'Epistemic violence'

Note: This was written about six years ago. When I looked back at it, it was more than obvious that we have greatly accelerated towards commodification of our education system. Thought it was time share it.

How often have you felt an ecstasy, have had a feeling of enlightenment, have had a realization that someone has given your deepest intuitive understanding a concrete form in a human language that you can now hold in your hand, or on your tongue and present to the whole world. Not that the world will immediately understand or appreciate the meaning of that word or phrase, because not everyone has shared the concerns you have shared for so long. Because language by itself does not carry meaning unless it is contextualized. But still, you have a word, a phrase, which can be the starting point for communicating what you have been trying to communicate, at least to your conscious self if not anybody else. 

I encountered such a phrase right now. A phrase that in just in two words of the English language expresses the idea of violence that has been unleashed on human knowledge by the global corporate capitalism. Let me quote the original:

An “episteme” is an item of knowledge. When one attacks or destroys the knowledge of something, this may be called “epistemic violence.” An example (and there are numerous others): Corporate brand names, such as “ashtanga yoga” – which obviously refer to Patanjali’s “ashtanga yoga,” ignore and pervert Patanjali’s meaning, in this case his first of the 8 (ashta) limbs (anga), establishing truth and non-violence as the foundation of the yoga practice, and as such, commit epistemic violence to the very knowledge we seem to seek. Worse, this projects a modern capitalist view of self-interested, even selfish, behaviour on both humanity and the rest of the natural world, supporting the very paradigm to which Yoga, as some of us know it, is the antidote. The result is not only furthering our ignorance, rather than removing it (as is the path of higher consciousness), but it is the most effective attack to date on the wisdom and sustainability of Indian culture, so that it may be a docile colony of the modern warfare state. — Baba Rampuri

`Epistemic violence’, how powerful two words can be! What deep understanding of the self and the world you need to have to come up with a powerful phrase like that! It is like capturing the most complex of social phenomena, and your feelings about those with as little expenditure of words as possible. When I first read the phrase, I paused, no, I stopped, I stood up from my chair, I sat down again, I held my head with both hands trying to balance it from the pleasantly violent shaking it got from assimilating this profound phrase for the first time. 

Once I regained my balance, I started thinking what can be other examples of epistemic violence in the contemporary world dominated by global corporate capitalism? Of course there are many. But it seemed to me that corporatization of education should qualify as the worst epistemic violence perpetrated ever. It attacks not only an ‘episteme’, it attacks the whole basis of knowledge, the process of acquiring knowledge, the meaning of knowledge itself; it turns epistemology on its head. And how does a society survive without meaningful knowledge getting transmitted from generation to generation, where `knowledge is free’? 

This epistemic violence starts early, right in the pre-school days. Let me make it clear that I am not suggesting that no private entity can impart education. But, making the process of educating children a for-profit enterprise, overtly or covertly, militates against the idea of knowledge as a means to sustain a society. Slowly, but surely, it eats away the basis of a healthy, sane society. In fact, a quick look at history will show that there are no countries that ever made progress in terms of an overall better quality of life for their citizens without the society (through the government, or any other way) putting in resources for a universal education. On the other hand, if one (or his/her parents) has to keeping paying for education through the nose, how does the idea and the ideal of giving back to the society survive? And this ideal is not a utopia, which it has been turned into in our corporate age. Unless adult people give back to the society, give back for nurturing of the future generations, how does a society survive and carry forward? A privatized education running for corporate profit reduces learners to consumers. In addition to leaving those out who cannot afford to pay, getting a degree somehow or the other, or at best the skills to successfully become a clog in the corporate wheel, becomes the ultimate goal. Learning takes a back-seat. Learning that, at a sublime level, involves quiet contemplation, that involves worrying about the deeper questions, thinking about the meaning of things without any assurance that we will ever understand that. Learning that teaches us to struggle with the deepest human emotions, to understand, appreciate, express, or at least to try to express them in our language. Learning that may also teach us to question the most deep-seated assumptions and belief-systems; a learning process that puts the teacher and the student at the center, and everything else as peripheral. Learning that at a more earthy level makes us part of this society, teaches us to share the resources, share the responsibilities, to care for the elderly (not just our biological parents as in a patriarchal hierarchy, but elderly of the society as a whole) and the infirm, learning that teaches us to become good citizens. Yes, corporatization of education is the biggest assault on episteme as a whole because it robs us of our radical consciousness and human agency, and aims to make us passive consumers of the corporate trash. 

Mindless Musings in Mid-life Lockdown

Disclaimer: The situation related to the coronavirus pandemic is changing very rapidly. These are my thoughts at a given moment in time (or a few hours). If things look different when you read this (if you read this), blame it on the virus, and not me.😊

It’s a cliché to say that are we living through a kind of a pandemic that happens only about once in a century. Surely, the last time such a pandemic broke out was the Spanish Flu during 1918-20 in which approximately 50 million people died the world over. When the H1N1 flu started in 2009 many people expressed concern that that is perhaps going to the once-in-a-century flu pandemic of the 21st century. Thankfully, H1N1 did not run very long. The virus still exists, for sure, and people get infected. But it did not break out in a scale that is anywhere close to the Spanish Flu.

But COVID-19 has turned out to be that once-in-a-century pandemic we had been apprehending for more than a decade now. Already 100,000 people have died in its outbreak. The actual number could be higher because of under-reporting (not necessarily deliberate) from different countries. Apart from testing and isolation, social distancing has been touted as the most effective measure for containing the virus in addition to personal hygiene like washing one’s hands often with soap and water, and not sneezing or coughing without covering one’s month. It is already quite astonishing that many societies, including in India, have not reached a stage of mass education and awareness that people in general practice regular washing of hand as a basic hygiene practice. 

Be that as it may, social distancing (physical distancing would have been a more appropriate term) has been taken to a whole new aggressive level during the present coronavirus pandemic. Many western countries are enforcing stay-at-home orders aggressively, to the extent that people are complaining of police high-handedness (in the UK, for example) incompatible with liberal democracy that lays great emphasis on individual freedom. In India this has led to complete stoppage of all economic activities for three weeks, most likely to be extended for at least two more weeks at the time I am writing this. Economic activities in other countries have also taken a huge beating, even if not completely halted everywhere. In many countries, including the US, cafe’s and restaurants are closed, factories were shut in Hubei province in China. Commercial shipments are stuck at ports and airports at many places, disrupting supply chains. Needless to say, this has already led to huge number of jobs lost. Number of people seeking unemployment benefit in the US shot up sharply this week. People have been fired in China. Migrant workers and daily wage earners are facing a  nightmarish situation in India. The organized sectors will begin to understand the full impact of the economic crisis once we try to come out of the lockdown.

When the economy is stalled, jobs are lost, hirings stop, salaries freeze or are cut. It is a no-brainer to see that people will have less to spend on non-essential items. So discretionary spending will decrease globally. This will lead to decrease in demand leading to further job losses or less job openings for new entrants to the job market. 

WTO has warned that global trade could decrease by as much as 30% from the pre-COVID levels [a]. The unemployment figures in the US is already over 10%. The number was somewhere around 23% during the great depression of 1928-30. The number of jobs lost in India has already crossed the number of jobs lost in the US during the 1928-30 depression. The summary of all this is that the global economic situation is rather grim. Faced with such grim reality, it takes bold steps by the government for a society/country to come out of it. That is what happened during the great depression. The US federal government pumped in huge amounts of money in infrastructure building that led to job creation in the short term, and to capacity building for the future, which ultimately helped the US come out of the rut they were in. The fact that the Communist Party of the US played a significant, though indirect, role in the whole process is a story for another day.

Unfortunately, we are living in a different world where there is no US Communist Party, the old Communist movement is dead world over. There is no USSR holding the red flag. The only country worth mentioning is Cuba, and they have truly been a shining example of what social spending can achieve in times of crisis. The western countries, most notably the UK and the US, have followed Neo-liberal policies since the Tatcher-Regan years. Public spending has been cut over the years, particularly after the 2008 financial crisis. Other European countries have followed similar policies, but perhaps not so aggressively. Italy, for example, had 10.6 hospital beds per 1000 population during the 1970’s. This came down steadily to 3.4 in 2012 according to data on the World Bank website [b]. The US, the ‘most prosperous’ country on earth, has 2.7 beds in comparison. Moreover, all developed countries have universal healthcare coverage provided by the sate, except the US.

What is the relevance of these to the COVID crisis? For one thing, it is true that governments are having to spend a lot of money in fighting the crisis. Some of it is direct in the form of actual spending for the healthcare services, procuring additional equipments, building temporary capacity etc. Some of it is indirect in the form of lost revenue, extra financial support being given to citizens etc. Even the US government has approved a $2 tn financial package to fight the COVID crisis and has made testing of corona virus free.

It can only be expected that the same governments which have followed Neo-liberal policies and policies of austerity in the name of fiscal discipline, will use this spending as further excuse to cut future spending. They will also use the same stick to beat the opponents. Any opposition to such extreme austerity measures will be termed as ‘anti-national’ or whatever other epithets they are given. In simple words, such opposition will be termed as irresponsible, and even greedy, in times of a grave crisis.

People, battered by the virus, and then further battered by a broken economy, will jump into the laps of the demagogues who peddle the image of a strong, decisive leader bordering on, or openly flaunting, depending on the social context, a toxic masculinity. More austerity will follow. More areas will be opened up for brazen profit-making at a further cost to public well-being. 

All this is almost a given. What is not so obvious about a post-covid world?

Well, there are experts and then there are more experts to opine on this. Open any newspaper or magazine, and you are sure to encounter one of these opinion pieces. Some are worth the time, most are not. I am no expert on this. So this is a non-expert’s guess of what may unfold in the coming years. Caveat: If you have read up to this point, you should decide whether you want to spend any more time on this based on my disclosure in the previous sentence.

The new Cold War over Covid has already started. Instead of a global response, what is on display is a every country on its own attitude. Trump trying to buy out a potential vaccine from the German company CureVac for a ‘billion dollars’ exclusively for the US [c], reports of the US snatching away masks on way to other countries [d], Trump trying to brand the virus the ‘Chinese virus’, Trump threatening India of retaliation if it did not relax export restrictions on hydroxychloroquine, are examples of open bullying in the international arena, a macho manifestation of Trump’s ‘America first’ policy. (By the time of posting this, the USA has withheld its payment to The WHO).  China, on the other hand has launched its soft power, power nonetheless. Being the ascending power, it does not measure success in terms of months or even a few years. Like a true aspiring global power, it thinks in terms of decades. Therefore, rather than behaving like a bully, it has acted like a true big brother. It has sent PPE and medical help to Italy, to India. A bunch of young Chinese diplomats have taken up the responsibility to propagate the Chinese model as the best one suited to face a pandemic [e], particularly in contrast to how countries like Italy, Spain and France have fared in their fights against the virus.

In short, a competition is on between authoritarian (ostensibly benevolent) vs. ‘liberal’ forms of politics and governance. How are the two sides likely to react in the immediate aftermath of the crisis? China, in a reasonable guess, will invest heavily in capacity building for the future. This will be in areas of education, research, healthcare system, whatever you can think of. It will project itself as an authoritarian state that takes the welfare of its citizens seriously. A vision to build capacity for the future, in terms of creating and propagating knowledge, taking care of healthcare needs at times of crisis are some of the measures that set apart societies, not just their politics. As an interesting move, China has made it a policy that vetting by the government is a must before publishing research on the novel coronavirus [f].

What the West does will be an interesting thing to watch. Will they continue in the path of Neo-liberal capitalism that has already caused so much of misery? Or will there be a re-think, and they will start re-investing in public welfare, public education, healthcare for citizens etc. What the US and UK, the two poster boys of Neo-liberal economic policies, do is going to be most important and interesting. Once they come out of this crisis, will the governments have the financial capacity to re-invest in public welfare? Or will they use the financial constraints to further go down the path of privatization and profit-making?

What will we see in India? Since the early 1990’s Neo-liberal economic policies have played havoc with the lives of millions. Expenditure in education and healthcare has been privatized to a huge extent. Rarely a middle-class and never an upper-class person goes to a government health facility. Middle-class parents, many of whom are products of government schools, do not send their kids to government schools any more. 

Here is my guess on these questions. 

The countries where Neo-liberal capitalism has taken roots will continue to follow that route. The economic elite (let us call the 1%) will not give up their power so easily. The governments, being controlled by the 1%, will enact measures that will advance their interests. So expect more cuts in education, healthcare, public services etc. 

In order to understand what I am talking about, let us take the example of the US. Through the 1960’s and 70’s, the federal government contributed more than 70% of the budget for basic research in science. Even in 2004, the figure was 61%. But it fell below 50% in 2013, and stood at 44% in 2015. This was a result of (i) flattening of the contribution from the federal government, and (ii) increasing investment by corporations in basic research. Among the corporations, Pharma companies made the most contributions. These companies’ investment in basic research increased from $3 billion in 2008 to $8.1 billion in 2014. Spending on basic research, all 46,000 companies combined that participated in the BRDIS survey of the National Science Foundation (NSF), increased from $13.9 billion to $24.5 billion during the same period [g]. 

So what is the point here? First, the gap left by the government(s) will be filled by the corporations. But, it will come at a cost. Corporations are, by definition, for-profit entities. They are answerable only to their share-holders. Generating profit for the share-holders is the only motive for corporations, anything else is expendable. Therefore, it is not for no reason that the Pharma companies in the US spend so much on basic research. First, they get tax break for investments in basic research. They get to keep intellectual property rights over drugs they design for 20 years during which they generate huge profits. Then they have devised ways of extending those property rights beyond 20 years, tactics known as evergreening  and thicketing [h].  

Let us look at some hard numbers to understand the situation. CEO’s of three major Pharma companies—Allergan, Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer earned a total total of $90 billion in 2018. Americans spent a mind boggling $535 billion in prescription medicines in the same year, up 50% from 2010. Even with that, many Americans have to ration their medications to keep their expenses within limits. This simply means they take less medicine than what their doctors prescribe. To understand how drugs are priced, a new hepatitis C drug Sovaldi, launched in 2013, costs $1,000 a pill, or $84,000 for each treatment [h]. That should give you an idea where that $3 billion (or $8 billion) investment in basic research stand in the bigger scheme of things.

While the Pharma companies have been spending money on research, both basic and applied, other companies are also doing so, and in a bigger way lately. Take the examples of Tesla and Google. From technology to AI, they are the leaders. Sum total of all this will be that research will be done more and more in the private labs of the corporations with the sole motive of generating profit for them. Understanding the implications of such a scenario in the present perspective, some British MPs, cutting across party lines, have written a letter to the government that any vaccine for covid-19 developed from public funded research is made available on an open-access basis so that the developing countries can afford it [i]. They write: Any pharmaceutical monopoly could see developing countries left behind. What if the vaccine is developed from private research? Of course, the corporations are not obliged to share their knowledge, and they won’t. They will try to maximize their profit. Whether that comes from keeping the price high and letting only those who can afford to have it, or from keeping the price low so that they have bigger sales volume will be a purely business decision. Saving lives will not be one of the considerations in the decision-making process.

This will be the scenario in other areas also if research is increasingly done in private labs. This is not to deny that in the past private corporations have made significant contributions to basic research. Take the examples Xerox, or the Bell Labs. But as statistics show, more basic research was funded by public money, and private companies benefited from public funded basic research more than what they themselves generated.

Increasing private research has the potential to qualitatively change the nature of academic profession as we know it. Professors in the universities and colleges, even today, are seen as people holding expert knowledge in their areas who can be relied upon to give unbiased advice and opinion when required. They are the generators, and keepers of knowledge of the society. If the process of knowledge generation is handed over to private employees of for-profit corporations, who may have no reason or opportunity to openly share their knowledge, we are going to enter a different era altogether. How as a society we access and disseminate useful knowledge, or whether we can build a society where decisions are taken based on publicly shared knowledge, is going to be a big question.

Finally, will we need teachers? What the current global lockdown has shown us is that much of what we do face-to-face can be done (not at the same qualitative level, for sure) over the internet. Classes can be taught over zoom, or Google class room, meetings can be held over Skype or Webex. Or recorded videos of lectures can be uploaded on secure sites for the students to access at their convenience. Once 5G technology is launched globally, these will become even easier. Why do we need teachers then, or why do we need so may of them anyway? One marker of quality of an educational institution has been the student/teacher ratio. The smaller it is the better. Then teachers can pay attention to and take care of the needs of individual students. But in a corporatized teaching model, where the eventual goal of ‘teaching’ is to (a) generate profit for the private entity running the institution, and (b) impart just enough skill to the students so that by the end of their degree courses they can fit nicely as spokes in the giant corporate wheel, such close personal care is a thing of the past that has outlived its utility. Who wants critically thinking individuals who can raise questions about the grotesque depravity the corporate culture has brought upon humanity? This is not to suggest that there have not been, or there aren’t any private institutions that impart quality education. But my point here is not about ‘private’ entities per se, but the 'corporate' entities. There are no dearth of them, as we all know so well.

To sum up after this long, mindless musing, future of liberal social democracy seems rather bleak in a post-covid world. The real ideological battle will be between an ostensibly ‘benevolent’ authoritarianism and Neo-liberal capitalism. It will be interesting to see how much life the latter has left. But for a vast majority of humanity, the relevant question will be: Where do we stand in this? Do we even have a choice?

[a] https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2020/apr/08/coronavirus-live-news-us-trump-threatens-who-funding-uk-boris-johnson-global-cases-latest-updates

[b] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.MED.BEDS.ZS?locations=IT

[c] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/16/not-for-sale-anger-in-germany-at-report-trump-seeking-exclusive-coronavirus-vaccine-deal

[d] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/02/global-battle-coronavirus-equipment-masks-tests

[e] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/11/coronavirus-who-will-be-winners-and-losers-in-new-world-order

[f] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01108-y

[g] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/data-check-us-government-share-basic-research-funding-falls-below-50

[h] https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/democracy/reports/2019/08/30/473911/big-pharma-reaps-profits-hurting-everyday-americans/

[i] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/live/2020/apr/12/coronavirus-live-news-nhs-staff-deaths-boris-johnson-latest-updates?page=with:block-5e9305738f082dfd549d500e#liveblog-navigation

With my senses’ hues …

আমারই চেতনার রঙে পান্না হল সবুজ,

                          চুনি উঠল রাঙা হয়ে।

                      আমি চোখ মেললুম আকাশে,

                          জ্বলে উঠল আলো

                               পুবে পশ্চিমে।

                   গোলাপের দিকে চেয়ে বললুম “সুন্দর”,

                               সুন্দর হল সে।

—(আমি) Rabindranath Tagore

With my senses’ hues

Emerald as green I muse

And the Ruby as red

As my sight I spread

The sky is luminous’

East to West with light glorious;

To Rose I said, “Bonny is thee”

And so did she be. 

[Translated by Rajat Dasgupta] 

Many of us who grew up with an adequate exposure to Tagore, know this and the following lines by heart. Every time I read, heard or recited this poem, a strange sense of mysticism came over me. In those teen years, I had not reached a level of maturity, either emotional or intellectual, to comprehend its full significance. After I studied quantum mechanics, and started encountering it on a daily basis, the meaning slowly started dawning on me. But about three years ago, a research paper published in Nature Physics suddenly lifted the veil, and I could feel the meaning of it all. I not only saw these lines in a new light, I sensed my science in a new way. What I realized is that this counter-intuitive finding of science is validating what Tagore expressed in his poem nearly a century ago. This also reminded me of the famous dialogue between Tagore and Einstein when they met in Berlin in 1930. What was thought to be a spiritual-scientific binary may turn out to be a false one, and a wrong way of looking at their dialogue. I attempt to explain these ideas for readers who are not experts in physics in this post.

In Newtonian physics, each material particle comes with a certain mass, and has a definite position and a velocity. Product of mass and velocity is defined as momentum. Evolution of position and momentum of a particle with time depends on the forces acting on it. The particle accelerates in the direction in which the net force acts on it. For example, if I release a stone from a certain height it accelerates towards the earth because of the force of gravity. The crucial point for us here is that a material particle has precisely defined position and momentum at any instant of time, and we can know both of these with arbitrary accuracy (only constrained by how accurate measuring instruments we can devise). This is where the quantum world differs fundamentally. The uncertainty principle, proposed by Heisenberg, tells us that we cannot know (i.e., measure) both the position and momentum of a particle with arbitrary precision. Another way of putting it is that when we do a measurement to find the momentum of a quantum particle, the measurement process itself disturbs it to such an extent that information about its position is lost, and vice-versa. Mathematically one puts it in the following form

ΔxΔp ≥ h/2π, where h is the Plack’s constant, one of the fundamental constants of nature.

Here Δx and Δp are the uncertainties in our knowledge of the position and momentum respectively of the particle. If we precisely know one of these quantities, we know nothing about the other. 

Yet another way of viewing this is that a particle is not just a particle, it can behave as a wave also. This is the so-called wave-particle duality. This is completely against our classical, everyday way of experiencing and understanding nature. If something is a particle, it always is a particle. For example, a ball, car, table and chair, though not  single particles, are collection of particles, and they always behave as that. They have definite positions and momenta at any given instant of time. So do the heavenly bodies: the sun, the moon or the earth. In contrast, a wave does not have a precise location in space. If I throw a stone in a pool of water, ripples propagate. I cannot say where exactly the wave is. It is spread over a region of space, and it moves. That’s exactly how particles, the tiny, sub-atomic ones, behave. How do we know they behave that way? Well, that’s the only way, so far as we can tell today, we can explain the stability of the material world around us. In a classical world, atoms would not even be stable! Even if they formed, they would decay rather soon. There are more direct experiments to establish wave nature of particles, and one of these concerns us here.

A canonical experiment to test whether something behaves as a wave or a particle is the so-called double-slit experiment. The idea is best illustrated through a diagram (Figure 1). S is a source of plane waves which can be light, for example. A little to its right, down the path the waves propagate, there is an obstacle with two openings S1 and S2. placed symmetrically on two sides of S. On the extreme right is a screen on which can see images and make our observations as shown in the figure. If S is a light source, one gets alternate bright and dark patches on the screen. This pattern is called in interference pattern. Interference is a definite signature of wave nature of the propagating entity. Interference happens because waves can pass through both the slits S1 and S2 at the same time.

[See this youtube video] If S was a source of classical particles of matter, each particle would pass through either S₁ or S₂ (or not at all). They would hit definite points on the screen, and we would have two spots corresponding to these.

Figure 1 [From: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDX3qb_BMs4]

If we close one of S₁ and S₂, then also the interference pattern vanishes because the waves now pass through one slit only. Interference pattern in a double-slit experiment with light has been observed umpteen number of times. This has become so commonplace that this is now a part of bachelor level physics experiments. But the interesting question is, what if we have an electron source or an atom source at S in stead of a light source? Would we still get interference patters? The answer is yes. The reason being the wave-particle duality. Electrons or atoms can behave as either particles or waves depending on how we chose to observe them, and this will be a major point of discussion in this article. 

Now that we understand what a double-slit experiment is, and how to say whether the object we are studying behaves as wave or particle, we are ready to discuss what is called a delayed-choice experiment. This is a variant of the double-slit experiment. Wheeler first proposed this idea [1]. Let me explain this in some detail.

Suppose to start with both the slits S₁ and S₂ are open. Waves from the source S pass the region of S₁ and S₂. After that, and only after that, a decision is taken to close one of them with a probability 1/2. In plain language this would involve something like this. After the waves pass through S₁ and S₂, a coin is tossed. If the result is heads, one of the slits is closed, else both remain open. Wheeler called it the delayed-choice experiment. Also suppose that if the experiment is performed with atoms, one can make sure that at a time only one atom is released from S. It (or the wave associated with it) passes though S₁-S₂, and after that one of the slits is closed with probability 1/2. What do we expect to see? Will there be an interference when one of the slits is closed? After all, the atom passed through both slits, and only after that one of them was closed. Any event (closing of one slit) cannot, and should not affect past events (the behaviors of the atom when it passed through the slits S₁ and S₂), the sacred principle of causality. If the atom behaved as wave then, because both slits were open, it should remain a wave, and we should see its signature as interference patters.

And here comes the biggest surprise. If one of the slits is closed after the atom has passed through the slits S₁ and S₂, the interference pattern vanishes. That is, the atom, as if, passes through only one of the slits, and behaves as a particle. How can this be? This apparently violates causality: causes must precede effects. How do we explain this?

The problem arises if we insist that there is a reality irrespective of whether we choose to observe it or not. In this view, the atom exists (behaves) as waves when it passes through S₁-S₂ if both are open, independent of whether or how we observed it. This view clashes with causality because then one has to conclude that the future decision to close one of S₁ and S₂ changes the behavior of the atom in the past from wave-like to particle-like.

Suppose we take a completely different view of physical reality: that, in the context of this experiment, the atoms do not have either wave or particle nature till we decide to measure them, till we decide to observe them. In this view, nature of physical reality is essentially dependent on the way we view it, measure it, observe it. If we decide to observe the atom by keeping both slits open, we observe its wave character. If we decide to observe it by closing one of the slits, we find its particle character. Thus it does not make sense to ascribe either wave or particle nature to a particle before the measurement is done. In Wheeler’s words [1]:

... the past has no existence except as it is recorded in the present. ... The universe does not "exist, out there," independent of all acts of observation. Instead, it is in some strange sense a participatory universe.

But with this the whole Cartesian view of nature is thrown into a crisis. As we see, there is not sharp observer-observed separation. Together they make up physical reality; they form an integrated whole. There is no meaning to a natural reality independent of the observer.

This brings me to the dialogue between Einstein and Tagore that I mentioned earlier. Here are some excerpts from it.

EINSTEIN: the problem begins whether truth is independent of our consciousness.

TAGORE: What we call truth lies in the rational harmony between the subjective and objective aspects of reality, both of which belong to the super-personal man.

…..

EINSTEIN: Even in our  everyday life we feel compelled to ascribe a reality independent of man to the objects we use. We do this to connect the experience of our senses in a reasonable way. For instance, if nobody is in this house, yet that table remains where it is.

TAGORE: Yes, it remains outside the individual mind, but not the universal mind. The table which I perceive is perceptible by the same kind of consciousness which I possess.

EINSTEIN: If nobody would be in the house the table would exist all the same — but this is already illegitimate from our point of view — because we cannot explain what it means that the table is there, independent of us.

Our natural point of view in regard to the existence of truth apart from humanity cannot be explained or proved, but it is a belief which nobody can lack — no primitive being even. We attribute to Truth a super-human objectivity; it is indispensable for us, this reality which is independent of our existence and our experience and our mind — though we cannot say what it means.

TAGORE: Science has proven that the table as a solid object is an appearance and therefore that which the human mind perceives as a table would not exist if that mind were naught.  …

In any case, if there be any Truth absolutely unrelated to humanity then for us it is absolutely non-existing.

It is not difficult to imagine a mind to which the sequence of things happen not in space but only in time like the sequence of notes in music. For such a mind such conception of reality is akin to the musical reality in which Pythagorean geometry can have no meaning. There is the reality of paper, infinitely different from the reality of literature. For the kind of mind possessed by the moth which eats that paper literature is absolutely non-existent, yet for Man’s mind literature has a greater value of Truth than the paper itself. In a similar manner if there be some Truth which has no sensuous or rational relation to the human mind, it will ever remain as nothing so long as we remain human beings.

I leave it for the reader to draw connections between Tagore’s views in the poem I started with, in his dialogue with Einstein, and what the delayed-choice experiment teaches us.

[1]  J. A. Wheeler in Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Theory, (Ed. A. R. Marlow), Academic Press 1978.

Declinism

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries were the centuries of `-isms’. After the (French) Enlightenment idea that man can shape his social and political future through conscious action, that found its practical demonstration in the French Revolution, -isms of various flavor got traction. Although in existence since well before the age of Enlightenment, the term `capitalism’ was used to describe the existing economic order only in 1850 by Louis Blanc, which is a good sixty one years after the French Revolution. Just three years before this, with the publication of the Communist Manifesto, socialism and communism had been added to the political lexicon. These concepts were further established by the publication of Das Kapital in 1867. There were, in addition, anarchism (Bakunin et al.), nationalisms of various flavors (civic nationalism of England and France versus cultural nationalism of Germany, Poland and Italy) etc. The political vocabulary, evidently, was rich.

This indicates that there were a number of options available. Once the central premise, that man can shape his political future by conscious action, is accepted, one needs a definite plan of action, or a political program to work along. Depending on the kind of future one envisaged, there were a number of different ways to build a program guided by various -isms.

Opposed to that era of competing political theories, we are living in an age of an apparent lack of alternatives. There is no alternative, TINA, to quote Margaret Thatcher (albeit, changing the meaning slightly) who coined the term in the 1980’s. This is a rather sad predicament to find ourselves in, as we are living in an age of profound social and political changes the likes of which have not been seen in a few centuries. One thing that can be said definitively about the current epoch is that the old order is crumbling. The capitalist order, or world system as Wallerstein calls it, is in existential crisis. Concurrent with that crisis, many institutions of liberal democracy are also in crises. To be sure enough, even the institution of nation state is in crisis. Given the scale of social upheaval, it is a pity that there are no alternative ideas of political organization on the horizon. No alternative political ideas means there are no concrete action plans for consciously shaping the future.

Given this lack of political ideas, let me introduce an idea that I would like to call decline-ism, or declinism. I borrow the word from Morris Berman (who calls himself a declinist as far as his analysis of the US and its global empire is concerned), and elaborate my ideas around it. Declinism, unlike isms of the earlier two centuries, does not call for immediate political action, much less gives a recipe for a political program. Rather, it calls for temporary inaction and critical introspection. It puts value on the courage of hopelessness, as Slavoj Žižek puts it. But it is not to be confused with despair. Despair comes with a negative connotation. Declinism encourages a positive state of mind. It calls for a realization of the fact that there is no grand scheme in history, `there is no deep logic to the unfolding of time’, historically speaking, notwithstanding what Michael Ignatieff may wish for. There is no direction in history, ‘history is on nobody’s side’ as Wallerstein put it. Since there is no grand scheme, and no particular direction in history, one has to fight one’s own battles standing on one’s own convictions. There isn’t going to be any help from either any greater moral force, or any natural direction of events. Therefore, one has to accept facts for what they are, that our present socio-economic formation at the global level is declining, it is terminally ill, and try to analyze and innovate from there.

What compels me to make such an ominous declaration? Well, it’s not me. A whole spectrum of economic experts have been saying that capitalism ‘has now come to a dead-end’. This includes the British commentator and Editor of Channel 4 News Paul Mason. In his book Postcapitalism Mason identifies the crises of present-day neo-liberal capitalism. He traces its decline not to any political revolt waged by the left, but, ironically in spite of FB and Goolge, to abundance of free information. Then there are Samir Amin, the Egyptian-French economist, John Smith, the Rutgers Economist, Richard Wolff, Harvey Davis, Immanuel Wallerstein, and our own Prabhat Patnaik. One must add to the list the flamboyant Slavoj Žižek. Patnaik says, ‘… capitalism at the moment has run out of options. It is yet to become clear how it will come out of this.’ Davis and Wolff essentially agree. Wallerstein and Žižek have more ominous predictions. Wallerstein predicts ‘the next 30-40 years will be hell’.

Now that a number of leading present-day thinkers agree that capitalism is in terminal decline, let us try to understand what else is in concomitant decline. In decline is the liberal democratic order, as I already mentioned. Žižek thinks we are moving from a liberal democratic to an ‘illiberal democratic’ era with the present crisis in capitalism and its institutions. Rise of China, Russia and similar illiberal powers definitely does not bode well for liberal democracy. The reasons for decline of the liberal order are perhaps embedded into the ideas of Enlightenment itself, as Pankaj Mishra has argued at length in his book Age of Anger. But let me not go that far back in time. I will confine the discussion to more recent events.

It would be wrong to assume that the simultaneous decline of capitalism and liberal democratic political order is an indication that the former fostered the latter, or that capitalism can function only in a liberal democracy. Far from it. Some of the most efficiently functioning capitalist economies today are political autocracies. Take the examples of China, Malaysia and Singapore and you will get the point. Facts are more curious than that. Liberal democracy is on the decline precisely because of the form of capitalism that has been practiced globally over the past, roughly, four decades. 

Fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 was a déjà vu moment for the proponents of unfettered free-market and liberal democracy. It was The End of History for Fukuyama and his ilk, and the world became flat for Friedman. The human civilization had reached its final point in evolution, Fukuyama proclaimed, and it was a matter of time before the institutions of liberal democracy spread all over the world. Roughly thirty years later, we are analyzing the reasons for its decline (and possible eventual demise in some more time).

So what happened in the intervening period? Turns out, TINA was a dangerous path to tread. As long as there were two ideologies, free-market capitalism and soviet-style socialism counter-balancing each other (though the two may not be fundamental opposites as is often made out) both survived. After the fall of socialism, instead of free-market capitalism becoming the economic order, and liberal democracy the associated political order, the world is seeing nation states trying to re-introduce protectionist measures, the beginning of a trade war as a consequence, and a good part of it (including the US, messiah of the ‘free world’) is already in grip of authoritarian rule.

In order to understand what happened in the intervening period, one does not have to go very far. Just getting out of one’s upper-/middle-class comfort zone and looking around, pretty much anywhere in the world, is enough. A lot has been written and said about how the middle class collapsed in Britain and the US, how that has lead to Brexit and the rise of Trump. So let me write, in very plain words, how I saw the world around me change.

Past nearly three decades of neo-liberal economic policies have seen investments in education, healthcare, public utilities going down over time. This started in the 1990’s. Till that time it was  generally accepted that government of the day had a responsibility to make sure that children go to school, teachers get paid, the health centers function and so on. To what extent these things really worked can be discussed, debated, but so long as there was a social-political consensus that these are the responsibilities of the government, one could hold it responsible. One could build politics around these issues. In 1991 Manmohan Singh as the finance minister in the Narasimha Rao government initiated neo-liberal economic policies. We started hearing that the government cannot bear these responsibilities any more in such a large and populous country like India. This was an excuse to open up these sectors for private profit. So there was mushrooming of private schools, colleges and universities with little control over the quality of education they imparted, or the amount of money they extracted. In fact, in my opinion, letting education and knowledge to be exploited for private profit is the single-most destructive step a society can take for its long-term survival as a civilized entity. It cannot be missed that this was intimately related to the crisis and decline of capitalism. As the old form of industrial capitalism was not as profitable, in its greed, the (global) capitalist class is in constant lookout for monetization and privatization of ever newer aspects of our lives. If opening up the business of education for making profit was not enough, arrival of reality TV opened up our very personal emotions as well for private profit.

So, affordable education slipped out and continues to slip out of the hands of common people. In this context let me narrate a story which is remarkable for its poignancy. We had a security guard working in our organization whom we knew for years. He was one of the most trusted and dependable ones. We could leave our children under his observation and trust him for their safety on their way to and from school. Like everybody else, this fellow also put his child in some local ‘English-medium’ school. And the problem started there. First he started borrowing from people to pay the school fees. But, obviously, it was not possible for him to pay back all that he borrowed. So this process was bound to fail. And the next thing we knew he was arrested by the police for carrying a consignment of illegal arms. Just think of the ordinary people around you—the maids, the taxi drivers, the rickshaw pullers, the vegetable vendors—one medical emergency, and their lives are ruined. thewire.in reported (April 14, 2018) that ‘An overwhelming 70% of healthcare expenses in India are met by out of pocket expenditure by the individual, due to which about 7% population is pushed below the poverty threshold every year.’

In addition, there is an agrarian distress that is going on for nearly three decades now. I will not go into statistics, for they are singularly ineffective in conveying the pains and sufferings of flesh-and-blood human beings. It is enough to recall that scores of farmers have committed suicide over this period. First it started in regions where the soil is not so fertile, and rain is scanty. But lately, it has spread to the fertile Gangetic plains as well. Recently I learnt that many state governments have made it a policy to push people towards the towns and cities, because, the argument goes, so many people cannot be sustained on agriculture. This is a blind imitation of similar policies followed in many European countries when they were industrializing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with little appreciation of the fact that disaffection these caused is having social consequences even today. On a more practical note, it is fool-hardy to think that we will be able to repeat that model of ‘development’ in the twenty-first century in this late phase of capitalism. This is what Mishra writes on the issue in Age of Anger:

… the Economist said that, on the basis of IMF data, emerging economies – or the “large part of humanity” that Bayly called the “long-term losers” of history – might have to wait for three centuries in order to catch up with the west. In the Economist’s assessment [in 2014], which pitilessly annuls the upbeat projections beloved of consultants and investors, the last decade of rapid growth was an “aberration” and “billions of people will be poorer for a lot longer than they might have expected just a few years ago”.

This brings us to the next level of problems. Displaced people, separated families, broken communities, shattered lives. People may be pushed out of their natural dwellings either due to lack of economic opportunities, or simply to make way for ‘developmental projects’—highways, industries, dams or whatever. These people, pushed to a life of anonymity in an alien town or city, lose whatever dignity they had in their traditional surroundings. Not all newcomers to the urban areas are necessarily as desperate though. There is a section of the landed class who decided to move to the newly ‘developed’ urban centers simply because agriculture is not profitable enough any more. This class, with huge sums of money in their hands, living in swanky new apartment complexes and gated communities, do not know what a civilized urban existence is. Displacement from the traditional ways of life, even if partly voluntary, leads to a loss of sense of meaning and purpose of life. All this shows up in bizarre crimes that crosses all limits of rational understanding: burgeoning rape cases associated with almost psychopathic violence on the victim, school kids shooting and stabbing each other just to get an exam postponed, school students threatening or beating teachers and so on. 

Aiding these pathologies is the easy availability of digital technology. Research has shown that excessive use of digital technology reduces our empathy. And for sure, addiction to smartphones reduces real face-to-face human interactions. As a result, we get isolated into our individual ‘electronic cocoons’ failing to empathize with the sufferings of anyone else. Remember the days when the death of mine workers in Chasnala elicited discussions and artistic expressions of solidarity with the working people. I think that kind of a large-scale communal solidarity is impossible in today’s atmosphere when, seeing someone dying on the road or drowning in water, our first reaction is to record it on our smartphones.

Getting to the theme of neo-liberalism, it has led to an enormous amount of suffering—both material and spiritual—of common people. I would even argue that spiritual suffering is not confined to the ordinary and the marginal alone. Everyone is affected by it. A drive for accumulation of endless wealth at the expense of everything else can only be a poor substitute for a communal way of life where meaning and purpose is derived more from social and familial bonds, responsibilities and obligations.

In this mature stage of neo-liberalism, thus, we have lost all that bonds a healthy human society together (with all its imperfections that need constant working on and improvement). This has been a real loss indeed. Associated with a lack of an alternative political idea, we are at a stage where we do not know what to do. Most of us know intuitively that there is a deep problem. Some know more consciously, analytically, its reasons and forms. But none of us has an alternative. Do I keep doing the same things that has brought us to this predicament, hoping that, providentially, I and my progeny will somehow be saved? Do I take a radically new course? What is that? There are no easy, straight-forward answers. Individual action is going to be of no real consequence anyway.

Standing at this critical juncture, I believe the first thing we should do is to accept that things are not going to improve in the short run. Even if you make a killing at the bourses, even if you get the next promotion in quick time, even if you win a great award, life is going to get worse, overall. The water that you drink, and the air that you breathe are going to get more polluted, the food that you eat will contain more and more chemicals that are harmful for you. Jobs are going to disappear. The idea of full-time jobs with associated benefits leading to a secure life with your loved ones are going to disappear. Education, particularly higher education, is going to get more expensive in most countries. I can go on. But the point should be clear by now. Our kids are going to have to live much worse lives (rotten ones in all likelihood) than us.

This realization, and understanding that our civilizational structure is collapsing, is to be at the core. It is crucial to realize that one or two elections (in countries where they still take place and have meaning) are not going to make any difference. We are in the midst of a great historical change. So building ‘resistance’ here and there is also not going to alter the course, though mass protests on specific issues will to play some role in shaping things, and to bring in some semblance of morality and sanity in public discourse. [Recent outrage at the Kathua and Unnao rape cases are examples of that]. But being keenly aware of the fact that we are going down, understanding and analyzing the reasons why we are going down, are going to help us in the long run. Once this phase of rapid change, when the capitalist order of the past few centuries, after its culmination in neo-liberalism, crumbling under its own pressure, gets over, may be we will have learnt some lessons. (Though I am not confident that this phase will pass without a serious collapse of the existing human civilization given the damage we continue causing to our environment). We have to develop, as Yogendra Yadav says, a ‘cultural tool-kit’  that helps us understand, and ride out (if we survive it), this phase. This cultural tool-kit must include our attempts at finding new meanings in life that goes beyond the dominant ideas of our present-day techno-commercial civilization which only glorifies mindless consumption. Among other things, it must search for a new science that, unlike our present-day science, goes beyond a mechanistic, reductionist interpretation of the natural world; a science that proclaims not `I think therefore I am', but ‘I think and feel, therefore I am’; a science that looks for ways to exist harmoniously with nature rather than constantly looking for ways to manipulate and exploit it for comfort, convenience or profit. We must reinvigorate arts and literature to explore questions about inherent values of human life. We must look for new spirituality and morality that explore man’s position in the cosmos with an open mind; spirituality and morality that explore with renewed vigor how man can co-exist with nature and his neighbors. We must look for modes of politics that constantly keep the welfare and a meaningful life of dignity of the many at its center. Its fealty should be to these core principles rather than to replacing one power structure with another. This is what I call ‘declinism’.