Friday, January 06, 2006
Of Symbols and Spirit
Just read a great post about social Symbols in India. I think we can see the battle of Symbols to Spirit everywhere, be it India or USA. The Spirit of an action/emotion is first bound in a Symbol -- almost as an honor, as a proclaimation. The Symbol serves the beautiful purpose of reminding us of the Spirit that was first embodied in it. initially, the Symbol is one that is self-imposed, and granted authority by free will. But over ages the Spirit is often forgotten while the hollow Symbol remains, no longer serving as a reminder of the lost Spirit. Often, the Symbol, in trying to preserve its own glory, even perverts the Spirit and becomes a gesture of oppression and submission as it begins to be socially imposed rather than being a personal expression. While the Spirit of an emotion/action evolves with different individuals and changing times, the Symbols get set in stone (sometimes literally) and unable to change, they rot. The dominance of selected social identities (male, white, heterosexual, higher caste etc.) adds an extra factor by gradually eroding the Symbols into equations of power. So it is with the mangalsutra, the sindoor, the Karwa-Chauth, the sati, the dowry, the joint family, and the heterosexual marriage among countless others.
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3 comments:
I did not know where to post a reply, so am doing it here itself. Bear with me.
About your comments on the spirit of questioning, I really appreciate your depth of skepticism. Every science theory is nothing but a model, which are bound to fail outside limits. But they are the truth of their domains atleast. They are better than faiths, and god-sends and god-wishes.
As human beings, with so many limitaions, we need to start with some approximations, understand things in this fuzzy sense and make a lead. Atleast this is one possible way.
Where would have we been if galileo would not have questioned the status of earth being the centre of universe. He thought earth moved in a circular orbit, which it doesn't. He was not totally right in what he thought, but yes he was better, and thus he made way to much accurate truth about recent solar system.
So, we really don;t believe in what science we do, but we believe that it is an improvement, which will always continue. The truth and secrets will uncover themselves gradually, and this quest is going to continue.
Also if the truth is really quite different from what we see today, this path of scientific questioning is going to lead us to our destination.
Lastly, one should not get lost in the quest of the destination. The journey is fun when you love the way. When you enjoy conquering small peakes and removing small pebbles from the way, so that the next traveller has more harder stuffs to handle. This is the road where we travel to see things, play with loacal mysteries, tackle them and put some landmarks to guide everybody to the way to 'super-why'. Enjoy questioning!
I did not know where to post a reply, so am doing it here itself. Bear with me.
About your comments on the spirit of questioning, I really appreciate your depth of skepticism. Every science theory is nothing but a model, which are bound to fail outside limits. But they are the truth of their domains atleast. They are better than faiths, and god-sends and god-wishes.
As human beings, with so many limitaions, we need to start with some approximations, understand things in this fuzzy sense and make a lead. Atleast this is one possible way.
Where would have we been if galileo would not have questioned the status of earth being the centre of universe. He thought earth moved in a circular orbit, which it doesn't. He was not totally right in what he thought, but yes he was better, and thus he made way to much accurate truth about recent solar system.
So, we really don;t believe in what science we do, but we believe that it is an improvement, which will always continue. The truth and secrets will uncover themselves gradually, and this quest is going to continue.
Also if the truth is really quite different from what we see today, this path of scientific questioning is going to lead us to our destination.
Lastly, one should not get lost in the quest of the destination. The journey is fun when you love the way. When you enjoy conquering small peakes and removing small pebbles from the way, so that the next traveller has more harder stuffs to handle. This is the road where we travel to see things, play with loacal mysteries, tackle them and put some landmarks to guide everybody to the way to 'super-why'. Enjoy questioning!
I really like this post a lot...I'm glad I found your blog!
What do you mean by the statement that the symbol gets "set in stone"? I get the literal meaning, but are you also saying that the Symbol stops evolving once it is objectified?
I think that what you mean by Symbol sounds a lot like how I mean the term "meme" and it's Spirit is it's meaning. In that case, then I would qualify your statement that the Symbol becomes completely set in stone; moreover perhaps we are not powerless to change the relationship between Symbol and Spirit...Symbols evolve, and so too perhaps do their Spirits...just like genotype and phenotype. The good news is perhaps that we can, through communicating like this, put evolutionary selection pressure on the symbols and their spirit to be less oppressive.
Does that make any sense?
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