Commentary/Ashok Mitra

Haute couture, threatens to become indistinguishable from the cult of nudity

The process does not end here. A supposedly free society insists on the unrestricted dissemination of views and opinions of all conceivable shades. It also permits such views and opinions to influence the mind of all voters. In the circumstances, the free will of an individual citizen no longer bears the solidity of a fortress; exogenous ideas violate its defences. The sequence that follow is straightforward enough.

Man is a social animal; he loves company, he also loves to act, more often than not, in the manner the company does. Out of free will emerges the notion of surrendering this free will: if opinion polls say X is going to be the likely winner, why be a deviant, why cannot you just suppress your private feelings about X, and vote along with re rest, thereby ensuring his victory?

The communications network has therefore made mincemeat of free will. A certain destiny, the opinion polls assert, awaits the nation. Confronted by his datum, the basic urge to exercise free will gets shrivelled, the other instinct, to vote in the way the neighbours do, takes over. Free will loses out to statistical prognostications.

Further questions inevitably arise. If everything is to be predetermined by information technology, including the decision on who is to be the next president of the world's most powerful country, why take the trouble of ambling across to the polling booth at all? This dilemma cannot be wished away.

Once major pollsters reach near-unanimity on the outcome of the presidential election scheduled for the first Tuesday following the first Monday of November, the American voters have been increasingly tempted not to exercise their franchise; compared to 1992, a perceptible decline has been discernible in the proportion of registered voters who exercised their right of franchise this year.

We are witnessing the phenomenon of, so to say a curve turning upon itself. In countries where levels of literacy and awareness are low, participation in polls is also generally poor. Political consciousness being either non-existent or dormant, it could hardly be otherwise.

As literacy advances and political parties begin to organise themselves and mobilise the voters, the proportion of the electorate crowding the polling booth, patiently waiting their turn to cast their democratic ballot, goes up and up. The tendency reverses itself though at a particular point.

Opinion polls, it is assumed, have already decided the issue; in countries with 100 per cent literacy and comfortable standards of living, increasingly larger proportions of voters are therefore opting out of the prerogative of exercising their franchise. Between a nation with only rudimentary levels of literacy and social awareness and one exceptionally sophisticated in terms of all conceivable definitions no distinction can be drawn henceforth in the matter of actual voter participation in democratic elections. Knowledge and knowledgelessness have come to rest on the same pedestal.

In such an ambience, hucksters and demagogues find it to be child's play to win electoral battles making use of the paraphernalia made available by information technology; recourse to vote-rigging of any description is not required to be put on the agenda any more.

Come to think of it, howsoever sharply differing in their externalities, participation in the electoral process in the United States of America and Rwanda has, for instance, now acquired such a quantitative proximity that we are hurtled into the thick woods of elitesque philosophy; the beginning is the end, and vice versa.

Do not other parallels abound too? Primitive man and his woman romped naked. In due or undue course, they discovered shame, and leant to hide their bodies behind apparel and other embellishments. even as the present millennium is about to close, an opposite trend has been vigorously set in motion.

Fashion designers and organisers of beauty pageants are furiously at work to design clothing which reveal more and more parts of the human anatomy, Haute couture, threatens to become indistinguishable from the cult of nudity. It was unclad existence at the beginning of human history; we seem to be harking back to that state. In our beginning is our end; the shame of being unclothed no longer means a thing.

Just as the sense of shame for being a felon is also fast coming to a sure case, at least in some lands. Here too, it is a retreat into history: in the uncivil society depicted by Hobbes, life was nasty, brutish and short. Since everyone indulged in mayhem and murder in order to survive, the concepts of crime and venality were unknown. Does it not look like familiar territory?