In The Role of Civic Religions in Emerging Thai Civil Society, Imtiyaz Yusuf, ed. (Assumption University and Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung), 2003. pp. 117-136. Note: In the printed edition the footnotes appear as endnotes.

Mythical Constructions of Society

Stephen Evans

Presuppositions A nation is composed of a People1, a State, a Society, etc. Civil society is a set of institutions that mediate between the People and the State. All of these, both separately and in concert presuppose a range of personality structures among the participant persons. A set of formal socio-political institutions presupposes a set of informal institutions, predispositions, and patterns of behaviour with which it is coherent: people will not conform to structures, nor obey laws that are inconsistent with what they are already doing. Hence, a new set of institutions, however ‘good’ and ‘right’ cannot simply be imposed or adopted. 1 In order to distinguish the People ( ประชาชน ) as such, as a collective entity, from ‘people’ ( หลายคน ) as the plural of ‘person’, I shall capitalise ‘People’ where it refers to the collective entity as such.

118 One way of understanding the coherence of political, social, and personality structures is as enactments of the predominant mythologies of the society. Any given mythology is capable of being enacted in multiple ways--but there are also multiple ways in which any given mythology cannot be enacted. Therefore attempts to adopt political and social systems that are not coherent with the predominant ways of enacting the dominant mythologies are bound to be problematic. Introduction

Western political thought tends to take for granted several constructs that are not well defined. Two of these interest me here: the People and the person. Democracy means rule by the People. The great American president and statesman, Abraham Lincoln said that government should be ‘by the people, of the people and for the people.’ We speak of the will of the People, and after elections we say that the People has spoken. It is by no means clear, however, what a People is, what its boundaries are or how it is constituted. The other construct of interest is that of the person as an autonomous individual that, in spite of its individualized autonomy, is submerged in the entity of the People. The Western ideal of the individual indeed is fraught with internal contradictions.2 I would like to suggest that ‘the People’ and ‘person’ are mythical constructs within a generalized Western mythology. I would like to suggest further that human societies in general can usefully be understood in terms of the enactment of the dominant myths of those societies. This paper sketches out such an understanding based on a small portion of the mythologies of the United States and of Thailand in hopes of casting light on the possible relations among civil society and religion.3 Since the topic of the conference, ‘The Role of Civic Religions in Emerging Thai Civil Society’, is drawn from a specifically American discourse about specifically American problems and issues, I begin with a specifically American problem. That is the problem of the construction of the autonomous individual. 2 The autonomous individual, for example, would be free of social conditioning, but an individual free of social conditioning would be a wordless lump of flesh, lacking the most rudimentary personality. 3 For a discussion of how religion structures societies, especially that of the United States, see, Wilson, 1979, particularly chapter 2, p. 23ff.

119 It is generally agreed that American style democracy depends on a citizenry of autonomous, authentic, and equal agents exercising a critical and independent style of rationality. Democracy may be schematically defined as the continual negotiation and renegotiation among a plurality of such agents of the terms of their common life. Civil society is one medium through which this negotiation takes place, functioning to mediate between the People and the State which rules in their name.4 If a vibrant civil society is vital to the functioning of a democratic nation, then autonomous individuality is vital to a vibrant civil society. The autonomous individual in turn has been thought to be the spontaneous and normal state of the human person. Over the last fifty years or so, however, contact with people of other cultures has demonstrated to Americans that the autonomous individual is rather unusual and that far from being normal and spontaneous, it may be an aberration. Just as Americans work at being individual and separate, Thais (and, for example, Filipinos) work at remaining integral parts of their families. Thais find it scandalous that I live in Asia while my aged parents live in the United States. I find it incomprehensible that aged Thais and their adult children would want to live together. At the same time there seems to have been an erosion of actual individuality in America, provoking some concern over the health of civil society and of the republic itself. Thomas Bridges writes, ‘full participation in a liberal democratic civil society, requires citizens to undergo a certain difficult and often painful process of individualization,’ (Bridges, 2002),5 and, ‘Free and equal individuals, i.e. human beings who effectively regard themselves as such and behave accordingly, are made rather than found.’ (Bridges, 2002).6 Bridges worries about how to motivate people to go through the ‘painful process of individualization’.

I should like to attempt to understand the autonomous individual in terms of the enactment of mythology.7 American mythology

In Christian mythology, the world is fallen, a realm of sin, and to be in the world is to be alienated from God. The world is essentially incapable of redeeming itself and Jesus called people out of the world to follow him in anticipatory participation in the imminently expected redemption of 4 In some sense, civil society is an operational substitute for the vague and ambiguous entity of ‘the People’, mediating also between the People and the persons who participate in it. 5 www.civsoc.com/issues/issues_three.htm 6 www.civsoc.com/nature/nature1.html 7 I want to emphasize that I do not assume that autonomous individuality is a good (or bad) thing. I am only interested in its meaning and generation.

120 the world by God. That redemption would come at the end of history and usher in the end-time Kingdom of God. Those who followed Jesus, that is, those who participated in his cult, would thereby be reconciled to God and be made fit for the Kingdom. When it came, they would then participate in the Kingdom of God itself. As that Kingdom was not forthcoming, those who participated in the cult had to find ways of bringing in new participants--in particular their children--after Jesus had gone. One solution was infant baptism, in which the children of the faithful were made to participate in the cult from birth and to be integrally bound to the erstwhile and symbolic Kingdom of God: the Church.

The Protestant Reformation attended more to those parts of the myth that emphasized explicit individual choice, as when Jesus recruited the apostles as adults. I shall call this the ‘Apostolic Myth’. In America, Evangelical Christianity, once the dominant mode of religiosity, enacted this mythology in the rite of ‘adult’ conversion. One chooses conversion for oneself, and must therefore have reached the 'age of reason'. Conversion in Christian families occurs at about age 12, when the child, feeling him or herself called by God, makes a profession of faith. Although the profession is typically made or acknowledged publicly, it is a strictly personal act: one always stands alone before God. The profession must be genuine, it must be really meant, that is, it must be authentic. Part of what that means is that the profession of faith is not a lie, but it also means that the candidate had a rational understanding of what she was doing, and that it was not unduly influenced by others: that the decision was autonomous. What Evangelical Protestantism presupposes and requires then is a high degree of individuation, characterized by authenticity, autonomy, and reason--precisely the personality structures presupposed by American civil society, and of Liberal theory in general. Upon conversion one turns away from the world, which is now understood as strange and hostile, and toward the Kingdom which will be actually achieved after death and/or in the end-time. Turning away from the world also means turning away from the state of nature in which one was born, and through an act of God the convert is purified of sin and made a new and sanctified person, fit for the Kingdom.

It is an inconvenient fact, however, that one still lives in the sinful world and that one may always later question whether his conversion was

121 authentic (did I really mean it?). The period of adolescence which typically follows conversion may be particularly painful. If one had been truly purified in the act of conversion, would one be assaulted so violently by the awakening sexual drives? Adolescence for Evangelical Christians is a time of heroic efforts at self-control, of learning to deny one’s own desires and of pursuing autonomy even from one’s own body. These efforts are aimed at convincing oneself that the conversion was authentic, that at the moment of conversion, one’s faith was ‘real’. An important result of the demand for authenticity is a distain for ‘appearances’ (while the convert strains to appear authentic, most of all to himself) in favour of ‘reality’, a distain for ‘surfaces’ in favour of ‘depth’. By putting each individual in a direct relationship with God, moreover, the evangelical enactment of the myth generates agents who are rough equals. The time of waiting in the sinful world for reunion with God at death or the end-time, might come to seem pointless and one’s actual life may threaten to become superfluous. But the apostles were called not only to their own conversion. They were called also to proclaim the coming of the Kingdom. In enacting the myth, Evangelical Christians take this on with a sense of mission. Besides efforts at converting more and more individuals to one’s own brand of Christianity, part of this mission becomes the denunciation of the status quo in society, the reassertion that the current system, however good it might be, is not the Kingdom of God. This is the prophetic dimension of the myth.

The apostles’ courage in proclaiming the good news, in the face of imprisonment and martyrdom, becomes emblematic of the authenticity of conversion, the integrity of one’s personal convictions. Enacting the prophetic dimension of the myth is manifested in the American near-obsession with seeking out evils simply in order to enact the drama of denouncing evil publicly and in ways that expose one to personal risk. The mythology here goes back to the Old Testament prophets as well. One need only recall Dr. Martin Luther King’s invoking Moses in his ‘I have a dream’ speech to see the connection.

122 The Social Contract

In itself, the Evangelical Protestant enactment of the Apostolic Myth generates a multitude of roughly equal, radically individuated human beings, striving for ever more authenticity and autonomy. These autonomous agents find themselves alienated from the world at the same time as being forced to live in it. This is where the secular myth of the social contract comes in. According to this myth human beings originally lived as individuals in the wilderness, fighting each other and wild animals over resources. Eventually they realized that life would be easier if they cooperated with each other. But cooperation required that the individuals give up some of their freedoms. For example, where stealing is advantageous to the competing individuals each considered separately, stealing is destructive of cooperative endeavour. The members of the primitive incipient community therefore agreed to give up their right to steal from other parties to the agreement. In this way a whole set of rules were formulated and a pact made to relinquish limited amounts of personal freedom for mutual benefit. That pact is the social contract and it is binding not for the morality of its provisions, but because the individual agents agreed to it. On the face of it the myth is absurd. There was no pre-social time when human beings fended individually for themselves: individuality is a very recent phenomenon. In the mythical time before the social contract was made, it is impossible to imagine how children were raised or how language developed, or how the institution of a contract could have evolved at all. Nevertheless, the Social Contract Myth is the very basis of modern Western democracies. In the United States, the Apostolic and Social Contract myths are mutually reinforcing. Any contract, for example, presupposes roughly equal autonomous agents. But equal autonomous agents are the personality structure generated, and valued by, the Apostolic Myth. On the other hand, inasmuch as the Apostolic Myth calls people out of the world, and therefore calls for them to break with natural (and therefore sinful) community, the Social Contract Myth provides a model for constructing a new and rational society. According to the Apostolic Myth, however, any actual society that is ‘contracted’ is flawed and the prophetic dimension motivates continual criticisms of the status quo. Social Contract mythology channels

123 prophetic action into political activism and thus into civil society. In a word, the enactment of the Social Contract Myth is given its motivation and intensity by the simultaneous enactment of the Apostolic Myth. In the specifically national mythology of the United States, the Fathers of the country drafted the foundational set of rules: the constitution is the originating social contract. The legislature and the courts are formal arenas in which the contract is continually re-negotiated and reaffirmed. Civil society in turn is the informal arena in which the terms of the contract are debated by large segments of the people themselves. I suggest that much of what is happening in both the formal and the informal institutions is an enactment of the myth of the Social Contract, and that it is in the process of re-enacting the myth that society is sustained and that the democratic system is reproduced. I do not mean that the rational function of these institutions is insignificant. Legislation is produced, rational policies are formulated. If civil society is a ritual enactment of the social contract myth, that ritual includes rational discourse that produces instrumentally effective plans. Reason and ritual, then, support each other. The ritual of engaging in discourse recreates the social and personality structures by way of which rational discourse is possible. The enactment of the myth then, transcends the specific issues.

In Liberal thought, the social contract is invoked to establish the legitimacy of the law. Since we all agreed to it, obeying the law is simply a matter of keeping my word.8 The problem here, of course, is that I did not personally agree to the constitution and I have had no personal hand in framing, approving or interpreting laws. I am not, in fact, a party to any social contract. Answers to this objection tend to argue either that the fact of my birth in society constituted a prior implicit acceptance of the contract, or that my acceptance as a rational adult of the benefits of the law is tacit assent. The first solution misses the personal autonomy that is a precondition of making contracts and hence undermines the myth of the social contract itself. The second solution undermines autonomy as well in that individuals cannot refuse the benefits of many of the laws.9 The fact is, however that my respect for law, and my recognition of its legitimacy has nothing to do with assent to a contract and it is in no way the result of a rational evaluation. I respect the law of the land simply because I am one of the People. That means: because my personhood is defined by participation in the same myths in which those laws participate. 8 The importance of keeping one’s word is itself a cultural phenomenon related to autonomy and authenticity, and with its mythical correlatives. 9 How would I refuse, for example, the benefits of public health regulations?

124

This is one reason that elections are so important. Voting looks and feels

like a highly stylised, ritual enactment of the Social Contract Myth. After an election we say that ‘the People have spoken’, and the results are called ‘the will of the People’. These are mythical ways of speaking. Objectively what has happened is that individual selections among pre-defined options have been tallied. If there is a will of the People here, it is in the prior acceptance of the results of the tally. But that prior acceptance is rarely articulated--acceptance of the tally is not rationally deliberated and agreed to, it is not contracted. The tally is accepted in advance because it is part of the re-enactment of the founding myth. In voting I participate in the myth-world of the original contract and my obedience of the law is further participation in that same myth-world.10

Participation in civil society has a similar function, as an enactment of myth it brings the participants into the world of the myth at same time as reconstituting the body politic as the world of that same myth. Voting and political activism are a kind of incantatory performance in which citizens become mythical beings in the mythical reality of the nation.11 Thai mythology

In Buddhism there is a mythology parallel to that discussed above. The Buddha, in his lifetime, called individuals out of society and into the Sangha. Like the apostles, the bhikkhus answered the call as adult acts of personal decision. Moreover, even more than the followers of Jesus, they embarked upon the much more private and individuating task of meditation in pursuit of enlightenment. Unlike the apostles there was no essential turning back to the world in order to call it to repentance. It is not that the Buddha and his bhikkhus were not concerned for the sufferings of the world--they gave plenty of advice for happiness in the world, but there is nothing like a redemption of the world, no imminent end-time to be proclaimed and prepared for in anticipatory faith. The world is rather conceived as in an endless alternation between better and worse and to escape suffering ultimately means leaving society altogether.

In the mythology, the world is conceived as a manifestation of Dharma in the sense of dhammaniyama, the fundamental and eternal order of the cosmos. As such, the broad structures of the world, including social 10 For most Americans this is not participation in the general and abstract Social Contract Myth itself, which they may not even know, but in the myths of the founding of the republic through the drafting of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitutional Convention. The founders however were very aware of Social Contract Myth (they would have called it ‘theory’). 11 Wilson quotes The Sacred Canopy (Garden City, L. I., 1967): ‘Religion legitimates social institutions... by locating them within a sacred and cosmic frame or reference.’ Italics in the original.

125 structures are taken to be natural and inevitable. What is required for happiness in the world is conformity to those basic structures. Unhappiness, in turn is explained as the result of the failure to conform to those structures, as personal wrongdoing, bad karma, paapa ( บาป ). Thus personal behaviour, but not social structures are subject to criticism. Society can be improved and the world made a happier place through gradual rectification, incremental corrections bringing behaviour into conformity with the eternal natural order that is already there. Dharma is no less a mythical entity than is the Kingdom of God. But where the Kingdom is an anticipated future new reality that breaks with the present, Dharma is the fullness of being, elusive but eternally present. Both are touched, as it were, by acting out the mythology which embraces them in a kind of incantatory performance.

Thus the Buddha did not call men and women out of the world in preparation for an imminent redemption, neither is there any prophetic turning back to the world in anticipatory critique. The Sangha is an alternate community, not a potential replacement or anticipation of a replacement. Moreover, the Sangha is not an end in itself, but a means to a profoundly apolitical end.

My focus here however, is not on the content of the mythology so much as on the way in which it is enacted. The myth of the Buddha’s calling men into the first Sangha is widely enacted in Thailand by the temporary ordination of young men in their early 20’s. In the course of the period of ordination, the young monks are immersed in a community of older monks with a high degree of supervision and support in following a highly stylised mode of life. These ordinations are very much in the public eye, and have the character of a performance for the audience of the laity. As performance, appearances are given priority. The young monk must learn to fold his robe just right, to adopt the proper postures, and to intone the chants without much concern for comprehension. The experience, accordingly is neither individuating nor authenticating but rather reinforces the dependence on social as opposed to self-control, and reinforces concern for ‘surfaces’ rather than ‘depth’. There is, moreover, no concern with the autonomy or authenticity of the decision to ordain, young men often ordain only at the behest, sometimes insistence, of their parents.12 The rite of initiation, the daily chanting, and the austerities are themselves efficacious for accessing the transcendent. The 12 Of course the Evangelical Protestant conversion of 12 year olds is not autonomous either; the point is that it is ideally autonomous, and that it becomes an ultimate anxiety to achieve autonomy.

126 story of Nanda in the Tipitaka itself (Udana) illustrates this well. In the story, the Buddha induced in Nanda a vision of beautiful young women and told him that he could gain access to them through becoming a monk and meditating. Nanda’s ordination was certainly not autonomous, nor was his practice of meditation authentic--the Buddha essentially tricked him into ordaining and meditating. Nevertheless, he attained arahantship.

The main way in which the population participates in the enactment, however, is not through ordination, but through making offerings to the monks, through the institution of thawai ( ถวาย ). The contemporary Thai Sangha, with its stylised movements, and special language may be seen as an enactment, a performance almost, of the mythological Sangha of the Buddha-time. As such it is also the immediate manifestation of Dharma. In the act of thaway, placing objects before the mythical but living figure of a seated disciple of the Buddha, one is oneself a mythical being and the myth-world of the Buddha-time and of Dharma becomes vividly real. But in the act of thaway, the indigenous mythologies of the spirit world converge as well. Food given to the monk becomes mythologized and one’s deceased relatives receive the spiritual portion of the food. Through this active participation in the myth-world, one returns to the mundane world fortified with the mythical force of puñña ( บุญ ). But as a manifestation of Dharma, the myth-world is profoundly connected to the mundane, because Dharma also constitutes the deep structure of the mundane world. The deep connection of actual society with the myth-world is demonstrated and enacted via ritual offerings to the Sangha at all levels of society from the King down to the peasant. Thus roles in society which seem to reflect the mythology take on the aura of the myth and are given exaggerated deference. Royalty are considered as near devata, and thus the importance of such ceremonials as the ploughing festival. Thus also the importance of public works and of the benevolence of the visible leaders. The more closely leaders play the roles of the benevolent leaders of mythology (for example, Prince Vesantara, King Asoka), the more deference they are given. Lucien M. Hanks writes, ‘to rule in Thailand is to serve,’ (Wright: 20), but the deference given to the benevolent leader, is not only in recognition of the benefits provided, but also, in recognition of the leader’s conformity to the mythical model.

127 The practical effect of this particular complex of mythical enactment is emphasis on personal morality through social control (rather than through self-control) and deferential conformity to the general structures of society, playing ones role as well as may be, and expecting the leaders to do the same. Thus electoral politics may seem as irrelevant to the typical villager as court intrigue, it is a game played--or a ritual enacted--in the city, not part of the functional role of village ritual (Wright: 217, 269). The expectation is that if everyone plays his or her role properly and well, general social harmony and prosperity will automatically ensue. To the extent that the mythology is coherent, harmony and prosperity might in fact accrue. In this view the continuity of State support of the Sangha, in spite of repeated coups d’tat, becomes comprehensible. First by contributing to the Sangha, the State participates in the myth-world, second, its support of the Sangha is in conformity to the mythical model of a good king. Moreover, the continued concern of successive governments for social and economic development conforms to the same model. Through participating in the enactment of the same myth, the State, the People, and the Sangha are united in the same myth-world. Because the mythology demands conformity to an eternal and present model rather than radical criticism of the status quo, the quality of the performance, the appearance, becomes significant. Political speeches therefore tend to be ceremonial rather than substantive, political parties tend to represent personalities rather than issues, and voters may quite frankly choose a candidate because he or she is good looking. The low level of interest in politics, moreover, together with a high interest in the monarchy, suggests that the politicians (and generals) have not yet found a secure role within the dominant mythologies. The search for such a role is vividly indicated in a book published by the military following the 1991 coup d’tat and ironically titled Democracy in Thailand.13 The book takes pains to link the State, the military, and ‘democracy’ together in the myth-historical frame of the monarchy and invokes the Buddhist myth of the ten duties of the king, the dasarajadhamma (pp. 4-13). 13 Published in English, the book would have been intended to legitimate the recent military takeover to an international audience. According to the book, the military ‘will not get involved in politics,’ but ‘will always protect democracy,’ (p. 35); it is ‘impossible to separate military affairs from the state,’ (p. 25); and ‘The military is made up of people... it can be democracy of the people, by the people and for the people.’ The version of the constitution and the history of elections (chapter 6) indicate a publication of late-1992 after General Suchinda was forced to resign as Prime Minister and after the subsequent elections of September (p. 71).

128 Critique

If we understand society as the enactment of the dominant mythology, then we may critique Thailand’s adoption of Western political models as an attempt to enact a non-dominant mythology. Since the dominant mythologies continue to be enacted, the result may be an incoherent enactment and a de-coherence of mythology. The instability of regime and the difficulty in constructing a democratic State may be due to this incoherence. On the other hand the continuity of the State and the stability of patterns of rule and even the stability of the ways in which coups d’tat have been conducted, may indicate the continuing coherence of underlying dominant Thai mythologies.

For the sake of the argument, we take the United States as the exemplar of the type of Western Liberal Democracy that the Thai State would like to emulate.14 Such a democracy depends upon a citizenry of autonomous, authentic, and equal individuals who engage in critical discourse concerning the affairs, conduct, and structures of the State. The portion of that discourse that is carried out external to the government itself is known as civil society. Although elections have legal force that civil society does not, elections are not genuinely discursive. It is rather through the open discourse of civil society that something like the voice of the People emerges and addresses the State. I have suggested that in the United States this socio-political model is realized through the Evangelical Protestant enactment of the myth of the apostles and the secular myth of the Social Contract. The enactment of the Apostolic Myth in the conversion of young adolescents produces highly individuated persons, deeply concerned to maintain their autonomy and authenticity and equality. By orienting these agents away from the actual, sinful, world toward the future redeemed world, the Kingdom, they come into perpetual prophetic criticism of the actual world. The secular myth of the social contract in turn channels the isolation of individual autonomy into the fiction of a prior mutual agreement and channels the prophetic criticism of any status quo into the continual re-negotiation of the contract. Elections are a highly stylised ritual enactment of the social contract myth. Participation in civil society is also a kind of ritual enactment that unites the Social Contract Myth with that of the prophetic apostle. 14 Again, I specify the U.S. only because the topic of this conference derives from a specifically U.S. discourse. A convincing treatment would have to take a much broader view.

129 The Thai enactment of the myth of the original Sangha, on the other hand, produces persons with low levels of individuation whose concern is to conform to a pre-ordained order, the broad outlines of which are assumed to be reflected in existing structures of society. The original myth-world of the Buddha-time is enacted in a living performance by the Sangha, and mundane society at all levels maintains its participation in the eternal pattern of Dharma via ritualised offerings to the monks. Individuals then are primarily concerned to fulfil their personal role in the social order. If there is criticism, it does not take the form of structural criticism of the system itself, but of calling upon others to better fulfil their roles. That essentially means that instead of political criticism there is the demand for greater personal morality. In Evangelical Protestant mythology, the world itself is flawed and cannot be redeemed except by a future act of God. The world as such is subject to criticism, or even denunciation. The best that the world can do is to break from the natural (sinful) order in anticipation of the redeemed order that will be created by divine fiat (but which does not yet exist). This makes American society subject to millenarianism and sudden upheavals, the most violent of which was the civil war.15 In Buddhism the world is flawed because of the moral failings of individuals. It can therefore be improved by calls for greater adherence to moral precepts. The best that the world can do is to conform to the natural order, Dharma. This is consistent with gradual, orderly and rational progress, such as the phased elimination of slavery under Rama V.16 In its enactment, U.S. mythology produces politically concerned individuals competing in a political system of controlled adversity. Open verbal conflict is valued and sought after. Civil society is primarily an arena of conflict among autonomous individuals and public discourse tends to take the form of debate. In its enactment, Thai mythology produces harmonious communities characterised by deference to perceived authority. Conflict is abhorred, and public discourse tends to take the form of mutual congratulation and praise.

American style democracy, including civil society, may therefore be incompatible with the dominant mythologies of Thailand. 15 On American millenarianism, see, for example Wilson, 1979, 28, 106ff. 16 The example is pertinent. The American civil war was fought largely over the issue of slavery. Slavery was abruptly eliminated, not only destabilizing the economy of the American South, but also throwing multitudes of former slaves into sudden unemployment and destitution. The fact that emancipation was not managed may have contributed to continuing long-term disadvantages for Black Americans.

130

The role of religion

I think that all of our mythologies would agree that the State and the political system itself exist for the People and for the persons who make up the People. There are differences, however in how Peoples and how persons are constituted in different societies. What we do not want to do, then, is to re-structure the People and the persons to fit a preconceived ideal political structure. In other words, I am not going to suggest that Thailand adopt mythologies to produce autonomous agents who like to argue. I would rather suggest that the political system be adjusted to fit people themselves--that systems be devised that are coherent enactments of the dominant mythologies. It is not that simple, of course. The radical separation between the People and the State is itself a Western presupposition--the two are rather involved in an intimate dialectic, each continually influencing, manifesting, and mirroring the other. I would rather not ask how religion might contribute to the emergence of Thai civil society. Civil society is set of institutions of a particular style that perform the general function of mediating between the People and the State. I would ask the more general question: ‘How can Thai religions contribute to the emergence of institutions that mediate between the Thai People and the Thai State in the contemporary world?’ One area in which religion could help is in finding and telling myths that might contribute to a greater degree of political consciousness. The Buddhist tradition is mythologically rich and such myths are easily found. There is even a story in the Digha Nikaya that is similar to the Social Contract myth and which thinks quite deeply about social and political issues (Cakkavatti Siihanaada Sutta). More important than telling myths, however, is the way in which they are enacted. The Vesantara story, for example, might be performed in a way that emphasizes the deliberative dimension of the decisions of the royal family, allowing the Bodhisatta’s wishes to be questioned and discussed.

There are other ways in which the Sangha might contribute to the development of a Thai equivalent of civil society. Monks could engage in a more interactive style of teaching, and the laity could be given a larger teaching role.17 The Sangha could demonstrate possible modes of public 17 More interactive teaching styles and involvement of laity are innovations that are already being adopted by a limited number of monks, for example at Mahachulalongkornrajavidyalaya University.

131 discourse by allowing some of its internal debates (for example over women’s ordination) to be carried out openly, thus demonstrating modes of unity in spite of disagreement, loyalty that questions authority. A very specific effort that might contribute to the popular and national self-critical reflection that is essential to democracy would be a campaign to eliminate discrimination against Muslims and to convince Thai Buddhists that Thai Muslims are indeed fully Thai.18

In addition to helping to form personalities and social patterns, religion can take a role in helping to form the structures of the State and can call for the ethical conduct of State affairs. I mean by that, not only calling for personal morality in government officials, but also calling for structures, systems and institutions which function in moral ways toward moral ends. The Sangha is particularly well situated for this function in light of the fact that so much of the State’s legitimacy derives from its participation in mythical enactments with the Sangha and under the Sangha’s supervision. According to the mythology, moreover, the Sangha is radically independent of the State. It accepts support from the State, but does not tolerate interference. The independence of the mythological Sangha is indicated, for example, in the Angulimalla story in which as a bhikkhu, the former mass murderer is beyond the jurisdiction of the State (Majjima Nikaya). That independence, together with its moral authority, positions the Sangha to criticize the State, thereby to call for State reforms to bring it more into line with the actualities of the People. Again, much of the way this would be done would be in the ways that the Sangha engaged the State in the performance of ritual. The problem is that the Thai Sangha, as indeed is the case for Christianity and Islam in Thailand, is not independent of the State. The State, in fact, dictates the organizational structures and lines of authority within the Sangha and the Sangha as a consequence may simply serve uncritically to legitimate the State. I would suggest, therefore, that the religions of Thailand look for ways to distance themselves from State supervision, positioning themselves to critique the State.19 It may be objected that the Buddha advised the first monks to avoid politics. This is true. But there are also many stories in which the monks, and the Buddha himself, advised rulers on State matters. We would not expect the Sangha to be involved in partisan politics, nor to indulge in Western style prophetic denunciations. Rather Thai religions need to 18 In common speech, ‘Thai’ is sometimes used as a synonym of ‘Buddhist’. As in, ‘His father is Muslim but his mother is Thai.’ Or, ‘My father converted to Buddhism from Islam because he wanted to be Thai.’ 19 I have experienced several occasions in which the Thai government cautioned the Sangha to keep to its ‘proper’ religious realm and to avoid statements or actions that might bring into question policies of the Thai State.

132 develop a Thai style of critiquing the State. What must be emphasized here, is that what constitutes a Thai style of critique, must not be dictated--nor even influenced--by the State itself.20 Conclusion

The widespread attempts to adopt Western political forms by non-Western countries, and the evident difficulties in doing so, indicate the need for a more culturally sensitive basis for political theorizing; the basic assumptions of political science are, after all, Western. On an intellectual level the problem is indicated by the use of the same political terms with different meanings--and not recognizing the difference. For Thais, ‘freedom’, for example means the absence of restrictions on personal behaviour (Wright: 269), for Americans it means the right to challenge authority. Wright (p. 269) has shown that even the concept of democracy ( ประชาทิปไต ) in Thailand diverges significantly from that in the West.21

I have suggested here an unusual approach to political analysis, one which does not produce easy formulas for generating solutions, but attempts to get beneath formulas and to recognize fundamental cultural differences. The approach needs a great deal of development, yet I think it can be fruitful in rethinking political structures and pubic policies. Even in its preliminary state the approach suggests that Thai political thinkers should be less anxious over whether Thai democracy fits Western models and more concerned with the possibility of evolving specifically Thai patterns.

Any socio-political system requires coherence among the State systems, the personality structures of the citizenry, the structures of social institutions, and the dominant mythologies. Such a coherence is not designed and implemented, it is a synthesis evolved over long periods of time. The Western synthesis evolved over many hundreds of years. In spite of the instability of government, Thai society as a whole, including the State, if not the individuals holding power, has shown a remarkable stability and continuity over the 200 years of the Chakri Dynasty. This stability and continuity could only have been based on a synthesis whose evolution took place largely throughout the Ayuthaya period. The 71 years since the 1932 coup is a very short time, and in spite the discouraging record of coup after coup after coup, Thailand has come a remarkably long way, in my opinion, towards forging a new synthesis for the contemporary and future world. 20 To address a current issue, this may imply that there should be no Ministry of Religion at all, much less a Ministry of Buddhism. 21 In this light, the irony of the coup prone Thai military publishing a book on democracy (Democracy in Thailand, referred to above) and its implied conflation of democracy with military coup d’tat may be less strange.

133 REFERENCES Armed Forces Information Office. 1992. Democracy in Thailand. Bangkok. Bridges, Thomas. 1994. The Culture of Citizenship: Inventing Postmodern

Civic Culture. New York: SUNY Press. Bridges, Thomas. 2002. www.civsoc.com. Wilson, John F. 1979. Public Religion in American Culture. Philadelphia:

Temple University Press. Wright, Joseph. 1991. The Balancing Act: A History of Modern Thailand.

Oakland: Pacific Rim Press. Date based on internal evidence. The book lists no publication date.