Ideas and ideologies

Ideas and words are lost on us, just like we have lost the distinction between Character and 140 characters.

I am happy that Yaqoob Khan Bangash has noted that we are increasingly a people that set little store by ideas; indeed, as I have seen, most of us abhor, downright, the idea of dealing with and in ideas. That Bangash noted this while speaking at the International Judicial Conference and not in a less august gathering or on his Twitter timeline, only adds to the irony, besides showing us the extent of our poverty.

Bangash wants us to have our own idea of justice, one grounded in the multiple identities that we have inherited, Islamic and non-Islamic. I agree. Yet, that’s precisely the point at which our troubles begin. As a people, regardless of which ideological camp we belong to, we look for purity, whether it is ideological, ethnic, linguistic, or denominational and religious.

It begins with anxiety and disquiet, to quote Amartya Sen. But it doesn’t stop there. Its passivity, given other circumstances, can, and does, turn aggressive. It can become a political course of action and when that happens, the idea of multiple identities coming together in a single human being to create its own complexity, where the sum is more than the parts, succumbs to the importance of a group identity — whether that group identity is based on shared history and a longing for it or is guided by other factors.

As a historian, I am certain that the irony of a deep anxiety for shared history is not lost on Bangash because it usually begins and ends with ahistorical attitudes. Going back in time to find oneself, as opposed to studying the past, requires that the march of history be stopped. Add to that ahistoricism ideological millenarianism and we get an explosive mix that doesn’t deal with ideas and multiple identities but with purity.

Purity does not allow for Sen’s multiple identities: one cannot be an Asian or an Indian, a heterosexual or a defender of gay and lesbian rights, religious or non-religious et cetera, all at the same time. That a man can carry multiple identities and “belong to each one of the membership groups” is a function of ideas, not ideologies.

Only a few days ago, I was reading about the English translation of Albert Camus’ Chroniques algériennes (Algerian Chronicles), a work that depicts the agony of Camus and subsumed in his self multiple identities at a time when circumstances forced one, even the intellectuals, to take sides. That’s never an easy choice to make; it requires a man who has the courage to walk alone.

Ideas are about freedom; ideologies are about binds, -isms. But let not another irony be lost on anyone. Ideologies always begin with ideas: the ideas of some, leading to mass ideologies. So, yes, not all ideas are benign and some, to go by Alexis de Tocqueville’s discussion of the French Revolution in The Old Regime and the Revolution, are either misunderstood, appear in a society not ready for them or simply fall victim to the paradox.

We allow ourselves to be bound every day in social sciences. The great thinkers use inductive logic to arrive at theories; those are what we call the big books. Others, even scholars, deduce from those frameworks. We call it domain restriction. It’s important for structured thought but it has its flip side. The restriction is both necessary and confining. I call it the paradox.

The history of ideas is replete with paradox. But what is important, and what Bangash implies, correctly, is that grappling with ideas generally leads one to understand that there are no final solutions. The quest for that state of bliss, as history tells us, has led to much bloodshed and ideologies that promise the utopia through purges and mass killings. As Jean-Paul Sartre noted in the preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth to his own question, “Will we recover?”, “Yes. For violence, like Achilles’ lance, can heal the wounds that it has inflicted.”

Camus didn’t believe in that. He lived with, to quote Sartre, the “tension which makes the life of the mind”, much like his Sisyphus that rolled the rock up only to see it roll down, but never losing the integrity in the measured steps that Sisyphus takes as he walks down the hill. Camus was his own Absurd hero.

Can we live with the tension, stay on the dizzying crest, grapple with ideas without taking the plunge into ideologies? I don’t think so. The life of the mind requires doubts, inquiry, an appreciation of multiplicity, a respect for the paradox, an appreciation of its own limitations. It also requires the ability to connect dots, find affinities, as William Wordsworth said, in objects where no brotherhood exists to common minds.

It betokens an environment conducive to thinking, a culture that rewards ideas and, going by Berlin’s definition of the philosophical, seeks questions that cannot fit into either the empirical basket or the formal one, “questions ... distinguished by being general and by dealing with matters of principle; and others, (which) while not themselves general, very readily raise or lead to questions of principles.”

There’s much literature on why we are where we are today. But so faithfully entrenched we are in our idiocy that to expect any kind of change would be a folly second only in its greatness to our collective grotesquery. There are modern reasons for our anxiety and there’s the historical baggage. Both sets of reasons can be found in The Great Theft and The Long Divergence, among other works.

Finally, I must thank Bangash for saving me from writing yet another cold piece and getting me in the mood to indulge myself. It’s particularly refreshing also after the dumb discourse one has to deal with on television, given the requirement of TRPs wedded to the general inability of our politicos to say anything meaningful. Equally, a warning is in order. No one reads this stuff. Ideas and words are lost to, and on, us, just like we have lost the distinction between Character and 140 characters.

Add to our inability to think the modern tools of communication, and we have tech-savvy morons far more dangerous than the proverbial monkey with a razor in his hands. The Lord be praised!

Published in The Express Tribune, April 24^th, 2013.