Pratap Bhanu Mehta On Liberalism Nihilism And The Collapse Of Sincerity

TITLE: Pratap Bhanu Mehta on Liberalism, Nihilism, and the Collapse of Sincerity CHANNEL: Mercatus Center DATE: 2026-05-21 ---TRANSCRIPT--- SHRUTI RAJAGOPALAN: Pratap, welcome back to the  podcast. It’s a pleasure to have you here in the   studio, in person, as opposed to doing this online  during COVID times. I’m thrilled that you’re here.  PRATAP BHANU MEHTA: It’s such a privilege to be  here and to think together actually, [chuckles] in   a sense, more than just talk. RAJAGOPALAN: I will think with a little bit   of lag compared to you, I have a feeling. I’ve  been reading a lot of your older columns again   recently, in general, both to prepare for this  conversation and also to make sense of the world,   which is in so much flux right now. Across all your writing, even if I go as far   back as the financial crisis, when you talk about  how we should think about repairing globalization,   especially to make it a little bit more  of a level playing field across different   stakeholders in the world. Whether it’s arguments  about the war in Ukraine and Gaza, whether it’s   what’s happening now with the entire WTO liberal  order being upended, the sense I got from the   arc of your columns is that you’ve moved away  from very specific critiques of globalization,   and the failures of the old liberal order. Your deeper worry is the broader norms like the   erosion of restraint, the erosion  of legitimacy, of leadership,   of a kind of moral authority in the international  order. Is this the correct way to read you across   the decades and the columns? Perhaps, you can  help us make sense of where are we right now?   What is this new world we’re entering, and what  is the frame through which we can enter it?  MEHTA: First of all, thank you for reading things  so closely. I’m not sure they merit as much close   attention, but I think you have characterized the  arc correctly. One way of describing that arc,   which might be an entry point into the  current moment, is, as you know, 15,   20 years ago, we used to discuss things  like institutions, incentives, questions   of distributive justice—questions of what’s the  basic architecture of a global economic order.  I think all of those questions and the way we  framed that did not reckon with one historical   possibility, which I think we are having to  face up to now, and liberalism has probably   had to face up [to] in its past as well. What do you do if there are, in society,   forces that have a degree of  ruthlessness and a willingness to,   as it were, burn the house down rather than  merely disagree or let the other side win?  I was going back to an old essay by Leo Strauss  on German nihilism. His characterization of   nihilism—and you can add it to it—nihilism for  him was a condition where a political party,   a political dispensation is willing to call for  radical change without the foggiest idea of what   that new change is. But more importantly,  in the process willing to jeopardize the   gains and potentialities of the current order. If you add on to that—I think the word you used   or something similar—which is this complete lack  of disinhibition in doing it, right? Disinhibition   in the sense that a certain valorization  of violence and a propensity to engage in   it both internationally and domestically. I  think the construction of your opponents as   existential enemies. Once you have done that,  then of course everything becomes permissible.  I think [there’s] deep skepticism that our  institutions, as they are currently configured,   can actually do the democratic job of producing  regimes of truth that are widely accepted.  This is not just a critique from the right.  I think there are sections of the left. I   think liberals have lost [the] courage  of their own convictions in some ways,   right? You have that deep skepticism about  truth itself. Skepticism about authority   would have been an absolutely wonderful thing. I think this amalgam of dispositions is an   existential condition which I don’t think liberals  know quite how to respond to. It’s not the kind   of condition that will be easily addressed  just by recourse to the very comfortable,   bland things we used to talk about. Tinkering of  institutional design incentives. Those things do   matter. I think for a world that we reconstruct  after this, those things will continue to matter.  But at this moment, diagnosing why we are in  this condition—historians used to say that if   you want to understand the prelude to World  War I, don’t read the social scientist. Read   Robert Musil, [chuckles] The Man Without  Qualities, that depiction of nihilism.  Cultures have been through this. I think that’s  our bigger challenge. To that extent, it’s   not that I’ve given up on those convictions or  actually changed my mind about those institutions.   But the battle on which we’ll have to fight  is of a very qualitatively different nature.  RAJAGOPALAN: When I was writing my  dissertation, my dissertation adviser,   Peter Boettke, used to say that as economists,  we never rely on saying bad people do bad things,   and good people do good things.  “When bad people do bad things,   bad things happen. When good people  do good things, good outcomes happen.”  Yet, that’s what the nihilistic framework  seems to suggest. Either accidentally or   through some emergent process, we have landed  on a particular set of actors who either lack   moral authority or leadership or just a  long-term view of how to build the world.  I think the counterweight to that seems to me  to also be that liberals and elites have also   lost that moral authority. In earlier cycles of  this, when terrible people came and tried to do   terrible things, there was another group that  was ready to absorb the burden of that. Because   of their moral authority or leadership,  they were willing to be heard, or people   were willing to hear them. Now that seems to be  lost. What explains this erosion on all sides?  MEHTA: It’s wonderful you’re going to begin with  Peter Boettke. As you know, my dissertation was   on Adam Smith. One of the great virtues of  the Scottish Enlightenment was that it never   fell into the simplistic trap that good people  do good things and bad people do bad things.  In fact, the dynamics of history are always more  complicated. Sometimes bad people actually end   up producing policies that are beneficial in  the long run. History is very paradoxical.   They all believed in progress, but  [in] a very skeptical way, right?  I think that’s absolutely right. I think that  sensibility is very important to understanding   politics, actually. Politics is not just  about drawing these lines between good   people and bad people. Politics has to  firmly keep its eye on consequences,   I think, again, as any serious student of  politics from Max Weber onward has told you.  I agree. I don’t think the issue is who are the  good people and who are the bad people. You can   certainly map on weaknesses, mistakes, terrible  moral judgments on a wide range of the political   spectrum. It’s very hard to argue at this point  that there are political dispensations that are   immune from that kind of moral abdication. I think the question is even deeper and more   troubling: Do we even have a sense of what the  standards of right and wrong are, independently   of who actually lives up to them and, in a  sense, who betrays them? That’s, I think,   the nihilism I was hinting at. There is such a  radical instrumentalization of almost every value.  The challenge of dealing with good people  and bad people is easier if you can make   the argument that, look, if you want to critique  something, by all means critique it. But critique   it in good faith and then live up to the  principles on the basis of which you are   critiquing. Don’t use critique merely as  a pretext to beat down on somebody else.  I think the disinhibition we are experiencing at  the moment—take the issue of war, for example.   It’s very hard to argue that there is only a  particular political dispensation, whether it’s   the right, the centrists. In some cases, the  left’s abdication has been as extraordinary.   How can we in democracies not ask tough  questions about our own moral complicity?  Sometimes people accuse others of acting out  of self-interest. Yet, the most secure classes   in both the democracies we care about exemplify  traits that Montesquieu described as, “Security   often breeds timidity, a lack of conviction and  courage.” I think that landscape is actually   all over the place. My worry is that our sense of  where the red lines are is eroding. That sense is   much harder to reconstruct once that breaks down. RAJAGOPALAN: Here, I have difficulty between   matching what’s happening in the micro sense and  the macro sense. I feel like if I just look at   the data on how much violence we commit against  each other as individuals, against women, how we   treat children, how we treat animals. Do we care  about the simplest of things, like conservation of   extinct species? Or the big rise in vegetarianism  and against this industrial complex that’s cruel.  On all of those margins, we have made progress.  People are actually kinder to each other in a   very literal sense of not being violent. They  are kinder to each other within the household.   Those norms have all changed, and they’ve largely  stabilized. But that doesn’t emerge into a macro   order of where we know what is right and wrong  at that level. We seem to know what’s right and   wrong at the lower level, and in fact, we’re  sticking with it quite well. What causes this?  MEHTA: That’s a wonderful observation,  but if you take the long arc of history,   there’s nothing anomalous about this, even if you  look at debates in late 19th century. There’s one   kind of long-term story about what Norbert Elias  would have called this civilizing process, where   lots of different forms of violence are tamed and  actually no longer found acceptable. We don’t do   duels anymore [chuckles], as if we are settling  disputes, right? We don’t do an eye for an eye.  There’s a whole range of things. In many ways,  a lot of the phenomenon that you describe,   a certain kind of revulsion against certain forms  of violence. I certainly think, for example,   the discourse on animal rights, the turn  toward vegetarianism. If you place it in   that long arc of societies trying  to curtail and eclipse violence,   these are of a piece. I think the norm toward  a certain kind of moral egalitarianism—you’re   also right—is a long-term trend  that is going to be hard to reverse.  In some senses, I think, if you look at the  20th century, there are only two ideologies   that have unequivocally triumphed:  One is nationalism and the other is   feminism. Feminism is the frame of reference  to which every other ideology has to adapt.   Yes, sometimes there are pockets of resistance. It’s really an extraordinary achievement if you   actually think about it. Part of the answer is  actually the tension between these two ideologies.  If you think of what produces or licenses a  certain kind of moral disinhibition, the claim   that nationalism is the one ideology that allows  you to do that much more easily is a very powerful   win. It’s true that nationalism and the modern  nation-state form have enabled liberal democracy,   at least as we understand it. It created  the idea of the people, popular sovereignty.  Yet, it is also the one ideology that is the  biggest competitor of religion. It’s the only   modern ideology that can consecrate death. It’s  an absolutely astonishing psychological fact   about nationalism. It is the one ideology  that can colonize our sense of meaning.   Even our sense of economic meaning comes in  national categories. GDP growth rate for my   country, [chuckles] as it were. It is so pervasive  in some ways in its ability to actually create   meaning, and through its ability to create that  meaning, license instrumentality in its cause.   Once you say, “This is for the nation,” it’s  extraordinary how many barriers you can break.  If you look at the current moment, I think one  of the things that is actually very striking   is almost every form of authoritarianism is  having to rely on nationalism to give it that   cloak and cover. Not just to create an electoral  majority, not just in purely instrumental terms,   but also, in moral terms to say that, “Look, this  is the highest god we’d worship. Once you worship   this god, you are allowed to take all of these  necessary—what we think are necessary—steps.”  I think that tension—If you use them as two  archetypes, feminism is representing progress,   equality, a certain softening of public mores,  dismantling of patriarchy, that modern impulse   toward liberation. And nationalism has that  modern ability to mobilize collective power,   in all its most murderous forms. That’s the  tension [chuckles] I think we are experiencing.  RAJAGOPALAN: If I had to connect this to how some  of the other scholars have made sense of it, to   me, it seems like—and I’m drawing the very simple  version of the story here—we had globalization   with its extraordinary success, but one of the  outcomes of globalization was people were less   connected to their local communities. They were  less connected to their local identities. Local   identities, as Ambedkar pointed out, can sometimes  be very problematic because of those hierarchies   and sometimes be wonderful to give you a sense of  reciprocity and really who you are in the world.  If I look at, say, what Raghuram Rajan  had to say about what happens to community   when we are thinking about the broader  global economic order, that erosion has   led to people floundering for new identities. Nationalism seems to be quite convenient. It’s   still rooted in localism because if you belong  to a particular country, then of course that   gets subsumed in it. At the same time, you get to  keep all the other good things. You don’t have to   do this around religious lines or gender lines or  caste lines or ethnic lines or state lines. You   still get to pretend to be modern and liberal,  while having a single point of identification,   which can then unleash these consequences. Is that just too simple a frame, or is that a good   way of thinking about what’s going on? Because  nationalism has not always had this kind of power.  MEHTA: I am a little skeptical of the story.  I actually agree with the underlying premise,   that there is an experience of a social lack,  in terms of community, in terms of actual   relationships. In fact, that is actually being  radicalized. All kinds of evidence, not just   Robert Putnam’s bowling alone stuff, but if you  think of what’s happening to family structures.   There is a sense in which the sociological  atomism of society is quite deep and persuasive.  I think the question is whether that has something  to do with globalization or, to use that old word,   capitalism. Because remember, this is a debate  that begins in the late 18th century. In fact,   somebody like Edmund Burke—I think it’s the  last moment where conservatives have this   illusion that you can actually hold on to stable,  fixed institutions in the social realm and yet   give markets free rein. That’s been the biggest  tension and challenge for conservative thought.  The reason, in part, I’m skeptical about the  globalization story is the best literature   on this crisis of relationships, of  crisis of communities, is actually not   the literature that’s being produced now. It was the literature that was produced in   the 1970s. I think Alasdair MacIntyre, Christopher  Lasch were probably the most prescient and deepest   diagnosticians of this phenomenon. It’s the ’70s,  which was, given that ’50s and ’60s was the high   tide of what we now think of as, at least in  the Western world, the nostalgia for the ’50s   and ’60s as forms of industrial production,  forms of national identity and community.  The deeper question might be, is it to do with  globalization, or is it to do with the fact that   capitalism requires both commodification but also  such extraordinary mobility that it is just very   difficult? I’m sure at personal level, at least  almost everybody in the younger generation,   we know just this whole idea of  what it might even mean to create   strong relationships in a world where  everybody’s constantly mobile. [chuckles]  I actually think its roots are deeper. The turn to  nationalism at the beginning of the 20th century,   again, was, in part, a response to that. This  idea that Kultur, in the German sense—some idea   of culture could be an antidote to atomization.  Actually, Matthew Arnold is already talking about,   in the late 19th century, where he  thinks of culture as an antidote,   both against mass democracy and what he  thinks is the leveling down. It’s also,   again, a kind of revolt against atomization. I think this inherent tension between the scale   effects, the productivity effects—which  are genuinely enchanting. The reason this   is a difficult problem is, again, it’s not  as simple as this is good and that is bad—  RAJAGOPALAN: The benefits  are so extraordinary, yes.  MEHTA: —It’s how do we find  win-win solutions that actually   mitigate some of the tensions between these? RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. Here, I just want to zoom back   a little bit. I’m going to be a little clumsy  in how I phrase this because I want to reference   a number of different works of yours. To look  at not just the economic component of what you   talked about, but also the cultural component. If I go back and look at your 2003 piece,   “Passion and Constraints,” you look at Rawlsian  public reason against what’s happening in India,   Indian electoral law. You find the Rawlsian  framework useful but also insufficient.  Then, if I look at your 2012 column, “Public  Reason, Indian Style,” and I’ve gone back to   revisit that column multiple times. Actually,  that column, I recommend all the listeners go   back and read, because it’s very prescient.  You talk about what’s going on with media and   media capture and the problems of social media  and the 140-character limit and what that does   to us. Everything you warned us about in that  column has, in some sense, come to pass, right?  In your more recent columns, you’ve argued that  sincerity is not just an inner mental state,   but it’s also about social legibility, or  legibility of at least how we interact socially.   Or social practice. You mentioned MacIntyre. You  also wrote a recent column on MacIntyre where you   argue that we’ve lost a shared moral vocabulary. Now, I don’t know if I’m jumbling too many things   together, but to me, this again seems like a  very clear arc on how you’ve progressed. To me,   it seems like you’ve gone from a Rawlsian  framework where we look at institutions and   test them and where they’re sufficient, and  then move closer and closer, in some sense,   toward Smith, where we’re now talking about “The  Collapse of Sincerity,” a shared moral language.  Without sincerity and a shared moral vocabulary,  how can we even think of what is right or wrong,   or who has moral authority or who doesn’t  have moral authority? Is this a good way   to both think of your own thinking, or  I’m jumbling too many things together?  [laughter] MEHTA: I just think you’re being very,   very generous in characterizing what was in those  columns. I think here’s how I’d put it. I have to   say, I’ve grown even fonder of Rawls actually.  Despite what I’m writing, I think I discover   even more depth in him now than I probably did  10, 15 years ago. I always loved both Rawls and   Smith and thought you needed to engage with both. I think what has changed or one way of telling   the story is thinking about the sociological  preconditions. I think one of the columns that   you referred to, “The Collapse of Sincerity,”  if one just takes that as a reference point—the   puzzle behind that column was actually a very  simple one. I’m sure any of you have engaged   in public writing, public discourse,  which everybody does these days. That’s   what social media has done. It has empowered  everybody to be a public figure in some ways.  One of those very simple experiences you have is  you will almost always be misinterpreted. Now,   you can make a philosophical argument  about, “All acts of interpretations are   misinterpretations.” But, you know what  I mean, in a much more colloquial sense.  RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. MEHTA: There used to be all of these   arguments in the philosophical language going back  to Paul Grice and so forth, which is, what are the   conditions under which we even actually understand  each other as engaging in acts of communication   and meaning? One of the conditions used to be  you actually attribute sincerity to somebody.  Now, one of the things globalization has done  with communication, in particular, is that it   has completely collapsed all contexts. Without any  context, the basic requirements of what it means   to do intelligible communication, how is this  word actually being used? What is its function?   Who the target is? It’s much harder to make these  kinds of judgments. I often say that in, at least   in a sociological sense Derrida has won out, that  all signs have become indeterminate. [laughs]  If you praise somebody, in a very  different context, somebody is asking, “Oh,   but why hasn’t this column praised so-and-so?”  You’re reading silences. It was actually just an   observation of almost a phenomenological kind of  experience of why communication across contexts   is actually becoming so, so much harder. Once you find it difficult to attribute   sincerity to any act of communication, and you  find it difficult to reconstruct the context,   which gives that communication intelligibility,  then the only function left for communication   is either pure expression or, in a sense, fighting  words. Knowledge is made increasingly for cutting,   not for understanding, right? RAJAGOPALAN: Yes.  MEHTA: At one level, I think our challenge with  this new information order is even a deeper one.   I still like to think that it is much more of  an institutional and sociological condition.   It’s maybe the kind of thing that people  experienced when the printing revolution came,   where structures that allowed you to attribute  context, the trustworthiness of authorities and   credibility—you went through a phase where all  of that collapsed. There will be, hopefully,   through time, some reconstitution of norms. Another example—for liberals, this is   absolutely central—is the complete collapse of the  distinction between the public and private. What   we implicitly ended up doing was taking norms  that were appropriate to private conversation   and taking them to the public sphere. By and large, even if it was not OK,   one of the advantages of a private sphere was  that you could actually say things without   those being your public identity. There  was an opportunity for self-correction.  You observe that among students in a  very trivial sense. People talk a lot   about political correctness and censorship. The  worry is not that there is actually an authority   censoring you or that in classrooms there is a  monocultural ideology or the professors won’t   let you speak. The worry simply is that even a  private conversation can be put on Meta or X,   “Oh, so-and-so said this,” and you are then  stamped for life. In fact, your only option   then is to double down on that. [laughter] A lot of these institutional norms   that liberalism had supposed about the  intelligibility of communication, context,   thickening our understanding of each other, the  distinction between public and private. The modern   information order has made those distinctions  much, much more difficult to hold on to.  I’d still like to defend the Rawlsian impulse in  some ways, which is the fundamental question of   society: How do we reconcile the terms of social  cooperation with institutional conditions that   acknowledge us as free and equal? I think that  still remains the central question. But now,   doing this across these extraordinarily  disparate contexts all at once,   I think, has made our challenge harder. RAJAGOPALAN: If I look at your earlier work,   the way I think about it is you were really  thinking about institutions from the point   of view of design, capacity. And therefore,  what are the reforms—sometimes major reforms,   sometimes minor tinkering—that will get us to  the appropriate institution design, institutional   capacity, and thereby, incentives and outcomes? This, you did at the level of the constitution for   all major central institutions in India, because  that was where most of your work was rooted. And   also local governments and things like that.  Now again, when I read your more recent work,   the thread I see is that’s not enough. It may  be necessary, but it’s nowhere close to enough   because in all this institutional capacity,  tinkering, reform discussion, we lost track   of what are the broader ideological forces that  both bind us and animate us and mobilize us.  We perhaps need to first understand  that ideological sense, or what it   means to be a citizen or what it means to be  governed by a particular institution before   we actually start fixing the institution. One, again, is this a good way of thinking   about how you’re approaching these questions? Not  to say you’ve abandoned the institutional agenda,   but something else needs to precede  that agenda to make it sensible again.  MEHTA: I think you’re exactly right. Look,  post–1989, even if you didn’t subscribe to   the literal thesis, I think we all acted—not  all—many acted as if we were in a kind of   end-of-history world, right? There is a broad  consensus on evolving meta-norms of conduct,   particularly around the pacification of  violence, the delegitimization of large wars,   the delegitimization of civil strife,  a whole range of political phenomena.  The main issue for democracies was how do you  make them amelioratively better over time?   You took it for granted that almost all  the actors in democracy were operating   within certain bounds of conduct. They just  did not have the will to ruthlessness that   you’re seeing [in] many actors now. It was a  tremendous time to think about institutions.   [chuckles] What are the incentives for judges?  What are the rules of parliamentary procedure that   might actually make deliberation more effective? Now, two things happened since. One [is that],   as you have characterized, the attack on  institutional life came not from where we   thought it would come, which is, “Institutions  will internally get dysfunctional. Incentives   will change.” The answer to that will just be  better institutional design. The attack came from   quarters which basically said, “We actually don’t  care what the institutional design is. Moreover,   if we can’t win, we are willing  to burn the house down with it.”  The second thing that I think happened—and this  is just a piece of intellectual biography. When   we did the institutions work, and particularly  some work with Devesh Kapur, one of the projects   we had in mind, which never got going—partly just  turned out to be difficult to do—was a project   on the creation of professional identities. Many years ago, when I used to teach modern   political thought, what I was very struck by in  the late 19th and early 20th centuries—there was   extensive discussion of the professions. Not  just in terms of service delivery norms, but   for people like Durkheim—actually to some extent  even Max Weber—professions were going to be the   central morality of modernity. Because they would  give modern subjects a very specific identity.  If I say I’m a lawyer, I’m an officer of  the court. If I’m an officer of the court,   how do I understand that phrase and  internalize that phrase that disciplines me,   commits me to certain moral norms, and commits me  to defending certain kinds of institutions, right?  They were also interested in the professions  because for them, professions were an interesting   class. The professions could be a bulwark,  both against the state and the market. Not   that professions are not embedded in the market.  Obviously, professionals work for a fee and they   are involved in market relations. But the basic  idea was that [for] the professions, the source   of their legitimacy is modern forms of knowledge.  With capital, it’s capital creating more capital,   in some senses. With [the] state, there’s coercive  power and the power that comes from legitimation   en masse, publics, right? RAJAGOPALAN: Yes.  MEHTA: If you could, through these sociological  experiences of the professions, create a large   class of middle-class professionals across a  range of professions. Who made their institutions   their professional identity, and therefore,  were willing to protect those institutions,   and through protecting them, decentralizing power. If universities protect their autonomy. If   courts of law protect their autonomy. Lawyers  historically were at the forefront of thinking   of a constitutional culture. You achieve a lot of  things simultaneously. You achieve a decentering   of power. You actually give people a source of  meaning because it has become your moral identity.   It’s also the nice confluence of something  that has become your moral and institutional   identity, also allowing you to sustain a living. I was actually very struck by the fact that   maybe the post–1940s, 1950s, if you look at old  journals, American Political Science Review and   stuff, lots of articles on the professions—and  then, that kind of drops out. Or rather,   it becomes much more a narrower question of very  technical questions about professional ethics.  There’s some work in the ’70s, I think, a  wonderful book by Abbott. It was partly on the   psychology profession, but the theoretical  frameworks there were quite interesting.  There was this kind of missing middle, as  it were, of what actually made institutions   work. It came home to us. I know it’s something  you are concerned with. I can speak of India,   but I suspect there are parallels in the United  States. One of the most disappointing things,   as you know, over the last 10 years has  been the abdication of the judiciary.  The disappointment has not just been the  abdication of judges and the absolutely scandalous   performance of the Indian Supreme Court. It has  been the abdication of the senior bar, which we   always thought was one of the most powerful groups  in Indian society. Who could possibly touch them,   that they would forget rising to the cause  of liberty? They have reached a point where   they’re not even willing to do the sort of  quotidian things that lawyers used to do,   which is accept cases of people who are  being targeted. Ram Jethmalani used to   very proudly say, “I will defend anyone.” What is it about those professional identities   that have become hollowed out? I think the crisis  of healthcare. One of the things I’ve been really   struck by—I’m not a health economist and so  will be agnostic on what organizational forms   healthcare should take. But the number of medical  professionals in this country who we increasingly   meet, but at one level, we’ll say, “Look, there’s  been a lot of progress in a number of fields.”   The sense of satisfaction they’re deriving  from their professions, because of the   institutional conditions under which they  work, so should doctors be shareholders?  What does that do to professional identity  and that hope Durkheim had? That actually   the basis of your legitimacy is your knowledge.  The basis of your legitimacy is not that you’re   just another property holder. In fact, signaling  that was extremely important. I think, again,   that sociological story about  what made institutions function.  Tocqueville, when he talks about lawyers  in America, he says, “This is going to be   the aristocracy American democracy needs.” I doubt  lawyers think of themselves [as] an aristocracy in   that sense, an aristocracy as in something that is  actually a professional identity that commits them   to defending certain kinds of institutions. RAJAGOPALAN: Is this just a byproduct of   democratizing education, professional  services too much too quickly? I   don’t want to lean toward that explanation  because for me, at a principle level, it is,   we need to lower barriers to entry to make sure  that anyone can be anything. At the same time,   you use the word aristocracy. I like that  better than the word elite, because it has   this intergenerational element, as if we are  custodians of a particular set of shared values   and norms that we will make sure gets passed on. That seems to have just completely disappeared.   I’m not surprised it’s disappeared. It’s  difficult to have that kind of guild or   shared sense of norms if anyone can be  allowed to enter. And at the same time,   we need that for these professional services, not  just to provide identity and satisfaction and a   sort of greater purpose, but also to produce  the next layer of knowledge and make it more   accessible. Is this a fundamental tension and  tradeoff, or can this actually be resolved?  MEHTA: I agree with you both normatively and also,  I think, empirically. I’m not entirely convinced   that you can be in premature democratization.  [chuckles] I think it’s become very fashionable.   It’s an easy explanation in some ways. I  completely agree with you that, in fact,   if you did not democratize, the profession would  have been undermined in another way. Why should   anybody go along with an arrangement that actually  closes off avenues and opportunities to them?  I think what happened in India—I think I can speak  to that context a bit more. I have one or two   things about the legal profession in the U.S. that  might be worth thinking about. I think in India,   what happened is we’ve got the worst of both  worlds. We did democratize, but democratized   under conditions of institutional design that  were designed to produce maximum inequality   within that framework of inclusion. I think the Indian legal profession   is a perfectly good example. I don’t think the  problem with [the] Indian legal profession was   that we got large numbers of lawyers getting  educated. In fact, that could have created a   middle class of lawyers on the front lines  of defending democracy. The problem we got   with the Indian legal profession is that it  is extraordinarily stratified and polarized.  A lot of this has to do with very quotidian  incentives. It is still very hard for a first-   generational lawyer to break into litigation and  profession. Practices, particularly at the level   of the Supreme Court, are extremely concentrated.  Judicial norms, where judges [are] deferring to   senior lawyers and enhancing their power. There’s  a whole range of things we talk and talk about.  What you’ve got is an extraordinarily  dual structure within what was supposedly   a framework of inclusion—elite lawyers at  the top and a mass who are being formally   included but not substantively included. I think the same is true of Indian higher   education. We wanted inclusion on the cheap.  Inclusion on the cheap was “We’ll just give   everybody admission.” Absolutely the right thing  to do, but not asking the subsequent question:   If you’re going to make this work, what else  do you actually have to put in place? I think   the reservations were expanded Post–Mandal.  I remember this conversation where Indian   universities were asked to expand their  seats in capacity 25 percent in a year.   No education system in the world can do that,  and without any extra money. Without any sort of—  RAJAGOPALAN: Of course, the quality would  get compromised in a meaningful way then.  MEHTA: You increased formal inclusion. You  did not increase the commitment you made about   how much you will spend as a proportion of GDP.  Again, we know spending is not always the answer.  RAJAGOPALAN: But capacity  building. It’s a proxy for that.  MEHTA: The capacity, right. What we got was we got  formal democratic inclusion under conditions of   extraordinary inequality. The same is true, by the  way, of the Indian business sector. As you know,   extremely concentrated capital at the top.  We formally liberalized. We formally have   done all the ease-of-doing-business stuff,  and yet, the structures of our institutional   life produce this incredible inequality  within this broad frame of inclusion.  You end up having, the disadvantage  of both worlds. You’ve not reaped the   political gains of inclusion as much as  you might have, and you still experience   the pathologies of extraordinary inequality  within the paradigm of these institutions.  RAJAGOPALAN: This concentration of power point.  Initially, I wanted to talk to you about that just   in the context of economics, but I think you’ve  given me something broader to think about. This   is the 250th year of The Wealth of Nations. You  wrote a wonderful column about it. Of course,   your dissertation was on The Theory of Moral  Sentiments, and we’ve talked about this before   on the podcast. You boil it down to capture by  special interests and concentration of power.  Now this concentration of power is usually  in terms of capital when we’re talking in   the business setting, but everything else that  you’ve just discussed. Now it becomes that every   regulation is a rent-seeking opportunity. Every  subsidy is a transfer. Every welfare entitlement,   even when it is completely justified,  becomes a vote-bank concentration of power,   which is at a different level than just business. The logic of Smith points to the fact that the   answer has to be a more limited state. As long  as the state has this power to redistribute,   the state has the power to grant favors  and draft regulation in a particular way,   you’re always going to get some attempts  at capture, successful or unsuccessful.  Is there a tension within your own  Smithian analysis that if you have   a large state that has the capacity to bring  about all the other social changes we want,   then that large state is automatically at  tension because it’s going to create these   opportunities? If we have that state  retreat, then it creates a vacuum.  My question is not so much, should we go  back to a night watchman state, but more,   what is the Smithian answer to this  question, or is there no Smithian   answer? Smith just gives us a good diagnosis. MEHTA: No, I actually think there is a Smithian   answer. I think it has more layers than  what are normally attributed to it. The   basic premise of Smith—and I think this  should be a mantra for all liberals—is   a presumptive suspicion against concentrations  of power anywhere and everywhere. [chuckles]  In fact, I think if you ask the question, what  defines a liberal sensibility? It is actually   that, including, by the way, concentration  of power in a single interpretation of the   demos. [chuckles] Fragmented power—that  is a sensibility, I think, consistently.  You’re right. Of course, if the state is empowered  to do certain things legally, and if the ambit of   that empowerment expands, you will get all kinds  of rent-seeking. I think Smith also had a parallel   argument. This one’s slightly tricky because Smith  is writing before the Industrial Revolution. I   think the Industrial Revolution poses a challenge  to Smith, not in terms of his principles, but in   terms of how we think of power institutionally. The second complement to thinking hard about what   the state should and should not do, is Smith also  thinks about the concentration of social power.   You can reverse the equation as well. On the one  hand, you can say, if you have a limited state,   there will be less rent-seeking. You  can also reverse the equation by saying,   if you have specially empowered groups in  society who have a lot of power, because they   own a lot of capital or something, they will  also get the state to produce rents for them.  That’s what he thinks was partly happening  with mercantilism. He was consistent. He said,   “Look, it’s always easy for small  groups of capital to organize. The   collective action problems are much lower.” If you look at our contemporary crisis, we   talk a lot about the rent-seeking that might come  from this combination of democratic populism and   an expanded ambit for the state, whether it’s cash  transfers or the expansion of a welfare state.  Honestly, in the Indian context, it completely  pales in comparison with what big capital   has been able to extract. RAJAGOPALAN: Absolutely.  MEHTA: The other question [Smith] wanted you  to ask was not what powers the state have,   but what is the distribution of social power  that actually ensures that the state does not   get captured by one particular set of interests  or forces? Of course, that will vary by context.   I think it’s been true of liberals mostly. I  think it’s even true of Rawls. Rawls’s model,   if you want to call it an economic  model, was property-owning democracy,   but where it is very widely distributed. That was for this political reason:   The minute you get certain kinds of concentration  of power and capital, they will distort the state   one way or the other. You need a social  force to counteract another social force.  RAJAGOPALAN: On the social force to counteract  another social force, this is where I want to   think about your arguments about citizenship.  In The Burden of Democracy, you had argued that   caste-based or caste-organized inequality prevents  these horizontal bonds. When we talked last about   The Theory of Moral Sentiments, you talked  about how—and you’ve written about this many   times—poverty actually excludes people from  the circle of sympathy, as Smith discussed it.  This is really important in the Indian  context because when we interact caste   and poverty relations, the number  of people who are excluded from this   circle of sympathy becomes larger and larger. If I had to connect that then to your recent   column you had written wonderfully about vishwas,  which has become this national tagline almost. You   wrote about how the vertical faith, or vishwas,  almost blind faith in political leadership or a   particular leader has substituted or replaced this  horizontal trust that we have between citizens.   That horizontal trust is very difficult to form if  there are people outside the circle of sympathy.  One, is this a good way to think about where we  are and why that’s going on? Then I have a few   follow-up questions on where we go from there. MEHTA: This is a tremendously challenging   question. [chuckles] I’ll try  not to be too long on this, but—  RAJAGOPALAN: No, no, take  as much time as you need.  MEHTA: No, no, I know. RAJAGOPALAN: I know I’m   trying to connect so many dots in your work. MEHTA: In fact, you’re making connections I   hadn’t seen. I think a couple of distinctions.  As you rightly said, India had this twin problem,   which is appalling rates of poverty and  the existence of one of the most appalling   social institutions in the form of caste,  particularly for Dalits. Even now, it’s just   hard to imagine actually what that condition  is, despite all the progress we have made.  They produced both a form of invisibility in  the policy process, which I think still exists.   In a sense, the poor are almost always  fending for themselves at the end of the   day. They also created a particular dynamic  of the politics of exclusion and inclusion.  Now, we can have a long conversation of where we  went wrong in addressing these twin exclusions.   The politics of vishwas, I think, had two  sources. One, that phrase was actually, I think,   first used by my CPR colleague, Neelanjan Sircar.  I think he had done some empirical work on this   politics of vishwas and the politics of faith. It seems to me that it has three different sources   in contemporary politics, and they’re aligned  in a fortuitous way to reinforce each other.   Let’s, first of all, not forget that the  biggest proponents of sole leadership,   cult of leadership, are actually elites.  That’s also true of the United States.  If you want to put the more charitable  gloss on that elite support,   it came from a place of saying, “All these things  that you liberals cared about—checks and balances,   democracy, balance of power, separation  of powers—these have become a hindrance   in democracy being able to do things together.” People don’t openly say it. But somewhere,   if you scratch, the argument basically comes out,  “Actually, these institutions are the problem.”  RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. And they say it  here in the United States often—  MEHTA: There’s an equivalent here as well. Again,  as a descriptive level, you can see there is   something to it. There is a form of institutional  complexity, the jostling of regulatory norms that   takes place once institutions proliferate.  The sense that that actually made it very   difficult to do things. You can’t build railroads  anymore. You can’t build energy plants as quickly.  There’s an elite buy-in to the proposition that  if somebody can just cut through this Gordian   knot—just the very thing that Tocqueville said  was the strength of democracy, which is forms   protect us. This was an argument that these  forms of government disable us in some ways.   That is one source of the politics of vishwas. The second source is that [for] liberals,   progressives, modernists, the ideal trajectory  for the Indian state would have been that   it creates the conditions for high growth,  and it translates those conditions into   resources that can actually empower and  build human capital for all its citizens.  In fact, there’s a phrase from a Chinese  colleague, Qin Hui, I really like. It’s a nice   objective for liberal democracies. He says what  we need simultaneously is a liberal critique of   oligarchy and a social democratic critique  of populism. It’s the best summary of the   political agenda. By social democratic, he means  an economy that allows people to participate.  Very clearly, as you have documented so  brilliantly, both historically and analytically,   there’s a long story for why the Indian state  fails on that front. What that creates is a   vicious circle where it’s very difficult for any  political formation of leader to credibly promise   the kind of welfare state we actually need. Today, if a politician stood up and said,   “I’m going to transform Indian education in the  next 10 years—” Arvind Kejriwal briefly tried it   in Delhi, and it’s the exception, almost, that’s  proving the rule. There are some minor experiments   going on elsewhere. There’s a bit of a turnaround  in Uttar Pradesh, people are arguing. To do it on   a scale that is visible and has impact, most  of us probably disbelieve that proposition.  The default then is to say, “Look, that is  not going to happen. What’s the second best?”   The second best is this patchwork of competitive  favors from the state, some of which can have   genuinely welfare-enhancing benefits. To the  extent that a political party can credibly   deliver that—one of the advantages of these things  is that there’s a very simple metric of success.   That’s the nice thing about cash transfers. That’s  the nice thing about a one-off targeted scheme.   Does everybody get a gas cylinder or something?  Our politics is now caught in that equilibrium,   irrespective of which political party is in power. If you look at [the] state government level,   what strikes me most is how most of them are  doing the same thing. One chief minister once   joked to me. He said, “Look, the winning  formula these days is every government   needs to do two-and-a-half schemes well.”  Which two and a half you can quibble about   [laughter] and then have a party structure that  can mobilize support about it. Vishwas has been   converted into this claim of something tangibly— The third aspect of this politics of vishwas is,   of course, what we began the conversation  with—around nationalism, India’s place in the   world. In India’s specific context, of course,  it has to do with the sense over the years   that Hindus had become a victimized majority.  That’s the core of what drives this politics.  A political dispensation or political  leadership who can embody that belief,   create a whole political structure around that  belief—that was a different kind of vishwas.   The thing about that vishwas is, I have  literally heard very distinguished business   leaders in India say that their support  for the government is not instrumental.   That if it turns out that this tradeoff  and this government does not give as much   on growth as they had hoped, even then, so  long as it delivers on the third dimension,   they would continue to support. What this  government has done is braided the three forms   of vishwas together in a single narrative. One more thing about caste, if I may.  RAJAGOPALAN: Yes, please. MEHTA: It’s a complicated issue. In relation   to politics and the politics of vishwas, one of  the problems with centrist and liberal politics   as it came to be practiced in India, but possibly  in the United States, is we all became very great   believers in “demography is destiny” when it comes  to politics. It’s true that caste did matter to   how people vote, and understandably so. But we  took too literally the proposition that people   vote their caste, they don’t cast their votes. Now, one of the striking things that has happened   over the last 15, 20 years—and this is both a  good news story and a bad news story—is that   what we thought of caste as natural political  formations begins to break down. In part,   it begins to break down because there is greater  internal differentiation among these groups. In   class terms, that’s what 20, 25 years of  liberalization creates the conditions for.  It also internally begins to break down, in part  because, as you would expect in a democracy,   when more and more people come to exercise  political agency, and if there are large   numbers of people involved, you will get a  diversity of strategic and tactical perspectives.  If you wanted to now do social engineering  based on demographic characteristics,   you can no longer do it simply on the old  models. I’m not saying there’s no room for it,   and God knows every political party is still  doing it, but its logic is very different.  One of the advantages of the right—the BJP has  been good at it, I think the right probably in   the United States has been good at it—is they  were the genuine postmodernists. That social   identity can be constructed through the hard  work of politics. I don’t think the left   and center have any equivalent project. It’s  either appealing to just individual interest—  RAJAGOPALAN: Or elites. MEHTA: Or elites or some general   institutional argument about democracy  [or the] importance of proceduralism.  The idea that what political and social  movements do is reconstitute political   identities. You can take what was an identity  of an excluded group, bring it into the fold   of Hindu nationalism—albeit with problems.  Twenty-five years ago people used to think   this was an impossibility. In fact, the mantra  of Indian politics was, “Caste will cut Hindu   nationalism.” That’s it. We can go home safely. RAJAGOPALAN: Today, the mantra is, “Language will   cut it.” But we don’t know if that’ll hold either. MEHTA: In fact, I’m pretty sure that will not   hold, actually, on the Hindu national design  dimension. It will probably help on the federalism   dimension. I think that sense that we are not  treating our citizens as democratic agents who   are constantly renegotiating their identities and  assessing their choices has been pretty fatal for   non-right politics. I think we were way too  fatalistic about society and social trends.  RAJAGOPALAN: On that second part, which is about  us as citizens, or at least embedding a sense of   agency and identity in citizens. Now, when I  think about Indians, especially those who were   left outside of that circle of sympathy, we’ve  had a structural transformation. Now we know   that Indians can trade with strangers.  Earlier, Indians did not trade across   particular caste lines or ethnic lines, or in  a very, very narrow way. Now we have centuries   of evidence that Indians know how to trade. Can we actually sustain a modern commercial order,   which is entangled with a modern democratic  order in this post-liberalized India,   where you need a broader sense of social  cooperation and trust? We don’t trust outside   of caste networks or ethnic or language networks  very easily, other than [for] commercial trade.  How do we embed that sense of social trust  and cooperation in citizens, especially in   light of the fact that this vishwas hierarchy has  already nudged or crowded that out a fair bit?  MEHTA: The question of social trust is  complicated. Again, there’s partially   a good news story. Despite the problems of the  Indian economy and the horrendous forms of social   exclusion that still exist, there is arguably  much more interchange now than there was 25, 30   years ago. I think the norms of how you can treat  people are changing in all kinds of subtle and   small ways, quite visibly so. I don’t think it’s a  question of romanticizing the modern Indian story.  I’m less skeptical that India is not capable  of deeper market and commercial relations,   and that the obstacle to that is caste. In  fact, one of the things you could argue,   and may be worth thinking about, is just  like we treat institutions as endogenous,   can we think of caste choices as also endogenous? I’ve come to think of institutions or think of the   question of how endogenous they are much more. I  think we need to do a little bit more on the caste   front as well. Given the structures of finance  you had, given the lack of formal institutions,   all those things, many of what seem like  in-network choices are perfectly rational choices.  I’m not saying institutions by themselves  are going to dissolve caste in its entirety,   or they’re going to address all the deep ethical  questions about equality and reciprocity.   But they can certainly mitigate a lot of these  sharp edges and barriers. People trading with   each other. People talking to each other. By the way, we’ve seen it even in politics as   well. I’ve had chief ministers whose diagnosis  of their own political careers was that they   would argue that people would vote their caste  under conditions where the state could not send   any signal about making a sufficiently big impact  in a five-year term to create a large coalition.  In fact, as you know, for 20, 30 years,  Indian state government elections were   basically anti-incumbent elections. It  really didn’t matter who came, who went,   even [which was] the best-performing government. As this chief minister put it, “How many roads   would I build in a year? Maybe 300  kilometers if I was not corrupt.”   It doesn’t matter to most people. Once the amount of state resources   went up as a result of liberalization,  and scale effects began to change—  RAJAGOPALAN: Yes. MEHTA: We can fault this government   for many things, but one of the remarkable things  of continuity between UPA and this is how much   politicians want to advertise infrastructure.  Once scale effects begin to change, people’s   perception of what governments can do—[and] what  they therefore can vote for—also begins to change.  I think we have to treat caste both as something  that explains some of the problems in the Indian   state, but also do the reverse operation. It’s  being sustained through effects of the ways in   which we’ve configured other institutions, and  in particular, not let caste become the lazy   explanation. We’ve gone from colonialism is  the explanation of everything to caste is the   explanation of everything. That’s, I think, the  good news story, which opens up the possibility.  The trust story is an interesting one because it’s  trust at many different levels. I often argue—and   maybe this is a debatable proposition. You could  argue in the 1950s and ’60s, the conditions for   a Nehruvian secularism technically were  even less propitious than they are now.  The population was much more disempowered, more  illiterate. All the kinds of things that we   associate as making of democratic citizenship  [were] absent. It’s not entirely clear that   most of the population agreed with Nehru, but  there was an ability to generate a presumptive   trust. Broadly speaking, well-intentioned in the  right—maybe there was too much trust. [chuckles]   Maybe they should have asked harder questions. Now, one of the interesting things, particularly   when you’re talking about politics—and I must  confess, I find this a hard question to answer.   What makes for politicians that elicit that  presumptive trust? We often focus too much on,   “Well, what are their ideas? What’s  their ideology? What’s their program?”  RAJAGOPALAN: It doesn’t even matter. [laughter] MEHTA: In fact, if that was the case,   all of us would be first-class politicians.  If most of us went into the political arena,   the people would rightly be suspicious of us.  One of the elements of the success of Mr. Modi—It   doesn’t matter which side of the political  spectrum you are on and whatever changes   might happen in the next four to five years. You  have to admit that just in sheer political terms,   he was a once-in-a-generation politician. RAJAGOPALAN: Absolutely.  MEHTA: The sense of being able to  produce an identification. Actually,   Trump has that in some quarters. Significantly. One of the questions I’ve now puzzled over—it’s   not obvious to me what our answer to this question  is—what makes for a political class that can   generate this presumptive trust? Then, hoping  that a political class can do that, can actually   direct that trust to constructive purposes? To  me, I think for a democracy, that form of trust   is probably the most important one. Because  that gives the state the right authority and   headroom to be able to do the things that would— I think one of the disappointments about Mr.   Modi—there is the deep worry about  communalism, but just on his own terms—is   that he had this extraordinary headroom  in terms of that presumptive trust. In a   number of areas, [he] has not capitalized  it in a way that his supporters had hoped.  RAJAGOPALAN: I’ll tell you where I would  push back on the trust question. The way   we thought about market transactions and social  transactions is once you have trust in the market   sense and the structural transformation, some of  these other identities that we rely on to foster   that within-network trust can start getting  weaker. Which means then you are less reliant   on the pathologies of that particular identity. We seem to have carried on with both for the last   30-odd years. We have people from every caste  participating in the structural transformation,   which, as you pointed out, is the wonderful  news. Yet, we don’t have the breakdown of   marriage endogamy as one would expect coming out  of that structural transformation. Even everyday   indignities of where you’re allowed to live, where  can I get housing, what kind of a family will   accept me either as a paying guest or accept our  child to study with them, or get tutored by them,   or eventually to marry into a particular  family—those things have not moved much.  The amount of segregation we have in our urban  landscape is not that different from what we   had before. It’s almost like everyone goes  out to this third space of a market order,   where everyone mingles, and then we go back to  our separate corners, which are largely within   network. I don’t know if that’s only about  social trust, but there’s something there   about trust, which seems to be a factor. MEHTA: No, the phenomenon you’re describing   is spot-on; Indian cities are among the most  segregated. My colleague, Partha Mukhopadhyay,   has asked this question—“Are Indian Cities  Urban?”—in the sense of what we associate   with urban and urbanity. RAJAGOPALAN: No,   we’re just a collection of ghettos, almost. MEHTA: There are two or three different things,   I think, here. One, and again, I’m less confident  of answers on this one. Not to exonerate what’s   happening in India, but segregation has  proven to be so difficult to address   globally. It is truly astonishing in some ways. Lots of different hypotheses: the bland social   science hypothesis that the threshold of  collective action has to be so high for   desegregation effects to kick in, and those are  very hard to achieve through policy instruments,   through the old-fashioned ones, which is  just the sheer persistence of racism or   casteism in the deepest sense possible. It’s  probably true that there is a mix of both.  Yes, absolutely, I think we still don’t understand  the deepest dynamics of segregation. The second   thing—what I think in the Indian condition I would  argue—that the basic social preconditions for the   “social endosmosis that Ambedkar talked about,  that phrase from Dewey he used a lot. I like   that phrase, endosmosis. Everybody, in a sense,  freely mingling with each other. Those conditions,   I never thought they would come just from market  interactions. In fact, quite the contrary.  What the market does is produce two effects on  society. One effect is a question of individual   reciprocity. Market transaction is just that. It  is an atomized act of individual reciprocity. You   have something to sell. I have something to buy.  We exchange. The reciprocity impact part of it is   morally important. It’s a very important form  of reciprocity, but that’s all there is to it.  The second thing that we thought the deepening  of market relations would do is weaken the   relationship between occupation and caste. Because  three mechanisms made caste such a stranglehold.   One was endogamy, the most persistent. The second  was the association of caste and occupation,   which completely fused economic and social power  in deep ways. The thought was that if these can be   dissociated, even if caste does not disappear,  it either mitigates its effects or it has to   take a newer form. The third was the monopoly  over education. The three basic mechanisms.  Now, if you think about the three basic  mechanisms, we’ve barely progressed on all three.   We barely progressed on education. Again,  the formal data looks good:100 percent school   enrollment, finally, 75 years after independence. RAJAGOPALAN: That’s different from learning.  MEHTA: Not just different from learning. India  is one of the few countries, or few democracies,   where the experiment that most democracies have  done with shared public education—I mean, American   democracy was built by its public education  system. That was the crucible of citizenship.  We did not create that public  education system. Again,   this is not about just the ownership  structure, public versus private,   but the idea that the school is actually a  public institution and a crucible of citizenship.  Even as a pedagogical philosophy, [this] does not  exist. For those of us who’ve lived in England and   America, for all the problems of [their] schools,  this aspect was extraordinarily pronounced.  Yes, we have education, but those effects have not  kicked in. Actually, those are also important for   endogamy because the social space is going  to come through education. It’s not going   to come through market relations, or maybe even  office relations, which don’t exist. [chuckles]  One of the reasons endogamy—There’s a joke  going around in India that India will,   like in everything, skip every stage. We will  not go through this stage of really dismantling   endogamy, but marriage as an institution might  disappear. [laughs] At least in urban circles,   that’s been talked about quite openly. RAJAGOPALAN: I’ve heard the other version,   which is actually, endogamy we’re going to now  also see in queer relationships. Apparently,   in queer dating websites and things like  that, people have caste preferences.  MEHTA: Again, if you think deeply about the  conditions that would even allow endogamy to   be dissolved, none of this is a guarantee. None  of those social institutions exist in a serious   form. The caste and occupation dissociation  is also much slower. I know our common friend,   Chandra Bhan Prasad, has been assiduously  documenting that dissociation. He’s much   more optimistic about that dissociation  and its effects. You’d say in aggregate—  RAJAGOPALAN: The scale at which it  needs to be done hasn’t happened.  MEHTA: We can talk all about the expansion of  the Indian welfare state, but the fact of the   matter is, 40 percent to 45 percent of the  country still lives at levels of precarity,   where those norms of social identification matter  a lot. It’s not even an option to actually say—  RAJAGOPALAN: It’s the safety net. MEHTA: —“I’m going to reject kinship.”  RAJAGOPALAN: Absolutely. MEHTA: That’s what I meant by the endoginative   cult. The basic things that Dr. Ambedkar very  clearly identified, we’ve fallen short on that.  [There’s] one last thing I’d say about caste,  which I think is important in this context and   particularly in relation to the question you  raised about segregation. One of the unintended   consequences of the reservation debate in India,  to my mind, was that the question of ethics   became completely sidelined in favor  of a pure politics of distribution.  Now distribution itself has an ethical dimension,  but ethics meaning a very simple proposition,   which is how do we relate to each other?  How do we treat each other? On a spectrum,   at the very least, not inflict the worst  kinds of indignities on each other?  Once the debate switched to the distributive  question, two consequences happened. One,   I do strongly think that for a lot of urban  Indians, the specificity of the Dalit experience   has been eclipsed. It’s all become all backward  caste, Dalits, all as if this was just one big   historical blob. Once you begin to say 90 percent  of the country was oppressed. India’s the only   country where 90 percent was oppressed, and 80  percent of them were oppressors in their own way.   That complete eclipsing of that ethical question  and its supplanting by pure, raw politics of   distribution—you see it reflected, unfortunately,  even in institutions of higher education.  You have granted access, but  you’ve not asked the question,   “What are the pedagogical practices [and] ethical  relations that should govern this modern campus?”   It frankly let the upper caste off. “We’ve  given reservation. What else is there?”  RAJAGOPALAN: What more do you want? MEHTA: That’s the milder version. The   worst version is, “Look what a disaster  this is.” That’s the unacceptable   version. That whole ethical debate around caste  got sidelined in this political articulation.  RAJAGOPALAN: The last question I have, and  feel free if you want to keep this abstract,   is you have a very long track record of  building institutions. You built CPR. You   were instrumental in building Ashoka University. Your experience both shows what it means to be an   institutional builder long term, but also what  are the kinds of constraints that are faced   in modern India and across the world, perhaps,   in developing independent institutions  that need to survive over a long period   of time to really fulfill their purpose. You don’t need to get into organizational details,   but what are the necessary conditions for  institutional building going forward from   where we are today, not the glorious past  when these things were possible? Is there   a purpose for these institutions beyond  truth-seeking? If so, what is that purpose?  MEHTA: First of all, I would not take the credit  for building Ashoka. I was there for a brief time,   and I think at a crucial time in its history.  Looking back, I think my own story about CPR   is—I think it now looks like more of a story  of how we failed to build it. [chuckles]  That is a segue into the general lessons. One  general thought—I know it’s an obvious one,   but sometimes the most obvious things are missing  from our societies. [This is] particularly true   of institutions of higher education. There is an extraordinary conceit in an   institution of higher education. The conceit is  not just that we are going to shape minds and be   this place where young people discover themselves  and flourish, but the time horizons on which they   operate. Many of the world’s greatest universities  are hundreds of years old. In fact, often they’ve   survived lots of political discontinuity.  They have been a kind of bulwark against that.  RAJAGOPALAN: Political, religious,  ethnic mass mobilization, so many things.  MEHTA: India also had amazing  institutions of those kinds.   One of the interesting questions is, where do you  get a sensibility that even has that ambition?  We often talk about it in the context of human  capital. Where do countries get human capital   from? How do societies generate entrepreneurial  capital? Again, that’s something that’s produced.   It’s not something that’s given. There is  something similar here. What are these moments   in history, and for what reasons do you actually  get this extraordinary alignment of people   thinking of this as their professional identity?  This is a thousand-year project. [chuckles]  The second general principle—for a modern  society I think it goes without saying—is   four things have to work in tandem, or at  least not completely at cross-purposes:   the professional identity of the community  of academics and their vocation and mission;   the state valuing these things; capital supporting  it enough—honestly, we cannot wish away capital,   as much as we can rail about the influence of  donors and so forth; fourth, a demanding public.  Again, there are these brief moments. When  I think of snippets of good institutional   building phases in India, I think of  Ahmedabad in the 1950s and ’60s. There’s   this interesting alignment of Gujarati  capital, the state, independent academics.  RAJAGOPALAN: Union movements and mass movements. MEHTA: Mass movements, and a sense that this is   an engine of empowering you, even though  it looks like an elite institution. Those   alignments have got to be actively produced  by some forces of political leaders. If any   one of these legs is weak, it’s very hard  to build and sustain those institutions.  Each one of them understands that one of the  values of that institution is just by existing,   it’s a force for democratization. Not in the  sense that it necessarily preaches democracy   or is brainwashing people into a progressive  ideology, but because it is an alternative   center of power and has a different basis  for legitimacy. Because that’s what a liberal   society also requires: different principles of  legitimacy across different kinds of institutions.  Michael Walzer used to have this nice phrase  about liberalism as the art of separation, that   the only way this politics can work is if you  can make distinctions between public and private.  If you can recognize that you need capital,  you need the state, you need the autonomy of   knowledge, there are principles specific to each  of these spheres. They lean on others for support,   but they have to do so in a way that their own  essential integrity is not compromised. They   should not be subject to this similar singular  logic. For example, I think if you do subject   higher education to the logic of profit, there  is no way it can fulfill its core mission.  RAJAGOPALAN: I see two things happening. One  is this exit from state-built or state-led   higher educational institutions.  This has all kinds of problems,   from the way they treat personnel to leadership  to campus politics and so on. The second part,   simultaneously, is the rise of the  multimedia education empire that we   have. There are enormous YouTube stars who are  actually teachers who are teaching IIT classes   or helping you prepare for civil services  or something. Now they’ve become modern-day   icons or heroes, almost, which I largely applaud. It’s very difficult to convert that into some   kind of stable institution. Is this a threat?  Is this a complement? What is a good way of   thinking about it? I also, like you, operate  in the world of second best, where I’m like,   “Thank God for YouTube. If everyone can’t get  a decent STEM education in their local school,   then at least there’s someone to  teach them literacy and numeracy.”  On the other hand, that doesn’t quite seem to  be the only purpose of an education institution,   which is literally transferring skills and  knowledge. There seems to be something bigger,   which we’re now not able to do on  digital media or social media. Some   physical building and continuity seem to  be important. How do you grapple with that?  MEHTA: As you pointed out, we are at  a moment where there will be massive   disruption in higher education because of  these new technologies. There’s no question   about it. Like all disruptions at the moment,  it seems there’s both a democratizing potential   and possibly a destructive potential. RAJAGOPALAN: Or at least narrowing.  MEHTA: Yes. As happened, I think,  in the first phase of social media,   when we thought of its impact on politics,  initially, there was this incredible euphoria   about democratization. Then it turns out  it has authoritarian possibilities as well.  The honest answer is we don’t know where all  these chips are going to fall. I think there’s   agreement that there is massive disruption. Now,  the thing about the influencers, the YouTuber,   of course, [is that] it’s part of a general  phenomenon of the curious individualization   of authority. Because the world of social media  does not require intermediaries and gatekeepers.  It’s not just happening in the realm  of higher—It’s happening practically   to every institution in society,  whether it’s media houses—Any   institution whose function was arbitrage  and mediation is increasingly under threat.  I think the question to ask, and I think  this is the one which is—One, obviously,   a university has a very different social function,  particularly a residential university. It has the   function of scholarship and the production  of knowledge, and I think this sense of,   “We are just trying to wrest.” It has to convey what it means   to wrest snippets of intellectual order  in a world that seems so unintelligible   to us. What that process looks like. What that  enchantment looks like. That, to me, is still   the core purpose of the university. If you don’t  think that’s the core purpose of the university,   we have no business being in universities. Of  course, as a site of education, universities   have traditionally been the most powerful  agents of a certain kind of socialization.  The joke in America is that you broke endogamy  basically by the university system. In a sense,   its socialization function, at all different  levels of experience—personal relationship,   the experience of this transition point between  leaving home and being then completely abandoned   to the wider economy. It’s this still-structured  arena. That incredibly luxury space that a   four-year education is supposed to give you.  It’s the last time you probably have in your   life where your function is to accumulate  intellectual capital, discover yourself   in a way that becomes much harder later on. To that extent, there will still be a need   for institutions. I don’t think those functions  will go away. There’s another market reason to   think you will still need universities. A lot of  what we see by way of individual influencers and   so forth—they have relied upon the fact that they  themselves came through these institutions. Now,   you could say, “Look, this was the story of  the past. You may not need them in the future.”   I suspect you still will. This is going to be  the cherry on the cake, maybe a slightly bigger   cherry, maybe a plum on the cake, as it were. The conditions of interchange through which our   views evolve, through which we form identities  will still require modes of socialization. In   fact, I could make the stronger argument that if  you don’t have those modes of socialization, what   you will produce is a society of incredible anomie  and atomization. The theme which we began with,   that if even these last bastions of structured  sociability and the formation of nonreligious   identities disappear, from grade one, we are on  you and your YouTube channel and one influencer,   and an occasional chat in a cafe with friends. I think that atomization, frankly, is going to be   pretty detrimental to society. I suspect  that functionalist logic will kick in, even   if you don’t buy the intellectual logic entirely. RAJAGOPALAN: I’m actually nervous about the “you   and your AI tutor having the conversation.”  At least even with the YouTube influencer,   there is a community which is not in contact.  But there is this sense of community that we all   follow a particular influencer. One-on-one, you  and your AI tutor could unleash amazing things,   but also a terrifying level of atomization. MEHTA: There was one essay I read recently,   I think it was in The New Yorker, where they  were interviewing a bunch of undergraduates   about what they thought of AI. There’s this one  Princeton undergraduate who says this absolutely   extraordinary thing [about] why she likes AI. She says, look, in a sense, it solves three   problems for her in learning. One, she says,  “With the best professor, I may get two   hours [of] lectures a week and maybe 20 minutes  [of] office-hours time. This is unlimited.”  Two, this is unlimited Socratic questioning. Even  when it’s getting it wrong, if you approach it   in a Socratic spirit, if you just approach it as,  “I’m taking a question and not thinking about it.”   Three, the more interesting social thing, which  is the fact that right now, at least one is doing   it in a context where we are not being judged  opens up even greater Socratic possibilities,   which maybe traditional education won’t. I do think the human element—There used to   be these studies which used to say that one of  the indicators of a good teacher had to do with   one physical attribute of lecturing, which is  how you make eye contact. They looked at tons   and tons of videos of how people lectured.  Apparently, eye contact turned out to be a   pretty good proxy for how much effect you had on  students. Maybe we will need that eye contact.  RAJAGOPALAN: At the head of the conversation,  we were talking about what’s happening in the   global order. I just want to end  with what that means for India.  In 2012 you had written Nonalignment 2.0. Within  that, there was the baked-in assumption that the   international system had enough order  and coherence, despite all its flaws,   for India to navigate it and get a place  in the world and strategic autonomy.  Now, that’s completely changed, and you’ve  written a lot about it. Does that 2012   framework survive for what India needs to do  going forward? If it doesn’t, what replaces it?  MEHTA: I think here’s what survives of that  framework. I think one of the things we   underestimate about nonalignment,  partly because we just confuse   nonalignment with the nonaligned movement. RAJAGOPALAN: Movement. I don’t mean that.  MEHTA: I know you don’t mean that, but I think for  some listeners, I think it’s an easy association   sometimes. The core idea of the nonalignment was  [that] we have to ask the question, what kind of   world order do we want which allows maximum space  for our development and adheres to some basic   norms which in the long run are good for all of  us? It was an exercise in world order-building.   In fact, it did not even take for granted—I  know the context was there is a Cold War,   there’s a Soviet bloc, there’s an American  bloc, can you be nonaligned between them?  The ambition was actually deeper, and it was  tied to a second assumption which these days   gets ridiculed, left, right, and center. The  deepest assumption was that even if sometimes   in the short run, there might be choices that  are not entirely in your optimal interests, it   is almost certainly the case that most things that  will be good for the planet as a whole or humanity   as a whole will end up being good for you. I think we forget the power of that assumption. If   you gauge every little war and skirmish with what  it’ll do for me in the next 10 years as opposed to   saying, “What does it do to institutionalize  the rule of law or the next long duration?”  Then, of course, the third idea was the idea of  strategic autonomy. Strategic autonomy was the   idea that what you need is options. We never  fulfill the material dimension of strategic   autonomy, but it was that in order to be an  autonomous actor, you need a range of options.   When you devise a strategy, you devise it in a way  in which those options are available. You’re not   locked into just one choice or another choice. I think those three principles still hold quite   powerfully. Right now, if you see the critique  of nonalignment, on the options view, it’s, “Oh,   we have no option but to align with x or y because  China is an immediate neighbor. We have to put all   our eggs in the US basket.” What options you  can accumulate will be a matter of context,   but you have to think of those options. I think the second point, that I do   feel strongly about—maybe this is the last  vestige of the idealism of Indian nationalism,   the Tagore–Gandhi–Nehru legacy left in us—which  is it can never be a mistake to ask the question,   [whether] what is good for the planet and humanity  will in the long run turn out to be good for you.  RAJAGOPALAN: Absolutely. MEHTA: If you are always   playing the short-term tactical game, you  will undermine not just your interests,   but you will undermine your moral capital in  some ways. I would also say it more strongly.   I think there is a narrative in India—and I can  sympathize with where it’s coming from—which   thinks that India was hurt a lot by actually  trying to occupy these moral high grounds.  Some of that critique is fair. Obviously, when  you just speak and don’t act, it opens you up   for the right kind of criticism. Sometimes we did  it in a way that was completely formulaic. It was   not attentive to varying historical context. You  just trot out a standard communique on everything.  I think what that narrative misses is how much  credibility that also gave us. There is that   other side of the ledger. In fact, many of the big  breakthroughs we managed to produce, the Indo–US   nuclear deal, independently of what we think of  our strategic relationship with the United States,   was in part because you actually had that capital. Whatever else, the charge was never leveled   against India that India’s going to be a threat  to world order. It’s an extraordinary compliment   to have in the long run. It’s a form of capital.  Now there’s, I think, deep skepticism about that   idea in some ways. What did we get out of that? It’s true. Sometimes bullies and bad boys get   more attention than good boys in class,  but ultimately, it’s the grade at the   end of the year that’s going to count. I think this is a moment to go back to the   basics and say, “What are the first principles  that will allow us to accumulate these options   that do not make us vulnerable in the way  in which colonialism did?” Geopolitics and   economic reform. Again, the imperative has  never been greater [for] their alignment.  RAJAGOPALAN: No, I couldn’t agree more. Thank  you so much for doing this. I’ve been waiting   to have this conversation with you for a long  time, and it was wonderful to have you here.  MEHTA: Thank you so much. Always  a great privilege to talk to you.