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Chaturanga

~ statecraft, strategy, society, and Σοφíα

Chaturanga

Tag Archives: welfare

Apathy Also Begins At Home

14 Sun Jul 2013

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Society

≈ Comments Off on Apathy Also Begins At Home

Tags

Adam Smith, al-Farabi, anomie, Aristotle, Émile Durkheim, eudaimonia, jihad al-nafs, Plato, Qur'an, social justice, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, welfare

Perhaps not in the sense of foreboding that William Shakespeare meant it in his Richard III, but more in the metre of John Steinbeck’s message of moral decay and rhyming with Helmut Flieg’s (Stefan Heym) tale of utter despair, this really feels like the winter of India’s discontent. I am not sure if it has become worse these past few years, or whether it has just been a very long winter and we didn’t know about it.

It was not the malaise of the economy, the alarming security condition, a new multi-kharab (खरब) scandal, or even yet another encroachment upon my civil liberties by the state that brought about this melancholy – living in the Third World, one is inured to many such things. Rather, it was the gratitude of my maid when I brewed a fresh pot of coffee for her when she arrived for work early in the morning, wet from a pleasant Bangalore drizzle. What is there to be grateful about coffee for someone working in an economically solidly middle class home (upper middle by Indian standards, I suppose)?

The plain truth of the matter is that despite the loud support many of us express for India’s rampant welfarism – FSB, NREGA, RTE, UHC – we treat our own servants (domestic help for the politically correct, or, why not – domestic management executives?) quite inhumanely. Collectively, India’s financially better-off classes seem to suffer from a combination of a massive Genovese syndrome and apathy. We would prefer that the state stepped in and helped these poor wretches, that they not take up any more of our time than they absolutely have to. After all, what are our tax rupees doing?

The fundamental nature of domestic help has changed over the years. A couple of decades ago, the conditions were harsher but the master-servant relationship was warmer. Today, the circumstances are not as onerous but the association is transactional and cold. As many poor have seen their financial status inch up and more and more handouts, quotas, and also opportunities come their way, many have abandoned manual labour, or have placed conditions upon their employment. It is harder to find domestic help nowadays, but not only because of the slight financial upturn the poor have enjoyed. Few servants feel the same loyalty and attachment to their employers that their parents’ generation might have felt. When employers mistreat their employees or don’t invest in them, the same is reciprocated from the bottom up.

I am not restating the silly Bollywood fallacy of the pre-liberalisation era, that the rich are bad and the poor are good. If one were to step away from the strawman zone of either extreme to the more common and everyday centre, there are many matters of virtue, prudence, justice, and beneficence that deserve to be pondered.

This mistreatment of servants need not take extreme forms; indeed, as Søren Kierkegaard warns us of the slow and unnoticed process of losing one’s Self, the daily erosion of human dignity between master and servant nudges us closer towards the precipice. It is not uncommon nowadays to find children being rude to the help; after all, they probably observed and replicated the behaviour from their possibly nouveau riche parents. I have seen guests leave their hotel rooms in deplorable states because housekeeping will clean up the room later anyway. My servant, who could not expect a hot cup of coffee on a cold morning, also had stories to tell of homes in which it was near impossible to keep up with the owners’ constant littering around the house. Others, she said, were unhappy with the stale leftovers they were sometimes given at the homes they worked in, but owing to their poverty, accepted it anyway. Sometimes, they would not even get that simply because the memsahib had forgotten or was busy. Pay is a monthly battle, as inflation corrodes the purchasing power of a salary and employers resist the upward creep in demands from their employees. Any time off is deeply resented, though the masters themselves need their two-day weekend and year for the occasional long weekend.

These are just some of the seemingly insignificant frictions between the master and servant that are caused more by apathy than malice. India’s New Society – rapidly wealthy, sometimes double-income, individualist, Bacchean, greed-is-good mantra’ed – has unfortunately not been able to cope with the accompanying social shifts. Modes of social exchange have been transformed, whether for better or for worse, without full cognisance. In our parents’ generation, servants stayed employed to their masters for long periods, sometimes over multiple generations. They got little, but there was little to go around in our socialist republic then, the black market and long queues outside ration shops for substandard goods being the norm. Other social injustices such as caste discrimination were, no doubt, more common, but literacy was low and poverty high. As is wont when we leave theory for the real world, we lived in paradoxes –  as a child, I remember my grandmother making it a point to give the servants the same food we ate but serve them in their own special utensils that no one else would use. Despite having several servants, my grandfather used to insist that we clean up ourselves; several of my friend and cousins were also reprimanded for their rare rudeness with the help. Our neighbour, a severe taskmistress if I ever saw one, would ask me or my cousins to help the servants’ children with their homework and ask after their progress in school though never allow us to play with them; for some of our friends, money might have been tight but anyone who worked for them was additionally compensated in food, firewood, clothes, and sometimes even a place to stay during the monsoons. For all the handed-down caste bigotry previous generations exhibited, many were equally generous and built relationships with their workers.

This is not a nostalgic recounting of the “good old days,” nor is it an eternal damnation of the present. Then, as now, the experience is mixed; however, nowadays, the value of the relationship-building of yore seems to have been missed. Interestingly enough, some of the same apathetic people have also given substantial sums to charitable organisations (though I wonder about the purchase of social approbation), which points back to unthinking indifference rather than malice. Though coined by the French philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau, it was a sociologist from the same country, Émile Durkheim, who popularised the term Anomie to describe the dissipation of bonds between individuals in a society. Normally,

sensitivity to mutual needs promotes evolution in the division of labour. Producers, being near consumers, can easily reckon the extent of the needs to be satisfied. Equilibrium is established without any trouble and production regulates itself.

However, as we become a more transactional and impersonal society, these ties that bind begin to unravel. The breakdown in empathy between employer and employee, when replicated across society, carries with it unseen scars in much the same way as Basil Hallward’s painting did of Dorian Gray.

We don’t need philosophers to tell us that Man is a social animal, or that the good life is possible only through society. However, al-Farabi, the famous 9thcentury Islamic Neoplatonist polymath, goes a step further than self-interest of association (Plato) or even eudaimonia (Aristotle) to the soteriological dimension of cooperative – dare I say eusocial? – living. Unlike Plato or Aristotle, al-Farabi believed that happiness can be achieved by the masses as well as the elite. Some scholars think that al-Farabi’s theory of four-fold happiness (theoretical, deliberative, moral, practical arts) rests not only on the Greek thinkers but also on the Qur’an (9:71) and hadith (al-Tirmidhi 604, Muslim 496, 1774), but the philosopher himself, interestingly, steers clear of religious vocabulary in expressing similar ideas. Al-Farabi exhorts us, beyond philosophical enlightenment, physical skill, and mental excellence, to support each other in need as limbs cooperate with a body. Only thus can a good (perfect) state evolve.

Qur’an, Surat al-Tawbah (9:71): The believers, both men and women: they are guardians, confidants, and helpers of one another. They enjoin and promote what is right and good, and forbid and try to prevent the evil, and they establish prayer in conformity with its conditions, and pay the zakaat.Sahih Muslim, Hadith 1774: The believers, in their love, mutual kindness, and close ties, are like one body; when any part complains, the whole body responds to it with wakefulness and fever.

Another thinker who expressed similar communitarian ideas is none other than the father of capitalism, Adam Smith. In his oft-neglected The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith lays out the framework of what informs all his other writing. Rejecting reason alone as a guide to moral action, Smith informs his world view with psychology in an early echo of Antonio Damasio’s explication of the importance of emotion in higher rationality. Smith’s “invisible hand,” for long taken as an endorsement of market forces, also makes a case for concern for the welfare of your fellow citizen.

The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.

To return from my brief philosophical rambling to the topic at hand – apathy towards our servants – the importance of being nice, not just to service providers like maids, waiters, and receptionists, but to all, cannot be understated socially, morally, or even economically. Our present state of apathy is blamed on many things – sudden wealth, erosion of traditional values, internet isolationism, rampant materialism, postmodernism, delayed adulthood, constant distractions – and I have neither the expertise nor the space to open that can of worms. While a quick “good morning, how are you today?” or if you feel like it, a fresh warm meal, might not cost you much, it could go a long way in forming bonds whose value is not discernible today.


This post appeared on Tehelka Blogs on July 24, 2013.

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The Importance of Being Chetan Bhagat

03 Wed Jul 2013

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Opinion and Response

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Centre Right India, Chetan Bhagat, hindutva, India, Lakshmi Chaudhry, minorities, Muslim, Narendra Modi, Prayaag Akbar, Sunanda Vashisht, welfare

When my mother handed me her copy of Five Point Someone a few years ago, I promptly bought her a copy of Richard Pevear’s and Larissa Volokhonsky’s magnificent translation of The Brothers Karamazov (the best, in my opinion). That is not a smear on Chetan Bhagat, the author of Five Point Someone; I’ve had similar responses to people excitedly shoving copies of Paulo Coehlo’s The Alchemist or Robin Sharma’s The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari into my hands, preferring Aristotle, Spinoza, and Dante as my teachers.

Yet this unnecessary spitting contest misses the point – there is no doubt that in comparison to Bhagat’s corpus of works, WH Auden is the better litterateur or Moshe ben Maimon the better logician. However, Bhagat has chosen a different style and audience for himself – he seems to prefer being the common man’s Maruti 800 to a Rolls Royce Corniche, or MS Windows to a custom Linux shell. Rather than be remembered by posterity, Bhagat prefers to get the conversation started…if we let him.

The newest round of Bhagat-bashing was kicked off by his blog post, Letter From An Indian Muslim Youth, written in an imaginary, eponymous voice. Bhagat’s scandalising suggestion was that, perhaps, the average Indian Muslim youth would rather be given opportunities than handouts, development rather than topi symbolism, and acceptance into the mainstream rather than separateness. In short, they want to be Indians who just happen to be Muslims and not “Indian-Muslims.”

Prayaag Akbar criticised Bhagat’s blog post in a poorly titled piece, Why Chetan Bhagat shouldn’t speak for Indian Muslims. I am told that authors are rarely in control of the titles of their pieces, and if so, someone at Mint really dropped the ball on this one. In his response, however, Akbar clearly states that his objection is to Bhagat’s scholarship and analysis, not that he is an outsider to the community he is trying to speak for: “while anyone should be encouraged to produce scholarship and analysis about communities or historical figures, Bhagat’s casual ownership of the voice of 150 million people is patently not that” (emphasis added).

Akbar readily accepts Bhagat’s point that many Muslims have used the political manipulation of “secularism” to their benefit, that the so-called secular parties such as the Indian National Congress, Samajwadi party, and the Trinamool Congress have pandered not just to Muslims but the “most regressive elements within the community” for their own selfish agenda.

Where Akbar legitimately disagrees with Bhagat is in the treatment of Muslims as one monolithic community. Even a cursory analysis would reveal data to the contrary – Muslims in Udupi think and behave differently from their religious brethren in Lucknow, and as occasional columnist Sajid Bhombal writes, politics is ultimately local. These differences indicate the strong role social, historical, and economic environments have on a religious group, usually more than mere scripture. The success of a Shah Rukh Khan, Zaheer Khan, or APJ Kalam cannot stand as representative of the Muslim condition any more than the Nehru clan represent the state of Kashmiri Pandits.

Akbar’s response was written in the same vein Bhagat’s essay was written – journalistic. Otherwise, he would have cited the warnings on data dredging – academese for cherry picking – databases and using labels in a cavalier manner that Ethan Bueno de Mesquita (not to be confused with Bruce Bueno de Mesquita) mentioned in an unrelated recent talk on the new methods of understanding violence. Bhagat’s writings are known, on occasion, to contain crude generalisations – just a couple of months ago, he set off another storm along similar lines with his Five Things Women Need To Change About Themselves.

Lakshmi Chaudhry’s response to the offending column can basically be boiled down to one suggestion for Bhagat: Stop playing Daddy. Her objection is to the presumptuousness of the privileged male in thinking that he can provide solutions to macro-problems by interrogating his own experiences. This view has much value, but just to water it down a little, consider this: when was the last time someone not of privilege had time to inform public discourse intelligently? There are a few, but only a few.

The IIT/IIM graduate also received much support, most notably (Bhagat RT’ed it himself) from Centre Right India’s new community editor, Sunanda Vashisht. Vashisht argued that the tempest Bhagat caused had little to do with his piece but the ideology it hinted at – in the binary world of Indian politics, attacking minority welfarism is automatically seen as a pro-BJP position. Regardless of whether this view is true or not, Vashisht’s point is that Bhagat, who is generally seen as pro-Narendra Modi, speaking on uplifting the Muslim community denies the Indian Left a major stick with which to attack the BJP in the upcoming elections in 2014.

Vashisht does not, unfortunately, address Akbar’s other criticisms but she is right about the motive for the criticism. While most critics prefer to hide in the ambiguous zone, thankfully, Akbar is refreshingly honest in his speculation:

“What Bhagat will not admit is that this piece is the latest in his sporadic series in support of Gujarat’s chief minister Narendra Modi and the bring-BJP-to-power-2014 effort. But—and this is only my suspicion—I wonder if his desire is the uplift of the long-marginalized Muslim community, or if this piece is a roundabout expression of his vexation with a religious group that he believes might well keep his favoured party and candidate out.”

Let us assume, for the sake of argument, Akbar is right on this point. So what? Personally, I doubt Akbar’s suspicions are true because of Bhagat’s long history of advocating a liberal, middle class understanding of development. Whether the wells being dug and the schools being built are done in the name of Modi or or “holy secularism,” they will still provide people with clean water and education.

I do not read Bhagat for the reasons stated in the beginning of this post, but neither am I aware of him cheering for the more orthodox and regressive elements of Hindu society; I have not heard of Bhagat’s ardent support of quashing the investigation into the post-Godhra riots. If his development platform resonates only with Modi and no other political party, frankly, it is a sad commentary on the poverty of ideas among the Indian political class and they and their supporters need to take some time off for introspection.

Anyone who dismisses Bhagat because he is not a suave writer, liberally dropping quotations from Mikhail Bakhtin or Jean Baudrillard, clearly has little understanding of journalism. In writing for a mass audience, one is compelled to simplify concepts and language. While many supporters of Bhagat suggest that this kind of criticism stems from jealousy, it is easier to deal with text than intent. I would rather everyone write like Mark Hibbs, Ashley Tellis, or Aaron Zelin, but I suspect Bhagat has more readers than these three combined.

There is a fine line between complexity and reach that every author has to choose for him/herself, and editor has to decide for his/her platform. Vashisht tells a cautionary tale about the majority of Bhagat-bashing, but Akbar and Chaudhry also make some valid assessments Bhagat should think about. Given his two recent posts that have generated some flak, Bhagat might want to consider using labels and categories more thoughtfully, reflecting on cause, correlation, context of his themes and drivers. With increased reach comes increased responsibility, and Bhagat has an excellent opportunity here to demonstrate multi-layered textuality to tens of thousands of his fans.

Then again, with all those tens of thousands of fans reading his articles while I can hardly get my parents to read mine, Bhagat must be doing something right – maybe the flow of advice should be the other way around! Nonetheless, the importance of Chetan Bhagat is that has got people talking, perhaps even thinking, about an issue; he has articulated the first stage of a conversation that can be carried on in thousands of offices and homes across India. Bhagat does not pretend to be a Yeats or a Goethe, and we should not falsely make him out to be one so that we could then disparage him rather than address his hypothesis.

As for those criticising Bhagat because they do not like his political views, ignore them – it is unbecoming to dignify ideology masquerading as argument with a response.

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W(h)ither Right?

07 Thu Mar 2013

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Opinion and Response

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Bharatiya Janata Party, BJP, Conservative Party, Cornerstone Group, cultural Right, democracy, elitism, France, India, Left, Parti chrétien-démocrate, populism, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Republican Party, Republican Study Committee, Right, RSS, UK, Union pour un Mouvement Populaire, US, welfare

So what’s wrong with the Right? Despite a steady diet of expanding government, foreign debt, and runaway welfarism from the Left, the Right finds it difficult to excite the electorate enough to be voted into power. Failure breeds internecine conflict, further weakening the Right. In India, for example, despite nine years of criminally poor governance by the incumbent party, the Right does not yet have an assured victory in the upcoming general elections and even that chance seems based more on an anti-incumbency sentiment than a genuine embrace of the Right political platform. Describing the woes of the Right, as a friend put it, the issue is not that the Left is so powerful but that the Right is not loved.

Why is this? Part of the reason lies in the agglomerated nature of the Right. More than a coherent and uniform ideology, the Right is fundamentally a reactionary political movement. As Thomas Sowell argued in Intellectuals and Society, it is “simply the various and disparate opponents of the Left.” These opponents of the Left are bound by nothing beyond their common disagreement and can come in all hues and colours, from Islamists to libertarians. In the cacophony of ideologies, a clear and unified platform is lost.

From this Right jumble, two broad themes emerge: a Right motivated by economic ideals, and a Right grounded in cultural certitude. Economic conservatives have not been able to capture the electoral imagination; their message is too abstract for the average voter. Preaching long-term fiscal responsibility to an impatient electorate not used to institutional stability and good governance is like lecturing an obese person on his way to a triple bypass on the benefits of yoga. Furthermore, quotas and entitlements are an emotional argument, not an economic one. It is difficult to argue against feeding a hungry man, or providing medical aid to sick child. The misery of an individual moves one far more easily than lofty principles of governance and economics.

It is for this reason that the economic Right has usually had to seek allies among the cultural Right. Such partnerships are quite common – the Parti chrétien-démocrate and its association with the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire in France, Republicans and their Christian fringe in the United States, the Cornerstone Group within the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom, the and the revolving door relations between the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in India. However, social conservatives are not necessarily fiscal conservatives; whether due to their cultural mores, national pride, or religious beliefs, many on the cultural Right have greater sympathy for socialist policies than their fiscally conservative allies. This dissonance creates an ambiguous political platform that leaves the centre of the political spectrum confused.

Language, religion, ethnicity and all those other strands that make up the web of life are just as tangible as government dole. The average voter can relate as easily to soft loans and subsidies as the razing of a nearby temple or a gradual change in the lingua franca due to the influx of outsiders into his/her village. However, cultural protectionism militates against socialist practices, making the cultural Right natural foes of the Left and pushing them into the arms of the free-market libertarians. The social conservatives offer the economic Right not only the advantage of their mass appeal, but also the benefit of their well organised cadre at the grassroots level. The cultural Right thus becomes the base of the entire Right. As a result, most economically right-of-centre parties find it difficult to jettison their cultural agenda and still remain a viable political force.

Unfortunately for the Right, cultural protectionism is an inherently divisive message that can mobilise the excluded as easily as those included. Be it the Ten Commandments in government buildings or a ban on beef, such issues guarantee fierce opposition as much as rally the base. The economic Right loses ground among their own, who may otherwise have been persuaded by a fiscal argument but are forced away by the cultural agenda. The wisdom of the political pundits so far, however, has been that people moved primarily by fiscal conservatism are less likely to vote and wooing the social conservatives is a electorally more rewarding tactic.

Beyond the fissiparous difficulties of the Right, the Left has one more advantage – they understand humans better. While the free marketeers repeat the mantra of self-interest incessantly, the Left seems to understand human beings in context. One interesting term psychologists use that may apply to quotas and entitlements is “social trap.” It is a situation in which a group of people act to obtain short-term individual gains that leads to a loss for the group as a whole in the long term. Given the uninspiring institutional integrity in India and an environment of lack, people are understandably tempted to seek advantage when possible rather than invest in a future. Another way of looking at it is, as Prospect Theory explains, how people understand risk and reward – the outcome of an entitlement is guaranteed immediately while the benefits of the market are in the future and probable at best. Other selfish and self-serving beliefs and behaviour such as psychological entitlement feeds into these traits as well.

So is it the end of the road for the economic Right? Perhaps, if they cannot package  their beliefs in a more enticing cover. Fiscal prudence must supercede narrower personal, regional, or communal sentiments.  This is easier achieved when the state is stable and impartial in the dispensation of services and justice. As the powerful story of the 9-year-old boy from Fukushima illustrated, people also have a capacity for remarkable fairness and generosity if they trust the system. Yet it is difficult to reform the system if one is not in power, or if one is bogged down by socialist impulses within one’s own ranks…and power is difficult to achieve if one is viewed merely as an anti-incumbent alternative. It is a pretty little vicious cycle the economic Right finds itself in.


This post appeared on FirstPost on March 25, 2013.

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