Samir Chopra's Blog, page 129

Liberal Democracies and Armed Insurrections: Never the Twain Shall Meet?

Jeff McMahan has an interesting article–Why Gun Control Is Not Enough–over at The Stone today (New York Times, 20 December 2012). I agree with him that gun ownership does not have the salutary political effects that its most fervent, Second Amendment-quoting advocates claim it does, even though I don’t agree with McMahan’s conclusion that ‘the United States should ban private gun ownership entirely, or almost entirely.’  In any case, in this post, I want to focus on one exceedingly curious claim that McMahan makes in response to the former Congressman Jay Dickey, Republican from Arkansas, who is quoted as saying,

We have a right to bear arms because of the threat of government taking over the freedoms we have.

In response, McMahan says:

There is, of course, a large element of fantasy in Dickey’s claim. Individuals with handguns are no match for a modern army.  It’s also a delusion to suppose that the government in a liberal democracy such as the United States could become so tyrannical that armed insurrection, rather than democratic procedures, would be the best means of constraining it.  This is not Syria; nor will it ever be.  Shortly after Dickey made his comment, people in Egypt rose against a government that had suppressed their freedom in ways far more serious than requiring them to pay for health care. Although a tiny minority of Egyptians do own guns, the protesters would not have succeeded if those guns had been brought to Tahrir Square. If the assembled citizens had been brandishing Glocks in accordance with the script favored by Second Amendment fantasists, the old regime would almost certainly still be in power and many Egyptians who’re now alive would be dead.

Why is it a ‘delusion’ to suppose that a liberal democracy could not become so tyrannical that those subject to it might consider armed insurrection a viable response? Is this a conceptual truth about liberal democracies? Why would ‘armed insurrection’ never be the ‘best means of constraining it’? And why is McMahan so confident that the US will ‘never’ be Syria? This is a prophecy, not an argument, one that does not seem to consider what might happen if this country had been subjected to more than one 9/11 attack. One of those was enough to see a crackdown on minorities, the passing of regressive legislation, the declaration of two wars, and the commission of war crimes. What would have a couple more of those have done?

McMahan’s example of the Egyptian overthrow of their government is also curious. If the insurrection in Egypt had been an armed one, the protesters would not have congregated in Tahrir Square to present themselves as sitting ducks for the Egyptian police and armed forces. Rather, they would have concentrated on other tactics: assassinations, attempts to take over or destroy government property and so on.  The Tahrir Square assemblies took place precisely because the ‘revolution’ was sought to be conducted by public, visible, attention-gathering, solidarity-generating means.  The insurrection would have been conducted very differently once armed violence was chosen as one of its modalities.

Whatever the arguments for gun control, and I think there are many excellent ones out there, including some that McMahan uses in his piece, complacency about ‘liberal democracy’ shouldn’t feature in them.

Pistol-Packin’ Professor: A Day in the Life

In honor of those–like libertarian law professors, the last defenders of the faith–who have attempted to point out the silliness of keeping faculty unarmed in our school’s classrooms, I offer these recollections of a day in the life:

The alarm went off at 6. I sat up, swung my legs off the bed, and reached for the Glock 30 SF. There it lay, cold, implacable, loaded, right next to the stack of unread New York and London Reviews of Books. I tucked the cold steel into my pajama pocket and rose. It was time to get cracking. Brooklyn lay outside. And a full day of walking on its mean streets, lecturing in its even meaner lecture halls, and worst of all, meetings with fractitious faculty, awaited,

After I had showered and shaved, the Glock visible and within reach at all times (getting jumped while I was all soaped up and vulnerable in the shower had never appealed to me), I changed into my work clothes. As always, my holster went on quickly, and I packed two spare clips of ammunition into my jacket’s roomy pockets. (I had these enlarged for easy access to the clips in case of an extended gun battle.)

Emerging from my building, I quickly checked the streets, scanning left and right, looking for concealed shooters, ready to roll to the curb and squeeze off a quick covering volley of fire if needed. All was quiet. A few schoolkids walked past and I kept them visible in case any of them reached into their backpacks. Crossing Coney Island Avenue required similar caution; the Pakistani bodega owners could never be trusted not to each for the AK-47s that are  so common back in their land.

I arrived at the campus in time for my class. The students filed in, shuffling past me with that usual mix of insolence and boredom manifest, as I kept a wary eye on them. As always, I had the clear angles of fire for the lecture hall worked out. Contingency plans at the back of my mind, I began the class. As I paced up and down, I kept one hand on the Glock, feeling its heft even as I evaluated argument after argument. It was oddly reassuring, knowing that not even a fallacy or two could diminish its ability to bust a cap in some philosophy major’s ass. (Only in self-defense.)

The afternoon faculty meeting went off without incident. I kept the Glock on the table in front of me in case any of the usual objections over curricular changes needed speedy resolution. I kept my chair pushed back just a little, so that I could spring to my feet, squeeze off a round or two before executing the classic ‘roll-and-rock-upright’ move into a more favorable shooting position. Thankfully, the votes went off without incident, though I had my eyes on the beady-eyed Continental type in the back. I got your Nietzsche right here, pal. This one will kill ya; it won’t make you stronger.

As evening fell, the winds sharpened, and darkness closed in, I packed up, locked the office, and headed out for the walk back home. Every day called for the same challenge: negotiating dozens of traffic crossings on the walk back home, as cars loaded with potential shooters pulled up next to me, and hooded teenagers strolled past, their baggy pants bulging suspiciously.

And then, I was home. I sprinted up the stairs, avoiding the confinement of the elevator (those kinds of enclosed spaces aren’t conducive to the quick draw), and moved into the apartment. After checking all the rooms, it was time for dinner. I ate, as I always did: the Glock next to the salad, my chair well away and out of line with the windows.

And then, time for bed, and the necessary letting down of the guard for some shut-eye. I checked to make sure the Glock was in its place, and went through my usual bedtime ritual: the quick roll-out of bed, the taking of cover next to the dehumidifier, the clip reload with the lights off.

Finally, lights out. I drifted off, as the glowing green light of the clock-radio threw into sharp relief the metallic outlines of the SF, my companion and keeper, my torch, my flame, my lodestar.

Semester’s End: A Teaching Self-Evaluation

As this semester winds down to its inevitable, slow, painful end, it’s time to reflect just a little on what went right and what went wrong with my teaching. I taught three classes: Philosophical Issues in Literature, Core Philosophy (Honors), and Political Philosophy. These three constituted three ‘new’ preparations for me: I last taught Core Philosophy (not at Brooklyn College) some fifteen years ago, and Social Philosophy (the second of our pair of Social and Political Philosophy classes) some eight years ago (and besides, this semester’s syllabus was drastically reworked to reflect my focus on revolutions).

My grade for this semester, I think, was a solid B. I did some things right: I devised an interestingly unconventional syllabus for Political Philosophy and picked a reasonably diverse and provocative set of readings for Philosophical Issues in Literature; I managed to spark some reasonably robust discussion in all three classes on many occasions;  my reading assignments were reasonably sized; I asked questions and encouraged students to ask them as well; I provided good introductions to many central philosophical issues in both my core classes and often managed to pique interest in those areas; I often provided detailed exegeses of difficult passages and made some interesting connections with other philosophical debates. Among other things. (Says he, flatteringly.)

I got some things wrong as well: my syllabus for the Core Philosophy class could have been more inspired; I failed, as I often did, to get many students roped into discussions and in some cases, gave up on some of them; I did not give very detailed or helpful written comments on papers (though in my defense, I would say I was good at meeting students one-on-one and providing detailed feedback on their papers on those occasions); I was sometimes disorganized in my discussions in Political Philosophy class; I did not pay enough attention to the written responses my students provided me for Political Philosophy (I deeply regret this because many of the responses were excellent and could have served to spark some very interesting discussions); my discussions in my Philosophy Core were a little rushed at times; and so on.

I have now taught, on and off, for over twenty years, ten of those as a full-time faculty member. My challenges remain the same: devising syllabi that are not tedious for the students and myself; sparking robust discussion in class; coming up with an evaluation scheme that is fair and pedagogically sound; helping students with their writing; explaining difficult arguments clearly; finding ways to represent philosophical positions in a way that is fair and not superficial. I have yet to master any of these, and every semester finds a way to either remind me of my inadequacies or induce a step backwards in a domain where I thought progress had been made.

My students continue to delight, confound, perplex, and edify. They raise me up, they bring me down. I sense I am a small part in their lives, but for fourteen weeks, twice a year, they are a very big deal in mine. I will see some of them again in other classes. Others will graduate, yet others will avoid me like the plague. Some will ask me for recommendation letters, others will advise their friends to give me a pass.  Our encounter, for now, is over. I can testify to the traces they have left; their lives will testify to whether I was able to make any sort of impression at all.

The Bushmaster Male (Man Card in Tow)

Chandra Kumar recently wrote on my Facebook page:

One other thing not mentioned in the media: all these gun-happy killers seem to be male. Lots of women have ‘mental health’ problems too but I don’t hear about them going out on mass killing sprees. Surely this fact, in a civilized society, would be cause for reflection as well.

And then, this morning, Paul Campos wrote:

Now almost literally 100 percent of the mass murders and spree killings in America and around the world are committed by members of a very well-defined and particular social group: men.  Indeed it’s nearly impossible to find an example of a female mass murderer….Men commit the large majority of violent crimes, the overwhelming majority of murders, and practically all of the most violent murders (98.2 percent of current death row inmates are men).

Speculation about possible causes is the beginning of investigation, and so in that spirit, here goes.  (I don’t doubt for a second all of this will sound very familiar to anyone that has read more than one series of analyses that follow The All-American Mass Murder.)

The perpetrators of  spectacularly violent, elaborate killing sprees, besides being male, are frequently said to have suffered from some kind of ‘anti-social’ characteristic. Even if they weren’t the kind that pull wings off flies they were said to be moody, reclusive, given to dark, borderline unhinged ramblings, and so on. They were, in short, ‘misfits’. These folks didn’t fit in. They failed to meet some standard, follow some guideline for conformity. That rejection, that repeated cuff of the ears and the slap across the face, fed back and inward, till the repressed anger finally erupted in an attention-grabbing act. Still pretty familiar stuff. But why are males prone to such acts? What makes them particularly susceptible?

Because, in part, in this hyper-masculinized society, the male of the species is often brought up–in ways distinctive to males–to be acutely conscious of the consequences of the failure to conform. The lack of ‘fitting in’ is more often than not, the failure to match some notion of masculinity, well-established and cast in stone. The relentless invocation of generic notions of power and money and sexual conquest (preferably rough and dominating) as hallmarks of ‘success’ drums into most male heads a steady, repetitive maddening litany: you aren’t man enough till you throw off every single behavioral characteristic that might possibly carry the faintest whiff of the not-masculine (sometimes this is the feminine, sometimes this is just an established vision of the successful life). And our world’s cruelty doesn’t end there: these failures are not just met with social ostracism, they sometimes provoke mockery and violence. The misfit isn’t just ignored, he is sometimes tracked down, cornered and baited. That acute sense of failure at these moments of confrontation will be felt the most keenly by those aware that it represents the greatest distance from their supposed ideal state.

What better way to retaliate than to simultaneously strike back and exit? To go with an assertion of manhood, to carry a man card (like the kind issued by Bushmaster), to show up on the nightly news, the most accepted sign in our culture of having made it?

Growing up with Guns

I grew up with guns. Two of them: a 12-bore shotgun and a .25 automatic. I do not remember the make of the former but the latter, I’m pretty sure, was a Browning (a ‘Baby’; again, if I remember correctly). They belonged to my father (and thus, our family): he had purchased them overseas after getting the necessary clearances and applying for a gun ownership license, and then brought them back home. I do not remember how old I was when I first saw them, but they fitted rather seamlessly into our household. We were, after all, surrounded by weaponry of other kinds. Most prominently, large, loud, fighter jets that carried bombs, rockets, missiles and guns; we lived on an air force bases, and these reminders were never too far away. Our living room sported 20-mm and 30-mm cannon shells, remnants from gunnery exercises that my father had participated in. The guns in our household felt like an extension of that visible firepower.

But these weapons were not visible quite the same way. For one thing, my father kept both guns disassembled, with the various parts scattered over the house, well-hidden away from my brother and myself. Once in a while, the pieces were collected, and the guns cleaned and assembled. These occasions also served as a time for my father to check the shotgun cartridges; they came in colorful boxes, with wax paper inside that enclosed the shells. They were all things of beauty; the gleaming metal of the shotgun barrel, the lettering on the red shells, the embossed marks on their back, the polished wood of the butt. Then, the cleaning and checks over, the guns and the ammunition were put away again.

We did use them though. It was pretty clear they were meant for hunting, and not for defending ourselves against intruders or the government. So, I learned how to shoot at an early age. By the age of nine, I could shoot the shotgun, and was a reasonably good shot. I learned how to load, the use of the safety catch, how to handle the inevitable recoil, how to aim,  the safe ‘barrel-down’ carrying of the gun, and so on. (My father made sure to tell me a few stories of careless fools who mishandled their guns and caused grief to themselves and their families.) We did occasional target practice and a little hunting for partridge. One of my fondest memories of my childhood, by far, was spending a week–as a nine-year old–by myself, with my father on an air force base, which like most bases of its time, was partially forested and thus offered ample opportunities for tracking and hunting. We would take out the shotgun, assemble it, get the ammunition ready, and head out in the evening. Those walks through the elephant grass with my father in front, and as the sky darkened, won’t ever be forgotten. Game was easy, and I had the satisfaction of bagging a bird or two.

I do not know where the guns went, and what ever became of them. In my teen years, I lived in a city, and hunting never happened any more. (More to the point, hunting had lost its appeal for me after I saw a deer get shot but not die immediately.) I remember seeing the guns once when I was seventeen, and then a few years later, I left for the US.  After that, on my trips back home, I never inquired about them, and they never came up again in conversation. I still don’t know where they are or what happened to them.  I don’t think I will ever own one myself.

A Couple of Reflections Prompted by Sandy Hook

Yesterday, on Facebook, I reposted a link to a post I had written here in response to the Aurora shootings in July. You could change the title of the post slightly to reference ‘Sandy Hook’ rather than ‘Aurora’ and nothing else would need changing. This morning, still clearly unable to write anything coherent in response, I posted the following three messages on my Twitter feed and Facebook page:

Guns don’t come up with half-assed arguments against gun control. People do.

Guns aren’t scared of the NRA. People are.

Guns don’t say after every tragedy: “Lets mourn, no time to talk politics’. People do.

You get the picture; I’m still not capable of making a reasoned contribution to the ‘national debate’ on gun-related violence.

But I do want to make a couple of points about the nature of the ‘debate’, such as it is.

The first is prompted by the third quip above. For an outstanding feature of the political response to the sickeningly common and soon-to-be-mundane massacres is the loudly broadcasted call to immediately seek refuge in bromides and palliatives: the usual mix of mourning, counseling, holding hands, which is supposed to bridge political divides, apply ‘healing balms’ and bring peace to all us traumatized folks. There is never, ever, seemingly any desire evinced by our political classes to prevent the recurrence of the massacres, for they are, as noted before, inevitable. This call is then faithfully parroted by the media (always at its ghoulish worst in its coverage of these kinds of tragedies). This is what I’d much rather see the next time: ditch the candlelight vigil and tell your local politician, congressman, senator, or anyone else that matters that they don’t get your vote unless they start a ‘national conversation’ about guns. Or something else. (The broad similarity of this call to the calls that electoral disputes be settled quickly so that the nation’s citizens don’t get embroiled in something as messy as a politically tinged dispute, one that might produce a little heat and light, is unmistakable and not coincidental. As always, the most important thing is to keep citizens numb, not provoked. God forbid that a difficult issue be aired in all its complexity and that the inevitable disputes it provokes be allowed to get a decent hearing.)

The second is prompted by noticing how mental health is sought as an obfuscatory factor in this debate.  That is, a familiar slogan soon starts making the rounds in two variants: one, ‘this is a mental health issue, not a gun issue’ and second ‘people will find a way to kill people, so banning a particular weapon is unlikely to bring these massacres to a halt.’   These are particularly egregious; they amount, roughly, to saying that no actions need be taken that might make it more difficult for mentally deranged people to go on brutally effective and successful killing sprees. We can control the damage done by the insane by treating them and by making sure they cannot lay their hands on dangerous weapons. The two are not mutually exclusive.

It is truly amazing that a nation, so willing to put up with the evisceration of its civil liberties in order to guard against shadowy, poorly understood threats from elsewhere, is unwilling to countenance the most minor of inconveniences in order to guard against a clearly visible threat from within.

Psychologizing, Immortalizing, and Unamuno Contra Nietzsche

As promised yesterday, here is Miguel de Unamuno on Nietzsche. In my first post on Unamuno, I had written that ‘there are streaks of ‘conventional’ conservatism visible in his fulminations against Nietzsche.’ The following is one such outburst. It occurs in the chapter that sets up Unamuno’s central thesis in The Tragic Sense of Life: ‘The Hunger of Immortality’:

There you have that ‘thief of energies’ as he so obtusely called Christ who sought to wed nihilism with the struggle for existence, and he talks to you about courage. His heart craved the eternal All while his head convinced him of nothingness, and, desperate and mad to defend himself from himself, he cursed that which he most loved. Because he could not be Christ, he blasphemed against Christ. Bursting with his own self, he wished himself unending and dreamed his theory of eternal recurrence, a sorry counterfeit of immortality, and, full of pity for himself, he abominated all pity. And there are some who say that his is the philosophy of strong men! No, it is not. My health and my strength urge me to perpetuate myself. His is the doctrine of weaklings who aspire to be strong, but not of the strong who are strong. Only the feeble resign themselves to final death and substitute some other desire for the longing for personal immortality. In the strong the zeal for perpetuity overrides the doubt of realizing it, and their superabundance of life overflows upon the other side of death. [Nietzsche is not named directly here but, instead, is footnoted via the 'he' in the first sentence above.]

Sympathetic readers of Nietzsche will find plenty to disagree here: the accusations of nihilism and self-pity, the claim that ‘his is the doctrine of weaklings’, the resignation of Nietzsche to ‘final death’ (this is especially an oddity as it occurs a few sentences after noting Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence).  But these criticisms of Nietzsche are not novel, of course; most arch-critics of Nietzsche have made them too. The irony implicit in a man perpetually racked by illness writing so eloquently on ‘health and strength’ has not gone unnoticed, for instance, and neither has Nietzsche’s religious upbringing, nor his anxiety over romantic failure (with Lou Salome) and publication and recognition. There is plenty in Nietzsche’s life to prompt such readings then. And because Nietzsche dished out so many dressings-down in his writings and suggested much philosophical theorizing amounted to involuntary autobiographies of its authors, he himself invites such polemical counterblasts built on relentless psychologizing.

It is not something that he would have minded, I suspect. The vigor of his polemics have clearly provoked Unamuno and shoved the proverbial burr under the saddle. Unamuno has been forced to admit he has read Nietzsche and found him a threat to the doctrines he aims to expound and defend in his book; he knows that unless Nietzsche is defused and defanged, his writing will continue to mock them.

For a man who feared lack of attention the most, this is not such a bad outcome. For the final irony is that Unamuno himself immortalizes Nietzsche by this attack.

Unamuno on Lasting Glory

Today’s post is merely a pointer to a couple of lyrical passages from Miguel De Unamuno‘s The Tragic Sense of Life (Collins; The Fontana Library of Theology and Philosophy, 1962). These aren’t just lyrical, they ring true as well. Or perhaps that’s the same thing. Either way, here they are.

This violent struggle for the perpetuation of our name extends backwards into the past, just as it aspires to conquer the future; we contend with the dead because we, the living, are obscured beneath their shadow. We are jealous of the geniuses of former times, whose names, standing out like the landmarks of history, rescue the ages from oblivion. The heaven of fame is not very large, and the more there are who enter it the less is the share of each. The great names of the past rob us of our place in it; the space which they fill in the popular memory they usurp from us who aspire to occupy it. And so we rise up in revolt against them, and hence the bitterness with which all those who seek after fame in the world of letters judge those who have already attained it and are in enjoyment of it. If additions continue to be made to the wealth of literature, there will come a day of sifting, and each one fears lest he be caught in the meshes of the sieve. In attacking the master, irreverent youth is only defending itself.  (pp. 68)

If the man who tells you that he writes, paints, sculptures, or sings for his own amusement, gives his work to the public, he lies; he lies if he puts his name to his writing, painting, statue or song. He wishes, at the least, to leave behind a shadow of his spirit, something that may survive him. If the Imitation of Christ is anonymous, it is because its author sought the eternity of the soul and did not trouble himself about that of the name. The man of letters who shall tell you that he despises fame is a lying rascal. Of Dante, the author of those three-and-thirty vigorous verses on the vanity of worldly glory, Boccacio says that he relished honours and pomp more perhaps than suited his conspicuous virtue. The keenest desire of condemned souls is that they may be remembered and talked of here on earth, and this is the chief solace that lightens the darkness of his Inferno. And he himself confessed that his aim in expounding the concept of Monarchy was not merely that he might be of service to others, but that he might win for his own glory the palm of so great a prize. What more? Even of that holy man, seemingly the most indifferent to worldly vanity, the Poor Little One of Assisi, it is related in the Legenda Trium Sociorum that he said: You will see how I shall yet be adored by all the world. And even of God Himself the theologians say that he created the world for the manifestation of His glory.  (pp. 66)

Note: I hope to excerpt another passage from Unamuno (on Nietzsche) tomorrow.

RIP Ravi Shankar

I was born in an obscure small town in Central India: Maihar. If that name is known outside of its local, provincial, confines, it is almost certainly due to the Maihar gharana of Indian classical music. (From Wikipedia: ‘In Hindustani music, a gharānā is a system of social organization linking musicians or dancers by lineage or apprenticeship, and by adherence to a particular musical style. A gharana also indicates a comprehensive musicological ideology. This ideology sometimes changes substantially from one gharana to another….The word gharana comes from the Hindi word ‘ghar‘, which means ‘family’ or ‘house’. It typically refers to the place where the musical ideology originated.’) One of the most distinguished members of that gharana, which includes the sarod maestros Baba Alauddin Khan and Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, was Ravi Shankar.

I have never been a particularly sophisticated fan of classical music, Indian or Western. Still, it wasn’t that difficult to sense the presence of genius when confronted with a performance–live or recorded–by Shankar. There was the physical dexterity, of course: the dazzling, giddiness-inducing play of his fingers over the strings and frets of his sitar; they would fly and strum and pick with such speed and abandon that worries about the physical state of his digits were only natural. (I often wondered whether he iced his hands after a show.) Then there was the visible physical absorption, so characteristic of the accomplished artist: the intense meditation on the progression of his piece, the coaxing out with visible effort of a series of complex notes one after another. Finally, there was the music.  Since the sounds of the sitar were the sounds that were indelibly, part of the sonic landscape that had surrounded me from my earliest days, it wasn’t too hard to find an emotional resonance in Shankar’s playing; his genius lay in being able to summon up, seemingly effortlessly, the varied moods associated with each raag.

I had an indirect personal connection with Shankar, which I bragged about for a bit before I gave it up: my grandmother took lessons in playing the sitar from Baba Alauddin Khan in his company i.e., they were classmates. Or at least, that’s how I was told the story and I faithfully repeated it. Perhaps she only sat in one session, perhaps she was a regular. The details seemed irrelevant: after all, there were photographs of him in our family album, and that seemed confirmation enough. (Even now, after all these years, it’s hard not to feel that connection, even one so distantly intimate. Perhaps it’s because it establishes a link to my grandparents.)

Despite this link, I never met or spoke to him in person. I did see him up ‘close’ once, when he performed live at my undergraduate college. He arrived on time, set up his stage with little fuss, and after a short opening address, got down to playing the raag selected for the day. I watched from the balcony. There was the usual crowd-pleasing crescendo that brought the house down, and those attending to their feet, but what came before it was infinitely superior: the gradual, textured, development of a complex composition, finding, yet again, at the hands of a master, a unique, personal realization.

RIP Pandit Ravi Shankar.

Free Software and ‘Appropriate Technology’

Last week, as part of a panel session organized at Queens College of the City University of New York, I spoke briefly on ‘Free Software and Appropriate Technology.’ I began by introducing the term ‘appropriate technology’ by setting it in the context of India’s attempts to achieve self-reliance in energy production, an effort that in the 1970s involved a serious interest in nuclear power. This effort had become the subject of a fierce critique by Professor Dhirendra Sharma of the Jawaharlal Nehru University, who suggested in his book, India’s Nuclear Estate that nuclear power was an ‘inappropriate technology’ for India: it encouraged centralization of political power, made energy into a national security issue with its concomitant secrecy, encouraged dependence on erstwhile colonial powers and the signing of treaties that were detrimental to national sovereignty, and more to the point, was expensive, unproven, and unlikely to meet India’s growing energy needs. (Sharma’s efforts did not meet with favor in the councils of power; he was ‘transferred’ to the School of Languages from the School of Sciences as a reprimand, a bizarre move that did nothing to silence Sharma and merely directed more attention to his writings.) Over the course of a few conversations with Sharma I grew to develop an understanding of the notion of ‘appropriate technology’, which might not have been in complete accordance with those who first coined the term, but which did a great deal to provide me with an evaluative framework for thinking about technology and its connection with politics.

I then moved on to making the case for free software as an appropriate technology for India. As Scott Dexter and I noted in our book, Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software:

FOSS provides a social good that proprietary software cannot; for example, FOSS may be the only viable source of software in developing nations, where programming talent is abundant but prices for proprietary-software  licenses are prohibitive. Countries such as China and India have seen in FOSS an opportunity to draw on their wealth of programming talent to provide the  technological infrastructure for their rapidly expanding economies. Microsoft’s substantial investments in Indian education initiatives may be prompted by worries that free software might fill indigenous needs instead. FOSS has been cited by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as a key element of achieving economic independence from the global North. At the 2005 World Social Forum in Porto Allegre, the Youth Camp focused largely on  FOSS issues. This enthusiasm for FOSS extends to the industrialized First World as well, as many members of the European Union adopt it for governmental administration. [citations removed]

To emphasize the point made in the first sentence above: FOSS prevents lock-in with a monopolistic vendor; it provides an educational laboratory for a country where education in advanced technology is necessary to sustain its economic growth; it encourages autonomous development of software applications and local skills; its price is right, especially if local talent can train themselves on it; it is the ideal software base for the educational system; and so on.

The case is compelling, I think.