On the blindness of those who will not see
‘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.
Socially sensitive
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’).
Poverty alleviation
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.
Complete blindness
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 anomally 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.
Bottom-lines
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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