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| Anand Giridharadas | ||||
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It is the possibility of Social Mobility; of kids living a better (materially) life than their parents did. It is the opportunity to “pull yourself up by your boot straps;” to be a “Self-made Man” (or Woman, now). It is about entrepreneurship and taking chances and “making something of yourself.” It is about being a strong-willed Individual, who doesn’t care what the nay-sayers think; about being a “Rugged Individualist.”
In his brilliant account of our country, Democracy in America, Tocqueville’s favorite word for describing our citizens was “restive”: unable to keep still or silent and becoming increasingly difficult to control, especially because of impatience, dissatisfaction, or boredom.
Basically, we are all workaholics, obsessed with the idea and the possibilities of growth—both personal and societal. There is always something else wrong that can be improved upon; that can be done more efficiently or more intelligently. It doesn’t necessarily matter to us how our fore-fathers did things—especially if it is a material, scientific issue—which causes in us a lack of reverence for more traditional, i.e. Culturally-based, ways of living that could potentially ground our ambitions and restivity. For us, Reason is an instrument through which we can look out at the world, judge what is wrong, and use it to improve upon it.
This idea is now being exported to the rest of the world and is becoming a very destructive force in these still more traditional cultural settings. Most of the time this gets disparaged by calling it “Cultural Imperialism” because it so disrespectful to these old Cultures’ Values—and who is the West to say we’re right, right? But that is painting the situation with a very broad brush and the reality is a little more nuanced than that.
As Anand Giridharadas shows in his new book, India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Remaking, sometimes it can be a good thing for old Values to fall away and new ones to take their place. In India, one of the most conspicuous elements of the new economic forces that are taking shape there is the dissolution of the once determinate Caste System that formerly kept India immutably stratified in a culturally based social hierarchy. But now, a much more meritocratic system of fluid social mobility is rising to take its place: aka, The American Dream. (Sidenote: sometimes the loss of old values can be a very, very bad thing as well.)
These developments made the writer, Giridharadas, decide only one generation after his family’s emigration to America, to renounce the opportunities here and return to his homeland because India has now become the new “Land of Opportunity”. The Caste System had ordered society for thousands of years—at times more or less rigidly: more so since the imposition of British rule in the 1700’s—but is now coming to be seen as an antiquated relic of a superstitious, myth-based past.
The country is importing all sorts of jobs from factories to IT to call centers for companies from all over the world—NBC has even made a sitcom about it: Outsourced. They are becoming a major force in the world and are asserting themselves upon the world stage as a nation to be “taken seriously.” The Economy of India is now the eleventh largest in the world by GDP and the fourth largest by purchasing power parity. And Economists are predicting that by 2020 India will be among the leading economies in the world. (They also, by the way, now hold $41 billion in US debt.)
It will be interesting to see how this plays out—as the rest of the world plays catch up to America and the rest of the West, in the material realm. They are kind of experiencing our history—only in fast forward—but with one little exception, and possible advantage. This is what Giridharadas spoke of at the end: the “challenge of culture and spirit.” In America, our Culture is dissipating—the foundations are eroding and the dividedness of Western History between our Christian heritage and our “Enlightened” experiment are at war with one another and we are in the midst of a great Identity Crisis. The one side is receding further and further backward under the cover and comfort of fundamentalist Self-assurance, as the other side is trying its hardest to pull us in the opposite—just as dangerous and destructive—direction toward ungrounded, contentless “Freedom.”
We no longer know who we are, nor do we have an aim or purpose that is guiding us into the unknown future. Obama tried to inspire us with his so-called “Sputnik Moment” he spoke of in his State of the Union address, but the goals he set were low, paltry and all-around inadequate for the direness of the situation. Whether or not these rising countries are truly more united than us, or are just superficially so—united by a common “enemy” or competitor—will remain to be seen, but, if we are going to remain united, we need something much higher and loftier than high-speed rail and nationwide wireless internet access to reinvigorate our floundering and disunited nation.
Can America create a new national Culture out of the vast range of diversity and interests that are now contained within in it; is it even still possible to satisfy this diverse of a People at the Federal level, or must our government shrink to meet the needs of an increasingly balkanized Nation?
