Combating the Interface between Religious Fundamentalism and Market Fundamentalism: Lessons from India

Amartya Mukhopadhyay*

Fundamentalism: A Word and a Concept

Before interrogating the known interface and affinity between religious fundamentalism and ‘market fundamentalism’ in the present-day world, and suggesting the ways to undo their affinity, it should be noted that the word fundamentalism comes from Christianity itself, with a ‘made-in- America’ written all over its body, however much the US might decry fundamentalist movements all over the world after 9/11. Though Lutheran and Calvinist Reformation went to the fundaments of Christianity in order to rid it of the vices, which institutionalized Christianity smuggled into it, 1yet the term fundamentalism is of far more recent coinage. It was first invented to describe the reaction of U.S. Presbyterians and then of other Protestant groups to two disturbing intellectual trends in Christian religious practices: i) ‘high’, rationalist criticism informed by a new historical approach to biblical studies; and ii) the increasing currency of Darwinian theories concerning the origin and genealogy of the human species in public school curricula and educated parlance. In 1910, to counter these challenges, U.S. Presbyterians drew up a list of criteria, called fundamental principles of the true Christian faith, for discriminating between true believers and others. These were: the inerrancy of Scripture, the virgin birth of Jesus, the death of Jesus on the cross as a substitutionary atonement for original sin, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, and the authenticity of the miracles. Other lists of basic beliefs, published in series of volumes, and regularly reworked from 1910 to 1915, were marketed to a mass audience of believers. But it was only in 1920 that the authors of these lists began describing themselves as ‘fundamentalists’. Later inclusion of anti-Darwinism as a basic belief led ultimately to the famous Scopes ‘Monkey Trial’ in Tennessee in 1925, in which a teacher was convicted under a state law which forbade the teaching of Darwinism.2 Of course, just the coinage of the term ‘fundamentalism’ and its grafting into religious practices in the 1920s did not make the US the hotbed of religious fundamentalism in the sense in which we understand the term today. One should remember how since the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 to the enactment of the Bill of Rights a deep tradition of pluralism eroded the sway of Puritanism and ensured the evolution from faith and toleration to secularism in the US constitution.3 While historically speaking, “Americans, by and large, have relied on religion as a source of moral unity… The U.S. Framers, however, rejected any attempt

* Professor Amartya Mukhopadhyay teaches Political Science at Calcutta University, West Bengal. 1 Quentin Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought: Volume Two, The Age of Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 3-108, and 189-348. 2 See Mary Ann Tétreault “Contending Fundamentalisms: Religious Revivalism and the Modern World”, in (Eds.) Mary Ann Tétreault and Robert A. Denemark, Gods, Guns & Globalization: Religious Radicalism and International Political Economy, Volume 13, International Political Economy Yearbook (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner, 2004), p.1; and Iain Mclean and Alistair McMillan, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), p.75. 3 See A. James Reichley, Faith in Politics (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2002), pp. 158.

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at enforced religious uniformity, regarding attempts to dictate to the soul as violations of natural, unalienable rights. And the Federal Constitution was “silent on religion”.4 For a long time after that religious freedom was a pillar of individual freedom in America.

However, instances of a fundamentalist, in the sense of going back to fundaments, turn in religion after application of rationalist criticism and social Darwinism happened also in respect of Hinduism in colonial India, much before in the West. Raja Rammohun Roy (1772-1833) started it through founding a Brāhmosabhā in 1830. But after his departure to England and death there the movement got moribund. The Tattvabodhinī Sabhā, a body established by Rabindranath Tagore’s father Debendranath Tagore (1817-1905) for religious discussions in 1840 took over its charge in 1842. Actually the name of the new religious doctrine as Brāhmodharma, in place of the rather cumbrous name of ‘Vedāntapratipādyadharma’ (religion aiming at the exposition of the Vedanta, an Indian religio-metaphysical school), was fixed in a meeting of the Tattvabodhinī Sabhā in 1847. After a gifted and zealous young man of the name of Kesabchandra Sen (1838-1884) joined the new order in 1858 as a disciple of Debendranath, his efforts at reforming the Hindu religion got a new boost. It was through his initiatives that from a medium of exploration of the doctrinal aspects of Hinduism, Brāhmodharma turned into a denominational body, with its own rules of ceremonies and social functions. The followers were called ‘Brāhmo’, i.e. people who wanted to take Hinduism back to its Upanişadic fundamentals and monotheism.5 But before long the movement was beset by sectarianisms, over the criteria of determining fundamentals,6 and Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), one of its greatest proponents had to take many pains to explain why Brāhmodharma was not a different religion but a reformed part of Hinduism, and had to give an architectonic definition of the word Hindu to preclude the theoretical chances of such sectarianism.7 Likewise Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay (1838-1894) also wanted to apply rationalist criticism and social Darwinism to prove the superiority of Hinduism over Christianity in a very aggressive manner.8 But neither ‘Brāhmodharma’ nor

4 Wilson Carey McWilliams, “American Democracy and Politics of Faith”, in (Eds.) Hugh Heclo and Wilfred M. McClay, Religion Returns to the Public Square: Faith and Policy in America (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2003), p. 145. 5 See Sivanath Sastri, History of the Brahmo Samaj (Calcutta: Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, 1974). Raja Rammohun Roy was the principal founder of this movement. For the best contemporary study of him see Sophia Dobson Collet, Life and Letters of Raja Rammohun Roy, (eds) Prabhat Chandra Ganguli and Dilip Kumar Biswas (Calcutta: Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, 1962). 6 See Prabhat Kumar Mukhopadhyay, Rabindrajībanī o Rabindrasāhitya Prabeśak [Life of Rabindranath and a Primary Introduction to His Literature] (Calcutta: Visvabharaī Granthanbibhag, 1985), Vol.1, pp.7-12. Also see Prashanta Kumar Pal, Rabijībanī (Life of Tagore) (Kolkata: Ananda Publishers Private Ltd.,), Vol. 1, pp. 12-16. 7 Tagore, “Ātmaparichai”, Tattvabodhinī, Baiśakh, 1319 (May, 1912), excerpted in Hindu-Mussalman Samparka, compiled by Nityapriya Ghosh (Kolkata: Mŗttaka, 2003), pp.77-98. 8 Partha Chatterjee, one of the most renowned political scientists of India, shows how Bamkim attempted a “rationalist critique of Christianity” to prove the superiority of Hinduism over Christianity as “a suitable moral philosophy for man living in living in a scientific age”, and made use of Darwinism to that effect in an essay entitled “Mill Darwin and Hindu Religion”, originally published in Bañgadarśan , and later changed to “What Science Has to Say about [Hindu] Trinity”. See Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 67-8. For the original Bengali article by Bankim (“Tridev Sambandhe Vijnānśāştra Ki Bale”), see Bankim Chandra

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Hinduism generated the forces of religious fundamentalism in the modern sense because of this, and at least up to the 1980s post-colonial India was free from it. Defining Religious Fundamentalism and Market Fundamentalism

So, before we move any further we need to clarify the meaning of religious fundamentalism– in the modern sense – and also by market fundamentalism; what are the forces that have given rise to them; and what have caused their present elective affinity? Only after these points are cleared can any strategy of effecting a breach in their present relationship be delineated. Religious fundamentalism has many facets. One has to do with ‘fighting’ in five ways or contexts. The first is ‘fighting back’. Fundamentalists do not hate being seen as militants, for “they are reactive”, and “fundamentalists begin as traditionalists who perceive some challenge or threat to their core identity’, be it social or personal. The second is a ‘fight for’ the worldview “they have inherited or adopted” or “their conceptions of what ought to go on in matters of life and death in the world of the clinic and the laboratory”. The third is a “fight with”, typically with a particularly chosen repository of resources which one might think of as weapons”, consisting of “real or presumed pasts … actual or imagined original conditions and concepts”, and selected as fundamental. The fourth is a “fight against” others”, whether general or specified enemies, both inside and outside the group. The outsiders include many social types: “the infidel, the agent of antithetical sacred powers, the modernizer”, or even a friendly messenger negotiating a compromise or a middle ground. The insider may be a moderate, making concessions to modernity or trying to adapt the movement to changing realities. The fifth involves a “fight under”, whether the God in theistic religions or the signs of some transcendent reference”, as in non-theistic religions like Buddhism or Confucianism.9 But another facet of religious fundamentalism is linked with a combination of interpretation and activism. One renowned Muslim includes within its meaning not only a “rather narrow and literalist interpretation of the Bible” in the context of Christian fundamentalism; and “fires of fanaticism and extremism forced upon them [Muslims] in the name of Islam” in the context of Islamic fundamentalism.10

Market fundamentalisms, by contrast, has a more agreed meaning and connotation. It is a term coined by financier George Soros. In his book The Crisis of Global Capitalism, Soros refers to it as the belief that “the common interest is served by allowing everyone to look out for his or her own interests and that the attempts to protect the common interest by collective mechanism distort the market mechanism”.11 It believes that “competitive markets are always right – or at least they produce results that cannot be improved. The financial markets, in particular are supposed to bring prosperity and stability – the more so, if they are completely free from government interference in

Chattopadhyay, Bankim Racanabalī, Vol.2, (ed.) Jogesh Chandra Bagal (Kolkata: Sahitya Samsad, 2004). We are not entering into the arguments. 9 (Eds.) Martin Marty and R. Scott Appleby, Fundamentalisms Observed, The Fundamentalism Project (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. ix-x. 10 Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Traditional Islam in the Modern World (London: KPI, 1987), pp.304, 313. 11 Quoted in Brink Lindsey, Against the Dead Hand: The Uncertain Struggle for Global Capitalism (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2001), p.6.

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their operation and unrestricted in their global reach.” 12 So, Soros uses the term to describe the unregulated capitalism favoured by institutions such the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and by the G/5 nations led by the US.13 The governments of these countries believed and they still do that the public interest is best served by the “accumulated effects of freeing people to pursue their private interests”. The state is viewed as a nuisance or a “nanny”, sapping individual initiative and “people’s capacity to take responsibility for their own future”. Competition from the private sector against the public sector and competition within the public domain are regarded as the surest recipes to improve quality and raise standards. Where choice and competition cannot bring about improvement, intervention and force is expected to ensure the minimum standards.

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A good textbook on the market identifies four distinct ideological characteristics of market fundamentalism. The first is refusal of contrary evidence, possibly the key feature of market fundamentalism, from which all other secondary features derive. It has been shown that a number of developing and transitional countries, forced to adopt it, have seen deepening gulf between the rich and the poor, destabilization of the middle class, un-employment, under-investment in education, bribery, corruption and gangsterism. Yet, the failures of their policies do not dissuade the proponents of this doctrine to change their mind. Rather, it hardens their resolve to pursue these policies further. The second characteristic is fetishism and reification. This implies failure to examine policies in their wider context, and failure to abandon fetishized and reified notions of the market, instead of focusing on their social realities. The third feature of prescriptivism means that this unreal conception of the market makes the market fundamentalists offer it as the universal solution to social, economic, and political problems, counterfactually to the development needs of these developing societies. The fourth feature of hypocrisy relates to the readiness of market fundamentalists to propagate policies for other countries that they would not even touch in their own countries, or to preach free market outside while practicing protectionism at home. The fifth and final feature of denial of government refers to denigrating the role of the government, even where it is absolutely necessary, as ‘interference’.15

Some critical social scientists, however, do not give market fundamentalism separate theoretical status, but rather regard it as part of the neo-liberal package. As one puts it, “… neo-liberalism covers a vast array of practices, ideas, and objectives. Distinctive though, to neo-liberalism are four common elements: market fundamentalism, consumerism, welfare retrenchment, and liberal governance. Faith in the market is clearly the primary feature of neo-liberalism, the belief in the virtues of unrestrained exchange

12 Soros quoted in Micheline R. Ishay, The History of Human Rights: from Ancient Times to the Globalization Era, with A New Preface (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 2008), p. xviii. 13 See (Ed) Stuart Sim, The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, Second Edition (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2005), p.268 14 Andy Hargreaves, Teaching in the Knowledge Society: Education in the Age of Security (New York: Teachers College Press, 2003), p.73. 15 Alan Aldridge, The Market (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), pp. 49-51

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and the commoditisation of virtually all aspects of human life.”16 Some simply call it the Washington Consensus because of the dominance of Americans in the development and propagation of this ideology and the location of its primary institutions and leaders in Washington D.C. Some economists again think of market fundamentalism as an offshoot of the brand of liberalism generated by the Washington Consensus. As Stiglitz puts it:

The Washington Consensus policies … were based on a simplistic model of the market economy, the competitive equilibrium model, in which Adam Smith’s invisible hand … works perfectly. Because in this model there is no need for government — that is, free unfettered ‘liberal’ markets work perfectly — the Washington Consensus policies are sometimes referred to as ‘neo-liberal’, based on ‘market fundamentalism’, a resuscitation of laissez- faire policies that were popular in some circles in the nineteenth century.17

Bandana Shiva, in her offbeat way, bases market fundamentalism, which “redefines life as commodity, society as economy, and the market as the means and end of the human enterprise” on two other types of fundamentalism, “technological fundamentalism and trade fundamentalism., both of which are emerging as the tools of this new totalitarianism”.18 Market Fundamentalism as Bad Economics

The view that market fundamentalism is bad in economics is now pretty well established even in mainstream economics and social science, not to speak of its acceptance among anti-globalization activists. As a leading economist points out: “Most academic economists couch their support for free trade in terms of a broader set of economic policies, because they know that unbridled free trade is not a perfect policy. Nonetheless, there is an incredibly powerful section of the international economic elite that believes, explicitly or implicitly, that unbridled free trade is always a good idea. This belief almost invariably comes with its correlate: that economic markets work best when government stays out of the way. This ideology has come to be known as “market fundamentalism”19 Another economist argues in the same vein:

The statistical records of the 19990s show beyond doubt that the market

fundamentalism – the quasi-religious thesis that preaches that markets are harmony-producing machines – has caused great damage. A reaction is slowly mounting. Joseph Stiglitz’s whistle blowing and the refusal of the World Bank’s development report to yield to the pressures from the U.S. government to change the report are two examples of a mounting reaction. So are the protests at Seattle and Davos, and

16 See Mustapha Kamal Pasha,“Hegemony, Perilous Empire and Human Security”, in (eds.) Joseph A. Camilleri, Larry Marshal, Michális S. Michael, Michael T. Siegel, Asia-Pacific Geopolitics: Hegemony vs. Human Security (Cheltenhan, Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2007), p.35. 17 Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2003), p.73. 18 Vandana Shiva, India Divided: Diversity and Democracy under Attack (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), pp. 55-56. 19 Jeff Colgan, The Promise and Peril of International Trade (Peterborough, Not.: Broadview Press, 2005), p. 44.

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the establishment of the ATTACK (the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of citizens).20

But it was really Stiglitz who was one of the first to blow whistle on the economic apocrypha. Apart from pointing out the disasters wrought by market fundamentalism all over the developing world and the former communist societies, he put it under the scanner of political economy, to show that perhaps of all the blunders of IMF policies the most glaring ones were of “sequencing and pacing”, and of “the failure to be sensitive to the broader social context”. It was this that “forced liberalization before safety nets were put in place, before there was an adequate regulatory framework, before the countries could withstand the adverse consequences of the sudden changes in market sentiment that are part and parcel of modern capitalism; forcing policies that led to job destruction before the essential job creation were in place; forcing privatization before their were adequate competition and regulatory frameworks. Many of the sequencing mistakes reflected fundamental misunderstandings of both economic and political processes, misunderstandings that were particularly associated with … market fundamentalism.”

Stiglitz also finds fault with the attempts by the framers of free market ideology to link their doctrine to Adam Smith’s concept of the ‘invisible hand’, to posit that market forces and the profit motive would somehow drive the economy to efficient outcomes. This is because the highly restrictive conditions under which Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ works perfectly are not available in today’s situations of “imperfect information” and “incomplete markets”, especially so in developing countries. So, Stiglitz’s verdict on market fundamentalism is unequivocal:

In the aftermath of the Great Depression and the recognition of other failings of the market system, from massive inequality to unlivable cities marred by pollution and decay, these free market policies have been widely rejected in the more advanced industrial countries, though within these countries there remains an active debate about the appropriate balance between government and markets.21

Even a cursory reading of the above passage would show that the real issue was of a balance between government and markets, not of allowing the market, like a Punchinello in the puppet show, to kick out all before it. This point has been brought out by Soros through economic theory:

My critique … first is quite a fundamental critique of our interpretation of how the financial markets operate. The prevailing view based on economic theory is that financial markets tend towards equilibrium. I contend that it is actually a false view of financial markets. Equilibrium is not appropriate for understanding how financial markets operate. It is based on a false analogy with physics where you have a

20 Erik S. Reinert, “Globalization in the Periphery as a Morgenthau Plan: the Underdevelopment of Mongolia in the 1990s”, in (Ed.) Erik S. Reinert, Globalization, Economic Development and Inequality: An Alternative Perspective (Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar Publishing Inc., 2004), p. 194. 21 Stiglitz, Globalization Discontents, pp.73-4.

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pendulum that may be dislocated by some exogenous, extraneous force but it will swing and eventually come to rest at the same equilibrium point.22

Elsewhere Soros attacks the concept of equilibrium from another angle. He argues

here that market fundamentalism, by appealing to the concept of equilibrium, misinterprets the causes of economic growth. “It is not the tendency of equilibrium that creates wealth but the release of energies”. And wealth creation, in his view, is a dynamic process. It does not regulate itself, and does not ensure social justice.”23 Besides, Soros shows that it is a false claim that markets are self-correcting: “it’s generally the intervention of the authorities that saves the markets when they get into trouble. Since 1980, we have had about five or six crises: the international banking crisis in 1982, the bankruptcy of Continental Illinois in 1984, and the failure of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, to name only three. Each time, it's the authorities that bail out the market, or organize companies to do so. So the regulators have precedents they should be aware of. But somehow this idea that markets tend to equilibrium and that deviations are random has gained acceptance and all of these fancy instruments for investment have been built on them.”24 Soros considers market fundamentalism more dangerous as a doctrine than Marxism. This is because while the dominance of market fundamentalism “cannot be compared with the paramount position that Marxism used to enjoy in the Soviet Union because United States is a democratic country”, it shares one basic feature with Marxism, namely its false “claim to validity on the authority of science”. But while Marxism has been discredited, “market fundamentalism is the ideology that underlies the globalization of financial markets”. It has achieved this status because market fundamentalists have succeeded in convincing people “that markets have a moral quality about them by allowing the diligent and creative participants to come out ahead.” But this argument conveniently overlooks the “social injustice of unequal initial endowments”– or in Rawls’s words the arbitrary effects of “natural lottery” – because of which “markets do not merely permit free exchange but promote the dominance of the powerful.”25

The same point of the myth of market self-correction has been made by a website for propagating against market fundamentalism, where it says:

“But Big Business’s insistence on self-regulating markets is disingenuous. They know that their success depends on government involvement and lobby heavily for it. An economy that truly adhered to Market Fundamentalist teachings would be

22 George Soros with Andrew Brody, Olivier Giscard d’Estaing, Ferenc Rábar and Jörn Rüsen, “Against Market Fundamentalism: The “Capitalist Threat” Reconsidered” [proceedings of their public debate with Soros on June 22, 1998 about his influential paper “The Capitalist Threat” published by The Atlantic Monthly in February 1997], in (Ed.) Lázló Zslnai, in cooperation with Wojciech W. Gasparski, Ethics and the Future of Capitalism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2002), p.24. 23 See Ishay, History of Human Rights, p. xvii. 24 See “The Financial Crisis: An Interview with George Soros”, By George Soros, Judy Woodruff, Volume 55, Number 8, May 15, 2008, New York Review of Books: www.nybooks.com/articles/21352, visited on 23 October 2009. 25 George Soros, The Alchemy of Finance, with A New Preface and Introduction, Foreword by Paul A. Volcker (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2003), p.14. For the quote from Rawls, See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Revised Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1971/1999), pp. 64-65, 89.

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terrible for big businesses. However, if the private sector can convince the public that we ought to and do live in a free market economy, the public will not demand that private firms give anything back for the benefits they receive from public money.”26

Now, where the critique of market fundamentalism steps out of the bounds of hard

economic theory it takes two different directions. The first points out the damage to real human development that market fundamentalism has wrought, even in the USA, not to speak of other parts of the less developed world, through an essay in political and economic sociology. The second teases out the theological overtones of market fundamentalism, to explain the marriage of religion and politics in the USA, which smoothened the way of this doctrine. Looking at the first strand of criticism we see an American educationist branding market fundamentalism as a “short sighted view of the knowledge society’s needs” and designing an elaborate programme for reorienting educational programmes to cope with the challenges posed by this free market ideology on its home soil.27 The Longview Institute however casts the critical net wider to show that market fundamentalism “is a huge barrier to progressive change in the United States. Its ideas have been used to discredit taxes, regulation of business, and good quality public services. We cannot solve any of our most pressing problems—from global climate change to our dysfunctional health care system to our flawed foreign policies—as long as Market Fundamentalism restricts our policy choices.”28 In similar vein a social scientist shows that the charm once exercised by market fundamentalism has almost worn off. In his opinion the song of “capitalist triumphalism since the end of the Cold War, especially the lyrics of ‘market fundamentalism’ broadcast to Central and Eastern Europe and heralding ‘the end of history’ has become less and less credible in the face of social chaos and acute suffering” that came in its wake.29 Sim points out that the application of such principles in debtor countries, as conditionality for receipt of IMF and World Bank aid, has very often led to disastrous consequences. He cites the case of Argentina in the late 1990s, when the whole nation was plunged in political anarchy. Sim holds that in “its belief in the authority of the market, market fundamentalism runs counter to the postmodern skepticism towards authority, although some postmodernist thinkers would see the market as a way of undermining traditional social and political values.30 In even more stringent terms Shiva shows how market fundamentalism has spelt the doom of democracy and participation in the world, and made it fertile for all other fundamentalisms:

Free trade treaties like those managed by the WTO and the structural adjustment programs of the WB and the IMF are imposed against the popular will of the people. Decisions in the WTO and WB and the IMF are made undemocratically. The

26 See ‘Market Fundamentalism: Frequently Asked Questions’, Longview Institute, www.longviewinstitute.org/.../marketfundamentalism/marketfundamentalism - visited on 21 October 2009. 27 Andy Hargreaves, Teaching in the Knowledge Society, pp.74-93. 28 ‘Market Fundamentalism: Frequently Asked Questions’, Longview Institute. 29 Alan Geyer, Ideology in America: Challenges to Faith (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), p.91. 30 Sim, Routledge Companion, p.268.

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policies these institutions impose transfer the assets of the poor to the rich and to global corporations. Economic democracy, which involves the participation of all people in the decisions about the economy, about ownership of productive assets, especially natural resources, are [sic] not advanced by the free market. Economic democracies have space for the creative productive contribution of all people irrespective of class, gender, race, or ethnicity. Unlike the world of globalization there are no disposable people in economic democracies. It is the indignity of being treated as disposable that pushes people toward religious fundamentalism in order to retrieve a sense of self, of meaning, of significance. This is why globalization breeds religious fundamentalism and free markets create terrorism and extremism, not democracy.31

Vandana Shiva quotes Amy Chua to drive home the point, even more forcefully, that

the increasing incidence of “group hatred and ethnic violence throughput the non-Western World” is directly traceable to the global spread of markets and democracy. Since markets and democracy benefit different ethnic groups in such societies, the pursuit of free market democracy engenders “highly unstable and combustible conditions. Markets concentrate enormous wealth in the hands of an ‘outsider’ minority, fomenting ethnic envy and hatred among often chronically poor majorities.” Besides, through eroding equality, justice, and democracy, globalization generates a culture of fear, and religious fundamentalism feeds on this fear, irrespective of the type of society where it occurs. This explains why religion emerged as a driving force in India’s elections after the trade liberalization/ free market reforms were imposed by the World Bank and the IMF in 1991, and in the 2004 US elections “religious and cultural values, not the war in Iraq or the economy, emerged as the deciding factor.” Shiva further argues that:

As market fundamentalism generates economic insecurity, people move to religious fundamentalism as a source of security, reinventing identity to deal with the culture of insecurity. Right-wing ideologies grow in direct proportion to the insecurities generated by deregulated markets.32

Hartsock not only points to the coincidence of market fundamentalism and other religious fundamentalisms, but shows from a Marxist feminist perspective how all of them marginalize women:

I am tempted to point to the rise of neoliberalism and market fundamentalism as semi-religious forces that have reshaped the lives of the vast majority of the world’s population over the last fifty years. Yet others have stressed to me the importance of Christian, Islamic, Jewish and Hindu fundamentalism in shaping very different visions of the world. I believe all are important in reallocating resources in important ways. And each of these regimes has been important in depriving women of access to resources, respect and power. Whether the tools have been structural adjustment policies administered by the World Bank and the IMF, welfare reform laws in the USA, the application of fundamentalist readings of Sharia legal systems in some Muslim countries, or the teachings of Catholic or evangelical churches around the

31 Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability and Peace (London: Zed Books, 2006), p. 80. 32 For Amy Chua, World on Fire, quoted in ibid, and Shiva’s comments see pp.80-81, 133.

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world, the results have been the exploitation and disempowering of women and have contributed to the creation of a new generation of female illiterates worldwide.”33

The full weight of the economist and sociological criticism comes out in the argument of Ishay, who thinks market fundamentalism is “worse than bad economics. Its ideological prevalence, starting in the 1980s, reinforced the dark aspects of western values in the eyes of the world’s poor. It was the antithesis of the of U.S President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal call to achieve ‘freedom from want’, replacing it with Gordon Gekko’s proclamation to a crowd of stockholders in the movie Wall Street that ‘greed … is good.’” In Ishay’s view this doctrine has come in handy for Islamic fundamentalists:

That distorted formulation of western values provided a perfect opportunity for Islamist fundamentalists to fill the void left by western abandonment of the poor. … Thus, if laissez-faire is the first commandment of the globalization proselytes, fundamentalists draw from religious texts the obligation of economic altruism and along with it, belligerence against the infidels as the antidotes to western greed and decadence. Without overstating the parallel between the dogmatism of market fundamentalism and that of religious fundamentalism, can we carve a new space beyond the Manichean [P. xix] world of both fundamentalisms?34

Then how does one explain the rise of market fundamentalism? This brings us to the second strand of criticism, which traces the legitimacy of market fundamentalism to its religious facet. This is being treated in the next section. Market Fundamentalism and Its Religious Connection

Critiques point out that free market ideology attracts the name of fundamentalism because of its similarities with religious fundamentalism. Erik Conway points out: “Like religious fundamentalism, market fundamentalism has its bases in belief, not in historical evidence.”35 The similarities have made clearer by Shaker and Heilman the market fundamentalists share some habits of mind with their religious counterparts. There is a sloganeering ring in their devotion to “free markets” and privatization. “This attachment has similarities to religious faith in that complexity and analysis are marginalized in political discussion, as is a sustained use of evidence. The intonation of magical terms substitutes for argument, and the consequences of policy count for little in determining the future course of events.”36 Stuart Sim too points out that “market fundamentalism involves the same kind of closed mind and unquestioning commitment to basic principles that are to be found in religious fundamentalism. For market fundamentalists, the market has an almost divine status; its will is law and it must be left to its own devices, with the so-called ‘invisible hand’ providing a self-correcting mechanism.” 37

33 See Nancy Hartsock, “Globalization and Primitive Accumulation: The Contributions of David Harvey’s Dialectical Marxism”, in (eds.) Noel Castree, Derek Gregory, David Harvey: A Critical Reader (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006), p. 181. 34 Ishay, The History of Human Rights, p. xviii. 35 Erik M. Conway, High Speed Dreams: NASA and the Technopolitics of Supersonic Transportation, 1945-1999 (Baltimore, Maryland: The John Hopkins University Press, 2005), pp. 190-91. 36 Paul Shaker & Elizabeth E. Heilman, Reclaiming Education for Democracy: Thinking beyond No Child Left Behind (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 71. 37 Sim, Routledge Companion, p.268.

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But the best statement of the reason why the word fundamentalism does stick to free market ideology is by Tétreault and Lipschutz. As they so insightfully point out, “fundamentalist social movements that thrive in today’s globalized environment are not always motivated by religion in a theological sense. Economic prophets also seek to propagate their doctrines and make them real by forcing changes in social practice. This is why Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz and billionaire investor George Soros call the ideals of these economic prophets ‘market fundamentalism.’ They point out how like religious fundamentalisms, market fundamentalism asserts the inerrancy of selectively drawn texts, which in Stiglitz’s list includes Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, the writings of twentieth century economists like W. A. Lewis and Simon Kuznets, and the speeches of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and U.S President Ronald Reagan.38

Of course there are conservative economists, who loathe the parallelism between market fundamentalism and religious fundamentalism, and seek to set free-market ideology free from this association. As Bryan Caplan says in his ire:

Market fundamentalism is a harsh accusation. Christian fundamentalists are notorious for their strict biblical literalism, their unlimited willingness to ignore or twist the facts of geology and biology to match their prejudices. For the analogy to be apt, the typical economist would have to believe in the superiority of markets virtually without exception, regardless of the evidence, and dissenters would have to fear excommunication.

Caplan thinks that viewed in this perspective “the charge of “market fundamentalism” is silly, failing even as a caricature.” This is because if one asks the typical economist to name areas where markets work poorly, he would give him or her a whole litany on the spot. Avowedly this would consist of public goods, externalities, monopoly, imperfect information, etc. More importantly, in Caplan’s argument “almost everything on the list can be traced back to other economists. Market failure is not a concept that has been forced upon a reluctant economics profession from the outside. It is an internal outgrowth of economists’ self-criticism.” Caplan shows in its defense how Milton Friedman, a committed defender of the market, is surely market friendly, but by no stretch of imagination is a market fundamentalist, as he “has no quasi-religious need to defend the impeccability of the free market.” Except solitary figures like economist Ludwig von Misses and especially his student Murray Rothbard, very few economists could be called market fundamentalists.39 But where Caplan deliberately misleads us is that free market ideology does not refer to concrete, individual markets, but to ‘the market’. It is the full freedom of the latter that is the fulcrum of market fundamentalism. And this market is the creation of ‘the State’, not of concrete states. As Tétreault and Lipschutz so convincingly point out, market fundamentalists are more privileged than religious fundamentalists in getting governments to adopt and enforce rules to transform their visions into reality.

38 Mary Ann Tétreault and Ronnie D. Lipschutz, Global Politics as if People Mattered (Lanham, Md: Rowman and Littlefied Publishers, 2009), p. 172. 39 Bryan Caplan, “‘Market Fundamentalism’ versus the Religion of Democracy”, in Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (Princeton: N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 184-85.

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This is because of the magnitude of their money and power. They sit atop the commanding heights of structures that reach beyond nations and religions to control most of the earth. The term “Washington Consensus’ is a synonym for the agreement among US policy makers, the directors of international financial institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank, the World Trade organization, and NAFTA, and leaders of informal institutions like the G-5/ G-7/ G-8, a shifting but always small coterie of leaders of the most economically powerful governments, who regularly meet to ‘fine-tune’ the global economy to further their interests. Through the ‘self-enforcing’ mechanisms at their disposal, these organizations compel cash-trapped LDCs to cut education and health services, and open markets to cut-price goods from abroad. The perpetrators are insulated from outcomes that include “forcing thousands into destitution and undermining these governments’ authority and ability to provide basic services.” 40

The pervasive, gripping and ‘religion-like’ influence of market fundamentalism on modern lifestyles, its abyss and its ennui, is eloquently shown by Pasha below:

Elevated to a religious system, market fundamentalism aims to liberate society from itself, particularly from other belief systems requiring society to tame individual material desires and their spill-over into the personal sphere. Resting on a materialistic ethic, self-realisation becomes available through consumption. Other societal obligations are reduced are reduced in scale and content. The empty container of the self can be filled with little assistance from embedded social relations, of family, community, and politics. The attractiveness of the neo-liberal design is based principally on a presumed nexus between consumption and selfhood, an expanding universe of self-fulfilment via the market. However, this image mischaracterises the centrality of sociability to self-hood. Market fetishism obfuscates the simple fact that the more enduring aspects of self-fulfilment lie outside exchange, from family ties to membership in the community and social relations relatively untouched by the logic of exchange.41

When such an ideology captures the minds of people like Maupassant’s ‘Horla’ 42 and produces such spiritual deformities in their souls, a peep into the devil’s workshop where it was forged – in all senses of the term – becomes intellectually alluring. The ‘Smithy’ of Market Fundamentalism: The ‘Visible Hand’ of the US Secular and Religious Right

What makes Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ such a handy tool for the market fundamentalists? The preliminary answer is: a misreading of the concept, which is unfortunately quite endemic in the discipline of economics. An example would be this statement:

40 Tétreault and Lipschutz, Global Politics as if, p. 173. 41 Pasha, “Hegemony, Perilous Empire and Human Security”, p. 35. 42 At the height of his syphilitic frenzy Maupassant wrote a story about an evil supernatural force named ‘Horla’ which possessed the minds of men and caused horrible things in the world. See “Horla” in Guy de Maupassant: Selected Short Stories, translated with an Introduction by Roger Colet (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), pp.313-44.

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… the classical and neo-classical market doctrine is itself a religion, and … its “invisible hand” prescriptions regulate society’s economic relations themselves. Beneath the notice of the social sciences … market theory and practice together depend on a core structure of presuppositions of a necessary and benevolent design which constitutes an unacknowledged religious metaphysic.”

Hodgson thinks that, while many decades before Max Weber had unearthed the

connection between religion and capitalism in his 1904 classic Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and treated Benjamin Franklin as the ideal type of its personal-religious code of ‘time is money’, any contemporary analysis of the “non-scientific and impersonal mechanism of market doctrine as a machine-god idolatry” should unearth its utter difference from “Franklin’s folksy religious pragmatism of self-advancement”43

Some scholars trace, like Hodgson, the genealogy of market fundamentalism to the ‘invisible hand’, and others wrongly trace the hidden hand of Scottish theology, and of Smith’s precursors Joshia Tucker 1712-1799), and Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733) behind it.44 But as a noted commentator on Smith rightly points out, “Smith’s Invisible Hand and the related concept of the self-regulating market and non-purposive social formations in general (which are not the result of design but of the interplay of the actions of individuals who pursue purposes of their own) are secularizations of thoughts that originally and earlier appeared in theological contexts, in which the unintended consequences of individual actions were attributed to divine providence. Spiegel sets to “mark off a few milestones along the road that leads to the signpost labeled Invisible Hand”. These are provided by: John Chrysostom in the fourth century A.D., one of the Greek fathers of the Church, and his observation that economic activities undertaken for private gain may end up benefiting society; Tommaso Campanella’s observation in the City of the Sun (1623) that the Spanish conquerors of the Indies, who were doing it for private gain were “but the instruments of God” in spreading the Gospel; Mammon’s words in Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) that “Our greatness will appear/ Then most conspicuous, when great things of small, / Useful of hurtful, prosperous of adverse,/ We can create, and in what place soe’er/ Thrive under evil..”; French Jansenist Pierre Nicole’s idea in his Essai de Morale (1675) of ‘enlightened self-interest (‘amour propre éclaire’); and Mandeville’s notion of “private vices and public benefits” in his Fable of the Bees (1723); and Pierre Boisguilbert’s faith in “laisse faire la nature” in his book Détail de la France sous le règne présent (1712).45

Howsoever might Smith have got the idea of the ‘invisible hand’, the main thing is that he had secularized it and wanted to mean through it the existence of a natural order, and a cause of that order as opposed to the irregularity of human actions. This is why along with ‘invisible hand’, he uses such references as “invisible Power”, “a chain of invisible objects”, “invisible causes”, “invisible chains”, “invisible beings”, etc. Actually, Smith refers to the concept only three times, once in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1757); once in Wealth of Nations (1776); and once in “The History of Astronomy”

43 John McMurtry, “Understanding Market Theology”, in (ed.) Bernard Hodgson, The Invisible Hand and the Common Good (Berlin, Heidelberg, New York: Springer, 2004), p. 152. 44 Norman Barry, “The Tradition of Spontaneous Order”, Literature of Liberty, V.2 (Summer 1982): 7-58. 45 See H. W. Spiegel, “Adam Smith’s Heavenly City”, in (ed.) John Cunningham Wood, Adam Smith: Critical Assessments (London: Routledge, 1996), pp.576-78.

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(1976).46 But the concept takes on multifarious meanings in Smith’s writings: divine beneficence, a state of balance in competitive market, a literary embellishment, harmony, the mutual advantage of free exchange, and a concept of natural order.47 But the way in which he broached the concept in TMS does not help market fundamentalism, unless vulgarized by market fundamentalists as it has been. Smith’s argument is that the rich “are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided among equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, advance the interests of society, and afford the means of multiplication of species … In ease of body and peace of mind, all the different ranks of society are nearly upon a level, and the beggar, who, suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for.” In Jordan’s view this famous passage, if taken in its entirety, shows a striking contrast with the new Blair-Clinton orthodoxy. “The invisible hand” says he, “working through the self interest of the rich, gives an almost equal share to the poor, not because of any work effort of the latter, or any good intention of the former. It is hard to imagine that Tony Blair would have chosen an idle beggar to illustrate the justice of free market institutions or the equality of advantage to be gained from them, as it is to suppose that Bill Clinton would support the American labor market for the advantages it bestows on black mothers who claim welfare.”48 Rather, as Evensky quotes the famous Chicago economist Frank Knight to explicate the meaning of the concept, the “mutual advantage of free exchange is the meaning of the ‘invisible hand’, directing each to serve the interests of others in pursuing his own.”49 The problem of how the actions of a volatile, passionate and fully self-interested man can bring about such a harmonious order has been sought to be solved by Smith through the concept of an “impartial spectator” residing in every man.50

If Smith’s concept does not lend itself to such vulgarization, then how was the ‘invisible hand’ invested with such religio-economic sanction? For this we have to look beyond economics to the American religious scene, the reassertion of religion in America, its subservience to America’s politics and its pollution. A social analyst captures this entire process admirably, and shows that just forty years back anyone mentally visualizing the twenty-first century would never have imagined that events would unfold in this way. In the 1960s the death of God, the secular city, and the demythologization of The Bible relegated traditional religion into a corner, amidst a widespread agreement among historians, sociologists, and even many theologians that modernization-induced secularization, expanding media networks exposing people to 46 See Smith, Theories of Moral Sentiments (London: Alex Murray, 1869), p. 163; Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (New York: The Modern Library, 1937), Bk. IV, Chap. II, p.423; and Smith, The Principles which Lead and Direct Philosophical Enquiries: Illustrated by the History of Astronomy (1795), reprinted in (eds.) W.P.D. Wightman et al, Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), Book III.2, p.49. 47 See Deborah A. Redman, The Rise of Political Economy as a Science: Methodology and the Classical Economists (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), p.233. 48 Bill Jordan, The New Politics of Welfare (London: Sage, 1998), pp.89-90. 49 Jerry Evensky, Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy: A Historical and Contemporary Perspective on Markets, Law, Ethics, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p.245. 50 See Louis Schneider, “Adam Smith on Human nature and Social Circumstances” (1979), in (ed.) Jay Weinstein, The Grammar of Social Relations: The Major Essays of Louis Schneider (New Brunswick: Transaction Books 1984), pp.64-68, 75.

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different cultural traditions, and new technologies transforming traditional societies and populations into urbanized ones led to long-held traditional beliefs losing their hold on their followers. Rather than viewing it as a fall from grace, many people regarded the disappearance of religion as the liberation from age-old superstitions, prejudices, and ideologies that had long divided humankind and threatened the future. But in retrospect, this view seems to have been shortsighted and simplistic. For, religion as such did not simply disappear as analysts had diagnosed. Merely alternative forms of spirituality temporarily displaced traditional religious beliefs and practices. For, the 1960 counterculture was a spiritual, if not overtly religious, phenomenon. Its springs were disillusionment with domestic social policies and the escalating war in Vietnam, leading the youth to seek inspiration in long-overlooked traditions of social protest and political activism in Judaism and Christianity. Innumerable other young people, alienated from reigning materialistic Western values, turned to the East in search of spiritual visions that promised a Manichean change through a new consciousness. “Politically, these latter-day mystics and militants were far to the left of centre; ethically, they were humanists, relativists, and libertarians. The only thing about which rebels and resisters were certain was that moral absolutes were as dead as the traditional God. As absolutes faded and foundations crumbled, there was a loss of clarity and growth of uncertainty; the logic of the world seemed to have become undeniably fuzzy.” But a reaction started in the mid-1970s, when repressed forms of religious belief and practice staged a social, political and economic comeback. Since the 1980s, the spread of global capitalism saw a concomitant rise of global fundamentalism, even in the religious sphere, tending to legitimize market fundamentalism and sanctifying American power. 51

It was a new form of religion preaching a dangerous apocalypticism of the American empire, the full import of which has been analyzed by scholars like Robert Barro and Rachel McCleary, offering a “market” analysis of religions that underscores the importance of the new phenomenon for understanding economic growth. 52 A few other scholars other have also shown the affinities between religious and right-wing conservative movements in the contemporary Unites States Linda Kintz shows how “the tenets familiar from religious conservatism help shape market fundamentalism by sacrificing certain groups to the purity of the market while displacing attacks on workers, people of color, gays and lesbians into the abstractions of economic theory.”53 And Cynthia Burack makes the same point in stronger terms, “Christian right distinguishes itself from other recent religious social movements in being aligned with the market fundamentalism of the new right coalition”. In her estimate the identification with business interests and market fundamentalism is so fundamental to the Christian right that “one sticking point between Protestant and Catholic conservatives remains the remnants of the Catholic social justice tradition.” She shows how John Dilulio Jr., political scientist and former director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, who branded himself as a “pro-poor Catholic”, found himself at odds with the

51 Mark C. Taylor, Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World without Redemption (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 305-06. 52 See Robert. J. Barro and Rachel M. McCleary, “Religion and Economic Growth across Countries”, American Sociological Review, 68:5 (October, 2003): 760-81. 53 Linda Kintz, Between Jesus and the Market: The Emotions that Matter in Right-Wing America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), p.4.

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Bush administration because of his concern with ‘social justice’.54 But some scholars are loathe to search for the affinity only between religious conservatism and market essentialism. Rather they blame the general character of religion in the US for the misalliance. In one such formulation of the position: “it is the very adaptability of the American religion to the market-place of American consumer capitalism, and to the individualistic values and behaviors this market-place fosters, that has enabled the misalliance of conservative Christianity with the neo-imperial political ideology that now dominates the economy – and the foreign policy – of the Unites States. It also explains the alliance of market fundamentalism with religious fundamentalism on the religious and Republican right, which has found its most potent advocates in Presidents Ronal Regan and George W. Bush.”55

According to Northcott the market-friendliness and voluntarist character of American cultural Christianity despoil it of “adequate resources for the critique of American capitalism, consumerism and imperialism.” As a result, contrary to “the claim that the separation of Church and State corrects freedom of religion, in reality the churches, and religion in general, have become captive to the American way of life … Consequently the religion of the new world is not so much the anti-imperial Christianity of its founder Jesus Christ, as it is the civil religion of America. Its core values are more American than New Testament, and include the curious combination of individual liberty and patriotism that requires individuals regularly to commit themselves and their children, and the lion’s share of the nation’s public budget and hence their tax payments, to war and preparations for war. This is why it was not hard for Bush to enlist the majority of American Christians in his neo-imperial crusade.”56 There are scholars who think that all the Aramaic religions have fallen prey to this new market-friendliness. It is this what explains the “notable comeback” of religion not only as a mode of popular understanding but also a site of elite interest. As an analyst linked the process to the 2004 Presidential election in the US:

The irony is, of course, that as Yahweh, Allah, and Jesus loom ever larger in the consciousness of many cultures, their legendary rival, the Golden Calf, has been born again. In the form of the Merrill Lynch bull, it now thunders triumphantly through the kingdoms of this world. The globalization of financial markets, and of many, though far from all other markets, is perhaps the outstanding theme of contemporary social analysis. Not only in the advanced countries, but in much of what used to be styled the ‘Third World’, consumption, with its newly resonant associations of ‘freedom’ and ‘choice’ has become, virtually, sacred. In Tokyo, New York, Paris, Mexico City or Shanghai, the mall or its local cognate functions as a kind of church, increasingly open even on the Sabbath. If the lively anticipations of some sects whose members stoutly supported the reelection of George W. Bush are

54 Cynthia Burack, Sin, Sex and Democracy: Antigay Rhetoric and the Christian Right (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), pp. xxix-xxx. 55 Michael S. Northcott, An Angel Directs the Storm: Apocalyptic Religion and American Empire (London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd., 2004), p.20. 56 Ibid.

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ever realized and Moses suddenly returns to this earth, he will have no trouble figuring out the whereabouts of the idols most in need of smashing.57

But how was technology roped in by the new religion? A possible explanation has been given by Shiva. She shows that while “[h]istorically technology has often been applied at odds with the goals and theories of religion … unembedded technology and unembedded religious ideology – those removed from social and ecological context and regulation – converge as instruments of war and militarization. Thus, the war against Iraq was simultaneously an unfolding of a new religious crusade based on Christian fundamentalism, and a display of military power based on ‘smart bombs’ and digital technologies. The neocons in Washington are both religious and technological fundamentalists. Fundamentalism makes the categories of the traditional and the modern irrelevant, rather fundamentalist ideologies converge around the organizing principles of exclusion and inclusion.”58

If religious right facilitated the mix of market and the God, then the kitchen was provided by Republican Presidents, and their critique comes as much from the religious sphere as from the field of finance and economics. In the words of a religious encyclopedia Ronald Reagan “often mixed sincere conviction with saccharine piety and moral self-righteousness, creating an image that appealed to conservative evangelicals and traditionalist Catholics alike. His vision of religious individualism comfortably fit [sic] a political ideology that championed market fundamentalism and government minimalism.” While his policies often deviated from this political rhetoric, Reagan helped restore conservative religiosity to American public life, accelerating what many commentators have described as the culture wars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.59 A commentator shows that the crusading cries of this mix is very far from religion. “There is never anything ‘religious’ about violence except the rhetorical trappings to sell wars. Still, people fighting over land, resources, and power try routinely to bestow legitimacy and weight to their campaigns by invoking religion and/or the name of God.” He warns against the mistake of assuming that Islamic fundamentalists are “the only fighters who do this.” Rather, “counting by sheer numbers, Christian fundamentalists, including those in the present Bush administration, are far deadlier than extremist Muslim militants.” His argument is that if terrorism is measured by the death and injury caused to civilians, then American activity in Iraq has involved far more terror than September 11, 2001. “The cover image for Tariq Ali’s book – a photograph of Osama bin Laden superimposed on an image of George W. Bush to create a fusion of the two – emphasizes the similarities between the leaders. Both commanders-in-chief, in pursuit of land, resources, and power, order and organize acts of violence on a massive scale; both claim an authority that comes from their allegedly privileged relationship to God. Both suffer from religious fundamentalism …” 60 From the same logic Soros pens

57 (Ed.) William Crotty, A Defining Moment: The Presidential Election of 2004 (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 2005), pp.190-91. 58 Shiva, India Divided, pp. 56-7. 59 Entry ‘Ronald Reagan’, in (eds.) Roy P. Domenico and Mark Y. Hanley, Encyclopedia of Modern Christian Politics (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006), pp. 464-66. 60 Jean Ellen Petrolle, Religion without Belief: Contemporary Allegory and the Search for Postmodern Faith (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), p. 156.

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the following remarkable lines in the context of the belief system of the Bush administration particularly after 9/11:

Until recently, I was inveighing against market fundamentalism, which I considered a greater current threat than Marxism. Now I regard the ideologues of American supremacy as even more dangerous than market fundamentalists.61

On the same lines Tariq Ali thinks that “the most dangerous ‘fundamentalism’ today – the ‘mother of all fundamentalisms’ – is American imperialism”, and since the Islamic world has not been monolithic during the last thousand years at the least, what Islamic fundamentalisms have simultaneously doing is fighting among themselves and mounting what Chalmers Johnson had predicted one whole year before 9/11 as a ‘blowback’ against the US, the new evangelist of free market orthodoxy.62 In Benjamin Barber’s opinion too, Islamic fundamentalism is a reaction against American totalitarianism. He does not think that Islamic fundamentalists are afraid of democracy, pluralism, and liberty, whatever Bush and his colleagues said. They “fear, beneath what seems to them a smoke-screen of liberty, justice, and pluralism, what is in reality an aggressive, materialistic, secular, consumerist, commercialized monocultural domination” that wages war against their belief system.63 Breaching the Affinity and Lessons from India

The elective affinity between market fundamentalism and religious fundamentalism means that exorcism is necessary in both the spheres. The mantras for this have been spelt in different terms: the “third debate”, the “third way”, a “new paradigm” and so on; and have been sought in institutionalist re-orderings, global democratic struggles, ideational changes etc. As Ishay points out, “each humanitarian crisis since the cold war has promoted speculation over how best to redesign new international or multilateral institutions. … In the ordre du jour, it is the confrontation of the forces of market fundamentalism and those of religious fundamentalism that prod us on toward an engagement in a third debate.”64 Giddens argues that the “expansion of cosmopolitan democracy is a condition for effectively regulating the world economy, attacking global economic inequalities and controlling ecological risks.” But the battle has to be fought on the global plane. “It makes no sense to contest market fundamentalism on the local level, but leave it to reign on the global one.” Giddens’s complaint is that market fundamentalism “has been forced on the retreat in domestic politics because of its limited and contradictory nature. Yet still it continues to reign at a global level, in spite of the fact that the same problems appear there as more locally”.65 Soros hopes that the “new paradigm would protect us from what may be called as the “fundamentalist fallacy”: the argument that just because a construct has proved flawed,

61 Soros, The Alchemy of Finance, p.15. 62 Tariq Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihad and Modernity (London: Verso, 2003), pp. xiii, 300, 316-24, and generally pp.279-328. 63 Quoted in Petrolle, Religion without Belief, p. 156. 64 Ishay, The History of Human Rights, p. xvii. 65 Anthony Giddens, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), pp.147-48.

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its opposite is bound to be flawless.”66 Just because state failure in some areas led to, a

market monism has to replace it. For him the combination of the fundamentalist fallacy and the efficient market hypothesis, has brought market fundamentalism into being.

abatement of the growth potential of the long-wave post-war investment and prosperity

67 The battle has however, to be taken to the religions too. But this does not mean

that one has to take seriously what Sam Harris calls ‘the end of faith’, and introduce another endist argument, 68 though one has to target “today’s deceptively blooming and kitschy religious market; the massive increase of internalization and privatization within the sphere of religion; and the conspicuous cultural impact of ‘postmodernism’”. ‘Religious rule’ is to be replaced by ‘religious voices’. One has to remember that there are “

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multiple ways of being Christian, Jewish, and Muslim”, without imposing one’s religious beliefs or ways of life on others, but rather using “their religious ideals to help make a society that transcends the limitations of the modernist, rigid imagination of the nation-state.”70 For this we need to view religions as faith, and not as ideology. As Nandy so insightfully points out, religion as faith means “religion as a way of life, a tradition which is definitionallly non-monolithic, and operationally plural. But when religion is an ideology then it is “a sub-national, national or cross-national identifier of populations contesting for or protecting non-religious, usually political or socio-economic interests. Such religions-as-ideologies usually get identified with one or more texts which, rather than the ways of life of the believers, then become the final identifiers of the pure forms of the religions.” Nandy shows why the modern state always prefers religious ideologies to faiths for dealing with them. It “finds the ways of life more inchoate and, hence, unmanageable, even though it is faith rather than ideology which has traditionally shown more pliability and catholicity.” 71

Religion as faith is not only more difficult to capture for non-spiritual and/or fundamentalist ends, but allows a fluid identity which may be even difficult to conceive in conventional terms. But in today’s postmodern world we need such fluid identities to make globalization real and not phoney. Its best example has been provided by Tagore in an essay concerning the self-referential question regarding one’s identity- ‘Who am I?” There Tagore offers a very inclusive meaning of the word ‘Hindu’ to clear his position as a Brāhmo’ in India. For Tagore the fixed identity of Indians is ‘Hindu’ as a people and ‘Brāhmo’/Muslim/ Christian etc. as member a religious denomination. The best exemplar of this scheme is Rammohan Roy, for whom the question of a new identity for a Brāhmo never existed. Religion as ideology cannot be a giver of identity, for “it is never true that what Hindusamāj has these days chosen to consider its religion (’dharma’) is its permanent characteristic.” This is because “any particular religious credo or any particular rite can never be the perennial marker of a race (‘jāti’). Taking this logic to its

66 Soros, The Alchemy of Finance, p.22. 67 Ibid. 68 See Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason (New York and London: W.W Norton & Company, 2004). 69 Ola Tjørhom, Embodied Faith: Reflections on a Materialist Spirituality (Grand Rapids, Mich: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2009), p.3. 70 Pierette Hiondagnneu-Stelo, God’s Heart Has No Borders: How Religious Activists Are Working for Immigration Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), pp. 170-96, especially 194. 71 Ashis Nandy, “A Critique of Modernist Secularism”, in (ed.) Sudipta Kaviraj, Politics in India (Oxford/ New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp.330-31.

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extreme, Tagore asks: “Then can you remain a Hindu even after joining the Mussalman or the Khristan denominations?” His answer is loudly affirmative. Kalīcharaņ Bāndujye Mośai’ (Hon. Kali Churn Banerjee) was a ‘Hindukhrīstan’ (Hindu-Christian), as was Jnanendramohan Thākur before him, as also was [Reverend] Krishnamohan Bandyopadhyay still before him. In other words they are Hindu by race (‘jāti’), but Christian by faith. In similar vein Tagore pointed out that in Banglādesh [undivided Bengal] there are thousands of Muslims (‘Mussalmans’) who are really ‘Hindumussalmans’ (Hindumuslims). He made his message dramatic by saying that “it is not difficult to imagine that in a Hindu household one Christian brother, one Muslim brother, and one Vaişnava brother are living together, sharing the affection of the same parents; rather it is what is easiest to imagine - for it is the proper truth, so beneficial and beautiful.” Replying to a self-posed question why even disobeying the caste system, and conversion to Christianity or Islam do not sully or mar one’s Hindutva, Tagore warns that any answer to this question will surely raise a note of protest from somewhere in this huge community of the Hindus. So one who wants still to give an answer would have to take the absurd position that “for a denomination (‘sampradāi’) Hindutva is that faith and those rites that it has observed for some time, and exceptions to that faith and those rites are exceptions to Hindutva only for itself.”72

While regarding Hon. Kali Churn Banerjee, Jnanendramohan Thākur, and [Reverend] Kŗşnamohan Bandyopadhyay as Hindu-Christians, Tagore was not speaking through his hat. Full nine years before he penned this essay a Western book on religions in colonial India referred to him in this way:

I shall never forget the eloquent appeal which Hon. Kali Churn Banerjee, a leading native Christian in that land, made before the Bombay Missionary Conference, begging the missionaries to cease emphasizing, as he said, ‘adjectival’ Christianity and to dwell upon ‘substantive; Christianity before the people in India.

Jones was making this observation in the context of enlightened Indians’ tendency to praise Christ, but turn away from Christianity, as shown in an essay written by one of them: “Why do We Hindus Accept Christ and Reject Christianity”. The reason was that they considered it more as “Churchianity”, backed by colonial power of the West, than as Christianity, in short religion as ideology.73 Anyway, such a picture of non-fundamentalism was Tagore’s recipe for making India something more inclusive and accommodative than it was possible even under the American ‘melting pot’ metaphor, namely, his idea of India as a ‘big chemical plant’. After analyzing the role of the Aryans, Hindus, Muslims and even Englishmen in the creation of the complex mosaic of the ‘Indic’ civilization, Tagore pens the following immortal words:

In this way all the four great [sacral] communities that exist in the world around the four major religions – Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and Christians – have come and

72 Rabindranath Tagore, “Ātmaparichai”, Tattvabodhinī, Baiśakh, 1319 (May, 1912), excerpted in Hindu-Mussalman Samparka, compiled by Nityapriya Ghosh (Kolkata: Mŗttaka, 2003), pp.77-98. All the translations are mine. 73 John P. Jones, India’s Problem: Krishna or Christ (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1903), pp. 295-96.

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got mixed in Bhāratvarşa. As if God has set up a big chemical plant in this Bhāratvarşa for a great social intermix.74

The West, or the North as it is called now, needs to learn this lesson, to avoid what F. Coronil terms ‘the dissolution of the “West” into the market’.75 Bonnett diagnoses the greatest victory of the market as the disappearance of the signs of its domination: “When a pattern of domination becomes so extensive as to be accepted as part of everyday life, something curious happens. It disappears. More precisely, it becomes a natural, common sense aspect of existence and, as such, unworthy of notice or comment.” But according to Bonnett, the automatic correspondence between the West and the market makes it vulnerable, through two complementary processes: “1. by associating the west with a rigid formula of success in a volatile global and political pluralism; and 2. by weakening the association between the West, democracy and political pluralism.”76 The duality of market and Christian fundamentalism is bringing about this vulnerability of the concept of the West, and here the norm of the world as a “big chemical plant” can be the best transformationist recipe.

74 See Rabindranath Tagore, “Bhāratvarşe Itihāser Dhārā” (“The Course of History in India”), in Paricai, Rabīndra Racanābalī (Collected Works of Tagore), low-priced edition on the occasion of Tagore’s 125th birth anniversary (Kolkata: Visvabhāratī, 1986-1991), vol. XI, 575-92; and Tagore, “Swadeśī Samāj”, Bangadarśan, August-September 1904, excerpted in Hindu-Mussalman Samparka, compiled by Nityapriya Ghosh (Kolkata: Mŗttaka, 2003), p.43. 75 F. Coronil, “Towards a Critique of Globalcentrism: Speculations on Capitalism’s Nature”, Public Culture 12(2): p.354, cited in Alastair Bonnett, The Idea of the West: Culture, Politics and History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p.139. 76 Ibid., pp.140-41.