Our values and us

The differences between our conceptions of society and what we see in society often leave us disappointed. This is a situation very frequently encountered and experienced especially by people who have political visions and causes. Those who claim to pursue a cause in the name of the people, even for the people, experience it in a very tragic way when they see that what they do is of no concern to the people at all. Whatever cause you pursue, whatever vision you hold, before you discover that the people are absorbed in their own troubles, their own amusements, or an altogether different world, it is among the unfailing rules of a successful politics to know, measure and assess the distances between what you are doing and the people, and to behave accordingly. That is, of course, if you practice politics at a democratic level. If instead you have set your mind on practicing politics "in spite of the people," then you already know these distances, and you are bent from the very start on imposing your own standards on the people.

The 2024 Values Survey Report, prepared by the Ankara Social Sciences Foundation under the chairmanship of Prof. Dr. Beşir Atalay, with a research team consisting of Prof. Dr. Ömer Demir, İbrahim Dalmış, A. Ömer Toprak and Cem Eyerci, is an important study on the way to knowing the society we live in as it is, without making certain attributions about it. Although the values of a society are a dynamic field subject to change over time, they constitute the motivations that relatively give a society its character. Though it is a field considerably neglected by positivist sociology, since Max Weber it has stood out as the most important address for seeking the distinctiveness of a society.

Weber attributed the development the West experienced to the influence of certain values visible precisely from within Protestantism. Working hard as if in self-mortification, keeping one's word, work discipline, saving, rationality: these are the values said to have brought about the emergence of capitalism in the West and the European development as we know it. Conversely, the backwardness of Islamic society was attributed to Islam's being ascribed the exact opposite of all these values. Of course, these attributions of value, especially where Islamic society was concerned, stemmed from a quite Orientalist mind. Otherwise, neither did Protestant values have as much influence on Europe's development as is supposed, nor were Islamic societies really backward because of the lack of values that was imagined.

These attributions of value, which began before Weber and acquired a sociological formulation with him, have in my view misdirected sociological research for nearly a century. The approach that attributes the progress Western societies have recorded for two centuries in every field to the positive values they possess made no reference at all, among these values, to occupation, colonialism, theft, genocide, and the human values that made these possible. The emergence of European capitalism was thus attributed almost entirely to the devout hard work of the Protestant tradesman or investor and to his ascetic, anti-hedonist austerity. Muslims, meanwhile, were depicted as victims of their laziness, their irrational business management and their indifferent attitude. Today we see much better that such comparisons were ultimately used as a way of legitimizing colonialism.

In the end, we must also bear in mind that this asymmetrical power relationship we have had with the Western world has been quite decisive in the formation of the map of values of society in Turkey. From the moment the Ottomans were defeated in war, values not belonging to Islam and to this society began to be sown on its lands, quickly and in the most aggressive manner. The education policies put into effect in Turkey during the One-Party period, as their very name implies, were carried out in spite of the people and aimed to change the society from top to bottom. In return, the society's resistance and its conservative clinging to its own values have produced before us a very different, complex map of values.

The 2024 Values Survey, like many other identity and value studies, is in fact trying to find its way through this complex map. Some are aware of this ground, some are not, or they try to determine values as events without history by ignoring this ground.

The study in our hands, on the other hand, is of course aware of this history, and therefore, especially on society's expectations and desires regarding secularism and the relations between religion and state, it examines today's data in the context of the course coming down from the past.

In Turkey, despite all the tensions experienced at the end of the century, secularism has evolved to a point very different from what those who instituted it desired. According to the survey, there is a high rate of adoption of secularism even among conservatives, but with a meaning quite different from Kemalist secularism. An interesting attitude has developed in Turkey regarding the state not interfering in religious affairs, and religion not interfering in state affairs. This in fact emerges as a quite positive value that prefers freedom over the pressures of the state or of certain religious groups. This, in my view, without getting caught up in the proportions of the data, is one of the survey's most important findings.

For example, the great majority of society states that adequate religious education should be given to young people in schools. The proportion of those opposed is only around 18%. The high level of support for this view makes it unimportant to look at differences by demographic and other independent variables.

Another question in the field of religion is whether religion is a driving force or a hindering factor in economic development: the well-known two-century-old question, "Is Islam an obstacle to progress?"

The survey findings show that in this debate, which has remained topical for at least two centuries, the large majority of society (80 percent) does not agree with the view that the religion of Islam is an obstacle to economic development. The proportion of those who find this view correct is around 18%. It is seen that on the relationship between Islam and underdevelopment, the great majority of society does not establish a causal relationship between the two.

Besides the role of identity in understanding society, the study has questioned headings such as freedom, work, defense and welfare, democracy, leader and institutions, Turkey's migrant policy and the question of sending migrants back to their countries, and the equality or superiority of nations. It is difficult to address them all here, and there are undoubtedly findings that deserve lengthy assessment, but let me close by touching on one last one.

In the survey, regarding the comparison of nations, people were asked whether there is superiority among nations and, if there is, whether it is natural.

Although nationalism in Turkey is a very strong and widely accepted identity, the great majority of society (around 84%) agrees with the view that the world would be a better place if all nations could be equal to one another. The researchers took this finding as an indicator of how widely equality at the level of nations is accepted in society as a value, and interpreted it as showing that nationalism in Turkey is not the negative nationalism frequently treated in the literature.

Knowing values and following their development is undoubtedly very important for knowing ourselves as a society, and for following the course of change, degeneration, alienation or improvement within us.