Meaningfulness Conundrum

 Human life seeks meaning or purpose. Yet most human beings are not privileged enough to consciously pursue life as something meaningful. They simply walk on as circumstances shape their paths. This is the first tragedy of human life: too many people do not know what their lives are meant for, how to live with contentment, and, for that, how to live in harmony. They cause pain to themselves and others.

The second tragedy is more serious. The meaning of human life comes from nowhere; it is invented by human beings themselves. Those who enjoy some material advantage often seek meaning in life, but even those who pursue meaningfulness do not understand what meaningfulness actually is. The real problem is to know what meaningfulness means. How do we know that something is meaningful? How do we identify its implications and consequences?

Most people simply do not know, and they are not capable or equipped to know how certain pieces of knowledge came to be recognised as such, how meanings are constructed, and how to examine their consequences. Societies need to identify people who can think deeply, and to listen to them intently, even when they sound absurd or offensive. This knowledge of knowledge, or meaning of meaning, is indeed a very rare and challenging noetic inclination and exercise, as it seeks to extricate almost nonexistent ideas from phenomena deeply entrenched in life and defended by soulless forces.

The fact is that human beings are what they know themselves to be. Much of human suffering could be substantially reduced if people learned how to weave meaning carefully, to avoid false meanings that masquerade as genuine ones and cause profound trouble.

Yet communities must guard against people who, in pursuit of the knowledge of knowledge or meaning of meaning, get overwhelmed by the absolute darkness of meaninglessness, upon which float only tiny vessels of constructed meanings, and speak and speak as if possessed by it. The philosophically inclined ones must also save themselves from being sucked into meaninglessness.

Niraj Kumar Jha 

Democrats and Democracy

Democracy functions not merely through institutions but through a habit of mind. It requires citizens who examine their experiences, question what they are given, and take responsibility for their actions. The central human problem has always been epistemic and practical: how to know and how to act. Societies tend toward cognitive ease; inherited assumptions, social cues, and now algorithmically curated information often substitute for independent judgment. The availability of better information, including that generated by advanced technologies, does not by itself produce better citizens. When individuals outsource judgment rather than refine it, informational improvement can coexist with civic passivity.

If democratic life weakens, it is not only because institutions fail but because citizens cease to exercise reflective agency. Instinct, habit, and group loyalty are natural features of human psychology, but democracy demands that they be examined rather than blindly obeyed. The responsibility here is irreducibly personal: each individual must resist passive acceptance and subject even the most ordinary claims and experiences to thought.

Yet reflection in isolation is insufficient. Democratic agency matures in conversation. Through disciplined, respectful exchange, individuals test their judgments, revise errors, and recognise others as equal participants in a shared world. Such dialogue is not ornamentation to democracy; it is the practice through which citizens sustain both political responsibility and their own humanity. Democracy endures when reflective individuals engage one another seriously, and it erodes when thought and conversation are replaced by reflex and consumption.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Excellence and Equity: On the Moral Foundations of Social Order

History has incontrovertibly validated Orwell’s depiction in Animal Farm: the bare drive for equality destroys not only liberty but equality itself, leaving the community utterly devoid of any sense of fraternity. This points to another fundamental rule of human affairs: it is the pursuit of excellence alone that brings equity to fruition. In fact, the very idea of equity emerges only when the value of human excellence is recognised and actively pursued; it cannot arise otherwise.

This brings us to a puzzling aspect of the unfolding story of the United States: a nation that occupies a commanding position in technological, economic, and institutional excellence in the modern world. It is deeply unsettling that, for certain elites, the pursuit of excellence degenerates into unbridled aggression or unrestrained sensual indulgence. What is at stake here is not individual moral failure alone, but a structural distortion in which success is increasingly measured by domination, spectacle, and excess rather than by contribution to human flourishing. This is certainly not the Protestant ethic that underpinned modern capitalism.

Excellence is intrinsically multidimensional, and at its core lies the elevation of human life through the disciplined pursuit of one’s highest capacities. The domains of excellence are manifold—service, art, literature, philosophy, science, sports, and beyond. Wealth and power are merely instrumental; they acquire meaning only insofar as they serve these higher ends.

However, entrepreneurial excellence must not be undermined, but wealth finds its meaning and purpose only when its possession elevates the holder through aesthetic pursuits and charity, rather than descending into monstrous indulgence in carnal pleasure or the sadistic thrill of domination, and when the enterprise helps meet the genuine needs of people and contributes to the betterment of life. When it does otherwise, it is demonic.

Niraj Kumar Jha 

National Power in a Post-Order World

Internationally, the truth of truth is that power is truth and might is right. For nations, power therefore acquires a significance it had ceased to possess for a long time in the evolving international order. Today, even the pretence of fair play, alliances, multilateralism, and collective security has collapsed. Every nation stands for itself, as there exists no law or organisation capable of guarding against illegitimate transgressions.

India is a great power and a nation steadily ascending to newer heights of power and prestige. Yet this is not enough. It must vastly increase its leverage to negotiate a world of great powers unhinged from any coherent order. India is a nation of nearly one and a half billion souls, many of them highly vulnerable, whose well-being is inseparably tied to the national good. It is therefore the duty of public intellectuals to identify what strengthens the nation and what weakens it, and to build public support around these questions.

Equally critical is the fact that artificial intelligence is constructing entirely new templates that script human life itself, pushing older templates into the background. These changes are creating colossal opportunities and are likely to generate equally unimaginable crises; the early signals are already highly disruptive. A country like India must consciously negotiate this unprecedented transition to mitigate its disruptions and reap the benefits of a revolution of scale unparalleled in human history.

Niraj Kumar Jha 

Democratic Identity

Democracy is basically a question of human dignity. It also brings benefits such as security and freedom, which, in general, make people prosper. Democracy, in turn, demands that people act as citizens and not carry their pre-democratic identities and inclinations into democratic affairs. It seeks to make each person the master of their own life, while also obliging them to act and interact knowledgeably and responsibly.

It is surprising and anomalous that pre-modern, job-related identities and narratives responding to existential anxieties continue to capture the human imagination and tragically impede the democratic potential of societies. Humanism unfolds as liberalism in the domain of knowledge, democracy in politics, and capitalism in the economy. Strengthening democracy, therefore, requires freeing the market to the maximum, as this alone promises mobility into secular roles and a spirit commensurate with democratic norms.

Let me add something here about the free market. It is a truism that competition begets excellence in corporate affairs and that people empower themselves to serve humanity better. However, the free market must not be seen as economic entities engaged in a blind race for market domination, but rather as a drive to serve fellow human beings better and to respect competition rather than curb it. I am not speaking here of Western liberalism, but of an incipient Indian liberalism, a manifest form of which is Gandhism.

Some may find the passage contradictory, as I advocate secularism in the second paragraph and dharma in the third. It is a gross epistemological folly to equate dharma with religion. Dharma concerns the upholding of life in the best feasible way, commensurate with time and space. In doing so, it draws upon both reason and the emotional sensibilities of human beings and transcends the boundaries of religion and science. In brief, dharma is a conscious and cultivated realisation of human consciousness.

Niraj Kumar Jha 

Adharma and Civilizational Drift

I had read an essay by the venerable Harimohan Jha, the great Maithil litterateur and philosopher, in the early 1980s, when I was an intermediate student. Though my memory of it is now faint, it has returned to me with renewed force in recent times, as the United States lays bare its civilisational underbelly before the world.

What I recall is Prof. Jha’s characterisation of the West as a civilisation primarily oriented towards artha and kāma, with Marx and Freud serving as their most articulate exponents. When artha and kāma are pursued in isolation, without dharma as their normative and regulative principle, they no longer remain legitimate ends of human life. Livelihood and pleasure then cease to be dharma-mediated pursuits and collapse into crass greed and unrestrained lust.

It has taken me more than four decades to fully comprehend the depth of Pandit Jha’s insight. This belated clarity has also illuminated the classical idea of rājadharma. In the Indic conception, the political order is not entrusted with moral instruction; that responsibility belongs to ṛṣis and seers, the custodians of ethical and metaphysical wisdom. The ruler’s duty is more circumscribed yet foundational: to uphold dharma by restraining adharma, neutralising predatory forces, and ensuring a social order in which individuals may pursue their own dharma in accordance with varna, āśrama, and vocation, without fear or obstruction.

A dharmic person, in this sense, does not merely obey rules but embodies righteousness in action, recognising the inviolable dignity of every individual engaged in the pursuit of his or her own dharma.

The United States represents the culmination of Western civilisation in terms of knowledge production and the rational organisation of life. Yet this knowledge, increasingly severed from moral restraint, transgresses ethical boundaries. Reason, when detached from dharma, does not liberate; it corrodes.

We, the people of India, must therefore move beyond what is commonly celebrated as modernity—a historically specific, Western variant of it—and re-anchor our consciousness in what may be described as an eternal modern: a civilisational orientation in which knowledge, power, and desire are disciplined by dharma rather than freed from it.

Niraj Kumar Jha

इतिहास बोध और समाज

इतिहास स्मरणीय तथ्यों का संग्रहण है। स्मरणीय तथ्यों में से आधारभूत है गुणी और सुधी जनों के मानवों को पाशविकता से मानवातीयता की ओर ले जाने के लिए संघर्षों की और दुष्टों के अतिचारों की कहानियाँ। सज्जनों के संघर्ष प्राकृतिक प्रतिकूलता तथा मनुष्य की अमानवीय प्रवृत्तियों के विरूद्ध रही हैं। ये कथाएँ और गाथाएँ हमें सूचित करती हैं कि किन-किन प्रकार के विचारों, किन-किन अभियानों और किन-किन प्रयासों ने मानवता का हित किया है और किन-किन ने अहित। अच्छाई को कैसे बचाया और बढ़ाया जाए और बुराई को कैसे रोका जाए या कम किया जाए, इसको जानने के लिए जिया हुआ अनुभव सबसे प्रामाणिक पैमाना है। इस संदर्भ में तर्क और भावना भरोसे लायक नहीं हैं। इतिहास की यह मौलिक उपादेयता है।

 
विगत की समझ और समझदारियाँ विचारधाराओं के रूप में हमारे बीच रहती हैं। इस संदर्भ में विचारधारा और क्रियाशील ज्ञानमीमांसा भिन्न नहीं है। सामान्य लोकयात्रियों के लिए उनके बीच प्रचलित विचारधारा ही उनका प्रश्नातीत अवलंब होती हैं। बेहतरी के नजरिए से बड़ी बात यह है कि विचारधाराएँ भी ऐतिहासिक और समाजशास्त्रीय अनुशीलन की मांग करती हैं और भिन्न विचारधारा पोषित इतिहासकारिताएँ  (इतिहासलेखन की धाराएँ) भी।  

 
इस लघुलेख का उद्देश्य यह रेखांकित करना है कि विगत में ऐसे भी दौर आये जब इतिहास बोध विलुप्त हो गया। हर समय ऐसा भी नहीं था कि इतिहास की पुस्तकें और इतिहासकार उपलब्ध नहीं थे। वास्तव में इतिहास मात्र ज्ञान के लिए ज्ञान की विधा नहीं है, बल्कि समाज की अच्छाई के प्रति प्रतिबद्धता से जनित बोध और सक्रियता है।

 
नीरज कुमार झा