My favourite is an old scientist, a
student of my father, who still goes to the laboratory regularly. I
asked him what he thought of the Covid crisis and he answered, “Covid may be a failure of storytelling and ethics.” The crisis stems from that. I was surprised, I asked him to explain.
He smiled wryly; a minimum of
one could sense it. Science often becomes barren in these moments. It
gives you facts, but facts without perspectives do not tell you much.
One needs literature, the texture of a fable or a parable, to tell you
that. He added, “Look at the way the govt is pushing all the mush about the new normal, as if it's
a mini-utopia. A Kafka could have squashed it in a minute.” He paused
and said, “I know I have told this story often but it still has insight.
It is, I believe, the only story Kafka wrote about India.” The old
scientist said the idiot understood the new normal. No logic of numbers
can capture that. In fact, numbers as narrative have been one of the
first casualties of Covid. He explained, “It isn't just an issue of statistics being value loaded, it's the way numbers allow you to check out an occasion .
When you talk about an exponential rise of casualties, talk of body
counts, the fact of death acquires an indifference. You lose your sense
of mourning and the sacred. Death acquires an inevitability. You begin
saying, 45,000 deaths are tolerable, normal for a population like ours.”
Numbers destroy the potency of storytelling where every individual
counts.
Even science, he said, “has lost its sense of storytelling.
People talk about science as problem-solving. The philosopher, Thomas
Kuhn, immortalized it in his work. Problem-solving banalizes and
routinizes science. You invoke an equivalent method, an equivalent
predictable pattern of discovery. Talking normal science, you lose your
sense that science today is about risk, uncertainty, an adventure of
the unanticipated. You lose your sense of exemplars like Alexander
Fleming and Louis Pasteur or Robert Koch. Science as method, reiterating
a traditional science, loses its sense of fable.” it's an equivalent with policy where the expert pretends to understand what he doesn't .
He loses the humility before nature and the life that science demands.
But the worst casualty of Covid, he claimed, is social science.
In describing Covid, social sciences lost their sense of the social, a way
of norm, of altruism. Economists forgot about the informal economy, of
thousands of migrants who became visible. The State destroyed the sense
of adulthood by treating it as a sort of
obsolescence. The idea of the social, which forms a grand frame of
understanding in Marx, Weber, Durkheim, just disappears. “Covid becomes
an abstract story of vectors without community. The social scientist had
almost nothing to say about Covid, apart from playing second fiddle to
the State. This is why policy is such a second-rate, voyeuristic sort of
narrative. Policy is not even a third-person narrative. In fact, it
lacks a sense of the person and sounds like a pathologist’s report.”
I told him, “For a scientist you tend to be sceptical of science.” He smiled and said, “It is my scepticism that creates
me a scientist. Scepticism and faith go together. Science gives me a
sense of the sacred, of the sense of the limits of a science, which
still sustains a sense of mystery.”The sad thing is that debates on
Covid rarely mention ethics. Ethics is not a catechism of dos and
don’ts. “Look at it when the migrants were waiting at the bus stations,
you sprayed them chemically
with an objectivity that was frightening. It was as if you were
spraying a troublesome crop. When death is treated with indifference,
all you see is a corpse. Human rights should begin in an anatomy class.”
He stopped, was silent, then
said, “When you managerialize a crisis, you banalize even spirituality.
You create handbooks of spirituality as if it is another technology. In
Covid, psychology, management and spirituality continued to create a
feel-good feeling. You sensed it in the colourful succulent supplements
newspapers produced. You have a science of well-being for the middle
class and the affluent but you had no language of suffering, no
sensitivity to pain.” Cost-benefit analysis has no sense of pain. This
is the primary time there was no Teresa , no religious group talk about sacrifice. Stories of heroism are few and far between. Science without altruism does not go far.
He
then explained problem-solving. The idea is touted as activist but the
concepts are routine. Problem-solving alone cannot resolve a crisis.
“Any epidemic is also a crisis of values. It involves choices. The
fact-value distinction breaks down in these moments where game theory
does not work.” He added, “It is at this time you need storytelling,
method and discourse to intersect.” He claimed the philosophy of science
we read in India doesn't transcend
Popper, Kuhn. They are textbook science, but textbook science is too
insulated to handle a crisis in all its complexity. The idea of the new
normal is scientifically flawed and ethically illiterate. Yet our
leaders spout it like god’s truth. The new normal reflects the
mediocrity of ideas in India.
He stopped, then said, “The trouble is
Covid should have been a graphic novel, a moral fable, a new kind of
case study like the neurobiologist, Oliver Sacks, would write. It should
bring out the alternatives we'd like to face. Sadly, we operate within the
new flatland called policy. We need a return to storytelling. Science
and society have their roots, their creative myths, there.”
I
listened, spellbound. It was a fine assessment of a crisis. I merely
waited to write it out as the work of an exemplar, as the articulation
of a different paradigm.
I felt Happy
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