Revelation and Reason Part I

Modernisation is not Modernism

A Srinivas Rao

1^st May 2011

Sangay Lobsang of Harvard was appointed last week as the Prime Minister of the Tibetans and more than 500 years of tradition yielded to a modern view of separation of the Church ( as represented by the Dalai Lama) from the State. Somewhere along the way, the discomfiture within Islam in our times also stems from the unitary conception of Church and State and the inability to separate the two. Of course there is no hierarchically organized church in Islam (nor is there one in Vajrayana Buddhism). Yet the principle of separating the institutions of the state fashioned on reason and church founded on faith and revelation has been inexorably continuing on a secular trajectory.  All modern institutions of the state and by contagion all public institutions (except those of religion) follow this as a cardinal principle, including the separation of the domain of ethics from that of religion. Indeed the definition of modernity is often predicated on such a separation of powers; a quarantine between faith and reason. Often when as a faculty I have noticed well meaning prayer invocations in Sanskrit and celebration of religious festivals, I have felt that the school more than others must reflect on the place of religion in society and while giving it its due, keep enshrined not loyalties or traditions but reason in its prayer halls. What is the genesis of this and what are the values it assumes and makes us complicit in is what I would attempt to write.

Most people I know of are shy of facing the issue of faith squarely. The reasons are not difficult to fathom. The discomfort that most people have is the dualism that is implicit in our values between faith and reason. Both ends of the dualism are subject to much abuse and the horrors of the twentieth century were often the result of excesses committed in the name of either end of the spectrum be they faith, ethnicity, race, emotion on one hand and reason, instrumentality, efficiency, order and freedom on the other. What is interesting is that modernity, as a condition that we are complicit in, is underscored by the values of what is called the (European) Enlightenment. We unconsciously follow those values and on reflection see the seams especially when it pulls and tugs at traditional societies like India and China. Thus modernism is not just modernisation which is what adhunikaran (in India) and xiandaihua are about. Xiandaihua (as described by the critic Eric Li) is the Chinese model of modernisation of tempered economic freedom but no political freedom of association, free press etc. This is a modernity which is against the grain in which we consume and enjoy the technologies and sciences that ameliorate our existence. Here I am using the terms modernity and modernism one as a condition and another as a set of beliefs and values as rooted in the European Enlightenment (not modernism the art movement also by the same name). Often we find that adhunikaran runs up against values of the Enlightenment bringing into sharp relief what basis our modernism has.

Modernism is the espousal of the values of the Enlightenment and also its spectrum of counter currents challenging them in the 20^th century.  What then is the Enlightenment? This was a question asked towards the end of the 18^th century the period which is historically referred to as the Enlightenment and Kant in an essay titled the question using the term Aufklarung (1784) and exhorted the people to ‘dare”; to dare to know (Sapere Aude) and trust their own understanding. That was the historical enlightenment project that took place all over Europe, especially Germany and France; and what we are concerned is about the values they enshrined. They include among others rationality, secularism, liberalism, constitutional democracy and the notion of inalienable human rights, pluralism, scientific temper, republicanism (as against monarchy) and a repudiation of priest craft and superstition, belief in progress etc.  “Nothing is required for this Enlightenment except freedom; the freedom to question …..to use reason publicly in all matters” wrote Kant. The rejection of the hegemony of religion over thought was the valorisation of the human subject and his autonomy, and capacity for self-governance as well as his moral responsibility. It is this autonomy based on reciprocal responsibility that gives birth to all our modern institutions, democracy, rule of law, civil liberties etc. The Enlightenment project is a work in process and can never claim to be over.

The march of the Enlightenment was in its history countered several times and does so even today. Its principal challenger was the movement called Romanticism. Romanticism rejected the privilege that reason was accorded by the Enlightenment and in turn sought to retrieve traditional sources of authority such as tradition, love, race, nationalism, God, genius, emotion in the place of reason. The Romantics insisted on the primacy of subjectivity, emotions, the visionary and the non-rational. If the Enlightenment was criticised for the cold imperiousness of reason and its reductionism, the Romanticists had the rash of nationalism, racism, Fascism and Stalinism at its door steps. Reason gave birth however to the technocratic corporatism of our times, transferring power to legions of managers. The structural complexity of society is presided over by managers and their goals are not always chosen on grounds of morality but usually profit or self interest.

Often we are unable to discern the contesting frameworks that fashion the modern view of India. There are at least three different visions that are all contesting dominance in building the modern Idea of India. The first is that of the modernist as envisaged by Nehru and the Left, the second is the ‘hindutva’ as described by Savarkar and the sangh parivar, and the third is the pluralist, essayed by Gandhi and Tagore and which was open to a wide religious tolerance, was rural, and decentralised. After independence it is the modernist vision that prevailed which recognised Indian identity as more political in nature than civilizational or cultural (as the Sangh would have preferred). The modernist vision was based on a civic nationalism based on the constitution and its political system. The vision failed to give voice to sub regional and linguistic aspirations and identities and failed to have any place for religion in its conduct. The ‘hindutva’ view was authoritarian and not egalitarian and did lot have a coherent view of what it was to be ‘hindu’, and failed to acknowledge the multi strandedness of Indian civilization. The pluralist view seems to be rather romantic in its appeal but have had few leaders after Gandhi with the vision to essay its contours as against the modernist idea. Despite its failures the modernist vision continues as its flaws seem much fewer than that of ‘Hindutva’ which seemingly veers towards a Romanticism of civilization, counter to the grain of the Enlightenment and always holds the threat of becoming Fascist.

Indeed I must argue that we need to find our own indigenous sources of strength based on conditions and institutions that we populate and not emulate the West blindly. But until then we must be careful in our thinking and understanding the basis of what constitutes our modernity and its assumptions and sources (there is of course the whole field of post colonial or sub-altern studies that interrogates these ideas differently). Eventually we might build our own institutional architectures that may be indigenously grounded or a hybrid of cross influences rooted in local improvisation. Whatever the outcomes, these waters run deep.