And people are turning against narratives continually clashing, like cymbals in a shaadi band — because of the noise and shrillness they produce in our politics and over our airwaves. Obama’s “inclusiveness” received an overwhelming response from those in America who thought that partisanship was poisoning their politics. Closer home, the growing distance between the BJP and the Congress is beginning to cause concern; and the tone and tenor of television news is being questioned, not least from within that industry.

So where do we look for answers? One illustrious career might help. Samuel Huntington, the Harvard political scientist, died last week. Since the late ’60s, he had been one of the most influential of public intellectuals. Surely, one might think, he represents all that our idea-generating professionals need to recover. And his career is indeed something we can learn from, just not so simply.

The truth is that Huntington, a tremendously erudite man and endlessly fascinating talker, was throughout something of a harbinger of such trouble. Consider the “clash of civilisations” thesis, for which he is best known: that the world is divided by civilisational boundaries, and those — between the “Christian”, “Muslim” and “Hindu” worlds, for example — alone matter. This is something that has been endlessly challenged in the academy, and has been as close to being debunked as it is possible to, given that it is so far from specific; and yet it lives on in political discussion, trotted out to support arguments otherwise untenable and incoherent. Consider also his breakout work in the ’60s, Political Order in Changing Societies: it argued that in developing countries, the search for “order” was more desirable than the search for democratisation — something that fit in nicely with the need then universally felt in the free world to find a moral justification for its support of dictatorships elsewhere. Both when disagreeing and when agreeing, Huntington’s work isn’t the solution.

... contd.