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’.