Nationalism by Rabindranath Tagore

Title: Nationalism
Author: Rabindranath Tagore
Original Publication Date: 1942
Pages: 143

You have to heartily concede it to Tagore, he is still no less poetic writing this essay on nationalism than if he were writing a poem.

“And yet I will persist in believing that there is such a thing as the harmony of completeness in humanity, where poverty does not take away his riches, where defeat may lead him to victory, death to immortality, and where in the compensation of Eternal Justice those who are the last may yet have their insult transmuted into a golden triumph. Let our life be simple in its outer aspect and rich in its inner gain. Let our civilization take its firm stand upon its basis of social co-operation and not upon that of economic exploitation and conflict.”(92)

And really this is what Nationalism is all about. It is maintaining the morality amidst the inevitable mechanical aspects of progress.

Nationalism is more of an essay than an academic work. This contains Tagore’s ruminations on nationalism from his extensive travels. It is divided into chapters on Nationalism in the West, Nationalism in Japan, Nationalism in India, and fittingly it is ended by a poem originally written in Bengali.

The chapter on Nationalism in the West provides us the framework with which Tagore undertook writing on nationalism. Nationalism is, as he claims, created by the concept of the ‘Nation’, “in the sense of the political and economic union of a people, is that aspect which a whole population assumes when organized for a mechanical purpose.”(12) This working definition does not stray from traditional definitions arrived at in the social sciences. Tagore however points out that the ‘Nation’ has a mechanized and amoral aspect that drains man of spirit and morality. “this strenuous effort after strength and efficiency drains man's energy from his higher nature where he is self-sacrificing and creative. For thereby man's power of sacrifice is diverted from his ultimate object, which is moral, to the maintenance of this organization, which is mechanical. Yet in this he feels all the satisfaction of moral exaltation and therefore becomes supremely dangerous to humanity.”(78) A caveat on Tagore’s term on the use of the West, the West refers exclusively to Europe and does not include the Americas (probably both by reason of his sentiments of freedom and the fact that America has just gotten a foothold on the pedestal of world superpowers at that point).

The chapter on Nationalism in Japan reveals Tagore’s admiration for the Japanese Nation and calls it the nation that the Asian region should emulate (this was published in 1942, written earlier and I would almost give anything to satiate my curiosity on Tagore’s reaction on Japan’s participation in the Second World War).

The chapter on Nationalism in India is more of an examination and admonition. Though what is curious to me is that Tagore initially justifies the establishment of the caste system as a legitimate response to the diversity present in Indian society and bolsters this stand by juxtaposing the Indian response to that of the American response which is of futile deferral and discriminatory avoidance. Though Tagore later on calls for an action that rises above the caste system and stays true to the morality he is espousing in this work.

What is so amazing in reading this is Tagore wrote a postcolonial approach in a time when such methods of intellectual discourse are yet to be conceive decades hence, in a time when future notified scholars like Said and his Orientalism and Spivak and his Subaltern are but suckling babes in conceiving their respective postcolonial theories. This point is clear when Tagore wrote that, “You (addressing Japan) must apply your Eastern mind, your spiritual strength, your love of simplicity, your recognition of social obligation, in order to cut out a new path for this great unwieldy car of progress, shrieking out its loud discords as it runs. You must minimize the immense sacrifice of man's life and freedom that it claims in its every movement.”(43)
This statement further resonates with the scholar and the Filipino in me when, “And yet someone must show the East to the West, and convince the West that the East has her contribution to make to the history of civilization.”(75)

Tagore’s writing is also defined by his unwavering idealism and incomparable desire to pursue morality. This leads to his loving belief that men, are innately good. “Man in his fullness is not powerful, but perfect. Therefore, to turn him into mere power, you have to curtail his soul as much as possible. When we are fully human, we cannot fly at one another's throats; our instincts of social life, our traditions of moral ideals stand in the way.”(30)

Tagore’s aim was noble in writing this, but as I said, this is not an academic treatise on Nationalism. Tagore presents us the danger inherent in modernization, the alienation and mechanization of the human spirit, he provides recourse for the invasion of the imperial capitalistic designs of the West, but does not actually provide for a concrete solution to the inevitable force of modernization.

I fittingly  end this review by quoting the last stanza of his beautiful poem.

“Be not ashamed, my brothers, 
to stand before the proud and the powerful
With your white robe of simpleness.”
“Let your crown be of humility,
your freedom the freedom of the soul.
Build God's throne daily
upon the ample bareness of your poverty
And know that what is huge is not great
and pride is not everlasting.”(97)




Other works by Rabindranath Tagore:
The Gardener (4 Stars)
Gitanjali (4 Stars)

This book forms part of my remarkably extensive reading list on Nobel Prize for Literature Awardees

The End of History and The Last Man by Francis Fukuyama

Title: The End of History and The Last Man
Author:  Francis Fukuyama
Original Publication Date: 1992
Pages: 464

"But it is not necessarily the case that liberal democracy is the political system best suited to resolving social conflicts per se. A democracy's ability to peacefully resolve conflicts is greatest when those conflicts arise between so called "interest groups" that share a larger, pre-existing consensus on the basic values or rules of the game, and when the conflicts are primarily economic in nature. But there are other kinds of non-economic conflicts that are far more intractable, having to do with issues like inherited social status and nationality, that democracy is not particularly good at resolving.”

Francis  Fukuyama was born on  October  27,  1952 to Yoshio  Fukuyama,  a second  generation  Japanese  American,  and  Toshiko  Kawata  Fukuyama. Fukuyama’s childhood years were spent in New York city and in 1967, the family moved to State College, Pennsylvania, where he then attended high school. His Bachelor of Arts in Classics was obtained in 1974 from Cornell  University  and  taught  right  after  in  the  Yale  University  Department  of Comparative Literature during 1974 – 1975.  In 1981,  he  received  his  Doctor  of  Philosophy  in  Political  Science  from  Harvard University by doing a dissertation on Soviet foreign policy. Francis Fukuyama was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation which conducts researches about public policies in Santa Monica,California  from  1979  to  1980,  1983  –  1989,  and  then  in  1995  –  1996 . In 1981 and 1982, Francis Fukuyama was an official member of the Policy Planning Staff of the United States Department of State where he focused on Middle Eastern issues. In 1989, he returned to the same body, but this time as a deputy director for European political and military affairs. While he was a member of this said policy planning staff, he published an essay entitled “The End of History?” in a small foreign policy journal named The National Interest.

The End of History and the Last Man is a book expanding the essay “The End of History?” that Francis Fukuyama wrote in 1981. It sparked extraordinary debate both in the United States and abroad. Francis Fukuyama’s analytical philosophy is anchored in the fact that the article was written five months  before the collapse of  the Berlin wall  where ideological  contentions between democracies and communism were in head to head disputation. His  employment  at  those  times  and  his  origin  of  education  has  surely predicated his preferences in writing the article and eventually the book. Being a RAND corporation researcher and as a member of the United States Department Policy Planning Staff would have surely molded his very reasons for writing such. As an officially employed citizen of the United States, one cannot deny that fact that he must advocate to the principles of the State and government that has employed, nurtured  and  protected  him,  and  that  is  liberal  democracy.  We  may  say  that because he is of the government, he wrote the “End of History?” to impinge on disintegration of the Berlin wall.

The End of History and the Last Man posits the idea of writing a universal history of human development with the end of liberal democracy. The prevalent extension  of  not  only  liberal  political  but  also  economic  ideas  throughout  the communist  world  and  to  third  world  countries  presupposes  that  mankind  has reached its ideological evolutionary process. Although the occurrence of events in the  simplistic  sense  of  history  still  occurs,  the  evolution  of  human  society  has reached its end with liberal democracy and not with communism.

Francis Fukuyama points significant emphasis on the French and American Revolutions. He stresses that the amalgamated ideals formed in the momentous revolutions were the indispensable foundations of the end of man’s history, liberal democracy.  His  periodization  ends  with  all  states  having  the  same  form  of government.

It rejects Marx’s idea of human development with communism as the end goals of the system. And just as any post – modern theory rejects grand narratives in existence,so does it support and enact one of its own. This is what Francis Fukuyama’s work is doing, it rejects the various numerous ideas of the development of human society and  presents  that  grand  narrative  that  societal  development  ends  with  the institutionalization of liberal democracy in every state.

Perhaps the biggest critique about Francis Fukuyama and his book The End of History and The Last man is that he has this tendency to show his biases on his writings. His position in the government of the nation is clearly felt in the arguments of the origin of liberal democracy and the end of which he speaks of in essence perpetuates the imperialistic aims of a world super power.