The Argumentative Amartya?

Re: # 56

khare

“why it does not happen in other parts of the world where minorities can live fine... Do you think oppression by majority in non muslim regions ONLY are typically Islam-related?”

Germany >Turks (democracy)
Germany > Jews (democracy)
Japan > South Koreans (democracy)
India > Christians, Muslims and assorted others (democracy)
Fiji > Indians (democracy?)
Malaysia > Chinese (democracy)
Yugoslavia > Muslims (democracy)
Africa > Various (doesn’t matter)

“I am a moinority in the US and was a minority in India. Never faced anything out of ordinary.”

That’s very individual and personally exceptional. I’m sure many expatriates at Chowk, including me, at individual level have not faced trauma vis-a-vis the majority. However, it’s the group of people (minority group) that’s being addressed; it’s the group that’s the target, not individuals.

farzana -- use of the word `facetious` was simply a take on your title for this piece -- as for `not having arguments` that would be an incorrect reading of my response -- there are, in my view, many cogent arguments to counter what you have said and i suppose i could be held guilty on not wanting to list or discuss them here

also -- being a writer myself i save most of my arguments for my own articles which are usually not published on chowk -- hope that explains my lack of arguments here --

Re: #45 by BrainsGalore

Having managed to fool highly educated people all over the world for decades, Amartya Sen has finally come up short against the formidably erudite ``anti-establishment`` FarzanaIdiot with her incomparably strong grasp of Economics and socio-Economics.

Here`s the REAL reason for her ire:

First, the denial :

[Others have talked about a ``Muslim woman`` writing on an Indian - this reveals a mindset that i have no truck with. I have not discussed his `Hindu` leanings not only because he has none, but it would be of no interest to me.]

Next, the REAL reason for her disapproval:

[2. The exotification of (Indian - read Hindu) roots from a distance. ]

#35 by godot

[aaah! Here’s a sight one doesn’t witness often. An idol-worshipper and an ignorant, fanatical mullah befriending each other, laughing with each other instead of at each other. It’s true! Need makes strange bed-fellows!

If you weren`t the ass that you are, it wouldn`t be too surprising for you. In fact, some of my best friends are Muslim, and you know what, one of them is a Hafeez (I don`t know what exactly it means, except that it is used for someone who has memorized the Quran).

Re: # 52

harish

``some of my best friends are Muslim, and you know what, one of them is a Hafeez``

Congratulations!

Btw, happy bedding with an ignorant, fanatical mullah at Chowk...it`s just a one-night stand, though...that is, until Farzana shows up with her danda the next time!

Go on, you two celebrate the beautiful night together...

Godot, Urstruly

Ultimately, people make any system work or not work. But Professor Sen (like many other theorists) suggests comparisons only between different systems of governance. So democracy`s potential problems could only be set off against the potential problems of other systems.

Khamkhwa,

Dullabatthi and I are the other sikhs on chowk.

Godot,

What if in case of famine, a democracy enacts a Patriot Act and limits the food supply to a minority e.g. Blacks or Quadianis, would it be the expression of “aggregation of individual values into collective decisions,”. I think that is what FV`s beef is with Sen`s theory. It seems that Sen`s ideas are as politically charged and propaganda oriented as VS Naipauls.

Re: # 48


Urstruly

“Majority rule” leading to the elimination of poverty and famine does not hold true if one looks at China or the pre-democracy South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. It’s the ruling elites’ vision and policies, not necessarily “majority rule,” that determine the outcome of how its subjects live.

Nobel, as I said before, is just a political tool. Many agree to it and this prize commands no respect outside perhaps for the natural sciences. Watch for Salman Rushdie joining Naipaul!

I think you are correct about Farzana’s issue with the possibility of cruelty of the majority towards the minorities in a “majority rule” scenario.

We knew chairman mao liked to do private exercises with nubile young comrades but this is new. the conclusion is even more enlightning, despite his behaviour china may be better prepared for growth than it would other wise have been:

NYTimes
October 23, 2005
`Mao`: The Real Mao
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
If Chairman Mao had been truly prescient, he would have located a little girl in Sichuan Province named Jung Chang and ``mie jiuzu``- killed her and wiped out all her relatives to the ninth degree.

But instead that girl grew up, moved to Britain and has now written a biography of Mao that will help destroy his reputation forever. Based on a decade of meticulous interviews and archival research, this magnificent biography methodically demolishes every pillar of Mao`s claim to sympathy or legitimacy.

Almost seven decades ago, Edgar Snow`s ``Red Star Over China`` helped make Mao a heroic figure to many around the world. It marked an opening bookend for Mao`s sunny place in history - and this biography will now mark the other bookend.

When I first opened this book, I was skeptical. Chang is the author of ``Wild Swans,`` a hugely successful account of three generations of women in her family, and it was engaging but not a work of scholarship. I was living in China when it appeared, and my Chinese friends and I were all surprised at its success, for the experiences she recounted were sad but not unusual. As for this biography, written together with her husband, Jon Halliday, a historian, I expected it to be similarly fat but slight. Also, the subtitle is ``The Unknown Story`` - which, after all that has been written about Mao, made me cringe.

Yet this is a magisterial work. True, much of Mao`s brutality has already emerged over the years, but this biography supplies substantial new information and presents it all in a stylish way that will put it on bedside tables around the world. No wonder the Chinese government has banned not only this book but issues of magazines with reviews of it, for Mao emerges from these pages as another Hitler or Stalin.

In that regard, I have reservations about the book`s judgments, for my own sense is that Mao, however monstrous, also brought useful changes to China. And at times the authors seem so eager to destroy him that I wonder if they exclude exculpatory evidence. But more on those cavils later.

Mao is not only a historical figure, of course, but is part of the (tattered) web of legitimacy on which the People`s Republic rests. He is part of the founding mythology of the Chinese government, the Romulus and Remus of ``People`s China,`` and that`s why his portrait hangs in Tiananmen Square. Even among ordinary Chinese, Mao retains a hold on the popular imagination, and some peasants in different parts of China have started traditional religious shrines honoring him. That`s the ultimate honor for an atheist - he has become a god.

Mao`s sins in later life are fairly well known, and even Chen Yun, one of the top Chinese leaders in the 1980`s, suggested that it might have been best if Mao had died in 1956. This biography shows, though, that Mao was something of a fraud from Day 1.

The authors assert, for example, that he was not in fact a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party, as is widely believed, and that the party was founded in 1920 rather than 1921. Moreover, they rely on extensive research in Russian archives to show that the Chinese party was entirely under the thumb of the Russians. In one nine-month period in the 1920`s, for example, 94 percent of the party`s funding came from Russia, and only 6 percent was raised locally. Mao rose to be party leader not because he was the favorite of his fellow Chinese, but because Moscow chose him. And one reason Moscow chose him was that he excelled in sycophancy: he once told the Russians that ``the latest Comintern order`` was so brilliant that ``it made me jump for joy 300 times.``

Mao has always been celebrated as a great peasant leader and military strategist. But this biography mocks that claim. The mythology dates from the ``Autumn Harvest Uprising`` of 1927. But, according to Chang and Halliday, Mao wasn`t involved in the fighting and in fact sabotaged it - until he hijacked credit for it afterward.

It`s well known that Mao`s first wife (or second, depending on how you count), Yang Kaihui, was killed in 1930 by a warlord rival of Mao`s. But not much else is known of her. Now Chang and Halliday quote from poignant unsent letters that were discovered during renovations of her old home in 1982 and in 1990. The letters reveal both a deep love for Mao and a revulsion for the brutality of her time (and of her husband). ``Kill, kill, kill!`` she wrote in one letter, which became a kind of memoir of her life. ``All I hear is this sound in my ears! Why are human beings so evil? Why so cruel?`` Mao could easily have saved this gentle woman, the mother of his first three children, for he passed near the home where he had left her. But he didn`t lift a finger, and she was shot to death at the age of 29.

By this time, the book relates, many in the Red Army distrusted Mao - so he launched a brutal purge of the Communist ranks. He wrote to party headquarters that he had discovered 4,400 subversives in the army and had tortured them all and executed most of them. A confidential report found that a quarter of the entire Red Army under Mao at the time was slaughtered, often after they were tortured in such ways as having red-hot rods forced into their rectums.

One of the most treasured elements of Chinese Communist history is the Long March, the iconic flight across China to safety in the northwest. It is usually memorialized as a journey in which Mao and his comrades showed incredible courage and wisdom in sneaking through enemy lines and overcoming every hardship. Chang and Halliday undermine every element of that conventional wisdom.

First, they argue that Mao and the Red Army escaped and began the Long March only because Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek deliberately allowed them to. They argue that Chiang wanted to send his own troops into three southwestern provinces but worried about antagonizing the local warlords. So he channeled the Red Army into those provinces on the Long March and then, at the invitation of the alarmed warlords, sent in troops to expel the Communists and thus succeeded in bringing the wayward provinces into his domain.

More startling, they argue that Mao didn`t even walk most of the Long March - he was carried. ``On the march, I was lying in a litter,`` they quote Mao as saying decades later. ``So what did I do? I read. I read a lot.`` Now, that`s bourgeois.

The most famous battle of the Long March was the Communists` crossing of the Dadu Bridge, supposedly a heroic assault under enemy fire. Harrison Salisbury`s 1985 book, ``The Long March,`` describes a ``suicide attack`` over a bridge that had been mostly dismantled, then soaked with kerosene and set on fire. But Chang and Halliday write that this battle was a complete fabrication, and in a triumph of scholarship they cite evidence that all 22 men who led the crossing survived and received gifts afterward of a Lenin suit and a fountain pen. None was even wounded. They quote Zhou Enlai as expressing concern afterward because a horse had been lost while crossing the bridge.

The story continues in a similar vein: Mao had a rival, Wang Ming, poisoned and nearly killed while in their refuge in Yenan. Mao welcomed the Japanese invasion of China, because he thought this would lead to a Russian counterinvasion and a chance for him to lead a Russian puppet regime. Far from leading the struggle against the Japanese invaders, Mao ordered the Red Army not to fight the Japanese and was furious when other Communist leaders skirmished with them. Indeed, Mao is said to have collaborated with Japanese intelligence to undermine the Chinese Nationalist forces.

Almost everybody is tarnished. Madame Sun Yat-sen, also known as Song Qingling, is portrayed as a Soviet agent, albeit not very convincingly. And Zhang Xueliang, the ``Young Marshal`` who is widely remembered as a hero in China for kidnapping Chiang Kai-shek to force him to fight the Japanese, is portrayed as a power-hungry coup-monger. I knew the Young Marshal late in his life, and his calligraphy for my Chinese name adorns the Chinese version of my business cards, but now I`m wondering if I should get new cards.

After Mao comes to power, Chang and Halliday show him continuing his thuggery. This is more familiar ground, but still there are revelations. Mao used the Korean War as a chance to slaughter former Nationalist soldiers. And Mao says some remarkable things about the peasants he was supposed to be championing. When they were starving in the 1950`s, he instructed: ``Educate peasants to eat less, and have more thin gruel. The State should try its hardest . . . to prevent peasants eating too much.`` In Moscow, he offered to sacrifice the lives of 300 million Chinese, half the population at the time, and in 1958 he blithely declared of the overworked population: ``Working like this, with all these projects, half of China may well have to die.``

At times, Mao seems nuts. He toyed with getting rid of people`s names and replacing them with numbers. And discussing the possible destruction of the earth with nuclear weapons, he mused that ``this might be a big thing for the solar system, but it would still be an insignificant matter as far as the universe as a whole is concerned.``

Chang and Halliday recount how the Great Leap Forward led to the worst famine in world history in the late 1950`s and early 1960`s, and how in 1966 Mao clawed his way back to supreme power in the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Some of the most fascinating material involves Zhou Enlai, the longtime prime minister, who comes across as a complete toady of Mao, even though Mao tormented him by forcing him to make self-criticisms and by seating him in third-rate seats during meetings. In the mid-1970`s, Zhou was suffering from cancer and yet Mao refused to allow him to get treatment - wanting Zhou to be the one to die first. ``Operations are ruled out for now`` for Zhou, Mao declared on May 9, 1974. ``Absolutely no room for argument.`` And so, sure enough, Zhou died in early 1976, and Mao in September that year.

This is an extraordinary portrait of a monster, who the authors say was responsible for more than 70 million deaths. But how accurate is it? A bibliography and endnotes give a sense of sourcing, and they are impressive: the authors claim to have talked to everyone from Mao`s daughter, Li Na, to his mistress, Zhang Yufeng, to Presidents George H. W. Bush and Gerald Ford. But it`s not clear how much these people said. One of those listed as a source is Zhang Hanzhi, Mao`s English teacher and close associate; she`s also one of my oldest Chinese friends, so I checked with her. Zhang Hanzhi said that she had indeed met informally with Chang two or three times but had declined to be interviewed and never said anything substantial. I hope that Chang and Halliday will share some of their source materials, either on the Web or with other scholars, so that it will be possible to judge how fairly and accurately they have reached their conclusions.

My own feeling is that most of the facts and revelations seem pretty well backed up, but that ambiguities are not always adequately acknowledged. To their credit, the authors seem to have steered clear of relying on some of the Hong Kong magazines that traffic in a blurry mix of fact and fiction, but it is still much harder to ferret out the truth than they acknowledge. The memoirs and memories they rely on may be trustworthy, most of the time, but I question the tone of brisk self-confidence that the authors use in recounting events and quotations - and I worry that some things may be hyped.

Take the great famine from 1958 to 1961. The authors declare that ``close to 38 million people died,`` and in a footnote they cite a Chinese population analysis of mortality figures in those years. Well, maybe. But there have been many expert estimates in scholarly books and journals of the death toll, ranging widely, and in reality no one really knows for sure - and certainly the mortality data are too crude to inspire confidence. The most meticulous estimates by demographers who have researched the famine toll are mostly lower than this book`s: Judith Banister estimated 30 million; Basil Ashton also came up with 30 million; and Xizhe Peng suggested about 23 million. Simply plucking a high-end estimate out of an article and embracing it as the one true estimate worries me; if that is stretched, then what else is?

Another problem: Mao comes across as such a villain that he never really becomes three-dimensional. As readers, we recoil from him but don`t really understand him. He is presented as such a bumbling psychopath that it`s hard to comprehend how he bested all his rivals to lead China and emerge as one of the most worshipped figures of the last century.

Finally, there is Mao`s place in history. I agree that Mao was a catastrophic ruler in many, many respects, and this book captures that side better than anything ever written. But Mao`s legacy is not all bad. Land reform in China, like the land reform in Japan and Taiwan, helped lay the groundwork for prosperity today. The emancipation of women and end of child marriages moved China from one of the worst places in the world to be a girl to one where women have more equality than in, say, Japan or Korea. Indeed, Mao`s entire assault on the old economic and social structure made it easier for China to emerge as the world`s new economic dragon.

Perhaps the best comparison is with Qinshihuang, the first Qin emperor, who 2,200 years ago unified China, built much of the Great Wall, standardized weights and measures and created a common currency and legal system - but burned books and buried scholars alive. The Qin emperor was as savage and at times as insane as Mao - but his success in integrating and strengthening China laid the groundwork for the next dynasty, the Han, one of the golden eras of Chinese civilization. In the same way, I think, Mao`s ruthlessness was a catastrophe at the time, brilliantly captured in this extraordinary book - and yet there`s more to the story: Mao also helped lay the groundwork for the rebirth and rise of China after five centuries of slumber.

Nicholas D. Kristof, a columnist for The New York Times, has written books about China and Asia together with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn.

I can see a whole lot of respect for Amartya sen here without a lot of people having a clue as to what they are respecting. When one sets out to contradict a viewpoint, there ought to be a basis to it.

The fact that one is asked whether the writer has anything positive to say about anyone I find disconcerting. It only means that `niceness` should be enshrined when one talks about Nobel laureates and visible idols.

I have a position on three issues...

1. Prof. Sen`s analysis of democracy.
2. The exotification of roots from a distance.
3. The blind deification on any and everything that comes with a West-approved tag.

Yes, I did hold forth on `madness`. Anyone with some understanding of psychology will tell you that it is not about lunacy. There are several factors; one of them being able to confront one`s own truths.

I am not amazed that some people have mentioned his being a Bengali. I do not suffer from such parochialism. Others have talked about a ``Muslim woman`` writing on an Indian - this reveals a mindset that i have no truck with. I have not discussed his `Hindu` leanings not only because he has none, but it would be of no interest to me.

For the rest, I would have been happy to listen to other points of view, whenever they are given.

PS: I personally have no problems with interactors calling a writer facetious, especially since they have no arguments to back the assertion with. I believe letting such posts stay as they are is a fantastic display of the ability to argue that some imagine they possess.

Thanks for reading, anyway...

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Godot,

Like every other interactor on this website I also claim to be the expert on everything but frankly Dr. Sen`s thesis zoomed past above my head. But thanks for trying.

Re: # 42

Urstruly

Sen is emphasizing that, to rid of famine and poverty, “majority rule,” ie, democracy, must prevail in a society/country. He theorized that since democracy is the “aggregation of individual values into collective decisions,” it is the road to eradication of poverty and famine; because, he apparently believes, a democracy reflects the wishes of the majority, and the majority does not want to live in poverty. I believe that was the basis of him getting the Nobel.

The issue of corporations is a different issue. That is a matter of competition, a matter on which one could be a very pro-market person and be very anti-corporation. Indeed, trust-busting is a very old capitalist virtue, that is, a virtue of a pro-market economy where you want competitive capitalism. A kind of Smithian pro-marketing person would want some restraint on the corporations. That`s a different question. One has to separate out the question of inequality within the market economy in the form of corporations at one level, which is the highest level, and inequality at the other end, whereby a lot of people are prevented from entering the market because they can`t borrow money, they are not educated enough and skilled enough to enter the modern economy. That is one kind of issue. There is the other issue of the state and the market. The market is after all only an instrument.To be anti-market, pro-market, anti-state, pro-state, I think that`s not the right way of thinking about the issue. One has to take it in terms of what it does to the lives and freedom of the human beings that make up society. We need different institutions, not choose ``between`` them to get exclusiveness.

What drives you?

I wish I knew. We live for a short stretch of time in a world we share with others. Virtually everything we do is dependent on others, from the arts and culture to farmers who grow the food we eat. We live in an interdependent world. Given that fact, the idea that somehow a person could feel very comfortable being enormously ahead of others seems to me to be ultimately a mistake. Quite a lot of the differences that make us rich and poor are matters just of luck. To somehow revel in one`s privilege would be a mistake. An even bigger mistake would be trying to convert that into a theory that the rich are so much more productive than the others. That`s at the one end. But the other end, if one thinks about the people who live in a world in which they need not be hungry, in which they need not die without medical care, in which they need not be illiterate, they need not feel hopeless and miserable so much of the time, and yet they are, that seems to be scandalous. But this is not just a matter of poverty. There are some people who say that they`re concerned only with poverty but not inequality. I find that very difficult for the reason that Adam Smith discussed a long time ago in The Wealth of Nations. He pointed out that the same thing that everyone likes doing, talking with others, appearing in public without shame, taking part in the life of the community, if you live in a community that`s relatively rich, you need a much bigger income to be able to do these elementary things. If you are a villager in rural Bangladesh or Uganda, you might be able to meet with people very easily even if you`re not schooled or if you don`t have a car or if you`re not clothed in a way that`s regarded as obligatory in some cultures. But in, say, America, if you don`t have a television at home your kids might find it hard to converse with each other in school. The income that we need in order not to be poor is much higher in a richer society. So that relative poverty, which is really a matter of inequality, in terms of income can be the cause of absolute poverty, the inability to do the basic things which Adam Smith noted we all like doing. The idea that we can be interested only in poverty but not in inequality I don`t think is a sustainable thought. A lot of poverty is in fact inequality because of this connection between income and capability. The same capability to take part in thelife of the community requires a much bigger basket of commodities and therefore a much bigger income in a rich society. So you have to be interested in inequality. And since we live in a global village, events in different parts of the world influence each other. The Internet begins to penetrate in my country. Indians begin to find out how other people live in the rest of the world. Given these circumstances, the issues of inequality and the issue of poverty are not separable even globally. They`re very closely linked, both in terms of the need to ask the moral question, Is it right that I should enjoy my privileges, and not feel I owe anything to others? As well as the other level, Do I have a right to be content living in a world with so much poverty and inequality? Both these questions motivate us to take these issues to be central to human living. Ultimately, the old Socratic question, How should I live? has to include a very strong component of awareness and response to inequality.

India Together
September 2001
{concluded)