Kalyanaraman
Wendy Doniger, Mr Lewd and Ms Prude Liberalism can lead to paradoxical outcomes which leave everyone unhappy.
February 14, 2014 Last Updated at 22:44 IST
The Wendy Doniger affair has once again brought an old issue to the fore, namely, the paradox of liberalism. One aspect of it concerns the obsessions of liberals that only what they certify as liberal is liberal. In that sense, it is their certification and not a fair outcome that becomes the yardstick by which to measure.
So for decades now Western intellectuals have debated the paradoxically illiberal mindset of the liberals, the insistence that only their interpretation is valid and all other interpretations are invalid. Millions of words of have been written about it by some outstanding scholars.
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The debate has now come to India, occasioned by the occasional ban on, or withdrawal of, a book either from the market or a syllabus. Each time this happens, the liberals start weepily sighing that the end of Indian democracy is very near, which it is not, of course.
Exaggeration in, and the merits of, the argument aside, I think it is time people paused for a moment before they wrote or spoke. All sorts of people sound off, from actors to activists and writers to wanglers.
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A moment of reflection before spouting forth will -- if nothing else -- ensure that they do not make fools of themselves. Far better intellects than theirs have been grappling, that too for more than half a century, with the problem that arises when personal and social preferences collide and then require someone to lay down a rule to avoid such collisions or at least minimise the damage that such collisions can cause.
Sen’s sense
Possibly the most famous and erudite analysis of the problem came from our own Amartya Sen who, in 1970, wrote a now largely forgotten paper called “The Impossibility of the Paretian Liberal” in which he demonstrated the central logical paradox of liberalism.
He postulated that two members of society called, say, Mr Lewd and Ms Prude, collide when considering the only issue before them, namely, that only one of them can read the only book that exists. The third alternative is that it must be pulped.
Now, said Sen, imagine that Mr Lewd wants to read it but would be absolutely overjoyed if Ms Prude were forced to read it. Schadenfreude has its uses, too.
Ms Prude, on the other hand, would prefer it to be pulped without anyone reading it. However, if it can’t be pulped, she thinks it is better that she reads it even if she is disgusted by it rather than someone actually enjoying reading it.
What, asked Sen, should the government do in order to rank these outcomes in terms of their social impact? It has three choices before it – give it to Mr Lewd, give it to Ms Prude or pulp.
The paradox
The government decides that the most liberal policy will be to respect individual preferences over things that concern only them – thus pulping is better than Ms Prude having to read the book, since in a liberal society Ms Prude should not be forced to do anything she doesn’t want to and Mr Lewd’s wish to read the book is better than pulping because a liberal society would not block his wish to do so.
Thus the liberal government judges that Mr Lewd should get to read the book, while Ms Prude is saved the discomfort of reading it -- and the book is not pulped.
Sounds fine, said Sen, except that this solution makes society worse off because both individuals prefer that Ms Prude read the book to the actually chosen outcome that Mr Lewd read it.
The point Sen was making is this: If social benefit was not measured expressly in individual freedoms, this would not happen.
Let me explain this further in the way Allan Gibbard, a philosopher, explained it. Suppose two neighbours, who hate each other with an all-consuming intensity, have divergent colour preferences for their houses. One prefers red and detests blue. The other prefers yellow and detests green.
Gibbard showed how, following the liberal principle if each of them were to choose the colour of their houses, they would choose colours for their houses merely in order to annoy their neighbour. This would leave both hugely annoyed because they hate each other to such an extent that each will prefer the wrong colour for his house.
In short, liberalism can lead to inconsistent choices when strong preferences are highly polarised, which is what happens with religions and especially so when religion becomes a factor in public policy.
Silence can be useful, too
To conclude, I must also refer readers to what a commentator on the The Hoot, a media website noted, namely, that Penguin as private entity is at perfect liberty to do as it wishes to with its products. And, howsoever obnoxious it may be, the fringe groups also do have a right to feel just as offended as do the liberals by them. The problem arises when such rights are imposed on others.
Net-net: Our liberals should think before they speak because it is not only the illiberal people who hold illiterate opinions.
http://www.business-standard.com/article/opinion/t-c-a-srinivasa-raghavan-wendy-doniger-mr-lewd-and-ms-prude-114021400613_1.html