The word, crisis, has a deceptive normalcy to it. We apply it to institutions like the State, nation, bureaucracy to hide the fact that our very concepts are outdated. The crisis of institutions that we flaunt is more a crisis of the modes of thought that are imbued in them. It is, in fact, a crisis of social science masquerading as policy. Social science needs new categories to create a process of ethical and cognitive repair.
One witnessed this in a stark way during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. Citing the Holocaust, Western-educated theorists insisted that there could be no forgiveness. Anglo-Saxon law could not go beyond compensation and punishment. Political scientists ruled that forgiveness was a oneway street to forgetting, to erasure, arguing that the Holocaust needed justice, not forgiveness. Confronting them, Bishop Desmond Tutu insisted that African folklore had possibilities that Anglo-Saxon law and social science would not allow. Tutu picked up a folk word rich in cosmology. He called it Ubuntu. Ubuntu allowed forgiveness as well as the ritual of forgiveness as part of a society redeeming itself. Tutu showed how an Old Testament social science made little sense in a post-apartheid world. Ubuntu, he felt, needed translation, a poetics of language, that would make it acceptable to Western law and science. Despite his success, he was treated as a folk idiot, mumbling his way to success. As he himself wickedly suggested, “I am content that Tu and Tu make four.”
Such a crisis of categories is appearing all over. The immediacy of Covid still haunts us. But Covid reflected the failure of social science as policy. It had little sense of suffering, pain, loss, or memory. All it did was create a behaviouristic science around social distancing. It sanitised society without creating a sense of community. It talked of death in terms of body counts where Covid became an Olympiad of casualties, measuring the index of State competence. As a friend put it, the real casualty of Covid was the patient. A sociology of medicine around the voice and epistemology of the patient needs to be done to redeem the iatrogeny of medicine. Iatrogeny is doctor-induced illness. Social science as policy is often iatrogenic. The question facing us today is how does one create an alternative sense of pain, body, and suffering. By overemphasising time and timetable, we panopticonise life as time, monitoring every moment. As a result, we read old age as obsolescence and regard the old as dispersible. As cost-benefit replaced care and control, we banalised spirituality by blending it with management.
One needs a sense of laughter to read social science categories while retaining a sense of critique. One recollects an interview with the Dalai Lama where he claimed he was a Marxist. He then explained there were two aspects to the Marxist worldview. One was compassion, a sense of justice, and equality. This was laudable. The other was a horrific theory of the State as genocidal. Neither Stalin nor Mao or Lenin could separate the two. Respect and critique combine in Dalai Lama’s sense of Marxism. He showed the difference between categories that are life-giving and those that are genocidal. Social science needs such a filter. Only his Holiness could sense the unholiness Marxism was capable of.
Social sciences need a sense of exegesis and an openness to a variety of interpretations. Consider a tree. Even science still has to learn to read it. Suzanne Simard, a Canadian scientist, shows that tribal wisdom extended to a vision of the tree as an epistemic range of connectivities. A tree is a poetics of connectivity. Trees have to be reread to be understood by a science in pursuit of profit.
Patrick Geddes, the biologist and sociologist, claimed the same thing about the city. To reduce it to a Haussmannic machine is a form of violence. Geddes extended these ideas to peace. He realised that peace was a way of thought connected to a way of being. He was always searching for a holistic view that connects part and whole in different ways. Peace is deeply linked to the categories of knowledge and Geddes suggested we need a knowledge that does not echo of jackboots. He tried to build such a world along with Tagore at Santiniketan.
In this sense, a social science celebrating certainty and predictability can be counterproductive. It needs to grasp pluralism, uncertainty, risk and go beyond linear time. Social science needs a regular reworking of categories. Otherwise, it gets reified into positivism or ideologies. A supple, plural social science is a prelude to democracy as an imagination.
The social sciences need a sense of experiment — not on people but with themselves. The citizen has to become a repository of knowledge pursuing a new epistemology, following new possibilities into the future. Politics and pedagogy are in constant interaction in this sense. As Geddes said, a city should be such that a child should celebrate it as memory, experiment, and citizenship. Our categories need that sense of play and suppleness.
The idea of the Anthropocene as a new sense of the wrath of the earth rather than the impersonality of the globe becomes critical. This idea of the Anthropocene returns a sense of healing and sanctity to the earth, becomes a pilgrimage beyond ethnocentrism, and constitutionalises a new relationship between humans and non-humans. Peace on earth is peace in the Anthropocene where man has to overcome his ethnocentricity to create peace through a dialogue of new plural categories. Peace returns the I-Thou as a dialogic frame to the Anthropocene. Peace needs exemplars like Abdul Ghaffar Khan or Simone Weil to show us how to move beyond the rigidities of the paradigm. In this pursuit, social science becomes experimental, searching for different solutions.
The crisis of science is a crisis of the monolingual and the monologic. It is a search for a choreography of pluralism, dialogue, and a celebration of difference. Security and the nation state lack the poetics of it. One needs a different playfulness. When peace is pilgrimage and discovery, social science becomes a celebration of a meaningful world. One hardly needs to add that a search for categories is a search for ethics. New concepts demand a different trusteeship of language and action. Crisis demands invention and an ethical and cognitive repair of the relationship with the world.
Shiv Visvanathan is a member of Compost Heap, a group pursuing alternative imaginations
