India’s crisis of ethics

I firmly believe one does not get old fashioned as one gets older. One gets more demanding of the new. One demands a sense of fundamentals without the facileness of fundamentalism. The world might shrink in terms of people who mattered yet memories become everlasting lemon drops to taste and treasure. Looking over the last few years what I sense most is the absence of an ethics which conveys a robust goodness and also understood the inventiveness of evil.
Consider the newspaper or TV as a landscape and ask where ethics come from and where are the ethical figures? It is definitely not in religion. Our gurus and acharyas preach well being, they might be ascetics and renouncers but they offer a religion separate from ethics. Take our corporate dons. Even the best, from Ratan Tata to Narayan Murthy, remain blasé about the violence of Gujarat riots, almost suggesting that investment is a substitute for ethics. Corporate life has a discipline which often simulates ethics. Sadly, our social movements have lost the edge that JP, Baba Amte, the early Medha Patakar provided them with. One can hardly think of ethicists in academic life.
If one moves from individuals to domains and searches for institutional frames or organisational sites, the search is equally futile. The bureaucracy has only an occasional whistleblower to redeem itself. The corporate world offers corporate social responsibility as a great dropping to legitimise its indifference to ecology, justice and moral indifference. Occasionally, non-governmental organisations bring sensitivity to issues but don’t dwell long enough to make a difference. Literature helps by producing a Mahasweta Devi and seems content with it.
Our world of politics brings forth a few Hamlets but the rest are content with a sense, a greed, an appetite for power which makes Right and Left brothers under the same carnal skin. The media offers stuttering pygmies as examples, but they are eventually brittle or hysterical, substituting an inquisitional style for a lived ethics. Eventually the examples we thrive on are the good father or the pious mother, a goodness that gets reduced to family recipes.
The question one wants to ask is why is there an absence of ethics in public spaces.
The first thing one senses is the absence of a civilizational view. There is no Bhakti Movement to rework ethics into law, music or politics. We use civilisation as a prop, a relic, or best as a heritage. It is a monument we salute but not a code, a model or a way of life. The nation state has corroded civilisational possibilities and consumerism has dessicated it further. The simple differences between need and greed as litmus tests have lost their relevance. Ethics as a home remedy becomes impotent in public life.
Earlier nationalism provided a framework of values through people like Gandhi, Gaffar Khan and Kumarappa. They walked their talk. But as nationalism yielded to the nation state, value frames got dessicated into policy frames. Gradually, politics became managerial. By reifying corruption as a political or bureaucratic problem, we failed to realise the inventiveness of evil. In fact, if anything is global, it is the globalisation of evil that we fail to confront. Terror, genocide, societal indifference to violence or poverty is spreading. Consider how dessicated our id­e­as of peace, progress and rights are. Evil is not only more inventive, it possesses a more se­d­u­c­t­i­ve sense. We see goodness as ef­feminate, lacking the robustness of evil. In fact, we see viole­n­ce as the only way to fight evil, and thus becoming what we fight.
Thirdly, there is something about democracy that banalises ethics. Ethics get managerialised, banalised or become a collection of regulations. It becomes a rote procedure rather than a set of individual initiatives. It is reduced to a set of do’s and don’ts and as a result it lacks inventiveness. An ethical act, rather than being the norm is seen as a signal for deviancy. Ethics becomes a singular act of whistle blowing where the ethical act is seen as rare, even eccentric and vulnerable.
Fourthly, we are caught in a dualistic economy of thought which separates the ethics of science from the ethics of religion, the ethics of the formal and the informal, the domains of public and private, the ethics for male and female. Oddly, where we need specialised thinking as in the ethics of scale or the ethics of risk technology, we assume stupidly that conventional science or economics has the answer. We assume that ethics is a symptom that surfaces in crises, disallowing a prosaic ethic of everydayness.
As a result, India as a civilisation, as a nation state, as a civil society, as a community, has few answers about development, displacement, diversity, alternatives, terror, poverty or torture. The poverty of our ethics is more stunning than the poverty of our society. Maybe the two are connected and we need to invent a different ethics of technology, development, poverty and ecology, if India is to remain a viable democracy.
Let us be clear that the old words stemming from Christianity like philanthropy, aid, charity have run dry. We need other words and metaphors to answer questions like what are our ethics regarding poverty? Do we criminalise it or pathologise it or do we treat it as a threat to peace, a form of structural disempowerment? What new thought experiments and institutions can we invent that goes beyond the commoditisation of the environment that sees climate change through carbon credits? What is the ethics of the other that can make citizenship more tolerant of tribals and nomads? What is a civilisational ethic that resists the economisation of a problem or the forced obsolescence of a people? Can we devise a new Hippocratic code for the ethical illiteracy of science? Our ethics need not be fundamentalist but it needs to be a way of life, a dwelling, not an abstract paradigm or a dessicated flower lacking the life blood of water, nor does it have to be humorless wardenship of Gandhi?
We need to invent, create new forms of response to fill in our current silence about Afghanistan, Sri Lanka or the idiocy of our development or the emptiness of our ideas of science, agriculture or governance. The 63rd anniversary of our Independence should provoke some concern about such issues.

Shiv Visvanathan is a social scientist