually, the term of cultural diversity is threatened. If it seeks to have an absolute and a comprehensive notion, it will undoubtedly change into a negative and dangerous ideological stand: such as differentialists’(9) justification of inhuman acts that could happen any where under the banner of religious cultural differences and diversity.

For this reason, I stress the fact that cultural diversity is a social and a civilizational phenomenon depicting the changes undergone by the community of globalization, without being a coherent intellectual concept, as it penalises all attempts of unity, all forms of freedom, and the concept itself. It is rather a kind of description than a concept.

The term of acculturation can reconsider the process of thinking and reasoning that make coexistence possible in the world. Acculturation is possible whenever it tries to find a link of understanding and communication between the different identities and “possible and factual worlds” with a view to finding a common ground among people.

2- Acculturation

At the first sight, we can understand to what extent the acculturation based on the values of openness, innovation, prospecting the future and difference, should strike roots in our way of approaching modernity. This renders the relation between the individual and other people uninterrupted and leads to a realistic organization establishing the continuity of identification which specifies the concepts of identity and diversity, as well as their particular function in society at large.

Acculturation is the philosophy that allows, at the same time, respect for structural differences of cultures and the assertion of the global nature of each culture, no matter what size it has, to become one of humanity’s assets.

This definition of acculturation puts an end to the ambitions of Western rationalism to monopolize this humanistic dimension in its culture. Furthermore, it gives globalization a controversial aspect for mutual understanding.

The imposition of a single and final vision concerning the rights and the way of life of all cultures, undoubtedly leads to an everlasting violence. In fact, there are nowadays two types of interrelationships that are predominating in Western societies: racism and colonialism that currently constitute the main perspectives of capitalism:

a- Racism:

Actually, the great violations perpetrated against foreigners and Moslems in many countries in Europe in recent years show the seriousness of this exclusion. It is not only limited to condoning “the massive violent expressions of racism(10)”, but also there is a kind of general approval of these actions that are reflected today by the adoption of stated positions, diffused by the media, of many intellectuals and writers who lay the blame on foreigners and their cultures, as well as on their styles of life and faiths(11).

b- Colonialism:

Yet “Colonialism” is to some extent a barbarous word, it should be tackled with more rigour, not only as a subject for study in American universities, but as a word that could primarily be understood as a case in point of a new relationship between imperialism and the oppressed countries. Colonialism is undoubtedly a key word revealing some cues that help to understand the peoples’ intercommunication. The colonization of America marks the start of modernism. Some research papers go beyond that to confirm that modernism and colonialism stand for the same thing(12).

Actually, the rationalistic structure of the West has integrated colonialism as a possible relationship with the other. An eloquent exercise of this relationship has taken place only recently in Iraq after its occupation. The construction of Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories is another form of colonialism. The first consequences were the persistence of massacres and the establishment of racial, political, and economic structures of the West in non-Western world.

The multi-capitalist globalization has tremendously reduced the relationship between cultures, within a bloody domination, at times, through these two actions, as to exclude the other when he/she is within the Western world (racism) and controlling the existence and the destiny of the other in his/her own country (colonialism).

Worse still is the situation where others are excluded. The bloody relationships produced, through these two forms of exclusion, a strong reaction when the latter took on the cultural level, at large, two movements of exclusion: confinement and extremism on one hand, and terrorism on the other.

1- Confinement and extremism: in our book “The Strategy of Identity”, I explained why nowadays, everywhere in the world, people are claiming a specific identity on the individual and cultural levels, through highlighting the personal identity or the culture, as well as their feelings, their ways of life, and their faiths. One of acculturation functions is the struggle against the political identification and standardization of life styles: confinement is escaping the reality and clinging to the past till reaching the point of radicalism and extremism. Religious fanaticism is one aspect of confinement of identity and the excess in the cultural narcissism. Hence, its direct result would be exclusion through building an exclusionary dogma against the other, based on suspicion, accusation and interdiction, which could lead to terrorism.

2- Terrorism: It is a well-known fact that terrorism still has a vague meaning. As a word, terrorism was used by the West two centuries ago. Since that time, it refers to the use of violence to change the political regime in a country.

In its essence, terrorism is the extremist expression of violence, as it denies the right to life and targets the politician, the soldier, the civilian, women, and children, deliberately and without reasoning. In this regard, it should be noted that the fierce campaign lead by the West against Islam, as if terrorism becomes a distinguishing feature of Muslims, is part of the Western culture of exclusion, in which - they tend to ignore it - this phenomenon originated and grew up.

Let us carefully consider this quotation by a German intellectual, Karl Heinzen 1848, who wrote an essay on “Murder” in which he gave many advices about some techniques used in slaughtering, carnages, and annihilation against Berbers, i.e. the barbarous people who did not enter the Western civilization: “If you have to blow up half a continent and cause a bloodbath to destroy the party of barbarism, you should have no scruples of conscience. Anyone who would not joyously sacrifice his life for the satisfaction of exterminating a million barbarians is not a true republican” (this quotation is found in the book of Jean Claude Brusson, le siècle rebelled, Dictionnaire de la contestation au XXème siècle, Larousse, Paris, 1999).

Any way, terrorism is the first enemy of humanity whatever are its reasons and objectives. Acculturation is the only way to avoid violence and its causes, as it adopts dialogue instead of clash.

If we theoretically examine the clash of civilizations’ thesis, we will find that it wrongly tackled the phenomenon of acculturation. Its main blunder resides in the fact that it did not notice that civilizations were formed, changed, and evolved through the dialectics of give-and-take, interference and conflict. The western civilization is the result of scientific and technological development which is sometimes based on the achievements of Greeks, the Arabs, and the Moslems; sometimes by clashing with their theories. Their main objective was modernity. It is complicated and definitely results in acculturation within societies. This acculturation is some times achieved through violence (such as the colonial war or Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt) and some times through the transfer of science and technology.

The cultures, therefore, “converge”(13). This convergence could be determined within the scope of hospitality and openness, as it could also be determined within the scope of animosity and yearning to “consumption” and destruction. It is obvious that ignorance can lead to malevolence and clashes. The knowledge of other cultures can change, within a large scale, each contact that is basically violent into reasoned (refléchie) hospitality. The mutual understanding that can be expressed through a multitude of conceptual styles, such as the communicative action and reasoning or mutual support, contribute to reducing the causes of violence within humanitarian and acculturation bonds.

The cultures’ convergence within the system of rationalism(14) is fulfilled through sociability and amiability(15). For this reason, the cultural alliance takes the form of mutual cordiality which adds to the logical and rational coexistence of humankind the sense of convergence and the generous division of richness and ideas, friendship and love, hospitality, and mutual openness. This predisposition feature of coexistence and this amiability find their genuine translation in the philosophy of Attawhidy(16) when, for instance, he calls it mutual sociability.

The new vision of cultural alliance recommends mutual amiability as a basic rule for any human action. It is a new space opened by more modernistic intellect so that the world could regain its humanity and save it from biased and violent practices.

Thank you.

Wassalamu Alïkum wa Rahmatou Allah wa Barakatuh.

(*) Professor at Tunisian University, Supervisor of UNESCO Chair for Philosophy.

(1) Hegel considers that each nation has its own specificity, its own organization, its own way of existence, and its own singularity. This explains the nation’s opposition to other nations in order to affirm its position so that the others could recognize its existence and allow itself to recognize them too. In order to demonstrate its specificity, the nation has to fight to death with others. Therefore, war is another way of communication between nations, as each nation is not aware that its freedom is correlated by death and it has to maintain it through war. In this regard, he says: “so that people would not remain confined to seclusion and preserve thought, the government spoil their mutual amiability through war. The government has to ruin the stability of their regime and violate their right to independence. The same applies to individuals who would renounce to unity…(Hegel, phenomenology, Trad. D’Hyppolite, Tome II, p. 23).

(2) Assimilationnisme.

(3) Différentialisme.

(4) monoculturelles.

(5) Fred Constant, multiculturamism, Flamarion , Paris 2000.

(6) L’étranger.

(7) The number of migrants is estimated at 130 millions, see: Samir Nair and Jvier de Lucas, the world’s movement, Paris 1996.

(8) Henna Arnt’s analyses of refugees phenomenon are very important, as they present the positive side of this phenomenon “the refugees running away from one nation to another are acting as a safety valve for their nations” see the article of Giorgio Agamben, “Au-delà des droits de l’homme” in sujet et citoyenneté, Intersignes, N° 9/9, Paris 1994, P. 127.

(9) Les différentialistes.

(10) Etienne Balibar, La crainte des masses, Galilée, Paris 1997, p. 325.

(11) Ithian Balibar wrote in “Les craintes des masses”: “what is really new is the increase of violent demonstrations and racial groups. It concerns the change to action which publicly bans assassination. He went on to include some forms that may appear casual and primitive to you; it is a clear awareness of a historic right. In this regard, the revelation of this obstacle or this successive series of obstacles happened in European countries, where it is always pointed out to the kind of foreigners, and even the indigenous who share the same social feature with them, especially the feature of being migrants and stateless (every thing happens as if the relay changes from one European country to another, a long time ago. No European country shall aspire for salvage: from East to West, from England and France to Italy, from Germany to Hungary and to Poland (I will not bridge to talk about the case of Yugoslavia). This increase is accompanied by the emergence of organised extremist groups and a symbolic animosity to Semitism: this will not lessen their danger, as this proves that it will not neutralise this pattern which is not adopted by the concepts revealing xenophobia and the dream “to find a final solution to migration”. Every time, the opinion poll of those who are prompted by illusionary fantasy reveals that the parties legitimating racism as a defensive reaction for their nationalistic identity and for a “threatened” social security, are largely adopted by many layers in society, even if these extremist forms are generally (or not yet) accepted: especially that a great number of migrants and foreigners constitutes a threat for the standard of living, employment, and the public security. While some cultural differences are some times vulnerable, they actually constitute an obstacle that cannot be overcome when it comes to cohabitation. Yet, they are “threatening the nature” of our traditional identities” .

(12) Walter D. Mignolo, for instance, said in his book: Local Histories/Global Designs, Colonialism, Subaltern knowledge, and border thinking, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey “ this historical logic was so obvious to me (as also pretended by those working within the theory of the world system or within the history of Spain and Latin America) to the point I did not notice that the majority of attendance is from northern Africa and that the history of the Maghreb Arab has its own specificities. It is so different from the history of Spain and (Latin) America. When I finished my speech, Rashida Triki, a teacher in the history of art at the university of Tunisia, asked me a question about pairing modernism and colonialism; I did not understand the question, so I did not provide a clear answer, though I spent a great deal of time turning around the question. At the end of the meeting, I went to Rashida and asked her to reformulate her question; finally, I understood: our misunderstanding comes from our prejudgements. Rashida was thinking about the history of colonialism from a French point of view (in the aftermath of the European Renaissance); on the contrary, I have seen the “same” scenario but from a Spanish and (Latin) American point of view. In other words, through the marginalised national history after the European Renaissance (Spain) and the colonial era (western Indians, the underdeveloped people of (Latin) America which has been also crossed from the intellectual structure of colonialism and the modern world (after the Renaissance). In my opinion, it is so “natural” that modernism and colonialism are two faces of the same currency. According to Rashida, colonialism does not come only “after” modernism and it is not easy to understand the two Americas’ point of view. Modernism is created through colonialism. It is the colonial differences that are effected in this regard, revealing at the same time the difference between the French colonialism in Canada and the Caribbean, before the French revolution and the time of Napoleon, and since the French colonialism and so on; in other words, the colonial difference acts within two directions: recombination of internal borders relating the imperial conflicts and the recombination of foreign borders by giving new meanings to colonialism difference”.

(13) Derida pointed out in “Violence et métaphysique, in l’écriture et la difference, Seuil, 1967”, that, for (Levinas), the original relation is possible through “convergence”: “Levinas pointed, that time, to confrontation and facial meeting”.

(14) Acculturation requires the mind for openness and politics as a direct passage relating the mind and feeling. I called it “rationalism” in my works as AL Farabi did.

(15) We clarified in our book “Philosopher le vivre ensemble” that love means by derivation the predisposition to love that could be determined according to the Arab Philosopher Miskawih as “reaction-love (passion), friendship love, frantic love (passionate love), gradual love (cordiality)”. But this love goes necessarily through amiability, as, in this regard, Miskawih (a philosopher of the fourth century of Hegira) said it is a pressing necessity in order to fulfil a certain situation.

(16) A philosopher and writer of the fourth century of Hegira (11 century AD) .

Publications of the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

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