Nowhere: The Utopian Destination

“To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.” (Anatole France)

Believe. The journey of 2005 would have tested your patience. Laughter was a smirk or acid bubbling on the tongue. There were gods aplenty who made the news for

their glory, guts, or simply because they goofed it. But they graced the pages of the newspapers or crackled with the static on our TV sets because of the halo of glamour that they came naturally with or that was thrust on them.

Posterity was ensured via the disdainful route of puke, pestilence, paparazzi, and piffle. Achievement came with g-strings attached, accolades with prejudices, seriousness of purpose was pickled in scandal, and those who were not Us were sought to be made into not just Them, but Nobodies.

Nobodies. Exhumed skulls*. Yesterday, once more. Don’t burn the old man just yet. Ghosts seldom leave us. Yet, each time a rotted corpse awakens us, or a few bullets are fired at a protected site of worship, or protest marches are held and voices get louder, it is not only about raising of issues. It is a search for Utopia. In Thomas More’s credo, it simply meant “nowhere”. The ideal state.

Yes, even the failed state, for it is a negation of the ideal, a rebellion against it. Rebellion is Utopia.

Pakistan is a failed state. So is India.

They are also both ideal states, actors in search of a character.

Must a Utopia work as a definite goal to be achieved?

Messiahs are lucky. They need no Utopia. They are it. For the rest of us hot-footing our way through life, Utopia acts as a bonus lolly of a free welcome drink or the satin ribbon-covered surprise gift. We seek it in our laser-beam cordless culture and fool ourselves that deep down all is well with the world. Destruction merely means clearing the garbage – whether it is in the grubby interiors of a Naxalite dungeon or the craters on the moon.

The beardo’s bomb is Utopia; so is the White House.
Abu Ghraib is Utopia; George Bush is Utopia.
Mukhtaran Mai is Utopia; Pervez Musharraf is Utopia.
Zaheera Sheikh is Utopia; Narendra Modi is Utopia.
Hindutva is Utopia; Sonia Gandhi is Utopia.
‘There is no other alternative’ is Utopia; ‘Give me red’ is Utopia.
Jihad is Utopia; Kar Sewa is Utopia.
Renaissance is Utopia; Regression is Utopia.

Repression and self-destruction are utopian – to call it a dystopia, a nightmare, would ensure a too-quick change to the other wakefulness -- because only then can there be rejuvenation. Utopias cannot exist in a perfect state; they are a condemnation of it or else we would have a moribund Utopia.

The beatniks, the peaceniks, the flower children, the power children, the cults have at different times been looking for it. Moksha is it. Hegel’s Absolute Idea was it.

All in the head then?

There is the story of the philosopher William James being teased by a theologian friend thus, “A philosopher is like a blind man in a dark cellar looking for a black cat that isn’t there.”

“Yes,” replied James. “And the difference between theology and philosophy is that theology finds the cat.”

We could extend the metaphor. Utopia would require a man with clear sight to enter a dark cellar with a torch, find a black cat and proceed to paint it white. A perfect scenario, except for the possibility of the batteries of the torch failing.

And what happens to our castles in the air? They become reality and are forced to deal with non-idealistic contrarian voices. Perhaps it was this that made Diogenes wonder why we do not “turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained.”

Plato was more impatient. “Why do these Utopias never arrive?” he asked. If only he knew they are the rays of hope behind men’s mockery. When the Twin Towers fall, Utopia manifests itself not only as a unified America but in the concrete slabs of souvenirs and tombstone vengeance. Ideals are blurred outlines, conformism the core.

In such a scenario, is it even possible to think of the State as an ideal?

Are political Utopias possible?

Despite the corruption, the nepotism, the complete lack of accountability, is there a reason for hope in the future of these countries? Is every idealist necessarily non-conformist? And being so, does it not act as a barrier to the realisation of the dream?

Martin Luther King had a dream. Jawaharlal Nehru spoke about a tryst with destiny. Mohammed Ali Jinnah talked about a secular polity. Were these mere candle-in-the-wind words or did the wax seal their fates as visionaries blinded by their own light?

Individual short-sightedness results in a blind community and it takes a one-eyed man to declare himself to be a saviour. We must not forget the stratagem of Utopia. It is not always subtle. Political leaders sell it to gather votes and adopt modern ‘message is the massage’ techniques to achieve their ends. There could be phobic reasons. These Utopias either die or have to reinvent themselves constantly.

Are real Utopias then based on the principle of equality?

However painful and gruesome the Partition of India, on hindsight it would be proper to see it as the extension of democracy as chaos, in that Jinnah was giving a voice to the repressed needs of some. Therefore, it cannot be belittled in any manner. Whatever be the political expediency of his position – and almost all the leaders of stature then were on this grand ‘we are fighting for freedom’ trip anyway – the fact is that ‘free expression’ for a free state, and its subsequent realisation, is a part of the democratic, as much as it is of the demagogic, principle.

Pakistan should not even strive for the Western model of democracy. It was established with the intention of being a Utopia for a section of the population that comprised a religious minority. In that its intention was clearly theocratic.

Every dictatorship strives to be legitimised by democratic standards, so the General becomes a President; and every democracy is a benevolent dictatorship in that you can choose your friends, but must inherit your enemies.

Electoral politics is only one aspect of democracy. Choosing your representative does not mean that in the natural course you have exercised your right of choice. In societies where coalition governments are becoming the norm (as in India), one may elect a member of one party and find that you have been cheated due to its later alliance with a party whose politics you may not agree with at all. And this only refers to the section of population that thinks, not those who are bought.

“Direct” rule of the people is possible only at the micro level. Panchayat Raj in India is a valiant attempt, or co-operative control over certain economic aspects – the Operation Flood in Gujarat and the Gramin Bank in Bangladesh can be cited as examples.

There will always be a conflict between ‘liberal’ and ‘illiberal’ democracies not only in the matter of control but because the so-called constitutional rights are often a good deal of paper work and fancy words. Western societies may not have an obviously reprehensible human rights record, but their jury system is clearly based on ‘natural selection’. These societies too thrive on totems and lobbies – whether it is Jewish, which is ‘kosher’, or expats from our part of the subcontinent (with their mathematically precise brains), or the Blacks, who get their TV time as evangelists or as shrill ‘other’ voices, like the Nation of Islam. This is democracy as pretty showcase. In the USA, every State has its own newspaper and few outside that State read it. So the robust dynamism of democracy turns out to be quite insular.

If we look at the issue dispassionately, then here too the medium is the statement. You say you are a democracy and you send out certain signals. You do not have to justify yourself, as much as dictatorships and theocracies do.

For any Utopia there must be a belief in the idea of infinity. A fact must have the potential to convert itself into a phenomenon. Whether it is through reason or faith, the search is for the unknown.

According to the Advaita, Brahman does not become the world; it only appears as the world. The direct descendant of mortality is morality, causing a dilemma about whether one should live by the ideas of a just and benevolent society or the greed for a better life.

Is Materialism anti-Utopia?

“Let us first be as simple and well as Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our brows, and take up a little life into our pores. Do not stay to be an overseer of the poor, but endeavour to become one of the worthies of the world.” (Henry David Thoreau)

The romanticisation of beggary is primarily non-rational. So when you talk of equality it is a legal expression, not utopian. All legal systems have been brought by force.

In a world where robots are learning to be human and men live on pacemakers, is science capable of creating a sanitised environment where all you may have to be inoculated against is boredom? Francis Bacon had spoken of a situation where a perfect science and then a perfect social order would itself be Utopia.

By its very nature Utopias must have consumer appeal and, as any ad strategist will tell you, there is nothing more enticing to the human mind than the idea of the Perfect Human. Is there a benchmark for it? Every society develops its idea of perfection, often using history as a yardstick. What people do is to see Utopia as not something that is being created but what one is forced to leave behind. The concept of “refugees in their own land” is both a physical reality as well as a nostalgic construct faking Buddhist renunciation. It is often a smart move. But as Pythagoras said, with the advent of the intelligent man, there is no honest man.

Yesterday’s cult figure becomes today’s brand name and tomorrow’s cartoon strip or kitsch.

Even the unspoilt child becomes a cog in the wheel of Pottermania. The philosopher’s stone is now merely a hedonistic albatross.

What is the role of the individual in influencing Utopia?

The need for self-assertion can rebel. Every philosopher/prophet/freedom fighter/terrorist had to break the norms. Unlike the stratified and codified democracies of the West where you are riled for snorting but not for bombing, the subcontinent has a dynamic protocol-less mutinous edge. An unlettered village woman can become a threat to a dictator-president; a social activist can spend years to prevent a dam from being built; small people create islands of dissent.

The greater the frustration of a man or woman, the greater the internal concept of Utopia. The resultant sense of failure could make for insecurity. Since the individual falls in his own esteem, he looks for an idol outside. Even a perfect psychological state can be counterproductive because it has to work within a certain social milieu. A community realising itself goes against the very idea of the ego, which is a Freudian Utopia. Or in the words of Henri Bergson, “To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”

Where, then, do we draw the line? Is it a razor’s edge or a finger traced on water? Are borders meant to delineate the land or to fence the mind?

I have often asked such questions: Why are we being stopped from loving others only because they come from a different country and religion? Why do we have to be a part of a war against terrorism but are not permitted to fight against the terror of always being expected to say the right things? Do we have to dig our own graves to seek an identity?

As the year ends we find that, alas, Utopias do require us to exhume.