Knowledge & Culture

“As you know all Western Knowledge in the form of hard sciences, social sciences, philosophy and Humanities had their birth in the movement called the Enlightenment that took place in the 17th century Europe. It was a movement that took place following the Industrial and Scientific revolutions which banished "God’ and put the Western man in his place. The father of the movement was the French philosopher and Mathematician Rene Descartes. This movement is supposed to have ushered in the modern period in the Western civilization.”
___________________________

by Gunadasa Amarasekera

(April 02, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) When your President, my good friend Dr. Waidyasekera asked me to address this learned gathering I was rather taken aback and at a loss to know what prompted him to do so. Dr. Waidyasekera no doubt would have read some of my writings in Sinhala and the fiction I have produced over the years. In these fictional creations there are certainly characters and situations that belong to your province of psychiatry, which could be handled better by you than a writer of fiction. But as a writer of fiction I have had a great fascination for the morbid and the surrealistic.


As a matter of fact one of my recent creations deals with a day in the life of a very successful psychiatrist. It may have been these forays of mine into your realm of psychiatry that would have prompted Dr. Waidyasekera to conclude that I could say something sensible and relevant to you on this occasion. However I rang him up a few days later in utter desperation and told him that I know next to nothing about this field except for a vague feeling I have that it has a lot to do with culture of which I know a little more and whether he could provide me with some material dealing with this aspect of psychiatry — its relevance to culture. He was kind enough to give me a book by one Suman Fernanado a Sri Lankan psychiatrist practicing in UK which he thought would help me.

As you know I have little respect or regard for these expatriate experts academics and professors. They are often fellows who have failed to make their mark here and migrated to become promoters hired by some white man who is out to promote his pet theory across the globe. We have seen this happening over the years. Apart from the seepticism of the actual worth of their so-called academic work, I have supreme contempt for most of them. Over the last two or three decades they have become traitors who are out to sell their country and people for their survival. The innocent Doladuka of yester years has become a insatiable Dollar duke with absolutely no moral or ethical consideration.

It was in this frame of mind that I started reading Dr. Suman Fernando’s book. But soon it became a profitable and enjoyable experience. It is by any standards an outstanding piece of writing of which we could be proud of it. It is a book that should be read not only by psychiatrists but also by all those interested in the problems facing our country and the entire under developed world. In fact I find in him an ardent supporter of our own Jathika Chinthanaya which Prof. Nalin Silva and I have been trying to put across over the last few years. To put it rather crudely I see this work as a plea for a Jathika Chinthanaya in psychiatry. It helped me enormously to translate my instinctive intuitive random thoughts and insights of which I was rather diffident into a coherent convincing format. Hence I thought I should start what I have to say with a few quotations from this work which I think would also provide the necessary background to what I have to say.

Here are the quotations

‘As Western influence and economic power spreads across the globe its ways of thinking about health and illness including mental health and mental illness follows suit. Any action that opposes this trend is likely to be met with powerful forces. The position at present is that psychiatry functions as an imperial force enforcing its views and exerting its power, confident in assumptions of its own superiority, not just of its presumed scientific methods but of the Western culture that underlies it - a culture that promotes a materialistic non-religious standpoint and deep seated presumptions about race’...

Again under the heading The Global scene; psychiatric imperialism’ this is what he has to say.

‘As Western influence spreads across the world and Western ideas, technology and politics are imposed upon, or taken on by Asian and African countries, Western psychiatry follows suit for several reasons. Firstly psychiatry, as a part of a medical system accompanies Western medicine. And Western medicine, through wonders of Medical technology, its drug treatment, its surgery and its techniques for the treatment of specific illnesses has clearly outshone other systems of medicine across the globe.

The fact that psychiatry itself has not been shown to be applicable cross culturally or to be free of both racial and cultural bias gets obscured by its overt attachment to medicine - the prestige of the latter rubbing off on to psychiatry. Secondly psychiatry being presented and accepted as a part of scientific medicine is assumed to be a scientific discipline with objective methods for diagnosis and treatment that are free of cultural bias. As such psychiatry is seen as being applicable to all people in all countries, irrespective of culture, race and social system, although this is clearly not so. Thirdly psychiatry like all things Western is perceived as superior to non-Western equivalents. Its content is not questioned, it is taken on ‘trust’. Finally psychiatry is pushed on to non-Western societies by economic and political forces allied to Western powers. The promotion of drugs manufactured in the West goes hand in hand with the psychiatry of the West; centres of excellence are based on the West for people from underdeveloped countries to come to training so that the psychiatric institutions in Britain, United States, and others centres of European culture maintain their dominance. And the types of psychiatry that is promoted, with its emphasis on drug therapy with psychoanalysis that have developed within Western cultures and with models of socio therapy suited with Western political systems, perpetrates Western dominance’.

Reading through these very valuable and valid comments one cannot help feeling that the racism that Dr. Fernando speaks of is intentional to a very high degree; that the disregard for other cultures, the assumption of the superiority of the Western culture are not mere unconscious prejudices but deliberate wilful acts. This may be so but I think there is something much more fundamental behind this attitude. We would have to dig deeper to find out why Western psychiatry became tainted with racism, racial arrogance and grew up regardless of other cultures and other worldviews. I believe it has much to do with the genesis or birth of ‘knowledge’ in the Western world and for that we will have to go beyond the confines of psychiatry to find out the reasons.

As you know all Western Knowledge in the form of hard sciences, social sciences, philosophy and Humanities had their birth in the movement called the Enlightenment that took place in the 17th century Europe. It was a movement that took place following the Industrial and Scientific revolutions which banished "God’ and put the Western man in his place. The father of the movement was the French philosopher and Mathematician Rene Descartes. This movement is supposed to have ushered in the modern period in the Western civilization.

Arran E Gare in his book ‘Post Modernism and Environmental Crisis’ gives a succinct description of the nature of this Enlightened movement.

"In the 17th century, the efforts of the Moderns to leave behind the wisdom of the Ancients received its most forceful expression in the philosophy of Descartes. Descartes claimed to have formulated and systematized a new method for acquiring knowledge in place of the authority of tradition, dogma, faith, superstition and prejudice. It presented a picture of the natural world as a single system which could be described and explained by rational principles elaborated by Hobbes, Newton and Locke; this picture provided the impetus for enlightenment, the quest to bring all beliefs before the bar of reason and to create a rational society accordingly; the idea of humans as complex machines, society as a social contract between egoistic individuals, utilitarianism, main stream economic theory and psychology are all aspects of this world orientation."

The influence of Descartes was so pervasive at the time that there is a story how an ardent disciple of his had once kicked a pregnant bitch. When the bitch was yelling in pain he is supposed to have said not to worry about it as what they were hearing were sounds emanating from a damaged machine."

It was on this philosophical intellectual foundation that all Western knowledge was built. In this system there was no place for anything non-material as culture. The human being was a complex machine and whatever he did or felt was explicable in terms of a series of physio-chemical reactions. If he had a mind separate from the brain it was just a blank sheet — a universal blank sheet. The mind as a ‘cultural construct’ was completely alien to their way of thinking. If psychology grew up in such a ‘scientific milieu’ that it should have completely ignored the ‘cultural factor’ should not come as a surprise to us.

However within this Enlighten-ment tradition there appeared in the 19th century two great thinkers who challenged this concept of man as a complex machine. They were Freud and Marx.

Freud saw that man was no rational machine and that there was a subconscious mind which was hidden from him but which determined much of his conscious behaviour. In the same manner Marx saw man being capable of guiding his destiny and liberating himself from the capitalist yoke. They were both radical thinkers within the Cartesian tradition which saw man as a machine and society as a collection of these egoistic machines.

But neither of them was radical enough to see man as a ‘cultural construct’. They could not think of a mind without a material base.

There had to be a material foundation for the mind to feed on.

Regarding Freud, Eric Fromm has presented this very well in his essay ‘Greatness and limitations of Freud’.

‘The dogma of bourgeois materialism expressed by Freud was that of his teachers, and under this influence he could not conceive that there could be strong psychological powers whose specific physiological roots could not be determined. Freud’s aim was to understand human passions;

‘How did Freud solve this problem. At a time when relatively little was known about hormonal influences on the psyche there was indeed one phenomenon in which the connection of the physiological and the psychological was well known; sexuality. If one considered sexuality as the root of all drives then the theoretical demand was satisfied, the physiological roots of psychic forces were discovered’.

There was no place for anything like culture which had no material base.

The same is true of Marx, and we see it more explicitly where Marx is concerned. Man as well as human history were products of materialism for him. Historical materialism was his foundation. Culture was just an insignificant factor that belonged to the supra structure while productive materialistic forces formed the infrastructure on which that supra structure rests.

Though Freud and Marx were radical thinkers being imprisoned within the Cartesian Enlightenment tradition they could not fundamentally change the concept of man as an aggregate of matter, a complex machine whose workings could be, described in terms of physio-chemical reactions. The enlightenment thinking held sway right through out the centuries.

What were the results of this situation?

1. The cultural factor was completely ignored. The idea that man as a cultural construct was never entertained.

2. Secondly what was assumed, as culture in a very restricted narrow sense meant nothing more than the life pattern of the Western bourgeois man. It was taken for granted. He represented all what was meant by culture and he was the zenith of human evolution. That man was essentially a cultural construct and that cultural construct varied from civilization to civilization was inconceivable.

Eric Fromm has this to say about Freud’s attitude to culture. This was indeed one of Freud’s blind spots. For him bourgeois society was identical with civilized society and when he recognised the existence of peculiar cultures that were different from bourgeois society they remained for him primitive and under developed.

As I said earlier to understand that racist attitude of Western psychiatry, its arrogance indifference to other cultures we would have to go deeper into the very fountain head of Western knowledge the Enlightened movement initiated by Rene Descartes. If Dr. Suman Fernando had considered this fundamental factor he would have understood racism in a broader light.

Our inability to recognise the imperialistic nature of Western knowledge and to understand it as part of the Western culture imposed on us, is at the bottom of many of the dilemmas facing us today. Even fifty years after Independence we remain slaves unable to see that what we practice and crow about does not belong to us. We have not been able to shake off the white man’s burden. I believe we Sri Lankans have become the most esteemed darlings of the Viceroy Macaulay, who said that the primary aim of Western education should be to produce a man who will be different from the white man only in the colour of his skin.

We have not understood either our culture or what the term culture stands for in any meaningful way. Of course our politicians from 1956 onwards have understood it as wearing the white cloth and banian, lighting traditional oil lamps, eating kevun and kiribath and as a powerful means of deceiving the masses. I think the hypocrisy and the deception practiced by our leaders is one of the factors that has made our younger generations cynical of culture and the importance of the cultural dimension. If the cultural imperialism that is let loose on us by the imperialist forces in the name of globalisation and the global village continue unabated for a few more years that may well herald the end of our nation. This cultural imperialism seems to be getting stronger and more pervasive every day.

As you know we are now going to start our children’s education from the kindergarten in English — in the tongue of the imperialist master. Even some of you may be for it. The argument put forward in its favour is that English is a world language and that it would be to our advantage to get our children to start on English right from the kindergarten. If it is so, and if you are looking for a world language for your children I would suggest to you to start them not on English, but on Chinese. For in 20 years time it is very likely that Chinese may be the world language in this part of the globe. China with a 20% annual growth rate is bound to be the supreme power in this part of the world and Chinese the lingua franco of this region. The recent confrontation between the US and China should give you some indication of the shape of things to come.

Fifty years ago Professor Geoffrey Barraclough wrote an outstanding work ‘Contemporary History of the World’ in which he said that there would be the dwarfing of the West by the end of the last century. This prediction did not come true, because the natural course of history was perverted and stalled by the Western powers by destroying the Socialist World with much deception and treachery. But that prediction will come to pass in a different guise. What we are witnessing today may be the final death struggle of those Imperialist powers. The clash of civilizations that is going to come will certainly dwarfen the West and relegate the English language to a much weaker Western world. Do not judge the future with what you see around you today. What you see around, going about in your cosy limousines is a mirage, and that mirage would have evaporated by the time your children grow up.

Now that we are dealing with this word ‘culture’ it would be worthwhile to know at least briefly what exactly we mean by this word. I find even the more enlightened among us thinking in terms of song and dance or etiquette when this word is mentioned. Those are certainly external expressions of culture as art and architecture are cultural artefacts. The poor understanding of what culture stands for even among our academics and intellectuals is I believe due to its neglect by Western intellectuals till recent times. As I mentioned earlier under the hegemony of the Cartesian thinking, culture was outside the pale of intellectual discourse. It is only recently after the onslaught on Enlightenment thinking by the Post modernists that western intellectuals have taken to a study of culture. At the moment I find very valuable discussions going on within academic circles in the US on this subject.

Dr. Suman Fernando in his work has interpreted culture as world view, and discusses the major cultures African, Eastern, Native American in terms of the worldview incorporated in them. This is certainly a very valid interpretation of culture, but I think the term ‘worldview’ gives the impression of an intellectual attitude rather detached and removed from life. We have in our recent writings in Sinhala used the word ‘chinthanaya’ which gives the idea of a more dynamic force permeating through every cell of our conscious as well as unconscious being guiding our thoughts and actions. I think the best description of culture has been given by Buddha. I am sure you would remember the first stanza of the Manowagga in Dhammapada:

Manopubbangama setta/ Mano setta manomaya

Mind is supreme; it is the forerunner of everything. We are made of the mind. What Buddha refers here to as the mind is obviously not the physical organ the brain; it is the consciousness, the cultural consciousness — the culture. So unlike the Westerner we should be in a position to understand the concept of culture more fully.

Now that I have been waxing eloquent and condemning our intellectuals and politicians for not understanding our culture I am sure you must be itching to ask me to elucidate to you this so called elusive entity which seemed to have escaped everybody. You are quite justified in asking me for such an elucidation. But it is a daunting task which cannot even be accomplished within a few minutes or even hours. I shall however attempt a description almost in short hand, which may prove to be a useful guide.

Dr. Suman Fernando has attempted to do this with cultures he has taken up for examination. But it is in relation to the field of psychiatry.

I could give you two broad descriptions of our culture:

Firstly our culture must be designated as ‘Sinhala Buddhist culture’. This does not carry any chauvinistic nuances. our culture is the expression of the civilization built by the majority ethnic group, the Sinhalese over thousands of years. I do not think anybody could deny this. The core values inherent in this culture are those derived from Buddhism; hence it is a Sinhala Buddhist culture.

Secondly our culture is a culture of being. If the cultures of the world are to be described in terms of having and being, ours is a culture of being, unlike the Western culture which is a culture of having. I think we have to understand what is meant by these two terms — Having and Being.

These two terms have been used by that great thinker philosopher Eric Fromm who was a member of your profession — a practicing psychiatrist

He takes up a poem by Tennyson to illustrate the having mode, and a poem by a Japanese Hyku poet-Basho to illustrate the being mode. Both poems deal with a flower.

In Tennysons poem to enjoy the flower it has to be plucked. In the Hyku poem one does not need to posses the flower to enjoy it.

Eric Fromm describes these two modes in the following words: Tennyson’s relationship to the flower is in the mode of possession or of having; Basho’s relationship to the flower is in the mode of being. By being I refer to the mode of existence in which one neither has anything nor craves to have something but is joyous, enjoys one’s faculties productively and is one with the world.

I earnestly request those of you who are interested to know about our culture and to understand how it is different from Western culture to which we have become exposed to read this book ‘To Have or to Be’ by Eric Fromm who was a member of your own profession. The Sinhala Buddhist culture is a culture of being and not a culture of having.

In defining any culture we have to see it in terms of a few basic concepts and their application to the ‘life process’ of the people concerned. The concepts are few in number and can be counted on your fingers. The study of the application to the life process is a vast field that deals with the ethical and moral codes, beliefs, rituals customs and manners, language, literature, art and architecture in short all aspects in the life of a people. It is by a study of this application to the life process that one can really understand the flavour and the feel of a culture. Such a study is really a major academic exercise.

The few central concepts inherent in a culture are invariably derived from a religion. In our case these concepts are derived from Buddhism. I will enumerate a few of them just to give you an idea.

1. We do not believe in man being the centre of the universe: the universe is not created to serve man. The universe is for all for — all living things, all beings, for all flora and fauna in it.

2. The world cannot be separated from us. There is no Cartesian wall separating me from the rest of the world. I am part of the world as the world is a part of me.

3. There is no objective truth a paramartha sathya as such which could be grasped by reason. Hence reason is not supreme or all encompassing. We believe in an agreed-upon consensual truth - sammuthi sathya.

4. There is no permanent athman; Hence. Egoism and individualism are illusions created by the human being.

5. We believe that the aim of living is not having but being.

6. Humanism and selflessness are supreme virtues which should be practiced in our sojourn in Samsara.

7. The supreme state of being ‘nirvana’ is our ultimate goal.

These are a few of the central concepts that go to form the core of our culture. What is really needed is to understand how these concepts have been applied to the life process of the people. That only will give you the flavour and the feel of the culture. Though you may not be aware of it this has been done to some extent by our intellectuals in Sinhala. Martin Wickremasinghe’s writings can be seen as such an attempt. The entire corpus of his writings is devoted to unearthing our cultural identity. I would very much like you to read his novel Viragaya where he gives a picture of the present society, where the mode of being is being undermined by the mode of having which we have got from the West.

Finally I wish to take up the question that Dr. Suman Fernando poses at the end of his work, which I feel has great relevance going far beyond the narrow confines of psychiatry. Quite naturally being a practicing psychiatrist he sees the value of Western psychiatry in these terms. ‘ Although Western psychiatry as a total system is too much a part of its home culture to be plucked out and transferred into other cultures as it stands it has within it modules of theory and practices that may be usefully offered to people of all nations races and cultures. It has after all amassed over the past 300 years a mountain of knowledge - however ethnocentric it may be, and however racist its view point. It has developed ways of managing people deemed to be mentally ill or emotionally disturbed whether by confining them in institutions or with systems of community care. It has developed medicines, talking therapy, and techniques of modifying behaviour aimed mainly at the relief of human suffering. And it has refined over the years, its own ways of observing human beings and examining their behaviour and dealing with complex techniques".

As he very rightly pointed out we cannot completely ignore Western psychiatry out of a narrow cultural bias. I am happy to note that he has looked at this problem in an extremely enlightened manner, never slipping into cultural bigotry. I think the tentative suggestions he offers in the field of psychiatry must be judged by you. I am in no position to comment on them.

But this is a question which has great relevance going far beyond psychiatry for all of us at the moment. How do we take over this modern knowledge and make it part of our tradition? We have been thinking of this over the last so many years, especially after the innunciation of the concept of a Jathika Chinthanaya.

As I said before we cannot afford to throw away the baby with the bath water. The knowledge that developed in the West within a different cultural tradition cannot be ignored totally because of its culturally tainted birth. There is a mountain of knowledge without which it would not be possible to live in this modern world. To put it differently or rather bluntly as Samuel Huntington has put it "how can other cultures and civilizations achieve this modernization without Westernization?"

I do not see this as an insurmountable situation or an imponderable dilemma. I cannot speak for other cultures. But where our culture and civilization is concerned, the process of borrowing, adapting and integrating has been going on through out our history. As a matter of fact being a tiny island next to a great land mass, open to all the cross currents sweeping across the world we would have by now disappeared from the face of the earth had we not had this mechanism of adaptation and integration built in to our culture. If we could do it with the great Hindu gods Brahma, Vishnu and Maheswara, the creator, the preserver and destroyer of the universe, by making them submissive servants of the Buddha, I see no reason why we cannot do this with this so called mountain of knowledge. After all when this so-called mountain is broken down to the basics, I believe it could be nothing more than a plate of rice, which could be easily chewed, digested and absorbed. Ours is a liberal supple culture which has great capacity to absorb, adapt and integrate. There is also another factor which makes this assimilation an easy process. Though the epistemological foundations and traditions are completely different, the methodology used based on reason,’ in getting at the truth ‘ appears to be common to both traditions which I believe makes this cross-cultural transfer facile and easy. of course for us reason is a means to an end, a raft to carry us across to be discarded thereafter. I think it is this commonness that has made scholars like K. N. Jayathillake to present Buddhist philosophy in terms of Western analytical philosophy with such success. This is just a speculation of mine which should be examined further.

Finally let me thank you, the President and others for this great honour of having invited me to address this very learned gathering.

I was happier with the original date on which this talk was scheduled; it was the 1st of April - April fools day. I felt with no fear of indictment I could rush in where angels fear to tread. Anyway I realize that the date does not matter at all, especially considering that our little island has become a veritable fools’ paradise today.
- Sri Lanka Guardian