This is a response to the exciting idea of Ain that Taufik discerned in Einstein’s name followed by Rahul’s meticulous research on the etymology of the word.
Let me explain why I find the whole exercise interesting. Firstly, our exercise reminds me of a similar exercise done by Max Mueller’s philological/linguistic exercise, which sought to explain variations in the existing assumption that all Indic languages, Sanskrit, German etc. had one grammatical source. It was this exercise which also came to subscribe to the idea that it was the Aryans, an improved race which spoke the Indic languages. We are aware of one of the most notable consequences of this discourse-the extermination of Jews under Hitlerite Germany, something that Einstein did not anticipate in 1926, when he met with Rabindranath Tagore.
Now it is interesting to note that the method used by Max Mueller to understand indeterminacies within the grammar of Indic languages would not have been possible if the discipline of “statistics” had not arrived over the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Statistics emerged as a “law of averages”, whereby chance that is future itself could be tamed-a simple rule of recording, registering various details about how one or more people in a particular place inhabit the world-what kind of food they ate, water they drank, diseases they suffered from, crafts they made. What could be stated about them in “probable” terms based on an avalanche of “printed numbers”? Even today we participate in such exercise by identifying ourselves during census operations. Max Mueller, writing as he was around the second half of the nineteenth had in his possession a vast literature of “facts”-from various parts of the world, the most conspicuous of them being possessed by the French and British Empire. Hence we may very well say that the very discipline of statistics would not have been possible, leave aside Max Mueller’s philological works (and Nirad Chaudhury’s homage to him) without the empire and their “muted” subjects.
Statistics, the law of average was unique in that its usefulness was being discovered at every instance in every discipline. My hunch (and not knowledge) tells me that quantum physics endorsed its usefulness by mapping a pattern of movement of smallest elements, along with ways of reading its determinacies and indeterminacies, statistically. Hence Einstein’s use of the word “statistical order”. But why was Einstein so enamored by this “order”?
Statistics essentially includes a perfect as well as ever perfectable logic of disposing of humans and non humans. It provides ways of arriving at “truths” where the very idea of truths as “everlasting” is redefined as “ever perfectible” facts. When Einstein was talking about the “stastitical order” he was emphasizing the importance of this fundamental change in the very idea of truth and its gigantic potential. Statistics would help “normalize”, rather than “discipline”. There would not be any need to force people to do the right thing. The norms themselves would aid people to follow that path. Thus, if some one has high blood pressure, for him it would mean that he would have to get it down to the median. For one with low blood pressure, he would have heat up his blood. Laws, therefore, would not be necessary. Humans would find the law of normal, the law of averages by themselves. Western civilization would finally and truly behead the king. This was Einstein’s aspiration.
Einstein would find, at his own cost, the problem of this assumption and the danger it sowed. Hitler’s plan with the Jews, much like our contemporary Modi ji’s actions, was a very statistical affair based on ideas pertaining to the best ways of disposing humans to realize the dream of an empire that looked like a workshop, stretching across Eastern Europe. The concentration camps themselves were samples of such workshops, each being divided into labor gangs divided racially in the best interests of “economy”. The statistical order had become part of a logistics that happily treated some humans and non-humans at par. The statistical order forced Einstein to flee Germany and join the Manhattan project to create the atom bomb.
It surely means that that this neutral statistical order needed to posit two extreme situations to establish legitimacy of its calculations, which would tame the uncertainties of future. The Hitlerite philosophy, as we very well know, sought to establish Aryan might as the norm precisely by culturally depicting the Jews as the world’s most unwanted species; hence, for their own good they deserved the treatment that they themselves represented. This was not a situation different from the way the Europeans had been treating their empire. The British administrators were convinced that absolute despotism was good for indians because that is what they were used to. Any form of improvement would therefore have to be introduced not through persuasion but through force even as the rulers claimed a “rule of law” (close to the English rule of law) as the aspired goal of humanity. Interestingly enough, Rabindranath was experiencing a predicament that Einstein would face two decades later-that of state barbarism when he decided to renounce his Knighthood. Having witnessed the Jallianwallah Bag massacre he was convinced that this “rule of law” was a farce-because it bore, within itself, the reason of its own suspension. The Amritsar massacre was preceded by a law of emergency (something we have become used to-emergencies are these days declared in specific territories-Hindu, Muslim, Sikh habitations, Nandigram, Jangalmahal). The gathering did not acknowledge the law of emergency and gathered in a place. They were shot dead. Thus the very law, which normatively existed to protect human lives, was suspended by a declaration of emergency. Evidently, for Rabindranath, the norm was too flexible a term for humans to depend on-chances of its suspension for the welfare of people, for preventing future chaos, for preventing future deaths (for instance the dropping of Atom Bomb to prevent a more prolonged war) was not a reliable premise of humanity. The idea of economy could very well turn against humanity itself. Tagore, a subject of Empire, decided to renounce his identity with the British rule of law and effectively the normative idea of humanity that flowed from it.
This are my observations on Tagore and question of a modular frame within which humanity could be understood. It is a very important critique not because it showed a different way of handling modernity. Tagore’s prescription, based on his understanding of the grammar of indian music was espoused at the highnoon of cultural nationalism. Hence I am not too inspired by the content of his counter argument as much as I am invested in his ability to “doubt” the master discourse. It is important to remember that his inability to stand by the idea of nation-state as a viable form of collective order demonstrates his anxiety of a repetition of the western modular form of nation-state and all that it entailed-a statistical order, an idea of collective “economy” that could easily compare, for everybody’s good, the body parts of one individual with that of many.
Hence, Tagore’s planchet and his advocacy of the same around the world is a demonstration of his efforts at endorsing philosophical doubts by animating specters of the human. It was not a bureaucratic resolution-not an end in itself. It represented a search for possible “selves” outside the realm of the natural, the worldly, and the mappable. I live with Thakur’s doubts and his ways of working on them.
