Outrage and opposition are not the same

Tabish Khair in The Hindu



I cannot say this online, I am sure, but I do not believe in getting publicly outraged. This does not mean that I do not feel privately outraged at times. I do. When one hears of a woman being raped, one feels outraged. When one hears of the most powerful man on earth reportedly discussing nuclear war options, one feels outraged.

And yet, it is one thing to feel outraged and another to act from outrage or even cultivate that self-righteous feeling of outrage. Because outrage is not opposition. Actually, it is not even rage. It is an ‘outing’ of rage.

Rage versus outrage

Rage is a problematic word: its etymology connects it to madness, violence, passion and fierceness in battle. Its uses, if they can be justified, are hazardous, and pertain to extreme circumstances. In Greek mythology, the consequences of human or semi-divine rage tend to be disastrous, even when the act of rage is seen as justified. However, rage has one purpose in extreme circumstances: it can get things done.

Outrage is not like rage: it is a venting of rage. When we are outraged, we basically let off steam. This is more so online. Its primary purpose is to make us feel good about ourselves. Unlike rage, it might not even get anything done. Because once we get outraged and post a few things or espouse a list, our attention wavers, and soon we have another matter to get publicly outraged about.

Like rage, outrage often leads to hasty action. In India as well as in Europe, people got outraged at the rumour of some women putting spells on their cattle or their person, and proceeded to burn the women as witches. Racists in the American south are known to have become outraged at some real or imagined slight by African Americans and lynched them. The list of innocent people persecuted, killed, burned, or lynched because otherwise decent people got publicly outraged is pretty long.

Unfortunately, outrage is particularly adaptable to online culture, where the dominant ethos is that of self-indulgence rather than an engagement with the other. By getting outraged, we signal to ourselves and others that we have the right views. We might also, by the very level of our outrage, absolve ourselves from a close examination of the matter and an organised effort (with others) to tackle the matter. Outrages tend to lead to nothing at all — or to witch-hunts.
By moving on from one outrage to another, we might also make it more difficult to address the root causes of the injustice, if it exists, behind our outrage. Outrage is expressive, reactive, wordy, fleeting. Opposition requires physical action, thought, organisation and perseverance. It is a major mistake to confuse the two.

Opposition needs a considered evaluation of evidence and possibilities; outrage tends towards self-centred and sweeping pre-judgment, usually passed without deep thought to the matter or comprehensive collection of evidence. It is worth remarking that ‘prejudice’ basically means ‘prejudgment,’ from the Latin words prae and judicium.

The general flow of outrage is towards a kind of fascist violence: it assumes guilt unless the victim is proved innocent, and moves too fast for sufficient proof to be collected. Opposition is a democratic construct: it accepts that you are innocent unless proved guilty.

Dismissing opposition

Unfortunately, given our hyperventilating cybercultures, outrage has become synonymous with opposition. Apart from the problems outlined above, this has another serious drawback: in an atmosphere of frequent outrages, it is possible to dismiss legitimate opposition as outrage. This, as we know from places like India, Turkey and the U.S., is the usual policy of the parties in power.

Because all opposition is increasingly wrapped in verbal and digital forms of outrage, this is easy for people in power to do. Online postings, TV shows, etc. consistently assume the registers and pace of outrages, so that the pith of the matter is often lost in the smoke, and even necessary acts of opposition can be dismissed as just the hyperventilation of easily outraged groups.

It is sad that this has happened even in India, where Gandhiji set a very rigorous example of calm and collected opposition, even, I would say, a slow and forbearing opposition. He knew that any true opposition — he would have called it a just opposition — needs thought, time, slowness and perseverance. These are not characteristics that outrage respects.

I find it troublesome that we have entered a phase of public discourse where, on the one hand, outrages erupt one after another and then evaporate in the desert sands of usual practice, and where, on the other hand, genuine acts of opposition are dismissed by people in power as just fleeting outrages.

On the one side, there are people yelling at us to be outraged, without considering evidence, context or effective responses, and on the other side, there are people telling us that we are just acting outraged when actually we are opposing something that needs to be opposed. How does one negotiate a public space like that? Your answer is as good as mine. But I think slowing down just a bit before passing judgment and looking more deeply at matters might not be such bad ideas.

Saffron storm, hard cash

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn

A young man described himself as a dejected Muslim, and punctured the sharp analysis that was under way about the Uttar Pradesh defeat. The venue was a well-appointed seminar room at the India International Centre. Why don’t we show our outrage like they do in America, the young Muslim wanted to know. People in America are out on the streets fighting for the refugees, Latinos, Muslims, blacks, everyone. One US citizen was shot trying to protect an Indian victim of racial assault. Why are Indian opponents of Hindutva so full of wisdom and analysis but few, barring angry students in the universities, take to the streets?

It’s not that people are not fighting injustices. From Bastar to Indian Kashmir, from Manipur to Manesar, peasants, workers, college students, tribespeople, Dalits; they are fighting back. But they are vulnerable without a groundswell of mass support like we see in other countries.

Off and on, political parties are capable of expressing outrage. A heartbreaking scene in parliament is to see Congress MPs screaming their lungs out with rage, but that’s usually when Sonia Gandhi is attacked or Rahul Gandhi belittled. Yet there is no hope of stopping the Hindutva march without accepting the Congress as a pivot to defeat the Modi-Yogi party in 2019.
It’s a given. The slaughterhouses may or may not open any time soon, but an opposition win in 2019 is easier to foresee. It could be a pyrrhic victory, the way the dice is loaded, but it is the only way. Will the Congress join the battle without pushing itself as the natural claimant to power? Without humility, we may not be able to address the young man’s dejection.

Like it or not, there is no other opposition party with the reach of the Congress, even today. Should we be saddled with a party that rises to its feet to protect its leaders — which it should — but has lost the habit of marching against the insults and torture that large sections of Indians endure daily?
A common and valid fear is that the party is vulnerable before the IOUs its satraps may have signed with big league traders, who drive politics in India today.

If religious fascism is staring down India’s throat, there’s someone financing it.

The Congress needs to ask itself bluntly: who chose Mr Modi as prime minister? It was the same people that chose Manmohan Singh before him. The fact is that India has come to be ruled by traders, though they have neither the vision nor the capacity to industrialise or modernise this country of 1.5 billion. Their fabled appetite for inflicting bad loans on the state exchequer is legendary, though they have seldom measured up to Nehru’s maligned public sector to build any core industry. (Bringing spectrum machines from Europe and mobile phones from China for more and more people to watch mediocre reality shows is neither modernisation nor industrialisation.)

The traders have thrived by funding ruling parties and keeping their options open with the opposition when necessary. It’s like placing casino chips on the roulette table, which is what they have turned a once robust democracy into. If there’s religious fascism staring down India’s throat, there’s someone financing it.

The newspapers won’t tell you all that. The traders own the papers. The umbilical cord between religious regression and traders has been well established in a fabulous book on the Gita Press by a fellow journalist; same with TV.

Nehru wasn’t terribly impressed with them. He fired his finance minister for flirting with their ilk. Indira Gandhi did one better. She installed socialism as a talisman against private profiteers in the preamble of the constitution. They hated her for that. The older Indian literature (Premchand) and cinema were quite a lot about their shady reality — Mother India, Foot Path, Do Bigha Zamin, Shree 420, to name a few.

At the Congress centenary in Mumbai, Rajiv Gandhi called out the ‘moneybags’ riding the backs of party workers. They retaliated through his closest coterie to smear him with the Bofors refuse. The first move against Hindutva’s financiers will be an uphill journey. The IOUs will come into play.

For that, the Congress must evict the agents of the moneybags known to surround its leadership. But they’re not the only reality the Congress must discard. It has to rid itself of ‘soft Hindutva’ completely, and it absolutely must stop indulging regressive Muslim clerics as a vote bank.

For a start, the West Bengal, Karnataka, and Delhi assemblies will need every opposition member’s support in the coming days. The most laughable of the cases will be summoned against the unimpeachable Arvind Kejriwal, a bête noire for the traders, whose hanky-panky he excels in exposing.

For better or worse, it is the Congress that still holds the key to 2019. Even in the post-emergency rout, the party kept a vote share of 41 per cent. And after the 2014 shock, its vote has grown, not decreased.

While everyone needs to think about 2019, the left faces a more daunting challenge. It knows that the Modi-Yogi party does not enjoy a majority of Indian votes. However, the majority includes Mamata Banerjee, who says she wants to join hands with the left against the BJP. Others are Lalu Yadav, Nitish Kumar, Arvind Kejriwal, Mayawati, Akhilesh Yadav, most of the Dravida parties and, above all, the Congress. The left has inflicted self-harm by putting up candidates against all these opponents of the BJP — in Bihar, in Uttar Pradesh, in Delhi. In West Bengal and Kerala, can it see eye to eye with its anti-BJP rivals?
As the keystone in the needed coalition, the left must drastically tweak its politics. It alone has the ability to lift the profile of the Indian ideology, which is still Nehruvian at its core, as the worried man at the Indian International Centre will be pleased to note.

Love, intuition and women. Science would wither without them

Boyd Tonkin in the Independent

As it sometimes does, last October the Nobel Committee for the prize in physiology or medicine split its award. Half the pot (of eight million Swedish kronor in all) went to the British-American neuroscientist John O’Keefe, the other to the Norwegian couple who have charted the grid cells in the brain that enable our pathfinding and positioning skills via a sort of “internal GPS”.

May-Britt Moser and Edvard I Moser first met at high school and have worked together over 30 years. Professor Moser (May-Britt) said after the Nobel nod: “It’s easy for us because we can have breakfast meetings almost every day.” Professor Moser (Edvard) stated: “We have a common project and a common goal … And we depend on each other for succeeding.”

“There were a lot of things that made me decide to marry Edvard,” the other Professor Moser has recalled. Not all had to do with neurological breakthroughs. Once, Edvard gave her a huge umbrella. Open it, he said. “So I opened it above my head, and it rained down small beautiful pieces of paper with little poems on about me.”

This week, another Nobel laureate in the same discipline – Sir Tim Hunt, 2001 – found himself in need of a titanium umbrella in order to fend off the media flak. The 72-year-old biochemist told a conference in South Korea that “girls” caused mayhem in the lab. “You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you and when you criticise them, they cry.” Cue the avalanche of outrage that has now driven Sir Tim – married, by the way, to the distinguished immunologist Professor Mary Collins – out of his honorary post at University College, London. In Britain, where only 13 per cent of scientific and engineering professionals are female, his off-the-cuff “banter” has gone down like a tungsten (denser than lead) balloon.

So it should. Yet the champions of equality in science who have justly hooted at Sir Tim’s antique ditty might spare a thought for the Mosers’ partnership. The Norwegian pair are not alone in fusing personal commitment with top-grade scientific collaboration. Last year, in a fascinating study for Nature, Kerri Smith reported that, according to the US National Science Foundation, “just over one-quarter of married people with doctorates had a spouse working in science or engineering”. A 2008 survey found that the proportion of research posts that went to couples had risen from 3 per cent in the 1970s to 13 per cent.

Smith consulted a range of high-flying scientific double acts. They included the Taiwanese cell biologists Lily and Yuh-Nung Jan, who have collaborated since 1967. Lily Jan praised the joint progress made possible by a “very consistent long-term camaraderie”. After years of long-distance romance and research, physicists Claudia Felser and Stuart Parkin now live together in Germany with plum posts at the Max Planck Institutes in (respectively) Dresden and Halle. “Lufthansa and United Airlines will be very unhappy,” said Parkin.

These partnerships in life and lab follow a different, far more equal, pattern to the liaison of master and muse, once common in the arts. Scientists tend not to bother much with history. But the rising number of collaborating duos will know that they can hail as their forerunners the most intellectually fertile pairing of all: between Marie Sklodowska-Curie and Pierre Curie.

Marie had plentiful Hunts of her own to vanquish. In 1903, only a late objection by a Swedish mathematician with feminist sympathies prevented her first Nobel Prize, in physics, from going to Pierre and Henri Becquerel alone. Not that the Nobel selectors learned their lesson. Lise Meitner, who first explained the significance of nuclear fission, never got the call. When Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins shared the Nobel for their work on DNA in 1962, no mention was made of Rosalind Franklin (who had died in 1958). Her research into the double‑helix structure had made their triumph possible.

As any woman scientist will tell you, such neglect and condescension die hard and slow. Yet the atavistic Hunt and his denouncers share a common position. Both would banish Eros from the bench. Cases such as the Mosers suggest that, in some conditions, intimate bonds may even seed creativity. Expel love from the lab, and who knows what angels of deliverance might flee as well?

Besides, in science or any other pursuit, the same seeker can benefit at different stages both from solitary striving and intimate collaboration. You will find moving proof of this in the “autobiographical notes” that Marie Curie appended to her 1923 memoir of her husband. As a lonely Polish student in 1890s Paris, she relished her independence, even at the cost of cold, hunger and isolation in a freezing garret. She wrote: “I shall always consider one of the best memories of my life that period of solitary years exclusively devoted to the studies, finally within my reach, for which I had waited so long.”

Later, as she and Pierre experimented to isolate radium and investigate its properties in a tumbledown hut on the Paris School of Physics site, another kind of bliss took hold: “It was in this miserable old shed that we passed the best and happiest years of our life, devoting our entire days to our work.” Marie and Pierre’s shared quest embraced rapture as well as reason: “One of our joys was to go into our workroom at night; we then perceived on all sides the feebly luminous silhouettes of the bottles or capsules containing our products. It was really a lovely sight and one always new to us. The glowing tubes looked like faint, fairy lights.”

Note the poetry. Sir Tim, in contrast, reveals himself as a strict dualist. Love and tears will ruin your results. On the one hand lies intellect, on the other emotion. As always, the female serves as proxy for the latter. Yet the binary mind in which Hunt believes no more exists in physics than in painting. Investigate the history of scientific discovery and you plunge into a wild labyrinth of Curie-style ecstasies, hunches, chances, blunders, windfalls, visions, guesses, serendipities and unsought “Eureka!” moments.

However, at the entrance to this theme park of happy accidents one statement should stand. Louis Pasteur said: “Chance favours only the prepared mind.” The intuitive breakthrough that rewrites all the rules happens to people who have toiled and failed, toiled again and failed better. Vision blesses the hardest workers. “I’m enough of an artist to draw freely on my imagination,” Einstein said in 1929. “Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” But he could get away with such New Agey bromides only because he was Albert Einstein.

Still, the scientific evidence in favour of intuitions, dreams and visions is strikingly widespread. In 1865, August Kekulé slumps in front of the fire and, in a reverie, sees the atoms of the benzene molecule “twisting and moving around in a snake-like manner”. Then, “one of the snakes got hold of its own tail, and tauntingly the whole structure whirled before my eyes”.

In 1869, Dmitri Mendeleev grasps the structure of the periodic table in another dream. In a Budapest park in 1882, Nikola Tesla recites Goethe’s Faust and then imagines the electrical induction motor. “The idea came like a flash of lightning and in an instant the truth was revealed… The images I saw were wonderfully sharp and clear.”

More recently, the Nobel-winning biochemist Kary Mullis has written a Thomas Pynchon-like account of the day in 1983 when during a nocturnal drive in California he “saw” the pattern of the DNA polymerase chain reaction that kick-started genetic medicine. With his girlfriend (a chemist in the same lab), he had left for a weekend in the woods. “My little silver Honda’s front tyres pulled us through the mountains… My mind drifted back into the laboratory. DNA chains coiled and floated. Lurid blue and pink images of electric molecules injected themselves somewhere between the mountain road and my eyes…”

A self-mythologising tinge colours many such memoirs of inspiration. They uncannily tend to resemble one another. All the same, these “Eureka!” narratives have a consistent theme, of a break or rest after thwarted labour. The pioneer of quantum mechanics Paul Dirac wrote that “I found the best ideas usually came, not when one was actively striving for them, but when one was in a more relaxed state”; in his case, via “long solitary walks on Sundays”. In science, the unconscious can work hardest when the intellect has downed tools.

In which case, the flight from emotion – from Tim Hunt’s dreaded tears and love – may sterilise more than fertilise. Shun “girls”, by which he seems to mean all subjectivity, and the seeker risks falling into an antiseptic void.

But enough: it feels unscientific, to say the least, to pillory a bloke for a gaffe that shows up a culture and an epoch more than an individual man. Perhaps Sir Tim, and the Royal Society that clumsily rushed to distance itself from him despite its own distinctly patriarchal history, could lay the matter to rest with a suitable donation. It ought to go to the Marie Curie charity for terminal care, which since 1948 has enlisted science and research to strengthen love – and to dry tears.