Co-Existence as Harmonization of Law

CO-EXISTENCE AS

HARMONIZATION OF LAW,

MORALITY AND CULTURE 1

An tana s Mocku s

In t roduct ion

Co-existence

is a concept that has arisen or been adopted in Latin America to synthe-size the ideal of a life shared by culturally, socially or politically very diverse groups,a viable shared life, a stable, maybe permanent ‘living together’, desirable in itselfand not just because of its effects.

In the English-speaking world co-existence usually describes people living peace-fully side by side, particularly as the result of a deliberate choice. In fact, as the oppositeof war, it carries a slight connotation of resignation when accepting the other. Perhapsas occurred during so-called peaceful co-existence, one co-exists with the other throughnecessity, because there is no alternative. It therefore shares two common featureswith tolerance: on the one hand, it is a desirable thing and, on the other, it to someextent involves learning to put up with things. A similar nuance of co-existence as some-

Prospects, vol. XXXII, no. 1, March 2002

Original language: Spanish

Antanas Mockus (Colombia)Educated in France and at the Universidad Nacional of Colombia, with degrees in mathe-matics and philosophy. Elected Mayor of Bogota from 1995 to 1997 and re-elected 2001–2003.Professor at the Universidad Nacional; Chancellor, 1991–1993. Worked with the Instituto deEstudios Políticos y Relaciones Internacionales. He has carried out research in projects relatedto co-existence, a peace agenda for civil society, the harmonization of laws, morality andculture, the state university system, the theory of education and the articulation of formal andnon-formal knowledge. He has published numerous articles about education, teaching, highereducation, culture, science and technology.

E D U C A T I O N F O R L E A R N I N G

T O L I V E T O G E T H E R

thing deliberately opposed to exclusion and something arrived at with a degree ofresignation appears in its translation into French as cohabitation. However, perhapsdue to its origin, the Spanish term convivencia has ended up with more positive con-notations and as promoting something intrinsically desirable.2

Co-existing is when different people manage to live together without risk of violenceand with the expectation of making fruitful use of our differences. The challenge ofco-existence is basically a challenge of tolerance towards diversity and this is mostclearly manifested in the absence of violence.3

Tolerance towards diversity today involves:• a transformation of identities and how they are reproduced, so that to acquire

a strong identity, or to maintain it, it is no longer necessary to deny the other’sidentity, or to exclude him/her;

• acceptance that the options provided by different groups or traditions with respectto the most important questions (religious,4 philosophical, political) couldsomehow be considered equivalent and, more recently, acceptance that it canbe possible and useful for various models of society to exist within the samesociety;

• a broader scope for making agreements (many issues, such as those relating tosexuality or household chores, cease to be regulated by custom and are thesubject of agreements, between partners, for instance).

Lack of violence involves:• exclusion of violent action, through shared rules (legal or cultural) or through

rules set or internalized autonomously and unilaterally (moral/personal);• universalization of competencies for the peaceful resolution of conflict (resolving

problems, reaching agreements).There is, of course, a connection between the two aspects, tolerance and non-violence:identities rest to a large extent on shared or autonomously adopted rules.5 In general,more shared rules mean a greater common identity and vice-versa; agreeing on atleast the most fundamental rules perhaps provides the essential basis for us to be dif-ferent with regard to others (our style of dress, our personal discipline, etc.). The factthat there are different religious, philosophical or political options that are equallyvalid from a certain point of view in practice poses the challenge of reaching agreements(inevitably partial and imperfect) and, in particular, leads us to seek common rules (eventhough we recognize and respect them for varying reasons from different traditions).6

In short, for tolerance towards diversity to be viable and to exclude violence: (a) some common rules are necessary:

• shared cultural rules (some common cultural denominators);• an explicitly adopted constitutional and legal framework;• international conventions.

(b) it is necessary for the great majority to share the capacity and willingness toreach and comply with agreements:

To change from seeing difference as a danger to seeing it as an opportunity for gettingto know each other, for a mutual broadening of horizons, also crucially requires thosecommon rules and that willingness to accept agreements.

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As well as mutual tolerance and the absence of violence, co-existence suggestsprocesses of construction and stabilization of that ‘living together’: ultimately, co-existingcould mean harmonizing the processes of economic and cultural reproduction.7 But it is notour intention to go as far as that here. Our approach is more limited: we simply wantto go beyond the negative definition of co-existence as an absence of violence, to explorea positive view of it.

What leads to us to tolerate diversity, to adopt it enthusiastically? What takes usaway from violence? An initial positive response to date – i.e. provisional – and whoserefinements we will examine in this article by moving from the most philosophicallevel (the first four sections of this article) to my experience as Mayor of Bogota (thefifth section) and the conclusions from an investigation with young people (six andseven), finally to return to a more philosophical issue, co-existence as tolerance accom-panied by approval, given the existence of different models of society and humanity(the last two sections).

Considering the positive view achieved prior to the investigation with young peopleand used as the initial concept for this,8 co-existence means keeping common rules,having culturally rooted mechanisms of social self-regulation, respecting differences andcomplying with rules to process them; it is also learning to reach, comply with and amendagreements.

Co-ex i s t ence and ru le s

Why could respect for rules be so relevant to co-existence? Respect for whatrules?

In order to address respect for rules, it should be recognized that the modern agestresses the difference between legal, moral and cultural rules, between the law, moralityand culture. A legal penalty is not the same thing as a feeling of guilt and neither ofthese punishments is comparable to social repudiation. Likewise, the motivation forbehaviour based on respect for the written law, for how it is drawn up and appliedcan be differentiated from motivation based on gratifying one’s conscience and the latterfrom motivation based on social recognition.

Thanks to this difference, we can conclude that co-existence largely consists ofbreaching the gap between law, morality and culture, that is, overcoming moral and/orcultural approval of unlawful actions and overcoming the lukewarm or non-existentmoral or cultural approval of legal obligations.

Skill in reaching agreements and complying with them, and if necessary amendingthem, moral and cultural disapproval of unlawful actions and moral and culturalapproval of legally compulsory actions, will be recognized as key to co-existence, aco-existence which, due to the connection with the difference between law, moralityand culture and to the inescapable central role of the law, we will call civic co-existence.

Co-existence as harmonization of law, morality and culture 21


Co-ex i s t ence and p lura l i sm

In Colombia, and to a greater or lesser extent in many other countries, for manypeople conscience or custom justify the breaking of the law. I have been fortunate inhaving the opportunity to help correct this through both government action and edu-cation. After working for over ten years in education, I was able to apply part ofwhat I had learned during my term as Mayor of Bogota (1995–1997, and now2001–2003) in the Civic Culture Programme with visible results in the protection oflives, compliance with rules and civic behaviour, such as, for example, voluntary watersaving. Also, in the three years following my first term as mayor, I had the opportu-nity to undertake a survey with ninth-grade youngsters in Bogota9 with J. Corzo, theresults of which are providing a useful input for the second version of the CivicCulture Programme.

What has inspired this work, in short, is a vision of societies where there is harmonybetween law, morality and culture. This does not mean that law, morality and culturegovern exactly the same thing; that would be fundamentalism and would be incom-patible with cultural and moral pluralism – commonly accepted ideals in mostcontemporary societies and clearly so in our own.10

One of the characteristics of contemporary society is that people with differentmoral criteria can feel mutual moral respect; that is how I would characterize moralpluralism. It is not just that each one should set their own rules, but that these rulesshould be sufficiently universal, sufficiently consistent or find an appropriateaesthetic expression to arouse the respect of people with different moral frameworks.For centuries mankind has not found this easy to accept or comprehend, so we canunderstand that a contemporary society also finds it difficult to grasp.

Now, how can we make sure pluralism does not turn into indifference to legal criteria?How can we avoid it being accepted as meaning ‘anything goes’? Harmony betweenlaw, morality and culture is where each individual chooses behaviours morally andculturally, but selects them from legal behaviours and this choice may vary from oneindividual to another, one community to another. In other words, there is no moraljustification for illegal behaviour and if there were, a number of conditions wouldhave to be present. John Rawls, for example, studies these conditions in his work oncivil disobedience (Theory of justice, chapter VI, see footnote 6). Some of these con-ditions are to accept publicly that the law is being broken, be willing to debatepublicly the intention of the individual who breaks the law for moral reasons and,secondly, be willing to recognize that the value attributed to morality is so high thatone would accept legal punishment for breaking the law.

The Colombian Constitution allows for respect for cultural and religious diversityand for diversity in customs, but subject to respect for the law. In other words, ‘longlive pluralism’, but not so that it will morally justify or lead to cultural acceptance ofillegality.

In the ideal democratic society, as illustrated by certain periods in the experienceof some stable industrialized societies, the three systems of behaviour regulation referredto – law, morality and culture – tend to coincide in the following sense. All behav-

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iours that are morally valid according to the individual’s moral judgement are usuallyculturally accepted (the contrary does not necessarily occur: there are culturally acceptedbehaviours that some individuals abstain from adopting due to moral considerations).What is culturally permitted in turn coincides with what is legally permitted (in thiscase the opposite does not occur either: there are legally permitted behaviours thatare rejected culturally). In these societies, culture simply demands more than the lawand morality more than culture.

Gap between l aw, mora l i ty and cu l ture

By the ‘gap between law, morality and culture’ I mean the lack of consistency betweencultural regulation of behaviour and its moral and legal regulation, a lack of consistencythat is expressed as violence, delinquency, corruption, illegitimacy of institutions, weak-ening of the power of many cultural traditions and a crisis or weakness of individualmorality.11

We can thus classify Colombian society as exhibiting a wide gap between law,morality and culture. The systematic exercise of violence outside the rules definingthe State’s monopoly of its legitimate use, or the practice of corruption grow andconsolidate precisely because they become culturally accepted behaviours in certaincontexts. There is thus tolerance of clearly illegal and often morally reprehensible behav-iours. In a subsequent work the strength of cultural regulation in Colombia is stressed:‘The stability and dynamism of Colombian society depend largely on the great powerexerted here by cultural regulation, which does not always match the law and leadspeople to act against their moral convictions’.12

Other nations, other continents, even Europe itself, have experienced crises due tothe gulf between law, morality and culture. In general, it has been the national Statesthat have been able to establish a certain degree of order by giving priority to thelaw, and it has been through the law – with some support of course from moralityand culture and, more specifically, through religion and ideology – that a high degreeof consistency between law, morality and culture has been achieved.

In short, the gulf between the three systems is expressed in: (a) illegal but morallyand culturally approved actions; (b) illegal actions disapproved culturally but judgedmorally acceptable; and (c) illegal actions recognized as morally unacceptable but cul-turally tolerated. And it is also expressed in legal obligations that are not recognizedas moral obligations or in certain social circles are not incorporated as culturally acceptedobligations.

Civ ic cu l ture

The first Civic Culture Programme (1995–1997) emphasized cultural regulation.Cultural regulation and its consistency with moral and legal regulation are a greathelp in understanding the workings of what is healthy, non-violent, non-corrupt. Thepurpose was to recognize and improve the cultural regulation of interaction betweenstrangers or between individuals and officials in their capacity as strangers. Subsequently,



there were initiatives that involved an interest in the cultural regulation of interac-tions in the family (for example, in combating domestic violence).

Co-ordination between institutions and an understanding of the process by society,which were necessary to obtain the results achieved, depended largely on the institu-tional and social appropriation of the idea of civic culture itself. Recent legal reforms(Bogota’s fundamental law, planning law and budget law) facilitated institutional appro-priation of the idea and thus gave it top priority among the government team andfor society through stronger communication (high media interest, partly motivatedby the novelty of the media involved).

The notion of civic culture sought above all to foster interpersonal self-regulation.Emphasis was given to cultural regulation of interactions between strangers, in contextssuch as public transport, public areas, public establishments and neighbourhoods;and cultural regulation was also stressed in individual-government interactions, giventhat the public sphere depends substantively on the quality of these interactions.

The four objectives for civic culture, top priority and backbone of the city’sDevelopment Plan, were thus defined:1. To increase compliance with rules of co-existence.2. To increase the capacity of some citizens to encourage others towards peaceful

compliance with rules.3. To increase the capacity for agreement and peaceful resolution of conflicts between

citizens.4. To increase citizens’ communications skills (expression, interpretation) through

art, culture, recreation and sport. Moral and cultural pluralism should not mean a corrosive relativism. For this not tobe interpreted as ‘anything goes’, it should be related again to individual and collec-tive self-regulation: the fact that others have partially different rules from mine in noway means that I can or should relax my own. If I recognize the validity of other culturaltraditions, this does not mean I should weaken my interest in developing and strength-ening my identity with a specific tradition.

The actions relating to the idea of civic culture sought to identify something ofthat common ground, of that set of minimum shared basic rules that should allowus to enjoy moral and cultural diversity.

The Civic Culture Programme included many civic education initiatives set withinthe framework of a common philosophy. It involved great inter-institutional and multi-sectoral co-operation, particularly in the conception stage and in contingency actions.The total cost over the three years 1995–1997 was close to US$130 million (3.7%of the city’s investment budget). The Civic Culture Programme and the philosophybehind its objectives were also the inspiration for many of the unplanned govern-ment actions that responded to unforeseen situations. Consistency between the twoparts of the government agenda – planned and improvised – contributed greatly tosocial acceptance of the concept. The civic culture successes are still locally and nation-ally recognized as the main achievement of that government.

An absolutely crucial element for creating a multiplier effect in the Civic Cultureactions was its very high visibility in society, largely achieved through the mass media.

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Not paid campaigns, but novel, attractive methods, with a high visual or psycholog-ical impact. In particular, in the city’s conflicts with the refuse collectors, taxi drivers,buses, mini-buses and collective taxis and with the national government itself with regardto arms decommissioning, the more timely, sincere and frank the communication,the more favourable the results. Perhaps the case with the greatest limitations on com-munications – legal arms decommissioning – was the one involving the greatest setbacks.

In three of the behaviour changes indicated (see Box 1) there were updated indi-cators that enabled frequent evaluation of the actions undertaken and communicationwas strongly influenced by how the indicators evolved.13 The most outstanding case:water savings during the drought in 1997.14 Many of the Civic Culture initiativeswere presented as preventive actions and therefore laid the ground for measures justi-fied as risk reduction procedures, thus breaking with positions that hold that individualsare completely free to run risks.

The combination of sensitive public opinion, radical frankness and an elementarymethodology for regulating communication often played a crucial role. When com-munication intensifies, there is of course a danger of removing certain convenientambiguities and generating a crude perception of rules, hierarchies and competencies.



• Reduction of the homicide rate from 82 (in 1993) to 35 (in 2000) per 100,000inhabitants, a drop of over 50% in the last seven years. A number of measures relatingto the three types of regulation probably had considerable influence: ‘carrot law’ (impo-sition of a closing time of 1 a.m. for bars and discos and the sale of alcohol, a measurealso adopted in other Colombian and Ecuadorean cities), arms decommissioning (legaland voluntary), arbitration centres, police training, voluntary handing over of over 1,500weapons. In the month of the voluntary weapons decommissioning, the homicide ratedropped by 26%: only 1% of weapons were collected, but the message involved inunilaterally handing over arms had a significant effect. Some 45,000 people participatedin the ‘vaccination’ against domestic violence: a very brief, intense workshop with thesupport of psychiatrists and psychologists, useful for detecting cases requiring profes-sional attention, to announce the provision of institutional attention and understand towhat extent violence involves illness.

• Reduction of deaths in traffic accidents from 1,387 in 1995 to 834 in 2000. In this respect,the fact that the Metropolitan Police took over the city traffic had a great influence andalso led to elimination of the custom of paying bribes to avoid traffic fines.

• A two-thirds reduction in the number of children burned by gunpowder.• Marked progress in the restoration and respect for public areas.• Voluntary water savings of between 11 and 14% in a crisis lasting several months, with

a residual saving stimulated by the tariff structure (the average monthly domestic con-sumption has finally dropped from 27 to 20 m3, making it possible to postpone thecostly construction of new dams for over fifteen years).

• An end to the clientelist relationship between the Government and the Council. The jointsearch for a legally, morally and culturally defensible relationship has led to the rigorousexchange of arguments instead of the customary exchange of favours (appointments andcontracts).

BOX 1. Civic Culture results in Bogota (1995–2001)

But sincerity almost always produced better results than the traditional (misplaced)diplomacy. Saying quite clearly what could and what could not be done, and accu-rately remembering competencies were day-to-day tools.

Something that was also important in this first version of the Civic CultureProgramme was to accept conflict as caused or exacerbated by restrictions on com-munication. In a congress of sociologists to which I was invited to in 1993, I presenteda paper entitled La violencia como forma de comunicación [Violence as a means ofcommunication]. It took ideas from Jürgen Habermas – his communication theory –to show that a violent person is someone who chooses a certain language and it couldbe of interest to society to invite him to choose other means of communication. Itwas then shown that the communications functions of violence can be partly replaced.In other words, if certain forms of violence did not have the communicative reper-cussions they do, they would be most unattractive. In most cases, it could be saidthat there is no physical violence – particularly public physical violence – that is notaccompanied by an attempt to communicate something. We thus conclude that conflictcould be caused or exacerbated by restrictions on communications and therefore thatintensified communication and interaction could reduce the gap between law, moralityand culture.15 One way of understanding the foregoing was recognizing that in situa-tions of conflict an exchange of arguments can be more useful than negotiations.Likewise it became clear that direct, face-to-face contact could dissuade violence.Obedience to authority, an investigation by Stanley Milgram carried out at Yale University,shows it is easier to drop an atomic bomb from a height of 10,000 meters than towound someone face to face. That is no guarantee, but it was a clue we followed up:new ways of expressing lack of agreement, such as symbolic aggression, can be veryuseful.

In short, the Civic Culture strategy sought to strengthen cultural and moral regu-lation. It sought to increase the consistency and complementary effectiveness of thosetypes of regulation with each other and with the law. It tried – and very often managed– to weaken the cultural or moral legitimacy of unlawful actions. It also sought tocommunicate (or reconstruct in the sphere of communications) the rationale and theadvantages of legal regulation.

Research in to c iv i c co -ex i s t ence

In the research with ninth-grade youngsters in Bogota, the responses from a sampleof 1,400 youngsters to over 200 questions were analysed using multiple correlationanalysis techniques. In the research, co-existence was initially described as a combina-tion of obedience to rules, the ability to reach and comply with agreements and trust.Obedience to rules was specified in greater detail as obedience to three types of rules:legal, moral and cultural. It was attempted to find out what happened when therewas a tension between these regulatory systems and how tolerant the youngsters wereof moral and cultural pluralism.

We attempted to test the initial point of view by contrast and empirical refine-ment. We used an instrument of over 100 questions (some of them with forty

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sub-questions). The multiple correlation analysis enabled us to identify the groups ofquestions that best predicted each other. Obviously, the results are strongly influ-enced by the initial questions. However, this reflection is exposed to the resistanceand sometimes the counter-intuitive nature of conclusions deriving from the data.16

One way of addressing the theory behind both conceptions, the intervention inBogota and the research into co-existence among youngsters, is by using Table 1. Itdistinguishes several dimensions or concepts, which are in turn broken down intowhat were called primary variables.

The research made it possible to detect the following fairly widespread characteris-tics in the population (the first two and the fourth were confirmed in almost 100workshops throughout the country):1. I am guided by my conscience, others by the law and culture.2. I understand things willingly, you unwillingly.3. Pluralism tends to be the same as ‘anything goes’.4. The highest value is given to the ‘family’ (most frequent response to what is

your greatest pride)In the first two characteristics there is an obvious asymmetry in the perception of theyoungsters of Bogota (and possibly of Colombians in general) of their fellows. Theasymmetry between one’s own perception and people’s perception of others could becorrected by respect: respect is, by etymology, looking again, turning round to lookand consider in detail. It is like the first instant of recognition. There may be a highdegree of respect in a society where hierarchies are very marked. One can equally imaginethe importance in the most recent events in societies like Colombia (where secular-ization and democratization have advanced, where there has been notable progress ingender equality and in access to educational opportunities) of egalitarian respect, ofrespect between fellow men. The notion of citizenship is inseparable from this respectbetween equals. Where there is citizenship, any encounter between strangers is aboveall an encounter between citizens. Seeing the other as similar to oneself in his rela-tionship to the three regulations, believing that oneself, like others, can understandin the main willingly, constitute the foundations of civic respect. Completing thetransition from respect based on hierarchies to respect based on awareness of equality,comparable to a radical change of paradigm, seems to be one of the main challengesto the construction of co-existence. Respecting the stranger, from the outset assigninghim qualities as a subject analogous to one’s own, is a crucial mainstay for co-existence.

We also included questions on violence in the questionnaire. ‘Remember the mostimportant agreement you have reached in the last few months, write a very shortsummary, and now answer the following questions [. . .] have you used or experi-enced violence?’ Similarly: ‘in the solution to the most important problem you hadin the last few months, have you suffered, inflicted or threatened violence or wereyou threatened with violence?’ And also a more generic question: ‘did you suffer violencein your childhood or at any stage in your life?; at what stage and from whom?’ Butthis part of the questionnaire was not included in the co-existence indicators, since itwas to be used later as a contrast. The theory was: co-existence consists of following



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TABLE 1. Initial conceptualization for the research into co-existence17

Description Breakdown into dimensions

Co-existence Includes indicators on • Attachment to rules;agreements, rules (moral, • Harmony between law, morality and culture;legal and cultural), trust • Trust;and non-asymmetry. • Capacity to draw up and comply with Indicators of non-violence agreements;serve as contrast variables. • Gratification.

The other is not very different from oneself (low ‘asymmetry’)Not to use or accept violence in resolving problems or drawing up agreements (low ‘violence’, contrast dimension).

Dimension or Description Breakdown into sub-dimensions or primary sub-dimension variables

Attachment Compliance with law, • Legal, moral and cultural regulation;to rules morality and culture and • Attitude towards rules.

appreciation of rules.

Moral Each individual’s • Intensity of moral regulation;regulation obedience to his • I comply with rules for moral reasons;

conscience, moral • Others comply with rules for moral reasons;‘coming of age’. • I comply with agreements for reasons of Tries to incorporate an conscience;approach to the degree • Others comply with agreements for reasons of moral development. of conscience;

• Morality regulates action in line with the law;

• Approximate degree of moral development.

Cultural Obedience to social rules • Intensity of cultural regulation;regulation of one’s context or group • Cultural pluralism;

and compatibility of • Culture regulates action in line with law;these rules with law and • Cultural regulation compatible with personal conscience. morality.

Legal Force of law and law • Intensity of legal regulation;regulation seen as an agreement. • Perceive the law as an agreement.

Harmony of Consistency, lack of • Morality regulates action in line with law;law, morality conflict between law • Culture regulates action in line with law;and culture18 and what is accepted or • Cultural rules compatible with personal

imposed by cultural morality;and/or moral regulation. • Pluralism.



TABLE 1. Continued

Dimension or Description Breakdown into sub-dimensions or primary sub-dimension variables

Pluralism Tolerance of diversity in • Moral pluralism;matters of conscience and • Cultural pluralism.cultural tradition.

Confidence Interpersonal trust • Others trust me. I trust others;granted and received. • Trust in institutions;

• Trust in authorities;• To reach agreements both sides must built

trust.

Capacity to Willingness and capacity • Orientation towards agreements;reach and to construct agreements • I comply with agreements for reasons of comply with and try to see they are conscience;agreements complied with. And • Others comply with agreements for reasons

to resolve problems of conscience;through agreements. • I seek agreements that are advantageous

to me;• I seek agreements that are advantageous

to others;• Personal orientation in agreements;• Objective orientation in agreements;• I comply with agreements willingly;• Others comply with agreements willingly;• Perceive the law as an agreement.

Gratification Attribution of greater • I comply with rules and agreements regulatory force to willingly;rewards than to • Others comply with rules and agreements punishments. willingly.

Asymmetry Differences between • I control myself more by conscience, othersself-perception and the more by law or culture; perception one has of • I control myself willingly, others unwillingly;others. • Asymmetry in the use of violence: I inflict

but do not receive violence or vice-versa;• Asymmetry in non-compliance with

agreements, I demand compliance from others but I do not comply;

• Others trust me but I do not trust others.

Violence Use or invocation of • Agreements reached with threats of violence for solving violence;problems or reaching • Problems resolved through violence or agreements. threats of violence;

• Physical violence received and/or inflicted.

the rules, of drawing up and complying with agreements and in generating and repro-ducing trust; trusting others and making compliance with rules and agreements reinforcetrust. It was a positive theory of co-existence; co-existence was not defined as non-violence. Once the statistical work was consolidated, the violence variables wereprojected on the results, to find out which factors were related to the lack of violence(and to what extent).

Resu l t s o f the re search

The two main factors in co-existence proved to be the capacity to draw up and complywith agreements and to respect the law. However, respect for the law was a betterpredictor of the absence of violence inflicted by youngster on youngster. This researchhas influenced the second version of the Civic Culture Programme, so this places greaterstress on democratic culture, particularly on appreciating what is good, appreciatingrules and democratic procedures for making decisions.

We conclude that for co-existence to happen, agreements are more important thanrules and, in the latter case, harmony between law and culture was very important.The research confirmed that cultural change, rather than change in moral criteria, couldmake for improved co-existence. It is obvious that the questions were skewed by thetheory, that is, it is not final proof, merely an argument in the discussion. In LatinAmerica there is a current of awareness-raising and in a way the Civic Culture approachshows that ‘we are all right with regard to conscience’. Perhaps the difficult thing isto achieve habits and behaviours that are consistent with what is clear in people’sconscience. Everyone knows that we should not kill, but culturally it is more an issueof external regulation.

The final result was that if co-existence is looked at from a positive view, whatbest predicts it is the capacity to draw up and comply with agreements. And if it isregarded from the angle of violence, of the urgency to reduce violence, the mostimportant thing is to learn to respect and follow the rules, and very particularly thelaw.

Thus, for example, an unexpected result was the agreement on the same factor bycultural regulation and the utilitarian argument. The response ‘breaking the law isjustified when great economic advantage is involved’ largely coincides with ‘breakingthe law is justified when it is customary to do so’ or ‘when others do it’. At least atthis point in history, for Bogota youngsters in school, it could be said that culturalregulation summarizes utilitarian learnings, but does not contradict them. Today, customis not a barrier to utilitarianism as it may have been at some other time. Other examplesof counter-intuitive results: trust proved not to be an important predictor of co-exis-tence (except for the response ‘when I draw up an agreement, I trust the other partyto comply’). It was to be expected that co-existence would lead to trust: obedience torules and agreements would generate trust and trust would in turn generate greateradherence to rules and agreements. But, at least in the population studied, those whotrust and distrust co-exist more or less equally.

Another result derives from a statistical analysis of responses to a classic question

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in social sciences: would you accept as neighbours people of a different religion, froma different region, of a different nationality, people with AIDS, destitute or indige-nous people? A number of categories are thus included in order to establish how tolerantthe person is. The same question also includes corrupt people, drug traffickers, guer-rillas and paramilitary personnel. We hoped to obtain two pluralisms, but there provedto be only one: the youngster who tolerates indigenous people and AIDS sufferers asneighbours tends to also tolerate drug traffickers, guerrillas, paramilitary personneland corrupt people.

Pluralism has become ‘anything goes’. However, the wonderful thing about thewritten law, about all the processes for debating laws during their gestation and aboutthe constitutional guarantees for minorities, is that it all exists to protect pluralism,but not to the point that it becomes an axiom that disrupts the constitutional frame-work itself.

When contrasting the data on pluralism with the variables of violence, a certain directrelationship between these factors became clear: despite the trend to put toleranceand ‘anything goes’ on the same footing, the intolerant person has a slightly greaterprobability of using violence or being a victim thereof.



TABLE 2. Seven paths to co-existence19

Five paths, in declining order of importance for their presumed contribution to a reductionin violence

C2: nomia: complying with the law over and above its immediate utility and custom (com-plying with the law even at the cost of the results) and seeking licit ways of innovating.

C3: adherence to the law: admiring the advances of national or local law, liking rules andbeing able to comply with the law even when it is in conflict with moral convictions.

C5: order but within the law and overcoming neglect of agreements: harmonizing legal and culturalrules and learning to cultivate agreements.

C4: pluralism: tolerating diversity.

C1: agreeing: learning to draw up and complying with agreements and very particularlyamending agreements that have not been complied with.

Two additional paths corresponding to problematical traits found almost throughout the population:

C6: egalitarian respect: breaking the asymmetry, coming to respect the other as an equal; seeingthe other as more similar to oneself (we are both basically autonomous and seek toconstruct harmony between our morality and the law, we both basically understandwillingly).

C7: democratic culture for a viable pluralism: learning to resolve the tensions between moralityand law through democratic procedures and achieving the primacy of the law overculture and morality that is necessary for a viable pluralism (‘not everything goes’).

Since it is less closely associated with violence, a total neglect of agreements (diffi-culty in drawing them up, complying with them or even recognizing them) is preferableto what we have called ‘order without law’ characterized by a liking for rules accom-panied by disregard for the law of cultural approval.

Tolerance o f a p lura l i ty o f

mode l s

Co-existence is also sharing dreams or, at least, managing to have compatible dreams.Dreams can come from the past, thus being endowed with authority, or may be bornfrom contractual processes, from agreements recognized as such. In some way, thearts, and particularly the moral emotions provoked by the arts, help to hand downand express shared dreams.

The authority of the inherited dream – the one that comes from the past – also seemsto be expressed as cultural regulation, as a determining effect on routes or constraintsalready handed down by tradition.

We see how the idea of ‘model’ has expanded, thus increasingly offering the mostdiverse aspects of nature and human life. Not the blanket offer associated with mes-sianic inheritances, but localized, often gradual, possibilities.

Again, in the indecision associated with the simultaneous existence of severalmodels (discussions about them, their varying strength deriving empirically fromtheir successes or failures), the law is inevitably central, in that it hands down cleardefinitions of accepted behaviours. The law also performs the function of closing offroutes.

For some societies where co-existence is not assured, for some the vision of a defen-sible future would be a society with many future visions (‘a society where each individualhas his own vision of the future’ someone proposed in a workshop for the construc-tion of a shared vision of the future!). The model consists of fostering the co-existenceof many models. Now, models are an expression of will and a will for power. Thestruggle between models is again a struggle against violence, against exclusion andinevitably requires a more or less general, or at least majority, agreement on rules;rules for the co-existence of various models. One of the most important guaranteesof the development and survival of these various models lies in the law, but at thesame time they depend a great deal on custom (such as debates, or fair competitionbetween organizations).

What is the authority for the common dream constructed through a deliberateprocess with that precise purpose in mind? We do not know exactly, but there aremany methodologies in vogue based on this type of joint construction of a commondream. We do not know if any vision of the future thus constructed can lead to theidentified routes to co-existence: complying with the law over and above immediateutility and custom, liking rules, valuing the law and complying with it over and abovemoral conviction, seeing the other also as an autonomous moral subject and learningto try to change the law democratically when it clashes with our moral convictions,harmonizing legal and cultural standards and forbidding disregard of agreements,accepting daily contact with diversity and learning to draw up and comply with agree-

32 Antanas Mockus


ments and amend them. At least some of these routes are tacitly and practically acceptedin the procedure followed to construct this shared vision.

Some conc lus ions

Co-existence would seem to depend mainly on the so-called ‘rule of law’. However,what is central is not exactly the law: it is the consistency between cultural and moralregulation and the law. What is important are the justifications for obeying or dis-obeying the law, or the example of others, or what is customary, or the only meansof achieving the objective. Thus, the central focus is not precisely on the law, but onaccompanying the law from the sphere of culture and morality. It is precisely wherethe law’s own force is not sufficient that the backing of ethical or cultural traditionsand/or transformations is indispensable for achieving co-existence. Each time somethingis legislated a (preferably voluntary) process of cultural and moral change should betriggered. To achieve this, the law that is produced should seem fair, at least to a majorityof citizens.

Culture is expressed in custom, particularly to the extent that custom has authority.Custom serves as an expression of culture, particularly when it ‘obliges’ supra-subjec-tively, when it expresses authority by generating a sense and feeling of obligation.

That authority of culture is at least in part displaced by technical aspects associ-ated with the model. We can increasingly represent, know and draw diagrams of –and therefore dream of giving technical shape to – even the most sacred or intimateaspects of cultural reproduction. Economic reproduction tried to modify itself sub-stantively on the basis of changes in only one of its dimensions (ownership of the meansof production), forgetting its relationship with cultural reproduction. The best inspireddreams that aimed at creating communities morally and culturally closer to certain idealsalso inspired and can still inspire totalitarian regimes, such as German fascism orStalinism; this has made many of us more modest. But the challenges of co-existenceare clearly also challenges to understanding better (and transforming more carefully)the relationships between economic and cultural reproduction. Will it one day bepossible for production and education to be changed simultaneously and consistently?Many societies have already advanced in the construction of a cultural frameworkthat lays the ground for, fosters and gives meaning to productivity in a sustainablemanner.

In short, the construction of a positive conceptualization of co-existence guidedby a reflection on rules and agreements and by attempts to modify in practice somecivic behaviours in Bogota was empirically contrasted with 1,400 Bogota youngsters.Due to their importance for the positive concept of co-existence and to their capacityfor predicting non-violence, two dimensions were stressed: • complying with the law over and above immediate utility and custom; • liking rules and obeying the law even when it conflicts with moral convictions

and admiring the acceptance of national and local law.Learning to draw up and comply with agreements and particularly to amend agree-ments not complied with or coming to respect the other as an equal, or learning to



resolve the tensions between morality and law through democratic procedures werenot such important variables in relation to the reduction in violence, but they didcarry weight when positively characterizing co-existence.

Post -data : f rom re l ig ious to l e rance to a t t rac t ion tod iver s i ty, the ‘cu l tura l amphib ians’

Tolerance of diversity has gradually been transformed into enthusiasm for diversityand a growing awareness that – in some conditions, an examination of which hasbeen the main objective of this paper – diversity is a source of human wealth thatcan be exploited fruitfully and in the long term. When cultural diversity is merelypreserved, it becomes unexploited wealth. It is essential that along with the preserva-tion of differences, other mechanisms such as contact, dialogue, exchange, crossfertilization be triggered or stressed.

In diverse cultural contexts there are diverse rule systems. The ‘cultural amphibian’is the person who acts effectively in various contexts, like a chameleon, and at thesame time, as an interpreter, enabling fruitful communication between them, that is,carrying fragments of truth (or morality) from one context to another. The culturalamphibian, both chameleon and interpreter, facilitates the process of selection, rankingand translation required for cultural wealth to circulate.

For this, it seems necessary for there to be harmony as described between the regu-latory systems – law, morality and culture – compatible with moral and culturalpluralism. Perhaps continued construction of the model of a humanity interested in,enthusiastic about its diversity, but also questioned by it, would be helped by the presenceof the cultural amphibian, either as a general identity of humanity, or as a greattransnational community, or rather as an exceptional figure – that is, an ideal figurethat is never fully realized.

The integration of the moral base of various traditions facilitates the amphibian’sactions in which morality and culture coincide and are expressed purely or with exem-plary perfection, showing actors from different cultures the possibilities and fruitfulnessof what at other times could have been perceived as contamination. The amphibian,insofar as he weaves bonds and facilitates processes for recognizing elements of man’sunity in the very mosaic of the plurality of traditions and models, can be seen as akind of moral integrator of mankind.

Mutual knowledge – with the ability to become morally and culturally involved,as the figure of the ‘cultural amphibian’ tries to describe it – seems to be a conditionfor making the co-existence of what is culturally diverse more viable and fruitful.

Notes

01. I am very grateful for the invitation of the International Bureau of Education to collab-orate in the March 2002 issue of the journal, Prospects, contributing to the first part ofthe publication (informally entitled ‘philosophy’), with a summary of the outcomes ofmy work on co-existence. This invitation, together with the experience of some academic

34 Antanas Mockus


work on the subject, a first mandate as mayor of Bogota, research into youngsters in Bogotaand my second term as mayor of Bogota, will perhaps help to understand the rather curiousstructure of this text: philosophical reflection, a summary of my academic initiationinto the subject, some lessons from the civic culture programme, others from the research,and finally some further reflections.

02. Perhaps for this reason UNESCO decided to use the versions ‘living together’ and ‘vivreensemble’ and opted, even in Spanish, to promote ‘learning to live together’.

03. Sooner or later, all intolerance turns into violence from the intolerant individual orfrom the individual who is not tolerated. In many countries, learning to co-exist, learningto live together, has an obvious immediate meaning: learning to live without violence. Thevery complex question that then arises is, what are the minimum conditions for a non-violent shared life for individuals and diverse social groups? There are many desirableconditions one could try to associate with a non-violent society. Here we need to identifyminimum sufficient conditions.

04. The historical matrix for tolerance has been religious tolerance. The following text fromMartin Buber illustrates the challenges to achieving and maintaining it:

‘Every religion has its origin in a revelation. No religion holds the absolute truth,none is a piece of heaven transplanted onto Earth. Each religion represents one of man’struths. This means that it expresses the relationship of a particular human communitywith the Absolute. Each religion is a dwelling for the human soul thirsty for God, adwelling place with windows but with no door; I only have to open a window for God’slight to come in through it. But if I make a hole in the wall and escape, I will be leftwith no home, and I will also be surrounded by an icy light, which is not the light ofthe living God. Each religion is a land of exile into which man is thrown and where,more than anywhere else, he is separated from the other human communities by theway he relates to God. And we will not be freed from these exiles nor will we haveaccess to God’s world, common to us all, until after the world’s redemption. But thereligions that know that they are all associated in the same wait can communicate witheach other, from one place of exile to another, from dwelling to dwelling, through theopen windows. Moreover, they can join their efforts to see if they can find what can bedone by man to bring the time of redemption closer. Common action by all religions isconceivable, even though each one can only act in its own dwelling. But this will onlybe possible insofar as each religion goes back to its origin, that is, the revelation that isat its origin and from which it advances towards the criticism of everything that hasdistanced it in its historical process of development. Religions tend to turn into ends inthemselves, to replace – so to say – God, so that in fact there is nothing more appro-priate than a religion to darken God’s face. [. . .] Each one [of the religions] shouldaccept the fact that it is only one of the forms of human expression of God’s message,that it does not have a monopoly on the divine; each one should renounce its claim tobe God’s only dwelling on earth and accept that it is the dwelling place of the men inspiredby the same image of God, a house open to what is outside. Each one should give upits exclusive attitude – lacking any true basis – and adopt a behaviour that is closer tothe truth. [. . .] Then they will have united not only in the common wait for redemp-tion, but also in the daily tasks of a world that has not yet been saved’. Zaghloul Morsy,ed., La tolerancia: antología de textos, Madrid, Editorial Popular/Editorial UNESCO, 1974,pp. 213–214.

05. This is accentuated in societies with extreme divisions of labour: the system of crafts or,even more so of professions, increasingly defines more social categories because society can



be sure that these categories will act within a set of categorical (moral) imperatives andalso in line with a set of hypothetical imperatives (technical rules).

06. Consenso por traslapes, in: John Rawls, Liberalismo político, Mexico, Law Faculty UNAMand F.C.E. (First edition in English 1993) (Chapters IV and V).

07. The learning and internalization of rules and standards, which contribute substantivelyto the shaping of identities and patterns of interrelationships, and therefore to culturalreproduction, are recognized today as the indispensable complement to institutions (formalrules) when an explanation has to be given as to why some societies develop economi-cally more quickly than others (Douglas C. North, Instituciones, cambio institucional ydesempeño económico [Institutions, institutional change and economic recovery], F.C.E.,Mexico, 1993; Francis Fukuyama, Confianza [Trust], Buenos Aires, Editorial Atlántida,1996). Despite notorious manifestations of autonomy, cultural reproduction of identi-ties and of behaviours is inevitably intermixed with economic reproduction. The tensionsor friction between the two reproductions perhaps lie at the root of the problems of co-existence.

08. A concept possibly typical of the Colombian situation and by what we have been ableto learn and do in this situation, mainly in public administration and in research.

09. Antanas Mockus and Jimmy Corzo, Indicadores de convivencia ciudadana [Indicators ofcivic well-being], research project, Institute of Political Studies and International Relationsand Department of Mathematics and Statistics of the National University of Colombia,May 1999.

10. As can be clearly seen in the Colombian Constitution promulgated in 1991.11. A paragraph taken from Antanas Mockus, Anfibios culturales y divorcio entre ley, moral

y cultura [Cultural amphibians and breakdown between law, morality and culture], Análisispolítico, vol. 21, 1994, pp. 37–48. Some of the texts included in sections 4 and 10 ofthis article have been taken or adapted from this article and from Antanas Mockus, Anfibiosculturales, moral y productividad [Cultural amphibians, morality and productivity], in:Revista colombiana de psicología, vol. 3, 1994, pp. 125–135.

12. Anfibios culturales, moral y productividad, op. cit. 13. The information on weapons and alcohol provided by the National Institute of Legal

Medicine was of crucial importance. Inter-institutional co-operation was very useful forthe analysis of the causes of violence, in the promulgation of measures and in the detailedco-ordination of enforcement. Arms decommissioning, water saving and restrictions onthe availability of gunpowder were actions constructed, perfected and socially validatedthanks to indicators.

14. Taking the invitation to save water seriously, instead of making this invitation formalsimply to justify rationing two days later, not accepting journalistic pressure to focusthe news on the penalties for those who did not save water, checking that there was awill to save and that it was necessary to help with information and methodologies inthe change of habits were some of the milestones in this campaign which made it possibleto manage the crisis over four months.

15. This was in fact the moral of the first academic work on the subject by Clara Carrilloin 1991 in the National University under my direction (Clara Carrillo Fernández, La inter-acción en la reconstrucción de legalidad y moralidad [Interaction in the reconstructionof legality and morality], undergraduate monograph, Bogota, Philosophy Department,National University, 1991).

16. Later on some examples will be given of unexpected results.

36 Antanas Mockus


17. It provided the basis for drawing up the questionnaire for the empirical research. The com-parison with the results of the multiple correspondence analysis led to a simplificationand ranking (see the two charts under the title Chart 2. Siete caminos hacia la convivencia).

18. Antanas Mockus, A. Armonizar ley, moral y cultura [Harmonizing law, morality andculture]. Cultura ciudadana, prioridad de gobierno con resultados en prevención y controlde violencia en Bogota, 1995–1997. 1999 Published on the website of the InteramericanDevelopment Bank: www.bid.org.

19. Except C6 and C7. In fact, the potential influence of C6 and C7 on suffered or inflictedviolence has not yet been analysed empirically. Correspondences have been found forthe other five.



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Co-Existence as Harmonization of Law

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