Want to Prosper? Then Be Tolerant - Forbes Magazine

[Guest guest]

>Bal Ram Singh <bsingh

>bsingh

>Want to Prosper? Then Be Tolerant - Forbes Magazine

>Mon, 07 Jun 2004 14:00:15 -0400

>

>Dear Friends and Colleagues,

>

>The article below by a very prominent writer points out the economic value

>of being tolerant. This is a welcome observation, and must be promoted and

>pursued with more vigor than Tomahawks to open at least an alternative

>front to deal with the current turmoil in the world.

>

>India's tradition, particularly Hindu tradition of tolerance, has been

>exalted by Paul Johnson to make his point that whenever a society develops

>tolerance, there is prosperity in the society. He makes two contrasts to

>send his message home.

>

>One is the communist/Marxist mind-set pervasive in 50s, 60s, and part of

>70s in China (under Mao Zedong), and until 80s in India (under congress

>party in India). It is notable that in recent Indian elections, not only

>Congress is back in power but it has communists on its piggyback for the

>first time in Indian history. If Paul Johnson's theory is correct, it may

>lead to shocking retrogressive results in the Indian Subcontinent.

>

>Second, Johnson draws upon focus on the escalation of intolerance in the

>Islamic Society and increase in poverty in many Islamic countries such as

>Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. There has been much talk of root causes of

>Islamic terrorism, particularly the Israeli-Palestinian issue and Kashmir

>issue. I feel these latter issues are really the shoot causes, rather than

>the root causes.

>

>The sad travesty - United States has a tendency to fight one with the help

>of the other. So, US in their fight against Soviet Union used the Islamic

>militants whereas now we are using communists, including China and Russia,

>against the Islamic terrorists.

>

>Intolerance is not quite, but comes closest to the root cause of terrorism

>throughout the world. That is the only enemy of humanity which should be

>targeted, irrespective its source.

>

>That said, I take strong issue with the concept of tolerance being promoted

>as the magic capsule of the world's current problems. I recently had a

>brief encounter on this issue with a faculty colleague in my department.

>Just like Paul Johnson, the whole intelligentsia has bought this

>politically expedient word as the panacea for world's ills. While tolerance

>could mean sympathy for other's beliefs, its primary and common meaning "to

>endure pain or hardship" does not bode well for tolerance to be embraced

>readily.

>

>Tolerance gives a message that every time I see you I get pain that I

>manage to endure. How long would such state last without exploding?

>

>In reference to India, the word that I think describes the practice is at

>least the acceptance, if not celebrations. I know numerous examples

>throughout the history, and still today, that when left alone by

>politicians, ideologues, and religious demagogues, people in India happily

>live in harmony while celebrating their differences.

>

>

>Bal Ram

>

>

>Want to Prosper? Then Be Tolerant

>

>Paul Johnson

>

>http://www.forbes.com/columnists/free_forbes/2004/0621/041.html

>

>In economic activities the greatest of virtues is tolerance. All societies

>flourish mightily when tolerance is the norm, and our age furnishes many

>examples of this. China began its astounding commercial and industrial

>takeoff only when Mao Zedong's odiously intolerant form of communism was

>scrapped in favor of what might be called totalitarian laissez-faire.

>

>India is another example. It is the nature of the Hindu religion to be

>tolerant and, in its own curious way, permissive. Under the socialist

>regime

>of Jawaharlal Nehru and his family successors the state was intolerant,

>restrictive and grotesquely bureaucratic. That has largely changed (though

>much bureaucracy remains), and the natural tolerance of the Hindu mind-set

>has replaced quasi-Marxist rigidity.

>

>In the last fiscal year India's GDP grew an estimated 8%, and in the third

>quarter, 10%. India's economy for the first time is expanding faster than

>China's. For years India was the tortoise, China the hare. The race is on,

>and my money's on India, because freedom--of movement, speech, the

>media--is

>always an economic asset.

>

>When left to themselves, Indians (like the Chinese) always prosper as a

>community. Take the case of Uganda's Indian population, which was expelled

>by the horrific dictator Idi Amin and received into the tolerant society of

>Britain. There are now more millionaires in this group than in any other

>recent immigrant community in Britain. They are a striking example of how

>far hard work, strong family bonds and a devotion to education can carry a

>people who have been stripped of all their worldly assets.

>

>

>Common Denominator

>The contrast between China and India--both moving steadily to join the

>advanced countries of the world--and those countries where Islam is

>dominant

>is marked. Whatever its merits may be, Islam is not famed for tolerance.

>Indeed, of the major world religions it is the least broad-minded and open

>to argument. With the rise of a new form of fundamentalism in recent

>decades

> its intolerance has been growing--as has the concomitant poverty.

>

>In the past when an Islamic society has been modified by a strong secular

>influence, economic progress has been possible. Take Iraq. Until 1958 the

>British-influenced Nuri as-Said regime, which was comparatively tolerant in

>its outlook, made good use of the country's oil revenues. The Iraq

>Development Board was doing an excellent job. Had it been allowed to

>continue, this enlightened form of capitalist state planning would by now

>have made Iraq one of the richest countries in the world. Alas, the regime

>was too tolerant of extremists. In 1958 Nuri as-Said and all his colleagues

>were murdered by an alliance of Baathist officers and religious fanatics.

>Since then Iraq's oil revenues have been wasted on war and armaments, and

>its people brutalized almost beyond belief.

>

>The tale in Iran is similar. Under the secular regime of the last Shah the

>economy was going great guns, but then the Shah wasdriven out by the

>Ayatollah Khomeini and his zealots. Some Iranians believed the modernizing

>and industrialization were happening too fast. But at least Iran had been

>moving forward--incomes had risen and poverty was on the wane. Since the

>Iranian revolution this great and once highly civilized country has

>stagnated or gone backward, and all the money generated by its oil has been

>wasted.

>

>There are many other examples. Algeria once had a flourishing agricultural

>sector, a significant industrial sector and highly productive oil and gas

>fields, but it has little to show for all that now. Libya's Muammar Qaddafi

>may have come to his senses, but a generation of rich oil production has

>been wasted. Nigeria, where Islam is on the ascent, has also dissipated its

>oil wealth. Conditions there are less promising today than when Britain was

>in charge a half-century ago.

>

>Saudi Arabia is another country where intolerance has held back economic

>advance. No nation has received more cash from its natural resources than

>has this Sunni Muslim state, with its ferocious tradition of Wahhabi

>fundamentalism. What's happened to the wealth? Gone with the wind of

>bigotry

> Some of the other oil-rich Gulf states have done a little better, but in

>none of them do enterprise and free-market capitalism flourish.

>

>As for the less well endowed Islamic states like Pakistan and Bangladesh,

>it

>s better to draw a veil over their misery. On the evidence of the second

>half of the 20th century it would appear that Islamic state control is a

>formula for continuing poverty, and Islamic fundamentalism a formula for

>extreme poverty.

>

>The more I study history, the more I deplore the existence of those--be

>they

>clerics, bureaucrats or politicians--who think they know what's best for

>ordinary people and impose it on them. We have a pungent example of this

>know-all mentality in the EU. The bureaucrats of Brussels have created yet

>another brand of intolerance that determines by law everything from the

>shape of bananas to the number of seats in a bus, from apple growing to

>house plumbing. As a result the German economy is contracting and the

>French

>economy is stagnant. There are now more unemployed people in

>single-currency

>EU Europe than there have been at any other time since the worst of the

>1930s, and many of them will never work again.

>

>Let those of us fortunate enough to live in the U.S. or Britain hang on to

>our traditions of tolerance at all costs, resisting like fury all those who

>seek to undermine them with political correctness or any other kind of

>dogma

>

>

>

>

>Paul Johnson, eminent British historian and author, Lee Kuan Yew, senior

>minister of Singapore, and Ernesto Zedillo, Yale Center for the Study of

>Globalization, former president of Mexico, in addition to Forbes Chairman

>Caspar W. Weinberger, rotate in writing this column. To see past Current

>Events columns, visit our Web site at www.forbes.com/currentevents.

>

>

>

>

>Bal Ram Singh, Ph.D.

>Director, Center for Indic Studies

>University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

>285 Old Westport Road

>Dartmouth, MA 02747

>

>Phone: 508-999-8588

>Fax: 508-999-8451

>Email: bsingh

>

>Internet address: http://www.umassd.edu/indic

 

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