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Article Summary   by:jitendra kumar sharma    
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2/22/2006





ABSTRACT BY Dr. JITENDRA KUMAR SHARMA



Closing Of The Western Mind

Cartoons,
and sterility of the democracy project



Cartoons make fun and
rarely demand reflection. One is laughing the problem
away. Cartoons use stereotypes that cause exaggerated laughter .
Cross-cultural communication, as

advertisers, translators and marketing men know, is a dangerous art. Cartoons can invite riots instead of laughter as
did the controversial cartoons published in a Danish weekly followed by inane
editorials as stereotype wrestled stereotype predictably. Is there something
wrong in our mode of thinking? Why do we reinforce stereotypes after every
controversy?

Anthropologist Gregory Bateson coined schizmogeresis to signify such occurences.
He wanted to understand violence and how peculiar thinking escalates violence.
He considered dualistic societies caught in the either/or. Each side escalates
the opposite reaction rousing a spiral of violence. There is no alternative
signal to diminish the urge to excess.
A says you have hurt, insulted, denied me my basic being. B responds indifferently suggesting
why A can’t be like B. Myth, symbol and history aid the violent escalation.

The cartoon controversy is a schizmogeretic situation where humor becomes unwanted and the worst medicine. The cartoon loses its very raison d’etre drowned
under editorials that adumbrate on
press, faith, secular
citizenship all in need of freedom from
ethnic pressure. Analysis gets fixed up to a clash of religions- Islam and
Christianity. Also it is seen as irrational faith confronting liberal
secularism with implied invidiousness. Islam becomes Third World, ethnic and
inferior while the liberal West is
mature, superior with its rule of law. Identity politics vs citizenship,
law vs vigilantism and reason vs obscurantism dualities or the worst of both
sides emerge propped on the clash of civilizations thesis and 9/11.
Not Chomsky alone but all others can see the western press as
hypocritical practising separate rules for Holocaust debates or Christianity.
But freedom and hypocrisy go together.
The cartoons are Orientalism at its worst and freedom of press is essential to democracy and the current
situation will benefit neither.
If democracy is central, free speech must be
within the law? Does insulting Islam
violate the laws of blasphemy? Is free speech free of hate? When will the
West confront its illiteracy about
Islam? The Muslim is no longer the invisible terrorist but also a fellow
citizen reading the same newspaper. Both Islam and the West need alternative
myths. The West’s response to 9/11 is a crude mimicking of the Crusades.
Europ and Islam need to be reconnected mythologically showing that western
civilization arose from Islam. To the myth of 9/11 must be counterposed the
pre-1492 world,the original 9/11, the end of Moorish Spain where Jews, Muslims
and Christians lived together as a creative mosaic.

The pre-1492 world needs to be translated into a democratic
theory,that is, democracy can no longer be constructed on singular identities
and homogeneous histories and heterogeneity has spaces of interaction beyond
violence. Europe deserted its pre-1492 myth and plunged into the genocidal
nationalism and Nazism. Pluralism must
rework and recast pasts and futures. Democracy and Islam must reach out
interactively beyond liberalism and
fundamentalism.



An
abstract of The Times of India article “ Closing Of The Western Mind

Cartoons,
and sterility of the democracy project”

“Dated 2/22/2006 submitted by Professor Jitendra Kumar
Sharma

=============The
End===========================
Published: February 22, 2006   
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