Kerala: The graveyard of all war propaganda, Part IV

6th century Ladkhan temple, infinite two knots symbol of karma rebirth cycle and interconnectedness, Aihole Hindu monuments Karnataka. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Author: Ms Sarah Welch.

by Ian Hansen, PhD

Particulars and Universals

Kerala is a geographically tiny state in a large country—India—that doesn’t make the news much in spite of having over a sixth of the world’s population.  As such, Kerala is a very particular place.  When I was a graduate student in cultural psychology, I remember my advisor telling me that another particular place, Japan, is considered the graveyard of all great social theories.  This is in part because as an “interdependent” or “collectivist” culture, Japan fails to conform to many of the theories of human psychology backed up by data gathered in individualist cultures (particularly the United States).  It is also in part because idiosyncratic Japan often defies expectations about what an interdependent or collectivist culture should behave like.  I have now come to think that almost any distinctive cultural-political-economic entity, closely examined, will seem like a graveyard of all great social theories.  Examinations of the particular tend to trouble pretenses to the universal.

Japan’s 127 million people—1.7% of the world’s population—are more plentiful than Kerala’s 35 million.  But if Japan’s population is not to be sneezed at, then neither is Kerala’s.  A whole movement in psychology—cultural psychology—has drawn much energy from studying fractional exceptions like Japan and Kerala to the apparently universal.  And cultural psychology is gradually shaping the sense of the “actually universal” in general psychology, with psychology textbooks highlighting cultural differences in psychological processes, and cultural psychologists even becoming well-known public intellectuals like Jonathan Haidt1.

Now Japan specifically is a political ally of the United States, so studying it can feel like looking at some of the charming differences enjoyed between allies.  Even with Modi’s India also being a US ally, Kerala’s particularities—including its role as a pocket of resistance to Modi’s Hindu nationalist fascism within India—are more politically troublesome to study.  Though most psychologists are nominally “liberal”, a plutocratic militarist structural academic climate still hangs heavily over the psychology profession.  So Kerala will probably not be a household word among even cultural psychologists anytime soon.  Kerala’s benign-looking manifestations of communism, Islam, etc. will probably not be considered sexy by those whom many US psychologists beg hat-in-hand for grant money, status and fame.  If the political economic will were there, though, more cultural psychological attention to the study of Keralan particulars—and Kerala-illuminated universals—could skewer some paradigms to potentially explosive effect.

Scientifically speaking, I think Kerala could illustrate how apparently shocking exceptions to the supposedly universal can sometimes mask an illuminating embodiment of the actually universal.  In this case, the shocking universal that Kerala embodies exceptionally is that most ideologies are okay, and peace between them is better than the alternative.  More specifically, most of the ideological principles we humans have been stealing, raping, torturing and murdering for over the last century are both (a) pretty good, and (b) would have been better served by peaceful integration, or at least live-and-let-live coexistence.  Insofar as Kerala illustrates both the pretty-goodness and should-have-tried-to-get-alongness of the big three value foundations for the last century’s massive ideological projects, Kerala can be considered a cultural psychological goldmine.  Or rather it could be considered a self-interest-threatening landmine if what you want is the military, corporate or CIA funding that can make you a household name in psychology.  That’s because Kerala is, as per my title, the graveyard of all war propaganda.

Footnote

1. Haidt’s case illustrates the costs of once plucky and gadfly-like cultural psychology going mainstream.  Being a US public intellectual and a successful psychologist at the same time appears to require more fealty to structures of power in the US (the military, the intelligence agencies, and the peculiar form of “capitalism” practiced by US financial institutions and corporations) than is required for public intellectual success in other disciplines.  To some extent, Haidt embodies the gadfly critiques of cultural psychology.  He became a wealthy, famous public intellectual even while offending many rank-and-file psychologists with his attack on an apparent hegemony: the overwhelming prefer-Democrats-to-Republicans “liberalism” of rank-and-file US psychologists.  But perhaps his underdog success capitalizes on the fact that the psychology profession is minimally accountable to its rank and file.  With regard to the more powerful sources of hegemony affecting how psychology operates as a profession, Haidt has demonstrated considerably less inclination to offend them.  Even cultural psychology’s ideological organizer, Richard Shweder (whom Haidt studied under), appears to have felt the zeitgeist calling him to flatter these sources of power.

Ian Hansen, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Behavioral Sciences Department at York College, City University of New York, with a research focus on social psychology, religion, ideology, tolerance, and support for peace and pluralism. His core research interest is investigating psychological “odd bedfellows” phenomena with regard to religion and ideology.  He is also an active member in Psychologists for Social Responsibility, and served as its 2017 president.  

Kerala: The graveyard of all war propaganda, Part III

WWII A Nazi propaganda poster. In English: “Marxism is the guardian angel of capitalism.” his file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Author: Dontworryifixedit.

by Ian Hansen, PhD

Pointless War #3: The War on “Bourgeois” Liberty and Democracy

Finally, consider liberty-protecting electoral democracy.  Over in these “Western” parts we adore liberty-protecting electoral democracy, of course.  But other world players have considered it so evil that Der Fuhrers, Dear Leaders, Big Brothers, Generalissimos, Chairmans and Commandantes have all felt obliged to smash and destroy it with totalitarian enslavement, sometimes garnished with genocide.  Though their methods may have seemed harsh, these figures imagined they were merely breaking the eggs necessary to make beautiful, radiant omelets, like, say a thousand-year Reich of Righteousness from the fascist/Nazi side, or True Democracy from the totalitarian communist side (“democracy” embodied in obsequious groveling obedience to The Party).  In the totalitarian view, legally-protected liberty and the electoral-parliamentary forms of democracy were the eggs that had to be smashed in order to prevent them from poisoning people’s minds away from these utopian projects.  Totalitarians feared that “Western”-style individual liberty and electoral parliamentary democracy would turn the precious volk into capitalists, selfish individualists, bourgeois liberals and rejectors of civilization and sublimity.

But Kerala defies both forms of totalitarian genocidal expectations by being a liberty-protecting, parliamentary democratic kind of place where communism flourishes politically and religion flourishes culturally.  Kerala has hammer and sickle flags flying all over.  It also bills itself as “God’s own country,” with ordinary people praying, God-believing and religious service-attending as far as the eye can see.  So liberty-protecting electoral democracy in Kerala did not destroy either communism or religion there, as totalitarian genocidals might have imagined it would.

And, for that matter, declining to destroy communism and religion did not lead to the implosion of liberty and democracy in Kerala, as anti-communists and anti-religionists might have imagined it would. If anything, bourgeois “Western” electoral parliamentary democracy and individual liberty have grown stronger in Kerala over the years.  And they’ve been growing in a fertile soil that combines regularly-elected communism with indigenous or indigenized Indian religions.

In another article, “Reconsidering Communism, Religion and Liberty-Protecting Democracy Through the Lens of Kerala” I present detailed empirical evidence that Kerala is a delightfully free and peaceful communism-inclined state, a delightfully free and peaceful religion-inclined culture, and a delightfully free and peaceful liberty-protecting democratic political entity.  I nevertheless argue that in none of these particulars is Kerala an “exception that proves the rule,” at least not in the usual sense of the phrase.  Kerala is not, in other words, a bright spot for X (X being communism, or religion, or liberty-protecting democracy) that just throws into sharper relief how repulsively evil X usually is by nature.

When avoiding post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc fallacies and other failures to account for confounds, the relevant empirical data points in a surprising direction.  The data suggests that communism, religion and liberty-protecting electoral democracy are all somewhat salutary to peace and freedom and thus are compatible with each other in their most basic, stripped down, core value-grounded forms.  Want to spend another half hour wading through my prose so you can see that data?  Read the article here, and don’t forget to click the links.

Kerala: The graveyard of all war propaganda, Part I

First Nebraska volunteers, Company B, Spanish American War. From the album in which it was found: “The 1st Nebraska had the honor of being the vanguard of the eastern troops mobilized in San Francisco that was to constitute the army of invasion of the Philippines.” In the public domain.

by Ian Hansen, PhD

A preamble on the logic of war and the logic of peace

There is a little-known statistic, hidden in an academic paper on another subject, relevant to the dangers of militarism. The statistic is that the more militarized a country is—the more of its population in the armed forces, the greater proportion of its GDP going to the military—the more refugees are likely to have fled that country, presumably in terror.  More militarized countries are also judged less free, in terms of civil liberties and political rights, by the organization Freedom House.  The same paper finds that the embrace of militarism, as a psychological proclivity, is so strongly correlated with the embrace of oppression and atrocity that the militarism-loving and oppression/atrocity-loving items form a single unified scale.  These findings together suggest that militaries tend to terrorize and traumatize people—sometimes foreign people, sometimes their own1.

Even to the extent armed forces can be persuaded not to corrupt and betray civilian governance at home, adherence to Golden Rule morality still suggests that it is wrong to organize militaristic political economies.  Militaristic political economies tend to systematically impoverish and lie to some underclass of vulnerable young people and then, having seduced/coerced them, condition them to become more blasé about harming and killing other human beings en masse.  The world would do well to slough off such political economies, enlightened society by enlightened society. 

Nevertheless, too much attention to the evils of war can result in triggering deep-seated human intuitions that we need to wage our own organized violence to discourage, punish, or “manage” the war that’s already out there, or that might one day be.  Almost all nations and movements that inflict or prepare to inflict carnal, flesh-ripping war claim to be doing it for the sake of peace and/or justice.  Thus people—whether as ordinary individuals, commanding officers or heads of state—feel best about inflicting atrocities when they can plausibly assert the pretense that they are resisting or punishing other people’s atrocities.  The pattern that shows up repeatedly is (1) first we rage at the oppression and atrocity of others and then (2) we commit our own oppression and atrocity, rationalizing it as a justifiable excess to prevent/avenge excesses by the dreaded Them.  This pattern reflects an ensnarement in the logic of war.

To get caught up in the logic of peace instead, it helps to keep our eye on peace working, and not just on war being horror.  One place to look at long and hard if hoping to be caught up in a logic of peace is Kerala.  Kerala is a small, populous, and not nearly famous-enough state on the southwest tip of India. Peace there has arguably watered a soil in which more peace flourishes. Kerala, I will explore in subsequent posts, is living evidence that most, even all, the wars that humans have fought over the last hundred years have been murderously wasted effort.

Footnote

1. This was, in fact, a major reason that the Central American nation of Costa Rica abolished its own army in 1948—an example other nations, my own especially, would do well to follow.  Costa Rica is not the subject of this essay of course, but worth a mention in this context.

Ian Hansen, PhD

Ian Hansen, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Behavioral Sciences Department at York College, City University of New York, with a research focus on social psychology, religion, ideology, tolerance, and support for peace and pluralism. His core research interest is investigating psychological “odd bedfellows” phenomena with regard to religion and ideology.  He is also an active member in Psychologists for Social Responsibility, and served as its 2017 president.