All this is not to deny, either, that some dense networks of subtle interpersonal obligations are bad. Most are mixed bags. Some, like the agape communities of the early Christians have generally enjoyed among commentators the status of an ideal to strive for. Others, like the traditional patriarchal family, are seen by most commentators today as institutionalizations of disrespect. What is distinctive about modernity is not that its characteristic dense networks of community norms are especially good or especially bad. What is distinctive is that there is a vast area of human behavior that is not, from the point of view of law and liberal morals, subject to any community norms at all. The marketplace where strangers meet strangers is the institutionalization of Durkheim’s anomie, of Gandhi’s adharma. In the words of modernity’s greatest moral philosopher its transactions are ohne sittliche Gehalt (without moral content). Friedrich Engels, in his The Condition of the Working-Class in England described the amorality of life under pure capitalism in terms as graphic as those of Gandhi in Hind Swaraj:

“…everyone stands for himself, and fights for himself against all comers, and whether or not he shall injure all the others who are his declared foes, depends upon a cynical calculation as to what is most advantageous to himself… all differences are settled by threats, violence, or in the law-court. In short, everyone sees in his neighbor an enemy to be got out of the way or, at best, a tool to be used for his own advantage. And this war grows from year to year, as the criminal tables show, more violent, passionate, irreconcilable.” (3)

The history of India provides many examples of the simplification of ethics wrought by the imposition of modernity on the subcontinent by force of British arms. Gandhi cites historical works that describe the shredding of the social fabric of traditional life by the knives of the laws that governed commerce. To the works he cites could be added others written later, such as those of Ananda Coomaraswamy, and the detailed descriptions of the normative structures of traditional India provided by the great anthropologist Louis Dumont. When Dumont wrote his great book about western society From Mandeville to Marx: the rise of economic ideology he used traditional India as a foil to the West, bringing out the ethnocentric character of the norms the modern West supposes to be universal by contrasting them to those that had given form and structure to life in India, and also pointing out, as Gandhi points out, that the pre-modern societies of the West had much in common with the pre-modern societies of the East, in those many centuries prior to what Karl Polanyi in his great book The Great Transformation called the “disembedding” of market relationships from the matrix of interpersonal social relationships. Some of the most telling examples of the simplification of ethics are related in Asian Drama by the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal. (4)