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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27236 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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In no other people is there the same extraordinary gap between the achievements of the diaspora and the abject squalor of the homeland.

And that, really, is the Indian Question. Are they an intellectual elite of fifty or a hundred million capable of Denmark-tier (or at least Israel-tier, let’s say) civilization were they not sadly chained to a billion 80 IQ commoners?

The problem with this narrative is that one would expect that at least, like white South Africans, the smarter Brahmins would have created some semblance of high civilization if only for themselves.

And yet as I have noted, even in wealthy parts of Delhi and Mumbai garbage piles in the streets, random cows and other animals stand around, and the exteriors of the homes of the rich often appear crumbling or at least unkept (even if the interiors are pristine). Even many temples, which one would assume would be highest priority for maintenance and cleanliness (as they are in every other religion) and which would presumably be the responsibility of the priestly caste are dirty or otherwise poorly kept, often despite a large contingent of priests and other staff.

The Indians can go to space for nationalist symbolism, but they cannot clean the Ganges, despite it being of central spiritual importance to their faith and the fact that they have had a Hindu nationalist government in power for a decade. I read this article about Varanasi which quotes a Brahmin priest, whose day job is a professor of engineering, who still drinks from the water each day despite knowing how contaminated it is by fecal matter, corpses and so on. A show of faith, certainly, but why must it even happen? Obviously this is a country that has enough engineers to clean the river. (They try, but it appears halfheartedly.)

What gives? Even when China was a poor communist shithole, places like Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan were rapidly developing, it wasn’t like you had to look hard in 1975 for evidence of Chinese achievement. But the Indian nations in the world - including diaspora nations in the Caribbean and the Pacific like Guyana and Fiji - all seem to suffer from similar issues.

I'm going to go out on a limb and blame colonialism, Yes, really.

There's much the same problem in Ireland. I've often grumbled that we have no sense of the built heritage; we're scrabbling around trying to create tourist spots based on very dodgy grounds (ancient east coast etc.) while we've permitted, or in many cases destroyed, the kind of heritage that would be attractive. Germany and other European countries have pretty little towns (or even cities) where the Old Traditional Buildings are the main attraction, hell even England manages to have the idea of the idyllic villages (where the murder rate is sky-high) as tourist bait.

We don't. We let our towns and cities collapse, and any new building was and is poor copies of Brutalist or modern architecture. 'Development' meant, in the 60s and 70s, knocking down the old buildings and selling on the sites for massive profits.

Part of it definitely is that the attitude was "we lived in thatched cottages when we were peasants without a pot to piss in, but we've moved on from that" since such housing was not seen as quaint 'cottagecore' but stark reminders of poverty and deprivation. In Dublin, the elegant Georgian terraces had become inner-city slums.

But part of it definitely also was because the British being in charge, and being the ones responsible for everything, down to the local landlords, took away initiative from the locals. You had no power to do anything for yourself, so you became used to not doing anything. Somebody else would make those decisions, decide what should and shouldn't be done, what should and shouldn't be repaired and in what manner.

(There's also the folk stories about not being too visibly striving and improving, as that would just jack up your rent; e.g. stories such as the tenant who saved up for years to afford to buy a fine new coat, and one day the agent/landlord himself sheltered in the cottage from a storm; the tenant proudly lent his new coat to the visitor, and the next day it was sent back with a note saying that if he could afford to dress that well he could afford to pay higher rent. The higher rent eventually meant eviction as no, he could not afford it).

Then we got independence, but the same old mindset prevailed: if the gate falls down, just tie it back on with bailing twine to the fencepost. Don't repair crumbing walls and ditches. Knock down, instead of preserving and repairing, the old architecture. Sure, it'll do. It's somebody else's business to worry about that.

I wonder if there is something of the same mindset in Indians post-the Brits? 'Not my job, not my place; someone else will make the decision' and 'oh well it's good enough'.

Being ruled by a culturally distinct elite is not an unusual condition for human societies. It is very much the norm. European colonization simply meant that the culturally distinct elite came from a bit further away. Before the British, India was largely ruled by Islamic-Persian-Mongolic-Turkic elites. You will be hard-pressed to find many corners of the world where this is not the case. At most, the foreign elite just goes native and adapts to local customs after a while.

If you are looking for an explanation of why many modern independent nationalist "democratic" states are such failures, then you should perhaps realize that their current condition is a highly unusual development in history.

There's probably something to that, but it explains too much.

We let our towns and cities collapse, and any new building was and is poor copies of Brutalist or modern architecture. 'Development' meant, in the 60s and 70s, knocking down the old buildings and selling on the sites for massive profits.

Part of it definitely is that the attitude was "we lived in thatched cottages when we were peasants without a pot to piss in, but we've moved on from that" since such housing was not seen as quaint 'cottagecore' but stark reminders of poverty and deprivation. In Dublin, the elegant Georgian terraces had become inner-city slums.

But part of it definitely also was because the British being in charge, and being the ones responsible for everything, down to the local landlords, took away initiative from the locals. You had no power to do anything for yourself, so you became used to not doing anything. Somebody else would make those decisions, decide what should and shouldn't be done, what should and shouldn't be repaired and in what manner.

All of this is true in Britain too, just replace "the British" with "the government". To the extent that beautiful areas remain, it's because rich second-hand homeowners and large landholders were able to stave off the 60s/70s socialists and vandal developers.

I suppose you can rescue it with @2rafa's theory that the British colonised ourselves first. There is something to that. But in general I think it's more unusual to have nice, clean well-maintained spaces than the reverse. You (we) need a theory of upkeep, not a theory of decline.

Do you or @2rafa have a link to the self-colonization post?

I don’t. I do recall suggesting that one of the reasons I think British elites are relatively nonplussed about mass immigration is that they don’t really consider themselves the same people as the native working class and don’t care if they’re replaced by other peoples they’ve ruled over before, but I’m not sure if that’s what they’re referring to.

Sorry, perhaps it was a take from somewhere else. It lines up with

British elites are relatively nonplussed about mass immigration is that they don’t really consider themselves the same people as the native working class and don’t care if they’re replaced by other peoples they’ve ruled over before

so maybe that's why I attributed it to you. The idea is that the ruling method which British elites use at home resembles that which was used in the empire - quelling a restive native population by dividing it (often ethnically) and elevating sympathetic puppets with little real support to speak for each of the tribes. The tribes can then be kept busy fighting among themselves while the rulers make inconsistent promises and play arbiter.

Hong Kong and the US were also British colonies.

The US was a settler-colony while Ireland was more a case of classic imperialism. I think FarNearEverywhere should have mentioned "being (an unwilling) part of an empire" as opposed to "colonialism", as it gets at the core idea better.

Northern Ireland was closer to a settler-colony and has similar issues.

In fact NI has fallen behind the Republic.

https://www.thefitzwilliam.com/p/is-northern-ireland-a-failed-state

In Ireland in general a lot of the best architecture, ie the great houses, was deliberately burned by the IRA.

I do remember going to Ireland as part of a school trip and being pretty confused why Dublin's only Landmark seemed to be the Guinness Brewery.

I don't believe this at all. We were never colonized in Sweden and the exact same thing happened.

Also the British in India (notably unlike Ireland) governed through local elites - they had to given that the Indian Civil Service only employed less than 8000 expats - so the idea that local elites lost their initiative due to the effects of British rule seems implausible.

Yeah. I've always found the movie Lagaan insane where they're holding up the existing monarchial despot as being oppressed by having a layer of British taxation on top of his feudalism. Like I understand in the movie the British are enforcing a brutal tax, but it's not like India having droughts and feudal taxation being harsh are some unique invention of the Anglo.

local elites lost their initiative due to the effects of British rule seems implausible.

Local elites were kept on a short leash; if you got any uppity notions about "hey this is our country and I should be governing on my own behalf, not as the puppet satrap of an overseas empire", you got swatted and the British government stepped in to take over and run the entire enterprise directly, instead of letting a trading company do it.

Yes but in a lot of the satraps the previous running of affairs prior to the British was also some flavor of being a Satrap to the Mughals, Maratha or whoever the hell else. And if you were a peasant it didn't make a huge lick of difference who exactly held the reins of power on account of said reins being about 14 social classes above where you were.

I've got a few friends of very upper-caste Indian extraction, and the complaints about the Raj always rang somewhat hollow to me as the vibe was always very 'For a century there we were only the 2nd highest rung of the ladder, and lived lives of luxury that were somewhat obliged to Anglos' ilk whilst trying to uplift the grievances of commoners as being somehow related to their great grandfather who was the vice-chief minister of Commerce for Bombay and dined mightily off his servants.

That's true of all management all the time. If a mid-level line manager gets uppity motions about 'this is my factory and I should be governing on my own behalf, not as a puppet of the CEO', he or she is going to get smacked down. Despite this, different companies/orgs allow very different levels of initiative at lower levels.

And that, really, is the Indian Question. Are they an intellectual elite of fifty or a hundred million capable of Denmark-tier (or at least Israel-tier, let’s say) civilization were they not sadly chained to a billion 80 IQ commoners?

Yes. Assuming they managed to lose the maladaptive cultural baggage they developed. Which they do, at least in the West. Or they wouldn't be model minorities and the single richest ethnic group when it comes to average income in quite a few nations.

And yet as I have noted, even in wealthy parts of Delhi and Mumbai garbage piles in the streets, random cows and other animals stand around, and the exteriors of the homes of the rich often appear crumbling or at least unkept (even if the interiors are pristine).

As I've previously explained to you, rich Indians do not particularly care about that. It's only when they're socialized in a place where that's expected that they put in the effort.

Being richer than 97.23% of our 100k gods, like Ambani, will buy you a sick skyscraper. It won't clean the streets outside. So you become rapidly inured to it and focus on the interior, which is both free from the Hoi Polloi, and also what your peers care about.

Most temples let anyone in who wants to enter. That puts a firm cap on how clean they can be when the average person isn't.

What gives? Even when China was a poor communist shithole, places like Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan were rapidly developing, it wasn’t like you had to look hard in 1975 for evidence of Chinese achievement. But the Indian nations in the world - including diaspora nations in the Caribbean and the Pacific like Guyana and Fiji - all seem to suffer from similar issues.

They have 10-20 IQ points on us. That counts for a lot. It takes a certain baseline level of intelligence for prosociality to really start paying dividends, leaving aside the other benefits of human capital.

Besides, the Indians in places like Guyana and Fiji are descendants of indentured laborers abandoned there by the Brits. They're not the same sampling as the average emigre to the US. I am under the impression they still spank the native populace, South Africa would be a pertinent example.

Being richer than 97.23% of our 100k gods, like Ambani, will buy you a sick skyscraper. It won't clean the streets outside.

But it will clean the streets outside, friend. Google says Ambani is worth 97 billion dollars. Street cleaning is no arcane secret, many nations have essentially perfected it. The machines are readily sold by all the usual manufacturers. Salaries for manual laborers are very low. Training the local population is only a matter of hiring traffic and street wardens for a few years until the people get used to it. Google suggests the average Mumbai taxi driver makes about $3000 a year, and I suppose we can assume that street cleaners are unlikely to be paid much more. If the city objects, India is a corrupt enough place that the country’s richest man can bribe them. A guy worth $97bn can clean the streets outside his skyscraper, he can hire 10,000 men to do it by hand if he wants to (that would amount to what, a paltry $50m a year?), it’s absurd to discuss this banal issue solved in every developed country and even many poorer countries for much less money as some impossibility!

Downtown Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, even Jakarta (!) are so much cleaner than the wealthier parts of Mumbai or New Delhi. So is Windhoek. So are parts of Accra and Addis, even. What holds India back? It’s not some kind of upstanding socialist government insisting that the rich can’t do this; as the Adani reports showed, the government is clearly in the pocket of the billionaires, who are largely high IQ and high caste. The only explanation is lack of will, not among the peasants but among the rich.

And why should they bother, when they can travel abroad to their mansions in London or their penthouse in Singapore? But again, the rich Malaysians have those too, and they still work to make Kuala Lumpur a better place to live. I’m often criticized for my own elitism, but I don’t blame all of society’s problems on the poor in whose nation I share.

I had much the same argument with my sister about cleaning up San Francisco and she simply refused to concede that any San Francisco elites actually care about stepping over human waste on their way to the office. Perhaps it's the same in India.

In San Francisco at least one can point to some kind of ‘war’ among the elite, with intense power struggles over the lax treatment of the homeless and some tech lords taking strong, opposing political stances, Alex Soros getting involved, the drama around the DA recall and school board stuff, national politicians using it as a key indicator, huge dissent within Silicon Valley etc. Yes, it’s still a dump, but also (a) the nice parts like Pac Heights where rich people live are mostly still ‘relatively’ clean and (b) it’s a major topic of conversation. In Mumbai there is no great public obstacle to cleaning the streets, people don’t worship garbage the way the left worships homeless vagrants in major progressive cities in the US. In India generally there is some religious sensitivity around curbing the rights of cows specifically, but they’re not the main issue and there are solutions acceptable to religious conservatives.

Deep insecurity. The best Indian doesn't want to improve India because he doesn't consider himself Indian, in a much deeper part of the lizard brain than Indians staring at any and all white people they see can convey. The most surefire way to get a desi supermodel's parents to force her to marry you is to have a British, Canadian, or US passport.

I asked almost this exact question to a (native) friend while living in Mumbai. We were driving past this dudes skyscraper and I asked him how people feel about the fact that this super rich guy has a skyscraper to live in but it’s surrounded by absolute filth and poverty. Isn’t he at least embarrassed?

He said it’s because of the Hindu belief in Karma and reincarnation. Basically: those people living outside of the skyscraper fucked up in a past life and this is their punishment. The rich did well and this is their reward.

Personally I would assume that cleaning the streets would be a karma earning thing to do. If I was rich and wanted to secure a good life next go around, cleaning the streets and helping the poor would be high on my list of priorities, but this could just be me assuming me own, Catholic, culture as the default. A little googling backs this up; among religions Christians are more charitable than Hindus (or Muslims): https://www.jstor.org/stable/41940751#:~:text=the%20relationship%20between%20religion%20and%20philanthropic%20behavior.,%2C%20Hinduism%2C%20and%20Buddhism).

He said it’s because of the Hindu belief in Karma and reincarnation. Basically: those people living outside of the skyscraper fucked up in a past life and this is their punishment. The rich did well and this is their reward.

Lol. Lmao. Maybe that's what your friend personally believes, but that's nowhere near representative of the actual reasons.

Rich people are usually tolerated by the poor pretty much everywhere (not that they have the power to change it).

Most Indians are firm believers in meritocracy, regardless of particular quibbles about corruption, nepotism and so on.

This explanation is just as daft as claiming that the reason why a struggling but pious redneck in the States doesn't burn down someone's McMansion is because he expects them to be equalized in Heaven.

Lol. Lmao. Maybe that's what your friend personally believes, but that's nowhere near representative of the actual reasons.

Yeah I'm not a Hindu and admittedly know nothing about the culture. Some googling does seem to suggest that Hindus aren't particularly charitable, though.

At first I thought it was that the rich don't use the public realm because of the oppressive climate, which makes being inside an air conditioned mall preferable to a walk outside. But again there are many countries with equatorial / tropical / hot-and-humid climates that don't have India's issues, so that can't be it. Even for entirely selfish reasons, wouldn't it be nice to occasionally be able to walk outside? Wouldn't it be nice to have a good view from your palace skyscraper instead of looking down at squalor? These considerations don't appear to be of great import.

Sure, Ambani can pull that off, if he made it a priority. That leaves about 99.999% of us. Certainly the few hundred million middle class who wish it were otherwise.

The only explanation is lack of will, not among the peasants but among the rich.

And why should they bother, when they can travel abroad to their mansions in London or their penthouse in Singapore? But again, the rich Malaysians have those too, and they still work to make Kuala Lumpur a better place to live. I’m often criticized for my own elitism, but I don’t blame all of society’s problems on the poor in whose nation

I am in agreement there's a lack of will. I disagree that emigration is the most suitable explanation for it. Like I said, this has been a problem well before UMC Indians could, with only a little bit of effort, flee to the West, if not the US.

Sure, Ambani can pull that off, if he made it a priority. That leaves about 99.999% of us. Certainly the few hundred million middle class who wish it were otherwise

There's clearly either a revealed preference here or some kind of skill issue. India is around 41% urbanised. Take away the rural classes and a "few hundred million" people represents like 30-50% of the urban population, which would be even higher in non-slum areas. If those people and a smattering of billionaires can't or won't clean up their cities then I'm not sure what would get them to. There doesn't appear to be that spirit of municipal capitalism that was prominent in, say, the late 19th century in England. Mumbai must have greater resource than 1870s Birmingham, and look at Chamberlain! And if not grand paternalistic mayors, then at least naked self interest to carve out a space for those few hundred million you mention.

I am claiming it's revealed preference, to the extent that applies when considering coordination problems.

I'm pretty sure I have an accurate idea of how dirty 1870s London is, let alone from the horse shit, and believe me most of the country is nowhere near that bad.

By the time most people become billionaires or at least multimillionaires, they're used to taking the overall grime for granted, and besides they're going from enclave to enclave in Audis with the windows rolled up, it's not like they have to walk.

What was the population density in 1800s coal country?

The more people around you, the higher chance one or more is going to engage in some commons-trampling. Maybe not even on purpose, given that sanitation and transport are not trivial problems.

Well England's population density was around 160/km² in 1870, 22m in total. Maharashtra has a population density of 365/km². Mumbai now must be 3 or 4x denser than the West Midlands of the time if the state as a whole is that dense. I don't think density is the key at all (look at the Ganges valley, UP and Bihar combined is ~USA worth of people!).

To be clear, I’m saying higher density makes things harder. Especially as automation, even steam power, cuts demand for labor.

That’s my answer to @2rafa and others who are asking why the Brahmins haven’t built a shining city on a hill: there are already people there! And on the next hill, and the next. A billionaire can surely buy some of them out, but how many? How long before you get one of those desperate holdouts like in China?

Or to put it another way—Central Park sits at the heart of one of the most expensive cities on the planet. Some of the leading US firms look out over its greenery. It’s also open to the public. The latter completely dominates public perception, because one big apple spoils the bunch. If all the wealth and power of New York can’t overcome the noise floor, why should India have a solution?

That's my mistake. But I still don't see how density is a reasonable cause- there's the classic Japan example, swathes of China, Singapore (any city state).

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