The problems and sociology of thought in Turkey

The factors affecting the present-day development of Turkish thought are not independent of the factors that determine the development of Turkey and of our world in general. Whether our expectations about the relationship between the rise of literacy in society and the development of thought are being met depends, of course, also on what we expect from thought. The meaning we attribute to thought and the criteria we adopt for appreciating thought operate through the evaluations of the "jargons of authenticity" to which we resort, in Theodor Adorno's phrase.

We now live in a world where, thanks to the possibilities of technology, access to knowledge has become possible and easy for everyone. Today we witness the rapid and intense circulation, in print or electronic form, of books written on every subject and at every level. Turkey does not lag behind at all in this general development in the world. While book print runs have decreased considerably compared to the past, there is also a considerable increase in the variety of books compared to the past.

Nevertheless, the increase in literacy and the excessive ease of access to books and knowledge do not give rise to a feeling that the quality of thought in society has risen. On the contrary, there is a general discontent that this excess and variety of information and books do not point to an increase in quality in Turkish thought. This is a strange paradox that needs to be pursued.

In the article I wrote on the occasion of the "Workshop on Thought and Its Problems in Turkey" organized by AKSED in Ayaş, we said that the extremely lively intellectual environment of the sixties and seventies, in which certain texts were fervently debated among intellectuals despite the far smaller number of universities and books, is remembered today as a criterion of the decline of thought. Indeed, there are today no "order"-focused texts that had deep effects on the political thought world of the period, such as Avcıoğlu's Türkiye'nin Düzeni or Ecevit's Bu Düzen Değişmelidir. But we also said that we find it problematic to regard the scarcity or ineffectiveness of this kind of book as a sign of the backwardness of thought.

That certain texts are treated as a basis and reference for fights, and that violence is risked for the sake of a world to be built with those books, does not always, indeed does not often, show the presence of thought. Often there is also a situation having to do with the ideas attributed to these texts turning into slogans and being lived as blind, fetishistic attachment. Seen from this angle, the fact that such texts do not appear today, despite so many books being written and so many people having access to books and knowledge, is in essence something explicable by the increase in grassroots-level acquisition of knowledge.

Perhaps this is actually a manifestation of a "post-ideological" cultural reality that Daniel Bell pointed to as early as the sixties. Though, to think that the ideological level, which can also be defined as a state of human weakness or disability, can be transcended forever is itself another kind of human self-sufficiency. The human being is a creature bound by time, place and environment. These bounds are the human limitations that Ali Shariati described as "prisons" (the prisons of history, geography, biology and selfhood), the limits of man. Man struggles to realize himself by transcending these limits, but there is no criterion valid for everyone as to at what stage he can transcend them.

Still, it is a fact that in our age the spread of knowledge to the grassroots has made it very much harder for crude ideologies and doctrines to spread easily and become effective, and this is by no means considered a negative development in terms of the free performance of thought

The contemporary British sociologist Anthony Giddens underlines, as the level of self-reflexivity, the fact that in postmodern societies even knowledge requiring expertise has become open to everyone's use and access, no longer remaining the monopoly of experts alone. This level, at which it is not easy for people to deceive one another and everyone has at least a certain common field of knowledge, sounds very pleasant from whichever side you look at it, and to tell the truth it also coincides at a certain level with the reality we live. If the rise of self-reflexivity does not make it impossible for people to fall easily for ideological pep talks, or to believe that texts written by people afflicted, like us, with history, society and their own selves can explain the whole reality we live in and lay down maxims to which we should devote our lives, it does make it harder.

Of course, how structures like FETÖ were able to have such a widespread influence through a personality cult at such a relatively high level of knowledge and consciousness is another paradox that needs to be examined.

Today there are nearly two hundred universities in Turkey. Every year thousands of master's and doctoral theses are written in the social science institutes on nearly every subject. Some of these theses are published as books by countless publishing houses and contribute to the accumulation of Turkish thought. In my opinion, among these theses there are many works whose contribution to our intellectual world could be appreciated at a much higher level if one dwelt on them a little. Those who truly wish to evaluate these accumulations can find these works, discuss them and make them the subject of better productions; indeed there are those who do.

But in the face of so much production, another problem that stands out in this production is that the texts put forward are not aware of one another, do not see one another, and our knowledge production cannot advance cumulatively. That is, there is a weakness whereby everyone accepts his own work on the field he studies as a starting point. Bahattin Akşit described this problem, which he identified in the eighties on an even smaller sample than today's, as "compartmentalization in the field of social sciences." That is, despite the production that has now reached excessive levels, people working in the same field continue their production without seeing one another and without debating with one another. Sometimes even within the same department two people cannot be aware of each other's work in this sense.

There is much more to say about the problems and sociology of Turkish thought; we shall continue in this vein…