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Rethinking our constitution for the Anthropocene

This geological epoch, when man is the main destroyer of nature, sets new limits on human rights. So we must celebrate the Constitution by envisioning it afresh.
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Change provides an element of charisma, a sense of theatre for the routines of everyday life. But, of late, the concept of change itself has become problematic, subject to paradoxes and ironies.

This week, we are celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Constitution. How should we look at it? One tries to locate the debate within the wider debates of the national movement. So let’s consider the Constitution as a locus of radical change.

The national movement had a civilisational perspective of change. Consider the early debates on tradition and the museum. The debates, fed by geologist and art critic Ananda Coomaraswamy, claimed that the West had no sense of tradition, even less of memory. It argued against the establishment of museums, claiming it would create a tyranny of memory, while oral memory created traditions that were dynamic. Coomaraswamy argued that the Swadeshi movement should fight for guerilla war against the museum as ‘false memory’, a taxidermy of life.

The movement went further—Coomaraswamy coined the term ‘post-industrial’. Today, people associate the term with Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. Bell borrowed and narrowed the term. But Coomaraswamy had used the label for coexistence of nature, craft and industry—a mix we desperately need today.

On the other hand, biologists like Patrick Geddes felt the Constitution should not only have a sense of cosmos, livelihood and a rigour about time and energy. He said it was a tragedy that the national movement had not embodied ideas of cosmic time and entropy in the Constitution. As a result, it had no link between waste and justice. As the scientist C V Seshadri put it, we had no sense of the link between waste and the people of a wasted society.

This leads us to how we consider change and the Constitution today. Leading advocates of the Constitution advocated a conservatism about constitutional change. But a new issue that stands stark before them is Anthropocene.

The term Anthropocene’ was coined by Dutch scientist Paul Crutzen. It is a label for a geological period when man has become a geopolitical force and is a confession of the damage he has done to the earth.

A constitution has to face this sense of confession and guilt whether war, genocide, forest loss, or obsolescence. The Anthropocene sets the limits of human rights and its parochiality. Can we at least acknowledge the genocide of the American Indians? Can we see a question about monocultural forestry? One has to acknowledge the limits of rights as a working concept and create a glossary of words around words like commons.

The commons with its tacit universe is a greater protector of ecology than human rights. As Desmond Tutu’s commission put it, one needs both ethical repair and ethical healing. One has to visualise new transitions from crisis to normalcy.

One of the proposals made in this context is a new UNESCO. U R Ananthamurthy, the Kannada author, suggested we need new modes of translation where vernacular is directly accessible. A reinvented UNESCO would be ideal for it. One needs a notion of the region far more complex than what the nation state is offering. In fact, we need a weaving of regions beyond what the current nation state has provided. The vernacular has to return to its centrality.

The Anthropocene has to go beyond the nation state and have responsibility both for ecosystem and territory. It demands that man revive a new ethics and new words of governance. Scientist C V Seshadri suggested the Constitution should be reworked to Swaraj, ranging from civilisational commons, civics, syllabus, citizenship. The Constitution has to rework law, morals and responsibility across the scales.

Time here becomes a form of trusteeship, where each wears a different scale of responsibility. We have to add a new notion of pedagogy and epistemology. The university has to change along with the Constitution. We have to invent a notion of the sacred for such a constitution, provide a new sense of evil and violence as political philosopher Hannah Arendt indicated.

A constitution, during the theatrical moment of Anthropocene, cannot be a parochial entity. It needs a different set of narratives and concepts, a different kind of storytelling, so myths can create a new unconsciousness. The old stories won’t do. It is not just a question of creating the anthropocene. In the new theatre, new plots and new responsibilities come out into the open.

But our Constitution has little sense of nature, time, ethics or the fate of tribals. It needs a new sense of swadeshi and the swaraj to combine complexity. Yet, one must make sure the spirit of communitas that sustains the Constitution is not hijacked by any irresponsible group. This is why one has to face the constitutional crisis at the macro level while retaining a sense of the Constitution at the micro level. One has to engage with the pedagogic, the political and the ethical crisis without tampering with the Constitution’s sense of the contracting community.

You need to go beyond the current ideas of citizenship and rewrite a notion that includes nature as a stakeholder. We need to create new concepts for our Constitution that creates a theatre of ethical and conceptual responsibilities. The future has to be viewed many times for the anthropocene to be handled competently.

A constitution is a good example, not our solution between textuality and change. It verges on the conservative. We need a change of mentalities, an array of new concepts, time frames and actors. One is reminded of biologist Lynn Margulis complaining that the way some historians thought of man in history tempts her to start a trade union for the role of bacteria in evolution.

It is clear that we need several such trade unions to bridge the silences of the Constitution. A constitution now becomes a cybernetic entity, a network of connectivity for the Anthropocene to be confronted. Denial, erasure and distortion will create ethical and conceptual scars that will haunt the future.

The best way to celebrate 75 years of the Constitution is to rework democracy and create a more inclusive set of debates that includes nature, time, and memory as a part of notions of responsibility.

(Views are personal)

(svcsds@gmail.com)

Shiv Visvanathan | Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations

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