Anxiety, generated during periods of intense political and social conflict, such as the one Greece experiences today, urges a people to reflect on the most fundamental constitutive myths, symbols, and memories they identify with, and to question the values and cultural themes from which societyâs institutional patterns and structures have been derived. These themes in question stretch from the constitutive cultural and institutional premises of the nation, to aspects of social cohesion and solidarity, and to individual moral stances and attitudes vis-Ă -vis fellow citizens and the state. Under pressure, these elementary components of norms, values, and morals become detached from social structures and institutions, exposed, and problematized. I endeavor to analyze and scrutinize these elementary components as they stand today, in the midst of a crisis that becomes deeper by the year, with no hope of being resolved in the foreseeable future.
In a nutshell, in order to examine the moral self in Greece today, its historical roots and institutional forms, the types of social action this self encourages or inhibits, the kind of civil society it cultivates, and the civic aspirations it nourishes, we have constructed an original, multilayered, model of cultural analysis. It is used to descriptively examine the historical development of civil religion and empirically analyze political discourse in Greece today. It is based upon the Durkheimian sociology of morality as it has been informed by Alexander and Smithâs school of cultural sociology and expanded by Charles Taylorâs history of moral imperatives, and the Weberian theory of social action, as it has been clarified by Stephen Kalberg and employed in Shmuel Eisenstadtâs theory of multiple modernities.
More substantively, the model adopts a phenomenological perspective to argue that the self is not prior to morality, but, instead, that (a) the self is substantiated in and through the taking of moral stances informed by âconstitutive goodsâ (Taylor 1989, 63) that emerge out of, and are embedded in, civilizational, cosmological, and ontological principles (Eisenstadt 1995, 146â148); (b) these constitutive goods manifest themselves in codes, myths, narratives, and symbols (Alexander et al. 2006); (c) inform methodical-ethical ways of life through processes that can be analyzed, employing the Weberian ideal types of rationality (Kalberg 1980); and, last, that (d) the binary oppositions that constitute these moral imperatives and ethical ways of life can be retrieved by qualitative (Alexander and Smith 1993) as well as quantitative analysis, allowing us to reconstruct the symbolic patterns that reflect these constitutive goods in social action and structures.
We place this model into a neo-functional framework (Alexander and Colomy 1985) as we assume that these symbolic patterns do not constitute the moral foundations of harmonious social relations, but the moral resources used on the battlefields of social antagonisms, precipitating, even cultivating in some cases, deep social cleavages and long-lasting cultural traumas. In this vein, we regard moral principles to infiltrate social relations of power through discourses, that is, through internally coherent narratives, rhetorical practices, rituals, and performances which bind together the symbolic universe and the raw exercise of power, in an effort to create morally justified power relations. Power infused with sanctifying discourses constitutes the backbone of the public sphere and encapsulates moral imperatives which are mobilized by various elites and social groups in their struggle for political supremacy and privileged access to resources (Fairclough 1995). These discourses could be altered or informed by different moral imperatives or constitutive goods (a) due to the multiplicity of moral goods which âfloat freeâ in a given society (Eisenstadt 1963, 301), or, as this analysis reveals, (b) by the emergence of alternative and distinct moral variations that are produced out of the same moral universe by a process of selective affinity, and (c) by liminal processes in periods of structural disorder and moral confusion (Szakolczai 2009).
Selective affinity among binary symbolic sets that are combined to produce wider and more comprehensive moral statements about the self, civil bonds, and civic obligations creates various patterned orders and constitutes the structural aspect of the public discourses that animate and shape the public sphere. These patterned orders provide social action with consistency. Yet, they do not create social action or social structure. Instead, they provide moral foundation to various social formations, acting as âa valid canonâ in Weberâs terminology (Weber 1978, 429), encouraging or inhibiting certain social stances, evaluating social events, and setting off âthe good from the badâ (Alexander and Smith 1993, 157).
The actual power arrangements, the pursuit of power in all its various forms, constitute a different sociological domain with its own internal logic, dynamics, and social manifestations (see Sect. 1.6). This aspect of social interaction, that is, the actual social division of labor, is covered by theories of power such as Michael Mannâs theory of the social networks of power. The latter does not constitute a thematic subject of this book, but it is of use in scrutinizing and setting the analytic limits of moral structures vis-Ă -vis non-symbolic social structures.
Such a theoretical syncretism, based upon compatible tenets that bind these theories together, allows us to probe some of the major perennial problems of modern Greek society, without becoming cultural essentialists, and without losing sight of specific historical exigencies and social processes that culminated in this ongoing deep social crisis. We suggest that to explore the causes of this crisis, we need to examine the interaction of morality, that is, âdeep cultureâ, with historical processes and contingencies in the framework of the social division of labor and the networks of social power that together constitute âsocietyâ. In effect, we examine and analyze the above in the context of the Greek historical experience and the Greek civil religion, since it was the hegemonic political discourses that utilized sacred symbols to produce the rigid social structures that brought Greece to its knees. The qualitative as well as the quantitative analysis of these discourses, to reveal the moral imperatives in their pure form, constitutes the second and third parts of this study.
1.1 Cosmological and Ontological Principles
We start the analysis with the axiom that social action is structured around strong evaluations of right and wrong which are not identical to arbitrary choices, interests, or inclinations, but rather stand independent of these and offer standards by which social action can be judged (Calhoun 1991). âConstitutive goodsâ, definitive notions of the good, the beautiful, and the true (Windelband 2018, 305),1 provide the moral criteria for establishing the tangible âlife goodsâ that we cherish. Typically, constitutive goods are unarticulated, embedded in practical consciousness, in that the claims of our moral actions and reactions remain implicit. Latency urges us to explicate what is implicit, as well as a method to detect signs of major moral orientations. Even then, moral orientations cannot be taken for granted since there is a plurality of orientations (âpolytheistic value fragmentationâ in Weberâs nomenclature) that may coexist or be partially exclusive with one another. The disjunction between various constitutive goods demands an effort to explicate what is implicit, as well as a method to detect signs of major moral orientations. In all cases, constitutive goods define (either intentionally or instinctively) the boundaries, the substance, and the purpose of the moral community, and as such, they affect civility and social action in profound ways (Taylor 1989, 19â22).
In this framework, personhood and its moral imperatives are products of historical âevolutionâ (Bellah 2011). They are based on their predecessors to the extent that they accept some axiomatic validity in them (explicitly or not), as they proceed in asserting their own truth and their own vision. No moral imperative, and no specific notions of the good, the beautiful, and the true develop ex nihilo. They constitute mutations of basic themes that can be traced back to their historical sources no matter how remote or alien they appear to be to their contemporaries. Thus, Charles Taylorâs âselfâ and the associated development of constitutive goods in his Sources of the Self do not refer to a universal self and to equally universal sets of constitutive goods (as his title suggests), but of the Western self, and its evolution from Platoâs inward-looking and Augustineâs rational self, to todayâs modern multifaceted self, even though Taylor never explicates the social carriers of such evolution.
Specific, present-time, constitutive goods are only timely manifestations of a long journey of symbolic-moral accumulation that is not visible to a cultural outsider. For example, âindividual dignityâ, as it is understood in the West today, could not exist without its predecessors, such as romantic expressivism, disengaged reason, and the affirmation of ordinary life. Thus, the empirical identification of any constitutive good in any given society would be of little significance if not associated and attached to indigenous or inherited moral imperatives.
This genealogical dimension of cultural evolution is best captured by Shmuel Eisenstadtâs ontological and cosmological principles. Though Eisenstadt never fully explicates the term, the use of the concept leaves little doubt that he refers to the ultimate principles of a given symbolic order such as a Christian worldview, a Jacobin political program, or a liberal regime, all of which advocate very distinct definitions of reality and of the nature, the meaning, and the purpose of things, material as well as symbolic. In all respects, ontological and cosmological principles of any given society are hardly ever internally coherent and pure setsânot even in cases where a Jacobin revolution endeavors to wipe out any memory of past âimpurityâ. Instead, they constitute a depository of moral principles and codes which offer a wide (but not unlimited) variety of symbolic orders.
While they are not identical, constitutive goods and cosmological and ontological principles are conjoined: they situate the individual inside time, space, and society; delineate the sacred and the profane; and provide answers to basic existential questions. They constitute the wide civilizational background upon which specific moral goods are produced and promulgated and suggest institutional ways and means to reach them. Civil religion, as it has been conceptualized by Durkheim as a moral community, and more recently explored by Bellah in his analysis of civil religion in its various symbolic and ritualistic manifestations, constitutes the most visible and tangible manifestation of hegemonic constitutive goods (Bellah 1967). And while some kind of causality among cultural heritage and constitutive goods should be acknowledged, the openness of the social system that allows communication among various social networks allows for a relative autonomy of the latter from its cultural cradle (Mann 1986).
The free-floating quality of a certain imperative moral good suggests that its acceptance by any social system is a matter of elective affinity or compatibility between the social system and the cultural order, as well as a matter of interpretation and of various ways of its incorporation into the dominant symbolic framework. Concomitantly, to identify the ideal-typical Greek moral self and its civil and civic...