Re: PUBLIC: Re: Trusteeship, the nature of man, and utopia

[Prabhu.Guptara]

     Kush
     
     I do not know how much your statements are the result of factual 
     investigations and how much they are the result of mere impressions 
     gathered from the anti- and non-religious sentiment in the upper 
     reaches of the two-tier American culture I spoke about in an earlier 
     post (the lower tier is highly religious).
     
     I would like to suggest that there is a difference between making 
     organisational changes due to demographics and making fundamental 
     compromises on essential beliefs because the intellectual environment 
     has changed.
     
Yes, of course you will find Jews, Catholics and Protestants who have "made 
compromises", but if you will look at the resurgence in grass-roots religiosity 
since the Sixties, you will see (as has been documented by several researchers) 
that (i) American popular religiosity continues unabated, (ii) that it does have
a profound impact on the lives of Americans - for example in their sense of 
responsibility for their communities and country (though we may not like 
particular expressions of that sense of responsibility) and (iii) that the most 
popular and indeed growing brands of Protestantism are those which have 
compromised least with "the spirit of the age" (Catholicism and Judaism have 
compromised more, and have suffered more decline in involvement).  These are 
matters of fact, not of my opinion or yours or anyone else's.

You are of course right in saying that public corruption declined when people in
America "got tired of corruption and decided to do something about it".  The 
question is why did they get tired of it?  It had something to do with the 
impact of the Great Awakening; it had something to do with their sense of 
offense at the gap between the structure of the morality of their private lives 
versus the corruption of their public life.  Perhaps you have an explanation for
why our people have not got tired of the increasing corruption of public life 
right since Independence.  What motivated Americans to do something about 
corruption in their society?  Why is there a lack of motivation in our society?

At this point, I confess that I have not looked up the earlier discussion on 
corruption in the IP archives, so I must remedy this lack in my education before
engaging further on this!

Equally, I think you will benefit from Mangalwadi's INDIA: THE GRAND EXPERIMENT 
in which he points out that even our own pride in our own heritage was made 
possible because of the work of foreigners who were inspired by their devotion 
to God and therefore stood against the interests of their own country (Britain) 
and laid the foundations of freedom for India knowing that it would make Indian 
independence inevitable (a politically-unfashionable thesis but TRUE).

Actually, the old division of Protestant, Catholic, Jew is no longer valid 
anywhere in the world; the new division should be between those who take 
traditional teaching seriously and those who don't....traditional catholics and 
protestants and jews seem to think that they have more in common with each other
than with people who have "lapsed" from their own denomination...

Prabhu

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