Laptops & Liberalism Why We Want One Without the Other
http://www.timesofindia.com/300501/30edit4.htm
By MAHESH DAGA
LAST week, the Taliban made it mandatory for minority Hindu men in Afghanistan to wear distinctive clothing and the women to wear burqas. Beyond the sheer horror of the latest Taliban edict, there was a strange sense of banality about its timing.
Consider this: While the Taliban was parading its `purist' Islam, the chief minister of Uttaranchal was proscribing ``vulgar'' entertainment shows which violate the spirit of "Indian culture". Weeks earlier, cultural vigilantes were disrupting beauty pageants in Ahmedabad, Valentine's Day festivities in Delhi and much else.
Prima facie these `events' appear disparate, but are they really? Can we simply explain them as the inevitable wages of lumpenisation of the Indian body politic or mediaeval Islamic politics in our neighbourhood?
Across the globe, there is in evidence a disturbing atavistic surge where whole cultures or societies are violently rejecting the modernist legacy - often in the name of its most visible manifestation, the `degenerate' Western mass culture. The rejection usually involves certain cultural practices concerning gender roles and the representation of women. While these symbolic practices seem perverse to their Manichean critics, they often stem from a deeper framework of values - the concept of individual rights, the moral equality of humans qua humans, etc. Marxist utopianism apart,these ideas have defined the horizon of hope and emancipation for a major part of recent human history.
But is there a method in the global madness? Contrary to the fashionable mantras of globalisation, there is. It amounts to something like: "While we crave the nirvana of western technology and economic prosperity, we can do without its cultural pretensions". In other words, we want technological, not cultural modernity; the forbidden fruits of the `free' market, not its commodity culture.
This trashing of modernity is tantamount to a pathological aversion to the core values of its spiritual progenitor, the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was, as the German philosopher Kant pithily suggested, the ascendance of "one's own reason" against "the tutelage of another". Kant's "another" included religion and tradition. His idea of reason referred to an individual capacity and, by implication, a culture. The blind spot was that Kant regarded critical reason as universal. To him, the idea that the labours of reason could yield different results in, say Haiti and Honduras would have made little sense. Once individuals and cultures attained a certain level of adulthood - and potentially all could - they were all alike. Subsequent history has, tragically, suggested quite the reverse.
It is now widely accepted that other than the formal reason of logic and mathematics, and to a lesser extent natural science, reason is essentially a product of human culture. This implies that unlike the world of nature, artifacts of human reason, be they moral imperatives or political arrangements, are precisely that, artifacts - conceptual realities created by humans. The idea of human rights acquires common currency only in a particular liberal ambience. This is not a call for abandoning the concept of rights. However, it does suggest that universal rights have to be justified on grounds other than their self-certainty.
It follows that to say "two plus two equals four" may probably hold in all cultures. But assertions such as "all men are born equal" may look as unreasonable in one culture as the belief that "hierarchy is fundamental to the human condition" in another. In sum, the Enlightenment was a cultural synthesis, which arose from a scientific and industrial revolution, rather than a logical canon built from indubitable first principles which we cannot disown without sounding insane.
Historically, the myth of universal reason was inextricably linked to the history of colonialism, of forced subjugation, violence and repression. In the first flush of colonial conquest, the natives were encouraged to believe that the key to western dominance lay in western knowledge. It soon dawned however that it was not knowledge but culture that formed the basis of western superiority.
The native project was to marry the imperatives of modernity with the need to assert one's cultural self-identity. So began the search for inventing cultures which, while upholding modernism, would reflect native identities. This ironically and tragically led to the reification and museumisation of non-western cultures. First, the untamed plurality of cultural traditions was subordinated to the need for a monolithic and homogeneous national culture. Second, tradition was increasingly seen as an ossified repository of cultural markers of identity.
As imagined political community, the nation was literally `inscribed' on the female body. From dress to deportment, the nation's women were to carry the burden of its distinctive identity. Little surprise, then, that the culture police of the Hindu right as much as the Taliban find issues of women's changing roles the most offensive. To revert to history, what emerged in the anti-colonial era was a patriarchy which was both modern and national. The emphasis was still on emancipation, however circumscribed, because for the earlier breed of nationalists there remained an indissoluble link between cultural and technological modernity. For a variety of reasons, the forever-unhappy marriage of unequals - of assertive nationalism and cultural modernity - has now truly floundered. The cunning and conceit of reason, to paraphrase Hegel, has more than met its match in the enchanting claims of national purity. That indeed was the larger historical significance of Khomeini's coup in Iran.
The truth is that while the link between cultural and technological modernity may not be strictly logical, neither is it as tenuous as is now assumed in the puerile dogmas of cultural nationalists; whether their nationalism is informed by an atavistic religious identity or by more secular ideas.
Finally, the issue is not the inherent superiority of political liberalism. Indeed, liberalism is as peculiar to western culture as Brahmanism is to India. Its claims cannot be universalised on grounds of some innate moral superiority. But it still deserves our support for the possibility of decent co-existence that it offers. All things considered, liberalism has provided a reasonable framework for governance in increasingly complex modern market economies.
What may seem like the `obscene' excesses of liberal permissiveness are at least as much a product of capitalist consumerism. We cannot righteously reject one without also rejecting the other. To be sure, we are free to give liberalism a hasty burial if other non-western political traditions can be shown to offer a viable moral and institutional framework for a modern, pluralist society. Until that happens, liberalism may not appeal to our moral sensibilities but it must still be tolerated as a pressing political necessity.
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