Violence and Non-Violence across Time by Sudhir Chandra

Author:Sudhir Chandra [Chandra, Sudhir]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367029142
Google: jLOnwwEACAAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-01-15T01:33:06+00:00

IX

It is strange to think that, till only recently, many had begun to feel that we had left the period of the great and cruel wars of Europe – elsewhere too – behind us, given up the predatory politics of old colonialism as well as its modern variations and begun to find ways of replacing eras of brutal dictatorships by more legally accountable democracies. There is a growing flood-tide of news about random street bombings, prisons specially designed for torture, assassinations of political opponents, genocidal acts of ethnic cleansing, ruthless clashes between religious sects, brutalizing slavery of women and children and so forth. Sadly, we seem to have slowly slid, once again, into a time when every aspect of our daily social, religious, moral or political practices is either infected by violence or being used to achieve narrow aims. The result is that our present discourse is sometimes melodramatic with its call to set up technologically sophisticated security states in which every human being is perceived as a potential threat and at other times is so apocalyptic in its fervour that it is difficult to distinguish between assertions of peace and calls for extermination. We no longer seem to hesitate to imagine a world, our world, where human beings can and do inflict the most grievous kinds of injury on each other and claim legitimacy for doing so in the name of law, political necessity, religious authority, social stability, cultural cohesion or the preservation of moral values. Our descent into the vicious cycles of violence is, of course, not unique. Indeed, the only surprise is that we did not seem to have anticipated it; our historical knowledge, our philosophic or literary discourses, should have alerted us to the fact that violence returns in our lives and days with the same predictability as winter snow over fertile lands; indeed, with the same banal certainty. We are, after all, as Kant says, made of such ‘crooked timber’ that there is little anyone can do to make a decent ‘forked animal’ out of us.34 Perhaps we know that and so create for ourselves a few comforting illusions about the unique human capacity to self-consciously find beauty in the world, to create a small space called home, to love and dream of small comforts, to believe that the Other will not only have a tolerant regard for what we believe but would be delighted to find in the difference the makings of a delightful human comedy or to even consider how the powerless and the weak can someday dare to believe, without fear of abuse or coercion, that the earth is part of their inheritance. Is Mahatma Gandhi’s call for non-violence part of this daring? Or is his presence and fleeting success yet another confirmation of the fragility of goodness in a world where the largest majority are more at ease with inquisitional powers which lay down, as William Blake’s Urizen does:

One command, one joy, one desire,

One curse, one weight, one measure,

One King, one God, one Law.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.