CORPORATE TOTALITARIANISM
I have almost come to believe in the myth of corporate liberalism. And then comes Prof. Mehtas resignation to remind us of the lurking reality of corporate totalitarianism. It seems it never went anywhere. It just dons liberal attire occasionally to brand its products. When it comes to the university, once the educational market is secured, it resumes its predatory habits and a high-cost model of learning is confidently installed in a poor country.
It is possible that my contract may not be renewed at some point in the future. Regardless, my pedagogy is inert to such unannounced threats. Long have I known the nature of institutional cowardice. This is what I expect in the normal course of things, for organised avarice and structural cowardice are ancient cousins.
What has happened does not surprise me in the least. In my Ecosophy classes, we learn that the globalised corporate market, with the devastating technologies at its disposal, is the most acute threat to the health and survival of humanity on earth.
The economic anthropologist Karl Polanyi wrote three generations ago that markets traditionally embedded in human cultures are healthy. But disembedded markets cause pathological mayhem and will ultimately demolish the very substance of human society and nature. Markets in our world today are not merely disembedded; they are controlled almost entirely by insatiable corporations, padlocked in a global system of compulsive structural avarice.
The greatest lie of our time is the myth of consumer sovereignty that is taught to innocent economics undergraduates from the first day at college. The thinly disguised reality of the world is what I like to call investor sovereignty. Ignore the economists. Think Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Not the small thela-wallahs wife managing a shoestring family budget.
In such a global environment, the university, like much else, is today under siege from corporations the world over. The viral spread of the internet - especially booming in the pandemic-afflicted age of zoom - may actually put an end to it altogether in some not-so-distant future. Or transform its character to such a degree that only the servile arts of technical training (in engineering or medicine, for instance) will be taught, not the pretentious liberal arts. It would be in the fitness of things for the death of the humanities to presage the end of humanity itself.
With the Bengal elections looming, it is perhaps appropriate to remember Tagore, especially since he is being invoked by all the political parties in the fray. We also study him closely in Ecosophy, especially his interpretation of the ancient Upanishads. While setting up Vishwabharati University a century ago in the hope of reviving Indian and Asian cultures, he said:
Before Asia is in a position to co-operate with the culture of Europe, she must base her own structure on a synthesis of all the different cultures which she has. When, taking her stand on such a culture, she turns toward the West, she will take, with a confident sense of mental freedom, her own view of truth, from her own vantage-ground, and open a new vista of thought to the world. Otherwise, she will allow her priceless inheritance to crumble into dust, and, trying to replace it clumsily with feeble imitations of the West, make herself superfluous, cheap and ludicrous. If she thus loses her individuality and her specific power to exist, will it in the least help the rest of the world? Will not her terrible bankruptcy involve also the Western mind? If the whole world grows at last into an exaggerated West, then such an illimitable parody of the modern age will die, crushed beneath its own absurdity.
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Ashoka University, a despotic democracy and servitude of the quiet kind - National Herald
