Abstract: Money, muscles and machine are the three pillars of male overwhelming dominance over the world and is creating a lot of problems for humans survival itself; and that is having its deep roots in the basic perspectives of male identity: violence, power and control. We do not know what the alternate way is, what we r practicing till date in our lives is the same: we are a participant of this rat-run. But there are different worlds as per differences in mind as each mind has its own set of world and many a times an array of minds with similar world views are created by nations and their people and it is successfully done by the so called systems, ethics, and obedience.
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Excellent levels of learning and adaptability are the most important attributes of Homo sapiens making them different from other species on this planet (if we are not concerned with extraterrestrial lives). It also contributes to high levels of creativity which is having consequences in design of human mind (cognition). The history of humans is the history of this design.
A system (human socio-political organization) is a functional association of different actors and processes a member has to face. A system always tries to maintain its continuity by evolving certain kind of values and rule-regulations depending upon the origin of the ecological circumstances originating the system. For example, a woman in a tribal community is socially more empowered than in an agrarian community because the ecology doesn’t allow male to have a hegemonic control over resources and decision-making process in the prior. Before going into further details, let us understand the meanings of Hysterical and Procedural systems.
Imagine a patriarchal kingdom in which rulers belong to a particular community. Now this system has following attributes:
- Not all members of society can join the ruling class.
- Not all people belonging to ruling class can become King.
- Only men can become kings.
This kind of a system in which actors and processes depend upon certain non-universal and non-neutral rules and values and their application depend upon the birth, position and other partial values rather than merit (skills and capabilities), mode of participation and other neutral values is called a Hysterical System. On the other hand, a system in which there is no partiality and processes and actors depend upon neutral universal rules or say processes are called Procedural Systems. Rationality is supposed to be inbuilt in above mentioned system if replaced by participative democracy in which anyone can become the head of the state based on favor from majority of the members of the state will be a procedural system.
Let us come back to design, there are always different types of forces active to create systems according to it. Therefore we can find certain types of attributes common in different members/participants of a system. We can integrate these common attributes and make analytical studies upon it taking it a representative identity. This representative identity can be called ideal type.
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Human, like animals, was having procedural systems in the very beginning of its history but the emergence of society, culture, larger visible and invisible forces destroyed the naturally evolved procedural system and we fell into hysterical system. From very beginning of our organized life, there have been such visionaries and leaders who always tried to reestablish the procedural one. Actually our history is the history of transitions from hysterical to procedural and vice-versa.
What is the best attribute of the machine for which it is liked most? Similar set of inputs give similar outputs. Yeah! It seems to be completely rational and procedural. It gives us a great control over the processes and we can manipulate as per our will. This control is continued and universalized with a standard set of measurement units. Indus Civilization was the first to develop a complete set of perfect measurement units supporting marvels of engineering (4500 years ago). It was the beginning of the controlled rationality.
What is law and why do we need it? Why should it be common to all? Probably our classification answers it. The first substantial recorded history of law is Hammurabi’s Code. A humanist will find it to be very severe as it curses death easily to anyone as well as it is based on the principle of “tit for tat”. Some of the examples are:
- If anyone bring an accusation against a man, and the accused go to the river and leap into the river, if he sink in the river his accuser shall take possession of his house. But if the river prove that the accused is not guilty, and he escape unhurt, then he who had brought the accusation shall be put to death, while he who leaped into the river shall take possession of the house that had belonged to his accuser.
- If a Builder build a house for someone, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built fall in and kill its owner, then that builder shall be put to death.
Before making any laughter, let us look deeper into the contexts of the laws. Hammurabi lived nearly around 1760 BCE. At that time we didn’t have sophisticated courts, lawyers, lie-detecting machines and many of the present organizational or scientific techniques which make judicial process humane. But anyway, introduction of a neutral law was a big achievement.
The third wave of rationality created new dimensions around 5th century BCE all across the world. In India, we see Gautam Buddha and Vardhman Mahavir protesting against the excessive controlled rationality of Bramanism. They explicitly focused that how personal freedom and negation to external control can be created, co-existed and sustained; and similar were the Greek philosophers Aristotle, Plato and Socrates. We see that the Greeks stressed more on attributes of materials as symbolizing this universal coexistence while Indians focused on non-material universalization. A third perspective developed in China by Confucius who introduced well defined state actors, personal morality and codified behavior for all members and processes of the Chinese state. A more politically inclined perspective is found in Arthashastra by Chanakya who rigorously deals with state actors, political processes, political economy and foreign policies. In this same period, we see feminism, universal declaration of Human Rights, an urge for sustainable development and emergence of rationality (the issues we are talking in 21st Century) under Emperor Ashoka in the same empire founded by Chanakya. So in one side there are extremes of controlled rationality and there are struggles for more personal space. And all are said to have rationality in their contexts.
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This era was not followed by any other great procedural shift but one can find a great hysterical shift as controls became more and more prominent over time. When we started with ages, we found controls creating neutrality (measurement units in Harappan Period) but gradually we see it to be resulting into hysterical one. Why?
When a control is created in a particular era against disarray, it promises to create neutrality but to support this neutrality it creates hegemonies, and these hegemonies, without visionaries try to maintain the older visions created under contemporary contexts, and hence go hysterical! So, continuity through regular updations is the key to maintain a system procedural.
Spread of Buddhism, emergence of Christianity and Islam started with a neutral appeal but very soon after their beginning, they became hegemonic. Instead of improving themselves they promoted controlled rationality and we trapped into the Dark Ages. This was the worst time in human history of rationality.
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The Dark Age was not completely dark. We had visionaries across the world, keeping their minds and acts anew. In our popular language/terminology, we call them scientists, sufis, bhaktas and saints. The ideas of these great visionaries spread across the world and we see an era of renaissance in Europe. Controls were challenged even at the risks of lives. Europe (and somewhat India also) seemed to be war place between hysterical and procedural systems. Art, astronomy, mathematics, sciences and democracy started taking their modern shapes and giving rationality newer faces.
Here again, we see different paradigms emerging in Asia (excluding middle-east and central Asia) and Europe. In India (or China and South-East Asia) we had people like Kabir who stressed more on spiritual rather than material or political needs which were prominent in Europe. The sharp distinction can be attributed to many reasons. Prosperity in Asia (excluding middle-east and central Asia) didn’t require day-to-day survival struggle against nature while it was most important in European and middle-east countries. So, they had only few options like migration, go for trade or exploit surplus regions of world through military conquests. Islamic military raids or European search for India were perfectly rational in their terms of survival. We, the colonized parts of Asia may say it to be irrational. So now we see regionalization of rationality. We will have a detailed discussion in later parts.
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New machines were being invented which replaced human (partially) in textile production. They were faster, cheaper, indifferent and controllable. The idea of control over such bigger machines gave rationality a greater designable aspect. There was an acute need of cheap workers in factories and agriculture was sufficient for British farmers to sustain. Although factory wages were sometimes higher than other unskilled industries, male workers were originally reluctant to enter the workforce because they lost their independence. As a result, the bulk of the factory workforce came from the more exploitable sector of the population: women and children. It is estimated that in 1838 only 23% of textile workers were adult men. As the factory system progressed, more men entered the workforce and women were gradually confined to the domestic sphere. Early unions were often male dominated and saw women workers as competition. Many men who lost control over their work by being reduced to factory automations reasserted control through domestic violence at home or against women in workplace. Here two issues are discussed; we will focus them one by one.
Productivity of male is more than that of women and children, so it was very much needed to bring them to factories. So, deliberately relief to agriculture and poor were abolished through reforms in Poor Law Act (1834, Britain) and men were forced to come to factories. It also created a scenario of free labor market; in fact cities in England originated due to Industrial Revolution. Similarly, we can see the ideas of free-trade and liberal government coming into picture.
The status of women in primary industrial society is a debatable issue. We can see here that women has been replaced by men `from factories and at the same time, a virtual competition has started between man and women for resource control and decision-making. The stereotyping of women as stupid, less intelligent and commodity can be traced back to this competition.
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Enlightenment: it is not a word only; it represents a revolt against controlled rationality. It liberates human from the basic hegemonic controls of anything.
France is in the heart of Europe. By the end of 18th century, it became the center of battle between hysterical and procedural systems. On one side, there were Church, Royal Family, different state actors, all sorts of undemocratic practices and mismanaged market practices and on the other hand there were intellectuals and mass which came out massively to eliminate all these odds. Enlightenment was the key to this revolution.
Liberty, Fraternity and Equality are three basic requirements of a system to become neutral. French Revolution showed the path to the world with the Declaration of the Rights of Men and Citizen. It was 2nd to Emperor Ashoka’s Declaration. The declaration said that “the aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.” If we replace man with human then it becomes the UN Declaration of Human Rights, 1948. And if we look at “All living entities in my state are my children” declaration by Emperor Ashoka, we enter into a bigger domain of rationality having implicit sustenance.
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Machines machines everywhere, not an activity left.
Make bigger and complex machines, generate more money and again make a more complex machines. Control compounds. Make humans obsessed with these machines and money, so that they will always tend for greater controls. Control makes one impersonal, so experiment for impersonal designs. Greater impersonality, more neutrality, more rationality: we are reaching towards 2nd industrial revolution marked by giant assembly lines in USA where a person is basically an automated unit (many of them really replaced by robots and automatic processes). Here we see hegemonic growth again leading towards hysterical pathways but it is continuously countered by ideas emerging everyday in large numbers. We can say it a sustainable procedural model. But it is one-sided story, we will discuss in details later.
French Revolution said that a person is born free and equal, but the system of machine-based control always gave some people hysterical advantage of means of production. This advantage resulted into a society dominated by capitalists and soon there were a large number of wage laborers who were marginalized in all respects. So again, some visionaries propagated the idea of a socialst society in which no one will have any hysterical advantage, instead, practically, state became the level-player acquiring the paramount hegemony over its citizen. It was Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and Socialist Revolution in China.
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“Naked Fakir”: it was the appraisal for a 70 year old coming downstairs in Imperial Office, London. He was holding a stick, wearing half dhoti (and covering body with the rest half) and was fighting with the strongest government of its time with simple weapons of truth and non-violence. His truth and non-violence are implicitly imbedded in life giving strength for “satyagraha”. He was against party-politics; strong supporter of localization and decentralization of powers within an economy and demanded more space for individual even in the presence of state. The ideas of globalization, mechanization and fast growth with lucrative practices and conspicuous material outlook are anti-Gandhi. We see that as we are building our capacities to understand sustainable development, these are the most promising perspectives!
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Every year more than 500 students take admissions in Undergraduate courses at IIT Kanpur. In the beginning all are equally treated in a perfectly neutral environment. During orientation period, there are some rules applied commonly to them: Golden Rules. These are:
- Do not argue with seniors
- Seniors are always right
- In case of any confusion or dispute, refer the above two
These rules give seniors a supreme lead over incoming juniors and continue for more than 15 days. So it causes a perfect orientation of their minds. For past few years, we see a greater proportion of students going for easy-money jobs like consultancy or management or finance. The tastes and distastes for particular ideas and institutions build at this time and continue up to his/her undergraduate study at IIT Kanpur. Until or unless (s)he undergoes a stronger orientation program, this mindset continues till his/her life, even though (s)he realizes very soon that (s)he had been stupefied. One of the biggest benefit seniors get is getting students motivated towards cultural festivals and hall rivalries. Larger the size of festival, more they can show their managerial capabilities (here managerial is a generic word used at IIT Kanpur to represent skills for organizing an event with a bigger pomp and plunder), better the job they think to get. Similarly, greater hall rivalries, more will be scope of lobbying for different posts in festivals and Students’ Gymkhana, more managerial skills to learn and greater the probability of getting a job in finance, consultancy or management.
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For this subsection, rationality means calculability, predictability, efficiency, automation and control over uncertainties.
Max Weber had extensively worked upon rationalization. It is the process making someone rational. He thinks that rationality is an eventual outcome of process of industrialization and capitalism. He assumes that systems were hysterical before that so they were irrational.
Control and determinism are the biggest contributors to rationality. it is reflected in calculability, predictability, efficiency, automation and control over uncertainties. Since the machines and uniform capitalistic laws support these on a massive scale, so mechanization and capitalism are carriers of rationality. it doesn’t mean that he didn’t support personal pursuit of interests, but he stressed that means should be universal, and deterministic.
The organizations and actions known to be modern are very controlled, neutral and deterministic. Greater it is rational more it sustains, propagates and greater are the chances that it will become hegemonic like what has happened multiple times in the past (discussed above).
Weber has classified rationality in four types:
a. Practical rationality: A person is free to follow any path to attain its final goal depending upon the contemporary circumstances, once it is defined that his goal is a rational choice.
b. Theoretical rationality: it is the rationality of ideal types not dealing directly with real life.
c. Substantive rationality: An individual is not always running for a rational end or a determined target. (S)he has a lot of life components which are done without much universally controlled and deterministic output. Taking bath in a small town like village (like my native place Katoria, Bihar) is an example. A person can take bath in tap inside bathroom, take bath at government hand pump or well, take bath in a pond or the river flowing nearby. There is no any determinism or set of rules deciding which one is better or efficient. In other words, it can be referred as a set of freedoms at personal level. It is substantive rationality. it is an uncontrolled procedural system.
d. Formal rationality: When processes try to develop continuity, they evolve hegemony over personal procedures; rather they focus upon larger procedures as we have seen that greater and efficient machines gave greater control which evolved more and more controlled universalism. This universalism is strengthened by economic, legal, and scientific institutions, as well as in the bureaucratic form of domination.
Weber felt that advent of technologies; capitalism and formal burocracy symbolize growth of hegemony of formal rationality which will restrict creative social actions. His feelings are supported by matrician evolution of consumerism.
Weber had extensively analyzed the design of rationality. He said that market needs indifference, calculable determinism and a level player (money); people and governments are trained to support it as a rational choice. To attain all these it applies appropriation, market, rational technology, free labor markets and commercialization of every aspect of our economic life.
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Water resources in Chili can be a private commodity. One can own a river! Mining firms at Quillagua, world’s driest place, is prospered by Loa River. A mining firm Soquimich (SQM) owns 75% of the rights in Quillagua. Now the river is completely controlled, its water flow, uses of water, species flourishing in it everything determined. Perfect rationality! Relative humidity of the region is nearly zero as it is extremely dry. Living things in the water have died; it is neither crops nor livestock getting natural support from the river they were getting earlier. And now, people around it also suffering a lot so most of the people below 50s have migrated from the city. Only old and helpless are left at the mercy of these firms and God.
One can find that the initial stage of river sharing was very procedural but later, firms got a hegemonic control and the system became hysterical. After all, the question underlies: what is more rational: social efficiency or economic efficiency.
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China has made a tremendous progress in recent decades with its sustainably high growth rates. This growth has given Chinese government so much power that it is now trying to promote its interests across the world. But what is Chinese Govt.? It is an amalgamation of power, capital and military (physical strength). People and environment, both are not respected much and it is the country and the party getting top priorities. So it became the most green house gas emitting nation (overtaken USA). If Chinese policies or success are there to confine its boundaries then it is not a big challenge but when its Oil firms fund ethnic cleansing by Janjawee Militia (Darfur, Sudan) or its pollutants accumulate over Canadian air disturbing the whole natural cycle and kind of species living then it really requires serious attention. Some days ago, China had conducted world’s largest artificial snowfall and now Govt is going to create two artificial rivers supplying water to its north. The point which is common is comprehensive control and determinism enjoyed by the Govt. This dominance is increasing day by day and more and more countries are now being inclined towards this Govt model. This is the whole challenge. Hegemonies are alarmingly increasing.
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Before 2nd World War was about to end, USA got a paramount position in control over capital and energy. So, its policy makers decided that capital intensive and energy intensive practices, whatsoever it may be, will make people across the world more and more dependent on USA. So with the help of its financial, scientific and political instruments and institutions, it became the propagator of unsustainable development across the world on such a large scale that only China is matching it.
GDP has been made the indicator of economic development as it is directly related to capital accumulation. GDP can be increased only if consumerism is increased. So USA tried to increase consumerism massively within and outside its boundaries. A human identity was reduced to a consumer fed up with ideas poured in by advertisements floating in the mass and private media. It is not just feeding, it is a kind of attack over individual identity. Society, systems and lifestyle had been so much intervened by these forces so that everything has been made perfect, calculable and deterministic. Japan is the most suitable example. However there have been region-specific approach in this design and different strategies have been applied for different regions of the world.
This trend is being followed by all countries of this world. 5% Americans (315 million) need 20% of world resources. How many earths we will be needed for its nearly 7 billion population if everybody follows that model?
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Arab is the center of controlled Islam. It has got a lot of oil money, so it started designing of a bigger control over the thinking of the Muslim population across the world. USA had a convergent interest, so it employed its military for this purpose and got a control over world oil politics (energy and capital) in turn. And USSR had to be stopped by USA at all costs (Eisenhower Doctrine), so USA also got people to contain the growth of USSR.
In 1979, there was a Islamic (Shia) revolution in Iran and in the same year, USSR attacked Afghanistan. So USA and representative Arab countries (Saudi Arabia and its allies) decided to contain both. So they started supporting the idea of hardcore Arab Centric Sunni ideologies like Wahhabism. Thousands of mosques were erected across the world (especially Pakistan) preaching this radical form of Islam. Consequently, Muslim societies across the world became more and more fundamentalized, Taliban and other Islamist groups sprang-up across the world and the cultural sphere was completely excluded. One can see that many of the cultural aspects propagate freedom at individual level, so hegemonies always tried to either eradicate culture (Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Taliban) or propagate the designed one (consumerism culture by USA, Arabic Islam in south Asian and south-east Asian countries). A very simple example is replacement of Khuda Hafiz (Indo-Persian) by Allah Hafiz (Arabic). In short run, it provided fighters against USSR and ideological unity of Sunnis but now it is biting back USA and Pakistan. It is worth mentioning that Pakistan has been culturally very sound even after it was carved out of India. But the radicalization process has made Pakistani Society so habituated to anti-cultural violence and terrorism that the recent attack on Sri Lankan Cricket Team was hardly countered by Pakistani security personnel and society both (viz. easy exit of attackers from a posh area in Lahore with heavy arms and ammunitions).
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After trade embargo, Cuba has evolved one of the best agricultural practices in the world. Life expectancy of Cubans is more than that of Americans (USA), there are more number of doctors per unit of population and they use one eighth energy as compared to USA. They also use minimum energy and minimum capital technologies; their economy has evolved localized models eliminating any scope for multinationals to commercialize every aspect of life. Not only this, community services and activities have developed so much that they have several models of collective ownership.
Scandinavian countries are systematically eliminating commercialization of life step-by-step; the boldest one was commercialization of sex. It helped a lot in controlling women trafficking, forced sex and eroticization of women (though increased after 1990s but recent laws are decreasing it). We have seen above that women have been portrayed as competitor of men in the beginning of industrial revolution, so violence against women, their objectification and their identity crisis have been systematically nurtured.
European and American countries are outsourcing their pollution; Asian countries are receiving carbon credits and carbon-tax is another kind of compensation for the pollution caused by rich. These ideas are propagated as solutions to future sustainable development, but they are not so. In a conversation to BBC, Wangari Mathai (Nobel Peace Prize winner) was saying that if you want forests and wildlife to exist and at the same time, you want to commercially exploit forests then there will be neither restoration, no conservation.
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Local economy, less energy and less capital intensive technology and lifestyle, decommercialization of certain aspects of our life and heterogeneous outlook to world eradicating universal systems and practices could be the starting points. Money as a level player needs to be displaced and GDP must be replaced by a more inclusive and well designed Human Development Index. Profit maximization and efficiency increment are implicit to our idea of rationality; these should be supplemented by implicit sustenance. All attempts of hegemonies need to be eliminated through decentralization of resources and authorities, means participative democracy must be promoted. Britain is witnessing a no-party election campaign for next general elections. In this regard, Gandhism must be revisited.
The ideas dominating the world till last century were mainly European, so we could see materials at the top. But this century is Asian Century, therefore we can hope beyond saying that human body is only a combination of different chemicals, parts and components!
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