Opinion Jack out of the box

The most important functional component of morality in complex societies is not personal virtue or sacrifice for the collectivity; it is rather contributing to society through your profession. In the long run,societies can mobilise the collective power of their citizens only if they at least minimally fulfil their professional roles,whatever these happen to be. If you are in a society where,for example,teachers don’t show up to teach,no amount of civic engagement or personal virtue can compensate for that lack. This is a complicated problem; some may attribute it entirely to an absence of punishment mechanisms. But there is probably a more complicated moral psychology at work,where the job does not become part of your professional identity. A society that has to rely largely on external mechanisms to produce compliance is doomed from the start.

In India,elite professionals are prepared to do everyone else’s job but their own; they are not governed by the logic of their own vocation. In government,this confusion of roles has become legion. Judges have imperiously taken on the role of the executive,with not too great an effect. Politicians often behave with academic detachment,while academics confuse partisanship with the production of knowledge. Journalists don’t want to describe reality; they want to remake it in their image. Literary critics reinvent themselves as economists,while technical economists use their skills to argue like lawyers. Yoga gurus think fixing the body and fixing the body politic is one and the same thing. Lawyers no longer act as officers of the court. Doctors are often more entrepreneurs than healers. Indian discourse,whether in government or outside,is too dominated by generalists: people who can not only transgress their role,but who think they can take on any role.

The sense that you contribute first and foremost to your society by being true to your vocation seems to have disappeared for a number of reasons. One wishes this could be attributed to a capacious inter-disciplinarity that prompts us to transgress boundaries. However,the reality is rather more sordid. Indian society is in a mad scramble for being visible. But its moral discourse has not yet learned to recognise,esteem and value ordinary functional roles. The temptation to overreach in order to be recognised is pervasive. Second,perhaps as an aftereffect of the caste system,we have a strange belief in the unity of virtue,knowledge and eminence. A little bit of distinction in a particular area or a rise to a position almost licenses authority to transgress. It is extraordinary how reticent our society is about pointing out that often eminences make complete fools of themselves. Third,modes of professional recruitment have very little to do with professional identification. Arguably,most middle-class identities are formed by the exams we crack,not by the vocations we choose. Can you think of any other country in the world where the police and civil servants are recruited through the same methods? Most of our recruitment devices,be it in the case of teachers or policemen,are not implanting a sense of vocation from the start. They are governed by a bureaucratic logic detached from a sense of vocation. Fourth,there are undoubtedly the distortions produced by politics. When politics transgresses its limits,when accountability structures in general are quite warped,all kinds of other role confusions will ensue. The one thing an excessive politicisation of society does is prevent us from developing norms appropriate to each sphere of activity. Politics is central. But it should be a kind of under-labourer that creates space for other vocations to be pursued on their own terms. Indian discourse,however,has taken the centrality of politics as a licence for the colonisation of many spheres of life,for doing away with the idea of professional integrity. Professions,in turn,have not been strong enough to resist this colonisation by external considerations; their own low standards of accountability have given the upper hand to pretenders.

A society not governed by a sense of professional identities will indeed resemble a group of headless chicken running in all directions. It will be a society where,in the guise of deference to eminence,genuine expertise will be devalued; it will be a society where the credibility of institutions will be subordinate to the authority of perceived virtue; it will be a society where people seek recognition not in their own jobs,but their ability to act as superior to other professions; it will be a society that is not mobilising the talents of its citizens to the fullest because it does not value their core competence.

Whenever we talk of bringing social change we oscillate between the sternly personal and the extravagantly civic. Either there is the Gandhian exhortation,“Be the change you want to see in the world”,on the assumption that all that is required for a proper ordering of society is an ordering of the self. Or there is self-flagellation that not enough people engage with politics in the right way. But what we have not done is to create modes of valuing ordinary roles; that people contribute to society by being who they are. It may turn out that social change may not require hoary calls for “total revolution”. It is better served by a rather less enchanted,more difficult,but more prosaic slogan. Simply put: Do your job.

The writer is president,Centre for Policy Research,Delhi,express@expressindia.com