Karen Cronick
INTRODUCTION
It is
important to reflect on the theoretical aspects of citizen participation. This
can happen as a result of a professional intervention, but it can also be a collective
endeavor that results from “naturally” occurring processes. Even when it
originates in the relatively spontaneous movements of concerned citizens, it is
important for professionals who are active in community work to understand the
dynamics of these events.
In this
essay I will consider the role of culture in bringing about political change.
While it is possible to “create culture” in a community intervention, it is also
important to understand naturally occurring beliefs and customs in order to
help people to redress injustices or correct damaging practices. It is also
important to understand the term “consciousness” in the sense of the awareness
that people have of their place in the world, their aspirations for change, and
their possibilities of achieving it.
I will
review certain conceptions that describe how culture works in this way, and its
relationship to consciousness. I will also consider political action from
different points of view including efforts to overcome violence, scarcities, and
migrations.
The people
who develop new ideas about social change tend to be intellectuals, dissidents
(such as active minorities -Moscovici 1996), groups such as non-governmental
organizations (NGOs), ad hoc committees and other similar groupings. It rarely
happens within the power structures of centralized systems, except as a means of
concentrating even more power in fewer hands.[1]
It
sometimes happens that a population actively attempts to submit to a tyranny.
Thomas Hobbes’ (2022) promoted citizens’ voluntary submission to powerful
figures; he described how they can organize to renounce their rights and hand
them over to a monarch or an assembly. The citizen abdication that Hobbes
describes can also occur after a conquest if the defeated "authors"
agree to become the subjects of a king or a tyrant because of their fear of
reprisals. A Hobbesian "pact"—manifest, implied, or obligatory—would
be a means of escaping the natural violence that, according to him, would occur
in groups that lack an absolute governing figure.
The
structures of public administration that are organized around powerful leaders
such as kings, conquerors, dictatorships and even some elected presidents, do
not generally respond to the needs of general welfare. Throughout history,
societies have been divided into classes or castes, which include the
successive levels (from bottom up) the slaves, the free but lower classes
(serfs and laborers, artisans, small merchants), the clergy, the nobility in
its various ranks, and finally the king or the great lord (or mistress). This
kind of hierarchy with its variants has lasted for millennia.
On the
other hand, given the right conditions people can stand up to power and demand
their collective rights. Normally the changes initiated from a profound
cultural level have to do with the need to increase popular participation in
decision-making in order to increase the well-being of the majorities.
Political change is a complex issue. We must ask, where does the need for
libertarian change come from?
There have
been a few moments of popularly motivated social change. They tend to surge
from the proposals of artists, playwrights, writers, philosophers and intellectuals
in general who at certain critical moments have responded with proposals for
social transformation.
There are a
few examples: In ancient Athens it was not a simple coincidence that Solon
(fourth and fifth centuries B.C.) was a poet. He created the conditions for the
world’s first constitutional democracy, that opened the door for some of the
most prolific intellectual achievements the world has known. But after the
brilliant years of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, and the others, Athenian
democracy weakened, largely due to military influence, the involvement of the
Greeks in various wars, and the rivalry between Athens and Sparta. It ended
definitively with the arrival of Alexander the Great.
Likewise,
philosophers and poets paved the way for European and American democracy in the
eighteenth century. The origins of these movements had long periods of
development: the Enlightenment, for example, began with the Renaissance
(fifteenth and sixteenth centuries), and continued in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. In these times authors, artists, scientists, and
philosophers (who were not in power) such as William Shakespeare, Leonardo da
Vinci, Nicolaus Copernicus, Sir Francis Bacon, René Descartes, and later,
Immanuel Kant, John Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
Thomas Hobbes, Denis Diderot and Adam Smith debated each other in the
publications, theaters and meeting houses of their time. Each proclaimed his
particular perspectives. These people did not need to agree, the important
thing was their shared debate.
In other
words, free debate, far from causing havoc and chaos, produces critical
thinking that empowers people of all ranks. It would be better if the whole
population were literate, but at the critical moments just mentioned, few could
read. It was enough for the information to come through word of mouth from of
those who could understand the written word. The various options these people
put forward resonated with people’s needs.
It was a
necessity at those times, and it is a current task. Our present society is in
crisis. The well-being of the majority requires urgent attention. What are our
current needs? We can find them in need to resolve the conditions that produce
unrest: a) wars between nations, b) acts of terrorism that arise in the name of
the ideological causes of discontented and uncontrolled groups and individuals,
c) deaths and other misfortunes that accompany migratory attempts[2], d) violence between citizens of
the same country based on ideological differences or identity issues such as
race and religion, e) the local and
poorly resolved efforts to alleviate hunger and disease and f) the
dehumanization of the institutions we call prisons and jails, among others.
In the
following reflections I will briefly refer to these tragedies, and I will
discuss how cultural opposition to these situations begins to develop. As a
culture we have allowed these misfortunes to grow, and as a culture we can solve
them. Governmental institutions will not act in favor of the common good
without the insistence of their populations and its thinkers. And community
psychologists have an immense role to play in this process.
In modern
times have we have sometimes tried to transform these situations with massive
programs. After the Second World War there were two extraordinary attempts to
alleviate the suffering caused by that conflagration: the creation of the
United Nations and the Marshall Plan.
The First
attempt occurred in 1945 when the United Nations (UN) was established. Its main
purpose was to prevent future wars. Specifically, the objectives of this organization
were: the maintenance of world peace, the protection of human rights, the
provision of aid in cases of need, and the promotion of international law.
Eighty years later, it is clear that the organization has, indeed, had a
positive effect, but it has not enjoyed all the support it requires to able to
avoid war. The weakness of the UN is a problem now. State and international
organizations tend to reflect the interests of the already powerful, not those
of the world's population.
We rely on
national and international organizations, congresses and parliaments, political
parties, businesses, and other organizations to solve our social problems.
However, it is becoming more and more evident that the only organizations that
are going to "save" us are those that promote widespread considerations
about who we are and what we wish to become. They open debates and awaken
awareness about the possibility of more just societies. One example of such an
organization would be an innovated education system, and another might be found
in NGOs[3]
such as "Care for Peace", "Save the Children",
"Doctors without Borders”, “Greenpeace" and others that offer relief
and reflection in emergency situations. We have to evaluate our true needs, and
reconsider what our most transcendental values are. And we have to do it as
interconnected collectivities. It has to be an explicit and intentional
process, if we want to stop being xenophobic, violent, vindictive and fearful.
The second massive
historical attempt at alleviating the civilian cost of war and promoting world
peace was the Marshall Plan (also called the European Recovery Program, April
1948–December 1951). It originated in the United States and was designed to
rehabilitate the countries defeated in World War II that had been recent
enemies. The aim was to create stable economies in which democratic
institutions could develop. This program was such an overwhelming success that
it allowed Germany and Japan, at that time completely war-torn, former enemies,
to rebuild within a few years.
The
victorious countries had learned from the consequences of having imposed on Germany
the obligation of “reparations” after World War I, only 27 years earlier. These onerous obligations were part of the
Paris Peace Accords in 1918. The demands placed on Germany produced so much
unrest in the country that they lead directly to the temporary success of Fascism
and the Second World War. The agreements required Germany to hand over 6% of
its gross domestic product to its former enemies, and this caused much
impoverishment and unrest in the population.
The
Marshall Plan had great popular appeal in the United States. Its citizens
wanted peace. At the time of the presentation of the program to both legislative
houses of the U.S., and multiple national and international guests, President
Truman declared:
“At the present moment in world history nearly
every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too
often not a free one. One way of life is based upon the will of the majority,
and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free
elections, guaranties of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion,
and freedom from political oppression. The second way of life is based on the
will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority [....] I believe that our help should be primarily
through economic and financial aid, which is essential to economic stability
and orderly political processes” (Jones, 2022, p 21-22).
In this
case, the decision to finance the reconstruction of Europe after the war was
taken at the highest levels of the US government, but it responded to a general
desire among the population for the construction of a lasting peace.
In what
follows I will examine current social and cultural expectations that have to do
with aspects of human well-being that we could control and change. I will first
consider the ideas of culture and the Lifeworld, and then I will consider the
problem of human consciousness within the cultural limits we have imposed on
ourselves. Finally, I will reflect on the sources of social discomfort and ways
of alleviating it.
CULTURE
AND THE "LIFEWORLD"[4]
AT ITS PSYCHOSOCIAL AND CULTURAL LEVELS
Culture
and its role in social change
"Culture"
is the favorite topic of anthropologists and sociologists. As a general rule,
anthropology studies small communities, often tribal and isolated groups.
Sociology, on the other hand, tends to analyze large institutions in Europe,
Asia, or the Americas with the aim of making social trends and structures
visible. In what follows, I will concentrate my ideas on the idea of culture as
a social-political environment in which ideas about the general welfare can be
debated and understood.
Culture can
have a positive or a negative influence. In Cronick (2025) the author reviews
the positive effects of the European Illustration on democratic self-government
in the American continents, together with three other influences: a) the
negative effects of slavery, b) the almost-annihilation of the indigenous
populations, and c) the massive displacement caused by European migrations. She
discusses the nearly simultaneous impact of these experiences, and the conflict
between them in the 19th century, all of which continue to influence
intercontinental American culture.
Martínez, Bermúdez, Cediel, and Beltrán (2022), in an article on the role of
culture in the economic and political development of nations, state that it has
a fundamental role in the creation of well-being and the full participation of
citizens in the decision processes of their state and communities. They point
out how the United Nations, together with the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), is promoting culture as one of
the pivots of development, within the framework of fundamental freedoms. They
say that it "strengthens political and citizen participation, invigorates
social solidarity and cooperation, refines the formation of values, and
strengthens the re-memorization of the historical heritage". They offer
various definitions of culture such as:
1. a
complex whole that links to the totality of manifestations that express the
life of a human group,
2. a
textile of meanings, in which all kinds of semantic and syntagmatic
relationships are intertwined, but also social and cultural content exchange
through which we can carry out the exegetical exercise of the ontology of
being,
3. a means
of change and social transformation. The authors cite the work of Escobar
(1999) in this definition. The approach is more enriching when the
epistemological vision leads us to think about development from a humanistic
approach, which includes the participation of Nation-States, local communities
and different social actors in decision-making and in the formulation and
implementation of cultural policies.
The authors
say that "culture is expressed as artistic creation and reference,
identity, education, patterns of conduct, life models, social representation,
symbols, values and practice, as well as an element of power". The role of
the individual is to recreate the meaning of the world and of his or her own
existence, always within the framework of his or her cultural history, but also
with the possibility of intentional change. Martínez, Bermudez et al affirm
that culture can influence nations’ social and political development,
strengthening human rights and social values and even their models for economic
growth. They say that it is understood that the intertwining of social factors
influences the cultural and economic development of a society.
This
approach to culture incorporates the ideas of intentional and thoughtful change
in favor of humanistic values. It does not abandon the idea of tradition, but
puts it at the service of the well-being of all members of society. Even in
countries where leaders have used cultural aspects mainly to strengthen their
own power, the diversity of cultural allows us to question some practices. In
South Africa, for example, apartheid was challenged by members of both the white
and black populations, and eventually Nelson Mandela became the nation's first
black president. Both he and the
previous (white) president, Frederik de Klerk, shared the Nobel Peace Prize in
1993 for their efforts which were backed by an immense collective effort.
In its
usual sense the term "culture" is used with reference to works of
art, fiction and music. This meaning, too, has served as a precedent to
mobilize consciousness. And these manifestations are always active in social
change.
The desire
for peace is perhaps the deepest longing of all. Possibly one of the most
famous artistic achievements promoting peace -of all times- is Beethoven’s
Ninth Symphony. Premiered in 1824, in its fourth and final movement Beethoven included
a chorus developed from a version of Friedrich Schiller’s poem "An
die Freude" (which in the symphony is called the “Ode to Joy”). The
poem evokes ideas of cultural harmony and friendship. It still today expresses
humanity's oldest aspiration. The Council of Europe, 161 years later, adopted it
in a musical version developed by Herbert von Karajan, as the Anthem of Europe,
and later the European Union also adopted it. It evokes an appeal to universal
peace, and thus, the anthem does not have official lyrics, only music; everyone
sings it in their own way, in the language they want, and with the same desire
for worldwide goodwill, following the same notes in a beautiful gesture of
unity. A translation into English of the original lyrics of the first verse
used by Beethoven would be:
Listen, brother, to the song of joy. The joyful
song of the one who waits for a new day. Come, sing, dream singing. Live
dreaming of the new sunshine in which men will be brothers again.
Throughout
history there have been many works that have promoted the essential brotherhood
-and sisterhood- of humanity. The ancient Greeks wrote multiple texts in favor
of peace, or at least lamentations for the effects of war, for example,
Euripides' The Trojan Women (n.d.). In this work, the author, who was Greek and
a descendant of the victorious conquerors of Troy, writes about the mourning of
the Trojan survivors of the conquered nation. Centuries later Erasmus of
Rotterdam[5] was a medieval pacifist philosopher
known throughout Europe. Another author who promoted peace was Miguel de Cervantes[6] , who in his work praised it as the
greatest good of men.
The
Renaissance paintings, especially in Italian paintings and sculptures,
represent not only technical changes in relation to the medieval styles, but
also philosophical ones: this new artwork celebrates the human body, not only
because of its divine origin, but also for its humanist values. In these
paintings and sculptures, the body is depicted with realistic enthusiasm.
Objects and people are “in the world” and have their own reality. Peace was a
major theme among the thinkers of that time. Isabella Lazzarini, Andrea Guidi,
Elena Bonora, Sean Roberts and Diego Prillo (2020) observe that:
[… ] In the Renaissance and the Reformation,
the term ‘peace’ referred at the same time to a state and a notion; the first
derived from events and treaties, while the second participated in a system of
representations, that is an image that a specific society constructs about
itself. In this second acceptation, the notion of peace crossed the path of some
other crucial concepts like justice, freedom, the common good. Such political
keywords not only played a pivotal role in daily social and political life but
also represented the building blocks of the theoretical analysis of reality
outlined by intellectuals such as Machiavelli, Erasmus, Vives, Vitoria,
Montaigne, Gentili, Bodin, Grotius, who worked extensively on peace and its
opposite – war – and on their crossings and reciprocal interferences [….]
In more
recent centuries the longing for peace has several iconic representations in
fiction. There are, for example, two episodes, in two different novels, in
which enemy soldiers meet, look into each other's eyes, and finding humanity
instead of adverse interests, they separate in harmony. The first is found in
Tolstoy's War and Peace: (cited by Bosé and Puyana, 2017, p. 39).
"They were looking at each other for a few
moments and that saved Pierre. In that gaze, apart from the conditions of war
and judgment, a human relationship was established between the two men. In that
brief moment, the two of them vaguely felt an infinite expanse of things: they
understood that they were both children of humanity, that they were
brothers."
In a second
example, in the twentieth century, Javier Cercas (2023) in Soldiers of Salamis,
talks about incidents at the end of the war between the Republicans and the
Francoists, especially stories about a fascist soldier, Rafael Sánchez. The
novel opens with a description of a mass shooting by the Republicans in
Catalonia, almost at the moment of beginning their flight from Spain. What
Cercas describes was an encounter between an anonymous republican militiaman
and Sánchez, in which a human gaze prevents an execution:
From there, sheltered in a hole, [my father]
heard the barking of dogs and the gunshots and the voices of the militiamen,
who were looking for him [...] At some point my father heard a noise of
branches behind him, turned around and saw a militiaman looking at him. Then
there was a cry: "Is he out there?" My father said that the
militiaman stared at him for a few seconds and then, without shifting his eyes,
shouted: "There's no one around here!", turned around and left....
(p. 5-6).
Another
example is the historically true episode at the beginning of World War I on
Christmas Eve, 1914, when German and English soldiers observed a series of unauthorized
ceasefires along the Western Front. During lulls in the fighting the soldiers
began to sing Christmas carols. It began with the Germans in their trenches
singing “Stille Nacht” and the English in their own trenches joining in
with “Silent Night”. Soon French, German, and British soldiers crossed the barriers
to exchange Christmas greetings and gifts of food and drinks. There were
football games, and they took time for joint burial ceremonies and prisoner exchanges.
These celebrations were soon stopped by the English military command and then
fighting resumed. Some of the participants were court-marshalled (Ray, 2025).
This is another example of how war is not a universal motive.
In the
visual arts, Pablo Picasso's Guernica (painted in 1937) is one of the most
iconic paintings of the twentieth century. Also, Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd's
sculpture, Nonviolence, demonstrates a revolver tied in a knot; it is on
permanent display at the UN. Also at the UN is Norman Rockwell's Golden Rule
mosaic that shows people of all races, religions and genders, in peace and
harmony.
In this
very short journey through the culture of peace, it is important not to forget
the historians. Perhaps one of the stories that most describes the lamentations
of war is Homer's Iliad. In addition to the legends of heroes and their
exploits, the poet grieves the destruction and the lives lost. Homer mourns, in
the very first lines of the Iliad: (Homer, VIII c. B.C.E. /n.d.):
Declare, O Muse! in what ill-fated hour Sprung
the fierce strife, from what offended power Latona's son a dire contagion
spread, And heap'd the camp with mountains of the dead; The king of men his
reverent priest defied, And for the king's offence the people died….
The study
of the history of peace should lead to a broad historical narrative. Gittings
(2016) describes the history of peace thusly:
Taking a very long view of modern history, we
may detect four separate strands of peace-and-war thought and argument over the
last millennium. First is the realist approach, whose origin is popularly
associated with Machiavelli (although it has older antecedents with Thucydides,
among other classical sources). The realist approach had particular appeal in
the age of the rise of nation-states, was later associated with the ruthless
outlook on humanity of Social Darwinism, and flourished again in the amoral age
of Cold War nuclear strategy. Second is the theory of just war, often traced
back to St Augustine …. Dormant for obvious reasons for most of the Cold War,
just war theory has been reinvigorated by more recent debate on the ethics of
‘humanitarian intervention’ and the ‘war against terror’. A third strand is the
continuous narrative of peace thinking which can be traced from the time of
Erasmus and fellow-humanists of the Renaissance, through Kant and other
philosophers of the Enlightenment, to the peace societies and conferences of
the nineteenth century, whose efforts to find international mechanisms for
peaceful negotiation of differences between states seemed for a while to
produce tangible results in the creation of new institutions for arbitration
and for the limitation of war. Though these hopes were dashed by 1914, they
paved the way ahead for the League of Nations, and ultimately for the United
Nations. The fourth strand is the history of pacifist thought and action …. “
This approach leads to
understanding peace as a human condition that people can stimulate, organize
and administer. But it also requires that the participants understand the
history of the concept, and the manipulations that leads them to war. They need
to know about the social instruments they can count on to obtain a fruitful
coexistence based on dialogue and understanding. And they need to know that all
this is possible.
Freedom
or lordship
For as long
as there has been historical evidence, kings have exercised power exclusively
in their reigns, and have attempted to conquer nearby kingdoms, enlarging their
own territories or creating colonies under their control. There is evidence
that human beings were not always like this. In fact, in their book "The
Dawn of Everything", Graeber and Wenfrow (2021) state that in the first
millennia of human history, human groups exhibited cooperative and deliberative
behaviors. This collective decision-making was not limited to tribal life; according
to these two authors, some large settlements were governed by these principles.
It was only
in the last four or five millennia that kings, conquerors and dictators, with
their war strategies, have dominated the human experience, but this period
covers all documented history. For as long as we have historical references,
there have been colonialists and monarchs who have imposed their authority by
force.
It has
happened that the inhabitants of some lands have chosen to be ruled by kings. In this we remember Hobbes´writings. For example. There is a captivating story in the Old Testament (Samuel I,
chapter 8) that has been cited by Cronick (2024a). It relates how the people of
Israel asked Samuel, the priest, to appoint a king for them. The Israelites had
been peaceful nomads until then, but their fears of the surrounding empires
made them desire a stronger society that could protect them. The wise old
priest warned them that they would lose much of their autonomy if they accepted
the authority of a king. He told them that a king would take their sons as
servants, cooks, and soldiers, that he would take their lands, their vineyards,
and their olive groves. But the people persisted, despite Samuel's warnings
about the misfortunes and wars and difficulties that were to come. Finally, the
priest gave in and facilitated the search for this first monarch, who ended up
being a young man named Saul. The story is interesting because it demonstrates
a certain awareness among the ancient sages of the time about the meaning of
power and the privations that come when the authority of princes is accepted.
This
account describes a long time of transformation in which independent peoples,
described by Graeber and Wenfrow and ancient sources, became monarchies with
their different levels of authority and distribution of wealth. In this
hierarchical and cultural reorganization, the old norms of tribal solidarity
were replaced by others in which competitiveness and rank became important.
Once in
power, the acquisition of new territories was not only attractive among the
kings, but also a requirement for their survival. When Agamemnon went to
conquer Troy, and when Alexander the Great ended Athenian democracy, they
obeyed the same cultural mandates that the European conquerors followed in
Africa and the Americas. It was a similar mandate when the Germans launched their
war to increase their "lebensraum" and Russia and the United
States invaded Afghanistan in turn.
I just
watched a video of an interview with Jeremy Griffith (Wtm, 2024) in which he
says that he has "discovered" the solution to the human condition in
which aggression and domination have been the main motivations. He says that the
models that claim that this aggression is genetically determined are not the
most suitable for understanding this problem. Despite what I consider to be
some important simplifications in his arguments, I think he has touched on
something important. Griffith says that there is no determinism based on
chromosomes to explain competitiveness and violence in human beings. Rather, it
is a psychological imposition. Taking his argument a step further, it can be
added that this has long-standing cultural roots.
Sources
of violence
Wars and
terrorism
There were
56 wars in 2024, according to Alejandra Agudo (2024), with 92 countries
involved beyond their borders. These events were international in nature and
had their origin in the aggressions carried out by those who hold governmental
power. Terrorism, on the other hand, is a kind of undeclared war in which
individuals or groups (with or without the backing of the countries they
support) physically attack people and groups they consider their
"enemies." Stephanía Suarez mentions some of those that occurred in
2024: walkie-talkie explosions in Lebanon, a fire in Turkey, explosions in
Kerman in Iran, a shooting in Pucallpa in Peru, violence in Durán in Ecuador, a
massacre in the municipality of Crocus in Russia, and an attack on a Christmas
market in Germany. This type of violence is sometimes supported by governments
that fund and control violent groups that promote these acts, but they are not
full-blown wars.
Migrations
The
discomfort reaches the most intimate experience. The intensity of migrations in
which almost entire populations trying to escape hunger and oppression is at
levels never seen before. The violence associated with these escapes is not
limited to the countries the migrants flee from: migrants face intimidation
throughout the trajectory of their exodus, and eventually also in the countries
where they settle. They are treated as undesirable people and sometimes there
are political interests that foment hostility against them. Migrant-receiving
populations often accept this xenophobia as part of their own cultural
identity, without reflecting on the nefarious values with which they are
associated.
Violence
among citizens
Aggression
between citizens and between neighbors is sometimes related to acts of
terrorism, but in general it is the result of individual acts of homicide or cruelty
the source of which is rooted in the personal psychological distress of its
perpetrators. This type of violence has also reached tragic levels. Our news
sources are filled with accounts of mass murders and attempted violence. These
news items have to do with aggressions with no probable links to the multiple
repressive bodies associated with the governments of the world.
What needs
to be emphasized here is that we are living in a time of great unrest and
threat. This collective mood is affecting all of us. Not all of us would grab a
gun to kill our neighbors, or throw a vehicle at defenseless people on the
street. But we all live through the effects of the anxiety that all this causes,
and many of us – who haven't actually executed anyone (yet) – own guns at home that
have the sole purpose of violent defense. [7]
Numbeo
(Index, n.d.) published a list of the countries in the world according to the
homicide rate (number of deaths per 100 thousand inhabitants) in the first half
of 2024; The top five countries, with their indexes are: 1) Venezuela, 80.90, 2)
Papuea New Guines, 80.08, 3) Haiti, 78.65, 4) Afghanistan 75.74, and 5) South
Africa, 74.84.
The
countries with the fewest homicides in the same period were Hong Kong, (China),
Isle of Man, Oman, Taiwan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Andorra. There
is an obvious bias due to the small population of these places, even
considering that these are indices and not total numbers.
Among the
largest countries we find that the United States has an index of 49.21 and
Russia’s index is 38.85.
The
aggressors are usually people who lack the emotional and social resources to
control their anger. These are cultural shortcomings that could be remedied if
there were appropriate psychological and educational resources to help them.
It is also
important to remember that our societies give undue influence to certain
economic interests that benefit from the manufacture and sale of lethal
instruments. These interests promote both wars and social violence. Taking on
the task of controlling them would also be an undertaking that would include
the development of a new social and cultural consciousness.
The
aggressors are people who lack the emotional and social resources to control
their anger. What's more, they usually cannot locate the causes of their
discomfort. These are psychological and cultural shortcomings that could be
remedied if there were appropriate clinical and educational resources to help
them.
Lack of
adequate food and housing
Regarding
the problem of the lack of adequate food in the world, a United Nations page (UN
News, 2025) reports that "hunger is spreading in the world, affecting 20%
of the population in 59 countries". This is even the case in some sectors
of well-to-do countries.
At the same
time, economic inequality is on the rise: Markus
Schreiber (2025), writing in the newspaper La Nación, informs us that:
"Between 2015 and 2024, fortunes of more than one billion dollars in the
world increased by 121% (from 6.3 trillion to 14 trillion dollars), and the
number of billionaires went from 1,757 to 2,682, according to the annual report
on high net.worth by the Swiss bank UBS."
The very rich are not directly responsible for the unrest of the poor,
but an economic system that allows a few people to enjoy most of its economic
resources engenders extreme shortages among some of its members.
Prisons
In a
society governed by empathetic principles, people considered criminals would
receive appropriate treatment to remedy their antisocial status. This society
would recognize that criminals have also been victims of affective
deficiencies. But this has happened on
few occasions. As a general rule, those who are considered criminals end up in
places of confinement, without rights and in deplorable conditions. These
conditions do not diminish their aggressive tendencies; rather, they reinforce
them. In our cultures we still demand retribution and revenge, and we believe
that these people must "pay" for their guilt with their own pain and
discomfort.
There are
initiatives for a reconsideration of this ethic of retribution, but in general
they are suggestions without legal obligations. Anastasia Platonova (n.d.)
summarizes the Doha Declaration (adopted at the 13th United Nations Congress on
Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice) on the importance of measures to
rehabilitate prisoners and integrate them back into their communities. This
document emphasizes the need to build effective, impartial, humane and
accountable criminal justice systems globally. The author points out how the
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has offered support to its
member states to develop prison programs focused more on rehabilitation than
punishment. UNODC has developed a "Roadmap for the Development of
Rehabilitation Programs in Prisons", to support sustainable rehabilitation
effort. It also offers a "Manual on Anti-Corruption Measures in
Prisons" and an "Introductory Guide to the Prevention of Recidivism
and Social Reintegration of Offenders".
In other
words, there are voices that ask for change, but there are interests and
prejudices that maintain the current system. The changes that might occur will
arise from popular demand. The proponents of change are going to have to find
voices and echoes in civil society. It is a phenomenon that has occurred
before, for example, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of the
European Enlightenment. Now we need similar voices to ask for harmony,
well-being and peace, as well as freedom.
SOCIAL
CHANGE AND POLITICAL ACTION
Social
consciousness
We may need
to consider that consciousness is a cultural phenomenon, not in the sense of a
mental capacity, but rather in terms of self-perception and awareness of others.
The way people perceive themselves makes a difference in what possibilities
they see for themselves and how they act. This changing self-perception has
cultural roots and has influenced humanity’s ways of relating to the world and
to others, and has had a profound political impact.
For René
Descartes consciousness was rational thought that defined a thinker’s very
existence. Juan Manuel Navarro in his introduction to Rules for the Direction
of the Spirit (Descartes, 1996) quotes Hegel who said that self-consciousness,
as described by Descartes, is an essential moment of truth for modern
philosophy in which it declared its independence from theology. It was the
beginning of the “principle of immanence", in which philosophy’s attention
switched from “the object to the subject, from the world to the self, from the
exterior to the interior” (p. 8). Meditation about objects becomes a deliberation
about the essence of “what is”, in this case, an appreciation that arises from
the thoughts of a being who is thinking.
In his
fifth rule Descartes (1996) talks about the need to substitute ontological
reflections (in the scholastic sense) for epistemological ones, which, although
objective (scientifically speaking) imply subjective criteria (Navarro-Cordón in
Descartes 1996, p. 21), or, at least a conscious decision to think one way and
reject other ways. Method is important for Descartes in that it underlies his
philosophy, and given that the method is chosen by the person who thinks, it
determines de direction of his thoughts.
In Descartes the method is a requirement for the critical spirit who is
confronting his or her own cultural and historical legacy. The method is not
something merely "methodological", but is rather an intimate
motivation and anthropological demand. What is questioned is the self itself,
and therefore the method gives rise to the birth of "secularized man"
(p. 26).
In John
Locke we find reflections, not only about how conscious thought leads to a true
appreciation of reality as conceived by a conscious mind, but also the
mechanics of thought and self-awareness. Gideon Yaffe (2011) has analyzed
Locke’s approach to consciousness. Consciousness and awareness can be
distinguished from sensory perception. Perception is an appreciation of what
goes on in the world according to one´s visual and auditory appreciation.
Consciousness, however, is directed inward. “As Locke puts it, “[c]onsciousness
is the perception of what passes in a Man’s own mind” (p. 2). Locke described
how one is aware of both individual events or thoughts in time, and a
continuous stream of awareness. The thinking person is then capable of
abstraction in which general ideas are created from particular ideas given by experience.
Next, the person combines ideas to create complexes that may or may not be
found in experience. And finally thought permits comparing, in which one
creates ideas of relations from these ideas. This reflection on the nature of
being and awareness has obvious roots in Descartes, as Yaffe notes, and is at
the same time a new way of looking at man as a thinking creature.
The
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Kant, 2024) examines how Kant enlarged on
these reflections. The authors say: Kant’s phenomenal consciousness was more
than just a succession of associated ideas. It was the experience of a
conscious self, but placed in an objective world that incorporated a structure
of space, time and causality. Kant was able to englobe ideas about ethics, and
the transcendence of specific moral dictums. This observation is crucial for
the growing awareness among Illustration philosophers about the role of
responsiveness in the development of man’s role in determining political
awareness.
Truth and ethics
In la
publication in Bioética (2024), the ideas of truth and ethics are linked. The
author says that the development of a concept of ethics is a cultural and
transformational work; For example, he affirms that in political scenarios this
could manifest itself in movements that articulate real demands for social
justice. He affirms that the value of loyalty to the family or social group can
be culturally contrasted with other values, and we can mention the recognition
of the basic unity of humanity as an ethical foundation. Therefore, he says,
there is no single way to understand morality; it varies depending on the place
and the time. Education would be central to the development and extension of
ethical concepts in each culture.
It is
interesting how, in popular language, ethics is linked to the idea of
"what is right", a concept that is invariably connected with the
foundation or with "the truth". Daniel Figuera (2025) refers to the
idea of truth in Alain Badiou. For Badiou, truth is not a static fact or a
universal revelation. It is a cultural recognition of a new way of defining
what is true. In such an occasion, a process or "event" originates
that introduces a new logic within a given system. There are plural
"truths" that necessarily have to be partial and linked to specific
contexts, such as in a religious revelation, or significant political change.
He gives as examples the current ideas on climate change or economic
inequalities. It would then be something built through participation.
However,
one of the characteristics of truth, for a very long time, has been that it has
to be a pronouncement that is based on rules that determine its acceptability.
One of these basic rules is that any statement must be accompanied by the
method used to establish it. In science or mathematics, rules are deductive or
inductive logics. In science, a description of how the objects under
investigation have been observed is also required. Claims about unobservable
objects are not accepted, unless they have been predicted by a proven mathematical
theory, such as electrons, for example.
To
establish the truth in other scenarios such as historical accounts or legal
testimonies there are also rules. There must be previous writings or stories
that arouse a certain documentary confidence in order to be labeled as truths.
In this sense, a religious testament drawn up before the historical period of
written records is not the same as the stories recorded by identifiable
authors. And even in the latter case, the stories must be subject to analysis and
verification. We can ask, for example, about the total veracity of Plutarch's
stories in Parallel Lives[8].
One can even critically analyze modern narratives such as the reasons that
nations use to justify wars. In the legal sense, witness testimony must be
based on some evidence, which can be other people's verifiable allegations, or
physical evidence such as fingerprints, for example.
The
active promotion of cultural change
Most cultures
have resources for generating social change. They incorporate the possibility
for narrational shifts within their belief systems and social structures such
as families. Usually, these structures involve long established decision-making
strategies and communicational systems. But narrational shifts require a
competence for incorporating new information and new ways of interpreting it.
As we have mentioned, some of these tactics appear in artistic manifestations
and sporting events.
Numerous
examples of these shifts are reported in the social media. These are not
verified sources, but they echo a general cultural phenomenon. For example, a
Facebook user (2025) reported that:
“Fifty years ago, one man introduced the game
of chess to a small village in India in hopes of combating rising alcohol abuse
and gambling. What started as a simple idea grew into a community wide
obsession with strategy and focus. Today, the village is known not for vice,
but for intellect and discipline. Generations have grown up surrounded by chessboards,
proof that one game can truly change lives.
Amanda
Gorman says, (2021) “[…] culture is the home for stories and narratives. It
provides the contextual framework and basis for meaning-making for all society
in the same way that a constellation makes more sense when you understand it in
the context of a galaxy” (p.5). Thus, she says, “This phenomenon is a
constitutive part of changing opinions and belief systems and, therefore, a
constitutive part of culture change” (p. 8).
An example
of this kind of questioning, based on new expressive experiences, can be found
in a master-level thesis by Ligia Mujica (2008) in which she described how the
creation of a mural motivated profound cultural changes in the border city of Santa
Elena de Uaren (between Brazil and Venezuela). The mural was painted by the cinetic artist
Juvenal Ravelo, who has used his aesthetic and community proposal for promoting
cultural changes through environmental and aesthetic adjustments. Ravelo calls
his concept, “Art of street participation”.
Mujica
related how, in this experience in Santa Elena de Uaren in Venezuela, Ravelo
involved the inhabitants of the city in the development of a mural. It can be
found on the edge of the border street that connects Brazil and Venezuela in
that town. Before the mural, the area was a disadvantaged and environmentally
depressed neighborhood in which violence and drug use were prevalent. Ravelo
involved the neighbors in clean-up activities, and the improvement of the
structures bordering the street. He taught volunteers how to apply his designs
to the bordering walls and supervised the changes. After the painting process, which
lasted almost a year, many social phenomena changed. Drug use declined. The neighbors
began to participate in the civil instances available to them to redress
grievances, such as the local town hall. School assistance increased among the
children. These changes happened without direct political participation, in a
profound narrative shift, that later became civic awareness in the sense of cognizance
of the importance of legitimate participation and a demand in the community for
citizen involvement.
This
strategy, that juxtaposes a disagreeable reality with a vision for possible
change, has been studied elsewhere. Sánchez, Cronick y Wiesenfeld (1988)
related how a self-construction project to replace housing lost in a landslide
led to new ideas about education, women’s rights, and community relationships
in general.
Environmental
awareness can also stimulate community consciousness. On one hand, Kelling and Wilson (1982) proposed a theory of “Broken
Windows”. They assume a close interaction between urban settings and the behavior
of the people that live there. An unrepaired broken window sends a message to
criminals and vandals that the neighbors are unwilling or unable to defend
their vicinity. The broken window is a symbol of weakness. It represents a lack
of community will. The authors say, that when the residents care for their
windows, walls, streets and sidewalks they communicate a strong sense of
cohesion and social responsibility, effectively giving themselves control of
their space.
On the
other hand, neighborhood maintenance is a collective endeavor that requires
coordination and the negotiation of differences. Some people will want to plant
trees, others will want to widen the streets. Most solutions are “polemized”,
that is, they are defined, discussed, and negotiated. Benjamin Schiemer (2018)
discusses community’s creative problem-solving processes. He says that there
are three paradigmatic community orientations that can be described in terms of: a) cultural representation and
differentiation; b) the formation of ideas of order and meaning; and c) their creative
processes. In terms of the last characteristic, local culture is constantly renovated
“as communities-in-the-making”. In fact, we may say that culture develops
plausible solutions over time, and is constantly debating the relative merits
of all of them (Cronick, 2002).
Resistance
to cultural malaise as can be found in reactions to totalitarian solutions and
ideological tyranny in small community settings. Luis Ewan (2025) cites Edward
Muir’s description of “thin trust” in Italy in the beginning of the 20th
century in Italy, as an:
“Idea of the commune as a physical space, as
social interaction and as a process of exclusion. Central to Muir's depiction
of community life in the commune is the notion of ‘thin trust’, the trust that [has]
existed between complete strangers or mere acquaintances based on their shared
provenance. The physical spaces of the commune, its piazze and churches,
narrow closes and taverns, its winding rivers, forests and fields offered
venues for frequent and repeated social exchange, which ‘thickened’ [this] ‘thin trust’ [….]”
Ewan
describes how the campanilismo of certain rural sectors in Italy in the
early 20th century resisted the country’s growing fascism. He
describes a “a traditional way of life that rooted rural Italian peasants to
their place of birth and its immediate surroundings. “
Changes, or
resistance to undesired change, can be associated with well-being, but they
also can reflect malaise and xenophobia. Historically there have been numerous examples.
In modern examples, Syazwan Bin Jumaat (2020) describes how in Indonesia some
communities:
“[…] through misinformation and misguidance, have
acted in a way that does not protect the people within them. They have fallen
under the influence of fake news and skepticism towards the devastating crisis
situation, which has led to large numbers of people being potentially exposed
to COVID-19”.
In another
example, Paul Jackson (2024) says that the British fascism that survived World
War II can also be framed around a sense of community.
“[…] The fascists, in their attempts to attract
followers, use evocative, and often specifically emotive, themes to help
activists imagine alternate forms of community, typically recalling a seemingly
lost past as well as a time to come in ways that resolve perceptions of a dying
or lost community in the present. Fascist literatures [provides] crucial ways
to explore and understand these visions of alternate communities.”
When
members of a community ally with undesirable or damaging worldviews, such as
crime organizations or fascist or tyrannical political interests, they are
still clinging to some hope for political change. On the other hand, sometimes
communities foster hopelessness, or what Seligman called “learned helplessness”
which happens when their members have no vision at all for a better future
(Cronick, 1985). In this case they fall
into a semi depressive state. This can be very difficult to problematize.
Another
difficulty with problematized, or negotiated, community differences is that some
cultures have immiscible worldviews in relation to other cultures. And it
happens at times that these cultures coexist in the same geographical and
political entities. This occurs mostly with religious and ideological
groupings. Thus, agreeing on policies having to do with topics such as
euthanasia, abortion or the acceptance of certain scientific findings such as
evolution becomes difficult. The only solution in these circumstances is
probably a mixture of a relativistic belief stance and emotional tolerance.
This posture requires an open humanistic attitude in which each member of a
given society accepts the possibility of difference and diversity. This is a
self-conscious, ethical posture that must be generally and explicitly shared to
be successful.
In this
brief review of how culture enhances and inhibits cultural change we can see
several themes of interest: a) facilitated changes that awaken an awareness for
new possibilities, b) the spontaneous development of new ways of interacting,
c) traditional cultural structures that inhibit negative changes, and d) the
vulnerability that some local structures have to negative influences. These
situations can be addressed through the introduction of new themes, such as
tolerance, empathy, new communicational resources, and even the mitigation of
economic and social stress. For the stimulation of tolerance and empathy, artistic works and participation in theater and musical endeavors are very
useful.
FINAL
REFLECTIONS
Schiemer
(2018) assumes that communities are order-creating entities, that is, they
coordinate their actions and attributes. Therefore, he says, more than one type
of social ordering can exist simultaneously and sequentially in each one of
them. They also generate, from within their own dynamics, “practices that have
a “we-intentionality” (p. 3), that is, their members can be aware of their
community’s changes and can intentionally help to produce them and control
them. He argues that “these practices generate incomplete structures […] which motivate
further practices” (p. 3). Order can be established through regimes and rule
systems, but community members interact directly, in multifaceted ways. This
differentiates communities from civic entities such as cities or states. He
talks about a “common property” in the sense of shared needs and aspirations, some
of which may be implicit.
Making
these needs explicit is one of the jobs that community leaders, NGO members,
and the artistic community share. These influences, together with the effects
of each community’s varied cultural dispersions and capacities, open the
possibilities for growth and change.
There are,
of course, impediments. Powerful interests promote divisionary tactics and
xenophobic fears to protect themselves, their power, and their investments. The
armament industry, for example, benefits from wars and massively armed
populations. But these influences have a long history, and nevertheless,
communities continue to generate viable social solutions for their problems.
First of
all, individual community members can often feel and express empathy and
compassion. This can be the first, basic step toward inclusive programs for
social well-being. This fundamental emotion, however, needs to be channeled
through a process of self-awareness that leads to community consciousness. It
requires a method that permits individual members, and then community groups to
express their feelings and to convert them into viable action. A sense of the
basic unity of humanity then may be channeled into collective action,
tolerance, and the construction of socially sustainable “truths”. They can then
be “objectified” into, for example, the means for generalized economic
wellbeing, environmental esthetics, social concord, physical and emotional
health, and universal education.
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[1] It has happened, however.
Below I discuss the origin of the United Nations and the Marshall Plan for
restoring the economies of Germany, Italy and Japan after World War II.
[2] They are so-called
"illegal" displacements, but in fact they are situations of flight
from intolerable situations of hunger and violence.
[3] It is not a coincidence that
tyrannical leaders often try to diminish or eliminate the presence of NGOs in
their countries.
[4] Lifeworld (or the German term
used by Edmund Husserl, Lebenswelt) refers to a collective, self-evident
subjectivity.
[5] Erasmus of Rotterdam "[...] denounced
war and defended peace in the following terms: To those lovers of strife and
bloodshed among nations, who are divided only by one name and one channel, you
should know that this world, that the planet called Earth, is the common
country of all those who live and breathe upon it. They should also remember
that all men, regardless of their political reasons, come from the same fathers
and also share the same consanguinity and affinity towards concord and
peace" (Bosé & Puyama, 2017, p. 22).
[6] "Cervantes' pacifist and
humanistic convictions from are reflected in his famous Discourse on Arms and
Letters in which he openly condemns war [...]” (Bosé & Puyama, 2017, p. 23).
[7] To clarify doubts, I do not have a
gun at home nor would I have one.
[8] Available at: The Project Gutenberg
eBook of Plutarch’s Lives, Volume I (of 4), by Plutarch, et al. (s. f.).
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14033/14033-h/14033-h.htm
