For a Republic on Earth

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.