Ends and Their Means

Ends and their means are not simple affairs in public life. In public affairs, everyone is inescapably a participant, notwithstanding the distinction between activity and passivity, and everyone receives, in one form or another, whatever public affairs produce, whether pleasing or painful. Yet people hardly take note of the pains of common affairs, as those pains affect people in common, and they tend to take pleasures for granted, as though they were happening on their own.

The intellectual construction of collective ends is, in fact, a critical human need. Wicked people take benefit from weak, faulty, ill-organised, deficient, or manipulated conduct of public affairs that follows from misconceived or mistaken public ends. Their success can then convert their perversion into what they present as personal life goals for others, often within an idealistic framework. The earlier imperial and colonial authoritarian order provides an instructive instance. Its administration of public affairs essentially worked at the subjects' expense and for the benefit of the ruling people and their agencies. Yet the very positions and roles that were instruments of subjecting and imperilling the subjects became enviable possessions for aspiring people from among the subjects themselves, who came to regard attaining such positions as proud accomplishments of life. These roles could include even menial, hazardous, and degrading forms of service to the ruling power. This is only one instance. By the way, Mahatma Gandhi, in contrast, presented a thought for the reclamation of human worth.

Political Science is a far more serious intellectual engagement than what many of its practitioners make of it by merely regurgitating concepts and theories gathered from global history and presenting them fancifully as chapters of knowledge or, worse, though not relevant here, by inventing inconsequential but fanciful ideas merely for self-celebration. Let me elaborate on the first part of what I have just said.

A history chapter on the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution, for instance, may conceal far more than it reveals. It can resemble a cinema that glorifies violence and makes violence thrilling while skipping the depiction of the prolonged, excruciating pain and the profound dislocations it causes to the sufferers and their kin among both the losers and the winners. The events are thus presented primarily through their dramatic political outcomes. In contrast, the human costs of those events, the stratagems of the people involved, and the devastating aftereffects recede into the background. The French Revolution was followed by a reign of extreme terror and unrestrained manslaughter, which later obliterated the distinction between the persecutor and the persecuted. Similarly, the Russian Revolution created a totalitarian regime that collapsed under the weight of its follies merely a few decades later.

In other words, the ugliest things can be masked as attractive. Violence can be made heroic, oppression can be made glorious, and often avoidable suffering can be presented as lofty idealism. One can comprehend the recurrent reality by looking at Orwellian depictions. The intellectual task of Political Science should therefore be not merely to recount political events, institutions, concepts, and theories, but to examine the ends being pursued, the means employed to pursue them, and, most importantly, the immediate and enduring human consequences of both.

Let me end this with an invocation of the Kalyan Mantra:

सर्वे भवन्तु सुखिनः।
सर्वे सन्तु निरामयाः।
सर्वे भद्राणि पश्यन्तु।
मा कश्चिद्दुःखभाग्भवेत्।
ॐ शान्तिः शान्तिः शान्तिः॥

May all be happy. May all be free from illness and suffering. May all see what is auspicious and good. May no one suffer or be afflicted by sorrow. Om, peace, peace, peace.

Niraj Kumar Jha