Flawed (Western) Objectivity And The Long Journey Back To Self
Sajeeva Samaranayake
Separation of ‘right’ from ‘good’
Both colonial and post colonial structures of thinking and action for ‘educating and governing’ a captive population relied on a brand of objectivity and reason that dominated or excluded subjectivities and emotions. As Portia said in The Merchant of Venice,
“The brain may devise laws for the blood, but a hot temper leaps o’er a cold decree; such a hare is madness the youth, to skip over the meshes of good counsel the cripple.”
This basic flaw in the application of ideas related to both education and governance has distorted them in the developing world. In post war Sri Lanka ‘truth’ itself is confined to ‘facts’ in the sense of ‘who did what’ with a powerful mainstream media and an overwhelmingly ‘literate’ public concerned with little else. The final product is a comedy of Dickensian proportions – well outlined in the opening salvo of Hard Times:
“NOW WHAT I WANT IS, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to facts, sir!”
Such has been the plight and fate of our entire system of education – where learning based on self knowledge has been driven out.
And so we need to get back to two simple ideas of what is Right and what is Good? Western culture (in its application to us) starts with what is right and then seeks to discover goodness. Thus our education commences with norms, standards and definitions of the meaning of words. The traditional eastern approach to education and consequently governance was to help the disciple discover what is good within. It would then set the young person free to work out what is right in different situations. The western approach does not trust the human being so much but seeks instead to control him within ‘established norms.’ Goodness must be found within those limits or you would be imprisoned, put in a mental hospital or children’s home to be ‘re-educated.’
However, goodness as we normally know it is something that is spiritually, socially and culturally conditioned. It is about good communication, positive relationships, caring, empathy, forgiveness and all the so called maternal values of human society.
Ideas as to what is right (usually solidified with ideas of justice, equality, human rights etc) must naturally be derived from this matrix of co-existence, conversation and dialogue so that we can genuinely build a consensus that will last. I have often said that from this perspective it is relationships that build rights – not the other way about. This is the solid and organic bottoms up approach that most ancient societies that now belong to the Third and Fourth Worlds enjoyed prior to the colonial interference. In a word the starting point in this so called eastern approach is the SELF. Read More
