Shiv Vishwanathan
Shiv Visvanathan is a social science nomad.
The other day I had a dream. I dreamt I lived in a nightmare, a nightmare everyone else saw as normal. It was a world which saw the nuclear regime as normal and it did not make a difference whether it was nuclear energy or nuclear war. Both were necessary and there was nothing as necessary as a necessary evil.
One cannot think of the modern state without the baggage of necessary evils. Torture is a necessary evil. Detention is a necessary evil. Suspension of Rights is a necessary evil. Genocide is a necessary evil. It is almost as if you cannot have a social contract without necessary evils. The greater the evil, the bigger the necessity.
It is the beginning of the Machiavellian mind. I somehow want to belong to a world where ethics is not a technical answer to a technical question. I want my ethics to be playful like I like my future to have laughter. Today politics has become a dismal science and science a dismal politics. We summon experts for everything and an expert seems to be a form of truth outside truth as we all live it.
Inside the dream, I had an idea. I summoned into my head a panchayat of the wise, men and women who have taught me that truth is what you live out. Let me list them out for you. There was Dalai Lama, there was Baba Amte, scientists like Amulya Reddy, C. V. Seshadri, Satish Dhawan, Madhav Gadgil, activists like Aruna Roy and Medha Patkar, wise women like Mahasweta Devi and Ela Bhatt. They were men who brought laughter even to this august crowd, the irrepressible Ashis Nandy and to keep an eye on him, his old compatriot, Rajni Kothari. They were storytellers like U. R. Amantramurthi, all great speakers, also wonderful listeners, people who understood the power of silence like the power of prayer. A commons of wisdom. I asked them about Kudankulam, what it meant, what to say. How does one say no as a resounding yes to life?
I asked the scientist first, a Pavlovian reflex tacitly confessing that Kudankulam was still defined as a scientific problem. That was a give away. Reddy laughed “Science has to return to life. It needs a good laugh at the pomposity of clerks who run our world, who titrate truth through pipettes”.
“Look at number” Seshadri said. “We lie through a number. Number is seen as a form of assurance that creates certainty for the Hamlets in us. Number is a form of story telling. To use percentages is to hazard a guess. Number is a wager, and an estimate, a ratio. Number needs a hermeneutics, a numeracy to match literacy. Numbers have to be read and one has to know how to read a number”.
I naively responded “But President Kalam said Kudankulam is 100% safe”.
There was a wry silence. Dhawan shrugged wryly. “Forget it is young Kalam. He was always a bit serious. Dutifull. You cannot use numbers that way. Numbers need integrity. It is innumerate to say nuclear energy is 100% safe. There is no such thing as a fail safe possibility in this case. 100% is autism, a refusal to face the truth and to realize that truth is a world beyond facts. Between facts and truth lies life. Facts are seductive, apples of knowledge which lie”.
Gadgil added, “Today we live in the world of risk. Risk is a profound form of being. The ontology of risk says one does not know or that one knows only so far. That is uncertainty. But in some cases, one can never know and never predict. One cannot predict a nuclear mechanism. Writing an equation does not mean you can play god”.
“But you can play Pascal” Reddy added. “Blaise Pascal was a great believer but a believer who wished to understand belief. He wanted to explain why one should believe in God. He stated what is now called the Pascalian wager. To believe that God exists makes you behave ethically, creates a code of duty, a set of dos and don’ts. Honour your father. Love your neighbour. Even if God does not exist, acting as if you do, helps. It creates a form of goodness”.
“Imagine later you discover God does not exist, that tired of man he had left behind a bit of clockwork. It does not matter. A clock even as a poor concept of God keeps God going. It is a bit like Niels Bohr”, Seshadri explained. “He loved the logic of quantum but still stuck a horse shoe in his lab door. When asked, he said ‘just in case…..”.
Dhawan explained there are somethings you can never know but that does not mean that knowledge is not necessary. Science and ethics become much more essential. You need knowledge to say you do not know. Not knowing is an essential form of knowledge. To say, we don’t know, creates a form of precaution, of caring, for eventually knowledge is not hubris, it is a form of caring. Caring is connecting and as you connect you will realize that the very connectivity of nuclear energy demands that you say no to it. It is an ethics of prudence, of modesty of a science that senses limits and converts them to possibilities .
Seshadri added “Saying no to the nuclear demands you work on the other forms of energy. The sun. The leaf. Every civilization has to decide whether it gets its energy from the reactor 50 miles away or 93 million miles away from the sun”.
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