The Argumentative Indian

by Amartya Sen

  Finally, on a more specific point, no country has as much stake as India in having a prosperous and civilian democracy in Pakistan. Even though the Nawaz Sharif government was clearly corrupt in many ways, India’s interests are not well served by the undermining of civilian rule in Pakistan, to be replaced by activist military leaders. Also, the encouragement of cross-border terrorism, which India accuses Pakistan of, is likely to be dampened rather than encouraged by Pakistan’s economic prosperity and civilian politics. It is particularly important in this context to point to the dangerousness of the argument, often heard in India, that the burden of public expenditure would be more unbearable for Pakistan, given its smaller size and relatively stagnant economy, than it is for India. This may well be the case, but the penalty that could visit India from an impoverished and desperate Pakistan, in the present situation of massive insecurity, could be quite catastrophic. Strengthening of Pakistan’s stability and enhancement of its well-being has prudential importance for India, in addition to its obvious ethical significance. That central connection – between the moral and the prudential – must be urgently grasped.

  PART FOUR

  Reason and Identity

  13

  The Reach of Reason*

  W. B. Yeats wrote on the margin of his copy of The Genealogy of Morals, ‘But why does Nietzsche think the night has no stars, nothing but bats and owls and the insane moon?’ Nietzsche outlined his scepticism of humanity and presented his chilling vision of the future just before the beginning of the last century – he died in 1900. The events of the century that followed, including world wars, holocausts, genocides and other atrocities that occurred with systematic brutality, give us reason enough to worry whether Nietzsche’s sceptical view of humanity may not have been right.

  Instinct and Humanity

  Jonathan Glover, an Oxford philosopher, argues in his recent and enormously interesting ‘moral history of the twentieth century’ that we must not only reflect on what has happened in the last century, but also ‘need to look hard and clearly at some monsters inside us’ and to consider ways and means of ‘caging and taming them’.1 The end of a century – and of a millennium – is certainly a good moment to engage in critical examinations of this kind. Indeed, as the first millennium of the Islamic Hijri calendar came to an end in 1591–2 (a thousand lunar years – shorter than solar years – after Mohammed’s epic journey from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE), Akbar, the Moghal emperor of India, engaged in just such a far-reaching scrutiny. He paid particular attention to relations among religious communities and to the need for peaceful coexistence in the already multicultural India.

  Taking note of the denominational diversity of Indians (including Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jains, Sikhs, Parsees, Jews and others), he laid the foundations of the secularism and religious neutrality of the state which he insisted must ensure that ‘no man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over to a religion that pleases him’.2 Akbar’s thesis that ‘the pursuit of reason’ rather than ‘reliance on tradition’ is the way to address difficult social problems is a view that has become all the more important for the world today.3

  It is striking how little critical assessment of the experience of the millennium took place during its recent worldwide celebration.4 As the century and the second Gregorian millennium came to an end, the memory of the dreadful events that Glover describes with devastating effect did not seem to stir people much; nor was there much detectable interest in the challenging questions that Glover asks. The lights of celebratory glory not only drowned the stars but also the bats and the owls and the insane moon.

  Nietzsche’s scepticism about ethical reasoning and his anticipation of difficulties to come were combined with an ambiguous approval of the annihilation of moral authority – ‘the most terrible, the most questionable, and perhaps also the most hopeful of all spectacles’, he wrote. Glover argues that we must respond to ‘Nietzsche’s challenge’: ‘The problem is how to accept [Nietzsche’s] scepticism about a religious authority for morality while escaping from his appalling conclusions.’ This issue is related to Akbar’s thesis that morality can be guided by critical reasoning; in making moral judgements, Akbar argued, we must not make reasoning subordinate to religious command, nor rely on ‘the marshy land of tradition’.

  Interest in such questions was particularly strong during the European Enlightenment, which was optimistic about the reach of reason. The Enlightenment perspective has come under severe attack in recent years, and Glover adds his own powerful voice to this reproach.5 He argues that ‘the Enlightenment view of human psychology’ has increasingly looked ‘thin and mechanical’, and ‘Enlightenment hopes of social progress through the spread of humanitarianism and the scientific outlook’ now appear rather ‘naive’. Following an increasingly common tendency, Glover goes on to attribute many of the horrors of the twentieth century to the influence of the Enlightenment. He links modern tyranny with that perspective, noting not only that ‘Stalin and his heirs were in thrall to the Enlightenment’, but also that Pol Pot ‘was indirectly influenced by it’. But since Glover does not wish to seek solutions through the authority of religion or of tradition (in this respect, he notes, ‘we cannot escape the Enlightenment’), he concentrates his fire on other targets, such as reliance on strongly held beliefs. ‘The crudity of Stalinism’, he argues, ‘had its origins in the beliefs [Stalin held].’ This claim is plausible enough, as is Glover’s reference to ‘the role of ideology in Stalinism’.

  However, why is this a criticism of the Enlightenment perspective? It seems a little unfair to put the blame for the blind beliefs of dictators on the Enlightenment tradition, since so many writers associated with the Enlightenment insisted that reasoned choice was superior to any reliance on blind belief. Surely ‘the crudity of Stalinism’ could be opposed, as it indeed was, through a reasoned demonstration of the huge gap between promise and practice, and by showing its brutality – a brutality that the authorities had to conceal through strict censorship. Indeed, one of the main points in favour of reason is that it helps us to transcend ideology and blind belief. Reason was not, in fact, Pol Pot’s main ally. He and his gang of followers were driven by frenzy and badly reasoned belief and did not allow any questioning or scrutiny of their actions. Given the cogency of Glover’s other arguments, there is something deeply puzzling about his willingness to join the fashionable chorus of attacks on the Enlightenment.

  There is, however, an important question that emerges from Glover’s discussion on this subject, too. Are we not better advised to rely on our instincts when we are not able to reason clearly because of some hard-to-remove impediments to our critical thinking? The question is well illustrated by Glover’s remarks on a less harsh figure than Stalin or Pol Pot, namely Nikolai Bukharin, who, Glover notes, was not at all inclined to ‘turn into wood’. Glover writes that Bukharin ‘had to live with the tension between his human instincts and the hard beliefs he defended’. Bukharin was repelled by the actions of the regime, but the surrounding political climate, combined with his own formulaic thinking, prevented him from reasoning clearly enough about them. This, Glover writes, left him dithering between his ‘human instincts’ and his ‘hard beliefs’, with no ‘clear victory for either side’. Glover is attracted by the idea – plausible enough in this case – that Bukharin would have done better to be guided by his instincts. Whether or not we see this as the basis of a general rule, Glover here poses an interesting argument about the need to take account of the situation in which reasoning takes place – and that argument deserves attention (no matter what we make of the alleged criminal tendencies of the Enlightenment).

  Reason and Enlightenment

  The possibility of reasoning is a strong source of hope and confidence in a world darkened by horrible deeds. It is easy to understand why this is so. Even when we find something immediately upsetting, or annoying, we are free to question that response and ask whet
her it is an appropriate reaction and whether we should really be guided by it. We can reason about the right way of perceiving and treating other people, other cultures, other claims, and examine different grounds for respect and tolerance. We can also reason about our own mistakes and try to learn not to repeat them. For example, the Japanese novelist and visionary social theorist Kenzaburo Oe argues powerfully that the Japanese nation, aided by an understanding of its own ‘history of territorial invasion’, has reason enough to remain committed to ‘the idea of democracy and the determination never to wage a war again’.6

  Intellectual enquiry, moreover, is needed to identify actions and policies that are not evidently injurious but which have that effect. For example, famines can remain unchecked on the mistaken presumption that they cannot be averted through immediate public policy. Starvation in famines results primarily from a severe reduction in the food-buying ability of a section of the population that has become destitute through unemployment, diminished markets, disruption of agricultural activities, or other economic calamities. The economic victims are forced into starvation whether or not there is also a diminution of the total supply of food. The unequal deprivation of such people can be immediately countered by providing employment at relatively low wages through emergency public programmes, which can help them to share the national food supply with others in the community.

  Famine, like the devil, takes the hindmost (rarely more than 5 per cent of the population is affected – almost never more than 10 per cent), and reducing the relative deprivation of destitute people by augmenting their incomes can rapidly and dramatically reduce their absolute deprivation in the amount of food obtained by them. By encouraging critical public discussion of these issues, democracy and a free press can be extremely important in preventing famine. Otherwise, unreasoned pessimism, masquerading as composure based on realism and common sense, can serve to ‘justify’ disastrous inaction and an abdication of public responsibility.*

  Similarly, environmental deterioration frequently arises not from any desire to damage the world but from thoughtlessness and lack of reasoned action – separate or joint – and this can end up producing dreadful results.7 To prevent catastrophes caused by human negligence or obtuseness or callous obduracy, we need practical reason as well as sympathy and commitment.

  Attacks on ethics based on reason have come recently from several different directions. Apart from the claim that ‘the Enlightenment view of human psychology’ neglects many human responses (as Glover argues), we also hear the claim that to rely primarily on reasoning in the ethics of human behaviour involves a neglect of culture-specific influences on values and conduct. People’s thoughts and identities are fairly comprehensively determined, according to this claim, by the tradition and culture in which they are reared rather than by analytical reasoning, which is sometimes seen as a ‘Western’ practice. We must examine whether the reach of reasoning is really compromised either by the undoubtedly powerful effects of human psychology, or by the pervasive influence of cultural diversity. Our hopes for the future and the ways and means of living in a decent world may greatly depend on how we assess these criticisms.

  Jonathan Glover’s arguments for the need for a ‘new human psychology’ take account of the ways that politics and psychology affect each other. People can indeed be expected to resist political barbarism if they instinctively react against atrocities. We have to be able to react spontaneously and resist inhumanity whenever it occurs. If this is to happen, the individual and social opportunities for developing and exercising moral imagination have to be expanded. We do have moral resources, including, as Glover writes, ‘our sense of our own moral identity’. But to ‘function as a restraint against atrocity, the sense of moral identity most of all needs to be rooted in the human responses’. Two responses, Glover argues, are particularly important: ‘the tendency to respond to people with certain kinds of respect’ and ‘sympathy: caring about the miseries and the happiness of others’. Hope for the future lies in cultivating such responses, and this line of reasoning leads Glover to conclude: ‘It is to psychology that we should now turn.’

  Indeed, the importance of instinctive psychology and sympathetic response should be adequately recognized, and Glover is also right in believing that our hope for the future must, to a considerable extent, depend on the sympathy and respect with which we respond to things happening to others. For Glover, it is therefore critically important to replace ‘the thin, mechanical psychology of the Enlightenment with something more complex, something closer to reality’.

  While applauding the constructive features of this approach, we must also ask whether Glover is being quite fair to the Enlightenment (even without Pol Pot and assorted criminals blocking our vision). Glover does not refer to Adam Smith, but the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments would, in fact, have greatly welcomed Glover’s diagnosis of the central importance of emotions and psychological response. While it has become fashionable in modern economics to attribute to Smith a view of human behaviour that is devoid of all concerns except cool calculation of a narrowly defined personal interest, those who read his basic works know that this was not his position.8 Indeed, many issues in human psychology that Glover discusses (as part of the demands of ‘humanity’) were discussed by Smith as well. But Smith – no less than Diderot or Condorcet or Kant – was very much an ‘Enlightenment author’, whose arguments and analyses deeply influenced the thinking of his contemporaries.9

  Smith may not have gone as far as another leader of the Enlightenment, David Hume, in asserting that ‘reason and sentiment concur in almost all moral determinations and conclusions’,10 but both saw reasoning and feeling as deeply interrelated activities. In fact, Hume (to whom Glover also does not refer) is often seen as having precisely the opposite bias by giving precedence to passion over reason. Indeed, as Thomas Nagel puts it in his strongly argued defence of reason,

  Hume famously believed that because a ‘passion’ immune to rational assessment must underlie every motive, there can be no such thing as specifically practical reason, nor specifically moral reason either.11

  The crucial issue is not whether sentiments and attitudes are seen as important (they were clearly so recognized by most of the writers whom we tend to think of as part of the Enlightenment), but whether – and to what extent – these sentiments and attitudes can be influenced and cultivated through reasoning.12 Adam Smith argued that our ‘first perceptions’ of right and wrong ‘cannot be the object of reason, but of immediate sense and feeling’. But even these instinctive reactions to particular conduct must, he argued, rely – if only implicitly – on our reasoned understanding of causal connections between conduct and consequences in ‘a vast variety of instances’. Furthermore, our first perceptions may also change in response to critical examination, for example on the basis of empirical investigation that may show that a certain ‘object is the means of obtaining some other’.13

  Two pillars of Enlightenment thinking are sometimes wrongly merged and jointly criticized: the power of reasoning, and the perfectibility of human nature. Though closely linked in the writings of many Enlightenment authors, they are, in fact, quite distinct claims, and undermining one does not disestablish the other. For example, it might be argued that perfectibility is possible, but not primarily through reasoning. Or, alternatively, it can be the case that in so far as anything works, reasoning does, and yet there may be no hope of getting anywhere near what perfectibility demands. Glover, who gives a richly characterized account of human nature, does not argue for human perfectibility; but his own constructive hopes clearly draw on reasoning as an influence on psychology through ‘the social and personal cultivation of the moral imagination’. Glover has more in common with at least some parts of the Enlightenment literature – Adam Smith in particular – than would be guessed from his stinging criticisms of the Enlightenment.

  Cultural Contentions

  What of the sceptical view that the scope of r
easoning is limited by cultural differences? Two particular difficulties – related but separate – have been emphasized recently. There is, first, the view that reliance on reasoning and rationality is a particularly ‘Western’ way of approaching social issues. Members of non-Western civilizations do not, the argument runs, share some of the values, including liberty or tolerance, that are central to Western society and are the foundations of ideas of justice as developed by Western philosophers from Immanuel Kant to John Rawls. That centrality is not in dispute; indeed the long-awaited publication of Rawls’s collected papers allows us to see, in a wonderfully integrated way, just how significant and pivotal ‘the principles of toleration and liberty of conscience’ are in the ethical and political analyses of the foremost moral philosopher of our own time.* Since it has been claimed that many non-Western societies have values that place little emphasis on liberty or tolerance (the recently championed ‘Asian values’ have been so described), this issue has to be addressed. Values such as tolerance, liberty and reciprocal respect have been described as ‘culture-specific’ and basically confined to Western civilization. I shall call this the claim of ‘cultural boundary’.

  The second difficulty concerns the possibility that people reared in different cultures may systematically lack basic sympathy and respect for one another. They may not even be able to understand one another, and could not possibly reason together. This could be called the claim of ‘cultural disharmony’. Since atrocities and genocide are typically imposed by members of one community on members of another, the significance of understanding among communities can hardly be overstated. And yet such understanding might be difficult to achieve if cultures are fundamentally different from one another and are prone to conflict. Can Serbs and Albanians overcome their ‘cultural animosities’? Can Hutus and Tutsis, or Hindus and Muslims, or Israeli Jews and Arabs? Even to ask these pessimistic questions may appear to be sceptical of the nature of humanity and the reach of human understanding; but we cannot ignore such doubts, since recent writings on cultural specificity (whether in the self-proclaimed ‘realism’ of the popular press or in the academic criticism of the folly of ‘universalism’) have given them such serious standing.