Anxiety, Anger, Anomie: Mobilizing Generation Next

Something in modern life continues to exist without political articulation. While we try to subsume it under the known categories of caste, class, and gender, there is a pervasive excess that spills over and bleeds into everyday life. News and dailies routinely carry stories of child sex abuse, road rage, rape, murderous attacks, and suicides that are often reduced to individual psyche without an explanation in our collective existence. It could well be that the cause and effect of some of these phenomena seem to have become too circular to offer an explanation. Some of them that are relatively more visible include anxiety, boredom, alienation, anomie, stress, anger, and loneliness. These are related to issues of class, caste, and gender, as they are with urbanization, individuation, migration, and secularization but cannot be collapsed into them, and therefore need a novel political articulation to keep politics as an avocation relevant for the generation next.

Boredom has become so omnipresent that it stares at us from the billboards of advertisers, selling anything from chocolate to condoms. It is the sheer repetitiveness of the everyday life from your daily chores to work and art and literature that it seems time has come to a standstill.⁴⁵ There is a shrinking of interests and manufacture of an unmistakable ‘one-dimensional man’ that makes most interactions a routine or a protocol that burdens you rather than offering a sense of refreshment or refinement. One way is to come to terms with the repetitiveness of the everyday, perhaps as Gandhi signified in his use of the ‘charkha’ that was not only to make us economically self-reliant but also socially self-sufficient. In order to be socially sustainable, we need to ask ourselves if we can escape the repetitive activities of the social order or in what ways we can refashion our social ecology in order to not feel repetitiveness as sheer boredom. Politics for the next generation has to involve what seem like deeply personal and bio-political issues, but in actuality, have a more intricate interface with other processes. For instance, boredom has a connection with the changing nature of work in the modern industry including information technology; it has links to shrinking interests and the gap between an emboldened imagination of intense relations and their elusive nature in the lived reality. Intensity and ideas of intimacy, in turn, are related to ‘liberation’ of women from the private, from tradition and the ritualistic socialization. Liberation of women in the earlier generation was problematized with its relation to sexuality, and we need to today link it to issues of intimacy, and love (as we discussed in the previous essay). Foregrounding issues of intimacy, emotions, and love will perhaps allow us to reframe the issue of gender as we understand it, and it will also provide us new issues that have escaped a more explicit political mobilization. What would that mobilization look like?

Space and Technology

Closely linked is the deep sense of alienation in modern life that is a sense of organicity. Time seems to collapse into serialized moments each unto itself, refusing a sense of continuity and belongingness. Technology as visual and social media is intrusive and breaks down our relationship to the collective into a mediated experience and into titbits of information that we routinely feed on, only to move on to the next. While urban spaces inhabited with mediated interactions feel synthetic, there is no easy alternative in celebrating the local spaces and face-to-face interactions as being more authentic or more ethical; instead, they suffocate. Be it villages, suburbs, or small towns, life in the moffusil today seems burdened by imposed hierarchies of collective identities. The irreducible choice is between that ‘of hierarchical collectives of the local and facelessness of the global’. In what meaningful way can spatiality and space be politicized for a new kind of ‘spatial politics’? Can moffusils be a distinct space for political location, including the feelings of being left behind, the burden of socially intrusive locality, repetitiveness, and life without a spirit of exploring the new and the unknown, among many other such issues? These are linked to the way these mofussil-centric spatial imaginations have become structured after globalization. Moffusils at one point in time were centres of trade and culture; today they suffer from a pervasive sense of having been ‘left behind’. While this has been mobilized by capital for bulldozing urbanization, including claims by former Finance Minister Mr P.Chidambarm, that by 2050, 80% of Indian population will inhabit the cities, in what another way can we politicize this sense of moffusils being the backwaters of social life?

‘Celibacy Syndrome’

Anomie is yet another dimension of the excess of social/political life. Finding meaning has become all the more difficult. Life has become one of a combination of uncertainty with predictability. The more we strive for a certainty, the more it seems to become predictable. It has always been a hard choice to balance freedom and stability or security, as it is between a comfortable life and a meaningful life. The collapse of shared concerns, especially after the neo-liberal reforms that we referred to in our discussion about fraternity in the previous pages, has made meaning-generating activity and civic communication a casualty. While the meaning of the spiritual kind has become untenable or may be unreachable, the meaning of the pragmatic kind has become too oppressive, banal, and suffocating. Modern life cannot even be assessed in its elementary sense without referring to stress—an inexplicable experience without a point of beginning or ending. It is simply a part of the being. It has, in fact, become a way of relating to the world around us.

‘Time poverty’ has become a thickly collective phenomenon that cuts across class and the rural-urban divide. Individuals, and not merely the corporate, are working many times more than the eight-hour equilibrium between work, rest, and leisure, yet anxiety and ‘fear of fall’ have become inescapable in our workplaces and institutional life. In Japan, today, the stress explodes itself in intensely dark ways, where the ‘celibacy syndrome’ is becoming a norm, which they refer to as ‘Sekkusu Shinu Shokogum’ (modernity seems to have organically delivered what Gandhi arduously pursued through his experiments in Brahmacharya).⁴⁶ There is a visible ‘flight from human intimacy’. Work from a means of self-actualization is becoming a model of loss of the self. It only gets further complicated with life outside of work imagined without social security measures such as pension and care of the old and aging. It is, therefore, not strange that while in India, we dither from the retirement age being reduced, in France, they were on streets when the state asked workers to prolong and extend the age of retirement to 65 years. ‘Burnout’, a term not many of us had heard when we joined jobs, is now commonly understood as what leads to exhaustion, detachment, and feelings of ineffectiveness. ‘Time poverty’ is the afterlife of the way class differences work themselves. Can radical Left politics work in these new registers to recast class from its drab structural dimension to bring it into its more felt experiential dimension? Critical theorist Nancy Fraser incisively points out that ‘socialism is cognitively compelling but experientially remote.’⁴⁷ Will bringing in issues such as anomie and ‘time poverty’ bring forth a dimension of class that can reinvigorate class politics related but different from the way we understood it all along? Can it also point to a different kind of class politics that can hold appeal to the majority—99% as the Occupy Movement in the US put it,⁴⁸ cutting across differences between the petite bourgeoisie, and the working class, a difference the Left struggled to bring together—as part of radical politics?

‘Age of Anger’

Anger is yet another phenomenon that is present all around us, visible as road rage, growing crime, and violence and in the way multitudes erupt so naturally and spontaneously from the Occupy Wall Street to Arab Spring to protests against Rohith Vemula’s suicide. Nobody organizes these protests; they are leaderless and erupt against something that we ‘feel’ is deeply wrong with the way our ‘society’ or ‘system’ works. The anger needs a trigger and many a time has no specific target. There is often, in Freud’s words, ‘transference’ of this anger unto anybody that we may find to be weak and vulnerable.⁴⁹ It could be ‘Nirbhaya’, it could be an annoying small car driving next to a sport utility vehicle (SUV) or a shootout over a parking spot in an affluent south Delhi colony, or the regular shootouts in schools in the US. The ‘Age of Anger’ that we have collectively inhabited, as Pankaj Mishra pointed out in his recent book,⁵⁰ is a mode of coping with the fast-paced changes that globalization has initiated. Is anger merely an after-effect of a structural feature of our times or a potential source for meaningful political mobilization? Can it be weaned away from anger against the weak and relative inequalities internal to caste and religious communities to more systemic aspects of modern life? Can this be an important dimension of ‘Left populism’, unlike what it has been so far contributing exclusively to the rise of Right-wing populism across the world?

Finally, there is a vice-like grip of loneliness that is growing among the old and the young alike. We collectively inhabit an era of hyper-recognition. The more we are incapacitated of enjoying anonymity and solitary existence, the more we are vulnerable to the vagaries of loneliness.⁵¹ The spaciousness of anonymity that allows us to self-reflect is losing ground to the demands of finding a self in being recognized by the other. French philosopher Michel Foucault once observed that as we fail to externalize our ‘natural impulses’, we are prone to internalize them in murderous ways.⁵² There seems to be an inescapable circularity. The more we demand recognition and love, the less of it we find. How do we move back to an ‘original position’ of finding ourselves without being interrupted and contaminated by the outer world? Accumulated loneliness only makes us collectively incapable of making the world a more secured home that we persistently aspire for. Homelessness and ‘nomads of the present’ that reside in the deeper recesses of individual lives mark our social spaces. Loneliness has become an epidemic, prompting the government of UK to start for the first time an exclusive Ministry of Loneliness.⁵³

These phenomena put together add up incrementally to a social crisis that is failing to find a political language for itself. We seem to open the social spaces across social hierarchies, with, of course, an imprint of the hierarchies overlapping with the more generic spread. How do we retrieve the generalness of this crisis without slighting or clouding the known social hierarchies is an insurmountable challenge of our times. Future of politics and democracy might need to be radically recast and populism, as we are witnessing, can well be the initial and a preliminary signpost signifying an interregnum as Gramsci pointed out, ‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’.⁵⁴