Final words on fatalism

Himal takes leave of the debate on Dor Bahadur Bista's book Fatalism and Development (Orient Longman, New Delhi 1991) with two
items. One is an excerpt from a talk presented by Bista on 6 September at the National Congress on Sociology and Anthropology of Nepal.
The other is an extended definition of 'fatalism' as provided by Robert Nisbet, Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at Columbia
University, New York, in his book: Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary (Harvard University Press 1982). We suggest that any reader
contemplating further correspondence on fatalism and development consider writing a book instead.

Hawking the Anomalous
It is true that I have frequently shied away from the identity of an anthropologist. That is because I am not sure whether I fit in with the straitjacket definition of an orthodox anthropologist. I am, by nature, an unorthodox creature. 1 cannot help it. This is the only way 1 can be honest with my academic friends, colleagues and myself. But it does not bother me because it is not my problem…

I have been frequently criticised by some of my colleagues for not appearing with the appropriate behaviour and style of an anthropologist— whatever that may be or whatever they may have had in their own minds. My actions, particularly the publication of my latest book Fatalism and Development, has touched upon the sensitive nerves of many a traditional Nepali elite and has done a little bit of an unsettling job.

In some ways I feel that I have done a very good anthropological job by disturbing the peace of a certain type of mindset. As Clifford Geertz, one of the well-respected anthropologists of our time, has said, "We, with not little success, have sought to keep the world off-balance; pulling out tugs, upsetting tea tables, setting off firecrackers. It has been the office of others to reassure; ours to unsettle. We hawk the anomalous, peddle the strange."

Talking about hawking the anomalous and peddling the strange, I envy some of my Western colleagues and my Western gurus that they can and have been hawking and peddling the exotic from faraway and strange lands to audiences who can lake it at a theoretical level. It becomes an entertainment item rather than an unsettling, sensitive, nerve-touching pinch, the way some of our Nepali upper- class academicians have taken it.

Thus, my fate here lakes a very different turn. As you know, I am a Fatalist, albeit in a mythical sense. You know what I have been trying to do lately. I am trying to distract the worried and insecure upper-class, upper-caste Nepalis and draw their attention before they go to bed towards a grisly ghost in their own back yard. This makes it difficult for them to have a sound sleep until they clear it al I away from her minds with careful rationalisation.

I am not necessarily concerned about the future of anthropology, but I am concerned about the future of Nepal and its people. I cannot afford to worry too much about what happens to anthropology as a discipline. What I am interested in is how best anthropology can help Nepal.

I am aware that there are anthropologists who do not like to be involved in the process of change. There are others who do not even like to see the changes. To be involved in the process of change is a risky business with a very heavy moral responsibility. It is much safer and easier to remain an objective, uninvolved scientist pundit. It is also the easiest way to remain always right and never be wrong. You never commit yourself to do anything which could go wrong. We have quite an impressive share of such persons among us here in Nepal and, to a certain extent, abroad.

There is a Nepali adage, Pani maihiko obhwio (pretending to be dry while sitting on water—an impossibility). To claim that field anthropologists can remain uninvolved, objective scientists who do not want to interfere with the lives of the people they study is absurd. Whether they know it or not, and whether they like it or not, field anthropologists do mess up the lives of the people they study.

Living here in Kathmandu as a member of a society and producing a book that criticises the lifestyle which is at the heart of one´s own background, is madness. It is like heating from below the rock that one sits on. There is no way I can escape the criticism and its consequences. I was quite aware of this when I began writing and I am fully aware of the wave of reactions that is up in the air now. But that was my deliberate choice and there are as yet no surprises.

I am at the moment deeply involved in action research in Jumla, in northwest Nepal, with a community that has a very serious crisis of identity. This action researches natural result of the kind of rationalisation I have just made. To make the point more explicit, I would say that this project is a sequel to the publication of Fatalism, and Development. It will be the second volume of the book. I am trying to deliberately expunge the community of the evils of fatalism as reinforced by degenerated Baftunw/w, which most of the urban-based educated elites are not even aware of, and therefore do not want to admit, exists.

As far as I am personally concerned, I visualise my own role here like that of an untouchable low-caste or at best that of a Shudra, who performs all the menial jobs of fetching mud, stones, bamboos, flowers, pots, pans, lice, vermillion, firewood and so on; but who will have to step aside, stay away and apart to make room for the dhoti-wearing, clean -bathed- in- a-holy-river and prayer-mumbling cosmopolitan pundits. They will perform iheyagya, invoking the Gods while carefully staying away from Shudra who has completed all the unclean but very important tasks.

We anthropologists cannot continue for too long mimicking the great classical scholars who can only perform the incantation part. We need the Shudra type of anthropologist who will try to be innovative and develop new levels of methodology and blue prints.

Thanks to the clean-handed anthropologists who tell the people that they should stay and remain where they have always been, the people continue to live in misery and apathy. They should not try to change because their culture and lifestyle is idyllic and therefore enjoyed by the distraught visitor from the industrialised West. Study of Nepali society in its entirety is not a piece of cake. And until you know the society in its entirety, your arguments are going to be fragmentary. Then you would not be able to write in the type of language that my critics have been filling up the pages of Himal with.
But I have patience, I will wait, because I know I have to. If not me, personally, my thesis will.

Fatalism of the Multitude
Nearly a century ago, Bryce wrote of "the fatalism of the multitude". In his view, this fatalism had far more appositeness to American reality than did the more famous reference by Tocqueville to "the tyranny of the majority". Bryce, in his frequent visits to and extensive travels over the American continent, could find little evidence that rule over individuals, in the local community, state, or nation, was other than that of well-placed or zealous minorities. He saw no evidence of individuals cowering before the majority. What Bryce was deeply struck by in America — and to some degree in all democracies — was the kind of mass community that was formed, not by any positive initiative, but by the submission of individuals to their perceptions of amorphous but large and determining forces: "This tendency to acquiesce nee and submission, the is sense of the insignificance of individual effort, this belief that the affairs of men are swayed by large forces whosemovement may be studied but cannot be turned, I have ventured to call the Fatalism of the Multitude."

Bryce was correct in distinguishing this fatalism from, and giving it greater appropriateness than, Tocqueville´s tyranny of the majority. Tocqueville himself had declared that democratic peoples are both susceptible to faith in ineluctable forces of a massiveness that allows little individual interference and prone to falling into an undifferentiated social mass within which personal ambition and enterprise come to seem unavailing. Still, Bryce´s phrase, his direct invocation of fatalism, is the more trenchant.

The question is whether Bryce described accurately the American people of 1880, or whether, as is true so often of Tocqueville´s insights into American culture, he extracted a quality or attribute from an ideal type, a theoretical model of democracy in his mind, and declared it a visible characteristic of Americans. It is hard to say for sure. Certainly, few other visitors to this country or native prophets seem to have spied such a fatalism in the American people at that time. What is far more perceptible, through the medium of books, diaries, letters, and speeches of that day, is an ebullience of individual faith in self that borders on hubris.

But Bryce´s fatalism does have a striking relevance to the America of a century later, just as so many of Tocqueville´s descriptions of Americans in 1830 seem more nearly telescopic previews of the future than accounts of what was around him. There is no mistaking the degree to which Americans today have become fatalistic. In a hundred immediately evident ways, Americans reveal an atrophy of faith in the industrious apprentice, in the Horatio Alger ethic of pluck and perseverance. They reveal too a strong faith in the power of chance, fortune, luck, the random, and the purely fortuitous to affect positively or negatively men´s fortunes in life. Rarely in history has so large a proportion of a people become so preoccupied by the occult, the miraculous, and out-and-out gambling. Contrast the savings propensities of Americans of every class a century ago with the virtual antipathy towards savings that is evident today. There is an enormous amount of money potentially savable or investable.

The tens of billions of dollars spent monthly by Americans in either domestic or foreign casinos, race tracks, slot machine centers, bingo parlors, lotteries, and numbers games are tribute to that fact. And the whole of this vast orgy of chance bespeaks but one thing: the fatalism of the multitude. The time has passed when gambling was the avocation of the few who were rich, eccentric, or interested in brief recreation. It is the single greatest, though far from only, sign of the true and distinctive temper of this age. The wager is the constant companion in American society today of the occult belief in the stars or other impersonal, unreachable, but decisive forces. Gambling joins a multitude of analogous expressions of disdain for, cynicism about,

and superstitious avoidance of Poor Richard´s Almanack. What alone matters, in the judgement of tens of millions of Americans young and old, is fate. One may work hard and be very successful; or one may take it easy, and be very successful. In neither case, though, is work or ease the crucial factor. Fate is.

Fatalism is the invariable refuge of the incoherent, distracted, and disenchanted multitude. It is a sign of a failure of nerve — failure of the collective nerve that exists in every true community, local or national, and the failure of individual nerve. There have been many ages of fatalism in world history. The spirit of fatalism waxes and wanes with the health of the social body. It was weak in the Greece of Heraclitus, Protagoras, and Pericles; but fatalism was strong and pervading in the Greece that followed the wars between Athens and Sparta and particularly in post-Alexandrian Greece where every conceivable form of occultism, superstition, and worship of chance could be seen. Fatalism was scarcely present in the Rome of the Republic, of Cato and Cincinnatus, but it was pandemic in the Rome of the Caesars. There was much belief in demonsin the Middle Ages, as well as saints, but little evidence of fatalism. That was reserved for the Renaissance, another age inundated by faith in fortune, chance and myriad forms of the occult.

Different explanations are necessary for the fatalisms of different epochs and places. Two explanations are apposite to the present age: the first, oldest, and most entrenched is egalitarian ism; the second is inflation. Egalitarianism represents the leveling of those "inns and resting places" of the human spirit which are found in social hierarchy, tradition, kinship, and institutionalised religion. When a society is leveled, this does not confer equality upon people, only a sense of individual isolation, a traumatic feeling of loss of the social bond, of introduction to the precipice or void. Egalitarianism, far from strengthening the sense of fraternity, greatly diminishes it, leaving what was once a culture a mere mass of disconnected atoms. When family, community, parish, social class, school, and job cease to be evocative, to supply incentive and kindle confidence, nothing else but the irrational, the antisocial, and the occult are left to turn to. Fatalism feeds on the carrion of the social organism.

So does it feedom inflation. Few things are better calculated to induce a permanent social vertigo than the incessant erosion of the values people depend upon for their sense of place and time. When it becomes clear that no amount of energy expended in a job will yield a re ward sufficient even to stand still, much less advance, despair quickly becomes disillusionment with the rational and leads increasingly to dependence upon chance, to faith in the stars or in numbers—to, in short, a gigantic, all-consuming fatalism. Bryce´s fatalism of the multitude is indeed a reality today.