Celebrating Non-Difference and the Birth of the Technological Being

Posted on July 11, 2012 by Sunanda

When I look at how much we share, I am amazed that we have waged so many wars and undergone so much conflict to prove that we are different.

But whether we are metropolitans, slum-dwellers of Dharavi, shepherds in the Andes — birth, mothers, memories, consciousness, sorrows, joys, disease and death are not the only things we share. Both the rich and the poor got buried in the ashes of Pompeii and are swept away by tsunamis.

It is not just the physical conditions of our life and death which is our shared human heritage. We share the workings of our minds and consciousness. We are tool-makers and structure-imposers on reality, whereby we look at the world and receive, meditate and regurgitate technologies. And that is why, irrespective of our educational and economic status, we in the 21st century are the technological beings.

Whether we are sherpas listening to a radio in the foothills of the Everest, or a banker in New York, technology has become so deeply ingrained in our lives that we notice it no more than we see the atmosphere. No doubt, there is a wild variance in the application of technology in individual lives,  but  still it travels throughout the world, much like the toxins of a manufacturing town.

And as technological beings, we have adopted a new God!

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Human Beings: Is redefinition even possible?

Posted on July 6, 2012 by Sunanda

Let us play a game here. Let us be presumptuous enough to redefine, on the claim that one never reinvents the wheel but always, invents new ways of using the wheel.

Philosophers, scientists, religions and cultures have spent all of human history answering this question. Culture, that umbrella term for our languages,  thought processes, social and religious practices,  is somehow the core of the definition, that one thing that makes us supra-beings: the top of the heap haminals, or humanals….Whatever!..few more words to show that human beget languages as much as languages beget us.

If a definition is finding the absolute commonalities, then let us begin with a minimalist definition: it is a physical being we are talking about. The human being, or  the hanimal. And of course, since we are creating the grammar, let us creat a new pronoun randomly—hb—just for the fun making ludicrous the he-she-s/he debate.  Can it get any stupider, more illogical than this?

Whats’ logic got to do with being a human being or with our cultural practices?  Logic is merely our effort to make sense of the world, to impose a structure, just like grammar is an imposition on language.

So the first element in our re-definition: living beings who happen to be humans, have a strangely illogical and crass need to impose logic, structure and grammar upon the it-is-what-it-is world.

More in my next post!

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Sometimes It Pays To Go Back To Basics

Posted on June 24, 2012 by Sunanda

Individualism, the other name of Humanism and, the foundation of Universalism, is built up on a paradox: that all individuals are unique and equal.  Now, dont the two terms ‘unique’ and ‘equal’ cancel each other out? So we have to then add a condition to the definition. “All individuals are equal despite their uniqueness”. Does the definition work “universally”? Not really, as we know by the best kind of proof: around 200 years of solid historical evidence, even if we take Western history. Power—whatever its source money,  beauty, land, resources—disbalances the equation in favour of some individuals.

And those that do not have individual power, “unite” to form fresh power centres—whether of religion, culture or politics. And then the power equations are replayed between groups, thus leading to the ideology of multiculturalism.

One of Multiculturalism’s great achievement—and  there are a few—is to replace a flawed idea with a more flawed idea. If individuals by themselves cannot be equal, can they be, as members of groups, be? For, power, plays out its game at every level of relationship.

Is this why idea of Humanism was so wrong? And did Multiculturalism manage to totally trash it?

Maybe Humanism is yet another term in need of a new definition, something that has to be done before we reinstate it?

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Multiculturalism, Universalism And Humanism

Posted on March 4, 2012 by Sunanda

Multiculturalism represents a new kind of universalism, writes Gurpreet Mahajan “one where integration of individuals into the state is not predicated on a total disengagement from particularistic community ties. Rather, people are included into the nation state as members of diverse but equal ethnic groups.”
In other words, this universalism means that the state values cultural diversity and is determined to establish equal value for each group. This also means that the rights of individuals are to be accounted for only so far as they are members of communities.
This universalism does not equate the individual to the individual, but the group to the group.

Does this not go against the very foundation of equality?
Are there values that are universal to human beings that, we, in our enthusiasm for multiculturalism have been neglecting?
What is our primary definition and how should we relate to each other: as human beings or cultured beings?
Is it not now time ripe to reinstate the idea of Humanism, so mauled by Postcolonialism?

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Are People CultoBots?

Posted on February 25, 2012 by Sunanda

Amartya Sen in The Uses and Abuses of Multiculturalism asks a crucial question:
“One of the central issues concerns how human beings are seen. Should they be categorized in terms of inherited traditions, particularly the inherited religion, of the community in which they happen to have been born, taking that unchosen identity to have automatic priority over other affiliations involving politics, profession, class, gender, language, literature, social involvements, and many other connections? Or should they be understood as persons with many affiliations and associations, whose relative priorities they must themselves choose (taking the responsibility that comes with reasoned choice)?”
Bikhu Parekh writes that modern institutions are at times a “positive handicap” in dealing with multicultural societies trying to find that fine balance between unity and diversity. But the problem with Parekh’s view is that even when he talks of “conversation” within and between cultures, he fails to show how cultural responses to the same incident can change in different circumstances—because though the people responding belong to the same ‘culture’ but they are changed people or in changing times.
Unfortunately, assumptions of multiculturalism are based on a static view of culture and even worse, the individual practicing the cultures. To answer, Sen’s question, people are not cultobots with automated responses, but temperamental individuals with real and dynamic choices.
And this changes all the parameters of cultural interactions.
And also raises other questions:
Were people cultobots in the past? Were there more comfortable times in the past, when the cultural barometer was more accurate?
How are modern institutions “the positive handicap” that are making people less culturally automated?

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The Cultural Minefield

Posted on February 19, 2012 by Sunanda

One of the paradoxes of Multiculturalism is that it has to take a very limited and reductive defintion of culture. A framework for the interrelationship between cultures can be theorized only if we pretend an intra-cultural structure does not exist.
An unacknowledged fact is that we live in contradictions–we smoothly transit through cultural conflicts when we shift roles from the social, professional to familial and further into personal.
The more roles we have in life, the more the cultural minefields we have to negotiate.
We cannot claim any one mono-culture for our hyphenated selves.

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The Cultural Pyramid

Posted on January 2, 2012 by Sunanda

Multiculturalism as a name, newly coined, has its conveniences. It defines a concept and a course of action that has been automatic throughout human history. Wherever two human beings have met, there has been a ‘clash of culture’, if one can slightly distort Huntington’s term. Though culture is primarily defined to be communal, each individual practices it in his own way. Since human beings have unique personalities, the practice of their culture—even the so called ‘shared’ communal culture is never similar.

This means that we should also consider the layers of culture. As a starting point, is then our personal cultures, derived from our familial and communal culture. The culture of the family may or may not be secular but the communal social culture is derived largely from the religious group one is born into, and in this sense, is the bedrock and the most impositional of all cultural practices. Since nationhood is so recent a concept in human history, national values forms the thin uppermost film of culture. Sometimes, nations who claim religious values to be foundational, combine nationhood and religion in a lethal retrograde combination.
Question is, when we talk of multiculturalism, which layer of culture are we talking about? Should we consider that multiculturalism impose a communal definition on human beings? Does multiculturalism ignore the cultural interaction of two individuals? Is that why multiculturalism has remained an academic or a topic for radio shows and not become a blueprint for human relations?
Multiculturalism as a belief system ignores the real issues of daily interactions and imposes a group identity by which an individual must present himself to others. The assumption is that the group culture is bigger than the individual’s practice of culture.
If belief in individualism is the bedrock of ‘modern culture’ then the idea of multiculturalism needs a corrective.

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