The Tyranny of the Persecuted

The last fifty years of European thought have taught us some very useful lessons. For one, it has become clearer than ever before how what was proclaimed throughout the world as 'modernity' (with its emphases on 'externalised' and 'objective' truth) was, in fact, a socio-historical construct specific to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of European civilisation. In the process of its forced propagation (through its 'meta-narratives' such as 'science', 'colonialism', and the like), the voices of various groups of people such as the slaves, the Blacks, the religious, the womenfolk, the Gypsies, and others were repressed, and these people themselves were thrown into a great anonymous heap which was banished from the 'public square'.

Now we have learnt the art of what is called the 'hermeneutics of suspicion' : we immediately suspect anyone who gives us 'grand theories', or claims that his/her world-view will make the world a 'happier place', or announces a coming Revolution, or propounds a view that claims to be 'universal'. So massive indeed is the weight of this suspicion that has slowly sunk into us that it has begun to exercise a paralysing effect on us, 'we the post-modern'. We scorn any politician/poet/thinker/writer who promises the world anything better as someone who is, at worst, a bungling trickster, or, at best, a naive chap, and go about excavating into his /her past life to explain why s/he happens to be making such childish promises. So overwhelmed are we, at least in the Academy, by the darkness of the colonial past of Europe that we have started to believe that whatever 'theory' comes out of Europe must be subject to the greatest possible suspicion (if not actually rejected at once), and that whatever views come out of the post-colonial world must be printed and circulated, irrespective of how plausible these latter views may be. The demand that the views of the once-persecuted people must be heard at any cost is suddenly felt, in some circles of the academy and the media, to be more important than the demand that these views must also be truthful, meaningful and coherent. (Indeed, the latter demand for 'truth' itself is demonised as 'imperialistic'. Which is highly ironical because most, if not all, independence movements, such as the Indian, were based by their leaders on a search for the truth.)

This state of affairs could perhaps be described as the tyranny that the once-persecuted come to exercise, after their liberation, over their previous persecutors. For example, British/American writers are upraided and penalised at once if one detects in their texts even the faintest trace of racism, 'Islamophobia', imperialism, colonialism, and such heresies. On the other hand, an ever-burgeoning literature from the post-colonial world is allowed to go scot-free with its 'constructed ignorance' of the 'West' as a land of intrinsic immorality, depravity, selfishness, fragmentation, and every possible evil. My intention here is not to deny in the least that racism and 'Islamophobia' remain, sadly, only too grim and ever-present realities in the 'Western' world; but that for the very same reason that we refuse to allow 'Islamophobia' to receive a public sanction, we must also reject in the same breath the post-colonial world's construction of 'Westernophobia'.

To declare that the post-colonial nations of the world must today be allowed to speak with whatever voice suits them merely because they had been persecuted once upon a time in the past is, in effect, to invite groups of people to invent a scale of 'comparative martyrdom', and situate themselves on that scale with respect to others (though, in truth, every group would want to place itself at the highest end of this scale). To put it in other words, one must not confuse 'truth' with what might be called 'populism', although nowadays this confusion is sometimes made within the academic world itself.

I shall conclude with one example of this. 'European science' occupies a very high position in the demonology of (certain strands of) feminist literature. These strands of 'feminism' tell us that this science, with its associated notions of 'rationality' and consequent development of 'technology', has produced untold evils, led to the destruction of the environment, marginalised women as 'sentimental', resulted in the exploitation of the colonies, and so on and on. As a historical report of the evils that 'science' has committed in the past and as a warning of what it can inflict on us in the near future, this feminist analysis is impeccable in its 'reading' of the past and its 'prognosis' for the future. However, one can accept of all this and declare, at the same time, that this feminist analysis has not impugned, in the least, the 'truth' of scientific theories. Shall we reject Newton's laws as false because Newton was a man, or discard Einstein's theory of relativity to the intellectual dustbin because of its author's masculinity? Such scientific theories may be the product of the 'male mind' (whatever that is), but unless feminism establishes, beyond any reasonable doubt, that there is a logically necessary connection between 'products of a male mind' and 'falsity', a scientist/mathematician cannot but reply that the feminist has not even raised the interesting question of what the criteria for truth are.

Here then is another example where we must indeed listen to the persecuted, women in this case, but this without giving in to the 'populist' stance that feminism has found the 'royal road to truth'. Because we men may happen to be suffering from the guilty conscience of having persecuted our women-folk in the past, we do not now need to add intellectual sloppiness to our guilt by declaring that feminism has settled, once and for all, the question of 'truth'. Indeed, in a somewhat ironical manner, it might turn out that this bland equation of feminism with the truth is actually a subtle and masked refusal to listen to what feminists are actually trying to say, in the manner of an impatient husband who declares to his wife : 'All right, all right, whatever you say is the truth. Now please keep your mouth shut!'