WV3: Geographical Lifezones of Worldvoice, Worldview, and Worldvenue

In 2014, Dr. Thom Wolf presented a lecture at National Institute of Social Work and Social Sciences (NISWASS),Utkal University, Bhubaneswar, India, and submitted this as an article to Fourth World Journal. In this lecture, Dr. Wolf assessed the legacy of  Jotirao Phule (1827-1890), largely considered India’s first systematic critc of caste. Phule directly influenced both Gandhi and Ambedkar as Indian social and legal revolutionaries, but who influenced Phule? Wolf explores what he calls the "WV3 Culture Tree”(Worldvoice, Worldview, Worldvenue) and how Phule was influenced to critique “caste” from within the system in India. What awakened Phule and what can we learn from his example?

The following lecture is a good example of how Wolf engages history, culture, and prominent social figures and thinkers. He unpacks not only what they said, but what influenced them and the power of their ideas. In Phule’s case, there is an underlying theory of human dignity, liberation, and uplift that characterized his work on behalf of the poor and outcaste (Dalits) of India. Wolf says that what motivated Phule wasn’t just ideas about how things should be, but an assessment of the core worldview that gave power to India’s caste system, which Phule believed was detrimental to the people of India and the future of the nation. 

Wolf says, "Jotirao Phule’s endurance and exceptional significance is that he addressed the issue of India as a whole, India as a cultural system, a WV3 matrix.Phule’s own picture of India’s traditional system was not a tree, but a prison: 'a prison,' ''the age-old prison house', 'this slavery system.'"

Wolf’s critique of a culture’s roots, shoots, and fruits is needed today as we look at competing perspectives and philosophies. Not all ideas are equal and they do not all lead to human flourishing. In assessing how we best live life this planet, we can learn a great deal from history and the results of prevailing philosophies in culture. What ideas and perspectives lead to human flourishing? Wolf charts a path here and gets us thinking.  

For further study, Dr. Wolf wrote a book length treatise about Phule, the Indian social revolutionary, and how his WV3 critique of Indian caste from within the system 60-80 years before Gandhi was influenced by the teachings of Jesus, whom he called the Baliraja - the crucified king. See Phule In His Own Words by Thom Wolf and Sunil Sardar, 2007.

Jotirao Phule: India as a Culture Tree

By Thom Wolf∗

A brief version of a lecture at National Institute of Social Work and Social Sciences (NISWASS),

Utkal University, Bhubaneswar, India, and an article submitted to Fourth World Journal 2014.

Thom Wolf, Ph.D., Is professor of Global Studies, University Institute New Delhi; visiting professor,

Gobal leadership, Andrews University; and research professor,

Centre for Social Research, NationalInstitute of Social Work And Social Sciences.

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Jotirao Phule, described India from Pune (in the middle of the generation of Karl Marx, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, and Sir Syed Ahmad Khan1). He stands as breathtaking conceptualizer for a new kind of India even today. Indeed, Rajendra Vohra has argued that 19th century Maharashtra belonged to two people only: M. G. Ranade and Jotiba Phule.2 Perhaps. Surely, it belonged to Phule.

Jotirao Phule (1827-1890) can be thought of as India’s first systematic theorist of caste.3 Internationally, the writings of O’Hanlon, Omvedt, Jaffrelot, and others, led the way for the rehabilitation of Phule’s contemporary voice.4 Nationally, perhaps no one has projected Phule into the public eye in a physical way more than Uttar Pradesh’s Chief Minister Mayawati, through her grand “statues drama” of enormous monuments, statues, and memorial parks; with the intent, according to sociologist Shiv Viisvanathan, “to create an alternate idea of history – one that cannot be easily erased.”5

Discovering Mahatma Jotirao Phule

Since living in India from 2004, Phule has captured my attention and compelled6 much of my in-country research. On a personal level, many Indian and international friends and colleagues have asked me why I originally found Mahatma Phule so interesting; Or, why have I found myself so compellingly captured by him?

Two reasons stand out especially.

First, Phule presented a conundrum. How could Gandhi, Father of India, and Dr. Ambedkar, Father of the Constitution of India, be fierce ideological opponents to each other and yet both of them call Phule their own guru?

Also, Phule’s comparative approach to the social problems of India I found remarkable. Phule so clearly, concretely, and comprehensively located the source of India’s millennia-long malaise, that I felt like I was reading a Max Weber analysis of India’s cultural system. More accurately, reading Phule is reading Weber-with-a- difference: Phule’s is an analysis by a street-level, Shudra-born, pucca-Indian aam aadmi Mali intellectual a half-century before Weber.

WV3: Geographical Lifezones of Worldvoice, Worldview, and Worldvenue

For a fact, Phule’s eye-level reporting impacted me so much that I credit my prolonged exposure to Phule for activating what I call WV3: the cultural matrixes of the major geographical lifezones of the planet.7

WV3 recognizes that the various cultural matrixes or social systems common to human life on our planet are systems with three dynamic, but not disconnected, dimensions. Those cultural system dynamics I am designating by WV3: worldvoice, worldview, and worldvenue.8

• Worldvoice is the virtuous person, the paradigm or model person of the culture.

• Worldview is the set of intellectual precepts, the comprehensive way of

  perceiving reality that flows from the prototype person.

• Worldvenue is the daily set of social pathways, the social life system of

  everyday customs and behaviors which flow from the worldvoice person and the worldview precepts.

  
  

  Thus a cultural matrix is recognized the distinctive dimensions of origination, incubation, and manifestation of its particular WV3: worldvoice adoration, worldview analysis, and worldvenue avenues.9 In everyday language, the three dimensions of a society’s WV3 can be highlighted by asking three questions: Who? How? What?

  
  

  • For the WV3 worldvoice: Who do you listen to?

  • For the WV3 worldview: How do you look at things?

  • For the WV3 worldvenue: What do you leave off or lift up?

    
    

A society’s worldvoice is the mentor, the luminary authority. A society’s worldview is the mindset, the lens of analysis. And a society’s worldvenue is the mazeway, the lifestyle of attitudes-actions.

For a clarifying picture,

Think of a cultural matrix as a WV3 Culture Tree. When you see a culture as a tree, it becomes clear that every WV3 Tree produces its own lifezone of roots, shoots, and fruits.

In other words, each cultural tree produces its own worldvenue fruits, its mazeway practices, social behaviors which grow from its supporting cultural worldview shoots, its mindset perspective. And those systemic beliefs are organically related to the underlying worldvoice roots, the model person, the culture’s spiritual benchmark.

WV3 Earth Orchards

Geolifezones locate the cultural WV3 earth orchards, planted in history and still living parallel lives around the planet. Hegel recognized that such orchard “patterns”, “which are spiritual forms, are also natural entities. Accordingly, the various patterns they assume appear to coexist indifferently in space, i.e., to exist perennially.”

For example, designated by their root luminaries, the WV3 Trees of the planet might be called the eight geo lifezones of the Shaman, Confucius, Shiva, Buddha, Jesus, Pope, Muhammad, or Self. Most people can rather readily see six to nine or so geo lifezones, including researchers of various disciplines.10 Samuel Huntington suggested six or seven; Samir Amin, seven or eight; Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel’s 2005-2008 World Value Survey Cultural Map clusters the world by nine cultural, not geographical, neighbors; Freedman-McClymond map five cultural river basins; I propose eight WV3 cultural geozones. But all see and largely agree on a fairly basic handful of major lifeways on our planet.

Jotirao Phule’s endurance and exceptional significance is that he addressed the issue of India as a whole, India as a cultural system, a WV3 matrix.

Phule’s own picture of India’s traditional system was not a tree, but a prison: “a prison”, “the age-old prison house”, “this slavery system”11. ▪

ENDNOTES

1 From the vast literature, see J. McPherson, Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press 2009); R. Blackburn and R. Dunaevskaya, Marx and Lincoln: An Unfinished Revolution (London: Verso 2011); R. Baum, Doctors of Modernity: Darwin, Marx, and Freud (Peru, IL: Sherwood Sugden 1988); C. Troll, Sayyid Ahmad Khan: A Reinterpretation of Muslim Theology ([Karachi: Oxford University Press 1979] New Delhi: University Institute 2013); T. Hasan, The Aligarh Movement and the Making of the Indian Muslim World (New Delhi: Rupa 2006); J. Barzun, Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1981).

2 ‘Prasthavbna: Adhunikta Ani Parampara, Ekonisavya Shatkatil Maharashtra’ in R. Vohra (ed.), Adhunikta Ani Parampara: Ekonisavya Shatkatil Maharashtra (Pune: Pratima Prakashan 2000), 9-24. See A. Devare, History and the Making of a Modern Hindu Self (New Delhi: Routledge 2011), 1-13.

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3 See J. Phule, Slavery. Collected Works of Mahatma Jotirao Phule. Volume 1. Translated by P. G. Patil (Mumbai: Education Department Government of Maharashtra 1991); L. Phule, Selections. Collected Works of Mahatma Jotirao Phule. Volume 2. Translated by P. G. Patil (Mumbai: Education Department Government of Maharashtra 1991); J. Phule, Cultivator’s Whipcord. Collected works of Mahatma Phule. Volume 3. Translated by Asha Mundlay (Mumbai: Education Department Government of Maharashtra 2002).

4 R. O’Hanlon, Caste, Conflict and Ideology: Jotirao Phule and Lower Caste Protest in Nineteenth Century Maharashtra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2009); G. Omvedt, Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society: The Non Brahman Movement in Western India 1873-1930 (Bombay: Scientific Socialist Education Trust 1976); G. Omvedt, Seeking Begumpura: The Social Vision of Anticaste Intellectuals (New Delhi: Navayana 2008);and C. Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics (New York: Columbia University Press 1996).

See also D. Keer, Mahatma Jotirao Phooley: Father of Indian Social Revolution (Bombay: Popular Prakashan 1974); T. Joshi, Jotirao Phule. National Biography (New Delhi: National Book Trust 1991); G. Deshpande, (ed), Selected Writings of Jotirao Phule (New Delhi: LeftWord Books 2002); and N. Gupta, Mahatma Jotiba Phule: An Educational Philosopher (New Delhi: Anmol Publications 2002).

5 O. Ahmad, Bronze Age Booming Outlook (October 7 2008), 90-92; A. Sharma, Mayawati’s statues of liberty Business Standard (November 5, 2011), at http://www.business-standard.com/article/beyond- business/mayawati-s-statues-of-liberty-111110500008_1.html.

6 T. Wolf, “Progress-Prone and Progress-Resistant Cultures: Worldview Issues and the Baliraja Proposal of Mahatma Phule” Journal of Contemporary Social Work (Department of Sociology, University of Lucknow) Vol. 1 April (2007): 1-52; T. Wolf, “Phule’s Baliraja Proposal” Forward Press (November 2011), 58-62.

7 See T. Wolf, Phule in His Own Words (New Delhi: University Institute 2008); Phule: Apne Hi Shabdon Mein (New Delhi: Aspire Prakashan 2010); T. Wolf, “Phule’s Fire” Forward Press (May 2010), 22-24; T. Wolf, “Nagpur, the Buddha and Kathi Rolls” Forward Press (May 2010), 57-60; “Phule’s Baliraja Proposal” Forward Press (November 2011), 58-62; “Two Different Trains, Two Different Bird Cages” Forward Press (December 2011), 56-60; “Nepal and Switzerland: Two Different Trains, Two Different Bird Cages Forward Press (January 2012), 58-62.

8 T. Wolf, “WV3: Worldvoice, Worldview, Worldvenue” Oikos Worldviews Bulletin 12 (1), 13-23; and T. Wolf, “Shivalinga: A WV3 Case Study”. In India: WV3 Voices, Views, and Venues (Azusa Pacific University 2012), 22-24.

9See K. Jaspers ̧ The Origin and Goal of History (New Haven: Yale University Press 1953); G. Graham, The Shape of the Past: A Philosophical Approach to History (New York: Oxford University Press 1997);P. Nemo, What is the West (Pittsburg, PA: Duquesne University Press 2005; and P. Nolan &G. Lenski, Human Societies: An Introduction to Macrosociology 2010).

10 W. Hegel quoted in R. Guha, History at the Limit of World-History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press 2002), 32; T. Wolf, Global history: The Oikonomia of God in World History (Bonn, Germany: Kim School of Intercultural Studies and University Institute 1999); S. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster 1996).

S. Amin, Global History: A View from the South (Cape Town: Pambazuka 2011), expressive of the thinking of the school of thought around the “gang of four”, Andre Gunder Frank, Giovanni Arrighi, Immanuel Wallerstein and Amin; D. Freedman and M. McClymond, The Rivers of Paradise: Moses, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus and Muhammad as Religious Founders (Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans 2001); as well as R. Ingehart and C. Welzel, http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs/articles/folder_published/article_base _54 (2010); R. Ingehart and C. Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy (New York: Cam- bridge University Press, 2005).

And see T. Wolf, The Geo Zones. Lecture 2, Swallen Lectures (Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews University 2012); and T. Wolf, Eight Contending Options. Lecture 3, Swallen Lectures (Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews University 2012).

11Phule Slavery and Whipcord quotations are from Despande (2002), footnote 20. See “prison”, “prisons of the Brahmins” and “prison house” in Phule, Slavery (2002), 44, 98-99; and “slavery system”. ▪

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