Our Growing Human Family

Our Growing Human Family

Summary

Our Growing Human Family is Minoo Masani’s 1950 book for young readers, reproduced here in the Indian Liberal Group’s 2007 third printing with line illustrations by C. G. H. Moorhouse. It asks why human beings live together at all, and answers by telling the history of ever-larger human groupings: the animal herd, the tribe, the family and village community, the city, the state, the nation and the empire, ending with the world federation that Masani argues the twentieth century now requires. He writes in a chatty second-person voice, borrows freely from H. G. Wells, Will Durant, Kropotkin and Darwin as well as from poems and proverbs, and keeps reminding the child reader that on prehistory nobody really knows and even the wisest can only make clever guesses.

The first eight chapters build the argument step by step. Chapter 1 (Why Not Live Alone?) shows that a lone person could neither meet basic needs nor bear loneliness, and sketches the evolution of life to argue that Man is a late and young animal for whom the earth was not made. Chapter 2 reads Darwin’s survival of the fittest as survival of the fitter, drawing on Kropotkin and Wells to claim that within a species mutual aid, not conflict, is the law of Nature, though each of us also carries a streak of aggression from our animal past. Chapter 3 presents the tribe as the first social institution, nomadic, without private property, ruled by custom and by the golden rule of each for all, but hostile to outsiders, with war producing the first rulers. Chapter 4 traces how the discovery of agriculture, perhaps a female one, ended nomad life, created private property and the patriarchal family in which wives, sons and slaves were the master’s property (Manu), and shaped the subordination of women and the premium on child-bearing. Chapter 5 describes the village community and its samiti or folk-moot, which governed by custom rather than law, and shows how craftsmen, the origins of caste, markets and a lower commercial morality grew inside it, until nomad conquerors imposed tribute and created rulers and ruled, the beginning of the State. Chapter 6 covers the city: expanded villages, harbours, royal camps and above all temples (the god as chief capitalist), Mohenjo-daro and Pataliputra, Greek city-states resting on slavery, and the medieval free cities and guilds where city air made people free, brought down by class division, then modern metropolises, slums and the Garden City. Chapter 7 rejects divine-right and social-contract theories and treats the State as the next unit to answer the need for peace, trade and security, created by war and tribute, with the ancient Indian republics giving way to kingdoms because distance is the enemy of democracy. Chapter 8 treats nationalism as the new tribal gods (Bharat Mata, Uncle Sam, John Bull), tied to the Industrial Revolution and to resistance against foreign rule, and argues that a nation is defined by feeling, not by religion, race or language.

Chapters 9 to 12 turn from history to prescription. Chapter 9 defines empire as the rule of one people over another, runs from Iran and Rome to modern imperialism driven by markets, raw materials and surplus capital, and concludes that no nation has the right to rule another. Chapter 10 argues that travel, broadcasting and economic interdependence have shrunk the world while minds still think at foot-and-horse pace, and examines the League of Nations (a league of governments with a unanimity rule and no common police) and the United Nations with its Security Council veto, ending with the case for a democratic world government. Chapter 11 sets three tests for a new order, that it be worldwide, a real government and democratic, answers the objection from the existing federations of Switzerland, the United States and Australia, and imagines the nation-state withering into self-governing Regions of garden cities under a World Federation, the Parliament of Man of Tennyson’s poem. Chapter 12 insists that federation is only a beginning, proposes two tests of good government (the greatest good of the greatest number, and the largest freedom resting on consent), invokes Lincoln and Lord Acton on liberty, weighs democracies against dictatorships and chooses democracy, wanting planning but not at the cost of liberty, and closes on non-violence (Buddha, Asoka, Gandhi), education to think freely, Joad’s time scale on which civilisation is only hours old, Donne’s no man is an island and Tagore’s heaven of freedom.

The 2007 printing adds apparatus not in the 1950 edition. An acknowledgements page from the Indian Liberal Group lists the members who funded the reprint, records that it was planned for Masani’s 2005 birth centenary and appeared alongside a reprint of We Indians, and thanks Firoze Hirjikaka for help with the epilogue and Vivek Raju for updating facts on the origin of man and the Earth and for the cover. Zareer Masani’s preface, dated August 2005, calls the book a precocious anticipation of globalisation, notes that it was written when Indian opinion was turning chauvinistic over Kashmir and trade barriers, recalls his father’s proposal for a Kashmir condominium and his early case for East Asian style liberalisation, and ties him to current reformers such as Manmohan Singh. The new Chapter 13, A Growing, and Closer, Human Family: An Epilogue, is written in an imagined voice: the Group pictures Masani alive at 102 and asked to bring the book up to date, and the text is what he ‘might have said’, so it is the Group’s composition, not Masani’s own words. Its argument is that the book’s theme is so universal and timeless that the basics need no updating, but the facts and a few judgments do. It updates the science (human origins in bipedal primates four to five million years ago, the Genome Project’s African ‘Eve’ about 60,000 years ago, an Earth about 4.5 billion years old, the dinosaurs’ extinction 65 million years ago, the Hubble Telescope, a big bang put at about 16 billion years ago, SETI and planets around other stars). It adds Nelson Mandela’s peaceful end of apartheid while observing that South Africans are still unequal. It qualifies the free-city maxim by noting that migration to cities has produced slums and poverty, that economic, religious and physical freedom have not clearly grown (poverty has increased, dogma has spurred terrorism, immigration limits have tightened), and that Singapore revived the city-state after Malaya’s merger failed. It credits Hitler’s war with dismantling the British Empire, and it marvels that the internet, Google and mobile phones have shrunk the world faster than the author imagined. It ends by reaffirming that a world government, a federation of the world without borders, is coming sooner rather than later and that the human family is growing and getting closer. It does not revisit the United Nations veto discussion or the liberal tests of good government from Chapter 12. Appendices give a brief profile of Masani (1905 to 1998), a list of his publications from 1939 to 1989 and a note on the Indian Liberal Group.