Deliberative Cultures

Introduction

Deliberative theories of democracy are often taken as beginning in the polis of ancient Athens, subsequently developed by figures from the Western canon such as Aristotle, Burke, Mill, Rawls, and Habermas, finding their current home in the constitutional contexts of mostly Western liberal democracies. But there has recently been great interest in extending deliberative theories and practices to new political contexts as different as China, Brazil, and India. To what extent, then, is political deliberation a universal practice? While deliberation manifests a universal human competence to reason collectively, the character of deliberation varies considerably across time and place. Such variation is partly explained in cultural terms, since the meaning, significance, and consequence of deliberation is realized in political institutions that are themselves culturally constituted. The implication is that a fuller understanding of political deliberation requires comparative and historical studies of diverse contexts. Such studies promise new insight into the forms deliberative practice can take and the conditions under which it can flourish. They might also enable established democracies to draw on practices seen in non-Western traditions to bolster their own deliberative cultures, as well as vice versa. Our aims here are thus hortatory and exploratory. We argue for the study of deliberative cultures, suggest how such study may be undertaken, and provide some illustrations. Seeking both depth and breadth, we highlight one case (from Egypt) while developing insights from several radically different others.

On the Universality of Political Deliberation

Cognitive scientists have identified cognitive and practical capacities—including reasoning and arguing—shared by all humans, thought important for human development and central to our evolutionary success. ¹ If collective deliberation about questions of authority arises from these basic human capacities, it ought to be a universal practice. This claim is further supported by the fact that political systems exhibit some constant features. Every political system, wherever on the spectrum it lands between autocracy and anarchy, requires that rulers exchange information with one another and with their subordinates (or, in the case of anarchy, with their equals). This information can become an object of evaluation and so deliberation. In some systems, deliberative processes are highly inclusive, elsewhere they are exclusive. In some places they are formal or ritualized, in others informal, even haphazard. And deliberation is not easily limited to elites. Outside the context of political decision, there can be no society without some form of critical practice, whether performed openly in conversations with strangers or secretly in sheltered locations. ² Deliberation about the use of power appears in this respect to be a basic feature of political systems. Moreover, social choice theory can be deployed to show that unless a polity is governed by dictatorship, deliberation about preferences and alternatives is needed to avoid arbitrariness and instability in collective choice. ³

Deliberation now inhabits a central position in normative accounts of political legitimacy, and is considered by many theorists to be crucial to the functioning of democratic institutions. What then of the cultural particularity of deliberative democracy? There are two developed polar views on this question.

The first is represented by Amartya Sen, who in his account of justice and democracy stresses universality. ⁴ For Sen, democracy-as-public-reason (he recognizes the affinities with deliberative theory, but generally eschews its language) is for all societies, more so than democracy-as-voting, tied to the West. At one level, Sen is attuned to cultural differences that help define particular contexts which mean that justice must always be deliberated upon in particular cases, not specified as a transcendental principle. But Sen does not recognize that cultural difference may shape the character and significance of public reasoning, so he speaks only of public reason in the singular. Even as Sen demolishes transcendental conceptions of justice, his approach to public reason takes on a transcendental hue since the practice on which it rests is assumed to be universal.

The opposite view presents deliberation as tied to Western liberal democracies. On this account, exemplified by Habermas, the growth of deliberative practice is a cause and consequence of modernization. ⁵ As societies modernize, their denizens become more reflexive with reference to cultural traditions and political power, and they exercise this capacity in communicative practices that are eventually institutionalized. Thus the primary limitation on deliberation is temporal; deliberation is a modern phenomenon. Gambetta, among others, proposes a secondary limitation: for him, even in modern liberal democracies, deliberation is limited to the “analytical cultures” rooted in Northern Europe. ⁶ Lynn Sanders and Iris Marion Young limit deliberation further still, suggesting it is a particularistic and privileged speech culture, that of white, well-educated, Western males, one that disadvantages women and minority groups. ⁷ For Sanders and Young, political deliberation is not a basic feature of human societies, but rather a practice limited to particular classes of people in certain countries during a short period of history.

We can respond to such claims by examining the forms deliberation takes in different contexts. If political deliberation does not appear in certain polities, that too requires explanation. Our inquiry is not motivated by a desire to evaluate these contexts in terms of some normative (inevitably Western) standard, as has often been the case in comparative political inquiry. We aim to demonstrate that deliberation flourishes in a wide variety of contexts and that Western liberal democracies could benefit from better understanding of the conditions that contribute to this flourishing.

Political Culture as a Residual Category in Deliberative Theory

If the capacity to deliberate is universal yet variously expressed across context, there is good reason to believe that such variations are at least partially explainable in cultural terms. Support for this position appears within contemporary deliberative theory, where political culture is recognized as crucial to the proper functioning of democracy. Habermas suggests that democratic politics depend upon culture, though the makeup of culture is only weakly articulated:

Democratic institutions of freedom disintegrate without the initiatives of a population accustomed to freedom. Their spontaneity cannot be compelled simply through law; it is regenerated from traditions preserved in the associations of a liberal political culture. ⁸

At the heart of Habermas’s democratic theory appear culturally inflected claims, including the argument that political deliberation should “transform voluntas into a ratio that, in the public competition for private arguments, [comes] into being as the consensus about what was practically necessary in the interests of all.” ⁹ This argument depends upon culturally specific distinctions between public and private, voluntas and ratio.

Likewise, Seyla Benhabib suggests that democratic institutions cannot survive just because they are justified by logically coherent political thought. They also demand a “civic culture of public participation [which] requires the creation of institutions and practices whereby the voice and perspective of others . . . can be expressed in their own right.” ¹⁰ Yet Benhabib does not examine the cultural foundations of democratic practice, her concerns being limited to cultural difference and the conflicts it can trigger. ¹¹

Simone Chambers also trumpets the relationship between culture and deliberative practice. Surveying a vast historical horizon, she proposes that through a culture of publicity, “modernity offers a new context of criticism and self-reflection. Differentiation and rationalization create a more open universe from which to draw criticism. The result is that criticism of received ideas and dominant principles is both deeper and wider in the modern context than in the pre-modern.” ¹² Chambers suggests further that “revitalizing publicity . . . requires encouraging a deliberative political culture in which citizens have a sense that their participation in the public sphere has meaning and significance.” ¹³ This is because the “health of the public sphere . . . resides at the level of culture.” ¹⁴

Chambers’s historical sociology raises a series of knotty questions. It contrasts the modern era with an imagined premodern other, located backwards in time or place. Irrespective of their truth or falsity, such claims can foreclose valuable opportunities to learn about deliberation in practice. Where premodern and non-Western people are thought to live in societies resistant to criticism, scholarly interest in their traditions of criticism, and so deliberation, is also undermined.

Whatever their limitations, prominent deliberative theorists readily acknowledge the significance of political culture in democratic practice. Yet they afford political culture only a residual status, at once central but largely unexamined. This curious state of affairs may have something to do with the old disconnect between political theory and empirical social science, which if overcome still has to confront the tenuous standing of cultural inquiry in the discipline of political science.

Turning to Culture

Upon invoking culture, we step into a conceptual minefield. One particular problem in navigating this minefield stems from the poor condition of the study of culture in political science, recently described as “moribund.” ¹⁵ This state of affairs is partly a result of diminishing returns in what was a vibrant body of comparative research on “civic culture,” which at face value should complement our present concerns. ¹⁶ This work treated culture as a distribution of subjective values, attitudes, and beliefs thought conducive to democratic institutions. ¹⁷ But so understood “culture” provided little explanatory power not already found in the individual-level dispositions that noncultural political scientists study, and it seldom (if ever) figures in empirical studies of deliberation.

So we adopt instead an intersubjective conception of culture, understood as the webs of meanings, symbols, and norms in terms of which action is constituted. ¹⁸ This approach means culture cannot be treated as an independent variable that influences politics from the outside. To suggest so would be akin to proposing that water exerts an “influence” on the swimming of fish. But culture here is not treated as the first mover of all political phenomena, since cultures can themselves be the objects of explanation. Further, cultures are not assumed to be easily identified wholes, coterminous with ethnic, religious, or national communities. Human communities comprise numerous webs of meanings, symbols, and norms, and the web that orders a particular sequence of interactions is partially determined by the actors themselves. For example, when two actors engage in a monetary transaction, they determine whether they are trading, gifting, bribing, or doing something else altogether. The meanings and norms they settle upon shape the transaction, as cross-cultural economic experiments indicate. ¹⁹

Interpretation is necessary where the meaning of action is unclear. Were we informed that a person engaged in “politics” by raising his or her arm we would understand little if anything of the significance of the act. Arm raising counts as democratic voting in some contexts, elsewhere as fascist saluting. As physical motions these actions may be indistinguishable, yet when performed their meanings would seldom be mistaken, since performers and their audiences understand what they are doing. Because understandings of like actions vary, an action such as arm raising can have vastly different political effects depending on the context in which it is performed.

Failure to recognize the significance of meaning to political action has been particularly pronounced in comparative studies of democracy, where electoral institutions and practices are routinely treated as culture-free zones. But what sense does it make to compare the electoral politics of a modern liberal democratic Western nation with those in a nation where it is customary to support the party established by the local “Big Man”? ²⁰ Such comparison may be valid were the aim to show that what constitutes a political party varies according to context. It makes less sense were the aim to specify covering laws predicting electoral behavior, a project MacIntyre suggested was as promising as building a “general theory of holes.” ²¹

This intersubjective account of culture is compatible with the expansive concept of political deliberation that characterizes most work in deliberative theory. ²² Deliberation here encompasses all communication concerning questions of political authority, not restricted to the argumentation, say, of communicative action (Habermas) or public reason (Rawls). Allowable communication includes rhetoric, silence, gossip, humor, ritual, the telling of stories, and what Mansbridge calls “everyday talk” (but not command, deception, coercion, or private expressions that cannot reach others). ²³ Deliberative theorists can apply critical standards to all these forms of communication. Yet they should also allow that communicative acts which are not deliberative in intention can be deliberative in effect. Certain kinds of protest, for example, may initially operate at the level of affect but later stir reflection and discourse. Thus intentions of individual actors matter less than their significance within larger discursive systems. A deliberative culture comprises the meanings and symbols in terms of which deliberative practices are afforded significance within a specific political context.

This expansive approach to deliberation may be charged with conceptual stretching, but such charges would be false. Were deliberation more tightly defined, our analytical lens would be closed to a range of institutions and practices that may contribute to deliberative process, sometimes in surprising ways. ²⁴ In this respect, we are working with a cluster term, that is, a concept which shares “some among a cluster of properties . . . without there being a core set of essential properties.” ²⁵ The openness of the concept does not indicate laxity; it enables casting a wide empirical net. We begin by casting our net to capture what would often be dismissed as an unpromising case. We treat this case in depth to show that a deliberative culture interpretation can capture key aspects missed by more conventional political analysis, and that deliberative lessons may be learned from cases truly distant from Western liberal democratic norms.

The Case of Egypt

The Islamic Revival (as.-S.ah.wah l-’Islāmiyyah), which emerged in Egypt in the 1970s, may seem an unlikely movement to consider in deliberative terms, especially because of the concerns its fundamentalism provokes among secular liberals in Egypt and abroad. But the Islamic Revival has fostered some noteworthy deliberative practices—practices that illustrate the diverse origins and unique dynamics of deliberation, whether it concerns social, religious, or political affairs. Although the Revival has not been studied along these lines, aspects of its deliberative culture appear in the ethnographies of Charles Hirschkind and Saba Mahmood, whose work forms the focus of the present discussion.

The Islamic Revival appeared in Egypt as a local manifestation of a wave of fundamentalism that emerged in the Middle East in the late 1960s. Like other fundamentalist movements, Christian and Jewish included, the Islamic Revival aims to rebuild society and culture from the ground up, and so its supporters court the participation of ordinary people more than political elites. Until recently, supporters of the Revival directed little attention to the Egyptian state. Their aim, rather, was slowly to displace the state by revitalizing Islamic manners of dress and speech, modes of greeting, gender relations, and other cultural practices, as well as by providing religious education and relief to the poor. In this they have challenged the efficacy and legitimacy of secular political authority without adopting an explicitly political program.

The Islamic Revival may seem an inhospitable environment for nurturing deliberative practices, since fundamentalism is associated with orthodoxy and authority, not the open exchange of ideas. But Charles Hirschkind’s The Ethical Soundscape challenges such assumptions. ²⁶ Although the study focuses on the production, distribution, and use of cassette-based sermons, it is also a study of the normative possibilities afforded by a technological artifact, and by the broader movement in which it appears.

Since their appearance in Egypt little more than three decades ago, cassette sermons have gained remarkable popularity. Although they are often associated with religious militants (because they turn up in the possessions of suicide bombers) such uses of cassette sermons are far from typical. ²⁷ Cassette sermons can be heard across Egyptian society—in mosques, stores, markets, taxis, on the street, and in private homes. They are listened to by Muslims individually and communally and, because of their ubiquity, they are routinely heard by non-Muslims too. As Hirschkind notes, they form “an omnipresent background of daily urban life.” ²⁸

The popularity of this mode of sermonizing is partly explained by its form: cassettes are cheap, easy to copy and share, and so hard for the state to control. Their popularity is also explained by the diversity of their uses. While early cassette sermons hewed closely to the traditional forms of sermonizing one would witness in mosques, contemporary sermons vary considerably. They include traditional forms of religious speech, with its emphasis on affect and poetics, but they also include forms strongly influenced by contemporary pop culture. Hirschkind describes, for example, a genre of sermon that morally exhorts its listeners by invoking many of the rhetorical devices of Western horror films, a genre often listened to for entertainment. ²⁹ The cassette, then, appears to have liberated the sermon from the normative and institutional constraints of the mosque, attracting a wider audience through its diverse offerings. ³⁰ Of course, much the same could be said about the rhetorical forms in which political affairs are expressed in Western democracies, where morbid and comic modes of entertainment are among the more popular media of political engagement.

It may seem unlikely that sermons, in their more traditional form at least, could stand at the heart of a deliberative culture. The sermon seems like one of the less deliberative genres of speech, one performed by religious figures who are considered the social and spiritual superior of their audiences, who dutifully listen and presumably obey. And yet this image of sermonizing misses the complex relations between speaker and listener in much “traditional” sermonizing, and it bears even less relationship to the new discursive practices that have emerged around cassette-based sermons in Egypt.

When sermons are listened to communally, but away from mosques, they can provoke deep reflection and passionate debate. ³¹ Hirschkind describes a lively exchange between a taxi driver, who is listening to a sermon while driving, and his teenage passenger. ³² As the sermon pronounces the evils of listening to pop music, the teenager speaks up, confidently arguing that such claims have no basis in the Koran. In this exchange the teenager does not submit to the Imam’s authority, nor to that of the taxi driver, but engages their arguments with his own knowledge of the scriptures. Hirschkind suggests that such exchanges are often seen in Egypt and that they express young Egyptians’ desire to understand the Koran on their own terms—a matter that they eagerly discuss with friends and strangers. ³³ Other scholars propose that these exchanges embody an emergent norm of publicity that has spread throughout Middle Eastern societies. ³⁴ If this claim requires further investigation, it is nonetheless clear that cassette sermons have helped establish the conditions of possibility for new forms of discourse.

In addition to facilitating passionate exchange, the Islamic Revival has seen the reassertion of long-standing forms of discourse, the deliberative potential of which is not immediately apparent. Hirschkind examines the normative principles that undergird the performance of traditional sermons, which reflect the image of hierarchy noted above: An Imam speaks at length and with authority; a lay audience remains silent, its members expressing submission with subtle bodily cues. But interpreting such exchanges as but a hierarchical form of communication is problematic, for it misses the ethic of listening that informs the audience’s actions. As Hirschkind explains, the success of these discursive exchanges is not measured in terms of the Imam’s scholarly or rhetorical prowess but in the qualities of listening embodied by the audience. ³⁵ This understanding of listening has deep foundations in Islamic theology, where religious understanding does not depend on the text alone but on the reader’s openness and purity of heart. Ethical listening, then, entails a performance of these qualities, thus lay people do not interrupt the Imam; through quiet listening they seek insight—an ethical orientation that warrants further consideration in other contexts, among them democratic politics.

The deliberative culture that emerged with the Islamic Revival deserves further study. It would be valuable to understand whether the ethics of listening, as performed within religious institutions, is extended to the religious deliberation that occurs in the everyday lives of religious people. The lively exchange between the taxi driver and the teenager showed evidence of this ethic, yet such listening was not the descriptive focus of the exchange. Research could also consider the opposite movement; whether the forms of deliberation surrounding cassette sermons are entering religious institutions, and whether this has affected the relations between Imams and their audiences. In all this, it is clear that deliberative cultures are not fixed sets of ideas and practices. Different forms of deliberation can stand in tension with one another, and yet they nonetheless “hang together” at the practical level, finding a place in different parts of a society or movement.

Saba Mahmood presents a different aspect of the Islamic Revival in her study The Politics of Piety, which concerns the modern piety movement. ³⁶ Pietists are women from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds defined by a commitment to educating one another about Islamic scriptures and a shaping their conduct according to Islamic principles. They meet in private homes and neighborhood mosques to study the Quran, the hadith, and other religious writings, and to discuss their practical significance. Most notable for many Western audiences is that pietists strive after the feminine ideal of modesty. As Mahmood notes, for many pietists modesty is primarily expressed by donning the hijab and through close attention to bodily comportment in one’s everyday interactions with others. ³⁷ There is also the challenge of interpreting the meaning of modesty when confronted with modern institutions and technologies.

The Politics of Piety explores questions about political autonomy across cultural contexts, including the intriguing notion that autonomy can be expressed in the act of abandoning it. But Mahmood’s study can also be read in deliberative terms. Though orthodox Islamic virtues may seem inimical to deliberative practices, Mahmood reveals how these virtues open new discursive spaces and modes of interaction. This is seen in the study groups themselves, which prior to the movement were unthinkable because religious instruction was traditionally led by men. These groups permit women to engage in new forms of discourse while learning but in other contexts too. When confronted by family members who reject the movement, pietists assert their claims and support them with scholarly argument, which is significant since these women generally lack secondary education.

These ethnographies reveal the complex articulations of deliberation in the Egyptian Islamic Revival. In each case, deliberative practices are shaped by the contexts of their performance. New forms of deliberation, whether ethical listening or raucous exchange, are the unintended consequences of cassette sermons and pietist study groups. Such practices express normative commitments that span different institutions and groups, and they represent a medium through which these commitments can be deepened. Deliberation, then, is hardly foreign to sermon listeners, nor even to a piety movement that seems to reject the autonomy of women. But the character of deliberation varies according to the meanings with which it is imbued—meanings that are as contested in Egyptian mosques as they are in democratic presidential debates.

These ethnographic studies suggest that normative insights can be drawn from unlikely sources, even fundamentalist movements. Some lessons for deliberative theorists would include:

Such lessons notwithstanding, we should avoid romanticizing any deliberative practice, let alone the society where it appears. The practices seen in Egypt have normative promise but can also reinforce social injustice. The unequal status of religious groups, as well as religious and nonreligious citizens, poses clear moral and political challenges, not only to a nascent deliberative culture but to numerous religious and political goods. Nonetheless, these practices offer us insight into the unlikely origins, diverse realizations, and surprising potential of deliberative cultures. In what follows, we examine how the key themes emerging from this case play out in radically different contexts.

Investigating Deliberative Cultures: Three Topics

Our scrutiny of the Egyptian case opens three lines of inquiry in the study of deliberative cultures: their historical emergence, the conceptual order they embody, and the communicative norms they establish.

Conclusion

The study of deliberative democracy is best conceived as a normative project informed by empirical findings, and what we propose is entirely in this spirit. Rather than take Western practices as a yardstick of democratic performance, we should examine democratic potential wherever it appears, even (perhaps especially) in seemingly unpromising contexts such as the Islamic revival in Egypt. Democratic potential is widespread—not limited to democratic polities—because it can be located in diverse expressions of the universal human capacity to deliberate collectively. But the political significance and practical consequences of collective deliberation can only be understood in local terms, with reference to culture. Culture meets deliberation where publicly accessible meanings, symbols, and norms shape the way political actors engage one another in discourse. If the power of culture may not always be obvious in our own context, it was plainly obvious in Botswana, where aggressive talk is ridiculed, and in Madagascar, where challenging a speaker is rude. Less is known of the meaning or prevalence of deliberative practice within modern Western polities. What research exists presents a somewhat grim picture—one of citizens who avoid deliberation, which seems to threaten the communitas on which civic association is founded. Democrats in established liberal democracies would do well to turn their attention to other societies to revivify the art of deliberative practice. Comparative and historical studies can aid in this, and in so doing they can contribute to the development of democratic theories with more universal reach. We hope to have set that project in motion.