The Kerala System

 This, then, will be a brief initial explanation of the subject of the Indian State of Kerala which I intend to return to on repeated occasions if possible. A brief disclaimer: I am slightly biased toward Kerala (but then again, all charming works of literature have a hint of bias in their objective analysis, and I am arrogant enough to try and be charming) because of personal religious fervour, which likes much the worship of the Naga in this variant of Hinduism, as snake-worship is a fundamental part of the pre-Indo-Aryan religions of many parts of Europe. Finding solace in the spirituality of a region is at least somewhat important and does provide me that tint of bias.

 Kerala, a state corresponding to the region known until recently as the Malabar Coast of the Deccan. Islam came here by trading and not by conquest as it northern India from the heights of Afghanistan and Persia, and Christianity was introduced in the Roman times, for Kerala contained the great Roman trading ports of India, which have had quarters directly controlled by the Romans, and before them also saw a Hellenistic Greek presence. It is a land of many unusual things. The first of these is an exceptionally favourable GINI coefficient. Kerala is poor, and wealth is extremely evenly distributed. This should not be a particular surprise, as GINI coefficients are most favourable in undeveloped nations and Asian states, for the most part, though this is not completely true.

 What is interesting is what has been accomplished with so little wealth. Here is a society of traditional crops, without even genetically modified organisms (of which I shall conduct a defence on a later date), for their introduction has been sporadic and opposed in India. A land of immense rainfall, it is certainly an ideal habitation for humanity, but the same is true of Cascadia, Kamchatka, Chile, or France, a natural breadbasket which would sate any desires of a Physiocrat, and on the Physiocratic school of Economics we shall also return shortly. Kerala's points of interest lay in the accomplishment of the people:

 Allow us to consider Kerala's own pride, first.

 Literacy rate for women: 87.86%
 Number of districts with a favourable (more females than males) sex ratio: 13 out of 14. -- a serious issue in modern India.
 Female life expectancy: 74 years.
 Number of deliveries under institutional care: +90%
 Infant mortality rate: Half the Indian national average.

 And an interesting note:


 "WORK PARTICIPATION

         Though Kerala rank top in women's literacy rate and education, the work participation sex-ratio shows a deviation. There are only 345 female workers per 1000 male workers which is lower than the national average (1991). The work Participation rate for women in 1991 was only 15.85 while that of men was 47.58 which is about three times that of women. This in turn indicate that women's share of earned income" in the state is only 12% . The above fact leaves the note that the higher rate of literacy/education among women is not a sufficient condition for gender equality in work. Along with low work participation, rates of unemployment and gender differentials in the labium market persist across the society."

  This is interesting because it references a recently published article on the Netherlands I shall reproduce here to help make a point:

 Women in the Netherlands work less and love it.  (as a paraphrase of the article title.)

This point, which I shall undertake to develop in a further post based on this article alone, however, shows that workforce participation is not necessarily an aim of women even in a very liberal, open society with plenty of rights for women and opportunities. We shall dare to say that the nature of women favours security over ambition, and if security can be provided at less effort it will be accepted, but this is a brief abstract of a thesis which would require much effort, very tangential to Kerala, to develop, so please understand the limitations of the assertion for now.

 In short the position of women in Kerala is much superiour to that in the rest of India, and indeed to that in most of the world. The life expectancy of women in Kerala is a full six years greater than that of women, the educational levels are similar, and workforce participation runs at roughly similar rates to the Netherlands, which is a significant indication of how two very different societies, but both with high female literacy and social participation, will tend to have relatively low involvement of women in the workforce. This coincides with further metrics: End of life care, for example, is better than it many industrialized countries in Kerala. And how we treat our dying and our dead is very, very fundamental to the overall human condition.

 People in Kerala have the resources to be as happy as those in the west based on their health metrics, and they lack the stressors of artificial western life which lead to the great unhappiness which plagues frankly most of us, especially intellectuals, and leads to the pandemic of false use of medication for supposed mental ills which would be regarded as a normal range of expression in a non-standardized society, and much less pronounced due to the relative happiness of people in regions like Kerala or Bhutan over the industrial world.

 The first and most important part of the data is that Kerala is the closest thing the world has ever seen to a modern Matriarchy. Ruled until Indian independence by long lines of Queens both openly and as effective powers to the throne, the Princely States which made up Kerala were traditionally ruled by the Nairs and Bunts, forward castes which practiced a matrilineal system of inheiritance. Worshipping the snakes of the Earth and organized on matrilineal lines with a history of strong Queens, the land of Kerala comes as close as anyone could ask for in a matriarchal society in modern Earth, and the immense success of women in Kerala relative to the rest of India must be ascribed to this fact. The culture had harmonious and more equal relations between the sexes in which women were actually respected as rulers and the creators of each generation, whose wisdom raised children and whose wombs determined inheiritance. Though imperfect, it is still something to be lauded as how a society can be organized. Maternal morality rate being a source of particular pride (in how low it is relative to the rest of India) continues to reflect the position of women in Kerala as being fundamentally different than in most of the rest of the world.

 The British, in perhaps their greatest intellectual crime in India, succeeded in largely destroying the old matrilineal inheiritance systems for the Nairs, though they remain with the Bunts, and then the arrogance of Nehru and his followers finished off the old Royal families, but that does not stop Kerala from being largely a success, and a sustainable success, at that. The legacy of the culture outlives the old customs of ruling, though, in the same way the legacy of traditional patriarchy serves to reinforce modern and less overt patriarchy by subverting women into its structure through force of tradition (the intellectual, activist conservative woman of modern America will often be single, very well educated, and successful. She is liberated. Many of her sisters, however, remain bound into traditional notions of womanhood which serve to enslave women as a system of more traditional patriarchy society. They are the likes of Phyllis Schyfly rather than Michelle Malkin).

 Kerala, on one-seventieth (1/70th!) of the income of the United States, has nearly identical health outcomes and education, and more happiness. This is a brilliant rejection of the idea that humanity must suffer a Malthusian collapse through overpopulation. It also disproves the idea that capital is necessary in any great quantity for a happy and prosperous society. This returns us to the ideas of the Physiocrats, those laudable philosophers of economy of the grand era of the Ancien Régime. The Doctrine of the Physiocrats held primarily that working of the land--that actual productive work (i.e., of farms and to a lesser extent mining and fishing) were the only actual forms of wealth to be generated. We may regard this assertion proudly as true, using Kerala as an example of how it is true, for in Kerala the agricultural produce remains still the main source of economic development, and yet all actual needs of the people are successfully met. This suggests in the most strong of terms that development of capital in excession of that found in Kerala is actually unnecessary for the human condition, and is based on speculation and not actual productive wealth. 

 This, then, is the principle argument for the Kerala model: It is sustainable, and nothing more is necessary, so we should we seek more when it provides us with nothing truly beneficial in any kind of rigorous, scientific analysis of available data metrics which measure the happiness, health, and cultural development of humans? We find there to be a very limited need to press beyond Kerala, and find the idea that much of modern technology could not have been developed in the Kerala system to be rather false.

 States with relatively concentrated industrial facilities and capabilities have been considered great powers in the past--Tsarist Russia and the Ottoman Empire, for instance--and were able to sustain that concentrated industry, enough for the business of state with an appropriate level of diffusion through society, despite having essentially agricultural existence for the average person. To combine the technological upper-class veneer required for the functions of an organized State with the human social development of Kerala is to make a nation. This furthermore addresses in and of itself the primary criticism of the Kerala model.

 That criticism is that approximately 30% of the people in the state are reliant on some form of cash allowances from outside of Kerala, known as remittances. But the people working for remittances make a true pittance, working usually for on the order of 1.00 USD an hour--or much less, only some of which they can send back to their families. Most importantly, however, Kerala has an extremely poorly developed industry, which is good, as modern multinational corporations would destroy the Keralan model if allowed to take root in Kerala. But it is not good in general, for the industry which, for example, sustained the Army of the Tsars, could be used to good effect in Kerala--to provide the industrial veneer required to more effectively distribute wealth through the families. This is where the loss of the Royal families hurts the most; they are bound to the land, their blood is of it, it is their investment and their glory. They are naturally going to invest their resources into it--and into defending it.

 The maintenance of the industrial structure that would have been funded by an active and involved Royal family would have provided the additional GDP that remittances in the global economy are instead forced to provide before the states of Kerala were denied an independent development under their traditional and matriarchalist form of government. And this, then, is why Royal Families are good: They tend to keep the investment, in their traditional expression (the consideration of the debasement of modern royalty in Europe is another matter), within their holdings, their own lands. They are tied by blood, honour, and tradition to their soil of their foremothers, and their wealth is therefore much, much more likely to be effectively reinvested in the provision of those people with jobs and livelihoods than could ever be expected from the shiftless capitalist interested only in accumulating wealth, especially when he is a foreigner. And so, the great flaw of the Kerala model indeed came about only because of the destruction of the Matriarchist-Matrilineal traditional governing structure within Kerala State.