Are good institutions enough? - I

Nowadays, private morals have been made less relevant in public life. The West relies upon external rather than internal restraints. The hope is that institutional checks and balances will control those who are in power rather than self-imposed ethical limits. But rules and regulations can only go so far and no further in catching unethical business/political practices. To work effectively, good institutions should be strengthened by matching moral values held by the majority of the population.

Gandhi considered as futile the modern quest of trying to make institutions so perfect that they would obviate the need for the individual to be good. A person in public life has to be a person of character exercising self-restraint all the time. Gandhi believed in self-imposed internal ethical control as against institutional restraints imposed from the outside by society on one’s behaviour, especially when in public life. Gandhi emphasises moral and individual change as necessary for social and economic change. He said:

Unfortunately a belief has today sprung up that one's private character has nothing to do with one's public activities. This superstition must go. Our public workers must set about the task of reforming society by reforming themselves first. This spiritual weapon of self purification, intangible as seems, is the most potent means for revolutionising one's environment and for loosening external shackles. 

This reliance on inner strength rather than external institutional control was because Gandhi believed that such external controls are easily subverted resulting in the abuse of power that we see around us. Practicing self-restraint is more sustainable and irreversible. If a person has taken a conscious decision to be in public life, he or she has to exercise self-restraint in private behaviour. Both perfecing individuals and perfecting institutions are impossible tasks but Gandhi believed that the former was a better gamble. 

What’s very important is that no amount of “good institutions” will stop people from cheating. No matter how well-designed rules are, and how good is the system of sanctions forcing people to follow the rules, if everybody is a rational agent maximising their own material benefits, the system will not work. Crooks will pay the cops to look the other way, while judges would decide in favour of who pays them more. Good institutions will only work when they are strengthened by appropriate values and preferences of the people who occupy them. In Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy wrote about what it means to be "honest": 

. . . when they talk of an "honest" politician, an "honest" writer, an "honest" newspaper, an "honest" institution, an "honest" tendency, meaning not simply that the man or the institution is not dishonest, but that they are capable on occasion of taking a line of their own in opposition to the authorities.

How well a society functions depends on its package of social norms. Adam Smith said that it’s our automatic norm following — not our self-interest or our cool rational calculation of future consequences — that often makes us do the “right thing” and allows our societies to work. In the period leading up to the financial crisis, some asset managers on Wall Street and mortgage lenders who sold toxic assets knew they were toxic and were proud of their ability to exploit unsuspecting investors. Institutions like SEC, The Fed or the banks proved ineffective. 

Two behaviours that have become devalued in modern times are guilt and shame. Feeling shame is about wanting to hide; feeling guilt is about wanting to make amends. Consistently ignoring the need to examine one’s own actions reduces the moral credibility needed to persuade others to make sacrifices to defend shared values. They reflect our judgments of our actions and the kind of person we think we are. These emotions tell us that there is something wrong in our lives and relationships that we must correct. 

Politics and the Gita - V

The sociologist, Timur Kuran, wrote Private Truths, Public Lies in which he coined the term “Preference Falsification”. Even in democratic societies, there are many things we feel or believe but do not express because we fear social disapproval. People’s willingness to speak freely depends upon their unconscious perceptions of how popular their opinions are. People who believe their opinions are not shared by anyone else are more likely to remain quiet; their silence itself increases the impression that no one else thinks as they do.

This increases their feelings of isolation and artificially inflates the confidence of those with the majority opinion. Thus, our perception of reality changes reality by altering the way we might otherwise act. This falsification of private preferences when people have to express them publicly causes much tension to build up in a society that appears asleep. Deceptive stability and explosive change are thus two sides of a single coin.

But as soon as people realise that others share their views, they are emboldened to express themselves. This leads to a “Preference Cascade” which makes it possible for profound transformations to occur. Kuran argues convincingly that the phenomenon not only is ubiquitous but has huge social and political consequences. They include the unexpected fall of communism, the paucity, until recently, of open opposition to affirmative action in the United States, and the durability of the beliefs that have sustained India's caste system.

In India, such a preference cascade has been caused by social media. Whatever beliefs or impulses we might have, we can find and connect with like-minded people online. Finding others who share our beliefs makes us more strident, and soon we form multiple echo chambers. This also means that impulses we would otherwise not express in polite society find validation, and a voice. Because liberal elites ran the media, and a liberal consensus seemed to prevail, people did not express these feelings. Social media showed the people who did not share these views that they were not alone, and gave them the courage to express ourselves.

Even avowedly secular politicians are pandering to what they see as the Hindu voter bloc, to the point of displaying religiosity publicly in order to not give the impression that they are too pro-Muslim. They perceive the need to do that because the atmosphere has already been shaped, the public discourse has already been shaped, in a way that polarises. So, Rahul Gandhi began wearing a sacred thread, visiting temples and calling himself a Shiv bhakt. The Congress and other Opposition parties try to boost their Hindu credentials believing they had to compete with the BJP for the Hindutva vote. 

This means that the men and women who wrote the Constitution were an out-of-touch elite, and the values they embedded in it were not shared by most of the nation. The “Idea of India” that these elites spoke of was never India’s Idea of India. These “liberal” values were imposed on a nation that, deep down, did not accept them. It is remarkable that the icon of that fringe - Gandhi - was able to pass off his minority version of Hinduism as the majority view and persuaded the majority of the country to accept it.

In From Beirut to Jerusalem:, Thomas L. Friedman compares the Left and Right in Israel and the situation has some similarities with India: the only difference between them was in rhetoric. The Right wanted to shout at the top of its lungs while the Left was ready to just quietly mouth the words. The debates were monologues in which everyone was speaking and no one was listening. He writes: 

If there is one thing I have learned in the Middle East, it is that the so-called extremists or religious zealots, whether in Jewish or Muslim society, are not as extreme as we might think. The reason they are both tolerated and successful is that they are almost always acting on the basis of widely shared feelings or yearnings. As Israeli political scientist Ehud Sprinzak rightly put it, these so-called extremists are usually just the tip of an iceberg that is connected in a deep and fundamental way to the bases of their respective societies

PS: For an interpretation of the Gita for present times as Gandhi would have seen it, see The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living: by Eknath Easwaran (3 volumes)