Dear Moderator:
The following article is submitted for publication in Mukto-mona. Because of the setting of my Mukto-mona email account, I am not able to automatically embed my article into the relevant thread. I request that you place my article in the thread indicated by the subject line above. I highly appreciate your help in this regard.
I enjoyed reading the articles by Dr. Avijit Roy and Mr. Diganta Sarker. I apologize for not being able to respond in Bangla because I currently do not have a functioning Bangla software. Also, I must confess being less than diligent in in achieving a satisfactory level of proficiency in using Bangla software. I am being apologetic about it because I feel that one could not do justice to Dr. Roy's well-written piece in Bangla if one did not respond to it in the same language. Also, I absolutely used to love to write in Bangla many moons ago, and according to friends, used to write a fairly decent Bangla. Anyway, I am going to buy some Bangla software one of these days and work on getting myself upto speed in using it.
I agree with the basic thesis of Dr. Roy that evolutionary necessity might be the origin of many of our beliefs and that such beliefs arguably have outlived their usefulness. Inertia, in more than one sense of the term, most aptly explains the persistence of obsolete ideas. However, I find that two of the supporting ideas to the thesis are either partially or completely wrong. The two ideas are the metaphor of the virus and that religious faith is the virus that led to the Mumbai massacre. Let me explain.
The virus metaphor used by Dr. Roy is only partly true. Truly like viruses, the particular ideas of prejudice, bigotry and xenophobia that underlie the Mumbai massacre have propagated through generations of human beings. One can say, metaphorically speaking, that human beings have served as media or hosts to these viruses. However, the metaphor breaks down if we consider the fact these ideas are not autonomous or independent entities and have no evolutionary necessity, that is, no imperative for self preservation and propagation. These ideas were arguably necessary or useful for the self preservation and propagation of human beings in ancient times. In other words, these "viruses" appear to have served the evolutionary needs of their host, instead of their own, something viruses are very unlikely to do, and something the virus in Dr. Roy's example definitely does not do (it is trying to get its current host killed and move inside a better host for self-preservation/propagation). So, while some unsavory ideas and beliefs do propagate like viruses but unlike viruses, they do not have any evolutionary necessity of their own and in the past, they served only the evolutionary needs of the host.
So, let us use the word "meme," coined by Richard Dawkins as alluded to by Dr. Roy, instead of the word "virus" to characterize the propagation of harmful ideas. Even then, religious faith, regardless of its many perceived or actual demerits, cannot be considered the primary meme that leads to tragedies like the Mumbai massacre. There is a more powerful and overriding meme that drives the xenophobic impulse and leads human beings to commit unspeakable atrocities on fellow human beings. This meme is the sense of identity. The common thread that runs through the entire history of xenophobic hostilities, from ancient tribalisms through religious bigotry, jingoistic patriotism, class antagonisms, and to modern ideological conflicts, is the sense of identity. Nobody can argue that a strong sense of identity was, and in some cases, even now, is necessary for self preservation. What most people do not realize that the necessity is much less now than what it is perceived to be.
The examples used by Mr. Diganta Sarkar clearly illustrates the role of the sense of identity. In all the examples, over-riding theme is that our religion/nation is superior and the adversary religion/nation is inferior, that "they" have perpetrated many injustices upon "us" and that we need to assert ourselves and right the wrongs. There is always a narrative of victimhood available to support and nourish this sense of identity. The idea of victimhood confers a comforting sense of nobility to the perceived victim group and helps them harbor a posture of contempt toward the perceived perpetrator group. If we were to talk to Arab jihadis and ask them to talk about themselves and the "West" and also talk to militant Hinduttavadis of India and have them talk about Muslims and Christians, and somehow managed to have their ethnicities and accents concealed, we would more than likely hear almost identical stories. We would hear the same story if we were to talk to Kashmiri jihadis about themselves and India or Hindus.
Please note that I am not saying that religious beliefs do not propagate harmful "memes." They certainly do. But those have more to do with other dysfunctions (such as oppression of women, unjust social stratification, obscurantist and repressive attitudes, fatalism, etc.) of human society, and less to do with the violent manifestations of xenophobia that we have seen in the 20th and 21st centuries. Nor can it be denied that such xenophobic tendencies appear to be more prevalent among Muslims than other communities. It will take a separate article to explain that difference, and I will not do that here. Suffice it to say that, like everything else, the effect of any "meme" on different communities, whether ethnic or religious, is likely to be different and will be a function of the history, culture and the particular circumstances of each community.
Now, let us turn to the important question of how to interrupt and obliterate this harmful meme. Here, we can resume the virus metphor. We need to take steps to physically destroy it, slow down its multiplication/propagation and prevent the infection of new hosts (i.e. vaccination). This translates into appropriate military responses to actual acts of terrorism, intellectual refutation of xenophobic ideologies (with particular emphasis on religious xenophobia) and finally imparting a strong culture of pluralism and universal humanism to the new generation (yes, this can be done even in the madrasas and other religious seminaries).
All comments welcome. Best wishes.
M. Harun uz Zaman
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