Now that Bush has finally made a state visit to India, residents of the world's strongest democracy (us) are thinking more about the world's largest democracy (them). It's about time.
I could spend this column critiquing Bush's policy toward India, but he doesn't have one. Instead, I will focus on a man who is so ahead of his time that he knew about India while Bush was still pumping oil.
Thomas Friedman, blockbuster author and foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, has been called the most important opinion journalist in America. (It is also worth noting, as a dispassionate aside, that Stalin was twice named Time's Man of the Year.) Friedman writes with a down-home Midwestern simplicity (some would say simple-mindedness) and has been known to sport a wraparound, Unabomber-style mustache.
Freidman has a hard-on for free trade. To hear him tell it, he invented globalization around the same time Al Gore invented the Internet. So, even though Friedman's background is in Middle East studies, his gaze has lately followed the markets further eastward.
Unfortunately for East and South Asia, Friedman's gaze is not too sharp.
A few days after returning from an eight-month trip to India, I had lunch with my grandmother. She was having trouble reconciling her conflicting preconceptions about India. They have a parliament, but don't they also have castes, religious fundamentalists and disease? "And if they're supposed to be a democracy," she asked, "why don't they pave their roads?"
Her reasoning was misguided. Fundamentalists can be democratically elected, as Americans now know. And anyone who has been to Saudi Arabia - or China, for that matter - can tell you that infrastructure is no guarantee against tyranny.
But my grandmother is the victim here. The villain, as you may have guessed, is her favorite columnist, Thomas Friedman. Twice a week, his neoliberal drivel conflates free markets with freedom. No wonder his readers are confused.
Last summer, Friedman wrote a Times column about India's high-tech industry. "Bangalore: Hot and Hotter" began with this literary wonder: "Every time I visit India, Indians always ask me to compare India with China." Apparently, Friedman studied writing at the Alan Shawn Feinstein School for Bumbling Billboard Prose. But we'll leave the writing aside for now and concentrate on the extended metaphor that follows.
It seems that China and India are both roads. China is a smooth road, but it has a speed bump up ahead. You guessed it: communism.
"India, by contrast, is like a highway full of potholes." Aw, Tom, say it ain't so! "But off in the distance, the road seems to smooth out, and if it does, this country will be a dynamo." Phew! Now, with Tom's blessing, Indians can rest easy. Except, of course, those Indians building the actual, non-metaphorical roads. They can only rest during their five-minute chai breaks.
Friedman's rhetoric is paternalistic and, oddly, also provincial. What I mean by "paternalistic" should be obvious. The visiting American blithely smiles on the Third World - "Keep it up, natives, and one day you'll be as advanced as we are." He even demonstrates his sensitivity to caste issues by re-defining "untouchables" as "people whose jobs cannot be outsourced."
By calling Friedman "provincial," I mean that, for a man obsessed with global interconnectedness, his idea of "progress" is woefully limited by what he knows. He has seen the future, and it looks like New Jersey. He augurs a "mature new phase" in Bangalore's steel-and-glass future; but who authorized him to determine what is "mature," and what does he mean by the term? In context, we can only presume that "mature" means wealthy.
The king of Bhutan, a tiny country north of India, famously coined the term "gross happiness product." The king values the happiness of his people over their wealth. I do not have space here to defend this concept, and I'm not sure I wish to defend it, but I find it appealing on its face. Unfortunately, Thomas Friedman seems never to have considered the possibility that happiness and wealth could vary independently.
Of course, even if money can't buy happiness, it can buy lots of things. Development serves a clear purpose; no one would deny that the average Indian would benefit from improved access to a hospital. The thorny problem, though, is how countries should develop, and it is here that Friedman's myopia (perhaps mixed with a dash of ethnocentrism) blinds him to the dangers of American-style capitalism.
Cultural critic James Howard Kunstler tells Americans what they subconsciously know: blacktop and strip malls and chain stores are demoralizing and ugly. Jack Donnelly, in the American Political Science Review, argues that globalization has "created a largely isolated individual who is forced to go it alone against social, economic and political forces that far too often appear aggressive and oppressive."
But variables like aesthetics and human dignity are much harder to quantify than economic growth, and Friedman would prefer to ignore them altogether. Forget your instincts, he croons; let the numbers tell you what progress is. When material gain and immaterial satisfaction coincide, Friedman is vindicated. But this is not always the case.
The irony of Friedman's road metaphor is that India, despite its world-renowned train system, is currently building a huge highway - modeled on America's Eisenhower Interstate, of course - that will split villages in half and send fuel consumption through the roof. But at least the businessmen will feel like mature dynamos as they speed to work.
Andrew Marantz '06.5 ate the worst nachos of his life in Bangalore.
