How do people come to know themselves?

One of the critical questions in Hindu philosophy is an existential question that people of any faith, or infidels like me, also worry about--or should worry about: Who am I?

I am sure that thinkers in cultures all around the world raised that very question.  The ancient Greeks, for instance, inscribed "Know Thyself" (well, not in English but in Greek, of course!) at the Temple of Apollo, and later Socrates declared that "the unexamined life is not worth living."

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My summer readings, on top of the different bits that I read and blog about, are essentially my attempts to keep after that question of "who am I?"  Instead of abstract philosophy, which I don't much care for, I ask that question in the contexts in which I find myself, in relation to the situations that surround me, especially because of my conviction that there is nothing after death, and it is all in the here and the now.  Thus, blogging about the Ebola crisis, or the Syrian refugees, or tweeting about the fascist, are all more than merely about Ebola or Syria or fascism--they are explorations into understanding who I am.

In an essay about James Baldwin, the author--Nathaniel Rich--quotes Baldwin:

The difficulty is to remain in touch with the private life. The private life, his own and that of others, is the writer’s subject—his key and ours to his achievement. Nothing, I submit, is more difficult than deciphering what the citizens of this time and place actually feel and think. They do not know themselves….

Rich follows that with his own observation:

How do people come to know themselves? One way is by reading fiction. The profound act of empathy demanded by a novel, forcing the reader to suspend disbelief and embody a stranger’s skin, prompts reflection and self-questioning. But most people don’t read novels.

The novel does not refer to the likes of Ian Fleming's James Bond series or the old Mills & Boon series or Fifty Shades of Grey ;)  I am reminded of a forum on campus, a little more than a year ago, when one faculty colleague referred to the "great books" approach at St. John's.  Another colleague, who is so convinced about his superiority that he never can even remotely understand how much of  an idiot he is, remarked that it is all relative on what "great books" mean and then went on to list some of the books that he has read, which made many of us gasp and wonder how such an idiot could possibly inhabit the world of higher education.  I suppose he doesn't know himself!  Hmmm ... where was I before this digression? ;)

In that same Baldwin essay, Rich notes:

Baldwin made the racial question personal, reducing a society-wide problem to a matter of one’s private conscience. He was not alone in this approach, but he was alone in bringing a novelist’s sensitivity to bear on it. In Baldwin’s writing racism is, among other things, a failure of empathy.

Indeed.  Racism, hate, or any systematic put down of "those people" is a failure of empathy.  Anybody who has any sense of empathy will not be able to generate the kind of rhetoric that foams from the mouth of the contemporary American fascist leader, and his ardent supporters equally suffer from a lack of empathy.  As this piece notes:

Trump deals in hates that dare not speak their names

This fascist leader:

enhances the force of a whole series of interlocking hates—black hate, Muslim hate, woman hate, and “Mexican” hate.

I would think that the fascist leader's short fingers have never ever touched the "great books" and the novels that compel the reader to reflect on "who am I?"

I wonder what James Baldwin would have said and written about this fascist leader!

Money! Money! Money!

The old Soviet system couldn't care a shit about gods; after all, they were implementing the ideas of a thinker who declared that religion was the opium of the masses.  Commies were godless and were anti-market.

The pro-market America was all about god and bible-thumping politicians.  "God bless America" became a mantra that if not faithfully rendered made one a dirty commie.  Can you imagine an American President not concluding a serious address to the nation with a "God bless America"?  It is like how beauty pageant contestants wish for world peace ;)

In that lies an interesting irony. The faith in god requires many beliefs, including that there is a higher purpose to life, with the path leading to god.  The market, on the other hand, is built on the exact opposite idea--there is no purpose to any damn thing.  If you want to sell and if there are buyers for it, the transaction happens.  If you can't sell, you lose.  If you make money out of it, so be it.  The market simply is.  The commies, on the other hand, firmly believed in a political economic system that served a higher purpose.  They were, ahem, religious about it.

Perhaps it would be more consistent if the god-believing "non-commies" designed their political economy in order to serve a higher purpose, while the godless "commies" lives in the anything-goes system.  But, inconsistency is what life is, I guess.

Apparently god likes the purpose-less free market of anything, and cursed the godless "higher purpose" commies to collapse ;)

The sudden death of the command and control Soviet economy features a lot in Svetlana Alexievich's Secondhand Time.  One of the people, who talks to the author dropped out of the university after his second year, says "the market became our university ... Maybe it's going too far to call it a university, but an elementary school for life, definitely."

I feel sorry for my parents because they were told flat out that they were pathetic sovoks whose lives had been wasted for less than a sniff of tobacco, that everything was their fault, beginning with Noah's Ark, and that now, no one needed them anymore.  Imagine working that hard, your whole life, only to end up with nothing.  All of it took the ground out from underneath them, their world was shattered; they still haven't recovered, they couldn't assimilate into the drastically new reality.  My younger brother would wash cars after class, sell chewing gum and other junk in the subway, and he made more money than our father--our father was a scientist. A PhD! ... This was how capitalism came into our lives ...

Whether or not we believe in gods and religions, every one of us--consciously or subconsciously--attempt to create a meaning for the insanely short times that we have in this cosmos.  When that meaning is shattered, the existential crisis becomes unbearable.  When people here in the US suddenly lose their jobs for no fault of theirs, the existential struggle is as real as the Russian PhD who was not needed anymore.  The tragedy is that the pro-market but god-believing people, who vastly outnumber us infidels, rarely want to spare a dime and help ease that existential struggle of the "losers."  But then that's what the "free market" is all about, I suppose.

One hundred years of ... "Inquilab Zindabad"?

The Russians who talk with Svetlana Alexievich in Secondhand Time are pissed off at how their lives have been ruined.  Their hate for Mikhail Gorbachev, whom we in the west laud, is not superficial.

Their lives were ruined because they were told that if they kept doing whatever they were doing, then the state would take care of them later on in their lives.  And then Gorbachev introduced perestroika and glasnost and the system fell apart.  The Soviet Union fell apart.  Their lives fell apart. As the book portrays, at the top of the system,  Marshal Sergei F. Akhromeyev, chief military adviser to President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, committed suicide, while a "commoner" literally set himself on fire.

The book also  helps me understand the frustrations of the typical middle-class people here in the US, or in Britain.  They were told that if they kept doing whatever they were doing, then their lives were set and that everything would work out fine.  The Soviet Union fell apart. China and India opened up. The world's economy dramatically changed. The lives of the typical middle-class were altered forever, and tomorrow seems immensely more uncertain than yesterday ever was.

What puzzles me is this: Observing the world from the banks of the Willamette, and working at a podunk university where I am ignored and shunted away to a voiceless corner, I have been commenting for a long time about the urgency to fundamentally restructure the social contract, fully recognizing that the economic forces of today do not resemble those from the New Deal era, with technology further complicating things with innovations that keep upending more jobs.

So, ... I wondered when it was for the first time that I argued about the need for a new social contract.  I was curious not about my writings in my blog, but in this guy's--I thought it might be a good indicator of how I have been yelling outside like a mad man ;)  I tracked it down--May 23, 2013.  At the end of a lengthy rant, I wrote there:

 it is one loud reminder that the social contract is in tatters.
Of course, we are not going to agree on how to re-work and re-word a new contract. But, the shame of it all is that while a bunch of us folks from different parts of the world are talking about it here, the ones who should talk about these--the Congress--will stage some dramas, take a few photos, and then go home to screw people up some more.

Imagine if three years ago Congress here, and the Parliament in the UK, had really done constructive things in order to ease the new challenges that the typical middle class was facing.  Instead, they didn't do shit.  To make things worse, they further tightened the screws on the middle class. by slowly dismantling the little bit that was left.  For instance, Mike knows well how expensive college has become now compared to his father's days when the government offered his father a much better social contract.  College is merely one aspect of the social contract.

I didn't give up.  Almost exactly three years ago--June 26, 2013--at the end of another lengthy comment at another post, I wrote (note that OWS is Occupy Wall Street):

I don't think it is about economic growth as much as it is a disagreement over how the growth ought to be shared. It will be easier if only it were about economic growth alone. Turkey has had some fantastic growth over the years. It is really not about wanting more growth there. OWS was not about more growth, and neither are the protests in Brazil.
In a few previous posts, here and at my blog, we have agreed, while disagreeing, that the time is ripe, or even overripe, in terms of rewriting various aspects of the social contract that exists within each country. Mere economic growth does not seem to be sufficient, though at least modest rates might be necessary.
I suspect that these issues will not go away any time soon because rewriting those contracts won't be easy.

I tell ya, it is the story of my life that nobody listens to me--not even Ramesh! ;)

David Brooks notes in his column over at the NY Times:

Their pain is indivisible: economic stress, community breakdown, ethnic bigotry and a loss of social status and self-worth. When people feel their world is vanishing, they are easy prey for fact-free magical thinking and demagogues who blame immigrants.

Brexit, Bernie, and Trump are, therefore, no surprise to me.  It is an interesting ironical coincidence that these are fomenting another revolution nearly a hundred years since that history-changing October Revolution. Oh, wait, the October Revolution was in November, and the US elections will be almost exactly the same date: November 8th.  Cue the Twilight Zone theme ;)

I wonder how Putin and Russia will mark the one hundredth anniversary--not by inviting Gorbachev, I am sure!

ps: I intentionally used "Inquilab Zindabad" in the title of this post--to remind Ramesh about his post in 2013 ;)

Keeping time with history

When young and keen on understanding the USSR, I had to deal with two different usages: the October Revolution, and the big celebrations on November 7th.  It always puzzled me that the October event was being celebrated in November.

Now, in the old days, there was no Google.  No internet.  And, of course, nobody to bug about this question either.

As years passed, I forgot about that issue altogether.  Who cared anymore when the USSR itself became history, right?

Well, except that I am now reading Secondhand Time.  It is not any old  novel like Tolstoy's or Turgenev's.  Secondhand Time is about the last of the Soviets, in which people refer to all things Russian, which are self-evident to Russians but not to aliens like me.  Which is why when Margarita Pogrebitskaya says "my favorite holiday was always November 7 ..." there is a footnote.  And that footnote both reminded me of my old annoying question that I had forgotten about, and answered it.

The Bolshevik uprising, which turned into the October Revolution, took place the night of October 24-25, 1917.

The rest of the footnote gets to the exciting part--those dates were "according to the Julian calendar, which is November 6-7 according to the Gregorian calendar that was subsequently adopted in the USSR."  I guess it is the academic in me that I read the footnotes even in the summer readings ;)

Wikipedia notes that Russia was the penultimate country to switch from the old Julian calendar to the Gregorian.  It happened in 1918--1 February became 14 February.  Just like that!  I suppose it was one of the first revolutionary moves ;)  The things I learn every single day!

If you are like me, then you are perhaps thinking: How about the US?  When did we change to Gregorian calendar?  Unlike the old days, I now have Wikipedia at my fingertips:

 In the British Empire (including the American colonies), Wednesday 2 September 1752 was followed by Thursday 14 September 1752.

In the old country, my grandmothers' generation kept time with a "Kollavarsham" because of their roots in the old Travancore Kingdom.  The curious fellow that I am, I recall bugging my grandmother about when the home was built and she said that the original structure had the year noted on the external wall.  I went out, and was puzzled at the number that I saw.  When I reported it, she laughed and said it was not in the "English" calendar but in kollavarsham.  

Thankfully, the year the addition was completed is in the "English" calendar--the Gregorian calendar, to be precise.

A view from the terrace on grandmother's home--you can see the nearby temple "gopuram"
This was during my trip to Sengottai in ... ahem, you see the date stamp? ;)

I suppose we are all Gregorians now.

Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose

The years since 9/11 have been of government watching us in many ways.  The same years have also provided us with phenomenal digital technological wonders that also keep watching many, many things we do and think.  A typical young person today has grown up in this environment of being watched practically all the time and, by and large, they seem to be ok with it.  It does not seem to trouble them.

These trends bother me.  They worry me.

Even the nearly two years of experiencing life under Indira Gandhi's "emergency" was enough for me to understand the value and importance of freedom.  A freedom in which we do not have to think about freedom itself.

It is this freedom, and the near total lack of it, that Herta Muller writes about in a haunting and surreal poetic prose that is as much a "witness literature" as is Svetlana Alexievich's.  I jumped to Muller's book out of sheer logistics--Alexievich's Secondhand Time is hardcover, whereas Muller's The Land of Green Plums is easy to carry paperback, which was convenient for the travel.  The writing styles are different, the locales are different, but both are about humans and their lives in repressive regimes.

Muller's Nobel Prize speech is a wonderful bonus in the book.  I read that even before I got to the book.  A few pages into the book, I wondered whether the speech ought to have been a prologue of sorts, so that readers like me would have been mentally primed for the haunting tale that Muller tells.

Romania's Nicolae Ceaușescu and his totalitarian state is the setting in which Muller weaves her surreal images.  In an interview two years ago, Muller said that she didn't quite buy into the notion that the Romanians didn't have organized resistance "because they were more tightly controlled, the country is small and more easily monitored":

But I always wondered about this. You had this magnificent language, and then there was this combination of utter cluelessness—as a kind of default predisposition, a preemptive stance—and brutality. But it’s precisely this cluelessness, this utter lack of interest in political affairs, that’s the problem. Because people who aren’t interested aren’t prepared for hard times, they’re quick to give in, quick to conform, and then they’re quick to act brutally against others so as not to put themselves in jeopardy. 

The cluelessness, the utter lack of interest in political affairs, in this country--especially among the young--deeply worries me.  Particularly because throughout this twenty-first century, various processes have made conforming to be the easier route.

Even if we want to dismiss the worries that I have, the life that she describes in the fictional work will come across as not that different from the ongoing Syrian crisis, for instance.  Muller writes:

Everyone lived by thinking about flight.  They thought of swimming across the Danube until the water becomes another country. Of running after the corn until the soil becomes another country.  You could see it in their eyes: Soon they will spend every penny they have on detailed maps.  They hope for fog in the field and fog on the river for days on end so they can avoid the bullets and the guard-dogs, so they can run away, swim away. ... You could see it on their lips: Soon they will whisper to a stationmaster in exchange for every penny they have.  They will climb into freight trains so they can roll away.

Practically a line-by-line description of those fleeing Syria, right?  And she adds:

The only ones who didn't want to flee were the dictator and his guards. You could see it in their hands, eyes, lips. ... You could feel the dictator and his guards hovering over all the secret escape plans, you could feel them lurking and doling out fear.

Freedom is a very recent concept and it is quite a struggle to make sure we don't lose it.  My worry is that there are far more people eager to curtail freedom than there are to fight for it.  The cluelessness, the utter lack of interest in political affairs, in this country, in an era of increasing technological surveillance and ready-to-conform behavior worries me that America, too, might end up with a fascist in power.    

What is freedom?

As I often note here, we struggle to make meaning of our existence from the time we realize that we are mortals.  It is a challenge to understand the fact that we arrive in this world with invisible expiration dates printed on us.  In the back of our heads, as we lay down to go to sleep, deep down we know that we do not know when it will end.

In order to make meaning, we developed various institutions.  Religions that explain where we come from and--even more important--where we go after the big sleep.  During our life on this wonderful planet, which I know I will miss, we work with interpretations of love and hate. Even as we mentally prepare for that ultimate outcome, we realize that there is a life to live out, for which we then come up with various socio-political arrangements.

Svetlana Alexievich writes about how the collapse of the Soviet system not only shattered the structure of the everyday life that people lived, but it also eviscerated the ideas about Russia and its place in the world and, along with that, their own place in this world.

The oral history that Alexievich employs is certainly different from the kinds of work that I have read.  She is not merely telling the people's stories but is helping readers like me understand the very existential crisis that people went through and go through.  I was reminded of what the New Yorker had noted about Alexievich after she was awarded the Nobel Prize:

The Swedish Academy, which announced today that Alexievich will receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, cited the writer for inventing “a new kind of literary genre.” The permanent secretary of the Academy, Sara Danius, described Alexievich’s work as “a history of emotions—a history of the soul, if you wish.” Her work might also be described as oral history by excavation.

 Even the few pages that I have read thus far make it abundantly clear that Alexievich is unpacking the lives of ordinary people who bare their souls to her.  It was so touching to read one say:

It became rude to ask, "What are you reading?"

As I have often noted here, even in the old country, the world of reading and thinking and art and culture does not seem to exist anymore.  Whether it is the old country, or Russia, or here in America, people seem to be obsessed with money and riches.  They seem to be think that they can escape the existential struggle by chasing wealth.  No wonder reading has been thrown out; after all, serious books "don't teach you how to become successful. How to get rich ..."

Most of the voices in the book are those of women.  Women authors, and women's voices in this book, will fill a huge void in my understanding of this world and my own existence.  There is a reason why Alexievich focuses on women's stories:

Focussing on women was a wise decision, Alexievich said: “Women tell things in more interesting ways. They live with more feeling. They observe themselves and their lives. Men are more impressed with action. For them, the sequence of events is more important.” 

Less than fifty pages into the book and I can already get a sense of why in his twilight years "Gorbachev has become an isolated figure".  Alexievich channels one voice:

We're rolling around in shit and eating foreign food.  Instead of a Motherland, we live in a huge supermarket. If this is freedom, I don't need it. To hell with it! The people are on their knees. We're a nation of slaves. Slaves!

I am sure I will understand more about the existential crisis over the 470 pages of the book.  

Freedom is normal

As a kid growing up in a left-leaning India, I was fascinated with Fidel Castro, and the legends of Che.  I distinctly recall watching on television--which was new to us back then--a meeting of the Non-Aligned countries that was held in New Delhi.   Fidel Castro went on and on, and I am now amazed at how I sat through and watched most of that rant speech on TV!

Fortunately, I grew up, and grew out of my socialist fantasies.

That conversion happened not because I read about America and how awesome the country is. I rarely read any American fiction back then.  I walked away from the left thanks to mostly Russian writers and, of course, George Orwell.

The Soviet Union that Solzhenistyn wrote about, and Orwell's Big Brother deeply worried me.  The older and wiser me couldn't understand the violence that the Stalinists and Maoists inflicted upon their own people, leave alone those on the outside.  The communist regimes were nothing but killers and anti-democratic rulers; Fidel and Che, it turned out, were no different from the violent and maniacal Stalin.

In the decades since 1917, communism has led to more slaughter and suffering than any other cause in human history. Communist regimes on four continents sent an estimated 100 million men, women, and children to their deaths — not out of misplaced zeal in pursuit of a fundamentally beautiful theory, but out of utopian fanaticism and an unquenchable lust for power.

I was, therefore, shocked to find Che as a beloved symbol in the American college campuses.  Did people not know about the violent Che?

Later, after the events of the fateful 9/11, Che's use of violence to achieve his version of utopia came across to me as no different from how Osama bin Laden didn't find anything wrong in killing civilians.  Yet, while no rational person would walk around wearing an Osama t-shirt, thousands all across the world, including here in the US, think it is cool to wear a Che t-shirt.  I suppose Osama, too, would have gladly worn a Che t-shirt if only Che weren't an infidel!

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In the years since 9/11, violence has not been caused by commie radicals but mostly by maniacal radicals who falsely believe they are working on behalf of their prophet and the Islamic State!  I suppose if Fidel, Raul, and Che could create a Communist State, and maintain it for decades, then we should not be surprised at the Islamic State and its ability to lure young men to its cause.

I needed solace after the Orlando shooting.  I had to get out of the madness of this world where a country allows military-style assault weapons to be sold to civilians at the neighborhood store.  I wanted to understand the insanity behind a human killing dozens of people only because they were dancing and enjoying life.

I hit the books.  The summer reading list, that is.  I reached out to my trusted authors from the part of the world where suffering was a way of life.

Svetlana Alexievich turns out to be wonderful counselor, even in the introductory pages.  She writes:

I recently saw some young men in T-shirts with hammers and sickles and portraits of Lenin on them.  Do they know what communism is?

I particularly like one line that Svetlana Alexievich has in those first few pages.  When writing about what freedom is, she channels this:

it's when you can live without having to think about freedom. Freedom is normal.

Thus, with a mass shooting in Florida, the cosmos figured out for me which of the three books I will read first.

Choosing the first book was my biggest problem, which means that I have a darn good life.  Especially, when I project this against the backdrop of the tragedy in Orlando, where no amount of books and talk can ever replace the lives that were lost and the lives that have been traumatized.

Some day, soon I hope, we humans will understand violence for what it is and work towards peace on earth.