Reviving the Invisible Hand by Lal Deepak;

Author:Lal, Deepak;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Modernization and Westernization

The Response of Wounded Civilizations

With the rise and global expansion of the West, the other Eurasian civilizations faced a dilemma. With their ancient equilibrium disturbed, most often by force of superior arms, how could their wounded civilizations come to terms with the West without losing their souls? There were essentially three responses. The first was to modernize by imitating the West: by adopting its material beliefs including the accompanying artifacts which provide military and economic strength, but without adopting Western cosmological beliefs. The second was to adopt the attitude of the clam for fear of a modernization that would undermine ancient traditions. The third was to find a middle ground between tradition and modernity.

During the Meiji Revolution, Japan, following its opening by Commodore Perry’s “black ships,” took the first route. It was the first to recognize that modernization (involving a change in material beliefs) did not entail Westernization (a change in its cosmological beliefs). The second route was advocated by sundry cultural nationalists, particularly in India by Gandhi and his followers—including till recently the Bhartiya Janata Party— the Hindu nationalist party. The third route was taken by all those countries which found a middle way in various variants of socialism to reconcile modernity with tradition. India and China have epitomized this route. The countries of Islam have tried all three routes, from Attaturk’s Turkey to Nasser’s Egypt (which took the first and third routes), to the current Islamists of the Muslim world (who want to follow the second route).

The third route of finding a middle ground between tradition and modernity was the most commonly taken. This usually took some socialist form. For socialism has its roots in both the Enlightenment, which sees all social and economic structures as open to rationalist manipulation to subserve universal human goals, and the romantic critique of modernization based on these rationalist ideas. The young Marx and the indigenous English socialist tradition represented by William Morris and R. H. Tawney took up the romantic critique. Fabian socialism, which has had the most appeal in the Third World, combined these two faces of socialism—the manipulative, utilitarian socialism of the Webbs (the Enlightenment strand) with the passionate critique of a dehumanizing capitalist society of Morris and Tawney (adherents of the romantic expressivist tradition). This form of socialism provided a formula for reconciling the two ambivalent rejections of the traditional and the modern which is the unique feature of this route.58

The Emerging Giants—India and China

Jawaharlal Nehru was the most eloquent exponent of this form of reconciliation of tradition with modernity.59 In his autobiography he wrote:

[R]ight through human history the old Indian ideal did not glorify political and military triumph, and it looked down upon money and the professional money making class. Honor and wealth did not go together, and honor was meant to go, at least in theory, to the men who served the community with little in the shape of financial reward. Today (the old culture) is fighting silently and desperately against a new all-powerful opponent—the Bania (Vaishya) civilization of the capitalist West.

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