About the issues in the discussion.
Dear Friends,
Having reread most of the posts twice and having thought about the best way to proceed in this discussion, I thought of a possible line that might actually help us move forward. Let me see whether this works.
(A) Consider the following sequence of sentences:
1. All Indians are perfectly and fully moral.
2. All westerners are perfectly fully moral.
3. All Indians are immoral.
4. All westerners are immoral.
For sentences (1) and (2), all it takes is one instance of immorality to be proven wrong. Our proverbial municipal clerk would be immoral, and it would disprove the sentence (1). The same example could also confirm sentence (3); an instance of a moral act would also be a counter-example.
Now, when the municipal clerk is brought out as an instance, what exactly is its status? Is it intended as an example of (3) or as a counter example to (1)? Probably neither, because no one on this board believes either (1) or (3). Consequently, it can illustrate another claim:
5. Some Indians are immoral.
This is undisputed; and we all take (5) to be true. In fact, we all believe
6. Some westerners are immoral.
Or, more generically,
7. There are immoral people in both the west and India.
So, the municipal clerk (and something analogous in the west) would be seen as a confirmation of the sentence (7). Since nobody is disputing this, and yet there is a dispute about the municipal clerk, the sentence (7) is not at issue either.
(B) Let us see whether the issue is about corruption. To begin with, let us simply say that “immorality=corruption”. But this time, let us begin with the following sentence:
8. Some Indians are corrupt.
No argument from any one. (To me, this is true as much as the claim: some westerners are corrupt, some Africans are corrupt, some Asians are corrupt and some American-Indians are corrupt.) The dispute about the municipal clerk cannot be with respect to the above either. How about
9. All Indians are corrupt.
Most of us disagree with this; most of us do not believe it to be true either. In any case, those with whom I am arguing (Kannan, Arun, Arjun, Tapori, Cynical, to name just a few) do not definitely subscribe to this. Therefore, the municipal clerk example is not seen by any of us as an example of sentence (9).
So, if the example of the municipal clerk, or the building contractor, is not an example of either (8) or (9), what else is it an example of or counter example to? Logically, there is only one option left:
10. No Indian is corrupt.
But every one of us, including me, believe sentence (8) to be true. From this it follows that (10) is false. To make it clear, I do not subscribe to sentence (10) at all.
So, we are left with a problem. If there is consensus among us about which of the above sentences are true, and which are false, why are we still disputing? Why do people feel obliged to come with instances like the municipal clerk or the building contractor? What is it an example of, what is it a counter-example to? What precisely are we disputing?
(C) There is also another common agreement because of the definitional equivalence. All acts of corruption and ethics are individual acts, i.e., individuals are either corrupt (immoral) or not corrupt (moral). So, we cannot be disagreeing about this either. So, why do people feel the urge to come with some or another instance, some argument or the other, and have a dispute with me? Where do we disagree?
(D) The next step is to break the definitional equivalence. Two of the issues about which there could be a dispute (of the possible four):
11. Some corrupt acts are moral.
12. Some non-corrupt acts are not immoral.
There has been some discussion about the sentence (11), but at a very late stage in the argument. (Especially in my post to Arun, where I invite him to think of scenario’s where 11 could be true, using the Indian psychology). But whatever it may be, the clerk and the building contractor could not be about this: I kept insisting that one is not defending that corruption is either morally good or bad, and that one needed to understand what it was before making a moral judgement either way.
So, what have we been discussing all along, and where is the dispute to be located?
(E) Here is my hypothesis. The discussion has been about the sentence “corruption is a social phenomenon” and what we understand this sentence means. We are at loggerheads about the scope of this sentence. I believe you do not quite appreciate the consequences of your interpretation. Let me approach my hypothesis by steps as well.
(F) Consider the following sentences:
13 There are more corrupt Indians than there are corrupt westerners.
14 There are more corrupt persons in India than elsewhere.
15 In terms of the percentage of corrupt to non-corrupt people, India ranks 73rd in the list of nations.
These are some possible ways of interpreting the claim that “India is a corrupt nation”. None of these are acceptable because no research has been done by anyone, anywhere in the world, at anytime that can provide us with any semblance of evidence that can justify such a statement.
Quite obviously, that claim that India is a corrupt nation (or that corruption is rampant in India) cannot refer to statements like above. Let us bring in the organisation to which the municipal clerk belongs, in order to see whether it makes sense.
16 The Indian bureaucracy is corrupt.
17 In 72 other nations, bureaucracy is less corrupt.
18 The bureaucracy in some countries is more corrupt than bureaucracy elsewhere.
19 The manner in which the bureaucracy, the police, the justice system is corrupt in India is different from the way similar organisations are corrupt in the USA.
The sentence is (16) is true, but no implications follow from this. May be, that is because all bureaucracies are corrupt: because of Nehruvian Socialism in India, Fascism in Germany, Democracy in the US, etc. etc. In other words, the claim could be about the organisation that the bureaucracy is. But, of course, it is not: no one means that only ‘the Indian bureaucracy is corrupt’, when they say that India is corrupt. Besides, no one has done a comparative research. So, we have no clue about what 17 through 19 say or do not say. Our dispute on this board, consequently, cannot be about any of the above sentences.
Suppose we add government to this list. Consider the following:
20 The Indian bureaucracy and the Indian government are corrupt.
21 The existence of corrupt organisations makes a culture or a nation corrupt.
22 If the society feeds corruption, such a society is corrupt.
Now, I have a feeling we are getting somewhere in the process of making sense of the statement that India is a corrupt country. But, let us take small steps here. Regarding (21) and (22) the following could be said: the existence of organised crime in all societies would make all societies corrupt. But no one says that America is a corrupt nation because the organised crime exists and grows in America. So, let us leave aside these two sentences for the time being and focus on (20).
23 The present incumbents in bureaucracy and government are corrupt.
This is not what is meant when one says that India is a corrupt country or that corruption is eating into the innards of the country. What one means is something stronger, more like,
24 The Indian regime is corrupt: not merely the present incumbents but the Indian system of bureaucracy and politics.
But (24) does not imply that the rule of law and democracy are corrupt. These institutions are not corrupt.
25 The way the Indians use these modern institutions is corrupt. Or, The Indian way is corrupt.
What is this Indian way? Some kinds of examples.
26 Such is the nature of corruption in India that anyone who has to do business in India is forced to play the same game.
27 One cannot do business in India without paying bribes.
In other words, such is the Indian way that even those who want to play fair and square are forced into playing the game of corruption. These business people themselves get corrupted because, much like the building contractor, they are forced to pay bribes in order to stay alive.
28 This means, that such is the pattern of interactions within the Indian society that anyone who wants to interact with them is forced to become corrupt himself. Or, pithily formulated,
29 One is taught to relate in a corrupt way to other people.
Both (29) and (30) imply the following:
30 One is not only corrupt; one corrupts the other as well. That is, ‘their’ (i.e. the Indian) way of interacting breeds corruption.
From this, it is a child’s play (almost) to go to the following conclusions:
31 Corruption continues to grow in India because more and more people are taught to become corrupt.
32 That is, more of more aspects of cultural life come under the scope of corruption.
33 The process of learning to be corrupt is part of the Indian culture and society.
34 A society or a culture teaches its members some ways of interacting with each other. If these ways are themselves corrupt, the society or nation is corrupt.
In other words, the commonsense claims (and the scholarly treatises) about ‘corruption in India’ involve the above statements. This is what I think most of you are defending without knowing it (or even explicitly rejecting it). Why do I say so?
(G) Because, now the examples of the clerk and the contractor begin to make sense. They are examples of the fact that India is corrupt. It does not mean the sentence (8) [i.e., some Indians are corrupt] but sentences 30 through 35. You feel that I am saying something else, something different from the commonsense claims you are putting forward. Therefore, you keep coming with examples and arguments that make no sense, have no point or purpose, at first sight. But they do make sense. If you realise that a ‘simple’ statement like that of the Transparency International has its own logic and takes you irresistibly towards one goal, you will also realise that your examples and arguments have but one purpose: to ‘show’ that India is corrupt in the sense we have just seen.
(H) When immorality increases in the West, people do not say the ‘west is an immoral culture’ because it encourages immorality. They bemoan this fact and say that the ‘fundamental’ western values (or Christian values) need to be revived. When immorality (say corruption) increases in India, people do not say the same and call for a revival of Indian values. No, they say that the Indian culture and society are corrupt. Why? Because the values that the Indian society embody are not considered moral.
(I) In other words, the discussions on this board illustrate the colonial consciousness I refer to in the article. Even when we want to, it is not that simple to break out of this consciousness. Even when we talk about our own experiences in India, we remain within the ambit of colonised consciousness. Because, “Colonialism”, as I have repeated a number of times already, “is about denying the colonised peoples and cultures their own experiences; of making them aliens to themselves; of actively preventing any description of their own experiences except in terms defined by the colonisers.”
(J) I am, of course, aware that I have sketched out but a path in the above paragraphs. This is not the only path, but one I found to be the simplest to show the logic involved in the statement that ‘India is corrupt’. I say your discussions suggest that you are merely following the logic of this statement. By saying this, I might alienate some of you. If that comes to pass, so be it. As I have said in another post, I can only help you think, I cannot convert you. You need to put in the effort and all I can provide are some tips.
I do wish sometimes that people read the posts carefully before expressing agreements or disagreements. Just before the sentence (8), I postulated a defintional equivalence between immorality and corruption. In that case, 'some Indians are immoral' becomes equivalent to 'some Indians are corrupt'. As such, there can be no scare quotes in sentence (8).
On the other hand, the scare quotes will reappear when one suggests that Indians are 'corrupt' in the sense in which one proclaims that 'India is a corrupt nation'. Because, here the notion of 'corruption' carries the meaning I have dealt with in sentence (31) to (34).
You do raise an important issue: whether it is possible to evaluate the ‘ethos’ of two cultures in terms of one being better than the other. Here is my answer: yes. The West has claimed that theirs were better; I believe it is possible to show that they were wrong. Of course, there will be some rational and objective criteria for deciding one way or another. My point regarding this are two: (i) they never spelt out these criteria; (ii) they were not able to say what the Indian ‘ethos’ was but simply assumed that it was ‘bad’. Today, we need commit neither of these two ‘mistakes’.
Dear Kannan,
As usual, you raise important questions. Not all, I am afraid, are capable of detailed answers at this stage. But I will take a preliminary run-up to tackling some of them.
(a) Let me begin with the issue of my choice for a descriptor like the Indian Renaissance and not place it in scare quotes. There are four relevant points to consider in this regard. The first is already noticed by you: the nature of my audience. I am writing to a western-educated audience, and I hope that this term resonates with some of us at least without sounding obscurantist. Hence the first reason for not using the scare quotes. The second reason has to do with the nature of the task we confront today. This is partially touched on in how I explain the title ‘Pratyabhigyaana’. There is a third reason. [There are two sides to this. On the one hand, I am not against some terminologies simply because they come from the West. Should that be the case, we cannot accept the scientific theories in the natural sciences at all]. On the other hand, the word picks out a phenomenon that took place in the western culture whose ‘analogue’ we are going to experience (I hope). I merely hope that the impact of this Indian Renaissance will be akin to the one that the Italian Renaissance had on the western culture: a revival of learning and the development of scientific thinking. I have no idea of the form or fashion of this impact, but merely a hope that it will regenerate our tradition and culture. To say that it is not an idle dream is to point out that such a phenomenon has occurred in human history at least once. Fourthly, it was Satya’s description and I have been charmed by this ever since she announced it. I hope that it will prove to be equally charming to some of us as well.
(b) Why the scare quotes around words like ‘reform’? Because, I do not believe their desire to reform our society arises from an understanding of the phenomena they want to se reformed. Instead, it comes from accepting the truth of the colonial descriptions.
(c) Regarding the ‘third voice’. You are right that it has been around some time. When I said ‘today’ there is a third voice, I did not mean the ‘literal today’ nor was I referring to my voice. I was simply positioning myself with respect to the spectrum. Is this voice ‘colonial’ too? This question can only be answered when we get a story that is better than the one the third voice tells. It is my hope that such a voice will soon come along and better the current story: is this not what scientific progress all about?
(d) Your point about logical necessity. All I want to say is this: if one uses the ethical terminology from the West (i.e. concepts like ‘forbidden’, ‘obligatory’, ‘permissible’, etc.) to describe some of the Indian practices, then one is compelled to move forward in certain directions. The meaning of these words, as they are used in the ethical discourses, is worked out precisely in deontic logics, including their logical properties. Of course, one might disagree on the meaning of these terms. In that case, one has to build an alternate set of logics that do the job as well as contemporary explications of the term. In other words, it is not all that arbitrary.
And then you ask the following question: “even after such logic has been demonstrated, whatever may have been achieved--even if a theory is established, clear communication is not achieved as far as everyday conversation is concerned. Is there an easier way?” The import of this question escapes me. Could you please elaborate on this and clarify?
There is some disagreement about the nature of the response of the Bengali intellectuals, as well as those of the Punjabi’s. Irrespective of where one stands with respect to this particular issue, there is a broader concern here: the response of the Indian intellectuals. They just seem to have gone under, and succumbed to the colonial rule. Why? One hypothesis proffered here is the inferiority complex of the Indians and the suggestion is that improvement in their material situation might change this state of affairs. There are, however, some general issues here.
(a) For a moment, let us assume that there is truth to the observation that Indians suffer from inferiority complex. This being a matter of individual psychologies, the general problem is: in our culture, what induces this complex in individuals? Where or how do we learn it? What mechanisms transmit this complex to individuals and how is this sustained at the level of a culture?
(b) Would material success reverse this feeling? If the current crop of intellectuals is an example, then the situation is not promising. Most of them are more servile than ever, and reproduce western stories more fervently than their predecessors. I shall take up this question (with examples) in one of the forthcoming articles on this column.
(c) Most disturbing for me is what happened before, during, and after the colonial period. (I include both the Islamic and the western colonial rule here.) When the Indian intellectuals met alien thought forms, which were unlike anything they had ever encountered, they simply succumbed to them without being challenged to investigate the nature of these alien thought forms. This raises a mammoth ‘why’ and I have not been able to come up with any satisfactory answer so far. I think this is the issue that underlies the current debate on this board.
(d) It might, thus, be better to take up the issue in its general form. Otherwise, we are likely to be sidetracked into problems that are both unproductive and harmful.
1. You raise the question whether one could call the phenomenon of the Indian intellectuals succumbing to colonialism as an early instance of the ‘Stockholm Syndrome’. Frankly, I am hesitant. Here are my reasons.
(a) Paolo Friere, a Brazilian educationalist, has spoken about such a phenomenon at length in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed. He calls it as an ‘internalisation of the oppressor by the oppressed’. Whether we use Paolo Friere’s terminology or the much later one of ‘Stockholm Syndrome’, the problem is the same: both name the phenomenon without explaining it. In and of itself, not such a big problem if it is not for a cognitive tendency that is dominant in the ‘social sciences’, which brings me to the second point.
(b) Often, names supplant the search for explanations by ending up as one. It is like saying that ‘patriotism’ causes one to fight for one’s country. The former names the latter and is not an explanation.
(c) Thirdly, once a name is given to a phenomenon, oftentimes it happens that the ‘why’ question gets ad hoc explanations. ‘How to understand the Stockholm syndrome?’ has been provided with so many ad hoc explanations that these explanations themselves are in need of further explaining.
(d) Further, the ‘problem’ itself has not been set up satisfactorily. (I aim to go some way in reflecting on this issue in my next contribution to this column.) That is to say, it is not quite clear what the range and scope of the problem is. For example: is the ‘post-colonialism’ of today a mere continuation of the same tendency or itself a phenomenon of a different kind? As has been suggested on this column by some, is the influence exerted by Marxism on the Indian intellectuals an expression of this phenomenon or does one have to look for an explanation elsewhere?
(e) Because I believe that these issues require to be answered by any satisfactory explanation of why the intellectuals succumbed to the colonialist story, I am hesitant to name it at the present moment.
2. Your point about the material conditions. You are right in that the world of a poor man is not the world of a rich man minus money. One has to know some kind of material comfort before one starts thinking about other issues. But I intended to draw your attention to a social and cultural phenomenon, when I disagreed. I wanted to point out to the fact that it is precisely the privileged intellectuals of today (as a social stratum and a cultural force) who appear incapable of breaking out of the descriptive straight-jacket they have been wearing for centuries. Not only that. They also actively oppose (often polemically and abusively) any attempt at scientifically investigating certain kinds of issues. My problem with calling it ‘inferiority complex’ is this: this psychological term might help one develop an insight into an individual; but when generalised to a social stratum or provided as a cultural explanation, it loses its explanatory force. It simply begs the question instead.
3. Regarding the conviction you express that the new ideas of today will end up as the orthodoxy of tomorrow. I hope for the same too. However, basing such hopes on some scientific analyses of the Indian culture would go a long way in transforming a dream into reality.
Let me begin by proffering you and many others an apology and do so by putting it in a context. The context first. Recently, I visited North America (both Canada and the US) as a part of my visit to the AAR conference. I met many practising ‘Hindus’ who were white Americans. I read that you yourself are a Balinese ‘Hindu’. In some senses, both facts have shocked me into an awareness of my own ‘parochial’ stance: calling this column the ‘Indian’ Renaissance. Even though I was aware what ‘Gandhara’, ‘Jambu Dweepa’, ‘Suvarna Dweepa’, ‘Khamboja’, etc. referred to, and that our ancestors had no problem in recognising “Dharmikas” among them, for some reason or the other, the implication never sunk in properly. It has partly to do with my own resistance to the BJP/VHP/RSS, I suppose, in that I did not want to be associated with them and hence wanted to avoid the term ‘Dharmic’. I owe you and many others an apology for this parochial stance. I think it better to re-title my column as “The Dharmic Renaissance” and not ‘The Indian Renaissance’. (For obvious reasons, I cannot accept the notion of a ‘Hindu Renaissance’.) Now to your question.
1. You raise the question after reading my book which many on this board have not done. So, I will try to keep my reply intelligible to them as well (discarding some nuances along the way). The point I want to make is this: the Indian intellectuals actively took over the description of the colonizer as though it was “God’s own truth”. This shows that they were not indifferent. Should they have been that, given what I say in my book? I do not think so: they are and were ‘indifferent’ to explanations given about the Cosmos and their own Rituals, but not so when it was about themselves and their culture. This must have been a slow and protracted process, but happen it did.
2. There is a second aspect to what I call ‘succumbing’ to the alien thought-forms. I am convinced that they did not understand what Islam and Christianity were any more than the Indian intellectuals do today. The latter strut around as though they do, just because they presume they are ‘familiar’ with these religions. Our ancestors did not have this drawback of a presumed familiarity. That is to say, they should have been provoked into studying what this entity, religion, was. Instead of doing so, all they seem to have done (our modern day intellectuals simply continue this ‘tradition’) is to accept and propagate notions about fictitious entities like ‘Buddhism’, ‘Hinduism’, ‘Jainism’ and such like.
3. You suggest that the visible intellectuals of today are not subservient but are opportunists instead. I do not want to quite call them ‘subservient’ (this is purely a question of semantic choice) but I do hesitate to brand all of them as opportunists. I think we are talking about a more insidious process. Even though these intellectuals are genuine, I want to say, there is something to the process of colonisation (and to the contemporary social sciences) that makes these ‘explanations’ very seductive. We repeat the latter as mantras blind to the fact that we do not know what we are talking about. Any challenge to these beliefs is met abusively and with ad hominem attacks; and this is an index of their ‘blind faith’. I think we need to look at this phenomenon as an objective given, and not take to imputing individual or collective psychological motives to their actions
4. Finally, the issue is not about assimilating these alien thought forms. It's about how one accepts opacity as the height of transparency itself.
Have the investigations of our earlier generations of intellectuals lost to us, or did they succumb to the alien thought-forms? Of course, this is a historical question that requires investigation. However, focussing on the effects (until such an investigation is undertaken) leads me to say ‘succumbed’.
(a) Let us assume that they did investigate. The fact remains that the results have not been transmitted to us. This means either (i) the link between the intellectuals and society were severed by colonisation, in which case we need to find out the how and why of it. Further, we need to ask ourselves too whether any intellectual tradition that reflects on social and cultural experiences could ever survive as a living tradition when its links to such a life is lost. Or (ii) there never was such an investigation in the first place; which is why the results have not been transmitted to us. This appears plausible because of the behaviour of the majority of the intellectuals during the last 200 years or more.
(b) Even the minority of the intellectuals who resisted ‘succumbing’ to the colonial description of India seem to have done so without exhibiting much insight into what they were confronting. In contradistinction to Pradip, I am not sold on Vivekananda’s critiques. What I have read of him (which is a reasonable quantity) does not at all convince me that he had much of an idea of what he was fighting against. In other words, he seems to resist without much help from an earlier generations of intellectual critiques. This makes me suspect that there were not many such critiques (about Christian religion or the western culture) in our intellectual traditions.
(c) By saying this, I do not imply that there was no resistance. But I do say that they appear pretty ineffectual because they are not pro-active but are purely defensive instead. The defensive nature of such resistances (as long back as the nineteenth century) makes me suspect that there could not have been many attempts at understanding these alien thought forms. Instead, I believe that the Indian intellectual succumbed. Understanding the ‘why’, of course, is beyond my ken at the moment. But should I be proved wrong, I would only be happy.
You raise two issues: one regarding the difference, if any, between the Indian ethics and the western ones; the second is about the Orientalist division between the West and the East.
Regarding the first issue. Yes, I do think that there is a fundamental divide between these two cultures as to the nature of the ethical domain. This forum is not the place to argue for it: in a book I have almost completed, I show what this difference is. Very briefly put: the structure of western ethical thinking is ‘normative’ in nature. (That means to say, it makes use of ethical categories like ‘obligatory’, ‘forbidden’ and ‘permissible’ to evaluate actions. Or that the ‘moral ought’ is central to its talk about morality.) By contrast, the Indian ethics is ‘non-normative’. There is no distinction between the ‘normative’ and the ‘factual’ statements in our culture, whereas it is fundamental to the western intellectual thinking. (For example, the scientific statements are seen to be ‘factual’ whereas the ethical statements are said to be ‘normative’ in nature.)
You are right, therefore, in sensing that this divide is the backbone to my argument in the passage you cite. This divide, however, is not a simple ‘postulation’ from my side but one based on arguments and evidence which, as I have already said, are not presented in this article.
Your second issue is addressed partially already. Is the division between the West and East Orientalist in nature? Well, that is what Edward Said says in his Orinetalism; that is what many writers in his wake say too. I beg to disagree. In my next article, I intend to address this issue with the care it deserves. Here, let me make but three points. One: that there is an Indian culture and a western culture has been established in my book. (Of course, it is also an experiential given.) Consequently, I have just presumed this distinction here. Second: some distinction does not become Orientalist just because the Orientalist thinkers use the distinction. Thirdly: that there exist empirical distinctions of culture etc. is not denied by Edward Said but only that speaking about these distinctions leads to violence. A rather funny stance, to say the least, don’t you think?
Finally, I am not looking for “pure” Indian traditions either. (I do not want to give such an impression and if I did, I have clearly not succeeded in my aim of wanting to communicate clearly and unambiguously.) Much like you, I am trying to understand the present India and am not going in search of a ‘pure’ and ‘unsullied’ Indian culture. We are what we are today, influenced in uncountable ways by other cultures and traditions. (However, I do not think we have become 'mongrels' because of this!)No, my foray into the past is strictly determined by the present in order to work within the limits set by that present. But thanks for making me realise that I need to be more careful in how and what I write.
a) If we focus on the persecution and the time span over which such an event has taken place, I can only think of one: the persecution of the Jews in Europe during the course of European history. They were discriminated against; there were intermittent violent pogroms, and they were under pressure from a religion that fancied itself as its competitor. Many Jews also converted to Christianity. Of course, other parameters are not applicable to the Indian situation. (For example, the Jews thought that Christianity was not the true religion and that they were heretics of sorts; sections of the Jews were well-off; they had no nation to call their own even though they thought of themselves as a nation, etc.) We need to look at the intellectuals in order to study whether their behaviour parallels that of the Indian intellectuals during the last couple of hundreds of years. From what little I know of the Jewish intellectual history, the reaction of their intellectuals during this period does not exhibit the same kind of reaction. But we need to do further study.
(b) The role of the non-Judaic intellectuals during the Nazi regime. Many Jewish friends were sold out; many intellectuals gave up their ideals and wrote tracts defending the Fascist movement and its ideas. This may not be a good place to look at because the fascist movement was intense, short-lived and immediate rewards and punishments were set in place. The only parallel I can think of in the Indian context is the bloody reign that the Jesuits set up in Goa in order to punish the Pagan religion and the Brahmins.
(c) The growth of Marxist ideas among the intellectuals during the periods of severe economic crises in Europe. Again, not a good period to study because Marxism was a product of a long tradition of radical and socialist thinking within the European political philosophy. This cannot be considered as an aberration.
(d) There is, however, one phenomenon I can think of from the post-war history of European intellectuals. And that is, the defence put up by the leftist intellectuals of Europe almost sequentially for: Soviet Union, People’s Republic of China, Cuba and the Red Khmers of Cambodia. These intellectuals (in a period of prosperity, nota bene!) systematically sold out all their radical inheritance, all their revolutionary and/or political principles, contorted themselves into all kinds of positions to sell stories about the glory of the above countries, their leaders and their regimes. At first sight, the way these intellectuals responded seems to mimic what I have in mind. These intellectuals were under the spell of revolution, they were mesmerised by the superiority of socialism (as they saw it), and no contortion was good enough to praise the superiority of the socialist doctrines or socialist countries.
If the last example holds water, then we may have to look at the sociological behaviour of the intellectuals (under certain conditions) and not couple this behaviour directly to the material circumstances or the material conditions of this sociological stratum. (Of course, not all leftist and radical intellectuals took this position: there was a minority that consistently resisted the pressure to sell socialism by trying to sell these countries to the European public.)
In other words, we need to distinguish between two aspects in the phenomenon we want to study: the behaviour of the Indian intellectuals when they were directly under pressure and persecution, and when they were under no such threats. Our question then becomes: why did (and do) the intellectuals in India succumb to the siren songs when they can do research into the phenomenon instead? In the absence of historical research, we can perhaps compress the question so that it becomes contemporaneous: to day, why do the Indian intellectuals in India (a majority among them) not do research to understand the western culture.
Thank you for reminding me once again that my style of writing requires becoming simpler and less difficult on the reader. I have no excuses or apologies to give: in all probability, I slip into certain modes of thinking and writing without thinking of the audience (at times). I promise to be more vigilant in the future.
Let me take some of the issues you raise ad seriatim.
1. Regarding corruption. The first thing to note is that there is no distance between how we use corruption in our daily language and the way it is used in political and sociological theories of corruption. You see, the problem we (Indians) face is the asymmetry in the way the word is used while talking about us and the way it is used when talking about India. I want to signal this by putting up the red flag: I want to suggest the reader not to assume the truth of these descriptions.
If we restrict ourselves to the recent past, then Gunnar Myrdal’s The Asian Drama can be used as a reference point for a way of talking that signals the current use of the term. He claimed that corruption (among other things) stood in the way of economic development of these countries. Since then, it has entered the popular discourse to such an extent that corruption is almost seen as a typical problem of developing countries today.
Consider the fact that you complain that one has to pay bribe to get a duplicate of one’s birth-certificate from the municipal office. Why do you complain? Is it because you have to pay money? If you had to pay for any and every such duplicate by law, would you call it corruption as well? (In Belgium, one has to pay for these things over and besides the taxes one pays for organising public services.) I presume not. Then why do you complain? Because, I suggest, you assume that (a) the clerk is not doing you any personal favour; (b) he is paid by the tax-payer’s money to provide you the service free of charge; (c) he is violating some or another moral precept by charging for what ought really be free; and such like. If this is the case, it is these assumptions that are responsible for transforming his action into corruption. These are (a) moral assumptions about some or another set moral codes; (b) moral assumptions about the role and function of public offices; (c) moral assumptions about the duties that such a function imposes on the incumbent; and so on. All of these belong to what I have been calling the western normative ethics. In other words, your complaint is a moral one, and it is that thanks to the western normative vocabulary that is available to you through the use of English and the western education.
Let us assume, for a moment, that this clerk’s function was privatised. (After all, why should I or someone else pay for this clerk so that you may get your duplicates?) That is, only those who make use of his office pay for the services they receive. Assume that the clerk charges you a fixed rate by keeping in mind he has to live too and not everybody in the community wants duplicate birth-certificates every day. (To keep the discussion simple, let us assume that the amount is fixed by him.) Would you call this corruption as well? I suppose not.
If you think deep enough on these two modes of organising public services, you will notice the problem. The clerk acts as though he is doing the second, whereas he appears to belong to the first. The problem of ‘corruption’ in India, I want to submit, arises due to the superimposition of the first on the second.
If this is the case, it ceases being corruption in any sense of the term. Hence my scare quotes as signals. It is intended to signal that the western normative ethics is structuring our experience itself, even when we think that we do not know what that normative ethics is all about. We need not study a western text-book on ethics in order to find out what it is. We merely need to interrogate the way we talk and the way (we think) we experience our own culture. What I have tried to do in the article is to draw your attention to the consequences of this way of structuring our experiences at a social and cultural level. In other words, I was hoping that these scare quotes would force one to interrogate one’s own experience. Hence the speed bumps: do not read further without pausing to think through the implications. Quite obviously, I have failed in my aim.
2. About what I have shown and what I have to show. Of course, Kannan, I have not proved that each of my claims is true. Within the purview of an article or even a book, one cannot prove the truth of all the claims one makes. This is so in every enterprise, including that of the natural sciences. What I was getting at, in my reply to Arun, was the nature of the task. It is not sufficient, I wanted to say, that we merely provide some interpretations of the Kama Sutra. We also need to explain our ethics. We face so many intellectual challenges on so many levels that we should not underestimate the nature and the tasks that confront the Dharmic Renaissance.
3. You speak further about the limitations that endeavours like mine confront on their way to becoming sciences. Actually, this discussion is about what it is to be scientific and what it is for some theory to become a science. I would rather postpone this meta-discussion to a future date, if you do not mind. However, there is just one point I want to make. Some of the limitations that you talk about confronts every science (e.g. the evidence is finite), does confront some sciences even today (example the ambiguity of the natural languages whenever evolutionary biology tries to develop some or another hypothesis) or that they were the initial difficulties faced even by sciences like physics (back when one wrote such tracts in Latin or Italian). I do not consider them daunting, but merely as a phase scientific theory building passes through. I am not sceptical about the possibility of undertaking serious scientific research about issues that keep me awake; nor am I sceptical about the possibility of its success.
4. You say it is still unclear what exactly I have shown. In this article, not much. In the book you have read, at least this much: the reason why western culture has constructed religions in other cultures has to do with the nature of religion itself. This has been shown, and the hypothesis can be tested.
Thanks again for your timely warning. I hope this post does not suffer from the faults you have warned me about. Let us pick up the other issues as and when they re-emerge again.
Here is how, rightly in my view, you formulate the challenge facing us:
“So, the challenge you (and people like me who find your explanations very interesting) face is to figure out a comprehensive, viable and sustainable alternate ‘clustering structure’ (the modern complex organization) that will deliver the complex goods and services needed in today’s economy while getting rid of the cultural distortions which give rise to ‘corruption’.”
Here, then, is my invitation and the reason for extending it.
(a) Are there people out there who are well-versed in Management theories (theory of firm, management control systems, organisational theory, etc) and sufficiently practical enough to undertake a medium to long-term research on the “relation between culture and management”? This research requires an intermeshing of the theories of organisation, my own studies on culture, and historical research into how public services were organised in India. Such research would help us develop an alternate “clustering structure”, as Arjun calls it.
(b) If there are people out there well-versed in any of the above three areas and are willing to work along (either directly through participation or indirectly by facilitating others to undertake such a research), could you please get in touch with me off-line? We can have exchanges through the e-mail and we can meet up with each other sometime in April in the US to talk the concrete steps through. (I will be coming to the US in April.)
(c) Such a research would enable us to develop not just an alternate description of India but also help evolving an alternate theory of organisation, which could get tested in practical life.
(d) About my reason for extending the invitation. Not being a management specialist, it would take me at least a few years to become familiar with the extant theories about it. I simply do not have that time. I am willing, however, to work along and guide those who want to do research because I have already spent some time doing preliminary work on the subject. I am convinced that this is a gold-mine and I do believe that we will advance our understanding about the relation between culture and management (which every business manager confronts practically when he sets up business in India) in very interesting and concrete ways.
Any takers?
You raise three inter-related questions in your post. Let me take them up one by one.
(a) The first question: “By saying that there exist "Western" and "Indian" cultures aren’t you somehow essentializing cultures into monoliths?”
I do not see how. When we talk of ‘the human species’ (in the singular), or about ‘life’ (again in the singular) while doing evolutionary biology, we do not presuppose or imply that either of the two is a monolithic entity, do we? In fact, diversity is a presupposition for any kind of knowledge and this is my presupposition as well. I presuppose (and my theory requires) diversity in both the Indian and the western culture. Without it, one cannot test the theories.
(b) Your second question: “by talking about these entities in the context of intellectual colonialism are you not implying that the interaction between the two was/is necessarily that between the victimizer/victimized?”
In fact, I dislike using notions like ‘victimhood’ in this context. That is why I speak about Indian intellectuals in terms of “succumbing” and not in terms of being “victimised”. In the larger context of my research, I speak in terms of the Indian intellectuals “taking over” the western descriptions. One reason, only one of the reasons though, has to do undoubtedly with colonialism. In my next article on this column, while speaking about Said, I shall speak of what (I think) post-colonialism really means. That is where we have to head for.
(c) Your third question is this: “if you do make the water-tight distinction between an essential India and its Western counterpart, don’t you think it is very likely that your argument be used to ask for the "unsullied" past (the return to an essential Indian tradition and the rejection of any Western attempts to study things Indian except on terms acceptable to the thekedaars of Indic traditions?)?”
You are right about this danger, even though I am not sure what you mean by ‘water-tight’ distinction. I do make the distinction that each of us experiences, viz., that there is a difference between our culture and the western one. In my book, I explain how I conceptualise cultural differences in such a way that it becomes amenable to a scientific investigation. In such a conceptualisation as the one I make, it is not even remotely possible to say that we should keep the Indian culture ‘pure’.
. The article invites the reader to reinvestigate issues about which he has a firm moral opinion: the cases of corruption and caste. I am not suggesting that the social structure which the caste system is supposed to be is morally just or that the social phenomenon of corruption can be defended as morally good. I want the reader to realise that we have a poor understanding of these phenomena and that, therefore, we should get to know what they are before we form firm moral opinions on the subject. I wanted to show that our present knowledge has to do with how the issues have been presented to us during the last two hundred years or so and that this presentation also entails that our ethics are immoral by nature.
2. Kannan’s post shows the nature of the issues poignantly. He suggests, for example, that even his grandmother finds the behaviour of the clerk is municipal office morally bead (cheating as he calls it), my attempts at exonerating the clerk not really successful, and that the problem remains at the ground level no matter what we call it and brings up the issue of the building contractor. Let us look at the issues a bit analytically in order to figure out what has gone wrong with this argument.
Why does he bring up the issue of his grandmother’s judgement as a counter-example? First, what do I say? That he calls it as corruption, I said, has to do with western normative ethics. Does it follow from this that the action of the municipal clerk is ethically good? It does not, unless one assumes either (a) I am presenting an alternate moral principle, which will make the action of the clerk morally good; or that (b) the only morality that will make the action of the clerk ethically bad is the one that construes it as corruption. I am not presenting an alternate moral rule that justifies the action of the clerk. But I want to know why the so-called corruption comes about and whether it is that. My attempt at doing this is assumed to make the action of the clerk or the building contractor morally good. Why this assumption? I suggest that it comes about because of the assumption (b).
Secondly, consider the underlying rhetorical force of the counter-example: “even we Indians call it ethically bad”. But whoever said that the action of the clerk or the building contractor is ethically good? Did I say that we do not have notions of adharma or paapa? I did not; so why does he assume that my reconstruction to explain corruption of the clerk is an exoneration of the clerk’s action?
So, it appears that there are but two options open to me: either I condemn it as corruption or I am doomed to defend the action as morally good. This is how the issues get set up in the normative ethics. The possibility that one can criticise the clerk or the contractor without making it into corruption and yet call it unethical is not even entertained. When vaguely entertained, it becomes a matter of labels as Kannan puts it. The problem, though, is that this label makes all the difference about how we tackle it: whether as a social phenomenon or as something else. That is to say, it is not a label which is at stake but one of re-conceptualising ethics. Is there the problem of corruption in India that makes about 20% of the adult Indian population into immoral people, or is something else going on? Surely, there is something wrong with a theory that makes us massively immoral but leaves the western culture intact. This is the issue I wanted to focus on. But such is the logic of the western normative ethics that there is little possibility of discussing it without being forced either into a defence of immorality or into the assumption that normative condemnation is the only way of conducting an ethical discussion.
True, I have not offered an alternate theory either of ethics or of corruption. The first will very soon (I hope) come out as a book, and research is needed on the second. I claim that we need to do research on this phenomenon, but Kannan and others know what the phenomenon is without doing any such research. Where do they get this certainty from? From two things, I would like to suggest. One from the conviction that the clerk and the contractor are being unethical (but this is not being discussed); second from the belief that the moral talk that has made this into corruption is also the only talk that will make it unethical. To challenge that it is corruption is to doubt its immorality. In other words, the only way of indulging in moral talk is to talk the way the western ethics does.
The above are one’s cognitive assumptions, probably not those one is aware of making.
3. VC comes up with a totally irrelevant issue in order to make another, related point. “We are savages”, he feels, when confronted with the tragedy of the girl who committed suicide because she was not found a suitable bride. It is totally unclear whether it is a moral criticism of arranged marriages, or of the taste of the would-be bridegrooms, or about extravagant weddings, or something else. None of it seems to matter as long as one can make some or another point about the immorality in the present-day Indian society. Is “keeping up with the Jones’s” an immoral phenomenon? Has anyone chronicled the tragedies this attitude has led the American families into? Does one find the advertisement industry and the producers of consumer goods who intensify this feeling immoral? Is the American society massively immoral the way extravagant weddings make the Indian society immoral? Who knows, or even who cares? As long as we can reproduce nonsense about the immorality of the Indians, what does it matter what one says?
4. Vikmas gets into another kind of quandary when he comes up with other texts that criticise adultery. Of course, I am aware of any number of such texts. That is why, I wrote, I want to focus on “an unlikely candidate”. Why the defensive attitude that makes us want to say that “even we have texts” that criticise adultery? What exactly is one trying to prove? That my consistent opponent should not think that we only have immoral texts? And that we too are moral? Why this need unless one …
5. Several people have come up with “human greed” to explain corruption in India. I will leave aside the assumption that one knows what corruption is but will concentrate, instead, on the explanation. Let us assume that the explanation is true. Does our problem disappear or become even worse? We have only three major routes we can travel with this explanation: (a) all cultures are ‘equally’ corrupt because greed is present everywhere; (b) Indians are genetically more greedy when compared to the rest of human kind; (c) the moral principles supposed to check greed are weak in the Indian culture. If (a) is true, then there is no specific problem of corruption in India; there is a special problem in India if the other two are true. Why this is even offered as an explanation is a mystery for me.
6. May be, this is not a uniquely Indian phenomenon but one that inflicts specific kinds of economies. This was the explanation that Gunnar Myrdal popularised. Corruption is endemic to underdeveloped countries. The problem with this explanation is that it masks the moral judgement by providing a pseudo-scientific explanation. That is why I focussed on the ethical aspect of this judgement.
7. We need ‘transparency’ says Bhadraiah. Good. Is it a secret in the Indian society who is corrupt? Does corruption exist in India because people do not know who the corrupt are?
8. I would really urge the readers to re-read the article in order not to lose focus. The discussion is *not* about (a) whether immoral practices exist in India; (b) whether we should be for or against corruption; (c) whether the caste discrimination is good or bad. The issues I am raising are anterior to them all. It is one of giving up the assumption that we know what corruption and caste system are. We do not know what they are. We assume we do because certain moral ideas have structured and presented some phenomena to us. Our current ideas (about either of the two) logically compel us make some kinds of claims about the nature of Indian ethics. We will be forced into this, I am hinting, because the nature of Indian ethics is non-normative and the western ethics makes alternate conceptualisation of the ethical domain difficult. The only way alternate ethics can exist, implies the western ethics, is by defending immorality. The discussions on this thread so far has proved this. The only question is: will you take the time to reflect and think about what has been going on in these discussions.
To answer the questions raised hitherto, one needs to have some understanding of what I have called the western normative ethics. One of the difficulties that hinder and understanding of this, however, is precisely what I have called the “colonial experience”. That is, the feeling that one knows what one is talking about and the absence of awareness that one does not understand it at all. I thought I could force the issue by engendering a cognitive dissonance, but it does not seem to have worked. So, let me try another route.
1. What is western normative ethics? It is a structure or style of thinking about ethics. What is its structure? It makes use of norms. What are norms? ‘Rules’ or ‘principles’ which have a characteristic structure that use certain concepts like the moral ‘ought’ and moral ‘ought not’. That is, some actions ought to be performed (i.e. they are obligatory); some actions ought not to be performed (i.e. they are forbidden) and some actions are neither of the two (i.e. they are permitted). What is important to note is that these norms (i.e. for example, some action is obligatory) hold irrespective of time, place, condition or the person. [For instance, the norm that one ought not to torture people because of their religious or political beliefs is indifferent to place, person, time, or culture. No human being ought ever torture another human being just because the latter subscribes to some or another political or religious belief.] In other words, norms are supposed to hold universally. From what I have said above, it logically follows that violation (or transgressing) some moral norm or the other is immoral (or unethical) and following some moral norm is moral (or ethical).
2. One of the important consequences of §1 is that all norms are universal in scope: that is, it is linguistically and logically impossible to have a particular norm or a context-dependent norm. Let me just illustrate with an example. Let us consider the norm that “Balu ought to reply to the Sulekha posts”. This appears as a particular (or context-dependent) norm. As soon is we ask ‘why’ we see that the chain of arguments leads us very quickly to a universal norm from which this particular norm is derived. Because “authors ought to reply to their readers, where it is possible to do so” or some such thing. (I have skipped the scenario because constructing any such scenario is easy.) This norm applies to all authors (in a position to reply to their readers) independent of their place, time, country or culture. This is what is meant by the universal nature of the norms. The particular norm is justified only because of the universal norm. If and only if the universal norm is justifiable is its derivation also justifiable.
3. When I speak of western ‘normative’ ethics, this is all I have in mind. In one sense, the confusion in the discussion is indicative of our lack of understanding: most of us do not understand this type of ethics. (We do not, that is, have the foggiest of what we are talking about, when we indulge in normative discussions.) At the same time, because the above ideas sound and look very familiar we think we know what we are talking about and, in fact, will go to absurd lengths to show that we know what we are talking about! An ignorance of the issue coupled to the conviction of knowledge of the same issue is the trajectory of discussions with Indians on ethics. It is extremely difficult to make them understand what ‘norms’ are; it is equally difficult to make them understand what ‘norms’ are not. (I shall shortly say why.) Let me begin by rephrasing what I have said in my earlier posts.
4. According to §1, Kannan’s clerk in the municipal office or his building contractor are immoral because they violate a moral norm. (‘One shall not take bribes’ or whatever else takes your fancy.) According to western normative ethics, one can be immoral, if and only if one violates some or another moral principle. [What, in this case, that principle is, is totally irrelevant to my discussion. The only requirement that this norm should be universalisable: it must apply at all people in the relevant situation - i.e. all clerks in the world, past, present and future -- irrespective of time, place, people, culture, etc.] Otherwise, not.
5. Not only is the phenomenon that we call “corruption” in India immoral but so is the caste system: the latter, because, let us say, it violates the norm that all human beings ought to be treated equal. Therefore, it is simple to condemn both corruption and the caste system as immoral because their existence and practice violate some or another moral norm. My opponent in the article simply represents such a person who, as I have said, reasons consistently, rationally and logically.
6. If you are with me so far (despite the drastically simplified presentation), I can now answer the following question: “where is the colonial awareness in accepting this ethics?” Let me begin with the following claims: this mode of ethical reasoning is absent in our culture. Even worse (or better!), we cannot formulate norms in the Indian (not just Indian, but let me leave that aside) languages! And further, we cannot even understand the western ethics because we are mapping this onto our Indian (non-normative) ethics. Do not expect me to argue for the truth of any of these claims: they will get taken care of (to some extent) in my book. Even one book is not sufficient to do this.
6.1. Let me begin with an example and an anecdote. The example first. In Indian languages, I claim, there is no equivalent of the “moral ought”. That is, we cannot say one “ought not” kill, one “ought to” respect their parents, the way one can do these in the European languages. In our languages, these sentences have the same structure as “one should not stand up and drink water”, “you should come home today” and such like. How can we know whether the “should” and “should not” (or “must” and “must not”) do not have the same logical and semantic properties in our languages that the moral “ought” and “ought not” have in the European languages? Simple. There exist systems of Deontic Logics (anyone with some understanding of the mathematical model theory can follow them) that very precisely delineate the property and behaviour of the moral concepts like ‘forbidden’, ‘obligatory’. That is, we can show that the Indian equivalents do not exhibit this logical and semantic behaviour.
6.2. One of the reasons that cultures like India were called ‘immoral’ by the Western thinkers lies here: there is nothing resembling a universal moral norm in our traditions. In the lens of the western culture, it appeared (logically) that all actions are permitted within the Indian culture. Hence the appellation ‘immoral’. This is also the reason why people like Shweder and others (please re-read the relevant portions of the article) transform us into moral imbeciles. (We have not even learnt to formulate the moral norms.)
6.3. However, this does not mean (that is where I would like to go) that the Indian cultures are immoral (or that we are moral imbeciles). I would like to show that non-normative ethics exist (i.e. ethics that works without using or needing norms to make ethical judgements) and that India is one such culture.
6.4. Let me take, as an example, one of the many frustrating discussions I have had with Indians on this subject. All of them have taken objection to my claim in §6.1 and want to ‘show’ that we too have the moral ought. In one such discussion in JNU, here is how one person tried to refute me: “the Hindi word ‘tha’ is the moral ought in Hindi.” (He had, most probably, a sentence like “Aap aiyse nahin karne tha” in mind.) I drew his attention to the fact that ‘tha’ was the past tense for ‘hai’ and that it was not the equivalent of “moral ought” at all.
6.5. Why did he think that this was a counter-example? He confused the ethical force in the above sentence with the structure of the sentence. He thought that I was denying that Indians had ethics, because, he felt, denying a normative language is to deny the possibility of doing ethics in the Indian languages. He was convinced, and probably still is, that he understands what western ethics is because he does ethics in his native language; because he learnt an English language through the medium of his own native language, he has understood the meaning of moral vocabulary in the English language.
6.6. Most (if not all) Sulekha readers are in this boat. They think they know what moral language in English means because they think they can use it. Actually, they do not understand it: they are talking ‘Indian’ while trying to be an ‘angreji’.
7. We have a colonial experience not only when we think that deva’s are ‘gods’, puja is ‘worship’ etc. We exhibit exactly the same experience when we say that “corruption is rampant in India” or that “the caste system is immoral”. Each and every time we ‘criticise’ the immorality of the Indians, we exhibit this colonisation. The tragedy is that we genuinely believe that we are modern, progressive, reform-minded when we do these things. My hope in writing the current article was to force an induced break in this experience. Would this all-too-brief-an-explanation, together with the article bring this about? I await your verdict. Only one request: please, please think about these issues and the article seriously.
1. Are western traditions innately richer because they have the moral ought?
My answer: No. In fact, in my book on ethics I will prove the following: the non-normative ethics are richer: Under specific assumptions, in limited conditions, one can derive a normative ethics from a non-normative one. The relation between non-normative ethics and normative ethics is analogous to the relation between Einsteinian theory and Newtonian theory: under specific assumptions, in limited conditions, you can derive the Newtonian theory from the Einsteinian theory.
2. “Uchit” and “Unuchit” do not function as ‘ought’ and ‘ought not’ do. They mean something like appropriate and inappropriate. That we have different words with different meanings to pick out the moral ‘ought’ and moral ‘ought not’ suggests (merely suggests!) that, perhaps, there is a greater richness to our ethical languages than those governed by the moral ought and moral ought not.
3. We can neither map the moral imperatives (let me call the ‘ought’ and ‘ought not’ this way in order to avoid using scare quotes to mention these words) at the phrase level or at a sentence level. What we ‘map’ are the ethical nature and the ethical force of some statements in some context or the other.
4. Yes, many systems of Deontic logics make use of one or another version of modal logics. They enrich the propositional and predicate logics with deontic terms (which the moral imperatives are) and allow us to track the logical and semantic behaviour of these deontic operators.
5. Decidability presupposes expressibility and, as you say, the converse does not hold. (See §1.) The trade-off between the two depends on what human situations require: a decision-procedure or a learning-heuristic. The western ethics sees the ethical event as one that requires a decision procedure; it is my claim that in our traditions an ethical event requires an action heuristic.
6. Which is better? This does not depend on the semantics of ethical languages but on what ethics is supposed to do: teach you how to act ethically, or decide which type of action is ethical. In the latter case, you still have the problem of performing the ethically correct action.
An important point is your side remark about the inability of the Chinese language to express counterfactuals. In fact the situation is even more intriguing. As you know, Confucius wrote his “Analects” in the Classical Chinese language. In order to see where I am heading, consider some of the thoughts that Rosemont, Jr. expresses. (Rosemont, Jr., H., “Against Relativism.” In Larson G. J. and E. Deutsch (eds.), Interpreting Across Boundaries: New Essays in Comparative Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988) Not only is there an absence of the concept of ‘morality’ in the Classical Chinese, but also the very cluster of concepts required to speak about moral issues.
Consider as a specific example the classical Chinese language in which the early Confucians wrote. Not merely does that language contain no lexical item for ‘moral’, it also does not have terms corresponding to ‘freedom’, ‘liberty’, ‘autonomy’, ‘individual’, ‘utility’, ‘rationality’, ‘objective’, ‘subjective, ‘choice’, ‘dilemma’, ‘duty’, ‘rights’, and probably most eerie of all for a moralist, classical Chinese has no lexical item corresponding to ‘ought’ - prudential or obligatory (Rosemont Jr. 1988: 61).
This claim is as puzzling as it is startling: in classical Chinese it is not possible to speak of ‘moral duty’ or ‘moral dilemmas’ or ‘moral choices’. It is not even possible to formulate a rule which uses the notions of ‘ought’ - either obligatory (“All ought to do X”) or prudentially (“If one desires X then one ought to do Y”). In the western intellectual tradition, we believe it to be the ‘essence’ of a moral principle or norm that it is formulated using the ‘ought’ - either in obligatory or prudential form. Without ‘ought’, there would be no difference in kind between factual and evaluative statements. Yet, it is impossible to do precisely that in Confucianism. The philosophical significance is immense:
Speakers (writers) of languages that have no terms (or concept clusters) corresponding to ‘moral’ cannot logically have any moral principles (ibid.: 60).
But, rightly enough, we take Confucianism at least as an example of a moral system. What is the upshot of the above remark? Rosemont formulates the issue as follows:
If one grants that in contemporary western moral philosophy ‘morals’ is intimately linked with the concept cluster elaborated above, and if none of that concept cluster can be found in the Confucian lexicon, then the Confucians not only cannot be moral philosophers, they cannot be ethical philosophers either. But this contention is absurd; by any account of the Confucians, they were clearly concerned about the human conduct, and what constituted the good life. If these are not ethical considerations, what are? (ibid.: 64).
The intriguing question, apart from the truth-value of these claims, is about their intelligibility. What is the structure of the moral domain if it is not defined by norms? If one does not act morally simply by ‘following rules’, how does one learn to act in a moral way? How is an ethical judgment possible without referring to norms? How are ethical disputes settled? And, above all, how is an identification of such a domain possible at all?
What I am trying to say is that these questions arise typically (at the least) in all Asian traditions, including the Indian one. And that what has been argued as the weakness of these traditions is actually their greatest strength.
The universalisability of norms does not mean that the western people all factually follow these norms. Even if everyone were to lie, the ethical statement “No one ought to lie” is a universal moral statement.
The existence of debates about abortion, war, etc. are indicative of the nature of normative rules. Because “one ought not to kill”, debates and doctrines about “justified war” come into being. It is important to note that these doctrines do not contradict the injunction not to kill but provide justifications for undertaking such an immoral action. (They provide, so to speak, the mitigating circumstances.)
Same about abortion. If you follow the debates, one side tries to argue that ‘abortion’ is not murder of a human being (e.g. the foetus is not yet a human person); the other urges against it because it is ‘murder’.
1. Regarding your first point. It is important to keep the general issue in mind, while arguing about specifics. The ‘corruption’ we are talking about refers to the social phenomenon in India which makes about 20% of the adult population into immoral people. When I said that I refuse to call the clerk ‘corrupt’ or that the issue I raise is anterior, I am talking about this phenomenon. Your grandmother, you said, uses the word ‘cheating’ (something like the Hindi ‘Dhoka’ probably). One could, for instance, use this word to describe the individual action of the clerk as an unethical one without making it into corruption.
Are these two conversationally synonymous? I suppose it depends on the person with whom you are having a conversation, the context and the language used.
The distinction, you say, is in my head. You are right, of course. Why is this distinction useful? Well, I am a bit surprised that you ask this question on this thread. The article tries to show that some logical conclusions (about our social structure, about the nature of ethics) follow if we use the word ‘corruption’ the way it is used to describe the Indian society. I am not willing to buy any of them. That is why I resist using the word corruption to describe the action of the municipal clerk or the building contractor or whoever else. This is the first reason. (I use a variant of the reductio et absurdum argument to show why we better make the distinction. Obviously, I have not made this point with the clarity I desire.)
There is a second reason. Let us continue using the examples of the clerk or the building contractor or a telephone linesman. The bribes you pay do not merely line the pockets of these individuals without them being distributed within the hierarchy of whatever organisation to which these people belong (the clerk and the linesman) or the one to whom (say the assistant engineer) the contractor has paid. You do realise, of course, that there is an enormous integrity within this hierarchy. The bribes are distributed among the relevant people in a very honest way. Not only that. Once one pays the bribe, one feels that one is morally entitled to the service one has paid a bribe for. The one who receives the bribe also feels that he is morally obligated to provide you with the necessary service once he has received the bribe. You are not cheated from this entitlement once you have paid the bribe. What you get is what you pay for. These index the extraordinary integrity of the bribe-receiving structures. In fact, these individuals lose their credibility and trustworthiness (look at the words I am using) if they do not perform after they have received the bribe. That is, a tremendous trust and honesty is required from both the parties. It is almost as though that in this ‘perverse’ (these scare quotes are red flags) system, there is an extraordinary honesty and integrity. Why, if they were corrupt, could they not tell you to take a hike after they receive bribes? Because, the so-called corruption works if and only if those who are ‘corrupt’ are honest and reliable!
The above is the second side to the so-called corruption in the Indian society. What I am trying to do is make use realise that, because the so-called corruption involves both honesty and bribes, to figure out what this phenomenon is requires that we go beyond mere ethical characterisations the way the western culture uses them.
To repeat myself, let us first find out what this phenomenon is which involves both these dimensions. To simply call it corruption not only has implausible consequences but also blinds us to the issues.
These are two of the reasons why I want to distinguish between ethically bad action and corruption. There are more, but they are irrelevant in the present context.
2. About your second point regarding my shoddy rhetorical reasoning. In a way, I have implicitly answered it. I shall waive my ‘right’ to answer it explicitly.
3. I do not see why you become polemical. Precisely because I was talking to a non-western, and presumably an Indian audience, I did not speak of the second aspect to corruption. I thought that you would be familiar with it. To a western audience, that would have been my first point. In a very simplified fashion, I would have said, using the word corruption to describe a social phenomenon in India leads one to say the following: Indian society is corrupt if and only if the ‘corrupt’ Indians are individually ethically good. (Each ‘corrupt’ individual has to be extraordinarily ethical, if corruption has to work at a social level.) However, a ‘corrupt’ individual cannot be ethically good. The problem I have had with the western audience is that they do not believe that corruption ‘works’. They are simply hung up on its alleged immorality. I thought that an Indian audience would have had enough experience with ‘corruption’ to see where I was getting at…
Dear Arun,
1. The translation is a plausible one when we want to translate it into English or some other European language. It is plausible when the context is a moral one (i.e. we know what the context is before the translation takes place) and we add the word ‘ought’ because it would not otherwise be syntactically well-formed. This should already tell us that we are adding ‘ought’ in English in order to signal that it is a moral statement. This is enough to alert us to what I have drawn attention to.
2. You describe your process of moral reasoning and ask the question whether this is western normative ethics. Let me quote from my 1985 paper, which you so kindly transformed into an electronic version:
“An example might illustrate the point. (I have taken this from one of my experiences where I was discussing a moral issue with a group of philosophers.) Let us say that ‘X’ does something which ‘Y’ considers corrupt. To keep it simple, let us say that ‘Y’ expresses the aforementioned judgement. In order to express it, or persuade others about the validity of this moral judgement, ‘Y’ will have to do something like this:
(a) Y defines ‘corruption’: “All actions which exhibit ________ properties are corrupt”
(b) Y’s ‘ethical principle’ (itself justified): “All actions which satisfy _______ (the principle) are moral”.
(c) Y infers: “Because all corrupt actions violate principle (b), all corrupt actions are immoral”.
(d) Y describes: “________ action of X shows _______ properties”.
(e) Y infers: “By definition, therefore, X’s action is corrupt”.
(f) Y argues: “All corrupt actions are immoral”. (reiteration c)
“X’s action is corrupt”. (reiteration e)
(g) Y infers: “Therefore, X’s action is immoral”
The goal of Western ethical philosophers is to construct a theory, which allows us to justify moral judgements or moral actions and choices in the above, albeit simplified, manner.”
You can see for yourself whether your moral reasoning proceeds this way or not.
3. You say that the context helps you decide which principle has to be modified, which to discard. Within the western normative ethics, the context is irrelevant to the process of deliberation. Maximally, what ‘contexts’ do is create the so-called ethical dilemmas, i.e. situations where the moral principles conflict. ‘So-called’, because most ethical philosophers do not believe that ethical principles could, in principle, be in conflict. They ascribe the empirical conflict either to the insufficient information the agent has, or to the moral imperfection of the actual world, or to the absence of a good theory of ethics which creates a hierarchy of norms, or whatever else. That is because, within the western normative ethics, it is not possible for an ethical principle to impose an immoral obligation. If it does so, such a principle has to be immoral. (In a situation involving a moral dilemma, following any one ethical principle entails violating the other moral principle. In this sense, the first imposes an immoral obligation to violate the second.)
One of the most popular ways to account for a moral dilemma has been to speak of two kinds of obligations: a prima facie obligation and an actual obligation. Prima facie obligations refer to situations involving moral conflict (i.e. a moral dilemma). They say that this is merely an apparent conflict (i.e. a prima facie conflict) and not ‘real’ at all. In a morally perfect world, they say, there could be no conflict of moral principles. So, all you have to do is ‘accept’ that ours is a morally imperfect world, where it appears as though we have conflicting obligations when there could be no such conflicts between moral obligations. In simple terms: they say moral dilemmas tell us that we live in a morally imperfect world but nothing about the nature of moral principles. Moral principles could never in conflict. In other words, moral dilemmas are a curse on humankind; they show us that we are imperfect creatures.
Do these ideas resonate with your understanding of morality? If they do not, it shows that you do not know what ‘ought’ means (philosophically speaking).
4. I beg to disagree with you as to why there is no cognitive dissonance. According to me, it has to do with what it means to have a colonial experience. But that does not matter. You say I have to show that Kannan’s clerk is not corrupt. Let us see what exactly you are asking me to do.
Am I to show that according to Indian ethics, the action of the clerk is ethically good? That is to say, are there situations where one could call the actions of the clerk an ethically good act? Surely Arun, if you use your Indian psychology, you can think of any number of such situations. Imagine that the clerk is looking after abandoned children of prostitutes, helping in their education, keeping them away from the streets and crime. Imagine further too that he asks bribe only from those he thinks are capable of paying them and this money goes entirely to feed these children. Is your Indian psychology willing to call this clerk corrupt? Or even unethical?
Am I to show that the clerk is ‘corrupt’ and ethically good at the same time? See my recent answer to Kannan’s post. The social phenomenon of corruption works if and only if the individuals are honest and possess integrity.
In other words, there are at least two possible routes one could travel in order to have a cognitive dissonance. Strangely though, both require using the ‘Indian-ness’ in us.
The first issue is whether the notion of “relative ethics” makes sense within the context of the western ethics. There are some attempts to develop “ethical relativism”, even though it is not clear what is relativistic about them. One would be a kind of factual claim: different people, different groups, different cultures have different principles which they consider as “morally good”. This does not make for ethical relativism. The issue still remains: are these principles also ethically good? That is to say, one undertakes a ‘normative’ enquiry in order to find out whether all these principles are also morally acceptable. The second would be to come up with a moral norm that is ‘relative’ to some person or group. Any examination would very quickly lead to the conclusion that, in so far as it is a norm, it is universalisable even if the domain of objects appears restricted. (That is because all ‘universal’ laws specify the domain of objects, whether implicitly or explicitly, where they are applicable. The ‘relativistic’ norms appear relativistic because they specify the domain explicitly.) In other words, no one has been able to come up with any coherent explication of what ‘relativistic ethics’ means. (According to me, it is impossible to do so when we speak of normative ethics.)
No, all I am trying to do is to make a case for just one thing. The manner in which Indians (not just Indians alone) think about ethics is not normative in nature. I am trying to explicate in English what is ethical about us without using the normative language. I want to say too that we appear immoral from within the western ethical tradition not only because the western intellectuals are Eurocentric or Orientalist but also because our traditions do lack normative notions. But that does not make us immoral but only moral in a different way. And that difference has hitherto been conceptualised only one way: through the lens of the western normative ethics. What I have done in the article is to say in an explicit fashion what westerners have written (and still write) about us. Either they are right that we are immoral; or we refuse to be logical and thus not accept such conclusions; or we better ask ourselves why the Indian intellectuals hitherto have not woken up, recognised their way of being ethical and articulated them.
At the risk of treading on some sensitive toes and alienating a probably sympathetic audience, some reflections are nevertheless in order about the nature of these discussions.
1. The first thing that is really striking involves what I will call the burden of proof. That is, I am being asked to prove that my assertions are true. In one sense, it appears an entirely reasonable demand to make: after all, one should not entertain gratuitous claims. But what seems to have escaped the attention of many is this: what precisely do I have to prove? Who has the burden of proof?
1.1. Let us strip the issue to its barest form. I am supposed to prove that we Indians are not corrupt, immoral and/or moral imbeciles. Without proof, is it difficult to accept these claims? But who has proved that we are any or all of these things? Not the western theorists, surely. Not any on this board either. All that exist are bare-bone assertions that some moral principles are violated in a systematic fashion in India. So, what exactly do I have to prove?
1.2. It could be said that people will accept my theories only if I can prove them. But I am not presenting a theory of corruption or caste, surely. I am merely extending an invitation to start looking at things in a way that enables research. There are some things I have a partial insight about; I can share them with you. There are some things I have some hunches about; I can try and communicate them as clearly as I can. Where and when I have a theory about some things, I can present them to the scientific public in a form that is adequate. [I am doing research on caste, but it is nowhere near complete. I do have a theory of non-normative ethics, and I am writing a book about it. I have written a book on religion and it is up to the scientific public to judge its adequacy.] On those issues where I have hunches, insights and intuitions I can only go some distance.
1.3. But then, it is not as though the western theorists have a well-worked theory about these issues either. No theorist has ever shown either why some ethical principles (whatever they are) ought not to be violated; what happens to a culture when such a thing happens; why it is not morally good (whatever that means) that these principles are violated. Which theorist has done (or ever did) a research on the Indian ethics that *proves* that we are immoral? No one. Yet, we do not ask proof of this; but, I have to prove we are not immoral. Which theory explains corruption in India, let alone the actions of a municipal clerk? None. Yet, I have to prove that this clerk is not corrupt. This is strange: there is no burden of proof imposed on those who call India a corrupt nation, but one has to prove that India is not corrupt. If I say that America is corrupt, I have to prove it and no silly anecdote will do in its stead; but if I come with silly examples of India, it suffices. Have we reflected on this strange cognitive asymmetry in imposing the burden of proof?
2. When for more than 200 years, the West went around trumpeting the ‘evils of the caste system’, we meekly accepted it without asking for proof. We inanely repeat the demand that the ‘Harijans’ be allowed into the temples, without even knowing why or whether this demand entails abolishing the evil that the caste system is supposed to be or where this demand originated from or even what it signifies. Even to this day, when the Hindu ‘reform’ groups go around peddling silly stories about the evil that the caste system is, we do not lay the burden of proof of them. But when someone asks what that system is, and whether we could have moral opinions on a subject we know very little about, the burden is on him to prove his claims. One has to prove that we Indians are ignorant of the Indian caste system; but, I suppose, if one says it is evil then the person demonstrates his knowledge.
3. In other words, I have difficulty in understanding the nature of these discussions. One is not merely requesting a clarification of some or another abstruse point. Instead, if you read the posts, many are telling me what I have to ‘show’, or ‘prove’ if I want to be believed. Friends, I cannot (at this moment) prove that Indian culture is not immoral, or that we are not moral imbeciles. Nor am I am asking you to believe that Indians are not immoral. You can believe what you feel like: if like some, you are “ashamed of our barbarism”, so be it. I am not going to (nor am I able to) prove to you that we are “civilized” or that we are “cultured”. I believe that the burden of proof lies on those who make such implausible claims about non-western cultures. I cannot hope to convince you by providing proofs: I have no such proofs. All I can do is draw your attention to the fact that those who call us “barbaric” have even less to go on than I have. If people are already convinced about corruption in India, there is nothing I can do to dispel this conviction except draw attention to the fact that it does not rest on any kind of a proof either. All it draws upon is some moral principle and some subjective feeling induced by some anecdote or the other. I ask for research into corruption because, I say, we do not understand it. But if your conviction tells you that you are against such a research, there is pretty little I can do about it.
4. The only thing I can do is help you think about the possible reasons why we show the kind of resistance we exhibit. I have some ideas about why our intellectuals have not done the kind of research they should have done. I can share these ideas with you: not to convince you but to help you reflect. I do that because I feel that you might be open to thinking about our culture and our traditions in a different way than our earlier generations. I might be wrong in assuming this, but that is irrelevant. However, what I cannot do is *prove* to you that you need to think differently. I can give my reasons why I think a Renaissance is due. It is beyond my ability (any human being’s ability, for that matter) to demonstrate and prove that such an event is due. Perhaps, it would be for the best if we keep these points in mind while we continue with our future conversations.
Link to Balu's Original Article 'Colonial Experience and The Indian Renaissance
http://sulekha.com/blogs/blogdisplay.aspx?cid=4527
another link : http://colonial.consciousness.googlepages.com/colonialexperienceandtheindianrenaissance