Jugaad Ethics

In the third world, radically different levels of technology can coexist in a single artifact. Here, for example, is a photo of a carriage in India:

Cars are an essentially modern mode of transportation. They presume an entire global economy of oil, steel, rubber and who knows what else. Creating and maintaining them requires the specialized labor of engineers, chemists, machinists and managers. If these arrangements break down, cars become useless as such. But a car chassis can still be hitched to a horse, and a horse is a technology with a five thousand year pedigree. Its demands are largely intuitive and readily met. Horse maintenance is democratic that way. The Hindi term for the nature of this horse-drawn car is jugaad, which La Wiki helpfully glosses as “creativity to make existing things work…with meager resources.” The closest English term is probably “hack.”

The image of the horse-drawn car first came to mind when I saw this poster a few years back:

One must marvel at this cultural artifact, which was no doubt the work of a highly educated team. Multiple pairs of eyeballs passed over it before it was printed. Yet judging from the many angry reactions it earned, most critics assumed that the error was one of oversight or bad faith. “How could they not realize that Jake can’t consent either?”

But imagine pointing to a jugaad carriage and asking: “how could the driver not realize that his car is basically just a /horse/?” The driver obviously knows this. Perhaps he would even concede that it’s kind of crazy. But if that’s the infrastructural hand you were dealt, you do your best to muddle through. So, too, with the poster: what we see here is jugaad social tech.

As recently as a generation ago, there was a widely shared understanding about Jake and Josie’s asymmetric payoff matrix, whose cells had labels like “momentary pleasure” and “years of childrearing” respectively. It was taken for granted that the downside risk of a night of heavy drinking fell mainly on Josie, and by extension Josie’s family. This understanding was embedded in formal and folk institutions whose mechanisms were, if nothing else, unambiguous.

Then we decided that these technologies were as backwards as they were boring—a kind of sexual horse-drawn buggy if you will—so we scrapped them for something faster and more exciting. Then we discovered that the new technologies require a lot of competence, special parts and disposable income that perhaps aren’t always available. They also have a tendency to run people over and dump toxic waste into the atmosphere. Yet even after the new tech proves itself unsustainable, the new chassis is the only thing you’ve got left lying around. So you bolt the old engine on as best you can and get back on the road.

Once you have the image of the jugaad car in your head, a lot of modern preoccupations start to look like jugaad social tech.

For example, much of contemporary feminism actually reads like an attempt to hook the horse of the patriarchy up to the junker of gender egalitarianism. The patriarchy was bad, as the story goes, so we got rid of it and had the sexual revolution instead. Then the sexual revolution turned out to be a catastrophe of abuse, disgrace, and regret. By the time we realized it, however, “consent” was the only language of sexual ethics available to us at all, so these were problems that we largely had no name for.[0]

At best, we could only gesture weakly at “inappropriateness” or “imbalanced power dynamics”, failing to notice that most women tend to see “imbalanced power dynamics” as a feature rather than a bug. But the fundamental problem was the failure of a father to protect his daughter.

To see this clearly, consider the concept of “affirmative consent.” As a cottage industry of campus educators teaches us, the failure to obtain explicit consent for each discrete sexual act is rape. And as its detractors correctly observe, the logical terminus of affirmative consent is a legal contract between lovers, signed beforehand in the presence of witnesses. But normal human beings don’t draw up contracts before sex, they go on to argue, so affirmative consent is absurd.

In fact, normal human beings have been drawing up contracts before sex for millennia. It was called “marriage.”

Slowly, and probably unconsciously, we took the existing material of gender egalitarianism and cobbled together a jugaad patriarchy that pretends not to be one. The jugaad patriarchy is less efficient, less humane, and less conceptually coherent than the actual patriarchy it replaced. But if it affords us an atmosphere in which men are terrified of the consequences of sleeping with women they’re not married to, perhaps it’s better than nothing.

To take an example somewhat further removed from us, consider the role played by the /tolkach/ in the former Soviet Union. Under the Soviet system, the exploitative and inefficient capitalist mode of production was supposed to give way to benevolent rational planning. A few Five Year Plans later, the Kremlin decided that benevolent rational planning was a lot harder than it looked. Thereafter it began to quietly tolerate the /tolkachi/, a class of middlemen and fixers who made the under-the-table deals within and between various state enterprises. On one hand, this allowed the economy to function at all. On the other, it could function only as a jugaad capitalism, which was less efficient and humane than actual capitalism simply because it had to work in secrecy while pretending to be communism.

Or consider the state of affairs in many parts of the world today, where governance, health care and infrastructural development are overseen by Nice White People. As recently as fifty years ago, these arrangements were formalized in a system we now call “colonialism.” Then we decided that colonialism was bad and decolonization was good. So we tried decolonization and were quickly reminded of why we had colonialism in the first place. Now we have the NGOcracy, a jugaad colonialism that attempts to provide the same administrative competence and moral instruction, but now using the old colonialism as a cover story. Nice White People must now administer African affairs in order to redress the historical inequalities wrought by Nice White People administering African affairs. It no doubt sounds better when Bill Gates explains it.

Or take “privilege”, the notion that unearned and self-perpetuating advantages accrue to members of various groups as a result of historical systemic oppression. Taken literally as a social scientific theory, “privilege” has some pretty awkward predictive failures. It would be a mistake, though, to fixate on these failures, any more than you would dwell on the absurdity of a car with reins for a steering wheel. The theory of privilege is just one way of cramming the square peg of natural human inequality into the round hole of a formally classless social system.

The antecedent of privilege was noblesse oblige, the notion that to whom much was given, much was required. But in the latter 20th century we came to reject the notion that anyone could be given much of anything except by theft. That is, we denied the distinction between /unearned/ advantages and /ill-gotten/ ones. Yet the intuition that the natural aristocracy owes something to the rest of us will not budge, so the moral calculus must be made to come out that way.[1] Therefore the natural aristocracy must have gotten its /aristeia/ by nicking it. Therefore we, the peasants, are entitled nick it back. Jugaad noblesse oblige.

By now a pattern has emerged. First, a horse-drawn carriage is replaced by a car. The car soon becomes a junker, which is even worse than a carriage. So the junker is discreetly retrofitted into a jugaad horse-drawn car. The jugaad car looks like a car, but it only works because it is, in fact, powered by a horse. Yet it doesn’t even work as well as a horse because it has to pretend to be a car.

Thinking back on the photo, it’s likely that proper horse-drawn carriages existed in that part of rural India within living memory. But imagine that you have grown up without ever having seen a working carriage (let alone a working automobile, for that matter). All you know is horse-drawn cars. You might harbor vague doubts that things are not quite fitting together as envisioned, but compared to what? Who would you even ask about your suspicions? Everyone you know drives a horse-drawn car, even as the rusting frames seem to require more urgent maintenance every year.