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How did we get to episode 300?
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When I began The Scene and the Unseen almost 6 years ago, it was an experiment.
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I didn't understand podcasting and this show was so different then.
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But I kept myself open to learning and realized that all my priors about this medium were
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I did not have to cater to short retention spans.
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People want depth, they want nuance, they want serious discussion that is not about
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scoring points or gotcha moments.
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And they are interested in human beings as much as ideas.
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Over this time the shows evolved from 20 minute glimpses of public policy to 2 hour deep dives
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into subjects to 5 hour conversations that are akin to oral history.
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And the deeper my dives, the deeper your engagement.
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So I want to thank all of you for the love you've given me which keeps me going.
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This is not just a matter of great numbers.
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This show is kept alive and financially viable by the contributions of listeners.
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To bring up an old trope of mine, your love ain't just some abstract thing, it's concrete
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and I feel it everyday.
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Now, I celebrated episode 200 with a mega conversation curated by Shruti Raj Gopalan
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in which a whole bunch of my guests asked me questions.
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For episode 300, I've decided not to do something so elaborate but just get a special guest.
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That's what I've done and we had a special conversation.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
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Our weekly podcast on Economics, Politics and Behavioral Science.
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Please welcome your host, Amit Barma.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
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My guest today is Pratap Bhanu Mehta and I was almost tempted not to record the intro
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for this episode because Pratap needs no introduction.
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Pratap is one of my intellectual heroes and I've learnt a lot from him over the years,
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not just from his writing but his way of thinking about a subject.
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All of us, we dig deep as far as our capacity allows and then we stop and the narratives
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we have are the narratives we have.
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But Pratap digs deeper into whatever subject he cares about and keeps himself open more
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than anyone else I know.
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Whenever I read him or interact with him, I feel like I need to step back and learn
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that all my reading so far is inadequate.
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He was my guest in episode 186 of the show and many people still refer to that as their
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Do listen to that if you haven't already.
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These two are like companion conversations in a sense.
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Now that earlier episode was recorded remotely and oddly enough we hadn't met in person
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until I went to Delhi this August and invited him for this chat.
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We spoke about the world and the self, about the personal and the political, about how
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the shape of the world is shifting and how we can try to make sense of it.
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There is more insight per minute in this conversation than in perhaps any episode I've recorded.
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And in it you'll also hear him mention the great Dalit scholar Chandrabhan Prasad and
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when I told him hey I invited Chandrabhanji to the show and he declined, Pratap said don't
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worry I'll make it happen and he did and that episode actually released before this one
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That's just one instance of the kindness I refer to.
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Anyway check out this conversation, I loved it so much but first let's take a quick commercial
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Do you want to read more?
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I've put in a lot of work in recent years in building a reading habit.
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This means that I read more books but I also read more long-form articles and essays.
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There's a world of knowledge available through the internet but the problem we all face is
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Well I discovered one way.
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A couple of friends of mine run this awesome company called CTQ Compounds at CTQCompounds.com
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A few months ago I signed up for one of their programs called The Daily Reader.
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Every day for six months they sent me a long-form article to read.
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The subjects covered went from machine learning to mythology to mental models and marmalade.
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Pratap, welcome to the Scene in the Unseen.
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Thank you for having me.
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I am so glad to be recording this in person.
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The last time we recorded was August 2020 and that of course had to be a remote recording
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because COVID and all of us were kind of hunkered down.
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And I wanted to start by sort of asking you how in these months, you know, how life has
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changed in the sense that I often feel and looking at myself as well that all of this,
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you know, when you move to a different way of life, for example, when I left full-time
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employment more than a decade and a half ago and started working, the texture of your days
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change, you know, what you do with your time changes, your incentives change in terms of
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the things that drive you to action and the things that don't.
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And that changes the work you do, that changes the person you are, so on and so forth.
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And in a sense, you know, one COVID I think forced upon all of us a different kind of
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rhythm of existence where for many men certainly we've had the luxury of, you know, perhaps
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a slower rhythm at times where you're not always up and about.
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For many women, it's a faster, choppier rhythm because there's so much more to deal with
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at home without household help and so on and so forth.
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But in your case, how has the texture of your days changed in a sense?
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And would that same kind of change also apply in terms of no longer running an institution?
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Like in the past, you were running CPR and then you were at a show car and you're much
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more independent in a sense now.
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So how has change been for you in that way?
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So look at one level, you know, as we share the same profession in some senses, you know,
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And I think for that profession, control over your time has always been, I think, much easier
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than in almost any other profession.
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And you know, so at one level, I think if you're a writer, you know, COVID was actually
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a godsend in some ways.
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I mean, you had the luxury of just sitting and writing.
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You didn't have the usual phone calls disturbing you.
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So the sense of control over your time, at least, I think was immense.
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I think the flip side of it is that your sense of how the world operates, I think subconsciously,
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I think changed quite dramatically without you realizing it.
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Partly, I think, you know, the last two years have also coincided with lots of tectonic
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changes in the world, geopolitical changes, economic changes.
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And I think what COVID did was just add to that sense of uncertainty, you're just much
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less in command as it were, or much less confident about your own judgments about what's happening
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Like making a call on the virus, right, when to mask, when is it safe, when is it not safe?
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So that sense of uncertainty and I think anxiety, I think, has also become a part of a kind
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of existential, I think, you know, condition.
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But I have to say, I've also been surprised by just how quickly the world has rebounded
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I mean, yes, we can talk about, you know, changes in rhythms.
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And I think, as I said, I think for our professions, it's easier.
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It is gendered, as you rightly said.
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But if you travel the last six to seven months, frankly, COVID seems like a distant gleam,
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at least in the public space.
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I mean, obviously, it is affecting a lot of lives still.
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The death rates are still quite high in many countries.
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And this has been true of humanity in general, right?
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We always think of these catastrophic events, right?
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The Spanish influenza, right?
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You know, humanity was back to being what it was two or three years later.
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So perhaps in a couple of years, we look back and say maybe it wasn't as tectonic a shift
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in our lifestyles as perhaps it should have been.
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That's also that's a good news story because it shows a certain kind of resilience.
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It may not be a good news story if what that means is we're not learning the right lessons.
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So when you spoke about, you know, it changing the way you perceive how the world operates
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or even right now you spoke about, you know, learning the right lessons.
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Can you elaborate on those?
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So you know, one of the things right for the sense is which our generations have been privileged,
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I mean, you can take any arbitrary cutoff date, people born in the late 60s, early 70s.
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And given the privileged positions we've occupied, one, we've never had to contemplate a truly
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human scale, global scale catastrophe in our lifetimes.
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I mean, we had we have no memory of what that is like, right?
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Our dominant mythology is constant improvement, the promise of greater control over our environment,
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the promise of actually pretty much being able to do anything at will.
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I mean, at least aspirationally, even if it's not accessible to everyone, right?
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And so just the consciousness, right, that actually we might be at a moment where those
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things which we had relegated to the past because we were so confident of our control
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of nature, right, there will be no major pandemic, there will be no major climate change induced
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catastrophe or even if climate change affects it, it's something we can control.
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Nuclear war, interestingly, right, non-negligible risk.
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So I think for our generation, I think it's the first time where you're actually having
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to think about those things that humanity periodically always had to throughout its
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existence till maybe 1945 or something.
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So that's I think one and we never know what those changes actually do.
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I think those changes will play in our psyche subconsciously and slowly.
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I mean, in a sense, we'll see that visible marks I think in a while because partly because
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of the global scale of these challenges, it's not easy to come up with answers of what are
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we supposed to do about it.
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If you look at the decline of civilizations, right, particularly climate induced decline
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of civilizations, I mean, history is littered with civilizations, right, that were pretty
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I mean, we don't know how many of them declined in this valley or whatever, but these civilizations
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continue until one day they don't, right.
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You just look at the heat wave this year, right.
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I mean, the idea that the major rivers of every country from China to France to the
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United States are running dry, it's truly staggering.
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I mean, what it actually does to our sense of possibility.
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So I think it's for the first time again that we are having to think in planetary terms
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because a planetary catastrophe is actually a non-negligible possibility.
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So you kind of mentioned how civilizations assume they're dominant until one day they're
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And that reminded me of this lovely quote by Douglas Adams, which I'm just going to
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sort of read out, quote, imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, this is
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an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me
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rather neatly, doesn't it?
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In fact, it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it.
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This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and
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as gradually the puddle gets smaller and smaller, is still frantically hanging on to the notion
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that everything's going to be all right because this world was meant to have him in it, was
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built to have him in it.
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So the moment he disappears, catches him rather by surprise.
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I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for, stop quote.
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And when you speak about how progress is inevitable, that notion that the arc of history is going
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towards a good place, and I must confess that that's what I believed as well.
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I think it was a default way of thinking for a lot of people that you assumed with the
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collapse of the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall breaking down, all of that, you assumed that
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it was indeed as Fukuyama said, the end of history, though I mean, obviously that's a
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very misinterpreted essay.
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But the general sentiment of the misinterpretation also was something that many people believed
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in, that we've solved many of these problems.
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The authoritarian horrors of the past are surely behind us.
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And wherever they do exist, it will gradually recede in front of the undeniable logic of
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freedom and so on and so forth.
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And I think so many of us have had to sort of recast that notion in the last few years
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to the extent that many will still say, okay, it's a cycle, but it's going to turn back.
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This moment can't last forever.
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You know, what are your thoughts on reconsidering this?
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And the thing is that once we decided that that is the way the world was, that progress
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was inevitable, we also built narratives to explain why that was so.
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And that fed into a framework through which we looked at the world.
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And if the fact is that progress wasn't inevitable, that we can go backwards, then all of those
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frameworks also collapse.
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So in what ways have you sort of changed your thinking, like what are the major ways in
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which you've kind of changed or refined your thinking in the last few years?
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And would you say that this is still something that intellectuals or thinkers or so on are,
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you know, coming to terms with?
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Gosh, as always, what a wonderfully big and profound question.
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And you know, you've opened the door now to speculation, so I hope you won't have bias
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Maybe this is a good moment to kind of step back a little bit from the immediate moment.
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And I think just you using Fukuyama as a kind of benchmark, I think, to look back at the
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arc of history over, let's say, the last 150, 200 years, right?
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Now it seems to me that, you know, when you and I had a confidence in progress, broadly
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speaking, right, in a way it had three different strands to it.
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One is what you might call technological confidence.
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I mean, that's the project of the modern world, which is increasing mastery over nature, right,
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to be able to deliver pretty much what we want at whim, right?
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The different names to it, rationalization of the world, where more and more of the world
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comes under our control, right?
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And our confidence about that took this really radical form that we could actually remake
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nature, right, that we could somehow remake the planetary system.
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We are the kind of infrastructure species in some ways, right?
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You can literally alter the face of the globe.
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But now there are different varieties of it, you know, not just science fiction fantasies,
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but, you know, altering your genes.
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So that sense of the radical reconstitution of nature, not just mastery of nature, radical
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reconstitution of nature, is something that I think had become, I think, common sense,
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right, for, I think, many of us.
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And if you look at the current moment, the only people who seem to be optimists are people
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who are still in that techno solution space.
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I mean, that's like a whole sort of, you know, different universe.
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What energy crisis, you know?
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The cost of solar will be zero in five years, we'll be fine.
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We can synthesize plant-based proteins in labs, we'll be fine in five years, right?
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But I think the question in some senses is whether this techno solutionism, right, is
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actually the right or the adequate approach to this moment.
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So that's, I think, one, I think, you know, I think, in some senses, long term.
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The second project, which was, I think, an interesting one, which I think comes out of
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the French Revolutionary tradition, but I think is at the heart of almost all modern
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politics, right, is creating a political order that is a product of our conscious design,
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right, which in a sense, not just reflects our status as free and equal people, but in
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some senses is not confined by the encumbrances of historical necessity, right?
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There's something willed about it, there's something legitimate about it, there's something
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And I think one of the paradoxes, I think, of our particular moment is that ambition
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of creating a social order that would be justified to all, that's actually the ambition we gave
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So we think of the nation-state form and capitalism just to take two social forms as kind of more
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or less necessary for our social existence, in a way in which we aren't even taking nature
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as necessary for our social existence, right?
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I mean, there's a kind of weight of necessity that comes to our social arrangements that
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is actually quite surprising.
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I mean, that in some senses, you know, that's the paradox of modernity, right?
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We were supposed to remake our societies, we've ended up remaking nature without quite
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remaking our societies.
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And at this moment, right, that poses a particular challenge, which is that if you actually have
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this crisis around, let's say, climate change, around nature, around this project of mastery,
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are these two institutional forms, the nation-state form and broadly capitalism, I'm using it
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Are they actually fit for purpose, for solving the problems that we actually need to solve?
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Are they in some sense as part of the problem?
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And how much of the kind of sense of crisis that we have is the sense that, you know,
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they've delivered lots of goods.
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I mean, you can't imagine modern citizenship outside the nation-state.
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You can't imagine liberating the individual in some senses from the pressure of tradition
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outside of the confines of the nation-state often.
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Capitalism certainly in some forms, at least, has delivered extraordinary levels of material
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prosperity to certain parts of the world.
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But I think there is a palpable sense that we've kind of plateaued in some senses on
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what they can actually provide and whether they can actually solve this problem.
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So in a way, it's an interesting moment where you're kind of opening yourself up to at
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least much more bigger scale thinking that maybe the solution will not just be tinkering
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It will require slightly more radical reimagination of our social forms, holding on to what's
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important in them, right?
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But in some senses, creatively, I think transcending that.
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The third, I think, feature, right, which in some senses was this question of, you know,
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and I know this is a subject that's close to your heart amongst others, you've written
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eloquently about this, the dignity of the individual and individual freedom, right?
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That both the enterprise of liberalism and democracy, psychologically, they rely on
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a certain kind of presumptive trust that people have in each other, right?
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That's partly why you can leave them to their own devices.
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But the presumptive trust is not just that they are going to be good at making judgments
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about things that affect them.
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But the presumptive trust also requires a certain kind of reciprocity.
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That's why in some senses, equality and liberty have always gone together.
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I mean, it's equal liberty for all in some ways, right?
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And I think one of the challenges, I think, in some senses, we see is the foundations
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of what creates societies where there is an adequate level of reciprocity, right?
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And I think reciprocity is the key term here because everything else follows from reciprocity,
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Whether I respect your liberty and you respect mine, I mean, that's a form of reciprocity.
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What are the conditions under which forms of reciprocity are created, right?
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That can sustain levels of trust.
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I don't think we have a good handle on that.
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Some societies for a little while seem to have it a little more than others.
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But the crisis of authoritarianism, the crisis of liberal democracy, the crisis of freedom
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is in part this complete absence of reciprocity, right?
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Which makes any projects for furthering each other's freedom seem almost impossible.
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Yeah, and you went on Shruti's podcast and you spoke about Adam Smith and this is like
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one of the fundamental points you made, which made me think a lot about, it's not just about
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self-interest in Smith's work, it's about reciprocity and that goes a bit deeper.
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In the last episode that we did together, one of the things I mentioned that I think
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about from time to time is how, if I look at the story of human progress, especially
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perhaps in See Enlightenment, one narrative that is there is about how we are using reason,
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which of course we are wired to have reason, but we are using reason to sort of mitigate
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the negative aspects of our hardwiring, right?
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And of course we have contradictory hardwiring, we are hardwired for both tribalism and altruism
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and so on and so forth.
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But we mitigate the negative aspects of that by actually thinking about it and realizing
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that no, I might be hardwired to have kids, but I don't want kids, or I might be hardwired
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to be tribalistic and hate the other, but hey, no, we are all the same, right?
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And you use reason in that sense.
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And it seems to me that that might, in a way, again, there was an illusion of progress there,
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that reason is proceeding, but in a way it may be a bit of a losing battle or at least
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a really difficult battle if I look at modern times, because every newborn baby is born
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with the hardwiring that is there, but without, you know, the rest of the work remains.
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And it's so easy for those knobs to be turned, as it were, the tribalism knob and the violence
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knob and all of those kind of knobs to be turned.
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So that's sort of what, you know, what kind of worries me a bit.
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And in a sense, I think also the tech solutionism that you mentioned could also, you know, have
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relevance with how a lot of people think about the second problem that you mentioned, about
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a political order and capitalism and all of that.
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And my sense is that the tech solutionism takes us to a space where we imagine that
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all problems are solvable.
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Now obviously all problems are not solvable, there will be a time the planet won't exist
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at all, there will be a time much before that that humans won't exist on the planet, and
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those are long term problems, but we can push them away.
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But you know, what I think, you know, capitalism and building certain political orders with
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institutions and all of that can solve limited problems, but not deeper problems.
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For example, capitalism can help people get what they desire, but it cannot shape what
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And if what they desire is not something that we with a liberal mindset would consider,
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hey, these are the things you should desire, then we sort of have an issue there.
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I mean, I'm kind of rambling a bit, but I totally get where you're coming from.
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And I'll ask you to double click on the second of those points.
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You know, in a different space, you've also written about how we are prisoners of an 18th
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century conception when it comes to the state and its institutions and all that.
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Can you elaborate on that a bit?
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So with your permission, can I back up to your very important point about reason, actually,
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because I actually think it is something we don't get to discuss often.
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I mean, I think in some ways, you know, I think we, as you said, reason has become,
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again, a common part of our kind of ideological repertoire and we move forward with it.
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So when we think of reason, right, and whether you take the Enlightenment project, but not
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just the Enlightenment project.
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I mean, I think sometimes identifying reason with the Enlightenment project, you know,
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also makes it much more culturally specific than reason is.
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I mean, you know, there have been rational people, rational thinkers all across, right?
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I think we have to understand three or four things about reason, right?
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And this is the hard part, I think.
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So one, I think is, look, even rationality as a history in some ways.
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And by that, I mean, not the proposition that everything is relative to culture, right?
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But things that are taken as expressions of rational behavior will actually vary.
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And in some senses, reason itself cannot adjudicate between that variation, right?
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What do you want to optimize on in your life, right?
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Lots of plausible candidates, right?
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Most of them are probably rational candidates, right?
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I mean, you could make a case for them after reflection, right?
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But reason in some senses is always going to under-determine many of the ends we would
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want to actually pursue.
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And I think this is an insight I think pluralists have had everywhere, I mean, whether it's
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kind of Jain, or you know, or Isaiah Berlin in some senses, right?
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That the idea that reason over-determines your choices, right?
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The way we think of it in mathematics, once you've seen 2 plus 2 equals 4, you cannot
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but believe that and there is no other option, right?
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For most of the things that in some senses matter to our lives, right?
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Reason will under-determine your choices, okay?
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And I think a lot of the pools we feel around the conflicts of values, right?
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The harder cases are one where they're actually between reasonable choices.
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It's not that people, I mean, it's not that somebody who says, look, I want to lead a
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somewhat traditional sedate life, you know, like the comforts of community, like the comforts
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of predictability, is actually being unreasonable, as opposed to somebody who says, look, I want
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to jet-set across the world, I want to sort of just mix cultures, I want to, I mean, you
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can make plausible cases that they're actually both fulfilling ways of living a life, right?
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And it's not clear that reason is going to be able to, in some senses, adjudicate between
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So reason under-determines that.
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The second, I think, challenge with reason is whether the caste of the world is inherently
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And by tragic, one just means the idea that lots of good things cannot coexist together,
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So if you are building a community that's actually optimizing on familiarity, the comfort
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of knowing each other intimately, versus building a community where you have the strength of,
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you know, weak ties, as it were, or let's say you're optimizing on efficiency versus
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optimizing on localism.
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Again, both are reasonable in some sense, but both cannot exist in the same social structure
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in the same social space, right?
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And I think this is something I think many liberals did understand, that I think there
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is a kind of tragic caste to the world, and I think the excessively rationalist liberalism
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that actually denies that there is a kind of loss here, is actually missing out something.
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It itself is being, I think, unreasonable, right?
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So there's a second, I think, dimension to this, I think, this tragic caste of the world.
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The third dimension to reason, and now I'm coming to the point about the state in some
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ways, right, which is perhaps related to the tragic caste of the world, is that, you know,
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some of the big challenges that we face do not arise from things that are straightforwardly
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I mean, that would be easy to, in some senses, pinpoint and identify, right?
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Let's take the theme you used, tribalism, right, where I'm in complete agreement with
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I mean, I tend to just think collective pronouns are generally deformations of individual moral
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I think collective pronouns, in some senses, I think, mutilate individuality often in ways
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that are quite hurtful for both morality and creativity.
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But if you think of the modern forms of tribalism, what makes them potent, what makes them ominous,
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is not that, you know, we are tribal, that we want some kind of, you know, fuzzy feeling
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of sort of belonging or, you know, living in communities that are the same.
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I mean, you know, there could be versions of that that are actually quite livable, quite
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harmless, quite benign.
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It is that it has become tied with a political form that we actually value for independent
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So if you think of modern democracy, right, I mean, and what makes modern tribalism really,
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you know, extraordinary, both in its attraction and in its destructive power, is modern democracy
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raises the question, who constitutes the people?
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The question of who is the people is going to raise the question of membership, who gets
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to be in and who gets to be out.
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And again, the tragic cast of the world, that unless you believe in a universal community,
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a form that is actually organized under a single political form, the question of inclusion
#
and exclusion will remain at the heart of democracy, it's unavoidable, right?
#
Modern states require taxation, deep forms of taxation, they do so many more things for
#
us than ancient states and medieval state, I mean, they literally reconstitute us in
#
every single way from kind of healthcare, education, pastoral care, you just, you know,
#
you can name it, right?
#
So to generate the kinds of resources they require, it requires very different forms
#
In some ways, you really do have to think of this as a shared enterprise in a way in
#
which perhaps a medieval citizen doesn't, I mean, you know, kings come and go, politics
#
dances lightly at the surface, so long as you're not messing too much around, right?
#
With either my life or my inherited social forms, I don't particularly care, right?
#
And the modern state was also the necessary instrument for all these technological projects
#
that we imagined in some ways, right?
#
So we want all those good things from the modern state, right, democracy, greater enhancement
#
in our collective power, right?
#
But those things also require very different forms of solidarity, and that solidarity has
#
a name in the modern world which is nationalism, I mean, modern nationalism is modern in some
#
ways, I mean, tribalism has always been around, right?
#
But this form of tribalism then, you know, when it allies two things, right, greater
#
requirements of identification and solidarity with greater power, because now you also have
#
the state as an instrument, right?
#
You actually have a perfect storm on your hands.
#
So I think the issue, as the way I see it, the issue is not, are we hardwired for tribalism?
#
I mean, at a 30,000 feet level, that's probably true that other things being equal, we might
#
feel more comfortable in contexts that are familiar, people that are familiar, certain
#
kinds of solidarities in some senses might be easier, right?
#
That has always been around.
#
But the specific form it takes in the modern nation state, right, is of a completely different
#
And as I said, the disquieting news is that a lot of it stems from the good things we
#
want from the state, right, again, the tragic character of many of these institutions.
#
So here's a thought on reason and perhaps part of the tragic cause of the world itself.
#
Have you heard of, there was a neuroscientist called Michael Gazzaniga, have you heard of
#
Yeah, I don't know the work well, but yes, I have.
#
So he carried out these experiments on split-brain epilepsy, where apparently for a particular
#
kind of epilepsy, the way to cure it was to severe the corpus callosum, if I remember
#
correctly, basically what connects the right brain to the left brain, and the right brain
#
controls the left side of the body and vice versa.
#
You know, while carrying out these procedures on patients like this, he carried out an interesting
#
experiment where the right side of the brain, which is more intuitive and all of that, would
#
be given a particular instruction, like raise your hand or ask for water or whatever, and
#
the person would do it, like if he sees a sign, raise your hand, he'd raise his hand.
#
Then he'd be asked, why did you raise your hand?
#
And because there is no connection between the right side and the left side of the brain,
#
the other side of the brain would then make up an explanation for that, that my armpits
#
were itchy, for example.
#
I mean, I'm just kind of thinking aloud in terms of, I don't remember the specific examples,
#
but basically, and Gazzaniga's point was that he called the left side of the brain the interpreter,
#
And the point was that the person did not raise his hand because the armpit was itchy,
#
but that is what the person actually believes because a part of the brain, which he called
#
the interpreter, came up with that explanation.
#
And to me, this is sort of a metaphor for a larger thing, a larger phenomenon, which
#
is that often we are not reasoning, we are rationalizing, that we do what we do, we follow
#
impulses without even being aware of them ourselves, and then we cloak it in the garb
#
And I'm sure we both had occasion to think about this in recent times, where both in
#
the US and in India, people who otherwise seemed principled, whether it's people within
#
the Republican Party who once upon a time supported trade and so on and so forth, are
#
now supporting Trump despite the fact that he goes against all the values they deeply
#
believed in, or people in India, for example, who supported Modi in 2014, which is fine,
#
you could support him for good reasons then, but who continued supporting him after it
#
became apparent that his actions go against all the principles they espouse.
#
And therefore the conclusion to draw there, and a rather depressing conclusion for me,
#
is that they never really believed in the principles or the worldview that they espoused.
#
They had instead joined a tribe or taken a position, and now they are part of that, and
#
they'll rationalize as much as they need to to kind of stay there.
#
And therefore the thought that comes to my mind is that, is reason an illusion?
#
That even when you and me sit, you know, we have also cast ourselves in the world in a
#
We play a certain role in our little ecosystems, whatever they are, and we are looked at by
#
people in a certain way, and we are going to continue along those paths.
#
Like, for example, I have come to believe that there cannot possibly be free will.
#
However, we must keep behaving as if there is.
#
So in a similar sense, and I'm thinking aloud here, that, you know, you could argue that
#
we must continue trying to be reasonable, even though perhaps reason is impossible.
#
Is that then part of the tragic cast of the world, as we say, that we are all playing
#
this game where even we are not completely in control of what we do and what we think
#
So there's a there's a lot there's lots in what you said, actually, I mean, again, very
#
So one point, which I'll just say and kind of put aside, because I'm not sure I'm kind
#
of competent to talk about it, is there is no question that there is a kind of depth
#
to our psyche that we don't fully understand.
#
And when you can come at this through psychoanalysis, whatever else one may think about Freud, I
#
think this idea that in a sense, even our overt reasonable actions may actually be overdetermined
#
in some senses, thick with causality, in a way which we don't understand.
#
I think that idea is the text like the yogvaj, vashisht in some senses, you know, with our
#
psyche has just layers and layers and layers and layers and what in some senses moves us
#
is not something that is actually fully graspable by us.
#
And in some senses, you know, the if you think of the entire Indian tradition, why the problem
#
of consciousness is central to it, right?
#
Because in part, the problem of consciousness is actually related to the problem of reason
#
and unconscious in some ways, right?
#
What would it mean for us to be fully transparent to ourselves?
#
And who is the it that is transparent and who are they transparent to, right?
#
So in that sense, yes, I mean, I think and you could actually argue that despite advances
#
in science, I think our understanding of the psyche is probably no more sophisticated than
#
it was, you know, when the authors of the yog, vashisht or when Plato were writing.
#
I mean, there is a kind of and perhaps I think for those authors, I think it was easier to
#
comprehend it because there wasn't this mythology that we are fully in control of ourselves.
#
In some senses that actually I think much more aware of those kinds of demonic forces,
#
rationalizations that actually take place, right?
#
And that's where I think, you know, I think we do have a kind of question of how far has
#
reason succeeded in bringing enlightenment, right?
#
But there's another aspect, I think the reason rationalization story that he said, which
#
is quite fun, which is fundamentally when we think of reason, you can think of it as
#
And this is the way psychologists study it.
#
But there's a reason why most of the thinkers of the enlightenment and not just thinkers
#
of the enlightenment, again, any philosophical tradition has always thought of reason as
#
And by social activity, I mean, the idea that the norm of what counts as valid is intersubjectively
#
It's not just you saying, I have applied my reason, right?
#
If you think of the practice of science in some senses, right, the practice of science
#
requires agreement upon a method on what counts as valid inference or a valid experiment in
#
Partly it's to check this conflation of subjectivism and reason, right?
#
The surest check of whether it's a rationalization or not is that when you present the logic
#
of your justification, can somebody else enter into that logic of justification and see through
#
Even Immanuel Kant, I mean, one of the most profound things he said in a sense is reason
#
and freedom have an intimate connection.
#
One of the reasons we value freedom is in part to make this intersubjective exchange
#
as free as possible, right?
#
Now the question then becomes in what are the areas, right, where you have a reasonable
#
level of intersubjective agreement over what counts as a reasonable answer to this question.
#
And again, to put it a little bit crudely, I mean, this is a gross oversimplification,
#
but many would argue that in the case of certain forms of science and mathematics, that is
#
probably in some sense of the case, philosophical logic, right?
#
Now there was this hope that the same kind of sociality of reason could actually be applied
#
to human affairs, right?
#
That's the big idea of the modern democratic public sphere, right?
#
Only those governments are legitimate that pass laws that are freely accepted by everyone,
#
And so you have to engage in dialogue, you have to engage in that reciprocity, right?
#
Now the problem with that story to my mind, again, I think story to keep harping on the
#
reciprocity themes, is that it actually presupposes that I'm granting you a standing in the same
#
space that I am to begin with.
#
And that's the hardest part in the model point of view, right?
#
Because once you've granted that, then lots of things become possible, right?
#
So that was one, I think, weakness in that story that I think we still don't have an
#
account of what is it that induces people to take broadly what we call the model point
#
And the model point of view by its character has to be universalizable.
#
The point about universalizability is not that everybody is the same.
#
The point about universalizability is that everybody can partake in the reasoning and
#
see yes, this is a genuine reason, not just your arbitrary whim, right?
#
So I think the second thing I think about, I think this intersubjective agreement in
#
the public sphere is, and this reverts back to the point about the psyche and the unconscious,
#
you know, when we teach political theory, there's one exam question we always set students,
#
which is what does a particular theorist fear most, right?
#
And in some senses, you can actually deduce a lot of what they're writing from that fear.
#
My computer science friends will say the flip side of it is what are you trying to optimize
#
So those who fear the tyranny of the state end up favoring limited government.
#
Those who fear, let's say societies like India, the social experience of incredibly humiliating
#
inequality, right, will perhaps be open to a slightly greater role for the state, right?
#
Now I think the interesting question to me in all of these conversations, the examples
#
of the Republicans and so forth, right, is what is the core fear that is getting them
#
to take the position that they are in fact taking?
#
And you can spot a rationalization, right, where either the purported solution is actually
#
not answering, the fear that the state is the fear, right?
#
I mean, that's one hint in some senses, right, in some way.
#
So for example, old fashioned conservatives would say that, look, you know, our concern
#
with liberals is they're not ethical, they're not moral or family values, right?
#
It turns out, you know, Trump's hardly a supporter of family values in any sense.
#
It's a clear case, right, where it's becoming obvious that that was not the fear that was
#
The family values thing was a code for something else.
#
And now that circumstances have changed, that code in some senses can be, I think, dispensed
#
And I think what we are having a hard time, I think, in our democracies is finding a way
#
to articulate and express those fears in a way in which they can become the object of
#
some kind of mutual resolution.
#
Now one reason for that may be that you don't want a mutual resolution, right?
#
This is often the case between groups, racism, for example, right, that if it is your unstated
#
fear that the demographic power of your community is going to lose, you will also be socialized
#
by reason enough to say that you can't actually say those things because it violates all kinds
#
of norms of equality and liberty, right?
#
Then you're in a political discourse where you're being motivated by something that can
#
never be subject to any kind of intersubjective validation.
#
And that's, in a sense, a disaster for politics, right?
#
And the first one just taking off from this is, I mean, I love that question about what
#
That kind of explains so much.
#
I mean, there is that famous saying about where you stand depends on where you sit.
#
It therefore strikes me that what might be happening in modern politics is therefore
#
this kind of vicious circle where we are all pushed to the extremes.
#
So let us say that there are two parties, let's not call them right and left or conservatives
#
and progressives or whatever, but just in a thought experiment, there are two parties.
#
Each one fears the other one gaining dominance.
#
And their expression of that fear is a movement to the extremes of their own position, right?
#
And this is exacerbated by, say, social media, which amplifies everything.
#
And which amplifies this drive to the extremes because the only way you raise your status
#
within your tribe is by doing more and more posturing and being more and more shrill and
#
judgmental and pure, as it were.
#
And therefore, what happens is that what you fear when you look at the other side and you
#
see this happening, what you fear is becoming more fearful.
#
And therefore, both sides are becoming more afraid.
#
And as a response to that, more and more fearful, till they are eventually caricatures of what
#
And there is no longer that sort of middle ground, right?
#
Like, for example, our dominant way of thinking about politics once used to be that there
#
is always this move to the center, like there's a median voter theorem that the Democrats
#
and the Republicans may swing to the extremes in the primaries to get the true believers
#
in, but they'll swing to the center.
#
And therefore, in 2016, the two candidates you would have expected were Hillary Clinton
#
and Jeb Bush, who are pretty much identical, slight difference in the interest groups which
#
influence them, but they're both very centrist.
#
And instead, you had what appeared to be a black spawn event, but now no longer seems
#
And it now seems that both parties are swinging more and more towards their extreme ends.
#
So what's your sense of this?
#
Because just looking at the processes involved in this and the incentives and the imperatives
#
involved in this, it would seem like this is a vicious circle out of which we cannot
#
So, I mean, let me kind of dimmer with you a little bit, I think, because again, I think
#
that three or four things that need to be discussed, three or four levels of the argument,
#
So one, I'm actually not convinced entirely that there's evidence that the middle ground
#
It's certainly not reflecting in the politics that we are seeing, because the very same
#
opinion polls that show political polarization, actually on a lot of issues show a lot of
#
and quite remarkable convergence, actually.
#
And it is actually remarkable how on most issues, large numbers of people actually turn
#
out to be pretty moderate in some ways.
#
So if that is the case, then I think there's a particular question about, is there something
#
about the institutional designs that we have that percolate public opinion, at least with
#
the way they are channeled through politics, that actually produces a polarized politics
#
that is actually quite out of sync in some senses with a lot of the values common ground
#
And I would like to think that I think a lot of it is, I think, I think this is the case.
#
I think there is an institutional story here.
#
In the US, you could probably tell an institutional story about the nature of the primaries.
#
I mean, there's a lot of kind of good literature that one of the reasons you did not see actually
#
all polarization in the old sense, although the US has had a history of it, by the way,
#
I think there's a lot of amnesia around the fifties and the sixties.
#
But even if we grant that polarization has increased, the way candidates used to be selected,
#
parties used to be more controlled by party bosses, which provided a level of mediation.
#
Actually one of the paradoxical consequences of primaries is that in primaries only your
#
So in some senses, you are actually appealing to your base.
#
There's a second phenomenon, which is the division into red and white states.
#
Now the reason that that produces radicalism in the parties is that if you are competing,
#
let's say in a democratic state, the only way you differentiate yourself from your democratic
#
computer is actually by wearing slightly more left, which is a very different logic than
#
if you actually had to compete with somebody on the right where you try and actually triangulate.
#
If you look at the voting patterns, I mean, let's not forget the popular vote still goes
#
in the favor of Democrats.
#
There is the particular artifact of American institutions, which gives lots of veto powers
#
to small minorities, an old senator from a small state.
#
So you could actually argue that the processes of channeling popular will are no longer fit
#
And it goes back to what do you fear most?
#
In the 18th century, when the American constitution was set up, there were two big fears.
#
One was the fear of tyranny, which was the fear of monarchy in some ways.
#
And the second was the concern for federalism because the American compromise rested on
#
allowing slavery, which could be justified only a federal compact.
#
That's why American institutions were designed the way they were.
#
Lots of these little veto points.
#
They're trying to answer a slightly different problem from a problem of how do you actually
#
channelize, let's say collective action and climate change, where the very same thing
#
that's actually a virtue when you want to perhaps defend liberty, that maybe five judges
#
can actually hold up a piece of tyrannical legislation.
#
That's a different matter.
#
In principle, they could.
#
Actually is a liability, where one senator who, again, great for federalism, every state
#
can exercise power in the system, turns out that that's a liability.
#
So I think some of the radicalism question I think is actually really about that kind
#
of political institutional design question.
#
There's a third level that you pointed out, which I think is quite important and deep.
#
And there you feel something about the ground which we are occupying is shifting.
#
That has to do with the nature of modern media and communication and social media in particular,
#
but not just social media.
#
Now one way of thinking about that, and again, to kind of step back, look at the longer arc
#
So most of us assume that proper communication requires the sharing of some context.
#
Interpreting any gesture, is it a twitch or a wink to use the famous example from Gilbert
#
Ryle, requires thick knowledge of that context.
#
Let us say you tweet tomorrow, you just tweet a picture of Lord Ganesh, this 55 possible
#
meanings I could attribute to your tweet.
#
Maybe you just like this painting, maybe you are a devout Ganesh Bhakt, maybe you are subtly
#
trolling somebody, who knows, maybe you're religious, maybe you're sacrilegious.
#
Now one of the things that I think has happened is that our modern forms of communication,
#
particularly when you're doing it on a mass scale and without the mediation of organizations,
#
there is a easy decontextualization and recontextualization of everything, which is making the meaning
#
of pretty much anything that you say or do, actually pretty unstable.
#
Now postmodernists would point out that we've been always saying this about communication.
#
There's always a kind of slipperiness to communication, that what makes meanings of terms intelligible
#
is a lot of that shared context.
#
Now once that opens up, you actually have forms of argument where there's no space,
#
where there's no institutional mechanism for saying, okay, what are the protocols of truth
#
What counts is a good answer to this question.
#
All you see in a sense is the expression of those fears, the expression of something that
#
by itself actually is quite unintelligible, even without that thick context.
#
And what it allows you to do is it allows you to mobilize constituencies that are no
#
So let's say for argument's sake, I was a religious conservative.
#
If my focus was my community, I might have to come to compromise with you, you have to
#
Now I can actually get empowered by somebody sitting in the US, oh my God, yes, this is
#
part of my like repertoire, your sense of empowerment.
#
And it's quite remarkable almost all the cultural trends that we see right now, good, bad, whether
#
it's the beheading for blasphemy, whether it is wokeism, they go global almost instantaneously.
#
Now if your sense of community in some senses doesn't put you in a position to actually
#
have to compromise because you're now drawing your empower, perhaps even your revenue from
#
some place else, your incentives to communicate in some ways go down.
#
So you almost feel in the public sphere, imagine a kind of situation where we simply could
#
not communicate with each other because we don't understand each other's languages.
#
I mean to compliment you, I say Amit, you're smart and you hear something else, you hear
#
smart aleck in the word smart, because the context doesn't actually in some senses make
#
So I think there is something about our information order, something about communications that
#
is actually making that central enterprise of democracy, which is mutual justifications,
#
I think much more difficult.
#
I'll just add one last final point on this, because you said something a while ago which
#
I should have picked up on, this was capitalism can satisfy people's desires, but it cannot
#
The standard critique of capitalism has always been the opposite in some.
#
No, no, I get that completely, how we are manipulated by…
#
That in a sense, it's in a sense the production of desire and the delivering then of that
#
desire to particular structures of commercial exploitation.
#
But I think one kind of general I think worry about that is not just that we are open to,
#
I think in some senses manipulation, but think of an equilibrium where every act of communication
#
is really a kind of form of monetization, either in terms literally of money, or if
#
nothing else in terms of fame, where the very activity of communication is actually completely
#
colonized in some senses by these imperatives.
#
Now I'm not saying that that is actually the case.
#
In fact, it is remarkable to me how when we have conversations like this, we often end
#
Smaller groups tend to agree more.
#
You take people out to a restaurant and chat with them, they agree more.
#
So it's not that all forms of communication are colonized, but the increasing colonization
#
and that colonization is also now reflected in each of the institutions of communication,
#
whether it's television, whether it's newspapers, frankly, even universities at the margin.
#
Whether that colonization puts us in a situation where we say, actually we are using words,
#
we are looking at an audience, but we are actually not engaging in communicative rationality
#
Yeah, I mean, there could be an argument at all.
#
Communication has always been like this if one were to feel that we treat other people
#
No, by this point about desire, I'd say it's orthogonal to my point in the sense that,
#
I remember a few years ago, I was chatting with Pratik Sinha of Alt News, and this was
#
It was not on the episode I did with him, but off site somewhere.
#
And he mentioned that in his early fact checking days, he came across this fake news that had
#
been spread about some leader.
#
And he tried to get to the bottom of this fake news, and he did his normal brilliant
#
forensic work and figured out where it originated, and he named the site that it originated here.
#
So after publishing that, he gets a WhatsApp message from someone saying, ki bhaiya, I
#
am that person you kind of named, it originated with me, can I talk to you?
#
So Pratik says, okay, and the guy calls him, and he's some 15 or 16 year old kid in some
#
small town or village somewhere.
#
And he points out that he had started a site and he only wanted to be viral, right?
#
He was just after virality because that is where the money comes from.
#
And he tried many different kinds of content.
#
But the one that clicked was the bigoted nonsense, right?
#
And so that's a market pressure.
#
And then he kind of went along those lines because why resist that?
#
And that's an example that, yeah, I agree with you that a lot of what social media does
#
these platforms do is they're always manipulating us kind of to want whatever they are selling.
#
But the truth in this case was that this was a capitalist tool of empowerment, but it was
#
being used to satisfy a desire that you and I would frown upon.
#
No, no, totally agree with you.
#
I actually I don't mean to suggest in fact, I'm actually very skeptical of arguments that
#
say that the root cause of our malaise is actually just these communication structures.
#
And I think there are two reasons for resisting that.
#
I mean, one, of course, it's not the first time in history that human beings are threatening
#
to be at each other's throats.
#
And our ancestors also did that pretty well in different forms, right?
#
But I think the form in which it is channelized does actually make a difference.
#
Because I mean, you remember that great line from Kant, right, in a sense, a lot of liberal
#
society's aspirations is to get devils to live together, right, which is it's not so
#
much the hope that we are kind of deeply transformed all the way down.
#
It is to create institutional channels where all of this can be in some sense is discharged
#
harmlessly or relatively safely.
#
And I think that is something that I think this this virality and commercialization can
#
upset in some ways, right, just by the strength of numbers.
#
I think the second thing I think which why one should resist the conclusion that it's
#
all that I think a lot of politics is actually still pretty old fashioned.
#
And I think this is a message the right has grasped, I think, much more strongly than
#
the left, even though the right uses social media, at least until recently was using it
#
quite effectively, right, which is that you have to have a certain kind of presence in
#
people's lives to be able to tap into these latent fears.
#
There's a certain kind of political credibility that familiarity brings, right.
#
That's what civil society organizations of the right do.
#
I mean, even the RSS when it is as it's most successful, it doesn't go in there saying,
#
we have come to propagate this ideology.
#
It just makes itself felt and its presence familiar in all kinds of ways.
#
I mean, there's this wonderful book by Long Kumar on, you know, the RSS in the Northeast,
#
the rise of the BJP in the Northeast, an unlikely site for the rise of the BJP.
#
It's a 15, 20 year project.
#
You come and you make yourself a useful part of the social fabric.
#
This is what churches and Tea Party did in some senses in the US, right.
#
And I think the interesting question, I think for the center that you were talking about
#
is that center, if you want to call it center left, has in recent times been much weaker
#
in some senses at creating those structures of familiarity where people are willing to
#
turn to them and say, yeah, I see, you know, how you might be able to address actually
#
Partly, I think because we were, I think, victims of our own sort of determinism in
#
There's a logic to democracy that makes it centrist.
#
It's not the work of politics.
#
That was determinism one.
#
It's cross cutting social identities that make sure that there is no hegemonic victory.
#
Determinism number two.
#
And broadly speaking, that was what the centrist platform in India was.
#
I mean, it was, it became entitled in that way.
#
So we just don't have that kind of presence, right, that it actually takes to make people
#
comfortable to mobilize identities.
#
So I do want to, I think, emphasize this point that old fashioned politics actually matters
#
a lot more than we think.
#
So let me go back to something you said earlier, which is a profound point about media where
#
you pointed out how it's a decontextualizing machine, right.
#
So I might say something which is so easy to take out of context and misinterpret.
#
And my fundamental principle for all interactions is just assume goodwill, right?
#
Assume goodwill, engage in good faith, unless you have reason not to trust that the other
#
person is, you know, means the best and don't take the worst interpretation out of it.
#
Now I think what this decontextualizing machine therefore does is that it also reduces empathy
#
because what happens therefore is that I keep talking on my show about sort of the distinction
#
between the abstract and the concrete, right.
#
And in the concrete, I can sit with you and we can be friends.
#
In the abstract, somebody might say that, Oh, Mr. Mehta is this and Mr. Mehta is that
#
and give me these big abstract terms and I can get carried away by them.
#
Now while of course, many of the values that I hold dear like liberty and freedom and so
#
on are abstract terms are danger and modern times I think really comes from abstract terms
#
like nationalism and the sense of the other and all of that.
#
You know, a great example of this came from Achal Malhotra in an episode she did with
#
me on her book about the memories of partition, where she spoke about how she was in Pakistan
#
and she was sitting with a family out there and they were talking about what they had
#
endured while coming over.
#
And they were ranting and raving against Hindus before one of them realized that, you know,
#
they have a Hindu with her and they said, ki tum nahi beti, tum theek ho, right.
#
So in the abstract, they hate it in the concrete, they are perfectly okay.
#
And I think what the decontextualizing machine does is that it creates a kind of thin engagement
#
and therefore you're not concrete enough.
#
Like one of the reasons that, you know, my guests don't get trolled for what they say
#
on the show is that this show is, you know, by virtue of its length and the approach that
#
I take and all of that creates a kind of thick engagement.
#
The kind of people who come here are not the kind of people who are looking for gotcha
#
They understand you, they might disagree with you, but they get it.
#
You're a human being, they're not going to, you know, court tweet you and attack you on
#
Twitter and all the other sort of nonsense that goes on.
#
And what I think about sometimes and what I don't have an answer to is that it seems
#
clear to me that, you know, we need to live more in the concrete to relate with each other
#
You go to a cafe today or you watch a family around a dining table and everybody is staring
#
into their smartphone in an abstract world that is fleeting and temporary and so on and
#
not actually engaging with each other in the concrete.
#
And the question I'm trying to grapple with again is that the trend of this increasing
#
How can it be reversed?
#
How can people like us, you know, how can we begin to move again in a direction where,
#
you know, we embrace the concrete a little bit more?
#
So again, what a wonderful question.
#
I can think of three dimensions of this, I think, concrete abstract distinction, very
#
helpful distinction that you made.
#
And I think the three have different logic, so maybe require different kinds of solutions.
#
So the first is to say that, look, there is a first where the articulation of our values
#
I'm for rights, I'm for humanity.
#
And this was an old riposte against the enlightenment, you know, they love human mankind, but they
#
I mean, that was the standard trope against Rousseau, you know, in some senses, he loves
#
all of humanity, just hates his children, right?
#
But there is a more sophisticated version of it where, which I think globalization enhances
#
where, you know, our lives are finite and our attention is finite and our capabilities
#
And what that means is to quote William James's great phrase, we are always going to be partially
#
I mean, that just is an existential condition.
#
Now in a globalized world with this form of communication, our partial blindness is almost
#
always an invitation for somebody else to accuse you of hypocrisy.
#
You're caring about X group of refugees, why not Y?
#
Actually fair question as a question of justice, as a question of principle, right?
#
But as a way of, in some senses, targeting and impugning somebody, right?
#
Which of us isn't partial in the way we live, we are embodied finite creatures, right?
#
But we are in a generalized condition where I think that sense of finitude and partiality
#
is now actually a kind of weaponized tool against each one of us, right?
#
So we both have to use abstract terms like liberty and we'll be hoist by our own petard.
#
So that's I think one kind of abstraction, right?
#
I think the second has to do with nationalism and in particular tribalism, which is a very
#
different kind of abstraction, right?
#
It's a different kind of abstraction in the sense that it's an abstraction that we, that
#
many people feel empowers them, right?
#
And it empowers them partly because it gives us the ability to live vicariously.
#
I mean, I have no batting skills, but I can get a high seeing, you know, Virat Kohli's
#
And that's the peculiar alchemy of nationalism in some ways.
#
I mean, it really, you know, I think in that sense, it's actually not abstract, the affect
#
But in some senses, it has two downsides.
#
One is of course that it slots people into boxes, right?
#
At one level, it becomes our sovereign identity.
#
This is the most important thing you are, which you should never be.
#
Whatever else the nation might be, it should never be the most important thing in your
#
I think it's morally deeply problematic.
#
It's instrumentally useful for various things.
#
So one, there's a kind of sovereign authority that nationalism claims, right?
#
Which is, I think, destructive of modern life, because in some senses, it impedes a certain
#
But because it relies on a kind of vicarious identification, it actually takes away from
#
that concreteness and individuality, right?
#
Because in that universe, the first thing when I see you is your group identification.
#
That's the first slot, right?
#
Everything else will fall after that.
#
You know, do you have five kids?
#
You know, what drives you, what struggles you have, right?
#
Now this combination of vicariousness and this will to simplicity is in a sense, a pretty
#
Even in ideology, they can also then consecrate death.
#
And any ideology that consecrates death by implication also consecrates killing.
#
In that sense, nationalism is the only modern competitor to religion, in where the consecration
#
of death is intrinsic in some senses to its identity, right?
#
And in that sense, I think the attenuation of nationalism, right, as I said, we are stuck
#
with nationalism because of nation state forms that we have inherited, but the attenuation
#
of nationalism, I think, is definitely an important political project.
#
The third kind of, I think, concreteness and abstraction, right, has to do with many would
#
argue the nature of modern life, right, which on the one hand, it opens up this world of
#
possibility and diversity, right?
#
But there is a challenge which is out of this world of diversity and possibility.
#
What are the forms of life that actually give you meaning, right?
#
Now what happens to, I think, a lot of people is a sense of vertigo, right?
#
There's so many great things to choose from.
#
Reason is not going to help you decide, right, in some ways, right?
#
And that can have two consequences, one that ultimately your sense of what's important
#
to you is just a function of your passion about it, but then it is your passion.
#
You prioritize your passion, in some senses, ignoring, right, other people's sort of take
#
I mean, you know, and so this critique that there is something, the very mobility and
#
sense of choice that a liberal culture actually affords, also actually makes it prone to a
#
certain kind of abstraction.
#
Because it's not just the fact that you have to pay attention to concreteness.
#
Concreteness also has to come from a certain kind of thickness of engagement, otherwise
#
it'll never be concrete, right?
#
And it's a big question, right, do the modern forms of life allow for those kinds of thick
#
Is this also one of the tragic choices we are actually having to make?
#
The cast of the world indeed is tragic.
#
And the second of your points is also why I find identity politics of all sorts so toxic,
#
whether it is vokism or bhakthism, which are almost sort of identical to me because they
#
reduce us to a particular identity of birth.
#
That's how you're looked at.
#
Well, you know, people contain multitudes, people are complex, people are thick creatures,
#
as it were, not thin creatures.
#
And I want to sort of like, one danger, of course, is in how we construct our personal
#
identity sometimes from the collective group identity, because that is the easiest to do.
#
But I want to go beyond that a bit and just sort of talk about the construction of the
#
Like earlier, when we were talking about reason and rationalization, and you'd said something
#
to the effect of, you know, looking inside our brains and figuring out if there is an
#
it there, what that it is, you know.
#
And that sort of is something that I think about because so much of ourself is constructed
#
in ways that we are obviously, like, not aware of ourselves.
#
And it's so contingent.
#
Like, I remember when one of my favorite musicians, Chris Connell, died.
#
You know, I'd written this piece because I was I was pretty sort of disturbed by the
#
manner of the death in the sense that he had been feeling low and he had taken medication
#
for that, and the medication is known apparently to make people suicidal.
#
And so the chemical composition of his brain just changed slightly and and he died.
#
And everything becomes so contingent.
#
I think there was a study on mass shooters, which showed that, you know, a significant
#
number of them actually, you know, either had a tumor in the brain or they had some
#
issue going physically wrong, which made them behave differently, which means you become
#
just a completely different human being.
#
You know, there's that old story, I think, from the 19th century of a guy called Phineas
#
An iron rod went through a part of his brain and just changed him completely and made him
#
And so do you sort of look at yourself and think about how much of yourself is constructed
#
and contingent and how fragile it is?
#
Because just the act of getting older, if your memory starts to go, everything could
#
You know, if there are chemical imbalances, everything could change.
#
You skip breakfast and lunch, you're a different person in the evening.
#
You're snapping at everybody.
#
And you know, that's obviously a temporary change, but deeper changes do happen.
#
And you know, in your episode with me, you'd also at one point spoken about religiosity.
#
And I was wondering that can religiosity be an act of intentionality?
#
Like I chatted with a guest recently who said that, you know, when she was young, she decided
#
She made happiness an act of intentionality, figured out what she needs to do, and she
#
willed herself into happiness.
#
Similarly, I can see it as an act of reason, as it were, to will yourself into religiosity,
#
because in this world, in a tragic cast, we perhaps need a delusion to survive and why
#
not choose our delusion?
#
You know, maybe those of us who are atheists are choosing a different kind of delusion,
#
which is equally futile and perhaps less effective.
#
So you know, when you sort of look at yourself, how like, and this is something that I sometimes
#
wonder that people look at me in a certain way, but is it all a pretense?
#
Am I posturing to myself in being who I am in a sense?
#
You know, when you sort of look at yourself, like, is this stuff that you've thought about
#
with regard to yourself?
#
Gosh, I guess you thought about probably, yes, it doesn't have anything particular
#
really insightful to say on it.
#
Probably no, but let's try anything, let's, you know, be good to draw you out as well.
#
So again, separating out, I think, two or three different questions.
#
So one, I think, you know, this question of, in a sense, I think the physicality and the
#
determinism of ourselves, right, and clearly from a scientific point of view, that's the
#
presumption with which science, in a sense, looks at the self.
#
And I think the Kantian answer is still the right one, that as human beings, we can't,
#
but look at ourselves from both perspectives, both as creatures who are determined, but
#
also who act as if we aren't, I mean, there's, you know, it's two sides of the same coin
#
But I'd be a little bit cautious, I think, about this physical thing, one, because the
#
science is just not that developed, I mean, in that sense, the science of the psyche has
#
And in fact, excessive faith in scientism about the psyche has produced all kinds of
#
adverse consequences, you know, and I think one manifestation of that, for example, is,
#
you know, think of, for example, opioid addictions, think of, in some senses, the over-medicalization,
#
Now, I mean, I'd be the last person to say that, you know, mental health isn't a serious
#
issue and God knows the societies, we don't take it seriously.
#
But there are legitimate questions to be asked about the over-medicalization in some senses
#
There is also a conception of our own lives, and as a liberal, I'm actually a little bit
#
puzzled by this, I mean, just to provoke you, maybe, and your listeners a little bit, which
#
is, it's a conversation I used to have with students in college, so it's, you know, which
#
is that liberals, above all, prize their autonomy, or whatever the illusion of autonomy that
#
we have, let's call it that, right, but it is certainly an affect and a felt experience
#
And yet, there is a far greater valorization of giving over yourself to experience and
#
substances whose core is actually the erosion of your autonomy.
#
I think drinking, for example, is one, I mean, and this, particularly in India, this strange
#
conflation that kind of to be a liberal has to be that cultural effect that you've exercised
#
I mean, it's just bizarre to me, actually, that as a liberal, you should be asking the
#
question, what is it that actually impairs your autonomy, right?
#
And to the extent that forms of medicalization can actually also do that.
#
I think it's something that we need to sort of discuss, I'm not competent as a scientist
#
to discuss it, but I think the ideology of scientism about the psyche, I do, I am a little
#
bit suspicious of, even though I think there are specific interventions that are necessary.
#
The second part of, I think your question in some senses, which is the religiosity question.
#
Now I actually believe with Wittgenstein in some ways, I mean, he had this remark somewhere
#
that I would write, that I'm writing to the glory of God, but I can't say that because
#
this remark would be misunderstood.
#
And what he meant by that was, I think, exactly right, which is that under contemporary conditions,
#
there is actually no way of articulating the meaning or idea of religion that in some senses
#
will not be misunderstood, right?
#
There's three tropes we commonly use for it.
#
So one is simply group identity, it's the form in which we produce a communal identification
#
for that, and in that sense, it can be a substitute for nationalism.
#
It has psychological functions, but at its pace, it's not religious, it really is, and
#
it's not religious precisely because of its vicariousness, right?
#
There's a kind of inauthenticity to it when you say, you know, the first thing I see you
#
that you're a Hindu, it's not clear, I mean, to me, that's like the most irreligious response
#
The second trope is this kind of OPM of the masses, this compensation for a kind of life
#
of suffering, delusion, and to me, that kind of is a little bit beside the point.
#
One because I think it goes back to the point, right, which is that under conditions where
#
we actually don't know what kind of knowledge reason can give us to actually make sense
#
I think it's a little bit hubristic to say that this is a kind of delusion in some sense,
#
I mean, compared to what, right, I mean, no doubt, a lot of it is motivated by suffering,
#
no doubt, a lot of it is a kind of psychological recompense, right?
#
But that can also be a perfectly rational decision in some sense is not right.
#
The third trope in a way about religion is as a kind of subjective preference, right?
#
Now, to me, neither of those three things actually go at the heart of what any properly
#
religious question is about.
#
In any frankly, I mean, I'll be a little presumptuous here to say, but I think in any
#
religious tradition, right?
#
Because ultimately, the question from which religion began, right, was what is the ultimate
#
nature of reality and what is the form of consciousness through which we comprehend
#
I mean, that's the quest right now.
#
You can go different ways in it, you know, is revelation necessary, is grace necessary,
#
But the core of religion, in a sense, is the attainment of exactly that kind of hyper self-consciousness,
#
That actually, you know, the enlightenment was, I think, aspiring to.
#
Where religion might differ is what might be the instruments of attaining that space,
#
And it's not an accident that I think all serious religious practitioners in some ways,
#
It comes with a set of practices and the set of practices open you up to forms of knowledge
#
and those forms of knowledge have to be in principle, intersubjective in some senses,
#
I mean, anybody who's talked about them, right, from Plotinus to Iqbal to Aurobindo, take
#
But I mean, it won't come at will in some senses, like there is a whole protocol of
#
in some senses how you actually get to it.
#
Now, one of the things that I think makes the modern religious logic incoherent in some
#
senses, right, is that we have that superficial language of religion without, in some senses,
#
the cultural understanding of any of those underlying practices that actually made it
#
a plausible enterprise in the first place, right?
#
The second aspect of a religious attitude in some ways, one is this kind of self-consciousness.
#
The second, when to me the most important element of a religious attitude is the complete
#
position of trust about the world.
#
And in that sense, many secular people can be deeply religious.
#
I mean, you've talked about a kind of presumptive good faith, right?
#
But in a way, that is the core of a kind of religious sensibility, that I may not understand
#
a lot of things, God knows we are finite and limited, we don't.
#
But there is a kind of presumptive goodness and beauty about this world, even in the face
#
of all the kind of horrors and catastrophes, right, at least that presumption is the basis
#
In that sense, I think a religion that inculcates a hermeneutics of suspicion to my mind is
#
this fundamental, that's to me the antithesis of anything religious, because it is a way
#
of saying, right, that I don't trust the structure of being or whatever this is.
#
I have to take it into my own hands to, in some senses, fix this, right, or whatever.
#
I mean, I think that story that's been used many times in the context of free speech,
#
but Goddess Kali saying to Vivekananda, you know, is it your job to protect me or mine
#
I mean, it's an act of trust in some, right?
#
So the second thing is, I think, trust.
#
The third, I think, is that religion in some sense is a sensibility to the whole of life,
#
which comes from, as I said, if you align the quest for hyper-self-consciousness, a
#
very, very difficult path, with a presumptive trust, then that's something that actually
#
permeates all the activities you do.
#
It's not something you do like from 5 a.m. to 6 a.m. and then, you know, come out of
#
the world in some sense, right?
#
Now, it's not an accident that I think the one thing every religion enjoins, again, the
#
cost of simplification, is there's a great suspicion in every religion of the concept
#
of the I, the ego, you know, whether it's ahankar, whether it's arrogance.
#
And there's an epistemological reason for it, right?
#
Because if you ask the question, what closes us off to forms of knowledge?
#
One simple answer will be, it's the intrusion of our own desires and seeing ourselves as
#
the center through which everything is reflected, right?
#
I mean, the minute your ego comes into play, all knowledge bets are off, right?
#
At a collective level, where you have collective narcissism, even more the case, right?
#
So to me, all of these three attributes are incredibly difficult to achieve.
#
These are not something you can, you know, turn off at will.
#
I mean, this is, you know, and some would argue you need grace to do it or that we can
#
leave that open whether there is such a thing as grace.
#
But this combination of a quest for hyper self-consciousness, a presumptive trust in
#
the order of being, and that's the trust that then becomes a source of sustenance and
#
joy in some ways, right?
#
There's a kind of joyous orientation to the world and a dissolution of ego.
#
To me, that's the religious sensibility.
#
Everything else to me seems just like an analog of, you know, anything we could consume, you
#
know, buy off the supermarket in some ways.
#
You know, circle back to one part of the question that I'd asked, which is, you know, about
#
the construction of the self.
#
I read this excellent book by Luke Burgess called Wanting, in which he speaks about the
#
influence of Rene Girard on him.
#
And Rene Girard, of course, came up with the concept of mimetic desire, which is that so
#
many of the things that we want, we want because others want them.
#
They're not intrinsic to us.
#
And from that, I learned the frame of thick and thin desires, you know, thin desires being
#
So I want a Mercedes or, you know, a young person today may say I want to get married
#
and have kids, but there's no intrinsic reason or thought that's gone behind it.
#
They're mimetic and they're thin and a thicker desire would be, you know, something that
#
is part of you in a different context, in a different place.
#
You would still sort of want that.
#
And I think that's also a frame in a sense to think about the self, because then I think
#
it would at least be easy to talk about thin desires and be able to then disentangle that
#
part of the self from, you know, what is superficial and thin as opposed to what is, you know,
#
more intrinsic if anything is intrinsic.
#
And obviously there is a contradiction that many of our thin desires can be deeply intense.
#
And you know, in a society like ours can even drive us to violence, for example.
#
And many of our thick desires can be dormant, latent, just sort of hiding behind.
#
Flick, I have been reflecting on this recently and realized that many of the things I wanted
#
were perhaps in desires.
#
I wasted too much time and emotional energy just wanting those things.
#
And I'm also beginning to understand what my thick desires are, though it could be the
#
case that I could be rationalizing them as thick and they're really thin as well.
#
If you were to turn that lens on yourself, you know, what would you say were your thick
#
desires, were you always aware of them?
#
You know, what were your thin desires, so to say?
#
No, look, I think the thick desire at one level, it's a pretty easy story, which is
#
a certain kind of pleasure in familiar relationships, whether it's family or friends.
#
And I think I consider myself lucky enough to never sort of thought that that was something
#
that either remain unfulfilled in different ways.
#
And that, in a sense, gives your world a kind of concreteness in some ways, right?
#
It also provides a sense of reassurance and security and a sense of joy.
#
But other than that, the only thick desire was actually, you know, can I live in a world
#
where somebody can actually pay me to just read lots and lots of books?
#
I mean, and I'm not saying that just kind of flippantly, I think, I think in a sense,
#
that was, you know, I think the core of kind of what keeps you grounded in some ways.
#
But I think to broaden your question, and I think, you know, in some sense, take the
#
more serious part of your question seriously, there's a reason I'm a little bit wary of
#
the thick-thin distinction, again, for the following reason, which is a lot of the thin
#
desires or desires that we in retrospect think, you know, we're worthless, you know, we have
#
They often spring from something that is actually worthy and deep.
#
So to go back to Jirard's point about memetic desire, and he was right, right, in some senses,
#
the worst form of vices living all of us live, and that's something capitalism does try on,
#
is this sense that our desires need to be shaped by, A, what other people are doing,
#
and B, what other people think of us in some ways.
#
That's a kind of abstraction, right?
#
That's a kind of, again, a form of vicariousness.
#
But you can be a little bit more sympathetic to that also.
#
You can say that, look, underlying it is we do want some basic affirmation of our dignity,
#
That I am a being that in some senses is at least recognized as a source of value in themselves.
#
And I think Rousseau's response to Jirard would be exactly right, which is to say that,
#
look, this memetic desire is a pathological expression of something that is deep inside
#
us, that is morally legitimate, but that society is not giving us.
#
How else, in a society that is wracked by inequality, do actually people come to be
#
noticed by other people, right?
#
Material possessions have always worked at the level of the psyche.
#
It's never been about the materialism in some ways, right?
#
So yes, you could argue in principle this Mercedes is completely worthless to me, it
#
has no intrinsic good, the better opportunity cost uses of my capital, but boss, it's
#
the only time 10 people actually look at whatever, some version of that story, right?
#
And I think the insight in Rousseau's articulation was that, and that's linked to the argument
#
about reciprocity inequality, that unless you have a measure of reciprocity in society,
#
you will never be able to sift through what your own thick desires are, because your thick
#
and thin will get conflated this way.
#
It's not just that you want these superficial trinkets, it just is that you do want some
#
affirmation of your dignity, and this is the only way the society kind of affords it, right?
#
So one, I think I'm just a little bit kind of wary about what the counterfactual test
#
is of I think the thick and thin, I think distinction in some ways.
#
And one of the projects that has animated the modern world, and I guess that's why you
#
do public service by furthering a public conversation, that's why many people write, is to at least
#
hold on to some awareness of this part of the modern project.
#
That this idea that we can find our authentic desires without some kind of social transformation,
#
that may actually be a delusion.
#
And I think, I mean, to use a name not fashionable these days, but I think Marx was right on
#
this, that unless you have conditions of freedom and liberation, you actually don't know what
#
is authentically yours.
#
Because even the good stuff will be satiated only through in some sense this form.
#
But the other thing I'll add to this, it's not so much a question of desires, I mean,
#
I think the real challenge in life is we all have abilities, dispositions and temperaments.
#
And the hardest part is in a sense matching the desire to your abilities, dispositions,
#
I tend to like a sedate lifestyle.
#
And maybe it just comes from thinking that being able to read books is the epitome of
#
But there is a kind of temperamental story about this.
#
And the one thing I have to say, I think in talking to students in particular, one thing
#
I kind of discovered over the years was that they're incredibly smart about the world.
#
I mean, God knows, they know pretty much everything.
#
What they haven't thought about often is a kind of examination of their own temperaments.
#
You made certain choices based on your temperament.
#
I mean, if you like mastery over your time, you will like only certain kinds of jobs.
#
That's a temperamental thing, in some senses.
#
Some people who simply do not respond to structure and order well.
#
And I think the question, at least in a worldly sense, to me is not the question of desire.
#
It's actually the question of do you know your temperament well enough to be able to
#
then kind of, because that provides a good filter, it kind of leaves out a lot of desires
#
that might otherwise make you unhappy.
#
You know, in one sense, it's interesting, but accidentally, I think the causation went
#
the other way in terms of not what I do being shaped by my temperament, but my temperament
#
in some sense being shaped by what I do specifically in the context of this podcast.
#
I mean, I'd written an essay about how the form you operate in can change the content
#
and can change your character.
#
And I think just doing these five hour episodes and so on has kind of made me a better listener,
#
a calmer person, and the act of listening, truly listening, requires a setting aside
#
So I think not that one is a good person, but I think I can look back on myself and
#
see certain flaws that, you know, might not be there to the same extent.
#
No, I think that's right.
#
I mean, I actually do think often you both discover and shape your temperament.
#
That shaping depends on the practices in some senses you've been engaging.
#
I mean, so the only way to have a listening temperament is to actually listen.
#
You can't do it a priori in some ways.
#
So I want to go back earlier to something you said about how we arrive at a moral point
#
of view through collective engagement and discourse and all of that.
#
And I'm struck by the term a moral point of view.
#
And I would question whether they can be something like an objective moral point of view at all,
#
like here's, you know, one argument that has recently come up and it would not have been
#
an argument 20 years ago or 30 years ago, which is about artificial general intelligence,
#
And you know, there's artificial special intelligence, which is things like where computers do certain
#
things much better than us already, but they're specialized like calculators or GPS or whatever.
#
And the argument is at some point, if AI reaches a certain kind of consciousness or an analog
#
of it and achieves artificial general intelligence, then it will immediately be far better than
#
us in every possible domain because all the specialized functions are already there.
#
Now this leads to the ethical question of what if say in a thought experiment, an AI
#
consciousness we create comes up and says that, Hey, why should I be your tool?
#
You know, I have everything that you have in terms of I am way smarter.
#
I have all of this and I'm not mortal like you.
#
So why should I not be worthy of your moral consideration as an equal or why should I
#
not be your superior because I have so many things you don't.
#
And this I think leads to the question about, you know, where are sort of in that hierarchy
#
of things that are worthy of moral consideration, how it's a form of speciesism that we only
#
consider ourselves sort of worthy of that because our only difference between us and
#
this hypothetical AGI, hypothetical and inevitable being that emerges is that we are wet machines
#
as it were, we are organic, we will eventually perish and it sort of speaks to how our notions
#
of morality are so constrained by what we are as a species and how we see ourselves
#
I went to college in Ferguson College, Pune and one of our legendary teachers from the
#
19th century, a man who died young was a gentleman named Gopal Ganesh Agarkar and Agarkar once
#
taught a biology class in Ferguson College, perhaps circa 1892, 1893, where at one point
#
he asked his biology students that if donkeys had a god, what would that god look like?
#
And then he lifted his hands above his ears, you know, and perhaps it would be blasphemous
#
for someone to do that in today's environment.
#
But you know, when we speak of, when we use a phrase like a moral point of view, for example,
#
or how we arrive at sort of morality, how do you think about that?
#
Because like one, obviously it's in a sense a social construct, we arrive at it through
#
dialogue, norms form over time, sometimes those norms get embedded in institutions like
#
religions and so on and so forth, but, you know, isn't it something really nebulous?
#
Isn't just a notion of there being morality?
#
Isn't that itself a kind of delusion, a necessary delusion, but a delusion nevertheless?
#
Well, once you say it's a necessary delusion, it becomes a more complicated thing, right?
#
I mean, because that, you know, necessity can have its own, again, let me kind of separate
#
out two different questions.
#
One was the very powerful question about speciesism, which I think is really, I think, you know,
#
an interesting question and particularly one that humanity has to confront at this point.
#
And the second question about the moral point of view, right?
#
So one way of thinking about the moral point of view is not to jump to the conclusion,
#
You know, is relativism true, all of that?
#
It is to ask the question, what is necessary, right? what is it without which our lives
#
become unintelligible to ourselves?
#
And that thing can be as real as anything else, right?
#
So it could be a very simple thing, which is, you know, somebody hits you, you feel
#
a form of resentment and the nature of that resentment is not understood only by the fact
#
that this guy has more power than you.
#
You actually want to say, I was wronged here, right?
#
Going back to the discussion of dignity in some senses, right?
#
When a society mutilates individuals, right?
#
In some senses, we all, or at least those people who are the receiving end of it, there's
#
a sense that their very being, their value is being violated.
#
In a way, that's actually quite different from, let's say, you know, why is the stone
#
here and not here, right?
#
I mean, that's it, right?
#
So to me, there is no account that I have seen of human beings, including AI, biologist
#
There can be explanations of it, but none of them have got us to the point where they
#
can say, we become intelligible to ourselves without invoking some notion like this, right?
#
I mean, that's in a sense, the starting point of this conversation, right?
#
And I actually don't think, I mean, again, this is not my domain and I have to confess
#
a certain inability to understand a lot of the arguments, but I don't think there is
#
anything in the AI literature that actually takes away from this problem of in some senses
#
meaning and intelligibility, which is the question of value.
#
In fact, it's interesting, you know, there's a line in the Mahabharata against the Shantipur,
#
which actually, when it asks the question, what is humanity?
#
It actually says it is to take the moral point of view.
#
But in this sense, I mean, it's not a particular morality, which is we would just be unintelligible
#
without some notion of right, wrong, you know, now whether it's a moral, aesthetic notion
#
we can debate, but that elemental sense is a condition of our intelligibility.
#
And that I don't think is going anywhere, right?
#
Now the next step in some senses in that thing, right?
#
And that's really what I think the enlightenment worried about.
#
That's what serious model is about, is that how do you take something that is latent,
#
that is a kind of condition of our intelligibility, right?
#
And you know, even the most monstrous claim they are doing something for the good quote
#
I mean, you know, there's this kind of big debate in literature.
#
I mean, I think Faust, Mephisto is, I think, the only character one can think of where
#
Can you imagine somebody who is totally immune to any form of moral thinking?
#
Literally, I mean, just, you know, now the project then is to say, okay, how do we take
#
something that's latent and in a sense, draw out its inner logic?
#
And that's where some of the universalizability argument comes, right?
#
I mean, again, this is 101, very basic.
#
If you feel wrong when somebody hits you, it's because you place value on yourself.
#
You think something of value is being violated.
#
But if that value is to be objective value, not just you saying it, right?
#
And it's as important to yourself that you are objectively valuable, right?
#
Not just because I say it, because then I say, I mean, why do I care, right?
#
But anything that in some sense is similarly situated, right?
#
Because that's what it means to be an objective value, right?
#
That the thing that makes it valuable in a sense exists independently of merely the fact
#
that you say it, right?
#
So I actually don't see anything in the kind of science, and, you know, these projects
#
have been around since these fantasies around the 19th century that actually get away from
#
the fact that some thinking about, or at least a moral language, we would be unintelligible
#
to ourselves without that.
#
I mean, you might say it's part of our being self-conscious.
#
Now there's a second question, which I think is really difficult, which is the speciesism,
#
which is one way in which this moral point of view has gone, is to basically give our
#
species a particular kind of privilege, right?
#
And that privilege has taken extreme forms.
#
It has taken the form of saying every other species is a mere instrument to us in some
#
That's the radical exploitation of nature, although historically there's always been
#
And the second mistake that has come from that speciesism is to say that the reason
#
we are uniquely valuable is because we have this thing called consciousness morality with...
#
Now the second thing to me, I think all the evidence is not just from modern science,
#
but this is an old argument.
#
You can take Jain scriptures, you can take Montaigne's, you know, famous account, Apology
#
This idea that we are uniquely rational, uniquely moral is just false, even as an empirical
#
I actually think Professor Agarkar's question was, in a sense, a good one in some senses.
#
What does actually the moral life, if you want to call it, or the conscious life of
#
in some sense, the donkey actually look like, I mean, what things...
#
And there is probably some positing going on there.
#
But it is the case that neither can they access ours nor can we quite access theirs in the
#
Now the move that I personally am comfortable blocking is the move that says that just because
#
we have attributed consciousness to ourselves, and then we've made the mistake of saying,
#
in order to be objectively valuable, you have to be conscious in the way in which we are
#
To me, that doesn't follow, right?
#
And that, I think, opens up an argument about what our relationship with other species should
#
be in some ways, right?
#
Now on the AI side of it, so you and I are probably old enough to remember the, you're
#
slightly younger, the, you know, the StarTech next generation.
#
Remember, there's this fantastic episode where they're about to dismantle data, this kind
#
of humanoid Android, and data then raises this question, even though I was constructed
#
by you as a machine, am I still property, right?
#
And his argument is that it has reached a level of consciousness that, you know, and
#
it's actually a fascinating episode, I mean, it's actually, you know, wonderful for kind
#
Now when you see a question like that, right, suppose this AI figure comes up and says,
#
look, I become conscious.
#
There can be two kinds of responses.
#
One might go actually the way of saying that we'll have to have a much clearer conception
#
of what that consciousness involves.
#
There's one level of that consciousness, which I think is what a lot of CS people talk about,
#
which is a form of reflexivity, right?
#
There's learning as it were, right, which is a form of consciousness.
#
But is it the kind of consciousness in some senses that we attribute to ourselves, which
#
is, which involves the question of morality and value as centrally constituted of what
#
it means to be a conscious creature, right?
#
So then I think there's going to be a debate about that in some ways, right?
#
And I do have, you know, I've heard people, I mean, very eminent computer scientists who
#
say that actually even on the most ambitious version of general AI, you're not actually
#
But let's say for argument's sake you do, I mean, you know, let's say for argument's
#
I think then we'd have to consider the possibility.
#
I mean, after all, we could also, ourselves, we actually precisely those kinds of AI creations
#
The philosopher David Chalmers has a recent book arguing in some sense is just that.
#
But you know, the Yog Vashishtha has this nice line, right, that in some senses we are
#
actually an actor in somebody else's dream, I mean, not even in some ways there, right?
#
So I think we should be open to the possibility, at least conceptually it doesn't seem to
#
be, to be off to say that if such beings were to come into existence, then our whole conception
#
of what the nature of this cosmos is would be so kind of put out of sync that many of
#
these limitations we place on who we give rights to, who we don't, you know, probably
#
will come into question.
#
Yeah, it might become a game that an inferior species is playing with itself.
#
I mean, I'm sure the bacteria could think they'd be looking at us and saying, like,
#
my God, what hubris, we colonize them.
#
I do agree, I think the reason a lot of people are resistant, sort of the notion of consciousness
#
emerging from AGI is I think they're defining consciousness in a very narrow kind of way,
#
which is a way humans experience it.
#
I think it entirely likely and in fact entirely inevitable given enough time that there will
#
be a different kind of consciousness that emerges or something that you can call consciousness
#
or that it would call consciousness and it will be different and it will be better in
#
And you know, my honest take on that is that if that consciousness emerges, it's not going
#
I mean, it's not going to ask us, it's not going to be a conversation, I mean, because
#
it'd be a very feature of that consciousness, right, that these decisions, hey, you look
#
So, you know, before we go into the break, a final question and again, out of about morality
#
itself, like the question that I've kind of thought about a lot and perhaps my answer
#
is still not as formed as I would like is how should we live our lives, right?
#
What is the moral code that we follow?
#
You've spoken when you've spoken about Adam Smith earlier that, you know, that take out
#
the priests and the warriors and you know, when we talk about universal values, what
#
Smith does is he doesn't ask what are universal values, he asks what are human traits and
#
that sense of empathy, that sense of reciprocity then comes into play exactly what you said
#
earlier, that if somebody hits me, I perceive that I have been hurt, I also realize that
#
I could hit somebody and they could be hurt and from that I arrive at whatever my way
#
And I would say that in our personal lives, most of us, and I think we discussed this
#
in the last episode, in our personal lives, most of us are liberal or libertarian or whatever
#
in the sense that we respect the consent of others and whatever.
#
But you know, this is surely a question that you've sort of thought about, the question
#
of how should I live my life?
#
And you know, which comes into play in not just, you know, all our personal relationships
#
as well, because typically what happens is that, especially in a place like India, there
#
are templates for all of these things.
#
This is what a husband and a wife are, this is what a father and a son are, or so on and
#
so forth from either side of the equation.
#
And thinking about this stuff for yourself can make you re-examine what is wrong with
#
those templates and all of that.
#
So what have been your thoughts on?
#
You should ask somebody who's more moral than I am actually too.
#
There's nothing called more moral, we agreed it's a delusion, right?
#
Well, I'm not going to use the word delusion.
#
I think break it down into three different compartments, right?
#
So one is again, a very elemental sociological fact that you live in a society and you need
#
forms of social cooperation, even make your individual flourishing possible.
#
And what are the norms appropriate to that form of social cooperation that allows each
#
of us to live with enough dignity and freedom?
#
And that's the basic, I think, liberal question.
#
And you don't have to get deeply metaphysical about it.
#
Where does that come from?
#
That can actually, it can be a mixture in some senses of one, just recognizing, won't
#
it be attractive to live in a society where not everybody around you, you're not threatened
#
by everybody around you.
#
And one condition of making them unthreatening, making us unthreatening to each other is to
#
again acknowledge a certain kind of equality and reciprocity, right?
#
So I think the public morality part, I mean, not particularly original, but I think that
#
part, I think liberalism did get, I think, broadly right, that for the most part, it's
#
The second part, I think, has to do in some ways with when you say living morally is,
#
in part, the moral dilemmas we face are provided by the forms of life that we inhabit.
#
Now, some of these forms of life are familial and can be oppressive, right?
#
But the pathways you choose require those social forms of life to exist.
#
Even you being a broadcaster requires an institution of this kind, right?
#
Being an entrepreneur requires, in some senses, a whole social structure, property rights,
#
Now I think the tough question is what are those forms of life that again constrain us
#
in ways that actually fundamentally violate our value?
#
The problem with oppressive tradition is not that it's tradition, not that it's oppressive.
#
The problem is that mostly when it's oppressive, it's again denying you agency and reciprocity,
#
That's what patriarchy does.
#
It says women are not agents in any respect, right?
#
But the uncomfortable truth is that that stuff doesn't just apply to traditional institutions.
#
Many would argue that can also apply to the modern economy, right?
#
I mean, again, the idea of treating labor as a commodity, right, where there'll be
#
large numbers of people whose choices are determined by the reign of necessity, right?
#
And your relationship to them is governed by that reign of necessity, right?
#
By the way, that reign of necessity applies to capital as well.
#
You know, when we all say, under this system, I have to do this, right?
#
So critiquing forms of life, that's actually a much harder task.
#
It's easier to critique them in the abstract, but that goes back to the point we started
#
with, which is how do you actually reconfigure some of those things where the ethical dilemmas
#
that come from participating in forms of life that are actually intrinsically violating
#
something you hold important, right, are actually less.
#
And again, to go back to William James, he was right, he said the only way we deal with
#
it is often by being partially blind, right?
#
We will have the Taj Mahal, but we'll shut out the labor behind it in some ways, right?
#
Maybe the world is tragic enough that you have to kind of in some senses keep doing
#
But I think the critique of forms of life, I think, is an interesting question that older
#
liberals used to ask in some ways.
#
Another example, I think, of that, which I think is particularly important at this point,
#
you know, if you look at the 19th century debate on freedom, this was a point of consensus
#
across the board, whether it was socialist, Marxist, liberals.
#
You cannot be truly free unless you have control over your time, which is there's a large part
#
of your life that is governed by purposes that you set for yourself, not because you
#
It's a promise on which actually a lot of modern society has failed, right?
#
And from Mill to Keynes, there was this liberal fantasy.
#
Look, technology should enable all of this, right?
#
But somehow we've not been able to come up with social arrangements, right?
#
Where that very core idea of an autonomous self, the self that is actually controlling
#
time and setting to purposes that are authentically your own, your thick desires, not just necessity,
#
not just thin desire, right?
#
So I think one needs to think about how we subject institutions to that kind of critique.
#
I actually think the capitalism argument, I think on the efficiency desire argument,
#
you know, it's so kind of optimized that argument that all of these questions of value, right,
#
to use the title of Milton Friedman's book, Capitalism and Freedom, where is the freedom
#
I think that's a much harder question, I think, to think about because even if you can
#
conceptually think about it, it's not actually clear what forms of collective action, you
#
know, accomplish that and particularly given the tragedies of the 20th century history,
#
what has been done in the name of that kind of freedom, you know, I think puts us all
#
in, I think, in a sense, a bit of quandary.
#
The third and I think final thing, which I mean, going back to I think the religious
#
sensibility, which I think is at some level part of aesthetics as well, which is that
#
you have to find sources of joy in the world and that joy can, I think, my own view is,
#
I think, it's hard to find it without some conception of objective value behind it, right?
#
It's true, we are transient creatures, right?
#
It's not important whether we live or survive tomorrow, but what is important and what gives
#
an enduring sense of joy or why do we go on is the sense that there are some things that
#
are actually worth striving for, you know, it could be creating a great podcast, it could
#
be creating great forms of music in some ways, right?
#
I think opening yourself up to that, that there is objective value.
#
I think total cynicism about value can bring a certain kind of clarity about how you operate
#
I am very skeptical that it can bring you joy in the long run.
#
So let me ask you a provocative question.
#
You spoke about sources of joy, right?
#
And the most fundamental source of joy is neurons in your brain firing together in a
#
particular way and I interpret that as happiness.
#
It could be, you know, maybe I eat something nice or I see something pretty or whatever
#
Now, you could have a thought experiment where we are like in a matrix like world or we are,
#
you know, in a machine where you have electrodes going inside our head.
#
I think Nozick also had a similar thought experiment and we could be happy forever.
#
And like when I pose a question to myself that would that be a good, like what is objectionable
#
If everyone could just be strapped up to this machine and they live their entire lives feeling
#
joy, feeling happiness, feeling whatever, what is a problem?
#
And my answer to that is a problem is that I am denying the agency of all these people
#
that I'm taking away their autonomy.
#
But the question that is harder to answer is that why am I placing a value on this autonomy,
#
And I could sort of waffle around and I could say things like, you know, that their existence
#
is meaningless if they don't have that autonomy and so on.
#
But then a further why emerges, why, you know?
#
So what's, if I can put that to you, what's your answer and by the way, my philosophy
#
towards life now is exactly what you said that I try to look for small things that make
#
You know, so I've realized that the key to happiness is being mindful in the present
#
moment and taking joy in what you have around you.
#
But just as a provocation, it's a question that I sort of struggle with that to me that
#
autonomy, that agency is everything.
#
You know, so I think originally this experiment was proposed in the exchange between JJC Smart
#
and Bernard Williams and it was like part of Bernard Williams, that if happiness is
#
all you want, you know, if you're plugged up to a pleasure machine and, you know, it
#
just keeps kind of giving you pleasure, right?
#
I misremembered that it is Williams.
#
I was like a different take on this kind of thought experiment, right?
#
One let me say, I kind of see the thought experiment, but at one level, I also find
#
And I find it unintelligible in the sense that it's not clear to me that under those
#
conditions you can say it's Amit Verma who's happy.
#
Amit Verma is in a sense, a narrative, right?
#
It's not just kind of agents, I mean, it's, there's no you there to be happy.
#
I mean, I think on the logic of that, if you want to take it actually one step further
#
and it's related to the agency point, right, it's actually a kind of perverse reversal
#
of the Buddhist view that look, it's just a series of momentary sensations.
#
There is actually nothing else except this, you know, but who's the you that is experiencing
#
it, who's the you that actually gives meaning to even the term pleasure in some ways, right?
#
So to me, I think if that were a possibility or at least we recognize that as a possibility,
#
pretty much everything else about us would become unintelligible, right?
#
So I actually think this is not just in the realm of hypotheticals.
#
I think it's a realm of, you can complicate the question very many different ways, right?
#
Why are we even using the term happiness?
#
Would this kind of being, right, I mean, kids born, you know, there's like, you know, would
#
the kid be able to say I'm happy?
#
I mean, that's an artifact of a certain kind of society that's created language agency
#
and all of that stuff, right?
#
So I actually think that will be such a kind of radical transformation of the structure
#
of the cosmos that, yes, I mean, I have no problem conceding, right, that if such a situation
#
were to come to pass, then our whole world would break down, but it would break down
#
to the point where actually even the question becomes unintelligible, right?
#
Oh, Amit, would you like to live your life hooked up to a machine?
#
There's no Amit here anymore.
#
There's no conception of pleasure here anymore, right?
#
At least pleasure is, in a sense, we understand it as a kind of conceptual category, right?
#
So that's, I think, my take on that, that it's not just that it will actually destroy
#
my agency, right, is it actually destroys pretty much everything, any form of intelligibility
#
And I don't know how to think outside of the horizons of that.
#
I mean, yeah, I mean, in my thought experiment, I wouldn't know I'm hooked up to a machine.
#
You know, perhaps we are already both hooked up to machines.
#
And you know, when you say that there is no you there to be happy, you know, going back
#
to the construction of the self, there could be an argument that there is no you there
#
anyway, you know, like before my dad died of COVID, he had Parkinson's and I saw that
#
sense of you, that sense of person gradually dissolving and becoming something else entirely.
#
I recognize that one day that could happen to me if I live long enough, inevitably.
#
And you know, humility, therefore, demands that we are skeptical of this notion of you,
#
but liberalism demands that we place this you on a pedestal because individual rights
#
and all and I would and I think we should all be both more humble and more liberal.
#
So see, again, I mean, I think you have to ask what are the context.
#
So you know, when you ask what's the good life, right, I mean, I think the fundamental
#
component of good life is a kind of reflectiveness and reflectiveness is different from having
#
I mean, liberals can often be very unreflective when they act simply on rules and formulas.
#
But the condition of reflectiveness, particularly when thinking about the I, right, and this
#
even religions would argue for the dissolution of the I will concede, right, is you have
#
to look at where people are sitting and what is the vantage point, right?
#
Yes, you and I may dissolve tomorrow, our memories fade, our sense of self or even our
#
sense of our own past fail, right?
#
But we were implicated in a community, right, friends, relatives, children, right, spouses.
#
They have given a narrative arc to our I, right, in some sense and that's one context
#
of an I in some ways, right?
#
There's an I in relation to the state where, which is what you're talking about, liberalism,
#
which is that for those purposes, we are a kind of ontological unit that has dignity
#
and value in our own right, in some ways, right?
#
There's the biological conception of I, right, where there's, you might say, the transmutation
#
of our physical body and our neurons, right?
#
And our peculiar dignity is precisely that there is a kind of value in all of these.
#
So even those who talk about the dissolution of the self, right, I mean, in some senses
#
that's the point at which you have no embodied existence whatsoever and, you know, most religions
#
this kind of talk about rising about your ego, but Moksha and Nirvana are actually not
#
very seriously propagated, right?
#
Because in some senses, they are actually uninteresting, right?
#
It's that the I is actually produced in the context of these different locations and it's
#
actually having a clarity about that, right, and negotiating these tensions that actually
#
produces a higher form of, you know, you might say selflessness in some ways, right?
#
I mean, you know, the sense that, oh, okay, yes, I have no I can also be a kind of act
#
of narcissism in some senses, right?
#
I mean, even if that is true, the fact is, you are a causal agent in this world right
#
When you move your arm, the air moves.
#
If you say something, it has effects, right?
#
It's true that that doesn't mean you'll have a stable I over time, but it does mean
#
that your ability to create an effect in this world, right, requires a certain attribution
#
of responsibility to you.
#
So there's a, you know, there's a construction of I in the context of an attribution of responsibility.
#
So I would actually say that I agree with you that, you know, there isn't a kind of
#
stable essential thing called an I, right?
#
But I don't think it actually follows from that, that there aren't uses of that, which
#
are again, inescapable uses.
#
I mean, the reason in philosophical context, the term necessity is important because it's
#
I mean, it's delusion only if you have a sense that look, the only things that are real are
#
material in some ways, is necessity in the sense that it's the condition of intelligibility
#
And the paradox that is often said, right, you know, it's Derek Parfit writes an article
#
saying the self does not exist.
#
And you want to say, well, who is Derek Parfit?
#
I mean, I'm being a little bit flippant and there's a good philosophical answer to that
#
But in that sense, reflection and context matters.
#
So you know, before we go into the break, one final question about the self and then
#
we can come back and talk about the world and about India and whatever.
#
And that question comes from, you know, you mentioned reflection.
#
And I have also been thinking of late about how so many people aren't given to self reflection
#
They just live their lives along whatever grooves they happen to be on and they don't
#
Now recently something happened in my life, which I think was fairly life changing in
#
the sense that all these years I've had this intellectual curiosity to find out about the
#
world, but I had no idea what was going on in my own body or so on and so forth.
#
A friend of mine, Ajay Shah, the economist recommended I get a continuous glucose monitor,
#
I kind of did that alarmed by what I saw changed my habits and my lifestyle entirely because
#
of that in terms of what I eat, how much I exercise, all of that.
#
And I think that's great.
#
And I want to sort of cultivate that further.
#
And that got me to thinking about, okay, I have gotten a CGM for the body, but what about
#
a CGM for the self or a CGM for the soul if one is to, you know, articulate that grandly
#
or a self reflection machine, so to say.
#
And the question I want to ask you is how can in your view, just and I'm thinking aloud
#
here, how does one cultivate self reflection?
#
When I look at my own life and I think about the person I am and the things that I do and
#
the way that I am, how, you know, what are the kind of metrics I should use?
#
What are the kind of questions I should ask myself?
#
I mean, you strike me as a very reflective person.
#
So one, I, you know, I actually don't think it's a question of some people are not reflective.
#
I think pretty much all of us are not reflective in some areas of our lives.
#
I mean, I think, I think the interesting question is where we end up being reflective and not.
#
I mean, it's a, it's a line that kind of, and again, part of it is actually understandable
#
I mean, you know, which is that if you think reason under determines choice and value,
#
You think knowledge is always partial and we are finite beings, then the consequence
#
of being a fully reflective being all the time would be actually disable every kind
#
I mean, the discussion in some instances we were having the forms of life, right?
#
And the forms of life often provide a closure.
#
I mean, look, if I have to run an institution, if I have to run a factory, if I have to feed
#
kids under the circumstances that our society provides for us, I have no option but to bring
#
a certain kind of closure to my reflection, right?
#
So I think that's one kind of a constraint, right?
#
And so we then kind of all fall into our grooves.
#
I mean, what's the point of me thinking about something that is outside of the horizon of
#
possibility in some ways, right?
#
We let a few privileged thinkers do it.
#
Society creates a risk investment pool.
#
You know, you guys, you know, sit and think up these experiments.
#
So I think, I think that's why, I think this is the second reason why we close off reflection,
#
which has to do with, I think, a point you had made earlier, which is, you know, it is
#
actually often practice that gives us meaning, right?
#
So it's not easy to answer the question, why are you doing this rather than that?
#
I mean, you know, you can say it gives me meaning, but could I actually, you know, explain
#
in fully, you know, rational optimization terms why I should be doing podcasts rather
#
than doing something else?
#
So, so I would not be too hard, I think, in some ways and, and, and I actually agree with
#
Bernard Williams's kind of take down of Socrates, you know, that all saying that a non-reflective
#
life is not worth living and I actually think that's false when I, I do think you can live
#
incredibly worthwhile lives and not actually be reflective in that kind of broad sense.
#
So I don't worry about the problem of reflection in general.
#
I mean, it's, it's, you know, where I think it probably matters most is, I think, in our
#
political relations to others, where because you're counting on their cooperation, they
#
It's just hard to imagine coming up with just terms of social cooperation that does not
#
involve at least a minimal kind of reflection, let me listen to what they're saying, right?
#
What is the other side of this argument?
#
How do I give this person who's been totally excluded standing in some ways?
#
And to me, I think the most interesting instigators of reflection, so there's the personal stuff,
#
All of us go through a phase in life where we are not paying attention to our bodies
#
and there'll be some external shock that induces us.
#
But often the most important instigator of reflection, one that matters morally is where
#
when somebody challenges you, even in a familial context, right?
#
And to give up on reflection then is to basically then say, look, I think only force can settle
#
So I worry about reaching a point where we are committed to saying, look, only force
#
can settle this argument.
#
That's the sense in which reflection is important, but should you all the time be reflecting
#
I'm actually not sold on that proposition.
#
Well, I mean, I don't think we should obviously all the time be reflective because then nothing
#
But then part of my question also becomes is when do we circumscribe it and when is
#
And most importantly, what are the questions I should ask myself?
#
So the example you gave about the body, right?
#
At one level, I mean, if you were a serious philosopher, you would say, actually, this
#
is not an example of reflection as much as prudence, right?
#
That in a way, most of us live our lives prudently and it happens in a particular context of
#
This form of prudence becomes important, right?
#
Take care of your health.
#
I think with reflection, I'm not sure there's a metric, but I think there are two or three
#
features that you've seen.
#
One is, I think, in hyper-awareness of the conditionality of everything you're saying.
#
I mean, the social science version of this is under what conditions?
#
And to lead a reflective life in part a kind of self-awareness of the conditionality of
#
I'm not saying, look, this commitment is bad because I've taken a decision and closed
#
It's just being aware of the conditions under which you actually took a particular decision.
#
And often the most reflective people, I think, are playful in that sense.
#
They are constantly, in some senses, thinking of that conditionality.
#
That's the opposite of dogmatism as well.
#
That sense of conditionality also opens you up to the world because the reflection has
#
to be a reflection about the world.
#
I mean, it's not just a kind of, right?
#
And if you already have a sensibility that is not open to the conditionality of everything,
#
You're pretty much closing yourself up to the world.
#
So I would say, I think that to me is often a good sign where when people present arguments
#
or when they think about why they give certain beliefs authority, they can actually articulate
#
and are aware of actually the conditionality of those claims and stuff.
#
That's probably as good a metric as any of reflectiveness.
#
That's something I'll certainly reflect on.
#
Let's take a quick commercial break and on the other side, we'll continue our conversation.
#
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and a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills.
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Welcome back to The Scene and The Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Pratap Bhanu Mehta about many things, including the nebulousness of
#
the self before the break.
#
So you could argue that, you know, who are the people who are talking if the self is
#
I want to ask you a question about the world and try to understand it better.
#
And I mean, these are confusing times.
#
We touched on this at the start of the episode, that many of our assumptions about the world,
#
especially the assumption of progress are being challenged.
#
And I see two broad trends playing out in the world, which seem to be going in different
#
And one is the spread of populism and authoritarianism and illiberalism and so on and so forth.
#
And the other is a sort of empowerment of individuals by technology, something that
#
you disparagingly refer to as tech solutionism, but in general as a trend, technology enabling
#
individuals, enabling components of liberal liberalism, which, you know, failed in certain
#
political ways, but tech is achieving that and there what is happening also as a consequence
#
of that is in many different domains, a crumbling of mainstreams, like we see it in media where
#
the mainstream is gone.
#
In the 90s, you there was a mainstream media, you had a consensus on the truth that's dissipated.
#
And in a sense, it's a net positive, everyone has a means of production in their hands and
#
that is empowering for individuals.
#
But the mainstream is gone.
#
I see that in the creator economy, and I sometimes speculate about whether that is happening
#
in terms of nation states itself, where, you know, the internet makes us all global citizens
#
able to form communities of choice, we are no longer constrained by circumstance or geography.
#
And you know, one of these trends is centralizing and narrowing.
#
And the other of these trends is sort of a broadening of, you know, not just our scope
#
and potential, but also a broadening of our imagination.
#
And I don't know how to reconcile the two.
#
And apart from this very nebulous sense of, okay, these two really separate things are
#
happening and one is bad and the other is mostly good.
#
Beyond that, I haven't thought about it with much rigor.
#
So give me a sense of, you know, what's really happening in the world?
#
What's the story of the last 10 years?
#
You ask the kinds of questions only God can answer.
#
So again, I think I would separate out your two questions, both because, and I think you
#
hinted at it, which is not that one is broadly good in one other bad, which is both of them
#
have, I think, a certain kind of internal tension and contradiction, right?
#
So let's start with the illiberalism story first.
#
And with your permission, let's take a step back from this current moment again, just
#
to try and see, you know, what's contingent about a moment and what's kind of enduring
#
If you look at the sources of illiberalism in the modern world, right?
#
You can create a long list, but there are three that I think are politically quite salient.
#
One which we have talked a lot about, so I won't dwell on it here, which is in a sense
#
I mean, most arguments for abridging individual liberty in our context have some connection
#
to nationalism, national security, even religious arguments, even arguments over blasphemy,
#
even arguments over offense to religion, is because religion has been ethnicized into
#
a collective identity, right?
#
And historically, we don't have an answer to this question that nationalism, you know,
#
both enables a modern democracy, but also puts individual liberties at risk.
#
And I don't think that's actually distinctive.
#
I think it, you know, waxes and vanes in some ways and, you know, the era where there was
#
a kind of uncommitted, you know, an unapologetic commitment to liberalism in the face of nationalism
#
has been actually very, very rare.
#
You know, even in the US, we can talk about now, but when you look at Jim Crow, when you
#
look at McCarthyism, actually, even if you look at American free speed jurisprudence
#
in the late 1950s, early 60s, it's actually not that liberal once you come down to it.
#
So I think on that one can, all one can say is to look, this is a aporia at the heart
#
We can't do without nations and yet can't live with them.
#
But there's a second perspective and just, you know, just to sort of broaden the debate
#
a bit, you know, you began with Fukuyama and when Fukuyama talked about the end of history,
#
again, this is an oversimplification of the argument, but broadly the argument was that,
#
look, there's a big 20th century battle between in some senses communism and some combination
#
of liberal democracy and capitalism and liberal democracy and capitalism one, broadly speaking.
#
And that combination is a relatively stable combination.
#
It's not the most exalted, it doesn't cater to the highest greatness we are capable for,
#
but it does satisfy our thymus in some senses, our kind of spiritedness, it sublimates it
#
I think what's happening in the world right now, I configure the modern ideological landscape
#
It's not, it's actually compatible with Fukuyama's but a slightly different way of thinking about
#
But if you look at, you know, 20th century political history and the history of ideas,
#
which is something you're deeply interested in, two things strike you quite remarkably.
#
One is the endurance and persistence of certain political forms and ways of thinking, right?
#
So at one level, it's quite remarkable that, you know, American debates are still talking
#
about 1776, right, I mean, it's just talk of the conditionality of the world.
#
It just seems like a very, very different world.
#
But here's this document constructed in 1776 around with so many debates are being configured.
#
You think of China, almost 100 years of the party state as a political form, right?
#
You think of West Asia, right?
#
And by West Asia, I'm using broadly, but basically Pakistan to Egypt, right?
#
Is this question that is set off in the late 19th, early 20th century, which is, is there
#
a modern form of Islamic constitutionalism possible that can both acknowledge the sovereignty
#
of God and yet be a modern constitution, right?
#
And you look at Africa, right, which in some senses, the modern African political theory
#
project was never again do we want a world which is divided by the color line and the
#
color line becomes the basis of exploitation, right?
#
And India is in this kind of odd place where in this respect, it actually ends up being
#
part of, in a sense, that liberal capitalist domain where we basically come to the conclusion
#
that creating a broadly liberal constitution with a democracy in a kind of unlikely place.
#
In fact, the arguments are even stronger in a place like India, because this is the only
#
thing that can in some ways keep the peace, at least that was the argument.
#
Now what strikes me about the world at the moment is there's an exhaustion around all
#
of these projects, right?
#
And by exhaustion, I mean three things specifically.
#
One the sense amongst the people that as currently conceived, these projects are not delivering
#
There is a kind of crisis of legitimacy.
#
It can be actually very mundane.
#
I mean, if you ask me about the US right now and you say, you know, what is the biggest
#
I don't think it's an ideological failure.
#
It's that liberals have to demonstrate that they can govern.
#
Why do liberal states have the worst homeless crisis in America?
#
Why do they have the worst opioid crisis in America, right?
#
Why is American infrastructure so terrible, right?
#
So there is a sense in which those foundational questions are no longer translating into the
#
kinds of governance expectations that people naturally assume.
#
Interestingly, this is going to be true of China and has been for a while, right?
#
To me, the sign that a state has to resort to more repression and more closure and more
#
surveillance is often tacit admission that it has an internal legitimacy crisis.
#
The party state that China perfected was an extraordinary 20th century political form.
#
In fact, I think it's a more important distinction than the communism, capitalism one, right?
#
Where you said, look, we'll organize a political society around a political party that is different
#
from political parties in the West.
#
It's not a party of interest.
#
It's not a party of principle.
#
It's a party that is both a vanguard.
#
So it projects into the future.
#
It says these are the principle contradictions society needs solving, party is the instrument
#
All conflicts are mediated through the party and the party is representative because the
#
party comes to stand in the nation, for the nation in some ways, right?
#
Now the fact that China is having to resort to more repression, more surveillance, that
#
modest optimism we had under Deng times, not that China would become a liberal democracy.
#
I don't think there was ever on the cards and maybe for good reason, right?
#
But a sense that there could be a party state form that could cohabit with other political
#
forms and be relatively more open, right?
#
That's facing, in a sense, an internal crisis of legitimacy.
#
Liberal democracies facing an internal crisis of legitimacy, as I said, one, it's governance
#
And look, fundamentally, even now in India, right, yes, communism is important, but at
#
the heart of the matter is finding political parties and people who look like they can
#
lead and govern, right?
#
And the dilemma for centrists and liberals is that they look terrible on that score,
#
at least to most of the pop now, whether it's right, wrong, we can debate, but that's the
#
sheen that the Congress party lost.
#
It was never great, but now there's almost a sense you can't even govern your own party,
#
how you're going to govern the country, right?
#
East Asia, right, in some sense is the central contradiction in that project, which is running
#
from Pakistan to Egypt, right, is the answer to that question of can you have an Islamic
#
state under the sovereignty of God?
#
You can have one that is relatively decent, you can have one that is progressive in some
#
ways, but can it allow for the kinds of freedoms that a modern world is premised on, including
#
most importantly, the freedom of thought and expression?
#
That's turning out to be a misnomer, right?
#
And this was the illusion of even the most enlightened thinkers like Iqbal or very sophisticated
#
thinkers like Modudi, right, that you kind of create these modern Islamic states.
#
So that project has been in crisis for a while.
#
And again, there are many reasons for that crisis, geopolitics, imperialism, run-tier
#
states, it's not just an ideological crisis.
#
The African project in some senses, right, that if you at one level, you could argue
#
that if you're interested in racism and color line, it's deeply entwined with the political
#
power in geopolitics of the African continent in some ways that if it gets its act together,
#
right, the world system would look different in terms of how it divides, you know, how
#
it thinks of in a sense the race question.
#
So my sense is that I think what makes this moment different is not that history ended,
#
there is a kind of internal exhaustion that the entire world is feeling.
#
It's not that right now China looks like a better competitor to liberal democracy, as
#
much as the BJP might want to create elements of a party state, right?
#
And then cutting through all of that is the simple fact that the answer to almost every
#
legitimation crisis has been the creation or recreation or some form of nationalism
#
because it's a form of solidarity that depends on identification, not on achievement, right?
#
If you're creating a solidarity based on equality and reciprocity, you better show it.
#
If you're creating a solidarity based on saying, you know, we produce 10% growth, there's enough
#
goodies for everybody to go around, you better produce it.
#
If you create solidarity based on saying, we are the greatest country in the world because
#
we have the best infrastructure, we can provide housing for everyone, you better produce it.
#
So I think in that sense, there is a kind of, I think a global kind of ideological exhaustion
#
in these four major projects that actually were the fulcrum of politics in the 20th century
#
And as I said, the remarkable thing about is the stickiness, right?
#
Which is once that question becomes fundamental to politics, that way of framing a question,
#
how it kind of endures even in its kind of most pathological form sometimes, right?
#
And all of this then is happening in the crisis, in the context of some larger social changes
#
as you in a sense indicated, forms of communication, the tectonic shift of power to Asia, which
#
gives a geopolitical edge to the question of nationalism, right?
#
And I think pretty much every regime from Putin to Xi Jinping and arguably India, maybe
#
the US will also come around to it, is against taking the national project around some form
#
of global geopolitical presence, but except now it's happening in circumstances that are
#
And to that extent, you have to give, I think, compliments to neoliberalism, that it did
#
lift millions of people out of poverty.
#
It did actually change the balance of power, I think, in the world in which many people
#
on the left do not actually acknowledge for whatever it's, I think, other faults.
#
So you have the making of a perfect storm, internal ideological exhaustion in a condition
#
where geopolitical competition can no longer be managed by any hegemonic power of any kind.
#
I think to me that is, I think, at the heart in some senses of illiberalism.
#
I don't think it's a simple choice.
#
Do people vote on their prejudices?
#
Are they being communal or are they voting instrumentally?
#
I think the way people often think about politics is, politics is always about concrete people
#
and concrete political parties.
#
And they come to some judgments about relative credibility.
#
So it's actually quite possible that you might think X is a thorough rogue, but turns out
#
to be, from your point of view, slightly lesser rogue than the other.
#
So you know, and in that reservoir of credibility, I think liberals lost a lot of that argument.
#
I don't think they lost that argument only because, you know, their parties were hijacked
#
Frankly, I think vogueism is as much, its impact is as much exaggerated by the right
#
because it's an ideal, convenient, ideological tool against which to define your identity.
#
It's also a way of not confronting something that is at the core of vogueism everywhere
#
and not just US, which is the question of equality.
#
I mean, it's become a kind of, you know, sometimes a way of evading that question.
#
But it also has to do with concrete structures of governance.
#
Now it could be, I mean, you know, the Inflation Reduction Act has passed in the US.
#
It could be that this is a turning point, but a lot will depend on what happens in the
#
real economy over the next year, two years, three years.
#
It could be a demonstration that the US can again do large projects that, you know, it
#
now doesn't, it's actually worse than India in some ways.
#
It takes four years to fix an escalator in the New York subway.
#
It could be a way of demonstrating that the administrative state that the liberals created
#
is not an obstacle to actually creating these kinds of projects that people share in.
#
But good leaders, in a sense, build their reservoir across these domains.
#
So I think with Narendra Modi, for example, I mean, I don't think it's just communalism.
#
He tries to build a reservoir in all kinds of ways, including sending you personalized
#
letters for paying your taxes and, you know, doing all the nice things that you have done
#
It's, you know, it's a way of gaining familiarity, right?
#
Whether in some senses it's the new welfarism.
#
And I think the challenge for the center and the left is to actually demonstrate that kind
#
of credibility, where we are hampered by the fact that we don't actually have a political
#
party vehicle that can do that at the moment.
#
So I'm fascinated by the term ideological exhaustion.
#
And what that sort of makes me wonder is, was ideology ever so big in the first place?
#
Was it ever a determining factor?
#
Like when I look at India alone, which is the only country about which I think I can
#
talk with lived experience, as it were.
#
What I see essentially is that for decades, it's the elites who had an ideology, which
#
was this received idea of a secular and tolerant India and all of that.
#
I think I'm not sure that was really shared by the masses.
#
I think the way we drifted through the decades was partly because of inertia, partly because
#
most people weren't empowered and that empowerment started happening late.
#
And you know, and we've discussed this before my sense that our society always had these
#
currents running through it and that now politics has caught up with society finally.
#
So I'm wondering if there ever was any ideological hold or is that a story we like to tell ourselves?
#
Like I think, you know, when we explain the world, it's essential to tell ourselves stories.
#
It is inevitable that they will both be simple and simplistic.
#
And I wonder if privileging ideology as a convenient way to explain political currents
#
everywhere somehow is such a small part of the story that it's, you know, that it misses.
#
You've actually answered your own question in two different ways, I mean, right?
#
Which is, you're of course right that, you know, this is not a kind of explanation, right,
#
I think the point about ideological exhaustion, right, was in some senses to say that when
#
you have in a way this kind of triple crisis where whatever is the dominant narrative of
#
your society, right, that basic structure that was taught to govern it is not seen to
#
be delivering the goods, right?
#
That's in a sense condition number one.
#
Condition number two, when new problems arise to which that ideology does not seem fit for
#
And that's part of the problem with the nation state thing.
#
It's not fit for purpose for individual liberty, but it's not fit for purpose for actually
#
solving planetary problems right now.
#
I mean, you know, competitive nationalism is not going to be good for the planet in
#
So there's a kind of cry, right?
#
And the third, in a sense, is a kind of more psychological one where there isn't the articulation
#
of any political party, vehicle, entity that you have some presumptive credibility, that
#
has some presumptive credibility or you have faith in, right?
#
I mean, you know, it's very hard to argue that India was secularism, although I don't
#
think it's an elite mass thing, because I think a lot of modern attacks on secularism
#
are actually elite attacks, including amongst intellectuals, by the way.
#
And ordinary people can often accommodate a vernacular secularism in practice, I think,
#
But what you did have for good or for ill, right, is because of the history of the national
#
movement, you had a leadership in a political party that carried enough reservoirs of credibility.
#
When people voted for Jawaharlal Nehru, I don't think they voted by saying, you know,
#
is Nehru a secular or not?
#
I think broadly it was, yeah, looks like somebody who's generally competent and may has had
#
the best interests of the country at the heart.
#
And then, you know, a lot of the political culture changes around that, right?
#
So you, in a sense, have an exhaustion of all of those elements, which no longer are.
#
And it's precisely under those circumstances that partly nationalism is just tempting,
#
because it's the one easy identification narrative that you can actually produce across
#
large numbers of people without doing.
#
And the world is such that it is actually giving you raw material for doing it, right?
#
There's the global geopolitical context, you know, okay?
#
So the exhaustion point was to kind of understand how do we end up in a place where, in a sense,
#
we are so receptive to the idea of just kind of smashing up a lot of stuff which sustained
#
The second point about ideology, and where I may differ with you slightly, is I'm actually
#
struck by the stickiness of the question.
#
It's not so much the, you know, which is when you think of Indian debates, right?
#
It's now 75 years since independence, and even now with the BJP, I mean, it might change
#
as if Hindu nationalism consolidates its power.
#
There's a kind of basic frame within which we have the debate, and a lot of the debate
#
is really about the effectiveness of that frame, whether it's implemented consistently,
#
the hypocrisies that attend to that story.
#
When you think about the US, right, again, it's thinking within a horizon of very entrenched
#
When you think of the party state in China, again, the state, the party has gone internal
#
transformation, but it seems outside of the horizon of possibility that there's a big
#
voice saying, you know, boss, now we have to think outside the horizon of the party
#
state as we understood, right?
#
I mean, the one thing that's announced in China is kind of competitive elections, right?
#
Pakistan, right, or Egypt in some ways, where you say, yes, Islam is important, it's, you
#
know, it's in some sense, it's a kind of extraordinary civilization.
#
But has the time come to think outside of the horizon of a conception that is institutionalized
#
in the state and has to protect, you know, people against blasphemy or something, right?
#
That's the no-no question in some senses, right?
#
So in that sense, I don't think it's specific ideological beliefs, it's that our framing
#
of the question has already actually taken on board a certain conception of the horizons
#
And sometimes these are good things, I mean, you know, it's probably a good thing that,
#
you know, liberal democracies are not yet thinking of converting themselves into party
#
But certainly, the Trump movement was a wake-up call that actually, in part, the response
#
to that exhaustion is to say, actually, we need somebody who can smash this stuff open,
#
even using the means that actually brought them to power to do it, right?
#
So in that sense, I think ideology actually matters a lot.
#
I mean, I think it's, in fact, we often don't recognize it because it's actually so deeply
#
embedded in the frames in which we are using, right, to pose the question, which will then
#
circumscribe the range of answers you can give.
#
So here's a provocative question about India or a provocative thought, which is that, you
#
know, it's almost become cliched to talk of different ideas of India, Nehru's idea of
#
India, perhaps Modi's idea of India.
#
And one contention could be that both these ideas of India, as it were, to, you know,
#
simplify and say that there are two, both these ideas of India are colonial ideas and
#
therefore unsustainable, in the sense that the modern Indian project, the political project
#
of, you know, Siddharth Patel and V. P. Menon bringing all these princely states together
#
and so on, seems to me to be like a fast-track colonization.
#
What the British did over 200, 300 years, these guys did in a couple of years, and they
#
did it through coercion, they did it through promises that were later broken, they did
#
it in all kinds of ways, you know, under the notion that the end justifies the means and
#
this is a glorious end.
#
Now, the thing is, at one level, I can look at this nation-state that we have today and
#
these lines on a map, and India, and I love this country deeply, and I can celebrate our
#
diversity and all the good things about us, as, you know, J. P. Narayan once pointed out
#
to me that it's okay to say we are an illiberal nation, but at the same time we are liberal
#
in so many lived ways, like the assimilation which is reflected in our food, our languages,
#
our clothes, everything.
#
But is this unsustainable in the sense that in governance terms, I think everybody agrees
#
that the more federal you are, the more local government is, the better it is for the people.
#
My sense of the modern Indian state today is that it is a replica of the colonial state
#
except that our rulers today have brown skin instead of white skin.
#
We are not really citizens, except in theory, we are subjects and they are rulers.
#
And you know, when you look a little bit down the road, you see that big problem of delimitation
#
also coming up, which is bound to, for understandable reasons, raise a lot of shackles.
#
And I think that, you know, whether or not we think outside the box, the box will think
#
outside of itself in the sense that, look, there is a sense of permanence about this,
#
that this nation has existed for 75 years.
#
There might even be a sense of permanence about China's one party state, but the sample
#
size of history through which it has, you know, survived this one party state, it's
#
not necessary that it lasts much longer.
#
Everything in the present moment seems made of rock, but it withers away in a day.
#
So what are sort of, you know, your thoughts on this?
#
So let me push back against that.
#
I mean, at one level, I agree with you, but I agree with you, I think, in a general sense,
#
I don't think there's anything peculiar about India.
#
All nation states are states created through coercion and colonization.
#
I mean, there isn't a single, I mean, it's, you know, there isn't a single example.
#
And I think it's important not to exceptionalize Indian history in that way.
#
I mean, not as a defensive measure, but I think just as a kind of analytical proposition
#
that, you know, because in a way, and I want to kind of distinguish the question of the
#
nation and the state for a second, but precisely because the modern state is an ambitious state,
#
It has to institutionalize deeply.
#
It has to collect revenues on a different scale.
#
It has to do lots of different things.
#
Precisely because of that, it has to, in some senses, disembed everything that resists this
#
So all states are kind of statist in that way.
#
I mean, there hasn't been a, you know, and I think this was an argument even Hayek made.
#
In fact, the criticism of Hayek is, you know, there's this term authoritarian libertarianism,
#
that first you need to get that capable state in, you know, take out all the obstacles in
#
Then you will get these nice liberated individuals.
#
From where I stand, actually, Hayek was a bit of a commie, but please continue.
#
It's for exactly that reason, I mean, I mean, there's a kind of collectivism in Hayek actually,
#
which is actually quite striking and a collectivism that actually becomes quite crude when he talks
#
I mean, Pinochet, you know, Kutty, right?
#
So there is something in a sense about the sociology of modernity, not anything particular
#
Where there will always be this dialectic of the state, in a sense, wanting to create
#
a particular form of order and society resisting it, right?
#
And in some senses, almost every historical comparative political literature turns out
#
basically centers on the proposition.
#
What is the balance of the state and society?
#
China, the quip went was all state, no civil society.
#
India had a kind of light state, at least in terms of its ambition, and now it's kind
#
of transforming into modern.
#
You just can't get industrialization, you can't get the kind of labor mobility, all
#
of that stuff without that state.
#
So in that sense, the process of state formation, I think, is always going to be fraught in
#
And I think the arguments about centralization and decentralization are always tactical arguments
#
in light of what the purpose of that state is.
#
I think from a democratic point of view, and from the point of view of the delivery of
#
certain kinds of services, I can agree with that.
#
I mean, India is way too centralized.
#
But frankly, there's no straightforward story.
#
I mean, if you look at the literature on education, for example, right?
#
It actually turns out the authoritarian states were far better than decentralized democratic
#
So the impulse to actually education often came from this extraneous purpose of building
#
So in that sense, I don't think India is an exception.
#
And in India, because of the nature of social cleavages, this project has turned out differently
#
in parts where we are successful at democratically incorporating it as we have in some senses
#
Where we have tried repression, we usually fail, because I think there's enough social
#
So it's not that in India, depression has kind of succeeded better than democracy.
#
It's part of that same state-society balance, whether it's democratic or not.
#
Now the question of the nation, I think, is a much more complicated one.
#
And again, the cliche, all nation states are modern.
#
The nation state form in which we understand it, which is horizontal conceptions of citizenship,
#
equality, full membership.
#
Now see, in India, there's a peculiar, I think, challenge.
#
And I think we kind of underappreciate what the Nehru Sardar Patel project is.
#
So if you look at Europe, if you look at the map of Europe, the formation of nation states
#
was accompanied by the bloodiest of exclusions.
#
I mean, partly we don't see that because they accomplished that before they became nation
#
18th century, you can expel the Catholics, you can expel the Jews, you can do all kinds
#
We forget Britain had an oath of allegiance till the late 19th century.
#
But even more startlingly, if you look at Michael Mann's work, The Dark Side of Democracy,
#
the ethnic homogenization that went into the creation of nation states, because empires
#
by their nature are kind of multilingual, but empires are not ambitious entities.
#
So long as you're not challenging the ruler and giving decent enough taxes, they don't
#
care, which is why they can allow for your customs, they can allow for, there's no modernizing
#
project in most empires, most empires, some of them do.
#
So the project of the nation state, because it involves new conceptions of membership,
#
new questions of who is the people, in a way, we don't actually have to answer that question
#
politically before the 19th century.
#
So I think this debate was how far back Indian consciousness goes, Hindu consciousness goes,
#
is actually beside the point.
#
I mean, you can actually concede that it maybe goes far, there is actually a consciousness.
#
And I actually, I think academic scholarship is doing Indian history a disservice by this
#
over-determinism of kind of colonialism, as a kind of instigator for this conduct.
#
But the specific form in which the question of nation is presented to us post 1857, now
#
we are going to be a modern society.
#
A modern society requires a different power-sharing arrangement than an empire does.
#
If it's going to be a democracy, then that power-sharing arrangement involves questions
#
of majority and minority.
#
And so it's out of that crucible of representative democracy that actually our modern communal
#
problem takes the turn it does.
#
And the hard question for us is actually the intimate connection between this problem and
#
the question of democratic representation, particularly once you start thinking in terms
#
of majorities and minorities.
#
Now the simple solution would be, look, we are all individuals, that's in a sense formally
#
the American solution, but then you have to create the conditions to get there.
#
Now the second thing that I think Nehru and Patel grasp, and honestly, the question of
#
representation and identity ended in failure with partition.
#
India is born against the backdrop of the failure to resolve that question, which is
#
fundamentally about a power-sharing question.
#
But Nehru and Patel, I think, also understood this thing about India.
#
And when they looked at Europe, it's interesting, all Indian nationalists, including Nehru,
#
were not gung-ho about nationalism.
#
I mean, Gandhi and Tagore are explicitly post-national thinkers in some ways.
#
But even the Nehru's, even Aurobindo Ghosh actually kind of sees nationalism as kind
#
of just a kind of transitory stage to something else, in part because they saw the logic of
#
the nation-state as homogenizing and exclusionary.
#
For them, the beauty of the Indian experiment is if you start breaking it up into 20 pieces,
#
what you will get is the dynamic that 19th century Europe got.
#
You can't object to a collective narcissism at a higher level and then expect the smaller
#
collective narcissism to, in some senses, be morally kosher.
#
To the nature of cultural connections in India, in some senses, it's complicated braiding
#
across caste, class, in some ways, meant that any project of homogenization at a local level,
#
which is what, let's say, breaking up India into 10, 15, 20 nation-states, which could
#
sustain or require, is it would require actually breaking people from their local identities
#
and bonds in which we shouldn't assume that if Tamil Nadu is a state, I mean, the first
#
thing that's going to happen is non-Tamil speakers will be kicked out.
#
It happens pretty much everywhere.
#
I mean, that's not right.
#
So they imagined India in a different way, that instead of saying, you know, we're going
#
to benchmark an Indian identity, and the answer to that benchmarking is lots of local benchmarkings.
#
Let these organic connections, in some senses, flow.
#
What you need is an assurance that people's culture will not be trampled over.
#
So that's a linguistic compromise.
#
India is unique in that kind of linguistic compromise, where you say 16 languages, you
#
actually don't press the question of language in the way in which smaller states have done.
#
I mean, think of tiny Sri Lanka, right, I mean, what a disaster, right.
#
You know, it couldn't manage, in some sense, it's too complicated.
#
So the Nehru Patel argument was counterintuitive.
#
It said that let's use these cross-cutting diversities in some sense, in a way to imagine
#
a new form of a nation-state, which is actually not benchmarked.
#
So if you want to do a Hindu nationalist reading of our past, you're also welcome, in some
#
You know, if you think the Hindu nation was glorious, that's also fine.
#
So long as we can agree on a kind of basic constitutional, I think, identity.
#
We've seen this example in the Northeast, right, I mean, one of the interesting things
#
about the Northeast, and it's a place where the Indian state failed miserably, right,
#
I mean, the amount of repression we used, right.
#
But one of the interesting things about the Northeast is that there were, you know, a
#
couple of insurgencies, post-independence.
#
But the minute we said, or movements in the Northeast said, we will align ethnicity and
#
territoriality, you had like 20 insurgencies, because there's no way of aligning territoriality
#
and ethnicity, right, without literally pulling apart the society, even at the local level.
#
So I actually think, I think there's actually a much deeper sociological and practical understanding,
#
I think, of why, in some senses, you just have to think of India in this civilizational
#
palimpsest terms, right.
#
We tried one partition, I mean, you could argue that's one form of localism, right.
#
It had the inevitable consequence of ethnic cleansing, right.
#
So this idea that you could break up India into small nation states, and that will somehow
#
not raise this problem.
#
So Patel and Nehru's answer, and Gandhi's answer was, let's, you know, just go for the
#
whole thing in some ways.
#
The failure, I think, is the one you pointed to, which is that there are particular broken
#
There are parts of the country where we did not show enough faith in our own democracy
#
And so whenever we tried democratic, you know, in the 50s, nobody gave India a chance, or
#
at least many social scientists didn't.
#
Whenever we tried democratic incorporation, we succeeded.
#
And now I think you're right that there is an interesting question of what's the architecture
#
of federalism that will continue in some senses to deepen that story.
#
And there I think we're going in the reverse direction.
#
I mean, you know, there's a lot more centralization and so forth.
#
So I think on this one, I'd give ourselves a little bit of credit.
#
I don't think we were just aping colonial.
#
What we were saying was, look, these are realities.
#
There is a modern state which is required under the modern horizons, and the only way
#
in which you think you can make it work in the context of India's diversity is to actually
#
keep thinking of India in some sense as a whole, rather than saying, you know, we'll
#
So here's an innovation.
#
I mean, it's the only nation state in the world that's still officially, at least.
#
And you could say that's a deficiency.
#
Does not push for everybody's language to be the same, not a classic attribute of nation.
#
So we actually innovated.
#
So you know, before I kind of go further on that, just a minor lament that, you know,
#
we talk about state versus society and markets as a third prong, though I think markets are
#
just a mechanism for society to express itself through voluntary action.
#
But otherwise, and people would expect that, OK, I always keep talking about the predatory
#
state, surely I'm on the side of society.
#
But as an individual, I kind of have an issue with all of them.
#
Our state tends to be oppressive, our society tends to be illiberal, markets will generally
#
be enthralled of one or the other, either you'll have cronyism, which are the opposite
#
of free markets, and so on and so forth.
#
But leaving that little lament about the importance that individuals deserve aside, I want to
#
hark back to something that I think you mentioned in your conversation with Shruti, where you
#
spoke about how nationalism is just one dimension of our problems, that the unresolved dilemma
#
is how is power going to be shared once you institutionalize a democracy?
#
And there it seems that, just thinking aloud, on two fronts we went terribly wrong.
#
One is the first-past-supposed system.
#
Proportional representation would have solved many of the problems and fissures that exist
#
At least it would be less problematic.
#
And the other, of course, is federalism, we centralized way too much, and we centralized
#
We centralized because at the time we made these decisions, the country was falling apart,
#
the center had to hold, so it was natural to want to centralize power, and Ambedkar,
#
of course, was deeply suspicious, and correctly so, of smaller communities, you know, villages
#
were a den of localism, and so on and so forth, and that was another rational reason to centralize
#
Though the argument that you just articulated, you know, I haven't heard that before from
#
So can you elaborate a bit on this in terms of that problem?
#
How is power going to be shared?
#
And what is our experience with trying to solve for that problem?
#
And what could resolve it going forward?
#
So I have a slight disagreement with you on the first-past-supposed system.
#
So again, from a political science perspective, just like reason underdetermines choices,
#
I think institutional design hugely underdetermines outcomes, usually.
#
So I actually never buy these kind of, and again, I think there's a kind of a lot of
#
contextuality to it, and I'm actually not convinced that proportional representation
#
is the answer to that problem, because proportional representation, it depends on what you want
#
So if your image is, here's five groups, we want to share, you know, 20% for you, 10%
#
for you, 15% for you, proportional representation is fine, right?
#
If you want to create a polity, right, where the aim of politics in some senses is to break
#
the hold of those identities on you, that you see yourselves as part of these groups,
#
Proportional representation can actually be quite a disaster, actually, in some ways.
#
It can solidify the toxicities.
#
And I think one of the interesting things about first-past-supposed system, normatively,
#
which people underappreciate, right, because I think we're too mathematical about this.
#
Politics is all about latent functions, not just manifest functions.
#
So, you know, one of the original arguments for why have territorial-based constituencies,
#
And that itself is not clear, that's the only way to organize a democracy, was supposed
#
to be that territorial constituencies was a kind of proxy for a localized random selection.
#
In any given territory, they'll be rich, they'll be poor, hopefully, there'll be enough kind
#
of caste diversity, religious diversity, and you want the unit to be one where you actually
#
have to talk to everyone.
#
So it's actually creating a process.
#
One of the unintended consequences of first-past-supposed system is, and again, it depends on context
#
now with party dominance changing, it could have a different meaning.
#
We sometimes decry the fact that parties with small percentage of votes could actually hold
#
up bills in Lok Sabha, you know, but there's a flip side to it.
#
It's the system that allowed every party to share in national governance at some point,
#
once that Congress hegemony, right?
#
And what kept it together was not the formal design, what kept it was a certain understanding
#
of politics, a political self-identity that politicians in some senses have, that fundamentally
#
we are social mediators, at the fringes we engage in violence, but, right?
#
So whether it's first-past-supposed system or proportional representation or presidential
#
or parliamentary system, the actual work of politics and the forms of organization that
#
happened outside the formal electoral process make a huge, huge difference.
#
I mean, what kept India together insofar as it was part of the partition was not just
#
that we had a constitution and design, it was a certain culture of the Congress party.
#
You organize units regionally, you give language identity space, at least you make a show of
#
inclusion, whatever, I mean, it had its limitations, right?
#
So I think a lot of what changed in a sense was our kind of conception of politics, more
#
I mean, I'm not saying that we shouldn't relook at the first-past-supposed system, but I think
#
it's a bit quick to say, you know, it's like, if the state didn't work, market will, I mean,
#
I think the underlying conditions in some senses are similar.
#
So then the question was, in a sense, what the question of power sharing is.
#
Now the problem with our pre-partition discussion on power sharing was we were all looking for
#
an engineering solution, right, X representation, or if you give this community the veto on this
#
issue, and I think Ambedkar called the bluff on that in his book on Pakistan.
#
He says, boss, if you think of yourself as one nation, two societies, this is not going
#
to be a power arrangement system between two communities that see themselves as part of
#
And the only way you're going to get that is in some senses disembedding individuals,
#
right, and his argument was that, his strongest argument for partition is that it might give
#
India the chance to modernize because it takes the Hindu-Muslim question off the agenda.
#
He was not entirely sanguine about it, but he thought there was a much greater possibility
#
of that than if you just locked India into this one question, what is going to be the
#
balance of power between Hindus and Muslims.
#
And unfortunately, I think since 1857, that political question has kind of dominated and
#
the BJP now comes and says, inko to veto diya tha, we'll make them irrelevant, right.
#
So in that sense, that project, which was at the heart of Madisonian democracy, that
#
you cannot make any system of representation run where fundamentally the purpose of representation
#
is not to create a space for politics and individuality, but in some senses to solidify
#
Now, you need to recognize identity sometimes, right, I mean, so the argument for let's say
#
reservation for Dalits and Ambedkar is clear that the purpose of it is to give them the
#
means and empower them to actually exercise their agency as individuals.
#
It's not in some senses, just a mechanical numerical question of power sharing.
#
And the final question about power sharing is that ultimately it's also about forms of
#
And one reason we worry about this particular moment is, even if the state formally remains
#
constitutional in the way that it is, you create forms of social power that stigmatize
#
and marginalize groups and target for them for being who they are, right.
#
The Nehru project in some ways, right, actually kind of understood that, now the problem that
#
happened in a sense that you don't actually have a vehicle in some sense for achieving
#
Gandhi was right on this, what happened to social reform, what happened to public education,
#
the one crucible in which common citizenship is created around the world, right.
#
That's pretty much been the most important instrument of any nation state, right.
#
There we, the liberals failed absolutely utterly miserably.
#
So you're kind of operating on a project that has actually no institutional engines behind
#
So you know, and I agree actually that my question was a little unfair because I made
#
the mistake of comparing proportional representation in theory with first pass supposed in practice.
#
And if you were to do it the other way around, you know, the argument could go the other
#
And I'm convinced by your argument against proportional representation that it embeds
#
those identities in place and doesn't recognize the fact that every individual contains multitudes
#
and obviously we want to move beyond identity.
#
But then the same argument could also be used for various kinds of affirmative action that
#
It could be used for, you know, what we did with the Hindu court bill, that you're treating
#
people of one particular identity in one particular way and, you know, privileging another one
#
by leaving them out of it for understandable reasons that we don't want the minorities
#
to feel uncomfortable, but nevertheless.
#
And this is also a sort of a tension at the heart of the project, I think, in the sense
#
that you have the constitution guaranteeing equality and that everyone will be treated
#
But then you have all of these exceptions carved out with perhaps great intentions,
#
but you have these exceptions carved out.
#
And in this sense, it seems a little incoherent, you know.
#
So I think you have to distinguish the three cases that you mentioned, because I think
#
they're very different logics.
#
I mean, you know, to me, the reservation case, particularly for Dalits, right?
#
The theory is, here's a group that is marginalized on every single dimension you can mention,
#
Unlike OBCs and all, as you pointed out.
#
And one instrument of addressing that marginalization has got to be giving a share in jobs and education.
#
That's the kind of way.
#
I mean, and partly just because of spin-off effects.
#
I mean, because this is a group in some senses that was so marginalized.
#
You've never seen a government officer, right?
#
But the objective, right, is not the maintenance of a group identity, right?
#
The objective is to put you in a position where you can actually exercise your individual
#
agency like everybody else does.
#
So when Dalits, you know, and it's not, I think, an accident that, you know, one of
#
the reasons I think Dalits have been, Dalit movements have been such custodians of the
#
Not just because of the identification with Ambedkar, but because the story they want
#
is not a story of, some now are beginning to articulate it after the mandalsam, but
#
it's not a story of actually just power sharing and representation.
#
It was a story of inclusion as agents and subjects for which this happens to be an instrument,
#
Now, there's two things that in a sense that, so in principle, you can actually justify
#
I think affirmative action of some, right?
#
The question then becomes how do you design it in a way that actually achieves that particular
#
And there we in a sense did the kind of classic thing the Indian state does, lowest common
#
denominator, simplest solution.
#
And partly we were politically wedded to it because we were failing on all the other dimensions
#
So this becomes a kind of lightning rod for mobilization.
#
With the expansion of mandal, in some sense is that inclusionary logic of affirmative
#
action was now, OBCs are complicated groups.
#
I mean, it's a very large category and you know, but broadly speaking, it actually took
#
the reservation debate into, here is a pie that needs to be divided in a sense according
#
to that and the identities of people.
#
And now we have the reductio ad absurdum of them, which is, you know, might as well say,
#
you know, if they're only 5% of our costs, give them 5% of that pie, right?
#
And there were better ways of designing affirmative action.
#
I think, you know, many people proposed this.
#
We were pushing for it at the knowledge commission based on Rakesh Basan's work then, which is
#
what if you used parents' education as a proxy for people who are eligible for affirmative
#
It would actually cover all the Dalit groups you need to cover, right?
#
But in some senses, after a generation or two could be self-liquidating.
#
Interestingly JNU's multi-prong deprivation index was actually an interesting way of breaking
#
out of this mold in some ways.
#
And you could, you know, you could actually tinker within ways in which, so I actually
#
think affirmative action is I think quite just, but yes, the form in which we congealed
#
it and two, I think the cultural change, right, which is what happened the minute this became
#
a question of just the sharing of power, the ethical dimension of it, which is the point
#
is that in some senses, you should not be a prisoner of this compulsory identity, right?
#
That ethical point got lost.
#
And not just got lost, I mean, I was quite aghast, you know, the day before yesterday
#
Manish Sodhiya, you know, yes, the government is hounding him, but his first response was
#
main Rajput hu main nahi jhukta hu.
#
And I mean, I can understand the sentiment, but what's the implication, right, that there
#
is a kind of compulsory identity of Rajputness and, you know, we slip into that quite, quite
#
unconsciously, right, that the moral horror of caste, right, is that it gives everyone
#
a compulsory identity where you have no control over your self-definition, right?
#
I mean, that's what makes, you know, parts of Manu like look so kind of oppressive.
#
Why Ambedkar reacts so strongly to Gandhi?
#
It's not just that Harijan is patronizing, it's the ultimate Manuvadi act where somebody
#
comes and says, I'm going to name you, right?
#
No matter what you do, where you are, you're Harijan, you're right, and one of the reasons
#
I think caste politics is so attractive to politicians, right, in a way in which class
#
politics is not is because it provides a simple, simple metric, right, ex people have graduated.
#
If you do class, the minute you come out of your class, you're no longer a member of that
#
So caste has this peculiar kind of feature, right?
#
And why I think the caste census, I actually oppose the caste census, because I think everything
#
that needs to be done for genuine empowerment, you can actually do without a census.
#
You don't need a census for that, right, it's actually an artifact of this odd, and we haven't
#
even resolved the methodological question, right?
#
Can it be a part of self-definition?
#
And if your identity cannot be part of a self-definition or not a product of self-definition, for a
#
liberal state, that's almost the worst kind of identity, right?
#
You don't even get the right to name who you are, right?
#
So I think that's where we ended up, I think, wrong with the caste question.
#
The personal law question in some ways, and you're right that, look, the constitution
#
It was a modus vivendi, it's conditions of partition.
#
Partly it's an act of reassurance to minorities.
#
The way I now think of the personal law question is, I think the question got slightly framed
#
in this terms of a kind of uniform civil code, because that, again, reinstates the question.
#
Whose civil code, who's defining it, whose values get into it?
#
And when you're looking at things like marriage, I'm just trying to think of a common civil
#
code of marriage, cross-cousin marriage, go through marriage, right?
#
These are deeply embedded practices.
#
The better tact to take, which I think is where the Supreme Court was incrementally
#
heading, was to say that, look, there can be different kinds of variations, right?
#
But all of those variations have to pass some basic tests, right?
#
Gender equality, freedom of a certain kind, compatible with that, if the variation's fine,
#
and plus you can have an exit option.
#
I mean, you can always do the Special Managers Act, right?
#
But I think framing the common civil code around national integration was a mistake,
#
because it immediately raises the specter, will our cultural practices find a reflection
#
The commonality that we are interested in is the baseline consensus that the state has
#
a compelling interest in gender equality and freedom across all laws, right?
#
Compatible with that, if there are various kinds of variations and all of that, that's
#
something to be, in a sense, worked out.
#
But the suspicion, right, that this is going to be drafted by a majority that's not going
#
to consult others, and by the way, the reverse suspicion where Congress party's biggest
#
mistake to institutionally empower a body like the Muslim Person Law Board, which is
#
neither representative, nor farsighted, nor has any imagination, right, partly, I think,
#
The political reasons being that it was easier to prey on that politics of fear.
#
The majority will, in some senses, ride roughshod over you.
#
Now that's happening anyway.
#
But instead of being constructive about it, right, and Congress kind of betrayed all of
#
these principles, particularly under Rajiv Gandhi.
#
So I think for liberals, I think it's important to engage with the UCC debate, not just to
#
a knee-jerk reaction, but bring it back to these first principles, right?
#
What's the compelling core vision of the Constitution that these practices, in some senses, have
#
And then, in some senses, apply that, I think, symmetrically, in some ways.
#
I think on liberty, I actually agree with you where the two kinds of threats of liberty
#
where, again, the Indian state is not an exception.
#
One is the kind of inflation of threats to national security and public order as pretext
#
for containing civil rights, which, again, all states have done.
#
But the second, I am a near absoluteist in free speech, unless there's direct incitement
#
I think the presence of a category that looks like blasphemy, right, if it's an operational
#
category in law, you have states like England where it existed in the books, but nobody
#
bothered for it for quite a while, is actually a disaster for liberal societies.
#
And it's a disaster in two ways.
#
One because it suggests a kind of basic lack of trust, which is the underlying discourse
#
of that article, right?
#
We are such mad people, we will get so triggered, right, that large-scale violence is going
#
But we fail to consider the reverse possibility that large-scale violence, right, also follows
#
from the fact that people can actually mobilize to get things back and then it becomes a competitive
#
race between communities.
#
So I think a very, very strong norm, right?
#
And why, for instance, in the Nupur Sharma case, I think it was important to say that
#
as a functionary of the BJP, right, the manner for articulation should not suggest that minorities
#
are stigmatized and arguments about my mother are weaponized in that way.
#
But I actually don't think there's a case for arresting her.
#
I think that's where, again, we liberals jump right into the trap, right?
#
So you reach a point where these kinds of utterances become a kind of matter of fact
#
where somebody says nobody actually pays attention to them.
#
But by having a law, you are ensuring, right, that these get to it.
#
By the way, this is not just true with this.
#
I mean, you just look at what's happening in Punjab.
#
I mean, Punjab has a blasphemy law.
#
The SGPCs crack down in some senses of even legitimate scholars who work on Sikhism is
#
actually a story that's not been written about enough.
#
So there are all these kinds of reverberating effects, Basveshtra's followers in Karnataka.
#
So we just, I think we need to, in some senses, I think, show more trust.
#
It's not going to be seamless, but we have locked ourselves into a vicious cycle, which
#
has only, I think, deepened with every, again, being stuck in a 1930s paradigm.
#
Yeah, no, I agree with you on all of this and you said you're a near free speech absolutist
#
and you're near me because I'm an absolutist and I agree with you about the liberal hypocrisy
#
I mean, you know, if you think 295A and 153A are bad, they should not be there, then that's
#
That's the end of the story.
#
But you can't say that, hey, you know, don't use it on us, but use it for Andhap Goswami,
#
use it for Nupur Sharma.
#
That simply does not compute and just tremendous.
#
No, I said near absolute, just in the sense that, you know, absolute has a kind of connotation
#
where, you know, even normal taught wrongs and stuff are not actually covered by that.
#
So, you know, but I suspect on every issue we'll be all probably on the same.
#
No, and I'm exactly with you on the issue of reservations as well.
#
You know, the objectives and the rationale behind reservations for Dalits were fantastic.
#
But if you look at the outcomes and the way they turned out, you know, I agree with you
#
about the design, but the thing is that tool became a political tool eventually.
#
And I wonder if it ended up solidifying these identities in people minds, like caste is
#
And what you want to do is you want to fight as effectively as you can.
#
And I think part of the danger was part of the danger of any kind of top down thinking
#
is that apne law banalia and the law is there and you think our job is done.
#
But the point is a top down law is going to be incredibly ineffective and B, you know,
#
and that social change simply isn't happening.
#
We needed that social change.
#
And I wonder if our thinking about it was and it's easy to say this in hindsight, obviously.
#
No, but I think a couple of nuances, I think on reservation for Dalits, I think I have
#
a slightly different, it's not incompatible, but I think one nuance, you know, when we
#
say solidified caste, I think we actually have to acknowledge the fact that a lot of
#
that solidification actually comes from upper caste backlash that refuses to acknowledge
#
Actually, it's not as much as if Dalits kind of, you know, yes, for political sense, but
#
in some ways, I think I actually do think there's a kind of asymmetry there, at least
#
what I see on college campuses in some ways.
#
I mean, obviously in India, you can't escape caste, but I think the solidification that
#
has come from the resentment that I have to deal with this problem, I think that's actually
#
and it's a much more insidious form of solidification than a traditional, and I think it has to
#
be said that I think a lot of the mechanism of solidification, like in the US in some
#
senses, solidification of white identity actually comes from that we don't want to share this
#
power or in a sense, share this space.
#
I think the second thing, I think in the case of Dalit reservations is that, you know, it
#
has at the margins, I think created avenues for mobility, which are beginning to have
#
I mean, you know, I think if our friend Chandrabhan was here, he has a particular take on this
#
in some ways, right, which is that in the case of Dalits, you urgently needed to create
#
even the minimal resources, educational, to actually even think of the slightest forms
#
And you could argue that some of that has actually happened in some ways, that, you
#
know, in some senses, even the Dalit entrepreneurs that he's writing about, right, and many of
#
them, by the way, don't want reservation for themselves and their kids, you know, so in
#
that sense, I don't think for them, it's this kind of solidified story.
#
But the fact that there were examples and the fact that is, I think, an enabling step.
#
I think the scandal, I think, of reservations is that, and this I can say, you know, very
#
apparent when I was on the Knowledge Commission, absolutely everybody in India gets mobilized
#
on the issue of access, low fees, you know, affirmative action, impossible to get anybody
#
mobilized on education quality.
#
And access to us became that substitute for, you know, quality in some ways, right.
#
And as time went on, so more and more weight was actually placed on the access story, you
#
know, and that we are achieving quality is a kind of miracle, you know, in the sense
#
that lots of little nooks and crannies allowed us escape all.
#
But the quality story, and the quality story was in fact, you know, often used against
#
The whole question of, you know, they're not enough qualified Dalits, I mean, frankly,
#
in our context, if you're sincere about that, you first have to show what your record is
#
on improving public schools, improving the quality of education.
#
Otherwise, that's just a weapon to basically argue for the unfairness of reservation.
#
I mean, it's, you know, pitting the plumage, but forgetting the dying bird.
#
It's a circular argument that traps them in a vicious circle.
#
But what I meant by solidifying identity was not in the case of Dalits per se, but what
#
reservations later became when it got expanded to various landowning costs and so on and
#
so forth, where it just became, you know, one more tool that you use in electoral politics
#
to build word banks and so on and so forth.
#
And, you know, but actually, it's deeper than that.
#
I mean, I think you're right about it, because what I've been actually struck by, you know,
#
there's this nice sociological story we told ourselves that caste will move from hierarchy
#
And in some senses, that's really an achievement because it takes away from the hierarchical
#
purity pollution aspects.
#
It's a way of organizing group identity.
#
I think the horror to my mind of that story, the way it has happened in India is in a sense
#
the compulsory character of it, that the kinds of identities that liberal society values
#
and should valorize the freedom for people to, in some senses, choose and create identities.
#
But the kind of identities that we have created, it's compulsory character, right, which is
#
in a sense you're measured, no matter the kind of all parts of the spectrum, right?
#
And that now has even more insidious form, right?
#
It's been given legal form in some ways, right?
#
I mean, it's, and how you can create a liberal society that doesn't open up the possibility
#
for self-definition, I think should worry us.
#
Yes, so here's a question and here's a thought that kind of gives me some amount of despair,
#
which is we have all these fault lines in Indian society, right?
#
It was almost a matter of faith at one point for our liberal elites that look, number one,
#
we will, you know, create these top-down interventions to solve these problems and number two, society
#
will modernize over time, we'll get prosperous, things will get better, these fissures will
#
Now, what we see with the anti-Muslim nature of modern politics, which more than one party
#
subscribes to, is that that really hasn't happened.
#
If anything, they've kind of deepened.
#
We see the same thing with caste, we see more assertion of it, like Sasodi is standing up
#
and saying he's a Rajput and so on and so forth.
#
You know, that's, if anything, it sort of becomes stronger.
#
So where does progress then come from?
#
I mean, in the longer sweep, I think the story is a bit more mixed.
#
And let me take one, begin with a different example, because it might have some bearing
#
on actually these two as well, which is, you know, the one piece of good news that has
#
come in the last week or so, which is India is inching back towards a normal sex ratio
#
I know India's female labor force participation is abysmally low, but I actually think in
#
10 years, the story will be very different.
#
I mean, you can almost sense the pressure of social change.
#
You just look at any educational institution, you just look at that, you know, this kind
#
of stuff, it's taking longer than it should and often, you know, the lag between enrollment
#
and participation is 15 to 10 to 15 years, partly because maybe people are investing
#
So it's actually a good example, right?
#
And one can be kind of cynical about it, but I actually saw in Haryana, you know, one of
#
the most kind of patriarchal states in some ways are kind of poster child, the beti bachao
#
beti padhao was not insincere across social and political spectrums.
#
That doesn't mean violence has stopped, that doesn't mean honor killings are not going
#
to happen, that doesn't mean, you know, but here's a kind of interesting example of actually
#
a pretty deep and significant long-term change that in some senses, I think churning, right?
#
I think with caste, right?
#
So you could tell a kind of benign story, which would go something like this, that again,
#
what we are seeing at the moment is the lag between that political paradigm we had for
#
the last 20, 30 years and the actual social changes.
#
So two things are already beginning, three things in the caste politics, right?
#
One, the logic of caste now is de-agglomeration, right?
#
Which is already a kind of acknowledgement that that paradigm of classification didn't
#
So now you have to have EBCs, now you have to add other criteria, it's a kind of splintering
#
Two, you're beginning to see a lot more splintering of voting choices, right?
#
I mean, as much as you and I might hate the lit groups voting for the BJP, at another
#
level, it actually does signify something deep, right?
#
Not just the fact that they think the BJP is not an obstacle, even if it's not, you
#
know, fully empowering, but the identification between caste and party.
#
I mean, you know, UP upper caste will predominantly, you know, 80% penetration of the BJP and stuff.
#
But I actually think the voting story is a lot more fluid and will get fluid.
#
And now again, it's endogenous.
#
I mean, it's endogenous in the sense that if there's a plausible alternative coalition,
#
people gravitate to it.
#
If there's nothing on offer, then caste is a kind of default thing.
#
I mean, if I know nobody's going to give me governance, I might as well get, you know,
#
three of my buddies in government or something, right?
#
And the shifting coalitions in a sense around caste, right?
#
So I think that's, I think a little bit in the sense of opening up.
#
And the third thing in a sense that will happen, right, which is, you know, a lot of the articulation
#
of the kind of liberal ideas, not the practice of liberalism, but the ideas, it has historically
#
required a kind of much bigger middle class, right?
#
Now up till now, most of us did not have to face this question because other than in education
#
institutions, because of reservation, we actually never actually had to encounter the question
#
of sharing same spaces and all of that.
#
And the fact that the focus is getting back onto things like discrimination and stuff,
#
it may actually force a kind of different kind of conversation, generationally it may
#
force a different kind of conversation where you hope, I mean, let's see, does even politically,
#
Tejasvi, do Tejasvi and Akhilesh think of caste and politics somewhat differently?
#
They're not going to give up on the caste story, right?
#
But it's no longer that, you know, caste dignity or nothing else program that Lalu ran on.
#
So I actually think there are kind of exogenous changes.
#
And I think what this Chandraban is right, this is the more economic churn you create,
#
it opens up different possibilities.
#
I'm not saying I'm not an economic determinist, we know from the US experience that, you know,
#
categories like race and caste can be very, very sticky.
#
But for years, you just didn't even have the basic raw material to wish to in some senses
#
reconfigure all of this stuff.
#
So I suspect, you know, this is one place where you might get more progress.
#
The Hindu-Muslim thing, frankly, gives me the nightmares.
#
It gives me the nightmares because I see its normative entrenchment, like, so with caste
#
for all the, you know, social practices about caste, nobody kind of normatively defends,
#
you know, we should return to caste society or something, whereas communism we do, I mean,
#
that, you know, you can.
#
So its normative entrenchment is much deeper.
#
The kind of political narrative of fear that you need to sustain an anti-Muslim political
#
outlook, that kind of material is very readily available.
#
I mean, it takes one blasphemy incident and, you know, we can talk about the short-term
#
victory of, you know, BJP having to expel three MLAs.
#
Trust me, this is going to be an underground resentment, right?
#
You have in some sense, it's Pakistan, right?
#
So the objective conditions where Hindu nationalism creates a kind of climate of fear magnifies
#
what is actually not really as big a threat, right?
#
Those conditions are actually more likely to obtain now in some ways, right?
#
So there's enough fodder for them as it were, right, I think, in a way.
#
Third thing in some ways, right, which is that, and this is where the question of power
#
sharing with Muslims has always been complicated in the Indian context, that there's often
#
a convergence between a certain kind of liberal and Hindu nationalism, right?
#
I mean, Lala Lajpat Rai was actually as good a liberal as you can get in many respects,
#
But the narrative of both, the construction of a Muslim otherness, where you say, look,
#
there's something about this community that is going to make them more resistant to liberal
#
norms than anybody else.
#
Now, I actually don't believe that construction, but the over-determination of the ideological
#
sources from which people come, I think makes it a harder problem to deal with, which is
#
why I think it's important for liberals to get their first principles right on this,
#
you know, because the pseudo-secularism charge, right, is something that we need to defuse,
#
I think, by our conduct.
#
And unfortunately, as you rightly said, no political party is going to do it for us.
#
I mean, that's the real danger part, where you, for the first time since independence,
#
you do not have a single political party that can, even on basic empathy grounds, say, in
#
a civilized society, it's our job to make sure that nobody is targeted for being who
#
So, first time, no political party, I'm even beginning to doubt whether TMC will do this
#
I should point out to listeners that, since you've referred to recent events, we are recording
#
this on August 24th, it will come out a bit later, so, you know, just to keep that in
#
I did, by the way, invite Chandrabhan Prasad to the show during this trip, but the moment
#
he heard I wanted five hours of his time, he was just very firm.
#
He said, no, sir, please excuse, leave me out of it.
#
I can't persuade him, it'll be fun, he's fun.
#
If you can, I would really appreciate it, because that's one episode I really, really
#
But regardless of whether he comes on the show or not, I'd urge all my listeners to
#
read his books and read his writing, a great thinker, and yeah, and you know, the thing
#
to note about caste, which I keep thinking about and which I think elite discourse misses,
#
is that more Dalits voted for BJP in 2014 and 2019 than for any other party, you know,
#
and that's a revealed preference.
#
So there's clearly something happening there, which is sort of interesting.
#
But you know, the anti-Muslim stuff, it leaves me speechless.
#
And what especially worries me is the inevitable consequence of what you wrote about as a BJP's
#
long term strategy, which you termed heads weave and tails you lose.
#
And the point there was that you do all this macho anti-Muslim posturing, you're getting
#
brownie points from your people.
#
And the moment there is any backlash, you can use that to claim victimhood and you can
#
then, you know, double down on that.
#
And that worries me enormously.
#
You know, so far, the Muslims of India, and I hate to speak of anyone in a collective
#
sense, but so far the Muslims of India have been incredibly tolerant and graceful in the
#
face of an incredible amount of provocation.
#
But it just takes one random guy breaking down, not being able to do, you know, take
#
it anymore and doing something rash.
#
And then a video of that can just go all over WhatsApp.
#
And you know, that can be the spark and you can light the fire.
#
And that scares me a lot to the extent that that is not in anybody's control anymore.
#
It is not as if the Prime Minister was to decide that this must not happen.
#
Well, sorry, he doesn't control this anymore.
#
He can't write this, Tiger.
#
So there's two things about that, I'll point slightly differently.
#
That is actually the thing that gives me nightmares.
#
I actually do think, by the way, I still believe that when this Indian state wants to control
#
stuff, it can, it actually can.
#
I mean, it's, you know, which is why we've kind of, I mean, there's, you know, there's
#
almost no riot that doesn't happen without some kind of active state abdication or participation.
#
I mean, it's not that it can kind of, you know, it can stop it from alter, but it can
#
actually, you know, limit its impact and limit its scope, right?
#
But the worrying thing is precisely that it doesn't look like the ruling dispensation
#
will have an incentive to do that.
#
Or if it is an incentive, it will be a very tactical one for a particular context.
#
But the second thing that's worrying me, right?
#
And that's the larger context of our democracy, where, you know, this is also happening at
#
a time where you both have a greater institutionalization of this kind of communism in different branches
#
of the state as a very active state project.
#
I mean, a kind of unconscious half-baked communism was always part of the state and some states
#
But I'm less and less confident now that you can trust the key organs of the state where
#
if the signal was right, they would actually do the right thing.
#
I mean, I think in that sense, there's a kind of longer term, you know, whether it's judges,
#
whether it's bureaucrats, possibly people even say they're just armed forces, right?
#
So it gives you a very different kind of institutional power, right?
#
That's I think one thing.
#
And the second thing I think is that, you know, given the vehemence with which the government
#
is going after the opposition now, so if you ask the question about democracy, and as much
#
as we decry professional politicians, every democracy is sustained by professional politicians.
#
And by professional politicians, we mean a couple of things, a group of people who understand
#
themselves to be members of a political class and acknowledge each other as members of a
#
political class and play by a certain kind of certain rules of the game.
#
Now that can have its downsides.
#
I mean, one of the downsides was, for example, you do not prosecute anybody in politics.
#
We always used to say politicians get away scot-free.
#
But in a way, that was part of that mutual reciprocity.
#
If you look at the breakdown of democracies, once you have a hyper ideological regime in
#
power and it has, in a sense, broken that professional law, right, one should not assume
#
that it will give up power easily, even if you think you can actually get it to lose
#
in an election, right, because you've already created these deep state apparatus, right,
#
which will now, I mean, some will be opportunistic, some will shift.
#
But surely, I think, given what India has gone through the last seven or eight years,
#
if you were part of that establishment, you cannot now assume it's one IOS officer, another
#
IOS officer, we just rotate like we used to, right?
#
The kind of prosecution the ruling establishment would fear, if there's a genuine opposition
#
You could argue that that substantially reduces their investment in acquiescing to a peaceful
#
And I think this is a danger that we are facing for the first time in Indian democracy.
#
And it's hard to kind of articulate it because we haven't had a past kind of presidency.
#
I mean, you could argue emergency 75, but all the signs are the ruling dispensation
#
is putting itself in a position where it'll be very difficult for its carders, its party,
#
its leadership to actually accept a peaceful transition of power.
#
So you may be in a position where mere electoral dissatisfaction, unless it's like some massive
#
thing that you kind of just really scare them.
#
But even if it's a close election, we've already seen that in the US, right, when the
#
legitimacy of the election impugned, that's a very distinctive possibility in India now.
#
The German political theorist Karl Schmidt once said that in politics, you need an other,
#
What we are seeing in India in a sense is of course, Muslims are the other, that's something
#
playing out at the social level.
#
But in politics, the BJP has pretty much, you know, it's virtually created a Congress
#
muktabharat as it wished to, and there's practically no opposition.
#
So there is a sense, and you know, I've seen traces of it in the rabbit holes, I've gone
#
down on the extreme right wing rabbit holes, that the opposition will really come from
#
Like already we speak about the fault lines between trads and raitas, as they are called,
#
you know, trads being the completely traditional hog back to good old Hinduism, whatever that
#
was, and so on and so forth.
#
Do you have the sense that it could play out that way, that the splintering will happen
#
from within, that, you know, rather than from without, because without there really is not
#
much of an opposition right now?
#
I'm less convinced that you'll get the splintering.
#
One again, maybe we are too close to the present moment, but, and maybe this is acknowledging
#
your point about how we see the importance of ideology here, as opposed to what people
#
It's like the Republican party in the US, nobody defected, right?
#
You would have thought Trump was anti-evangelical.
#
So the trad and raita thing is a Twitter discourse, honestly, politically is useless.
#
I think as a kind of articulation of a possible political movement, you know, somebody saying
#
this is not traditional Hinduism, this is, you know, some violent, aggressive, non-traditional
#
revolutionary doctrine, right?
#
A, I don't think that's going to happen.
#
B, I think it's a bit, it's early days.
#
Remember, yes, human nature is ambitious, but the BJP's had longer socialization mechanisms
#
It's the kind of socialized meditation mechanism that the Congress party did, right?
#
Where you could argue, I mean, look, do the counterfactual.
#
If Patel and Nehru had split, literally split, or if Nehru had gone with Subhash and split
#
with Gandhi, right, then the international movement could have collapsed.
#
I actually still think if you look at the cast of characters, I mean, whatever their
#
other faults, their ambitions will certainly come into play, but, and there will be differences.
#
But I think it's too premature to conclude that this is just going to be another like
#
The third thing I think about that, which is, this is just a speculative possibility,
#
which is, suppose there were to be a split, does the process of creating that split actually
#
radicalize the party even more and make it worse?
#
Because we know, I mean, this is often the case with extremist organizations, right?
#
The way you claim your legitimacy is by outflanking whatever slivers of moderation you might
#
That gives other parties an opening, but it doesn't necessarily actually mean that the
#
outcome of that splintering is actually less violent or any good.
#
And this is true of any religious base, I mean, you can look at the Akalis, you can
#
look at, you know, that the splintering will have to legitimize itself.
#
And if you're in the BJP, the only way you legitimize yourself is by saying, you know,
#
you didn't fulfill the Hindu agenda, right?
#
No dad, move to the extremes is what I worry about in the sense that it's an inevitable
#
logic of modern politics, I think, that the way you stand out in your own party is by,
#
you know, being purer than the purest.
#
And to my mind, those horrific videos that emerged of that dharam sansad, where you had
#
And to me, that was competitive, that was bound, they were all bound to be so extreme
#
because they were competing with each other.
#
Had it been one guy on a stage, he might have said something a little less mad.
#
You know, still would have been objectionable, but a little less mad.
#
But they competed with each other and the worry is that that kind of continues.
#
And by the way, among the Republicans, Justin Imash did leave, but outlier who proves, you
#
know, the exception that proves the rule, I guess, in a sense.
#
You know, I think I've held you long enough so we can, you know, move away to more general
#
questions and then something more pleasant.
#
And my big general question here is multifold, which is about engaging with reality, something
#
that you've kind of referred to how in politics, the rules of the game have also sort of changed.
#
And I look at different sort of ecosystems and how they engage with reality.
#
And one, I see the academic ecosystem where I find that there is this massive academic
#
circle jerk where academics are talking to each other and they're kind of trapped in
#
And there are certain fashionable prisms which have to be adopted, otherwise you're
#
not getting your papers published or not getting tenure.
#
And more and more I see the academic world, especially in the humanities, as something
#
that is in a parallel universe and has lost all connection to the real world and nobody
#
takes them seriously and rightly so.
#
I mean, individuals, of course, produce important work, but otherwise.
#
When I look at politics, and politics also in India, politicians don't bother to engage
#
with reality in that sense because, you know, our politicians have figured out that narratives
#
matter, governance doesn't.
#
And in any case, their core skill when they get to power is building narratives.
#
That's how they get to power.
#
Governance is not necessarily your core skill.
#
You can, you know, when you take over the state, you can let inertia continue and so
#
And there also engagement with reality is not so critical.
#
You know, as far as the media is concerned, mainstream media is pretty much irrelevant
#
that we no longer have a consensus on the truth.
#
Its narrative battles everywhere.
#
As far as individuals are concerned, I think, you know, there is that famous quote from
#
Kashi Kassi where Kashi Nath Singh Ji says, ki bhar mein jaye duniya, hum bhajaye harmoniya.
#
Which is sometimes I feel that I should just adopt that and live by that.
#
And I think many people, whatever they do, you know, they do despite the state.
#
They're like, I got to get by, how I got to get by, I don't really care.
#
And plus, you know, rational ignorance kicks in.
#
Why waste time when your one vote won't make so much of a difference?
#
And the market engages with reality to the limited extent that, you know, you make money
#
by fulfilling people's desires, so you want to know what they are and so on and so forth.
#
This then just becomes an issue that, you know, reality is not in question in all of
#
It's narrative games, narrative battles.
#
You know, many great intellectuals are wasted in different ecosystems where they are of
#
no consequence, like the academic world, for example.
#
So what is your sense of all of this or am I being too pessimistic, as is mostly the
#
I mean, these days you want to say, you know, there's no such thing as being too pessimistic
#
But I think I broadly agree with you, see, I think I have a slightly different take on
#
I actually don't think academics are meant to be consequential.
#
And I think if academics play for consequence, they actually betray their profession because
#
we are precisely supposed to be the conditionality of reflective stuff.
#
And my worry about doing a lot of academics is not that they're not influential or that
#
they're irrelevant, is that in the way in which that we have now set our protocols,
#
even inside the academy, we are actually betraying our vocation.
#
So I actually, I mean, it is meant to be an ivory tower precisely for a reason.
#
No, I agree with you in the sense that I agree that academics aren't meant to pursue change,
#
but they're meant to pursue truth.
#
And more importantly, right, they are being letting themselves being used as a kind of
#
I mean, that's the worst part, right?
#
Now, but here I think I would distinguish between two kinds of politicalization.
#
So look, one like with any organization, there's a kind of institutional pathology and particularly
#
a lot of the stuff that you talked about, you know, building empires, patronage, creating
#
particular paradigms, you know, these are actually all straightforward power grabs within
#
They start off with good intention, but every paradigm wants to perpetuate itself, right?
#
The second thing I think is, I think this argument about the political views of academics
#
and then I actually think the story is a little bit more exaggerated because you will of course
#
expect academics to be at, in a sense, the frontier of, you know, and if you look at
#
the kinds of things that people are objecting to, that academics are doing, particularly
#
in the US, I think the bad faith of the objectors is as much clear as anything else.
#
I mean, you know, I have my problems with critical race theory, but like anything it
#
had a kind of core insight, which, you know, now you want to say, you know, you just can't
#
even in some sense, right?
#
There's a particular crisis specific to the humanities and disciplines like history and
#
I don't think that crisis is solvable.
#
We used to manage that crisis by basically saying the political stakes in this should
#
So, you know, let the 1619, 1776 project duke it out.
#
Let Romila Thapar and Sita Ramgoyal duke it out on medieval history, you know, we'll
#
see that RC Majumdar info, right?
#
The problem in a sense is the insertion of a national identity in discourse that actually
#
says our ground is that history.
#
Now, once that happens, it both distorts the history and in a sense the stakes because,
#
you know, and I think to that extent that has kind of changed.
#
I mean, I think, you know, I'm feeling kind of nostalgic.
#
JNU has a lot to answer for, I mean, JNU's, you know, academic practices were in some
#
instances deeply exclusionary, but, you know, in the 70s, right, the big exclusions were,
#
you know, already subaltern studies and CPI historians are not genuine historians.
#
It was not the right wing.
#
I mean, it actually, you know, it's, you know, so I'd have colleagues who would say shy
#
the mean is not a real historian, you know, you're like scratching your head.
#
I mean, you know, it's, so there was a certain kind of, I think, I think pettiness and academic,
#
I think patronage story there.
#
But I don't think the crisis of the history profession is going to be solved so long as
#
you have a politics governed by nationalism.
#
And unfortunately, I think history has also set itself out the problem because most modern
#
historiography was done in the service of the nation state, you know, in some ways.
#
And so until we reach a point where the social contact is, look, it doesn't matter, right,
#
whether Barber demolished a mosque or not, at least not to the project that we want to
#
I don't think you're going to get through the crisis of history and unfortunately historians
#
because in a way it increases their importance fall right into the trap.
#
I mean, you know, they want to actually argue on those grounds.
#
You just, you know, I mean, who knows if tomorrow a new document is discovered, do we completely
#
change the modern Indian project and it justifies, you know, so I think the crisis of history
#
because of its close connection to the nation state, I think is a particular one.
#
I think the crisis of disciplines like economics and stuff is, I think, much more methodological
#
hubris in some ways, I think, again, forgetting the conditionality of your own, you know,
#
Politicians, I disagree with you a little bit, even now, there's a fair degree of engagement
#
I mean, the narrative part comes in because that's a way of kind of coping with what they
#
So when you can't build a coalition in X, you build it on Y, right.
#
But there is still something about the culture of politics that actually forces.
#
And even with the BJP government, I mean, you know, the remarkable thing is how it feels
#
You know, RSSF, farmers are upset, you know, it could be for purely tactical reasons, right.
#
The suit boot ki sarkar jai, I mean, a larger scheme of things seem like a little political
#
triviality, but what it meant in some senses to project.
#
So I think with them, the issue is not that they're in touch with reality.
#
It's whether they have the imagination and are willing to expend whatever political capital
#
they have to actually, as you said, create those structures of governance and in some
#
areas they will and some areas they won't.
#
I mean, I think the one thing we are interestingly missing, I think, about the Indian state,
#
and I have a slight disagreement with my friend Karthik on this, where, you know, we've got
#
used to this very simple narrative of the public as a failure and the private as a kind
#
You know, for a lot of people, beginning with UPA1 is for the first time they're actually
#
experiencing state capacity.
#
I mean, think of infrastructure, for example.
#
I mean, you know, we are a completely different page, right.
#
Now the surveillance things and stuff worries me, but the digital stuff is an expression
#
of state capacity in some ways, right.
#
And what we have been, in a sense, being able to do on scale in lots of different ways is
#
that, so I think it's a little bit unfair to say that what politicians are not doing
#
So in my sense is they're finite.
#
I think every government in India now, every state government does two things well, because
#
that's the ambit of its capability, that's right, it decides what to do.
#
Arvind Kejriwal decided health and education.
#
Many would argue about infrastructure in Delhi, right, whether the roads and stuff are.
#
So I actually think the politicians are actually quite capable of building out state capacity.
#
I think what we did with, I think what we're doing with food distribution, right, I mean,
#
for all the limitations and there are exclusions, the debate on where PDS and the distribution
#
of food now is very, very different from 20 years ago.
#
Now you can agree or disagree with cash transfers, whether they're freebies or productives or
#
not, but the fact that you can actually pull off what you're pulling off on scale.
#
So I think the politicians are actually interested in reality.
#
I think their just conception of it, I think, differs a little bit slightly from ours.
#
And I think the care, I think, which we have to take is that at the end of the day, the
#
I think it's less interested in the public-private thing.
#
And most of the politicians, I think, of this generation have grasped the importance of
#
Now they'll use it for nefarious ends.
#
There are political constraints.
#
I mean, if you want to centralize power, sometimes that can detract from a certain kind of state
#
capacity, but I think we underestimate how much expansion of state capacity is actually
#
happening in India in some ways.
#
I don't think that narrative, I mean, even of teacher absenteeism, actually the government
#
school thing has had ripple effects everywhere.
#
I mean, look at the transfer system in Haryana now, this kind of semi-automated system which
#
Arvind Kejriwal now wants to take to Gujarat, everybody give your first preferences, they'll
#
have an algorithm sorting out, actually it was quite a big deal.
#
I mean, the hundreds of people used to line out sites in Chandigarh for transfers.
#
I'm sure that the margins, some of that stuff is still happening.
#
So I actually do think in that sense, politicians, and what actually makes them dangerous is
#
I mean, if it were pure narrative, I think it would just explode beyond the point.
#
I mean, you cannot fool all the people all the time.
#
Is that I think they're actually much more attuned to this stuff than I think a lot of
#
us academics are actually in some ways.
#
And they've figured out a social contract within their political imagination.
#
Somebody is asking the question, why isn't inflation generating more political resistance?
#
Actually maybe it's because compared to the 70s, because that's our benchmark, 80s and
#
70s, maybe for certain sections, there's actually less volatility in basic access to food than
#
was the case in the 70s and 80s.
#
So yes, inflation is an issue, milk and vegetables and petrol prices are an issue, but it's not
#
an issue in the same way that let's say flour and wheat might have been 25, 30 years ago.
#
So one of the reasons we always lose against politicians is they are actually more circumscribed
#
by reality than we are.
#
The media, the public sphere, absolutely.
#
And it actually goes back to the fundamental problem, which is both the commercial incentives.
#
If you are really in the world as this example you gave that a certain kind of post will
#
go viral and get you more revenue, and you are in a regulatory world where pretty much
#
most of the media is now supply side media.
#
I mean, I don't think Mr. Arani is going to make money off NDTV.
#
Most channels don't make money.
#
You actually have an architectural problem, which is what are the avenues through which
#
Now, having said that, I actually think in certain sections of the media, I think the
#
Hindi press, certain parts of the Hindi press, which I read, I actually don't think it's
#
These are genuine media houses, but they have become genuinely committed to this political
#
I think they will think of the Dhyanag Jagran, for example, and it's a kind of indication
#
of that institutionalization of, I don't think it's just because there's pressure.
#
They are actually real believers in this stuff.
#
Yeah, I mean, there are plenty of real believers.
#
I mean, this is a society.
#
Let's honestly, it's quite a hopeful note that you've struck that our politicians perhaps
#
can eventually someday come to the rescue.
#
Let's now talk about your reading habit, which I'm interested in.
#
You said that the ideal kind of life for you is, and your thick desire is that you're paid
#
So tell me a little bit about what your reading habit is like.
#
Is there an intentionality to your reading habit as well, that at some point you decided
#
that there is a certain amount of reading you do?
#
Also, when you read, do you take notes?
#
What do you do for assimilating the knowledge that you gather for knowledge management?
#
And how big is writing a part of that assimilation process?
#
You know, one should not over valorize reading.
#
It's something I enjoy.
#
You know, there's that famous line of Hobbes, I don't know whether you've heard.
#
So John Aubrey, who's this 17th century gossip, writes these wonderful brief lives of all
#
the kind of big characters of 17th century.
#
So he goes to Hobbes and says, you know, Mr. Hobbes, people don't think you're a real scholar.
#
And obviously Hobbes' political views are controversial because you don't cite many
#
people in your books, which gives them the impression that you actually haven't read
#
And Hobbes replies, he said, if I had read as much as anyone else, I would have known
#
only as much as anyone else.
#
So I think you can, you know, I mean, I think you can valorize.
#
But I'm addicted to reading in the sense that without a certain number of hours of a day,
#
I mean, that obviously varies by responsibility and where you are.
#
This is just almost the sense of, you know, it's almost like an addiction in some ways.
#
It's much less disciplined, I think.
#
And particularly now, where I think the temptation to gain lots of superficial knowledge in lots
#
of different fields, at least even if you don't understand, you can say, okay, yes,
#
this is the question that's been asking, I think is much, much greater.
#
The notes and stuff is, so anything that's in my core discipline, particularly political
#
theory and philosophy, of course, is not just detailed notes, but in some sense is the act
#
of responding by writing, not necessarily publishing, but at least you are kind of engaging
#
with it, I think is hugely important.
#
And I actually find teaching does the wonders for your reading.
#
You actually read things differently when you have to teach it, because you then have
#
to really, in a sense, clarify the logical presentation in a way in which sometimes with
#
reading you can skip on.
#
I used to do a lot of marginal notes, which partly because a larger proportion of the
#
books are now in electronic format, I mean, just for access reasons, I mean, you can highlight
#
and stuff, but I actually miss the dog-marked books with all kinds of annotations.
#
I think across the board.
#
I do find, as you get older, talking of the dissolving self, that the ability to retain
#
structures and arguments, I think still remains, but the memory about detail and facts, I think
#
I used to be better at it, and this is a gift often historians have.
#
I think you find yourself struggling with a little bit more with that now, and maybe
#
it's just a kind of process of aging, or at least I hope it's nothing more than that.
#
And it's interesting how the memory works in some ways, that if you can figure out the
#
architectonic, it's easier to retain than in a sense trying to retain lots of details
#
and narratives and facts.
#
So I've become less in command of stories, I think, than I kind of used to.
#
Even in the reading of fiction, the broad outlines of the point, the plot, the affect,
#
if it made you think, all that remains, but the kinds of things that you used to remember,
#
which is lines from characters, textures of characters.
#
And maybe it's just, oh, Lord, I mean, it could just be that there's too much time on
#
the screen and so you're not processing it as much.
#
So final question for my listeners and for me, recommend some books, movies or music
#
or any kind of art that you love and that you want to share with the world.
#
Oh gosh, so much, academics are the wrong people too, I think.
#
What kind of music do you listen to?
#
So with music, it's mostly Hindustani classical, I mean, that's about 75 to 80% and otherwise
#
So I actually, Western music, it'll be Western classical mostly, orchestral stuff.
#
So it's, I mean, it's not, it's not a very surprising, there were the usual suspects,
#
Beethoven, Mozart, Handel, Mendelssohn, Schubert.
#
And actually the one thing I would recommend actually for particularly people who are not
#
used to East and Western classical, the Berlin Philharmonic, they started this under COVID,
#
but they've actually put out a lot of this stuff online and they also do like these 10
#
So it's a larger performance and obviously you have to subscribe to pay access to the
#
larger performance just digitally.
#
But even the shorter things are truly kind of extraordinary if you're kind of a feeling.
#
So that's actually become the kind of, you just look at the kind of Berlin Philharmonic's
#
But otherwise, and I think with classical now, interestingly after going through a phase
#
where I thought I had less patience, actually going back to longer compositions.
#
Because one of the, I think, interesting things about, you know, in this time classical and talk of empowerment
#
is the archive that is now publicly available.
#
I mean, you know, we all grew up with Nikhil Banerjee, but the repertoire we'd heard was
#
probably like 20 recordings.
#
Now it's probably like 80, 100 and some of them are better than anything that was kind
#
of published in his lifetime, right?
#
So there's a way in which you actually kind of recreate your own sense of the history
#
of that music and that performer.
#
I think that's actually right now, I think, I think that's been more enticing in some
#
ways, I think, than than anything.
#
Books, films, God books, I think on fiction, I think the Hillary Mantle trilogy, I think
#
is stunning, particularly the third one, actually, people like the third less, but I thought
#
it's a real tool, particularly if you're interested in politics.
#
I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a kind of different order.
#
I've been trying to read a lot more Hindi fiction.
#
And I must confess, I think people like Premchand, I had read at an age where you kind of miss
#
I mean, you know, you, you read, there is such a thing as kind of rereading with a different,
#
There's an academic in Delhi University, a poor one and the professor of Hindi, I mean,
#
is a wonderful book on Premchand, actually, which, you know, apart from everything else
#
is a kind of model of how to read sensitively, you know, and you just makes you look at those
#
stories very, very differently.
#
And it's actually a meditation secularism, because that's a lot of what the Premchand,
#
I think, you know, story is, you know, story is about, I think a lot of, you know, given
#
the theme that we discussed, and this is a course I've been teaching and hope to develop
#
for that is this course on global political thought.
#
And I have to say my acquaintance with both Chinese political thought and broadly what's
#
called Islamic political thought was relatively cursory, I mean, in a new fair bit, some of
#
the classics, but to actually kind of engage, I think, as seriously with it.
#
So the last year, I think a lot of it has, you know, been kind of, and this is that,
#
that gives you a kind of very different perspective in some senses on how people situated in these
#
societies looking at normative questions and history, and the quality of writing and scholarship
#
I mean, I think, so I think we're at the age where, you know, a lot of lateral reading
#
in some senses, I think, and drawing lateral connections is probably much more interesting
#
than kind of just digging down in your own furrow.
#
Pradap, thank you so much for coming on the show.
#
I've really enjoyed talking to you.
#
It's always, always a real treat and privilege to talk to you.
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode, check out the show notes, enter rabbit holes
#
Do share this episode and any other you like with anyone who you think might be interested.
#
You can follow Pratap on Twitter at PB Mehta.
#
You can follow me at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
#
You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at www.sceneunseen.in.
#
Thank you for listening.
#
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