Sunday, September 19, 2021

Arundhati Roy on Gandhi - 8g

It is said that modern civilization is a rational civilization and this is the most important aspect of the modern scientific society.  In modernity, reason is taken as the basis of knowledge and the rational self is taken as the final arbiter of truth. For Gandhi, truth was moral and could only be found in the experience of one's life. It could never be correctly expressed by rational theoretical discourse. Day by day the importance of rationality has become so prominent that it is over-shadowing all other aspects of life. Gandhi had a problem with this domineering rational tendency of modernity. He said in 1939 (quoted in Gandhi: Struggling for Autonomy by Ronald Terchek): 

Rationalism is a hideous monster when it claims for itself omnipotence. Attribution of omnipotence to reason is as bad a piece of idolatry as is worship of rock and stone believing it to be God. I plead not for the suppression of reason but [an appreciation of its inherent limits].

In some areas of human experience such as morality and politics, reason was inherently inadequate and needed to be guided by wisdom, tradition, conscience, intuition, and moral insight. He argued that the relation between reason and violence is much closer than we realize. For him, love, generosity, trust etc. do not flow from reason (for some rationalists, such feelings are unnecessary complications that spoil their beautiful equations). He sees these dispositions and actions that flow from outside reason embodying the best in human beings. He knew that the opposite of these feelings is not always reason. When love and trust is involved, the choice is not invariably between them and reason but between love and hate or trust and suspicion. 

To assume that reason should always be the arbiter is to misunderstand both its strengths and limitations. Reason can speak to an impulse to love, for example, but after a while reason is exhausted and has nothing more to say. Gandhi would constantly critique faith to ascertain whether it was meaningful and reasonable in terms of basic human values. He demands of reason adherence to these values as well. Gandhi was not against reason or rationality at all but his was a critique of the domineering nature of modern instrumental rationality. 

Rationalism also valued only one form of knowledge, namely the scientific, and only one form of life, namely the secular, individualist, and competitive, based on the mastery of nature. Further, for the rationalist, human life was transparent, fully knowable if not today then tomorrow, and whatever could not be scientifically known either did not exist or was not worth knowing. Rationalism therefore bred the arrogant and irrational belief that human beings could shape the world in whatever way they liked. 

For Gandhi, a watertight compartmentalization is not at all possible between the mind and heart, rationality and morality. In fact, an individual’s comprehensive personality depends on both rationality and intuition. Thus, we should not accept only one aspect as a whole, as that would be a partial perspective. In Gandhi’s words, 'I have come to the conclusion that if you want something really important to be done, you not merely satisfy the reason, you must move the heart also. The appeal of reason is more important to the head.' He realized that truth can be reached through a complex dialogue in which reason alone is not sufficient; therefore, he suggested that the arguments need to be reinforced with "emotional and political pressure." In Gandhi in the 21st Century, Prof. Bhikhu Parekh writes:

Like the rationalists, he stressed the importance of rational discussion; unlike them, however, he realized that what passed as rational discussion was often little more than alternative monologues or a public relations exercise, and that sticking to it under such circumstances was an act of irrationality. 

Even as Gandhi was aware of the limits of rationality, he was acutely conscious of the dangers of violence. He knew that narrow rationalism and violence tended to feed off each other, and that the failure of rationality rendered violence morally respectable. 

Ayn Rand’s philosophy is linked to the basic tenets of capitalism and her popularity supposedly keeps growing. She conceived of rationality as man’s basic virtue, the source of all other virtues. The virtue of rationality means the recognition and acceptance of reason as one’s only source of knowledge, one’s only judge of values and one’s only guide to action. She argues for a conception of self-interest grounded not in desires (or emotions) but in facts and reason. We are often told that the reason is the area of the mind, working at its peak, most purely logical level. Emotions are found in the lowly area of the body, busy with its chaotic, irrational passions. 

Antonio Damasio shows in his acclaimed book, Descartes' Error, that the brain, the body, reason, as well as emotions are inseparably connected together into a seamless whole. Pure reason, reason uninfluenced by emotion, seems to occur only in pathological states that are characterized by impairment of day-to-day decision-making and social interaction. Says Damasio, “Certain aspects of the process of emotion and feeling are indispensable for rationality.” To think otherwise was Descartes’ error. 

Damasio writes of patients with damage to the frontal regions of the brain which leaves them incapable of feeling emotions that a normal person would. When such patients are presented with a slide show that includes graphic pictures of sex or violence, for instance, they can identify them and describe their horrible details normally, but they show none of the emotional responses that are always present in normal people. As Damasio points out, these patients are the very epitome of the cool-headed, passionless thinkers philosophy has typically encouraged as the ideal, and yet that very lack of emotional reactions renders them incapable of real world time-pressured decision-making.

Jonathan Haidt, Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University Stern School of Business, says that we were never designed to listen to reason. When you ask people moral questions, time their responses and scan their brains, their answers and brain activation patterns indicate that they reach conclusions quickly and produce reasons later only to justify what they’ve decided. The problem isn’t that people don’t reason. They do reason. But their arguments aim to support their conclusions, not yours. Reason doesn’t work like a judge or teacher, impartially weighing evidence or guiding us to wisdom. It works more like a lawyer or press secretary, justifying our acts and judgments to others. 

Haidt views morality as driven by two separate mental systems, one ancient and one modern. The ancient system, which he calls moral intuition, is based on the emotion-laden moral behaviors that evolved before the development of language. Moral intuition occur instantaneously — they are primitive gut reactions that evolved to generate split-second decisions and enhance survival in a dangerous world. The modern system — he calls it moral judgment — came after language, when people became able to articulate why something was right or wrong. Moral judgment comes later, as the conscious mind develops a plausible rationalization for the decision already arrived at through moral intuition. 

He likens the mind’s subterranean moral machinery to an elephant, and conscious moral reasoning to a small rider on the elephant’s back. The rational rider tries his damnedest to make the emotional elephant go in the direction he wants but ultimately the huge elephant will have its way. Psychologists and philosophers have long taken a far too narrow view of morality, he believes, because they have focused on the rider and largely ignored the elephant. In Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, Robert M . Sapolsky writes:

The synergistic advantages of combining reasoning with intuition raise an important point. If you’re a fan of moral intuitions, you’d frame them as being foundational and primordial. If you don’t like them, you’d present them as simplistic, reflexive, and primitive. 

But as emphasized by Woodward and Allman, our moral intuitions are neither primordial nor reflexively primitive. They are the end products of learning; they are cognitive conclusions to which we have been exposed so often that they have become automatic, as implicit as riding a bicycle or reciting the days of the week forward rather than backward. 

In the West we nearly all have strong moral intuitions about the wrongness of slavery, child labor, or animal cruelty. But that sure didn’t used to be the case. Their wrongness has become an implicit moral intuition, a gut instinct concerning moral truth, only because of the fierce moral reasoning (and activism) of those who came before us, when the average person’s moral intuitions were unrecognizably different. Our guts learn their intuitions.

Sunday, September 5, 2021

Arundhati Roy on Gandhi - 8f

Gandhi's seemingly bizarre statements on the railways can be read as related to the unintended consequences of modern technology. People look at only the benefits that a new technology can provide and eagerly adopt it without considering its negatives. In the case of railways, people see how it provides a quick and cheap means of traveling long distances but they don't see its effects on various social goods. 

He is concerned that people tend to think of the goods and services they buy only in economic and not in social terms. The railways spreading bubonic plague sounds bizarre till you realize that he was talking about long-distance travel causing long-distance disease transmission. The latest instance of it is the coronavirus scare. It isn't the first, it won't be the last. From a Gandhian perspective, the vast amount of environmental harm caused by the blind application of modern technology shows how their unintended consequences can lead to heavy costs. 

Mobile phones were thought of only as instruments to help improve communication. It was not realized that it improves communication only with people who are far away; it reduces communication with people around you. Nobody thought that it would become an aid to control with employers who expect staff members to be available 24/7. It helps in stimulating  our emotional insecurities, requiring us to see what others are doing, 24/7. 

Gandhi’s critique is directed at a civilization committed to the quest for continually improved means to carelessly examined ends. The ultimate result is that people become concerned only with what is, as distinct from what ought to be with the consequent erosion in moral values. We might dismiss Gandhi’s concerns about the moral impact of the technological and scientific advances in his time as excessive, but the underlying principle of them is still highly relevant. He was in effect saying that we shouldn’t be led by the nose by science and technology. We should stop to think about the price we pay for adopting them, so that we don’t misuse or overuse them. 

Gandhi said, 'Civilization, in the real sense of the term, consists not in the multiplication, but in the deliberate and voluntary restriction of wants.' He finds that the consumer products of the new economy become new needs that exhaust people leaving them too tired to perform other duties. He observes that modernity brings its own forms of degradation and enslavement. He said in Hind Swaraj, 'We notice that the mind is a restless bird; the more it gets the more it wants, and still remains unsatisfied. The more we indulge our passions, the more unbridled they become.' And elsewhere in Hind Swaraj, 'Formerly, men were made slaves under physical compulsion. Now they are enslaved by temptation of money and of the luxuries that money can buy.' 

The market has a vital vested interest in constantly whetting jaded appetites, planting new wants and creating a moral climate in which not to want the goods daily pumped into the market and to keep pace with the latest fashions was to be abnormal and archaic. Most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate, belong to this category of created needs which force people to continue working where it is no longer a real necessity.  In a letter to Henry Pollack on Oct. 14, 1909, Gandhi says that when he looks at Britain, he is 'disillusioned'. He sees people who 'seem half-crazy. They spend their days in luxury or on making a bare living and retire at night thoroughly exhausted.' They have nothing else in life but work and consumption. 

Gandhi thought that modern civilization had a depressing air of ‘futility’ and ‘madness’ about it. He sees people numbed into accepting catastrophic consequences produced by modern science. 'The ceaseless rush in which we are living does not leave any time for contemplating the the full results of these new technologies. After a brief period of mourning following a disaster from a new technology 'the dead will soon be forgotten, and in a very short time' people will get back to their 'usual gaiety as if nothing whatsoever had happened.' (Indian Opinion, Aug. 20 1903). 

He condemned the blind adoption of whatever technological breakthrough happened to be the latest and most sophisticated. He once said, “I wholeheartedly detest this mad desire to destroy distance and time to increase animal appetites and go to the ends of the earth in search of their satisfaction.” He might well remind India and indeed the rest of the world of words said by Krishna in the Gita, “Enveloped by wisdom is this insatiable fire of desire which is the constant foe of the wise.”

As Oscar Wilde warned, “nothing is so dangerous as being too modern; one is apt to grow old fashioned quite suddenly”. As modernity proceeds, increasingly trivial items are marketed as items that are essential for leading a happy life. People spend more and more time in front of the mirror, keep buying beauty products whose names I had not heard earlier, there are 'beauty bloggers', 'selfie surgeries' etc. Before my stroke, there were no beauty parlors in this area but now there seem to be several of them. Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition attacks Marx's view that the emancipated man will reach for 'higher' activities - that free time eventually will emancipate men from necessity and make the animal laborans productive. She writes that we find:

. . . the spare time of the animal laborans is never spent in anything but consumption, and the more time left to him, the greedier and more craving his appetites. That these appetites become more sophisticated, so that consumption is no longer restricted to the necessities but, on the contrary, mainly concentrates on the superfluities of life . . . 

In The Patterning Instinct, Jeremy Lent writes about Edward Bernays, known as the “father of public relations.” Bernays was Sigmund Freud's nephew and used his uncle's insights into the subconscious to develop his new method of influencing consumer behavior. “We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture,” declared Bernays's business partner, Paul Mazur. “People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality. Man's desires must overshadow his needs.” 

In 1928, Bernays proudly described how his techniques for mental manipulation had permitted a small elite to control the minds of the American population: 'The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government that is the true ruling power of this country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of . . . In almost every act of our daily lives . . . we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons . . . who pull the wires which control the public mind.'

The following year, a presidential report gave credit to the mind control espoused by Bernays for helping to create a limitless future of American consumption, explaining it had “proved conclusively . . . that wants are almost insatiable; that one want satisfied makes way for another. The conclusion is that economically, we have a boundless field before us; that there are new wants that will make way endlessly for newer wants, as fast as they are satisfied . . . by advertising and other promotional devices.”

In Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity,  Zygmunt Bauman has a definition of marketing which you will not find taught to MBAs: ‘Marketing is dedicated to the discovery or invention of questions to which the recently introduced products can be seen as providing the answers, and then to inducing the largest numbers of potential clients to ask those questions with ever growing frequency.‘ Thus temptation and seduction move to the top of marketing concerns. Products soon tend to succumb to the pressure of ‘new and improved’ products with additional bells and whistles well before the working capacity of a product meets its preordained end.

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville warns that a democracy can fall into despotism by succumbing to an excessive passion for material well being.” He observes that democracy engenders an “ardent” interest in acquiring material comforts. According to him, “what attaches the heart most keenly” to material well-being “is not the peaceful possession of a precious object, but the imperfectly satisfied desire to possess it and the incessant fear of losing it.” If the democratic taste for material comforts goes unchecked, Tocqueville warns, democratic citizens will begin to view the duties of political participation as a burden because they take time and energy away from private economic activity.

According to Tocqueville, there is “no need to tear from such citizens the rights they possess; they themselves willingly let them escape. The exercise of their political duties appears to them a distressing contretemps that distracts them from their industry.” Neglecting these duties, they leave a kind of vacuum in the political realm, a political void that may be filled by despotism. If “an ambitious, able man comes to take possession of power” under such circumstances, he will find “the way open to every usurpation.” And if he chooses the path of usurpation, the citizens will surrender their freedom and submit to his rule.