Trying to be 'Progressive'

How tolerant a person is ultimately a question of how successful he/she is in disguising the limits to his/her own (proclaimed) 'tolerance'. Take the famous example of Voltaire who had applauded the Rialto, the exchange-market at Venice, for bringing under its financial aegis Jews, Catholics, Turks, and the huge anonymous heap referred to as the 'infidels'. From several perspectives, that is genuinely a tolerant atmosphere : here, if anywhere, is one place where the Turk will not be massacred by the Catholic. However, is even this environment tolerant enough? One must note in this context that Voltaire himself was not an atheist but a 'Deist' : a 'Deist' was someone who believed that there was one Supreme power which the different historical religions approached in their own unique ways. One might therefore wonder : would Voltaire have tolerated an atheist at the Rialto? Or an anti-Deist, a proto-Marxist, a proto-anarchist, a proto-nihilist?

Here are some more questions, then. What about someone who claims, for whatever reasons, that the Rialto is a nest of infernal powers? Would such a person be tolerated in Venice? And if this is a case not of one individual but say a group which claims, again for either 'religious' or 'non-religious' (such as proto-Marxist) reasons, that the Rialto must be razed to the ground, what would become of such a group? This is especially problematic if this group claims that there is a direct and logical connection between some of its central beliefs (say, that wealth must be evenly distributed in society) and its proclaimed intention to destroy the Rialto. Shall this group be compelled to give up such central beliefs?

Voltaire's alleged solution to the question of tolerating 'other-ness' has not died with him. Even today we still seem to believe that it is all a matter of extending socio-economic benefits to people whom we believe are unhappy, juvenile, deviant, reactionary, or simply stupid. If such benefits trickle down to these groups and they 'catch up with us', they shall become integrated into the 'mainstream', and all will be well. Consequently, several questions go unasked, and here is just a random sampling of some of them :

(a) What if a certain group claims, for whatever reasons, that the accumulation of wealth is a definite evil from which its members must stay away from? And, consequently, that they must stay away from the 'nation-building' process? Shall this group be forced to give up this view?

(b) Is the 'mainstream' to be defined in statistical terms, so that the reason why we think that we folks who believe in socio-economic 'progress' belong to this mainstream is simply because there are more of 'us' than 'them' who do not believe in such progress? The problem, of course, is that nobody really has, to the best of my knowledge, carried out such a statistical survey. If that were to be done, it would seem that it is far from being a unanimous matter even in the 'West', the very bastion of all 'development' theories, that such 'progress' is viewed as (a) a reality, (b) universally applicable to all parts of the world, and (c) an undiluted good.

(c) Even if all groups seem to believe, apparently at least, that socio-economic progress is a good thing, and also benefit from it, the reasons why they hold this belief may be fundamentally divergent from one another. Two people may seem to agree that X is a good thing, but this apparent agreement might conceal a much deeper disagreement; it does not imply that they also agree on why they think that X is indeed good. Therefore, both a devout Hindu and a secular atheist can work in the same multi-national firm in a suburb of Paris, and in most cases, their fundamental difference in world-views will not affect at all their financial dealings with their clients. Nevertheless, there might be important differences in the reasons why they work in that same firm. The Hindu could be working there to earn money which he wishes to send home to a right-wing party which will stand for his 'Hindu-ness', and the atheist because she wishes to go skiing in Switzerland the next winter. Though, superficially, their diverging world-views make no proximate difference to their clients, this divergence does ultimately have repercussions in a world that is gradually becoming more and more inter-connected (though whether this inter-connection has been for good or evil is yet another debate).

(d) A too facile connection is usually made between 'modernity' and 'socio-economic progress', as if the one logically (and inevitably) leads to the other. The point, however, usually obscured by the proclamation of the messianic gospel of the 'march of modernity', is that there are several ways of being 'modern', and that 'modernity' itself is not as homogenous as one might have been led to believe. Several Islamist groups have networks that closely resemble multi-national corporations, make use of some of the most sophisticated ('modern') technology in the ('global') market, and believe in 'progress' too. Except, of course, that they define the key term 'progress' in a very different manner. From their perspective, to tie 'progress' down to 'socio-economic growth' is too narrow a definition of that term. Socio-economic growth, rather, is to be understood only as a tool to lead one to the much grander future of the establishment of the perfect rule of God (and the latter alone is to be understood as 'progress'). Now we may not agree with this definition of 'progress', but neither can we brush away this view as 'anti-modern' when we see a group, making use of every possible bit of 'modern' technology under our very noses, putting forward this definition.

So will the 'progressive' (how difficult it has become not to use this word!) extension of socio-economic benefits to more and more people give rise to the 'heavenly city' on earth? This progress, as a matter of fact, will not even get off the ground unless the voices of those people are heard, respected, and responded to who claim that such benefits, no matter how useful they proximately may be, are ultimately pointless. In other words, theirs is a challenge to the notion that 'basic needs' must first be satisfied. The problem with this notion is, of course, that there seems to be no universal consensus on what these 'basic needs' are.

Perhaps, food is one such need. That is clear enough as an indisputable fact, until one goes on to ask the more important question : How much of this food? A Hindu ascetic in the lower Himalayas, a starving refugee in Somalia, and a German businesswoman in New York will all agree that food is a 'basic need', but will sharply disagree with one another over how much of food one needs, and what amount of it is to be universally declared as being 'basic'. Perhaps we may agree on settling down at the 'lowest common denominator'. Even so, who shall decide what this is? Whose dietary requirements are to be set up as the 'measuring dole'?

Nevertheless, we may agree that it is possible in principle, more or less, by appointing a medical team to come to a certain consensus, in terms of units such as calories, on the minimum amount of food that the human body requires to survive as a biological organism. When it comes to other 'basic needs' such as shelter, one faces similar problems, but these too can be solved at some minimum level. The discussion now shifts to a somewhat different, and more intricate, question : Who decides what is to be included in and what is to be excluded from this list of 'basic needs'?

(a) Is financial security a 'basic need'? Perhaps so, but what then of the billions of Catholic and Buddhist monks and nuns who live happily without experiencing such a need, and who, in fact, might very well argue that this is not, in fact, a basic need? 'Take no thought for the morrow', should be, they might say, the motto for everyone.

(b) Is emotional security a 'basic need'? Again, perhaps so, but what then of the billions of Hindu, Buddhist, and Jaina mendicants roaming throughout the countryside who might argue that far from being a basic need, the need for such security is precisely one of the fundamental evils of our unenlightened existence?

(c) Is 'individual liberty' a basic need? Once again, perhaps it is, but this time we shall have to confront Marxist thinkers of various stripes who will argue that the much-proclaimed individual liberty of capitalist societies is a sham; and various Islamist thinkers who will claim that the alleged liberty that 'Western' women enjoy leads them, in fact, to a greater bondage where they live in accordance with the ever-changing norms of what is 'fashionable' (read : 'acceptable to the masculine gaze').

My intention, in all of these, is not to deny, of course, that there are billions of people, even as I write, who are dying of starvation and thirst, and the first thing to be done about these people is to give them some food to eat and some water to drink, irrespective of seemingly pointless argumentation over how much food/water this should be. The point, however, is that once we are talking not about immediate starvation/thirst relief but about framing more universal and generally applicable 'basic needs policies' it is important not to forget that it is difficult to detach the notion of 'basic needs' from the respective world-view (religious/secular/atheistic/Marxist, and so on) within which it is embedded.

Am I then saying that people in different world-views have different 'basic needs'? In one sense, yes. What may have established itself as a 'basic need' in one world-view (say the Internet, a television, or a cell-phone in Western Europe), may be a luxury in another (especially if we remind ourselves that 'even' today only one out of every ten people in the world have made a phone call), a mild curiosity in a third, a hindrance to 'progress' in a fourth, and a positive evil in a fifth.

This is the reason why it is so difficult to associate the notion of 'progress' with one specific form of growth (whether it is economic, cultural, educational, or whatever). From an Islamic, Christian or Buddhist perspective, for example, the routine connection (made especially in the 'West', and now also the 'East' which has taken up some of these economic views of the 'West') of progress with socio-economic 'development' may be seen at best, as a necessary clarion-call to remove the ills of poverty, hunger and thirst, and at worst, a form of myopia that overlooks the 'broader picture' and disguises the 'true starvation'. My intention in this context is not to defend the internal consistency, coherence, or plausibility of such 'broader pictures' or to expound on the nature of this 'true starvation', but to point out that unless the voices of people who live, move, and have their being within such pictures and suffer (or, claim to suffer) from such starvation are taken into account, the definition(s) of progress in terms of socio-economic growth will continue to be viewed, if not with a detached suspicion then, with positive scorn in large swathes of the world. And these are precisely those swathes which have not remained untouched by modernity; indeed, they have accepted some aspects of it, digested, assimilated, and come to grips with them.