Although the international changes are so quick and unprecedented, it is not difficult to point out the reasons of our predicament. But it is not easy to give solutions. Despite the resolutions for peace with nature and peace among humans, the crisis emerging from natural calamities or manmade, deepen with each passing year. For the order making has lost its fulcrum.
The world is global but nation states are marked with boundaries. Within boundaries are diverse people living in groups and each group is clamoring for its share in power and resources. Diaspora politics, minority’s predicaments and majority assertions are the reflections that this world order, after European envisaged modernity collapsed, needs a new churning. European Modernity was a codified package of analytical categories, like confessional religions are. The difference is that religion tried to make order making of this world on the presumptions that life exists after this world, while science sees this life one time, nothing left over for the life in another world. The order making based on faith and the order making derived from scientific understanding, in reality are the arrangement of domination and power, stratified. The human nature, as such was presumed like that. There were no such laws of human nature formulated and perfected, as would treat the project of order making holistic, encompassing humanity in parity with dignity. For, human understanding as such remained explored within the gamut of power and domination. Faith twisted into exclusive blind faith, hence stratified humankind on the hard binaries, ‘we (us) and the other’, while science turned into scienticism, stratified humans in the fluid binaries ‘I and the other’. Understanding human nature in the paradigm of love, compassion and parity remains unperfected.
Science unable to give the meaning of life; it has been left to philosophy and literature to give us the entry into human nature. Philosophy working with literature has made us aware about glimpses of unexplored episteme, which could strive for the relevant social sciences, a possibility. Three centuries ago, modernity has laid down its canvass through positivist and neo positivist perspectives. The bridging of empiricism with phenomenology was not tasked in paradigm building. Despite efforts of post structural theoreticians, the epistemological lag could not be filled up. In simpler terms, its focus has been on human labor and its exchange, interactions: social or individual, binaries of mind and body: competing or contrapuntal, Human gaze in signifier or signified and structures: infra or super and its role vice versa. Further, explorations on these categories might enhance our capacity to find alternative order making system, provided it includes knowledge repertoires of different civilizations.
Faith is trust, science is reason, and both can be accommodated, provided we know the function of human nature and its fine tuning to overcome ego and identity syndrome. We have not been able till date to find human order just and fair, with parity, having compassion for one another. Any order making, either religious based or on goal- rationality has been a process of exclusion, stratified. Our boundaries have given us shocks, when we find our vulnerabilities. The limitations stand exposed in this era of globalization. The more we trespass, bigger are the challenges. Information technology, internet and artificial intelligence and then globalization have shown us that cracks are in the mirror. The notion of home has diminished, where father has lost his moral authority. For, he does not hold power to please the child. The institutional head has lost his means to control over members, for he cannot offer solutions to their problems.
The head of the state has to play on polemics of power, for populism cannot go with internationalism. And without populism, power remains fugitive. These are the hard realities. The world order is not a political order predominantly, but survival mode on hard economics and on soft political manipulations. It is what neo-liberalism is all about. Human resources are assets, provided it is skilled, working manually, as well as, functional on machines. The companies, institutions and the states care for them. If unskilled, instant perish, hardly a tear from any eye. It is our crisis of age, perishing of multitudes across the globe. The shining malls, glazing automobiles, travelling and visiting, clothes and ornaments, all need purchasing power. There is a vast class of people, who die because of hunger, may not be in our country, but across the globe its number is enormous. Their life is in movements from villages to towns and towns to cities and cities to across the countries, for survival and livelihood. Like, vagrants and visitors with visa or without visas, they remain isolated and secluded for years together. And once they stabilize, they willfully get detained in imagined nationalism. Look at the Diaspora existence, physically engaged there and mentally attached here.
Emphasizing on economics without human morality is political economics, a quest for power appetite. Since, faith is in affluence and affluence gives identity and it is displayable. It is visible in clothing, brands, mobiles sets, haircuts and mode of transport. Those who can afford it and those who cannot are discernible. The rural, urban and global continuums have attained new forms, like COVID changes its mutations. Moral values are stable values but only to be praised, not to be cultivated. Unsettlements and individual pleasure maximizations are to be searched and played without any guilt. Speaking about corrupt people seems to be a pretense, when corruption is running in the veins of the entire system. For, the definition of institutional merit has come out to the identified tick marks, apparently on target realizing in terms of materiality, rather than on institutional vitality to strive for excellence. In the process, it has turned out to be an era of acute surveillances. There is a huge trust deficit in human interactions, doubt on machine and even mimicry on nature and God, in private conversations. Apparently the scene is different. The ritualism, daily prayers are on rise for the relative score to compete with one another. The dependency syndromes have played so hard that freedom is paralyzed with insecurities. The conventional established institutions have outlived. We need new reformations that would read human nature well. Possibly, a multiple modernity that combines identified traditions, religious messages and scientific temperament in such a way that it has capacity to grow organically, not to get diminishing with the dust of time. Without thinking of humanity, going primordial is suicidal. Until that reformation comes humans would suffer, especially the youth.
This conundrum of crisis was always there, but it has become sharper with the collapse of systems, religious order as well as of modernity project. Had child been born independent; religious logic of the otherworld would sound a rationale. The lack stays original and it is perennial. The child is born dependent. Until end, it is his or her endeavor to overcome this dependency of one form or another. Human conditions are such that this ‘lack reemerges in structured representations of language’, always. Science has not been able to give redemption. The Modern project could not stand to its scrutiny even in Europe. It collapsed completely after the World War II.
It is here literature and philosophies come to our rescue. Great literature has felt the credence. Taking clues from philosophy, it sees life is to be accepted, like that, even if, it has any mode of governance, the dependency in one form or another would never end. There is always quest for reformation and rediscovering human order making. It is a time to work in intellectual holistic realm, where philosophy, literature and linguistics could help social sciences to frame new paradigms for the alternate modernity or multiple- modernity. It should replace the mode of domination and power with alternate modes of parity and partnerships. It is an acceptance that humans are perennially dependent; the social mirror should retain the hope and promise of a child when child looks into it, instead of breaking it. It should hold promise for a better life chances, then this world can sustain the humankind project of journeying together.
Ashok Kaul, former Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Banaras Hindu University.