The 'wicked' culture and the 'face book'

Pi magazine for those who keep up to date with the latest pub crawl news and also some ‘other events’ at UCL is a student magazine.
To some ‘lecherous slavering’ undergrad’s dismay in this issue they have broken with the longstanding tradition and haven’t published the lurid, voyeuristic, offensive and mundane photographs of union pub crawls.
Instead it has put a serious and critical ‘face and look’ by having a go at what it calls ‘a barrier to true communication’ and if you haven’t guessed what I am on about it is the indispensable, every students must have social networking tool the face book.

There is no doubt that to most people who are addicted to this evil it is the worst and most unrewarding way to waste time if it is used in a way that it has become synonymous to the word ‘socialising’ which often means foul language, booze fuelled profanity, steamy antics and unprotected sex.

Like many words in English language socialising has been raped and disrobed of its meaning which is a real shame. There was a time where socialising meant sharing ideas and enjoying the company of each other in a civilized and humane manner. University was a place to meet highbrow and big headed intellectual students who were both intelligent and witty without being offensive and outrageous.

Most grand ideas from metaphysics to microphysics were developed through this form of communication over a coffee or tea in great archaic establishments of the good old universities.
The biographies of great thinkers are all full of enticing anecdotes of their encounters with friends and colleagues who enlightened them by their stimulating ideas and insights.
To my annoyance students who chat at library’s quite study spaces is nothing but unadulterated vulgar gossips and boastings of how they got ‘pissed’ the week before provided they remember of their shenanigans.
Now thanks to face book they don’t even need to wait until the next morning but can share a pictorial and textual account of their night as soon as they get sober.

What the author of the pi article berates as a ‘procrastinators dream and ultimate time-waster’s idyll’ is nothing but the student culture which has been given a voluptuous yet a corrosive name of ‘cool’. Being cool is to be wicked and speak in a manner that would butcher the English language. To borrow Gillian Mckeith's holistic idea ' you are what you think' and ultimately the product of their life style and thinking is reflected on their walls and 'my notes'.

Sadly, university has come to be a place where students analytical and critical thought is suppressed and is replaced by a modus Vivendi of binge drinking, anti-social behaviour and sexual pantomimes.
Like any means of communication, face book which is the product of technological modernism has both liberatory and enslaving potential. It could be used to promote civility, knowledge, insights and views or could be used like it is done by most.

Having said this I am going to sign on my face book account to post this ‘blabber’.

Random stuff from my diary

Contrary to what I thought the level of enthusiasm and interest in interfaith dialogue has been tremendous. I hope this will boost the society and counter our doubts and fears of disaffiliation and disappointment. Any number above ten is good enough to make a society viable I don’t understand union’s arbitrary number of 20, it is a bit pedantic and frankly silly, that a side Mathew is right to say that we have to do much more than try to make a society above the membership threshold; to start with I have a few suggestions:

We can use this opportunity to draw up a constitution for the society. I passionately believe that interfaith can be much more than a socialising and discussion forum.
We should not shy away from taking a principled and ideological stance on “sensitive issues” arguing, criticising and opposing those who have been using religion for their mere sectional and personal interests. Neutrality shouldn’t mean pacifism; this should not foster a climate of numbness and docility. We should be able to call a spade a spade, speak in favour of justice and fairness and do not blur the clear boundaries of truth and falsehood in the name of pluralistic attitude.

All great prophets’ message was striding towards a world of justice, fairness and truth, from Moses to Mohammad they were all dissidents, thinking against the imposed beliefs and seeking actively to change the world for better.

Those who attended the last few meetings of faith link at Lancaster gate know that we have been discussing a project about Israel and Palestine. This is an issue which concerns all three abrahamic faiths we could ask members for suggestions and maybe participation. We may corporate and have events with friends of Palestine society and also with all other religious societies.

We live at a time where vacuous materialism is rampaging on people’s lives, where religiosity is the biggest sin and any meaning of life and existence has been made devoid of any substance under the thralls of ultra-liberalism. Capitalism and consumerism hand in hand has changed modern society to a lazy, passive and docile spectator in otherwise beautiful world of action and activity. The system has systematically destroyed the soul of collectivism and replaced it by individual material gains.

Famous philosopher and historian Will Durant asked an interesting question. What would you say if it is found that all our progress has been in the field of making the means better without knowing the aim of life or thinking where are we heading? It is not only the concern of academic philosophers, thinkers or intellectuals in fact anyone with a sound mind can contemplate about the meaning of life and existence.

It might well be the case that the world is a vast vat of sperm and egg and that each mate in random for mere statistical reasons. A bacterium lives to multiply it has no other reason as was famously pronounced by the then noble laureate “what then could be the aim of the bacterium? What does it want to produce that justifies its existence, determines its organisation and underlies it work? There is apparently only one answer to this question. A bacterium constantly strives to produce two bacteria. This seems to be its one project, its sole ambition.” Inadvertently or intentionally we have reduced human status to that of a bacterium. What is the difference between a human being a bi-pedal homo sapiens and a multi or mono cellular bacterium. To start with one would say that there are huge morphological, genetical, biochemical and anatomical differences between these two species but at close inspection it transpires that we are not having a discussion about the differences in those areas which are indeed quite distinctly dissimilar. We want to find out the reason for the very purpose of our being.
The established belief among the scientific elite is that there is a very vivid explanation for our life and we need not delude ourselves with complicated metaphysical and theological arguments but look at the undeniable facts, Facts which are reproducible and stand the test of time and scrutiny of inquisitive mind. We are not only something distinct from a staphylococcus but we are related, a pathogen which kills anyone if untreated is indeed our distant ancestor.
Evolution has been working since the big bang, when the seeds of life started to bud on earth. Four billion years ago that enormous explosion occurred, we don’t know quite for sure how loud and big it was but it was big enough to make millions and millions of galaxies that one shivers at the enormity and greatness of our universe.

The champion of this belief, now the darling of all imminent scientists who relate almost everything in science to his proposed theory, was Charles Robert Darwin, born in a wealthy family of land owners, educated and groomed in the great tradition of Georgian –Victorian England he sailed with HMS beagle to south America and landed in Galapagos islands.
Darwin was a smart cookie and a quintessential English naturalist, observing everything he found around him with a glaring eye, collecting and recording enormous amount of data and analysing them with an incisive mind , then as it is said by his disciples in a eureka moment with a sudden flush of insight he found the answer to his questions. Darwin was now in a hurry to let the world know what he discovered but it took him until 1859 after a hideous and painstaking labour to compile his findings and publish them under a long and dull title On the origin of species by means of natural selection or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life……

Identity by Ignorance

Marx sees a society in the grip of a savage and brutal economic system.A system which has taken the essence of humanity from the masses and turned them into selfless numbers used to maximise profit.
Capitalism is both evil and destructive said Marx, to counter that he envisaged a society based on the values of solidarity and corporation. This collective community of individuals would build a utopia on the ruins of a bourgeoisie regime which is bound to be obliterated by a universal spontaneous explosion of the proletariat rebellion.

To bring about revolution one should educate the masses about the ills and evils of the very system which has subordinated and enslaved them, in other words to raise class consciousness among the people and make them aware of their miseries and encourage them to revolt.

Whether class consciousness is a necessary precursor for the revolution or whether it is inevitable that a structure based on an old means of production would gradually be destroyed by a new order, is an academic debate.

Marx’s simple dialectic is based on historical determinism, the idea that every thesis will have an antithesis and this internal opposition will destroy the thesis until history reaches it’s pinnacle where dialectic stops because the antagonistic forces and factors which were acting as a catalyst for antithesis disappears.

The day I read Marx and his brilliant critique of capitalism was introduced to me through a very passionate Marxist-Leninist activist who happens to be a close friend; I was impressed by his breadth of work and the depth of his analysis.

My passion and love affair with Marxism was short lived when he presented his alternative system in a famous piece of literature which still adorns my shelf today with it's gripping red cover. The communist manifesto is a well written pamphlet, it has a confident tone and an epic note ; in short it promises everything but delivers nothing, it is a sad tale of a genius that got it all wrong.

However Marx’s grand idea was spectacularly off beam, at least he morphed a system and curved an identity based on consciousness and education.
The key to success according to Marx is to educate the masses that they are subjected to exploitation and abuse by the ruling class. The status quo is maintained by stupefying the people, denying them knowledge and access to the means of information. The book ends in a climax ‘workers of the world unite you have nothing to lose but your chains’.

Nationalism and love for the motherland also give people a sense of belonging and identity. Each individual feels a part of a whole a piece of a collective entity. What is nationalism, its history, development and influence in the world specifically in the 20th century and what constitutes a collective identity and finally what are its subjective and objective parameters is not my concern here and it’s purely academic.

What I intend here is to show that a hysterical, blind love for something you quite do not know, sometimes gives you an identity which I call it ‘identity by ignorance’. Your proud and made to be proud of your identity but what exactly defines that and how you can explain it , is not known and maybe not meant to be known.
George Orwell first in his 1945 ‘Notes on nationalism’ and then in his seminal work '1984 ' went through nationalism and its different forms with great insight that was characteristic of him. He describes nationalism as ‘power hunger tempered by self-deception’ this is at least for the rulers that use this phenomena to demand an unconditional subordination to power and hegemony as was demonstrated in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany ‘Germany is Hitler , Hitler is Germany’.
A friend once said that an English woman was so distraught by what she saw as a rapid erosion of Englishness by mass migration that she joined a far right party. When asked what constituted Englishness she was honest to reply 'going to the pub with her husband and drinking until late'.

Like that woman patriotism is an inseparable part of any Afghan’s identity. As an Afghan I was taught to be proud of my culture, country and nation which I am but most of my pride stems from the values which are either not exclusive to Afghanistan or it got it from a higher culture over the course of history.

I have read volumes of history written by often very jingoistic patriots and cannot see a trace of anything distinctly characteristic to the inhabitants of current Afghanistan before Islam. However I don’t deny the fact that certain behavioural characteristics like hospitality, bravery, persistence and heroism are better associated with Afghans than other people of the region which is perhaps due to weather,nutrition and other geographical factors.

The rest is more complex, most of what Afghanistan has in terms of culture, art and knowledge it owes to Islamic civilization which reached the country and made it the centre of knowledge and commerce for several centuries. Afghans soon assimilated Islamic values into their own and gave it an Afghan feel and taste.

It is natural that those aspects which were more compatible with the physical and spiritual traits of Afghans were developed and incorporated better. The geographical realities of Afghanistan with its harsh climate and terrains, the genetic nature of its inhabitants made them brave warriors adapted to doing hard manuel labour.

Over the last two hundred years Afghanistan has been a hub of social and political unrest most of which were imposed wars by superior powers that wanted to dominate and control this part of the world.

continued

The beheading of love

Modernism as an ideological construct has committed many crimes among those are : machinization of life,subjectivity of beauty, and the worst of all the unceremonious beheading of love. I am obsessed with Hardy's lamentations for this abattoir called "The modern world".

"Ah, are you digging on my grave, My loved one? -- planting rue?" -- "No: yesterday he went to wed One of the brightest wealth has bred. 'It cannot hurt her now,' he said, 'That I should not be true.'" "Then who is digging on my grave, My nearest dearest kin?" -- "Ah, no: they sit and think, 'What use! What good will planting flowers produce? No tendance of her mound can loose Her spirit from Death's gin.'" "But someone digs upon my grave? My enemy? -- prodding sly?" -- "Nay: when she heard you had passed the Gate That shuts on all flesh soon or late, She thought you no more worth her hate, And cares not where you lie. "Then, who is digging on my grave? Say -- since I have not guessed!" -- "O it is I, my mistress dear, Your little dog, who still lives near, And much I hope my movements here Have not disturbed your rest?" "Ah yes! You dig upon my grave... Why flashed it not to me That one true heart was left behind! What feeling do we ever find To equal among human kind A dog's fidelity!" "Mistress, I dug upon your grave To bury a bone, in case I should be hungry near this spot When passing on my daily trot. I am sorry, but I quite forgot It was your resting place."

Thomas Hardy