The question of forgiveness

Shiv Visvanathan in The Hindu



On May 18, standing before the House of Commons, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will offer a full apology for the Komagata Maru incident. File Photo


Canadian leader Justin Trudeau is to tender a full apology for the Komagata Maru incident of 1914. It should trigger similar repentance elsewhere for other sins of the past.

History rarely produces moments of epiphany, where politics appears as a creative act of redemption and the future becomes a collective act of healing. Each society carries its wounds like a burden, a perpetual reminder that justice works fragmentarily. Suddenly out of the crassness, the crudity of everyday politics, comes a moment to treasure. On May 18, standing before the House of Commons, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will offer a full apology for theKomagata Maru incident.

The drama of the ritual, the act of owning up to a wrong and voluntarily asking for forgiveness is rare in history. One immediately thinks of Willy Brandt, the West German Chancellor, kneeling down during his visit to the Warsaw Ghetto and apologising to the Jews. The act was moving. For once instead of the mere word, the body spoke in utter humility as Brandt knelt before the monument. It was a sheer act of courage, responsibility and humility, an admission of a politics gone wrong, a statement of a colossal mistake that needed redemption.

Hundred years to atonement

This movement for forgiveness is important. Forgiveness adds a different world to the idea of justice. To the standard legal idea of justice as retaliation, compensation, forgiveness adds the sense of healing, of restoration, of reconciliation. Society faces up to an act of ethical repair and attempts to heal itself. Memory becomes critical here because it is memory that keeps scars alive, and memory often waits like a phantom limb more real than the event itself.

The Komagata Maru incident is over a hundred years old. But like the Jallianwala Bagh atrocity, it is a memory that refuses to die easily. It is a journey that remains perpetually incomplete, recycled in memory as Canada would not allow the homecoming.

Komagata Maru was a ship hired by Gurdit Singh, a Hong Kong/Singapore-based Sikh businessman, a follower of the Ghadar Party, who wanted to circumvent Canadian laws of immigration. The journey of 376 Indians, 340 of them Sikhs, began from Hong Kong. They finally reached Vancouver where a new drama of attrition began. British Columbia refused to let the passengers disembark, while Indians in Canada fought a rearguard struggle of legal battles and protest meetings to delay the departure. Passengers even mounted an attack on the police showering them with lumps of coal and bricks.

The ship was forced to return to Calcutta, 19 of the passengers were killed by the British and many placed under arrest. Komagata Maru was a symbol of racism, of exclusionary laws, a protest to highlight the injustice of Canadian laws. When Mr. Trudeau apologises, he will perform an act of healing where Canada apologises not only to India but to its own citizens, many of whom are proud Sikhs. The index of change is not just the ritual apology but another small fact. The British Columbia Regiment involved in the expulsion of the Komagata Maru was commanded between 2011 and 2014 by Harjit Sajjan, now Canada’s Minister of National Defence.

Apology and forgiveness

This incident echoes the need for similar apologies, acts of dignity which can repair political rupture. Imagine the U.S. apologising to Japanese prisoners imprisoned in World War II. Imagine Japan apologising for war atrocities. Think of the U.S. apologising for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Press even further and dream of Narendra Modi apologising to the victims of the Gujarat riots of 2002. One senses some of these dreams are remote and realises that, after nearly two years in office as Prime Minister, Mr. Modi does not have the makings of a Willy Brandt. Truth and healing are still remote to the politics of the majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party.

The very act of apologising and forgiveness reiterates the importance of memory and the vitality of the community as a link between past, present and future. It raises the question of the responsibility for the past and its injustices. Somehow for many politicians, the past is a different country for which they have no responsibility. Australia’s Prime Minister John Howard refused to apologise to the Aborigines, contending that present generations cannot be responsible for the past. Tony Blair was ready to apologise for the mid-19th century Irish potato famine but refused to apologise for the depredations of colonial rule. One is not asking for facile or convenient apologies, one is asking for a rethinking of politics. David Cameron, in February 2013, came close to an apology for Jallianwala Bagh. More than that, I think what one needs is a British apology for the Bengal famine of the 1940s which eliminated over three million people. It is a pity that it has not received a Nuremberg or a Truth Commission. I realise apology is a mere moral act without the materiality of reparation, but apology returns to the victim and the community the acknowledgement of human worth and dignity. Without the axiomatics of dignity, no human rights project makes any sense.

One must emphasise that forgiveness and apology are not sentimental acts constructing melodramatic spaces creating what French philosopher Jacques Derrida called “the grand scenes of repentance and theatricality”. Here, as Derrida claimed, is that rare moment where the human race shaken against itself examines its own humanity. Anti-apartheid activist Desmond Tutu is even more hard-headed when he says, “In almost every language, the most difficult words are ‘I am sorry’.” Mr. Tutu adds that spurious reconciliations can only lead to spurious healing. For him forgiveness is a wager, an ethical wager on the future of a relationship. This is why the few events of apology which stand up to critical scrutiny deserve to be treasured.

India’s own chequered past

One must realise the past haunts India. Truth-telling, truth-seeking and the dignity and the courage of rituals of apology and forgiveness may do a lot to redeem the current impasses of Indian politics. Indians have not forgiven history or what they call history for its injustices. Yet, the language, the philosophy of forgiveness adds to the many dialects of democracy. I am merely listing moments of apology which could change the face of Indian politics. I am not demanding a census of atrocity but a set of ethical scripts whose political possibilities could be played out. The effort is not to provoke or score points, but to help create a deeper reflection and reflexivity about the growing impact of violence in the Indian polity.

First, I would like Narendra Modi to apologise to the Muslim community and to India for the horror of the 2002 riots. The genocide of 2002 froze Gujarat and India at a point, and the thaw can only be an ethical one demanding the humility of truth and forgiveness. A lot has been written about the unfinished nature of the 1984 riots in which over 5,000 Sikhs lost their lives. I know Manmohan Singh did offer an apology, but the Congress’s behaviour has turned this into an impotent mumbling. In the rightness of things, the Gandhi family owes an apology to the Sikhs, something it has not had the ethical courage to venture. Third, as an Indian, I think one not only has to withdraw the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act but also apologise to the people of Kashmir and Manipur for the decades of suffering. One must request Irom Sharmila to end her 15-year-long fast demanding the withdrawal of the Act with dignity. There has been enough violence here, and it is time that we as a nation think beyond the egotism and brittleness of the national security state.

Each reader can add to the list and to the possibilities of a new ethical and moral politics which requires a Gandhian inventiveness of ritual and politics. What I wish to add is a caveat. The rituals of apology and the question of justice, reconciliation and ethical repair are not easy. They require a rigour and an inventiveness of ethical thinking which necessitate new experiments with the idea of truth and healing in India.

Mr. Tutu makes this point beautifully and wisely. He talks of the man known as the Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal. In his book, The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness, Wiesenthal spoke of a Nazi soldier who had burnt a group of Jews to death. As the Nazi lay dying in his deathbed, he confessed and asked for absolution from Wiesenthal. Wiesenthal found he could not forgive him. In the end, he asks the reader, “What would you have done?” — and The Sunflower is an anthropology of various responses.

We need an equivalence of The Sunflower experiment to ask Kashmiri Pandits, Kashmiri Muslims, Manipuris, Dalits, tribals, women what it would take for forgiveness after an act of atrocity. In fact, each one of us is a potential citizen, as perpetrator, spectator and victim, in that anthology. Is forgiveness and healing possible in the history of our lives? Democracy needs to think out the answers.

The Untold and Unofficial History of Pakistan

By Hamid Bashani

Part 1 (In Urdu)

These are the psychological tricks both sides of the EU debate are playing on you - and how to recognise them

What sounds worse: a shortfall of 6 per cent of GDP resulting from Brexit, or a loss of £4,300 per household?

Ben Chu in The Independent


Imagine you’re lucky. Imagine you receive £50 from a benefactor. But, oh dear, there’s a problem with the gift. It turns out too much was paid out. There has to be a financial correction. So you’re faced with a choice.

So would you rather keep £20? Or lose £30? Think very quickly. Did you initially lean towards keeping £20? Many people do. But of course they amount to the same thing. You’d still have £20 whichever option you picked.

So what’s going on? Why did £20 look more appealing? That’s the brain’s “system one” at work, according to psychologists. Studies show that the reactive human mind sees the “keep” flashing in red lights before there’s any mental arithmetic (even before trivial calculations such as subtracting £30 from £50). And the word “loss” is also deeply off-putting to the mind’s system one. A quick decision framed as a straight choice between “keep” and “lose” will usually see “lose” rejected.

The mental arithmetic is “system two” and it takes much longer to be activated in most of us than system one. Sadly, many of us don’t even bother activating system two before making decisions at all.

Advertisers are aware of this bias. That’s why they often frame propositions in terms of how much money people can keep rather than how much they’ve lost in the past. “Keep more of your savings income by opening an ISA”, “Keep more of your money when you shop with us”, and so on.

Political advertisers are on to it too. That’s why the Leave campaign ahead of June’s European Union referendum have been emphasising so heavily the prize of keeping the UK’s £13bn annual contribution to the EU Budget. They emphasise what we can keep by voting to leave. Yet the Remain campaign is familiar with this tactic too. That’s why they emphasise the 3m UK jobs “linked to trade with the rest of Europe”. We naturally want to keep all those jobs, don’t we?

Both claims are actually tendentious. The £13bn is the gross contribution of the UK to Brussels – it doesn’t account for the money the UK receives back. And it’s silly to imply that 3m jobs would disappear overnight in the event of a Brexit. That would only happen if all trade between Britain and the Continent came to a sudden halt – something no one seriously expects. But the campaigners are not really trying to impart useful information with their soundbites – they’re aiming at the system one part of your brain.

That’s by no means the only psychological bias battleground in this referendum campaign. Psychologists talk of the power of “framing”. Which sounds more appealing: 90 per cent fat-free or 10 per cent fat? Advertisers know the answer, which is why one never sees the latter formulation even though they describe the same product.

Now consider which sounds like a more compelling argument in the context of an EU membership vote. “Almost half of everything we sell to the rest of the world we sell to Europe,” says the Stronger in Europe campaign. “British reliance on trade with the EU has fallen to an all-time low,” proclaim the Outers. The fact that both sound compelling - and both describe the same statistics - shows that the two campaigns grasp the importance of framing.

There’s more. What sounds worse: a shortfall of 6 per cent of GDP resulting from Brexit, or a loss of £4,300 per household? For many people it will be the latter figure, heavily highlighted by George Osborne yesterday. But, again, they amount to the same thing. £4,300 is merely the 6 per cent of GDP translated into cash terms and divided by all the 26m households in the country.

So why does £4,300 sound more off-putting to most people? Here we have the “ratio bias” at work. In any ratio there is the numerator and the denominator. In the two statistics above “6” and “£4,400” are the numerators. And “GDP” and “per household” are the denominators. Studies show that the system one part of our brain is more sensitive to big numbers in the numerator of ratios, and often neglects the denominators. So £4,300 sets off larger movements in many brains because, quite simply, it’s a bigger sounding figure than 6.

Consider another example. Which is the more compelling fact: “200,000 UK businesses trade with the EU” or: “Only 6 per cent of UK firms export to the EU”? The first is from the Stronger in Europe website. The second is from Vote Leave. Here the Outers are trying to use the ratio bias to minimise the sense of importance of the EU as a trading partner for British firms - and the Inners are doing precisely the opposite.

We are profoundly influenced by the framing of statistics. Quite understandably, politicians and campaigners seek to manipulate your system one brain. “I just feel I don’t know who to trust and I need a voice I can trust,” said a member of a panel of “undecided” referendum voters on the BBC’s Newsnight last night. But that benign and trustworthy figure does not exist. The way the facts are laid out will depend on the way the person wants the facts to be framed. Asking for someone to do the job for you - and placing your trust in them - essentially means asking that person to steer you in one way or the other.

If people genuinely want to make up their minds without bias, they are on their own. And their only trustworthy guide is their own brain’s system two.

What the great degree rip-off means for graduates: low pay and high debt

Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian

 

‘Ministers needed to sell universities to teenagers and their families – and in the process they have mis-sold them.’ Illustration: Bill Bragg



A few years back, I got my knuckles rapped by a government minister. In public. It was 2010: David Cameron had just come to power, and he was about to thrust university students into a new regime of higher tuition fees and debt.

Against that backdrop, I’d written a column criticising the way in which both Labour and Conservative governments marketed degrees as being some kind of social-mobility jetpack, zooming their wearers to more money and high-powered jobs. It was no such guarantee, I said, citing among other things Whitehall’s own plunging estimates of how much more graduates earn over a lifetime. Graduates, I said, would “probably end up doing similar work to their school-leaver parents – only with a debilitatingly large debt around their necks”.

For David Willetts, then universities minister, this was sheer and unpalatable sauce. In a speech to the annual conference of Universities UK, representing the top management of higher education, he named me – then tried to shame me. I was “wrong”, he claimed. Previous governments had indeed claimed that a graduate could expect to pull in £400,000 more over their lifetime than someone who hadn’t been to university. And, yes, his officials had knocked that estimate down to £100,000. But the difference, you see, was nothing to do with the increase in graduates – but “an improved methodology”. So I was “not comparing like with like”. Two Brains, one slap!

Willetts has since left parliament and gone to a far, far better place: the Resolution Foundation, an inequality thinktank that does much better work than the coalition government ever managed. But looking back, I shouldn’t have been surprised by either the reproof or the forum in which it was made. To sprinkle even a little doubt over the instrumental value of a degree is to take on both the well-paid managers of our universities, and Whitehall orthodoxy.

Higher education is “a phenomenal investment”, Conservative ministers tell us – even with tuition fees at nine grand a year. Repayments are only the equivalent of one “posh coffee” a day, according to the then universities minister Greg Clark (who is now communities secretary). “I think people recognise that that is a phenomenal investment,” he said. “It’s not just a good investment for the student, but actually it’s a good investment for the taxpayer.” I’ve seen ads on daytime TV for loans that do a softer sell than that.

And the marketing is still wrong. Take a look at research published last week by a team of economists from Cambridge, Harvard and the Institute for Fiscal Studies. They found that at 23 universities men typically earned less even 10 years after graduating than their counterparts who’d never been. The disparities are so yawningly wide that it makes a nonsense of talking about the “graduate premium”.

A student of economics at the LSE may walk into a City job and very soon be earning six figures. Their life and career will be utterly different from someone doing business studies, say, at a post-1992 university close to home in the north-east, and then chooses to work in the same area. Yet both are deluged with the official and industrial marketing that a mortar board and gown is worth an extra £100,000 over a lifetime.

Both New Labour and the dwindling band of Cameronian Conservatives have peddled the line that higher education breaks down class barriers. Again, untrue: last week’s research shows that students from the richest families did better than everyone else in the graduate job market – and earned far more than even those who’d done the same course at the same university at the same time.

Ministers needed to sell universities to teenagers and their families – and in the process they have mis-sold them. In this new world of tuition fees and debt, children and their parents have been assured that degrees earn big salaries. At the same time, voters have been told that higher education brings social mobility. Both claims have been made far too broadly – and the losers are those now coming out of university with 50 grand owing to the student loan company, a socking great overdraft and the discovery that internships and coffee shops are the only prospects.

I and others have argued down the years that there is no point in creating more graduates unless you have more graduate-level jobs. Such a position strikes me as being so obvious as to be crass, but it has been ignored by successive governments.

The result can be seen in research published last August by the Oxford economists Ken Mayhew and Craig Holmes. They found that the UK now has proportionately more graduates than any other rich country bar Iceland – yet uses their brains much less than most other countries: the “underutilisation” of graduates – at work but not using their skills – is higher in the UK than anywhere in the EU bar Romania, Greece, Croatia, Latvia and Slovenia.

So what are our graduates doing? Jobs that previously didn’t need a degree. Over one in 10 childminders (11.5%, according to the 2014 Labour Force Survey) are graduates. One in six call-centre staff have degrees, as do about one in four of all air cabin crew and theme-park attendants. In a labour market flooded with graduates, picky employers are now able to take the CVs boasting a university education. And so any young person who didn’t go to university now stands to be treated as a second-class employee.

And universities – with the connivance of their vice-chancellors and marketing departments – have allowed themselves to be sold to the public largely as CV-finishing schools. It is a gross act of vandalism to have committed on a higher education system that the rest of the world once admired. And it has displaced all the other values that accrue both to the individual and to society from education. Critical thinking, public knowledge? You won’t get much change for those from a government that plans to gag academics from using their publicly funded research to question public policy and hold politicians to account.

As for Willetts, he owes me an apology. But nothing like as big as the one he and his colleagues owe to tens of thousands of university graduates, stuck in low-paying jobs that don’t use their expensively acquired skills and certainly don’t pay off their vast debts.

Three-day working week 'optimal for over-40s'

• 18 April 2016
 
• From the sectionBBC Business

Image copyrightAP

Workers aged over 40 perform at their best if they work three days a week, according to economic researchers.

Their research analysed the work habits and brain test results of about 3,000 men and 3,500 women aged over 40 in Australia.

Their calculations suggest a part-time job keeps the brain stimulated, while avoiding exhaustion and stress.

The researchers said this needed to be taken into consideration as many countries raise their retirement age.

Double-edged sword

Data for the study was drawn from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey, which is conducted by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economics and Social Research at the University of Melbourne.

It looks at people's economic and subjective well-being, family structures, and employment.

Those taking part were asked to read words aloud, to recite lists of numbers backwards and to match letters and numbers under time pressure.

In general terms, those participants who worked about 25 hours a week tended to achieve the best scores.

"Work can be a double-edged sword, in that it can stimulate brain activity, but at the same time, long working hours and certain types of tasks can cause fatigue and stress which potentially damage cognitive functions," the report said.

Colin McKenzie, professor of economics at Keio University who took part in the research, said it would appear that working extremely long hours was more damaging than not working at all on brain function.

The figures suggest that the cognitive ability of those working about 60 hours a week can be lower than those who are not employed.

However, Geraint Johnes, professor of economics at Lancaster University Management School, said: "The research looks only at over-40s, and so cannot make the claim that over-40s are different from any other workers.

"What the authors find is that cognitive functioning improves up to the point at which workers work 25 hours a week and declines thereafter."

He added: "Actually, at first the decline is very marginal, and there is not much of an effect as working hours rise to 35 hours per week. Beyond 40 hours per week, the decline is much more rapid."

'No women, no rape': The warped logic of Harvard's students should disturb us all

Radhika Sanghani in The Telegraph


An all-male elite Harvard club has chosen 2016 as the year that it breaks a historic silence. In the 225 years of its existence, it has barely ever released a public statement. But as pressure mounted on the group to ditch its sexist ‘no women’ policy, the Porcellian went public.

Charles M. Storey, its president, defended the club’s single-gender status in an email to student paper The Crimson:

“Given our policies, we are mystified as to why the current administration feels that forcing our club to accept female members would reduce the incidence of sexual assault on campus. Forcing single gender organisations to accept members of the opposite sex could potentially increase, not decrease the potential for sexual misconduct.”

Yes, you read that correctly. Storey’s defence of the club’s boys’ only rule is that it keeps women safe. According to his logic, inviting women into the group would increase sexual misconduct. For their own safety, they’re better off not trying to join. Got it?

This is clearly an appalling defence on many levels. But what’s worse is the fact that a large number of students agree.

Though Storey himself issued an apology shortly after a backlash, (“Unfortunately, I chose my words poorly and it came out all wrong. This failure has led to extreme and unfortunate misinterpretations, which were not my intentions at all”) other students have taken to the paper’s website to defend him.

“Porcellian has no female members and no guests. Ergo no risk of the ladies getting assaulted. If the risk today is zero percent, it can only get worse is the club goes coed,” justified one commenter.

Another spelled out that “statistically speaking, any change in membership cannot decrease sexual assaults as Harvard claims. As a matter of fact, they could only stay zero or potentially increase, which is exactly what the club stated.”


A third echoed their views, agreeing that what Storey had said was 'obvious' - "no sexual assault of women can occur when no women are present."

It's hard to believe just how literally people are taking Storey's words. To them, it's perfectly logical that if a woman is present there's a higher chance of sexual assault - 'ergo' women should steer clear of male-only clubs.

In other words: no women, no rape.

Their logic is chilling. It might all add up ‘statistically’ but is that really how we should be looking at rape? If we followed that argument through to its logical conclusion, we'd be living in a world where men and women are segregated simply because it’s 'safer’.

Women-only public transport would be the norm, and the possibility of gender-neutral loos wouldn't even exist. Non-binary people would be ostracised from society and everything from socialising to education would become boys vs girls.

This dystopian future could ‘statistically’ lead to lower sexual assault and rape rates, but how is that feasible in a modern society? We need to be moving forward not backwards. The answer does not and never will lie in segregation.

If we want to stop sexual assault from happening, we need to tackle rape culture. On university campuses, male-only clubs are a good place to start. They are generally known to be rife with misogyny. And when women are not present, it's harder for men to see them as equals who deserve respect. Little wonder they often end up as the butt of crude jokes. The same can go the other way - and neither attitude is healthy.

Men and women need to be equal - and that means integration.

In 2016, this should be an accepted truth. The fact that a group of Harvard students - supposedly the brightest minds in America - clearly don’t understand that is incredibly worrying. They're so busy looking at rape culture ‘statistically’ they’re missing the obvious: men and women should be able to spend time together without the assumption of sexual misconduct.

That their time at Harvard hasn't yet taught them that, is deeply worrying indeed.

Are you Alright?

By Lucinda Williams 

Lyrics:

Are you alright?

All the sudden you went away.

Are you alright?

I hope you come back around someday.

Are you alright?

I haven't seen you in a real long time.

Are you alright?

Could you give me some kind of sign.

Are you alright?

I looked around me and you were gone.

Are you alright?

I feel like there must be something wrong.

Are you alright?

'Cause it seems like you disappeared.

Are you alright?

'Cause I been feeling a little scared.

Are you alright?

Chorus:

Are you sleeping through the night?

Do you have someone to hold you tight?

Do you have someone to hang out with?

Do you have someone to hug and kiss you,

Hug and kiss you,Hug and kiss you?

Are you alright?

Are you alright?

Is there something been bothering you?

Are you alright?

I wish you'd give me a little clue.

Are you alright?

Is there something you wanna say?

Are you alright?

Just tell me that you're okay.

Are you alright?

'Cause you took off without a word.

Are you alright?

You flew away like a little bird.

Are you alright?

Is there anything I can do?

Are you alright?

'Cause I need to hear from you.

Are you alright?

Chorus

Are you alright?

Are you alright?

Hey...