Modernization

Modernity in all of its complexity has been, at various points in history, packaged together and sold as a solution to social problems, most specifically with regards to post-colonial states. The approach to modernization – or development – has been for the most part predicated on two rough ideas: economic reform and political reform. The most recent iteration of the modernization program is the so-called Washington Consensus, although one admittedly notices scant mention of this concept in the literature of the past half-decade. The three pillars of the Washington Consensus are generally understood to be privatization, liberalization and deregulation, and these three pillars have been championed to varying degrees of success by the Bretton Woods institutions, namely the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Structural adjustment programs in the form of loans and their enforced repayment provide the carrot and the stick of Gramscian hegemony. The point of the present discussion is certainly not to provide another critique of the neo-liberal paradigm;

rather, it provides an opening for exploring a key concept, modernization, through the lens of liberalism.

First, however, it is important to expose the idea of modernization to a mechanical or practical critique of sorts. E.A. Brett (2009) contends, “Dramatic changes are occurring in DCs [developed countries] and LDCs [least developed countries] that cannot be properly understood, even in the former, by using orthodox theories that explain how societies maintain existing systems rather than manage fundamental change” (3). This speaks to some

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larger theoretical issues, namely the wrongheadedness of assuming that a phenomenon can be understood with reference to an old, possibly universal theory which is ill-equipped to address it. Brett, in discussing the ideas underlying development, adds:

…no two countries are likely to use the same combination of political, economic and social institutions to manage their transitions to modernity, but none can ignore the influence of the principles of freedom, equality, scientific objectivity and cooperative interdependence that originated in the western enlightenment project (3).

These ideals are well and good and are worth believing in, but the interaction of these ideals with the social world must be interrogated, lest they become meaningless.

Rehbein and Souza (2014), for example, refer to this embedded liberalism as symbolic liberalism (35) and argue that the de facto reference to liberal ideals, oftentimes written into the constitutions of countries, is not entirely genuine and even worse, works to obscure the ways in which social inequality functions and is reproduced. While this is certainly a compelling argument, it does not really speak to any fatal flaws in the liberal program itself but rather to its imperfect applicability. To suggest that a country with a liberal (Lockean) constitution must be perfectly liberal would be an error. If one were to measure social justice on the basis of the liberalness of a constitution, the United States, India and South Africa, for example, would be the most egalitarian, just societies in the world. That this is not the case provides an opening for arguments like those introduced by Rehbein and Souza.

The communitarianism versus liberalism debate can be left unaddressed. For the present purposes, however, it is necessary to explore the idea that symbolic liberalism has veiled attempts to understand and explain the social mechanisms which work to reproduce inequality. That liberalism is equated with representative democracy and the construction of political constitutions – or “laws of the lands” – can be taken as a fact. From there, however, it gets a bit foggy, because laws bestowing rights to individuals are not always – or even only seldom – delivered to those individuals. Communal and social mechanisms, mechanisms which happen outside of the realm of questions of legality and rights, prevent their transmission, which is why the most flowering constitutions do not offer citizens much in terms of being able to, again borrowing from Sen (2003), turn capabilities into functionings.

This disjuncture between “liberal” laws and “illiberal” societies or communities, and liberal

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emphases in the social sciences, effectively obscures ideas like social ascription.²² Symbolic liberalism, the idea that liberalism is a chimera which obscures critical social issues, will be on full display during the comparison between the German and Indian education systems, namely as it relates to their respective postwar and post-independence constitutions.

Within academia itself, this symbolic liberalism also plays an outsized role in shaping discourse. Wallerstein (1999), for example, argues that the division of the social sciences into

“disciplines” (economics, political science and sociology) represents a schematic model which reflects the liberal dogma and that these three disciplines should rather be treated as one because they are not autonomous (123). While this idea certainly is not new, it contains an important critique of the social sciences and reveals significant blind spots. Wallerstein furthers his critique that institutions which have an impact on the social world are approached as: “being economic, political, and sociocultural…but such designations are in fact inaccurate, since all the institutions act in ways that are simultaneously political, economic, and sociocultural, and could not be effective if they did not” (124). Liberalism divides the study of the social world into disciplines, and important ways of seeing the social (or political or economic) world are lost between the areas of demarcation. This simultaneity of disciplinary relevance requires, however, one important and enormous addition: history.

The expectation that liberalism or its ideological bedfellow, modernization, can offer a suitable, easily adaptable and universal social and political program is easy to rebuke as mere fantasy. Tamer Söyler (2015), for example, uses Ikea instruction manuals/graphics as a metaphor for the pitfalls of modernization programs. To paraphrase, Ikea operates in scores of nations, each one with its own particular culture, language and even spatial and mechanical understanding, and seeks to ensure that the same bookshelf, ideally, can be put together by individual consumers across the world with very few problems. The instructions, of course,

22 Alexis de Tocqueville (1998), whose Democracy in America still represents one of the most insightful, wide-ranging social scientific works ever produced, observed the following about democratic communities: “for equality their passion is ardent, insatiable, incessant, invincible; they call for equality in freedom; and if they cannot obtain that, they still call for equality in slavery. They will endure poverty, servitude, barbarism, but they will not endure aristocracy” (204). Published in two volumes (in 1835 and 1840, respectively), Tocqueville was attempting to understand how democracy functioned in the United States. If his observations had only been true, that democracy is coterminous with equality, the crisis of dramatically increasing economic, social and cultural inequality would not be an issue.

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are loaded with cultural assumptions about how things fit together, and they appear to be the same, meaning they appear to be universal.

This does not mean, however, that the same bookshelves will be assembled at the same speed and with the same ease; rather, things can become more complicated based on:

the relation of the translation to the original; the relation of the assembler to the words and diagrams; and the relation of the words and diagrams to the respective symbolic universe, among other things. While the input is universal – the manuals are standardized – and the output is assumed to be universal, the end result cannot be guaranteed (Söyler 2015: 66-67).

Modernization and development programs have unfolded in a similar manner. The input is assumed to be universal, and the embedded expectation is that the output, too, will be universal. The relational assumptions in between, however, preclude the results from being in line with initial expectations. If such is the case for something as simple and banal as furniture, how can it not be the case for societies and their education systems, which house myriad relations and their complications?