Your Myth, My Myth

The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master unless he transforms strength into right, and obedience into duty. Hence ‘the right of the strongest’—a phrase that one might think is meant ironically, but is actually laid down as a basic truth. But will no-one ever explain this phrase? Force is a physical power; I don’t see what moral effect it can have. Giving way to force is something you have to do, not something you choose to do; or if you insist that choice comes into it, it is at most an act of prudence. In what sense can it be a duty?

Suppose for a moment that this so-called ‘right of the strongest’ exists. I maintain that we’ll get out of this nothing but a mass of inexplicable nonsense. If force makes right, then if you change the force you change the right (effects change when causes change!), so that when one force overcomes another, there’s a corresponding change in what is right. The moment it becomes possible to disobey with impunity it becomes possible to disobey legitimately. And because the strongest are always in the right, the only thing that matters is to work to become the strongest. Now, what sort of right is it that perishes when force fails? If force makes us obey, we can’t be morally obliged to obey; and if force doesn’t make us obey, then on the theory we are examining we are under no obligation to do so. Clearly, the word ‘right’ adds nothing to force: in this context it doesn’t stand for anything.

‘Obey the powers that be’ If this means submit to force, it is a good precept, but superfluous: I guarantee that it will never be violated! All power comes from God, I admit; but so does all sickness—are we then forbidden to send for the doctor? A robber confronts me at the edge of a wood: I am compelled to hand over my money, but is it the case that even if I could hold onto it I am morally obliged to hand it over? After all, the pistol he holds is also a power.

Then let us agree that force doesn’t create right, and that legitimate powers are the only ones we are obliged to obey. Which brings us back to my original question.

–  Source: The Right of the Strongest, The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau

This piece is my attempt of capturing the mood of Political Right becoming the new Right irrespective of what world (First or Second or Third) you live in; similar to Oxford English Dictionaries’ attempt by choosing ‘Post-truth’ as ‘International Word of the Year’.

The above excerpt from Rousseau’s treatise, I feel, becomes more relevant than ever with the binaries of Right and Wrong being decided, like any other time, by the Strongest and people, in unforeseen proportions, falling in line, unlike any other time, with them.

The ominous trend, considering its prevalence, though makes you scoff initially, on little thinking unfolds itself by letting you see how people’s actions, irrespective of age or positions they hold or ‘supposed’ education they receive form their opinions and start trolling with what they read on Social Media, caring least for verification with a credible news source or caring least about the fundamental logic of dispersed knowledge, limits you, in your helpless position, to shrug them off rather than making a Sisyphean attempt of correcting them – for, ‘When They are so Accustomed to Privilege, Equality Feels Like Oppression’.*

There is, however, a different kind of critique of the reliance on reasoning that points to the prevalence of unreason in the world and to the unrealism involved in assuming that the world will go in the way reason dictates. In a kind but firm critique of my work in related fields, Kwame Anthony Appiah has argued, ‘however much you extend your understanding of reason in the sorts of ways Sen would like to do – and this is a project whose interest I celebrate – it isn’t going to take you the whole way. In adopting the perspective of the individual reasonable person, Sen has to turn his face from the pervasiveness of unreason.’ As a description of the world, Appiah is clearly right, and his critique, which is not addressed to building a theory of justice, presents good grounds for scepticism about the practical effectiveness of reasoned discussion of confused social subjects (such as the politics of identity). The prevalence and resilience of unreason may make reason-based answers to difficult questions far less effective.

This particular scepticism of the reach of reasoning does not yield – nor (as Appiah makes clear) is it intended to yield – any ground for not using reason to the extent one can, in pursuing the idea of justice or any other notion of social relevance, such as identity. Nor does it undermine the case for our trying to persuade each other to scrutinize our respective conclusions. It is also important to note that what may appear to others as clear examples of ‘unreason’ may not always be exactly that. Reasoned discussion can accommodate conflicting positions that may appear to others to be ‘unreasoned’ prejudice, without this being quite the case. There is no compulsion, as is sometimes assumed, to eliminate every reasoned alternative except exactly one.

However, the central point in dealing with this question is that prejudices typically ride on the back of some kind of reasoning – weak and arbitrary though it might be. Indeed, even very dogmatic persons tend to have some kinds of reasons, possibly very crude ones, in support of their dogmas (racist, sexist, classist and caste-based prejudices belong there, among varieties of other kinds of bigotry based on coarse reasoning). Unreason is mostly not the practice of doing without reasoning altogether, but of relying on very primitive and very defective reasoning. There is hope in this, since bad reasoning can be confronted by better reasoning. So the scope for reasoned engagement does exist, even though many people may refuse, at least initially, to enter that engagement, despite being challenged.

–  Source: Preface, The Idea of Justice, Amartya Sen

Considering what Prof. Sen tries to argue, like my attempt in another piece, it’s very much possible for rhetoric or a reasoned argument to be just a mythology (or ‘someone’s truth’ as Devdutt always argues) garbed in assertion in contrast to it being a whole fact.

So to look at Post-truth, in a bleaker view, as defined by Oxford English Dictionary – ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’ or look at it with optimism is one’s own choice of disposition. Faster you opine, more you judge, lesser is the probability you become a savant and more is that you become (or remain) cynic within and without.

I will conclude this part of my write-up with Devdutt’s oft-repeated extract of a popular saying, for life isn’t about getting into binaries or the warp and woof but about a very complex web of Subjectivity and Relativity,

“Within infinite myths lies the eternal truth
Who sees it all?
Varuna has but a thousand eyes,
Indra has a hundred,
You and I, only two.”