Ruination of the earth

Shiv Visvanathan

Sociologist

I wanted to write this article a week after Independence Day. August 15 has become a routine litany of a nation-state. I wanted to capture a moral imagination for a different future. This essay is an ode to a vision of the Anthropocene. Ever since India proudly articulated the doctrine of the Panchsheel, it has been bereft of moral imagination. Its vision of peace articulated as non-alignment has been devoid of inventiveness. Its one moment of glory is when we invited the Dalai Lama and his countrymen as guests. Ever since, whether it is Rohingya or nuclear power, India has played second fiddle to the great powers. Even in the Olympiad called development, we are content if we ranked 7th or 10th as a nation. This morality as mediocrity has affected India’s creative powers even as we have allowed the Pugwash movement against the atomic weapons fade into oblivion.

India can’t be content with mere development. We need a sense of the Anthropocene which we recreate civilisationally.

India’s failure as a moral imagination is now confronted with an ultimate challenge, the crisis of the Anthropocene. If the crisis is not accepted in its totality as man damaging the earth, and reduced to climate change, the struggle becomes a technical answer to a technical question. The moral, ethical, and ecological challenges become mere questions of political economy and search for technology as problem-solving. Climate change becomes the disease, when it is a symptom of a deeper distress, demanding ethical and ecological repair of the earth. One becomes a major problem in plumbing, the other as attempt to create a new economics and a new science where time, nature, value is constructed differently.

In fact, the Pugwash gives way to the bigger questions of the Anthropocene, demanding that we look at violence, nature and democracy in critical ways. The satyagrahi has to reinvent himself as a scholar, a mystic creating new imaginaries for a damaged earth.

It is in this sense that scientists from Lynn Margulis to Zia Sardar demand a reinvention of democracy and a recreation of science. There is need for a cognitive revolution in a double-barrelled sense. One has to locate this historically. Modern historians have emphasised three major changes in the cognitive world. Firstly, the Copernican Revolution which revealed that the earth was no longer the centre of the universe. Thus humbled, one confronted the Darwinian revolution where man discovered that he evolved from bacteria. Then came the Freudian revolution where man realised he was not the rational creature he thought himself to be. Each crisis challenged the ethnocentric visions of man. Industrial man, who thought of nature as helpless, now confronted the fact that he had damaged the earth excessively, confronting everything from extinction to climate change.

We have to simultaneously reinvent democracy and citizenship. Democracy as drama cannot be reduced to the aridity of elections and numbers because it then reincarnates as secondary authoritarianism. Democracy has to also challenge the dualism of lay and expert to create citizenship as a trusteeship of knowledge. Citizenship can no longer be confined to voting and consumption but to a range of ethical repairs. One has to challenge the alleged inevitability around extinction and genocide. More, the wisdom of hierarchy has to be questioned. CS Holling’s idea of panarchy as an idea of scale, each of which requires its own notion of problem-solving has to be consolidated. It is not John Stuart Mill and Robert Dahl one needs for democracy, but David Graeber and Slavoj Zizek to unravel the paradoxes of democracy. The Occupy movement and the Indigenesta struggle in Latin America have to become the preludes to the epic of the Anthropocene. Civil society has to play a bigger role. The only way to resist museumising a culture or subjecting it to genocide is to have a totemistic relationship to it.

Spirituality becomes critical here, but not a spirituality that plays second fiddle to management as manipulation. Today, we have to invent beyond Sri Sri’s meditation models in Kashmir or Jaggi Vasudev’s attempts to revive an interest in the soil. Trees have to acquire a new iconicity and India must invoke and reinvent the spirit of the Sacred Groves. One needs a new music around diversity where India celebrates not merely 300 Ramayanas but 1.50 lakh varieties of rice.

One has to realise science alone cannot save diversity. One needs hybridity, a syncretism of myth, fable, festival, cooking, livelihood and lifestyle to sustain diversity. One has to realise that we cannot settle for the current state of knowledge systems. We need interdisciplinarity which is a form of trusteeship of a vision of knowledge as a whole. The reductionist, the atomistic, and the specialised have a limited role to play in this world. The two cultures’ divide between science and humanities cannot hold. A science not knowing Hamlet, a writer not knowing thermodynamics parades a lethal illiteracy. The old binaries of sacred and secular will not work. The Anthropocene is not a clerical project, but a moral crisis which needs a new creation myth, an act of storytelling that gives new meaning to the planet and beings in it. Ecology in this sense becomes a restoration of life, livelihood and meaning recreated through nonviolence. It has to combine an old man’s wisdom and a child’s delight, a theatre where science and the aesthetic create a new politics of life.

The old complaints that it is the West that is responsible for the Anthropocene are true, but incomplete. Humanity now has to take responsibility and go beyond the old colonial and racial distinctions. We need to recover the wisdom and epistemology of tribes, learn to read trees again, sense the lifegiving nature of a soil. India can’t be content with mere development. We need a sense of the Anthropocene which we recreate civilisationally. The guru, the mystic, the shaman, the expert, the scientist have to come together to orchestrate a moral drama where every child feels she has a part. Love of a nation cannot be bereft of loving and celebrating the earth. That is the new responsibility of August 15, to reinvent India as a civilisation, playfully, ethically, and ecologically.

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