1001 ways to be civilized

The first time I saw Siva, a few years ago, I remarked that it was a neo-western. I hadn't, still haven't, seen any of the original Westerns but the following is what I learnt by cultural osmosis of what the genre signified:

• There is a lawless land.
• An outsider representing law and order, usually a sheriff or a morally upright outlaw, arrives.
• He tries to stay away from the gangs but is reluctantly drawn into a confrontation when he saves an innocent man.
• He then tries to leave the town but by then the citizens see in him a saviour and plead him to stay.
• While he takes on the burden and starts to transform the town, the main villain refuses to change and builds a personal hatred towards the hero.
• The villain then destroys something the hero holds as sacred/ innocent.
• Eventually, the hero is forced to 'act' like the villain and kill him.

Siva follows the template almost to the T. It is an extraordinary film, not just for it's technical excellence and narrative design, but also for the themes and topics it tackles. While rewatching the film today, after listening to the brilliant episode on The Other Banana podcast, I realised that it also does a brilliant job of portraying what I think is one of the foundational problems of a modern, liberal society. 

Namely, how do you deal with the illiberal minority in society that lays claim to power¹? 

Especially, when that minority manages to form a nexus with certain arms of the state. To be fair this is not a problem just with liberal societies. Primitive societies are infact exactly this where a king or a lord or a priest or the head of the family etc. is the illiberal dominant force acting upon the individual. So infact a modern society evolved as a reaction to this. So the problem with a liberal society is not that it desires this sort of an arrangement but while seeking specifically to avoid this, almost always ends up in this state.

This is a truth for most of us experientially. We have seen  the local rowdy who demands Ganesh chanda; The corporator who draws borewell water from the locality and sells it; The Hindutva goon who roams around with rakhis on Valentine's Day; The policeman who gets together with the builder/MLA and causes problems to the landowners. Basically anybody with power who wants something that isn't lawfully theirs. I won't go deeper into this here because I think it's clear to the reader what I'm talking about but I highly recommend Amit Varma's episode with Milan Vaishnav to get an excellent high-level understanding of why there's such a deep relationship between politicians and goons in India.

It is inevitable in any society that there be illiberal folks. Sometimes their fight maybe valid but as someone who celebrates and wants to live in a liberal society, I'd rather they not take over the parliament. Ofcourse it is hard, if not ever entirely right, to divide people into liberal and illiberal types (funnily, group identity is one of the things the liberal in me desists), for the sake of explaining I will use Atishi Marlena's Bell Curve Model:

20% of people in society are fierce liberals and will do everything in their power to fight illiberal forces.

20% of people are illiberals and will try to capture power and oppress others.

60% don't care too much either way but are still individually rational. So they'll try to game the system, but not too much, no matter what its nature. 

The fight then is between rule of law and autocracy. Between civility (all people are equal) and barbarity (power is right). The assumption being that a society is more humane when it veers more towards the former than the latter. 

Stating the terms of discussion as I have creates a picture of a noble army standing at the gates against the hordes of barbarians. That description is not very accurate. The critical difference being that the enemy is within the gates and is looking to take over the citadel. One of the critical safeguards the constitutional founders had for this problem was separation of powers. Ensure that an individual or a small group can never get enough power to become authoritative. Yet the more distributed the power, the harder it is to create consensus and take definitive action. So as some aspects start moving too slowly or seem less accountable or cause resenment in particular sections, it is natural for people to look for definitive, fast-moving reforms especially when that resentment reaches a critical mass. And that in turn makes the figure of the strong-willed king more alluring². But isn't that exactly the kind of autocracy we wanted to get away from in the first place. So what do we do³?

That brings us to the alternative the film, and Plato, offers. The concept of a philosopher-king. Give us somebody with power and strength who can fight for us, while also ensuring that he isn't weak or malicious enough to be corrupted by power.

Ofcourse the law of entropy states that no matter who is in power, eventually corruption will become so deep-rooted that the entire system will collapse⁴. No wonder stories of all great society are called 'The Rise and Fall of'. The question is, What you as a liberal would rather fight - Incoherence or Domination?

¹ It goes without saying that power can be of any nature. It could be about being physically violent, about being majoritarian, group over individual and even claiming an autonomy over religious interpretation and punishing those who don't toe the line.

² I think it is clear at this point that I'm using UPA IIs messy coalition politics, with a weak centre, as one of the primary reasons Modi's 'decisive', autocratic persona seemed attractive in 2014.

³ Amit Varma asks his guests if they believe in The Great Man Theory of history. Dr JP says that history is created both by large, extrahuman factors but also shaped by human actors. I think I agree with him.

⁴ I don't want to sound fatalistic here and say, "Oh in the end all of us are going to die anyway. So what's the point of all this?". To build a good human society is to stave off suffering to as many beings as possible for as long as possible and that is the assumption on which this discussion takes place.

P.S- As is often the case, this piece too started off as a hypothesis before veering off into unexpected directions and ending in a cul-de-sac. Sravani says, and I think she's right, that I have this problem where one attempt at an answer to a question leads to more questions. So in the end I'm left with a bunch of nested open brackets with very few closed brackets. 

I have tried staving this off by sitting on posts in the hope that I will work on them and build something more coherent and finished. More often than not I get bored and it just sits there. So I'd rather post this stuff here not at all as authoritative pieces but simply as acts of thinking in public in the hope they add some value to the world.