This is true. There was no non White, West European or American, democracies anywhere- even Liberia and Sierra Leone (where the indigenous people were denied a vote till the Fifties or Sixties). Haiti, it is true, sometimes had Presidents but it also sometimes had Emperors and Dukes. The Americans occupied it and despite F.D.R writing the constitution, corvee labor remained in place. No country in the world became Democratic save by explicitly copying a Western model.
Mimetics- i.e. mimicking what Western countries were doing is how Democracy was broadcast to the rest of the world. This may involve 'disciplined self-fashioning'- e.g Japanese legislators dressing up in Top Hats and tailcoats- or it may be purely functionalist and institutionalist as in India.
The truth is that there is no Democracy anywhere in the non-Western world where the rules of the political game aren't clearly of Western provenance. Look at Turkey. They had their first multi-party elections in 1946. This was because the Turks needed to be pals with America because Stalin's power had greatly increased. However, when an elected Prime Minister overrode constitutional checks and balances, the Army stepped in and hanged him. So much for 'autochthonous' democracy.
On the other hand, Leela may not be talking about Democracy as a system of Government at all. She may be referring to Democracy as the possibilization of the impossibilization of the inclusivity of the exclusivity of the cat which married the dog.
Leela hasn't noticed that Indians can't go to Amrika and vote in elections there. Democracy isn't really about 'infinitive inclusivity' at all. Religion- maybe. A guy who wants to be Emperor of the world may want to rule over everybody on the planet. But no Democracy wants to expand its borders such that foreigners will get the vote and, if they become the majority, take control of the country.
The self and the world are interconnected- till you die. Democracy isn't predicating this anymore than Imperialism was doing so. It's simply a fact that selves exist in the world, till death supervenes and the world wags on without those selves.
There was no 'ethical turn' in the early twentieth century. Ideas current in the second half of the Nineteenth Century- which was a period when moral philosophy enjoyed higher prestige- continued to circulate. However attention was shifting to quantitative research in the so called 'Social Sciences'. Statistics now mattered more than a priori arguments. As for 'the colonial encounter'- it contributed to Racism. In one sense, this was 'democratic'- all Whites deserve higher rights than any Blacks- and the opposite of the old Imperial tradition whereby the King Emperor might accord 'sovereign immunity' to a Black Maharajah while denying even the vote to some White men in his own capital city.
In this era, Leela Gandhi argues, the concept of ethics had obtained a ubiquitous application.
This is entirely false. Ethics had ubiquitous application only in the Age of Faith because life was nasty, brutish and short and so what people worried about was what sort of after-life they'd have. It would be a shame if you were kept out of Paradise for all eternity because of some trifling moral lapse- like killing and eating your Bishop.
The Twentieth Century was about Science and Technology changing the Social World so radically that Monarchs and Aristocrats and Bishops lost political importance. Engineers and entrepreneurs and the 'Mass Man'- working in factories or fighting in the trenches- determined outcomes.
No longer the denominator for right and wrong or good and bad behavior, merely, it came to designate all projects of disciplined self-fashioning.
This simply isn't true. Nobody thought body-building or haute couture or even whether you'd had elocution lessons and learned to talk like a lady was about ethics as opposed to making the best of your opportunities. No doubt, Leela's famous ancestor though wearing a dhoti was ethical. But he ordered his wife to cook mutton chops for Maulana Azad who wore a sherwani. On the other hand, Azad got to smoke cigars in Gandhi's presence whereas Nehru, who also wore a sherwani, wasn't allowed to have a ciggie.
The plain fact is that nobody in the twentieth century thought it was immoral to have muscles or to wear a smart coat rather than dress in rags and look half-starved. Maybe, back in the Age of Faith, people who bathed regularly and ate properly were castigated as fodder for Hell's fire, but no such prejudice obtained anywhere across the globe by the end of the Nineteenth Century.
These could tend either toward exclusivity and hierarchy or toward a more inclusive universalism, depending on the players.
But all ethical theories have a metric which distinguishes between those who hold a higher obligation by reason of their superior talents or resources and those of whom little can be expected and for whom much must be done.
No doubt, one might say 'all are equal in God's eye. The beggar delights the All Mighty by starving just as much as the rich man does by gormandizing. But this is a mystical, not an ethical, point of view.
Gandhi discloses a shared ethos of perfectionist values
No such thing existed. Having a metric doesn't mean you think perfection is possible. We can say this prime number is higher than that prime number. This does not mean we think there must be a biggest prime number. Even Gandhi, cretin that he was, didn't think he'd reached a stage where sleeping naked with a great-niece could cause the rains to fall or Jinnah to just fuck off back to Hampstead.
across imperialism, fascism,
Voodoo, playing with your own feces, Quantum Mechanics, putting pajamas on cats
and new liberalism, and highlights its exclusion of the ordinary, the unexceptional, and the unremarkable.
There was no such exclusion. The Twentieth Century was about the Masses not some aristocratic or spiritual elite.
By contrast, she illuminates a range of anti-colonial and anti-fascist practices of moral imperfectionism
which didn't end colonialism or fascism because it took guns and planes and tanks and- in the case of Japan- nuclear bombs to achieve that. Will the Chinese Communist Party be brought down by practices of 'moral imperfectionism'? No. Don't be silly. Only a fuckwit of Gorbachevian proportions could tank that regime. Wanking while gazing transgressively at a bowl of oranges won't cause the Dalai Lama to get Tibet back.
and points to their emergence in hidden transnational pockets, encounters, and events.
A guy bums another guy in a public toilet. A lady pinches the bottom of another lady. It was these encounters and events which brought down Hitler and Tojo- thinks nobody at all.
She shows how these oppositional practices were devoted to self-ruination and an anti-care of the self
thus provoking great mirth. I often tell the story of Shulamith Firestone to ladies on a first date. When they finally break down laughing I think I've scored. Sadly, I am generally mistaken. This is because women don't want to sleep with dudes who know about Feminist philosophy. They prefer guys who do mixed martial arts and who made a lot of money on the Stock Exchange.
and aimed at making common cause both with the victims and abettors of unjust sociality, by defending the former and reforming the latter.
because that's what happens when you do stupid, crazy, shit- right? Try it for yourself. Stop shitting in the toilet. Shit only in your bed or on your expensive couch. This will cause trillions of people, currently being raped, to gain affirmative action within the I.T industry. Budding sociopaths will stop torturing little animals and join the Boy Scouts.
Gandhi draws her examples from belle époque anti-materialism,
which, since French Democracy was a shit show, must have been shit.
antinomian Indian spirituality,
which had ceased to exist. The Mahatma's daddy was a member of the Pushtimarg. But the Maharaj Libel case had shown that the guy running it was infecting the wives of his disciples with syphilis. That was antinomian for sure. But the Hindus decided to get rid of that type of shit. This happened before Gandhi was born. Still, his Sanskrit tutor at Samaldas College was 'antinomian'- i.e. had syphilis and swung both ways. But that isn't why Gandhi's folk shipped him off to England. It was because England was known for more than Victorian morality. It was the place to which money went on pilgrimage.
the military cosmopolitanism of WWI,
which wasn't cosmopolitan at all. There was strict racial segregation.
and the world-situation of mutiny
there was no mutiny- except maybe the Naval Ratings mutiny in India which was quickly crushed. None of the mutineers got further employment in the military because they were shitty at their jobs.
in the moment of post-war demobilization and decolonization. She also engages key thinkers of the time, including M. K. Gandhi,
who was as stupid as shit but good at raising money from people of his own class so as to advance their economic interests
Edmund Husserl,
Who started off as a Mathsy guy but then wasted his time on 'phenomenology'- which is nonsense on stilts. Heidegger took his pants down. The fellow had zero political influence.
Aimé Césaire,
who couldn't stop France extracting a lot of money from its ex-colonies the way it had done with Haiti. Seriously, if you want text-book neo-colonialism it is to Francophone Africa that you must look.
Henri Bergson,
who had no political influence, more particularly after America abandoned Wilsonism, and was unwise enough to pick a fight with Einstein. I think Sorel once called him the French Marx but Sorel had shit for brains.
Sri Ramana Maharishi,
whom nobody in South India rated till Somerset Maugham talked the fellow up. Again, this is a guy with zero political influence. It was the anti-Brahmin ideologues of that period who prevailed.
Sigmund Freud,
who was studiedly apolitical and hoped there could be an 'Aryan' branch of his bogus cult.
and Theodor Adorno.
Who was utterly useless. He was chased out of Germany in '69 by girls baring their breasts.
Bringing raw material practices into conversation with the mainstream of twentieth-century thought
Dewey is mainstream. Ramana Maharishi and Theodore Adorno are not. As for 'raw material practices'- does that involve finger painting using your own feces? I suppose so.
in an imaginative historiography, this book defends democracy as a shared art of living on the other side of perfection.
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