THE paths of ‘modernity’ are paved with disagreements. In fact, its founding myth, in different geographies, is replete with ecstasies of ‘difference’. It is arguable that experiences of disagreement as difference, as negation, gave modernity its early force, used for legitimacy and mobilization. But paradoxically, its aspiration, informed largely by ‘enlightenment’ values, was to strive towards erasing disagreements, to reach a terminus where differences are overcome by rational thinking and conversation.

Despite his focus on the ‘present’, Kant’s projected future was premised on a possible consensus, on a promise that more and more individuals would be guided by and only by ‘reason’. The presence of strife and intense disagreements were clearly signs of immaturity that Kant believed humanity would eventually overcome. We know ‘modernity’ is not one thing, it is a plural phenomenon. However, the interplay between the experience of intense disagreement and its (im)possible erasure constitutes the core grammar of modernity in different parts of the world.

We live in a world rife with disagreements. We disagree with our friends, with our foes, with social mores, with institutions and their rules. At times our disagreements are not about fundamentals but about how things are connected, presented and validated. Let us say we all wish to stop the rising crime against women in our society. We may have a shared view as to why it is on the rise, yet fundamentally disagree with the means necessary to combat it.

There are other times when our points of view vis-à-vis our interlocutors are simply incommensurable. They inhabit worlds that are separated by an unbridgeable chasm. For example, some may argue that societal laws need to be guided by religious values, and others may reject this view out-right and want laws to be completely divorced from them. They not only disagree with each other, but they find their respective positions irreconcilable.

 

We disagree with facts as much as we disagree with values. There are occasions when we disagree with facts because they are located in a problematic normative territory. We also tend to disagree with values because they do not seem to cohere with the objective features of the world we occupy.

However, to depict the world exclusively as a site of intense disagreement would not be fully correct. People intensely disagree but they also come together in their shared beliefs and purposes. Individuals and communities are not hermetically sealed. No society or community is ever built and sustained on a foundation of implacable relativism. People talk, negotiate, adjust their views and interests, reorganize their assumptions when necessary, and finally craft something that is pragmatic and possible.

If disagreement is basic to human condition, then to fashion agreement (however temporary and fragile it may be), some would argue, is a remarkable achievement. It is an achievement because humans do not possess ‘god’s eye-view’ and are incapable of articulating, in Thomas Nagel’s¹ felicitous phrase, the ‘view from nowhere’. In other words, the incapacity to have a transcendental vantage and to obtain a total/comprehensive view of reality are the basic conditions with which we move around in this world.

Much of the contemporary liberal discourse takes this human condition as fundamental to build and foster justice in society. Because individuals’ moral values are incompatible and cannot be fairly adjudicated, the public institutions including the state must not enact policies that would be justified on the basis of one moral/philosophical/doctrine or the other. No defence of ‘monism’, however robust that might be, can help us in setting up rules for forging a collective life of citizens in the conditions of freedom and agency.

 

It is the reasonableness of multiple points of view that people articulate and believe in which is the salient issue here. Political philosopher John Rawls² calls them ‘reasonable comprehensive doctrines’. According to him, the public institutions must not strongly affiliate with any of these doctrines. The principle of justice requires that moral disagreements arising out of strongly held beliefs must be bracketed for the purpose of making laws and policies. According to this view, justifications for laws and policies must therefore belong to the realm of ‘public reason’. It does not expect individuals or communities to abandon their deeply held beliefs, religious faiths and such like but hopes that these beliefs are not pressed as the source of public policy and collective decision making. It is not surprising that against the background of such intractable pluralities involving philosophical, religious and moral values, liberals justify the necessity of freedom of conscience and enact the principles of toleration.

If we consider modernity as a mode of life then some sense of how to value both agreement as well as disagreement has come to occupy an important space in our moral and political imagination. Unlike the ‘ancients’ we cannot think of shaping our societies based on a single overarching value; we think no categorical imperatives can help us sustain our collective life. However, like the ‘ancients’, we also believe that our reflexive capacities can enable us to negotiate the deep thickets of disagreements all round us. This has led some liberals to argue for the priority of ‘rights’ over ‘goods’. When we tend to differ on ultimate meanings of life, liberals think it is important that we should defend our right to pursue life’s different ends.

Against the background of fundamental moral disagreements, liberals tend to look for sources of shared political commitments to keep us going. It can be a pure modus vivendi that can take people out of a morass of fundamental disagreements. It can also be shaped by an aspiration to escape the consequences of not having shared values and principles. In other words, when prices of disagreements remain inordinately high, then it is reasonable to reflect critically on the political arrangement of the society.

 

It is therefore not surprising that a commitment to liberal values such as freedom of conscience, religious freedom acquires a new expediency and becomes a legitimate, if narrow, escape from possible brutalities and violence. This is what Judith Shklar evocatively called the ‘liberalism of fear’.³ Her articulation of liberalism does not rest on a unitary conception of moral pluralism, but it is evident that fundamental disagreements among citizens can never be sustained in the face of illegitimate and excessive coercive power. While thinking of a liberal order, she prioritized the issues of violence and cruelty above all else. We are familiar with contexts where violence and cruelty lurk behind disagreements. People and institutions with power inject fear into people and those who disagree with them. We may consider avoidance of violence and cruelty as too thin an edifice on which to construct a liberal order, but without this society can easily plunge into anarchy and disorder.

 

It is clear that both in popular discourse as well as in their self-definitions, liberals often see a necessary link between pluralism and liberalism. This is not the place to examine whether or not this link is genuine or philosophically and historically defensible. It is vital to assert, however, that any defence of pluralism must take disagreements of all kinds, including the unreasonable ones, seriously. Similarly no human disagreement can be defended without a commitment to a plural outlook on values, ideals and sources.

However, the issues pertaining to human disagreement/agreement are not fully epistemological. I think it is a mistake to think that human disagreements can be erased if we were more knowledgeable and competent. For some, this ‘rational bias’ proves useful. It is this bias that structures much of our pedagogical practices within academia and media. Despite it being a useful bias to have, it is also fair to say that its mobilization has not been efficacious in our times.

Though important, no disagreement can be fully fixed by merely paying attention to its epistemic deficits. In moral reasoning how do we reconcile the consequentialist and deontological arguments? Do the differences in our background beliefs make them stand irreconcilable? How do we still continue to believe in our arguments after our opponents have expressed their reasonable disagreements? How do we avoid falling into the trap of skepticism? But answers to some of these questions go beyond what the field of epistemology dictates. This is an important point to remember.

It seems to me that the ‘affect’ of disagreement, both how and where it emerges and its continued presence, is not adequately theorized. How people experience the world, its constitutive complexity and the emotional opening to it, one can submit, provides a key to explaining the phenomenon of disagreement. We need not commit ourselves to a larger metaphysic to agree with our interlocutors. Similarly, in a democratic society, reasonableness of our points of view should not always be tethered to a large metaphysical anchor.

 

But any reasonable suspicion towards a hardcore metaphysical order should not be interpreted as a plea for accepting the world as a free-floating entity. It is useful to see disagreement deeply connected to the field of power. It would be naïve to believe that the world is a place where rational minded people are continuously engaged in debates and discussion and, therefore, encounter disagreement as a natural product of this process. People are regularly attacked, maimed, imprisoned, vilified because they decide to disagree with powers that be. There are occasions when the cost of disagreement is unbearably high. As I write this, some people somewhere are paying a heavy price, including death, for expressing disagreement. Who assigns different values to various kinds of disagreements? Who determines the price that the objectors have to pay?

Despite the fear of paying an unbearable price, people continue to disagree, at times defiantly so. It is because experience of one’s agency is often connected intimately with acts of disagreement. In the building of solidarity among citizens, among the members of an ethnic community, the facts of agreement and disagreement always remain side by side. The members of a community create solidarity through agreements as well as by standing in disagreement with their significant others. One encounters them frequently in identity stories and historical narratives.

 

Let me narrate two of my experiences. Some years ago I was invited to a conference in Allahabad that brought scholars together to discuss the contemporary identity question in Uttar Pradesh. The highlight of the conference, as I recall now, was the strident articulations of Dalit non-academic intellectuals about the history of their communities. They could be described as community historians. It appeared that they all broadly believed in the basic protocol of history defined in terms of accessing the past on the basis of available evidence. In fact, one of the participants who hailed from the Pasi community, was conferred the title of ‘Itihaskar’ by his community.

The idea of community here is not necessarily pan-Indian but local or regional. He proudly used ‘Itihaskar’ as a title for himself. As the debate intensified in the conference, some of the Dalit intellectuals expressed intense reservation regarding the depiction of their communities in the mainstream history. These descriptions, they argued, not only made them peripheral to the larger societal history but also undermined their contributions to the society. For them, the history of the province by and large was structured by the hierarchical mindset of the upper caste historians. They provided alternate narratives based on evidence that never featured in the dominant historiography of the state. The conference, as I saw it, was charged by legitimate disagreements.

The second event involved a meeting organized by a few local intellectuals in Odisha to discuss the history of Mahima Dharma (I am deliberately not using terms such as ‘cult’ or ‘sect’), a 19th century socio-religious articulation in Odisha, and its contemporary resonance. In an earlier avatar some of its followers, in a defiant gesture, intruded into the Jagannath temple in Puri in the 19th century, an incident that turned violent and as a result drew the attention of media and the colonial state. Mahima Dharma’s representatives drawn from different parts of the state and historians working on Odisha were represented in the meeting. As someone who worked on Odisha’s colonial history I was also invited to this meeting.

As the meeting progressed and participants began to reflect on the history of Mahima Dharma, the register of discussion showed sharp divergences. The leaders of the community in their presentations did not mention even once the dramatic episode of the 19th century. Most of them saw their identity within a larger Hindu fold. The markers of radical differentiation, their early dissenting voices, did not matter much to them. On the contrary, the historians present there focused on Mahima Dharma within the narrative of dissenting traditions within Hinduism. For them the incident involving the Jagannath temple was paradigmatic.

 

If the historians spoke about evidence embodied in different records including the colonial ones, the practitioners drew upon another ‘archive’ filled with religious texts, fables, myths, faith-laden narratives and intangible glories of their founder, Mahima Swami. During the meeting my intellectual loyalty oscillated between the two groups. As someone trained in academic history writing, I knew enough about my biases, about the protocols that shaped my intellectual life. I also knew the slippery nature of ‘smruti’ and ‘bismruti’ (memory and amnesia) in our engagements with the past. Once again, I hovered uneasily within the penumbra of disagreement.

 

How do we understand these disagreements? In both the meetings, the academic historians spoke with ‘authority’ sanctified by the academic discipline of ‘History’. The uneasiness of the academic historians with other ‘archives’ came from a familiar entrenchment of certain ways of thinking about the past and certain modes of its recovery. It is also academic historians’ way of colonizing the past and making it legible through a prism of a world sufficiently disenchanted.

I know this way of creating a monolithic category of ‘academic historian’ is methodologically suspect. But my point of doing this even at the risk of being criticized is to show how certain academic/intellectual practice, even when in its diverse form, can still be imbued with and connected by certain core values. And a historians’ craft is no exception to this. It is within this irreducible discursive framework that divergences appear and play out their functions. The Dalit intellectuals in the Allahabad conference were at the cusp of a productive ambiguity. It challenged the dominant history by remaining within its discursive fold. It enabled them to point out the limits of the dominant historiography. It also exposed their ideological functions. At times, the logic of dissent forced them to question the sovereignty of history itself, its untrammeled power to light up the past.

However, there was a fear. If they accept the legitimacy of ‘history’, they can still play the game within its domain. Over a period of time their challenges could move the centre of history to their side. But it also became clear that accepting the logic of ‘history’ as the only mode of accessing the past would domesticate their dissent. Some anticipations of victory, one can argue, are marked by moments of failure and defeat.

The past is always in excess. It is surely the arrogance of historians who claim that the past only exists as ‘historical past’. Outside the realms of history, they would argue, everything is unwieldy, superstitious, barbaric, a morass of opinions.

 

We know that ‘academic history’ is a small but powerful island surrounded by vast ocean of silences, inaudible clamour, unheard voices and feeble murmurs. This small island rules the rest of the ocean with power and frenzy. For the academic historians, the followers of Mahima dharma in the meeting behaved like unwilling subjects of ‘history’. The uneasiness of the historians was largely due to the fact that they were unable to regulate their points of view within the domain of ‘academic history’. They had no way of making sense of their disagreements because their discursive fields appeared worlds apart.

History, however, did not always feel like a trap, at least not to the educated and the powerful in India. When Bankim Chandra Chatterjee lamented the absence of historical sense among 19th century Bengalis, he was contributing to the emergence of a trope through which the educated Indians began to think of their connection with the ‘historicized past’. In the context of colonialism, the absence of ‘history’ became a new source of humiliation. The despair of not having a written ‘history’ quickly spread to several communities, ethnic and caste groups all over India. With this, an inviolable distinction emerged between professional historians’ labour and the work of others who harboured multiple conceptions of the past. With the ascendancy of academic history, other ways of accessing and talking about the past were devalued, if not entirely discarded.

If the Dalit intellectuals at the Allahabad meeting used the discipline of history to expose caste humiliation and recover their collective agency, the practitioners of Mahima Dharma in Odisha felt that the narrow academic history snatched away their autonomy and independence. It would be theoretically callow to understand the above politico-intellectual gestures merely in terms of history’s growing allure or its stifling burden in the conditions of plurality and injustice. In these instances, one can argue that the agreements/disagreements within as well about history are intimately connected. As we can see, some wanted to address the silences within the domain of history, and others questioned the category of ‘historical’ itself. The challenges before them, as well before us now, to use Ashis Nandy’s words, are simultaneously cognitive, moral and political.⁴

As I reflect on these events one thing becomes clear to me. Disagreements are not necessarily radical or subversive. Some kinds of disagreements happen within a larger discursive terrain, with an explicit assent to the broad scaffold that holds it. Paradoxically, the more disagreements of this kind exist among the people, the more robust and resilient the discursive field becomes. Much of the existing disagreements in the fields of ‘development’, ‘science’ ‘nationalism’ and ‘history’ are of the above type. Not surprising, then, that these fields thrive despite disagreements.

Disagreements that fundamentally challenge the dominant furniture of the world often meet with suspicion. It is then that disagreements become truly dissenting.

 

Footnotes:

1. Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989.

2. John Rawls, Political Liberalism. Columbia University Press, New York, 1993.

3. Judith N. Shklar, The Liberalism of Fear, in Nancy L. Rosenblum (ed.), Liberalism and the Moral Life. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass, 1989.

4. Ashis Nandy, ‘History’s Forgotten Double’, History and Theory 34(2), May 1995, pp. 44-66.