About the dominant powers

The question of our times is bound with the question of the dominant power of the times just as the Roman times or the (British) colonial days. Post war generation was brought up in a cold war dominated by the American and the Russian hegemonies now larely confined to a unipolar one with just one dominant superpower. Is it likely to be going on? Or like all civilisations will this also come to an end? Here is an article by Morris Berman.

The Twilight of American Culture


COLLAPSE, OR TRANSFORMATION?

Sallust's description of Rome in 80 B.C.—a government controlled by wealth, a ruling-class numb to the repetitions of political scandal, a public diverted by chariot races and gladiatorial shows—stands as a fair summary of some of our own circumstances....
—Lewis Lapham,Waiting for the Barbarians

Before we can talk about the long road to cultural healing, then, we must begin by understanding the illness. But here we are confronted with a complicating factor, briefly alluded to in the Introduction: Decline comes inevitably to all civilizations. With the exception of hunter-gatherer societies that have not been interfered with by more complex ones (and there are no pristine hunter-gatherers left anymore, I fear), the pattern of birth, maturity, and decay would seem to be inescapable. Est ubi gloria nunc Babyloniae? Where is the glory of Babylonia now? Or that of ancient Egypt, China, India, Greece, Rome? Gone, all gone—that is the historical record. Why, then, should America escape this fate? If decay is built into the civilizational process itself, then talk of healing might be a bit out of place. Indeed, from an analytical standpoint, the problem is not that states collapse—for that is the rule—but that some manage to last as long as they do. To what purpose, then, my attempt to give the reader a cultural roadmap, or to suggest a way out, a creative response? If the historical record is clear on this point, there is no way out. We might just as well fiddle while New York and Los Angeles burn.
This is, of course, a formidable objection, one not easily dismissed. Nor do I believe that America is somehow so privileged as to constitute a historical exception (which belief would be a typically American kind of hubris). But three things do jump out of the historical record that are worth mentioning. First, the process of decay may be inevitable, but it is rarely linear. In its three thousand years, for example, Egypt suffered periods of complete political disintegration and foreign domination that sometimes lasted more than a century, and it then bounced back. While its ultimate decline was inevitable, and it was eventually absorbed into the Greco-Roman Empire, three millennia is not exactly an unimpressive showing; and most of those years were "up" (in terms of political coherence), while some of them were "down." So it might conceivably be argued that the United States is going through a bad patch, from which it might recover, at least for a time.
Second, if the classical model of collapse of empire is that of ancient Rome, we have to remember that its fall was, in terms of the larger world system, as much a transformation as it was a decline. Indeed, it was from the ruins of the Roman Empire that medieval European civilization emerged. While the parallels between the Roman case and the American one are not exact, the analogy does suggest some transformative possibilities. If, for example, we are indeed slated for another dark age, it may not have to last six hundred years this time around. This is precisely a case in which something like the monastic option, and the deliberate work of cultural preservation, might come into play.

Third, there is the issue already mentioned in the Introduction, and which I shall discuss later on in this chapter, as well: This is a very lively kind of decline. In this sense, possible hubris notwithstanding, something unprecedented might be happening. Europe's Dark Ages were truly dark—"singularly monochromatic," as the historian Peter Brown put it. Our own transformation is confusing, because of the "invisibility" factor discussed above. For those seduced by noise, toys, and technology, the current transformation to a global economy is nothing less than cultural efflorescence. For those who place their values elsewhere, there is the paradox that the very success of McWorld, the very transformation that it represents, is a darkness that is ultimately every bit as dark as the early Middle Ages, no matter what the surface appearances might indicate. Whether this will make recovery easier or more difficult remains to be seen.

My point, in other words, is that even if decline is historically inevitable, it is still a process that contains unexpected twists and turns. The sine curve may be descending, but there are loopholes in it nonetheless. Furthermore, the precedent of the monastic option suggests that there might be ways of ensuring that what is of value in this civilization can be preserved and handed down in the hope of generating cultural renewal at some later point. As for the individual reader poring over these pages, he or she doesn't have to be a statistic; there are choices to be made that move in directions opposite to the general tide of events. Before we discuss all that, however, we need to have a closer look at the larger process of civilizational decline, and the factors that come into play when a culture enters its twilight phase and begins to implode.

The concept of decline often involves organic metaphors, notions of birth, maturity, and senescence. This way of viewing civilization goes back to the eighteenth century (Giambattista Vico), and perhaps even to the ancient Greeks; but it came into common currency in the nineteenth century through the writings of the German Idealist school of philosophy. Hegel, for example, saw history as a kind of spiritual journey, in which Geist ("spirit") moved around the globe, generating the Renaissance in fifteenth-century Florence, and sowing the seeds of decay when it subsequently departed. Oswald Spengler, as already noted, thought in similar terms, arguing that a civilization was organized around a central ideal, or some sort of Platonic Idea, and that the process of civilization involved a stage of aging, during which the Idea hardened into pure form. Writing in the early twentieth century, Spengler believed that this process of formalism, or "classicism," as he called it, was happening to the West during his lifetime, and that it would be on the Western agenda for the next few centuries.


There is, perhaps, something intellectually satisfying about the organic approach. After all, humans die, so why not civilizations? It is, however, not really necessary to rely on organic metaphors (or mystical forces) as sources of explanation. As Joseph Tainter points out in The Collapse of Complex Societies, civilizations are anomalies. The whole statist configuration of hierarchy, specialization, and bureaucracy emerged fairly recently—about six thousand years ago—and has to be constantly reinforced and legitimized. It also requires an expanding material base and a constant mobilization of resources, and the trend is always toward higher levels of complexity. There is the processing of greater quantities of information and energy, the formation of larger settlements, increasing class differentiation and stratification, and the development of more complex technology. Collapse, which involves a progressive weakening of the political and administrative center, is the reversal of all this, and a recurrent feature of human societies. As the center weakens, there is no longer an "umbrella" to guarantee safety. The strong savage the weak, and there is no higher goal than survival. Literacy may be lost entirely, or decline so dramatically that a dark age is inevitable.
Thus collapse is built into the process of civilization itself, but this can be understood in purely rational or economic terms. When stress—for example, resource shortage—emerges in hunter-gatherer societies, the members of the tribe have an easy option, one that worked for hundreds of millennia: They move. The solution, in short, is horizontal (dispersion). But if you are sedentary, committed to staying in one place and depending on that place for your livelihood, you must "go vertical," that is, generate another level of hierarchical control to solve your problems—a process that never ends. The whole thing is cumulative. Taxes rarely go down; information processing gets denser. Standing armies get larger, not smaller, and bureaucracies grow rather than shrink. Elites want—and get—more and more of the pie, and so forth. What is unleashed is an unending spiral of increasing complexity and correspondingly higher costs. Finally, says Tainter, "investment in sociopolitical complexity as a problem-solving response often reaches a point of declining marginal returns." The "center of gravity" is too high; the benefits per unit of investment start to drop off. At this point—that of diminishing returns—collapse is not only inevitable; it actually becomes economical. Although the effects are not exactly pleasant, collapse finally becomes an economizing process, the best adaptation under the circumstances.
Tainter's argument, however, is not necessarily at odds with that the of German Idealists. For one thing, both he and Spengler agree that collapse is inherent to the process of civilization itself, and thus inevitable. But there is even deeper agreement than this, although it is implicit: Economic decline has an obvious "spiritual" component, which shows up as apathy and meaninglessness—what the French sociologist Emile Durkheim called "anomie," and which is the reality lurking beneath the facade of Spengler's classicism. In the classicist phase, the culture no longer believes in itself, so it typically undertakes phony or misguided wars (Vietnam, or the Gulf War of 1991, for example), or promotes its symbols and slogans all the more. As the organizational costs rise, yielding increasingly smaller benefits, so does the formalism, the pomp and circumstance. Just as the jaded crowds of ancient Rome zoned out on bread and circuses, Hollywood makes Rocky-type films, rerunning tired old formulas, but nevertheless, these are box-office hits. And gladiatorial extravaganzas, as well as the "Rambification" of culture, are sure signs of spiritual death.
If we can pull together the threads of this discussion so far, it would seem that four factors are present when a civilization collapses:

(a) Accelerating social and economic inequality
(b) Declining marginal returns with regard to investment in organizational solutions to socioeconomic problems
(c) Rapidly dropping levels of literacy, critical understanding, and general intellectual awareness
(d) Spiritual death—that is, Spengler's classicism: the emptying out of cultural content and the freezing (or repackaging) of it in formulas—kitsch, in short.

It is at this point that this scenario may strike the reader as hauntingly familiar, because these four conditions would seem to apply to the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century. What reader of these pages is not aware that the gap between rich and poor has increasingly widened since the 1970s? That entitlements such as Social Security are under threat, or that we incarcerate more people per capita (565 per 100,000) than any other country in the world? That millions of our high school graduates can barely read or write, and that common words are now often misspelled on public signs? That community life has been reduced to shopping malls, and that most Americans grow old in isolation, zoning out in front of TV screens, and/or on antidepressant drugs? This is the nitty-gritty, daily reality that belies the glitz and glamour of the so-called New World Order.
In order to understand the reality of our situation, it will be necessary to flesh these four factors out in some detail. But—to skip ahead for a moment—it is, once again, not a simple case of civilizational collapse, but a more complex one of cultural transformation. Viewed from a certain perspective—that of Wall Street, Beverly Hills, the region contained within the Capital Beltway, and Redmond, Washington (home of Microsoft)—the transformation to the global society of the twenty-first century is a great success. In terms of late-empire developments, with the Soviet Union now a vestige of the past, it may even be adaptive, at least for another fifty or one hundred years. After all, if there is nobody around to offer a different definition of success, then perhaps there really isn't a problem. The meaning of collapse is in the eye of the beholder, n'est-ce pas?

Let us take a closer look at what the American transformation consists of. I shall begin with the data on social inequality, Item (a).

There was a time, not so long ago, when data on rich versus poor could only be found in left-wing journals. I remember how, as graduate students in the sixties, we would excitedly photocopy these articles and distribute them to our friends. Today, this is all just basic information, often obtainable from mainstream newspapers or the pages of journals such as Business Week and Fortune. In a 1995 article in The New Yorker, John Cassidy notes that between 1947 and 1973, while there was certainly a great disparity between rich and poor, actual incomes rose at the same rate for everyone. In that sense, the increase of income mapped across the five quintiles of society, and arranged on a graph, looked like a picket fence. But from 1973 to 1993, he says, it was only the highest quintile, the rich, that enjoyed a significant increase in wealth. The top 1 percent of the nation saw its income level grow 78 percent between 1977 and 1989, and Federal Reserve Board figures from 1989 reveal that this elite group owned 40 percent of the nation's wealth. By 1995, according to Robert Reich, the figure (excluding the value of homes) had risen to 47 percent—more than $4 trillion in assets—while the upper quintile owned 93 percent. The result is that America is no longer a middle-class society. "The picket fence," Cassidy remarks, "has been replaced by a small staircase, and some of the staircase is underground." The two lowest quintiles (bottom 40 percent) experienced a decline in income during the period from 1973 to 1993, whereas the top quintile saw a transfer of $275 billion per year from the middle class to the rich. In 1973, the typical CEO of a large company earned about forty times what a typical worker did; today, he earns from 190 to 419 times as much. Reich notes that Bill Gates' net worth in 1998—$46 billion—was larger than the combined net worth of the bottom 40 percent of American households. What the country has experienced, concludes Cassidy, is "an unprecedented redistribution of income toward the rich." In terms of wealth disparity, the United States leads all other major industrial nations.
MIT economist Paul Krugman refers to this trend as a "spiral of inequality," with economic lopsidedness increasing every year. As it gets increasingly difficult for most Americans to make a living, it also becomes increasingly easier for a select handful to make a killing. According to the Census Bureau, the bottom 20 percent of U.S. families in 1970 received 5.4 percent of the national income, while the top 5 percent received 15.6 percent. By 1994, the corresponding figures were 4.2 percent and 20.1 percent. All of this, says Krugman, signals a "seismic shift in the character of our society." It also indicates a shift in our values. In 1962, President Kennedy confronted the U.S. Steel Corporation over price increases and forced it to back down. Today, upper-echelon CEOs would be more likely to be invited to dinner at the White House.

As far as the White House goes, messages from it about the increasing prosperity of Americans have to be taken with several pounds of salt. "While the national economy has been growing," writes William Finnegan (Cold New World), "the economic prospects of most Americans have been dimming."

Yes, by 1999 the unemployment rate was the lowest it had been in twenty-five years, but during that same time period real hourly wages fell significantly, the median household income went down, and the national poverty rate rose. The number of low-wage jobs proliferated dramatically. The past twenty-five years, notes Finnegan, have produced "the first generation-long decline in the average worker's wages in American history. ... The middle class, defined by almost any measure, has been shrinking conspicuously for some time." Thus the White House boast that 70 percent of the workers who lost their jobs between 1993 and 1995 found new ones by early 1996 is hollow, for the great majority of that 70 percent found only part-time jobs or ones paying less than their previous wages. Since 1979, 43 million jobs have been erased in the United States.

We are, in short, drifting toward a situation such as exists in India, or Mexico, or Brazil, and nothing is being done to halt this. During the period from 1991 to 1994, for example, the number of Mexican billionaires went from two to twenty-eight. Ernesto Canales Santos, a corporate attorney who has represented many of these men, calls it "the Aztec pyramid model," much of which was made possible by U.S. investment, and which, in turn, had repercussions for our own lopsideness. Thus David Calleo (The Bankrupting of America) writes: "The advanced part of the [American] economy seems a more and more prosperous enclave, barricaded within a deteriorating nation. Rather than providing a model for the third world, the United States appears to be imitating it." "If anything," adds David Rieff of the World Policy Institute, "America, with its widening income gap, its vast, deepening divergences in everything from education to life expectancy between rich
and poor, is less democratic today ... than it was in 1950."

The effect of these trends, and of growing corporate hegemony, has been particularly devastating on children—not only in the United States, but in other parts of the world as well. Between 1979 and 1990, the number of American children living below the poverty line rose an astonishing 22 percent. A 1996 article entitled "India's Child Slaves," in the International Herald Tribune, notes that 15 million children in India work eleven to twelve hours daily in dangerous conditions, and are beaten if they try to escape. In the silk industry—financed by the World Bank—children as young as six and seven years of age are forced to plunge their hands into scalding water. To avoid starvation, many Indian families send their handicapped offspring to wealthy Arab nations to beg. Girls under ten are sold into prostitution, and India is hardly alone in this (Asian countries employ an estimated 1 million child prostitutes). Worldwide, according to the UN's International Labor Organization, 250 million children between the ages of five and fourteen are now employed across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and this involves slavery, prostitution, and work in hazardous industries.


Events such as these do not happen in a vacuum. Involvement of the World Bank, and/or U.S. corporations, is part of the whole fabric of oppression. Global corporate hegemony, multinational and transnational in nature, means by definition that these events are linked by a web of interdependent markets, investments, and trade agreements. The wealth of America's top quintile is implicated not only in the poverty of South Central Los Angeles but also in the slums of Buenos Aires. In 1991, the Nike Corporation made $3 billion in profits, paying its factory workers in Indonesia—mostly poor, malnourished women—$1.03 a day, not enough for food and shelter. (Just do it!) By 1996, the 447 richest people on the planet had assets equal to that of the poorest 2.5 billion—52 percent of the world population. What do we think it means when we buy a new sweater and the label reads Made in the Philippines, or a transistor radio stamped Made in Korea? What do we imagine the social and economic reality is behind these seemingly neutral words? Or behind the cup of Colombian (Brazilian, Angolan, etc.) supremo that we drink every morning, or the cleverly crafted decaf latte with 2 percent milk that we enjoy on a sunny autumn afternoon in a chic café with our friends? We hardly need Ann Landers to tell us to "wake up and smell the coffee." The truth is that it is a bitter brew; that the affluence of the few is purchased at the misery of the many.

The argument that world inequality is structural is a major theme of what is known as world-systems analysis, which views the drama in terms of a distinction between core and periphery. Core countries are those in the privileged regions of the Northern Hemisphere such as the United States and Western Europe. It is in these regions that financial, technical, and productive (usually industrial) power is concentrated, power that is controlled by an elite. The periphery, on the other hand, contains the exploited regions that sell their resources and labor to the core without ever having access to the latter's wealth. The enrichment of the core is structurally dependent on the impoverishment of the periphery. Thus today, the Pacific periphery consists of Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, whereas Europe's periphery is largely Africa, what the French economist Jacques Attali (in Millennium), calls "an economic black hole." In a future world of, say, 8 billion people by A.D. 2050 (a very conservative estimate, incidentally), Attali believes that 5 billion of these will, because of this structural inequality, be living right at the survival line, just managing to hang on. The twenty-first century, he writes, will be a Blade Runner world, "a world that has embraced a common ideology of consumerism but is bitterly divided between rich and poor." The latter, inhabiting the destitute peripheries, will be "boat people living on a planetary scale." But, he adds, this situation is highly volatile, because those in the periphery are increasingly aware that the prosperity of the core is purchased at their expense. They will, as a result, eventually rise up against the core in "a war unlike any seen in modern times."

Sociologist Christopher Chase-Dunn has pursued this theme in great detail in his book Global Formation. He shows that the core/periphery hierarchy is a structural feature of the world system, that is, it is an institution of socially structured inequality. Historically, going back to the Commercial Revolution of the sixteenth century and the plunder of the Americas, the exploitation of the periphery was crucially important to the emergence of industrial capitalism in the core, and the direct use of coercive force eventually evolved into institutionalized economic power based on "law" and private property. So a network of interdependent markets is the main glue of our global system, he says, bolstered, when necessary, by the military power of the core states. Thus, we read in American newspapers (Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 27 January 1997; originally reported in the Baltimore Sun in 1995) of a CIA training manual that decribes torture methods used in Honduras during the 1980s. This was part of President Reagan's effort to control leftist movements in Nicaragua and El Salvador; movements that were, like the subsequent uprisings in Mexico (Chiapas), fighting for local self-determination and against those market forces trying to grind them down into permanent peripheral status. Or consider the situation in Colombia, where according to the Human Rights Watch, CIA officials helped the government set up "killer networks" of paramilitary soldiers for the purpose of murdering suspected leftists, as well as supplying arms and money for this purpose.

No surprise here, of course; this is an old story in our relationship with Latin America. Nevertheless, writes Chase-Dunn, political coercion coming directly from the core has become less central to the structure of exploitation and domination, since the core can rely on local coercion—that is, authoritarian client states in the periphery to do its dirty work in exchange for economic aid to the elite in the periphery; and economic exploitation, organized through the production and sale of commodities, is a more efficient, "less dirty," means of control. (Add to this, in recent years, the role of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, NAFTA, GATT, the proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investment, and so on.)

In any case, the system is a nested one, with wheels within wheels. There are important inequalities between major areas of the globe, but also within specific regions. Thus the peripheral countries of Brazil and Nigeria play the role of core countries vis-à-vis nations peripheral to them. All of this, in turn, ricochets back onto the core sectors within the core countries. Exploitation of the periphery, and the threat of the flight of capital to the latter, has served to keep labor unions and socialist parties docile, preventing them from successfully challenging elite powers within the core.

All of this is part and parcel of the global economy. Thus, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, in congressional testimony given on 21 January 1997, said that "heightened job insecurity explains a significant part of the restraint on compensation [that is, wages] and the consequent muted price inflation." Typically, when employment increases, the Dow-Jones average falls. For the economic elite in the core, it pays to have an insecure labor force.

Both the penetration of a peripheral nation by foreign investment and the creation of debt dependence by means of foreign credit actually serve to damage that nation's economic development, and to increase inequality within that country. The net effect is the replacement of direct colonial control by neocolonial economic mechanisms. The structure of dependency, says Chase-Dunn, "provides support for elites in the periphery and keeps wages low relative to the income of elites." These elites, in fact, are linked "to the interest of the transnational corporations and the international economy," not to their own nations or people.
For the purposes of our own discussion, however, it is important to remember that this description also applies to peripheral areas within the United States, not just, say, to Guatemala. Month by month, more and more wealth is being transferred to fewer and fewer hands. In mid-1997, Republicans in Congress proposed a tax cut that was designed to give the upper quintile 87 percent of the tax savings over the next decade. Two years later the attempt was repeated when the House and Senate passed a compromise tax bill, which would give the richest quintile 79 percent of the tax savings, as well as pass billions of dollars in tax breaks on to multinational corporations. The process is inexorable; and although I would not predict a massive popular uprising within the United States—that is more likely to happen in peripheral regions outside the core countries—it is nevertheless true that this kind of inequality could eventually destroy the entire social fabric, as it nearly has already in the case of public schools and inner cities. It is also spiritually corrosive, demoralizing, and will do untold damage to this nation. In this regard, if one wants to make a comparison with ancient Rome, it is interesting to note that during the reign of Nero (A.D. 54-68) roughly two thousand men owned nearly all of the land between the Rhine and the Euphrates. The population was pretty much divided between the rich and all the rest, and the rich were very, very rich. Similarly, writes Kevin Phillips (in Arrogant Capital), what we are witnessing in the United States today is a broad transition "toward social and economic stratification, toward walled-in communities and hardening class structures, [and] toward political, business and financial elites that bail each other out...."
Why is this slide toward greater inequality occurring? Partly, it is because the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands is itself part of the process of declining marginal returns. Every time a greater investment in complexity takes place, it is accompanied by a greater share of the pie for the elite. Hierarchy generates power; the greater the verticality, the greater the opportunity for the few to exploit the many, especially in times of debt and crisis. "As massive debt becomes a major national problem," writes Kevin Phillips, "it also becomes a major financial opportunity and vested interest." For a select few, in other words, national collapse is a good business opportunity! But ultimately, no one knows exactly why America has experienced such a shift in wealth, as John Cassidy admits. It seems to be due to a combination of factors: the rising volume of international trade, the spread of computer technology, the decline of labor unions, and the immigration of unskilled workers into the country. Yet all of these factors are controversial, and a truly unambiguous explanation escapes us. The best that any economist can say is that this is just how capitalism has developed (or in the case of Rome, perhaps it was just a function of the closing phase of empire). The only thing that can reverse this trend, besides a dramatic revitalization of labor unions, would be a very steep tax on the rich. In the mid-1990s, Robert Reich, who was then Secretary of Labor, floated this out as a possibility, and his suggestion was met with a deafening silence. There simply is no sympathy for such a solution, even among middle-class citizens for whom such a move would be an obvious benefit (largely because, I suspect, they individually believe that they alone will somehow beat the system and become rich themselves—sort of like winning the lottery). As a result, the progressive "Aztecization" of the country is a foregone conclusion.

Let us, then, turn to Item (b), the Tainter thesis as it applies to the American economy. If we focus on what is probably the major issue here, that of entitlements—principally Social Security and Medicare—we discover that this is, unfortunately, a very murky area. As far as entitlements go, the data and prognoses seem to change almost every month. Hence, by the time this book appears in print, my data will probably be obsolete. In addition, in this particular area, the data can vary significantly depending on the political agenda of the researcher. Position papers published by right-wing think tanks—the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the National Center for Policy Analysis—argue that the entitlement system is in a crisis situation and that a program such as Social Security needs to be phased out and/or totally overhauled. Hence, we have to be wary of the data here, because they are often a front for privatization—for example, replacing Social Security with private pensions along the lines of IRAs or 401(k) plans. At the other end of the spectrum, such as it exists in the United States, we have the Brookings Institution, which argues that the system needs only moderate adjustments to stay on track. So it is hard to decide which arguments are valid, given these competing claims, and the reader should be aware that I am not an economist, or any sort of expert in these matters. Let me take a shot at it, nonetheless.

In some ways, the best place to start is with the reports of the Social Security Administration (SSA) itself. According to the trustees' report of 30 March 1999, Social Security will become insolvent in 2034, and the Hospital Insurance part of Medicare will do so by 2015. The combined expenditures here are higher than the taxes and premiums collected to support them, and this situation will continue. Thus the cost of these, which is 7 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) today, will rise to 11.7 percent by 2030. By 2025, claims on the Social Security trust fund will be $86 billion, and by 2075, costs for Medicare will be 45 percent higher than the income available for it. These figures, moreover, are not based on a particularly pessimistic scenario. In fact, as early as 2014, other federal receipts will be needed to help pay benefits. Hence, comments a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report on the situation, "the long-range outlook ... leaves little to be sanguine about," and popular opinion reflects this. Less than 50 percent of the American people believe that Social Security will meet its long-term commitments, and in the group of those below age fifty-five, nearly two-thirds have little confidence that it will work for them.

Why is this the case? The answer is obvious: We are becoming an older nation. By 2025, the number of people sixty-five years and older will grow by 75 percent, whereas the number of workers supporting the system will grow by only 13 percent. The current ratio of workers to Social Security recipients is 3.4:1; by 2035, it will drop to 2:1. The "big three" entitlements—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—will grow rapidly burdensome because the costs are directly linked to an aging population.

Turning to the reports of conservative organizations, such as those previously mentioned, the most pessimistic scenario of the SSA, they point out, is that by 2045 almost 53 percent of the total taxable payroll in the United States will be needed to fund Social Security and Medicare. Whereas in 1950, we had seventeen workers supporting each retiree, the number could drop to one in the next century. The revenue shortfall, they say, will be $232 billion by 2020. Life expectancy is increasing faster than previously predicted, while the fertility rate is falling faster than was previously thought. By 2050, the number of retirees will reach 80 million people. The entitlement system is not sustainable, and very little, short of privatization, can avert a major collapse.

Finally, the evaluation of Henry Aaron and Robert Reischauer of the Brookings Institution (Countdown to Reform) corroborates much of these data but maintains that the "Chicken Little" position is just plain wrong. Having until 2034, they say, does not amount to a crisis, and Social Security can be saved in its present form by enacting modest cuts in benefits, levying modest tax increases, and increasing the age of elibility for Social Security as well as taxing SS benefits like any other pension.

The problem, as the authors admit, is that public opinion polls reveal very little support for these policies, so the only solution is to phase them in slowly, thus triggering less opposition.

How much trouble are we really in, then? Are we, as Joseph Tainter maintains, rapidly reaching the point of diminishing returns, or is this unwarranted alarmism, as Aaron and Reischauer suggest? As I said, I am not an economist, but here is what I conclude from my research in this area:

1. The long-range outlook is not good, as the trustees' report of the SSA freely admits.
2. We are becoming an older population, the fertility rate is dropping, and we may well reach a situation toward the end of this century in which the ratio of worker to recipient is 1:1. This will indeed require drastic measures, but as the Brookings' authors note, Americans don't want higher taxes or lower benefits, even in the case of moderate measures, let alone draconian ones.
3. One thing everybody seems to agree on is that if we want to put a positive spin on these dates (2015 and 2034), and say that we've got time to spare, we must realize that a prime factor behind this "healthy" situation is the strong economic growth that has taken place in this country since 1995. It is this in particular that is giving the entitlement situation a boost, because such growth increases revenues (payroll taxes) flowing into both Social Security and Medicare. The only trouble is, capitalism operates in terms of ups and downs, and as the trustees' report candidly says, "we cannot prudently rely on economic growth." Nor can we reasonably project it indefinitely into the future. In short, a structural crunch does seem likely sometime in the twenty-first century.

This last point strikes me as the crucial issue. In Gray Dawn, Peter Peterson claims that the benefit outlays for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and federal civilian and military pensions will exceed total federal revenues by 2030. Between 1980 and 1990, the national debt went from being 34 percent of the Gross National Product (GNP) to 59 percent of it. By 1996, the debt amounted to $5 trillion, and interest payments on this were eating up one-sixth of the national budget. I suspect that only continued economic growth can outflank this kind of debt and interest burden, and I just don't think we can count on this happening. The accuracy, then, of Tainter's thesis as it applies to America's economic future remains unclear. My own sense is that we shall be in serious trouble by mid-century.

Going beyond the Indian heart over mind

I had written an article for business standard and mailed it to the paper.

Earlier I had started an academic work for Prof. Rajen Gupta of MDI, Gurgaon but was unable to complete it. Later I felt the same is better less academic. Hope BS will publish it.

Going beyond the Indian ‘heart over mind’.

Sabnavis’ article on heart over mind (1st May 2009 BS) provoked further thoughts on the subject of ‘the Indian mind’. Surprisingly the word culture was used sparingly in the article. While we call shared values, beliefs and assumptions of a group of people as the culture of the group, it also means the typical ways in which we respond to things, situations, people, themselves and others. While the mind heart distinction is useful to analyse business processes, culture is more comprehensive in import.

Culture has been variously called the programming of the mind and the lens though which people tend to see. In gaining insights on the implications of culture on business practices, the conventional way of looking at a large country like India as a single cultural entity seems to be too generic. This is because the political entity that is India is largely a result of some historical antecedents and geographic reality. An examination of the cultural differences is an imperative due to a number of reasons. This article aims to point out certain observed nuances both behavioral and linguistic that are likely to yield insights into the differences across the Indian states/regions. While some arguments for looking at the different states or regions as culturally separate entities is put forth, it is hoped that similar nuances and thereby underlying cultural programming can be provoked from researchers and academics of other linguistic groups as well and thus overcome the inevitable limitation of few individuals knowing one or only a few languages and similar insights. While the development of culturally congruent management interventions is a supposed outcome of such thinking, it may also serve the larger interest of reducing stereotypes and prejudices among the Indian states.

The mind heart distinction is a useful way of looking at differences. Culture provides a much wider canvas to work and yield further fine tuning beyond the duality. In this sense it may also be possible to look at not just the Indian mind but also finer distinctions between the states or regions. Many with a certain degree of exposure to India would notice the subtle differences across the different states.

Culture is identified as having four elements; values, symbols, rituals and heroes and has been studied extensively by many. Differences in symbols, heroes and rituals are apparent across the many Indian states or regions. An example would be differences in dressing (symbols) festivals (rituals) and the conception of ideal men as in say, popular cinema or politics (heroes). The differences may not be as stark as when comparing ‘Indian culture’ in general with other cultures. Nevertheless values that are deeply embedded and are unobservable like the other three elements also are likely to show the same subtle differences given the vastness and heterogeneity of the country. An incisive study can reveal many subtle differences across Indian states in terms of values as well as symbols, rituals and heroes.

In the contiguous sense, culture can also be conceived as a bridge from the past to the present. In the same vein, culture is the meeting point for modernity as in business organization-technology structure with the behavioral-social evolutions from the past. The twin realities of the modern world are the ubiquitous nature of and dependence of society on organizations and the indispensability and evolution of technology. There is also a tentative postulate that societies may move to convergence in the modern techno-organizational mould as a result of globalisation.

This postulate is on the one hand in terms of a possible leveling of diversity into a bland uniformity across different cultures and on the other hand a specter of societies or parts of societies who miss the bus as to be marginalized. The suggestion that India is a single cultural entity needs to be examined against this backdrop. Is it really a single cultural entity? Wouldn’t it be more useful to think otherwise as a hypothesis to be tested? Is it not necessary that the cultural diversity be examined more scientifically so as to identify, preserve and nurture the diversity? Also since the value part of culture, changes less rapidly than the symbols, is it not proper to fit the organizational structure, systems, procedures and practices to the culture rather than the other way around? If the different states or parts of the country are culturally different, or if we gain subtler insights into the variations, then is it not necessary and desirable to design the fit to suit the different cultures? In any case, even if from an instrumental point of view, as in influencing the mind or the heart through advertisements as was the gist of the article by Sabnavis, wouldn’t it be further desirable to look at the subtle differences to yield further usable insights?


From a functional perspective it may be necessary to develop a congruence between the particular culture and the particular techno – organizational structure. Consciously or unconsciously this is at the heart of any change intervention. Since, as already suggested, culture is difficult to be ‘changed’ what seems to be appropriate is a change in the techno- organizational structure including say, designing an advertisement.

A prerequisite of developing a fit is an identification of culture as the collective way of a people. In this sense studying culture is useful for the organisation and conversely organisations can facilitate greater understanding on the cultural front. An organization as a humanly constructed, system is a very specific domain where because of the meeting of technology, organizational science and culture and in turn the very organizational resources, yields itself to an experimental crucible where studies involving culture can be effectively taken up. For instance, the study by Hofstede leveraged the advantage of a globe spanning organization, IBM to develop specific insights into national cultures.

India provides a vastness and linguistic-political demarcation that lends itself to such an examination. “India is arguably, the nation with the longest historical encounter with the dynamics of cultural plurality.” (1)


A potential area for research from the Indian point of view could be the cynical way in which a society or people approach things especially in the face of ideals or ways in which actions are to be taken. In terms of religious rituals it appears that the age old and laid down patterns are more or less adhered to. However, one suspicion is whether less developed societies such as India approach technology and the concomitant appropriate habits of discipline in a much callous manner than warranted by the very same technological sophistication and complexity. One could design a superhighway, but can it be assumed or assured that the society that uses it will follow the traffic rules as demanded by the increased sophistication of the highway?

This line of thinking has been expressed by thinkers though not placing the issue as one of culture. For instance C. K Prahalad in one of his speeches talks about dysfunctional behaviours associated with developing countries. “There is absolutely no reason for not having disciplined traffic, absolutely no reason for keeping our airports dirty, no reason for us not to be concerned about time. These have nothing to do with resources but sheer attitude of mind”. That the attitude of mind Prahalad mentions is in the collective sense and therefore by extension the reference is to culture as expressed in behaviour is obvious.

An observed nuance in this vein is the strict following of operational sequences by the more advanced west, while the Indian mind set allows for skipping many a step in the sequence as routine. Stories about obeying red light in spite of no traffic by the more system conscious west versus callous disregard for red light even in heavy traffic in the Indian roads are legion. In the face of the behavior required by the same technological imperative, the two societies behave in two different ways. This many a time in spite of the same training! The difference could be attributed to a certain different value orientation. What if we could study this apparent contradiction of strict religious behavior vis-a- vis the not so strict observance of technological imperatives and take a new approach in say, training programs and other business processes such as advertisements. It is conceptually only a matter of transferring the disciplined behavior from one domain to another. Also while the Indian system may be chaotic, recently it was also observed that the apparent chaotic ways of Indian traffic are actually a better way of using space and time! At no point in time was any space left unutilized in what is apparent as chaotic traffic. Can it therefore be identified as a certain value that may be places the individual judgment above rules and systems as is the parallel case of ‘zubaan’ versus contract which Sabnavis mentions in his article.


Though India is politically a single entity, the reason for its political unity is the historical antecedent of having been a British colony eventually united at the time of independence. The continuity and unity is also argued in terms of Hindu mythology that spans, overarches and influences all corners of the country. However, when a person is out of his home state he usually seeks affiliations not based on his religion but on the basis of his language! The linguistic affiliation is more powerful than the religious one. This indicates that language as a unifying force is more powerful and therefore an analysis of the different Indian states formed on linguistic lines is likely to yield many valuable insights. Moreover it is interesting to note that a person from the south to be able to communicate to another from a neighboring southern state will have to use either the northern language Hindi or English as a lingua franca. It may also be postulated that the languages belonging to the same linguistic family in its development may have retained some of the original value programming. Also it may be of interest to decipher what differed and what was retained in the process of splintering into different languages within the same family.

The conventional acceptance of India as a single unit is largely attributed to its colonial past. In terms of the cultural transference that trade and commerce facilitated, the coastal areas must have had a different dynamics from the hinterlands. Similarly while the interiors were cut off, the northeast for instance stood chances of contact with the south eastern countries as also with the Chinese. Thus had it not been for the political unification facilitated by the colonial past, the cultural diversity would have been much starker.

Language provides an insight into the inner programming of a cultural group. Take for instance the fact that the Eskimos have many different forms to denote ice. The geographic peculiarity of cold climate is at the bottom of this wide a facility in the language. However, compare the English ‘brother’ with the specific single word appellations, for instance in the southern Indian Dravidian language, Malayalam of ‘chettan’ to denote elder brother and ‘aniyan’ to denote younger brother. Hindi however has only one word ‘bhai’ to denote brother. What is at the bottom of this higher facility in some Indian languages and the lack of it in another? Can we discern some equivalent to the cold climate of the Eskimos that necessitated multiple terminologies for different types of ice in their language? Since no one person can be an expert in all the Indian languages, only a systematic study by experts from different linguistic groups can decipher the evolution and the possible explanation. Another example is the use of reverential expressions in Hindi like ‘aap’ to denote a respectful you and ‘thum’ and ‘thoo’ to denote reverence of lesser degrees. In the Malayalam language though such gradations are available, it is noteworthy that in normal day to day conversation the reverential form ‘thankal’ or ‘angu’ is rarely used and mostly in very formal occasions as in a speech. It may also be used in a dramatic performance involving the classics. Similarly Tamil also provides inbuilt facilities to denote respect as in ‘irukkara?’ ( reverential ‘Is he there?’) and ‘irukkutha?’ ( non reverential ‘Is he there?’). From here it is only an extrapolation away from the implications for instance for ‘power distance’ (one of the cultural dimensions) among the various linguistic groups.

The lack of facility available in Malayalam mentioned above is made up by intonations, body postures or a reverential avoiding of ‘you’ altogether. The point is, these are interesting pointers to the different programming which if delved into would provide a new direction to our insights on subtleties in culture. In any case thinking in these lines will be the beginnings of fine graining the existing tendency of looking at India as a single unit.

Similar is the case with certain body language peculiarities noticed in the north and the northeast where the giver as in the one who serves the food or the one who lights the lamp holding the giving or the lighting arm’s elbow reverentially with the other hand. The absence of this gesture among many others may look awkward or non reverential to the ones who practice this gesture. While the ritual is fairly perceivable, the values and the value differences underlying these rituals are more fundamental and less obvious.

In the Malayali ethos calling a stranger from behind with a whistle like ‘shhhh’ is considered very normal whereas across the border in Tamil Nadu the same would be considered insulting and a cause for quarrel even for an absolute stranger. To say the least, while these nuances pose several grounds for study from the cultural point of view, mere cross cultural awareness may generate greater understanding among the different states.

If underlying meanings do reveal the underlying cultural patterns, then comparison of equivalents in various languages can be used to understand them. Feedback patterns are a necessary feature in any language and therefore serve as equivalents for comparison. For example, the inner programming revealed in the English feedback pattern ‘OK’ and the Malayalam and Tamil “shari” are both indicative of correctness. However “barabar” or “barabar?” in Gujarati is indicative of equal ness or a restoration of an imbalance as in a business transaction where one pays for a perceived value for a commodity or service. One is tempted to extrapolate that the underlying metaphorical meaning is indicative of an entrepreneurial or trading ethos in the latter.

Organisational tools like HR interventions seek to modify behaviours to suit the purpose of the organization. Necessity of interventions leading to behaviours that drive initiatives such as strategy implementations, rather than mere putting in place of systems and procedures is an imperative for the next wave of impetus for the field of HR and organisational development. The obvious influence of culture, if not its determining effect on behaviour, point to the need for the study of the antecedent context at various levels of increasing specificity such as national, regional, class and professional so as to design interventions of greater effectiveness.

Culture in this context can be thought of as the context from which one comes from that stays with him/her and guides his/her behaviour. Insights from the host context are valuable in developing specific interventions of greater effectiveness suiting individuals. The individual gestalt of one’s personality can be visualized as being embossed on the template that is culture. One could also imagine multiple planar templates: national, regional, class and professional. While knowledge in national, class and professional culture are fairly progressive, the same cannot be said about regional cultures within a large country like India.

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Religion as cultural artifact

I found an article on the subject just as I was having vaguely similar thoughts.

Roberto de Nobili was a Roman Jesuit who travelled to India in the 16th century and did evangelisation in Goa, Kochi and mostly in Madurai. who used incluturation as a method of evangelisation. The central idea being adopting the customs of th enatives to gain greater acceptance. The underlying assumption being that religion is an anthropological construct and therefore a cultural artefact.

All that I knew about him till now was that there is a theology college in Pune in his name. Now I know that such initiatives have given us the localised customs of the Kerala Christians too. Here is the article...

Religion as Culture:
Anthropological Critique of de Nobili’s Approach to Religion and Culture

Dr.C. Joe Arun SJ

This paper argues that religion is a manifestation of culture of a people and treating religion isolated from culture is unintelligible and, in some sense is impossible. This approach insists on the idea that culture is not merely patterns of human behaviour such as customs, habits and traditions but it is best seen as control mechanisms or programmes that determine, order, and guide human behaviour. Seen from this vantage point religion is not simply metaphysics but it is the ethos of people that is the tone and character of people. This creates indeed a meaningful relationship between values a people hold dear to them and their general order of existence. The ethos is conceived in the form of symbols, dramatised in rituals and re-membered in myths that show a people ways in which they ought to behave. Religion is in some way an expression of the limitedness of human existence in that every time human beings reaches the limit in which they become conscious of a power beyond and realise the need to depend on that power. This powerless is expressed in symbols that are evolved in and through culture. Such symbolic expressions have to be interpreted and understood in relation to the culture that gives rise to the symbols.

Therefore, sacred symbols can not be understood in isolation of the culture from which they come. This approach of relationship between religion and culture argues a case against the approach of de Nobili who believes that religions can enter into dialogue without referring to cultural symbols that might be used in religious rituals. The paper first begins with defining religion and culture. Second, it discusses the close relationship between religion and culture. Third, briefly looks at de Nobili’s view of dialogue between religions without referring to cultural symbols.

Defining Religion and Culture

Before I discuss the relationship between religion and culture I should be clear about the definitions of them that I use throughout this paper. This is important for the present purpose as the whole book focuses on the relationship between religion and culture. In particular, this book addresses the question of how religion could be understood and made use of isolated from cultures. More sharply, this is a discussion on the dialectic of religion and culture. It is hardly possible to provide a comprehensive definition about culture and religion since many authors use different definitions for different purposes. It is the contexts that determine the kind of definitions. But the discipline of anthropology has for long been concerned with religion and culture. Particularly, culture is the single most idea with which anthropology was concerned about among the nineteenth century anthropologists (Barnard and Spencer 2002: 136). Therefore, I prefer to use the anthropological definitions[1].

Culture as a System of Meaning

The concept of culture originates from organic evolutionary process. In agriculture one cultivates a plant in which the land is cultured first and later the plant is brought to the cultured land. There is a deep link between growth and land. From the cultured land comes a healthy plant. In the same way, human beings culture their personality in and through their manipulation of the environment they live in and the encounters they have with other peoples. This is why we can never avoid discussion of nature while we discuss culture. The crucial question is that how far human beings fall into nature and in what ways in which we need to study nature when we study peoples. Every reality and natural environment is unique and therefore every people is unique in the ways in which they lead their lives. Edward Sapir (1985), Alfred Kroeber (1917), Margret Mead (1943), and Ruth Benedict (1934) extended this idea in their works in that although human beings have similar biological qualities all over the world, their cultures are different simply because the environment in which they live are different that has different culture and language. Every people have unique culture that is different from other peoples.
Culture is an integrated system of socially acquired values, beliefs, and rules of conduct which delimit the range of accepted behaviours in any given society. Cultural differences distinguish societies from one another. In material culture that Archaeology, a branch of the broader field of anthropology discusses, we come to learn about the people who lived before from the remains of extinct human cultures such as pottery, art, music and weaponry. Such analysis is particularly useful where no written records exist. The first anthropological definition of the term ‘culture’ was given by Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (1871 Vol I): “Culture or civilisation, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (p.1). In all this they attempt to make sense of their lives. In this sense, culture involves at least three components: what people think, what they do, and the material and artistic products they produce. Mental processes, beliefs, knowledge, and values are parts of culture. This is why some define culture entirely as mental rules that guide human behaviour[2]. Culture also has several properties: it is shared, learned, symbolic, transmitted cross-generationally, adaptive, and integrated.
We need to discuss the nature of culture. Culture is a human ability to classify experiences, encode such classifications symbolically, and transmit such abstractions to others, or to successive generations that give them their uniqueness. It is usually acquired through enculturation, the process through which an older generation induces and compels a younger generation to reproduce the established lifestyle; consequently, culture is embedded in a person's way of life. This is built into subconscious level to the extent that one can not quantify the culture. This is why for a long time anthropologists were apprehensive about studying their own cultures. More sharply, culture is a system that is in and forms a person’s psyche and this can not be studied by universal rules. Every ethnic group has its unique culture. And anthropologists study these cultures from different view points. Symbolic anthropologists study cultures in terms of how people's mental constructs guide their lives. Structuralist anthropologists analyze the human relationships among cultural constructs of different societies, deriving universal mental patterns and processes from the abstract models of these relationships. Therefore, any universal theory or definition will not be helpful in comprehending the nature of cultures; instead every culture has to be studied in its own environment and in its idioms[3].

Keeping this in mind, I would like to look at the definition of Clifford Geertz[4] in detail. Geertz (1993) defines culture as "a historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life" (p. 89). In this sense, culture becomes a system of symbols that symbolises the worldview of particular community or groups. It provides a way of looking at the world and helps people organise their life in their environment. This worldview has been produced in course of history and in the lives of many generations to help develop a tradition that guides the successive generations to show them life orientations. This pattern is laid as meaning systems in symbols, what Cohen (1985) calls ‘symbolic gloss’ that can be used by social actors as symbols to communicate and understand each other with personal significance and meaning. In this sense, members of community depend on these symbols to form their opinions and thoughts and express them intelligibly. In this way mostly human behaviour is to be seen as symbolic action that needs to be understood in its culture. This human behaviour is guided and determined by the social structure which was produced by culture. If culture gives a worldview by which one structures his/her behaviour and by which one thinks, feels, and acts, this provides also a system or pattern of social behaviour that controls and guides the social actors. In this sense, caste system in India is a product of culture in which religion is a part. Pure and impure ideas of life are part of the pattern by which an Indian has to live and lead his/her life. This is successively done in the course of history to the extent that it would be hard to effect a change. We shall discuss this theme in detail later when we look at de Nobili’s view on religion. At the moment we should be clear that symbols become the carriers of meaning in one sense that can be read and used by others. Similarly, religion is also seen in this perspective of symbolic anthropology.


Religion as a System of Symbols [5]

As said earlier Clifford Geertz belongs to interpretive anthropology. His approach is mainly concerned with interpreting and providing a "thick" description of cultural systems so that they can be apprehended by those who are not insiders to that cultural system. Therefore, Geertz develops a theory of religion that is based on the view that it is distinctively a part of the cultural system. Geertz emphasises the idea that people basically act according to the system of meanings they have, therefore anthropologists should concentrate on interpret ting these meanings. For Geertz, the system of meanings both act upon and are acted upon by people's actions in and through a continuous dialogue in which cultures shape as well are shaped by individual and collective actions. As in our discussion of culture religion forms a part of culture in the sense that every religion forms its character and grows gradually in culture from which it has sprung. If taken out of that culture the religion loses its original meaning. But the core message can be applicable to or sensible in other cultures, not in its originality. To gain total sense and clarity of the original meaning one has to have a familiarity with the original culture from which the religion was formed. In this sense, Geertz sees religions as a cultural system.

Now let us look at Geertz’ definition of religion. Religion is defined as (1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic (Geertz 1975: 90). Let us take each point and discuss it to show how religion and culture are organically related to each other so as to show later in the paper in what ways de Nobili is wrong in separating religion from culture.
First of all, religion is a system of symbols and is a cultural construct, not innate human beings that could be universal to all human beings. Secondly, this system of symbols is the "model" for empirical reality, in two senses. One is that it is a "model of" and "model for" reality. By ‘model of’, Geertz means that it helps us apprehend the nature of true reality by giving us an idea of depiction of that reality. By ‘model for’ he means that that it functions as a tool to determine actually people's actions by providing for the blueprints of how things are ought to be conducted. This is crucial in the sense that gives us the idea of the dialect between structure and actions. Geertz says: "Unlike genes, and other nonsymbolic information sources, which are only models for, not models of, culture patterns have an intrinsic double aspect: they give meaning, that is, objective conceptual form, to social and psychological reality both by shaping themselves to it and by shaping it to themselves" (1975:93).
Secondly, religion forms in people certain mental or psychological dispositions. They do not effect any activities to take place directly, but increases the probability of certain activities or occurrences taking place. There is a difference between motivation and moods. Motivation has goals in mind and they activate the type of activity that could reach the goals. But moods have no ends in conception and they are meaningful depending upon the source of those moods. Goals have no relation to moods. The dispositions that a religion establishes are important in the sense that they control the activities and behaviour of a people. Very rarely intellectual speculations determine actions of social actors; instead emotions guide and determine human behaviour.

Thirdly, religion provides us an order of existence. It gives us a certain confirmation that the life we live is not in disorder but in order and it is comprehensible. In human life there are three areas that human beings have the possibility of losing their life’s core. They are analytic capacities, endurance, and moral insight. The religious systems make sure that these are not made weak or they are not broken and thus life is made meaningful. The analytical capacity accounts for the events that are seen odd and strange; capacity to endure stands for the problem of suffering; moral insight accounts for the problem of evil. In all of them, the key idea is that religion does not try to directly deny the existence or the reality of undeniable problems, but rather that religion merely tries to deny the notion that there is not any way that these problems may be accounted for in some way.

Fourthly, by acting out and participating in religious rituals the participants gain an idea of life they are leading -the model of reality – and realise how they should live their lives - model for reality. In other words, not only religion demonstrates what people already believe, but it also sets model in what to believe in doctrines, enactments and belief systems.

Finally, the fundamental core element of religion is the capacity to act upon and transform people's conceptions of the everyday life. Whatever one sees as a general order should be seen in every day actions of the social actors. If the order is not seen that way the idea remains as theory that has no relation to the order of existence (Goffman 1980). More clearly, the moods and motivations induced by religion become so powerful that believers sense that it is true and once they leave the ritual world they realise their life is in some ways transformed.
Geertz grounds his idea of religion as a cultural process in that religion and culture are intimately related to each other and isolated from each other they lose their original meanings[6]. Both culture and religion provides a system of symbolisation of life and every time these symbols are reactivated in rituals they establish a certain mental dispositions that provide an order of existence and meaning of life. As in the case of culture, religion too is cognitive in terms of conceptions of life, performative in terms of rituals and actual in terms of directing everyday life. This is to emphasize the cultural dimension of religion. Religion is constituted by symbolism that is the essence of culture, and then religion has to be understood in terms of culture. This helps us to look at the lived realities in which symbols become alive. If one wants to study s/he should observe how people talk about themselves and interact in their social relations, perform their rituals, and mythical discourse they have to make sense of their lives.

The Need for Interpretations of Meanings

Since religion and culture are basically a system of symbols they need to be interpreted to participate in the originary experience of the symbols. In that sense, both religion and culture need to be interpreted and their meanings should be understood properly. Interpretations of life people provide for themselves determine their daily actions and by studying these actions of people can provide an entry to the world of meanings. Fundamentally, religion, which is part of a culture, has conceptions about life that are symbolised that form a culture. For Geertz symbols are vehicles for the conceptions – religion as system of symbols that establishes moods and motivations giving an order of existence - which help a society bring their culture into focus. These symbols work in conjunction with one another to create cultural patterns. The ‘models of - models for’ in fact produces a cultural pattern for people to lead their lives meaningfully and this provides them with an identity of their own. This is people’s world view, the ways in which people look at the world and it is the ethos of people, their life style and ways in which they like to do things. The symbol systems – religion and culture - make the ethos intellectually reasonable by being shown to represent a way of life adapted to the worldview, and to make the worldview emotionally convincing by being presented as an image well suited to accommodate such a way of life.

In one sense, religion is and should be a locus of meaning in which people find meaning to their lives and it is part of the culture in which the religion is practised. In this ways there is a deep link between the religious symbols and cultural symbols in the sense that both through their formulations of a congruence between “a particular style of life and a specific metaphysic and so function to synthesize a people’s ethos – the aesthetic style, tone, and quality of their life – their world view, their most comprehensive ideas of order” (Geertz 1975: 95). Basically religious beliefs people have to gain meaning to their anomalous life, to give comprehension to the human suffering and to give an ethical code to explain the reality of how things in life are and how things ought to be (Morris 1993: 313). As said earlier, there are three breaking points where human beings can lose the grip of their lives: analytical capacity, power of endurance, and moral insight. In the reality of pain, conflict, disaster and mystery human beings approach a power beyond their powers. This is put into a pattern of meaning and behaviour that we call culture. We need an interpretation of this not only to understand the life but also to live the life. More than we need to a skill to learn from it about how the life ought to be lived. In this way religion and culture have to be kept within one realm to make sense of our lives. Keeping this in mind we should look at de Nobili’s view of religion and culture in his mission in Tamil Nadu.

Religion as Rationality: de Nobili’s view

As seen in the discussion above, religion is seen as i) a cultural construct, not innate ideas; ii) it deals with moods and motivations, not simply rational categories; iii) it provides a model of reality that gives us a meaning and model for living that motivates human beings for further progress; iv) it gives people an order of existence. Therefore, religion is closely related to culture and it would be hard to understand religion isolated from culture. De Nobili does not share this view. For De Nobili, religion is different from culture and makes clear distinction between what is religious and cultural. For him, religion (cattiya vetam) is concerned with salvation of human beings and the way by which they attain it. In this sense the concerns of religion are universally relevant. Therefore, caste, symbols and race are all particular and relative and they are not object of religion. When one converts to Christianity and learns catechism (nanoupatesam) he does not mean that he belongs to one caste and to one condition of life. Christian religion is a religion for one caste such as Parangis. The object of religion is to reveal dharmadharmam and cattiyacattiyam for salvation. The object of religion is not to talk about social customs and observances of castes. These matters are to belong to the civil society. They vary from caste to caste. The fundamental object (artam) of religion is to show how one needs to be sinless for the attainment of salvation. Christianity shows the path of salvation and a way of being righteous in one’s life. Thus Christianity is not confined to one race and that all races can live in it, and caste is not religion. In other words, one can talk about religion without referring to culture of the people and a Brahman convert can continue his caste practices that are only the signs of ‘a certain social and political rank’ and should not be implicated in ‘idolatry’ (Rajamanickam 1971:103) and certain symbols and signs of Brahmans such as ‘the thread and the tuft are social, not religious, insignia’ (‘Lineam et Curuminum non inter superstitiosa, sed inter politica esse’ and these are not exclusive to one group (Rajamanickam 1971:86–7).

There is a clear abstraction in the position of de Nobili that religion is a meta-thesis that does not need to be empirically connected to cultural conditions. And he gives ‘a norm by which we can distinguish between social actions and the purely religious’ (‘quod regulam, qua dignosci debent, quae sint apud hos Indos politica et quae sacra’ (Rajamanickam 1971:154–5). This he defends strongly by stating the differences between what is religious and what is cultural in his Narratio Fundamentorum (1619). There are three kinds of religious differences found among religions in India. The first is when, in one and the same sect, various modes of life may be found. Thus we have in the Christian religion various Religious families [in una Christiana religione variae Religiosorum virorum familiae]; of course these can use a common symbol of their faith, because they are of one faith [protestativum propter unitatem fidei]. The second is when a sect differs from another in such a way that, although they differ in some essential point, they can still use the same denomination. Thus heretics differ from Catholics, yet they are called by the same name Christian Unity and Plurality 213 [huiusmodi est oppugnantia haereticorum cum Christiana et catholica religione, quibus tame remanet commune nomen Christianum] and use the same Christian symbols such as baptism and the cross. The third is when each sect adores a god peculiar to itself they have their own customs and rituals.
Therefore conducting a dialogue between Christianity and Hinduism becomes easier as one can stand above the cultural categories and use the rational elements that are accompanied by moral truths in religion[7]. What is important in religious dialogue is the recognition of universal moral norms that can be obtained by human reasoning. The combination of reason and moral norms could help the dialogue become fruitful and this can be done by anyone irrespective of his or her caste. We must bear in mind that the community de Nobili addressed is the Śaiva community whose Śaiva Siddhānta theology teaches the idea that we could know some truths by reason. Unlike the Śaivites, the Vaişņavas (who worship Vişņ u - Rāma and Krişņu) could not understand de Nobili in the sense that they believed in knowing about God even before His revelation. And their worship of Rama the divine descent is not to be considered as ‘idolatrous’ but as a grace and opportunity to experience God directly, whereas for Śaivas Rama is an inferior manifestation of the divine. Therefore, de Nobili’s preoccupation was winning the confidence of the Śaivites that went against the other sects. In his The Dialogue on Eternal life he considers some of the Hindu beliefs as erroneous and immoral (Amaladoss and Clooney 2000; cf Clooney 2001: 6ff). In his belief that at the level of reasoning every one from any culture all could interact and share ideas on religion he did not pay attention to emotions of people that are close to their religious ritual. In particular, in his understanding religion from the Thomistic philosophy he failed to be sensitive to the people in Tamil Nadu and his ‘rationalist thesis’ of religion in Tamil country treated as ignorant (cf. Barnes 2002:146). In that sense, even his own universal arguments or what I call ‘meta-thesis’, were unable to applied to the context close to his area of his mission and life. The rational way of approaching dialogue in itself might have some strong points so as to unite many religions in a single line of thought as the object of religion as salvation but fails very clearly to link the idea with local contexts that are crucial to a successful dialogue. From this it is not very difficult to understand why it is hard to set universal norms for any dialogue as every culture has play a part in dialogue as seen with another sect in de Nobili’s life in Madura Mission.

As Clooney (1999:412) believes, I also agree that religious beliefs are concerned with ‘the application of norms’ (intellectual reasoning) that could be applied by any one from any cultures and can not be reduced to ‘one particular culture’. But if we understand the meaning of culture properly we will not make this statement. For culture is not just the symbols and signs and more importantly you can not divorce the symbols and signs from the rationality of a particular people. It is hard to effect the application of moral norms and universal truths without any reference to cultures in which the application happens. The approach of de Nobili is purely rational and speculative that flies in the face of the empirical and ethnographic data we have about the practice of Hinduism. It is not the reason that is central to a belief system but emotions play pivotal role in organising a community around a belief system and they are closely linked to cultures of the believers. To remove the believers from their emotional involvement in their religion is to see them without the functioning heart where you have dead body. Particularly, the conduct of rituals in which a real dialogue should happen evokes emotions that spring from the cultural ethos from which one come from. Ritual, symbol, ethos and emotions that dramatise universal truths and moral norms are clothed by cultural categories. Ignoring these we can hardly understand religion proper.

It is a hardcore armchair theology to think faith is to be approached only by reason and this ignores the cultural roots of the faith. As I understand de Nobili measures Hindu religion with the barometer of modern western understanding of religion that is not sensitive to cultural discourses and practices in relation to religious beliefs. This also leads de Nobili to think about religions that do not follow the norms set by Christianity should be classified as irrational belief systems and these need urgent reformation. To push this argument little further, it was the colonial mind-set that thinks Hinduism is steeped in ancient prejudices and superstitious rituals and this calls for purification or what is called ‘civilisation’.

The nature of indigenous cultures into which their religions are built is ignored in the treatises of de Nobili.

That just ideas about God are sufficient to enter into relationship with another religious group is not sufficient to understand religion and its adherents and one can not separate ideas from the empirical reality from which they have come and which give meaning to human existence. Religion can not be understood as purely immanent development that transcends cultures. Although religion is based on universal truths it is expressed in rituals that are based, what Geertz (1975) calls, on powerful moods and motivations. And those emotions provide a model for how to live and heal the wounds of human limitedness. Similarly, religious forms and symbols arise out of elemental religious experience and must be renewed and transformed by such experience if they are to retain their living reality[8].

Coming from a wealthy and aristocratic family de Nobili felt at home with the South Indian royalty and Brahmins and the royal architecture of Madurai. And he wanted to convert the Brahmins that would have greater impact in the work of evangelisation than the converts from the lower castes (parankis). In doing so, de Nobili adopted the dress, diet, and the ritual of religious practice of the Brahmins. In a way, indirectly he realised and accepted the fact that without the assistance of cultural symbols of the Brahmins he could not enter into their religious world. And it is hard to understand de Nobili who did not see the relationship between the cultural symbols and religious doctrines. More sharply, I am unable to see why de Nobili did not perceive the fact that the mechanism and the dynamics of the cultural symbols were sanctified and approved by religious doctrines that Brahmins considered holy.

Reading through the treatises of de Nobili I realise that he did not have proper understanding of India’s caste system - Varnahsrmadharma. If he had understood the fact that the socio-religious life of Indians was structured by religious principles enshrined in Varna system he would not have separated religion from culture. For the caste system is structured on ‘the fundamental opposition between the ritually pure and the impure’ and the pure occupy the higher positions and the impure the lower in social life and socio-cultural life is shaped and determined by the religious doctrine (Khare 2005: 17). To illustrate this we need to go back de Nobili’s time of Madurai. The break up of Vijayanagara Empire resulted in the satraps forming their own separate kingdoms that were legitimised by Brahmins. For this the Brahmins received lands and control of temples and the remunerative bounty of offerings from devotees and the produce of the lands attached to the temples. In this way the Brahmins shared the political power that sprang from their religious role of sanctifying a rule. This is the way by which military power is translated into ritual prestige and authority (Zupanov 1999). By becoming a Guru (sanyasi) de Nobili acquires power in a Brhaminic way to win the hearts of the Brahmins in his project of evangelisation. In that way, he became a ‘Raja-sannyasi, a high caste holy man’ with the view of making inroads into the Brahminical communities (Barnes 2002: 144). In addition, his interest in taking up to Brahminic life style was to convert the Brahmins to Christianity, not a genuine interest to enter into a dialogue between cultures and religions. In a sense, the life style was a weapon to win the enemies.

In addition, de Nobili should have been aware of the fact that only the Pure could read the Vedas and the Impure were disallowed to education and that led to an ordering of cultural life of individuals in society. As Zupanov (1999) notes, by renouncing polluting substances such as meat and alcohol, distancing from polluting persons such as lower caste people, applying sandal paste on his forehead, wearing the sacred thread across his body and rigorously following rituals of Brahmins, de Nobili entered into Hindu religion through the doors of the cultures. In fact, de Nobili was convinced that in order to enter into the religious world of Brahmins he needed to enter their cultural world and this demonstrates the fact of the unity between of culture and religion. One can not talk of religion and of God merely in terms of syllogisms but it should relate to the culture that help the religion make meaningful statements. In political terms too, religious ritual and political power are inter-related and one can not have proper meaning isolated from the other. To illustrate the relationship between religious ritual and political power we must look at the ritual of horse sacrifice (Asvamedha) in Vedic times. In it, it is said that when a special horse accompanied by a selected band of warriors was allowed to wander at will, the king claiming all the territory over which it wandered. It was clear case of the legitimisation of sovereignty by Brahmanical ritual.

In many ways, de Nobili ignored the fact that the ritual (religion) and the caste system (culture) were organically inter-related, because his aim was evangelisation and conversion. He was not concerned with understanding different religions and cultures but his main aim was to convert as many peoples as possible. In doing so he wanted a sound justification and therefore he artificially delinked religion from culture and he disassociated himself from Gonsalo and his Christians and treated them as inferior and pollutants. By doing so de Nobili himself actualises the unitary relationship between religion and culture in concrete terms. If he wanted to translate his idea of separateness of religion and culture he should have related to the Gonzalo Christians without any discrimination. By not doing so he indirectly agrees that religion can not be separated from culture. In brief, de Nobili failed to understand that the religion of the Hindus was closely related to the Hindu cultural traditions and he ignored the link between ritual and power, religion and caste system, the impure people’s culture and the pure people’s culture, and religion and identity.

The Nobilian Discourse

Finally I want to focus on the discursive formulation of de Nobili. This is important to understand not only what he reasoned as inter-religious project but also the impact it made on the church in Tamil Nadu. Discourse is defined as a relational or differential ensemble of signifying sequences in which meaning is constantly negotiated and renegotiated, with a tacit assumption that every discursive formulation has an implicit power to structure or de-structure a society, or to construct or deconstruct an identity (Torfing: 1999: 85-93). According to Laclau (1993), the concept of discourse has its roots in classical transcendentalism from which theory of discourse he asserts that “the very possibility of perception, thought and action depends on the structuration of a certain meaningful field which pre-exists any factual immediacy” (Laclau: 1993: 431-7)[9]. The discourse, understood as the relational totality of signifying sequences that determine identity, leads to either the construction or the de-construction of meaning. It is often understood as an identity of an object or a person or a community. For Foucault, discourse is a political commodity and the articulation of discourse adds power, that is, a phenomenon of exclusion, limitation, and prohibition (Gordon: 1980: 245). Particularly, power, for Foucault, is not simply an entity that can be ‘held, taken’ or ‘alienated’ but also a problematic of circulation within various channels and networks governed by discursive formulations and relations of power that constitute a social body and “can not themselves be established, consolidated or implemented without production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of discourse” (Gordon: 1980: 93). The discourse that de Nobili uses is formed by his missionary zeal (read power) of converting people by any means and inspired by the medieval Thomistic theology. Conveniently, reasoning religion in terms of universal truths and moral values helps him achieve his goals. He believed that clear reasoning would lead any one to conversion and thus to change of faith. In this sense, the de Nobilian discourse is a political commodity that articulates power that is used to exclude one from something and prohibit one from doing something. And de Nobili believed in his ethnocentric superiority that his way of reasoning (in Thomistic categories) helps him understand the Hindu culture better than the Hindus themselves (cf. Clooney 2001: 4-5).

More clearly the discourse signifies his identity as a man from elite background with elite education that has very little relation to empirical reality and this guides him to construct the meaning of religion in Tamil Nadu. The religious discourse that de Nobili reveals basically his elite background, his training in Thomistic theology and his interest in convert the elites of Tamil Nadu to Christianity. Obviously, the level of thinking and talking about it is abstraction and speculation distancing him from the concrete reality. This led de Nobili, as I understand, to live in an ideal world and engage in dialogue with Hindus in abstract terms. Although one might sympathise with his practical skill to move away from the colonial power and politics and use his opportunity to do in what he was competent, one can not deny the fact that he failed to feel one with the reality in the context of his times, instead he abstracted the Hindu religion from its cultural conditions that indirectly justified the oppressive caste system, which was a meaningless dichotomy. To my mind he could have entered into the world of Hindus by understanding their religion as a part of their cultural traditions and still he could have made significant progress in his mission. In fact, by taking up the cultural life style of the Hindu sanniyasi to enter into their religious world he demonstrates the fact that the Hindu culture is the door to the Hindu religion.

People who influenced me: Will Durant

What can one write about Will Durant who writes about philosphy and philosophers in his famous book "The story of Philosophy"?

Tracing the philosophers' biography and linking it to the philosophy is a fascinating way of giving life to such as subject. His sweep is so very vast as to expose his own interllectual powers that one recognises how short one's own capabilities are.

Ideas that influenced me: Survival of the fitting

I interrupt my series on People who influenced me to include a title "Ideas that influenced me". The idea I got introduced in early nineties when I was practicing touch typing on an old miniatute type writer was in an article by Kenneth E. Boulding " The evolution of riches". I recently got hold of the practice typescript and decided to include the same here not only for its content but also for the thinking process of grafting one idea on to another. Since Kenneth Boulding is the person here is his picture as well.

THE EVOLUTION OF RICHES

Kenneth E. Boulding

Why did science develop in Europe and not in China, much more advanced technologically in 1400 and seemed to be much more ready for it? The question why some societies develop and others do not or even retrogress- sometimes called the “Needham problem” after the great historian Joseph Needham- is one of the most difficult in the interpretation of human history.Needham confesses he still does not know the answer after 11 or 12 volumes.

Why did Europe an obscure peninsula on the edge of the civilized world in the year 1000, explode all over the world after about 1450? Why did modern Japan join the modern world so quickly after 1870 when China and India found it so difficult? Why did Australia continue to get richer after World war II while Argentina stagnated economically and went over a cliff politically? Coming closer will the US after its brief splendour lapse into stagnation and mediocrity as so many societies have done?

I have argued that modern evolutionary theory can throw a great deal of light on such a question of development although I am not sure it can come up with final answers. It is no accident that development has essentially the same meaning as evolution though it does perhaps have more overtones of human valuations about it.

Development means change for the better and we have the feeling that evolution from the first appearance of DNA to ourselves also represents development according to human values that we are in the same sense better than the amoeba and the dinosaur. The capacity of an organism to evaluate things, play an important role in the evolutionary process because it has survival value.

It is not unreasonable to regard human history and development as an extension of the evolutionary process of evolution changes as it produces change. Biological evolution is different from chemical and physical evolution and societal evolution is different again even though there are profound structural similarities.

Fit to survive

The great Darwinian concept of mutation and selection still dominates evolutionary theory, although our concept of what constitutes mutation and selection has changed profoundly since Darwin. Selection now seems to be a very complex process of ecological interaction.

Darwin’s metaphors here were most unfortunate. The survival of the fittest, a concept he got from Spencer means nothing. If we ask fit for what the answer is fit to survive and all we have is the survival of the surviving and we know that anyway in reality “what survives is what fits” into the complex structure of ecosystems. “Survival of the fitting” would be a better metaphor.

Ecological interaction takes place through the very complex relationships that determine the birth and death rates of a species. A species will survive if it has a niche that is an equilibrium population at which its birth and death rates are equal allowing for certain fluctuations. The birth and death rates depend upon its own population and also on the population of all the other species with which it is in contact including not only the biological species but also physical species and human artifacts . some of these relationships are co operative, some competitive some are productive. But they all add up to survival if the species has a niche, some population at which its birth and death rates are equal.

Mutation is simply another word for change. In biological evolution the more significant changes are of course in the genetic structures. Changes in environmental variables – climate, temperature, rain fall and so on are also very important. Biological genetic mutations are not strictly random. For any given structure the probability distribution of mutations that could take place from it. Some are more probable than others, but there is widespread agreement that a mutation is not much related to the life experience of the organism for which the genetic structure is a programme. Biological evolution at least is not teleological, that is the future which the change determines does not affect the change itself. This is because all that the gene has is know how, it has very little “know what” or “know why”.


However once we get to the human race and to the societal evolution the capacity of human beings for know what and their interest in know why become of great importance. Mutations in human society consists of new ideas, new inventions, new organisations new philosophies, new discoveries and so on most of which involve know what and know why. An increase in know what often produces a considerable increase in know why as we see with the extraordinary technological impact of the scientific revolution.

The concept of selection through ecological interaction however still remains. The principle here is that mutation will not be successful unless it produces a new species. Whether this is a horse, an automobile that has an empty niche that is something that would have an equilibrium population in the ecosystem if it existed,it is very clear that Australia had an empty niche for rabbits, l European type people and artifacts and automobiles.


Just because there is an empty niche does not mean that it will be filled. The mutation that would fill it may not occur. This means that evolution has a profoundly indeterministic element to it. It is not at all like celestial mechanics. The occurrence of mutation of very low probability has had a profound effect on it, and non occurrence perhaps an even more profound effect although it is very hard to know what did not happen that might have happened. The world as it exists today is a result of a long series of probable events that could have easily gone the other way.

This does not mean however that there are some patters are more probable than others. Our images of the future about what our decisions are made are always uncertain but they do have structures of greater or less probability. As I have sometimes said, we have to be prepared to be surprised by the future, but we don’t have to be dumbfounded, which means that as our skills improve we can make decisions that are better than the others we might have made.

What light does this throw on the different patterns of development of different societies? It is clear that if there are no empty niches there will be no development. A society that suppresses anything different from the present that has a rigid orthodoxy that is intolerant of all dissent that thinks it knows all there is to know will clearly be pretty stagnant. Islam after about 1300, Spain of the inquisition, China under the gang of four, are all possible examples . The English toleration of dissent in the18th century had something to do with the Industrial Revolution and the separation of the church and the state in the US has something to do with its economic development.

Another fundamental thing could be the protection of infancy. A potential species may have a niche in an ecosystem if its population gets to be large enough but it may have to get over a hump in its population size below which it may not survive.

The infant industry argument in economics is an interesting case. An industry may not survive if it fails to grow beyond a critical size but would prosper if it is large enough. The development of the human brain almost certainly had something to do with the fact hat the ancestors of homo sapiens developed child care and long infancies. The case for subsidising innovation in their early stage rests some what on this premise.

A third principle is that the rate of mutation itself is important though what determines this is very hard to say. We seem to know very little about this even in this biosphere. But what it is in the structure of the human being that makes some people bubble over with ideas and very creative and others dull and conventional we really do not know. Now do we ever think up something that we have not thought of? There are probably immense processes of random search and selection unconsciously in the human mind.

We could argue of course that the human capacity for innovation is very constant and that differences lie in the degree to which it is encouraged or suppressed. This would suggest that perhaps there is some optimum degree of ecological interaction but this is very hard to identify.

For instance one possible explanation of the development of science – the Needham problem - is that china was too well organized and Europe had the optimum degree of disorganisation. It was in the interest of the Mandarins not to rock the boat too much. In Europe there was separation of church and division into nation states so that Copernicus got away with it in Poland, Tyco Brahe in Denmark, Kepler in Prague and so on. The Romans would certainly have suppressed any rise of science.


The ideal situation seems to be islands in occasional contact. We need islands for infant protection to give mutations smaller humps over which they must get in order to survive.

If the island is too isolated, however, it will not have enough mutation, migration is a very important element in mutation in the evolutionary process, the migration of ideas as much as species. This is perhaps why my ideal world is a world of walled garden with doors – 500 independent nations in stable peace, each with its own culture and identity its own capacity for individual mutation but also related by travrl, trade and functional world organisations. In all this too we have to remember that most changes are adverse, most mutations do not survive and most ideas are bad ones.

SCIENCE DIGEST JUNE 1983