Posts
Taking up from where I had left my post
https://myvoice.opindia.com/2018/11/three-indias-and-a-possible-one-india-in-2019/
published about six months before the 2019 General Election results were to be announced, and just now when the Haryana and Maharashtra state election results have come in, (a period of almost one year) perhaps a fresh look at liberal democracy as it is practised in India seems to be warranted.
In the concluding paragraph I had opined, “the Congress, having completed its turnaround from liberal democracy to hereditary monarchy, has no new weapons in its arsenal and, will inevitably enter the phase of terminal decline from which it will not be able to recover.” Looking at the just concluded election results, perhaps I had been a bit premature in writing my obituary of the Congress party. What is it that I missed when I foresaw “terminal decline” when the party appears to have moved from the Intensive Care Unit into a private ward? The answer to this question has led me into a deeper study of the impulses that led humanity towards liberal democracy, the obstacles it had to overcome, and the possible future of this form of government.
Liberal democracy has its roots in the European Enlightenment; that efflorescence of thought that took place almost simultaneously across many of the European nations. “What is Enlightenment?” Immanuel Kant asked this question in his 1784 essay and then proceeded to answer it as “humankind’s emergence from its self-incurred immaturity.” He further fumed at the lazy and cowardly submission to “dogmas and formulas” of religious and political authority. Kant wrote: “One age cannot conclude a pact that would prevent succeeding ages from extending their insights, increasing their knowledge, and purging their errors. That would be a crime against human nature, whose proper destiny lies precisely in such progress.”
Immaturity and submission to dogmas and formulas was the outcome of an unscientific mind that had relegated into oblivion the great scientific discoveries of the early Greeks, who, in turn, had benefited immensely from the insights of Indian sages and savants. As India fell into darkness after Muslim conquest, and Europe emerged from its medieval Papal rule, science and reason began to reassert themselves in minds that saw the apple fall to the ground instead of floating in air, and looked at distant stars and planets through telescopes, realizing that our earth was not the center of the universe but a tiny dot in a vast, unimaginable cosmos that stretched into infinity.
From Creationism to Evolution was a giant leap from ignorance and superstition to skepticism, empirical testing, debate, discussion and the further quest for reliable knowledge. Apart from the study of stars and the cosmos, the new thinkers pondered over the nature of man himself. The biggest mystery in the Universe was not physics, chemistry or mathematics that, once understood, followed a set of principles that would hold true under most conditions. What was most baffling was the nature of man, a creature who was anything but a perfectly rational agent. The animal instincts that are part of human nature were the hardest to understand and explain. What were the moral sentiments that brought us together; what passions divided us; what selfish shortsightedness destroyed all the good that had been accumulated over a period of time? These were some of the questions that engaged the best minds of the Enlightenment. So, gradually evolved the idea of a universal human nature that, for want of any other better term came to be known as “humanism.” The Enlightenment thinkers saw an urgent need for a secular foundation for morality; because their memories were assailed by the demons of the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch hunts, and all such acts that were part of the centuries of religious carnage. Humanism put the well being of the individual man, woman and child over the glory of the tribe, race, nation or religion. It is as an individual that the sentient Homo Sapien feels happy, unhappy, pain or pleasure, self-fulfillment or anguish, not as part of an amorphous mass. The objective was to provide the greatest happiness to the greatest number, thereby making the people the ends rather than means. Human happiness or suffering was what eventually must be the concern of all thinkers, opinion-makers and political leaders.
It was this humanistic sensibility that impelled the Enlightenment leaders to condemn not just religious violence but also the secular cruelties of their age, including slavery, despotism, executions for frivolous offenses such as shoplifting and poaching, and imposing sadistic punishments too numerous to list here. When the Europeans militarily conquered India they were flabbergasted by the Enlightenment and the humanistic sensibility that they discovered in the culture and civilization of the East. The wealth of literature on all subjects including all the sciences must have come as a cultural shock to William Jones and Thomas Macaulay. Despite the fact that millions of works accumulated over centuries had been destroyed by the barbaric Muslim invaders, still there was enough material extant that would make the European Enlightenment pale in comparison. The mission to dehumanize Indians emerged from this cultural shock and 200 years later we are seeing the results of this psychological depredation that followed the physical ruination of Islamic rule.
In the West the Enlightenment movement inevitably threw up a counter-Enlightenment movement. There was a whole class of people who felt threatened by this new philosophy that took away their authority, their unquestioned power to accumulate wealth for themselves. Enlightenment asked them to share their good fortune munificently, if not equally, with the rest of humanity. Most of this countermovement came from the Church that till then had held complete sway over the lives of the laity. The other objections came from Existentialists who believed that human nature’s destiny was not progress but decline. On a finite planet with finite resources it is but obvious that humankind will consume itself into extinction or destroy every living thing in a nuclear holocaust. Between the two protagonists the Doomsday scenario is well covered. The creation of a Superman and the comic book hero is part of this existentialism that looks for an outside agency to put Doomsday behind the clock for a foreseeable period of time.
Fast forward to the present times where the Church has been replaced by another institution that we know as Intellectualism. Intellectuals, as we know them today, hate progress. Though they pretend to be progressive and will write whole volumes in pursuit of their ideas of progress, the fact is that they actually dislike it. It’s not as if they hate the fruits of progress; none of them is averse to flying business or first class from one symposium to another; staying in luxury hotels; using the latest computers, Apple phones and watches; jet-setting across the globe, telling mind-numbed audiences how the world was going on a straight road to hell if it did not abjure the pace of progress at which it was moving. It is the idea of progress that rankles the chattering classes – the Enlightenment belief that by understanding the world we can improve the human condition. Intellectuals of the Amartya Sen kind refuse to see that the world is getting better as they have drunk deep from the fountains of the Prophets of Doom. Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Sartre, and a host of other pessimists had become their Gods, and it was their gospel that they preached to their young impressionable students. Most educational institutions in the West and in India are in the iron grip of these intellectual terrorists and with every passing year they let loose a new brigade of militant students who are fed on this propaganda that we call “Optimism Gap.”
Optimism Gap is defined as the gap between the perceptions of individuals who think that the world is on the straight road to Hell, while they themselves are destined for Heaven. If you ask any of these people if their lives are personally threatened and do they foresee anything unpleasant happening to them, the answer in most cases will be in the negative. But change the question from the people’s lives to their society and they transform into the worst pessimists. Crime rates are definitely going down. It is easy to find statistics that will support this assertion. But ask any individual if he believes crime rates are going down the answer will again be in the negative. Same is true of the economy. Most individuals will tell you that they are generally better off while the country is going to dogs. They are living better, eating better, travelling better, but the rest of the countrymen, whom they cannot identify, are starving, living in hovels and contemplating suicide.
Are they right? Is pessimism correct? It’s easy to see why people feel that way: every day the news is filled with horror stories about war, terrorism, crime, pollution, inequality, drug abuse, and oppression. And it’s not just the headlines we’re talking about. It’s the op-eds and lead articles as well. Headlines warn us of anarchies, epidemics, plagues, collapses, and so many crises (farm, health, retirement, welfare, energy, deficit} that make us cringe and really wonder about the nature of progress. Whether or not the world is getting worse, the nature of news is slanted to interact with us in a way that wants us to believe that it is getting worse. News is about things that happen, not that don’t happen. No journalist is going to stand before a multistoried building and say that the said building has not collapsed. That is not news. As they say, “good news is no news!”
“If It Bleeds, It Leads: The Clinical Implications of Fear-Based Programming in News Media is an article by Deborah Serani in which the author examines how fear-based media weaken the ego’s ability to process trauma and can set into motion a variety of maladaptive defensive operations in patients. A case presentation illustrates the psychoanalytic principles that clinicians need to use to help meet this growing media trend that bears on the human psyche.” And it’s not just the professional media that creates these programs. Every individual with a smart phone today is a potential correspondent capable of reporting live from a disaster site almost like a sports commentator. As we all know, bad things happen quickly; good things don’t happen in a day, take much longer, and by the time their relevance is understood, they are out of sync with a news cycle.
The bias in favour of bad news is programmed in our psyche and page editors or newscasters enjoin their reporters to look for negativity, badger witnesses and victims to elicit negative responses that they spread across headlines or scream on TV channels. It doesn’t matter if the news is false and motivated. The moment is of primary importance. A small retraction later seems enough penance for ruining a whole life, like the recent case of Sarabjit Singh who was falsely accused of molestation by Jasleen Kaur. That the courts have thrown out the entire accusation is only available on social media where the clip of an animated Pooja Shali of Times Now is seen badgering Sarabjit Singh with complete conviction of his guilt. I have yet to read that the present employers of this reporter have sought an apology from her, let alone terminate her services.
The consequences of negative news are themselves negative. Far from being better-informed, heavy news-watchers can become actually misinformed. They worry about crime, even when rates are falling, and sometimes they part company with reality altogether. Consumers of negative news, not surprisingly, become glum, fatalistic, saying things like “Why should I vote? It’s not going to help,” and either do not stir out on voting day or press the NOTA button, which is even worse.
Seeing how journalistic habits and cognitive biases bring out the worst in each other, how can we soundly appraise the state of the world? The answer is to count. How many people are victims of violence as a proportion of the number of people alive? How many sick, how many starving, how many poor, how many oppressed, how many illiterate, how many unhappy? And are those numbers going up or down? All this data is easily and freely available on the worldwide web. One just needs to look for it. A quantitative mindset is actually the morally enlightened one, because it treats every human life as having equal value. However, resistance to the idea of progress runs deeper than statistical fallacies. The objections to progress reveal unpreparedness for the possibility that the human condition has actually improved.
However, is it fair to put the entire blame for people’s pessimism on media’s fondness for bad news for the cynical chase of eyeballs and clicks? No, the psychological roots of progressophobia run deeper. People tend to believe that times were much better in the past and the future holds a lot of apprehensions. People dread losses more than they look forward to gains. They are more stung by criticism than uplifted by praise. Franklin Pierce Adams wrote: “Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.” We tend to take all good things that have happened to us in the past as something that was due to us while looking at the future with dread and apprehension. We take our good fortune for granted and soon forget why it happened, or who made it happen. This negativity bias opens up a market for professional intellectual curmudgeons like Sen, who call our attention to bad things we may have missed, or that are going to happen if we continue to vote for the person he particularly hates. It is another truism that society tends to consider a critic more competent than someone who praises. Musical humorist Tom Lehrer once advised: “Always predict the worst, and you will be treated as a prophet.”
There is another negativity bias that relates to wealth and its creation: the belief that total wealth in a system is finite and people are fighting to divide it up. This brings in the story of inequality. Inequality has always been there even from the times of the hunter-gatherer. The stronger would appropriate the larger portions of food while the weaker ones got the leftovers. Intellectual curmudgeons who want us to believe that the poverty gap has widened inexorably; that the rich are getting richer, while the poor are getting poorer, have bred conflict into this debate on inequality. Nothing could be further from the truth. First, wealth is not a constant number. It’s not a lump of gold or an oil well for the possession of which people will fight and go to war. Today we know that wealth can be created. It is created primarily by knowledge and cooperation, by the application of science to the improvement of material life. The industrial revolution ushered in an economic revolution that generated wealth and the total pie got thicker and thicker over time. Genetic modification of food crops kept the Malthusian nightmare at bay and today one can see that malnutrition and famines of the past are truly found only in the pages of history books. It is true that the rich have become richer as the slice of the pie they get is thicker than before. But it is also true that the sliver that the poor get is also thicker. The gap may have widened but the measure of poverty, as we knew a century ago has itself undergone a drastic change. The GDP (Gross Domestic Product) that still continues to be used by economists as the measure of a country’s wealth is no longer an accurate indicator. Aggregate statistics like GDP per capita were designed for an agro-industrial economy, not one in which information and data are the most dynamic sectors. Many of the new goods and services are expensive to design, but once they work, they can be copied at very low or zero costs. That means they tend to contribute little to measured output even if their impact on consumer welfare is very large. Information technology has also launched a process of demonetisation that people today take for granted. Many things that we used to pay for are now almost free, including news, dictionaries, books, films, documentaries, maps, cameras, encyclopaedias, long-distance video and voice calls, and the overhead of brick and mortar retailers. People are enjoying these goods more than ever, but they have vanished from GDP.
Human welfare has parted company from GDP in other ways too. As modern societies become more humanistic, they devote more of their wealth to forms of human betterment that are not priced in the marketplace. A growing share of innovative effort has been directed toward cleaner air, safer drinking water, safer transport, safer and cleaner fuel for household cooking, better and cheaper drugs for diseases, and many more such welfare schemes. A larger amount of funds allocated to these efforts puts a higher value on human life, something that conventional economic theory cannot factor into a nation’s GDP. A rising value of human life may dictate a slower growth in regular consumer goods and services, but a natural interpretation of this trade-off is evidence for the acceleration of progress, not its stagnation.
The threat to human progress comes from political parties that tend to undermine these foundations through populism. This brings back the focus on tribalism as against individualism, caste and class divisions, regionalism, linguistic chauvinism, and other divisive factors. Political parties use populism to pander to these atavistic tendencies among the people and undermine institutions that are the bedrock of societal improvement.
Liberal democracy is a precious thing. Until society finds a better alternative, it is the best we have. It will always have problems, but it’s better to solve these problems than to go back to the era of Totalitarianism, Fascism, Feudalistic Oligarchies or Hereditary Monarchy. Selfish and narrow-minded intellectual social critics have been poisoning voters against responsible custodians and incremental reformers like Narendra Modi, who can consolidate the tremendous progress we have made and strengthen the conditions that will bring us more.
In a world outside of hero myths, the only kind of progress we can have is a kind that is easy to miss while we are living through it. As Isaiah Berlin pointed out, the ideal of a perfectly just, equal, free, healthy and harmonious society, which liberal democracies never measure up to, is a dangerous fantasy. People are not clones in a monoculture, so what satisfies one will not satisfy another, and the only way they can end up equal is if they are treated unequally. Liberal democracies can make progress, but only against a constant backdrop of messy compromise and constant reform.
“The children have obtained what their parents and grandparents longed for – greater freedom, greater material welfare, a juster society; but the old ills are forgotten, and the children face new problems, brought about by the very solutions of the old ones, and these, even if they can in turn be solved, generate new situations, and with them new requirements – and so on, forever – and unpredictably.”
Such is the nature of progress. Pulling us forward are ingenuity, sympathy, and benign institutions. Pushing us back are the darker sides of human nature and the tendency from order to disorder and chaos; the second law of Thermodynamics. Kevin Kelly explains how this dialectic can nonetheless result in forward motion:
“Ever since the Enlightenment and the invention of science, we’ve managed to create a tiny bit more than we’ve destroyed each year. But that few percent positive difference is compounded over decades into what we might call civilization. …. Progress is a self-cloaking action seen only in retrospect. Which is why I tell people that my great optimism is rooted in history.”
The Haryana and Maharashtra results prove to reinforce this definition of the nature of progress. The results are disappointing because the darker sides of human nature pushed the political system from order to disorder and chaos. The people have, mostly unpredictably, opted for short-term objectives, given preference to caste and class, and generally forgotten the mess the previous hung assemblies had bequeathed to them. That a Gopal Kanda could actually win an election or an Ajit Pawar could sail through with a margin of over one-and-a-half-lakh votes shows how the negativity bias works on the human psyche. Let us hope that when these people go to the polling booths in 2024 they will remember the good work of the incremental reformer and not get persuaded by intellectual curmudgeons to bring the patient out of the hospital ward, fully recovered, and ready to repeat its history of uninhibited plunder and destruction of institutions.
*Inspired by Steven Pinker's "Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress"
Vijaya Dar
Oct 29, 2019
https://myvoice.opindia.com/2018/11/three-indias-and-a-possible-one-india-in-2019/
published about six months before the 2019 General Election results were to be announced, and just now when the Haryana and Maharashtra state election results have come in, (a period of almost one year) perhaps a fresh look at liberal democracy as it is practised in India seems to be warranted.
In the concluding paragraph I had opined, “the Congress, having completed its turnaround from liberal democracy to hereditary monarchy, has no new weapons in its arsenal and, will inevitably enter the phase of terminal decline from which it will not be able to recover.” Looking at the just concluded election results, perhaps I had been a bit premature in writing my obituary of the Congress party. What is it that I missed when I foresaw “terminal decline” when the party appears to have moved from the Intensive Care Unit into a private ward? The answer to this question has led me into a deeper study of the impulses that led humanity towards liberal democracy, the obstacles it had to overcome, and the possible future of this form of government.
Liberal democracy has its roots in the European Enlightenment; that efflorescence of thought that took place almost simultaneously across many of the European nations. “What is Enlightenment?” Immanuel Kant asked this question in his 1784 essay and then proceeded to answer it as “humankind’s emergence from its self-incurred immaturity.” He further fumed at the lazy and cowardly submission to “dogmas and formulas” of religious and political authority. Kant wrote: “One age cannot conclude a pact that would prevent succeeding ages from extending their insights, increasing their knowledge, and purging their errors. That would be a crime against human nature, whose proper destiny lies precisely in such progress.”
Immaturity and submission to dogmas and formulas was the outcome of an unscientific mind that had relegated into oblivion the great scientific discoveries of the early Greeks, who, in turn, had benefited immensely from the insights of Indian sages and savants. As India fell into darkness after Muslim conquest, and Europe emerged from its medieval Papal rule, science and reason began to reassert themselves in minds that saw the apple fall to the ground instead of floating in air, and looked at distant stars and planets through telescopes, realizing that our earth was not the center of the universe but a tiny dot in a vast, unimaginable cosmos that stretched into infinity.
From Creationism to Evolution was a giant leap from ignorance and superstition to skepticism, empirical testing, debate, discussion and the further quest for reliable knowledge. Apart from the study of stars and the cosmos, the new thinkers pondered over the nature of man himself. The biggest mystery in the Universe was not physics, chemistry or mathematics that, once understood, followed a set of principles that would hold true under most conditions. What was most baffling was the nature of man, a creature who was anything but a perfectly rational agent. The animal instincts that are part of human nature were the hardest to understand and explain. What were the moral sentiments that brought us together; what passions divided us; what selfish shortsightedness destroyed all the good that had been accumulated over a period of time? These were some of the questions that engaged the best minds of the Enlightenment. So, gradually evolved the idea of a universal human nature that, for want of any other better term came to be known as “humanism.” The Enlightenment thinkers saw an urgent need for a secular foundation for morality; because their memories were assailed by the demons of the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch hunts, and all such acts that were part of the centuries of religious carnage. Humanism put the well being of the individual man, woman and child over the glory of the tribe, race, nation or religion. It is as an individual that the sentient Homo Sapien feels happy, unhappy, pain or pleasure, self-fulfillment or anguish, not as part of an amorphous mass. The objective was to provide the greatest happiness to the greatest number, thereby making the people the ends rather than means. Human happiness or suffering was what eventually must be the concern of all thinkers, opinion-makers and political leaders.
It was this humanistic sensibility that impelled the Enlightenment leaders to condemn not just religious violence but also the secular cruelties of their age, including slavery, despotism, executions for frivolous offenses such as shoplifting and poaching, and imposing sadistic punishments too numerous to list here. When the Europeans militarily conquered India they were flabbergasted by the Enlightenment and the humanistic sensibility that they discovered in the culture and civilization of the East. The wealth of literature on all subjects including all the sciences must have come as a cultural shock to William Jones and Thomas Macaulay. Despite the fact that millions of works accumulated over centuries had been destroyed by the barbaric Muslim invaders, still there was enough material extant that would make the European Enlightenment pale in comparison. The mission to dehumanize Indians emerged from this cultural shock and 200 years later we are seeing the results of this psychological depredation that followed the physical ruination of Islamic rule.
In the West the Enlightenment movement inevitably threw up a counter-Enlightenment movement. There was a whole class of people who felt threatened by this new philosophy that took away their authority, their unquestioned power to accumulate wealth for themselves. Enlightenment asked them to share their good fortune munificently, if not equally, with the rest of humanity. Most of this countermovement came from the Church that till then had held complete sway over the lives of the laity. The other objections came from Existentialists who believed that human nature’s destiny was not progress but decline. On a finite planet with finite resources it is but obvious that humankind will consume itself into extinction or destroy every living thing in a nuclear holocaust. Between the two protagonists the Doomsday scenario is well covered. The creation of a Superman and the comic book hero is part of this existentialism that looks for an outside agency to put Doomsday behind the clock for a foreseeable period of time.
Fast forward to the present times where the Church has been replaced by another institution that we know as Intellectualism. Intellectuals, as we know them today, hate progress. Though they pretend to be progressive and will write whole volumes in pursuit of their ideas of progress, the fact is that they actually dislike it. It’s not as if they hate the fruits of progress; none of them is averse to flying business or first class from one symposium to another; staying in luxury hotels; using the latest computers, Apple phones and watches; jet-setting across the globe, telling mind-numbed audiences how the world was going on a straight road to hell if it did not abjure the pace of progress at which it was moving. It is the idea of progress that rankles the chattering classes – the Enlightenment belief that by understanding the world we can improve the human condition. Intellectuals of the Amartya Sen kind refuse to see that the world is getting better as they have drunk deep from the fountains of the Prophets of Doom. Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Sartre, and a host of other pessimists had become their Gods, and it was their gospel that they preached to their young impressionable students. Most educational institutions in the West and in India are in the iron grip of these intellectual terrorists and with every passing year they let loose a new brigade of militant students who are fed on this propaganda that we call “Optimism Gap.”
Optimism Gap is defined as the gap between the perceptions of individuals who think that the world is on the straight road to Hell, while they themselves are destined for Heaven. If you ask any of these people if their lives are personally threatened and do they foresee anything unpleasant happening to them, the answer in most cases will be in the negative. But change the question from the people’s lives to their society and they transform into the worst pessimists. Crime rates are definitely going down. It is easy to find statistics that will support this assertion. But ask any individual if he believes crime rates are going down the answer will again be in the negative. Same is true of the economy. Most individuals will tell you that they are generally better off while the country is going to dogs. They are living better, eating better, travelling better, but the rest of the countrymen, whom they cannot identify, are starving, living in hovels and contemplating suicide.
Are they right? Is pessimism correct? It’s easy to see why people feel that way: every day the news is filled with horror stories about war, terrorism, crime, pollution, inequality, drug abuse, and oppression. And it’s not just the headlines we’re talking about. It’s the op-eds and lead articles as well. Headlines warn us of anarchies, epidemics, plagues, collapses, and so many crises (farm, health, retirement, welfare, energy, deficit} that make us cringe and really wonder about the nature of progress. Whether or not the world is getting worse, the nature of news is slanted to interact with us in a way that wants us to believe that it is getting worse. News is about things that happen, not that don’t happen. No journalist is going to stand before a multistoried building and say that the said building has not collapsed. That is not news. As they say, “good news is no news!”
“If It Bleeds, It Leads: The Clinical Implications of Fear-Based Programming in News Media is an article by Deborah Serani in which the author examines how fear-based media weaken the ego’s ability to process trauma and can set into motion a variety of maladaptive defensive operations in patients. A case presentation illustrates the psychoanalytic principles that clinicians need to use to help meet this growing media trend that bears on the human psyche.” And it’s not just the professional media that creates these programs. Every individual with a smart phone today is a potential correspondent capable of reporting live from a disaster site almost like a sports commentator. As we all know, bad things happen quickly; good things don’t happen in a day, take much longer, and by the time their relevance is understood, they are out of sync with a news cycle.
The bias in favour of bad news is programmed in our psyche and page editors or newscasters enjoin their reporters to look for negativity, badger witnesses and victims to elicit negative responses that they spread across headlines or scream on TV channels. It doesn’t matter if the news is false and motivated. The moment is of primary importance. A small retraction later seems enough penance for ruining a whole life, like the recent case of Sarabjit Singh who was falsely accused of molestation by Jasleen Kaur. That the courts have thrown out the entire accusation is only available on social media where the clip of an animated Pooja Shali of Times Now is seen badgering Sarabjit Singh with complete conviction of his guilt. I have yet to read that the present employers of this reporter have sought an apology from her, let alone terminate her services.
The consequences of negative news are themselves negative. Far from being better-informed, heavy news-watchers can become actually misinformed. They worry about crime, even when rates are falling, and sometimes they part company with reality altogether. Consumers of negative news, not surprisingly, become glum, fatalistic, saying things like “Why should I vote? It’s not going to help,” and either do not stir out on voting day or press the NOTA button, which is even worse.
Seeing how journalistic habits and cognitive biases bring out the worst in each other, how can we soundly appraise the state of the world? The answer is to count. How many people are victims of violence as a proportion of the number of people alive? How many sick, how many starving, how many poor, how many oppressed, how many illiterate, how many unhappy? And are those numbers going up or down? All this data is easily and freely available on the worldwide web. One just needs to look for it. A quantitative mindset is actually the morally enlightened one, because it treats every human life as having equal value. However, resistance to the idea of progress runs deeper than statistical fallacies. The objections to progress reveal unpreparedness for the possibility that the human condition has actually improved.
However, is it fair to put the entire blame for people’s pessimism on media’s fondness for bad news for the cynical chase of eyeballs and clicks? No, the psychological roots of progressophobia run deeper. People tend to believe that times were much better in the past and the future holds a lot of apprehensions. People dread losses more than they look forward to gains. They are more stung by criticism than uplifted by praise. Franklin Pierce Adams wrote: “Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.” We tend to take all good things that have happened to us in the past as something that was due to us while looking at the future with dread and apprehension. We take our good fortune for granted and soon forget why it happened, or who made it happen. This negativity bias opens up a market for professional intellectual curmudgeons like Sen, who call our attention to bad things we may have missed, or that are going to happen if we continue to vote for the person he particularly hates. It is another truism that society tends to consider a critic more competent than someone who praises. Musical humorist Tom Lehrer once advised: “Always predict the worst, and you will be treated as a prophet.”
There is another negativity bias that relates to wealth and its creation: the belief that total wealth in a system is finite and people are fighting to divide it up. This brings in the story of inequality. Inequality has always been there even from the times of the hunter-gatherer. The stronger would appropriate the larger portions of food while the weaker ones got the leftovers. Intellectual curmudgeons who want us to believe that the poverty gap has widened inexorably; that the rich are getting richer, while the poor are getting poorer, have bred conflict into this debate on inequality. Nothing could be further from the truth. First, wealth is not a constant number. It’s not a lump of gold or an oil well for the possession of which people will fight and go to war. Today we know that wealth can be created. It is created primarily by knowledge and cooperation, by the application of science to the improvement of material life. The industrial revolution ushered in an economic revolution that generated wealth and the total pie got thicker and thicker over time. Genetic modification of food crops kept the Malthusian nightmare at bay and today one can see that malnutrition and famines of the past are truly found only in the pages of history books. It is true that the rich have become richer as the slice of the pie they get is thicker than before. But it is also true that the sliver that the poor get is also thicker. The gap may have widened but the measure of poverty, as we knew a century ago has itself undergone a drastic change. The GDP (Gross Domestic Product) that still continues to be used by economists as the measure of a country’s wealth is no longer an accurate indicator. Aggregate statistics like GDP per capita were designed for an agro-industrial economy, not one in which information and data are the most dynamic sectors. Many of the new goods and services are expensive to design, but once they work, they can be copied at very low or zero costs. That means they tend to contribute little to measured output even if their impact on consumer welfare is very large. Information technology has also launched a process of demonetisation that people today take for granted. Many things that we used to pay for are now almost free, including news, dictionaries, books, films, documentaries, maps, cameras, encyclopaedias, long-distance video and voice calls, and the overhead of brick and mortar retailers. People are enjoying these goods more than ever, but they have vanished from GDP.
Human welfare has parted company from GDP in other ways too. As modern societies become more humanistic, they devote more of their wealth to forms of human betterment that are not priced in the marketplace. A growing share of innovative effort has been directed toward cleaner air, safer drinking water, safer transport, safer and cleaner fuel for household cooking, better and cheaper drugs for diseases, and many more such welfare schemes. A larger amount of funds allocated to these efforts puts a higher value on human life, something that conventional economic theory cannot factor into a nation’s GDP. A rising value of human life may dictate a slower growth in regular consumer goods and services, but a natural interpretation of this trade-off is evidence for the acceleration of progress, not its stagnation.
The threat to human progress comes from political parties that tend to undermine these foundations through populism. This brings back the focus on tribalism as against individualism, caste and class divisions, regionalism, linguistic chauvinism, and other divisive factors. Political parties use populism to pander to these atavistic tendencies among the people and undermine institutions that are the bedrock of societal improvement.
Liberal democracy is a precious thing. Until society finds a better alternative, it is the best we have. It will always have problems, but it’s better to solve these problems than to go back to the era of Totalitarianism, Fascism, Feudalistic Oligarchies or Hereditary Monarchy. Selfish and narrow-minded intellectual social critics have been poisoning voters against responsible custodians and incremental reformers like Narendra Modi, who can consolidate the tremendous progress we have made and strengthen the conditions that will bring us more.
In a world outside of hero myths, the only kind of progress we can have is a kind that is easy to miss while we are living through it. As Isaiah Berlin pointed out, the ideal of a perfectly just, equal, free, healthy and harmonious society, which liberal democracies never measure up to, is a dangerous fantasy. People are not clones in a monoculture, so what satisfies one will not satisfy another, and the only way they can end up equal is if they are treated unequally. Liberal democracies can make progress, but only against a constant backdrop of messy compromise and constant reform.
“The children have obtained what their parents and grandparents longed for – greater freedom, greater material welfare, a juster society; but the old ills are forgotten, and the children face new problems, brought about by the very solutions of the old ones, and these, even if they can in turn be solved, generate new situations, and with them new requirements – and so on, forever – and unpredictably.”
Such is the nature of progress. Pulling us forward are ingenuity, sympathy, and benign institutions. Pushing us back are the darker sides of human nature and the tendency from order to disorder and chaos; the second law of Thermodynamics. Kevin Kelly explains how this dialectic can nonetheless result in forward motion:
“Ever since the Enlightenment and the invention of science, we’ve managed to create a tiny bit more than we’ve destroyed each year. But that few percent positive difference is compounded over decades into what we might call civilization. …. Progress is a self-cloaking action seen only in retrospect. Which is why I tell people that my great optimism is rooted in history.”
The Haryana and Maharashtra results prove to reinforce this definition of the nature of progress. The results are disappointing because the darker sides of human nature pushed the political system from order to disorder and chaos. The people have, mostly unpredictably, opted for short-term objectives, given preference to caste and class, and generally forgotten the mess the previous hung assemblies had bequeathed to them. That a Gopal Kanda could actually win an election or an Ajit Pawar could sail through with a margin of over one-and-a-half-lakh votes shows how the negativity bias works on the human psyche. Let us hope that when these people go to the polling booths in 2024 they will remember the good work of the incremental reformer and not get persuaded by intellectual curmudgeons to bring the patient out of the hospital ward, fully recovered, and ready to repeat its history of uninhibited plunder and destruction of institutions.
*Inspired by Steven Pinker's "Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress"
Vijaya Dar
Oct 29, 2019
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