Living with Paradoxes

The word 'paradox' is perhaps one of the words that should be avoided by those who regard themselves to be 'straight-thinkers'. A straight-thinker I shall define as someone who believes that his/her ontological landscape must be populated by as few entities as possible, and that there is a necessary connection between 'truth' and this 'depopulation'. Consequently, anything that smacks of the paradoxical will appear to such a person as an invitation for woolly-headed thinking, or simply as an excuse for intellectual laziness. Arguably, such straight-thinking is the only one that is allowed today within the boundaries of West European and American academies.

The irony of the matter, however, lies in that even such straight-thinkers, especially those who believe that we are steeped in a 'post-modern' culture, live a somewhat paradoxical existence. Here are three examples to illustrate my point :

(a) One of widely-hailed features of the Academy is its alleged rejection of authority. You might, in the confines of your private life, accept the authority of the Pope, your next-door pastor, your neighbourly mullah, your grandparents, and so on and on, but inside the Academy, so runs the story, you shall not accept any authorities. But do academics themselves really allow their proteges to live by such an absolute rejection of authority? As a matter of fact, it so happens that much of academic life is deeply divided along lines of disciplines and sub-disciplines, and academics in each of these try hard to maintain these intellectual boundaries, and delegate to their students the thankless task of policing them very carefully against infiltrators. So that, for example, a student of sociology who might wish to take a peek at what anthropologists in the next room are doing might need, for all the supposed rejection of authority, to take the permission of his/her supervisor, and if this permission is denied to bow down to his/her authority. (And, of course, similar boundary disputes between philosophy and theology, economics and history, political theory and sociology, the 'hard sciences' and psychology, 'pure mathematics' and 'applied/applicable sciences', and so on, are legion.) So, then : Has authority really been rejected in/by the academic world? What has, in fact, happened is that many academics (though not all) have taken the following stance : 'Reject all possible sources of authority --- reject the Pope, reject your elders, and every one else. But do not reject My authority for I shall be a God unto you.'

Which is why the proclaimed academic rejection of authority verges on the paradoxical.

(b) The Academy, and especially its humanities departments, talk a lot nowadays about the death of the subject/author/viewer/reader. The tag 'death of the author' is taken to mean that his/her subjectivity has been annihilated, and that his/her 'personal' views do not matter. It is all 'relative', so goes the 'story', and this is a 'story' that continues to be 'narrated' in an endless number of places starting from the coridoors of academic power to the coffee-houses which conveniently forget to 'deconstruct' this power. It therefore is surely amazing that book after book continues to be written by post-modernist writers with their (personal) names on the very first page of those books. If the subject has been truly annihilated, such books should come to us with their author's names erased from them. Not only that, such writers take offence to criticisms of their views with replies such as : 'But you did not understand my point', or 'You have got me wrong', or 'That is not what I was trying to say'. Whence the justification for such responses if the first-person stance has been dissolved? To be a truly consistent post-modernist, the writer should say : 'Oh, is that what you have made of my writings?' and not, 'You missed my point', for if the subject is truly dead, there is no 'right' or 'wrong' way of singing an elegy for this death.

It might seem a trivial point to make, and indeed, in a sense it is, for to attain perfect consistency in thought and action is a privilege that is not granted to us mortals. However, consider this. Many books translated from say Latin/Greek to French/English/German by members of Catholic orders such as the Benedictines or the Dominicans sometimes come to us without the names of the writers on them. If anything, it would therefore seem that it is these Catholic members (who still hold on, in various ways, to some form of 'modernity'!) who have attained (or come much closer to attaining) the true annihilation of the subject than their post-modernist brethren.

Therefore, to claim that the author is dead, and to put this very claim in a book with the author's name on its first page has a hint of the paradoxical.

(c) The Academy swears by a motto that has now even entered into what might be called popular jargon : 'Let a thousand flowers bloom'. We are invited to savour the mental image of a beautiful garden that stretches on mile after mile, filled with every possible floral delight. The trouble with this idyllic image, though, is this : we know that even a Garden of Paradise is filled with inner dissensions, that it quakes now and then with soft rumblings. To carry on with the horticultural image, every gardener knows that to keep a garden beautiful, one requires to uproot, every now and then, all kinds of nasty weeds. We may very well wish that a thousand flowers should bloom in our garden, but what about those subterranean weeds?

Now I take it that some of the most vocal opponents of President Bush's war in Iraq are members of the academy in Western Europe and America. But if they are to call themselves post-modernists, whence this distress? Indeed, if I were to be a full-fledged proponent of post-modernism and also a member of Bush's inner circle, I could turn the tables on the post-modernists and retort, on Bush's behalf : 'Well, you see, we need to have a garden with a thousand flowers, as you yourself admit. This war on Iraq happens to be one of these flowers. Too bad you see it is a weed, I am sorry!'

In other words, a post-modernist who claims that the war on Iraq is 'illegal' must stop swearing by that shibboleth of a garden-with-a-thousand-flowers, and rather do some botanical home-work on setting down rules to distinguish a flower from a weed. Such home-work, however, is far from being started in most of these academic circles which, therefore, seem to be quite happy to live with the paradox of claiming : 'We do need a garden with a thousand flowers, but it is we who reserve the right to pronounce what a flower should look like!'