The official historians of the modern Universities in the Anglo-Saxon world and their colonies have created a myth. That myth has been transmitted over generations as the authentic history of the modern world, and can be traced through the Italian Renaissance, German Reformation and Industrial Revolutions in Catholic countries of Spain, Portugal and Holland, the French Revolution and the Protestant industrialisation in England and France.
The common element in all these processes was ideas and their symbolic representations in art and architecture, painting and sculpture. Renaissance brought forth a new interpretation of God and the world, a new theology of the Mass and a new framework of the moral relationship between the individual person and the divinity, leading to Reformation. The Catholic Industrial Revolution of the 16th century was understood to be driven by the white man’s burden to civilise the others in Latin America, Africa and some parts of Asia. The Protestant industrial drive in the 18th century made this civilisational mission much more sophisticated and economically efficient. The French Revolution of 1789 and the French Enlightenment of the 18th century glamorised the ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity by inventing a new concept of the moral individual as a sui generis “monad” (Leibniz, 1714) called ‘the citizen’.
The complementary readings by Edmund Burke, Tocqueville and Marx provided the academic platform for Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer and Adolf Philipp Wilhelm Bastian to envision three different types of sociologies in France, England and Germany.
Anna Plassart (2015) has forcefully reminded us that the Scottish Enlightenment and French Revolution offered an alternative and equally powerful imperative framework of the modern revolution in Europe. The Scots, in their alternative interpretation, focused on the transformation of the polite, civilised moeurs that had defined “modernity”, analysed by the Edinburgh intellectuals of the 18th century, particularly David Hume and Adam Smith. The Scots observed that the real historical significance of the French Revolution in particular and the modern enterprise of civilisation, in general, lay in the transformation of warfare, national feelings and relations between states, war and commerce that characterised the post-revolutionary modernity and the international order.
In another path-breaking joint-endeavor, the contributors to the Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment (edited by Alexander Broadie, 2003) have re-analysed the works of David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, Adam Ferguson and Colin Maclaurin to understand the genealogy of the ‘modern’ and the modernisation process in historical detail.
Arthur Herman’s work How the Scots Invented the Modern World (2002) presents a much more coherent argument that instead of ideas and representations, commercial interests and competitions among institutions have led to the transformations in the institution of traditional war, as the final solution of emergent conflicts, competitions and crises. This transformation was rooted in pagan ethos and led to the development of community sentiment devoid of territory. In the course of time, it led to the development of the modern nation state and the semi-autonomous moral individual.
In the 20th century, cinema became a much more sophisticated weapon of war than the other means, not so much in Europe as in the USA and Asia. American cinema from the very beginning was linked with the Pentagon and armament industries. The armament industries and major financial institutions, including banking in the then USA were controlled by the Jews of German origin. Thus, the migrant Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe became the pillars of Hollywood.
Almost at the same time, the mega synthesis by Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and Talcott Parsons available in the English language by the 1970s became the foundation of the various major departments of Sociology in India. By 1986, we had two major attempts to canonise the official history of Indian sociology: one was Indian Sociology by Yogendra Singh (1986), Ideology and Theory in Indian Sociology (2004); and the second was Sociology of Indian Sociology by Ramakrishna Mukherjee (1979). The influence of Yogendra Singh overshadowed the better documented book by Ramakrishna Mukherjee due to several interrelated factors.
B.K Sarkar drew on the ideas of German Romanticism, French Positivism and the Indian Swadeshi movement to combat British Orientalism and Indology that emphasised the ‘other-worldly’ spiritual distinctiveness of India. Sarkar underlined the materialist, positivist and non-mystical aspects of Indian science and culture. Sarkar also emphasised the continuity between the folk and classical traditions in India. Around the same time, A.K. Coomaraswamy combated Western depreciations of the Indian art as crude and non-realistic, and conceptually restituted the sacred symbolism and intellectual aspects of the Indian art. Coomaraswamy too emphasised the continuity between folk and classical traditions in India.
Indian cinema had by this time already developed in continuity with the storytelling traditions of pre-modern India as well as in continuity with the artistic conventions of iconic representation and non-realism in the temple. In this regard, Elie Wiesel (1996) has rightly written that “God made man because he loves stories. Human life is so bound up in stories that we are thoroughly desensitised to their wired and witchy power. Human minds yield helplessly to the suction of the story. No matter how hard we concentrate, no matter how deep we dig in our heels, we just can’t resist the gravity of alternate worlds”.
S.T. Coleridge has rightly said that experiencing a story, presented in any form, requires the reader’s willingness to suspend disbelief. Without silencing the inner sceptic and temporary belief, the reader or audience cannot enjoy himself or herself. If the storyteller is skilled, he simply invades us and takes over us and there is very little we can do to resist. A story told or presented effectively lingers in our imagination for long. Children are the creators of the story. They spend most of their working hours, both in and through the Neverland or the fictional world of the stories. They are either enjoying the stories in their books and videos or creating stories in their parent-play and role-plays like the Wonder Worlds of mommies and babies, princes and princesses, good guys and bad guys, and so on. Story is psychologically compulsory for most children. It is something they seem to need the same way they need bread and love. Story is so central to the lives of young children that it comes close to defining their existence. It is, however, a different story when they grow up. Their time is now divided between work and leisure.
Through the writing of sociologists like Veblen and Adorno, we know that as adults the working class has very little time for leisure. The affluent or leisure class enjoys the high culture, whereas the working class consumes the popular culture manufactured by the culture industry, mostly owned by the ruling class and managed by the upper middle class. This view is modified by the Structuralist, the followers of Claude Levi-Strauss. They claim that although at the surface structural level children and lower classes indulge in stories, myths and narratives to make their life meaningful and pleasurable by denying the reality of everyday life, but at the deep structural level even the leisure classes have their own set of stories or “the Neverlands” for evading the questions of guilt as exploiters of the working classes as well as the nature. This is the functional equivalent of the confessions in the church. In the language of Vilfredo Pareto, the stories for the leisure class provide foundations for “derivatives”, whereas the stories for children and the working class provide logic for their “residues” or survival instinct.
Hence, one can say that in modern culture people never grow up, as there are very few institutionalised rites of passages in modern secular cultures. Modern individuals never grow up; they remain like Peter Pan (the hero of James Barrie’s play Peter Pan, 1904). Peter Pan does not grow up. He never leaves the pretend space called the ‘Neverland’ behind. Modern individuals are like Peter Pan, who never leaves the pretend space. Novels, dreams, films and fantasies are provinces of the modern individual’s ‘Neverland’. Story’s role in human life extends far beyond conventional novels or films. Story, and a variety of story-like activities, dominates contemporary human life, more so, in urban spaces of developed as well as developing segments of the global village. In this age, one can be anxious about the demise of the book or cinema, but one sees that only the format is changing gradually. Books publishing or film making is still a very profitable big business. Fiction has a bigger market than non-fiction books for documentaries. This becomes the salient feature of popular culture in the modern, post- Modern and Digital World system.
