A Time-Tested Strategy for Sustainable Prosperity
Having Economic Power and Having Sustainable Prosperity for Centuries are two completely different concepts. The West has had economic power since the Industrial Revolution but it has miserably failed to have a stable, happy society. The economic power propels them to greed, lust and unreality. Consequently, the idea of economy as a means to achieve great human consciousness has not happened there. The profit making capitalist system devoid of ethics, ends up retrenching at the sight of depression, making employees live under constant stress. People live in an island of solitude and aggregated by the unreal relations called “social media communities”.
Why do I say so? The Western liberal ideology that demeans collective living, has ended up transforming their countries as countries of shoppers where shopping is seen as the quintessence of collective happiness. Since economy is consumption-driven, without periodic innovations it cannot keep its momentum. Each successive innovation creates a new world as described wisely by Neil Postman in his book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. Therefore, no sustainable society is ever possible in this economic system.
It may, unequivocally, be said that from Adam Smith to Karl Marx to Milton Friedman, all economists have imagined economic policy as a pursuit of happiness for society. From that point of view, the Western model has, unequivocally, failed to deliver a stable, happy society. The hope lies with a decolonized time-tested Indic society, argues Sandeep Singh in his two volumes of “Temple Economics”. This book describes the alternative system of economy in which culture can make a sustainable society and ensure people’s happiness by means of community-centric governance. This form of governance is called poly-centricism and widely appreciated following the path-breaking research done by economist Elinor Ostrom, recipient of the Nobel Memorial Award in 2009.
While Ostrom did study actual poly-centric institutions surviving for centuries, she did not exactly narrate what element in one culture makes a poly-centric institution originate. At any rate, the Western world that mistakes the Indian idea of dharma by a narrow term of religion, is immensely unaware of this understanding of culture. In the Indic culture, dharma-artha-kama are the three interconnected parts of life. Dharma is a socio-cultural code prompting for balanced ethics, not necessarily for some afterlife benefit but for beautifying this world and sustaining it. Therefore, Charvaka, the “Indic Marx”, did not need to denounce the system and could amicably walk along like Chanakya, the Indic conservative, into the mandir (temple).
The temple is the centre of dharma, not religion. The rituals of dharma are directly proportionate with patronizing very many art forms like dance, music, drama, painting, singing and what not. The activities of a temple support business enterprises and scientific innovations too. No wonder, the Indian scientific tradition is intrinsically related to dharma, where it is impossible to imagine a Galileo punished for probing into a new Cosmology. Temples were also the centres of social justice offering menial jobs and meals to hapless persons from the community. Temples used to keep people engaged in events to create a real community—which is, in today’s parlance, called social capital, the most prized possession for a Westerner.
The dogmatic left liberal would still argue back, why not let the secular government do it? Ostrom has the answer ready for people seeking reality without dogma. Big centralized governments do not last long, much unlike the local closely knit communities who survive all political and natural disasters more often than not. And, what is more is that the left liberal seeks the government as the only institution to do all these. Anyone with the basic understanding of Economics 101 would agree to “monopoly is bad, competition is good” as a rule. Empowering a centralized government is not the stable solution, formation of very many dharma-based communities is.
Singh is an erudite person. He has profound knowledge about history and colonization of the Indic civilization. He has demonstrated how the temple-driven institutions either degenerated or deteriorated or demonized or destroyed—mostly as a consequence of the colonial pressure—in the last millennium. Once the institutions are down, community mandirs have become “Hindu temples” as we know today. However, whatever the residuals of these institutions have been left behind, are strong enough to create a mandir-driven economy for a futuristic sustainable society, as argued by Singh with real data.
The book is not without its faults. Its editing could have improved much to shed its verbosity in favour of better popular perusal. The book could have created some appendices to relegate there some peripheral material and thereby, could create a smoother flow. Having said all these, I must maintain that the book does not have shortcomings in terms of data, argument or understanding, but needs a better presentation in an age when readership of the books is in decline.
Of course, this book cannot be an end in itself but merely a bridge to create actual temple-based economies. In most parts of India, the functioning temples are sufficiently modern, only two to three centuries old at the most. They could try to evolve these institutions only if the secular government unshackles them by entrusting the authority back to the Hindu communities.
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