Can anything good come out of Nazareth?

The title of the blog is from the Bible. It is Nathanael's response to Philip when he depicts Jesus as a native of Nazareth and claims that Jesus is the messiah spoken of by Moses and the prophets. (Nathanael and Philip later went on to become the disciples of Jesus.) I am writing this blog to explore some questions regarding human judgment and its basis. To be more precise, I am trying to see how we, as individuals, use prejudice and knowledge of history as basis for judgment interchangeably with the change being apparently seamless. I will narrate a few instances that have spurred my thought in this direction.

I remember someone once explaining to me that the seeming contradiction between Marx and current Marxists on the state providing for elementary education was to be explained by the change in the nature of the state during Marx’s time and that in the current Marxists’ time. He explained how over a period of time the welfare state emerged which was probably different from what the state was in Marx's time. He built a narrative that was compelling in its logic and rich with detail. I also remember an English lecture which I attended as part of my pre-degree course where by describing the French society of the time, the teacher breathed a life into ‘ The Three Musketeers’ by Alexander Dumas which I had missed during my earlier reading of the story.

More recently, I came across someone suggesting that depicting a corporate organisation as a partner of two Non Government Organisations (NGOs) seemed strange and that having to do so is a source of slight discomfort. The source of the discomfort was the difficulty in seeing entities of competing ideological positions partnering each other. On another occasion I came across someone inventing a story about an East German and thereby socialist links of a corporate organisation which explained its attempt at strengthening the government delivery of certain public services as part of its agenda in Corporate Social Responsibility. The reality is that the corporate organisation had West German links and was likely to be one with a ‘capitalist’ agenda. To be fair, the inventor of the story used it only when people were finding it difficult to reconcile to the fact that a corporate organisation can support the state and not necessarily continually attempt to weaken the state.

Before going further, I must define what I mean by history and prejudice. Put simply, to me, prejudice is based on an unsystematic analysis, whereas history is based on systematic analysis, prejudice is not based on logic and evidence, whereas history is. To me the latter two instances are possibly those where prejudice hinders understanding whereas the former two are instances where knowledge of history aids understanding. In the latter two instances, the perception about corporate organizations formed through exposure to particular strands of theory (or ideology) do not seem to explain the situation to the two individuals and hence the responses. But to me the issue here is not going into the details of the situation and the theory. Simplistic readings of theories tend to provide us with convenient categories and then our mind conjures up hypothesis disguised as conclusions, with the conjurer himself deluded by the disguise. Closer examination of the theory and also the situation would have probably revealed the complexities involved and could have provided the individuals with a more accurate explanation for the situation they found themselves in.

My concern is why they did not go into the details. As an initial hypothesis, I think it was because they unwittingly made a seamless transition from knowledge of history to prejudice as their basis for judgment. The seamless character of this transition is probably because this prejudice is not delinked from the knowledge of history. It is a particular understanding of the historical processes that gave the categories and concepts which they used to understand the events around them. However, in spite of the tremendous amount of work that goes into the establishment of these categories and concepts, they are abstract and have to be contextualized to be a useful basis for analysis. Secondly there is always the risk of them being dated. Given this scenario, one is often perilously close to making erroneous analysis unless one exercises extreme caution. But the ultimate deception that can delude even the trained mind is the possibility of the understanding being able to explain certain phenomenon but actually that understanding may not be anywhere close to the ‘correct’ understanding. The world of natural sciences is also not free of this. We thought that the genes determined many things about human life. But with the new understanding in the light of the work on genetic mapping, that seems to be an inaccurate understanding. As we stretch the boundaries of the known we feel the vastness of the unknown. Caught in this reality of human existence, judgment seems improbable. But we are forced to make judgments and that is the reality of human existence.

Going back to the title, Nathanael was in a situation where he was being told that the man without sin, the messiah prophesied about by Moses and others was a native of Nazareth. Nathanael asked the question "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" in disbelief; a disbelief based on probably his negative image of Nazareth as a place. The future King of Israel cannot be from a city like Nazareth. But this was based on analysis which did not factor in God's design. But to his credit, he was willing to reexamine his position and reexamine he did with wonderful results for him. The story holds a lesson for us all including for non believers. Reexamine, revalidate our theories. See them from diverse point of views and believe that these are but tentative hypothesis.

Information Asymmetry as I saw it

In one of my visits to Dharni in relation to a project there, I witnessed an incident which I thought I should share with you. Before I narrate the incident let me tell you a bit about the place itself. Dharni, along with Chikaldhara block, constitutes the Melghat region of Amravati district in Maharashtra. Melghat came into the public attention in the early part of the 90’s with the reports of acute malnutrition in children and related deaths. Its other, and more positive claim to fame, is that it is also a tiger reserve. The population in the region is largely tribal and most of them live in poverty.

I was staying at an NGO’s guest house whose campus was about 6 to 7 kilometres from block headquarters and consequently is in an isolated area with, what one could call a forest, surrounding the campus. A highway which runs through the forest connects the campus with the block headquarters and there are share auto-rickshaws that ply the highway infrequently. One morning I was taking one of these to the block headquarters. My co-passengers were largely farmers or farm labourers. There was one farmer with a huge sack which contained tuar dal. I had been told earlier that this is one of the major crops in the district. As this was also the day of the weekly mandi in Dharni, obviously the farmer was taking the dal to sell it at the mandi. As we neared the block headquarters (about a kilometre and half away), the driver, a young lad of twenty or thereabouts, stopped by the road side in front of a trader’s shop and asked the trader what the procurement price for tuar dal was. Since the shop was at some distance from the road, the trader asked the driver to come closer. The driver took the auto closer to the shop and stopped under the small shed outside the shop. There was a huge weighing balance hanging from the roof of the shed. The driver repeated his query to the trader and the trader responded that he would need to know the weight and quality of the dal. Accordingly the driver asked the farmer to weigh the sack. It was then that I noticed that the farmer was visibly disturbed by the turn of events and was reluctant to oblige. But by then the co-passengers also began to prod him to do the weighing. Perhaps it was their anxiety with the delay that it was causing them that spurred them to act in that manner. The farmer reluctantly took the sack down and put it on the balance. The trader quickly weighed it and stated a price. The farmer looked puzzled and quite agitated by now. He said something to the auto driver and the driver responded. I could not quite understand what was being said. But I could follow that the farmer was not happy with the goings on and some of his ire was being directed at the driver. But the farmer’s muted protests did not stop the deal from going through. The deal was done and money changed hands. The farmer saw the fruit of his toil taken away from him at a price which he was not sure whether to be contended with or not.

As we continued our journey, I heard the driver tell my co-passengers about the unwarranted suspicion of the farmer about him. Apparently at the trader’s shop the farmer had angrily accused the driver of being in cahoots with the trader to cheat him off his rightful price. The driver defended himself in front of the passengers by saying that he was trying to do the farmer a good turn by enabling him to avoid the hustle and bustle of a mandi. Anyway he would not have gotten a higher price at the mandi. I could hear some of the co-passengers murmuring in agreement with this defence.

The incident set me thinking in many directions. The farmer’s agony at sensing that perhaps he had been cheated out of his rightful earning is heart rending to say the least. The farmer’s sense of powerlessness could arise from his lack of knowledge on what could be the correct price. Knowledge of the correct price would have enabled him to be decisive in staking his claim and not be pushed into a corner by the turn of events. Then again, was it a deliberate act of common cunning on the part of the trader and driver to cheat the farmer out of his rightful price. Or was it the gods conspiring to cheat the farmer with the driver and the trader being mere pawns?

For a moment I went back to the many conversations on markets and economics that I have been part of at IRMA, my alma mater. The issues of market failure, information asymmetry, price discovery and commodity trading were manifesting its unpalatable side in front of my very eyes.