To corrupt the committed
State attempts to control culture cannot help but result in stagnation, writes Mohamed Rabie*
Culture comprises the non-material products of people living together in what we call society. Culture is, then, particular rather than universal. It belongs to its own people and to no one else. Culture includes values, customs, traditions, attitudes and ways of behaviour, in addition to literature, arts, science and a worldview that determines the way any given society views itself and the other. And because of the slow process of cultural development, and the role culture plays in regulating individual behaviour and group relations, it tends to be stable over time and to resist change. In fact, when culture is exposed to strong currents of change it usually becomes protective of itself, more assertive and resistant to change and often an obstacle to social transformation and political and economic development.
Third World intellectuals in general, and Arab intellectuals in particular, tend to believe that culture can be engineered and transformed through planning and state intervention. Consequently they tend to favour, consciously or unconsciously, strategies to change culture and to protect it from outside influence in an attempt to control and direct the course of its evolution. However, when intellectuals talk about culture they often limit their talk to literature, poetry, the arts and creative writing. They almost always ignore values, traditions, ways of behaviour and thinking. Yet history tells us that culture can be influenced. It will only be transformed, though, when the civilisational age in which it exists is transformed. When certain European societies moved from the agricultural age to the industrial one, for example, their cultures were fundamentally changed. The culture of the old agricultural society remained largely unchanged and consequently lost its dynamism and thus ability to hold society together.
When intellectuals talk about strategies to change culture they are talking about changing the products of human creativity, free thinking and individual initiative. Attempts to control culture or direct the course of its development then, tend to be state-sponsored programmes to suppress free thinking, limit individual initiative and undermine creativity. Cultural strategies, in short, are no more or less than attempts to subordinate culture to politics and award politicians and state bureaucrats the power to control cultural activity and force intellectuals and artists to produce what money can buy rather than what creativity and social responsibility dictate.
Whenever politics dominates culture, intellectuals suffer and literature and arts stagnate. And whenever freedom of speech prevails and escapes political control, culture flourishes and intellectuals gain the moral authority to lead and guide social transformation and political and economic progress.
Intellectuals have had an important role throughout history. They have always tried, and have often succeeded, in representing the consciousness of the masses, supporting the poor and the oppressed, helping to end economic exploitation and social discrimination. And through their creative work and political activity intellectuals have helped remould social consciousness, orientating it more towards the future than the past.
The French Revolution, for example, was led by French intellectuals, not by its politicians, capitalists or generals. And the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the most important legal and political documents of modern times, were written by America's intellectuals.
For society to develop and progress, for freedom to survive and creativity to flourish, culture must be separated from politics and saved from state control. State role in the cultural life of society must be limited to the following: guaranteeing freedom of expression and protecting individual rights; providing material support in the form of unconditional grants to thinkers, writers, artists and cultural institutions; supporting and protecting non-governmental institutions that promote the arts and appreciate creativity and creative works; creating national and international forums for dialogue and other cultural activities that encourage politicians to participate and expose them to the ideas and ideals of intellectuals.
Attempts by the state to direct or control culture are programmes that seek to transform intellectuals and artists into state employees. They invariably corrupt the committed and falsify consciousness. They are attempts to deprive culture of its spirit and dynamism and intellectuals, artists and thinkers of their freedom to create and their power to imagine.
* The writer is professor of international political economy at Al-Akhawayn University, Morocco. He is the author of The Making of History and Making the Arab Future
