We frequently hear words like “structural” or “system.” What does that mean? What do scholars mean when they say these words? Please allow me some rough thoughts on the matter that may help to clarify some confusions.
What is a “structure”? It is something that has been built, that has been created. Typically, many of us may envision roads, buildings, bridges – something tangible that we can touch. But there is more to the term than we might think.
Before we can build something, we have to have an idea of that thing. It has to be conceived in our minds in a certain way. But these thoughts are not as individual as we may think, or hope. Whatever we are thinking – whatever we are able to think – is typically set within a framework of other thoughts, of patterns of thinking, and of societal surroundings. A lot of this has to do with language. Different languages describe the world in different ways that allow people to draw different connections, inferences, or to make allusions or even draw conclusions just from the mere words itself. We may think of different objects as animate or inanimate, as male, female or neutral, as singular or plural, and build our philosophies and mythologies and religions on top of or in interaction with such concepts.
Do you think of shellfish as fish? In English, the connection is clear – in German, I would never think of that because there is no linguistic connection between “Fisch” and “Krustentier.” Do animals eat just as humans? In English, they do – in German, humans “essen” and animals “fressen” – a demeaning word immediately associated with animality. Thus when we see people describe how other humans “fressen”, you can imagine a rather non-civilized mean. Are sun and moon female or male? In Latin, “sol” is male, and “luna” is female – in German, the opposite. How do you neutrally describe someone doing something? In English “one” can be seen as reading, in German, the word for “one” is “man” (which sounds like the German word for man, “Mann”), and thus may invoke male instead of female activity. “Himmel” in Germany signifies both sky and heaven, and mixes the atmospherical with the spiritual. “Culture” in English by now means probably anything humans do, whereas “Kultur” in German automatically implies “high culture.” “Pax Romana” means the “Roman peace,” signifying the euphemistic idea of a peace brought by Rome to the areas united within it. “Pax” (peace) does not mean “orbis” (world). The Roman empire was always multicultural, at the very least Latin and Greek, but the idea of Rome allowed for the continuation of Rome as an idea beyond the political fall of Western Rome in 476 AD. But what is “Russkiy Mir”? In Russian, “mir” means both “peace” and “world.” Is “Russkiy mir” just the “Russian-speaking world”, or is there a claim to a “Pax Russica”, a world governed by Russia? And so on. By the way, all these examples were drawn from closely related languages. Now imagine how much more complex the problem becomes with languages that are even more different.
Now, let us translate this to the more social and political sphere.
Do we believe – with Aristotle – that every human being is by nature a political / social being, a ζῷον πoλιτικόν, a being living within the context of a πόλις (polis, the Greek word for the socio-political structure of the city, as distinguished from ἄστυ (asty, the city as a physical structure)? Or do we believe – with plenty of Enlightenment thinkers – that some people are or have been recently living in a “state of nature”, a more primitive form of existence that is primarily a-political, in contrast to Europeans who have been living in “civilization”?
What political consequences would such a difference in political belief have? If I agree with Aristotle (I emphatically do), I recognize that all human beings all the time have created societies, complex hierarchies, and have always been able to think and act politically, and thus their social structures have to be respected as maybe different but still equal. If I were to agree with the “State of Nature” assumption, I might believe that “civilized” people have a better claim on a territory than “primitive” people, and that colonization, although unpleasant, can be somewhat justified.
Aside from historical relevance, do we believe this still today? Do we believe that we should respect the political agency of other people and cultures, and that we should enable them to help themselves? Or do we believe we know better and that we should just dictate terms of help, and that people will readily accept this?
Don’t take me wrong – I am not in favor of the more stark notions of cultural relativism. I believe in the universality of human rights, but I also believe that we should approach others as equals, not as “other.” Do we let the “other” speak, or are only we allowed to speak? (In her brilliant and sometimes satirical essay “Can the Subaltern Speak,” Gayatri Spivak investigates key aspects of that; but warning: it is a heavy read, which is the point).
What I have been talking about so far are thus structures of thinking, which are oftentimes outcomes of our social surroundings, and which also shape our social surroundings. They influence how we think of others – not that we are limited by definition, but we are certainly in some way or other conditioned to think in certain ways.
Thus before we think about building physical structures, we need to interrogate our thought structures, our social and political biases, and allow ourselves to be open to the needs and potentialities of other people and other surroundings. Put differently, do structures emerge from the needs of the people, or are they imposed on them? If they are imposed, how sustainable are they? If the emerge from them, how flexible are they to outside change?
So much for now, I may build on this later.
Erratic Attempts 