Context is key

 India is a pre-modern, pluralist society

At the Tory conference in the United Kingdom (October 2022), the home secretary, Suella Braverman, referred to the “vocal” and the “ethnic minority” creating serious problems for the “law-abiding majority”. This can be understood as scripting an antithesis to the famous thesis by the British liberal philosopher, John Stuart Mill, who cautioned against the “tyranny of the majority”.

Now, while a word or a concept can be used differently from its original usage, the difference must be recognised. Mill, for instance, was reacting to his predecessor, John Locke, who criticised Robert Filmer. Filmer defended the divine rights of kings. Locke, in turn, proposed moving away from earlier forms of feudalism and theocracies, with citizens choosing their leader as their representative. In case of a lack of consensus, Locke proposed, the majority’s decision would prevail over the minority’s. This provided the foundation for representative democracy as a modern form of politics.

The majority and the minority in Locke and Mill comprise unencumbered modern citizens. However, Braverman’s use of these terms differs from that of Locke or Mill. She uses the word, minority, to refer to non-modern aspects such as ethnicity. Ethnic minorities, in her usage, are ‘encumbered’ within a community or region that falls outside that of ‘unencumbered’ individuals. At the least, she uses minority to refer to an overlap between modern citizens and the pre-modern self encumbered within a community. There is thus a difference between using these key terms within and outside liberalism.

Independent India adopted modernistic ideas of individual freedom and liberty, as well as institutions like parliamentary democracy from liberalism. This progressive move by our national leaders put India’s international profile on a par with other modern states. However, there is a difference between modern Western and Indian experiences. Modern Western nations have modern citizens as premises in the public sphere, and their institutions are based on these modern individuals. At least they projected themselves as such, and this is how the outside world perceived them.

In contrast, while the provision of citizenship is enshrined in the Indian Constitution, there is a vast difference between political ideals and social reality. People are entrenched in pre-modern communities, cultures, regions, religions and languages. The words, majority and minority, which are intrinsic parts of representative democracy, do not have an immediate referent in India. Hence, there is a cleavage between what is and what ought to be.

India is primarily a pre-modern, pluralistic society. Forcibly imposing modern liberal political terminology on Indian society can be problematic and misleading. For instance, Indian liberals and secularists use the terms, minority and majority, to refer not to citizens but to religious communities. This difference, if not recognised, can lead to confusion.

In Locke’s concept of liberalism, the majority is constituted first. The minority is then formed by those not included in the majority — in that sequential order. However, secularists and liberals in India claiming to represent modern liberalism not only used these terms to refer to realities that lie outside of liberalism but also inverted the sequence, creating confusion. They designated the minority first and then created a majority still in the making. These concepts were used as if they were predetermined — the past tense instead of the present continuous.

Critics of secularism have now taken on these concepts and embarked on a massive drive to define the majority by highlighting instances of minority appeasement and are steadily gaining followers. The confusing use of these liberal concepts has also taken its toll outside the political domain, beyond the concepts of minority and majority.

In a plural society like India, there are several majorities and several minorities. For instance, a non-Hindi speaker can feel a deep sense of being the minority in the company of Hindi-speaking people. Similarly, a Hindi-speaking person classified under the majority religion may feel like the minority in a non-Hindi-speaking place. And we find numerous such instances all over India.

An essential feature of a pluralistic society like India is that it allows each person to feel like a minority. Many aspects of a plural society are unfamiliar to its people. For example, several languages and cultural practices are unknown. And, when accessed, you are either alone or in a small group. In turn, this feeling in plural societies can sensitise people to similar feelings in others — a unique, yet common, virtue in a pluralist society. The way terms like majority and minority are used today fails to capture this special feature. Within this context, we can mostly use the shifting nature of the majority and minority.

Terms like majority and minority are thus used within the liberal framework by liberal philosophers like Locke and Mill. However, Braverman’s use of these terms and their use in India falls outside the liberal framework. It is imperative to distinguish these and avoid conflating one with the other. Maintaining this difference can lead to clarity.

Braverman’s comments provides the context to re-examine the background of various theories of liberalism, identify the use of concepts such as minority and majority outside liberalism, investigate the misleading nature of their use in India and highlight their unique aspects.

We also need to focus on making pragmatic political decisions that are sustainable in the long run. Since modern liberal ideals are not indigenous to India, we need to understand their history, their background and the complexities associated with the Indian context to utilise them for more effective decision-making.

Source: The Telegraph, 9/01/23

Becoming a ‘Weird’ society may no longer be necessary for India

 Of the several books I have read recently, Plagues and Peoples by William H. McNeill and The WEIRDest People in the World by Joseph Henrich have been very important, for they gave me good clues on the evolution of the world in terms of economic development and material prosperity. Both have to be read together to understand how and why Asian and other civilizational areas fell behind in the second millennium. They help us understand why several economies in developing South Asia and in Africa have not been able to organize commerce and industry on a scale as large as the West and a few North Asian countries have done. Perhaps I am guilty of over-generalizing, but it is true of India too. In Can India Grow? Gulzar Natarajan and I wrote about the fragmentation of many industries in India. Scale is conspicuous by its absence. What was not entirely clear was how the West got there. Henrich’s book fills that void.

A three-line summary of the book: The ability of the West to interact, do commerce with and trust strangers, thus creating scale economies and the institutions that sustained and supported them, can be traced to the strictures that the Catholic church placed on ‘kinship’ marriages.

WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Religious and Democratic. People raised in societies are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, non-conformist and analytical. They focus on themselves— their attributes, accomplishments and aspirations—over their relationships and social roles.

In ‘Weird’ societies, as defined, one is expected to behave ‘consistently’ with all others. Whereas in non-Weird societies, it is normal to change one’s behaviour in accordance with the context. One could be very humorous with friends, for example, and extremely deferential to those in authority. That would be hypocritical to members of Weird societies, but entirely normal in others.

An inability to behave differently in varied contexts and seeing it as hypocritical leads Weird members to lean towards moral universalism. In other words, moral truths exist in the way mathematical laws exist, writes Henrich. It also leads to overconfidence in their abilities. Combine the two, and we now have a good handle on the response of Western policymakers to the global financial crisis of 2008 and the ongoing covid pandemic.

It also explains why their economics textbooks are written as though they are universally applicable. There is no room for path-dependency in their economic theories. There is only one right way to frame policy: Free trade, balanced budgets, flexible labour markets, globalization and deregulation. Now that the context is changing, they are struggling to adapt. Universalism and overconfidence helped Weird members colonize the world and spread their word. Now, they may prove to be their undoing.

Henrich does not delve into the downside of Weird psychological attributes. However, he correctly warns that superimposing impersonal institutions of politics, economics and society that developed in Europe on kinship-based societies means that the web of social relationships that bound and protected people gave way to urbanization, social safety nets and individualistic notions of success. People in such societies faced a loss of meaning they derived from being a part of a broad network of relationships. This poses a dilemma for non-Weird societies that is not easy to resolve. Their economic imperatives necessitate emulating and copying the Weird model of impersonal trust, fairness, equality before the law and the institutions of governance that these entail. At the same time, these are alien to their own social models that date back in time. Indeed, even the inhabitants of Weird societies are not exempt from the loss of meaning that Weird values and social arrangement eventually generate. Has Weird psychology, therefore, driven all of modern humanity into an existential cul-de-sac?

For all their supposed impersonal kindness and fairness, Weird European societies did not hesitate to pursue wars and wreak destruction on non-Weird societies. The latter were won over, perhaps, as much by war and deceit as by the demonstrated superiority of Weird norms, ideas, institutions and economic prosperity.

Further, as Henrich writes, the absence of external competition has made the Weird society turn on itself and is causing fragmentation. Elites in Weird societies have not understood that being Weird is what has made them successful. They are unWeirding themselves. So, homogeneous Weird societies may be breaking up into clans and groups. So, before non-Weird societies could shed their identity-based politics, Weird societies have begun returning to their identity-based clashes.

In the end, there is little doubt that Weird societies that feature monogamy, religion and impersonal trust enabled scale-based capitalism. But these Weird societies could not stop the development of ‘winner take all’ attitudes in the field of economics and commerce. Maybe that is the inevitable last act of scale and technology-based capitalism. The denouement could well be the end of Weird societies as we know them.

V. Anantha Nageswaran is visiting distinguished professor of economics at Krea University.

Source: Mintepaper, 11/01/22

How the past informs the present

 

Currently, Indian society is divided into those who feel that an insidious Western influence has turned us into stunted copycats and that we should carefully reexamine our glorious past to appreciate our uniqueness.

Speaking at an event in Hyderabad recently, Supreme Court Justice S Abdul Nazeer lamented that despite India having a tradition of jurisprudence that can be traced to great sages like Manu, Kautilya and Brihaspati, a British-induced “colonial psyche” persists in the legal system today.

“In England, Western Europe and the US, judges and lawyers receive an education based on their civilisations. Russia’s judicial values stem from their Marxist past, but the Indian judge or lawyer learns about Roman law and the theories of Western jurists,” said Justice Nazeer, adding, “They learn nothing about the evolution of the law in their own land.” Ascribing the weaknesses in the judiciary to a lack of historical perspective, Justice Nazeer stressed that Indian jurisprudence must be included as a compulsory subject in law degree courses.

Currently, Indian society is divided into those who feel that an insidious Western influence has turned us into stunted copycats and that we should carefully reexamine our glorious past to appreciate our uniqueness. The others, a far smaller number, fear that a self-congratulatory ethnocentrism prevails, closing our minds to established facts from around the world. The truth, as always, lies somewhere in between. Even in India, the winds of change are impossible to miss. The stories we have been told about ourselves, family diktats on how we should live, seem unconvincing, at odds with a global reality. Laws support LGBTQ rights, single working women are a potent force and you get the sense that the youth are impatiently shedding all inhibition. The ‘wise elder’ of Indian households commands respect but has lost the control he once exerted.

At the same time, if not in legal circles, modern interpretations of Kautilya’s 2,000-year-old Arthashastra are thriving. There are over 25 books by management gurus available on Amazon who have distilled Chanakya’s realist approach, applying age-old principles to everyday conundrums. At some point in our lives, we all seek to know thyself better, to cope. Indeed, there is great value in the ancient texts, expanding our views on existence, and nudging us to discover that whether B.C. or A.D, mankind’s travails remains the same: our goals, peace and prosperity, our frustrations, troubled relationships and financial insecurity. Within these broad truths, Justice Nazeer’s call that each society differs fundamentally and must be evaluated in terms of its own structures is crucial not just for courts to deliver justice but for people to escape the limitations of their environment, which colour their perceptions of the world.

Cultural relativism can best be understood by example, like noting specifically, how differently Indians and Westerners view marriage. A top US newspaper is carrying a piece that has gained a lot of traction online, ‘How I Demolished my Life’. The writer proudly asserts that she walked out of a marriage with three children because her “husband was blocking her view of the world”. Even the most urbane and emancipated Indian would baulk in alarm at such self-indulgence, perhaps because in India, we feel duty-bound to power through situations, disregarding personal costs. Self-absorption versus sacrifice, who is to say what’s the better method to finding one’s way to that ever-so-elusive happiness? It seems both sides have considerable pitfalls; one would benefit by toning down the impulsiveness, the other by occasionally upsetting the status quo.

It was news to me that the word adhikar, my right, does not occur even once in the Arthashastra. However, the word dharma, the obligation to one’s duty, is central to the text, as it is to the Bhagavad Gita. The opinions and ideas of scholars passed down over generations have profound effect on society, so the subconscious baggage of duty is hard to shake off. Perhaps, we need to philosophically agree that our choices are dictated by factors larger than ourselves. Maturity isn’t just taking responsibility for our actions but critically assessing the history that placed us there. The ultimate freedom is having the power to change it.

Written by Leher Kala

Source: Indian Express, 9/01/22