Moral inversion arises when you think anything you or your friends or allies do is wicked while anything your enemies do is virtuous. It can arise simply from an uncorrelated 'information' asymmetry- viz. the fact that you are more likely to have alethic data about your own actions, or those of your allies, than you do about the enemy. Moreover, information the enemy makes available is likely to be propagandistic. The result of 'moral inversion' is Chomsky type indignation that the US killed Osama bin Laden but failed to kill some Cuban dude who had tried to assassinate Castro. However, what is even more shocking is that Chomsky wiped his own bum but totally neglected to come and wipe my bum back in 1966. Was it because he was a RACIST? I suppose so.
Michael Polanyi, who invented the term, thought “moral inversion”- which may be broadly understood as the process by which the fusion of scientific scepticism (“extreme critical lucidity') with utopian social aspirations (“intense moral conscience” ), is what produces the dystopia of moral and political nihilism out of which arises the modern totalitarian state.
Polanyi was wrong. Totalitarian states arise out of and for the sake of total war. What produces them is ruthless killers backed by sadistic torturers who can rely upon a horde of civil servants shuffling files filled with reports from spies.
Polanyi was a pal of TS Eliot. He should have known that there can be a totalitarian theocracy- e.g. a state ruled by the Inquisition or Calvin's Geneva. It is not the case that totalitarianism arises where 'the only principle of social order is absolute coercive power and in which material welfare is embraced as the supreme social good'.
Spiritual welfare or the 'purity of the race' or building pyramids for pharaoh may be considered the supreme social good. However, if you want to maximize 'material welfare', you will minimize coercion because the thing is costly. This is the folk theorem of repeated games.
D.M Yeager, in an essay titled 'Confronting the Minotaur: Moral Inversion and Polanyi’s Moral Philosophy' writes-
The exposure and critique of moral inversion is a project to which Polanyi reverts repeatedly between 1946 and 1975, and it can fairly be said that diagnosing this pathology, analyzing its causes, and devising a remedy constitute the social objective to which his philosophical work is ordered.
It was shit but slightly less mischievous than the work of his elder brother, Karl.
In 1968 Zdzislaw Najder
who was Polish, not Hungarian.
published, in the collection Intellect and Hope, an adept, biting, and comprehensive critique of Polanyi’s discussion of moral inversion. So far as I know, this powerful set of objections has gone unanswered.
because the dude was Polish. Anyway, Polyani could be considered an economist, as well as a Chemist, and it is economics alone which can explain 'moral inversion'- e.g. Polanyi's own preference for Christianity over his ancestral religion.
Consider the following-
To accept the indeterminacy of knowledge
is easy. This is because we know that we are uncertain or hazy about things we really ought to know- like where I left the fucking TV remote.
requires, on the contrary [contrary to the objectivist picture of the “functioning of a mindless knower”]
There is no such picture. Even God is pictured as having a mind.
, that we accredit a person entitled to shape his knowing according to his own judgment, unspecifiably.
We are all entitled to do that. But entitlement does not entail capability. You may tell me that I am entitled to get as rich as fuck and to lose weight and become sexually attractive to women. What good does that do me? I'm incapable of doing anything people would want to reward me for. As for women, if they can't be bothered to form an orderly queue outside my bed-room door, they don't deserve my jizz.
This notion— applied to man—implies in its turn a sociology in which the growth of thought is acknowledged as an independent force.
i.e. a Sociology even shittier than that of his pal Mannheim.
And such a sociology is a declaration of loyalty to a society in which truth is respected and human thought is cultivated for its own sake.
Smart Hungarian Jews emigrated to places where money was respected and human thought was cultivated for the sake of raising productivity and Social Welfare- not to mention aggregate Profit. Otherwise, there would be a Marxian 'general slump'.
Yeager thinks
Polanyi is probing a moral paradox: namely, that the twentieth century’s unprecedented lake of blood had its springs, not in moral decay or complete amorality, but in pathological moralism.
Fuck off! It had its springs in a spat between Imperial cousins. Apparently, Willy was jelly of Uncle Teddy but failed to keep cousin Nicky on side. By its end, no multi-ethnic Empire was left standing. Even India, despite Mahatma Gandhi's best efforts, was crawling down a one way road to Independence- and the blood-bath that was Partition.
The demonic is not a force that opposes the moral; it is Western morality’s own deepest and, in ways, most seductive temptation.
No it isn't. It wasn't true that the Archbishop of Canterbury vied with the Pope to get first suck of Satan's cock.
Although this has presumably been a perpetual danger, in late modernity, the demonic subversion of moral intention became nothing less than inevitable when certain supporting conditions conspired to defeat critical moral self-consciousness. The puzzle that totalitarianism
which Britain, in 1917, was doing better than the fucking Krauts or the Rooskis because the Brits were smarter, more patriotic, and better able to mobilize resources- including female labour- for the war effort.
presents to him is, thus, the puzzle of how profound and noble moral aspirations could be so completely twisted and perverted as to result not only in the callous forms of dehumanization epitomized by the unthinkable slaughter of millions of citizens by their own various governments but in the complete subversion of justice, the wholesale sacrifice of freedom, and the systematic substitution of purposeful lies for inconvenient truths.
There is plenty of ethnic cleansing and wholesale enslavement and transportation of nations in the Old Testament. Also, the fucker might have heard of a little place called America. Did he think its indigenous people had names like George Washington or Thomas Jefferson? Perhaps. TS Eliot was obviously a Cherokee maiden dressed in deer-skin.
Polanyi, being an actual scientist, was less stupid than Popper. One may say 'moral inversion' arises out of Popperian 'Conjectures & Refutations'- where conjectures regarding the virtue of your own side are more easily refuted because relevant information is more easily accessible- which, unfortunately, was the credo adopted by George Soros who has financed the circular-firing squad of woke 'moral inversion' which has been so fatal to Western Liberal Democracy.
In 'The Nature and Classes of Prescriptive Judgements', Amartya Sen distinguished between purely prescriptive and evaluative judgments. This was foolish since a prescription necessarily involves evaluating the state being recommended as superior to the one which obtains or would obtain if the prescription were not followed. What of evaluative judgments? Well, since Kant, 'judgment' in Ethics means the same thing as 'proposition' in Logic or 'theorem' in Math. Apparently, this has to do with some quirk of the German language. Still, when thinking about a proposition or theorem or a judicial decision, arguments for and against the thing are 'evaluated'. The one chosen is the one that better promotes the intended outcome. But, 'prescriptions' do exactly that. In other words, there is no actual distinction between prescription and evaluation. One may say the former is part of the latter or that the latter was the basis of the former but one could equally say cats are dogs which say miaow or dogs are cats which say woof woof.
Sen makes a different error when differentiating between a compulsive and a non-compulsive judgments. Sen thinks the former implies a strong imperative to choose one option over another while the latter suggests a preference without a strict imperative. He does not understand that the former just means 'judgment' while the latter means 'not a judgment, this is just a personal preference or passing whim'. A legal judgment or logical proposition or mathematical theorem compels assent from those satisfied by the proof offered. Saying 'I like Pizza but, for some strange reason, never on a Tuesday' is not a judgment. It is not a prescription. It is not an evaluation. It is merely a statement of no ethical import or imperative force. We may say it is 'phatic'- i.e. its primary purpose is to be sociable, not informative.
Sen then goes on to distinguish between 'basic judgments'- which remain unchanged regardless of factual circumstances and non-basic judgments which may change with new information. The cretin does not get that the former are knows as 'principles' or 'axioms' whereas the latter are called judgments, propositions, theorems etc. Sen says basic value judgments cannot be disputed through factual means while non-basic judgments can be examined and potentially revised based on new evidence. He appears oblivious to the Quid Juris/Quid Factis distinction. The facts of the case determine which principles or value judgements are applicable. However, those same principles or value judgments may determine what facts are 'eligible' or admissible.
Sen thinks utilitarianism evolved away from compulsive to a non-compulsive judgment. This was not the case. It simply abandoned a restrictive view of what was useful and what was vanity. Bentham coined a number of words- like 'quisquilious, to mean 'rubbishy'- for things he thought were a waste of time and money which nobody should indulge in. Once you have a notion of 'transferable utility'- i.e. money- we become charitable to those who produce 'quisquilious' novels about boy wizards because we realize that their author earns billions of dollars in foreign exchange for our country.
Sen, in his 1967 paper wasn't talking of Economics per se and, not being a Philosopher- or a Western European by birth or upbringing- his imbecility may be forgivable. We can't say the same for Antoinette Baujard who recently published a paper titled 'Value Judgments and Economic Expertise'.
Within economics, and particularly within economic expertise, there are three different types of judgments.
No. There is only type of judgement we require from a professional expert- viz. such and such is the best path for us given where we want to go.
First, descriptive judgments which correspond to statements of fact, or “is” propositions. “Sirah is a vine, so is Chardonnay,” for instance, is a descriptive judgment.
No. It is a positive statement which may or may not be true.
Second, evaluative judgments which correspond to statements of value. The “is” here is thus qualified. “Sirah makes good wine”
No. That is still a positive statement. If Syrah wine sells at a high price, it is true.
or “Sirah makes red wine” are instances of evaluative judgments.
No. If Syrah wine is described in the trade as 'red wine', it is true.
Third, prescriptive judgments which correspond to statements of either recommendation or obligation. For instance, “Paul should drink Sirah, not Chardonnay” is a prescriptive judgment.
It is a positive statement if the preceding utterance was 'Paul wants to impress the boss who likes Syrah but has a prejudice against Chardonnay.'
This trichotomy seems clear, and the separation between the three different classes of judgments is clear cut.
It is nonsense. Analytical philosophy can have no purchase in the pragmatics of utterances by economic experts.
Let us therefore consider the three types of judgment in turn, with the aim of shaking this first impression, and highlighting rather their interdependency.
Nonsense isn't 'interdependent'. It is merely nonsense.
(1) Let us begin by casting doubt on the assertion that a description is a mere statement of fact.
Some descriptions are factual. The Police may describe me in terms of height, weight, complexion etc. My wife describes me as a big fat pig. Both descriptions make it easier for a stranger to pick me out of a crowd.
Consider the following three statements: i) Paul is choosing Sirah whereas he could also have some Chardonnay.
Paul has 'revealed preference' for Syrah. That's a data point of high reliability.
ii) Paul says he likes Sirah better than Chardonnay.
A data point of lower reliability.
iii) Paul is choosing Sirah, and notices that Chardonnay is less expensive.
Interviewing him just at this moment yields qualitatively better data.
As these three descriptions of a possibly similar situation illustrate, each descriptive assertion requires a selection among all possible descriptions of reality, rather than mere observation (Sen 1980).
This is nonsense. Observation gives rise to description. The expert observer hones in on what is qualitatively more informative. Here, observing the guy who reaches for Syrah- presumably because this is his habit or because Syrah has a big ad campaign- and then notices the lower price of Chardonnay. His body language and the contents of his grocery cart add information about what is going on in his mind. Indeed, the expert may learn more from watching this guy than from a focus group.
However, we cannot say that each of these selections a priori involves an appeal to values –
Nothing wrong with an economic expert appealing to economic values- e.g. economizing on the use of scarce discovery, doing 'discovery' for regret minimizing reasons, etc.
as the ideology view would maintain (see below, section 4). At most we may speak of specific interpretations, where the selection depends on the aim of the description. Such interpretations may lead us to pursue certain specific paths of judgment, but this influence is not properly or strictly based on the descriptive judgments themselves.
There are no 'descriptive judgments'. There are mere observations of a positive type.
Rather, the evaluation presupposes the selection of a specific description.
E.g. tentatively placing a valuation on a house which is for sale on the basis of the average price for a house of that description on that particular street.
(2) Let us now consider the properties of evaluative judgments.
In economics, an evaluation is expressible in terms of money or 'opportunity cost' on a physicalist configuration space.
An evaluative notion of quality (such as “right,” “good,” “balanced”) supposes certain axiological abstract judgments.
Not if they are commonly used in the relevant market or trade. In that case, they are merely terms denoting a Schelling focal solution to a coordination game.
For instance, the definition of the “good,” “right,” or “just” relies on a specific ethical theory;
Not for positive economics.
but evaluative judgments are not all of an ethical nature, nor are they only of an ethical nature.
An economic expert is required to evaluate things in a purely positive manner.
Following Williams (1985), we may distinguish between “thin” and “thick” predicates.
But we don't because it is a waste of fucking time.
Thin predicates are strictly evaluative, such as “It is not good (right) to drink wine”
i.e. Wine is an illegal or repugnancy market. But this is a positive statement which may be true or false.
or “Sirah is a good wine.” Thick predicates are both descriptive and evaluative, such as: “Sirah wines have a balance of integrated, firm tannins and bright acidity with a soft, spicy and lingering finish.”
This is only evaluative because of the elision of - 'In the Wine trade, it is generally held'
Thick predicates include descriptions that go beyond the simple function of providing evaluations;
Not in Economics. Additional predicates add information which narrow down the valuation. This is a good Syrah but the tannins are too high, that's why it trades at a ten percent discount.
thin predicates do not. Applications of thin predicates do not make sense without also providing either a description or citing an experience.
Expert economists have experience. That is what makes them experts.
Expertise does indeed suppose the application of an abstract statement to a particular case – this is the fourth condition for defining expertise 7 (see above). Hence, experts will use thick predicates in their statements. How does this argument regarding predicates apply to judgments? I here present the notion of “basicness” as introduced by Sen (1967), and then discuss whether evaluations are basic or non-basic. Sen (1967: 50) defines a value judgment as “basic” to a person if no conceivable revision of factual assumptions can make him revise the judgment.
This is nonsense. It is a principle of the Economics of Oenology that wine is made from grapes. This corresponds to the 'basic judgment' that Pepsi Cola is not Wine. If you are valuing the wine in a cask and somebody switches a glass of Pepsi for your Syrah and you say 'this vintage has a complex bouquet and a smooth texture', you are not a fucking expert. That's a fact, not an assumption.
If such revisions can take place, the judgment is “non-basic” in his value system.
i.e. he has no fucking expertise
Judgments are considered basic until the converse is proved.
No. This shit is considered stupid by everybody.
If evaluations were to be considered basic, it would follow that no expertise was needed in order to move from that evaluation to advocating a specific course of action, since no statements of fact or specific attention to the actual situation would be involved in their formulation.
But principles, not evaluations are 'basic'. They are not informative. They lack any normative tie to action. The principle of Oenology that wine is made from grapes is not an 'evaluation'. True, a guy who claims to be able to value wine who thinks Pepsi is made from grapes is not an expert at all. But that is simply a fact.
It therefore follows that evaluations are non-basic in such case, since, if they were, we could imagine that a computer programmed with an exhaustive list of all the facts and theoretical knowledge (or an amicus curiae, as we said previously) would also be able to answer any such question; but this seems implausible.
Antoinette is assuming that an exhaustive list of 'principles' would uniquely identify and return a value for any particular object or course of action. This is the notion that there is some way to 'carve up reality along its joints'. But we don't know that way. Only an omniscient God might do so. But then there may be more principles than there are atoms in the universe.
If they are non-basic, then the request for an expert
as opposed to an omniscient God
does make sense, in that she would have to base her conclusions on a prudent judgment.
As do we all. I may think I am a cat and have nine lives and thus can afford to jump off a cliff. But this would not be a prudent. A Judge might well decide I am insane and ought to be confined in a padded cell.
Apart from cases involving strictly abstract predicates,
There are none such save in the sense that they are engaged in a homosexual relationship with leniently concrete predicates, who, however, are Bishops of the Roman Catholic Church.
evaluation thus requires that we make descriptive judgments of some kind.
No. Evaluation does not require judgment. It can be outsourced or be purely mimetic. However, whether an evaluation is correct or not can only be judged on the basis of further information.
(3) The class of prescriptive judgments is a priori the most important one for describing the judgments of experts,
Judgments don't need to be described. Guilty is just 'guilty'. 'Buy' is just 'buy'.
as these are the ones the client is expecting him to formulate.
We expect experts to say 'go ahead and do x' or 'don't do x. Wait and see.'
Let us consider their properties: namely, their imperative status,
We don't hire experts on economics to lecture us on morality. We expect them to be informative and, hopefully, to say something useful.
their descriptive content, and their evaluative content.
Information is good. Evaluation- putting numbers to things- is fine. But a genuine expert who says 'do this!' or 'don't do that!' may be preferable. After all, non-deterministic decision processes can dominate anything algorithmic or which can, currently, have a mathematical or logical representation.
(3a) Their imperative status is standardly what distinguishes prescriptive judgments from other descriptive and evaluative judgments: they contain some authoritative call for action, or at least some element which orientates action in a certain way.
Any statement may be taken to have an imperative and an alethic component. Thus when my mother said 'Que sera sera' to me, the imperative element was 'don't be such a fucking sissy.' The alethic component was 'whatever will be will be'. This is false if the Buddhist doctrine of momentariness is true.
But the link from prescription to action is not absolutely direct and unquestionable, as we shall now see. Consider the following examples of such judgments: iv) “As Paul prefers Sirah to Chardonnay, he should drink the former rather the latter” v) “Paul ought to drink Sirah”; vi) “Paul, do not drink Chardonnay!” vii) “Do not drink!” viii) “No drinking”
They can mean anything at all to anyone at all.
These examples belong to different categories of prescriptive judgment.
Whose categories? Nobody has ever bothered to construct such categories for their own use. We may as well say they belong to different imaginary homosexual elephants which moonlight as compact Hausdorff spaces.
By specifying the context and conditions under which the prescription holds, assertion iv corresponds to some conditional advocacy in favour of certain actions. Such prescriptions correspond to recommendations; they cannot be called imperative – or, at most, we can refer to them as hypothetical and non-compulsive imperatives, implying that the person formulating the prescription would not consider the imperative to have been disobeyed if Paul acted contrary to it.
An imperative statement is not necessarily a command. Also, it may have no alethic or informative content. It may be phatic, or nonsensical.
Conversely, assertion vi is an uncontroversial statement of obligation, incorporating an imperative judgment.
It may be. It may not be. 'Paul don't drink Chardonnay' may be informative. Suppose a beautiful woman comes up to you at a party and says that to you, and suppose your name is not Paul, it is Sally, and you are holding a champagne flute in your hand, you will twig that there is something wrong. Perhaps the woman is in danger. Perhaps you are in danger and she is trying to tip you off. Maybe the thing is some sort of Lesbian code.
It may accurately be called imperative,
if that is what it is. Paul's Mum is reminding him he is only six months old and really oughtn't to be drinking anything stronger than gripe water.
in that the person formulating such a prescription does hope it will be respected.
It is imperative even if it represents 'reverse psychology'.
Assertion v corresponds to an ought statement.
It may do. It may not. Consider the question 'what should Paul do, in order to get drunk on Chardonnay? Drink it or bathe in it?' Here, the answer is alethic. It conveys the information that wine is only intoxicating when ingested.
It is underspecified, and may belong to one or the other class, depending on the context.
All assertions are underspecified in the sense that they have no unique interpretation.
Assertions vii and viii correspond to a universal imperative,
only by arbitrary stipulation
whether explicitly addressed to one person as in vii, or focused on an implied situation as in viii.
Nonsense! It is obvious that you can shake your finger at the teenagers in the room and say 'don't drink!' while all the adults get sloshed. Admittedly, things may be different in France.
I therefore defend the claim that there are two distinct kinds of prescriptive judgments: obligations, and recommendations; the former have the status of imperatives, and the latter of hypothetical imperatives.
Rubbish! I pay fire insurance premiums all my life. My house does not burn down. Indeed, the great mass of insured houses don't burn down. The obligation to pay out on a particular policy is hypothetical. What of 'recommendations'? They are propositions which may or may not refer to feasible outcomes or courses of action. 'Buy Bitcoin' is feasible. 'Go fuck yourself' is not. The first is 'positive' and translates as 'Bitcoin will rise in value'. The second is imperative or phatic.
As this claim is not standard in the analytic philosophy literature, I shall now defend it against the counter view that all prescriptive judgments are imperative.
I think that stupidity arises from Kant's notion that a truly autonomous person would be constantly legislating for himself. This was Teutonic nonsense. Autonomy means having a set of Hohfeldian immunities which are defeasible to one degree or another.
A first argument in favor of the distinction that I defend may be based on differentiating between the roles we have identified in the description of the chronology of the decision-making process. Let us consider the competing view which holds that all prescriptions are imperative by nature. We may note, first, that experts are not entitled to formulate imperative judgments; if experts were to formulate prescriptions with imperative status – i.e., to be followed whatever happens – the client would be logically committed to follow his recommendations.
That is a command which is also known as 'positive law'. A Judge or a Legislative Assembly or a duly empowered Executive may indeed issue such commands. This may be on the basis of expert advise. But it may also be in contradiction to such advise.
However, since the clients are the entitled deciders, experts have no legitimacy to take decisions, nor to determine the decisions that the client makes.
A professional expert may have a statutory duty to override the decision of the client. This is a justiciable matter.
The distinction of roles between expert and client makes such a scenario unlikely to happen; but to guard against such a confusion of roles, which could arise if we take the imperative nature of prescriptions seriously, experts should content themselves with issuing evaluative judgments.
Why? I'd prefer an accountant who says, 'Dude, you invest in this money pit and you'll be bankrupt. In fact, before that swindler takes your money, I'll fucking run off with it myself!' This is a false statement. He'd never swindle a client. But it has great imperative force.
The formulation of prescriptive judgments, strictly speaking, should proceed from the client, who is the proper decision maker.
Doctors give prescriptions. Speaking generally, it is up to the patient to get if filled and to take the medicine.
This exclusion of prescriptive vocabulary from expert usage corresponds to an ideal use of the language of morals. However, describing an ideal case is not always the best way to understand how concepts are applied. We do indeed observe that prescriptive language is used by experts, and even that they are expected to use such language. For instance, the French Council for Economic Analysis (Conseil d’analyse économique, or CAE) is explicitly asked to formulate one or two pages of recommendations for certain policies at the end of each of their studies. CAE specifies meanwhile that “the opinions displayed in CAE surveys belong only to their authors and do not commit either the Council, nor the delegated president, nor, of course, the Prime Minister" (see CAE website).
Because it is an Advisory, not an Executive, Body.
It is assumed that the expected use of prescriptive vocabulary does not and should not imply any imperative meaning.
It may do. It may not. Your priest says it would be wrong for you to have an abortion. Your doctor may say the opposite. One might say there is a normative aspect to what is considered good spiritual and good physical health. One may also say that 'experts' only exist because they add imperative force to things everybody is already telling us- e.g. stop eating and drinking so much. Would it kill you to take some fucking exercise? Not doing so will.
The client is the one who decides and who is responsible for formulating the imperative statement.
You can hire a mouthpiece. I suppose what this silly lady means is that the person making the choice makes the choice or delegates the choice or doesn't make the choice but lets it happen by default or neither makes a choice nor permits nor forbids or has any thing to do with a choice, or both is and isn't a client while simultaneously not being or being a homosexual elephant slut shamed by imaginary dwarves. This is because responsibility for formulating something which does not exist may be, salva veritate, attributed to the actuaries whose dreams of spaghetti are actually those same imaginary dwarves except they only slut shame polyandrous pachyderms.
Conversely, the expert formulates an opinion which does not need to be followed, and which is referred to as a recommendation.
There are shitheads, like Amartya Sen, whom you hire because you know they will make a worthless and time wasting recommendation. This is because that is what suits you. The pretence that experts exist is a smoke-screen.
Another way to present this argument is as follows. If prescriptions presuppose an obligation,
then, salva veritate, those obligation are imaginary dwarves whose farts are what presuppose those very prescriptions.
there ought to be some authority to this obligation which is able to lead through to an actual decision.
why stop there? Why not say the authority that ought to be that by which it ought to be must lead the pious life of an imaginary dwarf whose fart is the actual decision of the decisional actuality of its own prescriptive evaluation?
Such statements may suppose
or propose or decompose
that Paul (in cases iv, v and vi) or anybody concerned (in cases vii and viii) shall indeed have a feeling
or a ceiling or a peeling
that they must do as the prescription enjoins,
though you can always get another prescription enjoining you to do the opposite because that is the prescribed way of following that prescription. Thus, I get a prescription from my Doctor for opioids and because my accountant suggests that I can profitably re-sell them on the black matter, it is the latter's prescription I follow because actually taking opioids when you don't need to is a very bad fucking idea.
just as if there existed an evaluative notion of the good (or of the “better”) that was personally accepted by the person concerned, and which would make her follow the prescription.
such a notion can coexist with the notion that anybody can have any fucking notion they want but the thing is bullshit from start to finish.
Individualized obligations are imperative for the person concerned if and only if there exists a principle of authority that establishes a link between the prescriptive statement and the actual decision.
But that principle must also forbid itself as such a link because otherwise there is no obligation, there is just a chain of command.
Conversely, there is no such necessity for the case of recommendations, since the advisers have no direct authority over actions, even though they are entitled to formulate recommendations for action.
Recommendations by expert professionals are governed by imperatives- viz. professional ethics and legal obligations of various types. Equally, an office holder may be obligated to act according to the best professional advise.
As well as the argument based on the difference between the roles of advisers and deciders, a second argument for the distinction claim may be proposed, this one imported from the philosophy of science. This argument focuses on how experts frame their judgments. An expert formulates his policy recommendation based on his analysis, which is limited on two grounds. First, the framing which is imposed by his appeal to the tools and knowledge of economic science places all other knowledge – inter alia, sociological, political, ethical stakes – as a priori beyond the scope of his analysis.
Fuck off! All those things have costs and benefits which can be evaluated in money terms. This is obvious in 'justiciable' or 'reputational' fields. It is less obvious in non-justiciable or opaque contexts but those are things which factor into 'endogenous growth'.
Second, all scientific statements, and especially those of social science, are marked by uncertainty: experts may have done their analysis properly, or they may not.
That is irrelevant. Knightian Uncertainty means that there are possible states of the world which we can't envisage. But the solution is regret minimization or some sort of 'machine learning' type multiplicative weighting update algorithm.
For instance, they may later learn something which would show that they should have used other tools to complete their analysis. Similarly, new theories in economic science may be discovered, or relevant data that were previously unknown or inaccessible may become known and accessible. In all cases, such developments are likely to invalidate aspects of the former statements, or at least to induce their reconsideration or reformulation.
This is true of every sort of statement. Robert Browning wrote a poem in which he rhymed 'Pope's hat' with 'Nun's twat' in the belief that 'twat' meant the headgear of some particular type of Catholic nun. Once he discovered his error, he changed the line.
Most serious scientists will withhold full commitment from very substantive empirical claims as made at any instant t.
As will everybody speaking about anything at all. Even baby, when he says 'Goo, goo, ga, ga,' indicates that he is speaking off the record. Mummy too takes baby's remark under advisement. Daddy stresses that alleged statements attributed to his son and heir can not be taken as a legally binding commitment and suggests that their probative value, if any, is not beyond doubt, peradventure or infirmity of suspicion.
We now develop a final argument in favour of the distinction claim.
It will be as shit as the previous ones.
As we shall set out below, prescriptions entail certain descriptions.
Some do. Some don't. But this is true of any statement whatsoever which, by the way, could be a prescription or a mocking of the notion that any statement can be prescriptive since reception is all that matters.
In particular, they imply certain implicit descriptions about what should be done to conform to the standard that people generally accept: to drink what you prefer in case iv, to drink what is better for certain reasons in cases v or vi, or not to drink at all in the contexts implied in cases vii or viii.
Unless they don't. They may be received as the product of 'reverse psychology'.
Paul is supposed
by whom?
to conform to these expectations just as if there existed an evaluative notion of good or better that is commonly accepted by people.
There is in most economic contexts. It is good to sell for a high price. It is better to sell at an even higher price.
Obligations as applied to groups imply that such ‘sociological facts’ do exist,
in which case the matter is either justiciable or 'reputational' or involves 'repugnancy' or impacts on 'endogenous growth' or dynamic efficiency. There is nothing in the social or legal or political or even sexual realm which isn't economic and to which a money value can't be attached.
Economists consult lawyers to figure out what an agent or enterprise's legal obligations are and they consult PR guys to figure out about reputational costs and benefits and then have to econometric work to test different structural causal models for 'endogenous' growth or other dynamic effects.
In any case, obligations aren't 'facts'. They are contingent and therefore arguably counter-factual in nature till outcomes (e.g. Judicial decisions or voting results) are known.
while a recommendation may simply suppose that the client holds that such a case is likely to occur, or that it is worth considering as a reasonable assumption.
Nonsense! The economic expert recommends stuff to inbred nitwits or coked up tech-bros who can't tie their own shoelaces.
Concretely, this means that experts may suppose that their clients are likely to want to act according to certain principles of action that the recommendation they formulate is supposed to reflect.
Or not. Just as the defence hires an expert witness who will say what they want him to say while the prosecution does the reverse, so too with economic experts. You pay the guy who will rubberstamp what you are going to do for your own selfish reasons. Even Amartya Sen understood this.
It is therefore necessary to distinguish between two versions of prescriptive judgments: obligations, which correspond to imperative prescriptions; and recommendations, which correspond to non-imperative prescriptions, as in the expertise case.
Why? A Doctor who prescribes a low-cal diet to me knows I will continue to stuff my face with burgers. But he has a professional obligation to pretend to believe me when I say that, this time, I will definitely follow through. The same thing is true of an economic expert. Arthur Lewis wasn't stupid. He knew that Nkrumah wouldn't follow his policy prescriptions. He would do crazy shit. Still, Lewis went through the motions.
What if the Executive is legally obligated to follow the prescriptions of experts? In that case, experts may be more cautious because their reputation is on the line. But that comes under the heading of Agent Principal hazard. It has a mathematical representation as a change in the incentive matrix. This is a matter of 'mechanism design' or 'reverse game theorem'.
(3b) Armed with this distinction,
there is none unless experts act in bad faith- i.e. say one thing if they think their recommendation won't be taken up (in which case they may 'virtue signal' or act strategically) and say something else if they think their prescription will be actioned (in which case, they may 'hedge their bets' or just follow 'best practice').
let us now scrutinize further statements of prescriptive judgments which rely on other kinds of judgments. These, we will see, do indeed contain both descriptive and evaluative parts. Firstly, as was noticed in case iv, some judgments may make explicit mention of the descriptive context in which the prescription holds, or they may assume there exist descriptive contexts under which the prescription holds. Such judgments do indeed depend on certain facts, which entails that changing the facts could imply changing the judgment.
Only if people act in bad faith or act strategically or are risk averse or irrational in some other manner.
Using Sen’s vocabulary, such prescriptions are hence non-basic, in the sense that a “change in factual assumptions would entail her changing judgment" (Sen 1967:50sen1967).
This isn't the case for economics. The notion of Pareto improvement is basic. The prescription- 'allow Pareto improvements' does not 'change when factual assumptions change'. What changes is facts about whether doing x benefits at least one y without hurting any one else.
Some obligations, however, seem to escape being non-basic: such as the commandment “thou shall not kill,” which is supposed to hold in any context.
Nonsense! It is fine to kill in self-defence or to save innocents or because you are soldier or a policeman or an executioner under orders to do so.
These kinds of judgments, however, belong to the class of universal imperatives,
which is empty. However, when you hire an economic expert or an expert plumber, there are principles- e.g. more money is better than less money or shitting going down the toilet is better than shit coming out of the toilet.
rather than to the hypothetical imperatives which are proper to the expert’s recommendations, and with which we are here concerned.
In the case of economic experts, if they are asked 'what should we do to be sure of tanking the Enterprise or ruining the Economy', then there is a hypothetical imperative different from the categorical imperative for experts who are characterized as Economists.
Besides this, it is controversial to claim that such prescriptions always hold no matter what.
No. In Econ it is uncontroversial that doing more with less resources is good. Similarly, in Plumbing, it is considered a bad thing if shit comes flooding out of the toilet bowl.
Faced with a moral dilemma, we might need to accept that the commandment does not hold in specific cases, for instance for self-defense, or in the choice of killing one fetus out of twins in order that one should survive. In such cases, a very precise descriptive judgment regarding the situation is essential in order to justify the prescriptive judgment that must eventually be made.
Nonsense! This lady just said 'it is okay to kill in self-defence'. Did she give any description of such situations? No.
Incidentally, this is not an example of an 'imperative'. There is a Hohfeldian 'immunity' for self-defence killing. But it is justiciable and thus defeasible. Kant, being a fucking Kraut, didn't understand how the law works. That which is quid juris is intensional, impredicative and wholly epistemic. In other words, nobody knows what its 'extension' is. True there is Res Judicata- i.e. buck stopping- but it is arbitrary. But, going forward, who knows what the Supreme Court will uphold or overturn?
In the case of recommendations, the descriptive part is by definition supposed to exist.
only in the sense that, by definition, it is supposed to be a Bactrian camel who is sodomizing trillions of Netan-Yahoos on the rings of Uranus.
As we said above with regards the fourth element of expertise, the expert is called upon only if some factual elements are at stake.
This lady calls in an expert to prescribe to her when and how to wipe her bum. This is because if her bum is shitty is a factual matter.
For instance, an expert might suggest letting the government deficit increase during a recession,
this happens anyway
while expecting or encouraging a drop in the deficit during periods of growth: her prescriptions intimately depend on the way in which she perceives the factual context.
She clearly has shit for brains. During a recession tax revenues fall faster than government spending. The deficit is bound to rise.
Hence all prescriptions do imply certain descriptive judgments, whether implicit or explicit.
only in the sense that they imply that Bactrian camels are sodomizing Netan-Yahoos on the rings of Uranus.
(3c) Secondly, prescriptions imply certain evaluative judgments,
not to mention their entailing Bactrian camels doing disgusting things to Netan-Yahoos.
even though these are not always clearly stated. Prescriptions imply some value judgment as to what is good, better, or acceptable in the precise context of the statement. This element is necessary in order for a prescription to hold, as Hume’s guillotine entails.
Sadly, Hume's guillotine entails that Hume's guillotine entails nothing whatsoever. This is because every ought is an is and every is is an an ought from some perspective. It all depends, as Bill Clinton said, on what you mean by 'is'. Ought it not to mean 'isn't'? Consider the forensic finding that 'The President's jizz is on the intern's dress'. Oughtn't we, as patriotic Americans, take that 'is' to mean 'is not at all- perish the fucking thought'? Here the 'basic value' pertaining to what 'is' changes because it conflicts with another value viz the fact that we may not want the word to think that POTUS is a disgusting piece of shit. Thus we see all 'Values become non-basic when facts reveal they clash with other values held by the person in a moral quandary'. Indeed, we may say 'values' are strategic. It is good to appear to have good values- because more people will want to do business with you- but it is better yet if everybody else, for their own reasons, chooses to believe you do.
Even in the realm of natural science, the 'is', 'ought', distinction collapses. Suppose, I say 'that is a cat'. If cats exist and the theory of evolution is true than cats ought to exist because they have an ecological niche in the current fitness landscape. That animal looks like a cat. That's why I say 'that's a cat'. I don't say 'that may be a cat or else a shapeshifter from another planet.' This is because one oughtn't to babble nonsense based on shit you say on late night TV while high on skunk.
Sen, cretin that he is, had proposed the basic vs. non-basic value distinction because he thought this would get rid of Hume's guillotine. But, like Wittgenstein's 'atomic propositions', not a single 'basic value' has been found over the last many decades. There is no point making a distinction if nothing corresponds to it.
Some would argue that the requirement of the presence of value judgments in prescriptive statements is controversial.
It is nonsense. Prescriptions are based on principles. But principles aren't naturally value judgments. They are merely protocols or conventions. You may say 'but it is a value judgment to say toilets should not spew out shit.' Our reply is 'eat shit, you fucking retard!'
Based on a “naturalistic” view of evaluations – in Hare’s words – or as a possible consequence of the D view elaborated below (see section 4), ethical or prudential judgments are considered as mere statements of fact, so that statements implying evaluations may nevertheless not be valueloaded.
We can easily distinguish between protocol bound judgments of an objective kind and expressions of preference, taste, morality, ethics, political alignment, 'virtue signalling' etc.
Where an economic expert is solicited for a prescription, it is likely that there are protocols or customs governing the choice of parameters which are to be evaluated and, indeed, the type of Structural Causal Model that will be used.
All in all, in the case of obligation, statements of sociological facts, psychological facts, and normative facts are necessary elements to build an overall prescriptive judgment.
Not in economics. Everything save relevant economic parameters should be 'bracketed'. The advise of the economic expert may be overridden by the political expert but the psychology of the Head of Government may play the decisive role.
Under the previous example of judging the rightness of a public deficit
Economists aren't asked to judge rightness. Is the PSBR inflationary or likely to cause a crowding out effect by raising the real interest rate? What will it do to the Credit rating and the exchange rate? How will it impact financial markets. Consider Liz Truss/ David Kwarteng's plan to cut taxes while increasing government expenditure. This caused the price of gilts to fall at a time when many institutional investors had Liability-driven Investment (LDI) strategies. This meant a rise in gilt yields triggered collateral calls creating a vicious circle forcing the Central Bank to intervene. It turned out, Kwarteng, whose PhD was in Econ History, didn't know that Pension funds were over-reliant on LDI. Posh Tory lads- especially of the coloured persuasion- are supposed to know stuff like that.
by appeal to automatic stabilizers, the expert supposes that there exists an outside evaluative statement which says that it is good to use the state budget for macroeconomic purposes, and that it is good to stabilize economic conditions.
Why stop there? Why not say, the expert supposes that it is good to breathe air rather than suffocate? It is bad to eat your own shit.
If these premisses did not hold, quite apart from the knowledge of the theory of automatic stabilizers and of the actual shape of the economy, the expert would not be able to derive any recommendation, but would have to be content with mere descriptions.
How fucking stupid is this expert?
In the case of recommendations, it is necessary to have some idea of the likelihood that the principles under which the prescription is formulated would be well received by the client, as well as a statement of the value judgments.
Also. Doctors should have some idea of the likelihood that their patients don't want to be sick. Perhaps, this could be achieved by this lady Professor eating her own shit. At any rate, that is my prescription.
(4) It now is time to summarize the conclusions we have reached so far, and conclude on the proper way to analyze value demarcation in expertise.
This is easily done in Economics. There are indices for various things like 'Inequality', 'Environmental impact', 'Quality of Life' and so forth.
Experts’ prescriptions, which I here call recommendations, are not compulsory even where they comprise recommendations for action deriving from a mix of both descriptive and evaluative judgments. Description is the ground for neutral scientific work,
No. Description is communicative in nature even if Observation is wholly scientific. Thus cyanide is described as smelling like bitter almonds- which isn't always the case. But astronomic observations concerning the presence of cyanide in a comet don't rely on smell for obvious reasons.
and it contains a fortiori no value judgments.
No. Descriptions are communicative. Some judgment about the value of a communication is always made because the thing has an opportunity cost. When I make observations- e.g. you are as ugly as shit- it is clear that I value being an asshole. When you say this to me, you are answering my question as to why women run away from me. Oddly, this is reassuring. I thought it was because they sensed I have a needle-dick. Men don't mind being ugly provided people think they have a ginormous dick.
Nevertheless, among the scope of true assertions, the formulation of a descriptive judgment entails the responsibility of selecting, among all possible descriptions, the relevant one for the actual objective of this description.
No it doesn't. Why not say 'wiping your ass entails the responsibility of selecting, among all possible methods of removing shit from around your anus, the relevant one for that actual objective.'
This selection task is called for by a distinct type of judgment – evaluation –
did you know that you are responsible for evaluating all possible methods of wiping your ass before you actually wipe your ass? The fact that it never even once considered the possibility of chopping off your leg and using it to wipe your ass shows you are totes irresponsible. How dare you even think about becoming a parent? Only a responsible person should be allowed to change a baby's nappy. You are too irresponsible to wipe your own ass in the manner prescribed by a crazy French Professor who, on the evidence, is even stupider than Amartya Sen.
which in turn has been selected in order to derive a prescription.
Sen banged on about 'evaluation' because the MIT India Team had persuaded Pitambar Pant to do, wholly useless, 'Project Evaluation' as part of India's 5 year plans.
Greek came to India long before it came to Western Europe. Socrates's 'asebia' (impiety) was known to Indo-Greeks as 'adharma'. Even Latin filtered through. The Hindi word 'dakhiyanoos' meaning antiquated is of Roman origin. It is foolish to think 'the Classics' weren't already part of Indian culture long before any such subject as 'Classics' existed in Western Universities.
Phiroze Vasunia, a Classicist trying to make his discipline a tributary to the turgid, turd filled, Ganges of Grievance Studies, takes a different view.
Oddly, he invokes the Ruskin whose Newdigate Prize winning 'Salsette & Elephanta' was wholly Utilitarian & Evangelical. Sadly, neither stripe of substantivist shite would survive the tectonic shock of Geology or Biology getting unmoored from Teleology.
Before 'Darwin's revolutionary idea' and the new Marxist or Socialist theories gained hold, the wanker, John Ruskin wrote in 'Unto this last'
The fact is, that people never have had clearly explained to them the true functions of a merchant with respect to other people.
Nonsense! The merchant buys cheap and sells dear. This is explained to small kids. Daddy says 'I won't buy you this bicycle from the bicycle shop. I will buy it straight from the warehouse or the factory because the price will be 40 percent cheaper. You will get the very same bike but I will have to shell out less money.' At an early age, we understand why Mummy buys vegetables at the open air market rather than the air-conditioned shop in the posh part of town. You get the same potatoes and peas but the 'mark up' is much less because of lower 'overheads' for the vendor.
I should like the reader to be very clear about this. Five great intellectual professions, relating to daily necessities of life, have hitherto existed—three exist necessarily, in every civilized nation: The Soldier’s profession is to defend it.
Scientists do a better job by inventing bombs and aeroplanes and submarines and nuclear weapons. Shooting people and being shot does not require much intellect.
The Pastor’s to teach it.
No. Teachers teach. Pastors pray and lead others in prayer. A pastor may have no intellect to speak of. What is required of him is Faith.
The Physician’s to keep it in health.
Medicine is intellectual iff it is scientific. Sadly, there are all sorts of quacks practicing non-allopathic medicine. Still, it is the pure scientist who does most to advance medicine.
The Lawyer’s to enforce justice in it.
Nonsense! The police and bailiffs and bail bondsmen enforce justice. Lawyers argue a case or draft wills and contracts. Judges pronounce judgment. But enforcement is left to people with muscles who may have little in the way of intellect.
The Merchant’s to provide for it.
No. Producers provide. Farmers grow food, Industrialists produce goods, various different enterprises provide services. Merchants merely buy and sell what is produced.
And the duty of all these men is, on due occasion, to die for it.
No. Only a few professions- e.g. soldiers, police officers, fire-fighters- run a risk of death. True, a merchant or a pastor may enlist in the Army or the police force and thus run the risk of dying. But, in that case, he has changed profession.
“On due occasion,” namely:— The Soldier, rather than leave his post in battle. The Physician, rather than leave his post in plague.
There is no such duty if the physician has no cure for the thing. Like others, he should run away from the place rather than risk spreading the disease himself.
The Pastor, rather than teach Falsehood.
should be silent or quit the Church. You don't have to die to do either of these things.
The Lawyer, rather than countenance Injustice.
Rubbish! The lawyer is welcome to appeal against a judgment he considers unjust. He is not expected to immolate himself as a protest.
The Merchant — what is his “due occasion” of death?
Getting hit by a bus.
It is the main question for the merchant, as for all of us. For, truly, the man who does not know when to die, does not know how to live.
Nobody knows when to die. All they can do is embrace or avoid risky situations. Everybody knows how to live unless they are so stupid they think they can breathe under water or that they will feel warmer if they set themselves on fire.
Ruskin lived in an age when 'intellect', as applied to Socio-Economic problems, had taken the shape of quite advanced statistical and mathematical techniques. Florence Nightingale, whose poor health meant she could do little as a nurse, used her capacious mind and industrious collaborators to compile information such that her policy recommendations were superior to those contrived by the War Office. The Fabians carried on this tradition. In India, Dadhabhai Naoroji, Gokhale and the Servants of India similarly used statistics and detailed factual accounts to criticize British rule. By contrast, Ruskin and Carlyle were merely bombastic literary stylists incapable of making a reasoned argument. This is why they appealed to Gandhi.
Pheroze Vasunia, in his essay 'Gandhi & Socrates' (on which I have previously commented) writes
Since Gandhi was from a bania or merchant community and had studied law in London, he was arguably both a lawyer and a merchant and thus was familiar with two of the ‘five great intellectual professions’.
His pal, Pranjivan Mehta, was a Doctor and Barrister who made a lot of money as a gem merchant. Gandhi was a lawyer and a newspaper proprietor who became an important politician. Indeed, he contributed greatly to various pieces of legislation. Ruskin forgot that Politicians and Statesmen do 'brain work'. They are not expected to kill themselves or seek opportunities for martyrdom.
As a lawyer, Gandhi found no rest in South Africa and was constantly agitating for the rights of Indians and others. In these pages of Unto This Last, Ruskin
whose dad was a successful wine merchant. I suppose what sonny boy was hinting at was that Daddy should kindly top himself.
was nonetheless interested in the merchant more than the lawyer: he wrote that the merchant ought to be ready to suffer on behalf of his men and even to suffer more than his men; the merchant or manufacturer should give of himself ‘as a father would in a famine, shipwreck, or battle, sacrifice himself for his son’ .
This is nonsense. We don't want the boss to suffer. We want him to pay our wages. Still, I suppose there were a lot of Victorian gentlemen who wished Daddy would very kindly just top himself already so as to inherit his money.
In effect, Ruskin was showing Gandhi that a merchant could be a ‘hero and martyr’ if he were prepared to act in a spirit of self-sacrifice
A merchant who goes in for self-sacrifice ends up bankrupt. His employees lose their jobs. His creditors may themselves go bankrupt. Ruskin was writing nonsense.
In the preface to his (translated) version of the Apology, Gandhi writes that the Indian body politic is diseased.
It could not defend itself. It would soon not even be able to feed itself.
‘When the disease is diagnosed
This had happened long ago. Indians were aware that they could do nothing to stop European nations establishing enclaves along the coast. First came the Portuguese, then the Dutch and the French and English. The English were the best of the lot. Why? Because Britannica ruled the waves. If India wanted to be independent, it either needed a kick ass Navy or a Super-Power ally who could keep invaders and pirates and slave traders away from its coasts. Indians understood this well enough. They wanted 'home-rule' but a continuing alliance with the British Crown. This was the meaning of 'Dominion status' which Gandhi would confess he did not understand even though he himself had been born a 'British Protected Subject'. In South Africa, the one advantage the Indians had over the Chinese is that they were protected by the British Crown. If they were chucked out off the country, as the Chinese were, then the Crown would have to provide for them. In the Nineteen Twenties, an agreement for such repatriation was in fact reached between the Governments of India and South Africa. But few South African Indians wanted to return home. Thus, they stayed and had to put up with increasing apartheid.
and its true nature revealed in public, and when, through suitable remedies, the body [politic] of India is cured and cleansed both within and without, it will become immune to the germs of the disease, that is, to the oppression by the British and the others.’
Not having a Navy is not a disease. The Japs had got themselves a Navy quickly enough. But Navies cost money. Indians didn't want to pay taxes for a Navy. Let the Brits provide Naval protection while we grumble at the relatively small cost this imposes on India.
Readers can find ‘in the words of a great soul [Gandhi uses a form of mahatma] like Socrates, the qualities of an elixir’ .
Socrates was forced to drink hemlock by the Ecclesia (City Assembly) of Athens. Why? He had misled the youth of the City and thus weakened it. Gandhi, too, would be jailed for seditious libel- i.e. misleading Indian youth and creating public disorder of a dangerous type.
When they have drunk this elixir, or amrit,
actually hemlock- a poison-
Gandhi’s readers may be able to fight off the disease and cure the afflicted body.
They would die. Still, it must be said, Gandhi's 'fasts unto death' never resulted in his actually dying. In 1942, he issued the order 'Do or Die!' but nothing was done and nobody died. Sulking in a jail cell is not 'struggling'. It is just sulking. Thus it was Churchill and Roosevelt who prevented Japan enslaving India. Sad.
Gandhi/Socrates is a special kind of physician who will help his followers and disciples overcome the moral sickness that restricts their spiritual growth and hinders their intellectual development.
Plato wrote the Apology and set up an Academy which emphasized mathematical education. Nobody thought fit to pass a death sentence on him. Mathematics is a genuinely intellectual discipline. Ruskin and Gandhi wrote ignorant, ultracrepidarian, nonsense.
Ruskin also places the soldier in the five professions he mentions in Unto This Last, and it is interesting to see Gandhi, the professor of non-violence, give prominence to the soldier, or warrior, in the heading under which he offers his version of the Apology. The title that he uses is Ek satyavirni katha, which can be translated as ‘Story of a true soldier’ or ‘Story of a soldier of truth’, the latter being the form employed in the English edition of the Collected Works. ‘True soldier’ is arguably more martial than ‘soldier of truth’, but in any case the association of Socrates with ‘soldier’ in Gandhi’s version suggests that he thinks of Socrates as a figure who is ready to go to battle
Socrates had served in the Athenian infantry with credit.
and to give up his life for what he knows to be the truth.
He was not able to convince the Court that he tried to inculcate civic virtue in his young friends. All we can say is that Socrates was unjustly condemned. But the same thing could happen to a person wrongly convicted of having been a spy.
Gandhi’s Socrates is religious and pious,
He has 'eusebia'- the word Greeks used to translate 'dharma'.
a man who says he believes in God, and a philosopher who has a soldier’s toughness to withstand the hostility that he encounters in many quarters.
A soldier shows his toughness by beating up people. That's how you withstand hostility.
Rather than choose words or terms that might connect Socrates simply or uniquely to a philosophical, spiritual, or religious tradition, Gandhi refers to the Athenian as a satyavir and by that expression emphasizes his willingness to fight unto death for his cause.
Socrates had fought for Athens in numerous military expeditions. He bowed to the majesty of the law, though he considered the judgment passed against him to be wrong, and accepted death when, perhaps, it would have been easy enough for him to escape and live in exile.
By making a soldier a part of his title, Gandhi may also be recalling the terms used by Plato in his Apology. Socrates uses military language to describe his own pursuit of philosophy in the face of threats to his wellbeing;
because he had a well deserved reputation for courage in battle.
he suggests that when he stands fast at his trial and declines to run away he is acting like a solider at his post; and he also implies that his own obedience to god is comparable to the obedience of the soldier to his commanding officer.
Socrates is saying that he does not support the oligarchs. He was a friend of Aspasia and thus part of the circle around Pericles. His 'eusebia' or pious regard was for the Ecclesia which was too Democratic for elite tastes. Though condemned for 'asebia' (impiety) he shows his pious devotion to the foremost Athenian institution by submitting to its judgment when, perhaps, he could have fled easily enough.
In Henry Cary’s translation, Socrates says, ‘I should then be acting strangely, O Athenians, if, when the generals whom you chose to command me assigned me my post at Potidaea, at Amphipolis, and at Delium, I then remained where they posted me, like any other person, and encountered the danger of death, but when the deity as I thought and believed, assigned it as my duty to pass my life in the study of philosophy, and in examining myself and others, I should on that occasion, through fear of death or any thing else whatsoever, desert my post’ .
But if Athena had appeared to him at Potidaea and said 'run away' and he had run away and was arrested and executed for desertion, his position would be the same. We might say 'strange are the ways of Olympus! No mortal can guess as to why this pious man has been brought low, and suffered infamy, by the apparition of the Goddess. Perhaps, Zeus hungers for the conversation of this charming man and has arranged this fate for him so as to the more quickly gain his companionship.'
Following Socrates, Gandhi is reframing the figure of the soldier or warrior and reclaiming him for his own particular cause and struggle.
Why is he doing so? The Courts would only condemn him to death if he waged war on the King Emperor. That, he was not prepared to do.
Solider, physician, pastor, lawyer, and merchant: Gandhi had affinities with all five
No. Soldiers fight. Gandhi was a Sergeant in the Ambulance Corps- a non combatant. He wasn't a doctor. Giving enemas and administering mud packs does not make you a physician. He was a lawyer but gave up his practice. He was never a merchant. That's why his Ashrams were money-pits.
and discerned in Ruskin’s prose the exhortation to give up his own life if that were required of him.
It wasn't. Still, his own people might beat or shoot him.
This emphasis on martyrdom and death is arguably even stronger in Gandhi’s version of the Apology than in Plato’s text. Gandhi writes in his preface that Socrates ‘had no fear of death’ and he goes on to describe the last moments of the Athenian philosopher.
Who died in obedience to a judgment given by his own, free, people. Socrates could not be an exemplar for a conquered race. Had Persians been ruling Athens, Socrates would have been trying to kill Persian soldiers.
We are told about the hemlock that he administers to himself and the speech that he delivers in the presence of Phaedo. Gandhi adds, ‘It is said that up to the very last moment Socrates showed no fear, and that he took the poison smilingly. As he finished the last sentence of his discourse, he drank the poison from the cup as eagerly as we might drink sherbet from a glass.’
Indians were drinking sherbet from glasses because the Brits were keeping them safe. Smuts- a barrister like Gandhi- had taken up the sword against the British. Kitchener took a shine to him and advised him to agree to what Milner wanted because Milner's days were numbered. Thus Smuts became top dog in South Africa- when the Boers would let him- and successfully used the 'Yellow Peril' and 'coolie labour' argument to gain the whip-hand over the big Mining barons. In the Twenties, ludicrously, there was affirmative action- for Whites!
Socrates was ‘a great satyagrahi’ and a role model to Indians in the subcontinent as well as in South Africa: ‘We must learn to live and die like Socrates.’
Why? Athens was free. If it had been occupied by the Persians, 'Suqrat' would have joined the army of some independent Greek state in the hope of liberating his beloved polis.
Gandhi ends his article on Socrates thus
‘We pray to God, and want our readers also to pray, that they, and we too, may have the moral strength which enabled Socrates to follow virtue to the end and to embrace death as if it were his beloved. We advise everyone to turn his mind again and again to Socrates’ words and conduct’
Suqrat and Aflatoon (Socrates and Plato) were known to Indian Muslims. Some Christian missionaries were promoting the view that Socrates was 'naturaliter' Christian. He was the 'pharmakos' or scapegoat who prefigures Christ, the Paschal lamb, who takes on our sins. The problem here is that Jain-Vaishnavs have a horror of animal sacrifice. Also, it is better to give up sex rather than 'embrace your beloved'.
Socrates's credo was that it was wrong 'for the sake of avoiding danger, to do any thing unworthy of a freeman'. Athens was a Democracy. It had no King. India had a King-Emperor. True, legal procedures were far less arbitrary than in ancient Athens. But the fact remained, Indians were not 'free'. They were subjects. If what they said and did was seditious- e.g. Tilak protesting against British measures to halt the spread of the plague- then they could be sent to jail. But they would not be executed.
Why does Gandhi keep banging on about death? The answer is obvious. There were Revolutionary cells popping up all over India. Young people were moths to the flame of shedding their blood for 'Swaraj'. Gandhi was offering the same martyrdom but one free of the inconvenience of actually dying. The Merchant, after all, can raise his profit margin by adulterating what he sells. In this case, no great harm is done. The consumer quaffs sherbet saying 'lo! I drain this bitter hemlock so as to die a martyr to Truth, Justice and Freedom!' The good news is that he will be back in the market for sherbet quite soon. Repeat business is the best sort of business.
Vasunia takes a different view-
The emphasis on death in the Apology, however, need not be taken to refer to some sort of naive or starry-eyed outlook on the part of Gandhi. He may have been deeply influenced by ‘a Jain-inflected Hindu orthodoxy and late Victorian psychomancy, the world of Madame Blavatsky, Theosophy, planchette, and the Esoteric Christian Union’,
All that was irrelevant. Gandhi was a 'Naram Dal' follower of Gokhale trying to compete with the 'Garam Dal'- Lal, Bal & Pal- and Jugantaar and the Savarkars and the Ghaddarites etc.
but he was also uncannily successful in his dealings with political opponents .
No. They were uncannily successful in getting him to give them everything they wanted even when he had them over a barrel. That's why Smuts spoke well of him. Reading however was not impressed. He had genuinely wanted to do something more for India- hoping it would avoid Ireland's fate. Gandhi's unilateral surrender meant his successor would face a big problem from Hindu-Muslim riots.
Both his South African and his British opponents were unnerved by the moral certainty and conviction that he showed in his dealings with them
No. It was Jinnah who was seen as adamant. Gandhi you could always hoodwink.
and they would have been rattled by the notion that they were dealing with an activist who was prepared to wage his battle unto the last breath.
He could have fasted to death. He didn't.
Jail sentences scarcely troubled him, and he wrote, in 1922, that ‘the prison cell where Socrates drank the poison cup was undoubtedly the way to bliss’ .
It took the bullets fired by a Hindu to get him to that bliss.
Secondly, although Gandhi wrote his version of the Apology before he threw himself fully into the independence movement in India, he had already begun to develop the concept of satyagraha, and it is possible to see in his words nascent support for those Indians who were, literally and otherwise, soldiers in the war against British colonialism.
Gandhi recruited soldiers for Britain's war against the Kaiser. Sadly, his fellow Gujaratis chased him away.
As Ajay Skaria (2010, p. 217) observes, ‘. . . the heroic nationalists who gave their life to the nation also practiced a certain living by dying, where they gave themselves to their very death for a cause.
That may be said of Bhagat Singh or Ramprasad Bismil. It can't be said of Gandhi & Co. To be a soldier you have to fight. Sulking in jail is not fighting.
This very giving of themselves to their death authorized a living on and an evading of death so that their cause, the nation, could be better pursued.’
Why stop there? Why not say 'Gandhi used to chop off his own head every morning so as to dedicate it to the Goddess Bhavani. Then he would slaughter at least a dozen British soldiers before sitting down to his breakfast.'
Gandhi’s rendering of the Apology is, in this sense, consistent with the behaviour of anti-colonial nationalists and it clarifies their actions.
No it isn't. Athens wasn't a colony. It had colonies. Socrates was himself a member of the Assembly which condemned him.
And third, Gandhi’s attitudes to death and mortality were part of a complicated if mostly consistent spiritual and political programme.
A program of stunning puerility.
This programme evolved somewhat over the course of Gandhi’s life, was shaped by such things as his experience of religion, Indian diaspora communities, and colonialism, and nurtured satyagraha and ahimsa, with their distinctively Gandhian attributes. Gandhi’s willingness to accept death was intimately connected to his philosophy,
Who wanted to kill Gandhi? The Boers? Maybe. But this might help the Indians in South Africa and so Smuts would ensure it did not happen. Who else? Indians. After Gandhi spent a few weeks in jail, he decided Smuts was right. Indians should carry a pass. What was objectionable was that the thing was compulsory. He got out of jail to persuade Indians to voluntarily acquire passes. Sadly, some Indians thought Gandhi had taken a bribe. So they beat the shit out of him. Gandhi then realized that if you have led your people down the garden path, you need to spend at least a few months in jail. If you get out after a few weeks, your people may kick your head in.
to his way of being in the world, and in particular to the principles of ahimsa and satyagraha that he espoused and followed until the end ).
During the Second War, he did become a Pacifist- probably because he thought Japan would win. But he supported India in the first Kashmir war.
The initial context of publication also explains why Gandhi’s Ek satyavirni katha becomes a vehicle for civil disobedience from an early date.
The Tatas did provide money for the South African agitation. Non-violence means money.
I have touched on some of the circumstances above, but it is worth noting that the instalments appeared in Indian Opinion, a bilingual (initially, multilingual) English and Gujarati newspaper that was, at the same time, not a newspaper in the conventional sense of the word (Hofmeyr 2013). In the issue (9 May 1908) that contained the sixth instalment of Gandhi’s Apology, Indian Opinion ran articles or editorials on government Bills that affected the rights of Indians in the region; the colour question; the poll tax; the ‘Asiatic Question’; ‘Asiatic Passive Resistance’; and ‘A Progressive Indian’, to name a few topics. As these examples show, Indian Opinion was concerned with the predicament of Indian immigrants around the Empire and took a stand against racial injustice and political oppression, especially when these affected Indians.
Gandhi had been asked to stay on in South Africa as the representative of his community. He was just doing what he was paid to do by fellow Gujaratis. The problem was that Muslims began to feel that his policies hurt them while helping Hindus. That is why some of them tried to get Jinnah to come to South Africa to provide them with leadership. The better course would have been for them to join forces with the Cape Coloureds whose leader was a Muslim Doctor of Malay descent.
The newspaper informed the Indian diaspora community in South Africa but was also, in its overseas location, contributing to an evolving sense of Indian nationhood .
Nonsense! It is a different matter that Indians wanted to participate in the benefits of Empire in East and South Africa. At a later point, the Aga Khan demanded Tanganika be handed over to the Ismailis! The problem was that, as the after-math of the Boer War showed, either indigenous people or White 'settlers' would get power and treat Indian immigrants badly. In the end, Nationalist Indian meddling tended to cut off profitable avenues of emigration- i.e. the thing backfired.
The Gandhian provenance of Plato’s Apology made it suspect in the eyes of the British authorities, who, in 1910, banned the pamphlet in Bombay.
There was a theory, at that time, that Gokhale and Tilak were in cahoots because they had attended the same school and came from the same sub-caste.
According to a notice in The Bombay Government Gazette , the translation of the Apology was seized by officers since it deployed ‘words which are likely to bring into hatred and contempt the Government established by law in British India and to excite disaffection to the said Government’.
This could have been appealed. It wasn't because the charge was true enough.
These expressions were formulaic and evoked the strictures of the Press Act of 1910. The Gazette also disclosed that three other works were banned by the government, namely, Hind Swaraj, Sarvodaya, and a copy of a speech delivered by Mustafa Kamal Pasha. The last was a reference to a speech given by Mustafa Kamal Pasha, in October 1907, in Alexandria, a few months before his death, which occurred, in February 1908, in Cairo.
Egypt was a 'veiled protectorate'. De jure, it had a King whose suzerain was the Ottoman Caliph.
Gandhi, who was sympathetic to the Egyptian, had translated the speech into Gujarati and published it in Indian Opinion in June 1908 (Indian Opinion 27 June 1908; CWMG vol. 8, p. 326). The text of Plato’s Apology now belonged to a literature that, in the language of the Press Act, contained ‘words, signs or visible representations which are likely or may have a tendency, directly or indirectly, whether by inference, suggestion, allusion, metaphor, implication or otherwise’ to threaten the British government of India. The inclusion of a translation of Plato’s Apology in the list of banned works was slightly anomalous in so far as it is the only one of the four that went back to antiquity. Clearly, the source of the publication and the identity of the ‘translator’ set off alarm bells in the British administration.
No. Some official read it and noted that British rule was described as a 'disease'. That was sedition pure and simple.
Gandhi’s version was not the first translation of the Apology into an Indian language; it was not even the first version into Gujarati. ‘Ala alDin Sharif Salih Muhammad published the second edition of his Gujarati account of Socrates—which admittedly draws on various dialogues by Plato and not just the Apology—in Bombay as early as 1897 .
In other words, it puts the Apology in its proper context. Gandhi does not do so. The proper parallel, for Indians, would be that Princess of Udaipur who consented to kill herself rather than remain a bone of contention between rival Princes seeking her hand in marriage. This occurred in the early nineteenth century and was the theme of the first play written by an Indian in English. My point is, Socrates was a freeman freely choosing to obey the judgment of his own people.
Indian treatments of Greek philosophy
were plentiful in Arabic and Persian and had begun appearing in Urdu and other Indian languages
were permitted to circulate by the colonial authorities (e.g. the Urdu discussion of Ihsan Allah published in 1883), as were other translations of Plato.
Plato was taught in Indian Colleges since before Gandhi was born.
In Gandhi’s lifetime, the British administrator Frank Lugard Brayne
considered a nutter by his colleagues
wrote Socrates in an Indian Village and a series of related titles as part of his programme of rural development in the Punjab.
That is irrelevant.
In 1931, more strikingly, Sir John Gilbert Laithwaite, a British civil servant and later private secretary to the Viceroy, wrote a pseudo-Platonic dialogue between Socrates and Gandhi, for the entertainment of another civil servant, Sir (Samuel) Findlater Stewart, the permanent under secretary of state for India .
Again, this is wholly irrelevant.
It was not Socrates or Plato who troubled the officers of the British government in India; it was Gandhi’s portrayal of Socrates that was the source of the grievance.
No. Gandhi said 'British rule is oppressive'. India must throw off this disease. That's sedition.
The notice in the Bombay Government Gazette did not pass unremarked on by Gandhi, who responded with a short piece in Indian Opinion (7 May 1910) and pointed out that the ‘Defence of Socrates or The Story of a True Warrior is a Gujarati rendering of Plato’s immortal work printed in order to illustrate the virtue and the true nature of passive resistance’.
He said British rule is oppressive. It is a disease. India must rid itself of it. Passive resistance may not amount to sedition. But publicizing the need for it is sedition if the current Government is termed oppressive and like a disease which enfeebles the body.
He also wrote that the banned publications, with the exception of Hind Swaraj, had been with the reading public for some time. These publications, Gandhi writes, ‘are intended to impart a lofty, moral tone to the reader and are, in our opinion, works capable of being put into children’s hands without any danger whatsoever’.
Would a Court of law concur with this opinion? Why not bring a test case?
The government was trying ‘to stop the circulation of literature that shows the slightest independence of spirit’ and was likely to consumed by excessive zeal.
One can show independence of spirit without saying the Government is oppressive and similar to a disease which saps the health and vitality of the body politic.
Gandhi goes on to present himself and his associates as champions of passive resistance and maintains that they will not be affected by the government’s repression. He agrees with the authorities that violence is unacceptable and adds that ‘the only way we know to eradicate the disease is to popularize passive resistance of the right stamp. Any other way, especially repression, must inevitably fail in the long run’
Passive resistance by Dissenters to the use of Local Authority Rates to finance Church of England schools had failed. So had the efforts of the Suffragettes. Gandhi's various passive resistance campaigns failed save where were led by capable people with limited aims of a type highly beneficial to those involved.
By the time Gandhi returned to India from South Africa, Socrates was established in his mind as the exemplar of a satyagrahi.
Nonsense! Gandhi didn't drink wine with handsome young men.
When the Rowlatt Act of 1919 took aim at the possession of seditious documents, the Satyagraha Sabha, led by Gandhi, decided to disseminate the same four tracts, including the Gujarati translation of Plato’s Apology, that were banned for sedition in 1910.
So, Gandhi broke the law. However, the age of multi-ethnic Empires had ended. The question was whether Gandhi, as the head of the Congress-Khilafat combine could negotiate a speedy transfer of power with the Viceroy.
As one critic notes, ‘the rereading and translation of the Apology becomes one of the first acts of civil disobedience for the 1919 satyagraha’ .
It was certainly the most inconsequential.
The statement by the Sabha noted that the books had been selected since they were ‘not inconsistent with satyagraha, and . . . therefore, of a clean type and . . . [did] not, either directly or indirectly, approve of or encourage violence’ .
Moreover, once the Labour Party put Irish and Indian independence into its manifesto in 1918, saying 'Imperial rule is oppressive' might no longer count as sedition.
In the Congress Report on the subsequent unrest in the Punjab, Gandhi again expounded on the meaning of satyagraha as truth-force and observed that Socrates was a satyagrahi since he insisted on telling the truth to young Athenians and then laid down his life for that principle .
A dangerous argument. It may be true that there is no God and no Prophet and no Mahatmas or 'Khilafat' (Vice-regents under God) but saying this to young people would get you in trouble with your village or caste Panchayat. Don't forget, a lot of Indians at that time thought death was the correct penalty for apostacy. As for the ideas of Lenin and Trotsky, they posed a yet greater danger.
Satyagraha was non-violent and involved self-control, he added, and it could not be blamed for the violence and pillaging of the protesters in the Punjab. ‘There was once a wise man, named Socrates, who lived in Athens. His unconventional ideas, which, however, spread love of truth and goodness, displeased the authorities, and he was sentenced to death’ .
It displeased his own people. The 'authority' was the Ecclesia- i.e. the Assembly of all the free male citizens of the City.
As the letter to a relative confirms, Gandhi’s identification with Socrates persisted at least into the 1930s, when he again summarized the Apology, though far more briefly this time.
Perhaps Nehru told him of the homo-erotic undercurrents in various dialogues- e.g. the Lysis. Moreover 'Symposium' means a party where wine is drunk and everybody gets sloshed. Some also start bumming each other.
Yet, it is a mistake to extrapolate from Gandhi’s references to truth and goodness in his writings on Socrates and to think of him as a simple, unsophisticated, or overly literal reader of Greek philosophy.
Because he didn't read Greek philosophy.
Plato and Socrates are not the first names that come to mind in connection with anti-colonialism or civil disobedience or with spiritual renewal, but one of the interesting features of the engagement with Socrates, in South Africa and India, is how Gandhi ‘brings to insurgency’
the Boers were 'insurgents'. Indians- apart from Jugantar, Ghaddarites, etc- were not.
the words of a Platonic text . This reading of Socrates was not entirely new and took its inspiration from, among other things, the writings of John Ruskin and nineteenth-century conceptions of Socrates as a martyr.
Based on Socrates's embracing the role of pharmakos, of scape-goat, in the Phaedo. After Darwin's revolutionary idea had taken hold, the attempt was made to turn Christianity into a sort of ethical religion based on doing stupid shit like getting crucified or drinking hemlock.
Ruskin, in particular, had awoken in Gandhi a powerful understanding of Plato’s text and affirmed for him that the struggle for satyagraha needed to be upheld at all costs, unto the last, even unto death.
'Cobbler, stick to your last' means don't talk about stuff you don't understand. The word 'ultracrepidarian' means the same thing. Also, if you aren't actually risking death stop pretending that you are a fucking martyr.
Many of Gandhi’s interlocutors, opponents, and gaolers would have had a far deeper knowledge than Gandhi of Plato’s Greek and a more wide-ranging familiarity with Plato’s dialogues (and, for that matter, of Ruskin’s work). Gandhi could not read classical Greek.
Whereas the average turnkey in India composed Anacreontics in between hitting delinquent prisoners on the head.
But it was he, and not they, who perceived the transformative potential of the Apology
it had none in Socrates's time. Athenian Democracy disappeared. Aristotle's student declared himself a God. The Greeks replaced the Persians as an Imperial race. Sadly, by 1917, it had became apparent that Imperialism was not viable. The future belonged to Nation States able to feed and defend themselves or else who could secure Super Power protection.
in an English translation of the Victorian period and who thereby came to a better understanding of satyagraha, the truth-force that brought an Empire to its knees.
The British Empire did get on its knees to suck off the Americans. This was because America had lots of money and planes and ships and submarines and, soon enough, the atom bomb. Gandhi may have delayed the transfer of power. But that delay meant much more avoidable death at the time of Partition. Talking bollocks is no substitute for alethic research and dissemination of information. Gandhi failed because he was stupid, ignorant and wholly indifferent to the facts of the case. Still, he did pave the way for a dynasty more imbecilic than the Windsors.
Was this the fault of Socrates? Yes! He should simply have buggered Alcibiades's brains out. Sadly, this is not the view of the scholarly community- at least that of the brown persuasion-
Mathura Umachandran, of Princeton University, has the following review of Vasunia-
Classics and Colonial India: Classical Presences.
‘Classical Presences’, a radical if sometimes uneven series from Oxford University Press, has done much in recent years to open up the horizons of the discipline of Classics.
By ignoring stuff written in difficult languages like Latin or Greek.
The latest in the series by Phiroze Vasunia ought to be considered a valuable contribution.
to Grievance Studies.
In a nutshell, Vasunia explores how the discipline of Classics and the British Empire in India profoundly shaped one another.
Chaps who learnt Latin and Greek found it easy to learn Sanskrit and Persian and Arabic- or even Tamil. Raja Ram Mohan Roy, who had earlier learned Sanskrit and Arabic, quickly learned Greek and Latin and Hebrew but he lobbied for unrestricted European settlement in Bengal only because Whites were needed to keep the 'rapacious' Muslim in check. Indians saw there was little to be gained from the 'Classics'. Study the Law and you make money. Medicine too can be quite lucrative. Even engineers can do quite well for themselves. But reading Greek or Latin will make you stupid and unfit for lucrative employment. Look at that cretin Aurobindo!
It is noteworthy that Vasunia has little to say about either Roy or Aurobindo- the only two Indians who knew Latin and Greek. As for 'competition-wallahs' like Otto Trevelyan, the soon fucked off back home unless, like PG Woodhouse's elder brother they became the tutor to the new Messiah, Jeddu Krishnamurthy.
This complex and shifting relationship is traced through the study of institutions and individuals. The imagination and breadth of scholarship on display here promises many further lines of enquiry. The qualms expressed in this review are therefore minor and should not detract from the overall recommendation to anyone interested in the history of the British in India or the history of Classics to consider carefully the material and arguments presented here.
This is a worthless book. But you and me might end up having to write shite of this stripe so let's pretend it aint garbage.
Vasunia distinguishes himself by being both conceptually sophisticated and a close reader of evidence. The book lays out the parameters for the inquiry in an Introduction that considers what the index of classicism is (what is meant by ‘Classics’ and ‘Classical’? How can these meanings be historically contingent?)
The thing means Latin and Greek. Either you know that shit or you don't. This is historically contingent on whether you have a brain and can make a living talking about that shite.
as well as what relationships are set up between past and present when the ‘Classical’ is invoked as a rubric. Vasunia identifies the challenge that Sanskrit, as another classical tradition, posed to those who had invested in Graeco-Roman antiquity, when they encountered India in a modern imperial context.
There was no challenge. You paid a Pundit to teach you Sanskrit. Even pre-Paninian Sanskrit was so easy that a German mathematician- Hermann Grassmann- could translate the Rg Veda in the hope that this would get him a Professorship and thus spare him the indignity of being a School Master.
The essential argument of the book is powerful; the classical past is malleable in the service of both the colonizers and the colonized.
No. Studying the past or reading ancient books is only useful because the past isn't malleable. You can't say that Socrates married Queen Victoria and thus became the father of the Duke of Connaught.
That is to say, the past can be both instrumentalized as a tool of hegemony
which is how come AJP Taylor was able to conquer Germany.
and of envisioning a post-colonial India. Vasunia does well to make such a complex argument without denying the oppressive fact of empire and colonization.
Shame. He should have pretended that India occupied and enslaved Britain. How else can you explain Rishi Sunak?
In Part One, ‘Alexander in India’ (pp. 33-118), Vasunia looks at two imperial contexts of the use of Alexander. Firstly Vasunia argues that Alexander occupies a central place in the imagination of those Europeans who set out to chart the terrain of the East and to establish trade and administrative structures.
No. Alexander came by land. His soldiers hated the place and wanted to go home. The Europeans came by sea. They needed to make a profit which they could return home to spend. The alternative was dying of dysentery.
The fascinating implication of the argument is that Alexander is an anxiety-inducing model for the proponents of liberal empire, since he is a fraught site for negotiating contradictory meanings (Sober or sot? Conqueror or tyrant? Imitable or inimitable? Greek or not Greek?).
He is fucking irrelevant except in so far as Tsar Alexander III might chose to emulate him.
Vasunia works through the European historiographical traditions concerning Alexander stretching from Droysen in the nineteenth century to G. S. Robertson.
So, not very far at all. I suppose Robertson could be said to have supplied material for Kipling's 'the Man who would be King'. But the 'Greeks' of Kafiristan came under the Afghan King and turned Muslim.
In the second half of his argument in Part I, Vasunia dismantles the nationalistic claim that Alexander played a minimal part in Indian history.
The 'Yavanas' played some part. They were thoroughly assimilated because they were few in number. Still, Jain historians continue to bang on about how Karevail defeated Demetrius in Magadha.
Rather, Vasunia examines the utility of ‘Sikander’ to Indian rulers at the end of the first millennium AD for the delineation of their political power.
This is because of the Persian and Quranic references to him. Also, many royal houses claimed descent from Sikandar and Caesar and the Achaemenids as well as the Sun and the Moon.
In examining the politicized interactions of these historiographical traditions together, Vasunia’s dynamic view of the reception history of Alexander answers the charge of being sterile and over-awed by Alexander.
Nobody gave a fuck. As Ghalib put it 'kyā kiyā ḳhiẓr ne sikandar se / ab kise rah-numā kare koʾī.' Khizr led Alexander to the waters of life but drank it up himself. Who would bother seeking a guide now?
Part Two, ‘Caesar in Peccavistan’ ,
When Napier conquered Sindh he telegraphed 'Peccavi' (I have sinned). Then Outram, who took Oudh, telegraphed 'Vovi' (I have vowed). After that, Queen Victoria told her Generals to stop being so fucking silly.
examines another dense and sometimes contradictory complex of imperial emulation and rivalry, whereby the British Empire in India, as an institution and as represented by individual administrators, conceptualized itself as a latter-day Roman Empire.
Fuck off! The Romans settled soldiers on land taken from the conquered. The Brits did not because India was too fucking hot.
Vasunia is rightly suspicious of the complacent idea that Rome was a ‘natural’ comparandum for the British in India.
Nothing wrong with Roman 'pietas'. At least they weren't constantly bumming each other like the Greeks.
In Chapter 4, ‘Visions of Antiquity’ (pp. 157-92), Vasunia makes a bold move in argumentation to look at the ‘architecture of architecture’
which is just architecture just as the fart of a fart is still just a fart.
or the racialised ideologies of power that underpinned the ‘what, how and where’ of British colonial building in India.
There were no such 'ideologies'. There was merely routine.
In this context, this reviewer feels more emphasis could have been placed on the decision to move the colonial capital from Calcutta and to make a new Delhi in 1911.
Why? Calcutta wasn't just a shit-hole. It was a shit-hole full of seditious Babus. Delhi was a backwater but less humid.
The final chapter in Part II, ‘Competitionwallahs: Greek, Latin and the Indian Civil Service’ , is perhaps the most pertinent to classicists interested in the history of the discipline.
What is pertinent is that Latin, Greek, Arabic, Sanskrit etc. gave poorer boys a chance to excel. Take Upendra Goswami whose father had lost all his money during the Depression. The boy swotted up Greek and Latin from dictionaries at the local library. This enabled him to crack the ICS exam. The fact is, an Old Etonian is likely to speak and write more elegant English than a lad who went to Godhulia Gornmint Collidge. But, when it comes to Latin or Greek or Sanskrit, the playing field becomes more level. Sheer hard work compensates for an inferior socio-economic milieu.
Vasunia demonstrates how the unequal weighting towards Greek and Latin in the curriculum reflected the privileged position of Oxbridge classics with the Indian Civil Service, especially for those under the aegis of powerful figures in both politics and the academy, such as Benjamin Jowett.
Jowett was considered a friend of India. He was Cornelia Sorabjee's guardian.
Again, looking at the subjects that were offered and the types of questions put to candidates, allows Vasunia to track how ‘colonial anxieties and fantasies were being triangulated through Britain’s complicated relationship with Greek and Roman antiquity’ .
This is nonsense. The ICS papers were similar to the 'matric' exams used by Universities.
For Vasunia, this exposes one of the great contradictions of the empire; though notionally open to Indians, the Indian Civil Service was a game rigged in favour of those who had been trained in Greek and Latin, underpinned by normative ideas of race and class.
Why rig the game when you are the only player? As for 'normative ideas of race and class', India didn't just have both, it went the extra mile with a very complicated caste system. To some extent this infected the English (less so the Scots or Irish) such there was a prejudice against 'country-bottled' Europeans.
Part Three, ‘Co-operation and Liberation’ (pp. 239-350), returns to the literary mode. In Chapter 6, ‘Homer and Virgil’ (pp. 239-278), Vasunia makes explicit that Greece and Rome can offer different political and cultural stimuli to different people.
Why not make explicit that Indians don't give a fuck about either?
If that seems crudely put, then it is a corrective to the often seen, little interrogated idea of ‘Graeco-Roman antiquity’ as an undifferentiated lump serving as a model.
Add in Judaism (second Maccabees is written in Koine) and you have the 'undifferentiated lump' out of which modern Europe emerged.
Vasunia offers this explanation for the popularity of Homer in India as opposed to Virgil;
Homer is exciting. Virgil is boring.
the latter is too tied up in British imperial visions, whereas the former can be read in the context of the Indo-European thesis.
There are common elements to Iron Age epics. But Virgil's work smells of the lamp.
The broad sketches of the reception history of both Virgil and Homer are useful. However, although Vasunia picks his moments judiciously in the nineteenth century, the first half of the twentieth century is unfortunately compressed and there is more to be said about Auden’s waspish poem ‘Secondary Epic’.
What could usefully be said is that Gandhi, learning a bit of Latin for the bar exam, embraced a millenarianism which, I suppose, appealed in multi-ethnic slave empires but which had not existed in the Iron Age. In Virgil's 4th Eclogue we read of a new Golden Age to be established by a Universal Emperor where - pauca tamen suberunt priscae vestigia fraudis, quae temptare Thetim ratibus, quae cingere muris oppida. In Timothy Ades translation- Few traces will survive of such old frauds/ As Shipping, Agriculture and Defence.
Even less successful for this reviewer is the analysis offered in the following chapter ‘Aristophanes’ Wealth and Dalpatram’s Lakshmi’ , which examines the Gujarati poet’s project of moral reform via a re-visioning of Aristophanes’ play.
Brahmins scold Banias for caring about wealth. This is a hint that maybe you should give them some cash.
Whilst the material here is interesting enough, Dalpatram’s thinking on history does not appear particularly interesting in and of itself.
He knew that the Brits were keeping India safe. That was good enough.
What is illuminating is the extraordinary friendship between Dalpatram and A.K. Forbes
he taught the latter Sanskrit. Forbes, like other British officials, wanted to encourage the vernacular languages and to get texts published which could be used in schools and colleges. So he got his Munshi to switch from Brajbasha to Gujarati. The same thing was happening up and down the country.
who introduced the Gujarati writer to Greek literature.
No. He takes an old Greek play and presents it in the vernacular- bowdlerising it and making it a bit more boring in the process.
Why, for example, is Aristophanes a good choice as a marker of Greek literature?
Dalpatram wrote some comic plays. Why? Boring the pants of your audience is bad for the box office.
This fertile intercultural exchange between the two men begs for further examination.
Did they bum each other? If not, why not? Was it because of the hegemony of racialized Patriarchy under the reign of Neo-Liberalism?
The final chapter, ‘Athens in Calcutta: Derozio Dutt and the Bengal Renaissance’
Madhusudhan Dutt & Ram Mohan Roy did know Greek. But the 'Bengal Renaissance' had to do with learning English and French. Aurobindo was a Classist. But the was as boring and bombastic as shit. His big worry was that the Brits were the Romans and the Bengalis the servile Greeks. People pointed out to him that the Greeks were as smart as fuck. Bengalis were boring and bombastic and as stupid as shit.
is more effective in terms of what it does for Vasunia’s overall argument. By juxtaposing the two Bengali writers, Henry Louis Vivian Derozio
He died young. Apparently his acolytes liked a drink or two. But, Indians had been getting drunk since the time of Dionysius- who peacefully conquered the land with lute, lyre and loose women.
and Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Vasunia can gesture towards the range of relationships and attitudes to Hellenism possible for Indians.
Which were like attitudes to Confucianism- i.e. didn't fucking exist.
Interesting in this context but not addressed here is what status Sanskrit held as an alternative classical tradition for those involved in thinking through a regional Bengali renaissance and a national Indian modernity.
The Brits, those bastards, forced Indians to study not just vernacular languages but at least one Indian Classical language. One may say H.H Wilson's students, who helped him with his translations of the Vedas etc., played a big role in Brahmo and other such bombast.
The Epilogue ushers us through to the twentieth century and the last hurrah of Graeco-Roman Classics in India. As is appropriate for a book that argues persuasively for the close relationship between past and present, it ends as it started with Jawaharlal Nehru.
Though it was Aurobindo who was the Classicist. Nehru studied Botany.
Vasunia examines the relationships of Gandhi and Nehru with Classics in their respective projects of nationalism. While Gandhi’s translations of Plato and self-styling as a Socrates figure are tantalizing, Vasunia rightly pays more attention to Nehru’s more vexed and ambivalent constructions of relationships between the classical past in India and Greece, as well as India’s relationship with its own past.
Nehru was convinced that the Greeks invented sodomy before passing on that vile habit to the Arabs and Turks and so on. No Hindu can be a homo. Us dudes like titties and pussies. We are repulsed by dicks.
One of the greatest strengths of this book is perhaps its most significant flaw.
It's attraction is to show you can easily knock off a book about the influence of Confucianism on eighteenth Century Nigeria. But this is also its flaw. There was no such influence.
Did the Roman Law tradition affect Indian lawyers, judges, and legislators? In one sense, yes. Macaulay was considered a sound Latin scholar. His name is associated with Codification and the displacement of the Court Pundit or Maulvi. But codification was inevitable- indeed the Iran of the Ayatollahs has gone in for it. However, the influence of Roman Law on India is indirect. Still, this may be an interesting topic to pursue.
Vasunia for the most part handles a great range of material well.
He is handling the wrong material. Greek was important for theologians and philosophers. Latin was important for lawyers. Comparative philology was a separate field where Indians rather followed in German footsteps than did anything original. However, Indians keen to uphold the notion that law is a 'samskar'- i.e. is defeasible- as well as 'natural deduction systems' (e.g. navya-nyaya)- did occasionally turn to Latin and Greek. Nothing much came of it because Utilitarianism was a superior path forward. Still, there was a lot of money to be made in the law and, even to this day, we find legal dynasties where, for generations, the male members have kept up a knowledge of Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian etc. This can come in useful for winning cases.
His style of analysis is nuanced, progressing by close readings and the gradual accumulation of evidence
which he looks for in the wrong places.
The reader not well equipped with the arsenal of post-colonial criticism would have benefitted from a more explicit orientation of the book in this scholarly field.
Vasunia should have pointed out that White men have White dicks. Dicks cause RAPE!
In the Introduction Vasunia states that he is indebted to the work of Edward Said
in which case, he is in debt to an ignorant nutter.
and indeed his name does crop up here and there. However, a brief but focused discussion of Said might help to explain why Vasunia’s analyses lean towards the literary.
Writing about the impact of Roman Law on Indian lawyers and judges would require genuine scholarship as would understanding what valency Ram Mohan Roy gave Hebrew and Greek words so as to champion Unitarianism. Equally, the Western Classical equivalent of various Indic words- e.g. dharma and karma- were sought for, generally in vain, by various translators and professors.
A second area in which this reviewer would have liked to read more is the role of gender in the various intersectional critiques.
Also trans-gender, not to mention people who identify as pussy-cats.
Vasunia touches on gender as part of the construction of masculinity in the civilized gentlemanly administrator of the empire, as opposed to the effete Oriental.
Nawab of Oudh had a vagina. General Outram had a dick. How is that fair?
Leaning further on gender as a conceptual tool in the construction of empire in the context of the ‘classical’ would have further enriched the analysis.
Homer had a dick. So did the Viceroy. Neither had to sit down to pee. How is that fair? Even when Victoria became Queen Empress, trillions of Indian women had to sit down to pee. This shows Colonialism is totes Patriarchal and Racist and that it slut shames transgender people who fist themselves vigorously so as to show solidarity with starving Palestinian homosexuals who are protesting against Joe Biden's sodomization of trillions of Netan-Yahoos.
This omission in respect of the conceptual orientation of the book begged the question for this reviewer of who the intended audience is.
People who don't understand that not till heterosexual dicks are banned will the illegal occupation of Turtle Island by white peeps be put to an end.
Maps could have been appended to help guide those not familiar with the activity of the British in India over the course of two-hundred and fifty years of empire, and could have been an elegant way to visualize other European interests in India too.
like their interest in vigorously fisting themselves.
The same could be said for the inclusion of chronologies. On the other hand, since the Greek and Latin are seldom translated, the intended reader is clearly the Classicist.
Vasunia knows that lots of Indian peeps can read Inglis. Better not translate Greek or Latin stuff lest those Indians gain by it. After all, it is one thing to gain affirmative action by playing the Brown card. It is another to have to engage with those smelly Brown peeps.
It seems to this reviewer that the overlap in that Venn diagram of skill sets would be narrow, which is a shame because of the value of the arguments variously and skillfully made here. Vasunia does the kind of detailed, high-resolution, critical look at institutions and practice that Reception Studies is often accused of lacking. This book ought to be considered as rigorous a part of the critique of the discipline of Classics as the work of scholars such as Christopher Stray
who was an actual Classics master and gave a very good account of its history in the UK.
and Susanne Marchand.
she does not have a dick. Allowances should be made.
This is patient, broad and deep research that builds up complex arguments and rewards the reader with the volume and density of the analysis presented. It was a pleasure to read this politicized examination of the discipline.
No it isn't. You would need to spend a lot of time looking at who taught Greek and Latin in various colleges and seeing what influence they each had. A separate matter is the teaching of Latin in theological seminaries, more particularly in Kerala. Syrian Christians sometimes turned to Greek so as to counter the arguments of the Latins.
What of Theosophists in India? Some were Classicists and their interaction with Brahmins from Shrauta or Smarta backgrounds is of interest to people like me. I suppose you might say- 'nothing came of it.' Still, what if Pico Iyer had carried on the tradition of his father? After all, having attended Eton and Oxford, he fulfilled Annie Besant's desiderata for a Tambram Universal Messiah. I suppose, the fact that his Mummy was a Gujju saved him from that fate.
I suppose, as machine translation and generative AI improve, kids in Middle School will be able to quickly compile a better book than Vasunia has written. Still, it must be said, the subject is of little intrinsic interest and no political significance whatsoever.
Vasunia's foundational error is to think that 'Classics as a discipline emerged about 200 years ago, and it in some ways accompanied the rise of the modern empires.' The fact is classicus means belonging to the 'best class'. In England the best class of schools were founded many centuries ago and were constrained by their charter to teach Latin and Greek. Thus, by metonymy, Latin and Greek scholarship was 'Classical scholarship'. The Romance languages are those which derive from Rome's Latin. Romantic literature is written in vernacular languages and being recent may or may not be 'best in kind'.
West European colonial Empires date back to the early fifteenth century when Greek was little known and such Latin as had currency was that of the Church or the Law Courts. 'Humane letters' and humanistic knights appear at around the time of the Reformation. But, by then, Spain and Portugal had vast overseas possessions and the Dutch and the French and the English sought to emulate them. By contrast, Greek and Latin were firmly established by the second half of the sixteenth century in England, before the country had anything substantial by way of Empire.
Why does Vasunia think something changed around 1800 with respect to the Classics? Nothing did. Elite schools were stuck teaching Latin and Greek while newer schools taught modern languages and other subjects useful to the rising mercantile class. But Classical scholarship turned out to be a good 'screening' and 'signalling' device. Even if Latin and Greek were perfectly useless, those who excelled at them in School, also did very well in the administration or the law courts or even in business enterprises.
Did Classical scholarship play any role whatsoever in Colonial India? No. True, some ICS officers had studied at top public schools. But many officers of the East India Company were of a Mercantile or Medical background. There was little demand for such studies in India and thus there was precious little by way of supply. However, the Brits did promote Indian Classical and Vernacular languages. It was only after Independence that you could have an IFS officer unable to speak any Indian language (though that loophole was shut around 1981 or 1982 with the result that my poor sister had to learn a bit of Hindi).
To some extent, Sanskrit did- at certain times and certain places- become just as much a Classical language as Latin or Greek. TS Eliot is an example of a poet who moved easily between these languages. But Aurobindo- whose Headmaster at St. Paul's had an MA in Sanskrit- also moved between them in a manner clumsy and cacophonous. The safer thing, Ind's British masters must have felt, was to let Indians concentrate on mangling the English language rather than turning their attentions to Horace or Hesiod.
