utopia

Swaraj and Utopia

Utopias are so perfect that they rule out both contestation and solidarity, also suppressing plurality, and politics as the negotiation of plurality.

Gandhi did not introduce the idea of the ideal state into political theory. The concept was first elaborated by the ancient Athenian philosopher Plato (427-347 B.C). His Republic evinces a desire to escape selfish, inelegant, and corrupt political relations, the dreadfulness of human nature, political competition that leads to instability, and complete degeneration of the finer aspects of society and the polity.

The philosopher constantly searches for a state that is so perfect, so balanced and so just that it is timeless. It is not of this earth. Plato’s Republic inspired later philosophers to conceive of a better society that can secure wellbeing and happiness or what Greeks called eudaimonia.

At the end of Section IX on Imperfect Societies in The Republic, participants in the conversation agree that such a society will not come into existence: “it is laid up as a pattern in heaven, where he who wishes can see it and found it in his own heart.

But it doesn’t matter whether it exists or ever will exist; in it alone and in no other society, could he take part in public affairs.” In effect, it is enough that we are motivated by the thought experiment to strive for a society that is far better than the one we live in.

The term ‘utopia’ was coined by Sir Thomas More (1478-1535) who lived out his life first as Lord Chancellor at the court, and then in the prisons of Henry the VIII (King of England from 1509-1547) till he was executed in 1535. He wrote Utopia in 1516. Sir Thomas More was a major figure of the Renaissance, poet, satirist, composer, author, and speaker.

He drew out the term utopia from the Greek ou-topos meaning a no-place, or ironically the opposite of topos or a good place. More was inspired by Plato, but unlike the Republic which engages in an abstract argument about justice, his work discussed in detail the social organisation and political arrangements of an ideal state.

True to the tradition of Plato’s utopia, More’s work showed a mirror to the English court mired as it was in sordid political intrigues and deadening conspiracies. In particular More was unhappy with the way Henry the VIII had renounced the Roman Catholic Church because the papacy had refused his plea to dissolve his first marriage to Catherine of Aragon.

The conflict between insitutionalised religion and the storm of reformism embraced by Henry the VIII heralded disaster for a man who was committed to Catholic orthodoxy. More’s refusal to accept the break with Rome and a new religion resulted in charges of treason. Expectedly he was executed.

In Utopia, More detailed an imaginary ideal community in which people share a common culture and way of life. At the core of More’s ideal society is the abolition of private property. Where he departs from Plato is his insistence on the primacy of manual work. Everyone should contribute their labour for the common good. Someone who does not work has to be punished. He, however, made an exception for scholars and officials; they need not work.

In More’s ideal state there will be no taverns, no alehouses, no brothels, no opportunities for seduction, and no secret meetings. Inhabitants must not only work but also spend their leisure time well, engage in conversation and attend public lectures. People can believe in God but no one should force his faith on others.

The literary critic Terry Eagleton wrote in the Guardian that the More’s Utopia is astonishingly radical stuff. “Not many lord chancellors of England have denounced private property, advocated a form of communism, and described the current social order as a ‘conspiracy of the rich’.” Yet More had watched with perfect composure heretics who were burnt at the stake when he was Chancellor.

Remarkably most utopian thinkers renounce city life and prefer small need-based rural communities. Whereas religious wars troubled More, for Leo Tolstoy writing in nineteenth century Russia, the Church had distorted the teachings of Christ. He was committed to creating an ideal society based on the teachings of Christ. His interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount influenced Gandhi.

Nineteenth century intellectuals in Russia were more than aware of the deeply flawed society they lived in, of an unjust society ruled by a hereditary monarch and one who allowed the peasants and an emerging working class to sink into the slough of misery and despondency. People had little access to education, employment was scarce, and ethnic minorities, the Jewish people and Poles were discriminated against.

Tolstoy believed that only if men could obey the principle of God enshrined in our heart, the state would wither away. The country would not need a standing army, and the people would not have to pay taxes to maintain it. In his diary on 13 January 1910, he wrote that he did not care whether his doctrines led to anarchism. In his ideal society, law courts based on violence and coercion would be irrelevant, and people have the right to judge and punish each other.

There will be equal distribution of private property and therefore no need for civil litigation. Inhabitants of Utopia will contribute labour to build roads and schools. People will pay taxes voluntarily for specific projects. Society will be sustained by subsistence agriculture. There would be no hierarchy between those who worked only by their brains and others by their muscles.

The only professionals he allowed were blacksmiths. Cities were irrelevant because they were built on the bodies of peasants. In his utopia, city folk will return to the land, take out their spades and begin to dig. This will enhance their capacity for intellectual work.

With a simplified economy there will be less need for money or factories, As for the railways, they appeared to him as the symbol of disaster as he had depicted in the opening sequence of ‘Anna Karenina’.

Common to all leading works on utopia, is the abolition of private property, the desirability of manual labour, simple living and elevated thinking, non-violence, abolition of class and exploitation, and in Tolstoy’s case the need to institutionalise the divine law. The impact of these formulations on Gandhi’s notion of swaraj is evident.

Gandhi’s ideal society in Hind Swaraj was the apogee of swaraj. For Gandhi, a life of simplicity and containment of one’s wants pre-empts struggles over power and resources. Thereby it contributes to social harmony.

Interestingly his commitment to spiritual swaraj or the realisation of the higher self, abolished not only the ego but also the overriding impulse to negotiate with other human beings howsoever different they may be to each other. Men in Gandhi’s ideal state are alarmingly alike, they had subdued their basic passions for higher ideals.

Once we do away with modern institutions and technology, selfishness disappears. So perfect is his ideal society, so conducive to the realisation of swaraj that man must be ready to sacrifice his life for the community.

His conception of the ideal society performed the function of all utopias, it showed a mirror to existing society and practices, it strove to attain a society that was far more desirable than the one that was in existence, and it facilitated swaraj or authentic freedom. The problems with Gandhi’s conceptualisation of utopia are best brought out by Nehru’s engagement with the concept.

Gandhi’s idealism that bordered on the bare life exasperated our quintessential modern- Nehru. Gandhi’s greatness or his services to India, said Nehru, were not in question. Yet the retreat to an agrarian society worried him. “All this seems to me utterly wrong and harmful doctrine and impossible of achievement. Behind it lies Gandhiji’s love and praise of poverty and suffering and the ascetic life…Personally I dislike the praise of poverty and suffering. I do not think they are at all desirable, and they ought to be abolished. Nor do I appreciate the ascetic life as a social ideal, though it may suit individuals. I understand and appreciate simplicity, equality, self-control, but not the mortification of the flesh,” Nehru had said.

“Nor do I”, he continued, “appreciate in the least the idealisation of the ‘simple peasant life’…instead of submitting to it myself I want to drag out even the peasantry from it, not to urbanisation, but to the spread of urban cultural facilities to rural areas.” “What”, asked Nehru in some perplexity “is there in the ‘Man with the Hoe’ to idealise over?”

He was also a little skeptical of Gandhi’s objective. “Gandhiji’s greatness or his services to India or the tremendous debt I personally owed to him were not in question” wrote Nehru. “But Gandhi, the supreme idealist, may be hopelessly in the wrong in many matters. In spite of my close association with him, wrote Nehru, I am not clear in my own mind about his objective, and I doubt If he is clear himself. Be good in your personal life and everything will follow. This is not a political or a scientific attitude and not perhaps even an ethical one. It is narrowly moralistic and begs the question-what is goodness?”

Nehru was also worried about Gandhi’s insistence on an abstract definition of swaraj that unfolded its many dimensions at different times. Gandhi believed that swaraj would evolve along with the freedom struggle, and he could be vague about its essential attributes. “Vagueness in an objective,” continued Nehru, “seems to me deplorable. Action to be effective must be directed towards clearly conceived ends. Life is not all logic and some ends will have to be varied from time to time, to fit in with it, but some ends must be clearly envisaged.”

Gandhi seems to know which direction he is going. But this does not fit in with modern conditions, for instance, his rejection of technological advances and his insistence that the rich live a peasant life.

Nehru’s predicament was acute. He loved Gandhi. All of us do, because there has not been such a man in India since the Buddha, so enlightened and so inspirational. He taught us tolerance and how to live together. He moved thousands of Indians to the core by his imagination, political inventiveness, creativity and sense of humour.

Yet we discern the same problem as Nehru did: “Gandhiji is always thinking in terms of personal salvation and of sin, while most of us have society’s welfare uppermost in our minds…He is not out to change society or the social structure, he devotes himself to the eradication of sin from individuals. It is not society but individuals who had to change.”

Nehru’s unease with Gandhian ideas can be appreciated only when we understand that society must be socially, culturally and economically transformed through collective action. We cannot rely on individual transformation to achieve this task.

Individual have different temperaments some are benevolent, others selfish, some believe in sharing, others on acquisition, some are religious, some cosmopolitan and others atheists. Their interests differ, their mentalities are diverse, their motivations are different, and above all colonialism had sparked off the spirit of competitive nationalism by its policies of segmented representation.

Gandhi did not take into account the lesson of political pragmatism evinced by the idealist Jean Jacques Rousseau who had memorably said that we must take men as they are and laws as they should be. Gandhi did not take men as they are, they had to achieve individual perfection to be genuinely free of ego and of the acquisitive instinct. He miscalculated. It was precisely the display of competitiveness and acquisition that shook him as independence came near.

On 5 June 1947 he wrote: ‘it is very difficult-practically impossible- to achieve real swaraj without self-denial…But today we are engaged in a race for positions of power. Shall I describe it as my own tragedy, the tragedy of our soldiers of truth and ahimsa?”

Competitive nationalism reached an apogee during the Partition. And he wrote to an associate on 25 July 1947: ‘Why so jubilant? Purna swaraj is far off. Have we got swaraj? Did swaraj mean only that the British rule should end? To my mind it was not so. For me Sabarmati is far off Noakhali is near.”

Finally, Gandhi, like other utopians did not make room for politics as contestation in his ideal state. Where is the plurality of social groups, of diverse opinions, of different practices, and of distinct dispositions in Gandhi’s village republic?

In Gandhi’s swaraj people might erode their ego, conquer their passions, realise their spiritual selves, but will they learn how to get along with others, accept that they are different, and stand with them in shimmering moments of solidarity?

Politics as contestation leads to politics as cooperation only through solidarity and acceptance of diversity. Utopias are so perfect that they rule out both contestation and solidarity. Above all utopias suppress plurality, and politics as the negotiation of plurality. They try to get away from the messiness of politics and land up as apolitical.

Neera Chandhoke was a professor of political science at Delhi University.

Once Upon a Time in ‘Utopia’

There’s a big difference between saying and doing.

In a distant universe, far, far away there was a land called Utopia. It was a land where ale poured freely, people’s spirits were jolly and their outlook toward life was merry – all owing to their hope coming from beyond themselves and their trust in each other.

On one such typical day in Utopia, 10-year-old Aarav was running around playing with his beloved toy; the shiny rocket his parents had bought for him on his birthday. He often dreamed of becoming an astronaut, of what space would be like. The stars caught his attention often, he wondered about the time paradox they lay in; the fact that what light he saw from them now was in fact light that was emitted hundreds to maybe thousands of light years ago. To wrap his head around it, he would ask his father questions.

“Papa,” he asked that day, “If the light we’re seeing from the stars now actually started many light years ago, what are the stars doing now?”

His father didn’t have all the answers, but he knew that they were not supernovae yet.

“They’re probably still shining out there,” he said.

“But Papa,” Aarav persisted, “Will we ever see what they’re actually doing right now?”

His father knew where this was going. They had had this conversation many times before. Aarav was always fixated – like everybody else in Utopia – on what was being done at a time.

He smiled, happy that his son was on the right track. He was more concerned about what was being done than said. He often wondered whether his son would grow up to be a good citizen of Utopia. Such small hints though gave him an assurance, that his wife and he were doing an okay job of raising Aarav.

While he was still lost in thought, Aarav nudged his hand. “Papa, you didn’t answer my question. How can we see what they’re doing now?”

“I guess we’d have to fly close by them so see that,” he answered.

“But Papa, then we would have to be in a rocket or spaceship,” exclaimed Aarav.

“That’s right, my son,” said his father.

“But what about the science or news channels,” he quipped, “Wouldn’t they be able to show us what’s going on with these stars now?”

“Even they would need to be flying by the star and relaying that information back home through the communication wormhole of LaGuardia for us to receive it faster than the light we can see,” said his father.

Aarav’s attention went back to his rocket and his thoughts of flying by the distant star. Vroooooooooommmm… he went, allowing his father to return to his thoughts too.

Aarav was so thankful for the communication wormhole. After all, it beamed home the latest happenings in the far reaches of the many galaxies; all created out of nothing.

“How amazing,” he thought, “that we have technology that tells us what is happening in distant places, what people and different things are doing.”

Also read: Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

He wondered whether he could leverage the wormhole to ship things to different galaxies. “Oh, that would be a wonderful business,” he thought to himself.

“I wonder how……..,” before his thought could finish playing itself out, he felt the ground shudder under his feet. His could feel his shoulder being shaken rather violently. “What’s happe…….”

“Sir, sir…” the commanding voice said, “Sir! Wake up. The flight has landed and everybody else has gotten off.”

Shaken, but not stirred, he woke from his slumber.

“Would you like to know what politicians B, C and D said while we were flying?” In front of him, a screen flashed, “Breaking News, politician Z says he hasn’t been saying enough about the situations surrounding Dystopia…”

With a sad half-smile he remembered he was in dreamland… again; that he in fact lived in Dystopia, not Utopia. It was a land where news channels were more concerned about what people said and not what they did. A land where politicians got away with saying much, but doing nothing, people fed off the same media rut of saying but not doing.

A land where people couldn’t care less about what good people had done or are doing since what is being said and by whom is all that mattered.

After all, doing is much more difficult than saying…

News was what was said, not what was done!

“Oh Dystopia,” sighed he. “When will you ever be Utopia? When will you concern yourself with the being and doing, rather than the saying?”

“What was that sir?” asked the attendant.

“Nothing, nothing,” he said, reminding himself to be careful of thinking such thoughts aloud. It was an unspoken truth that if he was caught even thinking about changing the way the media reported things and the politicians who controlled them only kept saying things to fuel further sayings, they would have his throat.

Away he walked sadly… Utopia on his mind.

Sushanth Abhishek is an IT guy by profession, curious by nature, amateur photographer by inspiration, writer/poet by occasion, Christian by choice and a husband and a father.

Featured image credit: Pariplab Chakraborty

Cli-Fi: Why Imagining Both Utopian and Dystopian Climate Futures Is Crucial

Our responsibility to consider how the future might look for generations to come requires imagination.

We are headed towards a future that is hard to contemplate. At present, global emissions are reaching record levels, the past four years have been the four hottest on record, coral reefs are dying, sea levels are rising and winter temperatures in the Arctic have risen by 3°C since 1990. Climate change is the defining issue of our time and now is the moment to do something about it. But what?

Society often looks to culture to try and make some sense of the world’s problems. Climate change challenges us to look ahead, past our own lives, to consider how the future might look for generations to come – and our part in this. This responsibility requires imagination.

So, it is no surprise that a literary phenomenon has grown over the past decade or two which seeks to help us imagine the impacts of climate change in clear language. This literary trend – generally known by the name “cli-fi” – has now been established as a distinctive form of science fiction, with a host of works produced from authors such as Margaret Atwood and Paolo Bacigalupi to a series of Amazon shorts.

Often these stories deal with climate science and seek to engage the reader in a way that the statistics of scientists cannot. Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour (2012), for example, creates emotional resonance with the reader through a novel about the effects of global warming on the monarch butterflies, set amid familiar family tensions. Lauren Groff’s short story collection Florida (2018) also brings climate change together with the personal set amid storms, snakes and sinkholes.

The end to come

Cli-fi is probably better known for those novels that are set in the future, depicting a world where advanced climate change has wreaked irreversible damage upon our planet. They conjure up terrible futures: drowned cities, uncontainable diseases, burning worlds – all scenarios scientists have long tried to warn us about.

These imagined worlds tend to be dystopian, serving as a warning to readers: look at what might happen if we don’t act now.

Atwood’s dystopian trilogy of MaddAddam books, for example, imagines post-apocalyptic futurist scenarios where a toxic combination of narcissism and technology have led to our great undoing. In Oryx and Crake (2003), the protagonist is left contemplating a devastated world in which he struggles to survive as potentially the last human left on earth. Set in a world ravaged by sea level rise and tornadoes, Atwood revisits the character’s previous life to examine the greedy capitalist world fuelled by genetic modification that led to this apocalyptic moment.

Also read: At UN Climate Summit, Green Funds, Collective Commitment in Focus

Other dystopian cli-fi works include Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife (2015), and the film The Day After Tomorrow (2004), both of which feature sudden global weather changes which plunge the planet into chaos.

Dystopian fiction certainly serves a purpose as a bleak reminder not to act lightly in the face of environmental disaster, often highlighting how climate change could in fact compound disparities across race and class further. Take Rita Indiana’s Tentacle (2015), a story of environmental disaster with a focus on gender and race relations – “illegal” Haitian refugees are bulldozed on the spot. A. Sayeeda Clarke’s short film White (2011), meanwhile, tells the story of one black man’s desperate search for money in a world where global warming has turned race into a commodity and circumstances lead him to donate his melanin.

The future reimagined

It is this primacy of the imagination that makes fictional dealings with climate change so valuable. Cli-fi author Nathaniel Rich, who wrote Odds Against Tomorrow (2013) – a novel in which a gifted mathematician is hired to predict worst-case environmental scenarios – has said:

I think we need a new type of novel to address a new type of reality, which is that we’re headed toward something terrifying and large and transformative. And it’s the novelist’s job to try to understand, what is that doing to us?

As the UN 2019 Climate Action Summit attempts to bring the 2015 Paris Agreement up to speed, we need fiction that not only offers us new ways to look forward, but which also renders the inequalities of climate change explicit. It is also key that culturally we at least try to imagine a fairer world for all, rather than only visions of doom.

When now is the time that we need to act, the rarer utopian form of cli-fi is perhaps more useful. These works imagine future worlds where humanity has responded to climate change in a more timely and resourceful manner. They conjure up futures where human and non-human lives have been adapted, where ways of living have been reimagined in the face of environmental disaster. Scientists, and policy makers – and indeed the public – can look to these works as a source of hope and inspiration.

Utopian novels implore us to use our human ingenuity to adapt to troubled times. Kim Stanley Robinson is a very good example of this type of thinking. His works were inspired by Ursula Le Guin, in particular her novel The Dispossessed (1974), which led the way for the utopian novel form. It depicts a planet with a vision of universal access to food, shelter and community as well as gender and racial equality, despite being set on a parched desert moon.

Robinson’s utopian Science in the Capital trilogy centres on transformative politics and imagines a shift in the behaviour of human society as a solution to the climate crisis. His later novel New York 2140 (2017), set in a partly submerged New York which has successfully adapted to climate change, imagines solutions to more recent climate change concerns. This is a future that is mapped out in painstaking detail, from reimagined subways to mortgages for submarines, and we are encouraged to see how new communities could rise against capitalism.

This is inspirational – and useful – but it is also is crucial that utopian cli-fi novels make it clear that for every utopian vision an alternative dystopia could be just around the corner. (It’s worth remembering that in Le Guin’s foundational utopian novel The Dispossessed, the moon’s society have escaped from a dystopian planet.) This is a key flaw in the case of Robinson’s vision, which fails to feature the wars, famines and disasters outside of his new “Super Venice”: the main focus of the book is on the advances of western technology and economics.

Forward-thinking cli-fi, then, needs to imagine sustainable futures while recognising the disparities of climate change and honouring the struggles of the most vulnerable human and non-humans. Imagining positive futures is key – but a race where no one is left behind should be at the centre of the story we aspire to.

Bernadette McBride, PhD Candidate in Creative Writing, University of Liverpool

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Why Jonathan Swift’s Satire and ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ Still Matter

In ‘Gulliver’s Travels’, Swift hijacked the form of the popular contemporary voyage book as the vehicle for his satire, though the work combines multiple genres, including history and dystopian fiction.

Pick up Gulliver’s Travels expecting a children’s book or a novel and you will be unpleasantly surprised. Originally published as Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts … By Lemuel Gulliver, first a Surgeon, and then a Captain of several Ships, it is one of the great satires in world literature.

Jonathan Swift by Francis Bindon. Swift is pointing to Part IV of the Travels, Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms. Note the horses in the background. Wikimedia

First published in London in 1726, the Travels was a sensational bestseller and immediately recognised as a literary classic. The author of the pseudonymous Travels was the Church-of-Ireland Dean of St. Patrick’s in Dublin, Jonathan Swift. Swift wrote that his satiric project in the Travels was built upon a “great foundation of Misanthropy” and that his intention was “to vex the world”, not entertain it.

The work’s inventive narrative, exuberant fantasy (little people, giants, a flying island, spirits of the dead, senile immortals, talking horses and odious humanoids), and hilarious humour certainly made the work entertaining. In its abridged and reader-friendly form, sanitised of sarcasm and black humour, Gulliver’s Travels has become a children’s classic. In its unabridged form, however, it still has the power to vex readers.

What’s it all about?

In Part 1 of this four-part satire, Gulliver is shipwrecked among the tiny Lilliputians. He finds a society that has fallen into corruption from admirable original institutions through “the degenerate Nature of Man”. Lilliput is a satiric diminution of Gulliver’s Britain in its corrupt court, contemptible party politics, and absurd wars.

In Part II Gulliver is abandoned in Brobdingnag, a land of giants. The scale is now reversed. Gulliver is a Lilliputian among giants, displayed as a freak of nature and kept as a pet. Gulliver’s account of his country and its history to the King of Brobdingnag leads the wise giant to denounce Gulliver’s countrymen and women as “the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth”.

In Part III Gulliver is the victim of piracy and cast away. He is taken up to the flying island of Laputa. Its monarch and court are literally aloof from the people it rules on the continent below, and absorbed in pure science and abstraction.

Technological changes originating in this volatile “Airy Region” result in the economic ruin of the people below and of traditional ways of life. The satire recommends the example of the disaffected Lord Munodi, who is “not of an enterprising Spirit”, and is “content to go on in the old Forms” and live “without Innovation”. Part III is episodic and miscellaneous in character as Swift satirises various intellectual follies and corruptions. It offers a mortifying image of human degeneration in the immortal Struldbruggs. Gulliver’s desire for long life abates after he witnesses the endless decrepitude of these people.

Part IV is a disturbing fable. After a conspiracy of his crew against him, Gulliver is abandoned on an island inhabited by rational civilised horses, the Houyhnhnms, and unruly brutal humanoids, the Yahoos. Gulliver and humankind are identified with the Yahoos. The horses debate “Whether the Yahoos should be exterminated from the Face of the Earth”. As in the story of the flood in the Bible, the Yahoos deserve their fate.

Gulliver taking his final leave of the land of the Houyhnhnms. Sawrey Gilpin, 1769. Credit: Wikimedia

The horses, on the other hand, are the satire’s ideal of a rational society. Houyhnhnmland is a caste society practicing eugenics. Swift’s equine utopians have a flourishing oral culture but there are no books. There is education of both sexes. They have no money and little technology (they do not have the wheel). They are authoritarian (there is no dissent or difference of opinion). The Houyhnhnms are pacifist, communistic, agrarian and self-sufficient, civil, vegetarian and nudist. They are austere but do have passions. They hate the Yahoos.

Convinced that he has found the enlightened good life, free of all the human turpitude recorded in the Travels, Gulliver becomes a Houyhnhnm acolyte and proselyte. But this utopian place is emphatically not for humans. Gulliver is deported as an alien Yahoo and a security risk.

Wearing clothes and sailing in a canoe made from the skins of the humanoid Yahoos, Gulliver arrives in Western Australia, where he is attacked by Aboriginal people and eventually, unwillingly, rescued and returned home to live, alienated, among English Yahoos. (Swift’s knowledge of the Aboriginal people derives from the voyager William Dampier, whom Gulliver claimed was his “Cousin”.)

Politics and misanthropy

When it was published, the Travels’ uncompromising, misanthropic satiric anatomy of the human condition seemed to border on blasphemy. The political satire was scandalous, venting what Swift called his “principle of hatred to all succeeding Measures and Ministryes” in Britain and Ireland since the collapse, in 1714, of Queen Anne’s Tory government, which he had served as propagandist.

In its politics the work is pacifist, condemns “Party and Faction” in the body politic, and denounces colonialism as plunder, lust, enslavement, and murder on a global scale. It satirises monarchical despotism yet displays little faith in parliaments. In Part III we get a short view of a representative modern parliament: “a Knot of Pedlars, Pickpockets, Highwaymen and Bullies”.

Gulliver’s Travels belongs to a tradition of satiric and utopian imaginary voyages that includes works by Lucian, Rabelais, and Thomas More. Swift hijacked the form of the popular contemporary voyage book as the vehicle for his satire, though the work combines genres, containing utopian and dystopian fiction, satire, history, science fiction, dialogues of the dead, fable, as well as parody of the travel book and the Robinson Crusoe-style novel.

The frontispiece and title page of the first edition of Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Credit: Wikimedia

It’s not a book to be judged by its cover. The frontispiece, title page and table of contents of the original edition gave no hint that this was not a genuine travel account. Swift and his friends reported stories of gullible readers who took this hoax travel book for the real thing.

It is also not reader friendly. The revised 1735 edition of the Travels opens with a disturbing letter from Gulliver in which the reader is arraigned by an irate and misanthropic author convinced that the “human Species” is too depraved to be saved, as evidenced by the fact that his book has had no reforming effect on the world. The book ends with Gulliver, a proud, ranting recluse, preferring his horses to humans, and warning any English Yahoos with the vice of pride not to “presume to appear in my Sight”.

Readers might dismiss the unbalanced Gulliver, but he is only saying what Swift’s uncompromising satire insists is the truth about humankind.

In many ways Jonathan Swift is remote from us, but his satire still matters, and Gulliver’s Travels continues to vex and entertain today.

Ian Higgins, Reader in English, Australian National University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Creative Labour, the Private University and why the Attendance Fracas Is Not Just a ‘JNU Issue’

Educational institutes adopting practices from the corporate and industrial worlds to measure accountability is a serious problem. It’s worth considering why our education system makes us feel and behave like criminals.

Educational institutes adopting practices from the corporate and industrial worlds to measure accountability is a serious problem. It’s worth considering why our education system makes us feel and behave like criminals.

Credit: File photo

We can safely say, that we are now deep in the throes of a crisis of education, across the country. The crisis has been brewing for a long time, but our attention has been recently drawn to it by way of the new regulation mandating minimum 75% attendance for Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) students.

If this change comes about, JNU will join the majority of higher education institutions in enforcing disciplinary measures to monitor students’ whereabouts. The question of regulating attendance, however, merits a wider discussion, as it moulds our vision for education at large. The present crisis therefore is not just a ‘JNU issue’.

Over the last three decades, the educational landscape of India has transformed dramatically. Private institutions and universities have emerged in large numbers.

The out-of-date figures published on the MHRD website reveal that presently, there are 45 central universities, 318 state universities, 185 private universities, 129 deemed to be universities, and 52 institutions of national importance, in the country. In addition, there are 37,204 colleges out of which over 20,000 are private colleges, roughly 700 are administered by the Central government and the remaining by state governments.

While not all of them deliver what they promise, it shouldn’t be overlooked that some among them are indeed attempting to construct pedagogies and curricula that are more relevant to our times. What really is fuelling this drive for innovation is a combination of dissatisfaction with traditional educational pedagogies, a desire to make learning more relevant, and the vulnerabilities of an unsubsidised industry trying to stay afloat, all of which are resulting in a radical restructuring of the traditional university into a new kind of organisational creature, influencing the very concept of education and what it stands for.

A central aspect of the reinvention of the conventional university is the growing and alarming culture of surveillance in private institutions. One of the primary aims of this surveillance is to assess faculty accountability, by notching up the total number of hours they work every day. Unfortunately, tabulation relies upon documented records of faculty’s physical presence on campus.

Also read

Kavita Singh on the fuss about attendance at JNU
Rajat Datta on the imposition of compulsory attendance in JNU
JNU students gherao admin block to protest compulsory attendance

The rise of this culture of measuring intellectual labour through the limited prism of ‘in class’ or ‘on campus’ poses a great threat to the very sense of education as a sustained love affair with ideas, art, literature, practice, and discipline. It is symptomatic of the challenges we encounter in calibrating creative work (teaching and research in the arts and humanities involve a fair bit of creativity and imagination) that restrict ‘affective labour’ to time-bound slots.

Italian feminists like Mariarosa Della Costa and Silvia Federici used ‘affective’ in the 1970s as a defining category for unrecognised domestic labour, that produced emotional and sensory responses. The term since has got fresh attention in the more recent work of Michael Hardt (1999).

Ironically, the segregation of ‘work time’ from ‘leisure time’, is an utopia shared both by Marxists and capitalists. In Modern Times, a remarkable film about the governance of time and productivity, Charlie Chaplin’s body gradually loses its own rhythm to uncontrollably mimic the repetitive motion of industrial machines. Modern Times is a classical representation of the Marxist idea of work and labour, considered as being both demanding and punishing. However, creative and affective labour, pose different kinds of questions about work that one draws pleasure from.

There is a serious problem when educational institutes adopt practices from the corporate and industrial worlds in measuring accountability. The fundamental difference in the two kinds of works is that the work of an educationist is to persist in life-long inquiry into subjects, through teaching and research, one enriching the other. If one must find the closest common political economy to understand modern education, it could be classified as ‘immaterial labour’ in the way in which Maurizio Lazaratto (1996) uses the term in describing how value is produced from affective and cognitive labour. As an extension of Lazaratto’s ideas, one may argue that the enforced segregation between work and non-work in the context of affective labour unleashes violence upon workers, through commodification of creative work, and regulation of workers’ time through assembly-line industrial economies.

Although we take into account the transitions in economic and industrial practices across different historical periods, the educational landscape and the governance of educational institutions to us appear to be static and unresponsive to the wider climate. As a consequence of this self-inflicted blindness, we find ourselves in a great mess. Our public universities are being bulldozed by the state, while private educational institutions are being modelled upon best practices from Wall Street. The education industry in this country (and elsewhere), finds itself in as precarious a condition. They are expected to act as the stock market or an unsteady government, which must at all times learn to recalibrate and speculate ahead, anticipating the next big game changer.

There has been extensive debate everywhere in the world on corporatization of education. It is no secret that the arts and humanities were the first to be affected. The first job cuts took place in disciplines that cannot generate revenue, such as history, anthropology, philosophy, cultural studies and so on. It is clear that educational institutions need to find ways to sustain themselves unless funded by philanthropies or corporates with deep pockets.

Since private institutions are not required to follow the set University Grants Commission (UGC) curricula, they also have more flexibility in innovating courses. This means that these universities need to make themselves attractive to a potential student community, which will be willing to pay their significantly hefty fees. There is wide ranging evidence of private institutions setting up programmes that not only are distinctive, but bolstered by a sprinkling of good international faculty along with some heavy-weight academics from India. A cursory google search through the websites of the ‘top’ private institutions in India will substantiate this claim.

However, the flexibility of not being bound by the limited vision and pedagogy of the UGC also comes with the absence of governance regulations, other than the general law of the land. For example, each private institute is at liberty to devise it’s own regulations with respect to leave policies, pay scales, work contracts etc, just as they can devise their own curricula. Often, simple things like research time, is solely sanctioned at the discretion of the management or directors. The concept of a sabbatical, i.e. paid leave for research is almost non-existent, as institutions do not see faculty as resources that need investing over a long period of time.

As a consequence of this culture, and of recruiting ‘star academics’ in order to attract students, there often tends to be a lack of transparency in governance and policies. This breeds a culture of silence among faculty themselves, as people are often not willing to openly discuss pay scales and other privileges extended on an individual basis. For example, the website of one such esteemed university lists several deans, assistant and associate deans, and directors within a single faculty/school, a liberal smattering of accolades for a liberal arts college. This is a marked shift from the value that deanship carried as an administrative responsibility taken up on rotation basis, to being a decorative badge of honour, sometimes without any corresponding authority.

In the pursuit of technological smartness, new forms of monitoring and surveillance such as biometrics, are adopted. Rather than aspiring to make their mark felt through teaching and research, faculty are compelled to record their physical presence on campus via biometric machines. Some institutions do not even provide faculty with the basic infrastructure required to carry out research and writing on campus, which would include a well-equipped library, and proper office space.

In addition, the faculty are forced to travel simply to record their physical presence on campus even on days there are no teaching or other commitments. Ironic that in institutions that are supposed to impart an education, the accountability of educators is being measured by the angootha chaap (finger print), a mark of illiteracy.

It is not uncommon to hear of salary deduction because some faculty member forgot to leave her fingerprint as evidence of having ‘worked’ that day. Reasons of ‘safety’ are often cited to justify fingerprinting not just once but twice a day.

The administration even calls faculty members to ask about their whereabouts, demanding written explanations about why they were late, who they were meeting and so on. Daily emails seeking permission to do what teachers are meant to do – teach, write and participate in public events – need to be followed up with monthly summaries of day-to-day reporting in order to get paid full salary. These reports are read by administrators who have little or no understanding of the nature of academic and creative work. This is not only humiliating but also a way of infantalising academic faculty by reducing them to corporate or industrial slaves.

Moreover, most private institutions are not unionised, with no clear procedures in place for conducting reasonable negotiations between management, administrators and faculty. Customised time-based contracts for each individual preempt collective resistance. Those employed in private institutions usually find it much harder to express their grievances freely.

This corporatised work culture extends to students as well, who are treated as ‘clients,’ with no real rights! Attendance tops the list in measuring academic performance. In some institutions, disciplinary actions force students to drop modules if their attendance falls short. The administration is indifferent to whether a student is unwell, has been working independently, or doesn’t find a compulsory module interesting. Sometimes students master the art of getting proxy-attendance. It’s worth considering why our education system makes us feel and behave like criminals.

Since parents or guardians often pay the fees for their child’s or ward’s education, a direct contract seems to get established between the educational institute and the holder of the purse-strings, bypassing the student. Though 18 and 19 year-olds are eligible to vote, they are rarely considered capable of making an independent decision, and are seldom encouraged or given an opportunity to do so. Not even the freedom to decide whether they want to attend a class or not.

Most of us, at one time or another, have had the privilege of encountering teachers who have opened up new horizons, and whose vision and courage have remained a guiding force throughout life. Why then deny students the opportunity of taking responsibility for their own learning? As a society, why are we so terrified of letting young people make their own decisions? Is this not a failure of our education system at large (starting from school)?

Tragically, the managerial and administrative classes that regulate our universities, show little sensitivity towards the nature of academic work Especially not in educational institutions where a large part of learning and teaching takes place outside the classroom, and increasingly now, given that students are learning a lot more through Youtube and Google. The classical distinction between work and leisure cannot be applied to the ‘business’ of education, as teachers and students are engaged in a continuous intellectual labour going beyond ‘class time or work hours’.

Vikas Bandwala has been a student and a teacher in public and private universities in India and Europe.

These Six Utopian Cities of the Future Will Help You Re-Imagine Life on Earth

Given that cities may be home to 80% of humanity by the end of the century, they can only be sustainable if eco-friendliness is one of their core features.

Credit: Alan Marshall/The Conversation

Utopia, a book by English statesman, lawyer and clergyman Thomas More (1487-1535), turns 500 years old this month.

A fictional rendering of social philosophy, the book describes an exemplary society on an imaginary island in an unknown place, far away across the seas.

Coined by More from the Greek ou-topos, meaning no place, or nowhere, the word utopia has been adopted in the English language to mean a place where everything is ideal or perfect.

In celebrating Utopia’s 500th birthday, the Ecotopia 2121 project, of which I am the coordinator, is harnessing Thomas More’s spirit to predict the futures of 100 real cities around the world – if they somehow managed to become super eco-friendly.

Of course, modern utopias need to be eco-friendly to overcome the global environmental crisis. Given that cities may be home to 80% of humanity by the end of the century, they can only be sustainable if environmentalism is one of their core features.

The cities of Ecotopia 2121 are presented in the form of “scenario art”, which involves a review of both global and local environmental challenges as well as their unique histories and cultures. This allows for a diversity of future scenarios rather than one common vision of the “future city”.

What you will see below are a series of artworks, but this is not an art project. We use art as a means of analysis and communication.

With that in mind, here are six ecotopian cities of my own creation that emerged from the project, one from each inhabited continent.

Accra 2121

Accra, the capital of Ghana, is exposed to disastrous floods every year. This has been made worse by climate change, as well as unregulated construction and dumping in and around its waterways.

In our imagined future, locals seek to procure housing above the floodline, by building low-cost tree cabins in the nearby forest.

Ghana has one of the highest deforestation rates in the world, but by 2121, the forest has become a home for some of its citizens.

Accra’s new residents would protect the forest ecosystem from those who would destroy it, such as the logging, mining and oil companies.

London 2121

In the summer of 2121, during an economic downturn, 100,000 pensioners take to the streets of London, the British capital, to protest cuts in pensions and education, shutting down the entire city.

They bring along their grandchildren to give them something interesting to do as they mind them. By summer’s end, the protesters despair at the government’s poor response, so they take matters into their own hands, staging a permanent occupation.

The pensioners convert some 20 kilometre square of London into a large eco-village, transforming unoccupied offices into homes, sowing garden lots on street corners, and setting up eco-businesses to trade products and services.

In the process, all the children get free education from their experienced elders in these various green arts and crafts.

Los Angeles 2121

The southern Californian city of Los Angeles once had a great network of tramways, but this was systematically bought up and then closed down by a group of conspiring auto-manufacturing companies.

As the world’s oil is depleted by the end of this century, cars will become useless and trams could make a comeback in Los Angeles. The unused freeways could then be redeveloped into vegetated greenways. Such greenways are suited for pedestrians and cyclists, but they could also act as ecological corridors, connecting populations of wild plants and animals around the city that would otherwise be isolated.

Retired cars could then serve as part of the fabric of high-density buildings, creating an architectural style whereby people live and work in smaller structures and within tighter-knit communities. This would mean cities such as Los Angeles would not need to sprawl further into the countryside and wild lands.

Rēkohu 2121

Known in English as the Chatham Islands, Rēkohu is an archipelago in the Pacific Ocean, 680km southeast of New Zealand. It’s the ancestral home of the pacifist Moriori people, who came to wear the feathers of the native albatross in their hair to symbolise peace during the 500 years they lived on the archipelago.

In the 19th century, British sealers and Maori warriors from New Zealand discovered the islands. The sealers decimated the colonies of the animals and introduced devastating diseases to which the Moriori had no immunity. Then the Maori staged a violent takeover of the islands, slaughtering or enslaving the remaining Moriori.

The Moriori refused to give up their pacifist ideals to fight against the invaders. While this history suggests pacifism is only going to get you killed or enslaved, the Moriori who survive today believe otherwise. They maintain that their pacifism meant that they lived in a peaceful society for five centuries.

By 2121, their small capital city on the lagoon is home to a peace school that expounds the virtues of pacifism to the rest of the world.

Salto del Guairá 2121

The Guairá Falls along the border of Paraguay and Brazil were once a natural wonder. The cacophonous roar of their seven columns could be heard many kilometres away and, for many years, the falls were a major attraction. They were also the economic lifeblood of the nearby Paraguayan city of Salto del Guairá, which thrived on tourism.

In 1982, however, the Brazilian military government blew away the rocks over which the water fell, to create a reservoir for a dam. Many Paraguayans mourned the passing of their much-loved falls.

By 2121, though, both the falls and the city have re-emerged in splendid style. The dam has collapsed through neglect and local people have regained control of their land. They set about rehabilitating the falls as best they can, turning their home into a scenic eco-city that attracts tourists once again.

Tokyo 2121

After a nuclear meltdown just out of town, a vast radioactive cloud sweeps over future Tokyo. Everyone must be evacuated. A few hardy ‘nuclear families’ tough it out in ‘moonbase’ homes, which are impervious to radiation.

Everything these families eat and drink must be produced and recycled within these homes. When they step outside, they must don protective clothing or ‘moonsuits’.

But because Tokyo is suddenly depopulated, it’s not nearly as noisy and stressful as before. If “hell is other people”, as French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre suggested, then Tokyo 2121 is utopia.

Wildlife also rebounds, albeit in a mutated manner.

Why Ecotopia 2121?

These six scenarios are but a small sample of the 100 that were produced within the Ecotopia 2121 project. Some readers will be delighted and others confused by the method of the project and its results.

Part of the point of utopianism is to be provocative. If you like your future riddled with self-driving cars and the magic of nuclear energy, then maybe these scenarios are not for you. And you’re likely to dismiss them as fantasy anyway.

But to study utopias – and formulate alternative scenarios to how we now live on this planet – is not an escape into fantasy. It is an active response to the many technological fantasies cast about with extravagance and excess into our lives right now.

These fantasies bind us to an unsustainable and unlivable future. If Ecotopia 2121 is but a collection of fantasies, at least they would do less harm to the planet we live on.

Alan Marshall is a lecturer in environmental social sciences at Mahidol University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Will Smart Cities Be Geared Only Towards The Well Off?

Technology and e-governance are not likely to change entrenched behaviour, such as the relationship between the police and the citizen

We are in the midst of a number of culture wars about the meaning of “Indian-ness” in a time of rapid change. Changes in patterns of work, relationships (between partners as well generations), leisure, sexual preferences, and food (to name just a few contexts) are producing new anxieties about loss and recuperation. But, curiously enough, the loss of social certainty hardly ever leads our politicians and policy makers to create spaces and opportunities for thinking about the nature of social change and how best to deal with it. This requires a clear understanding of the ways in which different kinds of lives and processes are entangled to produce cities.

Sadly, this perspective – without which the various seminar hall dialogues about urbanism are simply air-conditioned pass-times – is not really of much use either to either politicians or the policy makers. For, both of these groups think of society as a machine, capable of precise action through supplying the right kind of fuel. That imagined fuel in the present time is technology. In the midst of enormous social change – that is both an effect of technology and also its accompaniment – we are insistently told that technology will both return to us to a (mythical) cohesive past as well as deliver us to an Edenic future. In turn, we make technology sepia-tinted and begin to think of social complexity in the languages of Amar Chitra Katha and Marvel comics. While these forms of entertainment are relatively cheaply afforded, the cost of such thinking when transformed into social policy is extremely – and irreparably – high. The cost of such techno-totalitarianism is deep and wide because it censors and banishes a genuine understanding of social problems. The peculiar aspect of the present is the frightening belief in the exclusive powers of technology.

Investor-friendly smart city

One of the most significant experiments of our time is the Smart Cities programme of the Government of India. And, even though urbanization in India is a very significant issue, we have hardly paid any attention to government plans for our urban future. The last such intervention in urban living occurred in the 1950s with the construction of Steel Cities. The Smart Cities programme, however, dwarfs the Nehruvian dream of spatial modernity. The document called Smart Cities: The MoUD’s (Ministry of Urban Development) Note for the Parliamentary Panel on Urban Development outlines the following definition for Smart Cities: ‘Smart Cities are those that are able to attract investments and experts & professionals. Good Quality infrastructure, simple and transparent online business and public services processes that make it easy to practice one’s profession or to establish an enterprise and run it efficiently without any bureaucratic hassles are essential features of a citizen centric and investor-friendly smart city’. Ninety eight cities across India have been selected to be converted into Smart Cities. The Smart Cities idea is built around a host of technological processes that, it is suggested, will address issues of infrastructure, housing, ‘IT connectivity’, ‘e-governance and citizen participation’, and safety and security, particularly those relating to women, children and the elderly. Each selected Smart City will receive around Rs. 100 crores per year for the next five years. Further funds are to be raised municipal bonds, ‘leverage borrowings from financial institutions’, both Indian and global, and Public Private Partnership (PPP) schemes. Most significantly, Smart Cities are to be developed through ‘constituted boards’ to be known as Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs), each of which will have a CEO, as well as nominees from the central government, the state government and urban local bodies.

The Smart Cities plan was developed through the assistance of Bloomberg Philanthropies, which also assisted the MoUD in selecting cities for the Smart Cities funding. Among other global corporations, IBM and Cisco SmartCity Dubai have either expressed strong interest or signed agreements to convert selected cities into smart ones.

The conceptualization and planning of Smart Cities is taking place in the context of a number of broader changes that have been in train for the past few decades. One of these is the changing relationship between the state and private capital. Further, there is also a new imagination of the typical urban dweller. This is a historically significant development in as much as it also re-imagines urban citizenship in quite specific ways. To begin with, it is not clear – or perhaps quite clear – what the relationship between the SPV, elected bodies and non-professional citizens might be. If the city – the Smart City – is imagined as a corporation, then how might urban spaces – those of security and insecurity – be imagined? The social complexity of Indian cities lies in the kinds of asymmetries of power, identity politics and the politics of gender that cannot be captured when we recast this complexity as a mechanical relationship between technology and global capital. It is important to think about the kinds of publics the Smart Cities idea addresses and to consider whether this is where public good lies and is the best – or even within shouting distance of the ‘best’ – way of improving urban well-being.

What is the nature of Indian cities? It certainly isn’t something that can be understood through techno-totalitarianism, which is a way of thinking that borrows uncritically from urban experiments within western contexts. Our cities, however, are wracked by the kinds of problems that make even the most dystopic visions of the western city seem no worse than a very hot day without air-conditioning. A number of valuable studies tell us that deeply skewed access to resources – water and electricity, for example, – is a fundamental cause of urban violence. This is a problem of distribution and distribution of resources lies in the realms of social and economic justice. The most advanced of technologies care little about issues of equity. On the other hand, if thought of as singular solutions to the problem of contemporary life, (as the Smart Cities idea does), technology ends up widening the gap between the rich and the poor and, in fact, multiplying the problems we already face. Should the Smart Cities project primarily have the well-off as its key beneficiaries?

Relationship between police and citizen

Relationships between the police and ordinary citizens is at the heart of some of the greatest problems of urban life. Access to systems of policing depends on the type of the complainant and the type of complaint. So, as indicated by data recently released by the Delhi Police (The Hindu, October 9 2015), of the 7,124 registered cases of crimes against women, the police filed charge sheets in just 324 cases. Can mooted systems of ‘e-governance’ – which the Smart Cities idea seeks to expand exponentially – really address the social attitudes and relations of power that define crimes against women as well the lackadaisical attitudes that the police have towards those unable to exercise ‘influence’, to see their complaint through to a satisfactory resolution? Will better ‘IT connectivity’ ensure that a Dalit family in Greater Noida is not forced to strip in front of a police station to protest police inaction in registering its FIR?

Cities – as distinct from villages – promise anonymity and, hence, a certain kind of freedom that close surveillance in a rural setting makes impossible. And yet, the religious ghettoisation of our cities seems to be increasing rather than diminishing. Modern apartment complexes silently seek to ensure religiously homogenous populations, leading to rising intolerance of different ways of eating and being. How exactly might ‘e-governance and citizens participation’ come into play here? Is the role of CEO of a Special Purpose Vehicle for Smart Cities to be defined as a social one or only in economic terms?

Techno-totalitarianism promises technotopias. As we know, however, all forms of totalitarianism promise Utopias in return for suspending criticism of simplistic solutions. What we really require are courageous politicians, policy makers and bureaucrats who will not suspend criticism and ask difficult questions about what makes a difference in people’s lives. That is the public good.

Educational institutes adopting practices from the corporate and industrial worlds to measure accountability is a serious problem. It’s worth considering why our education system makes us feel and behave like criminals.

Also read

Kavita Singh on the fuss about attendance at JNU

Rajat Datta on the imposition of compulsory attendance in JNU

JNU students gherao admin block to protest compulsory attendance

Given that cities may be home to 80% of humanity by the end of the century, they can only be sustainable if eco-friendliness is one of their core features.