Max Weber

Debate: The ‘Sacrifice’ of Thinking and the Altar of Unreason

When cultural shifts that encourage superstition, and are decidedly discriminatory, emerge leading to extreme acts such as human sacrifices, the field that needs to respond swiftly is that of the liberal arts.

The Elanthoor sacrifices understandably restoked the fires of the religiosity versus secular debate. Theologians and socio-political commentators denounced the act:

while influential “intellectuals” are interested only in literature and not in promoting scientific temper, the media too failed in this battle against superstition because they no longer promote “critical thinking”.

Literature promotes critical thinking because it forces us to confront humans unlike us, that ‘human’ is a plural category and everyone within the category has the right to be treated equally. Everything hinges on how we define the human, and this is the task not of anatomists or political scientists alone, but of literature which shows us this diversity. But we shall get to literature and humanities in a while.

Mohammed Shafi, one of the accused in the Elanthoor ‘human sacrifice’ case, being produced at court, in Kochi. Photo: PTI

Languages of religiosity

The language of ‘faith’ and ‘religion’ when employed to speak of contemporary India is positioned as antagonistic to ‘secular’ and ‘modern’. This antagonism is fuelled by the language of the state itself. Claiming ‘scientific’ achievements for ancient times, reclaiming versions of ‘discoveries’ and technologies as native – and as a matter of faith – the state constructs a discourse that feeds readily into the above antagonism.

When state discourse enters the public language and public imaginary – a shift from the 1980s and even the 1990s India – it also invokes other, less pleasant, subtextual aspects of ancient beliefs and rituals, including practices such as human sacrifice. For how does one disentangle, from the discourse of ‘ancient glories’, strands of thought that are empowering and egalitarian from those that are sexist or anti-rights?

Sociologist-philosopher Jurgen Habermas cautioned that the validity claims of any religion must ‘adapt to the authority of the sciences’. He also conceded that individuals may retain a sense of religious belonging but without abandoning their autonomy (or, by extension, free will). But what we see now – and not just in India, let us not forget the ‘intelligent design’ debate across the US, critiqued by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion – is not a disowning of this authority of the sciences, an authority constructed and not without its own politics. Rather it is an appropriation of all sciences as always already ‘ours’.

Such discourses propose a divide between knowledge forms: native and ancient versus ‘western’ and modern, almost as though there are monolithic ‘native’ or ‘western’ beliefs (would ‘western belief’ be Catholic, Protestant or Eastern Orthodox?). Overlaps also occur even within attitudes of intolerance and offended sentiments: Saba Mahmood noted the same iconophilic strains within both religions:

the kind of relationship that many pious Muslims feel toward Muhammad, which was partly at stake in the Danish cartoon controversy, surely it is recognizable to scholars of Christianity (with its long and rich tradition of the Eucharist and Corpus Christi), Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and late Antiquity?

Mahmood went on to argue that we need to think (and speak)

critically about whether the sense of injury that derives from this sort of religiosity is translatable into a language of rights, and whether understanding this sense of injury is something worthy for the ethical and political life of a religiously diverse society.

The ‘language of rights’ is precisely what has been abandoned in toto with the rise of the language of hurt sentiments but also because in the era of mythic pasts and post-truth.

What counts as religion itself has been constructed in specific contexts and for particular reasons, notes Talal Asad:

It was late nineteenth-century anthropological and theological thought that rendered a variety of overlapping social usages rooted in changing and heterogeneous forms of life into a single immutable essence, and claimed it to be the object of a universal human experience called “religious”.

He further argued that when we speak of religions we need to ask ‘questions about what the definition includes and what it excludes – how, by whom, for what purpose, and so on’. These are questions, in our context of the widespread use of exclusionary rhetoric, we need to ask now for clearly, some humans can be sacrificed.

Several of these questions are the province of fields in the human sciences, intellectual history, even discourse studies and of course literature. Here we find the eschewing of hagiographies and instead a focus on histories of religious thought, complete with anthropological inquiry.

Also Read: Whither, in the Name of Religion, Goes the Voice of Reason?

‘Values’ and cultural change

The sociologist Max Weber noted:

Every increase of rationalism in empirical science increasingly pushes religion from the rational into the irrational realm; but only today does religion become the irrational or anti-rational supra-human power.

This categorisation of religion as ‘irrational’ moved religion into the realm of the private as well. But the World Values Survey is illustrative. For the 2017-2022 period, people of many countries agreed that religion was ‘very important’ to their daily lives. In terms of percentages, 37% of Americans agreed. Indonesia, Nigeria, Egypt and numerous countries showed more than 50% of the population agreeing. Only in the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Lithuania, South Korea, Iceland, Hungary, Denmark, Austria, Azerbaijan, Australia and a few other nations was this percentage less than 20%. In their comment on this ‘cultural map’, political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel noted two major dimensions of cross-cultural variation in the world: traditional values versus secular-rational values; survival values versus self-expression values. They defined Traditional values as

Emphasiz[ing] the importance of religion, parent-child ties, deference to authority and traditional family values. People who embrace these values also reject divorce, abortion, euthanasia and suicide. These societies have high levels of national pride and a nationalistic outlook.

They noted :

On the traditional/secular dimension, the United States ranks far below other rich societies, with levels of religiosity and national pride comparable with those found in some developing societies… The Swedes, the Dutch, and the Australians are closer to the cutting edge of cultural change than the Americans…

‘The cutting edge of cultural change’ is an apposite phrase because with the rise of the discourse of ancient traditions and their glories what is lost is the capacity for cultural change, unfitting our next generations for a rapidly changing world when they are asked to return to roots and supposedly stable values.

And yet, in the past, faced with crises and extreme events, even theologians have responded in interesting ways. One thinks of Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’ (2015), with its subtitle, ‘on care for our common home’, in which he pronounced ‘Climate [is] a common good’, and the Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change (2015) as examples. Just as the scientists drew our urgent attention to the climate crisis, so did religious leaders. Calling for changes in the way we live – especially fossil fuel consumption – these tracts were attempting to effect cultural changes. They were not just spouting back-to-scriptures rhetoric, but actively promoting critical thinking and an environmental consciousness that is humanistic in spirit.

Pope Francis speaks to journalists aboard the papal plane on his flight back after visiting Canada, July 29, 2022. Photo: Reuters/Guglielmo Mangiapane

Knowledge shifts and critical thinking

For cultural change ‘critical thinking’ is indispensable. The language of rights, dignity and autonomy helps rethink what it means to be human, a citizen, a community. In Heidi Bostic’s pithy phrasing, humanities explore the ‘basic issues of meaning, purpose, and value’ and ‘fundamental questions at the heart of humanistic inquiry: questions that the humanities confront….Who are we and how ought we to live?’ Following from these, how have returns to mythic pasts, the designation of some people as nonpersons and disposable persons, are matters of concern for the Humanities because it concerns how we as a people ought to live.

Those sacrificed were treated as disposable humans, and this is where our myths have something to answer for: how did we retrieve beliefs that, in the age of science and democracy, enabled some to consign fellow humans to the category of the disposable? What have we imparted as frames of perception? How have we manufactured memory in terms of cultural heritage management that congeals the public imaginary around ‘us’ and ‘them’?

Such a management is the organisation of perception which can lead, as Diana Taylor argues about the collective refusal to observe the cruelties around us, to percepticide. If we see the recent acts as just ‘perversions’ or ‘superstition’ then we wilfully miss how a train of thought has now appeared, valorising myths and post-truth ‘facts’ as acceptable and even respectable, and which will at some point call forth expressions of this heinous sort as well.

It is not, as Sunny Kapikad noted, an isolated incident but a reflection of a larger malaise and cultural resurgence of a certain kind. In this, Kapikad echoes the oft-repeated comments that the 2004 Abu Ghraib tortures and torturers were not just kinky individuals but a product of the American system that normalises violence and racism. The context legitimises and valorises stories and practices that then produce extreme acts, unthinkable acts that destroy the Other human. It is how we perceive the Other that allows, sanctifies and necessitates the destruction of the Other.

And it is within the liberal arts, specifically literature, that we learn how to perceive the Other, with outsiderhood.

As we set about fragmenting the disciplines into diploma and certificate courses in the name of interdisciplinarity and flexibility, preventing the young from acquiring a solid foundation in any discipline, the capacity for critical thinking is eroded. Where sustained reflection, deep reading and diversity of scholarship – the basis of the Humanities – are necessary more than ever, what we are attempting is minimising detail, shortcuts into a discipline and superficial jargon usage. There is no need, apparently, to examine the plural and sometimes problematic histories of an idea or ideology, the subtexts of a discourse.

A nation that abandons reflection for trendy myths and catchy teaching programmes that refuse groundedness in concepts, frames of perception and (untrendy) ideas of rights, when public discourse turns on emotional truth and unverifiable myths, when disciplines like the liberal arts are rendered ineffectual systematically, atavistic practices such as Elanthoor will return.

Sometimes the death of a discipline that offers the last of the grand challenges to the way we live heralds the death of the idea(l) of a nation.

How Bureaucracy Has Left the Indian Civil Services Adrift

India’s crisis-ridden bureaucracy is unrecognisable, and this perception of the civil services overshadows the handful of upright officers who continue boldly to keep the system afloat.

Once hailed as the steel frame of independent India, the country’s civil service today is a pale shadow of its halcyon past when officers of high intellectual calibre, personal integrity, and the brio to give unbiased advice, held sway.

Successors of the ‘heaven born’ colonial Indian Civil Service, or ICS, and the analogous Indian Police or IP, newly independent India’s civil services was not too different. They equitably managed the turbulent times of Partition, rife with bloodshed, refugees’ influx, and the division of assets between the two newly created nations.

In the decades thereafter, guided by competent political leaders they kept hope alive by nurturing a fledgling democracy in a hugely diverse country, which few in the world thought would survive as a nation state.

But over seven decades later India’s crisis-ridden bureaucracy is unrecognisable; vilified for its inefficiency, nepotism, and corruption, but above all else, for its arrogance and high-maintenance and low mileage capabilities. This common perception of the civil services overshadows the handful of conscientious and upright officers who continue boldly to adhere to old values and keep the system afloat.

Ironically, it is because of this latter diminishing complement of officers that many systems continue to function relatively well.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi seems to concur with this public perception of the Indian bureaucrats. He recently excoriated the country’s civil servants in the Lok Sabha, venting his ire particularly against members of the ‘hallowed’ Indian Administrative Service (IAS) that heads the country’s bureaucratic pinnacle.

Also read: The Civil Services Have Failed To Deliver and It’s Time To Reconsider Their Importance

The ‘babu’ culture

Participating in the motion of thanks to President Ram Nath Kovind’s parliamentary address, an incensed prime minister lamented that India’s growth had become ‘hostage’ to the whims and fancies of babus – a mildly pejorative euphemism for civil servants – and the untrammelled power they wielded.

“Babus will do everything,” an incredulous prime minister asked rhetorically. “Because they became IAS (officers) they run fertiliser factories ….chemical factories… even fly planes,” he fulminated. “What is this big power we have created,” he asked, going on to inquire of his fellow parliamentarians whether it was judicious to hand over the ‘reins of the nation (of power and governance) to babus’.

The prime minister’s outburst upset senior civil servants who rather than introspect on the criticism levelled against them spent their energy speculating on what had prompted Modi’s outburst. Near-unanimously they agreed that the prime minister’s tirade against them was because of a handful of projects that had been delayed; of course, due to no fault of theirs.

What Modi stated in parliament on February 10, starkly echoed the despair and helplessness of billions of Indians, subsumed by a bureaucracy which other than the IAS is supplemented by the Indian Police Service (IPS), and overseas by the Indian Foreign Service (IFS). Assorted central services oversee varied other departments like revenue, customs, railways, forests, and cantonments, amongst others.

New IAS civil servants headed for training. Credit: PTI

New IAS civil servants headed for training. Photo: PTI

Exceptions notwithstanding, there is a collective strain that defines them all, at least in the popular perception: power, pelf and relative inviolability. The civil servants’ calibre is in direct proportion to their ability to perform in the qualifying examination and the subsequent interview. Thereafter, efficiency, probity, conscientiousness, and empathy are of limited relevance for the average three decades most officers serve.

Most officers assume the trappings of feudal grandeur much like their colonial predecessors, but without either their efficiency, commitment, or impartiality. Their ‘power’ props begin with their massive office revolving chairs, with the mandatory white towel – changed regularly – draped over the back for reasons unknown. Over decades this white towel has emerged as an unquestioned symbol of bureaucratic authority that brooks no challenge and is always right.

Red lights flash continually outside their office doors to further indicate high office and importance. These worthies, ironically known as public servants, are largely inaccessible to common people who obsequiously line up outside their offices for redressal of their grievances, sometimes waiting the entire day without getting to see the ‘sahib’. In colonial times, those in authority were commonly known as ‘mai baap’ (my father); in independent India they have a shorter, adaptive Anglo-Indian appellation – sir ji.

Sir ji’s calls are screened by his army of staffers who invariably mouth the patent questions: ‘aap kahan se bol rahe hain’, ‘kya kaam hai’, or a helpful ‘dekhta hun sahib kamre mein hain ke nahin’. But this is mere tokenism as most callers are summarily informed that ‘sahib’ is either out or busy in a meeting. This generally means only one thing – the personal staff does not consider the caller important enough to bother the boss. Similarly, visitors are disdainfully discouraged either by making them wait, or advised to meet some other lower-level official in connection with their grievances.

Such inaccessibility contributes majorly towards building public perception regarding the importance and invincibility of the officer. And though civil servants cannot possibly meet, or talk to everyone, there is no system to differentiate between those who have legitimate grievances and others who do not. This malaise has percolated down to the lower power structure echelons, leaving millions of unrequited supplicants across the country.

A large proportion of these civil servants’ business is conducted via haloed meetings, attended by officers whose comprehension of the subject under discussion is normally limited to what is included in the briefs or notes prepared by their juniors. Moreover, these incessant rounds of meetings tend invariably to be long and tedious, devoid of all levity or humour, and seldom result in any definitive decision. In most instances, the minutes are recorded on the ubiquitous file which in turn remains in perpetual orbit.

The German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) had famously defined bureaucracy as a highly structured organisation predicated on specialisation and technical competence, a formal set of rules and regulations, a well-defined hierarchy, and impersonality in application of rules. A century later Weber would be hard pressed, to put it mildly, to define Indian bureaucracy even remotely in this overarching framework.

Even insiders, who have spent decades in civil service, find it difficult to explain this sarkari jalebi that impinges on every Indian’s life in varying degrees but one that renders the bureaucrat wholly indispensable. It is also a truism that the power an Indian civil servant wields is vast and in many cases in indirect proportion to the ability of the person exercising it.

Metaphorically, India’s bureaucratic hierarchy – divided into four groups – mirrors the toxic chaturvarna vyavastha, or the caste system, to which admission is determined by one’s performance in the annual civil service and other entrance examinations. And much like the accident of birth that determines one’s station in the chaturvarna vyavastha, entry into one of these aforesaid categories too determines the future course of one’s career, circumscribing mobility across the broad four civil service groupings.

Specialisation is an important facet of bureaucracy in the Weberian scheme, but in the Indian context the ‘generalist’ IAS officers are the ultimate mavens in all administration branches, as Prime Minister Modi emphatically pointed out in the parliament.

Potentially, an IAS officer with a mere bachelor’s degree in arts could well be deemed as much of an expert in financial management as in aerospace and defence, in most instances learning the basics on the job. The depth of knowledge and experience normally necessary in each of these areas, it seems, are no barrier. As the prime minister declared: the ‘Babu’s can do everything.

Also read: Lateral Entry Is Fine. but What About Enhancing the IAS’s Professional Competence?

Streamlining the country’s bureaucracy

India’s first Administrative Reforms Commission (ARC), aiming at streamlining the country’s bureaucracy, had in 1970 recommended that an overarching ‘functional field’ needed to be created for the lAS. The Commission proposed that this could consist of land revenue administration, exercise of magisterial functions and regulatory work in the states in fields other than those looked after by officials from sundry civil services.

It also suggested that the jobs which do not fall within a particular ‘functional area’ need to be demarcated into eight areas of specialised administration: economic, industrial agricultural and rural development, social and education, personnel, finance, defence and internal security, and planning.

Expectedly, these recommendations were never fully implemented. Instead, a hybrid system was adopted that provided an edge to IAS officers in matters of promotion, postings, and career furtherance. Under this skewered arrangement, the non-IAS services received step-brotherly treatment leading not only to resentment, but also demoralisation. Though the non-IAS officers are now being inducted into higher positions in the ministries in greater numbers than before, such opportunities continue to be limited relative to the number of officers seeking such opportunities.

The recommendations of the first ARC continue to be relevant as governance has become increasingly technologically enabled and specialised. Successive governments declared their intent on assuming office of executing administrative reforms, but these were cleverly stymied each time by the internal forces, reminiscent of the delightful BBC comedy Yes Minister and later Yes, Prime Minister.

In one uproarious episode Prime Minister Jim Hacker asks of senior bureaucrat Sir Humphrey Appleby whether he knew of a civil servant resigning on a matter of principle.

I should think not! What an appalling suggestion! retorts Sir Humphrey in high dudgeon.

Familiar?

Amit Cowshish is former financial advisor (acquisitions), Ministry of Defence.

Interpreting Erotic Sculptures in Ancient Temples the ‘Liberal’ Way

A response to Saikat Majumdar’s ‘Dreaming of a Hindu Left’.

Taken aside by a male tour guide who was embarrassed by the famous erotic sculptures on the Sun Temple at Konark, Saikat Majumdar writes in “Dreaming of a Hindu Left”, published in the Hindu on September 1, 2018, that the guide told him in hushed tones, “All those things that are there in Khajuraho, none of it is real. It’s all made up…”

When Majumdar asks him what he meant, the guide explains:

“None of these things — none of those acts,” he swallowed bravely, “ever happened anywhere. They were made up by the sculptors because they were away from home for a long time and were, you know,” his voice hushed again, “were missing their wives.”

Majumdar writes: “What is the modern, liberal, bourgeois urban subject to do in the eerie twilight of ancient temples, before the whispers of the possessed but crafty souls who sculpted these? When he has to listen to someone explaining these away as mere imaginings?” He answers his own question: “Nothing. Just listen to the stories. And if blessed enough by madness, tell a few of one’s own.”

A ‘kama’ scene on the walls of the Sun Temple. Credit: Wikipedia

What are his readers to make of Majumdar’s response? That they must encounter the Sun Temple’s erotica as “modern, liberal, bourgeois urban” subjects? Even if they don’t necessarily identify themselves as such, must they accept that there are no better and worse truth-claims and that they can therefore only make up more mad stories of their own? And that such counter-fictions amount to “doing nothing”?

Answering any of these questions in the affirmative begs further questions of why: why should the normative viewer of such temple erotica be liberal, bourgeois and urban (as for modernity, we could grant at least its chronological and post-colonial reality)? Why should Majumdar suggest that liberalism – a common sense of which is a commitment to individual liberty against the oppressions of religion, community and state – characterises him alone in this situation and not his tour guide, who says nothing to suggest he is opposed to such individual liberty? Is the guide’s embarrassment at the public display of sexuality on the temple not as bourgeois as Majumdar? As for urbanity, nothing in Majumdar’s account suggests the guide wasn’t urban too; or that his attitudes might not be common in Indian cities.

Let us consider another possible answer to Majumdar’s question about what to do when faced “in the eerie twilight of ancient temples” with their erotic sculptures. We could insist, against national and international cultures of anti-intellectualism, that we cannot treat all truth-claims as equal. Indeed, Majumdar hints at this when he calls the guide’s knowledge “amateur scholarship”. But by calling for doing nothing in response except telling stories “of one’s own” Majumdar is choosing to ignore publicly accessible scholarship.

In a series of essays that have been key to a scholarly reassessment (in English and thus accessible to Majumdar) of the arts of kama or pleasure in ancient and late ancient India, Daud Ali has argued that these sculpted temple erotica were intended as illustrations for the devotee of worldly follies to be encountered on the temple’s outer walls and mocked before being progressively abandoned as the devotee entered the sanctum.

In a sense, then, the tour guide was right to say that the sculptors made them up, even if his speculations about their sexual frustration were baseless. It’s admittedly difficult to persuade someone wholly oblivious of any scholarly culture and thus of criteria for truth-claims that Daud Ali is worthier of being taken seriously than the guide’s “amateur scholarship”. But to abandon the attempt altogether in favour of stories of one’s own is to lapse into the very anti-intellectualism that Majumdar’s article goes on to attribute (citing Ruth Vanita) to the Hindu Right and secular Left.

Secularisation and disenchantment

The next section of Majumdar’s article rehearses a narrative of secularisation familiar from the sociologist Max Weber, a narrative Majumdar sums up in his phrase: “modernity is disenchantment”. The narrative runs something like this: the waning of sacrality opens up texts other than religious scripture for scriptural analysis, thus giving rise to the secular discipline of literary criticism; and valorises the idea of a worldly vocation that Calvinists then turned into a worldly asceticism, giving rise to proto-capitalist mercantilism. Weber himself drew the idea from the 18th century German Romantic poet Friedrich Schiller who had argued that the theatre was all that was left of religion. On Majumdar’s reading, then, the rest of the world can only ever retrace Europe’s apparently secularising or disenchanted grasp of reality.

But as anyone familiar with a contemporary Hindu domestic puja shrine would know, calendar or poster print gods and goddesses form the objects of the same rituals of worship as ones made of the traditionally stipulated metal or wood. And as anyone familiar with most post-colonial nationalisms (the Indian one being a case in point) knows, nationalism that is dependent on print and other modern mass media also enchants the territory of the nation, Bankim Chandra’s novel Anandamath being a canonical formulation of the vision of India as a mother goddess.

Are these not massive cases of the enchantment through capitalist technology of spaces and objects that were not enchanted to begin with? It’s this sort of enchantment that forms the topic of Nile Green’s Bombay Islam: the Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean (2013). It is also the topic of what the discipline of religious studies now considers a major critique of Weber’s thesis, Jason A. Josephson-Storm’s The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity and the Birth of the Human Sciences (2017), a book whose many revisionist readings of what have been understood as classic formulations of disenchantment includes this statement by Weber

Now the history of philosophy shows that religious belief which is primarily mystical may very well be compatible with a pronounced sense of reality in the field of empirical fact. . . . Furthermore, mysticism may indirectly even further the interests of rational conduct.

Of this Josephson-Storm writes: “Here we can see Weber working to suture magic and rationality.” Neither contemporary Japan – Josephson-Storm’s non-European case – nor Western Europe and North America come off this book looking especially disenchanted. Why, then, rehearse Eurocentric narratives of worldwide secularisation when not even the original European theorists of secularisation were secular in ways Majumdar claims them to be?

The Hindu Left

Majumdar then raises the important question of a Hindu Left, remarking on its absence as he cites Ruth Vanita’s 2002 essay ‘Whatever Happened to the Hindu Left?’. He specifically cites Vanita’s following assertion: “The number of Indian thinkers today who try to integrate religious and leftist thinking can be counted on the fingers of one hand – Ashis Nandy and Ramachandra Gandhi are among the very few who make this attempt with Hinduism.” But none of either man’s books evince a more than an anecdotal engagement with any tradition of thought or practice that identifies itself as Hindu or some philosophical or theological sub-category thereof.

Sculptures at Khajuraho. Credit: Pixabay

Indeed, Majumdar’s article shows no sign of any awareness of the demographically and politically massive reality of North Indian non-atheist socialism that had its origins in Swami Sahajanand Saraswati’s (1889 -1950) Hindi language writings on and activism for Brahman caste reform and then peasant rights. (In this sense, Sahajanand was a Hindu equivalent of his Muslim socialist activist contemporaries, the Maulanas Ubaidullah Sindhi and Hasrat Mohani). Described by Gail Omvedt in 1996 as “an ‘organic intellectual’ of one of the most important mass movements of the third world”, Sahajanand and his legacy of peasant activism led to Ram Manohar Lohia’s non-atheistic socialism and its current political expression in the Samajwadi party. Does Majumdar ignore such long-term and large-scale manifestations of Hindu socialism because they express themselves in Hindi instead of English?

Majumdar writes: “Is it possible today for literature and the arts to engage with religious aesthetic without celebrating the repressive dimensions of religion?” A lot depends on what we understand by “religion” and “religious”. Does a “religious aesthetic” refer to the egalitarian bhakti content of the Tamil and Telugu texts sung in Carnatic performances? Or to the Brahmanised upper caste identities of most of its practitioners? Or to the non-sectarian aesthetics of its performance?

Is Majumdar proposing Arun Kolatkar’s 1976 poem sequence ‘Jejuri’ as a model for how we might relate to what he calls religious aesthetics? If so, it is hard to see how his validation of the tour guide’s incorrect explanation of the temple erotica bears any connection to Kolatkar’s poem since ‘Jejuri’, for all that it directs a modernist de-familiarising gaze at the elements of a bhakti pilgrimage, does not validate irresponsible fictions or ‘alternative facts’ about the past. It is continuous, as Laetitia Zecchini has shown in her book length study – Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India (2014) – with Kolatkar’s own abhang-style Marathi poems in Chirimiri and his decades long musical-textual preoccupation with Tukaram. Indeed, Kolatkar’s ‘Jejuri’, Zecchini points out, takes part in wider efforts by English language poets in India – Dilip Chitre, A.K. Ramanujan and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra among them – to appropriate bhakti ethics and aesthetics into English poetic modes, modernist or otherwise.

What such English-language lyric reformulations of bhakti have to do with a Hindu Left seems imponderable without attention to the regional language life-worlds of caste-, class-, religion- and gender-egalitarian aesthetic practices; and without the belief that academically validated truth-claims about this or that matter are not only possible but also more valuable as scholarship than “amateur scholarship”.

Prashant Keshavmurthy is Associate Professor of Persian Studies in McGill University, Montreal, and the author of Persian Authorship and Canonicity in Late Mughal Delhi: Building an Ark(Routledge, 2016).

What Did Max Weber Mean by the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism?

In reality, the true ‘spirit’ of capitalism moves beyond making more and more money out of greed, and encapsulates a holistic understanding of Western ideas and priorities.

Max Weber’s famous text The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) is surely one of the most misunderstood of all the canonical works regularly taught, mangled and revered in universities across the globe. This is not to say that teachers and students are stupid, but that this is an exceptionally compact text that ranges across a very broad subject area, written by an out-and-out intellectual at the top of his game. He would have been dumbfounded to find that it was being used as an elementary introduction to sociology for undergraduate students, or even school children.

We use the word ‘capitalism’ today as if its meaning were self-evident, or else as if it came from Marx, but this casualness must be set aside. ‘Capitalism’ was Weber’s own word and he defined it as he saw fit. Its most general meaning was quite simply modernity itself: capitalism was ‘the most fateful power in our modern life’. More specifically, it controlled and generated ‘modern Kultur’, the code of values by which people lived in the 20th-century West, and now live, we may add, in much of the 21st-century globe. So the ‘spirit’ of capitalism is also an ‘ethic’, though no doubt the title would have sounded a bit flat if it had been called The Protestant Ethic and the Ethic of Capitalism.

Max Webber (1864-1920) was a German sociologist known for his work on protestantism and capitalism. Credit: Wikipedia

This modern ‘ethic’ or code of values was unlike any other that had gone before. Weber supposed that all previous ethics – that is, socially accepted codes of behaviour rather than the more abstract propositions made by theologians and philosophers – were religious. Religions supplied clear messages about how to behave in society in straightforward human terms, messages that were taken to be moral absolutes binding on all people. In the West, this meant Christianity, and its most important social and ethical prescription came out of the Bible: ‘Love thy neighbour.’ Weber was not against love, but his idea of love was a private one – a realm of intimacy and sexuality. As a guide to social behaviour in public places ‘love thy neighbour’ was obviously nonsense, and this was a principal reason why the claims of churches to speak to modern society in authentically religious terms were marginal. He would not have been surprised at the long innings enjoyed by the slogan ‘God is love’ in the 20th-century West – its career was already launched in his own day – nor that its social consequences should have been so limited.

The ethic or code that dominated public life in the modern world was very different. Above all it was impersonal rather than personal: by Weber’s day, agreement on what was right and wrong for the individual was breaking down. The truths of religion – the basis of ethics – were now contested, and other time-honoured norms – such as those pertaining to sexuality, marriage and beauty – were also breaking down. (Here is a blast from the past: who today would think to uphold a binding idea of beauty?) Values were increasingly the property of the individual, not society.

So instead of humanly warm contact, based on a shared, intuitively obvious understanding of right and wrong, public behaviour was cool, reserved, hard and sober, governed by strict personal self-control. Correct behaviour lay in the observance of correct procedures. Most obviously, it obeyed the letter of the law (for who could say what its spirit was?) and it was rational. It was logical, consistent, and coherent; or else it obeyed unquestioned modern realities such as the power of numbers, market forces and technology.

There was another kind of disintegration besides that of traditional ethics. The proliferation of knowledge and reflection on knowledge had made it impossible for any one person to know and survey it all. In a world which could not be grasped as a whole, and where there were no universally shared values, most people clung to the particular niche to which they were most committed: their job or profession. They treated their work as a post-religious calling, ‘an absolute end in itself’, and if the modern ‘ethic’ or ‘spirit’ had an ultimate foundation, this was it.

One of the most widespread clichés about Weber’s thought is to say that he preached a work ethic. This is a mistake. He personally saw no particular virtue in sweat – he thought his best ideas came to him when relaxing on a sofa with a cigar – and had he known he would be misunderstood in this way, he would have pointed out that a capacity for hard work was something that did not distinguish the modern West from previous societies and their value systems. However, the idea that people were being ever more defined by the blinkered focus of their employment was one he regarded as profoundly modern and characteristic.

The blinkered professional ethic was common to entrepreneurs and an increasingly high-wage, skilled labour force, and it was this combination that produced a situation where the ‘highest good’ was the making of money and ever more money, without any limit. This is what is most readily recognisable as the ‘spirit’ of capitalism, but it should be stressed that it was not a simple ethic of greed which, as Weber recognised, was age-old and eternal. In fact there are two sets of ideas here, though they overlap. There is one about potentially universal rational procedures – specialisation, logic, and formally consistent behaviour – and another that is closer to the modern economy, of which the central part is the professional ethic. The modern situation was the product of narrow-minded adhesion to one’s particular function under a set of conditions where the attempt to understand modernity as a whole had been abandoned by most people. As a result they were not in control of their own destiny, but were governed by the set of rational and impersonal procedures which he likened to an iron cage, or ‘steel housing’.

Given its rational and impersonal foundations, the housing fell far short of any human ideal of warmth, spontaneity or breadth of outlook; yet rationality, technology and legality also produced material goods for mass consumption in unprecedented amounts. For this reason, though they could always do so if they chose to, people were unlikely to leave the housing ‘until the last hundredweight of fossil fuel is burned up’.

It is an extremely powerful analysis, which tells us a great deal about the 20th-century West and a set of Western ideas and priorities that the rest of the world has been increasingly happy to take up since 1945. It derives its power not simply from what it says, but because Weber sought to place understanding before judgment, and to see the world as a whole. If we wish to go beyond him, we must do the same.

This article was originally published at A eon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

Review: Why Criminals Enter Politics in India

In ‘When Crime Pays’, Milan Vaishnav explores the factors that influence voter demand for candidates with criminal reputations, showing that voters prefer them not despite their dubious record but because of it.

In When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics, Milan Vaishnav explores the factors that influence voter demand for candidates with criminal reputations, showing that voters prefer them not despite their dubious record but because of it.

Criminal candidates with ill-gotten wealth make themselves available to political parties as “self-financing” candidates. Credit: Reuters

“There are two ways of making politics one’s vocation: either one lives ‘for’ politics or one lives ‘off’ politics,” said German sociologist Max Weber in his essay ‘Politics as a Vocation‘. Surely, many politicians have come to live off politics but what are the ‘incentives’ that encourage individuals soaked in criminality to take the plunge into it in the first place? At a time when we are witnessing increasing criminalisation of politics in our democracy, this question needs to be confronted head on and that’s precisely what Milan Vaishnav sets out to do in his book When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics.

The author has adopted a political economy approach to the study of the “symbiotic relationship” between crime and politics in India. The book is divided into three parts: Part I lays down the subject of enquiry and gives a broad overview of the larger changes that have happened in our society and economy since independence; part II explores the demand side and the supply side factors influencing the marketplace for criminals in politics and part III examines the nature of that marketplace and discusses concrete steps that need to be taken to minimise its importance.

While we know that the share of MPs and MLAs with criminal backgrounds has been growing steadily, the puzzle that stares us in our face is why such candidates get rewarded and not rejected by the voters. The author says that “the market metaphor serves as a useful frame to understand why the appeal of politicians linked to criminality endures”. Political parties act as a platform, purveying criminal candidates to the voters. This marketplace is best seen as a ‘platform market’, where strong ‘network effects’ are at play and the two sides – demand and supply – mutually reinforce each other.

One notices that the presence of criminal elements in politics is not altogether new. As the historian Srinath Raghavan has pointed out, muscle-power as embodied in entrenched caste-relations in rural India was instrumental in mobilising votes for the Congress party in the first two decades after independence. But the phenomenon we are looking at is the transformation of criminal individuals from being the hired guns of party politicians to becoming full-time politicians themselves. Why did they have to take the giant leap?

“Three trends – political fragmentation, deepening competition and continued Congress decline – converged in the late 1980s to break open the political system in an unprecedented manner”. How did this incentivise criminals to make their foray into electoral politics? The explanation offered is an interesting one: “Thanks to the uncertainty stemming from greater electoral competition, they were no longer able to rest easy knowing that the party that employed them would remain in power”. The author intelligently deploys the concept of ‘vertical integration’ to elucidate this development.

Milan Vaishnav
When Crime Pays – Money and Muscle in Indian Politics
Harper Collins, 2017

What do political parties gain by recruiting criminally connected individuals, especially when it can be self-defeating as the party’s image can take a beating for fielding criminals in elections? This is where the role of ‘competition’ comes into play. With the proliferation of political parties and expanding size of the electorate, electoral democracy has become a costly affair, which needs a steady flow of money to keep its wheels moving. Criminal candidates with ill-gotten wealth make themselves available to political parties as “self-financing” candidates and promise financial rents to the party coffers, thereby liberating parties of the binding constraint.

The supply side incentives are clear, but doesn’t the demand side (voters), which demands democratic accountability, express its dissatisfaction at this trend by rejecting such crooks? The author argues that “where the rule of law is weakly enforced and social divisions are rampant, a candidate’s criminal reputation could be perceived as an asset”. He identifies four channels through which such candidates establish their credibility – redistribution, coercion, social insurance and dispute resolution. All four, including coercion, are the sole prerogatives of the state and by guaranteeing these through their criminal reputation, they signal ‘credibility’.

The crucial question that begs our attention is whether they cater to a cross section of the electorate. The answer is no and it is so because, such individuals exploit social divisions to thrive and promise to protect sectional interests by engaging in “defensive criminality”, where they use strong-arm tactics to uphold the dignity of their caste brethren. The tension between caste-kinship and citizenship will be the driving force of a social churning that would put Indian democracy’s stressed institutions to further test in the political sphere. These criminal politicians are partial answers to the governance vacuum and know it is in their interest not to think up sustainable solutions that would render them irrelevant: “If the rule of law vacuum were solved by investing in state capacity to provide basic public goods, criminal candidates would lose their lustre”. In other words, even a minimal state envisaged by Adam Smith can fix our problems if it gets its institutional structure right.

By explaining how these factors influence voter demand for candidates with criminal reputation, the author debunks the “ignorant voter” hypothesis and shows that voters prefer such candidates not despite their dubious record but because of it. This thesis neatly fits into the classic economic paradigm of rational individuals making decisions in their self-interest by efficiently processing all the available information. But the author alerts us to the caveat that this thesis is context-specific and cannot be universally applied.

It would be pertinent to look at the trends in the dynastic consolidation of political power and perpetuation of criminality in politics. Recall that during the political Emergency, the complete takeover of state power by the Nehru-Gandhi family resulted in the criminalisation of the entire state apparatus and it was only a matter of time before the regional and smaller players emulated the first family’s model of centralising power. From the Akalis in Punjab to the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam in Tamil Nadu, most parties are run as family firms.

Milan Vaishnav. Credit: Youtube screenshot

Nonetheless, it is important not to forget that leaders of such parties enjoy popular support in spite of their corrupt and criminal backgrounds. The paradigmatic example is Jagan Reddy of YSR Congress, who was seen by the masses as achha chor (Robin Hood types), as the veteran journalist P. Sainath put it, in the run up to the 2014 general elections. Lack of internal party democracy has increased the discretionary powers of the party patriarch/matriarch. The author has dealt with this aspect in detail to show how it encourages the continued supply of criminal candidates.

In using the marketplace analogy, the author states that a truly “free” market works through arm’s length transactions and informational symmetry. He argues that “politics often departs significantly from these core tenets” and “politics is about the structure of power”. These arguments are equally applicable to the so-called free market as well. In fact, information asymmetry is a major source of economic power and the invisible hand of the market doesn’t hesitate to use its invisible fist. As for the free market conception, it would be illuminating to read Ha Joon Chang’s 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism to know that the myth of the free market is predicated on weak grounds.

The author uses the growth of multiparty competition as one of the explanatory factors to show what forced criminals to enter politics. If one assesses this argument within the analytical frame the author has used, then contrary to the standard economic proposition that competition will lead to social well-being and optimal outcomes for all, competition in the electoral marketplace has resulted in sub-optimal outcomes. An important observation made in the book is that criminals are recruited by political parties across the board to contest elections and their ideological vacuum allows them the suppleness to recruit such candidates. If the recently concluded assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh and its aftermath is any indicator, then one can argue that it is perfectly compatible to have both programmatic content and criminal legislators who can push the boundaries of that content.

That said, this is an intellectually stimulating work of scholarship. The interesting anecdotes and apocryphal stories about the criminal candidates add rich flavour to the narrative. The author has crunched truckloads of data by mining the Election Commission’s database of candidate affidavits and findings from independent election surveys. The numerous graphs in the book effectively supplement the well-constructed narrative. For those who despair about the state of politics, the book is a sobering reminder that ‘politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards’ and ‘it takes both passion and perspective’.

Raghunath Nageswaran holds an M.A. in Economics from Madras Christian College.

Donald Trump, Primate President

A rough measure of dominance in ground-living primate groups is which animal is the centre of attention. The leader is usually at the physical centre of the group and the others glance at him as often as every 20-30 seconds.

A rough measure of dominance in ground-living primate groups is which animal is the centre of attention. The leader is usually at the physical centre of the group and the others glance at him as often as every 20-30 seconds.

President-elect Donald Trump arrives for the inauguration ceremonies swearing him in as the 45th president of the United States on the West front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, U.S., January 20, 2017. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

It should have been clear to any open-minded primatologist that the candidacy of Donald Trump had more to do with the turbulent liquidity of primate politics than the hard management of tough systems of power. His remarkable inaugural speech drastically enhances his isolation from all other primate/politicians in a manner difficult to comprehend using conventional tools of analysis. His political explosion has turned virtually the entire lordly once-confident commentariat into a glum and petulant knot.

For quick remedy, they should turn to the tightest analysis of what is an intensely elemental and biologically primitive process. The key piece of writing is from 1966. Its British author was an eccentrically brilliant University of Birmingham biological scientist, Michael M.R.A. Chance. The paper was called “Attention Structure and Primate Rank Orders”. It appeared in MAN:The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

The message of the analysis is that a rough measure of dominance in ground-living primate groups is which animal is the centre of attention. The leader is usually at the physical centre of the group and his subdominant fellows glance at him as often as every 20-30 seconds. He orients their collective action and stimulates them to forage, attack an enemy, protect group members – he’s the leader and they seem to feel good about him, if occasionally also resentful and rebellious. That’s all, and it’s enough.

That offers a realistic way to understand President Trump’s sashay to success. It had – at the outset, and still – little or nothing to do with political philosophy, articulated moral principles, commitment to religion or science and even, startlingly, to political parties. Scholars will puzzle for years about how a loner troubadour managed to climb above two extraordinarily wealthy, adept, and historically rich American political parties with such seeming ease and without the bag of tricks politicians are supposed to carry into battle.

Trump was far more elemental and personal than that. Instead, he was operatic and theatrical and the central fact is that people like looking at Trump because he appears to many to provide a comforting, even stimulating, sense that he has the remedy for what ails them. What he said during the campaign may have been meaninglessly florid, proudly even fatuously egotistical, a-historical, brazenly contradictory or simply wrong, or immune to subtlety. Yet voters – enough voters – suspected that actual leadership may be in his room and in their future. They suspect Trump sees around corners, or at least will know quickly what to do when he makes the turn.

How did this happen?

In the primaries, Trump was unburdened by the scary, self-righteous, and mysterious religiosity of his lingering challengers. The United States is not ISIS and the naïve effort of his opponents to elide political competence and faith backfired while Trump slid along in the real world everyone lives in – this one. Certainly the inaugural contained disappointing if pro forma reference to a generalised divine insurance policy. However it appeared not to matter because everyone was having fun.

And in the election, his highly-experienced and gifted opponent laboured under a mixed-message: her triumphant entry into the Javits arena in New York to claim her victory was to have featured a fake-glass ceiling which would shatter. But she was running for the presidency and not only the women’s vote. The surprising 53% of white women who voted for Trump may have noticed this division in her dreams of power and contribution. And they cared that their husbands may not have worked for a decade and they wanted them out of the house. Who promised that most convincingly?

Oddly, Trump and his leadership style remind me of Kwame Nkrumah’s. Nkrumah was the first leader of a free African country and I was there in 1960 when Ghana became itself and no longer the British Gold Coast. He came to Government House from jail where he had been installed by the same colonial officers who now, suddenly, became his civil servants. I was doing my doctoral dissertation on the sociologist Max Weber’s classical theories of political legitimacy. These were either traditional (obvious), rational-legal (bureaucratic) or charismatic (swirly and elemental). Weber, the profound thinker, said of charisma (from the Greek concept of “grace”) that it was “only understandable with an imperceptible transition to the biological”. So Nkrumah became and was the electrifying leader instead of a member of the traditional ruling groups of his country – represented. for example, by Kofi Annan who was the U.N. secretary-general for some years.

Weber was right, well before Jane Goodall sent dispatches from her primate colony in Gombe in Africa, and then other scientists revealed the internal systems of primate communities.We saw revealed the intricate structure of these lively and animated communities and especially the dramas of political dominance among the ground-living apes (which by the way we are – you too).

The Harris Tweed professoriate, coastal-city journalists, and the self-satisfied we-get-a-bag-of-money-by-the-year experts may have considered Trump and his disdain for PoliSci 101 and conventional political analysis wholly beyond the pale. However, he triumphed at the same time as he seemed to many to be merely that American Icon, a Big Blonde Starlet. He lives big too, which is improbably reassuring, and he enjoys the massive head start in his new career as president of not being a politician at a time when politicians are scorned by the voters and now by their President too. His inaugural speech was unlike any other.

He thinks like a First Responder. Can he perform that way?

Lionel Tiger is a Canadian-born, American-based anthropologist. He is the Charles Darwin Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University and co-Research Director of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.

Why We’ll Always Be Obsessed With – and Afraid of – Monsters

All the popular monsters you’ll see out trick-or-treating, from Frankenstein to Dracula, were born out of fear and anxiety about change and technology.

Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster. Credit: Insomnia Cured Here/Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0

Fear continues to saturate our lives: fear of nuclear destruction, fear of climate change, fear of the subversive, and fear of foreigners.

But a recent Rolling Stone article about our “age of fear” notes that most Americans are living “in the safest place at the safest time in human history.”

It continues – around the globe, household wealth, longevity and education are on the rise, while violent crime and extreme poverty are down. In the US, life expectancy is higher than ever, our air is the cleanest it’s been in a decade and, despite a slight uptick last year, violent crime has been trending down since 1991.

So why are we still so afraid?

Emerging technology and media could play a role. But in a sense, these have always played a role.

The title page of Cotton Mather’s ‘Wonders of the Invisible World,’ which describes the execution of witches in Salem, Massachusetts. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

In the past, rumour and a rudimentary press coverage could fan the fires. Now, with the rise of social media, fears and fads and fancies race instantly through entire populations. Sometimes the specifics vanish almost as quickly as they arose, but the addiction to sensation, to fear and fantasy, persists, like a low-grade fever.

People often create symbols for that emotions are fleeting, abstract and hard to describe. (Look no further than the recent rise of the emoji.)

For over the last three centuries, Europeans and Americans, in particular, have shaped anxiety and paranoia into the mythic figure of the monster – the embodiment of fear, disorder and abnormality – a history that I detail in my new book, “Haunted.”

There are four main types of monsters. But a fifth – a nameless one – may best represent the anxieties of the 21st century.

Rejecting rationality

The 1700s and 1800s were an era of revolutionary uprisings that trumpeted a limitless future, when the philosophers and scientists of the Enlightenment proclaimed that reason had the power to change the world. Emotion was pushed out of the intellectual sphere by scientific reasoning; awestruck spirituality had been repressed in favor of the Clockmaker God who set the universal laws into motion.

Of course, humans have always been afraid. But while the fears of the demonic and the diabolical characterised medieval times, the changes wrought by the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution created a whole new set of fears tied to advancements in science and technology, and an increasingly crowded and complex world.

During this age of political upheavals and aggressive modernisation, tales of Gothic horror, haunted castles, secret compartments and rotting corpses were the rage. The novels and stories of writers such as Horace Walpole, Matthew G. Lewis, Anne Radcliffe and Mary Shelley soon became bestsellers. These writers – and many others – tapped into something pervasive, giving names and bodies to a universal emotion: fear.

The fictional monsters created during this period can be categorised into four types. Each corresponds to a deep-seated anxiety about progress, the future and the human ability to achieve anything like control over the world.

“The monster from nature” represents a power that humans only think they have harnessed, but haven’t. The Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, King Kong and Godzilla are all examples of this type. An awesome abnormality that we can’t predict and scramble to understand, it strikes without warning – like the shark in “Jaws.” While the obvious inspiration are real ferocious animals, they could also be thought of as embodied versions of natural disasters – hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis.

“The created monster,” like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, is the monster we have built and believe we can control – until it turns against us. His descendants are the robots, androids and cyborgs of today, with their potential to become all too human – and threatening.

“The monster from within” is the monster generated by our own repressed dark psychology, the other side of our otherwise bland and blameless human nature (think the Mr. Hyde to our Dr. Jekyll). When nondescript and seemingly harmless young men turn into mass-murdering killers or suicide bombers, the “monster from within” has shown his face.

“The monster from the past,” like Dracula, comes out of a pagan world and offers an alternative to ordinary Christianity with his promise of a blood feast that will confer immortality. Like a Nietzschean superman, he represents the fear that the ordinary consolations of religion are bankrupt and that the only answer to the chaos of modern life is the securing of power.

Zombies: A vague, nameless danger

Recently, our culture has become fixated on the zombie. The recent explosion of zombie films and stories illustrates how fear – while it may be a basic human trait – assumes the shape of particular eras and cultures.

The zombie emerged from the brutal Caribbean slave plantations of the 17th and 18th centuries. They were the soulless bodies of undead slaves who stalked plantations grounds – so the myth went. But director George Romero’s pioneering films, like “Dawn of the Dead” (1978), generalised the figure into an unthinking member of a mass consumer society.

The central distinction between the traditional monsters – such as the Frankenstein monster, Dracula or Mr Hyde – is that the zombie exists primarily as part of a group. Unlike earlier monsters, who all stand alone, even in a kind of grandeur, one zombie is barely distinguishable from another.

What might the horrific image of mindless hordes out to eat our brains represent in the 21st century? It could symbolise whatever we fear will overwhelm and engulf us: epidemic disease, globalisation, Islamic fundamentalists, illegal immigrants and refugees. Or it could be something less tangible and more existential: the loss of anonymity and individuality in a complex world, the threat of impersonal technology that makes each of us just another number in an electronic list.

In 1918, German sociologist Max Weber announced the triumph of reason: “There are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play,” he wrote in Science as a Vocation. “One can, in principle, master all things by calculation.”

“The world,” he continued, “is disenchanted.”

Weber may have been a bit optimistic. Yes, we are committed, in many ways, to reason and analytic thinking. But it seems that we need our monsters and our sense of enchantment as well.

Author Leo Braudy discusses his new book ‘Haunted.’

Leo Braudy, Leo S. Bing Chair in English and American Literature, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Charisma is a Mysterious and Dangerous Gift

‘Charisma’, as an idea, spans 2,000 years. Is there a link between contemporary charisma – considered a special form of authority – and the religious charisma of Paul the Apostle’s time?

Mixed blessings. Credit: Paolo Sarteschi/Flickr

Charisma is easier to recognise than to define. Newspaper and magazine articles consistently identify charismatic leaders – such as John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Barack Obama – but those same articles rarely describe exactly what charisma is. It is often debated whether charisma is necessary for a ‘transformational’ leader, while shelves of self-help books optimistically promise to impart the ‘secrets’ of charisma. Other people hold that charisma cannot be ‘unlocked’ or ‘discovered’ at all because it is innate and present only in the rarest of individuals. So, to ask anew, just what is charisma?

Charisma’s origins are found in the letters of Paul the Apostle, written from around 50 AD. This is the first written use of the word ‘charisma’, derived from the Greek ‘charis’ (grace). For Paul, charisma meant ‘the gift of God’s grace’ or ‘spiritual gift’. In Paul’s letters to the fledgling Christian communities spread around the Roman empire, he wrote of the ‘charismata’ or spiritual gifts available to each member of the community. He identified nine charismata, including prophecy, healing, speaking in tongues, interpreting that speech, teaching, and service – a range of gifts both supernatural and pragmatic.

For Paul, charisma was a mystical notion: the gifts were thought to alight on each individual without the need for church authority or institution. And there was no charisma of leadership: the interlocking charismata were meant to serve the community without the need for an imposed leader. By the fourth century, however, the Church had largely suppressed the notion of charisma deriving directly from the Holy Spirit. Conveniently, in its place was a hierarchy of Church leadership, with bishops at the top, interpreting the fixed religious laws inscribed in the newly authorised Bible. Charisma survived only in heretical outposts, such as prophets claiming direct inspiration without the mediations of bishop or scripture. Such heresies were forcibly repressed by the Church.

The idea of charisma then lay largely dormant for centuries. Only in the writings of the 20th-century German sociologist Max Weber was it reborn. In fact, we owe the contemporary meaning of ‘charisma’ to Weber, who took Paul’s religious idea and secularised it, placing charisma within a sociology of authority and leadership. For Weber, there were three types of authority: the rational-legal, the traditional, and the charismatic. Weber saw the charismatic form of authority as the revolutionary, even unstable, antidote to the ‘iron cage’ of rationalisation found in the contemporary ‘disenchanted’ world. He held that there was something heroic about the charismatic leader, who galvanised followers with great feats or with the ‘charisma of rhetoric’ found in inspiring speeches.

Weber defined charisma as ‘a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities’. He traced charismatic leadership through history, in the person of great military or religious leaders – and also held out the hope that charismatic leadership would continue to emerge, even in the highly regulated bureaucracies of the modern world.

Weber died in 1920, and did not live to see the application of his idea to contemporary politics and culture. Perhaps that’s a good thing, since the first political leaders to be described as charismatic were Mussolini and Hitler. For many European intellectuals, this created the sense that charismatic authority had a sinister dimension. That same dark side of charismatic leadership long remained: 1960s cult leaders such as Charles Manson, with their spellbinding hold on followers, were readily termed charismatic. By this point, Weber’s works had been translated, so that ‘charisma’ was popular in the English-speaking world from about the 1950s.

The first politicians that the media identified as charismatic in a positive, rather than demagogic, sense were JFK, and his brother Robert F. Kennedy. After the 1960s, ‘charisma’ moved more into mainstream usage as it was applied to outstanding individuals other than political leaders: the late Muhammad Ali, for instance, was perhaps the most charismatic of all.

Today, charisma is used to describe a range of individuals: politicians, celebrities, business leaders. We understand charisma as a special, innate quality that sets certain individuals apart and draws others to them. It is considered a rare, specially endowed quality: in US politics, for instance, Bill Clinton was thought to have a charismatic presence, as is Obama – but nobody else in recent political memory earns the accolade. In business, Steve Jobs is the archetypal charismatic leader: visionary, driven, but also volatile and unstable. And in celebrity culture, charisma is regarded as a sign of rare authenticity when much of the entertainment industry is devoted to the plastic manufacture of fame in the manner of Idols or The Voice. Charisma cannot be created by reality TV.

Is charisma even desirable in contemporary politicians? The political biographer David Barnett has called charisma ‘one of the most dangerous concepts in a democracy that you can find’. Charismatic leaders can inspire followers with soaring rhetoric – which can also prove divisive and damaging to a party’s (or a nation’s) fortunes. Political parties are generally content with popular, unthreatening, folksy leaders who appeal to ordinary people. In Australia, Paul Keating was a charismatic, visionary prime minister, but also a schismatic leader who alienated much of the Labor Party’s traditional ‘heartland’ with his perceived arrogance. His successor, John Howard, was universally regarded as charisma-free, but his very ordinariness turned out to be his greatest asset: it was a reassuring rather than threatening style of leadership. Meanwhile in Italy, Silvio Berlusconi was a populist leader whose tenure as prime minister was deleterious for democracy. The charismatic leader might be thrilling, even captivating, but the success of that leader might not leave a political party, or a democracy, in a healthy state.

‘Charisma’, as an idea, spans 2,000 years. Is there a link between contemporary charisma – considered a special form of authority – and the religious charisma of Paul’s time? It lies in the notion of innateness, of the gift. Paul said that no bishop or Church required the blessing of charisma: it simply lighted on the individual, as a spiritual gift. Charisma today is enigmatic, an unknown or X factor, somehow irreducible. Nobody knows why rare individuals are blessed with charisma: it remains, as ever, a mysterious gift.

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.