A small dose of political philosophy

Some people fondle puppies, some kick out at them or wrinkle their noses.

Some weep to watch tragic movies, some yawn or titter.

Some people litter, some go about cleaning it up unasked.

Some eat little and eat healthy, others bring great sorrow upon themselves through gluttony, but deeply resent the suggestion that they would be well advised to change their ways.

Some people cannot imagine there can be a more delightful and rewarding occupation than reading books, others consider them mad.

Some luxuriate in fine art or mathematics, others cannot see what is there in such things to be interested in.

Some people fight lifelong and at great personal risk and loss for the kind of justice that they have nothing immediate and personal to gain from, while some break the laws because they find it 'fun'.

Some people work hard and save and try to make life a little easier, a little safer, a little more comfortable for their families, some squander away their parents’/spouses’ wealth on partying and shopping for expensive and basically useless trifles.

Some try all they can to make the best of the chances life has given them, while some blame all their unsuccess on luck.

Some people take delight in silence, others do all they can to make noise.

Some give away much of what they have in charity, others call them fools.

Some try to love as many as they can, as much as they can, others scoff at love or pretend to love to milk their ‘loved ones’ dry.

Some worship intelligence and wisdom and courage and courtesy, others deny that such things exist, or that they matter, or that they ought to feel bad for lacking these things entirely.

Some would build lovely things, others can only destroy them.

Now consider thoughtfully for a while the host of paired opposites listed above. The latter types are always and everywhere far more numerous than the former, nobody can doubt that, I think. Nobody in her right mind should doubt, either, that the former kind are better people than the latter, if only because they cause less harm to themselves and others by the way they live, talk and act. Then reflect upon a very difficult conundrum we face in contemporary society:

Democracy insists that every man is entitled to hold his own opinions and live by them. I have no quarrel with that: if pressed, I shall confess that I concur entirely with Voltaire’s famous retort to a foolish critic: ‘I don’t agree with a word of what you are saying, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it!’ – because without the assurance that every man can have his say without fear of the tyrant’s rod, whip or gun, liberty and everything good that comes with it will vanish from the earth, and then life would be liveable only for unthinking and spineless clods. And if we withdraw that assurance, we should also be doing immeasurable injustice to the memory of all those millions of great and brave men and women, famous and nameless, who have fought all over the world for millennia so that someday (as now, in most reasonably civilized countries) all men may breathe the glorious air of liberty.

My problem with the democratic ideal is that, however grand and edifying that immortal line in the American Declaration of Independence sounds, all men are neither ‘created equal’ (a fact at even the biological level – compare two identical twins as they grow up even in the same family!), but, more importantly, don’t even want to be equal: while a few reach for the stars, regardless of all obstacles in their path (and so become Michelangelos and Faradays and Beethovens and Lincolns and Chaplins and Peles), the vast majority of us are quite content to wallow in the gutters lifelong, morally, intellectually and aesthetically speaking (what more could there be in life beyond leching, mall-hopping and pub-crawling, unless it were gossiping and lounging before the TV set?). I could condone even that – why should all men and women be expected to reach for the stars? – but the one thing I cannot swallow is the tendency (growing more and more insistent in recent times, I can see) to believe, and impose the belief on all and sundry, that not only do all men have a right to hold their own opinions, but all men deserve to be accorded the same attention and admiration and respect for their opinions. So the superstitious grandma’s opinion should be given the same value as the trained surgeon’s, the illiterate coolie’s opinion should be given the same value as the learned lawyer’s or economist’s, the schoolboy’s opinion about what is a good movie should be given the same credence as the veteran director’s, the man who never reads a book will demand (especially if he has an MBA, and can talk for two minutes on all subjects under the sun, but knows nothing about any one subject to talk intelligently for an hour) that his opinion on anything should be heard as attentively as the savant’s! Now we are living in such a highly-commercialised world that everything is becoming oriented towards just one maxim – that alone is good which sells in large numbers/volumes, be it food items or clothes, books or movies, lifestyles or philosophies. The inevitable consequence is that Everyman has acquired a bloated, monstrous importance: since trivial and uncouth people are the most numerous, their tastes and appetites must be accepted and made universal, so that sales can be maximized; and all that does not sell because Everyman does not like it or understand it must be sneered at, shoved under the carpet and forgotten. The world may not care that someone like me worries so much about this, but a day will come (and it isn’t too far away either!) when the Ajanta caves will be demolished to make way for massage parlours or shopping malls, when people worldwide will use the roadside as a toilet, and democracy (which Plato called a ‘pig’s philosophy’ with some reason - democrats voted to kill his master, Socrates) will drown and die under its own excesses.

So are you counselling despair, my readers will ask: is there no cure for the malady? I am no doomsayer, and I shall go on believing (or hoping) that things can be changed for the better, and there is still time – if only more and more decent people will acknowledge that there is a serious problem which needs curing. I am the last man to suggest something so foolish as the idea of a return to some kind of totalitarianism: that a small coterie of dictators, religious or secular, modern-minded or atavistic, should compel us how to talk, act and behave every moment of our lives. But this much we must all agree upon: the need for true leaders of thought and manners (and the need for them to be respected and obeyed, though never slavishly) will always be there. Some people will have to teach and persuade the rest to behave better, for their own long-term safety and welfare. In an age when so many of us blindly follow either our parents/bosses/netas or whatever the advertisements are saying, it is important for teachers at all levels, from the school classroom to the universities and parliaments, to convince people that there is a difference between high and low, vulgar and sublime, cheap and precious, fads of the moment and things of eternal value – and that the former ought always to be given up for the latter. We should all be taught to be free and yet at the same time remember that we ought to defer to our betters, because there are always people who are better than us, and we will gain, and the world would gain, if we could sometimes swallow our silly vanity and listen to good things that our betters are trying to tell us.