An Analysis on Ethical Dimensions of Turkey’s Struggle During COVID-19 In Relation To Cultural Contexts
Turkey has undergone a culture shift and did not succeed at it to the fullest extent. Yet, the country abides as a unique structure that is offering an opportunity for observing cultural changes. It’s a developing country that is apt for greater changes than the ones it has already undergone. Not to mention that culture shifting is the new trend in COVID-19 and Turkey is a great opportunity for studying it. As a result of rapid changes, Turkey has a volatile ground of values and ethical conducts. The article takes historical contexts into consideration and makes way for individual, social, political outcomes. Turkey and COVID-19 are combined with their distinguishing characteristics to reach an understanding on the ethics of such instances.
Introduction
This article is aimed to analyze and evaluate Turkey’s effort on COVID-19 in the light of its distinguishing characteristics. It consists an ethical analysis of the pandemic in Turkey, illustrated by individual, social and political aspects in respect to their underlying values from within Turkish social-psychological-cultural contexts. By focusing on ethics, we try to found the article on the framework of human actions and consequentially, human axioms. The study of ethics- human actions- relies on axioms and assumptions in contrast to observable facts that are treated in epistemology. Therefore, the essay relies heavily on qualitative data instead of quantitative- objective facts. After all, in order to grasp an outlook of humanity, which is a cultural- dynamic construct that is grounded on axioms rather than measured or generalized quantifications, one has to rely on humanities language of qualifications, descriptions, obscurities.
The article starts with an analysis through “what is questions” on Turkey, COVID-19, their distinguishing characteristics, followed by an attempt on understanding of previous elements and an evaluation at the end. The article is a philosophical analysis of current events, and what we mean by “philosophy” is the analytical approach characterized with “what is” questions thus, generating the systematic understanding of knowledge through categorizing, conceptualizing, defining and other linguistic clarifications. It’s thus the philosophical studies make sense of the world through translating the world into words and here we are trying to understand a pandemic with a narrowed frame of Turkish context and particularly the ethical foundations of Turkish culture. Hence, we need to draw the distinguishing characteristics of the pandemic and the country to come up with an insight on the what is happening and what are the lessons to be taken.
Roots of Turkey
Turkey is a developing country that has multicultural- transcontinental features and unique characteristics. For (Toynbee, 1955) It’s the primary successor of the great Ottoman Empire. Ottoman Empire also had unique characteristics and they were roots of today’s “Turkish” branches. One of the uniqueness emerges from geographical position. Ottoman Empire and its breadbasket, Anatolia, stretches between the eastern hemisphere and western hemisphere like a suspension bridge. This geographical shape and location put the empire and the modern nation state in a cross-road position that is enabling researchers to observe it as a laboratory of transition, change, migration. Researching cultural changes and culture shifts are prolific on this location.
We have much to learn from Ottoman Empire and its main successor, Turkey in terms of cultural changes like COVID-19 transformation. For Toynbee, primary lessons are to be extracted from its civil service understanding and the autonomy given to separate communities. (Toynbee, 1955, p. 125) Thanks to its cultural diversity, Ottoman Empire is home to change and dynamism over centuries. It has been speculated that this was an underdeveloped economy with little effort on science, but one should not forget the empire and later Republic of Turkey did well in its own cultural group. Assessments on cultural studies should take the problem of sampling into account. A culture is fed and supplied by its own roots and it’s really hard for a tree to live on from an another root, namely another civilization and another culture group. So, in the same way of eastern societies such as China, India, Persia lagged behind western counterparts; Ottoman Empire also lagged due to ethical foundations of culture letting only its own constructs to develop and nourish.
Despite the view in public opinion that Ottoman Empire stayed behind the development of the West, Ottoman Empire observed the necessities required to sustain its existence; especially when we take the axiomatic culture group mechanics into account. It was as modern as their axioms, values and ethics letting them to be. The empire was one of the first states to build large scale telegraph infrastructure. Samuel Morse even praised the Ottoman sultan Abdulmejid being the first head of state to appreciate the real value of his invention. (Bektas, 2000, p. 672) This remark is of importance for one thing, questioning the popular wisdom of “development scale.” No culture is deprived of its enthusiasm to develop unless there are measures to prevent it. The popular wisdom of underdevelopment causes a huge hypochondria and thus, real draw backs in Turkish culture due to feeling embarrassed, incompetent and unable. In addition to technological changes, we can say that social changes were also present in this empire. Not as much as Russia or Japan; but better than Iran and some other middle eastern states. According to (Sohrabi, 1995, p. 1392) Ottoman bureaucracy was in rife with divisions of rational and patrimonial officers, unlike Iran with a fundamentalist one-way bureaucracy. Ottoman state and staff was far more modernized than its eastern counterparts. All in all, could not keep up with the West but the culture did well in its own terms.
The continuation between Ottoman Empire and Republic of Turkey is analyzed by authors like (Lewis, 2001), (Shaw, 1976), (McCarthy, 1997) in an elaborate way. The emphasis on the continuation is to see modern Turkey’s pillars more clearly as it’s founded on the remains of the empire. (Hanioğlu, 2005) thinks that the founding fathers and Kemalist reformers relied heavily on Ottoman reformers from Tanzimat and Meşrutiyet era. (Zürcher, 2005) establishes Ottoman sources of Kemalist thought and opposes to those who think Kemalist achievements were not rooted back to history or emerged from nowhere. Even though they’re radical, the tendencies for a massive change were present in the intellectual circles long before the republic. It’s clear that this empire and its successor is an area of observation for cultural changes together. Ottomans, Turkey and maybe the future social and political entities in this geography may share similar characteristics. Not only because the physical entities but also the axiomatic backgrounds in the geography makes change inevitable. Yet, change brings turmoil with it.
Turkey has shifted its culture to be western instead of an Islamic one. The shift was subject to many pieces of research due to its unique dimensions. (Huntington, 1996) describes Turkey as a torn country in the middle of east and west. (Özakpınar, 2015) describes Turkey in an inevitable culture shift and says that the country is in a crisis of changing. We can say that this is because of this geography being in a transitional location and a passageway of civilizations. Furthermore, the recent culture shift brought instability since the axioms, values beneath the society is changed. Due to the radical decision on westernizing the country was a bureaucratic decision initiated by the top officials, the empire and Republic of Turkey were reformed by bureaucrats instead of class struggles or any mass-population pressure. (Halil İnalcık, 2008, s. 15) This top-down enlightenment caused the foundations to be unstable, shaky and took time to be reconsolidated. The society suffered the blow of being changed.
A Turkish citizen is also in the middle of contrasting paradigms like the country, not only geographically but also culturally. We can speculate that Turkish citizen was anxious and hesitated in the process, thus became dent and submissive over time. And never ever rebelled against the radical changes with a few exceptions, most notably the lockdowns and measures during COVID-19 faced little challenge compared to western counterparts.
Turkey in relation to COVID-19
COVID-19 made the world crumble and get sick. The pandemic caused upheaval in the world. Turkey is not an exception and it’s naturally involved in global scale events. Its location and culture require it to involve and adapt. The problem with Turkey is its values are not concretely founded due to the reasons that we’ve previously said and as a result, the people don’t object to official declarations nor they abide to them. Enforcing Turkish people to follow rules and especially central- absolutist state rules are an another challenge as it’s also a challenge to make them participate in non-governmental organizations, possibly owing to the recent cultural and ethical changes. Besides, one another thing adding up to the crisis for Turkish people is their socialness. Turkish people are hospitable and get social very often. Its prayers, rituals, commute, lifestyle, kitchen are all social. It predictably suffered from the lockdown and its severe effects.
There are peculiarities in this country, emanating from its characteristics. One thing to note is Turkish definition of a COVID-19 case. After a high pressure from the media, minister of health “finally” admitted that their definition of a COVID-19 case was different from the popular opinion and international counterparts. The minister of health said that they didn’t count patients that are not showing symptoms. This way the case numbers seemed so low. (Daventry, 2020) It seems that one can get away with everything through redefining terms and manipulating language. We should now should ask, how did Turkish officials come up with this unique technique? One cannot simply change the definitions of international terms, especially when the audience expects some other meanings. We may assert that this banal attempt is probably arising from the volatile grounds of this society due to recent culture shift and instability, consequently encouraging torn activities apart from the established ethics of the international community or wide spread common sense.
Just like an individual suffering from a disease, a country suffers from a pandemic in a pervasive and lasting manner. Indeed, an individual has to rest and pull oneself together with a good heart; just like a country going into lockdown and building hope for the society of its own, while tightening the belts of economy and politics for a delayed gratification at the end. Unfortunately, Turkey has a difficulty doing that. Turkish government allegedly concealed true magnitude of the pandemic in order to protect the economy. (Hahn, 2020) But it might have caused a bigger problem, reliability. This attitude might be arising from the value shock suffered in the establishment of the new republic. Political maneuvering may not be unique to Turkey but let’s not forget that the world has chosen western lifestyle and they’re all in a shock of this shift. Whereas in Turkey, these ethical shocks seem to intensify.
Still, Turkey pulled the stings as well as the other states and managed to take hold. According to (Gumrukcu, 2020) Turkey has sent medical aid to 61 countries, including great powers like United States, Spain, Italy, France and Britain; consequently, claiming to be world’s third biggest aid distributor during the outbreak. The source also claims that it’s a fraught medical diplomacy for political aims. One should also consider that actions can be both sincere and instrumental in international relations. (Kanat, 2020) asserts that some will try to seek ulterior motives behind this relief, but it’s in the track record of the country to help other nations. It’s worth noting that delivering help to superpowers without a formal request indicates something else than relief. Whatever the reason is, this move is not only a sign of instrumentalist approach and opportunism, but also of capability of producing such equipment in vast quantities in times of crisis.
The country is sufficient in terms of medical facilities. It’s got five universities in the top 500 medical schools of the world. (Rankings, 2021) The country is also famous with its health tourism with rising statistics. (Erozden, 2018) Despite the superior capacity and manufacturing ability, Turkish healthcare facilities lacked organization and coordination (Argan, 2020) Comparable to medical investments, Turkey has also shifted its education system to be more involved with technological developments. FATİH(Movement to Increase Opportunities and Improve Technology) was a project of complete transformation in educational environment. It included an 8-billion-dollar infrastructure and personal computer investment. The plan was to donate a tablet PC to every student from 5th to 12th grade. (ERG, 2013) It seems like a vision concerning the future but it has a catch. The project was initiated with insufficient resources, hasty foundations and invalid orientation. Millions of tablets weren’t used and the equipment remained unproductive. (Gökmen, Duman, & Akgün, 2018, s. 29) The medical and educational leaps were timely and, on the mark, but it lacked the proper application. It’s much like the enlightenment process of the country that is still persisting. The actions rely on values and the values that are the pillars of this culture are not completely grounded. This shaky, volatile and dynamic foundation brings disadvantages in addition to unexpected advantages. There are timely and required decisions but there isn’t right implementation, a disciplined proceeding. There are enough resources but not enough stability in the values to keep people carry on the momentum.
Individual, Social and Political Analysis
It’s too early to see the outcomes of such a colossal pandemic, on the other hand we may speculate and try to come up with possible visions to overcome our issues. COVID-19 is a relatively more unrestricted area for speculations and problematic claims due to emergency situation. However we shall keep estimations and projections in minimum.
Individual
Both the disease and the measures to prevent its spread caused violations of individuals rights. Individual rights are an indication of law and order in the society. They’re not given, they’re manifested naturally by being human, therefore they cannot be taken. All governments in the world should be checked and balanced during the process as there is a huge possibility of resorting to autocratic and oppressive actions. Due to the emergency situations the society may neglect the control mechanism of power. Indeed, sleep of reason produces monsters and power is not something that one may release hold. It should always be checked and in times of crisis, when we have to let things slide, there’s an indicator for governments. Verbal expressions and behaviors of politicians will give away their possible intoxication of power. Turkey is much threatened with political turmoil insofar it’s a torn country with shaky, replaced, volatile set of values. The political turmoil may step into the individual lifestyle and seize personal rights in times of crisis. The society should uphold the individuals’ rights in order to sustain itself since it’s the soft belly of the law and order. Insofar there’s an ethical volatility, society should expect politicians to respect the values of otherised, alienated individuals in the country.
The average person has suffered a lot during the pandemic. It was unprecedented in terms of scale and has inflicted permanent marks onto many. Entertainment sector has changed shape, transformed and transferred into online environment. Individuals had to become more isolated and online in these days and in the following years. Turkish individual is not exempt from this exposure. Unstable values and lacking coordination may prove to be beneficial here, as a person is more open to change individually. Particularly in developing countries, times of rapid changes has multiplier effects on individuals both negatively and positively.
Social
Turkish people are very social and it’s really hard to dissociate them in times of distancing and lockdown. One thing that everybody knows is that Turkish people violate the rules so easily. This too, can be related to recent change of values and culture shifting in the society. Universally, rules only appeal those who comply with the values that rules are based on. Culture shifting is not an easy task and most of the people haven’t complied with the western positivist rules that have substituted the religious ones. The positive rules are in a constant battle with intuitive customs and conventions in this country.
The pandemic revealed the vulnerabilities in the society. One weak spot was social media. Despite the opportunities provided by online environments, it was also a diffusion area of misinformation and disinformation spread. Pandemic was both an opportunity and a loss for technology and online integration. The easy spread of misinformation and more dangerous disinformation shocked the educated people. Thanks for COVID-19 being less threatening than expected, the threats were averted. A more serious pandemic could have caused serious panic not because of the severity of the events but the misinformation causing much harm than the actual disease. Turkish society is very fragile in terms of social media and online environments. Tech usage is as high as the other OECD countries but literacy and proficiency scores are among the lowest. (OECD, 2016) It’s a shocking blow when we add its young population into account Technology is received but not used properly. Distant learning, distant working too, imported but not implemented accurately, most probably lacking the ethics and values behind it. This is a great threat for the country, especially when the president of a country admits failing in educating children. (Hürriyet, 2020)
Education and culture transfer is the most urgent element in cultural shifts and preparations for disasters like COVID-19. In addition to presidents statements, Turkish education system is compelled to fail from the beginning. The schooling is not productive, the outcomes of lessons are dwarfed by university preparation courses and test solving skills. This makes Turkish education system even more incompetent in distant learning.
The society is dominantly Muslim and Muslim prayers take place in mosques five times a day, collectively. This will also be an issue in the future possible calamities. The public opinion won’t readily listen to authorities in this regard. As a country in trouble with values beneath it, the religious issue is tense. The state has suspended prayers in mosques at the beginning of countermeasures. (Reuters, 2020) Anyone in Turkey could say that it would have started a domestic disturbance if the ruling party was a leftist one. Thanks to conservative Justice and Development Party being in charge of suspensions, it’s now averted. The future remains unknown though, there will be quarrels on the national, secular, religious, cultural customs in times of crisis and prohibition.
One of Turkey’s headaches, unplanned urbanization doesn’t either contribute to emergency situations. Urban sprawl becomes more severe as the time and city expansion goes on. Problematic urbanization is also related to the change of values. Sudden top-down culture shift obliged people to leave their rural life and move to cities that were not ready for sudden expansion. With the change of values and the shift of foundations, the people and authorities of cities started to break the rules and even the customs of their own social groups. It was a free for all urbanization process ruining forest lands and natural basins. It’s now a complete mess in Turkish cities that won’t easily let itself to be controlled in times of crisis like pandemics, earthquakes, fires, social catastrophes.
Political
Turkey has changed its values through top-down bureaucratic decisions. In this way it’s in every sense a centralized state. Health, education, legal, enforcement systems are all managed with absolutists iron fists. It’s extraordinary for a Westerner that very little or no autonomy is given to local administration. A vast, dynamic, diverse geography had to be ruled from the center in the Ottoman times to keep the empire alive and well; then again in the republic, centralization and absolutism was imperative to realize the modernization efforts. The problem is not being able to loosen the strings when needed. The local administrations get anxious and cannot move by themselves due to the spirit of 1900’s in 2020’s. The antiquated approaches to politics might be also a result of -not yet accomplishment- of the culture shift and set of values. Turkey belongs to nowhere in this stance, and it either needs to find a place or forge one.
The dynamism of the country, the instability and volatility of values brings suffering and suffering gives the society to sustain great damages from global events. Turkey is accustomed to wide variety of incidents. Turkish economy has become shock-proof, not because of its stability or future prospect but its being used to shocks that are very often. It’s not invincible though, especially in a global world that has extended its supply lines to far corners of the world. Furthermore, the lack of consensus on values in this country hinders the political situation. The instability of values brings lack of trust to countrymen. It seems that there’s more danger from political instability than from economic instability due to politics, ethics and values laying the foundations.
A great example for political, ethical, axiological situation of Turkey is its economy. While top-down interventions rock the markets (Anadolu Agency, 2020), officials and institutions also follow the political lead and take part in the economic issues as if it’s not a free market, consequently exhausting the already scarce resources. (Reuters, 2020) Due to top down interventions and trust issues, the citizens of Turkey invests heavily on foreign exchanges. In times of crisis, first thing to note is, not only the foreign investors but also the citizens dump the Turkish Lira. (Central Bank Of The Republic Of Turkey , 2021) During the COVID-19 Pandemic, foreign exchange deposits held by residents of Turkey has seen a historical high with 58%. (T24, 2020) Leave aside the foreign investors, Turkish citizens’ buying huge amount of foreign currencies definitely signifies an ethical problem. Trust comes from common grounds among people, and we can conclude from the facts that people don’t feel safe in Turkish Lira for decades. It could be smoother if there were more common values and stable foundations.
Conclusion
Turkey is still dynamic and open for change in terms of its foundations. It may establish its future with contemporary technological, advanced means. Moreover the state can implement radical changes in this dynamic ground. The society seems shock- proof to external threats like global economic disasters, however it lacks the internal common grounds to thrive and blossom. Most of the problems of this country leads to lacking shared values, ethics and good deeds in behaviors.
Turkey is inevitably a social country with its religion, entertainment, customs, history etc. This is both an opportunity and a risk in terms of deadly diseases like COVID-19. It was a relatively mild disease compared to others emerged in the past. A more severe disease will probably devastate the developing countries as well as developed countries with its domino effect. COVID-19 teaches a lesson on pandemics in an elegant way. It’s as much as valuable for developing countries as it’s for already developed countries.
We’ve learnt from COVID-19 that all the world is in the same boat when pandemics are the case. Developed countries should try to help the other countries to prevent pandemics spreading. The efforts on pandemics should first establish sharing common values, unification and participation for common goals.
Social working, social research has become more important in this process. Social services and service industry seems like the future job of humanity. Not just in the emergency but in general, jobs are inclined to be in the services sector while automation takes control of other sectors. What remains to people is to care of other people and help them. This will both help build an economy and solve the unemployment crisis. People can work for each other’s welfare, especially in the area of values, ethics, humanity that automation can’t handle. There’s also a great opportunity in online distant environments for this. It is both ecologically and economically an opportunity that people got used to online environments in this process. It’s also a great chance for developing countries that online environments require less investment than the actual teaching, meeting and social gathering.
Humanity has suffered many pandemics and has been through many disasters. But we have a tendency to see them as if they were new, and we are incompetent for repeating challenges. There are too few things that are new on the face of the earth. The panic is not the panic for unreadiness, it’s the panic of ignorance from the facts and lessons of history. This panic is the result of unethical conducts. If the men were to share common values and common grounds for understanding, the case would have been more different and it could have been averted much earlier.
The process taught us that we need to be ready for even more severe disasters. We can avoid future damages with a little care and awareness of the situation. That of course relies on sharing common grounds and caring for each other as humans. The values beneath us hold us together and those values don’t come from a particular group, but from the whole idea of humanity. In the case of Turkey, a giga factory of products and services; it would have been more successful if the ethical foundations were more accomplished.
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