A pot of wine among the flowers.
I drink alone, no friend with me.
I raise my cup to invite the moon.
He and my shadow and I make three.
–––Li Bai, Drinking Alone with the Moon
(Translated by Vikram Seth)
These lines, penned by the eighth century Taoist poet Li Bai, evoke an unresolved melancholia—a desire to be in company. An enforced solitude during this extended present has not been particularly helpful for people. On the contrary, this pandemic and the lock-down which ensued from it have had serious repercussions for the well-being of many. To reiterate the obvious, the sum-total of human well-being—the elixir of life—can be said to be constituted by three components—material, physical and mental. Yet, this simplistic formulation paints a picture which is far from being accurate. Moreover, it can be argued with some conviction that this extraordinary and truly unforeseen (not entirely unanticipated as some studies have hinted, yet this adjective is being used in a truer sense here than it is usually done in most places) situation has merely exposed and exacerbated fault-lines that have always already existed in our society. Although it has grasped us by our collars and forced us to confront many problems, we must recognize that most of these are hardly new.
We had turned a blind eye to problems which jeopardize our well-being and we cannot feign surprise now. This is because we have been complicit in sustaining a worldview that puts the blame on events and individuals and does not acknowledge the underlying processes which produce them. It is very convenient to shrug all responsibilities. It is disconcerting to introspect and confront uncomfortable truths. Another reason behind this worldview is the misguided and unfounded belief that the problems are perpetually unfolding—this is but a prelude to the storm that is yet to come. This belief has been informing our attitude towards climate change ever since it emerged as a serious concern in academic and political discourse. We find it too unnerving to accept that the disaster is here and now, not tucked away in some remote future. At this point, one would do well to pause and reflect what these old problems are; I will merely outline a few. I do not intend to engage in an exhaustive discussion on any of these. I simply wish to stress why they should not be viewed in isolation and why it is necessary to look beyond comforting but myopic explanations.
The concept of material well-being has for long been conflated with the limiting idea of economic well-being. Wealth continues to be viewed as the touchstone by which society vouches for individual material well-being. Aggregates like GDP and GNP are cited as the pre-eminent indicators of an untarnished national growth story. Equitable access to the commons and decent living conditions are left out of the discussion till the time when our sense of morality is shocked by events transpiring all around. Our conscience only gets stirred when we witness the death march of migrant labourers from one part of the country to another. We continue to look the other way when faced with the root causes of this phenomenon—dispossession of land, degeneration of employment, and rural indebtedness, among others. Famines are no longer caused by droughts. They are caused by policy failures and catalysed by entrenched inequalities. Production, distribution, and consumption are all social activities. Collective human efforts make these possible. Inequalities distort them. As a consequence, we have been observing a steady privatization of profits and socialization of costs. What economists call externalities—the unaccounted impact of one’s actions on another or the society at large—get ignored in this neat equation.
Some argue that we are living in the Anthropocene—a geological age in which human beings have emerged as a potent geological force, capable of altering the environment around us beyond recognition. We are facing the repercussions of past activities in the present. Our present actions are consistently annihilating the possibility of any future. This will not change unless we seriously begin to view material well-being in relation to the conditions which make it possible. One of these is an inhabitable environment. Our material well-being is also linked to our societal well-being. The latter is hindered by deep-seated prejudices and injustice. Racism, sexism, casteism, and poverty are not functions of individual disabilities. These are signs of social failures—our inability to create conditions which facilitate cooperation, enhance accessibility, and acknowledge difference. A holistic understanding of material well-being cannot afford to be divorced from the political realities that have normalized exploitation. When the material well-being of one is underwritten by the oppression of another, it deserves condemnation, not celebration. So long as we continue to overlook the ‘environmental’, the ‘social’, and the ‘political’ constituents of the ‘material’ we will not be able to speak of ‘well-being’ in any meaningful manner.
The present discourse on physical well-being is constrained by similar inadequacies. Although the ‘physical’ is predicated on the ‘material’, it is detached from the ‘sexual’. States continue to legislate on the bodies of people and it goes without saying that some bodies are considered more equal than others. Diversity in sexual orientation is yet to be fully acknowledged as natural in legal and pedagogical domains. As a result, personal choices and freedoms remain restrained. One should not, however, be mistake these for individual concerns. For example, only a delusional person would not identify genital mutilation as a socio-cultural problem. This holds true for fears regarding racial miscegenation as well. Physical well-being must necessarily encompass many apparently unrelated things. Freedom from gender-based violence, freedom from norms proscribing what one wears and what one eats, freedom from torture in custody, and freedom from ethnic profiling should, inter alia, be viewed as the integral components of physical well-being. We express shock and disgust when we hear that rates of domestic abuse in India have gone up sharply during this lock-down. We feel aghast at the unilateral dilution of labour laws. Yet, we keep ignoring the connections that exist between them. So long as we continue to delegitimize domestic work and sex-work as ‘not labour’ and refuse to view the channelling of tribal labourers to work in mines and plantations built on their land as ‘disciplining of bodies’, we will not be able to fathom the full implications of ‘physical well-being’.
To emphasize the relevance of mental well-being during this pandemic is bound to be a redundant exercise. Two things will establish why this is so. On the one hand, the leading cause of death due to the nationwide lock-down in India has been suicide. On the other hand, Yale University’s ‘The Science of Well-Being’, which deals with psychology and the good life has become the most popular online course of all time. It is interesting to note that this course has not been made available to the people of Venezuela, as a crippling US embargo is placed on this oil-rich and socialist-run Latin American country. It seems that Venezuelans are not supposed to learn the secret to the good life. This offers a good scope for foregrounding the larger point that I am trying to make. Mental health has been deliberately academized and depoliticized. All mental health concerns have been reduced to the individual pursuit of happiness, devoid of any meaningful social ethics. As a consequence, the bountiful literature on or around ‘mental well-being’ are mostly either scholarly publications pathologically emphasizing clinical diagnosis of diseases and disorders or self-help guides by self-proclaimed lifestyle-gurus. One doesn’t need to cite Foucault to stress this point further.
‘Depression’ is still a taboo in India. All suicides do not make headlines either. Most are consigned to the banality of statistics. P. Sainath had uncovered from National Crime Records Bureau data that over three lakh farmers had committed suicide in India between 1995 and 2015 (following which the data ceased to be published). Their economic insecurities have still not been addressed even today. One way in which this phenomenon was sought to be invalidated by many was by arguing that these farmers acted in such a manner because they were individually depressed and that it was futile to look for deeper causes. Walter Benjamin had said that we are progressing through a ‘homogenous and empty time’. It seems that he was right. We juxtapose apparently unconnected, simultaneous actions and experiences, without bothering to look at their shared genealogies. If we look deep enough, we will find what Marx had identified as ‘alienation from species-essence’ to be one of the prime reasons why mental well-being has been elusive. Human creative potential is unbounded, provided it is not otherwise subjugated to or restrained by a relentless pursuit of profit. A conflation of this pursuit of profit with the pursuit of ‘happiness’ or ‘the good life’ is a political distortion. So long as we do not recognize this, we will remain ‘playthings of alien forces’ and will not be able to realize the true value of mental well-being.
What then is to be done? There is no single answer. Nor is there a simple answer. To start with, we must strive to get out of the mental straitjacket which prevents us from making obvious connections between observable phenomena and underlying processes. We must have the moral courage to recognize and confront our old problems. According to Walter Benjamin, the angel of history is akin to an angel depicted by Klee in a painting called Angelus Novus. Benjamin had imagined that this angel, with his eyes wide open, mouth gaping and wings outstretched, keeps staring at the sky-high pile of past rubble as he is uncontrollably driven into the future by the storm called progress. Discounting Benjamin’s pessimism, it is important to accept that the rubble of the past must be cleared at present, or else there will be no future. The task can no longer be postponed. The ability to rethink society radically is a prerequisite for this. One must remember that etymologically, the word ‘radical’ is derived from ‘radix’, which means root. Radical rethinking involves addressing root causes and not their superficial symptoms. In a recent essay, Arundhati Roy has argued that this pandemic is a portal—we must not go back to the ‘normal’. At the risk of pushing this metaphor too far, I would argue that this pandemic has offered us a unique opportunity to reassess ‘normal’ realities. The machine is broken. It has always been so. We must free ourselves from the Sisyphean habit of servicing it nonetheless. This will not be an easy hatchet job. The possibility of a new order can lie in disorder itself. This is a strange harmony, almost poetic, often found in bricolage. We should not be incapable of introspection and empathy. We must become bricoleurs.
Lokayata 