Aditya Sinha: Nationalism, the true existential crisis

Each morning last week, I woke up to horrific videos on my phone, via social media. On Saturday, during the failure of an attempted coup by sections of the Turkish military against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, there were two: one gory video showed a tank rapidly and relentlessly running over civilian protestors; another showed a military helicopter chasing protestors down a highway, firing laser-like bullets. This was the day after the videos of French families fleeing a killer truck in Nice; and after several days of videos of Kashmiri protestors being blinded in police action. This current round of terrorism - military terrorism, non-state jihadi terrorism, state terrorism - began the weekend before, when a US military veteran in Dallas used sniper tactics to kill five police officers in the latest chapter of America's downwardly spiralling race war.

A man injured by pellets in Sopore at Kashmir is taken to a hospital. Many protestors have been blinded in police action. Pic/AFP

Many would look for a pattern in these events and would recite glimpses of medieval history to concoct some millenia-long fantasy of global domination. That would be giving the human race too much credit. Whether it is a lone Dallas gunman, a "loner" trucker in Nice (later claimed by Islamic State as an opportunity too good to pass up), an "isolated" military unit attempting the coup, or the Kafkaesque State that shot "non-lethal" pellets into the eyes of leaderless Kashmiri kids: nothing links these events other than each event's meaninglessness. The only connection is the violence. There is no holding ideology; indeed the opposite. Each individual involved tried to give meaning to an empty existence - despite supranational groups trying to claim credit, or equally opportunistic national governments willing to hand credit over to convenient villains.

Existentialism is not a new philosophy: though credited to the late 19th century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard it actually gained wide acceptance after World War II, the horrific global event started by Europeans and lightening the planet of millions of souls. The twin terrorisms of concentration camps and nuclear bombing (of not one but two population centres) made many deny God's existence, or at least think that God had deserted them (hence the title of Samuel Beckett's play, Waiting for Godot. The Europeans launched an existential examination of the individual, giving him/her meaning by stripping away all labels and focusing on "existing" before "essence".

Existentialism, however, became discredited from the 1970s onwards, following the blowback against 1960s radicalism from conservative forces in society. With the world seemingly on fire nowadays, perhaps existentialism merits a revisit (John Macquarrie's Existentialism is a capable introduction).

Or perhaps this is just my overreaction to popular culture adding to our miasma of anxiety. Radiohead's recently-released A Moon Shaped Pool has a more paranoid, self-loathing, panic-inducing, alienating sound than usual - with nightmarish lyrics ("Burn the witch/Burn the Witch/We know where you live"). Coincidentally I also recently read the emotionally-draining but magnificent 1965 novel, John Edward Williams' Stoner, whose hero, William Stoner, a man of the earth, joins a University, a refuge for the study of the timeless. He marries the wrong woman, someone trapped in the mistakes of time (her own marriage is a repeat of her parents', using an only daughter as its battleground). Yet he exists. The novel celebrates his existentialism.

Watching other people's kids getting shot in the eyes or trampled by tanks, I wondered if mine suffered existential angst. Nope. They're too busy roaming the lanes outside, healthy eyes glued to phones as they play Pokemon Go. Even at our local shopping plaza these guys are looking at their phones, passing by acquaintances who also don't notice them because they too are busy trying to catch those pesky Pokemons. Presumably these kids are also simply existing, stripped away of labels or paradigms that the politicians or the media try to lock them into. I just don't know. Or maybe this is merely another symptom of globalisation's tentacles taking control of our individual lives, facilitating our apathy against increasing violence, both state and non-state. I shudder to think that our dystopian future includes a scenario where terrorism or militarised police action become as commonplace as murder or rape.

Even worse, existentially, is that each of the recent events presents a Hobson's choice. You can support neither a police that kills innocents nor a war-vet that kills cops; you can support neither a secular military that wishes to overthrow a democratic government, nor the strongman President who openly dreams of reviving an Islamic Caliphate; you can support neither the terrorists from former Muslim colonies, nor the nativist Europeans who, having built magnificent cities upon colonial wealth, now seek to exclude their former subjects. Luckily, in India, our moral choice is clear: boys whose vision has been blacked out, over the hardline government with a myopic vision of the nation.

The true existential crisis of our times, thus, is nationalism.

Senior journalist Aditya Sinha is a contributor to the recently published anthology House Spirit: Drinking in India. He tweets @autumnshade. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com