‘Talk is cheap’ is an
ancient expression with multiple versions in multiple literatures. ‘Put your
money where your mouth is,’ is an oft-seen line in the USA. The descriptive
katen bathala hitavanawa (planting sweet-potato with your mouth) is a Sinhala ‘frequent’.
There are other variants on this theme of course. We see it happening all the
time in multiple locations including those that are close to us and ones we are
resident in. ‘Self’ for example. The expression came to me after reading the
following observation.
Three ‘socially sensitive’
students engaged in an impassioned discussion about the sad plight of the
homeless: two homeless individuals are within a few feet of them; the
individuals remain ‘unseen’. An example of the importance of ‘discussioning’.
My friend Tanya Ekanayaka
had made this observation somewhere close to a Tesco supermarket in Edinburgh,
Scotland.
‘Importance’, I assume is
partly tongue-in-cheek, but it could also indicate the exaggerated and
misplaced value that ‘talking’ has acquired (as opposed to ‘doing’).
There is a lot of
literature about how scandalous sums of money are spent on talking about
poverty, poverty alleviation, etc., in plush convention facilities while
children starve a few kilometers away. Homelessness is a buck-making business
for some, one observes.
It can’t be that people are
stupid. The global (and local) political economy demands the oppressor to act
as though he/she has only the interests of the oppressed at heart. In certain
situations the oppressor even argues that oppression is actually liberation or
liberating.
The oppressor even
appropriates the language of the oppressed, especially its emancipatory
elements. There are prisons called ‘Liberty’, torture chambers called ‘Justice’
and other hellish places called ‘Freedom’. The architects, movers and shakers
of the dominant and destructive paradigm of development talk of
‘sustainability’; tyrants talk of ‘participation’. The ‘doers’ make scandalous
amounts of money. The ‘talkers’ don’t get that much, but still make big bucks.
The key difference in the
‘homeless’ observation is that it reveals a malady or let’s say a condition
that is far more insidious than that captured by ‘talk is cheap’. A simple
extrapolation tells us that talk can be blind, that it can be a convenience
indulged in by the blind and perhaps that it has a way of inducing blindness.
The observation, at the
‘talk is cheap’ level reminded me of something that happened in a media
institution a few years ago. There was a petition doing the round in the
editorial office demanding stern action be taken against a fellow-journalist.
That petition was authored by a person who held a grudge against this
journalist. The author had considerable ‘political power’ within the
institution and apart from two people everyone else signed the petition.
They had no option. One of
the drivers is said to have told some of the ‘petitioners’ some time later that
they should stop writing about injustice (as they frequently did) because they
had all caved in come crunch-time at home.
This can be put down to
self-preservation and therefore pardonable. What is harder to forgive is the
complete blindness to things under one’s nose even as one writes/talks
extensively on under-the-nose things, condemning them, advocating alleviation
of relevant anomaly and even agitating on its account.
Theorizing is easy; doing,
harder. Neither makes any sense if nothing is done about the blindness. Some
say that only those who suffer truly understand the particular suffering. I am
told there is a condition called ‘epistemic privilege’, which holds that
unprivileged social positions are likely to generate perspectives that are less
partial and less distorted. Hence, only gays and lesbians understand
gay/lesbian issues, only the minorities truly comprehend the conditions they
inhabit, and only the poor understand poverty. A corollary would be that others
are naturally blind to these perspectives. In other words, they can’t help it.
Of course none of us can
really know everything about someone else, but there are things that are in
your face that you really can’t pretend not to see and defend the unseeing by
saying ‘I am not that person’. ‘Unseeing’ is an acquired taste, I believe. It
is a happy dismissal, a convenient untruth (or ‘de-truththing’) and a neat
guilt-ridding device that beautifully complements the comfort zone called
theoretical abstraction. Talk is not just cheap, it is fashionable too. There’s
something foul smelling in teaching/advocating social justice and looking the
other way when one is confronted with injustice. I am not saying one should not
pick one’s quarrels or prioritize, but cultivating 360-degree blindness has a
way of giving hollowness to words, irrelevance to sermon.
What’s the point in
contributing to a fund for people with disabilities if one does not see that
the architecture of one’s office is positively unfriendly to such people in
terms of access? There must be some ‘bottom-lines’. Here are some suggestions.
If you prefer to be blind, then don’t talk. If you want to talk, fine; but then
make sure you do some ‘doing’ about it.
Sure, some of the blindness
can be acquired involuntarily. But there’s nothing to say that one cannot
divest oneself of such myopia and acquire the necessary eyes. Self-inflicted
blindness is an insult to things one talks of as though they have been caressed
and their contours meticulously mapped. As for the related ‘discussioning’, as
Tanya puts it, some would call it ‘bullshitting’. I would not disagree.
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