...and then the poor impoverished the contented

A medicant lives on just four requisites. Scraps of discarded cloth dyed in the boiled juices of tree bark to cover his body, scraps of food begged from here and there to feed him, a tree to provide him with shelter from the elements and cow’s urine as medicine. The common denominators for all of these is a) they cost nothing and b) they are abundantly available. They provide him with all his material requisites.

Now, the question that comes to mind is this: Is a medicant poor? On the surface it would seem so. However, if he were asked he would in all probability, respond with the German proverb “A poor person isn’t he who has little but he who needs a lot” Indeed!

The keyword here is “need”. Need, not lack of accumulation or lack of wealth or lack of position or lack of power, determines who is poor and who is not.  So, if one were to minimize need, one would minimize poverty. Eradicate need and one eradicates poverty.

OMG! Is this really true? But of course!  And yet, “come come” I hear you say “…everyone has needs so everyone is poor at some level or other”.  Brilliant. “True. Glad you acknowledge that you are poverty stricken pal” I retort. “No! I didn’t mean to say that. That’s not what I meant!” comes the outraged counter from you. “Ah! Pal, who are we kidding? Regardless of what you wanted to say, what you’d really want is words such as ‘poor’ and ‘poverty’ redacted from any measure of your ‘worth’, right? Having those in there implies a negative balance to your idea of your own wealth, mm?  Rather, you would want a positive spin put on it and instead of counting the things you need, you’d rather count the things you have right?”

Therein lies the problem with the world. You see, what a person has or doesn’t have has not the slightest bearing on how poor that person is. From her dream man, to his dream boat, to her dream home, to his dream position, it is what one dreams of having but cant that truly causes people to suffer that mind bending pain and desperation commonly associated  with paucity.

“Aspirations” therefore, like its partner “need”, contrary to popular belief, has the opposite effect to the one intended. Instead of allowing one to reach even a basic  level of contentment, it forces one to rev up one’s wants to the umpteenth degree, forcing one to live very large segments of one’s life fretting, fuming and fumbling, unable to get to grips with what flies and what dies in the happiness department. The aspiring, needy, greedy, goal driven people of this earth, therefore, live their lives out not entirely like whirling dervishes, mostly unsatisfied, always uncomfortable, never happy, definitely poor, until death mercifully takes them, removing them from that self-inflicted hell also known as life-on-earth. For them, poverty is indeed the worst form of violence and it is mostly self-inflicted. You thought that what Gandhi said was about other people right? Gotcha!

Now, here is the insanity of it all: “Life-on-earth”, in its majority, thinks it is actually fashionable to live like this. In fact, it thinks this is the best way to live. Not only that, it promotes this as the only way to live. “Expand your choices”, “become greater than you are”, “fly with the eagles”, “become achievers” are all straplines we hear repeated in a monotonous rote that gives religious chants a good run for its money.  It doesn’t take rocket science to very quickly figure out the fallacy of this argument but, of all things that can cause people to be blind to simple stupid truths, “need” has the greatest potency.

Everyone knows this one would assume. One assumes wrong. All of the little post-its and old German proverbs that appear here and there, from time to time, saying the same thing in a hundred different ways, are simply there to be filed away under “sayings”. Or, to use their actual definition “things that are true but are either not fashionable or not convenient or not useful to practice in the here and now” *winks*

So,

What we have as a result is not the blind trying to lead the blind, but rather the blind trying to tell those who can still see that lack of ocular faculties is actually good for one’s health. The blind, in their blindness, are trying to put out the eyes of those who see. The poor, in their poverty, are trying to drag those who are not into that hell pit.

Who promotes this kind of foolishness? Obviously, those who have the most, because they need the most and therefore measure everyone else’s lives by their yardstick of “wanting more”. And they are powerful enough to do it and have such fallacies as GDP, GNI, PCI (all based on what one has) to popularize it.

World “poverty” statistics say “Oh my gosh! Did you know that a full 80% of the people on this earth live on less than ten dollars a day???!!! That 50% live on just two and a half dollars a day???!!!” Oh PUH-LEEZ. People don’t live ON $2.50 for crying out loud. No one can. They live on other things. $2.50 is merely what they have.  But this fact is unknown to those that measure wealth by their individual accumulations. It is hidden from those who measure their “livability” by what they have. It is removed from those who call the un-needy who are supposed to live on a few dollars “poor”.

So, in their aggression, armed with those aforementioned three letter dirty words, they declare their war on poverty and actually get buy-in for their effort from the nouveau uninformed. Be they activists, advocates, creators of charities, placard holders - all of these well intentioned, good hearted fools have bought into the rubbish that is being sold to them by those who created the problem in the first place. And, so, in their war, destructively, disastrously, they sell this horrid idea of poverty to the world and engage in rather charming little activities that go under the heading “poverty reduction”. Primarily what they are trying to do is make those who are content discontent. Essentially what they do in the name of poverty reduction is poverty production. HOOT!

Lordy lordy! That slicing was hilarious. It was. What a joke. ROFLMAO. But seriously folks, what about that half of the world whose as-at net worth is somewhere between USD 0 and 2.5? What on earth do they live on?

First, they live on not needing much… much like that medicant that was mentioned at the start of this post and the referral in that piece of German wisdom. Next, and this is crucial to the argument, they live on what they can use, not on what they can own. What are these? Free water, free fruit from the jungle, free access to land for cultivation, free air to breath, free smiles and communal giggles, free help from their communities. Basically, social wealth defined as something that is commonly available to all for use whenever one needs it, in just the right amounts, not too much, not too little.

Against this background, what do the poverty mongers do? How do they create the conditions for poverty for those that have no idea what it is? Having defined wealth the way they have, they attempt to acquire as many of the common resources as they possibly can so that essentially, the people who are supposed to live on $2.50 really do have to live on it since the things that their lives depended on are now in the hands of “those that have”. Emphasis – have.  Voila! Now, the well-heeled can rightly claim “OMG! 50% of the world actually lives on just 2.50 a day”. Where earlier, “poverty” per se was never a problem, this enforced impoverishment of common resources caused by a few people commandeering that which is used by most ensures true paucity. Over the last 400 years, these rats have taken everything that most people use and now call it their own. From world politicians to global policy planners to academics, to the media, to the various movers, shakers and implementers right down to that not-so-innocent lady holding that there placard, this is what they did. This is what they continue to do. And it is to their advantage to do so. Poverty is one of the easiest commodities to sell and one of the best ways to get hold of geographies and people who would otherwise not be all that easy to control.

Wouldn't  you want to shoot them for this heinous crime they are either purposefully, ignorantly or legitimately perpetrating across this planet? Well, I don’t. I want to put them all in a humungous barrel and have every single person who has less than tne bucks to their name to spit once in it so that they drown in the saliva of 5.74 billion people who were never poor to start with but were impoverished by them.

So far, Sri Lankans have been relatively safe because of their culture of sharing and their use of communal strengths. However, this is changing rapidly within the current political economy. If this continues for just a few more years we will have an “Asian Winter” to deal with (We went through our spring, summer and autumn uprisings centuries ago). In that winter, all that we will all have to live on is blinding white darkness regardless of who is richer and who is poorer.

(This post was triggered by that “war on poverty” photograph that my friend Imtiyaz Razak posted on facebook recently. Thanks, friend. It gelled my thoughts on an issue I’ve been battling for close to a decade and allowed me to write a giggle on the rather well known poverty-impoverishment slicing)

Fleadom of explession

Everyone knows the story of little Johnny and the flea.

Regardless of what sort of essay the teacher tells the class to write, this formidable brat always finds a way to very quickly tie the assigned topic through some marginal link to the flea and then proceeds to blast out his spiel on that redoubtable species and its critical importance to every single reason behind every single reason that underscores every single reason why Johnny, his peers, his educators and his examiners, his family, his community, his town, his country and his planet should or shouldn't live. The local equivalent of Little Johnny of course, as everyone knows, is Amden and the story is “makkage kathaava”.  In fact, when someone constantly harps on a single idea regardless of the idea he/she is responding to or its direction or its worth or its relevance, we, in Sri Lanka say “mekata one uge mekkage ellena” (He just wants to spin his flea) or PMS ( “Predetermined Mekka Spinning” - yeah, it was not what you were thinking but it is similarly annoying).


I was recently reading an article on Colombo Telegraph by Vangisha Gunasekera on the global problem of climate instability (to which, by the way, Sri Lanka contributed almost nothing) and found, both to my astonishment and day-long amusement that one of the responses was on Weliweriya (you see, the pollution of water bodies in Weliweriya are just as important to planetary climate stability as Amden’s mekka is to a fish right?). Another was just classic “what we are doing to mother earth at Weliweriya and other places is slow murder and therefore Sri Lankan women are fleeing to the middle east”! What the….?!

Let me clarify that “what the…”  What the whole of Sri Lanka has done to mother earth over the last 100 years is not even a blip on the climate horizon in comparison to what China and the USA do to it in a day. LOL. A piece I wrote on the same subject at a global level had someone responding with uppercase statements about Sinhalese kicking out Tamils and Muslims and watch out… the Christians next.  Huh?  I didn’t even get what this guy’s breed of mekka is or what sort of fish he might want hosting it. It certainly was not the nature of things or the things of nature but I suppose that’s his nature.

Was this specific to environment issues I asked myself. Answer: NO! PMS was evident in responses to practically every post, every article, every response to news, every new Sri Lankan film, every new song, every new piece of art, every civil initiative; regardless of whether the subject was violence against women, pharmaceuticals, beverages, milk products, buildings, or food crops. Whatever the creative, academic, research or governance outcome, I saw broadly, three basic species of mekkas based on their longevity: a) the flavor of the last month mekka (Weliweriya), b) the flavor of the last decade mekka (the regime) and c) the flavor of the last half century mekka (racial and religious differentiation).  All of these pointed to a queen mekka: politics. It seems as if people are spinning off or spawning variations of these breeds at a rather dizzying pace – at least on the interactive components of communications instruments.

Was this really true? Was Sunil Perera’s classic “Uncle Johnson’s Jubilee” and its two lines about politics the actuality? Well, no. Not really. The political mekka is the outcome of a desperate search on the part of human beings to find a target for one of three questions: a) “Who is to blame?”, b) “Who can I say tricked me into doing this?”, c) Why can’t I indulge in the same nasty things that I hate to see others doing?”.

What people are doing is finger-pointing and politics is the best vehicle there is to engage in the age old trick of shouting “LOOK THERE, THAT MAN HAS A KNIFE” while he quietly slits the throat of the man standing next to him with his own knife. Regardless of the target, everyone seems hell bent on engaging in digit-stabs that are then countered by the target with similar digit-jabs. Be the perpetrators the people, the regime, foreign powers, weliweriya or Zoroastrianism.

At one level this is simply a mean way of externalizing issues but at another level who can really blame people for this? When people, in the main, indulge in the worst possible human failings as a matter of preference, one of the few ways of reducing internal frustration is to scream in the direction of the nearest external entity that can be hauled in by the scruff of its neck and scaped into the reason why they get our goat. Be that scaped goat a journalist, the USA, the regime or the pollution of water bodies in micro-geographies. Who cares that five decades of agrochemicals have baked our nation’s earth into toxic mudpack? More to the point, who, amongst us who use PMS as a way of life would even want to? One cannot really spin one’s mekka over dozens of regimes or 300 different bad policy modifications can one? One needs a temporally manageable window and an easily identified regimen of action for this and every “current regime” and the conflict between that regime and those that elected it is ideal for the purpose. For everyone. Not just the citizens or the politicians or other “concerned parties”. Not just in Sri Lanka. Across the world. Regardless of whether or not they have little or no role to play in the myriad different ideas that are aired in public forums from nature to notion to nation. Forget reason. It is of no moment to a circus where everyone indulges themselves in flea market entropy.

Take our current regime for example. The world and her husband are pointing accusatory fingers at it and it is reciprocating by pointing accusatory fingers at the world and his wife. People get on either one of these band wagons and fling their fingers all over the darned place and mostly, all they do is end up poking their own eyes out in the process. This is not a tragedy because one really doesn’t need “vision” to get one’s tickles via the biggest mekka of them all – the one that lives just a few miles away from the end of each extended index finger. The only negative upshot of PMS is that there will be a lot of bemused article writers wondering what sort of weird lens these people have fitted to the spectacle frames carefully straddling their non-existent visual organs.

Why do this? Well, we must go back to why Amden did it to find a reasonable answer. Amden knew nothing about most things that were going on in the class. Amden didn’t want to know. Amden didn’t think it is either sufficiently important or edifying to know. Amden didn’t believe for one moment that paying attention in class would help him in engaging in the “attara qualities” that gives him the most joy. What Amden knew very clearly was that he knew something about the mekka. Not a whole lot but just enough for him to make a case for “knowledge of the mekka”. That mekka empowered him. That mekka rationalized everything that ever needed rationalizing for him. Therefore, Amden would grab onto this micro-critter and belabor everyone with it with a tenacity that makes people fall all over the floor laughing their rear ends off. Well Amden doesn’t give a rat’s rear. All Amden is interested in is getting his flea to bite everyone else’s rear. Regardless of what sort of seat the owners of those rears have parked them on.

Backward.

Harmonizing coexistence and sustaining development

All human activity on earth attempts to find safer, more stable and more comfortable environments to exist in and can be broadly lumped under the heading “human development”. The trouble is that every group has its own sweet idea of what comprises  “a better way to live” and thus, clashes will naturally occur and equally naturally, the more powerful minorities trundle over everyone else,  monopolizing what flies and what dies, what becomes policy and what does not. Mostly, that which flies and that which becomes policy, secures for them the lion’s share of human and natural resources required to um… “live better”.  This, despite the obvious fact that it goes against the very grain of natural justice. This, despite the fact that due to brutal exploitation of earth recourses over the last few centuries we are now on the brink of destruction. In order to turn it around, we need to understand what "environment" is, what "development" is and what the current human bias is when it couples these two words together.

This post is rather drawn out, definitely rambling in content and perhaps muddling in meaning but do bear with me. The “things of nature” explained in the previous post requires a bit of meandering and quite a few stops to smell the humus for it to make any sense at all :)

As we all know, the "environment" is a combination of three intrinsically bound components, namely, social, cultural and natural environments and "development" is a combination of three more such - environmental, community and economic development.

Now, the degree to which a majority of human beings place emphasis on one or the other of these six components determine the "stability" of a social system. Figures 1 gives a rough idea of where the powerful minority of the world’s urban population currently is and what the larger majority of rural and pastorals are constantly asked to aspire to. It is not an accurate picture but simply used to give an idea of weightage and bias. 

Interesting isn't it? What this essentially means is that development practitioners and environment policy makers are primarily attempting to convert the planet into America. In their minds, environmental and community development as well as the natural environment and the cultural environment should essentially disappear without a trace and we should convert ourselves purely into socioeconomic entities, living out our 600 months of life consuming as much of what is there to consume and give no heed at all to what those who come after us will feed their needs on. Never mind the great drumming, the superb dancing, the rituals of communal solidarity, the livelihood based recreational activity. Never mind the continuity of life on earth.

Such things don’t really give rural Africa any money, right here right now.... right? The rumba doesn't allow a South American  farmer to buy a cell phone and feed Apple Inc.'s bottom line nor Awale enable and Asian rural to construct a high rise building and become a so-called top-feeder, does it? Nope. Even the so-called "developing group of human beings on this planet", in their majority, is being led to believe that nothing can possibly be better than strong legal systems, reality shows, IPL, apartment dwellings and credit cards.

The simple stupid problem here is that if every single human being on this planet were to achieve socioeconomic equality as that phenomenon is identified by the drivers of world policy and focus exclusively on economic development and the social environment,  it is estimated we will require the resources of 2 ½ earths to satisfy everyone. This situation is made even more alarming because everyone knows but blithely ignores the fact that this focus has only yielded the enabling conditions for greed, opportunism, exploitation, moral degeneration, crime and destruction of the natural balance and that climate instability, pandemics, poverty and conflict are the life threatening results of such efforts for the planet. 

Two questions pop up.  a) Is there any possibility of reversing this trend? and b) Is there any possibility to even out the balance between the component parts of development and environment as a viable alternative to the madness of attempting to eradicate four of the six components? The answer to the first question is yes, but it will require a huge effort on the part of all human beings (most significantly, those that have the finances and resources to control the actions of others) to make the choice to change the way they view life and the way in which they view "safe, stable and comfortable living". The answer to the second question is no. At no point in history have all of these things been in ideal balance although many communities and even nations (such as Sri Lanka during the time of the kings) have managed to get very close. Given the current world population and the extent to which that collective has damaged this planet, a complete balance is an unrealistic expectation. The best that one can hope for (and the best one can hope for is not a bad place to be) is to achieve universal awareness of the interplay of these factors and how they affect long term stability of individual and collective lives and how to factor in the marginalized components more and more into core existence frameworks.

Well, how? Certainly not by ridiculing cultural and environmental sensibilities or by marginalizing natural and cultural development as Binyavanga Wainaina seems to think. Certainly not by tired thinking that wishes continual promotion of the straplines of development gurus. This requires a slightly deeper analysis. What follows is a lot of rhubarb, there is nothing here that people don’t know but it is important that people don’t conveniently forget so bear with me people. 

The interrelationships among development components:

These are fairly well known but for the record, I’ll state them nevertheless. Obviously, the linking common ground between the development components and the environment components is environment itself. However, we will address the two entities separately in order to make the interrelationships clearer. The Venn in figure 2 has been known to development practitioners for quite some time now and there is a belief among quite a few of them that balancing environmental, community and economic development would result in sustainable development. mmm...Interesting.The thing is, this process is not quite that simple. If it were, we would have already achieved sustainability. We haven’t. Here’s the reason. 

One cannot simply attack all of these areas simultaneously but rather, one must work on them a) through attempting to balance the relationship between any two pair of components and b) through qualifying the starting point of such an exercise. That is, we must address the common outcome of balancing environment and economic development in the relational activity of conservation (group cohesion excluded), the common outcome of balancing economic and community development in the relational activity of community economic development (nature excluded) and the common outcome of balancing community and environment development in the activity of deep ecological life-systems (money excluded).  Now, excluding entire facets might seem on its face as an iffy way of looking at the problem but that is because one is using a Venn to define the interrelationships and there is no discernible “where to start” within in. However, the problem resolves itself when one looks at the issue in terms of an “onion diagram” (Figure 3). 

Everything starts with the conservation and management of natural resources for without them nothing survives. Therefore this is the organic point of takeoff for achieving sustainability in development. While everyone needs to pull their weight by actively coupling any economic activity with environment sensitivity as a non-negotiable foundation, who amongst us can actually be the best custodians of such exercises? Well, the answer is obvious. The best are those who need no special “training” to understand balancing the human-environment interface. These are primarily communities of hunter-gathers such as the veddas of Sri Lanka and secondarily, rurals and pastorals living in dependence on the balance of natural resources. Now, here is where the problem lies. Urbanites are hell bent on “civilizing” these people with their urban crimes, their urban diseases and their cell phones. They, would like nothing better than to see the shepherds of our planet "socialized" and "economized". The urbanized believe, almost like a mantra, that living either in complete dependence on natural environments or slap dab in the middle of the jungle is a terrible miscarriage of justice and that these people deserve to discard their drums, their weapons, their ways of engaging in their livelihoods, their values and their idea of what constitute “civilized behavior” and espouse those of a group who promote, in their naiveté, lifestyles requiring 2 ½ earths.  

Do those people want it? Well, as one old-timer in the Vedda community stated to me a few years ago, “සිදාදියෙන් අපට දුන්නේ හර්ධාබධ පොජ්ජ. දියවැඩියා පොජ්ජ” (all that we received from living in semi-urban communities was heart disease and diabetes).  

So, no. Policy planners and development practitioners across the world need to understand the life-critical caregiver role that these people play, recognize their importance, provide them with every form of assistance possible and listen to them on how best to manage the world’s resources. The same policy planners should also start qualifying the recommendations of environmentalists, sustainable development experts and other urban ideologists against those of such communities.  Then, and very possibly, only then, will we engineer community cohesion and resilient community development and recreate the foundations for sustainability.

This is not going to be easy. In fact, this would require an upping of the ante for humankind and an increase in the difficulty and complexity of engagement because one will no longer be able to use the popular “one-size-fits-all” methodology of high-rises, TV dinners, pill-popping and rights as valid measures of comfort and security and will need to completely understand the unique interplay of environments and communities before they can be “developed”. The outcome, or rather, the fallout of such an exercise would be, simply, sustainable development. It is something that one must aspire to through years of developing the world based on a significant shift in thinking and it is something that will result almost as a continuous collateral “interim result” , rather than the achievement of a specific “final goal”. 

The interrelationships among environmental components:

The relationships amongst the environment components are not well known. The terminology used in figure 4 to describe the union of any two components is not the best. However, they are the closest one can get to. The phenomena are better explained using Sinhala. 

The balance of the natural and cultural environments gives "යහ සිරිත්" or wholesome/rewarding customs. The balance of the natural and social environments gives "යහ ජීවිකා" or wholesome/rewarding livelihoods and the balance of the social and cultural environments gives "යහ වින්දනය" or wholesome/rewarding enjoyment. 

The outcome of balancing out these dualities gives rise to "සමතුලිත සහජීවනය" or harmonious co-existence. As with the development components, the onion diagram in figure 5 better explains the starting point and process of moving towards its natural outcome.

Under ideal conditions (some of which did exist in the not too distant past), custom drove the way in which human beings did practically everything. The systematic marginalization of the natural and cultural environment saw the equally systematic rise in the establishment of laws. Whereas once, a whole nation managed co-existence through mutual agreement on how to live, now, there is a need to force them to live within relatively agreeable frameworks and this force is exercised through legislative instruments.

Obviously, anything that attempts to force a system of living on a person or a community will have to contend with resistive action. Therefore, laws are constantly broken leading to a lot of human effort going into destabilizing and re-stabilizing of societal frameworks. When custom was in vogue, there was nothing that could be "broken" since the entire process was one of "agreeing with one another" that had established itself in each social system over a long, slow  period of time. Violation of these customs was a heinous crime punishable mostly by ostracization, sometimes by removal and occasionally, death. Development practitioners need to recognize this, and be ultra-sensitive to the customs that govern every micro-community and the place that this natural-cultural weave holds as the basis for any process leading to a harmonic balance.

With reference to the onion in figure 5, wholesome customs leads into a balanced understanding of the relationship between the natural and social environment. With a deep appreciation of the need for a balance in the natural environment, social activity itself becomes harmonized with nature and living and livelihoods are established that do not abuse the natural or cultural environment. Therefore, livelihood systems that endanger or puts undue pressure on these (such as exploitative commerce, "criminal" business etc.) are rejected. So, by default, communities engage in livelihoods that reward them, the community in which they live and the nation. 

Now, while wholesome custom and livelihoods are important, recreation, entertainment and other forms of enjoyment are as crucial to a complete life. For harmonized communities, understanding the balance between the social and cultural environments gives rise to this. What must be understood here is that for them, enjoyment does not become an exclusive, stand-alone social phenomenon but rather a supportive and sustaining one enmeshed with their lives and livelihoods.

Again, granted, the paradigm shift required would be phenomenal and the effort that needs to be put in would be enormous. we have, as a planet, come so far down the road of "massives" that was Rome just before that particular civilization was wiped out that we can't even see we have simply recreated the competitive, excessive, gladiatorial mentality that brought about its downfall and that we are dangerously close to a similar fate. Take sport for example. Currently, sport has ceased to be a recreation and become a livelihood. It has become a socio-economic phenomenon rather than a socio-cultural one. Another example is that sexual activity has become an addictive physical engagement and not a life supportive or life enhancing one. Communities with a deep sensitivity to the outcome of wholesome enjoyment never indulge themselves in an excess of it but they are in the minority these days and the entire world needs to shift its collective rear and overcome its "comfortable inertia" to enable the world to survive. 

Lastly, the wholesome individual existence that is the outcome of balancing out these environment components then leads into faith. Faith in the ability of a human being to live today well and trust in the fact that tomorrow will be stable, safe and comfortable regardless of the expansion of choices that tomorrow may brings. The individual knows and understands that this faith and trust did not become out of individual effort and appreciates that stability and safety came out of the stability and safety of the entire community. The individual appreciates that breaking from this collective will necessarily endanger him or herself primarily and the community secondarily. Thus, every individual naturally and organically arrives at a state where harmonious co-existence becomes critical to the continuity of excellence of individual existence.

Apologies for rambling on but the final question is “Do we want this?" No. We Don’t. We are on a runaway train of excess in everything we do and we will, sooner rather than later, hit a wall at twenty million miles an hour. In the interim, we will condition ourselves to bear our own misery by attempting to drag everyone else down with us into our whirlpool of doubt and worry. Those that do survive would be those that resisted being sucked in or those that recanted their belief in “civilized behavior”, sold their apartments, binned their cell phones, buried their M16s and hid in jungle caves. Those will have every opportunity to recreate the peopled earth in accordance with that which sustained it in the first place. Not us. We would have committed suicide a long time before. To those few who lived, simply as a result of making some high quality choices,  simply because they never considered life a game of survival, I say “Salute! Good luck! God speed!”

Ok - I'm having a whale of time with this post so... here's an elegant recap of all the rhubarb above from Dire Straits. Thirty years ago, they were one of the few bands whose music actually reflected their lyrics and Mark Knofler is far better at this game of "communication" than I ever will be. You get both the lyrics and the live video from Alchemy *winks* 

(This post was based on the engagement paradigm of the Green Movement of Sri Lanka which the author constructed with the leader of the movement Suranjan Kodituwakku. Thanks Sura, for the many ideological skirmishes, hours of “bana” and many nights spent worrying about the effectiveness of our work)  

The things of nature and the nature of things

No one can justify saying that nature is unkind. In utmost kindness to this world of ours, it concentrated and hid from the regions of life on its crust, three things, namely, about 400 billion cubic meters of oil, about 300 billion tons of methane and most of its deposits of metals and silicon. In short, much of its potential and kinetic energy which, unleashed, could destroy the conditions required for life was sequestered where it can do the smallest damage.

In the habitable regions of the world, nature behaved in an opposite way. Instead of concentrating anything, it distributed everything, ensuring that the largest possible footprint on earth could sustain the continuity of life.  Willy-nilly, life became and prospered, stabilizing, balancing and recharging the inhabited parts of the planet through incredibly complex systems of material and creature cycling.

Human beings who used this system in the not too distant past understood the fine thread on which this balance hung, clearly recognized the pivotal part that distribution and sharing of life resources played in it and engineered their own life-systems to highly sensitized engagement of the human-environment interface.  Never letting human societies to get ahead of themselves, deeply in awe of and in instinctive recognition of the fact that they could not possibly fathom the interplays of nature, humankind managed the subtle task of harmonious-coexistence of ever growing populations with those of the natural world that they had to use in order to live.

Then, three things happened. We defined for ourselves some nebulous thing called “knowledge”, we discovered something positive in a hitherto highly frowned upon a human action-driver called “ego” and, using these two as a foundation, we set the human failing known as “greed” and its three henchmen “gain”, “fame” and “praise” at the apex of all things required to obtain that positive state of mind known as “pleasure” and its sidekick “comfort”.

To engineer this so-called comfortably pleasurable existence, we dug up and distributed all of the poisons that nature had hidden away and concentrated as much as possible, those resources that nature had distributed. In our folly, we decided that oil and gas were the only things that everyone must have in plenty and in pretty much the same quality and that the quality of food, clothing, shelter, water and land would have graded accessibility with the best of it and the most of it going to the smallest of groups which wielded the greatest of power. We believe that it is natural to aspire to be powerful, little realizing that such aspirations only rearrange the order of the powerful and not the percentage of gradations of power and all we actually do is end up being wasteful in the process.

Instead of allowing the great rivers of the world to water the multitudes, we dammed them in order to feed the power needs of a few urban elites. Instead of providing small plots of land to everyone so everyone can live, we took it away and gave massive parcels of it someone so that a few can live. Instead of allowing those who grow food to consume it, we gave it to people who haven’t planted even a weed in their entire lives. Instead of building dwellings that would last just a lifetime, we build mansions that last, uselessly, for many. Instead of allowing access to nature’s resources to those who use it, we gave access to those who abuse it. Instead of distributing money, we concentrate it uselessly in banks. Instead of using and releasing that which nature provide us with, we concentrate and horde it for no purpose except to massage our egos and credit our greed.

The nature of things as they have come to pass is such that we, as humans, have now come unstuck from the core edicts of nature that determine the continuity of life and we truly believe that it is good, natural and right that few users of the planet enjoy most of the things of nature.

So why do we do this? Why do we believe that we need three cars when we have just one backside to plant inside any one of them? Why do we need a forty room mansion when are bodies can only inhabit one? Why do we sequester millions in bank accounts when what we need to live on is so much lesser?

Fear. Primarily. Anyone who has played dice with nature would automatically become a very frightened human being. It (and I mean "it") would have revoked its right to be treated kindly by nature and it knows when push comes to shove, that it will be one of the first casualties. It believes, vainly, that its horded riches will somehow give it a bulwark, a moat, a rampart that will protect it against the results of its own stupidity.  It desperately uses those ill-concentrated gains to try, through some sort of magic to use its techniques of gathering to gain even more in order to fortify itself resulting in an even stronger and quicker backlash from nature.

It, simply, has angered order and balance by creating chaos and imbalance and it’s just reward for greed is just that... just.

Since the whole world seems to be hell bent (and I mean hell bent here) on standing nature on its head, this whole planet is awash in a very large percentage of very frightened people. Blindly and urgently attempting to shore up their security against snowballing uncertainty they go ungently, raging against the coming of their self-inflicted night.

We cannot unmake the dams but we can stop making new ones. We cannot change land boundaries but we can allow many more to live on it. We cannot stop gathering, but we can stop hording and redistribute unconditionally. Instead of running after material wealth, we can run after social wealth. We can, if we really want to, take a small cue from the social media networks where the most used icons are "like" and "share".

But we don’t, right? We can’t, mmm? In our fear, we will die, smaller, meaner and angrier won’t we?

We will, like all who stare death in the face after a lifetime of self-servitude, try to buy our terrified selves a few more seconds of life at the cost of the lives of any number of others, eyes wide, nostrils flaring, mouth drooling, pores oozing…mimicking the hell beasts that we will soon become. Looking at ourselves, I am less angry and more sorry for what we have done to ourselves. Less hateful and more compassionate because, each day, as I step into the peopled earth, I see people driving themselves very hard towards death, convincing and re-convincing themselves that they are actually good people doing good things despite the truckloads of evidence to the contrary. I am not hard man but a hard look at our continued insult to life on earth shows me that we can expect just one, sure-fire outcome:

The loss of our right to it.

Here is Joan Baez, saying it all, much more elegantly that I ever could:

Gehanu gathiya and pirimikama – desegregated gender relations in rural Sri Lanka

Over the last nine years, as a facilitator, activist and developer working with rural communities in Sri Lanka on systemic environment management, agriculture, fisheries, rural climate response, rural disaster prep and mitigation, aid effectiveness and development sustainability through civil, government, private, media, academic organizations and  trade unions, I had, for quite some time, been looking for a rather elusive link. As each year slid into the next, I began to feel the same type of frustration as scientists searching for the missing link between man and African tree frogs whose DNA apparently most closely resemble ours. I also began to lose hope. Until that is, I realized I was searching for the wrong thing in the wrong place.


This particular Dodo I was after is so deeply entrenched as being real in the minds of people that its existence has almost been taken for granted. It’s called masculinity and femininity and their classic associative links to males and females respectively. You see, a whole barrel load of development paraphernalia from funds to expertise to beneficiaries to goals are supposed to even out real or imagined disparities and inequalities and equip human beings to acquit themselves equitably. One of the more vociferously articulated differences was supposed to be those between men and women with women generally assumed to be sitting on the lighter end of the balance due to the said associative links and the power dynamics that supposedly arise from it with men snarling and drooling like tigers over women who were cowering and whimpering like rabbits beneath them.
Now, since its existence is so universally taken for granted I should have at the very least been wading knee deep in the stuff if not actually drowning in it.

hmm...? well!...ah :)... heh!... *giggle*

However, the fact of the matter is that I walked the length and breadth of rural Sri Lanka over a decade without coming across any evidence of it at all. This, to put it very mildly, was a cause for great concern on my part. That I, and many kindly, well meaning and completely silly donors and experts were fighting a mirage was not only obvious but also the least of my issues.  I was more worried that that sort of shadow boxing against an invisible or even unreal opponent could do some serious damage to a very large number of very real human beings completely innocent of the desire for differentiation, contention or outright war over an artificially enforced schism. This Hutu-Tutsi-itis or Blueeye-Greeneye  Syndrome or whatever silly else one wishes to call it, was downright dangerous so I explored the  actual dynamics of male-female relationships in rural communities in the country to find out how their heads were wired or disengaged with respect to their specific anatomies and the way those anatomies interacted with each other in socially cohesive groups.

Well, simply put, masculinity and femininity, matriarchies and patriarchies as they have been classically defined have little or no meaning in Sri Lanka.

Instead, what we have here are two qualitative factors “pirimikama” (positive attributes associated with the male principle) and “gehanu gathiya” (negative engagement strategies associated with the female principle). Both arise not from cultures or traditions or as resultants of interactive modalities but rather from Buddhist-Hindu karmic theory. Two very important facts that need to be noted here are a) that there is no concept of “gahanukama” (positive attributes associated with the female principle) or “pirimi gathiya” (negative engagement strategies associated with the male principle and b) that “pirimikama” and gehanu gathiya” are used when talking about the characteristics of both males and females with no tying of “pirimikama” to men or “gehanu gathiya” to women.

The conclusion is quite clear: Men and women are just that. Men and women. There are no classic attributes tied into the specific anatomies. The female and male principle as yielded up by karmic theory is applied without favor to both anatomical males and anatomical females with respect to individual occurrences of each entity. I must stress this. The application is individual – not collective. In the minds of rural communities, every human being displays specific trait combinations and the composite determine the personality of the individual, the type of strengths and weaknesses they have, the types of abilities they can use as a community and failings that need to be understood as a community. These types of individual dynamics shape the way in which the community optimizes the use of their individuals for the sustenance of the community which in turn is supposed to sustain the individuals that constitute that community. Rather than blanketing a specific set of SWOT results to an anatomical division, they SWOT the individual against the requisites of the community and the weightage of the composite male-female principles perceived in each individual that the community have to work with.

Does this essentially mean that rural societies are free-for-alls akin to urban communities where anyone can be anything in any situation with respect to anyone? Not at all. While attributes are not specific to gender, responsibilities and roles are and these are classic.  The two most important are based on the principles of protection and equity which are the core drivers of social cohabitation in rural communities and they are primarily passive in nature.  These have morphed into security and equality for urban communities and are primarily aggressive in nature. The one leverages individual strengths for collective good and the other leverages legislative mechanisms for individual good.

The responsibility of protecting the family socially and economically is assigned to men and the responsibility of protecting and educating the children to young adulthood is assigned to the women.  Men earn and women utilize what is earned. Women support men in their livelihoods and men as a group takes communal decisions on advisement from the women as a group. Responsibility of educating young males in livelihoods is for the men and educating young females for marriage is for women. In general, men do not attempt to look after the young and in general women never take on the task of protecting other women since both of these are considered beyond the innate skills sets of men and women respectively.

No rocket science here.

It is all pretty common knowledge except for the fact that there is a naiveté amongst urban segregationists who firmly “believe” that it is the men who exclusively control the family purse, that it is men who exclusively determine the course of a community and that inequality is equivalent to inequity. All three are observations that have arisen in the minds of people in the process of urbanization and despite their validity with respect to urban communities they are fallacious when applied to the rural populace.

Seems pretty cool but  does this mean that rural populations are a benchmark, a baseline, a valuable real-o-meter to measure sustainability or stability of social groupings?

Emphatically no. No on two counts. One, it is just one system and not the only system. Two, that system, like all systems fails as well under specific circumstances.

That the rural system, which has withstood centuries of internal and external impacts and upheavals, is under serious threat, shuddering and breaking apart at its seams is a fact. Climate, energy, food and money crises and their packaged outcomes – conflict and war have had rather charming impacts of the stability of these communities. None of these were of their making. Like gender segregation, all of that can also be laid squarely on the shoulders of urbanites that haven’t lifted a finger to plant a cucumber or catch a mackerel but have eaten their way through almost all of that which was produced by rurals and pastorals. Be that as it may, restabilizing it would require using its own system of checks and balances – not external interventions. The core silliness is to attempt to apply the rules of one social system or order to right the wrongs of another system. This where this imposition of alien ideas such as masculinity or a femininity to Sri Lankan rural cultures fails and fails miserably.

Where then lies the problem with rural communities? While there are many issues that are internal (such as migration, loss of resources, destabilized environments, loss of livelihood options etc.) and external (war, consumerism, development initiatives, resource capture etc.) arising out of the multiple crises that cause those communities to destabilize, going by the testimony of the Afghan woman in my previous post, chief among them is the weakening of the ability of men to fulfill their roles and responsibilities.

Clearly, there is recognition amongst women in rural communities of the mediocrity of their men these days. Maybe it’s gambling, non-traditional enforcement of monogamy, alcoholism… whatever… but the lessening of the man has put a lot of unfair and uncalled for pressure on the woman. Additionally, and dangerously, when a woman steps into the shoes of a man who is weak it makes that same man react in accordance with his frailty, spitting and foaming at the mouth, kicking and screaming, condemning, judging, manipulating, subjugating, raping, murdering, revealing his inadequacies in naked, inglorious silhouette for the world to see and condemn. However, it must be noted that the fact that this occurs, at least for rurals and pastorals in Sri Lanka results less in a sense of emancipation and more in a sense of tragedy. It is not a situation that calls for women to overtake men but one that calls for both sorrow for their lot and shame for the lot of their men. For these people, a weak man is not to be condemned, ignored or marginalized but rather, to be worried over … and over… and over. Reading between the lines of that brutally honest Afghan woman warrior, the reversal of this tragic situation is laid squarely on the shoulders of men. If they are strong in their maleness the women can be equally strong in their femaleness resulting in resilient, united, strengthened, sustained societies.

That, is a tough ask for both men and women given the spectrum of issues that assail them these days in rural Sri Lanka. However, it is when it is darkest that there arises the highest qualities of human beings amongst such societies. For example, it is when such a resurgence or re-enabling of a man is impossible to engineer that there rises in Sri Lankan rural communities the “dhiriya katha” (courageous woman) who takes on a large number of the attributes of “pirimikama” because the men have been overtaken by “gehanu gathi”.  Or, it is when the entire system is compromised that there rises the “yugapurusha” (the man of the era). This particular phenomenon is highly lauded in rural communities and the “diriya katha” is awarded the same level of recognition as a “yugapurusha” and both of these have historically led their communities. That leadership is vested in them for the qualities they depict and the enabling energy they bring towards stabilizing their communities and ensuring its protection and equitable interrelationships – not for the type of anatomy they possess.

Again, there is nothing very special here. Everyone knows all of this.  The danger lies in the fact that such dynamics are in the process of being forgotten to the detriment of the country as a whole.

In a recent news item the Speaker, Chamal rajapakse stated the following to the women’s parliamentary group:  “Women taking the lead sometimes obstruct work in progress. This is not something I am saying. When women take the lead there is a tendency to not listen to anyone else. It is like this in a lot of places. It becomes difficult to work. If a woman is in charge of a District Secretariat or Divisional Secretariat or any other high office, they have a tendency to exert their authority over that place. So because of that, sometimes justice is not done”.

What the Honorable speaker says it correct.  Over the last nine years, I’ve seen examples of this nauseating condition in many females hailing from all sorts of social settings from urban to rural and all sorts of institutions from international donor agencies, academic institutions, CSOs, PSOs, TUs etc. and their chief victims have been other women. However, I have seen it more these days among men in high office in all institutions both state and otherwise. One doesn't need to be the coming genius of the 21st century to clearly understand that the men in positions of power in Sri Lanka these days obstruct work in progress, do not listen to anyone, exert their authority over a place and make it difficult to work. Also, their chief victims are women as well. While it is convenient and fallacious to attribute such mindsets exclusively to women, what the Honorable speaker should remember is that in Sri Lanka, there are many “pirimi” (men) with “gehanu gathi” controlling many of the socio-economic aspects of the nation and the reduction of the potency of Sri Lankan society as a whole could very well be tagged to this state of the collective national psyche.

(This post is somewhat of an anecdotal exposition of continuing research into gender relationships in Sri Lanka. I need to also thank my wife, Manju Dharmasiri, who earns four times as much as I do and is the chief breadwinner of the family who contributed invaluable insights into gender realities in Sri Lanka and whose insistence on not taking high office in her workplace and  her rationale for it that started this line of inquiry on my part)

The segregation of women and the myth of equality

Masculinely female feminine male... excuse us? *heh*

I like the idea of the Hindu deity Ardhanarishvara.

Ardhanarishvara represents the synthesis of the masculine and feminine energies of the universe and depicts illustratively, the idea that Shakti, the female principle of God, is inseparable from Shiva, the male principle of God. The union of these principles is exalted as the root of all creation. I particularly like the fact that the vehicle or mover of the feminine part is the lion and that of the masculine part is the bull. While I can have a huge chuckle explaining the rationale behind this juxtaposition, for the purposes of this particular post, it is less relevant and therefore I shall desist. *heh*

The keyword here is “inseparable”. As I mentioned in the previous post, attempting to understand systems that exist dependent on the right juxtaposition of a very large number or even an infinite number of parameters by breaking things down has only one practical outcome – it breaks them. Separating complex organisms merely separates them. No more and no less. While this is true with quite a few forms of human segregation, for this particular post, I will only concentrate on the segregation of “nari” (female) from “purusha” (male).

The ideas behind the buzzwords of the gender debate such as identity, traits, roles, relations, etc. have, to a large extent been based on segregating and separating females and males anatomically and these days people are creating new and improved versions of the very stereotypes that such differentiation is supposed to eradicate such as discrimination, rights, equality, mainstreaming etc.

Human beings are far too complex and far too diversely and contiguously graded in the integration, weightage and juxtaposition of the psychological and physical parameters that constitutes their existence for that sort of simplistic treatment.  

All is not quite lost though. At least from around the early nineties, there has been some awareness if not conviction that the fundamental life-dynamic created out of the interaction of men and women is an infinitely complex one that cannot be treated adequately through segregation. There has been a slow-dawning realization that breaking down the social entwine into its component parts along anatomical and/or age related lines cut through an extremely complex web and when it was put back together, it just didn’t come back up alive or, if it did show signs of life, then that life was comparable to that of the Frankenstein monster.

Yet, amusingly, segregation dies hard. It’s almost as if that particular train has gained so much momentum that no amount of pressure on the breaks is going to have much of an effect on its onward rush over the societal precipice.  I am amused that quite a large percentage of the summit attending global trotters, video conferrers, researchers, activists, writers, blog readers and email users seem to think that attempting to find fairer sets of life-rules based on what is essentially an unnatural cleaving of social inter-networks into groups such as “women” and “men” (or “youth” or “children”) actually works. The amusement stems from the fact that it is not that hard to understand that the synergy of a society overarches the individual potency of its components and extracting those out of a family, group or community for segregated treatment simply weakens, damages or destroys the cohesiveness and energy of the overarching phenomenon.

This is true for 66% of the world’s population who do not have Facebook or Twitter feeds, do not have email accounts, do not read online newspapers and blogs, do not respond to posts such as this and do not jet around the world attending conferences and debates on gender. These are primarily the rurals and pastorals of the planet and they really don’t give a rat’s bum about such issues. They have far more life-threatening problems to solve than go ballistic on the percentage of female representatives on a governance council.  Such issues reach stratospheric proportions only for the 34% minority.

However, that minority, primary made up of relatively urbanized components of the global population is powerful enough to change governance and policy based on their segregation-focused ideas of fairness.

One can’t really blame them when one sees where they are coming from.

Their life-dynamics differ from the rurals and pastorals. Urbanization is a relatively new phenomenon and urban travails equally so. They have had to adjust on the fly and that pea-soup is still a “work in progress” that is yet to reach any semblance of stability.  Indeed, stability is not even a consideration for it since it primarily operates on flux. Its chief social signature is the breaking of classic norms used for social engagement and replacing those with legislative ones. Their social web is constructed out of legal rules and not cultural, traditional or spiritual ones. Therefore, as a matter of life-and-death, they must have access to constitutional guarantees, they must have access to social institutions, they must be able to engage the legislative frameworks of the nation, region or planet and they must have trust in enforcement agencies. And they do!

As a direct result of their history, their ideas of what constitutes life-security and an equitable share of that life are driven more by the idea that the individual should be able to help herself as an individual than the idea that a community should be able to help itself as a collective and their colleagues in these types of engagement naturally tend to be of their own segregated kind since every other type of relationship is both relatively unknown and/or relatively irrelevant in comparison.

And they are right, in their own societies where legal and institutional safety nets are in place. That is the caveat that gives credibility to their claims and makes their standpoints on equality, rights and recognition of abilities valid since to all intents and purposes, the extra part or missing part between a human being’s legs should not have significant impact when all are made equal when measured against the building block of their society – their law.  And if, constitution forbid, their specific framework of safety is compromised, of course they have a right to shriek. And shriek they will, as they did in India recently where the safety of urban women became hit-headlines across the world as trust in constitutional guarantees, trust in legislative frameworks and trust in enforcement agencies failed in urban Indian environments.

And they are wrong, in presuming that such systems are applicable across all societies and that their shrieks on everything from equality to discrimination to rape should resonate with all women in all social groups in all parts of the world.  Despite the fact that for a majority of those howls, there is no such empathy, these people own the powerbases of the planet, and move quite aggressively trying to subsume all other norms, believing firmly, mostly ignorantly, definitely honestly, that their framework is not only the right one but should also be the only one.

It doesn't need a great deal of thought to realize that each social grouping has its own unique mechanisms for assuring stability, its own modalities of governance and its own systems of understanding who does what to whom, where and why, how many times, next Saturday night. Each needs to be treated as such and engaged as such. These societies exist because of their ability to integrate differences into a cohesive whole, not because they subsume those differences under an empirical framework of legal instruments.

For example, a very general rule, applicable to most rurals and pastorals, was articulated brilliantly by a young Afghan woman whom I interviewed last year on women in conflict (not Malala who is a spokesperson in a different type of skirmish albeit on a related battle field- heh). I believe (unconfirmed) that this young woman had links to or was at one point a member of RAWA .Her response was along these lines (I am trying to quote this verbatim as her translator stated it because it was powerful testimony stated in short sentences like one-second bursts from an Uzi machine pistol):

"Why do women take up arms? Why do women have to do (emphasis hers) anything at all? It is only because their men are weak. When their ability to protect us is gone. When their ability to feed us is gone. When their ability to support our children is gone. This is why movements like RAWA happen. Because we did not believe our men were strong. Because we believed our men were hurting us. Islam did much to protect women.  Shariya did much to destroy women. It is a good tool in the hands of a strong man. It is a terrible tool in the hands of a weak man. To do, for many women in this world, is not something that comes out of choice but something that comes out of necessity. This is why we help in the field. This is why we help in the fishing. This is why we do not farm or fish ourselves but keep at the side of our men when they work and support them. They in turn protect us. This is why we are amused by western women going to war in other countries. Their men are strong enough. Their weapons are strong enough. There is no necessity. We see a person who can be safe, protected and a good wife. So why fight? I think Hussain was right when he said the aggressor has brought his wife with him. When our women fight we have no choice. When their women fight they have no reason".

Clearly, the life-dynamics here are different and based on societal norms, not legislative ones and is rooted in creating a balance of differences, not reducing everything to an equation. None of them feel that equality in life is essential for ensuring high quality of life. For them that type of reasoning is fallacious. None of them consider their interrelationships stereotypical. They consider them rational. They consider them valuable. They consider them critically important. Why?  For these communities, the harmonization of societal inter-networks is far more important than rights.  Why so? Because they have little or no access to constitutional guarantees, legislative frameworks and social institutions and they trust enforcement agencies not at all. Anyone attempting to shove “rights based approaches” down the throats of these communities is actually doing far more damage than good since the base requisites necessary for their validation do not exist.

One thing is pretty clear here. One must engage a group of people as a cohesive whole. Try to give them women’s rights, youth rights and child rights and all that one manages to do is remove their cultural, traditional, spiritual, familial and communal rights and replace them with hollow spaces that are essentially useless in providing them with either safety or equity. Working aggressively and/or earnestly along such lines is basically an amusing cop-out at best and mostly selfish in its target. It is the exercise of tired minds and weakened insights and little academic tricks like “nuancing” which presume that the base reasoning is right but that it needs to be tweaked contextually just don’t cut it. One must realize that the base reasoning is wrong and an entirely different rationale unique to that specific gathering needs to be understood if one desires to read it. Luckily, there are some people who are aware of all of this and are attempting to stop this mad rush towards societal suicide.

Trying to get men and women to work together has its place in some types of social grouping but they are anathema to those where men and women work with each other.  The later majority is deeply and justifiably rooting for norms that are based on alternative cosmologies and in almost all of their cases; they would rather work with the idea of Ardhanarishvara where two halves make one composite and not nari-purusha where two individuals make two individuals.

For the majority of this world, the former is exalted as the root of all creation. The later is debilitated as the root of all destruction.

Ardhanarishvara understands how a cow manages to suckle a lion and why a lion manages not to eat a cow whereas Nari-purusha will wonder “why the effing hell is the male on the right and the female on the left in that illustration”.  *grins*

(Some of the assertions are based on nine years of work in rural development and social activism, part of this was based on a blog response to women soldiers in American armies and part of it was based on a research exercise on the use of women centric gender models in development projects.  Oh, and, as I was searching my mind for the name of the Hindu deity mentioned in this post and I was pondering aloud, my 15 year old daughter who is an expert on Hindu Polytheism pipes up “Ardhanarishvara you goose”.  Given the type of deity, that was entirely appropriate *winks*)

Nothing special about specialization

THE TREE OF UNDERSTANDING

Everyone knows that a tree is an organism that is standing on its head. A very large percentage of tree species absorbs nutrients through their roots and excretes oxygen and water vapor through stomata in their leaves. The tree of knowledge is no different. However, we, in our collective madness have done something rather shocking with it. We have, to all intents and purposes, decided that *yuck*, no self respecting organism should identify as its “head” something that is buried in the ground and instead, we have, over the last century or so, valiantly attempted to legitimize the case for calling it’s excretory organ its intake organ. We have tried to re-label its backside as its mouth.

Let me explain. Despite the fact that knowledge, by its very definition should be an all encompassing whole, we concluded that we could become “knowledgeable” by acquiring fact-nuggets selectively. This is the result of a fact of science which proposes, aggressively promotes and teaches us that everything can be broken down into their component pieces, studied in a mutually disassociated state, deductively or inferentially linked together through analysis and understood as a whole. The rationale stems,as Thom Hartmann says, from thinking such as this: If you break a car into its component parts, you can understand exactly how it works and if you put it back together it will come back alive. However, and here is the fallacy of that argument, if you do that to a dog, regardless of how competent a surgeon one is, once one puts it back together it will remain dead. Something very essential to the idea of the living dog, the whole of it existence is lost in the process of dismembering it.  As a matter of fact, when attempting to understand systems that exist dependent on the right juxtaposition of a very large number or even an infinite number of parameters (such as a living being, an ecosystem, a social group, a nation etc.), breaking things down has only one practical outcome – it breaks them.

That there is a serious error in the thinking doesn't seem that hard to get and yet, that is precisely what our education systems, our schools, our universities, our teachers and our examiners are insisting that we do.  That, we are told, is the best shot we have at understanding what is really going on in this cosmos. It is the rope that our inquirers or researchers cling to with bulldog like zeal because there is precious little else to cling on to.Over the last century, blindly believing in this almost axiomatic truth, we have created more than a thousand major scientific “disciplines” or “areas of specialization” and literally hundreds of thousands of minor specializations. I like to call these specializations “fact-buckets” and specialists “fact-sops”. There is nothing there that even remotely resembles knowledge. Just a series of answers to a series of (mostly) irrelevant questions that yield a lot of nothings about mostly everything.

We have, over ten decades, managed to split the tree of knowledge into a very large set of branches (areas of specialization), an even larger set of twigs (minor specializations) and an almost infinite number of leaves (facts), none of which are even remotely aware that they are part of a twig let alone a branch let alone a trunk let alone a root… let alone a tree. I cannot be but blunt about this, but since leaves are the primary waste expelling unit of the tree, we have, essentially, spent thousands of man hours, zillions of dollars and tons of infrastructural resources to buy ourselves a world’s-worth of factual sh** and each time some poor apology for the human race coaxes and teases out a “new finding”  - or factoid - or fruit if you many, in some rarefied “field of inquiry” (for example: The effect of water droplets on the air-water interface, or, basically, what on earth happens when a drop of water is dropped into glass of water- or even more basically, oh lord, is this guy serious?), that individual is perpetrating the dung gathering exercise that we all earnestly believe is true blue gourmet chocolate manufacture, mined out of high quality endeavor, guaranteed to help us in our understanding of what we are, where we are, who we are and why we are.

Pause here for awhile. Take a look around you. What has this done for our world? Have we understood it clearer or made it better? It has done nothing of the sort. In fact, it has had the opposite effect to the one intended. We don’t need climate specialists, agriculture experts, energy gurus, military strategists or money moguls to tell us that through our scientific insanity, we are now almost at Armageddon.

These days, when I go to a doctor, I feel like the elephant that was analyzed by five blind men. I get shunted from the trunk -lady to the foot-dude who consuls the tail-gal who phones up the mahout who collectively proceed to test everything from my teeth enamel to my nose hair, tell me about the dangers of clipping my toe-nails too short,  give me ten dozen different types of medication, attack my wallet to the tune of fifty thousand rupees and turn me into a chronic, serial pill popper.  Almost, I want to tap them on their shoulders and whisper “people, it is the whole darn elephant that is sick, not the elephant’s spleen – that is only diseased and curing that will only cure the disease not the sickness”.  I know it won’t do any good though. Specialization has blinded these people and telling them they are blind won’t give them back their sight.

Amazingly silly aren’t we all? We who specialize and we who believe in the abilities of specialists?

Is there a cure for this giggle? Is there any possibility that such a course of action can be reversed? Sure. There are no questions that human beings feel the need to ask that don’t have solutions, provided that we are not afraid to look wide enough and deep enough. Wide and deep are the operative words here and acknowledging those two words is a challenge for most. Through this process of specialization, we have become instinctively terrified of both of them.

Instead of scrambling up into the branches and twigs of the tree of knowledge, we need to scurry down to its root. Instead of flying up into its canopy like eagles, we need to scratch at its base like turkeys. Instead of selecting the particular type of telescopic tunnel vision we will use for the rest of our lives, we need to buy ourselves the widest angled scope possible. Instead of selective facts we need holistic awareness. We need to be able to study the dog in-situ and figure out how it actually managed to be alive without trying to make mincemeat out of it. This can only be done by the wise – not by the knowledgeable, not by the intelligent, not by the intellectual.

Those who possess an intellect can formulate questions. Those who possess both intellect and intelligence can move towards formulating answers to those questions. Those who possess intellect, intelligence and creativity, can formulate answers to those questions. Those who possess intellect, intelligence, creativity and emotional stability can actually make those answers work in real.

The intellectuals? They are able. Only. The intellectually intelligent? They are enabled. Only. The intellectually intelligently creative? They are knowledgeable. Only. The intellectually intelligently creatively emotionally stable? They are wise. Knowledge, in some ways, we can get at with great difficulty, even while we are scrambling up the tree.  Wisdom requires that we make like rodents. Wisdom insists we acknowledge the importance of creativity and emotional stability as key requisites for actually solving problems instead of merely creating them, analyzing them, discussing them, collating them, researching them and publishing them. Both, unfortunately, are anathema to science and its limiting framework of reference. This is unfortunate for humanity as well.

(This post was triggered by a presentation I made on Democratizing Agricultural Research In South Asia in 2009. While there were a few great souls at the conference, two stand out. My own father, the ex-director of the Agrarian Research and Training Institute and P.V. Satheesh, the Leader of DDS and convener of the National Millet Network of India, Zaheerabad, Andhra Pradesh. To both, over time, I owe unrepayable debts not least for their unique and separate types of fatherhood).