Battle of ideas, not battle of leaflets | Ash Narain Roy

US President-elect Donald Trump’s “first buddy” Elon Musk has become what Guardian columnist Alexander Hurst calls a “one-man rogue state.” It is not clear who is basking in whose reflected glory. The tech billionaire is the de facto leader of the MAGA Republican Party and will be the Numero Uno in the Trump administration.

The unelected plutocrat is on track to become the world’s first trillionaire by 2027. The shadow president may prove to be a wrecker-in-chief for Trump. By claiming that only the far-right AFD can save Germany, he has stirred a furore in Germany and elsewhere. He had earlier backed other anti-immigration forces across Europe, including the UK’s Reform party and Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni.

Across the world, the war on ideas and independent thinking may get worse under the Trump-Musk dispensation. The cancel culture has already proved to be a death knell of learning and thinking organisations. American universities are now addicted to billionaires. As Farhad Manjoo writes in The New York Times, when a billionaire comes calling, “men in the ivory tower can’t resist lowering their golden locks to let the plutocrat climb aboard.”
 Such is the onslaught of the big tech and the neo-right that we are led to believe that grand ideas are fizzling out and have lost their marbles. In reality, technology is greatly to blame for our mediocrity and cultural-intellectual morass.

As British journalist Martin Bright argues, illiberal democracies are degenerating into “democraship” or “democratura”. These regimes are hollowing out the institutions and leaving them with scars so deep that they are difficult to heal. Plato had predicted that tyranny will spring from democracy. Today, in large parts of the world, democracy has been left intact only in name and has been replaced by timocracy, rule by money.
The America First loyalists and the big-tech bros consider the US as a ‘constitutional republic”, not a democracy. The battle of ideas threatens to become a battle of leaflets. Democracy is moving in reverse gear. The neo-right in Europe is surging ahead.

The Palestinians are going through an unprecedented phase of dehumanisation. Anadia Shibli, Palestinian writer, talks about “what it means to be born without land, without peace, without humanity.” She further says that “colonization blocks access to the words and information needed to construct the story of one’s own history because the victor erases all traces of the elements that could have preserved memory.” This is what colonization has done to the colonized.

There are two ways to look at things. We are now into unchartered ontological and epistemological territory. One could also argue that there has never been a good time for thinking. Spanish philosopher Victor Gomez Pin tells us that before bad education, we were all poets. To him, education is an “instrument of domination.” It is more oriented toward forming pieces of production machine, than critical citizens.

Robert Jones, New York Times’ best-selling author, in his book, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future, tells us how Native stories have been erased too long and that American history did not begin in either 1776 or 1619.

Turkish novelist and storyteller Elif Shafak says that the art of storytelling can “bring the periphery to the centre” making the invisible a bit more visible. The way history is taught and canonised, Shafak writes, is almost always “his story.” Therefore, much of her writings are “untold stories about women, minorities or stories that have been conveniently forgotten.”

We are dealing with infandous situations, that is, they are too horrible to be named, they usually don’t get planned for. It signals a loss of faith in progress and failure of imagination. The fool believes the tallest mountain in the world will be equal to the tallest she/he has observed. We are now in clima incognita.

But history makes us hopeful because we have seen it before in some way. There is lot to learn from the lived experiences of the indigenous people and their epistemologies.

Gandhi knew how to say no. Dai King, Chinese journalist, resisted 3 Gorges Dam in China. She said, “The highest expression of dignity can be summed up in a single ‘no’. Some years ago, when we saw the outpouring of citizens movements across the world, we heard a big no—Kefaya ( in Arab world), and Ya Basta! And Que Se Vayan Todos! ( in Latin America).

Today governments across the world are trying to silence that ‘No’. They want only yeses. ‘No’ is perhaps the hardest word to say. But it is the most necessary word today. For most of our lifetime yes is winning the race. It is time for ‘No’ to stage a strong comeback. ‘No’ can be the lighthouse that best guides our lives and our souls.

There are two ways to escape suffering. One, to accept hell, become part of it and no longer see it. Two, learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of hell, are not hell, and make them endure.

This is where comes storytelling. As Chimamanda Adichie says, stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.
Columbus was on a civilizing mission. His letter to the Spanish king was self-promotion and propaganda. It was a 15th century version of fake news. He made sure everybody knew what he had done, that he had reached the islands of the Indias which was not true. He was first of the exploiters rather than the first of the explorers.

Another distressing trend we discern today is the death of apology. To decolonize one’s mind is a life-long process. Nelson Mandela had told a Western journalist: “The problem with you all is that you want your enemies to necessarily be our enemies.”

The colonial powers were scrappy truth-tellers. History is written by winners. There will be winners when we have losers. As social-cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadorai says, the heaviest price extracted by colonisers on the colonised was “not in the currency of labour and resource extraction but in the realm of knowledge. The colonial subjects were classified as the other in Europe’s empire of reason.”

Decolonised nations threw off the shackles of colonial political rule but failed to decolonise their minds. They fell into what Appadorai calls, “the European epistemological traps of modernisation and development.”

Literature became a weapon of domination and falsehood for the colonisers. But over a period of time, literature has become a weapon of struggle. After all, politics intersects with politics, more so in Africa and Latin America.
We have good and bad story-tellers. Good story-teller can tell the same story over and over again and it will always be fresh. Mario Vargas Llosa said, “literature is fire” while receiving Romulo Gallegos Prize in 1967. He further said, writing great literature was a political radical act.

Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano describes geographical, political, and onto-epistemological extension of western domination as a “colonial matrix of power.” European colonisers inflicted a unique mode of domination that rested primarily on marginalisation, subordination and elimination of not just indigenous populations but also indigenous epistemologies and culture.
The indigenous local traditions of reproducing natural systems and placing humans within a larger cosmology were gradually replaced by Western ideas of nature, culture and progress, all seen as Christians, European and white monopolies.

Some self-liberated black people in South America established permanent or semi-permanent towns for themselves in hidden places not far from the plantations, a process known as marronage or cimarronaje.

It was a process of resistance to the colonial system whereby the black slaves escaped to forests and hills. It included dismantling their instruments, disobedience and rebellion. Sometimes the escape was collective or temporary.

Deconiality is not decolonisation. Decoloniality offers an alternative, one that is rooted in indigenous thought and practice about nature, community and solidarity. It thus escapes the twin trap of nation-statism and corporate globalisation.

The epistemes of the Global North are still flourishing in the Global South. But scholars have now been challenging those narratives and have come out with alternative paradigms. These include major works like Decolonising Ethics by Enrique Dussel, On Decolonialty by Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh, Coloniality of Power by Anibal Quijano, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? by Sandra Harding and A World of Many Worlds by Marisol De la Cadena and Mario Blaser.

European colonisation was also a cultural war whereby colonised states became societies based on ideas of progress and never-ending growth. The indigenous people are victims of the consequences of that culture wars.
In telling their stories, the colonial states excluded, rejected and misrepresented the stories of the colonised. Memory is a fundamental part of identity formation and social cohesion. In indigenous cultures, memory is used to negotiate and produce their stories which are passed on to the next generation. Memory is associated with identity, group solidarity, power, truth, values and dignity.

As oral historian of the Mande Society in the Mali empire stated: “we are vessels of speech, we are the repositories which harbour secrets many centuries old…without us the names of kings would vanish into oblivion.”
As one African writer says, Africans want to know their own history and not about King Henry and his six wives. Africa was carved up and the map was hidden from them all their life. They were not allowed to reimagine. They were taught history in which one group of people were made to feel inferior and another to feel superior.

As against the hegemonic Eurocentric paradigms, others have called for “Afro-centric epistemology” or what Enrique Dussel calls “geopolitics of knowledge”.

Western philosophy has privileged what one scholar calls “ego politics of knowledge”. Dussel talks of “ego conquistas” (I conquer, therefore I am). The Western-centric world system has privileged the culture, knowledge and epistemology of the West inferiorising the rest.

Epistemic decolonisation which is silent on epistemic redress is incomplete. Epistemic reparations involve the more fundamental ‘right to be known’—the right that victims have ‘to be a giver of knowledge to others about their own experiences’. One way of righting the epistemic wrong is by situating it in the epistemic oppression scholarship.

(Author: Prof Ash Narayan Roy, is director, Institute of Social Sciences, Delhi)