By – Amar Yumnam
Imphal, July 21:
The mid-1980s were the period when the appreciation of the importance of knowledge as a foundation and determinant (both short and long-term) of social transformation started taking shape. But by the beginning of this century, the study of the significance and the factors influencing the speed and shape of the growth of this social development determinant started taking a healthy shape; it still continues. Here it would be interesting to recall for all of us how Destutt de Tracy gave in 1796 the world the concept of the “science for the formation of ideas”, whose name is Ideology. France was passing through a period of huge social turmoil and a soul emerged who emphasised the application of ideas to address the issues for resolution. “Through observation and deduction, not calculus or geometry, one could discover the [non-physical] propositions contained in the original truth, “man is a sensitive being,” and thereby reduce all the human sciences to a few basic truths. This science of observation and deduction, the “analysis of ideas,” all ideas, not just mathematical ideas, was “ideology” to which all the other sciences could be reduced. “Ideology” itself reducible to none, guaranteed the unity of the sciences.” (Emmet Kennedy 1975) It is this realisation which led to the fast growth of culture and social norms as important ingredients of social studies. As I had emphasised in my recent inputs in this column, social studies today are no longer Sociology, Anthropology, Culture, Economics, Political Science and all the related ones following separated routes for understanding but an integrated, shared and continual approach of understanding a social issue. The resultant Social Policy also should be an outcome of this approach; return of the Tracy’s 1796 “science for the formation of ideas.”
But ideas are not something which falls from the sky or something like the mango which we can just pluck. There has to be an inclination for application of mind. Again, it is not a hollow mind which is needed, but a mind with consciousness. Further knowledge can be “tacit or enigmatic and foundational aspects of human awareness and knowledge of the world. Tacit knowledge is that which is not readily articulated. It consists of sentiments, feelings, emotions, hunches and so on. It is therefore different to explicit knowledge that can be readily articulated in symbolic form through texts, blueprints, numbers and the like. The difficulties attached to understanding tacit knowledge (or tacit knowing) have translated into uncertainty in knowledge management about how tacit knowing can be apprehended, represented and managed…” This is where the importance of culture and history emerges in whose context we have to try understanding any society. We cannot imagine the success of any control or solution of any social crisis without the understanding of these dimensions.
Now Manipur is in a situation with two, inter alia, very unfortunate situations. First, there are organisations sponsored by the political personnel to ensure their continuation in power. They have been behaving in a manner very subversive of the free will and explicit application of mind by the common people. Second, the governance does not seem to possess any visible sign of understanding that knowledge “communicability is dependent on the social context in which knowledge is communicated, the degree to which we can regard knowledge as being tacit or explicit is at least partly social context dependent. This position suggests that the same knowledge in a different context or in the hands of a different person may or may not be so explicit or accessible. Context can be seen in this light as a background of potential links or interrelations between people and ideas that is not solely a property of individuals.”
This is how there is no sign yet of resolving the more than two years old social crisis of Manipur. Today I would emphasise once again the damage being done to the much needed – contextually and globally – sector of education. As emphasised earlier, the world has been on the race for superiority in terms of knowledge possession such that the concerned societies can move ahead. Knowledge creation, sharing and furtherance can only be based on Education. In the case of Manipur, instead of ensuring continuation of the historical social justice, a new kind of social inequality in being shaped in which the children being deprived of proper access to education today. This deprivation is coupling the rising poverty of education administration in the state. A colleague of mine brought out recently to public knowledge that Manipur is marked by the highest outmigration of domestic population. One major factor determining this outmigration is the lack of meaningful education for children. Now even higher education is going downstream – before stabilising and strengthening and sharpening the existing network, a highly effective, successful and prestigious college has been converted into something with no sign of progress yet.
The knowledge economy race is now increasingly marked by superiority in the knowledge and application of AI (Artificial Intelligence). Here also the new social inequality would emerge with faster speed and stronger force. The sure necessity of Manipur today is not just the existence of administration but the presence of an effective governance with the quality of knowledge. There should be a governance along contemporary lines and conscious of the technical, normative, moral and justice components of governance in contextual perspectives.