Comment #108.
February 18, 2009 11:45 am
a version of my post below appeared on:
Islam in India: The Secular Democratic Project of Lived Pluralism
http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2009/02/18/opinion/18friedman.html
New York Times copyright
February 18th, 2009 8:37 am
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Friedman's piece is both courageous and timely. These are words that must be pondered upon as much by the US State Department as by every South Asian.
People like the 17th century scholar-soldier Dara Shukoh, murdered son of the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, the freedom fighter Maulana Azad (Gandhi called him "my conscience keeper") and contemporary outspoken writer Salman Rushdie, who stood up to fatwa, all come out of this proud tradition of thousands of years of LIVED secular pluralism. We people of diverse faiths as well as agnostics and atheists, have lived together, grown tolerant of each other in our lush (rather than harsh) natural environment and in the process, discovered treasures in each others' culture.
In India Democracy is not some borrowed western concept. It has emerged out of a lived experience of discursive mingling of Greek, Hindu,Buddhist and absolutely YES, Islamic ideas, not to speak of Sikh, Christian, Judaic, Zoroastrian, Dalit and indigenous tribal ideas.
The Ayodhya mosque demolition and the post-Godhra pogroms are blots on India's secular plural national conscience and character. Still, a billion plus Indians have maintained restraint in the face of such provocations incited by criminal politicians who have yet to be brought to justice. We cannot rest until they are.
However religious tolerance and secular pluralism are not the same thing as developing uncompromisingly intolerant attitudes and policy about hunger, homelessness and inequality of opportunity. Indians badly need to develop that sort of intolerance.
The Indian secular democratic project of lived pluralism which translates as SOCIAL JUSTICE, has miles to go.
Chithra KarunaKaran
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
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No Way no How not Here by Thomas Friedman
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/opinion/18friedman.html?_r=1&hp
New York Times copyright
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Showing posts with label Self in Society. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Self in Society. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Friday, February 13, 2009
2010 World Rally for Refugees' Right to Return
2010 World Rally for Refugees' Right to Return
We urgently need a World Rally for Refugees' Right to Return in 2010.
We know no people without a land to call home.
We know no people who do not share a land with others.
We know no people who have prospered by rejecting the land of their ancestors.
We, all of us, know of no people who are content to be deprived of the option to live their lives in a land of their ancestors' birth, as well as have the option to live elsewhere.
No one is exempt from Hope. No one is exempt from Hope, whether bowed or defiant in Despair.
Hope lives in the human heart, that "thing with feathers."
Is a year of the RIGHT to RETURN possible?
During the 2010 Year of Return Palestinians, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Tamils, Kurds, indigenous Peoples, dislocated Peoples, victims of ethnic cleansing, dispossessed Peoples, de-recognized or unrecognized Peoples, ecological refugees, climate refugees, farmers, refugee growers and displaced gatherers of food, refugee practitioners of traditional forest and bush medicine, refugee craftspeople, ALL will have the unfettered opportunity to return peacefully and without hindrance, they will have the Right to Return.
This has to be a Refugees Without Borders Peoples' Movement.
No government of a sovereign state can hope to succeed, nor does any government or intergovernmental agency have the ethical courage and political will to either order or block the universal human Right to Return. Governments, liberation groups like Hamas, ALL groups that stake a claim for the right to return, member-states of the UN, the agencies and organizations of the UN, need the driving force of borderless civil society, people like you and me, to help them focus an entire year on The Right to Return of ALL refugee Peoples. Only then can the refugee movement succeed.
It will not be easy. But such a world movement is fraught with ethical, civilizational possibility.
Can we collectively plan and implement a 2010 World Rally for Refugees' Right to Return? It is an ethical responsibility of borderless civil society everywhere.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
---------------
http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/THOU-77K58G?OpenDocument
We urgently need a World Rally for Refugees' Right to Return in 2010.
We know no people without a land to call home.
We know no people who do not share a land with others.
We know no people who have prospered by rejecting the land of their ancestors.
We, all of us, know of no people who are content to be deprived of the option to live their lives in a land of their ancestors' birth, as well as have the option to live elsewhere.
No one is exempt from Hope. No one is exempt from Hope, whether bowed or defiant in Despair.
Hope lives in the human heart, that "thing with feathers."
Is a year of the RIGHT to RETURN possible?
During the 2010 Year of Return Palestinians, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Tamils, Kurds, indigenous Peoples, dislocated Peoples, victims of ethnic cleansing, dispossessed Peoples, de-recognized or unrecognized Peoples, ecological refugees, climate refugees, farmers, refugee growers and displaced gatherers of food, refugee practitioners of traditional forest and bush medicine, refugee craftspeople, ALL will have the unfettered opportunity to return peacefully and without hindrance, they will have the Right to Return.
This has to be a Refugees Without Borders Peoples' Movement.
No government of a sovereign state can hope to succeed, nor does any government or intergovernmental agency have the ethical courage and political will to either order or block the universal human Right to Return. Governments, liberation groups like Hamas, ALL groups that stake a claim for the right to return, member-states of the UN, the agencies and organizations of the UN, need the driving force of borderless civil society, people like you and me, to help them focus an entire year on The Right to Return of ALL refugee Peoples. Only then can the refugee movement succeed.
It will not be easy. But such a world movement is fraught with ethical, civilizational possibility.
Can we collectively plan and implement a 2010 World Rally for Refugees' Right to Return? It is an ethical responsibility of borderless civil society everywhere.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
---------------
http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/THOU-77K58G?OpenDocument
Self in Society: Ethical Possibility As Lived Practice
Not Self and Society but Self in Society.
The non-duality (advaita) of Self and Universe of the Upanishad (800 BCE) meets neuroscience with Damasio's "somatic marker hypothesis."(1994).
What an engagement across eons of awareness. I am conceptually locating that momentous engagement in the study of the PSYCHOSOCIAL, which sits at the crossroads intersection of sociology, psychology, quantum physics and cognitive neuroscience but which cannot be collapsed or subsumed within any of them.
First and foremost as an ordinary and reflective person, then and only secondarily as a postcolonial sociologist who teaches foundational theories in Psychology, I am fortunate to have developed for myself, in spaces of academic institutional resistance, and in digital spaces such as this blog, the opportunity to conceptually bring the individual "I" and situate that i within the collective "We", an examined union of the natural and the social-cultural.
There is no lived distance between Self & Society. Such a constructed divide lacks temporal possibility because in real time there is no Self without Society. There is no Society without Selves. It is Society that makes Self human. Though we arrive, at infancy, in Society equipped to be human, to BECOME human, we need Society. Those very few selves who were unfortunate enough to be placed outside of the human social context failed to become human.
Though we are free to mentally manipulate the two, Self and Society, as distinct conceptual categories, in order to further our thought about Self and Society, Self in Society, each necessarily constitutes the other. That symbolic manipulation is a necessary intellectual scientific endeavor in order to contemplate, affirm and establish the interweaving and inseparability of Self & Society, Society & Self.
It has become my life's work and such work is not dependent on the US academy which pays me meagerly but sufficiently for my own frugality, but continually attempts to limit the ethical intellectual scope of what I may do. Therefore most of my work must be unpaid and conducted outside of the US academy. Neither the US academy nor its macro-context, the US nation-state nor its surrogate institutions, define who I am or who I am becoming as Self in Society.
In my own lived practice, I accept full responsibility for my thoughts and actions. Therefore, I cannot ascribe my thoughts and actions (which I concurrently experience or perform in real time), to others OR to magical forces (religion vs. ethics) or fictitious circumstances or fabricated representations, outside of myself.
I am responsible for my thoughts and actions, I am fully accountable for my own thoughts and actions, which may be shaped and influenced by the above, but I still am responsible.
It is my responsibility to myself, my family, my ancestors, my universal civil society to develop my intrinsic motivation and limit the influence of extrinsic motivation in the ethical pursuit of my own lived possibility.
Others are not responsible or accountable for what I myself think and do. I must importantly accept the responsibility that my thoughts and actions may influence and impact others, sometimes to their detriment, therefore I have an ethical responsibility to anticipate how I may affect these selves, these others who are also equally human and have the same ethical potential as I. This is the goal of the Self in joining with other selves in the pursuit of establishing the Greater Collective Good, an indispensable constituting force of Society.
By the same token I cannot accept responsibility for the thoughts and actions of others, including the thoughts and actions of individuals, financial institutions or governments. These I feel absolutely free to examine, challenge and oppose or support, according to my evolving understanding of my own ethical possibility as a moment-by-moment, daily, seasonal and lifelong lived practice.
It is fortuitous for me to have an opportunity for reflection on Self in Society, on this anniversary of Gandhi's assassination.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Self & Society: Ethical Possibility as Lived Practice
01/30/09 Gandhi was assassinated on Jan 30, 1948
The non-duality (advaita) of Self and Universe of the Upanishad (800 BCE) meets neuroscience with Damasio's "somatic marker hypothesis."(1994).
What an engagement across eons of awareness. I am conceptually locating that momentous engagement in the study of the PSYCHOSOCIAL, which sits at the crossroads intersection of sociology, psychology, quantum physics and cognitive neuroscience but which cannot be collapsed or subsumed within any of them.
First and foremost as an ordinary and reflective person, then and only secondarily as a postcolonial sociologist who teaches foundational theories in Psychology, I am fortunate to have developed for myself, in spaces of academic institutional resistance, and in digital spaces such as this blog, the opportunity to conceptually bring the individual "I" and situate that i within the collective "We", an examined union of the natural and the social-cultural.
There is no lived distance between Self & Society. Such a constructed divide lacks temporal possibility because in real time there is no Self without Society. There is no Society without Selves. It is Society that makes Self human. Though we arrive, at infancy, in Society equipped to be human, to BECOME human, we need Society. Those very few selves who were unfortunate enough to be placed outside of the human social context failed to become human.
Though we are free to mentally manipulate the two, Self and Society, as distinct conceptual categories, in order to further our thought about Self and Society, Self in Society, each necessarily constitutes the other. That symbolic manipulation is a necessary intellectual scientific endeavor in order to contemplate, affirm and establish the interweaving and inseparability of Self & Society, Society & Self.
It has become my life's work and such work is not dependent on the US academy which pays me meagerly but sufficiently for my own frugality, but continually attempts to limit the ethical intellectual scope of what I may do. Therefore most of my work must be unpaid and conducted outside of the US academy. Neither the US academy nor its macro-context, the US nation-state nor its surrogate institutions, define who I am or who I am becoming as Self in Society.
In my own lived practice, I accept full responsibility for my thoughts and actions. Therefore, I cannot ascribe my thoughts and actions (which I concurrently experience or perform in real time), to others OR to magical forces (religion vs. ethics) or fictitious circumstances or fabricated representations, outside of myself.
I am responsible for my thoughts and actions, I am fully accountable for my own thoughts and actions, which may be shaped and influenced by the above, but I still am responsible.
It is my responsibility to myself, my family, my ancestors, my universal civil society to develop my intrinsic motivation and limit the influence of extrinsic motivation in the ethical pursuit of my own lived possibility.
Others are not responsible or accountable for what I myself think and do. I must importantly accept the responsibility that my thoughts and actions may influence and impact others, sometimes to their detriment, therefore I have an ethical responsibility to anticipate how I may affect these selves, these others who are also equally human and have the same ethical potential as I. This is the goal of the Self in joining with other selves in the pursuit of establishing the Greater Collective Good, an indispensable constituting force of Society.
By the same token I cannot accept responsibility for the thoughts and actions of others, including the thoughts and actions of individuals, financial institutions or governments. These I feel absolutely free to examine, challenge and oppose or support, according to my evolving understanding of my own ethical possibility as a moment-by-moment, daily, seasonal and lifelong lived practice.
It is fortuitous for me to have an opportunity for reflection on Self in Society, on this anniversary of Gandhi's assassination.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://www.EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Self & Society: Ethical Possibility as Lived Practice
01/30/09 Gandhi was assassinated on Jan 30, 1948
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