12:32PM
Clear sign of moving into Core? Teaching critical thought.
Thursday, August 16, 2007 at 12:32PM MEMO FROM NEW DELHI: "Politics Is the New Star of India's Classroom," by Somini Sengupta, New York Times, 15 August 2007, p. A4.
Until recently, political science in India's educational system was all science, no politics. Why? Considered too "risky."
India clearly grows up in this way.
Reader Comments (9)
"India clearly grows up in this way" is a most carelessly chosen phrase, Tom. India was fully adult in many respects before the Roman empire came into existence.
I think you might mean "globalizes" or "westernizes" rather than grows up.
I don't expect you to post this, but it's more salient than an email :-)
Being around a long time is one thing. Being a modern polity is quite another. In fact, being around a VERY long time seems to correlate well with having a hard time becoming a modern society, where things like politics can be taught without much fear of the resulting "risk."
I think that there are serious issues with the idea that western culture is, in some way, more "mature" than other cultures. Western political thinking is bad thinking if you look at its actual effects in the world. It looks OK on the surface, but when you actually compile the code and run it, you get horrendous wars and global devastation. Europe had a thousand years of continuous war as it formed these ideas we call "politics" and every strand of western political thinking is shaped by that experience. It's really distorted as a result.
The assumptions encoded in the western worldview are inherently unstable because they focus on change and growth. And that works, up to a point, but what is going hand-in-hand with globalization is an enormous amount of environmental devastation and locked-in, hard-to-shift structural deprivation of entire nations through things like unfair trade policies and farm subsidies. The wealth comes, to some percentage of the new-core populations, while the rest remain stuck - *and we don't know if that will ever change.* What's happening in rural China right now is not good, and it's not from a lack of economic growth in the cities. Same thing in India. Does globalization eventually work for the villagers?
We don't know. It hasn't worked for them so far.
This is not a general bash at the west. What's coming out of western cultures in the past three hundred years or so is *remarkable.* The science, the technology, the engineering are utterly amazing. Constitutional democracies with decentralized government powers are extremely promising *if they can be stabilized.*
And that's a big, big if. It doesn't matter how shiny something is if it only lasts five hundred years and then collapses. It's not long term thinking - it's *young culture* thinking. 500 years seems like a long time to Americans because Americans only have a few hundred years of history, and act with a very, very short mental horizon as a result. That short term thinking, again, distorts everything that Americans do in the world. You don't think about the 22nd or 23rd century *as if they are real places.*
Believe me, this is *really* obvious from the outside.
China. 4000+ thousand years of more-or-less uninterrupted bureaucracy. Those guys have a view of the world which is extremely hard to understand unless you play a lot of Go and pretend your family have been in the civil service since before the Crusades. About the only institution in the West with that kind of perspective is the Catholic Church!
Folks from the older cultures look at the West right now and wonder how long you guys think you can keep this going. 50 more years? Maybe 100? So many loose ends, so much misery and strife in people's personal lives, so little regard for the children and how they are raised. Cultures that cultivate so much hatred.
A young culture, scarred by continuous war, running around on the planet with enormously powerful military technology and scientific/technical tools.
Anyway, "acquires western characteristics" is not grows up.
"Grows up" is what we of the older cultures are waiting for. We've got our problems - any amount of completely outdated and inhumane nonsense like caste, carried along right beside the perspective on the long haul business of being a civilization. We never got science, but we've got it now :-)
We're waiting for an American political context to emerge which takes the twenty second, twenty third, twenty fourth century into account *every single day.*
And this is not unrealistic. In India, most of the real political thought is still tied up in religious thinking because1> the Gurus are at the top of the intellectual food chain, and2> religion was our equivalent of science - which is why we didn't get antibiotics, but did get really, really advanced models of the mind
But if you look carefully at guys like Gandhi and Aurobindo, who were significant *political* thinkers, even if they're usually thought of as being religious leaders, you'll see how much the long term perspective on life pervades their work.
My own sect goes back six or eight thousand years, student-to-teacher transmission. The family have been teaching university classes for seven generations we can trace. We educated our women to university standards in the middle ages.
Do you see what I'm saying, Tom? About how *old* the rest of the world is?
I can't see what you're talking about as growing up. Learning unstable and dangerous political philosophies with no proven track record of producing peace is not progress.
PS: this is definitely kind of a rant, and I totally understand if you don't want to post this. I do have my own blog, and I have a copy of the text :-)
Since I've written extensively in my books about the West's need to learn from the East's rise regarding the mix of rule sets that should naturally govern the future international system, I don't want to belabor my larger arguments in response to the trigger generated in you by my use of the term "grows up." As a lifetime learner, I employ that phrase with only positive normative intent, but I know it can prick egos, both individually and on a civilizational scale.
In the 20th century, the West went completely insane, and the madness was contagious. First you have WW1, which was insane and obscene - trench warfare... my god, what *happened* to people that they were willing to do this to each other? Where was the sense of honor which had been so much of a part of war, at least in theory?
Then WW2... Just... more insanity. Then death camps and gulags, and the ever-present fear that the USA and USSR would **destroy the planet.**
I mean, did you ever think about how that period of time looked from the outside? To have to supposedly civilized West threatening to ruin the entire planet for all of the other human beings in their insane wars?
Something was **seriously wrong** with the west at a political level for about a century. So wrong that you were willing to destroy the planet for the rest of us over *how your societies divided up scarcity.*
I don't mean to rant here, but this is really really important: the west is contaminated with the 20th century and the things that the cultures did and went through in that period. And this madness has proven to be contagious, at least in China. However you think the line of transmission goes from Marx to Mao, we can at least say "inspiration."
I feel like this context is entirely missing from debates over globalization. The other thing that is missing is any serious appreciation of the environmental impact of economic growth, and the degree to which globalization rests upon the availability of cheap labor and international trade agreements which favor the industrialized nations over the rest.
Can it really work for everybody?
Right now, we have about 2 billion people in the "rich" niche, and four billion poor. We've already maxed out certain kinds of resource availability - oil, most notably, but also some of the rarer metals, and of course the questions of ecosystem carrying capacity not just for carbon, but for sulphur and other misc. air and other pollution.
4 billion more rich people? Doubling or tripling the number of available "jobs" - i.e. roles in the economic system other than "subsistence agriculturalist"?
Do I really believe this?
I'm not sure. Maybe.
Similar issues about the stability of capitalism - we've seen it crash once, during the Great Depression. Now we have another round of wobbles over sub-prime, which is just a tremor, but clearly indicates that The Big One is still a possibility. The global financial system is not absolutely stable.
So I guess what I'm reacting to here is the core assumption that the West has something which can be exported, and something which scales to a planetary level safely. I think I see problems in terms of environment, and in terms of the inherent stability of the global financial markets.
Are those resolvable? Maybe not until the west *learns* to stop placing immediate, short-term benefit over long term goals.
You still have nuclear arsenals capable of sterilizing the planet. How can we take your political thinking seriously when it generates this kind of insanity? The threat to destroy all life rather than lose a war? Who would even *think* such a thing?
This is what we mean when we say white people are crazy, and it's contagious. You have a breakdown in fundamental rationality about a lot of basic things in the west, and I'm not sure that it's progress.
I mean, I'm taking a somewhat exaggerated version of my actual position here - leaving out a lot of the counterbalancing points which are actually parts of my own argument here, just for the sake of sharp counterpoint - but this is the rational of the people who are knee-jerk anti-globalization a lot of times. It's seldom put into words, but that basic feeling of "there's something dangerous wrong with these people" is very strong and based on relatively recent behavior.
That's kind of why I flared when you talked about exporting western political thought to India as "growing up." It's more like spreading a disease.
Again, I'm sorry if this is a rant, and I know that you like your blog to be a place of constructive and reasoned argument - if you like I'll post this at home as a blog post, and you can comment there if you like, or we could take it to email.
Very nice to be chatting with you,
Vinay
2. While our criticisms of other parts of the world may be arrogance on our part, some of it is actually experience. For example, you yourself noted the devastation of WW2. That was the last time modern weaponry was used to its fullest extent, and it left Europe in ruins. When the Europeans of today criticise the eagerness of many countries to acquire nuclear weapons, memories of that ruin probably informs many of their opinions. Likewise the American criticisms of China's Three Gorges Dam; as one of the first countries to employ dam building on that scale, we KNOW what damage they can cause.
3. Connectivity always runs both ways. Even as western technologies and ideas flow to other parts of the world, technologies and ideas from those other parts- including your own- flow here. You are in a better position than us to know the dangers that flow with those ideas.
If those aren't dead-end options, then they are pretty good imitations until the real thing comes along.
Globalization has also got horribly difficult living conditions for most of it's inhabitants.
Remember, we didn't have science. We hadn't figured out germ theory. Takes time.