Turan Kışlakçı
As we enter the new century, it is clear that Türkiye needs much newer ideas in every field. The world, which is experiencing deep intellectual crises, has little to offer Türkiye. From music to education, we, like the rest of the world, clearly see that uniformization is not beneficial. For this reason, we need a climate of thought that prioritizes differences and innovations.
From political systems to economies, from cultures to societies, the world is experiencing one of the greatest moments of rupture in its history. Such an intertwined and deepened chain of crises has never been witnessed before in history. The tremors that began with the 2008 economic crisis have dragged humanity into the grip of a global crisis. Having thought that everything was going well until 2008, humanity suddenly found itself in a severe global turmoil. Despite the hoped-for advances in technology and artificial intelligence, pandemics, social corruption, threats of war and economic collapse have darkened the dream of a once“bright future”. Today, the world stands on the brink of nuclear war amid escalating tensions between Russia and Europe.
In this turbulent era, in the midst of crises, crushed under the rubble of ideologies, humanity is divided between those who cling to the past with nostalgic longing and those who are lost in the chaos of not making sense of the new world. The prescriptions of the past are no longer sufficient to heal the deep wounds of today. In uncertainty, trauma, depression and despair, today’s young generations are either daydreaming in the dim corners of cafes or lost in the labyrinths of virtual worlds. Science, politics and religion are becoming increasingly inadequate to provide the necessary satisfaction to the soul of modern man. International institutions and non-governmental organizations are not only deepening despair with their dysfunctional behavior in the face of tragedies ranging from Gaza to Sudan, they are almost sealing pessimism. Humanity has become desperate to find its lost identity and the “spirit of the times” at the doors of psychological support centers.
Accounts left unfinished a century ago are being put back on the table today. The order established after the First World War was shaped under the leadership of the US and theUSSR after the Second World War, but the world could not stabilize after the collapse of theUSSR. Today, humanity is in search of a new path towards a multipolar world order. Many concepts of the last century based on language, history, religion and culture seem to have lost their validity. The political, historical, philosophical, economic, social, psychological, sociological and scientific concepts that the West presented to the world between 1848 and1948 are almost completely questioned and redefined by the new generation of Western intellectuals.
The relationship between religion and science was one of the most important problems of contemporary thought. With the decline in the value of positivism as well as ideologies, the effort to create a comprehensive worldview made it necessary to reconsider religion. In fact, the transformation in all fields of social sciences began to manifest itself in the 1960s. From political science to sociology, there have been radical changes in many fields, especially under the influence of technological developments. As modern science moved fromNewtonian physics to quantum mechanics, social sciences underwent a profound transformation with approaches such as the Annales and Frankfurt schools.
Founding Ideas of Modern Türkiye
The intellectual structure that built modern Türkiye was in fact born under the influence of the intellectual movements that swept the world after the French Revolution, especially after1848. Blending these Western ideas with national values, ideas ranging from Namik Kemal to Şinasi, from Ziya Pasha’s Dream to Ziya Gökalp’s idea of “Turkification, Islamization, Modernization” were among the cornerstones of Türkiye‘s founding intellectual accumulation. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk became the first President of the Republic of Türkiye, which was founded by the people with high ideals of the National Struggle, who united around the principles of the Society of Mudafaa-i Hukuk Cemiyeti and united around the axis of the “Spirit of Kuvayı Milliye”. The National Anthem was written by Mehmet Akif Ersoy, an Islamist.
The founders of modern Türkiye, who reached an agreement with the powers that shaped the world in Lausanne a century ago, foresaw that issues that were partially agreed upon or frozen at the time would reappear before the country’s politicians and intellectuals a century later. Today, we know that Türkiye has important things to say on the world stage at a time whenthe unfinished accounts of the First World War are back on the world agenda and thegeography of ideas has completely changed.
Ziya Gökalp’s profound influence
In the process leading up to the founding years of the Republic of Türkiye, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk emphasized the importance he attached to Ziya Gökalp’s ideas by saying “Ali Rıza Efendi is the father of my body, Namik Kemal is the father of my feelings, and Ziya Gökalp is the father of my ideas”. Ziya Gökalp, one of the intellectual fathers of modern Türkiye, combined these three fundamental ideas with the French philosopher Durkheim’s concept of solidarity in his works Turkification, Islamization, Modernization and the Principles of Turkism. Gökalp concretized these concepts as follows:
The new generation that the “Spirit of Kuvayı Milliye”, that is, the new generation that theConstituent Assembly aimed to build, found itself in Ziya Gökalp’s ideas. Today, whether it is accepted or not, it cannot be ignored that the AK Party governments have been the most successful in implementing Ziya Gökalp’s ideas. However, this does not eliminate the lack of new ideas that our age needs.
The need for a new founding idea
As we enter the new century, it is clear that Türkiye needs much newer ideas in every field. The world, which is experiencing deep crises in terms of ideas, has little to offer Türkiye. From music to education, we, like the rest of the world, now clearly see that uniformization is not beneficial. For this reason, we need a climate of thought that prioritizes diversity and innovation.
However, one of the biggest problems in Türkiye is that practice overrides theory. The fact that politicians are ahead of Türkiye‘s intellectual world in many areas poses a serious problem. One of the most concrete examples of this was seen in recent months with the statements of MHP Chairman Devlet Bahçeli on the “Kurdish Issue”. This courageous step had an important repercussion in the society; however, the lack of intellectuals and academics to support this step with theoretical depth has once again revealed the blockage in Türkiye‘s intellectual world.
In short, the world has experienced great changes in the forty years since our childhood and youth, when we started to learn the abbreviations of politics. The dizzying speed of transformations that have taken place in the last century, on the other hand, leaves one dumb founded. Many ideas that we naively embraced in the last century, which seemed naive and promising, are neither accepted nor justified today. In fact, the “enemy brothers” of the right and the left, the product of the Cold War, and the tired representatives of these ideologies now get together in coffee corners and play backgammon, listen to Neşet Ertaş with a nostalgic smile, and get depressed together. However, in those days, there were great dramas and bitter conflicts. Now they want to leave these conflicts behind and build a new future, but their fatigue and financial struggles do not allow them to do so. It is also important to remember that when today’s younger generations look at the current political fights of past generations, it is clear that these fights are really about money and office under the mask of ideology.
Ideas that plan the future
John Kenneth Galbraith, the American economist and thinker who died in 2006, argued in his work “The New Industrial State” that planning for the future has become an indispensable feature of modern industrial states. What Türkiye needs is new perspectives in all areas toplan for the future and to avoid uncertainty. This need for planning, emphasized by Galbraith, is directly linked to the level of technological progress, whether capitalist or socialist. Because the more complex and costly technology becomes, the more entrepreneurs and societies have to plan for the future in the long term.
Indeed, in the last four decades, the study of the future has gained great momentum. Many new institutions, from think tanks to survey firms, have emerged in line with this vision. However, in this field, as in many others, we have been content with imitating the advanced countries of the West. We have imported whatever is on the agenda in the West without questioning it. Because the people of this geography are stuck in the past, they have attempted to discuss the ideas coming from outside without evaluating them within the framework of national values. Our secularists, leftists, liberals, nationalists, racists, conservatives and religious people are still floundering in the remnants of ideas from a century ago or from theCold War.
What we need today are intellectual pioneers like Ziya Gökalp or Mehmet Akif Ersoy who will comprehend the new world correctly. Türkiye‘s ability to make this intellectual leap will not only be a hope for its own future, but also for all of humanity. A visionary who will bring its cultural and intellectual heritage together with the requirements of the contemporary world is the greatest need of the new century. Deepening in the production of ideas is the first step to build the future by feeding on the accumulation of the past. Otherwise, we are doomed to remain in an imitative line and cannot realize our own potential.