The discovery of the last year was Plato’s Republic, even though as a student of literature
and history I had known the bits of it, in that filtered forms of assertions
that plagues modern education. Republic begins
with the question of justice, Justice in
Man and ends up with a vision of society that envisages justice for all men.
The premise is a catch, and that which to my knowledge made Plato the thinker
that he is (despite my aversion to Platonism as a school of thought). Plato
understood like, very few after him or probably before him did, not just that
personal is political but more importantly political is personal. It took me
time to understand this, but numerous desultory moments perforated by overheard conversations, heated
and ill-informed arguments and plain indifference, of those who are necessarily
well-provided for-that mark my circle of acquaintance, led me to an
understanding of as to how much and how far political determination involves
psychological well-being of a people.
In the last few months I have gone through literature about
experiences of people who have been oppressed and displaced, broken and beaten,
divided and singled. There’s no noun under which I can place these people
because academia suffers with a cancer of semantics. Every category or noun is
stretched to the point of rendering it useless for discourse. Countless numbers
of human faces passed across my eyes as I turned over the pages of their being
or listened to the hollowed cries to be seen. Faces that had seen layers of
their identities being peeled away―systematically, ruthlessly, ignorantly.
Where bodies survived, the tongue had lost its function. It spoke either a
language that no linguistic system could contain, or bargained itself into an
economy of silences. But in both the cases, I discovered that there was
something that existed despite the pogrom against presences. It was space- a hollow space. Not an absence,
just plain hollowness whose occupant can only be imagined not recalled… I
wonder why literature and literary theories have again and again talked of the
need of being rooted not the freedom to branch out. Being rooted easily slips into the
rhetoric of the identitarian politics, but the freedom to branch out is a
kernel against which a larger ethic develops. I can give this ethic a high
sounding name perhaps importing it from Sanskrit or Persian, but that would
defeat the purpose. I shall give it a very commonsensical name- Political Morality.
…
Before developing this argument let me first broadly outline
some of the established premises I draw my position from. It is here that we
need to define “Man”. Though the word is in the purely grammatical sense
singular it is intrinsically linked with certain sense of collectivity,
multiplicity and plurality. Multiplicity because many identities can exist in a
cross-cutting manner, plurality because definite wholes exist without shared
ground and “collectivity”, is what I would devote my rest of the post to
define. The reason I am evoking multiple
senses, a necessary heteroglossia of meaning of “Man” is not to eventually
conclude at that speciehood meaning
of the term, but to make it known that how singular in man is always something
plural. How and why, did this happen is a subject of another debate.
Anthropology will make it known to us more than perhaps any other field of the
study, as to why men have existed in collectives, in “organizations” (not
“circles”). Pierre Bourdieu argued that this organization which is at first a
mere invention of few trying to make choices of survival, eventually end up
making them. The more the “organization” becomes abstract, more symbolic power
it consecrates. It eventually becomes a “state”. At different periods of human
history, the “state” or consecration of the symbolic power is identified with
the personhood of an individual, namely a king or his progeny. Modern-state
come into existence at a moment when the state instead of being embodied in a
body namely “king”, becomes a wide network of power differentials (“power” in a
Foucauldian sense). Its presence is felt, reached upon but can never be arrived
at. Individuals like theologians of the organized religions, have established
discourses, debated upon and claimed ascendency to this God-like state. Many
political theorists have used the concept of “nation-states” interchangeably
with “modern-states”. The rise of “Nation-states” was tied in the moment of
history with imperialism and colonialism. Colonialism by its very nature is an
enterprise of more than one lifetime, and this necessitates a notion of
statehood which traverses an embodied existence like that of “king”. Keeping
this in mind, I tried to study colonialist enterprises of ancient Greeks. I am
not trying to confuse “nation-states” that came into existence after
fifteenth-century Europe with that of colonial empire of ancient Greeks, but
the rhetoric used by the colonizing power to recruit numbers to continue the
enterprise of their forefathers is depended upon a justification of statehood
which is equally abstract. Here, I must
remind the reader again that my subject of study is the psychological aspect of
an individual’s aspiration for political determination. If one keeps that in
mind, the distinction that I am trying to establish with the use of term
“modern-state” would make more sense. I
am aware that this view of history is Eurocentric, but I guess that with
certain theoretical qualifications this error might be covered to some extent.
The term “modern-state” must be understood as that which exists overwhelmingly
in modern society (despite eurocentrism, post-colonialism effectively brings
much of the globe under the aegis). But this essentially doesn’t mean I am
charting a “progressive” view of history. No political system can be argued as
advancement over the other, at least not in the context I am talking of. The
only determinant for a success of a political state is how effectively it could
provide political determination to the greatest possible number of people under
its territorial boundaries. Thus, there are native-American “nations” which may
appear at sides with a “modern-state” like America. What I am trying to argue
here, is a model of history with multiple time frames. A certain doubleness or multiplicity in our notion of history as an unfolding of events in
time. Despite my sympathies with Marxist understanding of history, I found
their notion of time as unitary or a flow, incomplete to explain modern
consciousness. Thus, in India two different stages of capitalism can be
witnessed alongside. So at one hand, Indian politics as a bourgeois pageant of
“finance capital” stands while on the other, we witness capitalists
accumulating resources and means of production (notably what is happening with
electricity production) as Marx illustrated to be that of “primitive
accumulation”. Homi K. Bhabha introduced an important category “diaspora”
(modern condition) to complicate the simplistic Marxist view of history. Diaspora
as a category precondition certain doubleness in consciousness and thereby, in
time.
There was a time when certain absolutist forms of monarchy existed throughout Europe, which worked better than the constitutional monarchy
of the other side of the English Channel: better universities, better system of
justice and narrower gap between the rich and the poor. Something similar
happened in Nicaragua. The Sandinistas did a remarkable job in ensuring social justice for its populace ―much
better than many democracies of the
world. We are so washed up by the Eurocentric epistemology that we don’t
understand that words like “democracy”, “secularism” and “socialism” are
experiences of a people. They do not exist in an ethereal space to which every
community must aspire for. That’s where Nicaraugua can make sense, Iran scores
and for that matter Arab peninsula would have survived. When we ignore the
difference between ethereality and what is essentially an experience of a
people, we end up in an ugly position where ideologies easily slip into
epistemology, and become the new normal or world view. And what follows it, is
centuries of abuse, intolerance and massacres---all in the name of the
civilizational good.
…
The reason for laying out this lengthy framework was to make
the reader aware of the relativistic position of his/her being in the broad arena called political determination. I
hope that this kind of understanding of one’s existence as a political subject
would help the reader to come to the arguments of the following paragraphs with
a more open mind. Modern political discourse with its secularist universalistic
appeal has the tendency to devalue communitarian identities founded upon
collective constraints and sanctions that provide the necessary social
environment for political connections between individual and group. That they
answer to the desire to branch out.
If one glances over the history of the Middle-East, we would come across a
society which in itself was little of resistances or revolutions. With no high
sounding concept of “equality” or “individuality”, the followers of at least
three major monotheistic religions managed to coexist for some two-thousand
years. It is not to say that minorities like Jews or Shiites were not
persecuted, but that they survived. A
feat if not better but equal to that of Europe.
When the desire to branch
out is not given a release or thwarted, we find a populace of
psychologically frustrated, and
eventually pathologically diseased people.
My experiences as a member of a group condition me to perceive my identity, my
functioning in a certain way. My political needs would be answered through the
structure of this group which because of long evolutionary history of group
based identities and memberships would be self-sufficient. The ruptures occur
when the structure can no longer contain the identities. Something like that happened in the History,
with the advent of capitalism. Thus modern history is marked with revolutions.
I live in a country where my conditioning as a political
subject is grossly at odds with that which the structure of my country can
answer to. On paper, I am a citizen of a democratic nation but in practice my
vote counts for little. I discovered this lately. I was educated in a polity
that valorized “democracy” as a system of governance and my character ,
identity and self, developed around the idea that I have a say in what happens to me. But I was surprised to
find how despite of what is agreed upon as “democracy” very little gets transformed
into practice, not just by cleverly bypassing it but openly flouting its principles.
About eighty per cent of currency was devalued with one stroke on a certain
day―this when a sizeable population of India fares abysmally in e-literacy,
financial literacy or simply literacy. I looked forward to the Parliamentary
session in order to get some answer. My Prime Minister never came to the Parliament
to answer, his ministry did-claiming to be answering on his behalf, though he
had been the face of the entire movement since the beginning. My representative
could never ask question, the highest executive of the country did not stoop
down to answer. My vote was wasted for it effectively made nothing happen. My
Prime-Minister does not have my mandate. He is only an elected leader of a
particular constituency which is not mine. He was chosen by majority of
legislature, to whom he is no longer answerable to. In effect I voted for
nothing.
Thus, largely in the most of India a certain detachment with
the larger system of governance prevails. Politics is seen as a special
conditioning―outside the experience of normal. To which a few are born into, or
some get infested with. The epistemology that my nation inherited from its
colonial past conditions me to believe that I matter, though actually I don’t.
Thus the great political depression
that is the inalienable part of modern Indian consciousness… People seek to
exist on their own hoping to find a justification in the matrix with values
which may be called without any exaggeration, survival skills… They eventually feel frustrated because “man” is
irredeemably a plural word. And thus the great exodus, of politically persecuted
group, which for the lack of a better word, is called Indian Diaspora.
…
I know somehow I have given the reader an impression that I
don’t believe in human agency. Especially for those of us who grew up with Eurocentric
values such an approach to polity might be too distasteful a morsel to swallow.
Thus, the concluding section of this post shall try to balance such theoretical
underpinnings. History does not get made
without work, intention, resistance, effort or conflict. And all of them
have conscious active human figures that
do not live their lives in neurosis. But very little if ever was done just
by a man. Generations tread on the same
path and draw lines which become natural
to tens that follow those.
It is here that we must understand
the value of the larger ethic called Political
Morality. That we may be educated so that we question the decisions that we
make, whose receivers in effect, we might never meet in our lifetime. Certain
dogged resistance to all lure of supremacy to understand the naked truth that all lives matter. I could not contain
my surprise as to how little work has been done to understand the nature of
American imperialism, which is in effect a direct descendent of the European
imperialism. The Universities had a chance, freshly wisened by imperial
experience that produced the horrors of the two world-wars to point out that what
the new super power was doing was nothing different than the horrors wrecked
for several centuries in the past. It was a chance to correct things in the
real time, save a few hundred thousand from dying and a number exponential to
that that would die. The sixty million people, who are out of their homes now,
might have bee thinking of things more than how to arrange for a meal.
Iraq, Nicaragua, Afghanistan and
Vietnam, or the tragedy of Palestine… The literary thinkers that have been
specially trained to understand the implications of rhetoric, were insulated
from the world by an odd ailment that make bodied individual imagine an
ethereal existence. It’s a great loss that thinkers do not own up to
themselves, a certain political morality.
That we do not bring to our ideas certain sense of here and now, an immediate
political or historical reference, and thus, we participate willingly or
unwillingly to great massacres that happen at the edge of our social environment… Good critical thinking can never be deduced
to easy position-takings for society is a flux of complicated and conflicted
currents. Political Morality might help us to bring human figurations in notion
and working of a state which has
become abstract to the level of a pathologically disease. The fact that Aleppo
happened despite the ritualistic reliving of Holocaust memories in an
America-centred world, says that every institution of the modern world failed.
A society where each individual
has certain sense of political morality will be a world where the congress
between ideology and epistemology would be broken. People might see things for
what they are. Our critical thinking is leashed into the world as it happens. Despite
whatever our parents have taught us, regarding glorification of certain group
based identities, we can never reach anywhere by trampling on others. We will
fall. As Europe did in what is called boomerang effect, and might end up giving
future generations, broken, pathologically
diseased consciousness.
