There is a need to
interrogate concepts such as
‘nation’, ‘sovereignty’ and ‘culture’
to arrive at
more pragmatic ways of living
In one of Buddhism’s
canonical texts, Sangiti-suttanta, monk Sariputta offered an explanation on
why the early Jainas failed to thrive unlike, presumably, he and fellow
Buddhists. He claimed that a great schism had emerged among the Jainas and that
they were bent on killing each other because their “doctrine and discipline
were so ill-proclaimed”.
By ‘ill-proclaimed’, he
meant that keeping the Buddhist sangha together required them to reiterate
their adherence — via chanting and memorisation — to the Buddha’s originary
discourses. In essence, according to Sariputta, an elaborate and intricate
network of Buddhist lives could only thrive and survive if they collectively
tied themselves to the mast of ritual and routine.
Sariputta’s diagnoses of
what can drive groups to divisions — mishearing, misremembering,
misunderstanding the originary discourse, infidelity to the primordial text —
have emerged in various guises over time. Historically, those without any
creedal affiliations to a text, even ostensibly strange ones, were often
described away as ‘barbarians’. Who remembers the Visigoths now? But we are
inundated with Roman history, even if the latter killed many times over.
Privileging the text
By the mid-17th century
in the north Atlantic, this conceit of privileging the text in order to
construct polities found two unexpected allies. One was the Gutenberg
revolution, thanks to which the printed word reached the masses; the other was
the idea of a ‘nation state’. In 1651, when Thomas Hobbes’s book De Cive was
translated into English, which he declared was an effort to perform “a more
curious search into the rights of states, and duties of subjects”, what
followed was a quantum leap with regard to how individuals could
re-conceptualise their loyalties. From being ‘subjects’, individuals slowly
became ‘citizens’, which in turn meant the particularistic loyalty for the king
was transmuted into a more diffuse commitment to the collective. More subtly,
in the era before Hobbes, the mere magnificent presence of the king was meant
to, as philosopher Quentin Skinner describes, “serve as an ordering force”. But
after 16th century, the social contract amongst the governed that we now call
‘the Constitution’ became this ordering force. In some circles, particularly among
the Americans, the Constitution has acquired near talismanic powers in the
imagination of many.
Yet, at its heart, any
Constitution is merely a protocol for coexistence with a specific grammar and
tags to annotate portions of the text. What is striking is that most
Constitutions are smaller in length than an average bestselling novel, yet they
affect so many. For example, the Chinese Constitution is 10,900 words, the
American one is 7,762 words, and even the longest — the Indian Constitution —
is only approximately 1,46,000 words. As a point of comparison, a conventional
high-end car has 100 million lines of software code.
Arguably, humans don’t
need programming and human societies are presumably non-programmable. Yet, out
of these thinly defined protocols — which make up the Constitution — has
emerged an elaborate ecosystem of self-descriptions. Concepts such as ‘national
identities’, ‘sovereignty’ and ‘patriotism’ have an incredible ability to
corral and coax us to act in certain ways, perhaps no differently than bots
that act under the influence of algorithms. In a way, these constructs are
analogous to ‘fat’ applications which are built on ‘thin’ protocols.
Self-perpetuating
institutions
For the past three
millennia, and particularly since the beginning of modernity in the 16th
century, we have had a situation that is not so different from what we see when
we study the architecture of the Internet. On a barebones protocol such as
TCP/IP, as venture capitalist Joel Monegro notes, gargantuan ecosystems such as
Facebook, Amazon and Uber have come about. Much like these ‘fat applications’
that operate solely to extract value and perpetuate themselves, elaborate
institutions have been built, since the beginning of the nation state, whose
sole function is self-perpetuation.
This status quo may have
been adequate a few decades ago. But now, thanks to the scalability,
communicability, and unpredictability of the challenges we face — like climate
change, monetary flows, migration and terrorism — institutions like the police,
central banks, and legislatures that we deem fundamental to society have hit
diminishing returns. We find traditional methods of organising small groups
into large, homogeneous clusters — as many since Sariputta have insisted —
becoming less effective with each passing year.
What are we — the
governed — and those who are governing us to do? One strategy to ensure
peaceful survival seems to be that we muddle along while taking small, creative
steps to progressively recognise many historical and personal forms of
conditioning. As citizens caught in the throes of feeling loyal to a country as
well as appalled by what is done in its name, in our name, perhaps another
answer is to teach ourselves to interrogate more critically concepts such as ‘nation’,
‘sovereignty’, ‘culture’ and hopefully arrive at less orthodox and more
pragmatic ways of living.
Keerthik Sasidharan
The Hindu, Sunday, 18 June 2017
Image courtesy: TLS
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