Why The Elite Have Faith In Democracy - The Irrational Reasons First

[For the sequel, Why The Elite Have Faith In Democracy - The Rational Reasons, click on the title.]

When Stanley J Tambiah identifies democracy as the cause of violence in South Asia, we should not be surprised. “The general theme of whether democracy as a political process and the democratic state as a system intensify the occurrence of violence is an old one in the history of political theory. From the Greeks onwards, even up to the nineteenth century, many theorists, perhaps most, associated democracy with civil strife, and it is only subsequently that this became a minority view (Levelling Crowds, Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia (New Delhi: Vistaar Publications, 1997), p 262).”

The minority view is not held by the elite of Bangladesh (or of South Asia). Why do they persist in believing in a system that is shown to be dangerous by empirical evidence? There are two reasons for this tenacity: one rational, another irrational.

First, the irrational.

The psychology of an elite has deep roots in experience, not so much immediate, but distant, as is history. We have seen outgroup-ingroup hostility and favoritism at work (in the context of Bangladesh, what West Pakistan did to ‘us’ is beyond criminal, but what ‘we’ did to ourselves, as in the famine of 1974 and other events of the period, must not be discussed; in India, Narendra Modi may be a ‘massmurderer’ but he’s ‘our’ mass murderer, and so on.) However, society at any given time consists of groups that dominate other groups. Heavily influenced by evolutionary psychology, the group dominance theory, chiefly associated with Jim Sidanius and his colleagues, views society as inherently oppressive and group oppression to be the “normal, default, condition of human relations” (Political Psychology, p 174 – 175).  Sidanius argues that

“most forms of oppression including racism, ethnocentrism (including the oppression of religious minorities such as Jews) sexism, nationalism, and classism and as well as a number of other social attitudes, human drives and social institutions function, in part, to help establish and maintain the integrity of this group-based hierarchical structure.”

An interesting corollary to this theory is the notion of outgroup favouritism. Outgroup favouritism or deference occurs among lower-status groups in relation to higher-status ones. Sidanius’ example is that of Uncle Tomming by blacks towards whites in the segregation era. A Scottish observer said of freed slaves that “chains of a stronger kind still manacled their limbs, from which no legislative act could free them; a mental and moral subordination and inferiority to which tyrant custom has here subjected all the sons and daughters of Africa (Scott Christianson, With Liberty for Some: 500 Years of Imprisonment in America (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), p 142 – 143).” Lower-status groups may also under-achieve due to lower social expectations.

The corresponding example from South Asia may be Dr Azizzing after the fictitious character Dr. Aziz in E M Forster’s A Passage to India (1924).

Pherozeshah Mehta, one of the early graduates from the University of Bombay, speaking in 1867, drew attention to “the strong Anglicising undercurrent which has begun through the deeper instincts of Indian students”. With pride, he predicted: “There will ere long be produced in India a body of men out-Heroding Herod, more English than the English themselves”. The instrument was English-language education. In 1860, there were 40,366 students in the schools of Bengal receiving an English-language education; in Madras Presidency, the number was 6,552 and in Bombay, 2,984. The number of university graduates in Bengal, Madras and Bombay were, respectively, 28, 11 and 8; in 1885, the corresponding figures were 264, 163 and 72 (South Asia, pp 180 – 181). My late uncle went to Presidency College in Calcutta, where he once blurted out a few words in Bengali for which he received a severe reprimand from the teacher: English was the intra-mural language!

In 1882, the headquarters of the Theosophical Society was moved from New York to Adyyar near Madras. For a brief period, Madame Blavatsky, a co-founder, lived in India. Speaking at Banaras, she said: “If the modern Hindus were less sycophantic to their Western masters, less in love with their vices, and more like their ancestors”, they would acquire mastery, through occult power (South Asia, p 182).  

“In any town in India,” writes George Orwell in Burmese Days (1934), “the European Club is the spiritual citadel, the real seat of the British power, the Nirvana for which native officials and millionaires pine in vain. It was doubly so in this case, for it was the proud boast of Kyauktada Club that, almost alone of Clubs in Burma, it had never admitted an Oriental to membership.” Thus, Orwell gives brick-and-mortar shape to the psychology of the ruler-ruled relationship that was the Raj, where a couple of hundred thousand British soldiers controlled teeming millions.

Dr. Veraswami befriends our anti-hero, Flory, and urges the latter to let him join the Club to escape the machinations of U Po Kyin, Sub-divisional Magistrate of Kyauktada.

“And you do not know what prestige it gives to an Indian to be a member of the European Club.  In the Club, practically he iss a European,” observes the good doctor. The members naturally object to having a ‘nigger’ in their midst. “He's asking us to break all our rules and take a dear little nigger-boy into this Club.”

Dr. Veraswami’s admiration for the British is pathetic. “Dr Veraswami had a passionate admiration for the English, which a thousand snubs from Englishmen had not shaken.  He would maintain with positive eagerness that he, as an Indian, belonged to an inferior and degenerate race.”  Flory and the doctor have a regularly comic conversation, in which the Englishman knocks down the English and Veraswami defends them. Dr. Veraswami says: “'My friend, my friend, you are forgetting the Oriental character. How iss it possible to have developed us, with our apathy and superstition?  At least you have brought to us law and order. The unswerving British Justice and the Pax Britannica.”

The frankest expression of cultural cringe –as we may call this type of outgroup favouritism -  flowed from the pen of Nirad C. Chaudhuri, who favoured all things British against all things Indian: “...all that was good and living within us was made, shaped and quickened by the same British rule (quoted, Mark Tully, No Full Stops In India (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1993), p 57).”

Swami Dayananda, founder of the Arya Samaj (Society of Arians) in Bombay, in 1875, famously tried to show that all Western scientific knowledge had been revealed in the Vedas – telecommunications, ships, aircraft, gravity and gravitational attraction (Peter Van Der Veer, Imperial Encounters (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2006), p 50).

The South Asian elite are in a parlous state. Spare a thought for Martin Kampchen, who wrote from Santiniketan: “Several daily newspapers of Calcutta flashed the news of Jhumpa Lahiri’s wedding in Calcutta as their first-page leader, complete with a colourful photo of the happy couple. First I thought: O happy Bengal! You still honour your poets as the ancient civilisations used to do. And for a moment I remained in this innocent bliss of satisfaction. Then it dawned on me that not any writer’s marriage is accorded such flattering coverage. Only expatriates who have ‘made it good’ abroad, who have ‘done the country proud’, are subjected to such exaggerated honours (The Daily Star, 27th January, 2001).”  Jhumpa Lahiri had just won the Pulitzer for her collection of short stories, The Interpreter of Maladies.

Before he became prime minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan used to insult some people by calling them Brown Sahibs (maybe he still does). Most of his friends fit that description – which means they ape the dress, habits and affectations of the former British colonial masters. Indeed, Khan himself used very much to be a Brown Sahib. “His English is more polished than his Punjabi,” according to the Independent.

In 2006, a photo of then prime minister Khaleda Zia taken by Shahidul Alam was printed on the cover of Time magazine. The Daily Star, the leading English daily of Bangladesh, made a point of mentioning the fact in its pages (April 14, 2006): “We would also like to take this opportunity to commend Mr. Alam for being the first Bangladeshi photographer whose work has been featured on the cover of Time magazine.” Alam had ‘made it’ in the west, so he had to be ‘honoured’.

“You mention the name Bangladesh to a westerner and wait for his or her first reaction and what you hear may not please your ear” lamented the now-defunct English daily The Bangladesh Observer in its cover story (October 20^th, 2006). But all is not lost! Mohammed Yunus and his Grameen Bank had won the Nobel Peace Prize, rekindling “the (sic) Bengali nationalism in the teeming millions”. Never mind that a connection, however tenuous, between a Nobel Prize for microcredit and Bengali nationalism, is not immediately obvious. The former, conferred by the outgroup, raises the prestige of the latter.

James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), the first American novelist, knew all about cultural cringe, and was probably the first person to articulate the phenomenon of cultural imperialism. Consider this footnote from his novel Afloat and Ashore (1844):

‘The miserable moral dependence of this country on Great Britain, forty years since, cannot well be brought home to the present generation. It is still too great, but has not a tithe of its former force. The writer has himself known an Italian prince, a man of family and high personal merit, pass unnoticed before a society that was eager to make the acquaintance of most of the agents of the Birmingham button dealers; and this simply because one came from Italy and the other from England....(Afloat and ashore, a sea tale (New York, Hurd and Houghton, 1871), p 439n).”

Despite the fact of American independence, the reality was that Americans still suffered from a colonial mentality. His book had been ‘puffed’ in England, which gave it greater mystique in America.      

A more recent case of cultural cringe has been detected down under. In fact, the term has been coined to cover the feeling that Australia is only a reflection of the mother country. In “The Lucky Country” (1964), Donald Horne famously suggested focus on Asia as an alternative to the “sometimes humiliating attempts to keep up the family relationship with Europeans…It is in dealings with Asian countries that Australians might regain a sense of confidence and importance” (Quoted in The Economist, December 14th, 1996, ‘Australia’s Identity Crisis’, pp 35-37). In the ensuing brouhaha, the thought got buried in static. Nevertheless, Paul Keating went down in history as the man who suggested ingratiatingly in Singapore that ‘mateship’ was an Asian value!

Parents in Bangladesh proudly announce that their children live in Britain, America, Canada or Australia. Living in the Middle East just doesn’t cut it. As an English teacher, I can vouch for the fact that those fluent in English positively look down on those lacking English. One of my former students said that she hated English medium students who proudly say they are weak in Bengali, the mother tongue. And this despite years of Bengali nationalism – Bengalism – when teaching in English was prohibited up to the age of 16. Father Peixotto, an American, delivered his physics lectures at Notre Dame College in the 1970s in Bengali, despite complaints from the students that he couldn’t be understood. He insisted he was required by law to lecture in Bengali. All that is over, of course. English medium schools have spawned all over the country. On YouTube, young people in intimate talk shows such as this one with D J Sonica combine fluent English with Bengali, which is considered ‘cool’ (modern). 

The intelligentsia to which people like Tahmima Anam belong (her mother, Shaheen Anam, is executive director of the mega-NGO, Manusher Jonno (For the People), which dispenses donor money to lesser NGOs), have extra-rational as well as rational motives. To observe one extra-rational motive yet again, consider that a lasting insult in Bangladesh is to call somebody “a Bangalee” (speaker of Bengali) – the antithesis of a westerner, lacking in refinement, sophistication, upbringing. Echoes of Macaulay, who had some nasty things to say about Bengalis, reverberate even today. This is a classic case of ‘outgroup favouritism’, Uncle Tomming or Dr. Azizing, as we saw above.

Imagine, then, what affirmation and rejection by the outgroup mean for the psychology of an intellectual in Bangladesh. It is a commonplace in economics and business that the customer is king, and in our case the customer is the West. But this particular customer is a monopsonist – a single buyer – and has the power to exploit. Liberals rail against colonial and neo-colonial exploitation, but is shtum on this subject.

The result is anti-empiricism.

In her BBCarticle, Tamima Anam continues, “Otherwise, even if the military cleans up the political landscape, even if they arrest all the corrupt politicians, even if they seize the illegal assets and raze the buildings that were made with black money, who will become our new democratic leaders? Who will we be left to believe in? Only those who wrested power in the first place: the army.” (She is referring to the military takeover by General Moeen U Ahmed on January 11, 2007 when the caretaker arrangement came unglued and the country threatened to tear itself apart in an orgy of violence and murder – which Ms. Anam keeps mum about -under the two toxic leaders, ending with elections in December 2008 in which the old Awami League and its leader Sheikh Hasina won.) Note her lament: “Who will be left to believe in?” This need for heroes has landed us with toxic leaders, leaders who seem miraculously to have inherited heroism. It is about time we stopped looking for heroes, and started trusting in our own finite resources, talents and abilities.  

‘The return of the repressed’, in Freudian language, refers to the tendency of repressed psychic material to reemerge in the life of an individual – or society (Continuations in Anthropological Psychology, p 165). Thus, in Europe ‘the spectre of communism’ and, today, fascism and, in America, racism, and anti-Semitism in both have resurfaced to bedevil society. In Bangladesh, the repression of Islam under Sheikh Mujib was reversed by General Zia; the repression of the love of English never quite succeeded in pushing it below the surface, and has come into its own in full daylight. 

Today, everything to do with the white race appears to us as remarkable. The belief that western civilisation is superior to ours is deeply ingrained in the elite. We have relieved the white man of his burden, and carry it on our shoulders. And the white man left us with a democratic burden, which we carry like a cross.

Despite the slaughter of the two world wars, despite the killings in Vietnam, despite the murder of 1.7 million Iraqi children through sanctions, the bombing of Afghanistan and Iraq, our respect for western civilisation remains undimmed. “The white race is the cancer of history,” wrote Susan Sontag, but we believe the white race to be the benefactor of humankind.