Jeremy Seabrook
By 2005, there were 83,000 dollar millionaires in India. The country showed, after South Korea, the highest annual increase in millionaires (a 20 per cent leap over 2004). In the United States, approximately one person in a hundred is a millionaire (about 2.67 million).
This news was published in India as an index of progress: the ultimate measure of development is, after all, the increase in wealth, since it is now only by the grace of the fabulous accumulation of the rich that the poor have the faintest of hope of relief from their wretchedness.
The triumphalism of wealth is scarcely a new thing in India, as the splendidly extravagant monuments of its past rulers testify. But side by side with such exorbitance more modest beliefs have also co-existed, not only the virtue of sparing use of resources, but also of the inter-dependence of all things, both living and inanimate.
If globalization really meant that each culture, civilization or country would bring to the world the treasures of its own history and experience, India would certainly have spoken to the excesses and waste of global consumerism. Instead, India has discarded its store of painfully acquired wisdom and understanding of the satisfactions of sufficiency, in favour of a development which guts the earth of its natural wealth as quickly as possible; to this end, subsistence, farmers, Adivasis and indigenous peoples have been robbed of their ancestral lands, and these have been presented as a gift to corporations, now revered as the supreme generators of wealth in the world. Relief from want is not found in wealth, but in the emancipatory power of sufficiency.
India has (or perhaps, had) at least two precious lessons to teach the world. One is certainly the ugliness and brutality of coercive poverty; and the other is in the joy of elective simplicity. Relief from want is not found in wealth, but in the emancipatory power of sufficiency. Unfortunately, these two things – poverty and restraint – have been represented by the dominant global model of development as one and the same thing, with the result that in the headlong flight from poverty, the very idea of a modest and sustainable self-reliance has also been lost.
If these late, wise times have discovered that human nature is greedy and selfish, what does this say of the nature of human beings who lived in accordance with reverence for the panch Mahabhutas, upon which all living beings depend for their very existence? (These are the five basic elements, prithvi, earth, aap, water, tejas, fire or light, vayu, air and akasa, space.) Was the nature of those people less than human, that they believed all living beings are born and evolve out of these elements, and that in death they go back to them? Was their conviction that no generation should leave a depleted resource-base to its successor mere superstition? Were they in pitiable error, that they had not perceived the true motives of all human endeavour, that egotism and rapacity, by means of which development and progress of humankind can solely be assured? Perhaps, after all, our version of human nature has not laid bare the incontestable root mechanisms of human behaviour: maybe it has less to do with the nature of humanity than with the nature of capitalism.
How many millionaires will be needed in India, before the most humble and deprived persons living in the remotest regions no longer feel the pinch of hunger? When Ruskin wrote ‘Unto this last as unto thee’, which Gandhi later reinterpreted as sarvodaya (the well-being of all), they were articulating a critique of political economy which has subsequently been overwhelmed by a show of wealth calculated to render such moral concerns archaic. It is time once more to re-affirm the distinction between poverty and sufficiency.
It is time once more to re-affirm the distinction between poverty and sufficiency. For in a world in which the very concept of enough has been banished in favour of the urgency of more (the ideological underpinning of the global goal of perpetual economic growth), anything which is not constant increase is deemed to be an intolerable impoverishment.
At the same time, some understanding of the difference between plenty and excess is also needed. The potlatch of waste built into the global paradigm causes one part of humanity to suffer the ills of exorbitance, while a majority struggles in vain for the security that would come with an assured sustenance. For all the sophisticated measurements of modern economics, there exists no way of assessing what makes for contentment: indeed, the undermining of any such stable condition is part of the mystery of the compulsions of permanent growth, since only by the spread of dissatisfaction can people be urged to strive beyond satiety for an increase, which nevertheless fails to still desires which have no place in the material world.
Somewhere, in the ample and unexplored spaces between sufficiency and plenty, the needs of all people may be met. And those who remain tormented by longings and yearnings which overflow these limits should look to appease them in other ways. Those people who actually long for infinite growth, endless expansion, limitlessness and the fulfilment of bottomless desire should apply to the religions of the world, which exist precisely to cater for these things, and should not expect economic growth, however dramatic, however florid, to answer them.
Somewhere, in the ample and unexplored spaces between sufficiency and plenty, the needs of all people may be met. In other words, the separation of economic ideology from other-worldly belief is long overdue. Instead of the theology of wealth-creation and the alchemy of millionaire-making, it is time to turn the attention of human endeavours to answering basic needs, which remain unmet despite wealth such as the world has never seen; needs which have equally been by-passed by institutionalised dissatisfactions which see only in limitless accumulation a remedy for all the unfulfilled desires of our lives.
That India had within the celebrated diversity of its culture some understanding of these matters might have been its unique contribution to globalization, that mixture of enriching impoverishment and immobilizing opulence. Instead, it has opted, in a classic colonial transaction, to exchange the wisdom of the ages, the preciously hoarded non-monetary wealth of the spirit and the heart, for a handful of showy baubles, which its new rich flaunt as though these were the jewels which they have trampled into the dust.
The article was published in June 2006
