One of the strangest contrasts one notices in public life is the difference between politics and ethics. Politics is public, demanding the presence of an audience. Ethics feels almost private and personal. The way the two are philosophically separated is worrying. While politics masquerades as a technocratic strategy, ethics is almost invisible. One notices these tendencies in two recent and very public events.
The first was the gossip and voyeuristic excitement surrounding Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. It is the stuff of theatre enacted as a science. Robert Oppenheimer is often called the father of the atomic bomb. There is a poignancy to his act, which almost blends ethics and politics together. In fact, Austrian journalist Robert Jungk, in his Brighter than a Thousand Suns, calls Oppenheimer the Hamlet of science—both in terms of his hesitancy and silence. Two events illustrate this attitude. When Oppenheimer is testing the bomb, he quotes from the Gita about the destructive potential of the bomb and cosmically claims: “The physicists have known sin.” Later, during the US Congress’ investigations, when Oppie is asked why he created the bomb, he is dismissive, instead giving a technical answer to a technical question.
The narratives of the nuclear bomb have desperately struggled to club ethics and politics together, but sadly, whether it is the bombing of Hiroshima or an abstract mass killing, ‘strategy’ as the immaculate principle takes over decision-making. Death, even genocidal death, becomes the subject for a cost-benefit analysis. There is, in the narratives, a sense of scandal—but ethics does not make it to the forefront. Morality is discerned at a distance, while science and objectivity dominate the narrative. The film on Oppenheimer is poignant in capturing this ambivalence.
In a more immediate sense, one senses the same gap in the Manipur crisis. The displacements, rapes and murders of tribals are read through the lenses of electoral politics. The logic of politics dominates the urgency of ethics. Narendra Modi’s silence and his delayed response to the rapes and murders of Kuki tribals is read as strategy. In a metaphysical sense, Modi in Parliament evades the ethical question with patriarchal and patriotic piety. There is no Dostoevskian interrogator to pin him down and demand he articulate his policy towards the other. Oppenheimer at least remains a hesitant Hamlet, but Modi survives as a colourless technocrat and a calculating politician.
In both the examples I have cited above, one senses the deterioration of ethics. Ethics implies impoverishment in this era. Yet the poignancy of ethics, though absent, haunts these narratives. Consider a simple case: the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) empowers the army—tasked with pursuing insurgents—with a pass to commit rapes and murders. An analysis of 1,500 cases of rape and murder filed by lawyer Colin Gonzalvez shows that the perpetrators were hardly haunted by doubt or sin.
One is compelled to ask: what happened to ethics in public life? One sorely, almost stereotypically, misses Gandhi in everyday life. Every individual needs a touch of Gandhi in them. How does one reintroduce ethics into political and bureaucratic life? What one sensed in Manipur was the politics of erasure backed by an absence of guilt and memory. Watching Parliament during the Manipur debate showed that the melodrama of politics can be equally hypocritical. Sadly, even Manipur, like the bomb, is read as a technical answer to a technical question.
If one thing has to be added to the absence of ethics in public life, it is the presence of the expert as an active actor. Policy experts seem ethically neutral. Experts hide behind the mantle of science and service. How many of us have heard of the word ‘iatrogeny’, which the social critic Ivan Illich describes as expert-induced illness? The expert as a source of disaster is a monograph waiting to be written in many domains.
Another reason for seeing violence as a neutral space is that we reduce the creativity of citizenship to an ethically neutral spectatorship. Spectatorship, unlike the poetic act of witnessing, is neutral, even passive. One is reminded of a famous anecdote in communication studies. It is about a young woman called Kitty Genovese.
The year is 1964. It is late at night in a New York suburb, and a young woman called Kitty Genovese is walking alone. She realises a man is stalking her, screams and begins running towards her apartment. Lights come on in the flats around and people gather at the windows. The stalker realises that no one has moved and stabs Kitty over 30 times. Later, when sociologists asked the spectators why no one moved, most of them confessed that they felt they were watching TV.
One consumes violence without challenging it. Neutrality has begun replacing any outrage. Ethics as dissent or protest is a performative act that the spectator finds too distant after the ritual of watching.
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What is worse is that a few spectators remember. But indifference seems to be the frame through which violence is viewed. How does one bring back caring to such a domain? We have to summon the ordinary citizen to redeem the poetics of ethics. One needs to introduce what the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber called I-Thou in public space. An ‘I’ and ‘Thou’ in public converts the attitude towards the other into one of reverence and care. The stranger, rather than being an alien, is a part of us. Gandhi’s ethics of care and courage is relevant here. The Dalai Lama cites the importance of compassion in this context. Such a political plea, whether from Gandhi or Dalai Lama, verges on the ironic when we confront Kashmir or Assam.
One has to realise the value of dissent in this context. A Daniel Ellsberg who leaked the Pentagon Papers exposing Vietnam War secrets, a Stan Swamy challenging the public policy on the tribals, and an Irom Sharmila fasting for over a decade are the exemplars we need to follow. Ethics always needs the exemplar. In following the exemplar, we create a sense of everydayness. To the exemplar we must add the power of storytelling. Ethics is a summons to memory. We have to be witnesses and storytellers. Manipur desperately needed a solution backed by ethics. One wishes one could return to the old-fashioned world, where character-building and nation-building went together. Democracy desperately needs the ethical individual more than the sociological validation of the voter and the consumer.
Shiv Visvanathan
Social scientist associated with THE COMPOST HEAP, a group researching alternative imaginations