It
is becoming customary nowadays to present slogans as fine thought. Not
surprising. Hard times have a way of forcing people to look for simple
solutions. Trash the elite is one such slogan. Doing so is supposed to get us
manna. It won’t.
Immanuel
Kant in his 1784 essay “An
Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” wrote: “…when things are
considered in broad perspective, a strange, unexpected pattern in human affairs
reveals itself, one in which almost everything is paradoxical.”
Nothing
can be truer. Yet, this principle — and I term it such on purpose — is flouted
in most human thought, especially by ideologues. Any concept that is put up as
an absolute category or put in practice as a political programme of action
begins and ends by violating the truth contained in the quote from Kant.
For
a start, slogans use terms loosely and often incorrectly. Take ‘elite’. What
elite are we talking about? Is the term to be taken in singular or are we
talking about elites? I would consider top-notch academics, doctors, engineers,
jurists, business, et cetera as elites. That being so, I cannot see how
trashing these elites would serve the purpose of pulling this country up from
its bootstraps. If anything, trashing them would rubbish us.
If
elites are inevitable, if nature is unequal, how do we create averages? What to
do about average Joes and Janes? This is where we created democracy, the system
that stresses mediocrity and caters to the mean. It finds the idea of the
survival of the fittest as too savage and competitive. So, in theory, even the
best — the elites — must submit to rules. The men who can climb the towering,
intimidating peaks of the Himalayas and the Karakoram are special. But when
they come back to the mundane, urban existence, they must submit like all the
average men and women to the banality of rules. They must get traffic tickets
for speeding like everyone else does.
Equally,
while average Joes and Janes must have chairlifts to take them to hilltops, it
would be a travesty of the human spirit if someone were to decide to put a
restaurant atop Mount Everest. That’s a place best left for the best to
conquer. It must not submit to the banality of our exercise in getting the mean
right.
This
is the paradox. The elites will always provide leaders in different spheres of
life. But we must create laws to make even the leaders submit to averages when
such submission is required.
Will
Durant set more store by the great men in history than events. Great men impact
events; great men are also, for the most part, reformers. The whole idea of
reforming something has a hidden assumption. Situation X sucks; it calls for
action A in order to lead to situation Y. Situation Y allows us to lead our
lives in the way that situation X did not. Corollary: situation Y is the answer
to all our troubles. Action A is, therefore, necessary, even to the point of
sacrificing one’s life. We have to sacrifice in order that our children might
live happily ever after. Revolutions are based on this, as is the entire
concept of reforms, violent or benign.
But
precisely at the juncture of the two conflicting values lies the paradox. The
solutions of today are the problems of tomorrow. The heterodoxy of today’s
revolution is the orthodoxy of tomorrow’s statist set-up. Today’s voice of
dissent, if successful, is tomorrow’s gospel. Communist totalitarianism is the
other face of fascism, as Hannah
Arendt noted so presciently.
A
century and half down from Kant, Isaiah
Berlin wrote about the importance of the paradox: “Liberty, in whichever
sense, is an eternal human ideal, whether individual or social. So is equality.
But perfect liberty (as it must be in the perfect world) is not compatible with
perfect equality. If man is free to do anything he chooses, then the strong
will crush the weak … and this puts an end to equality. If perfect equality is
to be attained, then men must be prevented from outdistancing each other,
whether in material or in intellectual or in spiritual achievement, otherwise
inequalities will result. Similarly, a world of perfect justice — and who can
deny that this is one of the noblest of human values — is not compatible with
perfect mercy. The two values cannot both be realised.”
If
democracy were to throw up, through the principle of fair voting, elements that
sought to destroy it after coming to power, then we face the dilemma of whether
we accept democracy as an absolute value and allow it to be destroyed in the
process or dilute the principle and save democracy from thus being destroyed.
In the first instance, absolute faith in democracy may destroy it; in the
second instance, holding it in abeyance may be its only chance of survival.
True, it is difficult to figure out where to draw a line, when to determine how
much democracy can actually be allowed, at what time and by whom can such assessment
be done, but then that is precisely the point: the concept cannot be reduced to
simple categories of black and white.
The
slogan for Kant’s enlightenment was ‘Sapare
Aude’ (‘Dare to know’). German Idealism, like the broad Romantic
Movement, celebrated the individual and his liberty. But as the thought panned
out, enlightenment got wedded, as it would have, to the rationalism that
informed the Empiricists and the Positivists. As Bertrand Russell argued, the
German Idealists were “not intentionally subversive”.
Yet,
that is exactly what happened. Political systems got subverted on the basis of
enlightened rationalism and individual freedom. At precisely the same point,
the paradox kicked in again. Systems created in the name of revolutionary
thought resulted in totalitarian regimes.
Thought
must celebrate the paradox. Elites are important but so is the mean. And for
systems to work, the interactive dynamic between the two must be watched,
understood and, very often, monitored. The elites must work for the overall
good and submit to the rules of the game. They are essential for any society
but they must function in the controlled environment provided by laws.
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