Silly ideas on knowledge, choice are destroying us

By Shiv Visvanathan

(July 29,Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) C. Wright Mills, an American sociologist, once described America in the Fifties as the "great celebration". While the United States was becoming a military-industrial-complex, its middle class was celebrating its sense of power and opportunity, crass about its cost in terms of freedom. India is in a similar position today and the great celebration is enacted in the works of management experts like Nandan Nilekani, C.K. Prahlad. They are works of great intelligence, both thoughtful and positive. Yet somehow one feels that theirs is a restricted story confined to a sector of the middle class. They are acute about innovation but innocent about violence, evil and problems of social justice. Their idea of India is a vision of a global secretariat. One does not have to be a card-carrying Leftist to provide an alternative imagination to the New Macualayism where English and IT have become a sign of grace and success.

Watching India, listening to the shrill voice of electronic media, one senses that India is being "out thought" and "out fought" in the battles of the 21st century. We are forced into idiot comparisons with China or we become suckers to our own brand-building game about this being the "Indian century". Academics wax illiterate about how India can be a hub for education as it is becoming for medical tourism when most of our universities don’t even have a decent library. These celebratory sentiments cater to some deep unconscious need of Indians for recognition and certificates from the First World.

We are a society where the importance of information is destroying knowledge and livelihoods that go with it. Imagine, one is a tribal listening to this story after his life of forced migration. He would argue that his life, livelihood and the knowledge systems that accompany it are declared as non-knowledge. Soon this society of non-knowledge will become a form of non-being by either being developed or eliminated.

A tribal with cosmopolitan experience might even ask why innovation in scientific terms is a privileged form of knowledge. He might notice that the squatter, the hawker, the scavenger all live by using "make dos". Yet this form of survival is dismissed as mere coping. The knowledge systems most of India lives by are not even treated as forms of knowing.

Secondly, the tribal, the nomad, might also present a case arguing that the evolution of Indian society has to be plural, that the oral, the digital and the literate worlds have to exist together. This is the only framework for democracy and knowledge in the 21st century.

The argument is not just that our systems of knowledge destroy the context around them. What one is arguing is that the elite operate with forms of restricted knowledge. Our ideas of management and science embody little of the new and exciting ideas of complexity, diversity and uncertainty. We pretend that science is still a Newtonian domain, thus leaving us deaf to the idea of "risk". Risk is a framework defining the uncertainty and unpredictability, depriving governance of the certainties it once provided. The very existence of the precautionary principle in law was an effort to affix responsibility in this age when knowledge remains uncertain and science remains unpredictable.

Subsistence societies had their own modes of prudence, their rituals of sustainability. But industrial India needs a new ecology of responsibility. It is in probing this that we realise that the key terms we operate with — security, predictability, federalism, innovation, sovereignty — condemn us to an outdated world. What is true of generals is also true of our policymakers. We are either fighting the last war or an older crisis. We can’t handle climate change with the vocabulary of the relief code.

The only dissenting academics of knowledge were our NGOs (non-governmental organisation) and the movements which challenged both science and government to explore alternatives. But sadly, we are more concerned with knowledge systems for choice than for alternatives. Choice is located in terms of individual preferences, alternatives deals with the plural ecologies of culture and livelihoods. It emphasises the community. We read diversity through the logic of individual consumption, not through the logic of alternatives which speaks through the prism of culture. For example, biotechnology cannot be understood in terms of market preferences of farmers but in terms of future of agricultural diversity.

With the emergence of print, out notion of memory, which involved retelling and reinvention, have become rote, marked by cliche. What was dubbed illiterate, was actually a different form of sensibility which emphasised memory as invention and storytelling as record and which was open to all the different senses. A society which has an inventive idea of memory builds its own safeguards against obsolescence and erasure. As India turns officially to census and history, forms of knowledge which occur in print are valued over orality. Ironically, we store information by erasing knowledge. Many forms of our knowledge are too tacit to be coded in discs.

We are a society that is so caught in the immediate and the practical that we have lost our sense of the future. The future is a site for imaginaries, for possibilities other than the present. But our elite is too enamoured with the present. Between our official sense of history and our narrowness of market time, we are losing the sense of long-run strategy. We plan roads for five years, our syllabi is outdated by the time it is accepted — we can’t think through the long run.

Consider our Constitution. It claims its Directive Principles are futuristic when they are virtually Victorian. We have no scenarios or heuristics for the future. Our notion of science fiction is limited to the image of America as the future. Ours is an information society destroying a community of knowledges.

In an oddly tragic way, our elite is museumising our society in the name of innovation, rendering ways of life obsolescent in the name of history. Ours is a society where, to modify what John Maynard Keynes the economist once said, it is the short run that a lot of us may be dead, or obsolescent, thanks to our idiot ideas about knowledge and innovation.

Shiv Visvanathan is a social scientist -Sri Lanka Guardian