I remember teaching a class of post-graduate students, many of whom were potential IAS and IPS officers. My lecture was part of a course on development. I asked them what they thought was the genocidal count of an officer. They were aghast at the question. They saw themselves as a crusading group representing elite values. I asked how many people would they eliminate or displace through their careers: 10,000, 50,000 or a few lakhs. I added that the potential genocidal count of the class—in displacing villagers through dams, urban dwellers from slums and tribals from forests—could easily be 50,000.
The class was aghast at the potential report card of their future careers—that is, till I told them their social science was still innocent. It had no sense of the changing nature of violence. Their sense of violence was still the comic book idea of bully-meets-victim, without a sense that violence today is part of the very ontology of action, normalised to look like table manners.
This point was brought out poignantly by political philosopher Hannah Arendt in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Watching Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi Holocaust organizer, stand trial like an anonymous clerk made Arendt wonder how he could be responsible for the death of millions. Arendt quotes sociologist Bruno Bettelheim saying that he was less normal than Eichmann after meeting him. Eichmann explained he was merely taking orders as part of a hierarchy following a plan of action.
Arendt explained that by creating a minute division of labour, by neutralising the language of command, the bureaucracy had normalised violence in colossal proportions to an everyday antiseptic-ness. This is what the students did not understand—that, as potential bureaucrats, there could be an Eichmann in each of them. One confronts this fact when one looks at the statistics that dams have displaced over 40 million people—and yet, we look at dams as a technical answer to a technical question.
One of the biggest problems of social science is its inability to handle violence. One is reminded of Kitty Genovese, a girl who was stabbed over a dozen times in a New York suburb in 1964. Her midnight stalker realised that while there were witnesses, they were mere spectators. When asked why they did not respond to the stabbing, they said they felt they were watching TV.
The Genovese story of passive spectatorship is outdated today. People have started consuming violence in a hyperactive way. After riots, we discover that people indulged in the extreme violence by videographing it because they felt they were enacting a role in history. When ordinary people think they are ‘aficionados’ of violence in history, violence becomes banal in such a way that they are not able to point fingers.
One has to recognise that social science has been illiterate before the inventiveness of violence, which has acquired a series of transformations. It expresses itself as obsolescence, where people fade into uselessness and are abandoned by the thousands. But more sinister is triage, which began as an exercise as innocent as sorting coffee, but has deeper policy implications as social triage. It is the application of rationality to the elimination of people.
When you have a limited set of resources, the question becomes who one allocates resources to. Policy makers like Henry Kissinger and mass murderers like the Paddock brothers argued that people who could not progress could be eliminated. Kissinger used this on African countries that were regarded ‘failed states’. Violence today is a part of the logic of policy. It should be on every social science questionnaire.
Violence has become even more ensconced in science. In his book Medical Nemesis, Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich talks of iatrogeny, which he described as expert-induced illness. He claims that roughly 40 percent of modern medicine is iatrogenic.
But what is all the more alarming is that genocide has become an even more intrinsic part of social science policy. When one looks at the Narmada dams, the Andaman projects, or urban planning, one realises that violence is built into their logic. It is this epistemological violence built into the folds that the potential IAS officers did not see. One has to understand that words like ‘progress’ are genocidal in such a context. One evaluates them while being totally indifferent to the costs of death and displacement.
A cost-benefit analysis today has no sense of the genocidal implications of development. Even more ironic was American nuclear expert Herman Kahn doing a cost-benefit analysis of bombing. The very fact that the Americans weighed the costs and ‘benefits’ of bombing Japan and Germany during the Second World War indicates an ethical indifference to the choices.
The logic of numbers and the idea of efficiency become profoundly dominant. Ethics recedes into the background as dull manners. This impersonalisation of violence as an epistemology is a problem deeper than the question of Trump and Putin.
One has to confront a revival of ethics, where ethics has to be innovative, cognitively inventive and operated both at the vernacular and global levels. One needs a personal ethics, an ethics of micro situations and ethics of the microcosm. Parts and the whole have to be connected.
Let me make a few suggestions on how civil society and the university have to recreate ethics. First, one has to go beyond the standard ideas of morality to look at cosmology and epistemology. Theories of knowledge carry with them their own profound problems of violence. One has to relook at science not as value-neutral, but something deeply rooted in the resurgence of violence.
Second, we have to create lifestyle choices with new ideas of consumption and production, and more innovative pedagogic ways of performing ethics. Ethics cannot be a passive textbook. It has to be an everyday performance, a pedagogic theatre that challenges science and dominant policy.
Third, we need to reinvent the idea of satyagraha. Gandhian satyagraha emerged out of colonial rule and had little to say about, say, nuclear energy. The desperate need of our times is to reinvent the idea of satyagraha to confront the ideas of genocide, triage and obsolescence—and link them to a new democratic imagination.
Shiv Visvanathan
Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations
(Views are personal)
(svcsds@gmail.com)