Financial Times

Business is scornful of the spirit of democracy
By Nous
Business that once saw J. R. Jayewardene as a class act and was only too ready to defend the authoritarian and even fascist tendencies of the JR-Premadasa era is now dancing to a liberal tune.

We would have taken this to represent progress, were it not for the fact the tune is that of a degenerate liberalism – the liberalism of the giddy libertine. There are many indications that a degenerate liberalism that has penetrated business in the country.

Witness the extent to which our business associations have come under the influence of the country’s professional reformers or improvers – the NGOs. To be sure, in pointing this out we risk exposing the resentment that many of us feel towards those who undertake the reformation of others as a profession.
Nevertheless, such an exposure is risked here because we find the impulse to undertake the reformation of others rearing its head among businessmen and business associations, and animating much of the civic interests of business.
Perhaps, without overstating it, we should merely view the reformist impulse among businessmen as something that has sprung from either the feeing of despair at the poor prospects for the economy, or the desire to become socially prominent and featured or both.

Yet we cannot ignore that the urge to reform another is an intensely anti-democratic urge. For it holds in derision the egalitarian spirit of democracy, and makes of business along with NGOs the superior class.

The most obvious outcome of the social divide between reformers, the superior class, and those who need to be reformed, the inferior class, is that it makes it all too easy to deny democratic legitimacy to the demands of those who are deemed inferior.

Accordingly, the inferior class would have to be first made respectable, sensitive and politically correct before its demands are given due consideration and an attempt is made to adjust them to the equally valid claims of everybody else.

Such an underlying attitude is wholly subversive to sound democratic institutions. Take the constant complaint of business today – which is that on the issue of Tamil terrorism the government is giving moral consideration to the demands of what some in business euphemistically refer to as “the southern polity”.

It is one thing to try to capture the imagination of as many men as possible for a political programme. But it is another thing to dismiss out of hand the demands expressed through the democratic process.

It is peculiarly irritating to be told by business, or by any one for that matter, that we must vote wisely and intelligently, or to be told to say no to violence.
On the other hand, if we were told why this or that political programme is in our interest to embrace, or why it is futile for our nation to aim to seek peace with justice, we would feel the ties of human fellowship and sympathy with our betters and would not resent them for helping us to make our decisions.
But to suggest either that the end at which our actions aim is not the perceived good or that we knowingly act unwisely is to convict us of either lunacy or depravity.

There is an obligation to welcome with interest and sympathy every demand expressed through the democratic process. The practical problem of politics is to adjust and harmonise them by means of compromises, bargains and deals.

The pattern of Sri Lankan thought is characterised by the absence of the spirit of egalitarianism. And such a spirit is lacking where the dignity of being a man is not deeply felt, where man is felt to be living in bondage to lust, greed and power.

It would be surprising, therefore, if we did not find the political orientation of business oscillating, for the most part, between fascism and a liberalism made sordid by libertinism.

There is much that fascists and libertines have in common. At bottom, the life that they both experience is best described as a neurotic chase after pleasure, profit, or prestige or any combination thereof, where the libertines might look for order and meaning in a pompous philanthropism, and the fascists in an extreme patriotism.

Even the business friendly political party, the United National Party appears to have been penetrated by a degenerate liberalism. For only a duplicitous political party, with no understanding perhaps of nation building as the progressive realisation of liberty, could have succeeded in creating the impression that it is an apologist for a reprehensible terrorist group, while at the same time being betrayed by those very terrorists.

Chandrika too belongs here, not just because at heart she preferred statism to capitalism, but also because it is difficult to imagine her as someone whose governance was informed and excited by a healthy respect for the rule of law and a feeling for the dignity of the human personality – the essence of liberty.
However, it is in vile and duplicitous France that the effect of the marrying of libertinism with elitism is writ large and in perfected form.

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