Lerner has wholeheartedly bought into what Gray calls the “modern myth”. To him, before the rise of the Demokrat party, the introduction of shops and neckties, Balgat was out of sync with the universe. To steal a metaphor, modernity is a train that’s leaving the station, but luckily the villagers just managed to board on time, with the help of the Grocer, “the cleverest of us all”. This is made eminently clear when Lerner writes, “the irony of the route by which Balgat had entered History stayed with me”. History with a capital H, that irrepressible force that pushes everyone and everything towards one endpoint, or at least that’s how it’s presented in the religion of modernity. Before the arrival of the neckties, the people of Belgat refused to “get out of their holes”, but now there are radios and shops, and everyone has obediently gotten their tickets stamped and boarded the train.
To harken back to last weeks’ topic, on social sciences and the like, I have the same problem with Lerner as I had with Gessen. Its not hard to understand why social science has a bad rap when writers like these wear their biases and ideologies on their sleeves. You have absolutely no doubt what Lerner’s opinion is of these people. The Grocer was a prophet who knew the Word, and the rest of them were ignorant and needed to be shown the light. Yes, he has respect for the Chief, but in the same way Rousseau respected the noble savage.
Despite the fact that the piece is opinionated, it seems to me that the insight provided outweighs the author’s personal stakes. It is important to recognize that political science can be studied through a number of lens. Journalism is easily susceptible to the author’s opinion, however I do not take this as something negative. It allows us one interesting, valid perspective on modernization in Balgat. Despite the author’s defense of the grocer, it is also clear that he sympathizes with the chief in the end, understanding the underlying sadness in the fact that his sons never learned how to fight and die for their country. If anything, I think this piece illustrates the nuances of the different takes on modernization.