In part six of St Stephen's and Network18 joint initiative where the former will offer a certificate course in 'Citizenship & Cultural Richness' with weekly classes conducted by its regular faculty and distinguished alumni, the discussion will on identity and violence.
The lecture will be delivered by St Stephen's principal Dr. Valson Thampu at the college on Saturday, April 25.
Below is the complete schedule:
Schedule: Saturday, 25th April 2015
Topic: "IDENTITY AND VIOLENCE"
By. Rev. Dr. Valson Thampu
Time: 4:00-6:00 pm
Venue : College Hall
Lecture Outlines
Slide 1. The picture of a circle with its centre marked. The circumference should be ideally thick...
The circumference corresponds to Surface. / The outer
The centre corresponds to Depth/ The inner.
The surface/circumference is a domain of difference
As we move closer to the Centre, differences become increasingly irrelevant.
Materialsim: The lifestyle of the surface/circumference.
Slide 2. Application of the image
What is our identity when-
1. We are in pain
2. We a baby is born / every babe is global
3. At the point of our death
4. Will we choose a surgeon based on identity or skill?
5. A singer? A dancer? A teacher? An author? Why?
6. Why are we required to choose a lover based on religious identity?
Slide 3. From dover beach
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Matthew Arnold in Dover Beach.
But: Identity can be a source of richness and warmth as well as of violence and terror and it makes little sense to treat identity as inherently evil.
Faculty recruitment in St. Stephen's.
Slide 4. Some preliminary observation
a. The relationship between the general and the particular. The challenge to maintain a balance. Illustrate
b. Self-obsession: a sign of pathology or health?
c. Do we have a fixed identity, valid for all contexts and times?
d. What is the framework for forming our identity?
Slide 5. Some illustrations
Kader Mia in the 1943 Calcutta riots.
Julius Caesar Cinna, the poet vs. Cinna, the conspirator.
The Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu once dreamt he was a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He did not know he was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou. But he did not know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming it was Chuang Chou. [The intensity of the thinking experience...]
Propaganda vs. thinking. Invasive of the sacred space...
Slide 6. What is my identity? Socrates
1. Self for others
2. Self for me
3. The harmony between the two
4. Identity and Otherness/ difference. No identity without otherness.
What is different is always so called with reference to other things. It exists among a plurality of Ideas. Every entity harbours the possibility of being looked upon as different from something. Plurality and difference are two sides of the same coin.
5. Above all to thine own self be true. Shakespeare
Slide 7. Mob: Features
1. Members of a mob do not think rationally
2. Mobs are emotional and irrational
3. Every mob is vulnerable to manipulation
4. Every mob enjoys a sense of power.
5. Is susceptible to suggestions towards violence.
6. The Principal of contagion
7. The art of addressing a mob
Slide 8. The ascendancy of identity politics
1. The role of ideology: them vs. us
2. The role of propaganda... Dehumanisation. Hutus vs. Tutsies.
3. History as ideology. Huntington [2 questions: (a) can the difference between two individuals be seen in terms of 2 civilisations (b) only clash, no dialogue? Who decides?
4. The negative definition of ideology
5. Unity for vs. unity against.
6. The rejection of "kinship" or fraternity
Slide 9. The imposition/ ascrdiption of identity
Jean-Paul Sartre: The Profile of an Anti Semite.
"The Jew is a man," Jean Paul Sartre argued, in Portrait of an Anti Semite, "whom other men look upon as a Jew". ..
Jesus and the Woman taken in adultery
The negative definition of one's own identity.
The miniaturisation of the human person
Slide 10. Identity: Some basic facts
1. Is an accident. Tagore's Gora
Tagore.. Gora. Gora differs from his friends and family in urban Bengal by strongly championing old fashioned Hindu customs and traditions. ....
At one stroke Goras' militant conservatism is undermined by Tagore since Gora finds the doors of traditionalist temples closed to him, being foreign born.
Gora chooses in the end, helped by his girlfriend, Sucharita, to see himself as a human being who is at home in India, not delineated by any caste, religion, class or complexion.
Slide 11: Identity continued from slide 7.
2. Artificial.. ascribed. Sartre. Portrait of an Anti Semite
3. No one identity, but an anthology of identities/ Remember other identities.
4. Identity is contextual
5. Identity is manipulable - reductive/synecdoche. Cf. cartoon.
6. The problematic of communal identity.. No community is Homogeneous.. also, no individual is monochrome
7. All Ascriptions are reductive, meant to denigrate.
8. Violence and hatred are manufactured. Ogden Nash. Any kiddie in school can love like a fool / But hating, my boy, is an art.
Slide 12. The cultural matrix
1. Growing anonymity/ the stranger as a touchstone.
2. Disappearance of Neighbour/ individualism/
3. Our inner emptiness/ materialism
4. Failure of social imagination/ neighbour as enemy
5. Decline of the caring culture. Care vs. kill
6. A growing taste for violence.
7. The tyranny of opinion/ media and public opinion (cf the sword)
Slide 13. Identity and religious fundamentalism
-A contradiction of the religion that corresponds to it.
-Shallow and superficial
-A cult of negativity
-Masks vested interests.
-Expresses itself through violence, being irrational
-The tension between appearance and inward truth.
Slide 14. Antomy of violence
1. Failure of social imagination
2. Blindness to worth...denigration
3. Crippling of our capacity to think
4. The cult of negativity...destruction
5. Violence and religion. Voltaire.
6. Why violence needs to be legitimized through religion.
7. Violence is subhuman: failure of reason/ persuasion.
Slide 15. Identity: Some contradictions
1. Identity and the Creator God... Children of one God
2. Identity and rebirth.... Who are we, were we? Who will we be?
3. What is the effect of conversion? Do we cease to be what we have been?
4. The other is inseparable from me. Violence as done first against God, then against myself and finally against the other.
5. Put down the sword...
Slide 16. What shall we do?
1. Do to others what you would.....
2. Refuse to turn humans into bonsais. Refuse to become one yourself.
3. Develop the strength of compassion
4. The resources of critical thinking. Vs. blind faith.
5. Develop an intuition of depth. Vs. superficial obsessions.
6. The reality of a universal kinship. The true spiritual vision.
7. Insist that identity is multi-dimensional and superficial.
8. Celebrate differences, diversity, plurality.
Comments
0 comment