Fears
For Democracy In India
By Martha C. Nussbaum
22 June, 2007
The
Chronicle Review
On
February 27, 2002, the Sabarmati express train arrived in the station
of Godhra, in the state of Gujarat, bearing a large group of Hindu pilgrims
who were returning from a trip to the purported birthplace of the god
Rama at Ayodhya (where, some years earlier, angry Hindu mobs had destroyed
the Babri mosque, which they claimed was on top of the remains of Rama's
birthplace). The pilgrimage, like many others in recent times, aimed
at forcibly constructing a temple over the disputed site, and the mood
of the returning passengers, frustrated in their aims by the government
and the courts, was angrily emotional. When the train stopped at the
station, the Hindu passengers got into arguments with Muslim passengers
and vendors. At least one Muslim vendor was beaten up when he refused
to say Jai Sri Ram ("Hail Rama"). As the train left the station,
stones were thrown at it, apparently by Muslims.
Fifteen minutes later, one
car of the train erupted in flames. Fifty-eight men, women, and children
died in the fire. Most of the dead were Hindus. Because the area adjacent
to the tracks was made up of Muslim dwellings, and because a Muslim
mob had gathered in the region to protest the treatment of Muslims on
the train platform, blame was immediately put on Muslims. Many people
were arrested, and some of those are still in detention without charge
— despite the fact that two independent inquiries have established
through careful sifting of the forensic evidence that the fire was most
probably a tragic accident, caused by combustion from cookstoves carried
on by the passengers and stored under the seats of the train.
In the days that followed
the incident, wave upon wave of violence swept through the state. The
attackers were Hindus, many of them highly politicized, shouting slogans
of the Hindu right, along with "Kill! Destroy!" and "Slaughter!"
There is copious evidence that the violent retaliation was planned before
the precipitating event by Hindu extremist organizations that had been
waiting for an occasion. No one was spared: Young children were thrown
into fires along with their families, fetuses ripped from the bellies
of pregnant women. Particularly striking was the number of women who
were raped, mutilated, in some cases tortured with large metal objects,
and then set on fire. Over the course of several weeks, about 2,000
Muslims were killed.
Most alarming was the total
breakdown in the rule of law — not only at the local level but
also at that of the state and national governments. Police were ordered
not to stop the violence. Some egged it on. Gujarat's chief minister,
Narendra Modi, rationalized and even encouraged the murders. He was
later re-elected on a platform that focused on religious hatred. Meanwhile
the national government showed a culpable indifference. Prime Minister
Atal Behari Vajpayee suggested that religious riots were inevitable
wherever Muslims lived alongside Hindus, and that troublemaking Muslims
were to blame.
While Americans have focused
on President Bush's "war on terror," Iraq, and the Middle
East, democracy has been under siege in another part of the world. India
— the most populous of all democracies, and a country whose Constitution
protects human rights even more comprehensively than our own —
has been in crisis. Until the spring of 2004, its parliamentary government
was increasingly controlled by right-wing Hindu extremists who condoned
and in some cases actively supported violence against minority groups,
especially Muslims.
What has been happening in
India is a serious threat to the future of democracy in the world. The
fact that it has yet to make it onto the radar screen of most Americans
is evidence of the way in which terrorism and the war on Iraq have distracted
us from events and issues of fundamental significance. If we really
want to understand the impact of religious nationalism on democratic
values, India currently provides a deeply troubling example, and one
without which any understanding of the more general phenomenon is dangerously
incomplete. It also provides an example of how democracy can survive
the assault of religious extremism.
In May 2004, the voters of
India went to the polls in large numbers. Contrary to all predictions,
they gave the Hindu right a resounding defeat. Many right-wing political
groups and the social organizations allied with them remain extremely
powerful, however. The rule of law and democracy has shown impressive
strength and resilience, but the future is unclear.
The case of Gujarat is a
lens through which to conduct a critical examination of the influential
thesis of the "clash of civilizations," made famous by the
political scientist Samuel P. Huntington. His picture of the world as
riven between democratic Western values and an aggressive Muslim monolith
does nothing to help us understand today's India, where, I shall argue,
the violent values of the Hindu right are imports from European fascism
of the 1930s, and where the third-largest Muslim population in the world
lives as peaceful democratic citizens, despite severe poverty and other
inequalities.
The real "clash of civilizations"
is not between "Islam" and "the West," but instead
within virtually all modern nations — between people who are prepared
to live on terms of equal respect with others who are different, and
those who seek the protection of homogeneity and the domination of a
single "pure" religious and ethnic tradition. At a deeper
level, as Gandhi claimed, it is a clash within the individual self,
between the urge to dominate and defile the other and a willingness
to live respectfully on terms of compassion and equality, with all the
vulnerability that such a life entails.
This argument about India
suggests a way to see America, which is also torn between two different
pictures of itself. One shows the country as good and pure, its enemies
as an external "axis of evil." The other picture, the fruit
of internal self-criticism, shows America as complex and flawed, torn
between forces bent on control and hierarchy and forces that promote
democratic equality. At what I've called the Gandhian level, the argument
about India shows Americans to themselves as individuals, each of whom
is capable of both respect and aggression, both democratic mutuality
and anxious domination. Americans have a great deal to gain by learning
more about India and pondering the ideas of some of her most significant
political thinkers, such as Sir Rabindranath Tagore and Mohandas Gandhi,
whose ruminations about nationalism and the roots of violence are intensely
pertinent to today's conflicts.
A ccording to the Huntington
thesis, each "civilization" has its own distinctive view of
life, and Hinduism counts as a distinct "civilization." If
we investigate the history of the Hindu right, however, we will see
a very different story. Traditional Hinduism was decentralized, plural,
and highly tolerant, so much so that the vision of a unitary, "pure"
Hinduism that could provide the new nation, following independence from
Britain in 1947, with an aggressive ideology of homogeneity could not
be found in India: The founders of the Hindu right had to import it
from Europe.
The Hindu right's view of
history is a simple one. Like all simple tales, it is largely a fabrication,
but its importance to the movement may be seen by the intensity with
which its members go after scholars who present a more nuanced and accurate
view: not only by strident public critiques, but by organized campaigns
of threat and intimidation, culminating in some cases in physical violence.
Here's how the story goes:
Once there lived in the Indus
Valley a pure and peaceful people. They spoke Vedic Sanskrit, the language
of the gods. They had a rich material culture and a peaceful temper,
although they were prepared for war. Their realm was vast, stretching
from Kashmir in the north to Sri Lanka (Ceylon) in the south. And yet
they saw unity and solidarity in their shared ways of life, calling
themselves Hindus and their land Hindustan. No class divisions troubled
them, nor was caste a painful source of division. The condition of women
was excellent.
That peaceful condition went
on for centuries. Although from time to time marauders made their appearance
(for example, the Huns), they were quickly dispatched. Suddenly, rudely,
unprovoked, invading Muslims put an end to all that. Early in the 16th
century, Babur, founder of the Mughal dynasty, swept through the north
of Hindustan, vandalizing Hindu temples, stealing sacred objects, building
mosques over temple ruins. For 200 years, Hindus lived at the mercy
of the marauders, until the Maharashtrian hero Shivaji rose up and restored
the Hindu kingdom. His success was all too brief. Soon the British took
up where Babur and his progeny had left off, imposing tyranny upon Hindustan
and her people. They can recover their pride only by concerted aggression
against alien elements in their midst.
What is wrong with that picture?
Well, for a start, the people who spoke Sanskrit almost certainly migrated
into the subcontinent from outside, finding indigenous people there,
probably the ancestors of the Dravidian peoples of South India. Hindus
are no more indigenous than Muslims. Second, it leaves out problems
in Hindu society: the problem of caste, which both Gandhi and Tagore
took to be the central social issue facing India, and obvious problems
of class and gender inequality. (When historians point to evidence of
these things, the Hindu right calls them Marxists, as if that, by itself,
invalidated their arguments.) Third, it leaves out the tremendous regional
differences within Hinduism, and hostilities and aggressions sometimes
associated with those. Fourth, it omits the evidence of peaceful coexistence
and syncretism between Hindus and Muslims for a good deal of the Mughal
Empire, including the well-known policies of religious pluralism of
Akbar (1542-1605).
In the Hindu-right version
of history, a persistent theme is that of humiliated masculinity: Hindus
have been subordinate for centuries, and their masculinity insulted,
in part because they have not been aggressive and violent enough. The
two leading ideologues of the Hindu right responded to the call for
a warlike Hindu masculinity in different ways. V.D. Savarkar (1883-1966)
was a freedom fighter who spent years in a British prison in the Andaman
Islands, and who may have been a co-conspirator in the assassination
of Gandhi. M.S. Golwalkar (1906-73), a gurulike figure who was not involved
in the independence struggle, quietly helped build up the organization
known as RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or National Volunteers Association),
now the leading social organization of the Hindu right. Savarkar's "Hindutva:
Who Is a Hindu?," first published in 1923, undertook to define
the essence of Hinduness for the new nation; his definition was exclusionary,
emphasizing cultural homogeneity and the need to use force to ensure
the supremacy of Hindus.
Golwalkar's We, or Our Nationhood
Defined was published in 1939. Writing during the independence struggle,
Golwalkar saw his task as describing the unity of the new nation. To
do that, he looked to Western political theory, and particularly to
Germany, where what he called "race pride" helped bring "under
one sway the whole of the territory" that was originally held by
the Germani. By purging itself of Jews, he wrote, "Germany has
also shown how well nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having
differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole,
a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by."
In the end, Golwalkar's vision
of national unity was not exactly that of Nazi Germany. He was not very
concerned with purity of blood, but rather with whether Muslim and Christian
groups were willing to "abandon their differences, and completely
merge themselves in the National Race." He was firmly against the
civic equality of any people who retained their religious and ethnic
distinctiveness.
At the time of independence,
such ideas of Hindu supremacy did not prevail. Nehru and Gandhi insisted
not only on equal rights for all citizens, but also on stringent protections
for religious freedom of expression in the new Constitution. Gandhi
always pointedly included Muslims at the very heart of his movement.
He felt that respect for human equality lay at the heart of all genuine
religions, and provided Hindus with strong reasons both for repudiating
the caste hierarchy and for seeking relationships of respect and harmony
with Christians and Muslims. A devout Muslim, Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad,
was one of his and Nehru's most trusted advisers, and it was to him
that Gandhi turned to accept food when he broke his fast unto death,
a very pointed assault on sectarian ideas of purity and pollution. Gandhi's
pluralistic ideas, however, were always contested.
On January 30, 1948, Gandhi
was shot at point-blank range by Nathuram Godse, a member of the Hindu
political party Mahasabha and former member of the RSS, who had long
had a close, reverential relationship with Savarkar. At his sentencing
on November 8, 1949, Godse read a book-length statement of self-explanation.
Although it was not permitted publication at the time, it gradually
leaked out. Today it is widely available on the Internet, where Godse
is revered as a hero on Hindu-right Web sites.
Godse's self-justification,
like the historical accounts of both Savarkar and Golwalkar, saw contemporary
events against the backdrop of centuries of "Muslim tyranny"
in India, punctuated by the heroic resistance of Shivaji in the 18th
century. Like Savarkar, Godse described his goal as that of creating
a strong, proud India that could throw off the centuries of domination.
He was appalled by Gandhi's rejection of the warlike heroes of classical
Hindu epics and his inclusion of Muslims as full equals in the new nation,
and argued that Gandhi exposed Indians to subordination and humiliation.
Nehru believed that the murder of Gandhi was part of a "fairly
widespread conspiracy" on the part of the Hindu right to seize
power; he saw the situation as analogous to that in Europe on the eve
of the fascist takeovers. And he believed that the RSS was the power
behind this conspiracy.
Fast-forward now to recent
years. Although illegal for a time, the RSS eventually re-emerged and
quietly went to work building a vast social network, consisting largely
of groups for young boyscalled shakha, or "branches"which,
through clever use of games and songs, indoctrinate the young into the
confrontational and Hindu-supremacist ideology of the organization.
The idea of total obedience and the abnegation of critical faculties
is at the core of the solidaristic movement. Each day, as members raise
the saffron flag of the warlike hero Shivaji, which the movement prefers
to the tricolor flag of the Indian nation (with its Buddhist wheel of
law reminding citizens of the emperor Ashoka's devotion to religious
toleration), they recite a pledge that begins: "I take the oath
that I will always protect the purity of Hindu religion, and the purity
of Hindu culture, for the supreme progress of the Hindu nation."
The organization also makes clever use of modern media: A nationally
televised serial version of the classic epic Ramayana in the late 1980s
fascinated viewers all over India with its concocted tale of a unitary
Hinduism dedicated to the single-minded worship of the god Rama. In
1992 Hindu mobs, with the evident connivance of the modern political
wing of the RSS, the party known as the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party,
or National People's Party), destroyed a mosque in the city of Ayodhya
that they say covers the remains of a Hindu temple marking Rama's birthplace.
Politically, the BJP began
to gather strength in the late 1980s, drawing on widespread public dissatisfaction
with the economic policies of the post-Nehru Congress Party (although
it was actually Congress, under Rajiv Gandhi, that began economic reforms),
and playing, always, the cards of hatred and fear. It was during its
ascendancy, in a coalition government that prevented it from carrying
out all its goals, that the destruction of the Ayodyha mosque took place.
The violence in Gujarat was the culmination of a series of increasingly
angry pilgrimages to the Ayodyha site, where the Hindu right has attempted
to construct a Hindu temple over the ruins, but has been frustrated
by the courts. Although the elections of 2004 gave a negative verdict
on the BJP government, it remains the major opposition party and controls
governments in some key states, including Gujarat.
For several years, I have
studied the Gujarat violence, its basis and its aftermath, looking for
implications for how we should view religious violence around the world.
One obvious conclusion is that each case must be studied on its own
merits, with close attention to specific historical and regional factors.
The idea that all conflicts are explained by a simple hypothesis of
the "clash of civilizations" proves utterly inadequate in
Gujarat, where European ideas were borrowed to address a perceived humiliation
and to create an ideology that has led to a great deal of violence against
peaceful Muslims. Indeed, the "clash of civilizations" thesis
is the best friend of the perpetrators because it shields them and their
ideology from scrutiny. Repeatedly in interviews with leading members
of the Hindu right, I was informed that no doubt, as an American, I
was already on their side, knowing that Muslims cause trouble wherever
they are.
What we see in Gujarat is
not a simplistic, comforting thesis, but something more disturbing:
the fact that in a thriving democracy, many individuals are unable to
live with others who are different, on terms of mutual respect and amity.
They seek total domination as the only road to security and pride. That
is a phenomenon well known in democracies around the world, and it has
nothing to do with an alleged Muslim monolith, and, really, very little
to do with religion as such.
This case, then, informs
us that we must look within, asking whether in our own society similar
forces are at work, and, if so, how we may counteract them. Beyond that
general insight, my study of the riots has suggested four very specific
lessons.
The rule of law: One of the
most appalling aspects of the events in Gujarat was the complicity of
officers of the law. The police sat on their hands, the highest officials
of state government egged on the killing, and the national government
gave aid and comfort to the state government.
However, the institutional
and legal structure of the Indian democracy ultimately proved robust,
playing a key role in securing justice for the victims. The Supreme
Court and the Election Commission of India played constructive roles
in postponing new elections while Muslims were encouraged to return
home, and in ordering changes of venue in key trials arising out of
the violence. Above all, free national elections were held in 2004,
and those elections, in which the participation of poor rural voters
was decisive, delivered a strongly negative verdict on the policies
of fear and hate, as well as on the BJP's economic policies. The current
government, headed by Manmohan Singha Sikh and India's first minority
prime ministerhas announced a firm commitment to end sectarian violence
and has done a great deal to focus attention on the unequal economic
and political situation of Muslims in the nation, as well as appointing
Muslims to key offices. On balance, then, the pluralistic democracy
envisaged by Gandhi and Nehru seems to be winning, in part because the
framers of the Indian state bequeathed to India a wise institutional
and constitutional structure, and traditions of commitment to the key
political values that structure embodies.
It should be mentioned that
one of the key aspects of the founders' commitments, which so far has
survived the Hindu-right challenge, is the general conception of the
nation as a uni-ty around political ideals and values, particularly
the value of equal entitlement, rather than around ethnic or religious
or linguistic identity. India, like the United States, but unlike most
of the nations of Europe, has rejected such exclusionary ways of characterizing
the nation, adopting in its Constitution, in public ceremonies, and
in key public symbols the political conception of its unity. Political
structure is not ev-erything, but it can supply a great deal in times
of stress.
The news media and the role
of intellectuals: One of the heartening aspects of the Gujarat events
was the performance of the national news media and of the community
of intellectuals. Both print media and television kept up unceasing
pressure to document and investigate events. At the same time, many
scholars, lawyers, and leaders of nongovernnmental organizations converged
on Gujarat to take down the testimony of witnesses, help them file complaints,
and prepare a public record that would stand up in court. The only reason
I felt the need to write about these events further is that their analyses
have, by and large, not reached the American audience.
We can see here documentation
of something long ago observed by the Indian economist and philosopher
Amartya Sen in the context of famines: the crucial role of a free press
in supporting democratic institutions. (Sen pointed out that there has
not been a famine in recent times in a nation where a free press brings
essential information to the public; in China, by contrast, in the late
1950s and early 60s, famine was allowed to continue unabated, because
news of what was happening in rural areas did not leak out.) And we
can study here what a free press really means: I would argue that it
requires a certain absence of top-down corporate control and an easy
access to the major news media for intellectual voices from a wide range
of backgrounds.
Education and the importance
of critical thinking and imagination: So far I have mentioned factors
that have helped the Indian democracy survive the threat of quasi-fascist
takeover. But there are warning signs for the future. The public schools
in Gujarat are famous for their complete lack of critical thinking,
their exclusive emphasis on rote learning and the uncritical learning
of marketable skills, and the elements of fascist propaganda that easily
creep in when critical thinking is not cultivated. It is well known
that Hitler is presented as a hero in history textbooks in the state,
and nationwide public protest has not yet led to any change. To some
extent, the rest of the nation is better off: National-level textbooks
have been rewritten to take out the Hindu right's false ideological
view of history and to substitute a more nuanced view. Nonetheless,
the emphasis on rote learning and on regurgitation of facts for national
examinations is distressing everywhere, and things are only becoming
worse with the immense pressure to produce economically productive graduates.
The educational culture of
India used to contain progressive voices, such as that of the great
Tagore, who emphasized that all the skills in the world were useless,
even baneful, if not wielded by a cultivated imagination and refined
critical faculties. Such voices have now been silenced by the sheer
demand for profitability in the global market. Parents want their children
to learn marketable skills, and their great pride is the admission of
a child to the Indian Institutes of Technology or the India Institutes
of Management. They have contempt for the humanities and the arts. I
fear for democracy down the road, when it is run, as it increasingly
will be, by docile engineers in the Gujarat mold, unable to criticize
the propaganda of politicians and unable to imagine the pain of another
human being.
In the United States, by
some estimates fully 40 percent of Indian-Americans hail from Gujarat,
where a large proportion belong to the Swaminarayan sect of Hinduism,
distinctive for its emphasis on uncritical obedience to the utterances
of the current leader of the sect, whose title is Pramukh Swami Maharaj.
On a visit to the elaborate multimillion-dollar Swaminarayan temple
in Bartlett, Ill., I was given a tour by a young man recently arrived
from Gujarat, who delighted in telling me the simplistic Hindu-right
story of India's history, and who emphatically told me that whenever
Pramukh Swami speaks, one is to regard it as the direct voice of God
and obey without question. At that point, with a beatific smile, the
young man pointed up to the elaborate marble ceiling and asked, "Do
you know why this ceiling glows the way it does?" I said I didn't,
and I confidently expected an explanation invoking the spiritual powers
of Pramukh Swami. My guide smiled even more broadly. "Fiber-optic
cables," he told me. "We are the first ones to put this technology
into a temple." There you see what can easily wreck democracy:
a combination of technological sophistication with utter docility. I
fear that many democracies around the world, including our own, are
going down that road, through a lack of emphasis on the humanities and
arts and an unbalanced emphasis on profitable skills.
The creation of a liberal
public culture: How did fascism take such hold in India? Hindu traditions
emphasize tolerance and pluralism, and daily life tends to emphasize
the ferment and vigor of difference, as people from so many ethnic,
linguistic, and regional backgrounds encounter one another. But as I've
noted, the traditions contain a wound, a locus of vulnerability, in
the area of humiliated masculinity. For centuries, some Hindu males
think, they were subordinated by a sequence of conquerors, and Hindus
have come to identify the sexual playfulness and sensuousness of their
traditions, scorned by the masters of the Raj, with their own weakness
and subjection. So a repudiation of the sensuous and the cultivation
of the masculine came to seem the best way out of subjection. One reason
why the RSS attracts such a following is the widespread sense of masculine
failure.
At the same time, the RSS
filled a void, organizing at the grass-roots level with great discipline
and selflessness. The RSS is not just about fascist ideology; it also
provides needed social services, and it provides fun, luring boys in
with the promise of a group life that has both more solidarity and more
imagination than the tedious world of government schools.
So what is needed is some
counterforce, which would supply a public culture of pluralism with
equally efficient grass-roots organization, and a public culture of
masculinity that would contend against the appeal of the warlike and
rapacious masculinity purveyed by the Hindu right. The "clash within"
is not so much a clash between two groups in a nation that are different
from birth; it is, at bottom, a clash within each person, in which the
ability to live with others on terms of mutual respect and equality
contends anxiously against the sense of being humiliated.
Gandhi understood that. He
taught his followers that life's real struggle was a struggle within
the self, against one's own need to dominate and one's fear of being
vulnerable. He deliberately focused attention on sexuality as an arena
in which domination plays itself out with pernicious effect, and he
deliberately cultivated an androgynous maternal persona. More significantly
still, he showed his followers that being a "real man" is
not a matter of being aggressive and bashing others; it is a matter
of controlling one's own instincts to aggression and standing up to
provocation with only one's human dignity to defend oneself. I think
that in some respects, he went off the tracks, in his suggestion that
sexual relations are inherently scenes of domination and in his recommendation
of asceticism as the only route to nondomination. Nonetheless, he saw
the problem at its root, and he proposed a public culture that, while
he lived, was sufficient to address it.
In a quite different way,
Tagore also created a counterimage of the Indian self, an image that
was more sensuous, more joyful than that of Gandhi, but equally bent
on renouncing the domination that Tagore saw as inherent in European
traditions. In works such as Nationalism and The Religion of Man, Tagore
described a type of joyful cosmopolitanism, underwritten by poetry and
the arts, that he also made real in his pioneering progressive school
in Santiniketan.
After Gandhi, however, that
part of the pluralist program has languished. Though he much loved and
admired both Gandhi and Tagore, Nehru had contempt for religion, and
out of his contempt he neglected the cultivation of what the radical
religions of both men had supplied: images of who we are as citizens,
symbolic connections to the roots of human vulnerability and openness,
and the creation of a grass-roots public culture around those symbols.
Nehru was a great institution builder, but in thinking about the public
culture of the new nation, his focus was always on economic, not cultural,
issues. Because he firmly expected that raising the economic level of
the poor would cause them to lose the need for religion and, in general,
for emotional nourishment, he saw no need to provide a counterforce
to the powerful emotional propaganda of the Hindu right.
Today's young people in India,
therefore, tend to think of religion, and the creation of symbolic culture
in general, as forces that are in their very nature fascist and reactionary
because that is what they have seen in their experience. When one tells
them the story of the American civil-rights movement, and the role of
both liberal religion and powerful pluralist rhetoric in forging an
anti-racist civic culture, they are quite surprised. Meanwhile, the
RSS goes to work unopposed in every state and region, skillfully plucking
the strings of hate and fear. By now pluralists generally realize that
a mistake was made in leaving grass-roots organization to the right,
but it is very difficult to jump-start a pluralist movement. The salient
exception has been the women's movement, which has built at the grass
roots very skillfully.
It is comforting for Americans
to talk about a clash of civilizations. That thesis tells us that evil
is outside, distant, other, and that we are perfectly all right as we
are. All we need do is to remain ourselves and fight the good fight.
But the case of Gujarat shows us that the world is very different. The
forces that assail democracy are internal to many, if not most, democratic
nations, and they are not foreign: They are our own ideas and voices,
meaning the voices of aggressive European nationalism, refracted back
against the original aggressor with the extra bile of resentment born
of a long experience of domination and humiliation.
The implication is that all
nations, Western and non-Western, need to examine themselves with the
most fearless exercise of critical capacities, looking for the roots
of domination within and devising effective institutional and educational
countermeasures. At a deeper level, the case of Gujarat shows us what
Gandhi and Tagore, in their different ways, knew: that the real root
of domination lies deep in the human personality. It would be so convenient
if Americans were pure and free from flaw, but that fantasy is yet another
form that the resourceful narcissism of the human personality takes
on the way to bad behavior.
Martha C. Nussbaum
is a professor in the philosophy department, law school, divinity school,
and the college at the University of Chicago. Her book The Clash Within:
Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future will be published
this week by Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Leave
A Comment
&
Share Your Insights
Comment
Policy
Digg
it! And spread the word!
Here is a unique chance to help this article to be read by thousands
of people more. You just Digg it, and it will appear in the home page
of Digg.com and thousands more will read it. Digg is nothing but an
vote, the article with most votes will go to the top of the page. So,
as you read just give a digg and help thousands more to read this article.