La kongresoj post la frostavalena epoko

La kongresoj post la frostavalena epoko

Probal Dasgupta

Dum siaj unuaj jardekoj, Esperanto ne estis sinonima al la internaciaj kongresoj. Ghi vivis en la leteroj, en la revuoj, en la lokaj societoj, kaj en iniciatoj por estontaj internaciaj kongresoj. Nur en 1905 prosperis al la movado Bulonjo-sur-maro, kiu lanchis la konatan, chefe kongresan historion. Ekde tiam, multaj organizitaj agadoj trovis nichojn ene de kongresoj, kaj tio shanghis la geometrion de niaj impulsoj.

En la epoko, kiam chefe temis pri la demando de inter-Nacia lingvo, gravis la internacieco de la kongresoj. Hodiau shajnas egale gravi la tute aligeometria demando de inter-Loka kaj inter-Socia lingvo. Por uzi la samajn kongresojn lige kun la novighantaj celoj de nia epoko, ni devos refasoni niajn manierojn kunsidi, kaj ankorau ne aperis klaraj proponoj, kiamaniere tion fari.

La kutima debato rilatas al la retaj disponoj. Oni demandas sin, kiamaniere la ekzistantan kongresan sperton ni per la elektronikaj komunikaj rimedoj disponigu al la necheestantoj. Iuj liveras brilajn solvojn. Ili estas tiel brilaj, ke aliaj avertas, ke tro uzi tiujn solvojn kreos la dangheron, ke oni bonege spertos la kongresojn defore, kaj ke do la homoj chesos fizike veni al la kongresoj. Oni notu, ke tiu debato premisas, ke la kongresojn mem neniu refasonos.

Se ni tiamaniere refasonos la kongresojn kaj niajn retajn komunikmanierojn, ke la retaj agadoj kreos senton de bezono pri fizikaj kunvenoj por fini multon, kion oni povas rete nur komenci kaj ne fini, tiam la reta laboro kaj la kongresado komplementos unu la alian. Tiam malaperos tiu danghero, ke la reta aliro al la kongresa sperto konkurencos kun la kongresanigho kaj atencos la poshon de la kongres-organizemaj entoj.

Kio plej evidente bezonas la cheeston de homoj, fizike, en unu sama ejo? Certe la teatro. Delonge nin ghenas, ke la Esperanta teatrarto ne bone vivas, ke la teatraj grupoj fartas senprospere. Chu ni povas memkonscie nupti la teatran arton kun la pedagogiaj bezonoj de nia lernema lingvanaro? Eble la ekscese artemaj teatristoj okupighas demonstri siajn pintajn lertojn al la plej kapablaj okuloj kaj oreloj, kaj eble ghuste tiu deziro simili al la teatristaroj en la naciaj lingvoj kreas la problemon. Se por chiu kongreso la plej evidente disponeblaj talentoj – eble lokaj, eble apudlokaj, dependos de la konkreta situacio – povas antaulabori por povi dumkongrese fari utilajn kaj ne nepre altegnivelajn prezentojn taugajn por la gustoj de diversnivelaj lingvanoj, tiam ni ne bezonas tro reliefigi konstantajn teatristarojn gvidatajn de stelaj reghisoroj. Kompreneble tiuj istaroj estas nia trezoro kaj devas esti kultivataj. Sed ni atentu ankau la bezonojn de la komencantoj kaj progresetintoj, kiuj abundas en niaj kongresoj, kaj ni agnosku, ke tiel la arto, kiel la pedagogio, bezonas la oran mezon, kiu tushas ambau dimensiojn.

Chu ekzistas simila problemo pri la lingva brileco ghenerale? La celo de la principaro de Frostavallen, kiu emfazis la uzadendon de Esperanto inter samideanoj kiam ajn ili kunestas, estis polure altigi la nivelon de lingvoposedo en niaj komunumoj. Oni atingis tiun celon, kaj la kongresoj estas interalie dismontrejoj de la fakto, ke iuj inter ni flue kaj brile parolas kaj audkomprenas la lingvon. Per la sama ekzerco, kompreneble,oni ankau konkrete evidentigas la fakton, ke multaj inter ni malflue kaj malbrile uzas la audan lingvon. La kongresoj antau Frostavallen estas fenomeno, pri kiu ni havas nur la memorojn de veteranoj, kiujn neniu intervjue demandis pri chi tio. Tiuj post Frostavallen, kiujn spertis la plimulto el ni, apartenas al tiu fazo en la vivo de nia lingvo, kiu alte taksas la valoron de parollingve aplomba elito inter la uzantoj. La logiko de la kongresoj certe fortigas tiun emfazon. Sed eble ni perdas ion valoran, kaj bezonas restarigi la ekvilibron?

Multaj statistikaj studoj de la komunumoj, kiuj uzas Esperanton, reliefigas la nekutiman aghprofilon de nia lingvanaro. Abundas la tre junaj kaj la tre maljunaj homoj, kiuj diversnivele bezonas helpon de la mezjunaj, kiuj malabundas, kaj kies proagha senpaciencemo ofte superfortas la helpipovon. La rezulto de tio ne estas, ke la mezjunaj homoj videble neglektus la helpobezonojn de la tre junaj kaj tre maljunaj samkongresanoj. La senpacienco vidighas ne en la rekta neglektado, sed en la evidente pacienc-elspeza maniero helpi.

Tiu chi krizo akute malkomfortigas multajn kunvenojn. Ekzemple, kiam en Universala Kongreso de Esperanto oni grupe traktas la tiujaran kongresan temon, la grupoj estas chiam miksaj. Enestas lertaj kaj mallertaj parolantoj. Por ke la mallertaj homoj ekzercu sian parolrajton, la aliaj pacience atendas, ke finighu iliaj malrapidaj kaj erarplenaj intervenoj, kaj poste rapide, lerte, flue, kaj temo-prie intervenas, ofte ignorante la enhavon de tio, kion diris la mallertaj kunvenanoj. Kaj la mallertaj lingvouzantoj same pacience kaj flegme toleras tiun ignoran sintenon. Oni povas kompreneble “solvi” la “problemon” per inghenieraj metodoj – ekzemple, disduigi la parolfluon en “porspertulan” kaj “porkomencantan” sesiojn kaj peti, ke la ghustaj homoj iru al la ghusta segmento. Sed tio draste evidentigus la lingvo-neposedon de iuj, kiuj atingis gravan rolon en siaj lokaj organizajhoj, kaj pro multaj aliaj kialoj neakcepteblus. Mi mencias tiun maleblan inghenieran “solvon” nur por diri, ke krizon oni ne traktu kvazau grandan problemon. Problemoj kaj krizoj estas malsamghenraj. De krizoj oni lernas. Oni ne hastu forbalai ilin.

Lau mi, temas ne nur pri tio, ke la lingvon ni malsamgrade regas. Temas ankau pri la ege diversa kompreno rilate la kongresajn temojn. Multaj kongresaj temoj rilatas al la faka demandaro sur la tereno de la makrosociologio de intershtataj rilatoj – kun juraj, ekonomikaj, kaj diosciaskiaj aliaj implicoj. Homoj lingve spertaj povas bone regi Esperanton sed tute ne kompreni la temon. Ni nun funkcias per aliro, kiu teorie supozas chiujn kunvenanojn egale kompetentaj kundiskuti en grupoj la diversajn dimensiojn de la kongresa temo. Kaj tiu aliro tute ne uzas la reton. Se ni iom pli sisteme rilatos al la kongresa temo, ni povos antauprepari grupestrojn kaj iujn kernajn grupanojn, se ni iom diserigos la kongresan temon en konvene trakteblajn subtemojn. Tiam ni povas unuflanke organizi sesiojn de la ghenro “enkonduko al la kongresa temo”, kie iuj spertuloj senkashe prelegos al naiva audantaro, iomete pridemandonta post la prelegoj sed ne traktota kiel egale diskutkapabla; kaj aliflanke funkcii en sufiche bone antaupreparitaj seriozaj sesioj, kies grupoj funkcios chirkau kapablaj kaj pripensintaj grupestroj.

Oni notu, ke en tiuj chi spekulativoj pri tio, kion ni povas fari, mi ne chefe emfazas la realigindon de miaj ideoj – kiuj eventuale estas sufiche stultaj kaj malmulte pripensitaj. Mi volas reliefigi ilian ghenron. Ili nete premisas la pligravigon de la substanco kaj la malpligravigon de la parola lingvobrilo. Apud ili (se tiuj, au almenau tiaj, proponoj montrighos vivipovaj) pli bone funkcios nacilingve funkciantaj landaj Esperantujoj, kiuj aplombe kaj sencohave partoprenos la sialandajn publikajn diskutojn pri diversaj por ni gravaj temoj. Mi esperas, ke ankau aliaj konsentas kun mi pri la fasonindeco de postfrostavalena epoko en niaj kongresoj.

Aperinta en Almanako Lorenz 28.29-35, 2008. Enhavo aktuala aparte dum la nuna rediskutado pri la universalaj kongresoj. Tiuj el vi kiuj volas komenti bonvolu skribi al mi per la ordinara retposhto au diskuti pri tiu chi dokumento en la kutimaj retforumoj. La komentan spacon de mia blogo oni ne povas vere efike uzi por la celoj de publika diskutado.

The nuclear complex: an obstacle to serious inquiry

[Expanded version of a talk at an OPDR Hyderabad meeting 9 Aug 1998; submitted for publication, but receipt not yet acknowledged by the editor, as of 25 May 2011; comments welcome; please email comments to me, do not post comments here, it amuses me to leave the blog comment space to spammers with hieroglyphic names and sometimes hieroglyphic messages]

Introduction

I shall argue that the societies in which we live suffer from a pathology that may usefully be called the nuclear complex. This complex obscures the relations between various types of knowledge, encouraging fallacies in public debate and making serious research difficult or impossible in most fields of inquiry, including the sciences. The nuclear complex is manifested most acutely, of course, in nations that directly undertake a small or large-scale nuclear adventure. But it is a pathology you find everywhere in varying degrees, like patriarchy and environmental pollution, and needs to be targeted by a global struggle. To be sure, not all countries have exploded nuclear devices or gone in for weaponization. But there is no room for complacency in those countries either. India was not free from the nuclear complex before Pokhran II, or even before Pokhran I. The 1998 explosions simply change the terms of the problem for us. They do not create it.

In this presentation, I take as a point of departure an observation made in 1985 by plant scientist H.Y. Mohanram (personal communication), which I will call Mohanram’s Observation for ready reference. He notes that most currently dominant perspectives, both in and outside the sciences, have been shaped by the typical image of action as a one-hit affair – the image of a physical action of narrowly delimitable impact and generating specifiable effects. He went on to observe that the life sciences tend to put us in touch more often with actions initiated from one series of cycles and intervening in another such series. Both the content of the action and its effects involve long-term repeated acts and inspections or responses over many cycles. Once this model becomes widely available to thinking people, and once we wean ourselves from the typical image of a one-shot physical impact, Mohanram argues, the average adult’s general idea of processes and actions will become more mature. So, he argues, will the overall health of public debate in general and scientific research in particular. In other words:

(Mohanram’s Observation)
Conventional thinking postulates single actions with pointed impact on a surface where it produces specific effects. As the contributions of life science come to be appreciated, thinking people will postulate one living experience slowly acting, over several cycles, on another living experience, as the typical form of action – not a single impact, but repeated, cyclical interventions, interweaving effects with causes. This revision of perspective will change both patterns of inquiry and patterns of action.

On the basis of this starting point, I offer a two-stage argument. My first approximation assumes that the nation-state can be a useful unit for maximizing rational decisions. At that stage I use Mohanram’s Observation to argue that a capital city making up its mind rationally should stop in its nuclear tracks; it should begin to revise its game plan away from weapon-focused militarism and towards the economic realities that weapons are a code for. This part of my presentation is about public issues in the nuclear domain. It speaks to friends who take the image of rational nation-states to be a normal basis for discussion, and who believe that the nuclear debate is best couched in terms of credible national defence strategies.

The second approximation, which drives the cognitive part of my argument, drops the oversimple assumption that maximizing rationality is best done at the level of the nation-state or other centralizations. At that second stage, I turn to issues of research in the pure and applied sciences and related domains. I begin at the interface where the public issues involved meet the apparent privacy of research priorities; I argue that accountability requires not just the physical act of disarmament, but the intellectual dismantling of the nuclear complex in the systems of academic inquiry. I then turn to issues at the interface between pure and applied science, and the very different stand-off between the hard sciences and the so-called soft fields like the social sciences and the humanities. I propose that the life science mediation can resolve this stand-off in a way that does not just resist the nuclear complex, but makes it possible to address problems long believed to be intractable. Such an initiative redirects the energies of serious inquirers towards a more sustainable approach to research priorities and to relations between disciplines.

Finally, putting the two tracks of the argument together, I argue for a frank cultivation of ego health so that ego considerations do not have to hide underground and express themselves in terms of violent conflict or the explicit threat of such action – this candour is desirable at all levels, I argue, regardless of whether the ego games are being played between nations, or between disciplines, or between communities or other partners in any interactive dyad. I argue that the mandatory habits of self-deprecation in discourse may only seem to serve the cause of peace. They are not really gentle behaviour, but amount to gestures of a fake politeness that may in fact contribute to a violent atmosphere in which people feel like violating the rights of others.

The Strategic Argument

I now turn to the actual argument I am trying to build. At stage one, where I address public issues in their standard political form, I make the assumption that the most readily available standpoint from which rationality maximization is feasible is that of the nation-state. Such a state gives technical advisors priority over democratic mechanisms. This in the limit encourages the scientific-industrial complex, mediated through a market-packaged economic rationality that formalizes the competition underlying the standard paradigm of scientific inquiry and industrial follow-through, to be openly allowed to replace democratic decision-making mechanisms. It is then assumed that in a healthy nation-state the democratically chosen legislators will always wisely defer to the imperatives of the systems mediated through the economist’s summaries of technical advice coming from the scientific-industrial system which innovates and makes the most of the best innovations.

In tune with these assumptions, the standard political rationality defines the primary functions of the state in terms of internal defence, through the legal and penal system, and external defence, working at the level of unchecked sovereignties always verging on a state of war, and opting for a state of diplomatic standoff at best. In both cases, it is assumed that offence is the best defence. This proactive mechanism can take the modified form of ‘peaceful initiatives’ winning wars beforehand without firing a shot. But the standard view relates this to the eternal basic question of defence and defensibility. At the first approximation, I accept this standard view as a base line. Even on these assumptions, questions arise about how nations can optimize and rationalize the way their proactive and reactive postures are supposed to work this logic out for a given nation at a given juncture.

I have a fairly simple argument here. Only the conventional physical image of an action as a one-shot job with an identifiable and containable fall-out can make the nuclear scenarios we toy with look even remotely rational, even in the context of war games and other simulations. Now, once you listen to and understand Mohanram’s Observation, you cannot sustain this posture. No nation can credibly imagine actually running through the course of a nuclear war and its aftermath. World War Two was not in this sense a nuclear war. In other words, the notion of nuclear deterrence is not a piece of military logic. It is evidently a mask for something else. What is it a mask for? What does a state that hoodwinks the public into believing a nuclear fairy tale really want to do? Is there a way to force the real game into the open? Is it less dangerous than the nuclear side-show that masks it?

Since deterrence is not technically credible, and must be a substitute for some other form of game playing, the simplest hypothesis – on the statist, marketist assumptions made at this stage of my argument – is that a nuclear-posturing state probably visualizes its pursuit of its best interests in terms of economic warfare. On such a reading of what is on offer, the nuclear diversion must be reread as an easy-to-sell tactic, perhaps accepted by domestic constituencies. Its real-life effect is that of forcing the partner in this game, the so-called enemy nation, to abandon the simpler, pre-nuclear form of economic warfare, and to divert resources and indulge in a conspicuous national consumption programme featuring such components as nuclear weapon stockpiling, the so-called peaceful nuclear energy option, and a so-called neutral scientific enterprise that accords priority to subatomic physics.

The basic move in this economic war game is to perform a crucial type of irrational action that compels the partner nation, standardly termed the enemy, to match unreason with unreason. The way the economics of this works, one might as well operate with some other “irrational” arena, such as sports or alcohol. And soldiers, come to think of it, really do enjoy both. I say this not to make a concrete suggestion about what could credibly replace nuclear scenarios, but to point up the need to question the types of rationality and unreason that are at work in this game.

If nations forcing each other to imagine nuclear war scenarios are really masking something else they are trying to do, such as divert the enemy’s resources into unproductive avenues so that ‘we’ can make a ‘killing’ on the business front, then we need to understand unproductive avenues more clearly so that we can find ways to persuade nations to divert these diversions from dangerous unproductive avenues to less dangerous but equally unproductive avenues.

The Cognitive Argument

In order to interrogate the types of reason and unreason involved, it is useful to move to the second approximation. So we now drop the assumption that it is at the nation-state level that rationality can be most effectively maximized. The inspiration for our second approximation comes from another life scientist, not H.Y. Mohanram, but Jacques Monod (1972:180), who wrote: “Where then shall we find the source of truth and the moral inspiration for a really s c i e n t i f i c socialist humanism, if not in the sources of science itself, in the ethic upon which knowledge is founded, and which by free choice makes knowledge the supreme value – the measure and warrant for all other values? An ethic which bases moral responsibility upon the very freedom of that axiomatic choice. Accepted as the foundation for social and political institutions, hence as the measure of their authenticity, their value, only the ethic of knowledge could lead to socialism. It prescribes institutions dedicated to the defence, the extension, the enrichment of the transcendent kingdom of ideas, of knowledge, and of creation – a kingdom which is within man, where progressively freed both from material constraints and from the deceitful servitudes of animism, he could at last live authentically, protected by institutions which, seeing in him the subject of the kingdom and at the same time its creator, could be designed to serve him in his unique and precious essence.”

Among these ‘institutions’ is education, which has to be radically denationalized if the redirection of energies desired by Monod is to be brought about. The serious pursuit of scientific knowledge – and of its serious application for human welfare – is evidently incompatible with a divided humanity. Excessively national educational institutions cannot be allowed to imprison the hearts and minds of scientists in the narrow chauvinistic spaces that the typical nation’s educational and cultural systems present to its children as the only spaces worth inhabiting. For science to be a truly global pursuit, children have to be educated as citizens of the planet. And such an education needs to rest on a sustainable conversation not only between nations – working towards a global order – but also between domains of inquiry, which have to work towards a mature interdisciplinary traffic of ideas.

Note that the need to dismantle divisive national apparatuses also cannot be used as a pretext for encouraging the hubris of scientific advisors to hijack society’s overall democratic process. The communities of scientists operate with their own internally democratic discussion system; but this system has to find ways to welcome and digest democratic criticism from non-scientific mortals. For even those of us who take no part in developing scientific knowledge are affected by the applications of science. Must we wait for a utopian global educational system to educate all children into planetary citizenship fifty years hence? Is there nothing that we badly educated adults can do here and now?

In my view, scientists need to start playing a more clearly articulated role in a truly public democratic discussion network. The sciences need to reform themselves to this end – which involves not just improving cross-disciplinary alignments within scientific work, but also not letting outside masters such as funding agencies hijack the priorities of scientific research.

The nuclear complex is built around claims about the fundamentality of particle physics. We all agree that particle physics has been the site of some of humankind’s greatest intellectual breakthroughs. Nonetheless, the social iconization of particle physics as the foundation of all scientific knowledge has been so timed and so managed that one of its functions has been to veil the complicity of some agenda-setting scientists with what Eisenhower famously dubbed ‘the military-industrial complex’.

The alleged fundamentality of particle physics is independent of the question of the unique excellence of particle physicists. Particle physics looks ‘fundamental’ only on an indefensible conception, once taken seriously by many, of the derivability of meso-domain results from micro-domain results. Persistent failure to make any breakthroughs in cross-disciplinary derivation enterprises should have convinced the votaries of that conception by now that it cannot be made to work.

What is fundamental is pattern, which comes in all shapes and sizes. The pursuit of pattern is what drives individual research disciplines. Cross-classification makes it impossible to arrange disciplines in a pyramid or a hierarchy. For instance, the chemistry of water, the geographical issues of water management, the impact of water availability levels on economic planning, and so on, do not add up to a conceptually coherent crystallization. In particular, they do not reduce to theorems derivable from an axiomatizable body of ‘water studies’ propositions. Derivations of theorems from fundamental assumptions – and correspondingly reductionist moves – are of course valid w i t h i n particular disciplines. My point is about cross-disciplinary reduction, the claim that, quite generally, conclusions in some disciplines must be derivable from premises in others.

To summarize, there is a strong case to be made for dropping the cross-disciplinary reductionist assumption that underlies the claim that particle physics is a fundamental discipline. Where does this take us?

Once we drop reductionism, we also drop the dogma of the separability of a ‘pure’ science research agenda from an ‘applied’ supplement, and the related dogma that has us regard ‘pure’ science as ‘basic’ and ‘applied’ work as ‘derivative’, as devoid of intrinsically valuable, creative, scientific ideas. The nuclear complex has led us to overvalue pure scientists, as unique holders of a claim to excellence, and to undervalue applied scientists, whose work we have been encouraged to regard as easy.

Difficulty, excellence and derivability are distinct issues. When we tease them apart, we begin to notice that in general it is applied scientists who have harder nuts to crack. As Palle Rama Rao pointed out to me on the basis of his experience as a coordinator of responses to the Latur earthquake (personal communication, 2001), applied scientists have to address problems that cannot be usefully approached from one discipline alone, and therefore find themselves compelled to work across discipline boundaries. In contrast, a pure scientist is typically working in a paradigm that has already been put in place and that makes it possible for researchers with monodisciplinary skills to come up with results that advance the subcommunity’s formal understanding of certain phenomena and therefore count as contributions. Thus, it becomes especially the applied scientist’s job to hold aloft Popper’s banner that says scientists ‘are students of problems, not disciplines’. Far more pure scientists than applied scientists are able to make do with decades of athletic exercise using the tools of just one discipline.

For us to reverse standard and deeply entrenched beliefs about the relative value of pure and applied research is not an isolated task pertaining to the natural sciences per se. What goes for applied research goes for teaching as well. In a more broad-based study, David Bleich (1988) points out that the academy – the system of journal publications, books, conferences, in which scholars express and criticize views – is valued more highly than the teaching system. He notes that this hierarchization overlooks the fact that pedagogy kindles knowledge afresh in millions of young minds – a context of renewal in which all knowledge is reinterrogated, often leading to the major modifications that then show up in journals and conferences. We are being wildly ungrateful to Richard Feynman when we value only his prize-winning work in particle physics and fail to notice that he went around learning languages to be able to give Portuguese medium physics lessons to students in Brazil, for instance. Feynman understood quite well the primary importance of physics teaching for the growth of science.

In a country such as India, we are particularly well placed to understand the need for such a revision of priorities. The ordinary achievements of most Indians (as distinctly from the spectacular achievements of a few Indians) are grossly undervalued in today’s world specifically because the areas in which we have been quiet and steady achievers – such as keeping a reasonable educational system going against incredible odds, connecting universal ideas to particular contexts in ingenious ways to serve local constituencies, successfully applying other people’s ‘pure’ research to our ‘impure’ realities without making a fuss about how much we are getting done – are areas that the entrenched priorities encourage everybody to undervalue. Reversing these priorities is something we independently need to do; that way we can appreciate better, and are motivated to keep cultivating, certain virtues that we do have. We notice these virtues far less often than we flagellate ourselves over our visible and certainly undeniable shortcomings. It is important, however, to not use this issue as a pretext for going to town about meraa Bhaarat mahaan. Large numbers of school-teachers in many developing nations have been working hard, under trying conditions. They too have been performing reasonably well, and the global public has been unwilling to cheer for them, in large part because of the distorted priorities that standard evaluations are based on.

This resetting of priorities within academia that I am asking for, a ‘science-internal’ process, is inseparable from the ‘external’ goal of getting academic workers in general and scientists in particular to participate more fully in the network of democratic discussions.


Egos and the Management of their Dis/contents

We now move from the pure a n d applied sciences and pedagogy to the humanities, which underwrite the pedagogic enterprise. What role can the modes of reasoning available in the humanities play in the revision of priorities I am advocating – in the struggle against the nuclear complex?

In the humanities, we learn how to take the form of a narrative seriously. Consider a case study by Krishna Kumar (2002). He demonstrates that school textbooks of history in India and Pakistan demonstrably stick to the facts, but manage to tell very different stories. These stories lead Pakistani schoolchildren to believe that partition was inevitable and desirable, and Indian schoolchildren to view the events as a tragedy that timely and thoughtful action could have prevented. As I see the problem we are discussing here, the humanities comes in as a laboratory where we can incubate narratives that can actually bring about such a revision of priorities, away from the nuclear complex. And the construction of new narratives is crucial to the optimal use of this laboratory.

My specific proposal is based on the recent history of identities. Once upon a time, ethnic and caste-type identities were viewed, especially by socialists, as minor problems that would be overcome through the growth of international processes and ideas. But we now view identities as an acceptable basis for politics. If i d e n t i t y has not remained a dirty word, it is slightly puzzling that so many of us are still willing to treat e g o as a dirty word. My proposal is that we should stop doing so. The social identities that people let each other flaunt now are a matter of names; so are individual egos; there is really no good reason why one should be able to flaunt a Dalit identity but feel abashed about saying ‘I am proud to be Selvakumar’.

What, however, do I mean by bringing the ego out of the closet? Am I advocating a celebration of the ego trip, of the ‘me generation’, and so on? What would such a proposal have to do with the struggle against the nuclear complex?

I am not saying that just individual egos need to be brought out of the closet; they are a salient example. My proposal is that individual a n d collective egos, of various shapes and sizes, should be brought out of the closet, and become objects of frank and unashamed cultivation, as well as sites of mutual respect. In terms of rigorous work done in the humanities on the theory of narrative, egos are where you and I emerge as individual faces – or you and we emerge as collective micro- or macro-identities – in the narratives that we circulate. Egos are points on which the stories turn.

This proposal of mine rests on the belief, which I urge you to think about and criticize, that war is an irrational response to the legitimate (and, in our social order, irrationally repressed) need to enable a mutually assured cultivation of egos – and to put in place a social agenda that couples this cultivation with a certain taming of its shrewishness. Both the cultivation and the taming take the form of tweaking the narrative formats we have been using.

On my proposal, an intelligent ego-taming enterprise will need to carry out, more effectively, the work for which we have put codes of modesty and politeness in place. (For critical commentary on slightly earlier versions of the hypocritical codes we claim to live by, see Russell 1975.) What I am suggesting is an extension of the way critical and thoughtful persons have been dealing with potentially harmful substances or experiences in recent decades.

Let us take on board the standard view that cultivating one’s individual or social ego is a ‘vice’. A social agenda for taming a ‘vice’ becomes viable only if it is generally acknowledged that ‘vices’ are an excessive response to compelling human needs. Moderation becomes possible only when the needs are admitted, and when people go about seeking moderate ways to satisfy them.

This is not to say that candour is the only strategy to use in all contexts. Waging a long-term social struggle calls for prudent and discreet management of one’s strategies and resources. There are times when you have to be wily.

Consider the case of poor countries where you want to push for applied research and to attract some of the best minds to this sector. If this means pampering the egos of some ‘pure research leaders’ in the richer countries, can you do this in the mode of open trading of ego credits to make the prioritization of applied research for poor countries profitable for all players? In principle you could; but the extension of the ‘carbon credits’ notion to ‘ego credits’ is not something you are likely to accomplish in the short run. Initially, you will have to simply pamper the egos in the richer countries and the pure research niche institutions in the poorer countries, gradually steering this surreptitious enterprise towards the openness of ego credit trading.

I am making this tactical point in order to emphasize the need for strategies to be need-driven and flexible. The overall perspective has to do with the belief that the transition from a militaristic to a peaceful social order involves several distinguishable struggles, which will have to open many ‘fronts’. As we open these ‘fronts’, we will at the same time have to beat our swords into ploughshares, and to learn how to articulate this construction of peace as a specific and new form of labour, which requires methods and resources of its own. If we fail to do this, we ensure that politics remains a continuation of war by other means – and we remain trapped in the nuclear complex even if we strenuously dismantle our nuclear reactors and do research on alternate energy sources with all our might.

The question is how to tame our old sense of ‘might’ that was once coupled with attenuated versions of the view that might makes right; and how to handle the self-righteousness issues – the ego issues – that arise in the course of any struggle that seeks to reverse the might-right equation. My answer is that uninstalling the nuclear must mean carefully and prudently installing a candid but moderate cultivation of individual and collective egos, and recognizing that these enterprises are related to each other and to a reconfiguration of our intellectual and moral universe.

The enterprise of becoming sensitive inhabitants of a nuclearized planet is anything but straightforward, and cannot be pursued by conventional means.

References

Bleich, David. 1988. The Double Perspective: Language, Literacy, and Social Relations. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Kumar, Krishna. 2002. Prejudice and Pride: School Histories of the Freedom Struggle in India and Pakistan. Delhi: Penguin.

Monod, Jacques. Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology. Tr [from the 1970 French original Le hasard et la nécessité] by Austryn Wainhouse. New York: Vintage.

Russell, Bertrand. 1975. Mortals and Others: American Essays 1931-1935. Volume 1. Ed. by Harry Ruja. London: George Allen & Unwin.

probal 1996 deccan herald article on chomsky's politics and linguistics

The Law and not the State: Principled Anarchism

Probal Dasgupta

Noam Chomsky is visiting India. This is a good time to remind ourselves how coherent and far-reaching his voice has been since his name hit the Vietnam war protest headlines in 1965, as a major MIT-based professor of linguistics opposing any US intervention, direct or proxy, in Asia.

His 1967 classic _American power and the new mandarins_ presented what one might call his first politics. It was a coherent message. And it opened many fronts.

The early Chomsky compared the Soviet and American imperial systems. Both of them posed as saviours and developers of their satellite nations – and of their domestic oppressed classes – in the name of a social scientific wisdom about the true path of development.

In both superpowers, the new mandarins, intellectuals pontificating about this true path, legitimized the state. But he noted that while the Soviet system frankly suppressed dissent, the US system stage-managed an appearance of free debate in the media. Only careful analysis shows how this managing is done, by the state aided by intellectuals who sell themselves in return for the comfort of being pets of the system and the virtuous sense of participating in ‘debates’. On issues where the elite itself is divided, the media in a democracy feature differing views within a narrowly defined range determined by elite interests. For example, when the Vietnam war became expensive and unwinnable, the US elite split into ‘hawks’ who wanted to bomb their way to victory and ‘doves’ who felt it was a shame one couldn’t win the war but preferred to write it off as a bad investment. The apparent ‘debate’ between them completely silenced those who felt the intervention was simply immoral and should be stopped regardless of America’s chances of winning it.

Also crucial to Chomsky’s first politics was an emphatic and principled nonviolence (we cannot compete with the state on that score, he said to his fellow protesters, finding it ironic that some of those who wish to stop state violence should indulge in brutal counter-violence at all) implying advocacy of co-operative rather than competitive mechanisms of social articulation. His programme was inspired in part by the early anarchist thinker Kropotkin, who celebrated the co-operative instincts of ordinary people. His other hero, the anarchist pioneer Bakunin, had urged the public to beware of intellectuals, who if rewarded with power willingly accept the job of keeping quiet or even justifying the crimes of the state to the public. Such a critique of the state and its mandarins lay at the heart of the early Chomsky’s view that global discussion options were stifled by a ‘liberal-Leninist’ consensus. Liberal Americans and Leninist Russians agreed that the state, a neutral machine, is to be legitimately used by ‘our side’ to attain just goals.

Thus the world public was deceived into assuming a radical difference between the two cold war powers. In fact, they used different management techniques for similar ends.

Chomsky’s own anarchist position holds the state to be consistently a corrupt and distortive system that coerces, manipulates, deceives.

Those seriously working for the public good cannot attain fair ends by such foul means. This view distances Chomsky from communist images of an intellectual-led revolution founding a scientific state that abolishes all evils. He works instead to strengthen the public’s spontaneous loyalty to justice and legality.

“What legality without the state”, did you say? Chomsky would find this naive. Governments are the criminals who get away with their crimes, he argues in _Pirates and Emperors_.

One factor that might discourage states from routinely committing crimes would be the growth of a world-wide public opinion that favours giving real teeth to interstate institutions like the United Nations and the World Court. Such a climate might stop governments from flouting all the laws they swear by. This public consensus will grow only as people begin to see through the lies they are cynically fed by the media. People don’t always understand the big frauds that all governments perpetrate on them. Consider the asymmetry – exposed by Chomsky’s analyses – between the media’s overcoverage of Khmer Rouge atrocities in Kampuchea and undercoverage of Indonesia’s equally barbaric genocide in East Timor. Unbalanced reporting produces unbalanced public awareness. As the desire of the public for true liberty and civil rights for everybody grows, people will demand accurate information as a right.

For this outcome, a lot of developments need to synchronize. A society must get out of grinding poverty, war, and other emergencies so that its public can begin to worry about issues like civil liberties or the struggle against official deceit. At the top of the global system, international legal arrangements have to emerge from principled negotiation between nations willing to subordinate their sovereignty to the general good. The need for this general good has to be felt by responsible negotiators and the publics they speak for. The public perceives this need, as in the case of ecology, most directly in relation to a home town whose well-being they, as a community, take pride in. Such public interest in the physical and social welfare of communities and their home regions grows as the public starts taking part in economic-political decision-making.

This argument leads to the ideal of self-governing communities, running their economies locally, resisting the wiles of big business and centralized governmental systems. Thus you end up wanting these anarchist arrangements if you really want massive state-and-media deceit to stop. Outsiders running your affairs always manipulate you, and you in your dependence get taken in. Even if you vaguely see what they are doing, you often let them get away with it. Chomsky, an optimist, believes that in the long run people do get acutely angry and impatient with this state of affairs and steadily struggle their way towards self-managed lives. This self-management which he believes will prevail is going to be based on shared principles rooted in universal human common sense.

This deep faith in the power of common sense – rather than the special expertise that intellectuals claim – receives some support from Chomsky’s professional work as a scholar in linguistics. In an unprecedented series of interventions since the 1950s, he single-handedly reversed the earlier tendency to treat languages as well-defined and closed systems that could become the object of description, manipulation, and control by foreign or otherwise alien ‘experts’ – this tendency, known as ‘structuralism’, had attempted to reduce the body of language to a corpus and its principles to a structure. Chomsky created a living discipline, generative grammar, to which he attracted many of the best minds of the time. That line of inquiry made it clear, from the 1950s onwards, that a language is not a dead set of forms that can be circumscribed; it is a living creativity wherein all members of the community have an equal, common, human share, regardless of who the stars are and who the fools. We will return to this topic, to show how Chomsky’s academic work exemplifies the principles of his politics.

Of the many fronts Chomsky’s early politics had opened, he later fought most energetically on a few. It became his main task, as a leading dissident, to set all intellectuals an example of how to make responsible use of the familiar resources of democracies and turn their power against the crimes of the state and its adjuncts like the media.

Issues arise all the time; one need not invent them. It is enough if, on every major issue, those who hold coercive power in the state and intellectual power in the media are held to account.

Your task, as a thinking person, is to expose their crimes publicly according to the known, typically clean rules of the law they claim to abide by. Such exposure keeps demonstrating to us that those who claim to be experts knowing what is best for us in fact consistently cheat us. Thus the public hardens its resolve to be vigilant and prevent such hoodwinking by forcing the system to follow its own rules and be accountable.

The later Chomsky, then, has been working hard to ground our skepticism about governments in our ever deeper loyalty to the law which they claim to defend, but chronically violate.

For him, respect for the law begins in the pan-human search for a transparent, understandable set of living arrangements consistent with common sense.

The end of this search is in sight. Humankind has painfully attained international legal mechanisms, born out of the universal revulsion at such grotesque state crimes as the Holocaust and Hiroshima. To strengthen the hold of the law on human minds, it is vital that responsible thinkers should help the public, on major issues, to see through official verbiage and get at the truth. They must restrain their intellectual flights of fancy. One should not dissipate public energy on adventurous ‘alternatives’ which either collapse without yielding durable arrangements or which, following a frequent route, initially whip up popular enthusiasm for a manifestly good cause but later leave the public chained to a powerful centralised state. Thus Chomsky does not support such gestures as anarchist deschooling or anticapitalist attacks on production as such. In his vision, communities freely labour to produce things for their own and each other’s use, harnessing ever improving technology to these human ends, extending the range of normal scientific means and not wildly abandoning them. This sober approach is crucial to his version of nonviolence.

Chomsky does not blindly endorse all the pollutive doings of the industrial-scientific tradition, of course. He wants environmental health and women’s rights as a matter of the self-improvement of the Enlightenment programme, not as a departure from it. The vigilant self-governing communities he envisages organise the modes and goals of their productive labour. In his vision, this provides a transparent guarantee of a truly environment-friendly, sustainable and fair industrial arrangement that can remove uneven development in all its forms.

However, Chomsky has not pleaded for his vision by producing complex arguments to impress fellow intellectuals.

For the glorification of the market or of undemocratic central planning by states or by private think tanks to stop, and for the co-operative alternative to receive widespread public support, he feels, ordinary public debate must give the new option a truly unshakable footing. Intellectuals can at most aid. They should not seek to lead. Social questions are matters of public decision, not privately discoverable fact, Chomsky believes as a scholar. ‘Behavioural scientists’ who offer a scientific basis for policy recommendations strike him as managers of behaviour and manipulators of opinion trying to subvert freely debated democratic decisions and impose their own views instead. In his early scientific work Chomsky subjected behaviourist psychology to a devastating critique from which behaviourist ideology never recovered. Psychologists still read his 1959 review of B.F. Skinner’s _Verbal Behaviour_ as the classic paper that terminated the behaviourist adventure. The critique of behaviourism rests, as do the arguments for a generative linguistics of living speakers against a structuralism of dead texts, on a breathtaking ‘Chomsky revolution in linguistics’. This revolution, too, focuses on conserving energy, refraining from wild gestures and overextensions, and developing an autonomous alternative by open debate and collective inquiry. The result, a self-sustaining ‘generative enterprise’ of international scientific study of the universal nature of human language, has been a fortress against potential invasions from systems of management, ‘teaching’, ‘control’, and ‘psychology’. The generative picture shows the native speaker of a language as uncontrolled, self-driven, spontaneous. The growth of language in each mind is rooted in an innate biological endowment and spontaneous curiosity reaching out to tune into other active minds. The person is not mechanically ‘taught’ language, but vitally grows it, independently of the tutelage of church, school, or other representatives of the state-machine posing as a nation-community. The generative characterisation of this vitality is widely accepted as the single most insightful picture anyone has ever drawn of language as a ‘mental organ’, as Chomsky puts it, comparing it with the heart or the lungs.

By steadily pleading lack of interest in just how such a linguistics can assimilate into broader (and thus inevitably managerialised) systems of thought – concerning language teaching, or writing ‘complete’ descriptive grammars, or placing language on media-friendly maps of the commonplaces of ‘culture’ – Chomsky and his colleagues everywhere, by visibly focusing on the strengthening of the autonomy of the generative scientific community, by refraining from diluting, mixing, packaging, selling managerial byproducts or otherwise taking populist advantage of the prestige of their research, have been directly practising a positive politics of dignity. The moment they stop insisting that the study of human mental phenomena is modular and that the language module we linguists study is unamenable to the routines of interdisciplinary journalism, generative linguists may have their sharp voice – speaking for the innate autonomy of the rich capabilities of the human mind for self-expression – drowned in the system-driven chorus of various ‘innovative and effective methods’ whereby the manipulators and modifiers of behaviour can tell people what to do. Or so the picture looks to the Chomskyan eye. Surely this is a coherent politics. For some reason, many observers misread the generative enterprise as an ostrich-like modelling of language as a mathematics divorced from social reality and perhaps amounting to reactionary escapism. These are odd, and possibly ill-informed, charges. Chomsky does plead for a linguistics that works with the hard sciences. But that is because the research programme, under his leadership, has been drawing a conclusive, hard-nosed, rich portrait of the human mental endowment with which to effectively challenge the natural sciences to offer biochemical infrastructures that can plausibly underwrite these demonstrated formal capabilities. Thus, in a central domain, Chomsky and his colleagues have forced the techno-industrial system, in this case its scientific sector, to play by rules it claims to uphold. A softer or compromised linguistics would be unable to issue or sustain such a challenge, for it would dissolve into adventurism. Chomsky may not have directly contributed to the ecological wing of the progressive endeavours of our times. But his sustained exemplification of a sustainable politics, on public issues and in his scientific work, leads to the steady and principled growth of local autonomies, to a responsible and non-adventurist support for human spontaneity as the mainspring everywhere of untutored/ authentic action, and thus to a world of healthy environments that learn not to imperially coerce or blackmail each other, but to co-operate. This may not be perfect, or complete, or proof against all criticisms. But I have yet to hear of any other programme that remotely matches its degree of coherence, continuity, reach, and rootedness in everybody’s ordinary, but powerful, shared human attributes.

Deccan Herald 21 January 1996, Sunday Herald section, pp 1 and 4