Fears for Democracy in India
by Martha C. Nussbaum
(in: The Chronicle of Higher Education - http://chronicle.com)
On February 27, 2002, the Sabarmati express train arrived in the
station of Godhra, in the state of Gujarat, bearing a large group of
Hindu pilgrims who were returning from a trip to the purported
birthplace of the god Rama at Ayodhya (where, some years earlier, angry
Hindu mobs had destroyed the Babri mosque, which they claimed was on
top of the remains of Rama's birthplace). The pilgrimage, like many
others in recent times, aimed at forcibly constructing a temple over
the disputed site, and the mood of the returning passengers, frustrated
in their aims by the government and the courts, was angrily emotional.
When the train stopped at the station, the Hindu passengers got into
arguments with Muslim passengers and vendors. At least one Muslim
vendor was beaten up when he refused to say Jai Sri Ram ("Hail Rama").
As the train left the station, stones were thrown at it, apparently by
Muslims.
Fifteen minutes later, one car of the train erupted in flames.
Fifty-eight men, women, and children died in the fire. Most of the dead
were Hindus. Because the area adjacent to the tracks was made up of
Muslim dwellings, and because a Muslim mob had gathered in the region
to protest the treatment of Muslims on the train platform, blame was
immediately put on Muslims. Many people were arrested, and some of
those are still in detention without charge — despite the fact
that two independent inquiries have established through careful sifting
of the forensic evidence that the fire was most probably a tragic
accident, caused by combustion from cookstoves carried on by the
passengers and stored under the seats of the train.
In the days that followed the incident, wave upon wave of violence
swept through the state. The attackers were Hindus, many of them highly
politicized, shouting slogans of the Hindu right, along with "Kill!
Destroy!" and "Slaughter!" There is copious evidence that the violent
retaliation was planned before the precipitating event by Hindu
extremist organizations that had been waiting for an occasion. No one
was spared: Young children were thrown into fires along with their
families, fetuses ripped from the bellies of pregnant women.
Particularly striking was the number of women who were raped,
mutilated, in some cases tortured with large metal objects, and then
set on fire. Over the course of several weeks, about 2,000 Muslims were
killed.
Most alarming was the total breakdown in the rule of law — not
only at the local level but also at that of the state and national
governments. Police were ordered not to stop the violence. Some egged
it on. Gujarat's chief minister, Narendra Modi, rationalized and even
encouraged the murders. He was later re-elected on a platform that
focused on religious hatred. Meanwhile the national government showed a
culpable indifference. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee suggested
that religious riots were inevitable wherever Muslims lived alongside
Hindus, and that troublemaking Muslims were to blame.
While Americans have focused on President Bush's "war on terror," Iraq,
and the Middle East, democracy has been under siege in another part of
the world. India — the most populous of all democracies, and a
country whose Constitution protects human rights even more
comprehensively than our own — has been in crisis. Until the
spring of 2004, its parliamentary government was increasingly
controlled by right-wing Hindu extremists who condoned and in some
cases actively supported violence against minority groups, especially
Muslims.
What has been happening in India is a serious threat to the future of
democracy in the world. The fact that it has yet to make it onto the
radar screen of most Americans is evidence of the way in which
terrorism and the war on Iraq have distracted us from events and issues
of fundamental significance. If we really want to understand the impact
of religious nationalism on democratic values, India currently provides
a deeply troubling example, and one without which any understanding of
the more general phenomenon is dangerously incomplete. It also provides
an example of how democracy can survive the assault of religious
extremism.
In May 2004, the voters of India went to the polls in large numbers.
Contrary to all predictions, they gave the Hindu right a resounding
defeat. Many right-wing political groups and the social organizations
allied with them remain extremely powerful, however. The rule of law
and democracy has shown impressive strength and resilience, but the
future is unclear.
The case of Gujarat is a lens through which to conduct a critical
examination of the influential thesis of the "clash of civilizations,"
made famous by the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington. His
picture of the world as riven between democratic Western values and an
aggressive Muslim monolith does nothing to help us understand today's
India, where, I shall argue, the violent values of the Hindu right are
imports from European fascism of the 1930s, and where the third-largest
Muslim population in the world lives as peaceful democratic citizens,
despite severe poverty and other inequalities.
The real "clash of civilizations" is not between "Islam" and "the
West," but instead within virtually all modern nations — between
people who are prepared to live on terms of equal respect with others
who are different, and those who seek the protection of homogeneity and
the domination of a single "pure" religious and ethnic tradition. At a
deeper level, as Gandhi claimed, it is a clash within the individual
self, between the urge to dominate and defile the other and a
willingness to live respectfully on terms of compassion and equality,
with all the vulnerability that such a life entails.
This argument about India suggests a way to see America, which is also
torn between two different pictures of itself. One shows the country as
good and pure, its enemies as an external "axis of evil." The other
picture, the fruit of internal self-criticism, shows America as complex
and flawed, torn between forces bent on control and hierarchy and
forces that promote democratic equality. At what I've called the
Gandhian level, the argument about India shows Americans to themselves
as individuals, each of whom is capable of both respect and aggression,
both democratic mutuality and anxious domination. Americans have a
great deal to gain by learning more about India and pondering the ideas
of some of her most significant political thinkers, such as Sir
Rabindranath Tagore and Mohandas Gandhi, whose ruminations about
nationalism and the roots of violence are intensely pertinent to
today's conflicts.
A ccording to the Huntington thesis, each "civilization" has its own
distinctive view of life, and Hinduism counts as a distinct
"civilization." If we investigate the history of the Hindu right,
however, we will see a very different story. Traditional Hinduism was
decentralized, plural, and highly tolerant, so much so that the vision
of a unitary, "pure" Hinduism that could provide the new nation,
following independence from Britain in 1947, with an aggressive
ideology of homogeneity could not be found in India: The founders of
the Hindu right had to import it from Europe.
The Hindu right's view of history is a simple one. Like all simple
tales, it is largely a fabrication, but its importance to the movement
may be seen by the intensity with which its members go after scholars
who present a more nuanced and accurate view: not only by strident
public critiques, but by organized campaigns of threat and
intimidation, culminating in some cases in physical violence. Here's
how the story goes:
Once there lived in the Indus Valley a pure and peaceful people. They
spoke Vedic Sanskrit, the language of the gods. They had a rich
material culture and a peaceful temper, although they were prepared for
war. Their realm was vast, stretching from Kashmir in the north to Sri
Lanka (Ceylon) in the south. And yet they saw unity and solidarity in
their shared ways of life, calling themselves Hindus and their land
Hindustan. No class divisions troubled them, nor was caste a painful
source of division. The condition of women was excellent.
That peaceful condition went on for centuries. Although from time to
time marauders made their appearance (for example, the Huns), they were
quickly dispatched. Suddenly, rudely, unprovoked, invading Muslims put
an end to all that. Early in the 16th century, Babur, founder of the
Mughal dynasty, swept through the north of Hindustan, vandalizing Hindu
temples, stealing sacred objects, building mosques over temple ruins.
For 200 years, Hindus lived at the mercy of the marauders, until the
Maharashtrian hero Shivaji rose up and restored the Hindu kingdom. His
success was all too brief. Soon the British took up where Babur and his
progeny had left off, imposing tyranny upon Hindustan and her people.
They can recover their pride only by concerted aggression against alien
elements in their midst.
What is wrong with that picture? Well, for a start, the people who
spoke Sanskrit almost certainly migrated into the subcontinent from
outside, finding indigenous people there, probably the ancestors of the
Dravidian peoples of South India. Hindus are no more indigenous than
Muslims. Second, it leaves out problems in Hindu society: the problem
of caste, which both Gandhi and Tagore took to be the central social
issue facing India, and obvious problems of class and gender
inequality. (When historians point to evidence of these things, the
Hindu right calls them Marxists, as if that, by itself, invalidated
their arguments.) Third, it leaves out the tremendous regional
differences within Hinduism, and hostilities and aggressions sometimes
associated with those. Fourth, it omits the evidence of peaceful
coexistence and syncretism between Hindus and Muslims for a good deal
of the Mughal Empire, including the well-known policies of religious
pluralism of Akbar (1542-1605).
In the Hindu-right version of history, a persistent theme is that of
humiliated masculinity: Hindus have been subordinate for centuries, and
their masculinity insulted, in part because they have not been
aggressive and violent enough. The two leading ideologues of the Hindu
right responded to the call for a warlike Hindu masculinity in
different ways. V.D. Savarkar (1883-1966) was a freedom fighter who
spent years in a British prison in the Andaman Islands, and who may
have been a co-conspirator in the assassination of Gandhi. M.S.
Golwalkar (1906-73), a gurulike figure who was not involved in the
independence struggle, quietly helped build up the organization known
as RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or National Volunteers
Association), now the leading social organization of the Hindu right.
Savarkar's "Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu?," first published in 1923,
undertook to define the essence of Hinduness for the new nation; his
definition was exclusionary, emphasizing cultural homogeneity and the
need to use force to ensure the supremacy of Hindus.
Golwalkar's We, or Our Nationhood Defined was published in 1939.
Writing during the independence struggle, Golwalkar saw his task as
describing the unity of the new nation. To do that, he looked to
Western political theory, and particularly to Germany, where what he
called "race pride" helped bring "under one sway the whole of the
territory" that was originally held by the Germani. By purging itself
of Jews, he wrote, "Germany has also shown how well nigh impossible it
is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be
assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan
to learn and profit by."
In the end, Golwalkar's vision of national unity was not exactly that
of Nazi Germany. He was not very concerned with purity of blood, but
rather with whether Muslim and Christian groups were willing to
"abandon their differences, and completely merge themselves in the
National Race." He was firmly against the civic equality of any people
who retained their religious and ethnic distinctiveness.
At the time of independence, such ideas of Hindu supremacy did not
prevail. Nehru and Gandhi insisted not only on equal rights for all
citizens, but also on stringent protections for religious freedom of
expression in the new Constitution. Gandhi always pointedly included
Muslims at the very heart of his movement. He felt that respect for
human equality lay at the heart of all genuine religions, and provided
Hindus with strong reasons both for repudiating the caste hierarchy and
for seeking relationships of respect and harmony with Christians and
Muslims. A devout Muslim, Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad, was one of his and
Nehru's most trusted advisers, and it was to him that Gandhi turned to
accept food when he broke his fast unto death, a very pointed assault
on sectarian ideas of purity and pollution. Gandhi's pluralistic ideas,
however, were always contested.
On January 30, 1948, Gandhi was shot at point-blank range by Nathuram
Godse, a member of the Hindu political party Mahasabha and former
member of the RSS, who had long had a close, reverential relationship
with Savarkar. At his sentencing on November 8, 1949, Godse read a
book-length statement of self-explanation. Although it was not
permitted publication at the time, it gradually leaked out. Today it is
widely available on the Internet, where Godse is revered as a hero on
Hindu-right Web sites.
Godse's self-justification, like the historical accounts of both
Savarkar and Golwalkar, saw contemporary events against the backdrop of
centuries of "Muslim tyranny" in India, punctuated by the heroic
resistance of Shivaji in the 18th century. Like Savarkar, Godse
described his goal as that of creating a strong, proud India that could
throw off the centuries of domination. He was appalled by Gandhi's
rejection of the warlike heroes of classical Hindu epics and his
inclusion of Muslims as full equals in the new nation, and argued that
Gandhi exposed Indians to subordination and humiliation. Nehru believed
that the murder of Gandhi was part of a "fairly widespread conspiracy"
on the part of the Hindu right to seize power; he saw the situation as
analogous to that in Europe on the eve of the fascist takeovers. And he
believed that the RSS was the power behind this conspiracy.
Fast-forward now to recent years. Although illegal for a time, the RSS
eventually re-emerged and quietly went to work building a vast social
network, consisting largely of groups for young boyscalled shakha, or
"branches"which, through clever use of games and songs, indoctrinate
the young into the confrontational and Hindu-supremacist ideology of
the organization. The idea of total obedience and the abnegation of
critical faculties is at the core of the solidaristic movement. Each
day, as members raise the saffron flag of the warlike hero Shivaji,
which the movement prefers to the tricolor flag of the Indian nation
(with its Buddhist wheel of law reminding citizens of the emperor
Ashoka's devotion to religious toleration), they recite a pledge that
begins: "I take the oath that I will always protect the purity of Hindu
religion, and the purity of Hindu culture, for the supreme progress of
the Hindu nation." The organization also makes clever use of modern
media: A nationally televised serial version of the classic epic
Ramayana in the late 1980s fascinated viewers all over India with its
concocted tale of a unitary Hinduism dedicated to the single-minded
worship of the god Rama. In 1992 Hindu mobs, with the evident
connivance of the modern political wing of the RSS, the party known as
the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party, or National People's Party), destroyed
a mosque in the city of Ayodhya that they say covers the remains of a
Hindu temple marking Rama's birthplace.
Politically, the BJP began to gather strength in the late 1980s,
drawing on widespread public dissatisfaction with the economic policies
of the post-Nehru Congress Party (although it was actually Congress,
under Rajiv Gandhi, that began economic reforms), and playing, always,
the cards of hatred and fear. It was during its ascendancy, in a
coalition government that prevented it from carrying out all its goals,
that the destruction of the Ayodyha mosque took place. The violence in
Gujarat was the culmination of a series of increasingly angry
pilgrimages to the Ayodyha site, where the Hindu right has attempted to
construct a Hindu temple over the ruins, but has been frustrated by the
courts. Although the elections of 2004 gave a negative verdict on the
BJP government, it remains the major opposition party and controls
governments in some key states, including Gujarat.
For several years, I have studied the Gujarat violence, its basis and
its aftermath, looking for implications for how we should view
religious violence around the world. One obvious conclusion is that
each case must be studied on its own merits, with close attention to
specific historical and regional factors. The idea that all conflicts
are explained by a simple hypothesis of the "clash of civilizations"
proves utterly inadequate in Gujarat, where European ideas were
borrowed to address a perceived humiliation and to create an ideology
that has led to a great deal of violence against peaceful Muslims.
Indeed, the "clash of civilizations" thesis is the best friend of the
perpetrators because it shields them and their ideology from scrutiny.
Repeatedly in interviews with leading members of the Hindu right, I was
informed that no doubt, as an American, I was already on their side,
knowing that Muslims cause trouble wherever they are.
What we see in Gujarat is not a simplistic, comforting thesis, but
something more disturbing: the fact that in a thriving democracy, many
individuals are unable to live with others who are different, on terms
of mutual respect and amity. They seek total domination as the only
road to security and pride. That is a phenomenon well known in
democracies around the world, and it has nothing to do with an alleged
Muslim monolith, and, really, very little to do with religion as such.
This case, then, informs us that we must look within, asking whether in
our own society similar forces are at work, and, if so, how we may
counteract them. Beyond that general insight, my study of the riots has
suggested four very specific lessons.
The rule of law: One of the most appalling aspects of the events in
Gujarat was the complicity of officers of the law. The police sat on
their hands, the highest officials of state government egged on the
killing, and the national government gave aid and comfort to the state
government.
However, the institutional and legal structure of the Indian democracy
ultimately proved robust, playing a key role in securing justice for
the victims. The Supreme Court and the Election Commission of India
played constructive roles in postponing new elections while Muslims
were encouraged to return home, and in ordering changes of venue in key
trials arising out of the violence. Above all, free national elections
were held in 2004, and those elections, in which the participation of
poor rural voters was decisive, delivered a strongly negative verdict
on the policies of fear and hate, as well as on the BJP's economic
policies. The current government, headed by Manmohan Singha Sikh and
India's first minority prime ministerhas announced a firm commitment to
end sectarian violence and has done a great deal to focus attention on
the unequal economic and political situation of Muslims in the nation,
as well as appointing Muslims to key offices. On balance, then, the
pluralistic democracy envisaged by Gandhi and Nehru seems to be
winning, in part because the framers of the Indian state bequeathed to
India a wise institutional and constitutional structure, and traditions
of commitment to the key political values that structure embodies.
It should be mentioned that one of the key aspects of the founders'
commitments, which so far has survived the Hindu-right challenge, is
the general conception of the nation as a uni-ty around political
ideals and values, particularly the value of equal entitlement, rather
than around ethnic or religious or linguistic identity. India, like the
United States, but unlike most of the nations of Europe, has rejected
such exclusionary ways of characterizing the nation, adopting in its
Constitution, in public ceremonies, and in key public symbols the
political conception of its unity. Political structure is not
ev-erything, but it can supply a great deal in times of stress.
The news media and the role of intellectuals: One of the heartening
aspects of the Gujarat events was the performance of the national news
media and of the community of intellectuals. Both print media and
television kept up unceasing pressure to document and investigate
events. At the same time, many scholars, lawyers, and leaders of
nongovernnmental organizations converged on Gujarat to take down the
testimony of witnesses, help them file complaints, and prepare a public
record that would stand up in court. The only reason I felt the need to
write about these events further is that their analyses have, by and
large, not reached the American audience.
We can see here documentation of something long ago observed by the
Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen in the context of famines:
the crucial role of a free press in supporting democratic institutions.
(Sen pointed out that there has not been a famine in recent times in a
nation where a free press brings essential information to the public;
in China, by contrast, in the late 1950s and early 60s, famine was
allowed to continue unabated, because news of what was happening in
rural areas did not leak out.) And we can study here what a free press
really means: I would argue that it requires a certain absence of
top-down corporate control and an easy access to the major news media
for intellectual voices from a wide range of backgrounds.
Education and the importance of critical thinking and imagination: So
far I have mentioned factors that have helped the Indian democracy
survive the threat of quasi-fascist takeover. But there are warning
signs for the future. The public schools in Gujarat are famous for
their complete lack of critical thinking, their exclusive emphasis on
rote learning and the uncritical learning of marketable skills, and the
elements of fascist propaganda that easily creep in when critical
thinking is not cultivated. It is well known that Hitler is presented
as a hero in history textbooks in the state, and nationwide public
protest has not yet led to any change. To some extent, the rest of the
nation is better off: National-level textbooks have been rewritten to
take out the Hindu right's false ideological view of history and to
substitute a more nuanced view. Nonetheless, the emphasis on rote
learning and on regurgitation of facts for national examinations is
distressing everywhere, and things are only becoming worse with the
immense pressure to produce economically productive graduates.
The educational culture of India used to contain progressive voices,
such as that of the great Tagore, who emphasized that all the skills in
the world were useless, even baneful, if not wielded by a cultivated
imagination and refined critical faculties. Such voices have now been
silenced by the sheer demand for profitability in the global market.
Parents want their children to learn marketable skills, and their great
pride is the admission of a child to the Indian Institutes of
Technology or the India Institutes of Management. They have contempt
for the humanities and the arts. I fear for democracy down the road,
when it is run, as it increasingly will be, by docile engineers in the
Gujarat mold, unable to criticize the propaganda of politicians and
unable to imagine the pain of another human being.
In the United States, by some estimates fully 40 percent of
Indian-Americans hail from Gujarat, where a large proportion belong to
the Swaminarayan sect of Hinduism, distinctive for its emphasis on
uncritical obedience to the utterances of the current leader of the
sect, whose title is Pramukh Swami Maharaj. On a visit to the elaborate
multimillion-dollar Swaminarayan temple in Bartlett, Ill., I was given
a tour by a young man recently arrived from Gujarat, who delighted in
telling me the simplistic Hindu-right story of India's history, and who
emphatically told me that whenever Pramukh Swami speaks, one is to
regard it as the direct voice of God and obey without question. At that
point, with a beatific smile, the young man pointed up to the elaborate
marble ceiling and asked, "Do you know why this ceiling glows the way
it does?" I said I didn't, and I confidently expected an explanation
invoking the spiritual powers of Pramukh Swami. My guide smiled even
more broadly. "Fiber-optic cables," he told me. "We are the first ones
to put this technology into a temple." There you see what can easily
wreck democracy: a combination of technological sophistication with
utter docility. I fear that many democracies around the world,
including our own, are going down that road, through a lack of emphasis
on the humanities and arts and an unbalanced emphasis on profitable
skills.
The creation of a liberal public culture: How did fascism take such
hold in India? Hindu traditions emphasize tolerance and pluralism, and
daily life tends to emphasize the ferment and vigor of difference, as
people from so many ethnic, linguistic, and regional backgrounds
encounter one another. But as I've noted, the traditions contain a
wound, a locus of vulnerability, in the area of humiliated masculinity.
For centuries, some Hindu males think, they were subordinated by a
sequence of conquerors, and Hindus have come to identify the sexual
playfulness and sensuousness of their traditions, scorned by the
masters of the Raj, with their own weakness and subjection. So a
repudiation of the sensuous and the cultivation of the masculine came
to seem the best way out of subjection. One reason why the RSS attracts
such a following is the widespread sense of masculine failure.
At the same time, the RSS filled a void, organizing at the grass-roots
level with great discipline and selflessness. The RSS is not just about
fascist ideology; it also provides needed social services, and it
provides fun, luring boys in with the promise of a group life that has
both more solidarity and more imagination than the tedious world of
government schools.
S o what is needed is some counterforce, which would supply a public
culture of pluralism with equally efficient grass-roots organization,
and a public culture of masculinity that would contend against the
appeal of the warlike and rapacious masculinity purveyed by the Hindu
right. The "clash within" is not so much a clash between two groups in
a nation that are different from birth; it is, at bottom, a clash
within each person, in which the ability to live with others on terms
of mutual respect and equality contends anxiously against the sense of
being humiliated.
Gandhi understood that. He taught his followers that life's real
struggle was a struggle within the self, against one's own need to
dominate and one's fear of being vulnerable. He deliberately focused
attention on sexuality as an arena in which domination plays itself out
with pernicious effect, and he deliberately cultivated an androgynous
maternal persona. More significantly still, he showed his followers
that being a "real man" is not a matter of being aggressive and bashing
others; it is a matter of controlling one's own instincts to aggression
and standing up to provocation with only one's human dignity to defend
oneself. I think that in some respects, he went off the tracks, in his
suggestion that sexual relations are inherently scenes of domination
and in his recommendation of asceticism as the only route to
nondomination. Nonetheless, he saw the problem at its root, and he
proposed a public culture that, while he lived, was sufficient to
address it.
In a quite different way, Tagore also created a counterimage of the
Indian self, an image that was more sensuous, more joyful than that of
Gandhi, but equally bent on renouncing the domination that Tagore saw
as inherent in European traditions. In works such as Nationalism and
The Religion of Man, Tagore described a type of joyful cosmopolitanism,
underwritten by poetry and the arts, that he also made real in his
pioneering progressive school in Santiniketan.
After Gandhi, however, that part of the pluralist program has
languished. Though he much loved and admired both Gandhi and Tagore,
Nehru had contempt for religion, and out of his contempt he neglected
the cultivation of what the radical religions of both men had supplied:
images of who we are as citizens, symbolic connections to the roots of
human vulnerability and openness, and the creation of a grass-roots
public culture around those symbols. Nehru was a great institution
builder, but in thinking about the public culture of the new nation,
his focus was always on economic, not cultural, issues. Because he
firmly expected that raising the economic level of the poor would cause
them to lose the need for religion and, in general, for emotional
nourishment, he saw no need to provide a counterforce to the powerful
emotional propaganda of the Hindu right.
Today's young people in India, therefore, tend to think of religion,
and the creation of symbolic culture in general, as forces that are in
their very nature fascist and reactionary because that is what they
have seen in their experience. When one tells them the story of the
American civil-rights movement, and the role of both liberal religion
and powerful pluralist rhetoric in forging an anti-racist civic
culture, they are quite surprised. Meanwhile, the RSS goes to work
unopposed in every state and region, skillfully plucking the strings of
hate and fear. By now pluralists generally realize that a mistake was
made in leaving grass-roots organization to the right, but it is very
difficult to jump-start a pluralist movement. The salient exception has
been the women's movement, which has built at the grass roots very
skillfully.
It is comforting for Americans to talk about a clash of civilizations.
That thesis tells us that evil is outside, distant, other, and that we
are perfectly all right as we are. All we need do is to remain
ourselves and fight the good fight. But the case of Gujarat shows us
that the world is very different. The forces that assail democracy are
internal to many, if not most, democratic nations, and they are not
foreign: They are our own ideas and voices, meaning the voices of
aggressive European nationalism, refracted back against the original
aggressor with the extra bile of resentment born of a long experience
of domination and humiliation.
The implication is that all nations, Western and non-Western, need to
examine themselves with the most fearless exercise of critical
capacities, looking for the roots of domination within and devising
effective institutional and educational countermeasures. At a deeper
level, the case of Gujarat shows us what Gandhi and Tagore, in their
different ways, knew: that the real root of domination lies deep in the
human personality. It would be so convenient if Americans were pure and
free from flaw, but that fantasy is yet another form that the
resourceful narcissism of the human personality takes on the way to bad
behavior.
Martha C. Nussbaum is a professor in
the philosophy department, law school, divinity school, and the college
at the University of Chicago. Her book The Clash Within: Democracy,
Religious Violence, and India's Future will be published this week by
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Source:
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 53, Issue 37, Page B6
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