Thinking about thinking
Two things this morning. Both are related to the assumptions we bring to the comparative process (some of which we don't recognize). The first comes from an Indian academic. The other from an advertising exec in China. Both are related to Insights for us teachers that I posted here last Friday.Put all this together and you could come up with at great lesson in the need to stay objective and still get trapped by unconscious ethnocentrism.
Pankaj Mishra is the author of Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Beyond. His essay in The Guardian (UK) offers a powerful rationale for studying comparative politics.What would your students make of his argument?
Indians are baffled by the paranoia and prejudice of European liberals
"David Miliband, the [British] foreign secretary... told a group of journalists that politicians of his generation who didn't understand what the world looked like through Indian eyes, weren't going to understand the world very well.
"Miliband's curiosity most likely derives from India's growing economic strength. But the country's political and intellectual life, particularly its experiment with democracy and pluralism, has an equal bearing on Europe today. With its many religions and languages, and inequalities of caste and class, India possesses greater social and cultural variety than even Europe. Aware that the potential for conflict between religious and ethnic communities was immense, India's founding fathers hoped to build a pluralist democracy...
"The scale of political-religious violence in India dwarfs anything suffered by western Europe in the postwar era. Yet India's unique liberal tradition, which respects minority identity and community belonging, remains central in the country's intellectual life. Indian economists, historians, sociologists, philosophers, novelists and journalists are deeply divided on many political and economic issues. But, apart from a minuscule few, they remain wedded to India's founding vision of pluralism.
"Not surprisingly, these postcolonial Indians are bewildered to see liberal politicians and intellectuals in Europe embrace a majoritarian nationalism, recoiling from what, by Indian standards, seems a very limited experience of social diversity and political extremism... It is clear that recklessly globalising capital and technology, and the failed modernisation of much of the formerly colonial world - of which religious extremism and migration are consequences - pose daunting challenges to European societies. But instead of facing them squarely, many Europeans have retreated into old insecurities about Islam and Muslims...
"Still looking at the world through the ideological simplicities of the cold war and longing to give battle to another evil "ism", they have found a worthy enemy in the conceptual conceit called Islamofascism...
"If this disturbs Indian intellectuals, it is because they are accustomed, from bitter recent experience of the BJP, to see strident rhetoric about values as a rightwing ploy meant to channel middle-class anxiety over seemingly insuperable problems into xenophobia...
"[I]t is likely that just as the militant Hindu is usually an upper-caste man fearful of assertive low-caste groups, the non-relativist muscular European liberals are no more than a few middle-aged pundits rattled to see their assumptions defied by the upstart regimes of Iran and Venezuela, as well as India, China and Russia.
"In any case, claims to superior values are likely to fall on deaf ears in a world where the chasm between moral grandstanding and actual conduct is quickly exposed. Last century, Indian thinkers pointed to this credibility gap.
"Indeed, much of Gandhi's strategy of non-violent persuasion consisted of alerting the British to the contradiction between their claims of fair play and the reality of imperial rule. Asked for his opinion of 'western civilisation', Gandhi replied: 'It would be a good idea.' It sounds like a cheap jibe, but he was in earnest. Civilisation, he implied, is never a fixed achievement, as Europe's own frequent descent into barbarism in the 20th century proved; it has to be maintained, primarily by a high degree of awareness about its fragility.
"Gandhi's warning came during the interwar years in Europe, when liberal democracy proved feeble before demagogic nationalism. It is no less relevant today, as opinion-makers berate what appears to be the latest of many minorities Europe has found indigestible. Intellectuals may balk at learning from a supposedly inferior Asian country. The lesson, however, from an embattled and resilient Indian liberalism in the 61st year of India's existence is clear: liberal values will prove their superiority by not collapsing before the challenge of pluralism and political extremism."
Labels: concepts, culture, pedagogy
posted by Ken Wedding @ 8:37 AM
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