Progress-Prone and Progress-Resistant Societies Why Real Change Is So Hard

                                                                                                                   THOM WOLF   

“All societies are sick, but some are sicker than others.” Did Gandhian Anna Hazare say that in New Delhi, or did UK Prime Minister David Cameron say that in London in 2011?

Neither. Actually, an anthropologist at University of California Los Angeles, Robert Edgerton, said that in 1991. But once it is said, it seems so obvious: all societies are sick, but some are more sick than others. Every society has it weaknesses. But it seems that some exist in a kind of serious and persistent dysfunctional condition. And in fact, various international organizations document that truth every year.

For example, Transparency International publishes an annual Corruption Perceptions Index. The TI report measures the perceived levels of public-sector corruption. The TI 2010 reports on 178 countries. On a scale from 10 (highly clean) to 0 (highly corrupt), 75% of the countries in the index score below 5: “These results indicate a serious corruption problem.”

Three nations tied for first place with a 9.3: Singapore, Denmark and New Zealand. The UK made the top 20 with score 7.6. For the first time, USA was not in the top 20, at 22 with 7.1. 

Last in line was Somalia 178, with a score of 1.1.  India ranked 87 with a score of 3.3 – as did Albania, Jamaica, and Liberia. China was 78 (3.5), tied with Columbia, Greece, Serbia and Thailand.

Other areas of societies are regularly monitored and reported. The Economist Intelligence Unit measures the state of democracy in 167 nations.

The Annual Health Survey of India measures health profiles by districts, as do many other nations. The UN World Health Organization (WHO) monitors the six diseases that worldwide cause 90 per cent of infectious disease deaths every year: pneumonia/influenza, AIDS, diarrhoea, TB, malaria and measles.

Thus, WHO documents the observation that while all societies have literal sicknesses, some are much sicker than others. Infectious diseases are plain to see. And sadly, they are fairly uncomplicated to document.

Pathology is the study of disease, its origin, nature, and manifestations. Literally “pathology” is the study (logia) of suffering (pathos).

Once diagnosed, prescriptions can be given for the cure of the disease or suffering.

Progress-Prone Progress-Resistant Societies

This series, Progress-Prone, Progress-Resistant Societies, is about the pathologies of and the prescriptions for India’s suffering.

Four doctors are consulted. Eight tests are run. The four doctors are Ambedkar, Marx, Gandhi and Phule. The diagnosis of each is given for a healthy society. India is particularly used as a case study.

In the vocabulary of cultural anthropology, Progress-Prone, Progress-Resistant Societies examines what makes a society progress-prone – inclined towards progress; and what makes a society progress-resistant – inclined away from progress.

While all cultures may theoretically be equal, in real life, it is fairly obvious to most that some cultures are actually more equal than others. That is, not all societies are equal in their ability to help persons and peoples to live and flourish. And flourishing does not mean to just prosper economically. Life flourishing encompasses prospering physically, economically, socially, politically and culturally.

My thoughts here on Progress-Prone, Progress-Resistant Societies began as a lecture in 2006 for the sociology department, University of Lucknow. It was published in the University’s Journal of Contemporary Social Work (2007), and later appeared in another version in Oikos Worldviews Bulletin (2007).

I know what you are about to hear is a minority voice. But I must say, the response has been remarkably united. Whether the audience is in South Asia, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, Eastern and Western Europe, Canada, the United States of America, or the Gulf States, again and again, people say that this is something we must talk about. Also, many have said that the approach I present here gives them handles to examine and compare with facts, not just opinions.

They have all only deepened my original sense that this is a topic many are interested in. And they are interested because it deals with matters that effect us all.

Mahatma Phule

For India, Jotirao Phule (1827–1890) is the national “father of social revolution”. In 1888 at a Bombay felicitation, Mahatma Jotirao Phule called people to follow the path of “truth, equality, and freedom.”

Phule had a picture that he drew of India. In two words, Phule described his homeland.

He would be called Mahatma by Gandhi and Ambedkar. But Phule minced no words. For Phule Brahmin-conceived andcaste-kept India, his India, was a “prison house”.

G. P. Despande, former professor at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, cautions us: “The blunt, polemical style of Phule is unmistakable. His work is seminal.”

In other words, Phule is blunt. He is in your face – he will argue into a corner. And he plants thoughts in your mind that stick and grow the more you think about them.

He is the father of the Indian social revolution. And he said that superstitious devotions, Brahmin discourses, and caste dictates have made India a “prison house”. For Phule, it was that simple, that straight, that sad.

But especially remember this. If in the 19th century, Phule called India’s social system a “prison house”. In the 21st century, social scientists refer to such a system as a “progress-resistant” culture.

Phule made a single point: to become truly progress-prone, Indians must be lifted-from themselves, not left-to themselves.

By comparing societies, Phule concluded that other people had also once lived in cultural “prison house” like India. But other societies had learned how to move out of their “prison house” and move into a “pleasant house”. Phule was convinced India could do the same.

Media India – Majority India: Discussed and Undiscussed India

India arrived on the world stage in the 21^st century. In the summer of 2006, in a single week India was highlighted internationally in cover issue editions of the newsweekly Time, the prestigious The Economist, and the authoritative journal Foreign Affairs. These three prominent portrayals of dynamic-India engendered Pankaj Mishra’s reminder of difficult-India in The New York Times. 

According to Foreign Affairs, India today is a roaring capitalist success story and an emergent strategic partner of the U.S. After the Indian economy was liberalized in the early 1990s India emerged as a world leader in information technology and business outsourcing. Growing foreign investment, easy credit, and even international education ventures have fuelled an urban consumer revolution. Slogan “India Everywhere” dominated the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Mishra, however, reminds us that not long ago, India was largely viewed as a poor, backward, communally violent country. She was saddled with an inefficient bureaucracy, softly aligned with the former Soviet Union; definitely on the wrong side of history.

Mishra contrasted investment-India with experienced-India. His New York Times article argued that the “increasingly common, business-centric view of India suppresses more facts than it reveals”. In fact, the business-centric view barely mentions Other India.

But anyone who lives in India clearly understands Mishra’s motivation for exposing Other India, the barely mentioned India. The business-centric mindset is too ready to discount Other India. But that is a serious mistake. And it is the India that Mishra refuses to not see.

I have become convinced that Westerners would do well to listen to the insider voices of the Mishras, the Manis, the Mungekars, and others who invite us to look more closely at Other India. It is the India that Barbara Harriss-White, Cambridge University economist, refers to as “India of the 88 percent.”

And look we must. We must look, consider, and fully factor in what business-centric New India seldom seems to see.

For Other India, majority India, is an India more than 70 notches below Cuba and México in human development indices. And this Other India, Majority India’s gdp, is only slightly higher than sub-Sahara Africa, just two rungs above Myanmar.

And it is this Other India that is the largely undiscussed and the too-often-unfactored-in India. It is not the publicity-India of the media. But it is the persistent-India of the masses.

The questions here are: “Why does persistent-India so tenaciously endure?” and “Why is India so little different from what Mahatma Phule 150 years ago called “prison house” India, a social construct of a comprehensive and reinforced worldview?” And lastly, “Why does this “prison house” so painfully and persistently flourish as the India we see every day – the 88 per cent India?”

Point-Counterpoint: Indians Left-To Themselves and Indians Lifted-From Themselves

Indian intellectuals and leaders, including Phule, Ambedkar and Gandhi, have been pained and perplexed by the issue of India’s nagging poverty. I call it the difference between Indians left-to themselves and Indians lifted-from themselves.

Indians left-to themselves plod, even pollute. But such a situation is not fate. It is not the “karma” of India. For there is an alternative possibility.

Indians lifted-from themselves tend to prosper. Indians lifted-from themselves rather persistently present a profile of development, even distinction. It is this alternative possibility that is  inadvertently made by Thomas Friedman in The World is Flat.

Friedman comments on British historian Paul Johnson’s essay in Forbes about Uganda’s Indian population, now immigrants in the United Kingdom. In the U.K., there are more millionaires among Ugandan Indians than in any other recent immigrant community in Britain. Johnson makes the point that “when left to themselves,” Indians “always prosper as a community.” Obviously, that is a contradiction to Cambridge University’s professor Harriss-White’s “88 percent India”. She finds that Indians left to themselves struggle just to exist. Friedman and Johnson say Indians “left to themselves” prosper.

Actually, Friedman and Johnson precisely make my point: globally successful Indians are extracted Indians, not embedded Indians. It is Indians lifted-from themselves, transported into a cultural framework other than traditional India, who tend always to prosper as a community.

And that is actually what Friedman and Johnson noted of the Ugandan Indian community in the UK. For the UK Ugandan Indian population is not an Indian population left-to-themselves. The UK Ugandan Indian is an Indian lifted-from-himself. And that two times: once, from India; and again, from Uganda.

The UK Ugandan Indian is a certain kind of Indian, an Indian lifted-from-himself/herself. Professor Joel Kotkin, the author of Tribes: How Race, Religion and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy, has described what happens to the Indian lifted-from Manu India, Majority India. “Cast apart from the setting of his village and [caste-determined] clan,” Kotkin writes, “the overseas Indian has begun to adopt a broader identity that increasingly cuts across traditional [Hindu caste worldview] sectarian lines.” That special kind of Indian almost forms a “new caste”, the world India, “the greater India”.  

Exactly. It is that “broader identity” that makes the difference. And it is these Indians who prosper. They have been culturally transformed by a worldview extraction. Ugandan Indians were extracted from the Indian caste system. There, in a foreign land, even though poor and bonded, they found ways to prosper. And when lifted from the caste system even further, into the freedoms of England, they prospered even more.

So then, Indians who most often demonstrate an excellence in the global world are not those who remain embedded and left in their traditional culture. Instead, they are Indians lifted from what Phule called a “prison house”. And their prosperity is realized by a cultural extraction, by some alternative catalytic means. In other words, by being lifted from themselves.

There are many who see this. Jay Dubashi of Value Research, for example, says, “Indians are getting rich, but not in India.” That is, Indians are getting rich, but not if left-to themselves.

Dubashi explains: “It’s the Indian Diaspora that is minting money hand over fist, all the way from London, England, to San Diego, California, and producing millionaires by the dozen.”

And then he asks the nagging and painful question, “If Indians can make millions in England and New York, why can’t they do so in Mumbai or Delhi or Kolkata? Why don’t we have as many millionaires per square mile as in those countries?”

The answer lies somewhere in the history and mindset of embedded India. Traditional India as a whole community, is a brahmanic Chaturvarnya world.

Embedded India, India left to itself, is a world that over long centuries has consistently created a recognizable signature. It is the signature of Manu.

And according to Pavan K. Varma,  author of The Great Indian Middle Class, “there can be no real assessment of some of the identifiable traits of the Indian middle class without taking into account the legacy that [Manu] Hinduism – the religion of the overwhelming majority of the middle class – has bequeathed and the influence it continues to have.”

It has been a culture of political despots, economic destitution, social castes, and spiritually dubious sadhus. Varma, for example, in Krishna: The Playful Divine, also addresses the moral and social consequences on Indian society of Lord Krishna as a model personality.

J. Varenne, Yoga and the Hindu Tradition; S. M. Dahiwale, Understanding Indian Society: The Non-Brahmanic Perspective; and Dolf Hartsuiker, Sadhus: India’s Mystic Holy Men, all examine the cultural person, , the ideal person, the sadhu. And Prasenjit Chowdhury, Kolkata analyst, asks the hard question:

“Is it a typical South Asian trait or is there something wrong with the religion we practise, which gives precedence to purity of the soul and not the environment? Many of our temple towns, such as Benares and Ajmer Sharif, where the priestly class calls the shots, are the dirtiest.”

That is a question that refuses to go away, and it is more than just about the physical environment. For over the thousands of years available, the Manu world has never generated a society of political justice, economic dynamism, social equality or spiritual integrity. Instead, it has only and always signed with a single signature. And the signature culture that it has persistently produced is a life situation where those left to themselves inside it, do not prosper.

Historically then, it is the Indians who have been lifted from themselves who have become transforming catalysts.  But that is precisely the point: they have consistently been extracted Indians.

Their way out has most often been education, immigration, conversion, or some combination of these transformative three. This pattern of extraction appears to hold true in a very consistent pattern.

Think of Indian heroes. They are all lifted-from-themselves Indians: the Phules, the Ambedkars and the Nehrus; the Tatas, the Ambanis and the Birlas; and Sun Microsystems’ Vinod Khosla, Pentium chip creator Vinod Dham and U.S. astronaut Kalpana Chawla – all of them and so many like them.

They all have one thing in common. They are all Indians who have not been left to themselves, embedded inside the caste system. They are all Indians who have been lifted from themselves.

And their roads out have been along three main routes: education, immigration, conversion or a highway with multiple lanes that combines two or three together – education and conversion, education and immigration, or education, immigration and conversion, etc.     

Next month we will look at four different prescriptions by four different doctors for how India can be lifted-from the Manu malady – because, while all societies are sick, some are sicker than others. §
                                          (Published in  Forward Press,  September 2011 Issue)

Forward Press.