Two more things. One is that societies have, since the dawn of time, developed their own methods of cultural production. Which is why more attention should be given to local government. Local government is actually one of the world’s most important concepts: It’s the means by which a group or a region governs itself, and there must be a sociological relationship between local culture and local government for things to work. Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV) once drew up a report on this issue in response to the question of how local governments might pave the way for cultural planning. If cultural production is a constitutional right, and government is obliged to ensure this right by establishing the necessary conditions, then local governments are in a much better position to carry out this function freely and independently.

We also tend to overlook the culture industry, and the question is, does government have obligations in this sphere? Everyone with an ounce of sense opposes censorship, but does government have an obligation to check occasional “destructiveness” in the culture industry? Because everywhere in the world culture is divided in two. There is high culture comprising opera, ballet, painting, sculpture, and contemporary art. And there is popular culture. It’s out of the question for high culture to compete with popular culture on numbers alone. A Rolling Stones concert might attract a hundred thousand people, far above the number that a modest but intellectually momentous exhibition could ever hope to attract. So, how do we protect the area of culture that is small in size but huge in intellectual value? The duty of government is to provide some form of support in order to defend high culture from the advances of the culture industry.

There are also concrete, functional steps that the state can take, such as tax policies. Special tax policies for book sales and the cinema rescued these sectors in France. We’ve yet to develop a similar awareness and approach in Turkey.

The crux of your questions is this: Are we going to formulate a cultural policy based on the idea that art and culture should be independent and free, or are we going to define culture, thereby determining how the arts should be?

Turkey has had a conservative cultural climate for a very long time – not just now. What, then, is a conservative culture? Is it even a real concept? Can we talk about the sociology of this sort of conservative culture? These are challenging questions. First and foremost, they require that we define “conservatism.” This may come as a surprise, but it’s actually a modern concept; it emerged in response to modernity, to the revolutionary era Professor Erzen just mentioned that started in 1789, resumed in 1848 and again in 1917, and reappeared with the cultural revolution in China.

Conservatism in Turkey is essentially nostalgic, a belief that everything in the past was good, and that certain things can only get better if we return to the past. When the Ottomans asked their theologians how to make progress, the answer was something like: “Our Sovereign, only by recalling the exceptional harmony and order of the Age of Bliss and establishing once again that order can we ensure order in all things today.” Which is what they believed until they translated Ibn Khaldoun, who said something different: “Humanity is made up of birth and destruction.” Nations are born, they live, and they fall. Returning to a golden age saves nothing; you can only survive if you can produce something new.

This is the essence of modernist thinking. We have a future only if we can innovate; you can’t revitalize the present by transposing the past onto it. That’s the view espoused by our Republic. Influenced by 19th-century European positivism, the Republic accepted the idea of continual progress and built its intellectual structure around this framework. It regarded the majority of past practices as erroneous and concluded that these practices were responsible for the country’s situation. Hence, the more we could renew ourselves, embrace the new, and produce new things, the clearer our path forward. Consequently, yes, the Republic did have this revolutionary bent. It disregarded the cultural accumulation of the past, or neglected it and left it to time. It assumed that if people embraced new models, new methods, and innovation, they would have the capacity to go back to the past if they wanted to take something from there and create a synthesis with the new.

The logic behind this idea is as follows: Every culture is dialectical and contains the past. Take a specific period, say the Scholastic period of Christian philosophy; that culture will exert an influence on today’s culture one way or another and is subsumed into today’s culture. But methodical reproduction of the past is something else entirely, which is what conservative culture can’t accept.

Conservative culture thinking goes like this: We used to have calligraphy, truly magnificent works that defy the imagination, and marbling and illumination, too. If we could revive them today, we could stand as a distinct culture, an original culture. Sadly, it doesn’t work like that. Perpetuating a cultural legacy using past methods goes against the nature of everything we know. Let me give an example, something I’ve personally observed. There’s experimentation and exploration in the art of calligraphy today, and among the conservative segment no less. People are using calligraphy like painting, and traditionalists are objecting that the works produced this way run counter to the philosophy of the art form. What I’m getting at is this: Even if we were to pursue this ancient art form using original methods and under the same conditions, the results would never be identical to historical works of the 16th century; so much has changed since then in terms of visual perception, ideology and language, not to mention our grasp of the world overall. It simply can’t be done. Instead, a new calligraphy emerges, one subtly permeated with today’s world. It looks old, as if nothing has changed. Expert eyes easily detect something new, though, something completely different. Conservatives don’t or can’t appreciate this synthesis, and that’s where the problem starts.

Consequently, I’d like to add this: Art has a higher standing than crafts. Crafts can be regarded as artistic, but art is always a process with an intellectual element; it always pursues newness and always seeks to add a new dimension.

Crafts, on the other hand, use traditional methods handed down via observation and imitation; development might take hundreds of years. Crafts can’t possibly sustain cultural life on their own in the present day. Modernity means every institution endeavors to surpass itself and does so willingly. On the other hand, people have a right to demand a less abrupt transformation. That I would accept, and that is the true definition of conservatism. But if you’re saying, “Never let anything change; we want to live in the 21st century as if we were in the 16th,” that’s no longer conservatism, that’s the start of dogmatism.

This issue isn’t limited to artistic production either; it concerns the broader matter of all cultural production. Indeed, the real issue is enabling culture to transform itself: for people to demand, expect and pursue this transformation in the cultural area. I can understand how people might look for something called “our culture.” Folk songs and dances are local, although they, too, are open to different influences. But great culture is always a synthesis. It is never restricted to a single culture. Quite the opposite: The more open to “blending” it is, the more important it becomes. Diversity leads to impressive originality. Producers of high culture also pay attention to local culture. Abbas Kiarostami, an Iranian, is a great filmmaker. Japanese and Chinese authors are winning Nobel prizes. They could never have reached these heights if they had ignored their distinctive local cultures. But their success stems from embracing a concept of universality that surpasses local culture and creates tension between local and universal elements. Conservatism can only make sense in this context, which, in effect, is not conservatism at all.

I’d like to say something here without becoming too theoretical: A basic claim of conservative circles is that the reforms of the Republic, such as alphabet reform of 1928, made Turkey lose its memory and undergo an identity crisis. The idea that you can import technology without ideology reflects a logic that has been around since Ziya Gökalp, before the Republic. Modern sociology has already answered the question of how to separate ideology and technology. Technology is always the determining variable. I mean, it’s impossible for ideology to remain the same when new technology arrives. The Ottomans were able to adopt reforms without resorting to revolutionary methods, but the Republic opted for a different path.