Cross-border Operation in Civilization: The Talcott Parsons' Civilization Reading

Rudyard Kipling’s The Ballad of East and West begins with the verses “Oh, East is East, and West is West,/And
never the twain shall meet.” As an eschatological proof of the never-ending divide between East and West, these
lines are often cited by writers and journalists in an international crisis. The current crisis is a product of a bigger
problem, while actuality is rediscovering the heritage of a selfish, violent, and agressive past. Many concepts,
such as civility, civilization and modernization, come into play in an evolutionist discourse that categorizes and
differentiates social differences and predicts that an ideal society will survive over time.
Social evolutionism may not be a basic form of explanation today as it was in the nineteenth century. It reminds
us of our zoological origins, our colonial sins, and the ruins of history. Contemporary thought, shaped by the
discussion of the end of history, the end of ideology, or the end of the meta-narratives has been distilled from the
dualities of old–fashioned philosophies (East-West, barbarian-civilized, irrational-rational, etc.). A recent
popular trend is to confess the sins of old social scientific accounts. So, the apocalyptic atmosphere in the
subsequent verses of poems can be felt in radical criticisms of post-modern approaches to modern civilization.
How can debates on civilization still be in the forefront of the individual or collective, even though all the crimes
of civilization have been revealed? Why do we remember where we are in civilization when there is a small
hitch in our daily lives? Why is it still important to determine the distance between civilizations when the
communication revolution has removed distance between people and turned the world into a “global village”
(unity/conflict)?
In this paper, we will try to deal with the reconstruction of the concept of contemporary civilization in the
context of Talcott Parsons' reading of civilization. The fact that the United States became the new central country
of the world after World War II necessitated the re-reading of world history in line with current developments.
The thought of Talcott Parsons, who formulated the Fordist-Keynesian welfare society model as a general
system theory, did not only shape the advanced capitalist societies; at the same time his understanding of history,
which treats civilizations as a relay runner for contemporary society, is an essential reference for modernization
theorists in the description of non-Western social structures. First, we will consider Parsons' social system
theory, which regards modern social structure and relationships as the ultimate goal that past civilizations were
trying to achieve. We will then try to address his views on the social evolution and civilization process. Parsons'
teleological reading of historical civilizations in order to explain the problem of change as one of the questions
that structural-functionalism leaves unanswered suggests that social change is caused by an internal influence
that arises from non-adaptation to physical and natural conditions. This reading, which legitimizes relations of
power among societies as a “theodicial necessity” in a sense, is an inspiration to the “modernization theory” of
the wide field of application in the non-Western world during the Cold War period. It is especially important that
this theory, which was developed in the post-1960s political climate (although some of its representatives and
basic views lose their old influence) is based on the actual civilization assumption.

Key Word: humanity, evolution, social system, modernization, non-Western

Immanuel Kant argues that universal morality depends on a morality principle that everyone will act upon. Such
a moral concept, rooted not in divine grace but in practicality, refers to the universality of the community in
which morality lies, even though it does not give a clear view of what behaviors are acceptable or pleasurable. If
the first step of the tradition of enlightenment is to get rid of the limit of space and time with a transcendental
leap, the second step is to explain the world with information (anthropology) that accepts itself as the only
criterion. The universal nature of man is a universalized nature through historical and social processes. It can be
said that this (contingent) rule did not deteriorate in the order of the new society that rose after the Second World
War. In the aftermath of 1945, when the world was seeking to heal the wounds of two deadly wars, structural-
functionalism aimed to develop an understanding that would solve both the solving of crisis of society and carry
the “historical burden of the white man.”

As a scientific statement of middle-class unconscious concerns, the turning point of structural-functionalism was
1938, when it was set down in the first edition of The Structure of Social Action. As some crises bring new
opportunities to surpass the boundaries of the conventional understanding of the world, there will be a turning
point for all new ideas in the following process. After the war, a new need for social science motivated Parsons
and his canonical reading. The work, which was grounded in the social scientific heritage of the 19th century,
offered a sociological paradigm of lessons learned from positivist and idealist misconceptions. Parsons was
trying to update the optimistic self-confidence of the 19th-century world, which compares civilizations and
explains its own supremacy, while at the same time receiving the creative discourse of classical sociology as a
starting point for the new era. Although putting the absolute objectivity of natural sciences into social
phenomena is the greatest dream of sociology, it was necessary to wait until after the war for a nation-centered
institutionalization process that dissolved different ethnic and interest groups in the category of citizenship. The
bureaucratization of economic, political, and other spheres made it possible to consider the sui generis thing
called society as a general “system” (Parsons, 1979, pp. 830), which defines the elements as the abstract sum of
their relations with each other and with the whole.

Parsons argues that social systems are composed of three sub-systems: “coordinated,” “intertwined,” and
“integrated” with social relations by reducing individual differences to a minimum: the social system, the
cultural system and the personality system. The social system, in which individuals learn to fulfill the social roles
and social expectations provided to them, is the product of a one-way functioning, not an interaction process,
contrary to Mead's hypothesis. The cultural system has a (re-production) function that allows the ideal balance to
be adopted by every new member of the collectivity. The cultural system consists of cognitive symbols that
produce objective judgments, descriptive symbols that produce aesthetic judgments, and moral-legal symbols
that produce value judgments about phenomena, and it tries to overcome the natural inequality between people
with a purpose and consensus. It is the process of devoting the individuals included by the personality system
that aims to be a mature member of human society. According to Parsons, According to Parsons, individuality
can only be established as the ability to capture the need-function balance, as determined by the system. In this
context, personality refers to the individual's social status as the degree of internalization of normative standards.

II. Civilization Reading of The Contemporary Evolutionist

"Who reads Spencer now?” Young Parsons begins The Structure of Social Action with these words (Parsons,
2015, p.39). According to him, for a new paradigm that explains social relations in the context of an integrated
system, Spencer was involved in the evolution of social theory because he represented a backward stage. The
new generation of sociologists also claim that Parsons, like Spencer, who imposed his interpretation as the
advanced stage of the disciplinary sociological tradition, made an “old fashioned evolutionism” (Pope et al.,
1975, p.230). Is the evolution of Parsons and his followers entirely different from Spencer's evolutionism? Yes
and no. It is difficult to reconcile the two approaches on a common theoretical basis. One of these approaches
saw society as a necessary condition for survival, while the other regarded a biological requirement as a random
outcome. On the other hand, these two interpretations of social evolution interlock the teleological beliefs about
the fate of civilization with the cultural pessimism of contemporary historians. There is nothing surprising about
the fact that concern for withdrawal and disintegration was spread during the two inter-war periods, and that
civilization has been restructured with the closure and protection instinct. The “Zeitgeist,” of which Parsons was
a member, also thought of the earlier crises as the beginning of a new, perpetual phase that escaped the
unnecessary weight of civilization.

Parsons concentrates more on topics related to historical evolution and the historical formation of modern society
in his later studies. As a comparative reading, The System of Modern Societies regards the contributions of
different civilizations to the development of the modern social system, while the failure of the universal system
to meet the demands is seen as a reason to withdraw from the stage of history. The System of Modern Societies
summarizes the concept of society as a system that Parsons operates works such as Social System (1951), Family
Socialization and Interaction Theory (1955), and Economy and Society (1956) in his mature period. Parsons
classifies pre-modern civilizations into primitive, archaic, and intermediate stages, while the civilization of
Greek and Israeli societies defines them as double beds. Parsons treats primitive societies as a negative category
since man's maturation is regarded as a construction of a symbolic order. Parsons deals with the Egyptian and
Mesopotamian civilizations that he called archaic societies as the second ring of the evolutionary process. The
distinction between the ruling and the ruled and the centralization of power take these societies up one level in
the evolutionary order. On the way to the modern system as defined by Parsons are the Chinese, Indian, Islamic
and Roman civilizations, which are defined as intermediate in the final step. These societies, which greatly differ
between physical conditions and social order, have prepared the substructure of the idea of the social system by
evolving an abstract state from God's anthropomorphic acceptance. For Parsons, the formation of a valued
community (believers or civilizations) in which political competence is gathered in a single center, is one of the
greatest contributors to the social evolution of intermediate civilizations. Greek and Israeli civilizations, the
cradle of civilization, have contributed more than the post-potentially subsequent eras, even though they have
fallen behind in terms of time, more than the periods following the sprouting of a universal system.

III. Real Politics of Civilization: Modernization Theory,

Immediately after the war, nations and states were re-divded, and reorganized in order not to repeat the small
apocalypses of the previous decades. The application of the Marshall Plan to non-Western societies, or the
United Nations's report on the economic development of underdeveloped countries, meant that there was a trans-
national discourse that emphasized the importance of the development of non-Western societies in the new
period. The efforts of the World Bank to develop underdeveloped societies, the establishment of “neutral”
financial institutions such as the International Cooperation Agencies, IA (1960), OECD (1961), the African
Development Bank (1961), the Asian Development Bank (1966) imply that an institutional and systematic
aspect, rather than the old colonial ambitions, would be effective in the modernization of the non-Western world.
In the post-war period, similar to the Parsons and its civil and administrative functions, modernization theorists
were to assume an international role after 1970.

Parsons’ macro-theory has great advantages for modernization theorists. It is not necessary to move a system that
develops in its own naturality to a separate physical-historical scene, and it is necessary to cope with local
complications. We think it would be useful to outline the modernization theories of Daniel Lerner and Marion J.
Levy Jr, who have studied two different regions of Parsons' civilization, in this section. As one of the classics of
literature modernization, The Passing of Traditional Society (1958) aims to explain the process of modernization
in Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, and Iran, what Parsons referred to as the Islamic Empire. According to
Lerner, the book has a unique value because it brings together two enterprises: a modernization theory and an
empirical data set. The path leading to a level of institutional organization from ideological conflicts is a social
hierarchy based on an emerging economic structure, a political regime based on democratic participation and
representation, and a culture with secular and rational norms. According to Lerner, one of the main parameters of
modernization is the level of use of mass communication and tools. Marion Levy Jr. was the first to make
modernized societies a research object of structural-functionalism. The Family Revolution in Modern China
(1947), which combines the concept of a structured functional society with a comparative method, is one of the
primary references to both Levy's first text and modernization theory. Levy notes that there is a far-reaching
continuity relation between the relatively modernized and relatively non-modernized societies, and he defines
the concept of modernization as penatration of the “universal” patterns of modernity to different structures and
the ability to change them.