Beyond the Post Normal

I Introduction

A great journal is like a river throbbing with life, and carries the memory of controversies and major debates which help inaugurate a subject and also the detritus of dead issues and failed articulations of problems. A journal like Contributions to Indian Sociology invokes a bigger genealogy of continuity between the nationalist debates on science and society and the developmental elaborations of industrialism. What one missed was the presence of an Auguste Comte detailing an alternative worldview like positivism. What we had instead were a variety of worldviews arguing that India as a civilisation needed a different set of categories, beyond Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, to understand itself. The writings of A. K. Saran (2013) evoking A. K. Coomaraswamy, and those of JPS Uberoi (1968, 2019) showing how Swadeshi and Swaraj as categories could create a new Gandhian science, were highlights of the debate. Yet debates often get bureaucratised and domesticated, with the later pages reflecting the professionalisation and bureaucratisation of sociology as a discipline. The debate moved towards domestication and faded out, rather than seeing a post Germanic science dreamt of by Patrick Geddes (1920) and J.C. Bose. The framework of thought shrunk from a dialogue of civilisations to a nation state civics. The debate reached a dead end but still haunts memories of later articulations.

The essay argues that it is time to revive this classic debate in the post normal era and use the playful, plural work of Ziauddin Sardar to seed it. Sardar is a Pakistani, South Asian, migrant, and an English scientist who has edited several major journals including Third Text, Futures and Critical Muslim.

The crisis of COVID has made the revival of debates more opportune and one senses the relevance of the other, not just the need for the marginal, to catalyse ideas about the necessity of sustaining alternatives. The sociology of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim appears like an Old Testament edict, and one needs a new more epistemic Comte, sensitive to a polylogue of religions, to put together the debate. As Sardar himself, following Funtowicz and Ravetz (2017: 42), argues that the old sociology of dualisms, whether it is the colonial East v. West categories, or the fact/value distinction which anchored Enlightenment theory, are no longer adequate in this search for a pluralistic sociology re-echoing the work of Patrick Geddes, Uberoi, and Ashis Nandy (1995). One senses the merging of the contemporary, the classic and the futuristic, as time becomes multiple and relevant beyond the linear and developmental forms which have haunted and impoverished official sociology. Beyond a new epistemology challenging dualism and linear time, we need a language of suffering re-reading the body beyond the panopticon and its Taylorist incarnations. A new social contract between orality, textuality and digitality becomes obvious. Sardar moves from the corseted categories of the nation state to a vision of South Asia, to the migrant blending of alien and indigenous sociologies like a happy brew in England. The post normal domain becomes a site, a text, a thought experiment for a new sociology of India where India itself serves as a metaphor for alternative imaginations.

II A detour through COVID

To outline what post normal means, one needs a detour through COVID (Jones et al. 2021). COVID becomes a metaphor, example and site for illustrating post normal science that arose through a problem of confronting time. After COVID occurred, most states responded with a schedule, a timetable, a rite of passage, stating when things were supposed to return to normal. When COVID did not die out, the new normal had to be rethought. It was a time of transition, of normality where the normal was being reified, where a new paradigm was not yet born. One stuck to the old definition of normalcy following old protocols, old methods, old ways of evaluating competence, when it all sounded surreal, a pataphysics masquerading as a physics of certainty. What kind of science and society were we dealing with? There was a sense that we were using zombie categories. This was a dead-end surrealism where one needed a new imagination, a new sense of epistemology, an exorcism of earlier concepts and language to provide a sense of the lifeworld we were living.

III The Original Incarnations

Ziauddin Sardar wrote his essay on the post normal as a farewell piece to his editorship of the journal Futures. He tried to explain that futurology was not a mere guessing game. It needed a new language of change. The world of Thomas Kuhn had become a corset to describe it. Normal categories from the past had become zombie categories of the present. Sardar argues that he was not presenting a Science Fiction scenario but an epistemic crisis of science and society (Sardar 2021). The Social disappears in ‘the death of the handshake’, in the act of social distancing, creating a social of self-isolation. There is a sense of denial initially about change. What was almost presented as Science Fiction, in many liberal societies, was the return of the big state (ibid.: 56). The digital world dominated the oral and the textual and big technology became the answer to most questions. It looked rational but soon disclosed shades of Kafka and Alice. The new normal, at first, ‘becomes what you want it to be’ (ibid.: 57).

But this manufactured normalcy evoked the first phase, as one groped for certainty. There is a denial of vulnerability in the search for normalcy. One wished Sardar had used the ideas of precarity, the sense of structural vulnerability to capture the situation. Yet it was not the present that was the problem. What was contested territory was not the present as manufactured normalcy but the future as contested territory, a struggle over different visions from different perspectives. The two time frames had come apart—the relation of oral, textual and digital, on the one hand and the linear relation between past, present and future, on the other. Sardar suggests what it marks was both a crisis of storytelling and epistemology, a sense of aborted narratives. Technology becomes a forced solution when complexity, chaos, and uncertainty operate. The phenomenon of COVID for Sardar has to be written as storytelling, parable and case study to grasp the nature of the problematic. The post normal, in fact, becomes the complex normal because the boundary between normal and abnormal has broken down. It is both liminal and epistemically new, and we lack the categories, the imaginations to articulate it. What one confronts as a stumbling futurologist is a multiplicity of the new normal. A modern Comte cannot domesticate it using standard topics like a sequence or a dialectic. It is as if society, not just science, is solving a set of what Sweeney calls ‘Weirding problems’ (Sweeney 2017). There is an ‘emergent complexity’ (Sardar 2021: 59) we still have to understand. In a civilisational sense, we are facing the end of an empire, the Western Empire, without a Gibbon. To testify to it, more societies have to articulate the language of alternatives, not the mere predictable linearity of old futures.

IV Enter the Anthropocene

What COVID captures at one level, is the question of the Anthropocene elaborated in a more cosmic way. What one needs now is to confront the complexity of science, not reduce it to method, institution or science policy. One of the first articulations of this was by Sardar’s old collaborator, Jerome Ravetz. Ravetz and Funtowicz capture a prescient sense of the post normal in an article written before the arrival of Anthropocene and COVID (Funtowicz and Ravetz 2017).

This almost ancestral essay shows that science has to now respond to differences in the uncertainty of knowledge and the intended functions of information. The authors unravel the secret of science, that so-called facts are of uneven quality. This raises in turn a change in social relations in terms of problem-solving strategies and the new complexities in ethics. As science is applied to policy, the conflicting values at play in any decision-making process become more apparent. The extension of the evaluation process creates an extended community of stakeholders with mixed values. Policy, in fact, creates a new division of labour and interest in science bringing with it a new politics and ethics of value frames (ibid.: 24). But Ravetz and Funtowicz go further. They show that the laboratory as a social construct changes. The classic Latourian picture of Pasteur extending his laboratory to the countryside and thereby conquering it for science no longer holds good (ibid.: 25) The earlier argument stated that nature in the wild gets tamed in the laboratory. Nature was read analytically and reductively. It was seen as predictable and controllable.

The rise of COVID, as an unravelling of the Anthropocene, reveals a more unpredictable nature, difficult to domesticate. As a result, a new post normal science is created where facts are uncertain and values in dispute. The old idea of the scientific method sounds dubious at best, when one refers to questions of quality assurance (ibid.: 28). As nature changes, so does the idea of the ‘social’ in science. Combining various constituencies, uncertainty acquires a variety of levels including the technical, the epistemic and the methodological. Also, as far as applied science is concerned, science is no longer public knowledge but the possessive knowhow of corporate groups. The idea of intellectual property justifies and sustains this world making the idea of science as a gift, a form of public knowledge, remote and paradisiacal.

Post normal science emerges as one faces the epistemic and ethical consequence of this change. One drastic consequence of this is that the traditional fact/value dichotomy gets inverted and what were considered ‘externalities’ suddenly implicate the scientific enterprise. Science no longer projects itself as a domain of neat solutions. It is not just a question of a global change in the problematic of science, it is a veritable transformation of epistemology.

Sardar builds his story absorbing all the literature. He systematises the new civics of complexity itemising its various implications. What begins as a sliver of problematic maths, a moment of philosophical doubt creates or challenges an epistemic world which Sardar weaves into a more epic story. Not only is Sardar’s canvas wider, his essay is more exploratory, a playful exercise in plurality demanding an invitation to new thought experiments. The plurality to be truly social has not only to be multi-epistemic, multi-disciplinary, but a polylogue of cultures. Policy from being a reified spectacle of categories becomes an open theatre of ideas.

V Welcome to the Post Normal

Reading Ziauddin Sardar, one senses a South Asian strain, a commonality of cultures. He loves film and talking films and futurology with its scenarios and heuristic seems a way of filming possibilities. More, he loves the adda, the commons of gossip, a gathering of ideas. ‘Welcome to the Post Normal’ (Sardar 2017) seems a blend of film and adda. Sardar uses film to capture the epic quality of the post normal showing that the future demands skills beyond science fiction writing. It demands a new imagination, a litter of epistemic sensibilities. Yet the essay is full of little footnotes which seem like leftovers from an adda capturing everyday problem solving. Sardar almost speaks domestically about the future, like a housewife desperate to spring clean normalcy, especially manufactured normalcy. But the broom has to be a metaphysical one, so that tool and concepts can be thought of differently.

Sardar is desperate to create a civics, a pedagogy around the 3 C’s of complexity, contradiction and chaos (Sardar 2017: 51) which he sees as wake-up calls for the future. He begins with complexity saying it is difficult to understand complexity fully. The knowledge we have of complex systems and paradoxically our understanding of these is based on models which reduce the complexity of these systems. We are left with an impoverished understanding of the real. He adds that what is left out of the system continues with it in a non-linear way, adding to the modesty of our understanding. Chaos adds to the travails of complexity because of the unpredictability of networks. Globalisation is an obsession with networks of connectivity where a small signal can transform the system. A minor hiccup can create a long-suffering story. Sardar also shows how political demonstrations based on mobile connectivity can become a network and transform in terms of consequences, citing examples from the Petrol strike to the Ukrainian Revolution of 2004. Volatility and destabilisation haunt the social landscape of the network.

Sardar explains that a complex network with competing parts inevitably throws up contradictions. Contradictions point out that every decision has a cost. Good inevitably produces a modicum of evil. All three impacts add a sense of limits, a consciousness of humility about the system. All three stem from the effects of global properties of speed, scale and scope which combined with simultaneity feed into each other making the system more elusive to grasp (ibid.: 53).

Sardar adds that what one confronts is not a sociology of knowledge but an epistemics of ignorance (ibid.: 55). His is not a fable about knowledge but about the social effects of not knowing. Ignorance, he emphasises, is of three types, each lethal in its own way. Modernity, for example, is stupid in its ignorance of traditional cultures and indigenous ways of knowing. Redeeming it as ethnoscience does not grant the knowledge that epistemic citizenship requires. There is a more general ignorance of the complexity of things around us, a built-in ignorance which unravels as the problem unfolds into the future.

Paradigms subscribe to routines of thought which merely disguise the endemic ignorance of a system. Ways of knowing become ways of not-knowing, and sadly, we are unaware of it. There is also the general ignorance which unravels as the problem unfolds into the future. There is also the general ignorance of the complexity of things around us. After every crisis, we have to turn our paradigm upside down, question every epistemological structure, narrative and worldview. Our ignorance now demands that we examine the very fundamentals of our worldview and ask whether they are hindering our basic comprehension of the situation. The power and poetics of Sardar’s idea of the post normal begins with this essay on the sociology and epistemics of ignorance and reference to Funtowicz and Ravetz (Sardar 2017: 23).

Ziauddin Sardar shows the crisis is both knowledge-centred, and civilisational. Modernisation has lost its liquorice coatings of progress. Modernisation has to lose its hubris. One senses that the West as a civilisation touting modernisation will lose its charisma, its hegemony, and its power. The appeal of binary logic has collapsed and the old oppositions that tethered us to its conceptual connectivity do not hold. East and West are a connectivity, a reciprocity that we need to reread and recreate. Sardar suggests that mere labels for the crisis are dramatic and inadequate but words have to become lifeworlds, a phenomenology of experiencing, an autobiography of humility that we have to understand.

To grasp COVID and the Anthropocene, we are entering the annals of humility. Yet the language is not apocalyptic. We retain agency and responsibility as ethics returns to a more inventive, interpretive imagination. As a civics, the university as a knowledge system has to be reworked—we realise that interdisciplinarity alone is a cosmetic solution to such a crisis. We need a deeper plurality of a cultural and epistemic kind. Sardar suggests that it is time we realise Political Science is congealed ethnocentricity, economics, ironic in the way it adds to inequality and management, a hubris, which we have to reframe in terms of societal consequences rather than unilateral notions of control (Sardar 2017: 77). Only such an exercise of humility will create the pluralism, the non-violence and the knowledge needed to create peace. Sardar is echoing the sociology of Patrick Geddes from a different impetus where Knowledge and Peace sought a sacramental relationship. Sardar provides a classic example of unanticipated chaos through literally a fable of jellyfish (ibid.: 81). He shows that rising temperatures create an imbalance of behaviour as species migrate to adapt to rising temperature. While the jellyfish population has multiplied, they have become an obvious nuisance. In 1999, they clogged the Secal coal field plant in Philippines and 2006 went one better by clogging the coolant system of the world’s most advanced aircraft carrier, Ronald Regan. In 2018, a massive bloom of jellyfish clogged the Oskarshamn Nuclear plant and forced a shutdown. Rising temperature creates climatic chaos and unexpected consequences.

Sardar explains that one needs a different reading of an event. Events, he observes, are no longer local, separate in time and affecting a few individuals. The idea of the network has made such a paradigm of understanding outdated. One needs a new sense of connectivity and a different understanding of the value frames within which they have to be comprehended. Between humility and imagination, one hopes for an alternative view of the world which is more lifegiving. A neotechnic argument only creates an umbilical dependence on technology. One needs a new epistemics to liberate science and the social attitudes entrenched in it.

VI Reading Ziauddin Sardar

Ziauddin Sardar’s narrative has to be read as a comprehensive philosophy. Originally seen as an editorial farewell to Futures, it was more an intellectual inaugural to a wider world. Futurology might have become a narrow exercise of heuristic and technology, but its discoveries demanded a new imagination, a search for alternatives which went beyond the future as contiguity. One was confronting rupture, repair and reconstructions. The standard architectonic of the future has changed with emphasis on imaginaries adding worlds not yet dreamed of. The scale of Sardar’s narrative changes as epic and everyday combine and he shows that the post normal is enacted simultaneously at several levels from denial to continuous invention. We sense this discussion on three levels. The first Sardar is a storyteller, combining the worlds of the oral, textual and digital. Secondly, he unravels the changing nature of discourse, pursuing, plotting its career and meaning, the growing polysemy of keywords. Thirdly, he looks at a paradigm looking for new exemplars who can challenge the urge for reification, for manufactured normalcy. The three steps create a gradient of narratives making a transitional drama.

What Sardar reveals is the collapse of the old Enlightenment dualisms. Dualisms no longer provide the civics of thought as the development discourse of linear time breaks down. Time acquires a polysemic form as the Future becomes less of a monologic affair. The initial emphasis was on liberty and equality. Fraternity was treated as secondary and even less as plurality. Sardar demands the logic of a future that goes beyond monologue. He and Raimundo Panikkar (Panikkar 2010) suggest that the future is Kairological. It is an encounter with another, which leads to the discovery of a plural self. Between multiple time and uncertainty, the future goes beyond the catechism of science fiction. It demands an exorcism of words. Zombie words like the nation state or development are concepts which are no longer life-giving. The search for the plural is a playful enactment, where diversity becomes key. Pluralism is an encounter which celebrates diversity as difference, as multiple worlds. Binary dualisms and Aristotelian logic become outdated. The search is not for technological reliance but a search for a new metaphysic which helps us read technology and management in new ways. The sense of the plural adds to the playfulness of uncertainty.

In terms of hegemony, the standard logic of the Centre–Periphery model, where the periphery as margin merely consumes original thought, is less relevant. One needs a more a playful backyard–frontyard model where myth and language domesticate dominant thought. For Sardar, the intimacy of the migrant with Western thought lets him invent it in new ways. The emphasis is not on standard subaltern imagination but a dream of alternatives which rescues both, the oppressor and the oppressed. Sardar echoes Gandhi’s dream of the national movement as an effort to rescue the West from the hegemony, the procrustean fate of modernity. Now margin and alternatives also combine with the ideas of the defeated West to create the fecundity of a new reciprocal imagination. East and West are now polylogues moving into different futures.

The abandonment of Enlightenment dualism necessitates what Julia Kristeva (Saleem and Sweeney 2021: 126) calls the polylogue, a multiplicity of conversations, of epistemic encounters that breaks the hegemony of the monologic, rational West. It is an exorcism and a celebration of metaphysics, concepts and language, with a sense that the pilgrimage of ideas is far from complete. Such an exercise at the philosophical, cultural level cannot be conducted in secular terms. Secularism is a protestant self-punishment which desperately needs the creativity of the sacred. Secular time and the timetables of planning, so obsessive in the COVID era disappear. Linear time is no longer a prelude to a panopticon.

VII For a new Sociology of India

Ziauddin Sardar’s essay on the post normal opens up futurology beyond being a restrictive exercise to a set of new frames, inviting new debates. He also hints that the age of the positivist Comte’s outlining the predictability of linear stages is over. Science today is more mature and uncertain. Futurology demands a new imagination different from Utopia or Science Fiction. The new scenarios virtually become an effort in reconstructing both the social and the theories of knowledge. Sardar as a South Asian sets up a debate equally relevant for the West and South Asia.

In a strange way, he is reminiscent of the first professional sociologist, Patrick Geddes (Philip Boardman 1978), who taught at Bombay. British sociology has too often flattened Geddes into an urban planner. He was one of the founders of urban planning, but he was more. In fact, he was one of the greatest sociologists of knowledge and peace. He saw an organic relation between the two. Sardar’s post normal science sets the stage for polylogues and non-violent cultures. In this, he follows unconsciously the pathways established by Geddes.

Geddes, in fact, talked of a post Germanic science. He claimed he heard the sound of jackboots when he confronted German science. Geddes outlined a post Germanic science, seeing in J.C. Bose the first post Germanic scientist and in Gandhi, the first post Germanic politician. Coomaraswamy, in fact, claimed that the national movement was a search for a post-industrial society, a term he coined. Nationalism in India, rather than being tied to the past, was a vision of the future. It was an exercise in futurology. Gandhi’s critique of science and Western civilisation continues in the writings of Sardar.

One can also hyphenate science and the debates in nationalism and the vision of the post normal. Both are marked by a search for pluralism, which goes beyond the rigid geometry of Centre–Periphery models. Both wish to rescue the defeated, the marginal, the subaltern, the dream of alternatives and the defeated West. There is a reciprocity, a dialogicity in both, which must be recognised. In fact, the last fragments of a sociology for India debate, where Ashis Nandy writes of Bose, and JPS Uberoi discusses the role of science and Swaraj in science, sets the stage for Sardar’s entry to recreate the polylogues of pluralism across a multiplicity of time. Sardar, in that sense as a South Asian, sets the stage for a second act for a sociology of India.

It will be civilisational, cosmic, post enlightenment, most of all post global, moving away from speed and efficiency while seeking a return to the Earth as an idea. The three revolutions of the history of science—Copernican, Freudian, Darwinian—each of which revised man’s ethnocentric sense of himself, and the earth is now met by the fourth—the Anthropocene, where man confronts the devastation done to Earth. A sociology now has to be a cosmopolitan sociology beyond the dualisms of West/East, developed/undeveloped or Centre/Periphery analysis and accept man’s responsibility for the Earth. The stories recited about COVID merely anticipate the wider issues of science and the Anthropocene. The sociology of India/South Asia becomes an acceptance of the crisis of the Earth today. It is critical, plural and interdisciplinary; it calls for an imagination that creates a new sociology more cosmopolitan than the ethnocentricity of industrialism. In a way, one must add that JPS Uberoi, Ashis Nandy, C. V. Seshadari and Ziauddin Sardar are comrades, fellow pilgrims in the quest of alternatives. This conversation has been taking place informally as gossip. It needs to be formalised as script and theatre. It sets the stage for a different set of worlds and possibilities.

One should be grateful for such a perspective, multi-paradigmatic in its preference. Knowledge and politics combine to create a new gift—a sociology of knowledge which is a sociology of Peace. A new sense of this alternative as a dream recreates the power of the social, the pluralistic and the playful in the acts of cosmic, social and constitutional reinvention.