Never meet your hero!

Nadeem F Paracha in The Dawn

The German writer J Wolfgang Goethe once quipped, “Blessed is the nation that doesn’t need heroes.” As if to expand upon Goethe’s words, the British philosopher Herbert Spencer wrote, “Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.”

There is every likelihood that Goethe was viewing societies as collectives, in which self-interest was the primary motivation but where the creation and worship of ‘heroes’ are acts to make people feel virtuous.

Heroes can’t become heroes without an audience. A segment of the society exhibits an individual and explains his or her actions or traits as ‘heroic’. If these receive enough applause, a hero is created. But then no one is really interested in knowing the actual person who has been turned into a hero. Only his mythologised sides are to be viewed.

The mythologising is done to quench a yearning in society — a yearning that cannot be fulfilled because it might be too impractical, utopian, irrational and, therefore, against self-interest. So, the mythologised individual becomes an alter ego of a society conscious of its inherent flaws. Great effort is thus invested in hiding the actual from the gaze of society, so that only the mythologised can be viewed.

One often comes across videos on social media of common everyday people doing virtuous deeds, such as helping an old person cross a busy road, or helping an animal. The helping hands in this regard are exhibited as ‘heroes’, even though they might not even be aware that they are being filmed.

What if they weren’t? What if they remain unaware about the applause that their ‘viral video’ has attracted? Will they stop being helpful without having an audience? They certainly won’t be hailed as heroes. They are often exhibited as heroes by those who want to use them to signal their own appreciative attitude towards ‘goodness’.

This is a harmless ploy. But since self-interest is rampant in almost every society, this can push some people to mould themselves as heroes. There have been cases in which men and women have actually staged certain ‘heroic’ acts, filmed them, and then put them out for all to view. The purpose is to generate praise and accolades for themselves and, when possible, even monetary gains.

But it is also possible that they truly want to be seen as heroes in an unheroic age, despite displaying forged heroism. Then there are those who are so smitten by the romanticised notions of a ‘heroic age’ that they actually plunge into real-life scenarios to quench their intense yearning to be seen as heroes.

For example, a person who voluntarily sticks his neck out for a cause that may lead to his arrest. He knows this. But he also knows that there will be many on social and electronic media who will begin to portray him as a hero. But the applauders often do this to signal their own disposition towards a ‘heroic’ cause.

We apparently live in an unheroic age — an age that philosophers such as Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche or, for that matter, Muhammad Iqbal, detested. Each had their own understanding of a bygone heroic age.

To Nietzsche, the heroic age existed in some pre-modern period in history, when the Germanic people were fearless. To Iqbal, the heroic age was when early Muslims were powered by an unadulterated faith and passion to conquer the world. There are multiple periods in time that are referred to as ‘heroic ages’, depending on one’s favourite ideology or professed faith.

The yearning for heroes and the penchant for creating them to be revered — so that societies can feel better about themselves — is as old as when the first major civilisations began to appear, thousands of years ago. So when they spoke of heroic ages, what period of history were they reminiscing about — the Stone Age?

Humans are naturally pragmatic. From hunter-gatherers, we became scavenger-survivalists. The image may be off-putting but the latter actually requires one to be more rational, clever and pragmatic. This is how we have survived and progressed.

That ancient yearning for a heroic age has remained, though. An age that never was — an age that was always an imagined one. That’s why we even mythologise known histories, because the actual in this regard can be awkward to deal with. But it is possible to unfold.

America’s ‘founding fathers’ were revered for over two centuries as untainted heroes, until some historians decided to demystify them by exploring their lives outside their mythologised imaginings. Many of these heroes turned out to be slave-owners and not very pleasant people.

Mahatma Gandhi, revered as a symbol of tolerance, turned out to also be a man who disliked black South Africans. The founder of Pakistan MA Jinnah is mythologised as a man who supposedly strived to create an ‘Islamic state’, yet the fact is that he was a declared liberal and loved his wine. Martin Luther King Jr, the revered black rights activist, was also a prolific philanderer.

When freed from mythology, the heroes become human — still important men and women, but with various flaws. This is when they become real and more relatable. They become ‘anti-heroes.’

But there is always an urgency in societies to keep the flaws hidden. The flaws can damage the emotions that are invested in revering ‘heroes’, both dead and living. The act of revering provides an opportunity to feel bigger than a scavenger-survivor, even if this requires forged memories and heavily mythologised men and women.

Therefore, hero-worship can also make one blurt out even the most absurd things to keep a popular but distorted memory of a perceived hero intact. For example, this is exactly what one populist former Pakistani prime minister did when he declared that the terrorist Osama bin Laden was a martyr.

By doing this, the former PM was signalling his own ‘heroism’ as well — that of a proud fool who saw greatness in a mass murderer to signal his own ‘greatness’ in an unheroic age.

The French philosopher Voltaire viewed this tendency as a chain that one has fallen in love with. Voltaire wrote, “It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.”

‘Something is in the air’: Ben Okri on the fight against racism

Ben Okri in The FT

‘Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter’ — Martin Luther King Jr 

My first conscious experience of race was when I was six years old. My father had come to collect me from school. As we made our way across the snow-covered fields in Peckham, south London, in the winter of 1965-66, I felt something crack my head. Then I heard the voices of boys shouting the N-word, making animal noises and throwing packed snowballs with stones in them. 

We fought back as best as we could, father and son, but in the end had to run. When we got home we were bloodied. 

“Why were they throwing stones at us?” I asked. 

Dad struggled for words. 

“It’s because we are black,” he said. 

 At the time, what he said made no sense to me. With time, other things said didn’t make sense either. “You will never amount to anything.” “There’s no future for you.” 

I think the 12 weeks of lockdown have purified our sense of justice. They have given us time to think. I was on a short walk the other day and found myself wondering how it must be for a child to feel that the world thinks evilly of them for reasons that don’t make sense. Imagine the additional effects of being insulted, picked on, ganged up against, constantly harassed by the police, wrongly accused, mocked on TV, excluded — in short, the whole catalogue of injustices that people of colour withstand daily?

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If anyone wants an explanation for the scale of protests following the killing of George Floyd, they need look no further than the buried accumulation of racial prejudices endured for years, for lifetimes, by black people. 

A people endure and endure and then one day an event becomes a living symbol of what is being done to them, a symbol that they are perceived as less than human. How long are people meant to suffer before they cry out? 

Racism is the perception that one race is superior to another, that the colour of their skin determines their place in the human hierarchy. Pernicious and pervasive, it is supported by a matrix of power and history. For racism to be real, there has to be power. It has to be a hard and incontestable power. It is this that gives racism its vicious quality. For every George Floyd and Sandra Bland in America, there is a Stephen Lawrence, a Julian Cole, a Nuno Cardoso in Britain. 

The real question is whether racism is inherently human. Every people, in the depth of their hearts, think themselves superior to others. They think themselves the centre of the world until another people overpower them. If a people have power over other people long enough, they think themselves intrinsically superior. Soon their mythology will reflect this. Racism is merely the mythology of power seeded into the culture of a people. But racism can also be a compensatory mythology. 

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Racism does not reflect reality. It only reflects the current reality of power relations. If the western economy were to collapse today and all the financial and military power move eastward, the mythology of race would move eastward too. Mythology is often the storytelling of those who have gained power. Strip people of their power and the justification of their racism vanishes. Watch a people acquire power, and the justification of their racism emerges. 

Racism is destructive. Racism is really war declared. It is war threatened at every moment. If you remove all the social niceties, this is what racism says: “Your life means nothing to me; my life is more important than yours.” A logical conclusion of racism is genocide. 

It is amazing to me that people don’t see that it is a few short steps from polite, concealed, social racism to Derek Chauvin of the Minneapolis Police Department applying a knee to the throat of George Floyd, also of Minneapolis, for eight and a half minutes. 

But a mentality that secretly thinks one race not quite of the same level of humanity, with a bit of power, and a sense of immunity, soon finds that very mentality justifying such state-sanctioned killing. If you doubt this, have a read through the nastier chapters of apartheid or colonial history and see the things that well-educated people who thought of themselves as perfectly civilised sanctioned in the name of race. 

The aspect that causes the greatest difficulty is how a person can reconcile their sense of personal decency with the possibility of harbouring, perhaps unknown to themselves, racist tendencies. I know many good decent people who do things to their friends of colour which, if said or done to them, would fill them with outrage. Let’s call these racism blind spots. 

The forms that racism takes are legion. They can be as seemingly innocuous as being given the tables near the toilet in a restaurant, or the most isolated places at dinner settings, or the silent insinuation of having someone clutch their handbag tighter when they see you. It could be as vicious as being set upon by the police, or having someone call the cops on you when you go birdwatching in a park. It could be as indeterminate as being the first person suspected if a mobile phone goes missing in a friend’s house that you are visiting, or taking an hour to get a taxi in the 1990s, while seeing them stop a short distance away for someone of a “less threatening” hue. It could be the terrible case of John Bunn, who was wrongly convicted of murder and spent 17 years in prison. 

Racism is one of the greatest wastes of human resources. It would be useful to have a cost analysis of what is lost to nations from the effects of systemic racism, the loss of manpower that could be put to work in the great enterprise of civilisation. 

All people who endure racial prejudice just want the normal rights of human beings. They want to get jobs, have nice working experiences, enjoy friendships, fall in love, raise their kids, and make their orderly procession through life just like everyone else. 

I think it is essential that every child be educated about race. An understanding of justice ought to be a basic part of their education. Our children carry forth the assumptions we make about the world. If we leave the moral education of our children to the schools, then they simply absorb the dominant views. A sense of justice can only really come from the home. The trouble is that so many parents have no idea of the injustices into which they are raising their children. People are not born hating, Nelson Mandela once said, they must learn. The parents needed to be educated first but weren’t. 

Children can be better educated on race, most importantly by being taught history more fully. They must be taught about the slave trade and that it was an evil. They should be taught about the empire and colonialism, but they must also learn about the legitimate voices against its cruelties and how people fought for their independence. They should be taught about the civil rights movement and apartheid. Every child should know that people are equal before God and their fellow human beings. It can only make them stronger and more in tune with the future, because they stand in truth with justice and their times. Every child should be raised with the fundamental assumption that all races, all colours, are valid and equal. This single thing alone would make the world a truly extraordinary place, rich with the possibilities of our commingled genius. 

The effect of racism on education is devastating. Not long ago, I visited a prison for a BBC programme. All of the black prisoners I spoke to fell out of the educational system because of how it made them feel. 

The issue of race is more than a moral problem. It is an existential one. The reason the issue of race keeps coming back is because people cannot face the truth about what they have done to one another. They cannot face the truth about the secret thinking that is behind the strangeness of their racial actions, or about the real reason why the ideology of race came into existence in the first place. 

The modern idea of race began with Europeans coming to Africa in search of gold. When the trade degenerated from gold to human beings, it was the ideology of racial hierarchy that was used to justify that monstrosity. 

The idea of race is not just black and white. A species of racism is there in the Bible, and in most sacred texts. It is there among the ancient Egyptians. It is there in the ancient Greeks towards the Persians, and with the Persians towards the Greeks. A casual reading of Caesar’s “Commentaries” shows that the Romans believed the British tribes to be a race of barbarians. 

Maybe all mythologies of origin are by implication racist. Tribalism is the microcosm of racism. It may well be that humans are inclined by nature to their own kind but over the course of years people learnt by trade, by the fact that no one can have all the blessings or resources, that it is better to have dealings with other peoples. They discovered in the process that the other is not so very different from them, or that their difference is not apocalyptic. Without this overcoming of prejudice to some degree, civilisation could never have happened. 

It seems that the idea of tribal or racial superiority belongs very much to the primitive stage of human development. Because, ultimately, thinking yourself superior to others is bad for business and fatal for progress. It causes possibilities to diminish around you. Those who respect others do better trade with others, and win their friendship and support. All the high-minded ideas of Rome’s superior destiny could not keep it from being torn apart by the concerted effort of the Goths. 

We have really misapplied the idea of civilisation. We think civilisation is Plato, the Acropolis and the classics. To my mind, civilisation is the unleashing of the noble impulses of the human spirit for the greater good of the human race and the beautification of the earth. The real civilisation begins when people realise that being human is one of the greatest miracles of the universe. 

Racial thinking is a toxic pathology, and at the heart of it there is a kind of madness. It is the madness of a denial of a reality which the inward mind knows to be true. The house of racial thinking is a divided, unstable house. It is unsustainable. And like the Berlin Wall, it will fall. Keep in mind the image of Chauvin with his knee on George Floyd’s neck. This is a police officer who should be protecting the citizens but who is in effect being an executioner. “It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners,” wrote Camus. 

This is a clamorous age of freedom. The young, the old, women, LGBT people, the differently abled, all demand their full human rights. 

Something is in the air. In the past, the big clashes were around visible, measurable events: the Berlin Wall, apartheid. There is some of that going on now, the tearing down of the statues of the Bristol slave trader, the removal of the statues of King Leopold II in Belgium. Maybe these protests are about an idea that is long overdue, an idea that will tear through our societies and reinstate the place of true justice in all aspects of our lives. 

Maybe the human race is growing up at last, refusing the horrible shackles of racism, rejecting all of its injustices. Maybe the time of that primitive idea of racial superiority is finally over. Black people and white people are joining forces in their monumental protests to rip this evil from our societies, our institutions, our hearts. 

In which case, the real birth of modern moral civilisation began on May 25 2020, when, for eight minutes and 46 seconds, George Floyd said 16 times over that he could not breathe.

On Devdutt Pattanaik

The Indian mythology of happy old age

Shiv Visvanathan in The Hindu

Indian culture seems too distant and fragile to sustain old age. A sense of tragedy haunts the future. One is forced to ask what is the use of the idea of India, of all our pride in our culture, when the old are left to die or live in indifference

One of the most hopeful sights one can see on Marina Beach, Chennai, is to watch groups of old people walking together, talking boisterously, comparing notes, showering each other with a barrage of anecdotes. Occasionally, one can see an old couple walking like a dignified pair, content with each other, as if their walk is a continuation of their love affair. There is dignity, a companionship and a beautiful everydayness to it. Parks and beaches are often scenes for the celebration of old age. I must confess that these scenes are public and reassuring. Yet, as one probes further, one discovers that this is a small slice of the reality of the old age in India. The HelpAge India report (2014) on old age abuse provides an altogether different picture. The statistics are frightening and the few interviews, deeply disturbing.

Based on a sample study of 1,200 people from six Tier I cities and six Tier II cities, the report suggests that old age is a frightening prospect, an ecology of violence where over half the elderly interviewed report to experiencing abuse within the family. Oddly, while the percentage of abuse has gone up, the report indicates that at least 41 per cent of those abused did not report it. Abuse, choked within and caged in silence festers like a sore. Fear and helplessness that there is no one else to depend upon and few to report to, adds to the penumbra of silence. While our myths and advertisements perpetuate the myth of happy old age, the data tells us the behaviour of our society is an insult to old age

Old age, a commodity

When cities are ranked in terms of the level of abuse, Bangalore tops among Tier I cities with the sample reporting 75 per cent of abuse. Among Tier II cities, Nagpur is highest with 85 per cent interviewed reporting abuse. What is interesting is that such abuse is not occasional but sustained with verbal abuse (41 per cent), disrespect (33 per cent), and neglect (29 per cent) emerging as the three most frequent types of abuse reported by the elderly. Despite their helplessness, the elderly are good sociologists, analysing the roots of their abuse to emotional dependence, economic dependence and the changing ethos of values. There is a sense that in a deep and fundamental way, we are no longer a caring society.

While the numbers speak loudly, the interviews, even if sparse and bald, capture the sociology of old age more graphically.

For many, old age is a space of helplessness, callousness and indifference. Despite being caught in the web of symbolic and physical violence, the old are still able to provide an ethnography of despair. They point out quietly that old age has become a commodity. The younger generation commodifies old age by seeing the old as sources of pension, property, income. The old are like the goose that must lay the golden eggs and move on. Waiting for the old to die seems an unnecessary inconvenience. Yet, when the old have nothing more to give, they are seen as dispensable. Keshav, a 65-year-old from Kolkata, complains that his wife and he are constantly abused because they do not earn. His wife cooks for the entire family and yet they have to plead for a fair share of the food. Worse, as the report notes tersely, “even requests for medicine or clothes are met with taunts of their impending deaths and termed as a ‘waste’ on them.” The political economy of our new old age becomes clearer in interviews. Old age is not a part of the ritual cycle, a natural process where the old retire with dignity, providing a richness of emotion and memory to the family. Today, when the elderly wither away as a commodity, a milch cow to be milked by greedy children, they become waste to be abandoned. One literally sees them as “useless eaters” to be denied food and medicines and to be eventually abandoned in the dust heap and suffer in silence and indifference. Many of the old reported that they went hungry to sleep.

Politics of abuse

What makes the report so devastating is that it is so baldly written. It’s a no-nonsense approach, its census of violence becomes even more devastating because of a sheer absence of sentimentality. It provides the facts and asks you to feel, feel angry or embarrassed. When parents complain that they have been reduced to being less than domestic servants, denied even their basic needs, one wonders what happened to the idea of India, our sense of a civilisation, the empty boast about our Indian-ness.

The report shows that the vulnerability of old age is created out of the political economy of dependency. The old probably grew up expecting their children to nurture and protect them, sustain their sense of worth and dignity. What breaks them is the fact that their children see them as being useless, a burden, and yet what adds to the desperate poignancy is that they are not able to cut loose. The family, memory, emotion becomes a guise of dependency perpetuating the violence as the old feel there is nowhere to go and no alternative system which could sustain them. The extended family or the neighbourhood, the local politician or the policeman are of little help. To the vulnerability that abuse creates, one adds a sense of helplessness. Old age is now an iron cage from which there is no exit.

There is a touch of the new to this politics of abuse. The tyranny of the regime is enforced by the son and the daughter-in-law. The daughter-in-law is the new Hobbesian sovereign in these sociological anecdotes as the mother-in-law becomes a desiccated old creature, unrecognisable from the soap operas of old which glorified her power and authority. The son sides with the wife against the mother upturning one of the oldest norms of domestic politics. It is also clear that there is a generational change here. The new generation wants the old to give them property but then move on. They are not seen as part of the ritual cycles of domestic life. The old grammar has changed. Old age, once a sign of status, a rite of passage to dignity, is now redundant or pathological, a problem for policy and social work, not for the family which states its indifference ruthlessly.

The report can be read both as a sociology and a social policy. As sociology, the old themselves ponder on the distance between generations, the absence of ethics and memory that could have provided dignity to old age. As a teacher I often ask my students — a sensitive lot — to talk about their grandmothers, to give me details about stories they have heard or food cooked. Most of them seemed embarrassed, surprised with such intrusive questions; only one could talk of his grandmother’s pickles with a zest that summoned a whole sensorium. For most of them, grandparents have become occasional question marks, ritual burdens. Few have recollections of stories told, preferring the narratives on TV or the Internet. It is almost as if grandparents are like creatures out of Tussauds; features that can be ignored. I asked one student to describe the touch of her grandmother. She almost felt repulsed exclaiming, “God, she is so old and scaly.” An absence of memories and ethos of sharing disrupts the ecology of old age. Dignity has become a rare word as abuse becomes the sociological constant.

The report also adds that for the elderly, there is little knowledge of helplines or sources of appeal.

Shift in values

The report however raises a deeper question in a tacit way. One has to understand that ours was a civilisation where the old were honoured, where old age was a position of dignity and wisdom. Somehow with modernisation, consumerism, individualism, the values of old age are no longer part of our society, at least as reflected in the survey sample.

The question is does such a problem have to be solved civilisationally or is it merely an act of repair, a creation of social security to be effected by public policy? It is the erosion of values that disconcerts one to suddenly realise that your grandparents are not a refuge, a bundle of stories, a ganglion of memories, an appeal against parents but an appendage, economically useless and burdensome. The question is do we rethink the norms of old age, treat it as a commons of stability and wisdom, and change the values of our culture? The other alternative is to accept that old age is a problem and accept that new institutions of support outside the family have to be built. Social policy as a piece of plumbing and repair haunts the report. Culture seems too distant and fragile to sustain old age. A sense of tragedy haunts the future. One is forced to ask what is the use of the idea of India, of all our pride in our culture, when the old are left to die or live in indifference. As children, we used to laugh when we heard that the Japanese were buying land for old age homes in India. Maybe they had a better sense of the future than us.

This is no return to ancient Greek democracy

Matthew Norman

Wednesday, 02 November 2011

There may be nothing new under the sun, but according to the ancient Greeks it is quite the celestial Johnny-come-lately. Long before the sun, long even before the Titans rose and fell, and Zeus slew his father Cronos to seize control of Olympus, there was only Chaos. The mother of all things is back in charge as the muthah of all financial crises moves closer – thanks to the modern Greeks – to sucking us all into the Abyss (Chaos's firstborn, as you cosmology fans well know). Perhaps by now a semblance of order has re-asserted itself over the mayhem prevailing at the time of writing, with markets in freefall and confusion reigning over Greece's forthcoming referendum on the euro bailout. If so, it won't last long.

The date of that vote is as unclear as any intricate political calculations behind Prime Minister George Papandreou's decision to call it, or even whether he informed the Franco-German neo-axis powers before announcing it. Nor is it obvious what the precise implications for Europe might be, other than perfectly hideous.

Chaotic hardly seems an adequate adjective. The Greeks have unleashed pandemonium, and if there is any hope remaining in Pandora's box this time around, you'd want the Hubble Telescope to locate it. In the frantic quest for an upside, all I can dredge up is gratitude that I took the mediocre redbrick degree in Classics, hence all the tiresome and pretentious allusions, rather than in economics. Now that would have been a waste of time. No professional economist has much clue what's going on, beyond a basic appreciation that we are, as Richard Littlejohn will surely put it, going to Hellas in a handcart.

What is abundantly clear is that all the comparisons between this grumbling nightmare and the approach to war in 1939 were less fanciful than one would have liked, though in the globalised age everything moves faster. There was almost a calendar year between Neville Chamberlain declaring peace for our time and war with Germany. From the moment Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy waved their Greek bailout paper in Brussels and Mr Papandreou's startling announcement were barely five days.

Why he did so is the source of contention, but we can probably rule out any driving passion to invoke the memory of fifth century BC Athens. Some muscular Eurosceptics will posit that, in offering the plebiscite denied us, Mr Papandreou honours his nation's status as the birthplace of democracy. But politicians tend not to think in such grandiose terms when trying to navigate a course between a rock and hard place. Or, to continue this whirlwind odyssey through half-remembered lectures, between Scylla and Charybdis. The waters may be uncharted, but the menaces to Greece are in plain sight. On one side stand the unforgiving rocks of unending austerity within the eurozone, struggling to tame sovereign debt which remains crippling despite that offer of a 50 per cent haircut. Already suffering horribly and riven by civil unrest, the Greeks do not much fancy a future of penury under German dominion, as the explosion there of Nazi-themed cartoons and graffiti confirms.

On the other side lies the dreaded whirlpool of "disorderly default"... leaving the euro in disgrace, and attempting to return to growth via a devalued drachma, with no protection from the world's second reserve currency. Which is the quicker route to perdition is anyone's guess, but from this remove it looks a bit like offering a terminal patient the choice between a revolver and the hemlock.

Mr Papandreou, who seems neither a madman nor a nihilist, will not have taken this apparently deranged last throw of the dice without feeling irresistible pressure. Apart from a livid electorate, he is assailed by an opposition so irresponsible in promising cure without pain that it makes Ed Balls look like Stafford Cripps the day his hairshirt returned from Sketchley's with a wire-wool lining. In delegating the decision, he presumably believes this is the only possible way to compel the opposition to face reality and to scare the electorate into accepting that the alternative is worse than the bailout. It is, to put it gently, a monstrous gamble.

It is also playing with fire on behalf of the rest of us, within and outside the eurozone. If Greece goes, as begins to look inevitable, the fall of Italy becomes more imminent... and as with their respective empires long ago, the latter is rather more threatening to the rest of Europe than the former. Perhaps when your liver is being daily devoured by vultures, you can be forgiven for losing sight of any obligation to the world beyond your shores.

It hardly behoves a country that slags the euro off from the sidelines at every turn – to borrow from Mr Sarkozy's trenchant rebuke to David Cameron – to lecture others on the altruistic need to remain in it. But there is a strong sense that, just as with the supremacy of chaos, the Greeks have been here before. Disguised as a white bull, Zeus kidnapped Europa and ravished her. With this referendum, Greece seeks to take Europe hostage and is screwing her in Olympian fashion once again.