Why Solidarity Is Not (Yet) Dead

Our generation will perhaps go down in history as that group of tolerance-intoxicated overgrown teenagers who believed that -D-i-f-f-e-r-e-n-c-e- was the final word on any matter. We have a tremendous zest (bordering on an obsessive compulsive disorder) for open-endedness, open-mindedness, playfulness, multifariousness, plurality, multiplicity, variance, dissimilarity, divergence, heterogeneity, and variety (just count the number of words that I have used in this sentence to mean pretty much the same thing!). So deeply anti-universalist have we become that we need, in fact, a bit of reminding that mere Difference is never an end in itself, and that certain forms of particularism, parochialism, and ethnocentrism can be as vicious as spurious forms of universalism. I agree that 'Western' universalisms have often degenerated into the exclusivisms of the White (Protestant) Male, but those of us who belong to the post-colonial world should not now pay back the Western Man an inverted compliment by constructing newer kinds of myopic exclusivisms based on language, race, culture, or ethnicity.

To see why it is facile to claim that heterogeneity and divergence are absolute and ultimate goods, consider the following in the context especially of Indian politics. Shall we exalt the variability of norms and usher in a carnivalesque utopia in which we invite four or five fascist parties to join the tea-party with buttered scones and mozarella pizzas? Or forcefully oppose the resolution, even if temporary, of conflicts for the sake of diffusivity and allow Indian patriarchs to have yet another go at the womenfolk? Or why not even invite some British imperialists from Lancashire and ask them to take over the country's reins for a week, as it used to be in the good old days, just to show how seriously we Indians take our celebration of diversity?

Enough, then, of our obsessiveness for displaying distinctiveness, divergence, and distinction. Ironically, to claim that we human beings are absolutely Different from one another and let the matter rest at that is a disguised version of (neo-)Imperialism. We need a sharp rap on our knuckles to be liberated from our astigmatic particularisms, and to be cautioned that it was by singing delightful paens to the enchanting goddess of Difference that the oppression of human beings (for example, of women and of the natives) has been legitimised in the past. And this oppression is being continued into the present day by our failure to see that unless we develop an ethic of human reciprocity we shall continue to have a domineering and assimilative relationship with that anonymous heap that we so blandly label (and then discard) as the 'Other'. (It was views of this nature that led Jean-Paul Sartre, at one stage of his career, to declare : 'Hell is Other people'.)

The ultimate aim of our political culture can never be the establishment of Difference as the eschatological goal, this goal rather lies in the recovery of richer dimensions of inter-subjectivity and in the fostering of a social order where human beings can rediscover through relationships of ever-deepening mutuality the springs of compassion, solidarity, amity, and concord. And this alone, and not the currently fashionable views which dismissively lump together women, prisoners, natives, gays, and dissidents as the faceless and nameless 'Other', can truly be called a morality of reciprocal Other-directedness.