Why Solidarity Is Not (Yet) Dead

Our generation will perhaps go down in history as that group of tolerance-intoxicated overgrown teenagers who believed that -D-i-f-f-e-r-e-n-c-e- was the final word on any matter. We have a tremendous zest (bordering on an obsessive compulsive disorder) for open-endedness, open-mindedness, playfulness, multifariousness, plurality, multiplicity, variance, dissimilarity, divergence, heterogeneity, and variety (just count the number of words that I have used in this sentence to mean pretty much the same thing!). So deeply anti-universalist have we become that we need, in fact, a bit of reminding that mere Difference is never an end in itself, and that certain forms of particularism, parochialism, and ethnocentrism can be as vicious as spurious forms of universalism. I agree that 'Western' universalisms have often degenerated into the exclusivisms of the White (Protestant) Male, but those of us who belong to the post-colonial world should not now pay back the Western Man an inverted compliment by constructing newer kinds of myopic exclusivisms based on language, race, culture, or ethnicity.

To see why it is facile to claim that heterogeneity and divergence are absolute and ultimate goods, consider the following in the context especially of Indian politics. Shall we exalt the variability of norms and usher in a carnivalesque utopia in which we invite four or five fascist parties to join the tea-party with buttered scones and mozarella pizzas? Or forcefully oppose the resolution, even if temporary, of conflicts for the sake of diffusivity and allow Indian patriarchs to have yet another go at the womenfolk? Or why not even invite some British imperialists from Lancashire and ask them to take over the country's reins for a week, as it used to be in the good old days, just to show how seriously we Indians take our celebration of diversity?

Enough, then, of our obsessiveness for displaying distinctiveness, divergence, and distinction. Ironically, to claim that we human beings are absolutely Different from one another and let the matter rest at that is a disguised version of (neo-)Imperialism. We need a sharp rap on our knuckles to be liberated from our astigmatic particularisms, and to be cautioned that it was by singing delightful paens to the enchanting goddess of Difference that the oppression of human beings (for example, of women and of the natives) has been legitimised in the past. And this oppression is being continued into the present day by our failure to see that unless we develop an ethic of human reciprocity we shall continue to have a domineering and assimilative relationship with that anonymous heap that we so blandly label (and then discard) as the 'Other'. (It was views of this nature that led Jean-Paul Sartre, at one stage of his career, to declare : 'Hell is Other people'.)

The ultimate aim of our political culture can never be the establishment of Difference as the eschatological goal, this goal rather lies in the recovery of richer dimensions of inter-subjectivity and in the fostering of a social order where human beings can rediscover through relationships of ever-deepening mutuality the springs of compassion, solidarity, amity, and concord. And this alone, and not the currently fashionable views which dismissively lump together women, prisoners, natives, gays, and dissidents as the faceless and nameless 'Other', can truly be called a morality of reciprocal Other-directedness.

Amaro Porano Jaha Chay
One of the ironies in my life (and this one has a tragic ring about it) is the fact that I have lost my childhood fluency in Bengali, a language that I believe is infinitely more beautiful, more melodious, more playful, and more delightful than English which can get rather drab at times and which is the language that now permeates my entire being. Indeed, I like to divide the world not along national lines but along linguistic ones so that I instinctively feel more comfortable in the presence of a Bengali-speaker from Dhaka, London, or New York than a Hindi-speaker from Patna, an Assamese-speaker from Tezpur (Assamese and not Bengali, by the way, is my native tongue), or a Tamil-speaker from Chennai. Indeed, if I were to meet a Bengali-speaker in Islamabad, I would willingly fraternize with the enemy. Does this make me a linguistic chauvinist? Yes, and No. No, because this is not to say that Bengali-speakers have by virtue of their speaking Bengali attained the pinnacle of Humanity (whatever that is). But Yes, because only native speakers of Bengali know what those who cannot read Rabindranath Tagore in the original are missing out in life. (Still not satisfied? You insist that when two Bengalis meet each other, they should speak not in Bengali but in English? My!My!My! Is that not another disguised form of linguistic chauvinism? One in favour of English?)

Irony As A Political Weapon : Diamonds And Dogs


Irony, in the Socratic sense of this term, is the adoption of an attitude of pretended ignorance when talking to a person so as to to allow her to present her views on a certain matter in a relaxed manner. In this blog, however, I use the term 'irony' in a more political sense to mean a device through which I pretend to accept some of the dominant self-images of my generation precisely to expose their inner contradictions. (And to the extent that I have made it clear how I understand and use this term, I am a Transparent Ironist.) For example, you will often find me arguing against 'tolerance' not because I am an intolerant bigot who believes that atheists should be burnt at the stake but because atheism itself may sometimes become a disguised version of intolerance. Again, I occasionally argue against relativism (the view that no trans-cultural dialogue is possible) not because I believe that European values can be readily universalised and exported to the colonies, but because relativism itself may masquerade as a subtle form of universalism. Irony can turn out to be an especially powerful weapon when discussing gender issues, and to see how it can subvert/invert some established dualities between 'masculinity' and 'feminity', consider the following nest of ironies about Diamonds and Dogs.

We are regularly told that diamonds are a woman's best friend. Perhaps so. But rarely are we informed that a woman who buys this dictum is also the best friend of the diamond merchant in whose factory underpaid women labour from morning till midnight. So here is the cycle : A diamond merchant, usually a man, sells the idea that it is cool for women to buy diamonds, and women fall for this trap and buy them little realising that it is yet another 'male conspiracy'. And what about the menfolk? Well, dogs definitely are men's best friends. Dogs are so awwwwww, so cuuuute, and so cho chweet; they are indeed the most beautiful thing that God ever created (except, of course, the men themselves). Someone called Madame de Stael even remarked that the more she saw of dogs, the more they reminded her of men. With such nonsense being hurled at them, can we blame men for complaining that life is a bitch?

The Ambivalence Of The Absolute

A short note in this respect. If you happen to be living in the 'West' (which, it seems, is nowadays everywhere else too), it is highly possible that you have been trained, asked, 'brainwashed',or even compelled to develop an attitude of uneasy ambivalence towards the Absolute. On the one hand, there is tremendous peer pressure on you not to accept any Absolutes whatsoever. If you do so, you do at your own peril : you shall immediately become a social outcast. Instead, you must resolutely oppose the notion that there are absolute truths, and rather celebrate the 'liberal' values of tolerance and co-existence. Very well. But on the other hand, you do not quite follow this advice at all times, do you? Every now and then you seem to complain that women are being oppressed in Afghanistan, that Stalinist totalitarianism is a descent into barbarism, that Pakistan is veering towards dictatorship, and that Syria is harbouring terrorists. Where are your grounds for such complaints if you oppose the idea that there cannot be any absolutes in principle? The four absolutes that women should not be oppressed anywhere, that the legacy of Stalinism must be eradicated, that dictatorships must be condemned in all places, and that terrorism must be uprooted from all countries?

Oh! My God!

God To The Transparent Ironist (TI) : Do you believe that I exist?

TI : Here we go again! It depends pretty much on who you think you are. If you are that reality that sustains the world from moment to moment keeping it from falling apart into absolute nothingness and is active within and through it trying to remove from it all forms of suffering, I affirm your existence. If, however, you are anything short of that, your existence or non-existence is simply, as we say, an academic dispute that can (and must) be postponed until we have done our own bit to reduce one another's suffering.

God : Do you believe in life after death?

TI : If post-mortem existence will be one when the suffering of all human beings will be removed, that is a life that I look forward to. The basic point, however, is that I also believe in life before death.

God : Do you believe that I shall send those who do not turn towards me into eternal damnation?

TI : That you may very well do; indeed, given the occasional lapses in your wisdom, there are times when I fear that you are going to do just that one of these days. In that case, however, you are no better than a bloated cosmic Patriarch who is so easily rebuffed or wounded by those who reject Him that He delights in their lasting perdition. You are not, I hope, a second-grade school teacher who, offended by her pupil's refusal to trust in her teaching, banishes her forever from her ministration. Surely, if you are truly infinite you can do better than such a human master by working in the world until the end of time when everyone has arrived at a lasting communion with you, if indeed this is the ultimate end that you have proposed for the created order.

God : Do you believe that the pervasiveness of suffering in the world disproves my existence?

TI : No, it does not, for I accept that suffering is a mystery whose depths I cannot penetrate with my human mind. However, I am also pretty much sure that I would not be writing this if I were dying of cancer or going through some other agony, and to such people you have a lot of explaining to do as to why it is better that the world exists 'in the first place' than it does not. What difference does the existence of the world make to you? Why is it a valuable thing for you that a world exists?

God : So you think that I, God, can be tried at the court of human reason?

TI : Yes, and No. Yes, because the scandal of the presence of apparently gratuitous suffering in this world remains a stumbling-block for me even when I wish to affirm your omnibenevolence. I have not yet found a reasonable and convincing explanation as to why you had to create or produce the world, what difference it makes to the plenitude or fullness of your infinite Being that a finite world exists through your sustenance, and how the temporal experiences of suffering and miserable human beings in this world add to the richness of your immutable existence. In spite of all these questions, however, I also do not have the confidence that the human mind is a resource powerful enough in itself to categorically affirm what cannot exist in principle. It may be the case that in some way that I simply do not know all our human experiences 'make sense' from some transcendent perspective, a perspective to which I have no access. I do not deny the existence of such a perspective (only affirm that I have not attained it so far, that is, in the year 2005), and to this limited extent, I also hold that you cannot be tried at the court of our finite reason.

God : Do you pray to me?

TI : I pray that you shall remove the suffering of the world, both in this existence and in the putative post-mortem one. Now if it turns out that you do not exist in reality, and that I have been praying all this while to a shadowy entity, it will not change anything so far as the suffering of human beings is concerned, though it will lead me to greater despair. But if you do exist, I hope that you shall answer my prayer in whatever way you can.

God : Why are you not a member of any specific religious tradition?

TI : Because I fear that if I join any religious group, I shall perforce have to blaspheme your name. The ultimate blasphemers of you are not those who deny your existence but those who claim that you are so much like an ordinary human school-teacher that you can be overwhelmed with ire, fury, and wrath at a finite creature's inability to trust in you.

God : But I have indeed appeared to one of my servants in the desert and told him that those who do not follow him and thereby return to Me shall be punished. Do you dispute this?

TI : No, I do not; you may indeed have manifested yourself to such a servant of yours. But if it is indeed the case that those human beings who, for various reasons, are not able to trust him and consequently in you shall have to endure everlasting torment, I would say that the very purpose of creating this world is defeated. For surely, if you created the world in spite of knowing at the moment of creating it that a significant proportion of humanity would move away from you, my finite human reason cannot but see this creation as a colossal waste. Why would you wish to create a world associated with suffering, the suffering of those who shall eventually reject you, when you could have remained perfectly blissful in your solitary existence? I do not deny once again there might be some reason from your so-called God's-eye-perspective, but what this reason could be completely baffles me.

God : Which is more important to you, the extirpation of suffering or the attainment of Myself?

TI : Surely, the former. But if the former is possible only with and through the latter, then I seek both, and see no contradiction or opposition between the two.

God : Do you believe that the history of the world is moving towards a goal under my governance?

TI : If the goal is the complete removal of all forms of suffering of all human beings, this is a goal that I affirm and shall strive towards with your assistance. I do not, of course, know that this state will be realised in the future. But I hope that it will be, and it is in this hope that I live now and it is in this hope that I shall die. It is to the extent that our human experiences are ambiguous and can be 'read' either way that I remain an ironist : I do not disagree, for example, with the vituperations and the complaints of atheists against you, and yet I do not quite agree with them thoroughly either; what religious believers say about you strikes a deep chord in me, and yet I ultimately part company with them on various issues. Some Old Master had once said with Gallic despair : Man is condemned to be free; as for myself : I have been condemned to be an ironist.

The Winter Nightmare

I am sometimes asked why I do not wear a wristwatch : it is simply because I do not want an instrument beside me reminding me of the passage of time. And the reason, in turn, for wishing to forget this flow is because of a nightmare that I had many years ago. I dreamt that I was a young horologist in the London of 1899, and that I had been commissioned by the Royal Academy of Sciences to conduct an investigation into everything that had been written in German on the topic of Time from 1150 AD to 1890 AD. I dreamt that I spent 15 years trying to learn the German tongue and acquiring some sensitivity to its subtle nuances, and another 20 years in collecting the various manuscripts on the theme of Time from that period. At the end of 35 years, I suddenly realised that I had become so old that I had no time left to read the books on Time that I had gathered.

http://www.niehs.nih.gov/kids/mindread/psychicSparkle.swf

And You Thought You Were Free?


If you had asked me six years ago, 'What is the difference between the West and the world of Islam?' I would probably have replied : 'Well, in the West people are more free. Firstly, democracy has established its roots more firmly in the West so that citizens are equal to one another, and secondly, women enjoy a greater degree of freedom here.' Today, however, I am somewhat unsure about both these issues.

(A) Firstly, the question of Equality. There is a certain sense in which all citizens of a (West European) democratic country are (formally) equal in that each person has one vote, irrespective of who he or she is. All of them can come together to form political parties, contest elections to set up governments, and these governments will decide on the future course that the nation will take in the international arena. However, is it really true that all citizens of a nation-state are equally capable of doing the above? Consider these facts : Michael Bloomberg, New York's 108th Mayor spent $ 68, 968, 185 on the election, while the unsuccesful candidate Mark Green spent $ 16, 500, 000. Here are some more : the 10% most well-off people in the UK have 27.3% of the total income and the 10% least well-off have only 2.6 % of the total income.

What do these facts reveal? That pace Abraham Lincoln it is only in a vague 'romantic' sense of 'universal brotherhood' that democracy is government by The People, and that it is in fact government by powerful interest-groups, corporate bodies, transnational institutions, and property-owners. In both the UK and the US (not to mention the democracies of the so-called Third World) the gap between the 10% best-off and the 10% worst-off is increasing at an alarming rate, so that to talk of equality in such contexts is to indulge in dangerous sophistry. In other words, financial, economic and political power, far from being equally distributed in our much-acclaimed West European democracies, is actually organised in a hierarchical and inverted-pyramidical manner. People are equal only in the abstract sense of being free from gender and racial discriminations in a legal court while they have to live with huge inequalities at the socio-economic level.

(B) Individuals in 'western' democracies, it turns out, are not really that free after all. What about the womenfolk, are they free in the West? Here are some words from a woman who died anorexic : 'I slept most of the time. But I didn't feel sick. I felt at peace, finally emptied of all the mind and body filth. No more disgust with my body . . . with me. I wasn't even hungry. And I didn't have to worry about how guilty I feel when I eat and throw up, and even worse, how anguished I feel when I eat and don't throw up.' Many teenage (and post-teenage) American and European women may think that they are free to do whatever they wish to; in truth, however, they are compelled, perhaps even unknown to themselves, to reduce their weight to become socially acceptable through drug abuse, smoking, and incessant dieting. (90% of anorexics are women.) Anorexia is prevalent largely in the West where some women aspire to attain idealised standards of beauty put forward by beauty magazines and TV commercials. (For example, the height of a Barbie doll is 6' and its (marked) weight is 100 lbs.)

Are You A Humanist?

There are certain words that are put to such a bewildering variety of use that they accumulate over time a surplus of meaning, and one such word which encompasses a wide range of conflicting meanings is 'humanism'. To begin with, there is the historical sense of 'humanism' which was the emphasis on 'Man' as the focus of study during certain periods such as the Italian Renaissance. Next, you can espouse 'humanism' in the ethical sense and claim that all human beings deserve respect and compassion, and enjoy certain rights across all cultural boundaries. You may also affirm that all human beings should be given the opportunities for self-development, even if this process leads them on certain occasions to adopt a governing stance towards the natural world.

Then you can defend a metaphysical form of 'humanism' which can take either an atheist or a religious turn. In its atheistic forms, 'humanism' is tied to a naturalistic world-view according to which all phenomena can be explained in terms of physical causes and scientific laws, and you would claim that human beings should rely entirely on their own powers without taking recourse to any (non-existent) supernatural help. If you accept one of its religious forms, however, you would argue that it is precisely this transcendent assistance that empowers you to move towards self-fulfillment.

Likewise, there are a number of 'anti-humanisms'. To begin with the crudest formulation, you are an anti-humanist if you believe that it is morally right to torture babies over a slow fire and eat them alive. Or you could be 'anti-humanist' in denying that human beings share a common nature in terms of some properties by virtue of their humanity (which, to be sure, is never easy to define), and in claiming that bacteria, trees, mosquitoes, dogs, cats, and termites are as valuable as human beings in every respect. A more subtle version is that which denies that human beings are, to some extent at least, self-determining agents, and are instead enslaved to some regime of inexorable determinism, whether it is astral, cosmological, genetic, economic, sociological, or cultural.

Democracy, Now And Then

The word 'democracy' is, as we often remind ourselves, a Greek one, but what the classical Greeks meant by that term is quite different from our current understanding of it. For one, the Greek demos was a far more restricted group : only adult Athenians were counted as 'the people' which excluded women and the slaves. However, all of these Athenians enjoyed an equality that is unimaginable in today's democracies : each one of them could speak before the gathering when it was trying to arrive at a public decision. Consequently, Athens could not go to war, form an alliance, or pass a law without the agreement of the assembled people (that is, the adult males). Our democracies are, of course, far more 'inclusivist' than the Greek democracy : all genders, all ethnicities, and all linguistic communities are brought under their ambit. What has been gained on the side of inclusivity has, however, been lost in the respect of immediacy : a modern nation-state can go to war without consulting its citizens on this matter.

Perhaps what we aspire for is a mode of government that is both more 'inclusive' and more 'immediate' : we may use the term 'democracy' to refer to such a mode, but it is only too clear that this does not exist anywhere in the world, at least in the year 2005.

Chinese Ironies

In 1897, Liang Ch'ao a thoughtful student of the barbarians (oops, I mean the non-Chinese) wrote an article called Chinese Progress in which he declared : 'I know that in less than a hundred years, all five continents will be under the rule of the people, and our China will not be able to continue unchanged ... as for the future, all will become democracies'. Perhaps Ch'ao was a bit too abrupt for in between came Chairman Mao who, on the one hand, had an avowed hostility towards things Western, and who, on the other hand, adopted Marxism, in its origins a very Western doctrine. And now finally Ch'ao's words have come true, though perhaps in not quite the way that he would have imagined. Sitting in Beijing, you can log on to the internet, and talk to your friend in Toronto about Jacques Derrida while drinking Coke. And most importantly, you can wake up the next morning and go for your lecture at Beijing's National Research Institute for Postmodern Studies.

The Enduring Valentine

Yesterday afternoon, I fell asleep in the university library once again, and I dreamt that I was in the Berlin of 1972. I tried desperately to wake myself up from that dream, but with each attempt I found myself sinking yet deeper into the labyrinths of the narrow lanes of suburban Berlin. And then I saw Maria, now an old woman with grey hair, seated on a brown chair sipping coffee and reading the morning edition of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. We had first met under the stormy skies of Paris in May 1968, and felt that we were finishing off the job that the stormers of the Bastille had left undone in 1789. She had come from rural Catalonia of a family with pious Catholic backgrounds, but her father had rebelled against her grandparents and joined the anarchists in the great Civil War against the monstrous Franco. And then in '68 it was time for her to follow her father's footsteps. As for myself, my parents had named me Karl after the great German theologian Karl Barth, but they had perhaps forgotten that Karl was also the first name of someone else.

After the turmoil of '68, Maria had emigrated to Canada where she settled down as the wife of a rich industrialist in Toronto, and I had joined the University of Tuebingen and spent an entire life-time trying to recover from my loss of faith in the Revolution. Maria saw me approaching her and smiled at me : 'Oh, it is you, Karl! Shall it be black coffee, no milk, one sugar, like in the olden days?' As we were sipping coffee looking at the tired red sun going down in the distance, an old man came up to us and asked us, 'Do you have any spare change?'. I rummaged through my pockets and found that I had a thick wad of 500 Euro notes. Maria dug into her red leather bag and took out seven shining credit cards, each from a different company. We both replied instantaneously, 'Sorry, but I have no change'. The old man stared into my eyes softly, and there was something in them that reminded me of '68 : Was he a long-lost comrade of ours? Could we have fought under the same tormented skies? Could we have chanted the same slogans against the vile Fascists?

Later that evening, I came out of the library and rambled into the noisy market-square where I saw a young man and a young woman distributing Communist Party pamphlets. On the first page, there was the usual gobbledygook about capitalism, communism, and consumerism, and I rapidly skimmed through it. On the last page, however, there was something that reminded me again of '68. There was this poem :

How does it matter, dear friend

What flag you struggle under?

Only the farmer knows

At sunrise and at sunset

The true unmistakable colour

Of the sun's unredeemed suffering.