Going further east, the trend continues. The Chinese poet-philosopher Lao Tzu reminded us that the Tao represents the omnipresent, forever-changing complexities that are all around us, yet elusive and inaccessible. The Chinese Taoists developed the philosophy that the intuitive knowledge of life can never be fully grasped as a concept, but can be understood only through actual living. Essentially, it prescribes going with the flow in life, not clinging to idea structures but changing and evolving because chaos is good and it creates infinite possibilities. The details of these philosophies—especially the Chinese and Buddhist ones—are beyond the scope of this essay, but pointing these out suffices to show that Eastern philosophies did not staunchly oppose chaos. They did not attempt to subdue chaos into order. They accepted the complexities of the world as a given, and suggested techniques for us to manoeuvre through them.
But societies in Europe have, instead, craved order. In the stories of Babylon and the ancient Hebrews, Apollo’s ascendance over Dionysus, the human role on Earth has been defined as building order out of chaos, needing to tame chaos to make us evolve from barbarism to civilization. Ironically, science has shown otherwise—that the universe actually evolved from an equilibrium state or order into chaos.5 In ancient Greece, the world was perceived as a fight or an agon between the two forces of reason or law, and chaos or nature. The Greeks called the first force nomos and the second force physis. Chaos is what there was before there were gods. For example, in his verses about the birth of the gods, the Greek poet Hesiod wrote in the eighth century BC that chaos was the divine primordial condition, which was the origin of the gods and of all things.6 The Greeks believed that the gods came to bring order to the world, and that the gods liked order and hated chaos.
Hence, for the Greeks, the disciplines of mathematics, architecture and music—as examples of nomos—followed strict sets of rules to impose order upon nature. Mathematics brought the infinite under control, architecture brought space under control, while music brought noise under control with set symphonies (unlike the Indian tradition of spontaneous jugalbandi based on ragas). Many centuries later, this fascination for bringing order to chaos has persisted.
As another example of nomos and the need for order, Europe created the concept of a modern nation and gifted it to the world. Nation states were presented (and still are) as a way of transforming societies from barbarism to civilization, from chaos to order. The English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes can be considered the first political philosopher to establish the idea of sovereign states in his work Leviathan, published in 1651, in which he wrote that the government should be established on an anti-religious basis. This was roughly at the same time the treaties of the Peace of Westphalia were signed, which decreed that the sovereign ruler of a state had power over religion as well.7 Hobbes’s absolute state was one based on fear—a fear of chaos and disorder. He advised that our only recourse was to surrender our natural rights to an absolute monarch who would protect us from chaos, but for that, we would have to obey him absolutely. Much later, after the French Revolution, the first modern nation state was created. Thereafter, most modern nations emerged after wars and struggles for freedom from tyrannical, colonial or dictatorial powers, with a seemingly missionary mandate for harmony. And so these modern nations—in the East and the West—have by definition taken on the goal of unifying the primordial mess.
In a country as diverse as contemporary India, our ancient traditions of learning how to deal with chaos (instead of suppressing it into order) are tough to carry forward now. For example, in India today, there is a chance that every opinion on an issue may be equally legitimate depending on the sociocultural context it refers to. Unlike societies that are more homogeneous in socio-economic, anthropological and cultural matters, in India, we are increasingly surrounded by multiple truths. Several truths can coexist, depending on the perspective you see them from. Often, these opinions are magnified by the media or by locals themselves, and our country’s millions vociferously take different sides on the matter.
Further, citizens with diverse backgrounds—and we have plenty of those in India—often have different individual preferences and beliefs. Lopsided development—which is the case in India8—has a compounding effect on the diversification of tastes, beliefs and opinions. For instance, the rich get richer, often with increasing levels of education and exposure to new ideas, whereas the poor have fewer chances to develop their full potential, thus broadening the socio-economic gap and at times the communication gap.
A nation state, however, is based on an aspiration for collective equilibrium. In a collective equilibrium, not every disparate voice is part of the final decision. In a country as diverse as India, politicians have feared that the citizens’ increasingly divergent individual preferences and beliefs, if left uncontrolled, will create political chaos. They are afraid that unbridled freedom to express opinions will make it harder for voters to remain in harmony with each other, and to ultimately submit themselves to a single leader. Thus, freedom of speech in India has never been abundant. Curbing expression is nothing new.
As I will explain now with a few examples, there were restrictions set by various governments in power—the Congress governments since the days of Nehru, as well as by the Left government in West Bengal, and continues even now.
In 1950, a leftist weekly journal in English, Cross Roads, started by journalist Romesh Thapar, published
