THE DEATH OF DIALOGUE
Narcissism and moral idealism are dealing a death blow to the exchange of ideas and the principles of brotherhood
Our times, and not in our own country alone, seem to be marked by an upsurge of anger bordering on rage in various groupings, a polarising anger tolling the death knell of dialogue between groups across political and social spectrums. What we have today is a preponderance of the monologue and, much worse, to coin a term, the divisilogue. Dialogue fosters the awareness of differences whereas divisilogue seeks to highlight differences in the service of dividing, of creating ‘us’ and ‘them’. Dialogue is marked by civility and humility; divisilogue by a lack of respect for the ideas of others, an attitude of dismissiveness and contempt. The views of those who seek to divide by religion, ethnicity, caste, class and gender are getting more and more strident. I do not doubt the sincerity of people who hold these views or their possession of partial truths. What is troubling is the passionate conviction with which the views are being expounded, closing the path to dialogue. Convictions, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once remarked, are more dangerous to truth than lies. What he meant was that a liar is aware of truth even while he is lying; conviction blinds us to any other truth but our own.
I believe the disappearance of dialogue in our country and the increase in the certainty of our convictions is related to two psychological changes taking place in our society: one, the rise of narcissism in the middle and upper classes and two, a concurrent upsurge of what we normally regard as desirable and encourage our children to develop, namely, moral idealism. Narcissism is a movement away from a We-society to an I-society. In other words, from an ideal of the caring person to that of the autonomous, independent one; from one perhaps too caught up in the web of family and social obligations to one who is much more of an egotist, always looking out himself or herself, for the Number One.
This change is most visible in social media, which is not only a facilitator for increased communication but also the stage for many to give full flow to their narcissism, to shameless self-promotion. What I did, what I am doing, the display of my photographs in all situations that flatter me are not only communicating with friends but also, for many, burning incense at the altar of self-love, of the Narcissus in all of us.
The change towards an I-society foregrounds the monologue. Dialogue is not a narcissistic talking at each other but exploring commonalities and differences with each other. It presupposes not only the presence of another person but giving him/her as much space as oneself and thus allowing for a change in both oneself and the other. A successful dialogue is where both parties have changed, at least a bit, after its conclusion. Otherwise what we have are monologues of two narcissists, each waiting for the other to finish, giving a perfunctory nod to the idea of listening while polishing his own lines and launching on a predetermined monologue.
The other change, the upsurge in fervour of moral idealism should normally be welcomed since it fosters commitment to social goals , especially of justice for those who have suffered and continue to suffer from discrimination and oppression. Yet moral idealism is dangerous if it is regarded as the only value that is worthwhile and permits no other values besides it. Idealism then becomes righteousness and
is hazardous not only because it lends a certainty of conviction to one’s beliefs, making dialogue impossible, but also for its potential for violence. Righteous idealism is inevitably accompanied by the belief that the end justifies the means. If you are fighting for God, for the oppressed or your moral community, then what matters is the outcome, not the path. Once you feel you have a moral mandate, you care much less for rules and legalities. As long as the perpetrator of violence maintains his moral commitment to a religious community, to the oppressed, or whatever else is the ‘cause’, he/she rarely displays guilt or shame for his/her violent actions, something which is not true of the same actions as a member of other kinds of groups. This is as true of (most) Naxals as of (most) Gaurakshaks.
There have been eloquent voices that have defended violence in service of moral ideals, especially justice. In her Reflections on Violence, the philosopher Hannah Arendt writes “…under certain circumstances violence, which is to act without argument or speech and without reckoning with consequences, is the only possibility of setting the scales of justice right again…. In this sense, rage and the violence that sometimes, not always, goes with it belong to the ‘natural’ emotions, and to cure man of them would mean nothing less than to dehumanise or emasculate him”. Without being consciously aware, many groups have adopted this position regarding violence as the outcome of a natural, human emotion curbing which is a shameful act of self-emasculation.
Gandhiji, a moral idealist par excellence himself, intuitively recognised the dangers of moral idealism and the violence it can unleash, both verbal and physical, when he insisted that idealism be tempered with empathy for the opponent, “shedding every trace of ill-will for others”. We have moved far away from Gandhiji’s position of hating the sin, not the sinner, of his insistence on not bearing ill will towards even one who considers himself your enemy.
We tend to dismiss Gandhiji’s views as utopian and unworldly in a world rife with inequalities, injustice and oppression. We believe they have little relevance for how relations between antagonistic groups in the real world should be governed. Yet we must remember that such a stance is not a Gandhian eccentricity but has been shared by other Indian icons. Rabindranath Tagore, for instance, called empathy (sympathy, in his language) as the defining feature, the highest value of Indian civilisation. Empathy is the feeling of kinship that extends to beyond what is our kin, a sense of ‘we’ that extends beyond kinship. And this feeling of kinship is not limited to human beings, but extends to the natural world. Here Tagore and Gandhi are in complete agreement. “Brotherhood,” Gandhi writes in one letter, “is just now a distant aspiration. To me it is a test of true spirituality. All our prayers, and observances are empty nothings so long as we do not feel a live kinship with all life.”
In other words, what both Tagore and Gandhi are suggesting as quintessentially Indian is that society’s, and mankind’s, interest is best promoted by increasing the sum of human affections. All our poetry, philosophy, science, literature, art, religion, politics serve to widen the range of kinship, our sympathy, to augment our supply of human affection. Dialogue is both a promoter and consequence of such an enterprise.
In contrast, we have a prevailing Western view that sees in power and its distribution and redistribution the key to social harmony. Let me add that ‘Indian’ and ‘Western’ are not monolithic categories but only refer to the dominant strands in the imaginations of the two civilisations. I am also not suggesting a simplified dichotomy between Indian and Western views. In the West, too, there have been thinkers, for example, Edmund Burke and Adam Smith in the Anglo-Saxon world, who have shared the traditional Indian civilisational value of sympathy, love in its most elevated form, as indispensable to social cohesion and solidarity. And we are all familiar with the famous slogan of the French Revolution, now a universal aspiration of liberté, égalité, fraternité—Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. It is interesting to note that fraternity, brotherhood, occupies the last place in this short list and, indeed, has become muted if not sidelined in contemporary Western discourse. I must also note that with the exception of saints like St Francis who is said to have addressed even a wolf as ‘Brother Wolf’, the dominant current of Western thought since the last 200 years, in contrast to the Indian one, has confined brotherhood, sympathy, to one’s own group and not extended it beyond its borders to other human beings, not to speak of other species. In our fascination with Western intellectual gurus, from Karl Marx to Michel Foucault, we do not realise what a disproportionate space the Western idea of the role of power in social relations has come to occupy in the modern Indian mind. Again, this is not to reject the value of the role of power and the truth it contains but, in Tagore’s spirit, seek to assimilate this truth with our own heritage on the primacy of sympathy.
To conclude: moral idealism, if not tempered with sympathy, deforms into righteousness, and social solidarity degenerates into a tribalism that “both binds and blinds”. Without empathy, compassion or brotherhood, moral idealism is a heady, dangerous brew, signalling not just the death of dialogue but a harbinger of the violence that follows its demise.
MORAL IDEALISM IS DANGEROUS IF IT IS REGARDED AS THE ONLY VALUE THAT IS WORTHWHILE AND PERMITS NO OTHER VALUE BESIDES IT