The Prince & Conceptism

The Prince and Conceptism

“ If you get to learn something even from the worst of creatures don’t hesitate.”

Chanakya

One of the most famous primers on realpolitik was written by a wannabe courtier in involuntary retirement. It did not win Niccolo Machiavelli his summons back to the charmed circle, but his suggestions, written like aphorisms, in then modern and colloquial Italian rather than the formal Latin, persist in the popular imagination to this day.

After all, the slim little book called The Prince, in preference to his lengthier explorations, written in 1513, is why “Machiavellian” is a contemporary description of expediency. Witness this: “Entrepreneurs are simply those who understand that there is little difference between obstacle and opportunity and are able to turn both to their advantage.”

Machiavelli had his turn in the sun during the Renaissance, and the intrigue laden world of the Medicis he was cultivating. There were other people, in those times, cast in a similar mould, all with their entreating, persuasive, often elegantly written primers. It was the age of patronage, and you had to peddle your wares before the mighty.

Notably, amongst the others, there was Balthasar Gracian, a Jesuit priest, with his slim and witty insights written in the 1600s, his style and content dubbed an ism before many others emerged. Gracian’s work was called “conceptism”, epitomised in his “The Art of Worldly Wisdom”, a book of 300 maxims plus commentary.

And then there was Giacomo Casanova, the renowned modernist lover and chronicler, who wrote himself into posterity in the 1700s, with not a little to say to the Doges of Venice, but also as it turned out, to the world. Casanova wrote to capture a world he knew would disappear, like his youth and vitality, and this, his memoirs, instructs us still.

Here in India, we had dear old Chanakya of course, and he preceded all in the West by centuries. Chanakya advised Emperor Chandragupta Maurya, the first King of a united India to rival anything the British or the Mughals accomplished many centuries later. Chanakya, something of a Shakesperean Richard the IIIrd; ungainly, ugly, but most acute, predated Machiavelli by 1,800 years.

But where oh where is the political theorist worth his salt or semantics nowadays? He or she is not only missing in action here in India, but across the world stage too. And this at a time when long held civilisation bolts and moorings, certainly those fashioned after the Industrial Revolution, are under severe strain.

There is no Adam Smith, Marx and Engels, no Hobbes, or Locke or Rousseau, not even Harold Laski in today’s world! The Gurus have exited en masse, replaced by a lot of technology on autopilot without anyone in the Captain’s Seat.

There are no political theorist cum practioners of the calibre of Genghis Khan or Mao (remember his little red book) or Stalin, or Deng, or Charles De Gaulle, or Jawaharlal Nehru for that matter. Today’s mistakes are sins of omission and commission with villains pulling strings from behind the arras.

The world is ruled by political pygmies, in a sequel to the decline and fall of the eponymous Roman Empire, but minus Julius, minus Augustus, Marcus Aurelius, minus all the ones remembered favourably by history.

Unless, that is, one insists on mentioning the failures, such as Bahadur Shah Zafar, beatified despite his disgrace, his ineffectual and mortified memory being attached to our own desi Fleet Street, in an act of municipal flatulence. Or the villains, that strutted across the stage for brief seasons, gorging on blood and human suffering and now reduced to caricatures reeking with blame.

 All the political colossuses though, like the legendary one at Rhodes, a lost wonder, have been erased from the face of the earth. But why, when the challenges the modern world is facing are grave enough to threaten the extinction the Mayans predicted, for this very year 2012? Where are the super heroes when you need them?

Still, we can perhaps take comfort that the end of the world is far from nigh. But the occurrence of flounder-worthy icebergs and elaborate, disguising orchestras seems to be proliferating. All it takes, after all, is one little mistake.

Oddly, there is nothing frenetic about our impending sense of doom, assuaged as it is with aspirational baubles and a stiff libation or two. But that may be no more than post modernist sang froid, the gristle and grist stuff of denial.

India, waiting for good times, will, alas, have to wait a little longer, like a deserving bride without a worthwhile groom in sight. It takes nothing away from our eligibility except a sneaking fear of wilting on the vine.

But why is this, with so much intelligence and ability going a begging here and around the world? Is it because we need pygmies rather than giants to transform the world into a more equitable and just entity? Could it be because it is the rule of mediocrity that ultimately nurtures, whereas a larger presence etiolates and enervates?

Is it time for the State to be tamed by the meek?  Did Marx have it right when he predicted the Capitalist State would “fade” and “crumble”, even as the Communism he spawned and inspired died a premature death? Will the world collapse under the weight of its “contradictions”, or its innate debauchery? Or is this much ado about nothing and just rank, paranoid exaggeration, a dirty nightmare caused by ill digested information?

 How can a Hollande and Merkel work together without imploding? But in doing so, yoked together like a bull and a horse, do they benefit the poor, as the riff raff in The Tale of Two Cities, presentimenting La Revolution.

Is it time for all of Europe to collect free wine from a spilt barrel? Sans culottes is not sans sense after all, and a dirge composer can also fashion a waltz. When dawn comes, it will clear the heads and eyes of both victor and vanquished, and all those queuing up on either side of the tug of war, for the churning.

It is ironic and anachronistic to have a Finance Minister from the Indira Gandhi era that is too indispensable to be trusted is it not? And the wonder of it is that the polity we live in thinks nothing of it.

The power of mediocrity is that it can readily and invariably put intelligence to shame.  But as Balthasar Gracian put it long ago: “Always leave something to wish for; otherwise you will be miserable from your very happiness.” Gracian had a way with words, but we should be so lucky.

(1,102 words)

29^th May 2012

Gautam Mukherjee


Published on  31st May 2012 as Leader on the Edit Page entitled "Rule of the mediocre" and online at www.dailypioneer.com