The strangest thing about the current national scenario can be stated simply. The charioteers of governance are cocksure of everything. But the citizens are sinking deeper and deeper into uncertainty and bewilderment. In an over-all ambience of presumed infallibility in governance, measures and initiatives are failing to deliver. How are we to decode this anomaly? Could it have a message that we need to mind?
Modi, as he became our prime minister, seemed the man of the moment to steward our aspirations. He wanted not to rule but to serve. Sought only to be accredited as a caretaker of people’s wealth and welfare against a background, as it then seemed, of growing anxieties on that count. We scrambled up in hope.
Why? Because everything Modi said and did symbolised humility and a heroic spirit of service. Humility, by the way, is not a random gesture, but an attitude to life based on a recognition of its profound complexities and uncertainties. Remove this from the jigsaw puzzle of governance; and you have an Alexander the Great cutting the Gordian knot, making short-work of tangled and complex situations. This flair for peremptory action, degenerated over time into recklessness and undid Alexander.
Voltaire’s Treatise On Intoleration offers an insight central to our theme. While certitude and capacity for summary action, based on zealous faith, afford advantages, they also prove a breeding ground for intolerance. Consider now from a layman’s perspective Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. It alerts us that no one can be absolutely certain about the physical properties of a particle—say, complimentary variables like position and momentum. Put simply, the scope of certainty, especially in situations of dynamism, as in dealing with human affairs, is limited. We can never be sure enough!
The moral application of the Heisenberg principle, if you don’t mind, is that courage, sans circumspection amounts to recklessness. This insight is akin to the age-old moral principle that human beings are free to initiate events and actions, but never free to control their outcomes. Hegel gave it a philosophical twist through his concept of the ‘cunning of Reason’. History, according to Hegel, rarely concurs with the intentions of even the mightiest. No one, in other words, is master of history. History deals as brutally with those who belittle its logic as the gods, in Greek mythology, did with Phaeton, the son of the Sun God (Helios) for presuming to drive the chariot of the Sun. Nothing wrong with Phaeton’s intention; but the outcome was calamitous.
In his magnum opus, Les Miserables, Victor Hugo posits a question, Who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo? Wellington? No, he says. “God”, he says, tongue-in-cheek. Why? “The excessive weight of Napoleon in human destiny disturbed the balance...These plethoras of all human vitality concentrated in a single head; the world mounting to the brain of one man -this would be mortal to civilization were it to last…. When the earth is suffering from too heavy a burden, there are mysterious groanings of the shades, to which the abyss lends an ear…”.
If that be the case, it’s time we re-examined our idea of politics. Shouldn’t politics be congruent with life? Or, is it a scheme of things insulated from the logic of history? Modi’s momentum was derived from our presumed collective illness. Let us take this diagnosis at face value. India, when it took refuge under Modi’s wings, was morally and economically ill. Destiny gifted her a physician of distinction. But ask any doctor worth his hire, he will tell you, “Well, I’ll do my best; but, ultimately, it is not in my hands. There are things that medical science is still not sure of.” I will not entrust myself to a doctor who deals with me as if he is God. Why? Because I know that he will not care for me; for the caring attitude issues from humility rooted in human vulnerability. A presumptuous, know-all doctor could disdain to care for me. He would impress me with the aloof sombreness of his professional gravitas, but I would be the fodder for his professional presumptions.
It is not my contention here that an ideal healer should be uncertain about his lore, but that he must reckon uncertainty as a sign-post to the mystery of healings. And be humble enough to enter into a partnership with the patient; so that together they endeavour in the sacred space of healing. Magic bullets don’t work even in a theatre of war, much less in the sanctuary of life. The partnership between the ruler and the ruled is the lynch pin on which democratic governance coheres.
Leave that out, and a nation crashes into the Dostoevsky-ian dilemma of having to choose—says the Grand Inquisitor in Brothers Karamazov- between ‘freedom and bread’. Bread, then, has to be got in exchange for freedom, which is the essence of fascism. Fallibility is the hallmark of being human. Any pretension of infallibility is bound, therefore, to breed at least two aberrations: hyper intolerance towards criticism, and a reckless indifference to the cost others have to bear for one’s adventures.
Due to a fallacy typical of our age, we assume that with progress in knowledge and ‘expertise’, the fog of uncertainty disappears. Well, it doesn’t. On the contrary, the proliferation of expertise tends to aggravate uncertainty. I can vouch this from my experiences as a patient: the exponential growth in medical knowledge has intensified uncertainty in health care, except for covetous physicians who prostitute this sacred profession for unscrupulous gains.
Consider demonetisation. The most charitable view we can take of it is that its implementation was blind to the underlying complexities. The exercise was, hence, marked by a groping around, each day spawning new alibis and corrective measures. Demonetisation, seen aright, illustrates the case for a politics of ambiguity and humility. The pity is not that this exercise occasioned massive and fruitless inconvenience for a billion people; but that the political wisdom it afforded has gone wholly unheeded.
Valson Thampu
Former principal of St Stephen’s College, New Delhi
Email: vthampu@gmail.com