I

We are told that these are post-truth times. While we may struggle to grasp the full portent of the term, we do experience the surreal world of fake news. We also hear the constant buzz that everything is about optics and perception. This is a global trend, but closer home in India, we have seen a surge in this since 2014. The parliamentary elections held that year have often been described as India’s first social media-driven election. Since then, the story has become murkier and more vicious. Central to this battle has been contending ideas of Indian nationalism.  The two related questions that have acquired unmatched stridency is ‘Who is the authentic Indian’ and who is the ‘anti national’?  

Worldviews in these times are absolute, with no space either for discussion or dialogue. Once labelled a Bhakt, a Sickular, a Chinki, a Terrorist who should go back to Pakistan, one is slotted for good. The accusations pile up, and the trolling gathers steam. Clearly, the intent is not a conversation of why one holds a certain set of beliefs and not another. That is a question perhaps for sociologists and social scientists. This matter of how reality and knowledge are linked has a long history in sociology. And perhaps the time has come to engage with the key questions that sociology of knowledge raises.

II

Sociology of knowledge is not so much about intellectual histories as it is about everyday beliefs and practices. And central to everyday practices is its certainty and taken for granted nature. It is a given, sacrosanct. Durkheim recognised it early, arguing that sociology would ruffle sentiments and people are unlikely to appreciate sociological examination of topics such as religion or nationalism. [i]

Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman stated that “reality is socially constructed and that the sociology of knowledge must analyse the process in which this occurs”. [ii]  The keyword is the process, the making of. Mannheim had argued the same point about the social conditioning of knowledge. And Marx had argued – that consciousness is a definite form of human activity. [iii] In a polarised world, we need to return to some of their ideas. In this essay, I argue the need to engage with the sociology of knowledge, perhaps to pries open spaces for communication and dialogue. 

Karl Mannheim opens his book Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge with these words in the expanded English edition of 1936: [iv] The book is concerned with how men think and how it functions in public life and politics as an instrument of collective action. The principal thesis of the sociology of knowledge is that there are modes of thought which cannot be adequately understood as long as their social origins are obscure and historical social situation given amiss.

As Berger and Luckman mention, the layperson does not normally engage with the nature of ‘reality. A quote may be in order here.

The man in the street does not ordinarily trouble himself about what is ‘real’ to and about what he ‘knows’ unless he is stopped short by some problem. He takes his ‘reality’ and his ‘knowledge’ for granted. The sociologist cannot do, only because of his systematic awareness that men in the street take quite different ‘realities’ for granted as between one society and another. The sociologist is forced by the very logic of his discipline to ask, if nothing else, whether the difference between the two ‘realities’ may not be understood in relation to various differences between the two societies. [v]

Berger and Luckman’s taken for granted use of ‘man’ to refer to ‘all genders’ draw attention to the contingent nature of knowledge and the matter of social conditioning that they seek to elaborate!

The layperson(s) is unlikely to engage with scientific debates on herd immunity and how religious cures are, in most cases, placebo. In a sense, a similar dissonance may exist between different understandings of social reality by varying cultures. What perhaps sets apart a sociological/anthropological approach as distinct from the layperson’s approach is the willingness to suspend judgements and accept that all people’s social reality is ‘constructed’.

A medical expert (by virtue of the methods of inquiry) is obliged to make evident by which a claim to an idea is being made. There are established procedures for validation and, importantly, invalidation. A medical expert has to perforce to ask how certain human bodies react to antigens (and how some do not), thereby leaving some people asymptomatic to a disease while being a carrier. Thus, come to terms with an understanding of how herd immunity may be achieved. There is an established protocol in place, explicitly stated assumptions, methods, logic and willingness to invalidate one’s findings and revise knowledge.  In short, the expert one can argue concerned with a certain form of truth.

A sociologist is also concerned with truth but with the added occupational hazard that there are, in fact, multiple truths (layperson’s knowledge) owing to the unmistaken empirical observation that there are many kinds of societies. It is this linkage of ideas and kinds of societies that alter the nature of sociological argumentation. The truth may be different from one society to the next, but they hold quite steady within the domain of their operation.

Thus, sociology of knowledge is something that concerns itself not only with the multitudes of realities and knowledge about those realities within their specific contexts but also with the conditions of possibilities that allows for those knowledges to exist. The specific mode of inquiry also investigates how knowledge becomes socially acceptable and for its social reproduction to occur.

Here, however, one must be wary of organic analogies and social autopoiesis as explanations. This suggests that humans do not exercise agency to either ensure the reproduction of accepted ‘knowledges and beliefs or question them. Further social institutions exercise power and ensure the production and reproduction of dominant ideas. The role of modern states in this cannot be emphasised enough.  And populist majoritarian states have the power to both produce and disseminate ‘knowledge’ that suits them. Usually, this knowledge is the lay knowledge of dominant groups, now rendered legitimate.  

An illustration of the relevance of sociological inquiries into everyday knowledge-making goes deep into the roots of the problems we are familiar with in today’s India –

1. Instances of religious violence of both the symbolic and belligerent kind that have their roots in the conviction to a certain way of knowing a society’s history,
2. The proliferation of fake news mobilising the waves of populism that supports political action that gains from religious dogmatism,
3. The reduced effectiveness of democratic protests movements inundated by short news cycles of the Media that fuels the short-term memory of the public,
4. Digital algorithms fostering the development of opaque echo-chambers such that people now form ‘tribalistic’ camps convinced by their own preferred truths
5. The inability of the (political) state to adapt to new challenges that this society faces due to the lack of a common accepted knowledge of nationhood.

For the political dispensation of BJP’s India, only the Idea of a Hindu Rashtra is nationhood. One is not a part of the nation unless one is aligned with the approved knowledge of the state. As is evident from the revoking of Article 370 and the ensuing push for the implementation of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) of 2019, today’s India is one that goes against the agreed-upon reality enshrined in its Constitution. Diversity, instead of being a nation’s pride, becomes an obstacle.

The question I ask is – how has meritocracy [vi] impacted the social mobility & presence of people of Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Class (OBC) categories in the knowledge discourse? What is the connection between what I know and believe to be true (for myself and others) as an individual with a certain way of looking at things (that may or may not change) and the society that I am part of, which is independent of me, but somehow exercises tremendous control over the communication of said knowing and believing? Gatekeepers to the same organisations hold tremendous power in this regard, and should they somehow exercise it with impunity, and perhaps even be motivated with ill intent (as seen in the case of the caste discrimination at IIT Kharagpur) [vii], the accountability held against them to check such practices are minimal and palliative, with little indication as to stem the systemic rot.

It is productive to reiterate that Mannheim argues in this 1936 introduction that it takes a certain level of complexity of society to permit us to even begin to notice the specific and controvertible presuppositions of our knowledge frameworks. “Essentially, this is the period in which people with different interests and life situations come into communicative interaction with each other. Disagreement raises the possibility of cognitive criticism”. [viii]

[i] Emile Durkheim. 1895. {1982}. The Rules of Sociological Method. New York: The Free Press.

[ii] Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Anchor.

[iv] https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2012/01/sociology-of-knowledge-mannheim.html, accessed on 10^th July 2021.

[iii] Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. 1845.  {1998}. The German Ideology: Including Thesis on Feuerbach (Great Books in Philosophy). Prometheus Books.  

[v] Berger and Luckman ibid.

[vi]  Allusions to merit has always paralleled anti-reservation rhetoric and the phenomena is resilient among the privileged within and outside of caste. The production of knowledge, that is new ways of knowing, is bracketed to include only those who usually fall in line with the dominant discourses of the day. https://thewire.in/caste/merit-caste-reservation-medical-colleges, accessed on 15^th July 2021.

[vii]  Corollary to meritocracy is the blatant manifestation of violence (belligerent & symbolic) that have sparked mass outrage but are yet to be dealt with decisively, leaving the concerned stakeholders against such injustices outside of popular discourse.  https://science.thewire.in/education/seema-singh-iit-kharagpur-students-marginalised-caste-backgrounds-higher-education-casteism/, accessed on 15^th July.

[viii] https://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2012/01/sociology-of-knowledge-mannheim.html, accessed on 10^th July 2021.

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Kitdor W. Kharbuli is pursuing his PhD in the Centre for the Study of Social Systems (CSSS), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi.