Editorial
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”
Charles Dickens (The tale of two cities)
The plural challenges of our times
May you live in interesting times- so goes an allegedly traditional Chinese curse. One might wonder why it is considered a curse when clearly it seems like a wish for positive tidings. Apparently it is only overtly an expression of good-will even as its unexpressed intention is, if not diabolic, at least not as harmless as might appear. The expression is normally used ironically and while seemingly a blessing, its hidden message is that life is better in "uninteresting times" of peace and tranquility than in "interesting" ones, which are usually times of trouble.
It seems as a species, and as a civilization that has inhabited this planet for so long, humanity is going through such “interesting” times, or one might even say epoch. Perhaps it is better to say it bluntly; these are dangerous, even catastrophic times that we live in. What is worse is that today, it is impossible to talk about the human world and not to worry about the earth, so seamlessly and intricately have the destinies of one become entwined with that of the other.
Humanity stands at the brink of a civilizational and ecological collapse. We are a wounded civilization, and the natural habitat and ecosystems that have sustained us and other sentient species so far, are under threat like never before. One wonders what, if any changes would Charles Dickens make if he was writing for the present geological epoch characterized by worried people as Anthropocene- a “geological epoch dating from the commencement of significant human impact on Earth's geology and ecosystems, including, but not limited to, anthropogenic”, as the period during which human activity has become so dominant as to create a crisis of the climate and environment; and by others who dispute this by instead calling it Capitalocene- as the epoch “of unbridled over-accumulation, which has brought about an “irreparable rift” in the metabolic interaction between humanity and the rest of nature… a distinct geological epoch in which the capitalist formula of “accumulation for accumulation’s sake” has penetrated into every nook and cranny of the planet’s biophysical environment, to the point where the survival of the capitalist system has come to constitute an existential threat to the survival of humanity as a whole." Perhaps the balance between hope and despair that Dickens brings so evocatively at the beginning of an epochal change inaugurated in 1789, would today as it draws to an end, tilt towards the latter.
Democracy in danger
Among others, the two most important challenges presently besetting humanity are: The potentially devastating effect of climate collapse that threatens large scale species extinction on the one hand, and, on the other, the atmosphere of mistrust and intolerance between communities from various religious, racial and ethnic denominations threatening cultural, social and civilizational breakdown.
A third and perhaps the most important challenge, on the resolution of which depend the resolution of the above two, is the crisis of democracy the world over; so much so that some believe a gradual Democide – death of democracy - is on-way (Keane 2023). Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that the crisis is of a democracy that is undergirded by capitalism - a capitalist democracy (if you may!), the foundations for which were laid in the French revolution (1789-99) which ushered in the age of enlightenment riding on the banner of a battle cry for liberty, equality and fraternity. Dickens’ story is set against the conditions that led up to the French Revolution. It is another matter that liberty did not go much beyond the liberty of owning private property, inequality based on class, gender, caste, race, ethnicity or religion persists and fraternity is conspicuous by absence of love and brotherhood (& Sisterhood) and presence of conflict, war and intolerance. This is not to say that we can only speak in the negative. The idea of individual rights, universal adult suffrage, freedom of expression, gender equality, right of association and other human rights, scientific progress, technological innovation, medical advances, etc. are also a positive consequence of the 1789 event. However, the promise of age of reason has also translated into a modernity dominated by predatory capitalism characterized by privatization of profit, socialization of losses and relentless destruction of ecological balance. Human suffering as a result of systemic exploitation, social oppression, corruption, patriarchy, war, endemic poverty, intolerance, religious extremism, democracy deficit, climate crises, etc., is there for everyone to see. The crisis of democracy is not only social and political but also ecological, moral and spiritual: a great tear is slowly rending apart the delicate fabric that holds the social, natural, and moral order together. There is an urgent call to suture this rift before it is too late, before a total civilizational and ecological collapse. On democracy’s substantive deepening or eroding away depend the very survival or otherwise of the collective achievements of all previous civilizations on whose tired shoulder the present rests. Either a radical, ecological and syncretic social democracy, or social barbarism and ecological collapse are the two alternatives facing humanity.
If the adage – In a democracy, people get the government they deserve and they deserve what they get – is true, then the world is in big trouble. World over we are seeing the rise to power through democratic means, of governments and demagogues who are contemptuous of the very principles of democracy that elected them to power. Democracy thrives best when it allows for a robust expression of plurality of ideas, discourses, cultural practices and religious traditions; and it withers and dies a slow death under dictatorial and totalitarian regimes that tend to foist a universalist ontology, a monolithic culture, an intolerant gaze, a majoritarian world-view and a homogenizing and revanchist ideology on the people that elects them to power. When this happens, constitutional values get trampled upon by those in power, institutions of check-and-balances are eroded, judiciary is hollowed out, and watch-dog media is co-opted. Often this is done by creating false narratives about imagined threat(s) to cultural and territorial identity – from those who form an ethnic or religious minority of the nation, while the real problems of the world are ignored. This opens easy avenues for othering, exclusion, persecution and lynching the perceived enemy while paving the way to identity-based violation of human rights of individuals and communities guaranteed under the Geneva Convention. All forms of democratic and peaceful expression of dissent are labeled as anti-national, even as students, activists, and intellectuals are jailed indefinitely on false charges. This paves the way for cultural, social and political fascism. This happened to the Jews in the 1930s-40s, and this is happening world over today to Hispanics, Palestinians, Muslims, immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers. Not only social issues but even as grave crises as the global warming has been met with skepticism by leaders as their scientific world-view tends to be informed by revanchist ideology, just as Nazism led to racist scientific theories.
India’s Challenge
India too has not been spared challenges, not the least of which is that of having rulers who take the climate crisis lightly. In its drive to foist a monolithic and Universalist cultural nationalism down the throat of the nation, the ruling government is stifling a multiplicity of voices, open-ended conversations, diverse & discontinuous world-views, and plural cultural practices & religious beliefs. This threatens the secular, plural and syncretic fabric of the nation of which our constitution forms the bulwark. While delivering the 25th convocation address on National Law School of India, ex-Vice President Haimid Ansari underlined this plurality:
Our founding fathers took cognizance of an existential reality. Ours is a plural society and a culture imbued with considerable doses of syncretism… It is this plurality that the Constitution endowed with a democratic polity and a secular state structure. Pluralism as a moral value seeks to ‘transpose social plurality to the level of politics, and to suggest arrangements which articulate plurality with a single political order in which all duly constituted groups and all individuals are actors on an equal footing, reflected in the uniformity of legal capacity.
Voicing concern at the rise in intolerance, ghettoisation and persecution of minorities he cites the Supreme Court in the Bommai case:
“Religious tolerance and fraternity are basic features and postulates of the Constitution as a scheme for national integration and sectional or religious unity. Programmes or principles evolved by political parties based on religion amount to recognizing religion as a part of the political governance which the Constitution expressly prohibits. It violates the basic features of the Constitution. Positive secularism negates such a policy and any action in furtherance thereof would be violative of the basic features of the Constitution.”
The Jesuit priest and social activist Rudolf Heredia, in a paper (Wani & Datta-Asane 2023, 393) says:
A multi-ethnic, pluri-religious society like ours will do well to encourage cultural diversity between groups, and multiple non-exclusive group memberships, networking across groups to make borders more permeable… Religious nationalism thrives on religious homogeneity: one creed, one code, one cult. However, the inherent diversity – cultural, linguistic and religious – among states like India has proven extremely resilient to any externally imposed uniformity.
Recognizing and honoring Plural Universes
One of the problems with totalizing, homogenizing, unitarian and majoritarian ideologies is they emerge out of a cosmovision that represents a non-negotiable dogmatic universe – which as final truth, is then foisted upon all as the only world-view of reality that matters.
Philosophically this is ultimately a question of ontology- or to put it simplistically the question of what your theory of reality is! Amaya Querejazu shows how totalizing cosmovision are based on the premise that only one-truth, one-universe, one-language, one-culture, one-narrative and one-myth ought to be privileged. Unfortunately this has “enormous consequences in the way we enact reality and in the creation of political arrangements that end up affecting our daily lives”. This leads to marginalizing differences by ignoring other epistemologies and neglecting other ontologies (particularly of indigenous people). If a civilizational and ecological collapse has to be avoided, then this ideal of one-universe, one-truth and one-reality needs to be countered by the idea of Pluriverse by:
understanding that reality is constituted not only by many worlds, but by many kinds of worlds, many ontologies, many ways of being in the world, many ways of knowing reality…pluriverse implies the existence of many worlds somehow interconnected..the human world is connected to the natural world and also to the spiritual world…we need to consider how these different worlds can coexist not submitted in one reality, but in incommensurability…The Pluriverse, then, is where the natural, religious-spiritual, political and social are not separated…allowing the coexistence of other narratives and world-views.
To live with this insight is impossible without a paradigm shift in our cognitive apparatuses which enables respect for those-not-like-us even when we don’t understand them. As Raimon Panikkar (1995, 85) puts it:
Pluralism climaxes in acknowledging the unimaginable, that which is absurd for me and, to a certain degree, unbearable to me. These flexible boundaries are the boundaries of pluralism. Everything circles around being aware of our contingency. Pluralism dethrones monism and, with it, monotheism.
And
An intercultural dialogue is not a purely political necessity…It is a personal affair and has to begin with an intrareligous experience. If I am not personally suffering from the painful tensions and polarities of reality, if I only see one side from the inside, the other from the outside, I will not be able to understand fully. That means that I will not be able to face reality under the influence of both the sides and will not do justice to both. (92)
Not recognizing this leads to “epistemic violence” of insisting on sameness of cosmovision that everyone must accept - which is followed by violence of other kind. Universalizing ontologies tend to be divisive, where separation rules, creating false narratives of us-against-them. Pluralist ontologies on the other hand, even as they reveal difference, stress on mutual correspondences, complementarity and reciprocity and recognize that relationality is the main, defining and fundamental principle of reality; everything is connected…Differences are required and necessary for reality itself to become possible.
A dossier celebrating pluralities
The contributions to this dossier try to address the challenges facing us in, well, plural ways. The crisis is multi-pronged- at once economic, social, cultural, political, ecological and spiritual. Individual authors have offered their own distinctive lens for the reader. The editors felt that these eleven essays can be grouped into three generic themes – those that ask question about the kind of Radical Vision required to change the present dismal scenario, those that hint at the role of Cultural Practices and Plural Imagination in offering hope, and those that speak of the role of Faith and Social Action in ushering a better world
In the first thematic category, i.e. Radical Vision
Annie James in Nature(s) in Us speaks about the poverty of our relationship with other-than-human-natures and explores how it can be countered by the idea of abundance or plurality.
Kalle Blomberg & Milind Wani in Unity at the End of False Beliefs: Towards Synchronising Plural Worldviews for Radical Social Transformation write about how money has become the alienated form of the binding force of religion and explore how our plural solidarities can re-bind us.
Siddhartha in Utopia and Climate Civil Disobedience criticizes our development model for spurring cataclysmic climate change while stressing that only a mass scale non-violent civil disobedience at world level, inspired by utopian ideals of thinkers like Gandhi and Marx, can save us.
In the second thematic category, i.e. Cultural Practices and Plural Imagination
John Clammer’s Ecological Pluralities: Relating Biological and Cultural Diversity for Sustainable Futures explores the significance of cultural practices in relation to sustainability and relates them to emerging ideas in the field of environmental humanities
Jyoti Sahi in Plurality in the Context of Indian Folk Culture and Marginalized Traditions points out how in the context of multiple identities, even Art gets embroiled into narrow identity-based politics. How to allow plurality in the creative growth of art forms is a question he grapples with.
Maya Joshi’s essay De-storying/Re-storying, visits the recent International Booker Award winning Hindi novel and its English translation Ret Samadhi/Tomb of Sand, to explore the theme of borders and border-crossings, across dimensions.
Sucharita Dutta-Asane taking a fictional turn in Let Go, through a story of a conflicted mother, her lesbian daughter and her proud indigenous lover, explores the dilemmas that self-declared ‘liberals’ need to face when confronted with their own unresolved prejudices about sexual pluralities.
In the third thematic category, i.e. Faith and Social Action
Anannya Bhattacharjee’s Spirituality as Fearless Enquiry for a Plural and Just World interrogates the dialectic between multiplicity of faiths and the search for singularity of truth that underpins them.
Urmi Chanda in The Hinduism Paradox: Heterogeneity, Homogeneity, and Hope, takes a compassionate look at Hinduism’s paradoxical tendencies for homogeneity as well as heterogeneity, even as she avers that Hinduism can be a harbinger of social harmony.
Bharatwaj Iyer in Between the Boundaries of Religious Worlds: An Interstitial Approach to the Problem of Religious Harmony in India writes about the dangers of over-identification in times of interfaith disharmony and how Sufi teachings can help us.
Aspi Mistry in A Meditation on Social Action and Spirituality: The Paradox of Two but Not-Two reflects on dilemmas confronting authentic spirituality’s relevance for social/political action even as he avers the spiritual "dimension" as the fifth element in our 4-dimensional space-time universe.
We hope that these contributions to the dossier on Plurality will find welcoming kindred spirits who are worried about the future of humanity and earth.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank Heinrich Böll Foundation for the opportunity to work on this important issue.
References
Ansari H. (2010). Pluralist society – contemporary constitutional values – India.
Keane J. (2023). Democide, step by step. Indian Express (January 18).
Panikkar R. (1995). A dwelling place for wisdom (Trans. Annemarie S Kidder). Motilal Banarsidas Publishers. (Original published in 1993)
Querejazu A. (2016). Encountering the pluriverse: Looking for alternatives in other worlds. Revista Brasileira de Politica Internacional (RBPI).
Wani M. & Datta-Asane S. (2023). Ecosophies of freedom: Suturing social, ecological & spiritual rift. Kalpavriksh and Earth Care Books.