The Social Cost of Political, Religious Inheritance
Since time immemorial human urban populations were governed by those whose business it became to manipulate public opinion for good or for ill, as state administrators. And there were always those huge numbers of the population who represented the peasantry, and whom the upper crust of any society used to their advantage. While the scant few well connected and wealthy in the upper social stratum prospered, the lower classes lived in squalor and poverty.This is what human beings do to one another. They advantage themselves through others' disadvantages. And feel complacently entitled to do so. Some religions are based, like the Hindu religion, on class structure. Some societies have traditionally, through their secular initiatives, accepted a designed and rigid class structure. The ancient Greeks, in their infinite wisdom and the formation of their city-states, finally formulated a new type of political administration that gave responsibility and opportunity to all its citizens.
It's where the first vestiges of some kind of democracy first surfaced, to eventually enlighten much of our current world. Yet after all those trials and errors over the ensuing millennia, many countries of the world remain indifferent to, and openly opposed to anything remotely resembling suffrage, and egalitarian opportunities will continue to be resisted there. Those are the brutal dictatorships, the military juntas, the inherited monarchies.
China exemplifies the rigidity of a totalitarian state, setting out a formula by which all its population is expected to live, under the guiding principles of Communism, only recently diluted by capitalist utility in a needful economy to advance the state and advantage the population. Slowly there has arisen a newly-advantaged urban middle class, massively unbalanced by a huge peasantry; subsistence farmers, resentful of their deprivation.
In that country's vast provinces people exist in stultifying poverty, eking out their bare lifestyles. Now and again some firebrand among them agitating huge, desperate groups into a volatile display of anger resulting in uprisings that are swiftly and decisively extinguished by an alert local government, answerable to the wrath of Beijing, uncomfortable at the possibility that any segment of their population dissents.
China strains toward modernity, frowning on tradition, the cultures of historical antecedents, superstitious beliefs, considering them to be "illegal". This is the inheritance of the Cultural Revolution, the culmination of a series of massive social engineering failures. Just as the great Russian Communist experiments of collectivization collapsed in failure, much as the USSR itself collapsed under the impossible weight of imposing homogeneity on disparate cultures, traditions, religions and ideologies.
India with its unweighty, diverse and argumentative population has come through its own series of social engineering failures, in its grand effort at dominating and re-structuring a religion-resistant hierarchy of local traditions and rigid class determinism. After its long colonization by Great Britain and its Gandhian glory resulting in independence; after its paroxysm of partition and its battles with Pakistan, it turned its attention to setting itself to rights.
Indira Gandhi triumphed against adversity only to be felled by her own arrogance in not being able to recognize when she had tramped too hard on a significant segment of her own population. Her initial and original administration fell into disorder with high inflation, economic downturn, and above all rampant corruption. Living standards could not have been more desperate than what poor Indians, both Hindu and Muslim, faced, living in rabbit warrens, earning barely enough to feed themselves.
She imposed a state of emergency, imprisoning those who defied her political reign; she lifted constitutional rights, placed the press under censorship, and allowed her younger son to run rampant as heir apparent to the country. A country which turned from admiring and respecting their prime minister, to hating what she represented with a fierce determination. Her son's dread forced sterilization program earned them both the undying enmity of all Indians. The second Emergency rule she instituted resulted in her attempts to crush Sikh militancy. Which, in the end, crushed her.
Now an emerging economic giant, along with China, nearly 70% of India's population remains landless and in dire poverty. Bombay, Delhi and Chennai boast prosperity. Despite the country's new industrial parks, high-tech office complexes and shopping malls, the 770-million of its people who strive as rural labourers or subsistence farmers are barely hanging on. The quarries and workshops where families labour in bonded servitude remain.
The lives of Indian women in the vast rural areas remain stagnantly impotent, as little-valued bearers of the next generation. Young girls are given away for marriage, helpless to help themselves. Old women are left destitute as their sons dispose of their houses, leaving them bereft. Indian widows, whether still girl-children married to elderly men, then left adrift at their death, or older widows with no one to support them, become street beggars.
Unwanted women are coerced to give up their belongings, are sent to the countryside to live in poverty-stricken collectives until they finally die; of illness and disease and neglect, and starvation. Women are sent by their husbands to undergo tests to determine the gender of the fetus they're carrying; female fetuses are routinely aborted, girl babies are neglected and often die of neglect.
There are still instances of enforced sati, where families are complicit in sacrificing the widow on her dead husband's funeral pyre. Unhappy and desperate Indian women often attempt suicide. Many try to burn themselves to death. When Indian wives cannot produce heirs, their husband's family will send them back to their own families, without their dowry, penniless, unwanted anywhere.
Inequalities among populations have always resulted in revolutions. Usually, it's the great dissatisfied masses that rise up in revolt against their masters, that proportion of society which traditionally lived off the labour of the disadvantaged. Europe's marching, militantly pious Crusaders represented a poor few knights, but more often an unwieldy, motley crew of starving peasantry, and children. Sent off with great fanfare and gullible hope, to recapture the Holy Land from Islam.
Europe thus ridding itself of the vast penurious, landless peasants who might otherwise eventually turn upon the land-owners. The peasants, ignorant, suggestible and eminently manipulable, were given the holy task of doing the work of God. The choices were simple; join the Crusades, or give up their lives otherwise, in hard labour over generations, constructing the great cathedrals of Europe.
The French Revolution set the tone for other countries to emulate, when the resentful peasantry finally decided it had suffered enough under the yoke of imperial majesty whose wasteful lifestyles knew no bounds while their servants simmered in anger, and the vast peasant population rose up in righteous anger demanding their human due. And in their anger, slaughtered those who had always haughtily ignored their presence and their need.
The Russian Revolution followed a similar plot line, this time delineating a well-thought-out and encouraged ideology of the common man inheriting the earth. Wealthy land-owners, the educated, the middle class were all destroyed, and society turned itself inside out to begin all over again. It was a course undertaken gradually by other societies chafing at the indignities imposed upon them by a superior, entitled, wealthy class.
But human nature being what it most undeniably is, all such noble ventures, to enhance the lives of the majority and bring the entitled minority down to their level, were destined to fail. Mostly because individuals cannot be herded unless there is a personal, not a collective, advantage, and because human emotions and needs are not amenable to collectivization and denial of self-advantage. We thrive on manipulating one another for our own advantage.
We rise to the challenge, not to benefit the entirety, but to benefit self. The American Revolution had an ostensibly noble purpose; to free black slaves and welcome them as equals. And just incidentally to call the bluff of the secessionists, willing to go it alone, separating and dividing the country between slave-owners and non-slavers. And while, post-Revolution, a spirit of equality did enjoy a brief presence, the traditional distance between white and black re-asserted itself.
Persia's modern revolution when the population welcomed the Grand Ayatollah Komenei back from exile in Paris, to take over the country from the de-throned Mohammad Reza Pahlevi, Shah of Iran, gave Iranians the impression that they were being rescued from a tyrannical ruler. One who, nonetheless, helped to empower Iranian women, opened new hospitals and universities, and began to modernize that ancient country.
Iran is now ruled by a rigid fundamentalist theocracy under the control of Grand Ayatollah Khameneii whose iron grip on the country through Shia belief in the ascendancy of Iran as the controlling power in the region, and whose long-range plan of achieving a universal return to the glory of Islam informs that country's program of nuclear determination. This is a society now rigidly controlled by the Ayatollahs' interpretation of Islamic sacred writings.
A country where social life is entirely circumscribed by the teaching of the Prophet Mohammad, and which believes implicitly in the return of the Invisible Mahdi, the Seventh Prophet, the "Imam of Resurrection" of whose eventual presence Mahmoud Ahamadinejad speaks so fervently. When truth will be revealed, and end the great cycle, and man and his celestial prototype become reinstated in their original condition.
And in anticipation of that coming, it matters little what occurs in the interim. There are no sacrifices too great to make to encourage the coming of the Seventh Prophet. It may even take a nuclear war, which Iran is ready to inflict on the region, ostensibly for the purpose of eradicating Israel from the Middle East, but really as a means by which to invite the Invisible Mahdi to return, and make everything right with the world.
Madness reigns supreme where humankind exists.
Labels: Political Realities, Religion, Societal Failures
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, July 13, 2008
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