Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Aug 4, 2014 4:00:55 GMT 5.5
(A while ago I found this old, rather ambitious, note in a forgotten computer folder. I'm wondering if I should continue to develop this.)
Man’s sense of morality evolved out of their social relation, which predates the birth of religions and the cultural sedimentation of values, though they later come to mediate and shape man’s moral consciousness. In most cultures, values which developed independently are swallowed up by their religions before their being recycled as religiously charged values. However, at every phase of man’s civilizational passage, even after the religionization of culture, there were moral elements which stemmed from mundane and practical concerns of life and could not be claimed by religion. Though they can be influenced in varying degrees by cultural concerns, people’s monetary behavior (to a great extent) and political practices (to a comparatively lesser extent) are mostly independent of religious grips. In secular countries, people’s political and economic practices, shaped greatly by their political and economic systems and policies, form a moral space, which I here call politico-economic morality.
Talking about political morality in South Asia with reference to the Cold War and the post-Cold War periods may initially seem to be forcing historical yarns wishfully into connection with irrelevant, distant historical events exclusively in other continents. However, considering the shaping economic and political influence of Europe through the British imperialism and post-colonial relations, and later majorly of America, on India, and India’s diplomatic relations with both these Western powers and Russia, the heart of the Soviet Union (whose geographical proximity to India is not less strategically significant), during this long period of 40 years, and the efforts Jawaharlal Nehru (1947–1964), Indira Gandhi (1966–1977, 1980–1984), and Rajiv Gandhi (1984–1989) made to strike a balance in the country’s political and economic systems between the two opposite power poles, the Cold War and the post-Cold War political and economic scenarios in Europe and America as a framework to understand the subcontinent’s politico-economic morality do not seem irrelevant any more.
Freedom and Morality
Though the collapse of the USSR in 1991 is said to have put an end to the Cold War with the triumph of the Western bloc, and though most of the now independent constituent soviet republics have embraced democracy and market economy parting ways with the still communist parental Russian Federation, ideology still matters and the world is still engaged in an ideological colder war between liberal democracy and communism (in spite of the fact that the latter is no more strong as it used to be during the post World War II period of the 1950s through the 1970s).
Conceptualizing Politico-Economic Morality in South Asia in the Colder War
Politico-economic Morality—definition and scope
Politico-economic morality in South Asia: Cold War impacts, and Post-Cold War period, and the Rise of China
Democracy and/vs Communism
Conceptualizing Freedom in South Asia
Man’s sense of morality evolved out of their social relation, which predates the birth of religions and the cultural sedimentation of values, though they later come to mediate and shape man’s moral consciousness. In most cultures, values which developed independently are swallowed up by their religions before their being recycled as religiously charged values. However, at every phase of man’s civilizational passage, even after the religionization of culture, there were moral elements which stemmed from mundane and practical concerns of life and could not be claimed by religion. Though they can be influenced in varying degrees by cultural concerns, people’s monetary behavior (to a great extent) and political practices (to a comparatively lesser extent) are mostly independent of religious grips. In secular countries, people’s political and economic practices, shaped greatly by their political and economic systems and policies, form a moral space, which I here call politico-economic morality.
Talking about political morality in South Asia with reference to the Cold War and the post-Cold War periods may initially seem to be forcing historical yarns wishfully into connection with irrelevant, distant historical events exclusively in other continents. However, considering the shaping economic and political influence of Europe through the British imperialism and post-colonial relations, and later majorly of America, on India, and India’s diplomatic relations with both these Western powers and Russia, the heart of the Soviet Union (whose geographical proximity to India is not less strategically significant), during this long period of 40 years, and the efforts Jawaharlal Nehru (1947–1964), Indira Gandhi (1966–1977, 1980–1984), and Rajiv Gandhi (1984–1989) made to strike a balance in the country’s political and economic systems between the two opposite power poles, the Cold War and the post-Cold War political and economic scenarios in Europe and America as a framework to understand the subcontinent’s politico-economic morality do not seem irrelevant any more.
Freedom and Morality
Though the collapse of the USSR in 1991 is said to have put an end to the Cold War with the triumph of the Western bloc, and though most of the now independent constituent soviet republics have embraced democracy and market economy parting ways with the still communist parental Russian Federation, ideology still matters and the world is still engaged in an ideological colder war between liberal democracy and communism (in spite of the fact that the latter is no more strong as it used to be during the post World War II period of the 1950s through the 1970s).