The Academic Roulette!

This is how one internet dictionary defines the term Russian Roulette : A stunt in which one spins the cylinder of a revolver loaded with only one bullet, aims the muzzle at one's head, and pulls the trigger. If you happen to be even vaguely associated with academic life, you might wish to participate some day in what I shall call here the Academic Roulette.

There are six players in this deadly war of wits, the Academic Roulette, each of them standing for some -ism or the other, and these can range from Buddhism to feminism to liberalism to ecologism to atheism to Marxism. Let us say that one of these players is a Marxist, but none of the other five are aware of her political beliefs, theories, and affiliations. We could say that all six academics are behind the Veil of Ignorance : nobody knows what the world-view of the person sitting next to her is. Now this Marxist is made to drink a cup of poison, and is given exactly 60 minutes to convince the other five that she is, in fact, a thoroughbred capitalist. If the other five believe that she has provided a reasonable vindication of capitalist theory and practice (irrespective of what they think she really is), she will be allowed to drink an antidote to the poison at the sixtieth minute : otherwise, she dies.

And the same goes for the rest. The Buddhist academic will have to convince the other five academics that she is, in fact, a Muslim; the atheist that she is a Greek Orthodox Christian; the feminist that she is a victim of domestic violence; the American libertarian that she is a follower of Chairman Mao Zedong; and, finally, the ecologist that she is a defender of Globalisation.

(I have added the bit about the poison only to 'spice up' this Roulette business. On a different note, however, I believe that it is extremely important for all human beings, whether or not they are inside the academy, to acquire the skills, intellectual, social and political, to become able to play this Academic Roulette. This is because quite often it is only by trying to present another person's view in her own words, trying to see her world through her own eyes, and trying to walk her mile in her own skin, that we may come a bit closer to understanding what she is really trying to say. This is not to say that we shall actually succeed in this endeavour, but that we may nevertheless wish to make the attempt.)