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Chaturanga

~ statecraft, strategy, society, and Σοφíα

Chaturanga

Tag Archives: society

Riflessioni: The Limits Of Liberalism

28 Tue Oct 2014

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in India, South Asia, Theory & Philosophy

≈ 1 Comment

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Alasdair MacIntyre, Aristotle, Émile Durkheim, Charles Taylor, cognitive psychology, community, Daniel Bell, dharma, Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft, Gesellschaft, Herbert Marcuse, individualism, John Rawls, liberalism, Michael Sandel, Neelly Bellah, Philippa Foot, purushartha, rasa, Robert Nozick, Self, society

Everyone is a Liberal these days – classical liberal, social liberal, neo-liberal, left liberal, economic liberal, conservative liberal…the variations go on. Despite the variations, all these flavours of liberalism are held together by the common belief in the rational individual as the atomic unit of socio-political existence. The Age of the Individual was ushered in by the Enlightenment, its emphasis on rationality and empiricism fuelling the birth of modernity and giving a fillip to individual rights. The seductive appeal of a universal ethic based on reason was difficult to resist, particularly in Europe where the Church and its excesses had eroded faith in the Christian brotherhood of man.

However, the pendulum finally swung the other way and several critiques of liberalism and its cult of the individual began to be voiced by the early 20th century. Sociologists such as Ferdinand Tönnies and Émile Durkheim warned that the individualism of liberalism threatened the integrity and cohesion of a society, making the famous distinction between Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society). This work was carried further after the Second World War by the thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse, Daniel Bell, Charles Taylor, Michael Sandel, Neelly Bellah, and Alasdair MacIntyre.

The opposition to liberalism occupies three spaces: the ontological that disputes claims made about the autonomous Self, the political that challenges the rights of the individual over the community, and the social that questions the value or even possibility of an individual not rooted in a mesh of traditions, duties, and relations. At first glance, it might appear that emphasis on the family over the individual originates in Eastern societies but criticism of the liberal foundation has no geographical boundaries. Furthermore, opponents of the liberal ethos are as likely to be secular as they are to be religious.

Perhaps the most obvious salvo at liberalism comes at its tendency to universalise a moral code. Liberals who espouse abstract ideas of justice and fairness meet fierce opposition from traditionalists who view these values as necessarily embedded in the traditions and history of a people and can vary by place, time, and context. The primary focus of this line of argument, a tad unfairly, is John Rawls and his landmark work, A Theory of Justice. Rawls does allow for the possibility that liberalism may not be exportable to all places at all times and accepts the possibility of justifiable non-liberal regimes but nonetheless considers these inferior and worthy only of toleration, not emulation.

The failure of other ideologies like fascism, communism, and theocracies have only buttressed liberal notions of the polity and society. However, an interesting critique has come from the revival of virtue ethics: the purpose of the good life is eudaimonia, an end achieved only by the appropriate balance of intention, will, emotion, habit and capabilities. As such, eudaimonia is flexible not only by culture and time but also by person. Neo-Aristotleians such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Philippa Foot, and GEM Anscombe argue that purpose of life cannot be separated from the process by which it is achieved and in doing so, revive the ideal of reciprocating local communities whose members play socially given roles and are made intimate by their shared ends.

Unfortunately, Aristotle never envisaged the gigantic scale and complexity of modern cities and states when he wrote about ancient Greek society. What may have worked for a polity of at most 100,000 voting members – and a population of approximately a million – cannot scale up to accommodate nearly 20 million Mumbaikars or over a billion Chinese. In these circumstances, liberals argue, the impersonal liberal system better manages human organisation than particularised communities.

Of course, the question arises whether liberals actually think that the individual self is created ex-nihilo, outside of any social context. As Aristotle argued, the man who can live outside society is either a beast or a god. Similarly, three of the four Hindu purusharthas – dharma, artha, kama – are intrinsically social and only the fourth – moksha – leaves the individual to himself and his relationship with the gods. To be fair, this accusation applies more to libertarians like Robert Nozick far more than it does liberals like Rawls. No matter, the point still holds in that the liberal virtue of unrestrained individual choice trumps the wishes and traditions of the community.

The liberal argument for individual choice rests on the desirability of normative self-determination, meaning that everyone should have the right to make his or her own decisions to secure for themselves the optimal conditions for leading fulfilling life that cherishes the values they hold dear. These choices may be made by an individual taking into account his or her own valuation of tradition and community. Liberals fervently oppose the notion that government endorse communitarian wishes over personal choice, thereby defending a system of rights, powers, opportunities, and self-determination for the individual. There is an interest in periodically questioning traditions, liberals argue, and reviving or abandoning them. This is particularly true for groups who have experienced prejudice against them.

While there are pragmatic reasons to accept these liberal arguments, their solutions run into difficulties in cases where traditional identities also form the core of one’s identity. For example, an oppressed woman might still hold on to traditional understandings of what it means to be a good wife or mother and an attempt to liberate her from her situation may cause irreparable psychological damage; similarly, it is still quite common in India and Asia for people to take care of their aging parents despite familial discord. This is because, as cognitive psychologists tell us, people neither think nor behave as atomistic individuals despite their abstracted arguments for the same. Their emotions are value judgments about the world and how it should be: one takes satisfaction not in the political and social liberty of a man but his success in leading a meaningful life. Whereas the assertion of rights was once confined to matters of essential human interest, a strident rights rhetoric has occupied contemporary political discourse. The cult of the individual, together with materialism and the desire for instant gratification, have left little room for reasoned discussion and compromise between community and individual.

Properly understood, the communal critique of liberalism is not over ossified traditions but about the solutions proffered by liberals that disrupt traditional bonds of kinship, duties, and authority, thereby fuelling the atomistic tendencies of modern society. Several liberal ideas have contributed to the erosion of social responsibilities and important means of social cohesion and communal life. The invisible hand of the free market has also undermined family life and been a questionable influence on politics at best. The rehabilitation of greed fostered a utilitarian ethic that encroached into social and intra-community relationships that had previously functioned on a sense of reciprocity, duty, and civil obligation. This trend was further reinforced by globalisation and the creation of a global marketplace.

It is neither possible nor desirable to turn back the clock; the dogmas of the quiet past are indeed inadequate to the stormy present. Liberalism, the noun and the ideology, must be tempered by a liberal – the adjective – mind. Just as the classical liberalism of the Enlightenment was a reaction to authoritarianism, arbitrary laws, overbearing communities, and rigid dogma, communitarians today are reacting to the undue emphasis on the rights of the egocentric individual. So far, few viable alternative political structures have been offered.

An interesting solution, however, comes from rasa theory in Indian aesthetics. Rasa, the Sanskrit word meaning essence, is fundamental to Indian arts, from dance and music to literature. Its principle lies in exciting emotional states in the audience and it does so by distilling the range of human emotions to a a handful and depicting them vividly. The goal of rasa is not to merely evoke a rudimentary emotional response but one of philosophical and spiritual contemplation. Though there are marked differences between the two, Ancient Greek plays also played an important social role beyond entertainment.

Exposure to great literature, be it the Mahabharata or the Aeneid, the Silappatikaram or the Divina Commedia, instills broad archetypes of human societies in the audience. Over time and with sufficient reflection, it develops empathy in audiences. Literature perhaps does this better than other forms of art because of a clearer intellectual component required in its appreciation. Qualities like empathy strengthen the cohesiveness of communities, be they of geography, profession, or memory. An empathetic society will have less need to resort to rights conferred upon its individual constituents by a centralised and universalising liberal state because grievances may be worked out at the local level. At a political level, it follows that authority must devolve to the local level and laws intruding on personhood and identity must be minimal and restricted only to the essential.

The problem in selling virtues like empathy is that they are not quantifiable and our post-Enlightenment rational minds find it difficult to grasp subjective evaluations, particularly in matters of national policy. The fear is that some sort of inequity may become institutionalised. However, liberals need to stop chasing their utopia as traditionalists have theirs and realise that there is no such thing as universal equality – innate human capabilities and preferences will never allow it.

Ancient political systems may have lost their relevance to modern society but they operated on the sound and realistic principle that people must live together as cooperative and preferably friendly members of communities; no man is an island. Ideologies that erode this foundational observation cannot improve human existence, and though we do not have a “Grand Unified Theory” of social organisation, it hardly helps if we go against common sense.


This post appeared on FirstPost on October 30, 2014.

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One-Dimensional Man

16 Fri Apr 2010

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Book Review

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Enlightenment, Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse, ideology, industrial, mass culture, society

Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991. 320 pp.

Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man is a biting criticism of post-industrial society that continues the work of the Frankfurt School philosophers in questioning the impact of the Enlightenment on modern society. Marcuse contends that the mechanization of modern society has led to a loss of individual freedom at all levels, political, economic, and social. In fact, Marcuse argues that the separation between the public and private spheres has been obliterated by the increasing level of technological penetration of society, whereby modes of social, political, and economic control have become more scientific.

Marcuse’s main criticism, however, is the gradual loss of pluralism and the institutionalization of important liberties that marked the birth of the Enlightenment. In a similar fashion as Daniel Bell’s in The End of Ideology in the West, Marcuse argues that post-industrial society lives in a state of subdued pluralism that is more threatening to pluralism than totalitarianism. According to Marcuse, economic forces have restricted what is and what is not rational/possible in the work world, thought has become what the population has been manipulated into believing as public opinion by mass communication, politics has defined a narrow arena in which players can act, and science and technology continue to undergird our values, beliefs, and our sense of reality/rationality. Typical of his Frankfurt School colleagues, Marcuse does not offer any concrete solution to this problem.

It is important to state that I shall consider Marcuse narrowly within his own historical framework, for some of his arguments hold less water now in the era of globalization than in the 1960s. However, Marcuse’s analysis leaves some issues unanswered. For one, his reasons for focusing on post-industrial society are not entirely evident. It can be argued that any form of order imposed upon a group of individuals, however primitive, entails a certain voluntary surrender of freedom. In fact, as Marcuse himself notes, the Enlightenment brought with it freedoms that were not available to pre-Enlightenment societies. Marcuse’s view that these freedoms are gradually withering away, however, fail to convince because he depicts a controller-controlled power structure in which the controller is as mythical as Adam Smith’s hidden hand of the free market. The ordering of the public and private space that Marcuse declares threatening is the byproduct of the rational choice made by individuals in the creation of laws and products. Their confinement to a narrow scope is true of any society, post-industrial or pre-industrial. Marcuse’s contention that the apparent “free choice” is actually fed to the public through the media again raises the question of who “the media” is. Furthermore, in all societies, at all times, choices were rarely made in vacuum, and therefore it is difficult to imagine what would make post-industrial society more totalitarian than the previous eras. The dissemination of ideas through mass printing is a practice that goes back to the fifteenth century.

Marcuse’s argument does have one merit – his warning about the hypnotic power of science and statistics is indeed a problem among the uninitiated. The scientific framework of thought has achieved the status of a new religion as Adorno and Horkheimer have argued in their Dialectic of Enlightenment and, as a result, the output of a scientific study is accepted far more readily and uncritically than it should be. Science, as many thinkers have reminded us, also functions within certain parameters which are sometimes arbitrarily decided. It is necessary to question and understand the data before it is accepted wholesale. However, with increasing knowledge about the world around us, it is natural for individuals to seek maximization of their material potential. Marcuse is against exactly this consumerist desire, which he claims has been brought on by the rationalization discourse of capitalist production. However, again, it is not clear why this is rooted in post-industrial society – consumer patterns in China and Europe between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries analysed by Kenneth Pomerantz in his recent work, The Great Divergence, show a remarkably similar pattern to today’s society.

Although Marcuse sees dangers in capitalist society, he does so even in the communist ones of Eastern Europe. In his view, the hope for a counter-revolution in thought and behaviour lies in the minorities. He argues that in the developing world (Egypt and India), it is unlikely that a more liberal form of society will take root unless the people are willing to retain their freedom from social, political, and economic automation despite the promise of a better life that comes with cooperation. Marcuse holds that by rejecting the totalizing effect of the capitalist discourse, the individual can retain his freedom. Unfortunately, Marcuse does not answer what this abstract freedom is, a freedom that guarantees no material satisfaction and offers no political ideology. I infer from this that Marcuse believes that being outside of ideology is what makes us free. Thus, the more comfortable an individual is in his/her material trappings, the less free s/he is. This is an unpalatable view for most of modern society, and in this lies Marcuse’s despair.

One-Dimensional Man eventually suffers from the same problem a lot of Frankfurt School writing does, namely, it makes allegations that sound even more dubious due to the lack of a proposed solution. Although Marcuse makes some interesting observations about society, he leaves unanswered the most important question: who is the controller?

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Surveiller et punir

26 Tue Jan 2010

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Book Review

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Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault, panopticon, power, prison, society, Surveiller et punir

Foucault, Michel. Surveiller et punir: Naissance De La Pris. Gallimard French, 1998. 360 pp.

Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish has become a canonical text in many disciplines since its first print in 1975. Considered one of the foremost post-structuralists, Foucault has drastically impacted the way in which we today think about power, a major theme in many of his works, not excluding Discipline and Punish. For Foucault, power is intrinsically tied to knowledge. Discipline and Punish describes the evolution of various systems of knowledge that give the institutions that possess the knowledge to apply it to society in the form of power. Although the prison is used as an example in this work, it can also been seen as a larger metaphor to society. Societal norms—created by knowledge—are a veritable prison for individuals. The power discourse that operates in prisons also operates in society, and the mechanisms of control over the criminal and the citizen are the same. As Foucault points out, these methods of observation, categorisation, and control originated in monasteries, factories, schools, hospitals and in the army and were later applied to prisons. All these institutions regulate the individual in similar ways because the power they claim over their subjects is also similar. The illustration Foucault uses in his defence is Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon. This model allowed for the possibility of constant observation of the subject without the subject knowing if s/he was being observed. This caused the internalisation of discipline, creating “docile bodies” required by the industrial world. The institution divided an individual’s experience of even the very basic mediums of time and space into rational/scientific units that could be regulated, essential to the development of the idea of abstract labour. In a way, the Enlightenment that promised freedom and liberty to its followers thus trapped them in a panopticon in which they are regulated even more closely and have less freedom. This argument, some claim, is inherent even in the book’s French title: Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison. The word “surveiller” means “to watch over” in French, not discipline. Thus, the role of institutions in modern society is to watch over ordinary citizens and regulate their time and bodies.

A critical leap Foucault makes in Discipline and Punish is the shifting of the subject of the punishment from the body to the soul. The traditional argument for the abolition of public executions and torture is the humanitarianism that swept through Europe on the heels of the Enlightenment. Foucault’s view, however, is that with increasing contemplation on the idea of the Self, the human soul offered opportunities for greater control than the human body. Reformists were more concerned with a effective way of controlling the mob rather than have humanitarian concerns. The justice of the Crown was usually ineffective in making an example of a subject, and unfortunately, in some cases, the body became a site upon which to focus admiration for other revolutionaries. Therefore, punishment had to go beyond its traditional domain to be effective, as psychiatry and other sciences allowed. A corollary of this is that power is now firmly in the hands of a few elites that could delineate the normative discourse for society.

Foucault’s arguments then place power between entities (individual or institution) rather than ascribe it to any one entity or the other. Because power is created through knowledge and its application, it must then subsequently reside in the nature of application. This is a major shift in previous views of power, ones that placed it firmly with God, his servants (the clergy), or his political representatives (divine right of succession of the nobility). Foucault’s assertion makes power far more intangible. Its dissociation from any entity and appearance in the dynamic relationship between entities makes it more difficult to influence it. Thus, Foucault’s power paradigm becomes a prison for society. In a sense, Foucault continues Nietzsche’s assertion that the world is merely a system that the Übermensch can rise above, but he then proceeds to declare that it is impossible to escape Max Weber’s iron cage of society, an all-encompassing institution Foucault calls the carceral system. Since power can be defined only by technocrats and exercised by bureaucrats, it is impossible for the individual to access the nodes of power, and those who rise in the ranks of the technocrats or bureaucrats will have no incentive to reform, as Herbert Marcuse argued in One-Dimensional Man, because they themselves will have the most to lose.

An interesting deviation from Enlightenment thinkers is Foucault’s pessimism regarding individuality. Foucault sees the individual as a social construct created by a power discourse. Through mass technology the individual is constantly eulogised, but in reality, this created individual is merely an efficient cog in the system’s wheel. To not be an individual is not to follow the prescribed norm, and that is subversive and therefore bad. These non-individuals are then the subjects of the new prison, to be moulded into useful functionaries in the carceral system.

Discipline and Punish thus outlines a whole mode of existence with the prison at its centre as a metaphor. Foucault reveals the power relations between individuals and institutions and emphasises the difficulties in bringing change. However,Foucault reifies neither power nor society. Instead, Foucault’s aim (with a healthy superimposition of Weber) is to explain that economic “intelligence” of the day demanded that more work be crammed into less time. This basic “value” has led to our society today. Change in society must therefore necessarily come from change in values people hold since power lies at the nodes of interaction between people and the institutions they represent.

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