The Meaningless Icons of Everyday Life

History has turned many an iconoclast into icons. Venerated and worshipped, the meaning of their life's work is relegated to the attic once they pass away. Their faces, sometimes smiling, sometimes brooding, would be all that remains. These decorate the drawing rooms of their friends and foes alike. Reduced into an icon, and frozen in time, they see the world, in silence.

Che Guevara's iconic visage is, arguably, the greatest example of the ‘indefinite icon'. Used by comrades and corporates alike, Che the Icon is a regular in the haunts of millennials, for whom it is (perhaps) a byword for ‘coolness'. Therefore, I wasn't surprised when I found a nail and string portrait of Che in a hair salon in Trivandrum. He sits there, with reciprocal defiance in his eyes to the indifference of the hairdressers and their clients around him. Neither he nor his hosts know what he does there; do you? 

A Proustian Soliloquy

For logophiles like me who are seized by the spirit of carpe diem, the oeuvre of Proust, Atget and Soofi serve as guiding lights. The act of capturing and metamorphosing our waking moments into literature, through words and images, is surreal. Nay, it is more than that. It is the ultra-real, the creative end to which human reality is hatched.

Organ Grinder by Eugene Atget (1898)
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Blind Spots of Liberal Thought: Thomas Paine, USA and the Unsaid History of Racism

Thomas Paine's Rights of Man is filled with exuberance and joy at the founding of two republics: the USA and Revolutionary France. Among the two, the USA was already a decade old when Paine published his treatise. Paine considered the founding of the American Republic as an epoch-making event, one that signaled the arrival of a new age in history, politics, and society. That migrants and settlers from all over Europe transcended their religious, linguistic and national identities and built a nationality around common interests, and fought against Britain, one of the mightiest imperial powers, was an inspiring testimony to the people's love of liberty. It was also evidence of people's capacity to avoid anarchy and establish society even in the absence of a government and live together in peace and security. For Paine, it proved the natural principle of human society: cooperation based on common interest. Therefore, democracy, or, the rule of the people, was the best way to exercise the peace of natural society.

Howard Zinn (1922-2010)
Source: howardzinn.org

For many European thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries America invoked the image of the Garden of Eden, an abundantly rich and virgin land, where men and women flocked to begin anew. Except that it was not. Although sparsely populated compared to the European nations, America was already home to the Native ‘Indian' tribes. The democratic peace and progress that settlers achieved were on the back of the expropriation of native lands. The founding of the American republic only exacerbated the process and the tragedy was compounded when the new nation started ‘importing' African men and women as slaves into the continent, to work their farms and plantations. Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States evocatively narrates this neglected side of history; so does Charles Mills' criticism (based on the the history of racism in America) of John Rawls' definition of society.

The biggest criticism leveled against liberal thinkers is that their analysis and philosophy tend to be ‘blind' towards the innate asymmetry of power and the injustices it spawns in the society. These blind spots of liberal theories include gender, class, race, caste, etc. By either ignoring or building upon these asymmetrical relationships, liberal theories and liberal politics have perpetuated these injustices and and helped institutionalize these in the daily life of our polities.

Paine included, the liberal impulse for human freedom and human rights is worthy of respect but the complexities of the real world are such that it demands scrutiny into the asymmetries of power and dismantling of it even as we build a world of human rights.

Thomas Paine and the Right of Democratic Consent

I am currently reading Thomas Paine's Rights of Man. A spirited rebuttal of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, Paine's work wades through both political theory and the history of French Revolution to establish its propositions viz. that people have natural rights, and that they are within their rights to overthrow a government that fails to respect their natural rights. For Paine, the French Revolution was an exercise of this basic political right.

Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
Source: Wikipedia

Of the many problems Paine dealt with, one that captured my attention the most was the 'problem of consent'. In Burke's Reflections, he argued that the English people had renounced their right to change their 'governors' in 1688 when the Parliament submitted the nation and its future generations to the new King. For Paine, the parliament of 1688 didn't have the right to bind the future generations, as it did itself. Therefore, even though the Parliament had pronounced such a declaration, it was null and void, and without effect on future generations of England. This was because, for Paine, politics is the realm of the living, and the deeds of the dead men couldn't hold a veto over the aspirations of the living. The line of defense adopted by Burke is preposterous in a country like England, where the individual liberty of a person is legally recognised once he/she reached majority at the age of twenty-one. If the Church and the parents didn't have the right of command over the free persons, then it followed, for Paine, that the dead didn't have it either.

Thomas Paine's criticism of Burke's formulation of the problem of consent goes deeper. For both Burke and Paine, the question whether or not people had the right of consent against their rulers boils down to whether or not people had rights, and how did they obtain them. Burke traced the origin of rights to historical precedents whereas for Paine it was a matter of innate natural rights. Paine argued that to ground the rights of people on accidents of history was arbitrary. If one went far enough in time, one would find counterexamples to the one on which the rights are grounded. To choose one over the other is based on personal preferences, and thus arbitrary. Therefore, to argue the case of rights based on precedents would 'prove' anything and 'establish' nothing. Paine 'established' his case, the origin of Rights of Man, based on natural rights that he gained by the virtue of 'unity of creation'. Firstly, men belonged to the 'unity' and 'equality' of Man (as a single species). Thus, no other man had innate rights over other men, and pretensions to the contrary are just that, pretensions. Secondly, he derived these natural rights from his Maker, God. The Man was imbued with natural rights by his Maker, who created him after Himself. Thus, imbued with equal, natural rights from his Creator, the Rights of Man was a fact to reckon with, and not the product of contingencies of history.

Paine's defence of the people's legitimate right to change their governors and the government is important even in a democracy because it provides the theoretical basis for periodic elections, where people's consent is sought at regular intervals. Unlike Burke's stance (that the people are bound by the decisions of the past generations), people's will isn't considered either absolute or their consent irrevocable. People and their representatives are allowed to reevaluate their older decisions, on the light of reason and experience. Although it isn't a foolproof system, as the state of contemporary democracies show, nations are yet to devise a system that is fairer and more practical.