This morning has been a bit of a rabbit trail for me. I started off looking at the newspaper and reading the interview that Economic Times had with Amartya Sen and getting a gist of what this economist had to say about so many things. He was so clear and vivid about the things that he pronounced. I went back and looked at some of his works and previous interviews and realized that in his eighty years, he has lived so well in terms of his life and contributions to society. He was a Nobel Laureate in 1998, won the Bharat Ratna in 1999, the National Humanities medal in 2012. When you see the institutions that he has served, Harvard, Cambridge, London School of Economics, Jadavpur University of Calcutta, MIT, Cornell, Stanford, Oxford, Delhi School of Economics, University of California – Berkeley, you can see how much this man has input into economics all around the world.
Yet, as I was trying to get a handle on him and get into his thinking and his life, I realized that for him, it was not enough to be just intellectually oriented. If you look at his interview, he says, "Basically, business administration is not enough. You need to also look at social administration. These two must come together." Right through his life, that's been his focus, that just the mere accumulation of knowledge is not enough.
Last week I was with a team at the Universal Business College in Karjat and we were looking at 'Pitfalls to Success'. All four lectures had to do with different aspects of those pitfalls. I talked about a lack of listening skills and said that basically, there were three issues at stake with listening:
· You have to hear
· You have to understand
· You have to form an opinion or judgment.
That's when listening is complete.
Looking at Amartya Sen's interview, you can see that where he doesn't know enough, he refuses to answer. That's so good! He acquires knowledge of a person or a situation or a thing, he has processed that knowledge and formed an opinion and then, through that interview, he was able to express and articulate that opinion. It was sound judgment that he was expressing. I followed him through his capabilities theory, his negative-positive thoughts on liberty and didn't understand any of that. But I found one little note in his life that caught my attention. He was nine years old when he went through the Bengal famine in 1943. If you look at that stage of British India (that was pre-Independence) you will realize that the estimates of the number of people who died were between 1.5 million to 4 million. So an average of 3 million people died. Amartya Sen went through that but he was not affected as he was born into a fairly well-settled family. But what he saw affected him. It came out in his writings on poverty and famine.
What really got my attention was that, while not really going through it, saw what was going on around him and thought that something needed to be done. He writes, "The famine was not about the lack of food. There was food. It was that the people couldn't buy that food. The price had risen so much during the war, that even though food was available, it was priced so high that people like cobblers and barbers just couldn't afford it. That was the tragedy of the famine of 1943." But that shaped his thinking and you see it when he talks about social administration. You cannot be a success and doing well if you ignore this particular component.
It brings me to the point that as we look at ourselves and ask the question, "In all that we are doing, is there a dimension where our lives are changing society, leaving things better than what we inherited?"
There's a wonderful article written by Umair Haque, "Is A Well-lived Life Worth Anything?" He asks this question and I quote, "Instead of an 'energy industry', I see a resource addiction that saps money and preserves self-destructive expectations. I see, instead of food and education 'industries', an obesity epidemic and debt-driven education crisis. Instead of a pharmaceutical industry, I see a new set of mental and physical discontents, like rates of suspiciously normally 'abnormal' mental illnesses and drugs whose lists of 'side effects' are longer than the Magna Carta. Instead of a media industry, I see news that actually misinforms instead of enlightening – rusting the beams of democracy – and entertainment that merely titillates."
Basically he is saying that a well-lived life is not about opulence. It's something more. He likens it to what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia, which meant that it's purpose was not merely passive, but living: doing, achieving, fulfilling, becoming, inspiring, transcending, creating, accomplishing – all the stuff that matters the most. That made me think so much about all that we do in our days. Sometimes we can get very myopic in our thinking. It's just me and myself and things that I do – I have to accomplish that and carry on. If we can take a leaf out of the lives of people like Amartya Sen, we see that there is a social dimension to it.
I remember the Harvard commencement speech that Bill Gates gave 2 or 3 years back. He said, "I learned a lot here at Harvard. I got great exposure to the advances being made in the sciences. But humanity's greatest advances are not in its discoveries – but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity. Reducing inequity is the highest human achievement."
Somehow in all of this, we need to find out what is really important and be able to pursue that. We need to make our lives count for something beyond even the companies that we work in, that there is an alleviating of people around us who face inequities.
I love the way Amartya Sen ends. He says, "You don't need to think negative." When somebody asked – will India attain glory? He said, "Right now, India's growth has fallen as much as the Chinese growth has fallen and far less than the rate of Brazil and South Africa. It's not a disaster story." Sometimes we can look around and say that everything is plummeting down. But look at the positives and then look at the lives we live and then say, "We've still got it good. What can I do to reduce inequities around us." I think the bottom line for us is that we need to be able to help society around us. Then we can say – we have lived and lived well.
I pray that God will give us wisdom to understand how we can do that. Can I pray with you?
Almighty God, on each one of these precious ones on this call, I invite You to pour Your wisdom upon all of us, that as we look at the many inequities around us, that we would be stirred, motivated, inspired to be able to do something to change the things that are around us, not to go on living our lives in a myopic way, but to have eyes for people around us as well. We invite You to help us, give us wisdom to know how, for it is in Jesus' name that we pray. Amen.
• Amartya Sen interview, The Economic Times, Mumbai, Tuesday 23rd July 2013
• Amartya Sen bio information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amartya_Sen
• Capabilities Approach, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capabilities_approach
• Positive Liberty, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_freedom
• Negative Liberty, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_freedom
• Umair Haque, "Is a Well-Lived Life Worth Anything," http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2011/05/is_a_well_lived_live_worth_anything.html
• Eudaimonia, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/194960/eudaemonism?anchor=ref273308
• Bill Gates commencement speech, http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/060807-gates-commencement.html
No comments:
Post a Comment