I wrote this as a Public Engagement submission for my Takshashila GCPP course. It was inspired by a Nitin Pai lecture and I'm somewhat proud of this essay.
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or politics as usual?
Would mass democracy have been possible except during the high-noon of Modernism?
The notion that a group of citizens can, by voting for their favoured (okay, maybe that’s too strong: how about least-worst?) politicians, choose the best leader to lead the nation seems like a fairly recent one. One that seems to have sprung less from that being the best way than a method with the least need for constant justification. That old fox Churchill was onto something when he called it the worst form of government and all that.
There are two obvious upsides to this arrangement though:
1. Since the people are, ostensibly, (s)electing their rulers (and I use the term with caution in the context of really existing democracy), there is less risk of an internal sabotage or coup, and, consequently, better chances of order and social cohesion.
2. By collating preferences from citizens who are actually impacted by actions of the government, the policy-makers get a sense of what is important for citizenry and what they need to work upon. It is an information gathering mechanism, albeit imperfect and prone to mis/disreadings, but works better than a more authoritarian form of government, if not for anything else but, simply because people are convinced that this is what the majority seems to want and that needs to be respected. Elections are, critically, also an intra-communication mechanism for society to talk to itself.
The precondition for both these tenets is a fundamental trust in the ability and the stated-intentions of the elected politicians and, perhaps more importantly, that other voters are as rational and well-intentioned as one is. The trust in the political system in India seems to have started fraying post the intial heyday of independence with a suspicion of the inadequacies and corruption of the political class taking root. But there was a clear demarcation between the classes of politicians and citizens with the mainstream media acting as the broad platform. To be clear, while any society, especially Indian society, has been sliced into smaller groups across many dimensions of gender, caste, language, region, occupation etc., the notion of all being equal citizens seems to have been deeply ingrained- atleast as a sentiment. With the advent, and rapid penetration, of social media platforms, that sense of seemingly solid reality began cracking up.
Much has been written about how the liberal intelligentsia was rudely exposed to this truth with the twin shocks of Brexit and Trump but if anything that was more a culmination of the process of distintegration begun in the late 2000s than an instantaneous manifestation. Steve Bannon's diabolical genius, it seems to me, was not to find a way to lie to people convincingly or confuse them ('Flood the zone with shit') as much as a realisation that we don't always seek information in search of some pristine truth (even if it indeed is as transcendentally static as some of us like to believe). We do it for various social reasons including signalling, to feel part of a group, reach for it as a way of assuaging some other grievance, to fantasise etc. Like Tyler Cowen recently argued, misinformation isn't a supply-side problem as much as a demand-side one.
People who believe in QAnon conspiracies or the statement that India had internet connection during the Mahabharata or any of those, what might seem like, loony beliefs to a certain English-speaking, liberal, cosmopolitan (the anywheres, to use David Goodhart's useful dichotomy) individual, are not necessarily irrational or stupid or ill-intentioned (though probably that sub-section exists in this larger group) as responding to deeper insecurities or grudges. Pankaj Mishra's argument in Age of Anger that resentment caused by the gap between Neoliberal Capitalism’s extravagant promises and harsh realities thereby creating the ferment that has lead to radical tribalism, while overstretching, seems to me to contain a large truth. The tumult we live in right now is as much cognitive as social, political or economic. The world is becoming stranger and stranger, and some of us who are feeling more unmarooned than others are holding onto whatever we can for temporary succor.
This brings me to the original question of the link between Modernism and a wider optimism with respect to mass democracy. Presumably, and this is a very timid hypothesis because there is a lot of reading I need to do on this subject, during the reign of High Modernist thought, there was a deeply felt sense that the world could be tamed by better instruments of social science, that all of us were rational in a fundamentally similar way, progress was linear, and more information led to better knowledge led to better outcomes for all. That sentiment eroded first slowly and then all at once. But rather than being a failure, I'd like to think of this as reality refusing to conform to any set of theories for long. It is a natural product of evolution, what the philosopher Venkatesh Rao has called Oozification. As long as individual agents are free, intelligent, adaptive, complex, like we insist all of us are (which is one of the fundamental tenets of democracy itself), they will shape the world in ways unforseen. It is ludicrous to insist that all of us should be left to be who we want to be, as the progressives claim, and should be left to make and spend money as we see fit, as the neoliberals claims, and then also expect all to conform to certain Englightenment notions of universalism. Ofcourse, we'd all love to have a royal middle path with the best of both worlds but that's easier said than done. As the brilliant Don Watson recently wrote, “The voters, and all their ignorance and prejudices, their self-interest, their meanness, their gullibility, and all their goodwill, faith and conscientiousness, are the raw material of the democracy, and to blame them is like blaming the rain for falling”.
I think Hegel was onto something when he said there is a natural direction to history. It seems unlikely that a people used to freedom would willingly relinquish it. Interestingly, though, we seem to be doing exactly that with the rise of authoritarianism. Maybe for all its rhetorical value, there is only so much freedom a society and an individual can handle before the centrifugal forces take over and undermine the identity and stability of the entity. In a spectrum stretching from a rigidly fixed identity (say a caste identity that imposes extreme social and economic limitations) to an anything-you-want-to-do-no-restrictions type freedom (say a late capitalist society where nothing is solid and everything is infinitely malleable), I think individuals feel unconfortable at either extreme. And while they want their freedoms, they also want assurances. So, for instance, whatever we gain in economic and social freedoms, we seem to feel compelled give up in political and cultural freedoms. What is to change and what is to remain is the metaphysical responsibility of politics.
All this is a long-winded way of saying that while it may seem like all of this will crash and burn, I think we will be able to create new tools, learn more about ourselves and the world, and fix all this mid-flight. Not a permanent fix but enough to keep flying until it becomes someone else’s problem.
