Sarwar Kamal
ও মন আমার দেখে শুনে
জ্ঞান হলো না।
আমি কি করিতে কি করিলাম
আমার দুগ্ধেতে মিশিল চোনা
Though I have been around,
my darkness didn’t lift.
I did just the opposite
of what I meant to do.
I spoiled my milk
with cow piss.[1]
Darkness, despite of our experience of the things,
can’t be eliminated for fallacy of observation. As Lalon’s song depicts, a
parable of ‘Touching an elephant by the blinds’ was in our school text
expositing incompleteness of individual’s perception, which still we can
ruminate. That ‘touching an elephant by the blinds’ situation, to infer
different conclusions, may occur at any stage of our perception of the things;
even for the finest researcher it’s quite normal to suffer such an epistemic
predicament when he can’t see the things from all sides. So, seeing the full
picture is an important precondition to have mastery over the affairs one speaks
of, which precedes suggesting what to do or not to do, and for those who sometimes
throw sweeping comments, being oblivious of how their sense organs receive the
phenomena of national affairs, tending to unfold their dubious moral
positioning, it’s prerequisite to overcome fallacy of observational knowledge. Like
the elephant’s parable, fallacy tends to occur when men observe things larger
than they are able to observe from a single perspective, which is only a part,
not the whole of the reality. Relation of the whole with a part is an issue of
mereology, yet it comes in our way of discussing day to day issues. Sometimes,
we experience how others observe us through their nosy questions.
Once a well-wisher of mine was asking me to buy a
land as if I had enough budgets and could afford buying that. As of his baiting,
one of my favourite mentors was inquiring if I had possessed a flat. In similar
vein of chat in another occasion, one of my colleagues was asking me if I had a
car. All of their curiosity stemmed from the idea of things, generated with
information from popular media, where reports are written, in most of the cases,
with fabricated data and concocted narrative. Their line of reasoning was that,
since there had been huge corruption reported in media, it was quite normal
that one could have, being a bureaucrat for considerable period of time, such fortune.
From their perspective, it was a simple and innocent query which made me
offended at my core, and I got surprised how wrong idea one could have with
fallacious inference from the concocted and scattered idea of things often generalized
in public sphere!
Every individual, as an employee in public or in
non-government services, gets a monthly emolument. From this, he has to spend,
for every month, on accommodation, foods, transport, communication, books,
paper, magazines, maintenance of the family, education for child, medical,
hospitality for guests, departmental business, charity, helping the cancer
patients in close circle, religion, social responsibility, social cost of
relative’s marriage, defending moral truth one speaks, and even enduring a
fight against corruption requires spending. Reasonably, spending for these
compels one to seek loan, in addition to his salary, from friends and banks. In
fact, difference between the amount one earns and scope of one’s spending is
what one may have to invest or adjust with a loan. If one has to spend more
than he earns, he must be in debt. So, a man in debt can’t afford buying flat,
despite that the leading national dailies publish very rosy stories, posing him
publicly to be corrupt.
Still, it can’t be denied, that there are phenomenal
number of corrupt officials, who are involved in amassing assets, fostering
capital to fly get themselves in the filth of money laundering, uses
discretionary power for personal gain, looting the state resources, get share
of bribes. If prima-facie evidence is accepted one may find it true, that one
gets corrupt through political patronization, loose definitions of law, and
insufficient regulatory system. Any case of corruption involves many hands,
from the receivers to the middlemen to the givers. Yet, an incident of corruption
is always reported with portraying one who leads the office. An office, as a
system, is like a machine, which lacks sensibility to detect corruption and
immoral things unless any of the officials feels it to be corruption through
his moral compass or legal sense. There are sufficient laws and institutions,
yet regulatory system doesn’t work. Everybody is crying why there is so and so.
Nobody can see the picture in full. It is why we can’t get a proper
understanding of the things.
So, the point is, we are at risk of getting wrong
idea of things, susceptible to epistemic predicament, for insufficient
understanding of how one should think of things complying with with logical
forms, factual evidence, epistemological methods of unmasking the reality. Media
led discourses may have three meanings, perceived, understood and realized
meanings. Man gets a prima facie meaning from a report; doing some research he
gets it understood and it is his experience of the thing that ultimately considered
in a broader historical context that makes it realized.
After the July uprising, everyone is saying
everything, sometimes, going beyond justification and objectivity. Like the famous
tea boy who comments on everything of the world from cricket to the statecraft
yet can’t make his tea properly, men are speaking about everything they are not
aware of, though they can’t deliver their own task. They are offering
suggestions, demanding many things to be abolished, and calling for radical reform
in the systems. What they don’t understand is many of such offers and demands
were met earlier in history, and most of them failed, some of which, worse to
it, had just made the institutions deformed and dysfunctional. So, it needs
more undoing than doing. In so doing, it’s required to understand the things
from proper perspectives, even if it goes beyond our personal limit of
experiencing the system. Theoretical as well as practical knowledge should be
blended to grow a sense of beingness of the institutions and their
functionality. Bias in favour of interest groups should not be taken to
dominate or tilt our reasoning.
What should be the cure for our epistemic malady?
Firstly, it needs to address why and what went wrong in earlier reform that had
made actual things deformed. Then, efforts should be initiated to rebuild and
reform the system on the basis of law, functionality and aspirations of the
citizens. Unless, we address our epistemic journey of understanding the system,
popular and perceived discourse may lead us to an unintended vain and void, and
it will bring a curse of collective blindness. Again, we can’t help quoting
from Lalon…
এসব দেখি কানার হাট বাজার
………
এক কানা কয় আর এক কানারে
চল এবার ভবপারে।
নিজে
কানা
পথ চেনে না
পরকে
ডাকে
বারে
বার।।
These I see is a market of
the blinds
………………………….
A blind suggests another
blind
Let’s cross the sea of life.
Being blind himself sees no
path
Yet, he invites others
repeatedly.
[1] Sai, Lalon.
(2017): City of Mirrors, Songs of
Lalon Sai, Translated by Carol Salomon. Oxford University Press. New York.
pp-196
Comments