For over a fortnight, I have been excited about the student revolt in Nepal. It seemed to be a new desire for democracy. What intrigued me in particular was the tacit balance it sought between oral, textual and digital cultures. I talked to my colleague, a brilliant philosopher. Oddly, he didn’t sound positive. He turned to me and said, “Let me play wet-blanket and argue with you.”
He felt that for all the enthusiasm for democracy there was a failure of imagination and aridity of concepts. He cited the example of citizenship.
When first coined, citizenship was an ode to hope, a claim to membership and its rights. A poetry of possibility. Today, it has lost its magic. It has become empty and desiccated. Words like migrant, marginal, refugee, exile—all emphasise the temporariness, tenuousness of citizenship. What one sees politically is the fragility of citizenship. One can see this state of being in Assam and Bangladesh. The tenuous fate of citizens emphasises the waywardness of democracy.
My friend argued that for democracy to survive creatively, the sense of justice needs to be politically agile and philosophically supple. He said there was an epistemic illiteracy about democracy.
Consider the word ‘I’, the idea of the self. Biologists Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock had pointed out that the body is composed of millions of organisms. Who does the word ‘I’ represent here? They then added that the individualism of the word hardly conveys the dynamism of the body. An ‘I’ indicates contract and commodification, but the body operates on symbiotic principles, which mark most of life. My friend added, the word ‘I’ inaugurates the illiteracy of present philosophy. Democracy has to rework the very idea of the person.
My colleague added there is naïveté to democracy. He claimed after Hannah Arendt that contemporary democracy was naïve about the idea of evil. Arendt showed that the concentration camp was a banal industrial entity and Adolf Eichmann, a mere bureaucrat, receiving orders.
Democracy needs to understand the inventive nature of evil today, particularly evil as violence. Violence is no longer a simple two-person encounter. It is collectivised, rationalised, impersonalised. It is evident in genocide, in triage of the disposability of people, in obsolescence. Violence creates a special kind of forgetting today, it creates a sense of erasure. Violence creates dispensability. Democracy needs responsibility. Dispensability is a way of forgetting, creating indifference. The very idea of the other has to be reinvented in modern politics. Memory as a concept has to be rethought. Modernity seems to have inaugurated the age of forgetting.
He added three other factors during his informal lecture. He said democracy has to work beyond calendrical time. It needs a creative sense of the future, without which you cannot have a concept like sustainability. The idea of the future includes your responsibility to a future generation. A constitution has to be built with a longer vision of time. The future claims its own idea of citizenship, which democracy is illiterate about.
He made two suggestions. The future must become a part of education. He suggested, citing Johan Galtung, that futuristics be taught in school and children taught to take the future seriously. Democracy must reclaim the multiplicity of time as part of its literacy. It has to understand that mere linearity is sheer illiteracy.
He suggested that we have to look at the language of words and concepts. Modern democracy is based on slogans of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Despite its eloquence, these three words are inadequate. Western theory had little sense of fraternity. We have to supplement the slogan with a second ideal of diversity, plurality and dialogue.
He gave me a simple example: India has over a 100,000 varieties of rice, which relate to 100,000 ways of eating. What he wished to emphasise was that democracy cannot emerge in monocropping cultures. Diversity is a celebration of difference, and difference is the enzyme of democracy. Democracy does not need majoritarianism. It needs plurality. Democracy is a celebration of difference, not hierarchy. He said we need to celebrate the varieties of language, seeds, colour—all this adds to the imagination of democracy.
He then added something that surprised me more than his philosophical concepts. He claimed that contemporary democracy was a failure of storytelling. Democratic news is too predictable. It’s about majoritarianism. He said democracy needs a new sense of morality but added that it requires something more. It needed a new sense of creation myths. He said the old Greek myths of democracy need to be recharged, renewed, revitalised. You have to invent the metaphor of Greece again. Democracy needs a new idea of pedagogy and a new mythology.
When he paused after this long outline, I asked him how do we respond to such a critique. He said what we need is a new kind of experimentation. Democracy needs to be more inventive than science. He said think of a new idea, we tend to create policy with experts.
What if we create a knowledge panchayat—a community of ordinary people speaking about their experiences? Here, people can discuss everything from genetics to nuclear energy. The insight of the housewife and the tribal should be caught in policy. One needs the warmth of ordinary language in the coldness of expertise. He said let’s not forget that some of the most brilliant critiques of nuclear energy came from the fisherwomen near the Kudankulam nuclear plant. We need a touch of pedagogy that reinvents, questions, and rewords democracy with everyday discussions.
Democracy, he said, should rework the idea of the expert. The expert seems to be an encyclopaedia of data; but data is cold, it doesn’t speak with the warmth of life. A hegemony of experts can unsettle democracy as an ecology. He said what we need is a democratisation of expertise. Expertise leads to iatrogeney, which is expert-induced illness. He then stopped and added: “Remember, the expert is not the shaman. Shamans carry insights and wisdom.” He smiled. “Which constitution will let the shaman in?” On that tantalising note, we ended the discussion of the day.
Shiv Visvanathan | Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations
(Views are personal)
(svcsds@gmail.com)
