The future need not be painted with the same darkness as the past - New possibilities

THE THIN EDGE | The future need not be painted with the same darkness as the past

M.K. Gandhi.;Wikimedia Commons

Ruchir Joshi   |  TT   |   26.01.21  : History constantly forms constellations of circumstances. Within the constant of these ever-changing constellations roils the constant of human struggle, first for survival and then for that thing called happiness, which one could perhaps call enhanced survival or, to use current jargon, value-added existence. What the luckier among us almost always fail to perceive — or, if they do see it, too easily suspend the understanding of — is the fact that most humans want the best possible life for themselves and their loved ones right now and not at some speculative, deferred moment in a ‘later on’ that no one has ever seen. This is where the greed-crazed impatience of capitalism is predicated on constantly convincing the poor and underprivileged to be patient and more patient, to stick within the laws laid down for them, to play by the rules they have not made, to not revolt, not be violent, not make demands. This convincing is managed via an ever-shifting array of confidence tricks which employ everything from nationalism and religion to pseudo-scientific theory and the blinding flashes of new technologies. This much was more or less mapped out in the 19th century by Karl Marx. Among the very few major things he did not see coming was the devastating impact human technology and mass consumption would have on the very vital organs of this planet.

Recently we’ve seen various efforts at changing the lenses through which we look at history. People have taken periods with which we are familiar and put different grids and narratives on them, accordioned them differently in their analyses. For example, there are articles explicating how Donald Trump is only the worst irruption so far of the unholy alliance that the Republican Party formed with right-wing Christian fundamentalists a few decades ago, with far worse still likely to come. Then there is the whole examination of how modern European and American democracies came about. The argument goes that these democracies were something that the countries of the Occident needed to create or expand in order to contain the internal reverberations of the Industrial Revolution and modern capitalism, as a domestic counter-balance to the empires they were imposing on other parts of the world. Now that manufacturing has been outsourced to other parts of the world, a domestic working class that genuinely participates in the process of democracy is an irrelevancy in America-UK-Europe; governments that protect the rights of these workers are an impediment to profit and the maintenance of control; it is now much more advantageous to hollow out democracy and the sharing of power and decision-making processes, and move to an international network of oligarchies that control things regardless of archaic national borders. The models of democracy that we’ve become used to in the last 70 or 80 years are, or were, essentially 20th-century phenomena that are now rapidly petering out. A third Rubik’s Cubing is specific to India, with writers such as Vinay Sitapati suggesting that had Godse not murdered Gandhi, we would have had a Hindutvavadi regime in power much earlier. Sitapati’s argument is that a Hindutva raj was always on the cards but the huge revulsion that people felt towards the killers of Gandhi actually gave the Congress (and the essentially elite notion of a secular nation) a much longer lease of life than could have been expected.

Thinking out of the box is always useful. One may agree or disagree with the various new modellings of our recent past, and with the conjectures and speculations about the future these modellings lead to, but perhaps the thing to borrow from these is the ability to think and say things previously regarded as unthinkable or unsayable.

Perhaps history will see what is going on in the United States of America as a series of low-level, criss-crossing civil wars, between Caucasians and people of colour, between coast and interior, between the urban and the rural, civil wars that last the best part of a century from, say, 1960, after which the ‘United States’ that emerge are unrecognizable as the nation that existed from 1776 for nearly 200 years. Perhaps this transformation from megalith ‘country’ to a loose north American federation will also be accompanied by the disintegration of Russia and China as we know them now, rendering the very idea of superpowers archaic.

Were this to happen, it is highly unlikely that our subcontinent would continue to stay distributed under the current national dispensations. Perhaps future historians will look back and see that the formation of nations in 1947 was but a phase that followed the departure of the British from our shores, a period of pomp and mass self-delusion, complete with Republic Day parades, rampant jingoism, periodic wars and constant, fevered sabre-rattling, but one that could not outlast the tectonic pressures of history, of the grotesque ethnic, religious and political tribalisms unleashed by the competing elites who had captured control of the different countries. They may also conclude that it was the ecological disasters this politics helped create that finally wiped away our coastlines and electric-fenced borders with impartial ferocity. Furthermore, they might arrive at the reading that had even one or two of these post-colonial nations managed to give genuine power to their masses and established an equitable society, this might not have happened so easily.

Obviously, looking at our past differently also enables us to see new possibilities in our future. However, examining darker new takes on our history doesn’t mean we need to paint what is yet to come with the same darkness and pessimism. National borders may well be rendered less relevant in the near future but it might not be a small cabal of virtual trillionaires that controls the lives of the humans on the planet. One can imagine perhaps a less streamlined contraption of a network, a far less oppressive, far more egalitarian jugaad that replaces the tatters of the old Westphalian model. In this time, when we are being bombarded with so much that was previously unimaginable, we could reasonably conjecture that what we are undergoing is the extremely painful birth-turbulence of the new, perhaps slightly more benign constellations that await us or maybe even ones that we can forge ourselves.