Invented Tradition: The Opiate of the Marxist?

"Tradition:

1 a: an inherited, established, or customary pattern of thought, action, or behavior (as a religious practice or a social custom) b: a belief or story or a body of beliefs or stories relating to the past that are commonly accepted as historical though not verifiable2: the handing down of information, beliefs, and customs by word of mouth or by example from one generation to another without written instruction3: cultural continuity in social attitudes, customs, and institutions4: characteristic manner, method, or style " (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary)

I begin with this lexical definition of tradition because I want to make a distinction between the philosophical and the historical/anthropological. In my own work I mainly use tradition in the sense of 4, while the readings for this week are using it in the sense of 1-3. I am interested in the philosophical tradition of virtue ethics and creating/”inventing” a new school of thought within that tradition. Is this still inventing tradition in the sense Hobsbawm intends? He makes a distinction between tradition, which has ritual and symbolic function, and convention or routine, which has no significant ritual or symbolic routine. He says: “Such networks of convention and routine are not ‘invented traditions’ since their functions, and therefore their justification, are technical rather than ideological (in Marxian terms they belong to ‘base’ rather than ‘superstructure’.)” (Hobsbawm, p.3) This ‘base’ facilitates definable practical operations that are readily abandoned to adapt to changing practical needs. On the one hand I want to say that my ‘invention’ falls under the category of technical rather than ideological, after all scholars of philosophy, by and large, tend to think of themselves beyond ideology in the sense that they are logically objective and the ideology is inherent in the specific philosophy/philosopher of study rather than them. Yet on the other hand I know first hand that this is never really the case. Plenty of scholarship attacks various commentators for having a hidden political/ideological agenda. In fact the very discussion of the term ‘philosophy’ and what can or cannot fall under it is itself ideological. In most departments philosophy encompasses only thinkers who fall within the historical genealogy of the Greek intellectual tradition, thus all “non-Western” thought is excluded from the department. Now, it could be argued that this is merely a technical contention that is slowly changing. In current philosophy departments there is likely to be one or two classes on eastern philosophy; however, is the language of technicality hiding the political? In the space I have left I want to discuss the political implications of “invented tradition.”

The brief reference Hobsbawm made to Marxist thought in the passage I cited above is tantalizing enough to make me question the ideological foundation of Hobsbawm and his term ‘invented tradition’. Does this theory rest on a purely Marxist foundation? Is Hobsbawm trying to hide this? I found this sentence that introduces his discussion of political and nationalistic inventions of tradition to be rather startling. He says: “More interesting from our point of view, is the use of ancient materials to construct invented traditions of a novel type for quite novel purposes.” (Hobsbawm, p. 6) Now, this may just be a personal opinion, but I find his use of the word ‘novel’ to be unsettling. To me, again this may just be a personal idiosyncrasy, the adjective had connotations of lightness and amusement. My unease is not helped by the fact that he mentions the formation of Swiss nationalism in the aftermath of its association with Nazi abuses, but excludes the fact that the construction of invented traditions “of a novel type and for quite novel purposes” equally holds for the Nazi party and for various socialist regimes. There is a dark political side to this idea of invention that seems to be completely glossed over. This bothered me and reminded me of Milan Kundera’s novel “The Joke”. Among other things the novel explores the use and manipulation of folklore and tradition by the Soviet party in Czechoslovakia. Early in the novel one of the characters tells his friends:

“Capitalism had destroyed this old collective life. And so folk art had lost its foundation, its reason for being, its function. It would be useless to try to resurrect it while social conditions were such that man lived cut off from man, everyone for himself. But socialism would liberate people from the yoke of their isolation. They would live in a new collectivity. United by common interest. Their private and public lives would merge. They would be connected by a host of rituals. Some they would take from the past: harvest festivals, folk dances, customs bound up with their daily work. Others they would create anew: May Day, meetings, the Liberations anniversary, rallies. In all of these folk art would find its place. Here it would develop, change, and be renewed.” (Kundera, “The Joke”, p. 141)

Folkloric tradition can be reinvented to promote socialist values. This is the novel invention for novel purposes. Yet, at the end of the novel, the same character, tells the reader:

“…my life had been robbed of values that were to have provided its foundations, and that were in origin pure and innocent; yes, innocent: physical love, however devastated in Lucie’s life is innocent, just as the songs of my region are innocent, just as the cimbalom band is innocent… just as the word comrade, though for me it had a menacing ring, is as innocent as the word future and many other words. The fault lay elsewhere and was so great that its shadow had fallen far and wide, on the whole of the world of innocent things (and words), and was devastating them.” (Kundera, “The Joke”, p. 313)

The dark shadow of political ideology tainted the innocent nature of the folksong, etc. Should this be a warning for the scholar? Is it possible to preserve and study the innocent tradition? Can invention of tradition be innocent, this might be what Post is trying to argue, or will it always be tainted by political motivation? I wonder then how my reinvention/addition to the tradition of virtue ethics will evolve?

“Dune,” Zombies, and Emotion, Oh My!

Paul Atreides wins the hearts of the Fremen of Dune by shedding a tear for his dead father, an act of emotion that defied all rational instinct. (The Fremen lived in the heart of the desert, on a planet where water was more precious than individual life.) This act of emotional excess wins Paul the religious and political allegiance of the Fremen. Earlier in the book Paul undergoes the test of the Gom Jabber, the test to determine whether he is an animal or human. He must place his hand in a box that produces indescribable pain. If he is merely an animal he will instinctively pull out his hand and be killed by the poisoned Gom Jabber held at his neck. If he is human he will control his instinctual reaction, leave his hand in the box, and endure in order to live. How does this relate to the readings on emotion for this week? In the first example, Paul’s display of emotion serves as a tool for reaffirming his religious and political authority. Corrigan says: “Persons do not form judgments based solely on their understanding of social norms, but actually feel the pain of shame or remorse in their moral orientations.” (Corrigan, p. 22) Choices, especially moral choices, involve emotion as well as reason. Religious and political conviction can be just as much an emotional choice as a rational one. I will come back to this in a moment. In the second example Paul must assert rationality over emotion/instinct. It is the ability to reason past instinctual emotions that separates humans from animals. In the book this incident comes before his tears for his father. If we take the Gom Jabber incident to be indicative of his realization that rationality sets boundaries for and reigns in emotion, what can be considered theoretical understanding, then the act of him shedding tears for his dead father, using emotion to gain the further devotion and zeal of the Fremen, is the practical application of this understanding. In what follows I argue that the rational use and manipulation of emotion helps to create religious and moral individuals. (In this entry I will assume that religion, in its ideal form, is necessarily concerned with creating moral perfection.)

However, before application can be discussed, general theory must be understood. The key to understanding emotion versus reason, at least in the context of the readings, is the “dichotomy” between rhetoric and philosophy. Shuger says that: “Rhetoric differed from philosophy in being a popular and practical art, more concerned with right action than speculative inquiry, but both disciplines, in the still largely Christian cultures of the Renaissance, assumed and expounded the same Truth.” (Shuger, p. 120) So while rhetoric is used to stir people into action, appealing to the emotions, philosophy is the speculative abstraction of the tenants of rhetorical action. Simply put, while rhetorical spurs individuals to act of certain truth, philosophy is the intellectual abstraction of these truths. Now, let us assume that religion is equivalent with rhetoric. (Equivalent in the sense that if we define religion to be primarily concerned with morality, making individual’s act rightly, and rhetoric’s goal is to produce right action then both religion and rhetoric are tools used to create moral individuals.) Thus religion/rhetoric relies on appeal to emotion, while philosophy, strictly speaking, does not. If an individual, such as Paul or any philosopher, understands this relationship he/she can manipulate the emotions of the masses in order for them to act in a certain way.

Now this action that is spawned can be either good or bad, however since the philosopher would be an individual who has reached Truth through abstraction and speculation, it is generally believed by philosophers that he/she will act rightly. (For a detailed argument for this and for the relationship between religion and philosophy see al-Farabi’s “One Religion” and/or Plato’s “Republic.”) Leaving political implications aside, I want to deal now with issues of morality. So far I have been implying that moral action relies on emotion. I want to construct this argument further by analyzing the concept of philosophical zombies. I have to acknowledge my debit to Dale Jacquette for his brilliant article “Zombie Gladiators” in “The Undead And Philosophy,” who first brought this argument to my attention. Let us assume that there are zombies living among us. They look exactly like us, behave exactly like us, except they have no consciousness. In short while they exhibit emotion they feel none (and feel nothing for that matter). Perhaps they have a small marking somewhere on their body that distinguishes them as zombies, in order not to be bogged down in details let us willingly suspend our disbelief and assume society has an infallible way of marking them. Because these zombies are undead society has permitted them to be killed in sport and to be used for scientific experimentation. However, because they look and act like humans, they have meaningful personal relationships and they present reactions to pain and loss. Is what society allows to be done to them morally wrong?

Appealing to reason the argument might be constructed like this: If something exhibits signs of pain then it is wrong to kill it because it might, in fact, be like us. Therefore, it is wrong to kill zombies. Yet how many people act morally merely due to rationality? What about this argument: Imagine that your brother/sister/lover/child was born with a marking similar to the one that distinguishes zombies. He/she is mistakenly taken and killed. Did his/her death look any different from a zombie death? Is there anyway of proving that he/she was not a zombie? Why would the appeal to emotion work better then the appeal to reason? Does this signify that, although rationality is superior to pure emotion, most moral arguments have to be constructed with an appeal to emotion because most individuals have not refined their intellect? What is the significance between sinner/saved, imperfect/perfect in relation to religious rhetoric and morality?

Ritual and Virtue Ethics

When I first started the readings for this week I was perplexed because I had no idea what to say about the topic or how to critique the articles, then I got to Mahmood’s article. I want to engage the topic of ritual as it relates to virtue ethics. I was amazed that Mahmood never mentioned the term “virtue ethics.” She dances around the topic, mentioning Aristotle’s habitus (pp. 11-13), but she never directly confronts it, which is rather disappointing because it would be a helpful insight in analyzing her findings. In what follows I will explore virtue ethics and its relation to ritual/performance in the context of Mahmood’s article.

It is important to start by clarifying what I mean by virtue ethics. Virtue ethics, which has Platonic and Aristotelian roots in the west and Confucian roots in the east, is concerned with producing “perfect” individuals, individuals who intuitively, or to use Mahmood’s term, spontaneously, do the good. For the purposes of this discussion I will define virtue as the capacity to not only know and do what is right/good but also to feel what is right/good, to do the right thing for the right reasons. Mahmood says of her subjects that: “In interviews with me, mosque participants identified the act of prayer as a key site for purposefully molding their intentions, emotions, and desires in accord with orthodox standards of Islamic piety.” (p. 2) She further says that these women are intent on initiating religious transformation in a society where they see religious devotion performed from cultural habit rather than actual devotion. Thus, they seek to cultivate an ideal virtuous self who spontaneously acts rightly with inherent “natural” religious conviction.

There are many branches of virtue ethics, each with its own specific theory as to how this is achieved and what it entails, so for the sake of brevity I will only employ the theory of al-Farabi. Al-Farabi, known as “The Second Teacher” (second only to Aristotle), is considered the first Islamic political philosopher and greatly influenced all philosophical thought that followed him. I choose to use his theory because it raises many questions inherent to the position of the women interviewed by Mahmood; most importantly: Is virtue primarily a habit? Can ritual/habit produce a state of being? And, does religion produce actual virtue or mere habit?

In the remainder of this entry I want to focus on how virtue is acquired by analyzing the three questions presented in the previous paragraph. The first question that asks if virtue is primarily a habit, deals with the central core of virtue ethics. If virtue is solely the habit of doing the right thing, then it is possible for someone to be virtuous, do what is right, without actually believing it is right or feeling that that is the only thing to do. For example, the women in Mahmood’s study expressed the distinction between those who perform the religious rituals out of cultural habit and those who perform them out of religious conviction. The first group consists of individuals who do the right thing, out of habit and social conformity, but who internally would rather do something else or feel a compulsion to do what is morally wrong. The second group is made up of individuals who strive to do the right thing with the right state of mind. Thus, virtue cannot be mere habit. Al-Farabi explains that: “The traits of the soul by which a human being does good things and noble actions are virtues.” (al-Farabi, “Selected Aphorisms,” p. 12) Virtue is a trait, not a habit. It is a part of the individual’s being, not just a custom that he/she adopts.

This leads to the second question concerning whether or not ritual/habit can produce a state of being. In the second footnote of the article Mahmood discusses the impact ritual has on the self, the distinction between the private and public, and the Enlightenment idea of the self articulated by Rousseau. She says: “This view of the unique privatized subject whose essence cannot be captured in the social conventions of a given society seems to resonate with the conception of ritual action as necessarily devoid of ‘authentic, individual’ emotions.” (Mahmood, p. 20) I want to contrast this with a quote from al-Farabi. He says:

“It is not possible for a human being to be endowed by nature from the outset possessing virtue… But it is possible for one to be endowed by nature disposed for virtuous or vicious actions in that such actions are easier for him than other actions… That natural disposition is not said to be a virtue, just as the natural disposition for the actions of an art is not said to be an art.” (al-Farabi, “Selected Aphorisms,” p. 17)

The position that Mahmood was articulating posits that the true self of the individual is separate from the public self that the individual displays, therefore, since ritual is a part of the public self, it never has any authenticity with regard to the true/essential self. Within this framework ritual or habit could never produce a state of being, it could only shape the public self. It could shape one of the modes of being, but not produce an actual state. In contrast, al-Farabi suggests that some individuals are born with a natural capacity for virtue. It is a disposition that he/she is born with, similar to the disposition to become a painter or a doctor. However, having this disposition does not mean the individual is that. Just as an individual has to learn how to be a painter or a doctor, he/she also has to learn how to become virtuous. This learning entails adopting good habits and cultivating a proper mind-set, thereby producing a virtuous state of being. I think it is fairly obvious that the women Mahmood studied are working within a Farabian framework rather than an Enlightenment one.

This leads us the final question concerning whether religion/religious rituals produce actual virtue or mere habit. If virtue has to be cultivated, and only some individuals are born with a disposition for virtue, then can only those with a natural disposition for virtue become virtuous? What would the women Mahmood interviewed say about this position? Regarding politics al-Farabi claimed that only the king/leader has to be virtuous, the subjects merely have to habitually do what is good. This is because, while the king can chastise the people who err, if the king errs he/she will lead the people into error. Does this have any impact on Mahmood’s study? The answer to the question concerning virtue and habit is it produces both. Should the emphasis then be on the individual rather than ritual?