Values and aberrations

Here are a couple of questions, obviously rhetorical, pertaining to the Diwali just over: Did crackers fall silent in your area after 10 pm? And, did women aged between 10 and 50 manage to enter the Sabarimala temple when it opened briefly? That these Supreme Court edicts have been observed in breach rather than compliance would seem to suggest that our oft-proclaimed reverence for the highest judiciary as the keeper of the faith is hollow. The rising tide of individual or majoritarian intolerance resulting in murderous rage was also evident in the same period: The horrific strangulation of a pregnant woman objecting to a fellow train-passenger’s smoking and the Tinsukia killings of five Bengalis are not exactly one-off incidents. We have been here before.

The historian, Dr Harbans Mukhia, had observed in a perspicacious essay two decades ago that the world over, development means a greater sense of responsibility and self-control, while in India, the exact reverse appears to be happening. We seem to place pursuit of our personal or group interests above unexceptionable norms of decent behaviour. In our polluted atmosphere, physical and moral, this is a major cause of concern, transcending narrow political and electoral considerations.

Intolerance and the fear of the Other have raised their ugly heads elsewhere in the world as well, and not just in lands ruled by despots and autocrats. The words of Emma Lazarus at the Statue of Liberty, “Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/…Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me” have symbolised the United Sates since its unveiling in 1886.  Yet its present president, Donald Trump, openly panders to racism by invoking the spectre of a flood of criminal immigrants not just at election times. In Sweden and Germany, long the European bastions of liberal democracy, Sweden Democrats and Alternative for Germany have made significant parliamentary gains on anti-foreigner platforms.

Such developments are serious enough for some public intellectuals to conclude that they indicate a decline of civilisational values. Pratap Bhanu Mehta wrote “The America of Warren Court liberalism and the Cold War sense of global purpose was an aberration in American history”, immediately following the Trump victory two years ago (The Indian Express, November 11, 2016). The historian Patrick French concurred in his column “The end begins now” on the same day. The angst of our own intelligentsia caused by events of the last four years is only too well-known.

One can understand the anguish at being challenged on one’s core values. But that should not warrant either a rethinking, much less their repudiation, or a sense of an irredeemable loss.

Human history is of evolution in desirable directions, but it is not without hiccups or even major reversals at times. Even the foulest deeds have been corrected by all that is good and decent among homo culturis. The Nazis threatened the world order like never before for a full 15 years. But the Holocaust notwithstanding, a kinder, gentler, more tolerant world emerged where Nazism is the ultimate horror. Stalin and Mao held supreme power in their countries, but like the czars and emperors whose successors they were, their legacy has long been effaced.

We have been witness to some remarkable changes for the better even in this present dark period. The sui generis #MeToo movement, entirely spontaneous and leaderless, has been strong enough to dislodge entrenched holders of asymmetric male power the world over. Women have electorally challenged increasingly successfully male bastions of political authority and have given a stinging reply to the Trump Republicans by snatching the House of Representatives from them earlier this month. These developments would be far more potent in establishing gender equality and justice than any law ever could.

The all-too-frequent wanton acts of mass killings by unhinged gun-wielding individuals in the United States have met with protests not just from the expected quarters of liberals but young adults who witnessed these horrors. Their not-so-silent protests would more likely silence the powerful gun lobbies than could Congressional activism. The tide is already turning against Brexit isolationism, and the vision of a unified Europe may yet prevail. If India eschews casteism, it would not be because of the host of legal measures against it, but because more young educated Indians see its utter irrelevance to modern living.

The Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has persuasively argued that violence in human nature has abated over millennia and we are now more enlightened than ever before. Values take generations and centuries to emerge and become rooted.  They do so not by coercion of law but by persuasion of logic and appeal to decency, coupled with compulsions of existence. 

Years and decades from now, the world will not remember a grumpy Donald Trump, the foremost champion of unbridled nationalism through his America First doctrine, sitting through the centenary commemoration of Armistice Day on November 11. It will instead recall the rousing exhortation of the French president Emmanuel Macron on that occasion: “By pursuing our own interests first, with no regard to others, we erase the very thing that a nation holds most precious, that which gives it life and makes it great: its moral values.”

Aberrations are transitory, values are permanent.

The writer is an economist