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 

Humanism and Its Manifestations

Humanism is the crux of modernism, or of the modern age. It is the centrality of the human person in human imagination. The grand ideas which the postmodernists contested may or may not be the essential aspect of modernism; they could have been facilitated by modern epistemology. It is another matter that postmodernists contested the very idea of essence itself.

The point I made earlier is what I am repeating here. Humanism manifests itself as liberalism in the domain of knowledge, as democracy in political affairs, and as capitalism in the economic sphere.

I anchor liberalism here in the idea of liberty, which I see as a mutual agreement on conditions that enable human beings to realise their humanity. In other words, it is a social contract wherein every order recognises the autonomy of individual human beings and constrains and disallows any person or group from violating it. In logical progression, democracy is the demand for the consent of such autonomous human beings in conducting collective affairs, which again are meant to ensure the autonomy of each of them. Capitalism, in that sequence, is not about capital being the centre of an order. Capital is only the lifeblood of such an order. The crux lies in the ownership of human beings over their persons and possessions, and their ability to conduct their businesses with utmost ease.

Humanism is the way humanity should follow.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Liberalism

Liberalism is a word so variously used and so often ruthlessly abused that it has turned amorphous as a conceptual category. Its essence,  a human being centres the phenomenal, is lost in the din of noble-sounding ideas that many people articulate and champion to further their vested interests.  Humanism was both an epistemological and political revolution. The idea can be dismissed theologically and even philosophically, but, the fact remains that the idea emerged at a historical juncture and caught the imagination of certain people. With this idea over time, human beings could claim their humanity. Those who lack civic morality and desire to lord over their fellow human beings often seek to extinguish the liberal spirit by invoking very liberalism.   

Niraj Kumar Jha 

For Being in Mutual Service

Serving each other, not cheating, robbing, and fleecing others, is the prime inclination of civil people. Barbarism relies on violence and craft, and barbaric people seek to enslave and despoil each other and anyone. The market is the mechanism through which one serves the rest. Democracy flows from this natural tendency of civilized people. Liberalism is the coin of which capitalism and democracy are two sides. Liberalism is the highest stage of civilizational evolution so far. 

I have used the term civilization here not in the sense of the racial-religious geographic regions of the world but in terms of the distance any individual has travelled away from their barbaric primality both historically and psychologically. 

What drags the civilizational march of humanity backwards is their primal instincts DNAed in them by their far longer existence in the wild. The herd mentality, natural to the primal human folks for surviving in the jungle,  undyingly informs human thoughts and leads to the production of collectivist ideologies, ironically, even through scientific methods. 

Liberalism in the last quarter of the twentieth century reemerged to be the default protocol for humankind as being the logical way to human good. The dismantling of the Berlin Wall was the most momentous occasion of the civilizational advance when ordinary people ripped the mighty menacing wall to rubble with their bare hands. 

We should avoid being the generation that would lose the legacy of the sagacity and sacrifices of the people who suffered and fought against the most barbaric regimes and orders ravaging humanity in the last century. 

Niraj Kumar Jha

 

Liberalisation

 Liberalisation is the unfolding of evolving consciousness in a society or polity. It eases people's living and creates a good ambience within society and beyond. It also happens that people fall for illiberal ideologies and undergo collective decline and great distress. 

The charlatans who drive people to illiberalism make people hate the capital, the medium which enables people to venture into serving others. They seek to control and dictate all and sundry and make a virtue of levying. They hate people living an independent dignified life. 

Slavishnes of the folks is the substance of humankind's history. The historical trap is difficult to get rid of. 

Niraj Kumar Jha