Occupying spaces

Renton de Alwis

Today marks Sri Lanka’s 65 anniversary of gaining independence from the British. I can not explain why I chose to repost this column I wrote and published in mid December, 2011, today. It is perhaps because the concept of occupying spaces relates somehow to dominance and in turn to the need to be free from such dominance.

I share these thoughts with you with the fervent hope and wish that we as a nation, will work towards achieving an independence and freedom that will be shared by all Sri Lankans alike, with a genuine belief in their hearts and minds, that it is real.    

For most of us, ‘to occupy’ would mean that we define it in a spatial sense. To many, it is what each of us perceive as our own and /or as defined by social convention that become our space i.e. title deeds, the wata-kotu (fences), our spheres of knowledge, influence and the extent of power we can wield.

‘Space’ to some would mean the outer-space as we know it in terms of man’s attempt to conquer it. Space exploration missions to the moon, mars etc would be examples.

 

Dominance over others

Most nations have an acquired sense of space that goes far beyond their own territorial domains defined in the cartographic maps or by the tenants of the law of the sea. Some such definitions have been or are being made after much sacrifice of human and other forms of life in the many, many wars that were or are fought to gain dominance over ‘space’, through exercising the will to establish overt or covert power within such ill-acquired spaces. That comes from being ‘powerful’ in the sense of the desire, need and the ability for dominance of other ‘less powerful’ or even ‘vulnerable’ nations or peoples infringing on their own defined territorial integrity. Some have been acquired by harming Mother Nature causing her ill health as we witness in the form of climate change and global warming now. In most cases these have been disguised as being wars for or efforts at establishing justice, democracy, creation of wealth, goodwill and peace, when in fact they are nothing more than attempts to gain access to vital resources and/or to challenge belief systems not akin to that of the dominant.

That brings to mind what George Orwell, in his dystopian novel ‘1984’, published in 1949 told, referring to the state of perpetual war in ‘Oceania’, his crafted society ruled by the oligarchic dictatorship of the ‘Party’ administrated by a privileged inner party elite; “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stumping on a human face for ever”. We heard and continue to hear much of this sentiment emanating from the front-liners of the ‘Occupy Movement’, which actually got me to wonder about the whole notion of ‘space’.  

 

Shift of power

The concept of territorial integrity in essence is about space and the rest comes as appendage.  When we talk of economic and social power shifts from the North to the South or the West to the East, we indeed talk about space and what has been happening or not happening in that space.

At another level popular science writer and physicist Marcus Chown in his book The Quantum Zoo: A Tourist's Guide to the Never-ending Universe published in 2005, using simple analogies and fun derivations thus refers to space and its true nature “Space and time are both relative. Lengths and time intervals become significantly warped at speeds approaching the speed of light. One person's interval of space is not the same as another person's interval of space. One person's interval of time is not the same as another person's interval of time.”

 

Relativity

A bit out of steam, as in the real world and in our day- to-day chores we would not be anywhere close to defining space and time in relation to the speed of light, I was relieved by his next quote from Einstein which placed it in a better light "When a man sits with pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute, But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute--it's longer than an hour. That's relativity"

In the Buddha word, space refers to emptiness or Shunayatha. ‘The concept of the zero’ as Zen teaching has it, refers to a state where any space, physical or made of the mind can be usefully and positively functional in a space-time sense, the ultimate emptiness being that of Nirvana, a state devoid of time or space.

 

Occupy movements

You may wonder why I got into this discourse on the idea of space and its occupation. It is because of what is happening in the world around us and in particular the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ type movements that are gaining wide spread ground on the real domain and on social media. It is on hearing the call of the 99%.

In an article released late last week, Bruce E. Levine, an occupy movement activist, clinical psychologist and author of “Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite” unfolded a story on alternet.org which should shock us all. Its title “How Ayn Rand seduced generations of young men and helped make the U.S. into a selfish, greedy nation.”

I must confess, I had not known anything about Ayn Rand or what influence she has had on the youth in the US as claimed by the author till then, but was shocked to read what he had to say.

 

Negative influence

He wrote “Only rarely in U.S. history did writers transform us to become a more caring or less caring nation. In the 1850s, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) was a strong force in making the United States a more humane nation, one that would abolish slavery of African Americans. A century later, Ayn Rand (1905-1982) helped make the United States into one of the most uncaring nations in the industrialized world, a neo-Dickensian society where healthcare is only for those who can afford it, and where young people are coerced into huge student-loan debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.

Rand’s impact has been widespread and deep. At the iceberg’s visible tip is the influence, she’s had over major political figures who have shaped American society. In the 1950s, Ayn Rand read aloud drafts of what was later to become Atlas Shrugged to her “Collective” which was Rand’s ironic nickname for her inner circle of young individualists, which included Alan Greenspan, who would serve as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board from 1987 to 2006, former US President Ronald Reagan and many other influential US political leaders whose names and the association with Rand, Levine unfolds.

 

Self-interest

In Levin’s words when he was a kid, his reading “included comic books and Rand’s The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.” He added “There wasn’t much difference between the comic books and Rand’s novels in terms of the simplicity of the heroes. What was different was that unlike Superman or Batman, Rand made selfishness heroic, and she made caring about others a weakness.”

Rand said, “Capitalism and altruism are incompatible….The choice is clear-cut: either a new morality of rational self-interest, with its consequences of freedom, justice, progress and man’s happiness on earth—or the primordial morality of altruism, with its consequences of slavery, brute force, stagnant terror and sacrificial furnaces.” For many young people, hearing that it is “moral” to care only about oneself became intoxicating, and some get addicted to this idea for life he said.

 

Seeds of justice

The celebrated American writer Gore Vidal who was in Sri Lanka for the Galle Literary Festival in 2008 is quoted to say “Thanks in part to Rand, the United States is one of the most uncaring nations in the industrialized world. Ayn Rand’s ‘philosophy” is nearly perfect in its immortality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society.… to justify and extol human greed and egotism is to in my mind is not only immoral, but evil” he added.

Spaces available for occupying are many. They can also be defined in any which way to fit our own desires and needs. Yet, there is what is right, just, moral and fair. Spaces that are filled with the right thoughts and deeds will sow the seeds that will form an anti-thesis to the picture Orwell painted in his 1984. The future Orwell saw is now and it is time that there is a redefining of how spaces are used, by whom for what. They certainly must not be occupied by the likes of Ayn Rand followers as described by Levine.  

  

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