SPEECH BY ADRAAN VAN DER STAAY
Noordwijkerhout, 3 July 2002

Ladies and gentlemen,
I must admit to feeling some surprise when I was asked to accept this award. I had not considered myself as someone who had been contributing to humanism. My work has been mainly practical, though informed by intellectual convictions.
Let me see. I have helped to internationalize the culture of Rotterdam. I have helped to consolidate the idea that facts verified by science count at the national level, in discussions about social and cultural policy. Through UNESCO and the Prince Claus Fund I have tried to further culture and development on a global scale. And I have been involved in the creation of some public gardens.
Was this practical humanism? Perhaps. So I accepted the prize. Thank you very much.
After the surprise came the work. I had to work rapidly. So I jotted down a few thoughts about the future of humanism or a future humanism.

A sense of commonality
My first note concerns Confucianism. Since the 13th century Chinese children have been taught the basics of Confucianism by reciting the Three Character Classic. In this traditional primer text for children and young adults one finds as the first sentence: Man at his birth in his original nature is good. The second sentence qualifies this Rousseau-esque opening. Man's nature at birth is like that of other people. But by experience people grow apart. Or translated differently: Man and man start by closely resembling each other, but being taught different things they develop different characters.
Over the centuries millions of Chinese children learnt these basic sentences by heart.

It is perhaps apposite to consider some implications of this teaching. By postulating that mankind at birth is basically one, one constructs a psychological foundation for mutual understanding. Whatever form human beings take on later in life, they start from the same point. This makes it possible to understand human beings whatever identity they acquire, whatever different characters they develop, whatever acts they engage in. We could all have become someone else if we had been taught differently. Nothing human is in principle unintelligible.

This indeed is what many travellers have felt: cultural differences notwithstanding, psychologically man is still much the same. Good travellers may marvel at the cultural forms they encounter, but what makes them good travellers is their understanding of these forms as nothing more than human possibilities.

All the same, people grow apart and may develop identities that will no longer understand each other. This happened in a historical time of long duration and a geographical space limited only by the size of the world. For all practical purposes they will no longer be on speaking terms. Being taught one language, they will ignore other languages as barbarian. They will consider certain cultural forms to be naturally theirs and thus better. Other forms are different, maybe fundamentally different, and thus incomprehensible. Therefore strangers are not fully human. In short it seems that cultural differences will override a sense of a common humanity. As the world is big, people are many, and memory is short, the most normal attitude of people towards other people is to see their strangeness. Few people will extend their feeling of sameness to everybody. Difference becomes more common than sameness.

Yet this is what Confucianism tried to do: to give each child a sense of commonality, as long as they were Han people, that is people of China. The question today could be whether humanism could and should do what Confucianism did for China, but this time for the world.

Cultural identity
The Confucian text not only points back to an initial commonality, but also forward to a diversity of identities. My feeling about the present mood is that we have entered a period in which commonality is losing out to cultural identity. Put differently: universalistic ideology is losing out to particularistic identity. If humanism were to develop into a universalistic ideology, the present mood would be unsympathetic to humanism.

Humanism as a world-wide ideology may be relatively new, thinking in terms of cultural identity is as old as the world. It represents the normal attitude. It is a restricted feeling of commonality which excludes all others, who are supposed to have different cultural identities. Especially in an age when cultural change is fast and comes from many quarters, cultural identity thinking is making a come-back. Political parties in Europe and historians like Huntington in the USA are successful because of this Return of the Native. Identity is becoming a political alternative to ideology.

However successful the concept of cultural identity may have been in the past or may be in the present, it seems to me flawed. Though it may clearly perform a function, as magic or racism do, it is not therefore the best choice, either intellectually or morally.

Cultural identity does not stand up to close historical scrutiny. Every cultural identity consists largely of culture borrowed from others. If the need arises, any such patchwork of cultural borrowings can become a basis for proclaiming wholeness and even uniqueness to a population. Identity thought does not point to a solution, it only affirms itself. It closes the argument on a declaration of cultural war. It is basically a regressive, nostalgic concept, good for a period of cultural conservatism, not good for cultural development.

I would not waste your time with cultural identity thought, were it not that it underlies one of the debilitating concepts of our time, cultural relativism.

Cultural relativism
As I said, cultural identity is a restrictive concept, a stepping back from commonality, which for me is basic to humanism. It would be less dangerous if it were not sometimes linked to conflicts of interest. If it were only a restricted view of the world due to natural forgetfulness or parochialism it would not matter so much. But when it is also linked to conflicts of interest between groups of people, the implications can be grave. These conflicts are of course the stuff of life. But they may also contribute to intellectual obtuseness and moral cynicism.

Just consider a few examples of conflicts of interest and their effects on cultural identities.
What else can the terrible conflict in Palestine be called than a conflict over land between an indigenous population and newcomers? This vicious war of interest is today cloaked in every kind of special pleading including the historical rights of two populations, and mutually exclusive claims to one city. But this conflict of interest, rapidly changing into a conflict of cultural identities, is breaking up any sense of moral or intellectual commonality. People will accentuate their cultural differences until these relative differences change into absolute differences and all sense of commonality is lost.

This conflict is not of course limited to the unhappy populations of Palestine. In its self-destructive past of nationalism Europe has been equally confused. How many learned disquisitions have there not been written about differences between Kultur and Civilisation, the one being characteristically German and the other just as characteristically French? This subject has bedevilled some of Europe's best minds.

Another conflict of interest is less obvious than the conflict between populations calling themselves nations, namely conflicts within society. When migrants or former slaves do not find a commonality with the indigenous or majority population, for whatever reason, what is more natural to them than to fight not for commonality but for their self-interest? Self-interest becomes the motor for cultural identity thinking. This may translate into multiculturalism, black studies, ethnic thinking or victimhood thinking. But it remains basically a conflict of interest.

This could still be regarded as wholesome if it were simply another phase in a process of emancipation towards some form of commonality. This was the illusion under which Dutch society laboured, both on the left and on the right, when it started subsidizing mosques for migrants: that national unity would always be the natural outcome of emancipation. But this type of multicultural struggle has also laid the foundations for that debilitating concept: cultural relativism.

I call this concept debilitating because it does not grapple with the problem of how to understand other cultures and pass judgement on them. Relativism lays down its arms at all too early a stage. Cultural relativism is a trap. It abolishes intellectual and moral commonality with the other. If cultural identities are assumed to enclose populations and there is no common framework, what can one do but accept the idea of cultural relativism?
If, right or wrong, my culture becomes the rule, what sense does it make to discuss right and wrong? How can one judge between competing identities? How can one show real respect to the other if one has no real respect for oneself? I have no doubt that all this has been amply discussed by you.

I would merely suggest that there is no future for humanism if it does not take into account the commonality of humankind as a whole and discard the constraints that the concept of cultural identity places on our minds.

Science
To sum up: humanism today seems to me to be suspended between the plight of ideology and the success of cultural identity. Ideology is too abstract a foundation if it is based only in thought. On the other hand cultural identity thinking leads to cultural relativism. Is there a way out that would confront ideology with historical realities? I hope such a way can be found by breaking down cultural development into cultural units. For this I turn to science.

Many books have discussed the cultural identity of periods or of populations. Johan Huizinga, the historian, was the author of a famous book about The Waning of the Middle Ages. As such his was a holistic interpretation, trying to identify the nature of a period. But later on theoretically rethinking this approach, he wrote a sceptical study about the cultural identity of the Renaissance. In a later study he even pointed the way to a more fruitful approach, which would follow the separate histories of cultural elements rather than to try to pursue the identity of the whole.

There are indeed shining examples of cultural history and anthropology that break down cultural wholes by detached analysis. The work of Joseph Needham on Science and Civilisation in China comes to mind. Painstakingly he identifies units of thought or practice that could be said to have made a difference to cultural development in China. And thus he is able to show how these units of thought and practice have travelled from China to Europe. He points the way to a relatively new form of cultural science, which is not based on cultural identity but on cultural transmission.

Cultural transmission
Commonly the idea of cultural transmission is not regarded as very exiting or important. It is usually linked to cultural identity. A culture obviously maintains its identity over a period of time by transmission of this culture from parent to child, from one generation to the next. Within this framework it is nowadays widely accepted that identities will change with time, and that transmitted culture will change, become different. But there's the rub. Where do these differences come from? Did they originate within the presumed inside of a culture or on the outside? Where and when did they first appear, what is their nature and what are the implications?

In the here and now, the link between cultural identity and transmission at first sight seems obvious. The link is however dramatically weakened if one changes the short term for the longue durée. If one exchanges the usual life span view for a theoretical view of the millennium, the speed of transmission in space and time becomes remarkable. Just as our gardens are filled with exotics we take for natives and our kitchens are filled with foreign vegetables and recipes we take for granted, our culture as a whole becomes a concoction of foreign extractions. Can one analyze this process? Is there a useful unit to describe the process of cultural transmission? I would suggest taking a chance with the concept of cultural invention.

Supposing we were able to break down the process of transmission into strategic and definable units, we would be able to study their origins, their dispersal in space and their progress in time, and presumably also witness their decline and fall or transformation. This is not just Ideeëngeschichte, but more. If we could have the diachronic sub-histories of culture studied, it would be easier to create a synchronic picture. Cultural identity questions would become questions of a synchronic living together of cultural forms, a kind of cultural ecology.

But is it possible to study the evolution of culture in this way as a series of inventions? Something comparable with the evolution of species in the genealogical time and space of biology? This remains to be seen. I shall quickly jot down a few thoughts.

The place of cultural inventions
It is not easy to pin down a cultural invention. A cultural invention clearly adds something to the former state of culture. Most cultural products don't qualify as cultural inventions. They are reproductions of a kind. But reproductions of what? Surely of something like an invention. The quality of being reproducible seems to rank high as a characteristic of a cultural invention. They are models.
Products may be transmitted, but it is not the same as reproducing them. I would not rate products as such as inventions.

Most cultural exchange involves just products. It is only when products are skillfully understood, that they may be reproduced. One can easily transmit a Chinese painting as a product, without being able to understand it or reproduce one. It is only when the invention of Chinese painting is understood, and mastered, that one is able to reproduce the invention in a new way. Culture lives by reproduction.

By the way, I would suggest that much of the confusion and conflict in present-day public opinion is caused by the discrepancy between the quick transmission of cultural products and the slow assimilation of reproduction skills and the still slower understanding of the cultural insights and values that underlie them. They are not seen as part of the transmission of cultural inventions.

To make it worth our while to look for cultural inventions within the enormous and varied field of cultural transmission, we should severely limit our search to strategically important units, units that matter.

The objectivity of culture
It is perhaps worth pausing for a moment to consider Voltaire. In one of his fables (Aventure de la mémoire, 1775) he makes the mental experiment of having people lose their memory. Cultural and social chaos is the result of this experiment in cultural forgetfulness. For culture has Mnemosyne, memory, who indeed is the mother of the Muses. Cultural inventions should be memorized to be reproduced. So amnesia is the fundamental menace to culture. In Voltaire's story, luckily, memory is restored, the Muses return, mankind is liberated from chaos.

To Voltaire's fable Karl Popper adds another thought: even if people were struck by a temporary amnesia, and forgot their cultural wherewithal, there are still libraries. If people were still able to understand and memorize what they learn, they might be able to reproduce culture, even if all its products had been wiped out. Except for the libraries, that is. Libraries, one hopes, offer both insights and skills in an ordered way. Popper concludes that culture is an objective reality. Culture is not a subjective state of mind.

What underpins culture as reality are specific cultural forms, which he calls ideas. As long as these ideas are available, that is, transmitted in time and space, culture remains possible.

Hegel commented pessimistically that history is a series of ruins. Even if one does not subscribe to his somber logic of history one could indeed recognize the insouciance with which mankind destroys - or allows to decay - not only the outward cultural products, but also the underpinning ideas, sometimes forever. While we seem to know more and more, today's fashion is a tendency to forget.

A future task of humanism could be to stress not forgetting. Humanism could and should defend the cultural memory of mankind in all its diversity.

Cultural invention as a strategic concept
Enter Daniel C. Dennet. In his Darwin's dangerous idea he embraces the suggestion by Richard Dawkins that what the gene has proved to be to biology (the basic unit of somatic transmission), the meme could be to culturology: the basic unit of exosomatic transmission. This has been dismissed by another biologist, the recently deceased Stephen Jay Gould, as an unproductive parallel. I wonder. The search for the basic unit of transmission in culture at least focuses our minds not on cultural wholes, but on cultural parts, which leads us away from the cul-de-sac of cultural identity.

Both collectivities and individuals could be seen as temporary libraries of cultural forms.
One could view the individual mind first and foremost as a transmitter. The individual is the indispensable transmitter in time and space of a repertoire of cultural inventions

For present purposes I would like to stick with that word invention, because Dennet's claims for the meme are all too wide. He does not distinguish between particular cultural products, like a song, and the reproducible cultural form that it is part of: the art of singing. I suppose the art of singing itself is to be understood as a series of cumulative inventions. In other words a repertoire of inventions that may be traced through history and space.
The historical linkage between memes is not tackled. There is simply a myriad of memes. Though there may be a lack of selectivity in Dennet's thinking about memes as replicators, I do feel the basic idea is sound.

There is reason to draw parallels between biology and culturology. Something like cultural evolution seems to exist, each cultural invention being made possible by the one preceding it, with the series of inventions producing differentiation. Some ideas succeed in the battle for the mind of populations, others fall by the way. The ideas developed by Popper, Peter Medawar, Dawkins or Dennet point to the possibility of an evolutionary theory for culture. And even cultural ecology is thinkable, in which the interaction of cultural inventions could be studied. This would give identity thinking its rational place.

The future of humanism would be greatly helped by a cultural Charles Darwin.

Judgement of cultural inventions
So much for the intellectual aspects, now what about moral judgements? While I find it hard to conceive of the judgement of cultural wholes, I find it much easier to conceive of a meaningful judgement of cultural inventions.
One can, for instance, define the advantages or disadvantages of writing by means of, say, pictographic, symbolic or phonetic signs. And then systematically integrate the three forms in our culture.
In the same way one can understand and judge the advantages and disadvantages of mimetic art compared with symbolic art, which by the way coexisted in the funereal art of Fayoum. The difficulties of integration of mimetic and symbolic art are the theme of a recent book by the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, My name is Red (1998). It clarifies cultural conflict.
Again it is possible to judge the advantages and disadvantages of the introduction of the individual narrative (for instance through Goethe's Werther) in the art of story-telling, which of course is itself a repertoire of inventions.
If one selects for judgement those elements in culture that are both transmittable and strategic, one liberates one's judgement from the constraints of time and space. These elements could in principle be replicated anywhere and anytime. It is no longer decisive where they came from, but it remains important what they do to culture today.
This casuistic approach opens our minds to a better understanding of the problems of the cohabitation of inventions and the possibility of cultural growth by diversification.
Diversification is basic to cultural growth.
The spread of Islam was a unifying force. But the fact that the Javanese retained their polytheistic Hindu sagas within the framework of the monotheistic religion of Islam, made their culture rich, compared with those regions where only Islamic precepts prevailed.
So did the inclusion of the Hellenistic culture of the bath enrich Ottoman culture, as I experienced in an ancient Turkish bath in Istanbul two weeks ago.

A future humanism will be tested as to its capacity to provide a realistic cultural ecosystem, which gives existing diversity its place in modern culture.

Judging cultural development
I think that cultural development is pushed forward by cultural inventions rather than by abstract principles or the accumulation of concrete things. In one's judgement about cultural inventions one may nevertheless be reminded of the importance of abstract criteria. In judgements about mimetic art or symbolic art one will of necessity invoke abstract principles like the relative importance of the ideal or the real. In one's judgement about the invention of the individual narrative one may turn to the importance of objectivity or subjectivity.
These abstract reasons may however not lead us into an all too controlled view of cultural evolution. Cultural evolution was not planned but it happened. It did not happen incomprehensibly but it happened unexpectedly. It was only occasionally guided, though it is possible to think of a selective evolution. Cultural diversity in all its surprising splendour was given to us by chance, but we are partially responsible for what happens with it, because we have that power, or could acquire it.
So there will always be more between heaven and earth than even humanism can conceive. A prudent position for humanism to take in the judging of culture could be to limit its ambition. Humanism could take to heart Eugenio Montale's dictum vis-à-vis fascism. It is about accepting everything except what one cannot accept:

Codesto solo oggi possiamo dirti,
ciò che non siamo, ciò che non vogliamo

(Eugenio Montale, Ossi di seppia, 1927)

Humanism should perhaps limit itself to declaring what it does not want to include in culture, what it does not want culture to be.

If you will allow me, I would like to wind up with a word about America and a word about Europe.

Cultural democracy in America
In creating the concept of a world-wide community of culture, America has for a while outstripped Europe. The experience of America, especially in its 19th century, was that of a country that seemed vast and empty and dominated by natural forces, in which a man was only one of many migrants from many countries. This experience of nature and mankind taught Americans to see the diversity of mankind as a whole. The invention of this conception of the commonality of mankind owes more to two American writers than to any European writer of those times. The names of both Walt Whitman and Herman Melville should enter the pantheon - if I may use that metaphor - of humanism.
In Walt Whitman there was indeed no strangeness that would cut him off from his fellow man:

Sail, sail thy best, ship of democracy
Of value is thy freight, 'tis not the present only
the past is also stored in thee
thou holdest not the venture of thyself alone,
not of the Western continent alone,
Earth's résumé entire floats on thy keel o ship.

(Thou mother with thy equal brood, 1872)

This ship of democracy has of course as its counterpart that other ship, the Pequod, launched by Herman Melville in 1851. With Moby Dick he prefigures a world to come, with all races aboard this one ship, and in its quest to destroy the sacredness of nature, the White Whale, destroying itself.

Imperious America may yet be saved from its narrow-minded self by these past reflections on diversity in nature and in culture.

The absence of Europe
And where does Europe stand in all this? What does Europe have to offer?
After the trauma of the First World War Europe lost much of its self-respect and self-confidence, which it had possessed in abundance before. We are still living the consequences of that implosion. The cultural neurosis that created totalitarian utopias has eased, and Europe is trying to grow healthy again, to regain some self-confidence and self-respect. It would perhaps be better if Europe were to withdraw from the world stage for a while. But this is not to be. The postcolonial world order, given a new lease of life by American involvement after the Second World War, is coming to an end. If Europe ever wakes up, it will be to a world that may in some respects seem similar to the uncertain world that confronted the Europeans in the 15th century. With new empires in China and India and the Arabic world, modern, atomic empires that is. And a new empire across the Atlantic. There will be no holiday for Europe to get healthy in. Europe will have to adjust to a world beyond its control, for which it is no longer prepared.

Humanism may help to steady the views that Europeans have of themselves. In Europe rebirth has at times meant the rediscovery of its classics, its collective memory stretching back to Homer and beyond. This long conversation with its past has been interrupted. Important cultural inventions of its past are no longer taught to youngsters in their schools. What Gore Vidal calls the United States of Amnesia is spreading its message. A ridiculous ideology dictates the worst type of amnesia to European pupils, that "history is bunk".

If I were to counsel Europeans on a conversation with the past I would give Herodotus a place of honour. Herodotus was born in Asia, lived in Athens and died in Italy two and a half thousand years ago. This man talks to us about his personal enquiry into his world, about the long history of cultural differences, of a world that he travelled in as far as the Tigris and up the Nile. He prefigures my future humanist in his encompassing ambition to understand.