writ a note on : self-relionce in the field of securiy
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The pandemic has led to a renewed reflection on what it means to be self-reliant in terms of our everyday practices. Nations too follow this logic in their own claims of self-reliance. This paper discusses the implications in these claims of self-reliance in the context of the nation by positioning this claim within the tension between two different formulations of the self: self of the nation as against the idea of national self.
In this essay, I want to explore the notion of self-reliance in the context of the nation in a very limited way. On the one hand, the term ‘self-reliance’ needs little philosophical reflection since its meanings are seemingly apparent. In fact, in our common usage of this term, the word ‘self’ plays very little part. It primarily functions in terms of inside-outside: self-reliance means nothing more than not to be reliant on the outside (others) but even this simple meaning has deep assumptions about inside-outside, self-other and so on. While this is a common usage of this term, in this essay I want to argue that there is a hidden function of the many meanings related to the self. These multiple approaches and paradoxes about the self arise in the many different questions about self-reliance. There are many different ways to understand the meaning of ‘self’, ranging from the ontological to the narratological. I do not want to enter into these different formulations but will focus on one implication of invoking the self in a term that has pragmatic considerations for the functions of a nation. I begin with some reflections on the question of the self during COVID. What I say here are some preliminary remarks to motivate the reason for critically focussing on the meaning of self in self-reliance. Then I try and attempt to understand why the notion of the self (which is so much related to the individual) is invoked in the context of the nation. What is in the understanding of a nation that allows the possibility of linking the nation to a self? I suggest that there are two primary ways of understanding the meaning of a self in relation to the nation: self of a nation and a national self. The implications of these two formulations are quite distinct and have differing implications on the meaning of self-reliance.
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a special problem that has to do with the relationship between the self and the society. The social pre-COVID was a field which catered to individual interests—from security, health, infrastructure and travel to shopping. What the pandemic really destroyed was our access to the social world, a world in which others performed their work on behalf of others. Labour itself was oriented around this act of distributing the tasks that one had to do for oneself. Restaurants took care of the individual’s need for cooking one’s own food, schools took care of the children (at least for a major part of the day), hospitals took control of health (much of which could have been in the hands of individuals themselves) and so on. Pre-COVID we were a society that increasingly developed a sense of the social defined through dependency. That was not a social that came together through friendship or kinship or as members working towards a common goal. The society itself was moving more and more towards not just a service economy but a service society, where the very idea of the social was reduced to a system designed to take care of the interests of individuals. Shopping malls were a literal exemplification of this social in urban areas.
Technology plays a major role in this subordination of the individual to the society since the basic functions of the individual were outsourced to technology. Right from the beginning, the ideal of technology was to replace manual labour—labour characterized as routine, as a drudgery and not having sufficient value. Thus, labour associated with hard physical work was slowly replaced by machines and household labour by women was taken up by technologies such as the washing machine. The aim of this view of technology was that eventually all human actions—particularly those that were repetitive and monotonous—could be completely outsourced to machines. This view of technology has become so much a part of our very understanding of a society that the great chess player, Gary Kasparov (2017), in his book Deep Thinking extends the promise of new digital technologies by arguing that now they can take care of ‘menial’ mental tasks which includes the human capabilities of memory, recall, calculating and so on.