P. B. Mehta: Can 2022 be a year of cooperation?
The modern world has been animated by two important impulses. The first is a drive to a mastery over nature, where we can remake and engineer the natural world, this planet and even our bodies, to serve human desire and imagination. Nature, in this view, is not a binding constraint but an obstacle to be overcome. The second impulse is the remaking of our social world so that it is justified to all those who inhabit it. There is nothing providential about our social institutions, and the power and hierarchies they embody. These have to be rearranged to acknowledge a degree of earthly moral equality. They need to appear legitimate to the citizens who inhabit them.
One of the paradoxes
of our political life is that we have thought it easier to remake nature than
to remake the social institutions that are constructed by us. When it comes to
nature, we overcome the empire of necessity by more and more technological
progress. There is a temptation, after each human calamity, whether a pandemic
or climate change, to talk of the humbling of human conceit, our vulnerability
to nature. But adversity does not change this drive to mastery; it does not
alter our relationship to nature. Instead, we will look for an engineering
solution. If we destroy earth, there is space to be conquered.
But in our social arrangements, we have, curiously, submitted more to the empire of necessity. Broadly speaking, the triad of some form of competitive economic extraction (capitalism), representative democracy and the nation-state form have defined our social horizons….
https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/can-2022-be-a-year-of-cooperation-7700571/
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