An Indian enlightenment?
The term 'enlightenment' is most often used in two very different contexts.
One usage is with respect to the spiritual enlightenment that swamis of the orient claim to have experienced and that seekers strive to attain.
The other usage is in the context of the 'Age of Enlightenment', a cultural movement of the 17th and 18th Century that started in Europe and spread to the colonies. Its purpose was to reform society using reason, challenge ideas grounded in tradition and faith, and advance knowledge through the scientific method. It promoted scientific thought, skepticism and intellectual interchange and opposed superstition and intolerance. This led to the Scientific revolution and ideas of liberalism and fundamental rights that have had a dramatic impact on the cultures of western democracies which are comparatively abundant in peace, prosperity and individual freedom.
I feel that it's about time India has its own version of the second type of Enlightenment. We can remain stuck in the superstitious and tribal mindsets of the past or break through them to the liberal, secular, democratic, peaceful, compassionate, intellectual India that is possible.The responsibility for helping our country through this transition lies on educated Indians who straddle both worlds and who can learn from the past, understand the present and envision the future.
Time moves futurewards and so the Indian Enlightenment will happen.
All we can do is enjoy being part of this movement at this moment. This blog is part of that movement and part of this moment.
Modernity in India?
"Modernity arose in Europe, beginning in the Renaissance, as a break with the traditional culture . . . "
So, Samir Amin writes in his preface to the re-publication of his seminal work Eurocentrism (2009), originally published as L'eurocentisme: Critique d'une idéologie (1988).
He continues:
"Modernity is constructed on the principle that human beings, individually and collectively (i.e., societies), make their own history."
Furthermore, he says:
Up until that time, in Europe and elsewhere, responsibility for history was attributed to God or supernatural forces. From that point on, reason is combined with emancipation under modernity, thus opening the way to democracy (which is modern by definition). The latter implies secularism, the separation of religion and the state, and on that basis, politics is formed.
Today, modernity is in crisis because the contradictions of globalized capitalism, unfolding in real societies, have become such that capitalism puts human civilization itself in danger. Capitalism has had its day. The destructive dimension that its development always included now prevails by far over the constructive one that characterized the progressive role it fulfilled in history.
The crisis of modernity is itself the sign of the obsolescence of the system. Bourgeois ideology, which originally had a universalist ambition, has renounced that ambition and substituted the post-modernist discourse of irreducible "cultural specificities" (in its crude form, the inevitable clash of cultures). As opposed to this discourse, I suggest that we begin with a view of modernity as a still incomplete process, which will only be able to go beyond the mortal crisis it is now undergoing through the reinvention of universal values. This implies the economic, social and political reconstruction of all societies in the world.
In The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World, I emphasized the extreme form taken by the ideology of contemporary capitalism, what I call the "liberal virus". The latter reduces the content of social organization to two and only two principles: liberty (mainly viewed as freedom of private enterprise) and property. This reduction, which I analyze as being the product of the involution to which the ideology of modernity was subject in the historical formation of culture in the United States, is at the heart of the impasse that threatens to imprison civilization.
(pages 7-9)
Reason and Emancipation
Enlightenment experience - Type 1.
Enlightenment experience - Type 2.
The painting depicts a natural philosopher, a forerunner of the modern scientist, recreating one of Robert Boyle's air pump experiments, in which a bird is deprived of air, before a varied group of onlookers. The group exhibits a variety of reactions, but for most of the audience scientific curiosity overcomes concern for the bird. The central figure looks out of the picture as if inviting the viewer's participation in the outcome.
Samir Amin points to an understanding that there are two periods in history that have had a decisive impact on the formation of the modern world. The first of these periods involves the birth of modernity. It is the period of the Enlightenment . . .
The Enlightenment is NOT a sleepover!
Extract from the frontispiece of the Encyclopédie (1772). It was drawn by Charles-Nicolas Cochin and engraved by Bonaventure-Louis Prévost. The work is laden with symbolism: The figure in the centre represents truth—surrounded by bright light (the central symbol of the Enlightenment). Two other figures on the right, reason and philosophy, are tearing the veil from truth.
Way Down South
What is the impact of right wing libertarian ideology on the real societies of the Global South?
Are the two largest democracies in the world "low intensity democracies"?
Communitarianism in India, identity politics, and self-identifying as middle class
Amin, has already been mentioned in some of the links above, concerning his view that in America there is a clear absence of a workers' party, and a "system", an American system, that ultimately produces a situation in which a de facto single party, the party of capital, holds the reigns. In this low intensity democracy this single party is comprised of the many factions of the two main parties, the Democrats and Republicans, that overlap in a political spectrum that predominantly fits the needs of the de facto single party of capital, regardless of the airing of political, social and moral differences.
In India there is a real middle class, the bourgeoisie, who belong to the party of capital, and a class of self-identifying workers who imagine they are middle class, but are not in reality middle class, yet form a minority within a number of social fractions. These social fractions, or communities, are then manipulated "in a perfectly cynical way by the ruling classes" in contests for political political power undertaken by two main party coalitions. These coalitions are the centre-right coalition of the National Democratic Alliance and the centre-left coalition of the United Progressive Alliance.
There is also the Third Front - A coalition of parties which do not belong to any of the above camps due to certain issues. One of the party in the alliance, the CPI(M) (Communist Party of India (Marxist), prior to 2009 general elections, was a member party of the UPA. The alliance has no official leading party, and smaller parties often enter and leave the alliance according to political convenience. Many of these parties ally at national level but contest against each other at state level. The inherent problem with such a third front is that they are only bound together by the fact that they are not aligned to either of the two 'main' alliances, and not through similar ideological stances. This often means that this alliance is merely an alliance in name and does not really provide a united front which can serve as an alternative to the two historically prominent alliances. Therefore, despite the presence of this so called Third front and seemingly alternative options, Indian politics by and large remains a de facto two party system at the national level.
In this identity politics milieu, a situation where communities are defined and self-defined by religion and/or tribal identity, there is little prospect of a national coalition emerging that would be capable of representing the political interests of working people across modern India, because the forces of communitarian cultural and political identities are so strongly working against such a formation.
A false consciousness?
What is also in play, is the phenomenon referenced below:
The rise of India's New Middle Class means there is a need to develop a class analytics of democratic politics in India, and carried out in a way that locates the politics of India's democracy within the framework of comparative class analytics and integrates this class analysis with the politics of caste, religion, and language.
It seems obvious that the dominant fraction of the actual middle class, rather than those who self-identify as such, plays a central role in the politics of hegemony, and these hegemonic politics are played out both as attempts to coordinate the interests of the dominant classes and to forge internal unity within the highly diverse fragments of the middle class.
However, rather than producing the classical pattern of liberal hegemony (in which the ruling bloc actively elicits the consent of subordinate classes) in India these projects have been marked by middle-class illiberalism, and most notably a distancing from lower classes.
Sociocultural inequalities such as caste and language are an integral part of the process of middle-class formation, and this results in a situation where boundaries are constantly being defined and tested.
Is there a tendency, in this fluid context, that hegemonic aspirations of the New Middle Class in India are gravitating towards a form of the politics of reaction, blending a pronounced market liberalism with a political and social illiberalism?
"The first decade of this century witnessed an historic reduction in global poverty and a near doubling of the number of people who could be considered middle income. But the emergence of a truly global middle class is still more promise than reality."The Pew Research Center
The Importance of Being Middle Class in India
by Devesh Kapur, Neelanjan Sircar and Milan Vaishnav
Is this part of the Americanization of India and the world?
Samir Amin ends his chapter on Modernity in his seminal work Eurocentrism with these powerful thoughts and questions:
I do not know if the culturalist opponents of the real world and its evolutionary trends, understood as Americanization by some and Westernization by others, can be described as rational. Confronted by the threat of Americanization, some defend unique "cultural values," without throwing into question the general trends of the system, as if reality could be sliced like a salami, in order to keep a morsel for tomorrow. Others, having previously confused capitalism and the West and then forgotten the decisive reality of the former and replaced it with the gratuitous and false assertion of an eternal "West," think they can transfer the confrontation from the terrain of a constantly changing social reality to the heaven of an imaginary transhistorical cultural universe.
The heterodox mix of this hodgepodge - the pure economics of imaginary markets, falsely egalitarian liberalism, and transhistorical culturalist imaginings - pompously sets itself up as new thinking, so-called postmodernist thinking. Since the bourgeois modernist critique has been watered down and reason has given up its emancipatory role, has contemporary bourgeois thought become anything then but a system that has seen better days?
(Pages 20-21)
The last episode of the TV series Mad Men ends with a montage of the fates of the major characters: Pete, Trudy and Tammy board a Learjet taking them to their new lives in Wichita. Joan operates her thriving new business, Holloway Harris Productions, from her apartment while her mother looks after her son. Roger and Marie sit in a cafe in Paris on their honeymoon and muse about an elderly couple seated nearby. Sally does housework and tends to her younger brothers, while Betty smokes a cigarette and reads behind her. Peggy, hard at work on an assignment, receives a loving embrace from Stan. Finally, Don, seated in the lotus position, participates in a meditation class at the retreat center when a smile comes to his face. The show then smash cuts to the groundbreaking 1971 "Hilltop" television advertisement for Coca-Cola (produced in reality by McCann Erickson), implying that Don would be involved in its creation.
He quotes a sentence from James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake:
"The West shall shake the East awake while ye have the night for morn"This cultural phenomenon was much in evidence during the so-called "counterculture" of the 1960's and '70's in the United States.
In Amin's chapter called For a Truly Universal Culture in his book Eurocentrism, he addresses the issue of Americanization in the context of the homogenization and standardization of everything:
Cultural life being the mode of organization for the utilization of use-values, the homogenization of these values by their submission to a generalized exchange-value tends to homogenize culture itself. The tendency toward homogenization is the necessary consequence not of the development of the forces of production, but of the capitalist content of this development. For the progress of forces of production in pre-capitalist societies did not imply the submission of use-value to exchange-value and, hence, was accompanied by a diversity of paths and methods of development. The capitalist mode implies the predominance of exchange-value and, hence, standardization. Capitalism's tendency to homogenize functions with an almost irresistible force at the level of industrial techniques of production, trends in consumption, lifestyle, and so on, with an attenuated power in the domains of ideology and politics. It has much less influence over language usage.
What position should be taken toward this tendency toward standardization? The historically irreversible , like the Gallicization of Occitania or the adoption of Coca-Cola by the Cuban people, cannot be regretted forever. But the question arises with respect to the future. Should the tendency of capitalism toward standardization be welcomed, the way progress of the forces of production is welcomed? Should it be defended, or at least never actively opposed, keeping in mind the reactionary character of the nineteenth-century movements that sought to destroy machinery? Is the only cause for regret that this process operates through the prism of class and is, as a result, ineffective? Should we conclude that socialism will move in the same direction, only more quickly and less painfully?
There have always been two co-existing responses to this question. In the first half of his life, Marx adopted a laudatory tone when describing the progress of the forces of production, the achievements of the bourgeoisie, and the tendency toward standardization that liberates people from the limited horizons of the village. But gradually doubts crept in, and the tone of his later writings is more varied. The dominant wing of the labour movement eulogised the “universal civilisation” under construction. A belief in the fusion of cultures (and even of languages) predominated in the Second International: think of Esperanto. This naive cosmopolitanism, effectively disproven by World War I, reappeared after the Second World War, when Americanization came to be seen as synonymous with progress or, at the very least, modernization.
However, any fundamental critique of capitalism requires a reappraisal of this mode of consumption and life, a product of the capitalist mode of production. Such a critique is not, moreover, as utopian as is often believed: the malaise from which Western civilisation suffers is ample testimony. For in fact, the tendency toward standardization implies a reinforcement of the adjustment of the superstructure to the demands of the capitalist infrastructure. This tendency diminishes the contradictions that drive the system forward and is, therefore reactionary. Spontaneous resistance to this standardization, thus, expresses a refusal to submit to the relationships of exploitation that underlie it.
Moreover, this tendency toward standardization collides with the limits imposed by unequal accumulation. This unequal accumulation accelerates tendencies toward homogenization at the centre, while it practically destroys them for the great mass of people at the periphery, who are unable to gain access to the modern mode of consumption, reserved for a small minority. For these people, who are often deprived of the elementary means of basic survival, the result is not simply malaise, but tragedy. Actually existing capitalism has , therefore, become a handicap to the progress of the forces of production on the world scale. For the mode of accumulation that it imposes on the periphery excludes the possibility of the periphery catching up. This is the major reason why capitalism has been objectively transcended on the world scale.
Nevertheless, whatever opinion one may have of this model of society and its internal contradictions, it retains great force. It has a powerful attraction in the West and japan, not only for the ruleing classes, but also for the workers, testifying to the hegemony of capitalist ideology over the society as a whole. The bourgeoisies of the Third World know no other goal; they imitate the Western model of consumption, while the schools in these countries reproduce the models of organization of labour that accompany Western technologies. But the peoples of the periphery have been victims of this expanding process of the homogenization of aspirations and values. The prodigious intensification of communication by the media, now global in scope, has both qualitatively and qualitatively modified the contradiction generated by the unequal expansion of capitalism. Yearning for access to Western models of consumption has come to penetrate large numbers of the popular masses. At the same time, capitalism has revealed itself to be ever more incapable of satisfying this yearning. Societies that have liberated themselves from submission to the demands of the global expansion of capitalism must deal with this new contradiction, which is only one expression of the conflict between the socialist and capitalist tendencies.
The impasse is, therefore not only ideological. It is real, the impasse of capitalism, and incapable of completing the work that it has placed on the agenda of history. The crisis of social thought, in its principal dimension, is above all a crisis of bourgeois thought, which refuses to recognzse that capitalism is not the “end of history.” the definitive and eternal expression of rationality. But this crisis is also an expression of the limits of Marxism, which, underestimating the dimensions of the inequality immanent in the worldwide expansion of capitalism, has devised a strategy of a socialist response to these contradictions that has proven to be impossible.
In order to truly understand this contradiction, the most explosive contradiction capitalism has engendered, the centres/peripheries polarization must be placed at the heart of the analysis and not at its margin.
But after a whole series of concessions, the forces of the Left and of socialism in the West have finally given up on giving the imperialist dimension of capitalist expansion the central place that it must occupy both in critical analysis and in the development of progressive strategies. In so doing, they have been won over to bourgeois ideology in its most essential aspects.
(pages 207-209)
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