ARE WE BECOMING PHILISTINES?

A WIDE CANVAS

ARE WE BECOMING PHILISTINES?

Almost every aspect of Indian public life and thought is deeply influenced by foreign ideas. Our Constitution, govt. based on the executive, legislature and judiciary, the system of administration based on a permanent cadre of (notoriously unhelpful but miscalled) civil service, our education system right from the pre-primary level, our economic arrangement, our media and entertainment- everything is run on foreign ideas. And many of them serve foreign interests.

While our academic institutions purvey foreign thoughts among our youngsters, our newspapers and electronic media disseminate such trends among the public at large with tremendous zeal. The reach of the media is so enormous through 24x7 satellite TV, that no corner of the country is free from it. 

The main aim and effect of such efforts is to make our people mindless consumers of the products of the greedy market manipulators. The products in the educational system dull the mind, and the products on the markets and the malls drain the money.. Now, you don't even have to go out to have your pocket picked: on line marketers target your very bank account, making you sit comfortably in front  of your PC. Oh, it is so easy to be persuaded to buy a needless product, and to pay for it on line! You may buy it at a discount, and pay by EMI! Sahir Ludhianvi wrote beautifully over 60 years ago:

Bhaav agar badha bhi daale sethji  yaar  gam na kar, khaaye ja majhe ke saath jab talak udhar de.

Kishore Kumar sang it so hilariously in Taxi Driver! (1954)

There was a time when we were told that our people had become 'mere hewers of wood and drawers of water' and some leaders made efforts to spread mass education, so that they could be culturally uplifted. Education has become mass now- and has made us all mass consumers of mass products on a massive scale,  as Ivan Illich explained,failing which our GDP-based economy will collapse! But such mass education is also in a mess- right from admissions, testing, evaluating the performance,announcing results and awarding the blessed certificate, everything is in a mess, as the newspapers report daily!

Our age is the age of mass consumption. In his 1960 book " The Stages of Economic Growth", economist W.W.Rostow proposed a non-communist model of development in which he called the last stage of growth as the age of 'high mass consumption'. But those were the days when man had no idea of or concern for environment. But high mass consumption has come to rule us. Consumption - shopping is such a compulsive part of our life. 

W.W.Rostow.


In his 1968 play, 'The Price', American writer Arthur Miller has one of his characters say:

"Because you see the main thing today is- shopping. Years ago a person, he was unhappy, didn't know what to do with himself- he'd go to church, start a revolution- something. Today you're unhappy? Can't figure it out? What is the salvation? Go shopping."

Arthur Miller. Public domain.Wikimedia commons.

American historian Daniel Boorstin wrote in 1973:

"GOODS SUITABLE for the millionaire", R.H.Macey's advertised in 1887, "at prices in reach of the millions." The fixed price had helped democratise the marketplace....Consumers with money to spend were eager to find something to buy. But they were more uncertain than ever about what they "needed", what was really essential...

New classes of merchandise came into being, characterized not by their quality or function, but by their price.

From: The Americans : The Democratic Experience, Part Two, chap.12.Vintage Books,1973.

 Daniel J.Boorstin. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.

To day, consumers need not be with money! They should have the Credit Card!

(But let us also note that poverty was not always associated with  lack of honesty or character. Indeed, in his fine novel Nicholas Nickleby, Charles Dickens makes his hero Nicholas say this:

 "Poverty should engender an honest pride, that it may not lead and tempt us to unworthy actions, and we may preserve that self-respect which a hewer of wood and drawer of water may maintain, and does better in maintaining that than a monarch in preserving his...."

It may safely be said that today in our 'developed' economies, those who are tempted and indulge in "unworthy acts" are all the elite products of mass education!  Higher the education, higher the temptation, and graver the unworthy act.

Charles Dickens

The point is, mass education has dried up the very roots of culture. Education is identified with literacy, schooling, jobs, ( we cannot speak of a career proper as most techies- the most visible part of the educated elite- hop jobs regularly), remuneration package, etc. Where does poor culture figure in here- except it be the culture of consumption?

The very idea of culture is anathema to our new elites and opinion-makers. The word is seen by them as a sign of stagnation if not backwardness. But this very stance is indicative of their own backwardness.

National Portraits Gallery, London.
 


Matthew Arnold begins his fine book Culture And Anarchy (1869) with the stance of two 'liberal' ( the equivalent of the present 'left, liberal, progressives) advocates, who took a fling at "the friends and preachers of culture" thus:

People who talk about what they call culture!- by which they mean a smattering of the two dead languages of Greek and Latin. (John Bright, liberal politician and MP from 1847 to 1889)

Perhaps the very silliest of the cant of the day is the cant about culture....The man of culture is in politics one of the poorest mortals alive.(Frederic Harrison, English barrister and critic.)

This was in the middle of the 19th century. Now, after 150 years, our leftist friends are expressing similar thoughts about Indian culture- calling Sanskrit a dead language, in the place of Greek and Latin. That is how progressive they are! And politics has become such a dirty pool that no decent man of culture would like to dip in it.

All this has been brought about mainly by the spread of mass education. It has spread literacy, but no love for or interest in intellectual pursuits. The so called brightest of our youngsters take to technical education, not intellectual pursuits- we still import our intellectual suits from abroad. The spread of income and wealth in society- it cannot be denied, though poverty too is spreading- has resulted in high consumption of mass produced goods and services. The current forms of entertainment are devoid of cultural content- ie not related to or sourced from our national roots. Even our film music is copied from western tunes, as also the costume.  And this has adversely affected every form of our national cultural activities- from our natural dress , costume and cosmetics, to our arts.

This is what is called Philistinism- an attitude that despises or undervalues culture, spirituality, art, beauty, the intellect, and promotes attachment to immediate satisfaction and material interests. This word has Biblical connotations, but is now derived from German sources. In the 18th Century, German poet and statesman Goethe said that-

the philistine not only ignores all conditions of life which are not his own, but also demands that the rest of mankind should fashion its mode of existence after his own.

 

Goethe. Public domain. Wikimedia commons.


This word was brought into public discussions on culture by Matthew Arnold in England in the 19th century and he said:

Philistine must have originally meant a strong, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the children of the light...who believes that most of our greatness and welfare are proved by our being very rich.

In the last century, the Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov explained the word Philistine thus:

A full grown person whose interests are of a material and common place nature and whose mentality is formed of the stock of ideas and conditional ideals of his or her group at the time....."Vulgarian" is more or less synonymous with "philistine.....I may also use the term "genteel" and "bourgeois".Genteel implies the lace-curtain refined vulgarity, which is worse than simple coarseness....The term bourgeois I use following Flaubert, not Marx. Bourgeois in Flaubert's sense is a state of mind, not a state of pocket. A bourgeois is a smug philistine, dignified vulgarian.

Vladimir Nabokov.

From: www.vadams-eng102.blogspot.in/2011/08/good-readers-and-good-writers.html

Acknowledged with thanks.

This is one of those words which cannot be defined sharply, but has to be understood .Think of the lakhs of youngsters who pass through our education mill with views and opinions firmly implanted by the system under the authority of the State, to a uniform standard, and the kind of lifestyle it results in. The system totally lacks any idea of culture or refinement or spirituality. The youngsters are solely endowed with material aspirations and some technical means and devices to seek their fulfilment through. 

We see this happening in India, especially since Independence.But this is the universal trend. The situation in the US-to which our own youngsters flock, first for higher education and then for employment- is so serious that Thomas Sowell, one of the leading professors with over 40 years of teaching experience says candidly:

All across this country, the school curriculum has been invaded by psychological-conditioning programs which not only take up time sorely needed for intellectual development, but also promote an emotionalized  and anti-intellectual way of responding to the challenges facing every individual and every society. Worst of all, the psychotherapeutic curriculum systematically undermines the parent-child relationship and the shared values which make a society possible....

....too many American schools are turning out students who are not only intellectually incompetent but also morally confused, emotionally alienated, and socially maladjusted.

 At the college and university level, the intrusion of non-intellectual and anti-intellectual material into the curriculum takes more of an ideological, rather than a psychological, form. New courses, new departments, and whole new programs concentrate on leading students to preconceived ideological conclusions, rather than developing the student's ability to analyze issues so as to reach independent conclusions....the general approach is the same, not only in its fundamental anti-intellectualism, but also in its hostility to American society and Western civilization, and the tendentiousness or even dishonesty with which it attempts to indoctrinate.

From :Inside American Education by Prof.Thomas Sowell.Preface. The Free Press, 1993.

Thomas Sowell.

From: www.tsowell,com.

Copyright position not known. Used here for purely non-commercial educational purpose.

We can clearly see that this is exactly what is being done in India too through the educational system- denigrate India, deny the Hindu cultural and civilisational heritage, praise the invaders,and colonisers, cut at the roots of society!

 And this is where modernity is reversing the whole historical trend of entire humanity. Every civilisation on earth so far, has tried-with varying degrees of success- to overcome the animality of man, to counter the external activity , caused by the necessities of external nature,  by cultivating the inner nature , resulting in some peace of soul or poise of the spirit. At one level, there is the attempt to overcome the sheer animality-through morality and ethics- commonly called religion;this results in some "inward peace and satisfaction"; but there is a still higher endeavour, trying to reach spiritual perfection, not just moral perfection, which results in the "peace that passeth understanding". But the material civilisation that is caused by the spread of philistinism is destroying all that the highest minds in all civilisations so far in human history held as sacred or valuable or worthwhile! We are again reduced to the level of hewers of wood and drawers of water. But alas! even this is not going to be possible in a few years: the woods are disappearing , and the water we draw is increasingly polluted. Victory to modern civilisation and all its advocates! 

 Remnants of the famed Nalanda University after it was finally destroyed by Turkish Muslim invaders in the 12th century.
By Arunava de Sarkar (Own work) CC BY-SA 3.0
Creative commons via Wikimedia commons.

Muslim Invaders destroyed our temples and educational structures.Macaulay destroyed the very Hindu mind. After Independence, leftists captured the 'commanding heights' of our educational system and institutions such as ICHR and foisted on the country the Marxist interpretation of history- the chief aim of which is to alienate young Indians from our own cultural heritage. Thus what happened in the US is happening in India too! So, we are also 'developing'.