Wielding Culture as a Cudgel in TrumPian Era

The strongmen of this era need to be out-thought. For that, we need to reinvent some frameworks that fell in place in the years following the Second World War

- SHIV VISVANATHAN

A friend of mine, a linguist, has an acute way of addressing problems. We were discussing the dominance of Trump and Putin. He laughingly said "bully boys" are conceptual problems and they need to be out-thought. To be trumped, Trump has to be out-thought. He did not add that he came upon the idea while working on Unesco as an institution.

He said that almost all the categories that we sanctified and legitimised in 1945 ring hollow today. He then added, "What's worse is that the word 'culture' has become ironic. It has lost its playfulness. Its sense of plurality. A feeling for the unexpected."

He gave me a strange example of why that's important. He said the extinct dodo is today a much-maligned word. It is first the stuff of cartoons, then of zoology books. But a zoologist from New Zealand observed that along with the dodo, several species of trees had disappeared too. He realised there must be a connection. He saw footage of the dodo consuming some seeds and spitting the epidermis out with contempt. He raced out to feed the same seeds to the first turkey he could find. In a few weeks, the extinct plant was back.

The vocabulary of the official international relations sanctified in the Truman era—which includes nation-state, development, science and electoral democracy—lacked this playfulness. In the official sense, culture has become an impoverishing term.

He remarked that development, in that sense, is one of the most impoverished of concepts. Development has no sense of culture. In fact, it treats culture with contempt. One can see it in the way Trump or Modi engage with development. The Andaman becomes a place sans culture. For Trump, all areas are merely real estate to be developed without a sense of people. The illiteracy of development and its genocidal impact centre around culture.