The feast and anxious moderns

We have lived through another Eid al-Adha (Kurban Bayramı), God willing for the best. A bayram is a pause in the dividing tempo of life... In this pause, people's lives are miraculously joined to one another, and we witness all the dividing elements blending into one another in a festive atmosphere.

Surely, differences in participation in the bayram still leave some difference.

Depending on how much we take part in the bayram, the bayram, within the stage it sets up for itself, redistributes to everyone, without losing anything of its freshness, the role that was assigned in advance and is handed out anew every year. Without suffering the slightest awkwardness in his role, everyone takes up again the role entrusted to him a year before. The differences that emerged over the course of the year are, if only for once, set aside, and we are returned to the meaning of being. That is why it is called "iyd" (return). It signifies the return of everything to its origin, history's return to where it began, the return to the point where human mind and consciousness were formatted, the Arafat point where every human being as an Abraham will find his own Ishmael and every Adam will know his Eve.

The bayrams, which open in their most traveled form the ways for a person to leave the dungeons of his own selfhood, nationality, ethnicity and even narrow religiosity and to meet other people and other beings, are among God's most important favors to humanity. Of course, how much we set out on these ways and how much we take part in the bayram is a separate matter. But, again undoubtedly, the magnificent side of bayrams is that they spontaneously assume a function that draws us in, however much we resist taking part, and does not leave us outside. When it comes and makes its own time and atmosphere prevail, no one can live in another time.

Even so, none of these bayrams are things that take away a person's will. Still less do they eliminate people's political differentiation in a way that binds their will. Moreover, there has always been the danger of using the bayrams' discourses of unity and togetherness to cover up political problems. It may also serve a mindset that trivializes existing problems and attributes a theological content and necessity to their unsolvability.

Aware of this drawback, while listening to what Bekir Ağırdır of KONDA Research said about "anxious moderns" on Mehtap TV's Tersi ve Yüzü, I cannot help wondering how, despite such strong bayram traditions in Turkey, worlds so alien to one another, made up of differences in lifestyle, can be possible.

The term "anxious moderns" is a term KONDA research coined to denote a certain social group. Bekir Ağırdır is a researcher who personally conducts all of KONDA's studies and who stands out for his extraordinarily high-quality, deep and horizon-opening assessments of the data he carefully gathers from the field. The area he has recently concentrated on is "anxious moderns." Perhaps not the whole of the segment said to be 42 percent, but within that segment, educated people distinguished by a lifestyle centered on alcohol and high consumption. His analyses of these people are very illuminating for those trying to understand them. It is not possible to recount his findings in detail here, but one finding he made must be particularly underlined.

Among the anxious moderns there is a segment, each of whom is at the top of his profession, who follow all the developments in the world related to their work in their latest updated form and reflect this in their professions with extraordinary speed. While these segments are extremely open to developments in the terminology and understanding of their professions, when they finish work, join social life and make a political assessment, the language and terminology they use cannot go beyond the sixties and seventies. On this they are extremely slow. The contradictory situation formed by an extreme openness on one side and an extreme closedness on the other requires serious social and psychological analyses in its own right.

Of course, Ağırdır makes this observation not to produce a cliché about "anxious moderns" and increase the distances that already exist. On the contrary, he wants to understand this distance or to help those who want to understand it. He especially cares about this because the extremely strong and rich know-how these people have thanks to their level of education cannot be opened to the general benefit of society because of these distances.

And not only that: a relationship confirmed in other studies carried out on other occasions requires us to think again and again about the nature and reality of knowledge today. The question is this: how can there be an almost visibly linear relationship between the rise in people's education levels and their distancing from values such as democracy, human rights and altruism? Will there not be a way to overcome this contradiction?