In the context of the devastating religious civil wars between the Catholics and the Huguenots in 16th century France, Michel de Montaigne reflects on the farthest point of cruelty when “man should kill man not in anger or in fear but merely for the spectacle”. Civil wars are periods of protracted sickness in the sense that they are fought within countries, not between them, sundering towns, streets and houses. It is a time when the basic criteria of human interactions are questioned and divergent ambitions of different political factions provide the spark.
When normal rules of conflict are suspended, the distinction between principle and private interest is blurred. All that is sacred and sustaining in human exchange is carved up by populist concerns. The generous core of reassuring relations turns sour and suspicious. Seen from the other side, forthright and open public life turns secretive and centralised. Rumour and conspiracy turn venomous on all sides, muddying the expansive terrain of public spiritedness and participatory citizenship. Hence, Montaigne exclaims: “Other wars act outwardly, this one acts against itself, eating away and destroying itself with its own venom.” Such a time seeks and extracts martyrs.
It is in this context that one must evaluate the rise of emotions in our times—especially the acerbic manifestations in everyday exchanges. India struggles with its specific cultural and political turf battles, but the nation is also part of a global zeitgeist that is resolutely anti-intellectual, provincial and exclusivist in temperament. There is a backdrop to the story. The rise of highly charged emotional reactions in our times has to do with the valorisation of objectivist science and extreme forms of doubt in the previous century. The very viability of the human attachment in any coherent sense to the cosmos was put to question. Fact-minded scepticism seemed to have encouraged just that: fact-minded people—arrogant and instrumental. The connection of doubt, fostered by the rational culture with the lived world, got severed. That gave rise to the obverse: large-scale populist demand for attaching emotion to trust and loyalty, short-circuiting the more complicated process of being able to reflect about our intuitive and affective journeys. The rise of emotions also means a moral upholding of social norms against the amoral claims of the thoughtful, witty sceptic. Scholars and thinkers are condemned as paranoid and disenchanted creatures. Patriotism or love for one’s region becomes a more authentic choice than internationalism or old-fashioned humanism. Here again, the rise of extreme mawkish reactions to everything intellectual and abstract means giving up on deeper ethical or aesthetic questions that would demand clear thinking about our emotional moorings to a group, locality or country. As course correction takes place, the baby is thrown out along with the bathwater.
Can we frame the problematic outside of the familiar secular/bhakt dyad? Could it be that there are more yawning fault lines in human interactions at this point of time? At the bedrock level—what divides the faithful from the curious, the reactionary from the liberated soul—is that the former is wedded to security, and the latter by an indefatigable spirit of freedom. Numerous varieties of spiritual and religious practice on the subcontinent have always been experimental, pantheistic, orally performed, non-hierarchical and philosophical in spirit. These varieties of everyday practice have made sure that the caustic, possessive individualism of modern living does not harm the foundation of a free and shared spirit. Often such open-ended spiritual practices have also squarely taken on home-grown feudal structures. By their very nature, such detached-attachment cares very little about earthly forms of social security. It inherently distrusts organic community rituals turning into tools of social engineering. Cleansing happens through a much more complicated route in and through everyday practice of body and soul. A missionary sense of moral purity is not the concern at all. This is what one notices in the devotional and aesthetic practices of Lal Ded, Ramakrishna Paramhansa or Sree Narayana Guru. The ethos of curiosity and trenchant forms of social critique is naturally bound to affective interactions. For instance, swear words and scatological exchanges create possibilities of an intimate, natural and loving tie between the preceptor and devotees, part of an expanding camaraderie in a larger critical universe. Sometimes such practices are pluralistic at the deepest level and at other times rebellious, standing up against forces of social consolidation. Contraries within us are celebrated, not banished. This is the same spirit in which William Blake pronounces that “the tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction”. The concerns are never petty political. Agnosticism and pantheism are major forms unto themselves. Images, relics, little deities, itinerant mendicants, minstrelsy—all create a universe of assurance that takes off the pressure from our buffered modern selves. The problem arises when such free spirits begin to be co-opted by forces of security and homogeneity. Unleashing of raw emotions begins to replace actual practice of passionate bonding. Liberating esoteric cults would rather take our darker preoccupations into account, meet those head on, and exorcise them. Such social catharsis humanises us paradoxically by bringing us closer to our terrible and vulnerable creaturely selves. By contrast, blurting out unworked emotions means before knowing, the sense of freedom alters gradually into concerns of security. Herds turn cagey. Each member even suspects the other in the same group. And then there is no turning back from sparring with each other. This is the beginning of fascism in public life; like surreptitious termites, it destroys trust in fellow beings.
On the other hand, liberating possibilities in incipient social uprisings can often go awry in times of tumult. Sectarian politics can be very democratic if elements of actual labour, issues of class and other forms of exclusion are brought together and a sense of immediacy is forced upon the authorities. Such outbursts put consolidating forces of power into a quandary. Sometimes the powerful relents or changes course. The cleansing force of such outbursts arrives prophetically and sometimes hysterically, as it energises mutiny. But there are also certain lacunae in such overflow of righteous rage in the public sphere. First, owing to the nature of anger against ossified legal processes, bureaucratic apathy or corrupt individuals, the initial sense of animation becomes difficult to sustain. Noble intentions get muddied. Soon, rebels groupuscules begin to divide internally into factions and lose direction. The very nature of flash or hashtag attacks creates spontaneous mobs, but the formations are often unable to take the initial democratic spirit in such assortments forward. The ups and downs of such social upheaval have been closely watched by commentators since the Arab Spring.
The other, and more fundamental, issue is that often anarchic sectarian moments, as mobilised in graffiti, blogs, social media posts and righteous trolling, can themselves turn fascistic in nature. A distant but suitable instance: there were several millenarian Protestant sects during the English revolution of the 17th century, which hoped to turn the world upside down. Some of them were genuinely progressive in their demands and ways, like the Levellers and the Diggers—simply because their heretic-enthusiastic language of social protest never lost sight of material concerns of labour, right to political representation of the cultivators, artisans and masterless men and women or freedom of press in the newly emerging culture of the print market. By contrast, the heretic language of chiliasm in certain other sects, like among the Fifth Monarchy men, quickly congealed into closed congregations of the faithful. Members resorted to high octane outbursts in scurrility and pure experiential rhetoric. Factions led to more factions. The monarchy could easily quell such ‘influencers’ since there was no solid material basis of such sects. What started as nascent democratic possibilities quickly ended up as narrow-minded provincial camps with no large vision for the nation or the world. We notice a certain gladiatorial ethos in cricket stadia and in live television shows these days. Even innocuous mohalla congregations or RWA meetings often needlessly turn into slanging matches. A large number of people seem to derive pleasure out of other people’s miseries. Surely, this is no blueprint for radical democracy. A left-fascist crowd is as morally authoritarian as any other such band. Those who wish to use affective registers to run social movements would do well to consider the implications of sharply driving a wedge between intellect and emotional experience.
The third group is also an interesting case in point, especially in studying the manner in which the members deploy emotion during troubled times in their little world. These are the well-heeled, metropolitan liberal-left people (politically an oxymoron). To be fair, a rare breed of urbane liberals has actually tried to read and analyse human vices and darker emotions. Judith Shklar, for instance, has perceptively tried to understand the fountainheads of ordinary vices like hypocrisy, snobbery, despair and docility. But the buck for her stops with cruelty. Similarly, Amanda Anderson’s foray into the bleaker dimensions of the liberal tradition cautions us against putting wholesale faith in human perfectibility and assured progressivism. She delves into negation and vital diversities of the human condition. These are valiant attempts to level with existential density. But there is a foundational problem within the liberal temperament which forecloses attempts to confront offensive emotions. The sensitive liberal can neither confront nor skirt offensive emotions, for his whole life is about cultivating politeness whereas his deepest core is as natural as any other living creature. On the other hand, he is unable to take critical thought to its analytical end-points, unlike an Ambedkarite or a Straussian. So, he is happy to abandon criticality at the first instance and espouse feeling as a mode of testing herd-loyalty. He is stuck in no-man’s land. The arrogance of such polite sociability is most nakedly visible in times when all masks are off. Therefore, this particular specimen, the morphed woke, must discover something soppy and individualistic: lament for a world he has lost, coupled with empathy for his own kind. This is exactly what has been astutely portrayed in a new book The Ruse of Repair by Patricia Stuelke, who teaches literature at Dartmouth College. Justice to this section means working within a closed circuit of injury and repair for those who have replaced critical rigour with breezy amateurism. It is by redistributing emotional reparative therapy that human lives are being privatised within the neoliberal system.
Respectability and its loss are at the centre of such an idea of relieving trauma through reparative means. Consequently, instead of real oppositional formations against the opportunist religious right, the metropolitan liberal-left espouses care of the self and indulges in a kind of solidarity tourism. This is essentially a process of exculpating guilt by adjudicating injury and repair. It is the therapy of the sentimental, mediated via feelings of moral action. This is the breed that Adam Smith had delineated quite accurately a couple of centuries ago in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments. So thin is their investment in real issues of the world or in its obverse: imagining a better world for the future, that it’s no wonder they are not to be found either in any genuine grassroots movement or in classically tuned circles. A ‘fearful polite time,’ to use Susan Sontag’s phrase, evades sanity and insanity alike.
In order to think clearly about the use and abuse of emotional language, gestures, cultural circulation of loaded symbols and also a psychic battle that rages among members of the larger community at multiple levels at this time, one must consider what exactly constitutes offence and how one draws a line between what truly shatters the basic minimum interactive possibilities among human creatures and what merely triggers disgust and revulsion at a more personal level, with no space given to self-reflection about such reactionary behaviour. The latter is a prior decision; visceral and ontological—that fosters within us an impulse to dismiss a whole community, order of humanity, or kinds of people with certain traits which are not exactly congruent to our own tastes and inclinations. Consequently, we begin to feel comfortable in our own bubble and gradually turn more sectarian in mindset, often unknowingly. Buffeted by what we see as enemies all around our select circle, we begin to protect our own terrain with extreme guardedness. None dares to plumb the depths of emotional complexity that makes us fallible and vulnerable creatures.
There is another important dimension to offensive emotions: silence. The emotion behind silence is apathy. G N Devy rightly finds silence to be more disturbing than overt violence: “when dialogue becomes impossible and an undesirable silence dominates, relations become impossible and thought acquires the colour of violence.” A whole culture turns silent, in which personae and avatars operate through unspeakability, in distrust, agony and contempt. Cultural aphasia is emotion’s nether side, eked out of acute narcissism and fear. Silence pre-emptively consigns dialogue to the backburner: another form of self-mutilation.
A whole culture is swept up during accelerated times. First-hand knowledge of fiendish bestiality is at once purgatorial and cleansing in effect. In times of spectacular cruelty, all idealistic ventures are always sieved at some point through the realist-determinist lens. Baser forms of violent outburst could produce surpassing forms of humility and love for human dignity, as in the case of Gandhi, Dr King or Desmond Tutu. But the real conundrum is to square with those who have been flogged, maimed and humiliated in the public square and therefore, have turned mute. Such beings may develop rare forms of cynicism, clumsiness and immorality and yet continue to profess the language of equity and human dignity. There is no easy way to level with the casual cruelty of care, brought about by our dear ones in times of civil war.
(Views expressed are personal)
Prasanta Chakravarty is an Associate Professor, the Department of English, University of Delhi
