 Not many Sri Lankans wish the US well. Yet Barack Obama’s victory has been quite a thrill for many of them, especially for those in the higher echelons of the country’s business, professional and academic life.
The ideal of racial equality could not have been served more thrillingly or magically than by the election of a person of colour to the most powerful office in the world. Yet it is difficult to imagine that the thrill of seeing Obama victorious could be adequately accounted for in terms of a feeling of solidarity based on the experience of injustice which people of colour might share.
Although for some Obama’s election might have been a matter almost entirely to do with the yearning for racial equality, rarely is the yearning for racial equality divorced from some form of cultural antagonism. For instance, in this country we do not routinely think of people of colour elsewhere as our brothers and sisters. It might be in poor taste to point out that it is difficult to know how far is ours an attitude of colour-blindness. But it is beyond doubt that when feelings solidarity between us and people of colour elsewhere are allowed to animate us, such feelings are for the most part intricately interwoven with some form of cultural antagonism between the West and the non-West.
Perhaps, without be-labouring more heartily so obvious a point, we may as well anticipate here the conclusion which we hope to clarify: there is a strong tendency to view Obama’s victory through the prism of “identity politics” which makes the victory a thrilling thing, especially for the educated among us, and this is a cause for some concern.
The habit of seeing the cultures, or patterns of living and thinking, of the non-West as those damaged or stigmatized by colonialism’s violence, exploitation and cultural imperialism, and the belief to which many of us have been long accustomed that the people of colour, in order to secure their self-confidence, must be true to the authentic ethnic patterns of living and thinking which their races have natively worked out in their own quest to master the necessities of life make Obama’s victory, for some, a triumphant affirmation of the power and the potency of the cultures of the non-West.
Vitality
A thrill is a flash of vitality. Although any act which imparts vitality to the spirit of this country ought to be owned by us without reserve, we are forced to confront the fact that the vitalization brought about by viewing Obama’s victory through the prism of identity politics may not be good for us. For identity politics stands to vitalize the emotional ties that bind us to the old and the familiar which are often in conflict with modernity, and when the emotional ties which bind us to the traditional ways of living, thinking, believing and feeling are vitalized, we begin to look with even more suspicion upon the habits, born of modernity’s ideas and ideals, that we are trying so hard to build into our own lives, to blend with our old habits.
It ought to be needless to caution against viewing Obama as authentically ethnic.
To all appearances, despite the cultural antagonisms commonly assumed of people of colour, and despite also what is commonly assumed of an Ivy-Leaguer, the sympathy for the philosophies born of the agonies of the European culture that owe a great deal to the traditions of the non-West, Obama has successfully built into his life the riches of the western civilization, adjusted to American conditions. Not only is he a person who exemplifies, in his outward behaviour and visible speech, the idea of a gentlemen of means as the West, following Aristotle and the Greeks, would define it: he is also someone who believes that the proper attitude for man is optimism, which is but another way of saying that man can live well in this world, and live supremely well when conditions are favourable, and that the experience of the encountered world can be known and understood through the representative or cognitive use of the art of language.
However, a cautionary note had to be struck because the process of consciousness-raising - which, rather than the advancement of learning, being the mainstay of the radicalized academia - forces us to believe that no culture is inferior to another. From the dizzy heights of a raised consciousness, the notion of backward, primitive or moribund cultures seems to us naive at best. Even more, our raised consciousness forces us to recognize that the dignity for man lies in the adherence to the way of living and thinking which is true to the identity of the group to which he natively belongs. The oppressed and the marginalized are those who are prevented from rediscovering their authentic identity, having become vulnerable to the cultural imperialism of the Western civilization because it is seen to have a distinct advantage over other civilizations or cultures.
Identity Politics
The demand of “identity politics” - or, to use another phrase to say the same thing, “ the politics of difference” or of “cultural relativism” - is that we be respected on the very grounds on which respect is denied to us, which is to say, on the grounds that we lack the western culture’s, attitudes and thinking. Freed from the oppressive stigmatization, and under no compulsion to adjust our native ways of living and thinking to those of the dominant western culture, we feel empowered to proclaim with pride the self-sufficiency of our ways for mastering the necessities of life and for understanding the nature of things.
The widespread practice of identity politics is restoring to the cultures of the world a sense of pride. But the question which those of us who are committed to modernity have is this: To what end would cultural pride be, if our native patterns of living and thinking are wholly inadequate to the task of increasing our comfort, delight and understanding?
Before man began to work out how to do things, he was only an animal among other animals, meeting nature as animals do face to face, body to body. But now tools and arts, from the art of agriculture to the art of investigation or science, intervene between man and what he controls. The dawning of civilization is symbolized by fire, club and stone; thereby signifying the increasing importance of the exercise of faculties and the practice of arts - and the progressive minimization of the body’s strength - for unlocking the forces of nature. And the height of man’s civilization is marked by the extent and the complexity of his arts, so that the question which dwells firmly on the assertions of cultural relativism becomes: what value would there be for man in a particular pattern of living, thinking, believing and feeling, if, as a set of institutionalized habits, it leaves him powerless to accumulate and perfect a body of intellectual techniques, methods and values to grapple with the world with its ever changing needs and problems and with its the never-ending task of adjustment and reconstruction.
For progress is culture - or the institutionalized ways of living and thinking - bettering the conditions of existence, making the human arts which control things increasingly more effective and extensive at increasing man’s comfort and the delight he takes in understanding the nature of things and in ministering to the possible perfections inherent in matter, instinct and emotion.
Considerations such as these lead one to wonder if the tendency to view Obama’s victory through the prism of identity politics or cultural relativism could prove to be something which is positively harmful to us.
There is the yearning for racial equality devoid of the stirrings of cultural relativism which makes Obama’s victory a thrilling and magical thing. This ought to worry no one. There is also the hatred of President George Bush which makes the thing even more thrilling for some. Such thrill seeking too is not worrying.
Bush, in his outward behaviour and speech, tends to remind us of the differences between the image many have of the uneducated pioneer of the colonial America and that of the gentleman of means of its seaboard cities who is thoroughly familiar with the intellectual currents of the day. The sophisticates who had nothing but contemptuous disregard for him to begin with, have come to judge him as a leader who has had neither the foresight nor the rhetorical skill to have undertaken what they call the unification of opposites, the reconciliation dialectically of that which is irreconcilable, when such unification and reconciliation were the first order of business in a post 9/11 world.
Attitude
The attitude of today’s cultivated is not impossible to fathom without oversimplifying it. If they assume the world to be an unknowable mess of miscellaneous stuff, where no one pattern of living and thinking could ever said to be better than another, then the impingement of modernity upon traditional cultures which stand in direct antagonism to modernity is viewed, not as a problem of adjustment and reconstruction in a world where the needs and the conditions of action are ever changing, but as a problem of respect for traditions in a world which has witnessed colonialism’s violence and stigmatization. From such a perspective, the lack of respect for traditional patterns of living and thinking is seen to fuel the infernal flame of extremism which is characterized by contempt for the world and by a desire for martyrdom. It is a perspective which enables one to see the tale of Bush’s failure to rise to the stature of a reconciler writ large upon the faces of extremist agitators.
Where the war on terror is deemed a preventable evil, and is blamed for “inflaming the moderates,” there the hatred of Bush is magnified. His insistence that the methods of liberty have absolute or metaphysical scope in securing for man the basic advantages which human civilization stands to provide, consisting of greater prosperity, greater security and greater variety of pursuits; as well as his readiness to confront violently the forces which seek to destroy through terror the mood of ethical optimism which has so far persisted in America, would have merely been absurdities for the educated to sneer at, but for the terrible devastation of life, civil liberty and treasure, which as they see it, wrought by his absolutist tendencies, and by his pre-emptory and retaliatory wars of annihilation. The yearning for the experience of rapture and glory of seeing Bush humiliated, strung and filthied over history’s garbage which many among the cultivated in the West share with the educated here and the shoe throwers in Iraq could not have found a more immediate satisfaction than the miracle of the ballot which delivered Obama. For Obama is the anti-Bush for the many.
Moreover, speaking of miracles, a hatred of Bush is not the only thing which needs to weigh on a mind for it to look for miracles. Men will never cease to look for miracles in nature or government or education, so long as they perceive possible perfections and experience uncertainty, defeat, failure frustration and suffering. Life is at bottom experimental, contingent and liable to chance, and the world will always be wrought with uncertainty, partial knowledge of things, discontent, sadness and misery, however advanced and affluent it may become, to keep alive the faith in magic, prayer, sacrifice and witchcraft to produce miracles - or, at least, in the updated versions of magic and witchcraft to produce miracles: consciousness-raising, education and radical policies which are by definition in neglect of nature’s law and constitution to which thought and action must conform if history is to crown action with practical wisdom and thought with knowledge and philosophic wisdom. And it ought to cause no surprise that there is, especially among the educated, a renewed sense of hope that the world would be so completely made over by a government led by Obama that the lion will lie down with the lamb, the lion never hungry and the lamb never food.
Hatred of Bush
However, in fairness to Obama this must be parenthetically said: although as a candidate, Obama did give expression to the yearning of the human heart for a transcendent reality in which the irreconcilables are reconciled, the opposites are unified and human action is guaranteed of success; but, as seen from his choice of nominees for the cabinet, where governance is concerned, he appears to have embraced a more naturalistic, or a less dualistic, position to which most Americans are accustomed, which is this: the world is already made; it cannot be made over so that failure, error, partial knowledge, imperfect understanding, frustration, uncertainty, chance and suffering may be abolished; man may discover nature’s law and constitution, and having discovered them, he may minister to the idealities or possible perfections inherent in it, which his reason and imagination discern. This is not to suggest, however, that Obama has abandoned his faith in miracles altogether: by all accounts, he continues to hope that the socialization of medicine will prove to be the magic and witchery that will raise healthcare to the ideal of a cheap and abundant commodity.
No; the excitement about Obama’s victory which is derived either from a hatred of Bush or from the desire for a transcendent reality - the two are not mutually exclusive - is no cause for either surprise or worry. What is worrying is the excitement which some of the educated derive from the hope that, because of the colour of Obama’s skin, his victory somehow is an affirmation of the potency of the cultures of the non-West, of the cultures barely touched by the naturalism of Greek thought in science and philosophy and by the naturalistic humanism of Greek piety and spirituality.
(The writer is chairman of a private sector company). Picture courtesy -vanityfair.com
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