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In this article we will discuss about the meaning and complexities of modernization.
Meaning of Modernization:
It has been very aptly said that “modernization is the current term for an old process— the process of social change whereby less developed societies acquire characteristics common to more developed societies”. This process is facilitated, sometimes hastened, by international, or inter-societal, communication. The developed societies transmit ‘images’ of their developed states to traditional societies.
Such transmission has become very frequently and efficacious since World War II, thanks to the expansion of mass media. The mass media have been called the “mobility multiplier”, because these ‘images’ of developed societies arouse among people of traditional societies a hankering for a ‘better’ or ‘higher’ standard of living.
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The mechanism by which such expectations are aroused is known as empathy. “Empathy is the psychic mechanism that enables a person to put himself in another person’s situation—to identify himself with a role, time, or place different from his own. Among the range of psychic mechanisms that supply imagination, empathy is distinctively the one that nourishes ‘upward mobility’…. The mechanism may or may not be innate, but it can certainly be trained to operate more efficiently in people with a desire to better themselves. Since World War II such training has been supplied by the mass media of print, film and radio”.
Karl Marx noted over a century ago in the preface to Das Kapital:
“The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future”.
Criteria of Modernity:
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If modernization is the process whereby less developed societies acquire characteristics common to more developed societies, the next important task is to identify the characteristics which are common to more developed societies—that is, to identify the criteria of modernity.
Sociologists have not yet arrived at a consensus about the criteria of modernity. But there has been a broad agreement among scholars on certain key points concerning modernization.
These key points are:
(i) A degree of self-sustaining growth in the economy—or at least growth sufficient to increase both production and consumption regularly;
(ii) A measure of public participation in the polity—or at least democratic representation in defining and choosing policy alternatives;
(iii) A diffusion of secular- rational norms in the culture—understood approximately in Weberian-Parsonian terms;
(iv) An increment of mobility in the society, understood in terms of urbanisation, spread of literacy and media participation; and
(v) A corresponding transformation in the modal personality that equips individuals to function effectively in a social order that operates according to the foregoing characteristics.’ While discussing the criteria of modernity, Daniel Lerner observes: “According to this typology, the modern person is an urban literate who participates fully in the public forum, market place, political arena”.
Complexities of Modernization:
Every nation that is undeveloped or less developed, but regards itself as developing, constantly receives pictures of modernity transmitted by more developed societies, and embarks on social planning in the direction of modernization. The experiences of such planning have been varied, happy in a few cases and unhappy in the case of most nations.
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It is one thing to define in detail the criteria of modernity and an altogether different thing “to plan the rational transfer of these ‘items’ from more developed to less developed societies”. To be successful and efficacious, modernization process should involve not simply a mechanical ‘transfer’ of a few chosen items, but a complete ‘transformation’ of the society in question.
Transfer of ‘items’ can only be meaningfully accomplished by the transformation of individuals. We may discuss some of the complexities involved in the planning process toward modernization.
To begin with, the planning policy is often ambivalent. As a result, the planning works, not infrequently, at cross purposes. Dr. S.C. Dube refers to the ambivalent attitude of Indian planners in this respect.
“The small modernizing elite continue to have a dominant voice, but the forces of tradition and conservatism are by no means dead or even insignificantly weak. When plans for progress fail, appeals of obscurantism become attractive. But whatever the lip-service rendered to traditional ideas and forms, the goal of modernization appears to have been generally accepted. There is, however, no consensus on the elements of tradition to be preserved and no assessment of the social costs of economic development and technological change: thinking on these themes continues to be hazy and wishful. It would be desirable not to approach the take off stage with a divided mind on these seminal issues”.
Dr. Dube highlights the failure of the Indian planning process directed toward modernisation in these words:
“The main failures have been on the educational and communicational fronts. Efforts in these fields lack direction: they are weak, poorly organised, and not quite in harmony with the national effort on the agricultural and industrial fronts. Their major failures are- (i) They have not effectively projected a positive image of the New India—of what the country wants to be, and of what it should be. (ii) They have not seriously tried to inculcate the attitudes and values that are conducive to modernisation, (iii) A new system of rewards and sanctions necessary for economic development and social change, has not received imaginative and careful handling on their part”.
Secondly, modernization is the process of Social change in which economic development is the principal component. Naturally, economic development is a high priority objective of every modernizing society. But in most cases this objective remains unfulfilled. The cause of failure lies in lack of proper appreciation and understanding of the dynamics of modernizing process.
The attainment of ‘self-sustaining’ economic growth involves more than purely economic processes of production and consumption. It involves, in particular, the transformation of human resources.
“For an economy to sustain growth by its own autonomous operation, it must be effectively geared to the skills and values of the people who make it work. On this view, a society capable of operating an economy of ‘self-sustaining growth’ is ipso facto a modernized society”.
Thirdly, modernization does not involve a mechanical transfer of institutions of the advanced societies to those which are not so advanced. “Modernization operates rather through a transformation of institutions that can only be accomplished by the transformation of individuals”.
It is, therefore, required of modernizing societies that they ‘must learn how transferred institutions may be transformed, how adopted life-ways may be adapted’.
Fourthly, the developed and modernized societies of today experienced low rates of change over long periods of time. Today, on the other hand, the modernizing societies experience high (and usually accelerating) rates of change over short (and usually decreasing) periods of time. This poses problems for the latter. There is hardly enough time for slow adaptation to new ways of life and transformation of individuals which are the essential pre-conditions for successful modernization.
Fifthly, in the case of those societies which are developed and modernized, the impulse for modernization came from within whereas in the case of the present-day modernizing societies the impulse comes from without.
S.N. Eisenstadt explains the point thus:
“It was in these European countries (Western Europe, England, the Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries, the United States, and in the English-speaking Dominions) that the first historical processes of modernisation developed, mostly through the transformation and working of various internal forces in these societies, and only to a small extent through the impact of external events”.
The conclusion at which the social scientists have arrived on the basis of this experience is this:
“Traditional societies can respond effectively to internally generated demands for institutional change articulated over a relatively long period, but they are typically incapable of rapid institutional changes to meet externally induced demands.”
Since the start of international development programmes in 1949 (with President Truman’s point IV programme), the traditional societies of Asia and Africa receive pictures or images of their own future from a more developed society.
Experience of the few decades suggests that the transmission of such images is likely to constitute an intrusion into the less developed, traditional society, and that such intrusions prove to be disruptive to traditional societies. This point merits detailed discussion.
The images of developed societies arouse the expectations of the people of traditional societies. These societies “manifest an urgent will- to-change but are unable to incorporate rapidly an efficacious way-to-change. The disruptive effect, which is produced by the imbalance between the will and the way to modernize, emerges as a key problem of induced and accelerated social change.”
The result is that a ‘revolution of rising expectations’, which is an outcome of externally induced stimulus, is giving way to a ‘revolution of rising frustration’.
The disruption that is caused to traditional societies as a result of externally induced stimulus and accelerated (high rates of change over short periods of time) social change may be discussed with reference to some illustrations. To begin with, let us consider the case of urbanisation which is a criterion of modernity.
In Western society’s urbanisation proceeded slowly over a long period of time accompanied by, and in response to, other social changes, the most important of which was industrialization. Employment opportunities expanded and people were naturally attracted by the prospect of employment in urban centres.
Those who came were absorbed and they became truly urbanite. Urban amenities developed simultaneously.
It is not so with urbanisation in modernizing societies of today. “This is an urbanization of very high density, of individuals living under conditions that may be even worse than the rural areas from which they have come, of not having available the kinds of work or the means of support which will permit them to do more than merely survive.”
Lerner observes:
“The great cities of the transitional world often have become massive impediments to orderly social change rather than productive centres of modernization. In much of Latin America, vast lands are deserted while the people are crushed into the mega polis – for example, half of all Cubans live in and around Havana, half of all Uruguayans live around Montevideo and about 80 per cent of the Venezuelan population lives on the 10 per cent of land located between Caracas and Maracaibo. In the transitional societies of Asia, which produce far less wealth than those of Latin America, the consequences of over- urbanization are even more disruptive.”
We may next consider literacy as a criterion of modernity vis-a-vis new modernizing societies. Eradication of illiteracy constitutes an important component of planning process for modernization. But this may also prove to be disruptive. In these societies literacy is often a status symbol.
Those who are introduced to alphabets or to 3 R’s are sometimes alienated from their ancestral occupation and at the same time they cannot fit themselves well with the requirements of an industrial society because of their limited capability.
The result is frustration. That is why literacy is now-a-days conceived of as functional literacy having three inter-connected components: literacy, functionality and awareness. That is, Literacy is linked to the occupation of the learner so that he may be more competent in his calling than before.
At the same time, through literacy he is exposed to the environment around him, acquainting him broadly with the environmental problems and the ways to tackle them. It will be prudent to heed the warning of Bernard Shaw: “How can you dare to teach a man how to read before you have taught him everything else?”
The experience of Western societies in this particular field is narrated by Lerner thus… “The growth of free public education was functionally related to industrial society, with its ever-growing need for literates to perform the skilled and semi-skilled functions of industrial production, distribution and even consumption. In the modern west, literacy developed initially as a skill with a ready pay-off to the ambitious individuals who acquired it. Only later, and at a much higher level, did it become a personal and cultural adornment”.
Even in the field of higher education, the modernizing societies do not appear to have designed their courses of study to effect ‘behavioural transformations’ of individuals. On the contrary, education that is imparted proves to be not only disruptive but often dysfunctional for societal modernization.
Teaching is also equally defective. Not only does it fail to arouse curiosity, it also discourages, and sometimes even dampens, curiosity of students. Sir Ivor Jennings, who was for sometime the Vice-Chancellor of Colombo University, recorded the conversation between a student and his teacher of English literature thus:
Teacher: ‘O daffodil were weep to see you fade away so soon’.
Pupil: What is a daffodil?
Teacher: Just an English flower, but the examiners will not ask questions on that. Take this note: The imagery in this poem
The experience recorded by Dr. Jennings is, by no means, unique to Sri Lanka. One may derive similar experience in India, and for the matter of that in dl traditional societies which are going through the process of modernization. Can such education develop among pupils adaptive capacity which is the most distinctive feature of societies that are genuinely modernized?
Let us take up political participation vis-a-vis the modernizing societies of today .Even here the effect has been disruptive.
Political participation has brought about “the relatively quick development of the political aspiration of the wider social groups and their overall political modernization before a concomitant extent of economic, professional, and often even educational development. The high level of modernisation of political demands, in its turn, usually gave rise to a quicker development of educational facilities and aspirations – especially of the more generalized and humanistic ones which often outstripped the economic facilities”.
Establishment of many schools, colleges and Universities in various states in India was dictated more by political expediency than by considerations of promoting the cause of modernization. Media participation has also proved to be dysfunctional.
The attractive advertisements of various consumer items, including consumer durables, in the mass media, tend to arouse expectations of having those attractive items. There is no corresponding increment of ability to fulfill those expectations.
“The disruptive imbalance that weighs most heavily on traditional societies in our time is the imbalance between what people have been taught to want and what they have learned to get.” The result is frustration which “is accelerating in transitional societies because articulated wants are increasing, diversifying and spreading at very rapid and erratic rates.”