Anyone who reads the daily newspapers, watches TV, or wades through the ‘Net, will know how our world and our lives are simply caught between what W B Yeats called two eternities of race and soul—the race representative of our tribal past and the soul anticipating the cosmopolitan future. Not what-is-as-it-is, or the shape of things to come, as propounded by the glossy, call them funky, if you like, magazines, or anything that intends to make the fair sex ‘women of substance’—as if they never had any substance. So, think of the mythical Sita, Helen Keller, or the millions of courageous faces in the crowd today. You may, or may not know them. But, just think.
It goes without saying that despite all the advance, in terms of science, technology, and political ‘hard sell,’ our secular entities are being smeared, what with race having been reduced to a mere symbol of resentment and the soul ‘beaten’ down to fit the demanding body on which it now measures its needs. Ask highbrow folks that read mainstream newspapers, magazines and the web. You may, or may not get a clear answer. Yet, the import would be imminent: neither race nor soul offers us a future that is other than gloomy. This is not all. Neither of them promises a polity that is remotely democratic. And, there resides the paradox—being free, but not being free from within and without.
Benjamin R Barber (1939-2017), the American political scientist, placed the whole percept, also precept, in his persuasive book, Jihad vs McWorld, published 25 years ago, and translated into 30 languages, as only he could: “… Caught between Babel and Disneyland, the planet is falling precipitously apart and coming reluctantly together at the same moment.” His canon is, indeed, striking, also amazingly relevant to the troubled times we now live in—a penetrating analyses of the fundamental conflict of our times. A state of intimidation: of consumerist capitalism versus religious and tribal fundamentalism.
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