Goenawan Mohamad

Let me begin with a compliment. In this part of the world, I mean in South-East Asia, journalists are invariably regarded as suspicious individuals or, if not, a worrying lot; so it is a commendable decision on the part of The Temasek Foundation and the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information to invite them to be the central part of our gathering today.

In parallel, I would like to thank both institutions for giving me the honour to speak at this special event.

As kindly suggested to me by Prof. Cherian George, Head of Journalism & Publishing Department of the Wee Kim Wee School, the topic of our conversation today is the role of journalism in a time of intolerance.

I trust that you all agree that the word “intolerance” should be on our radar screen today. It is a burning issue that prompts us to pay heed to, given the daily savagery we have been exposed to by the media.

Lately, the list of such horrors is almost like a catalog of old films rerun in a rapid sequence. Last month, in Lahore, Pakistan, a pair of homicide bombers detonated explosives within seconds of each other, killing at least 43 people and wounding about 100. It was the fourth major attack in Pakistan that week. A few days later, two suicide bombs that attacked the Moscow Metro during the morning rush hour killed at least 39 people. Two weeks ago, five bombs ripped through apartment buildings across Baghdad and another struck a market, killing 49 people and wounding more than 160.

I am not saying that such acts of murder are always signs of intolerance. Some cases of violence are the result of despair; some simply for revenge. Still, history has a rich record of prosecution and atrocities generated by the desire to annihilate people coming from different faiths and ethnicities. Voltaire, the French thinker and writer, published his famous Treatise on Tolerance in 1763. In one of his paragraphs he says that even it is true that “these absurd horrors do not stain the face of the earth every day”, they are so “frequent” that “they could easily fill a volume much greater than the gospels”.

In fact, they have a very, very long history. In the Bible’s Book of Kings, for example, Elijah, God’s Prophet, ordered his men to take 450 prophets of another belief, the prophets of Baal, to a river and “slew them there”.

This passage is, as it were, a beginning of something endemic in a lot of communities of believers, regardless the era they live in: the slaying, the burning, and the hanging of people of other faiths. Every student of European history knows the Massacre of St. Bartholomew in France in 1572. In the rampage, Catholics killed more than 10,000 Huguenots or French Protestants in six weeks. The Protestant leader, Admiral Coligny, was decapitated and his head sent to Rome. Pope Gregory XIII received it joyfully.

In 1530s, Henry VIII of England hanged and beheaded 161 Catholics at Tyburn. In 1553, Michael Servetus, a theologian who rejected the Christian belief in Trinity, was sentenced to death in Geneva. Calvin, the staunch leader of the Reformation, himself a target of repression by the Roman Church, requested that Servetus be executed by beheading. The man was burned at the stake. To be sure, since the Modern Time, there has been neither auto-da-fé, in which they burn heretics to death, nor beheading among Christians. But only a month ago the FBI arrested an American group of Christian militia, called Hutaree, who had been undergoing firearms and bomb making training since 2008.

The history of Islam has equally violent chapters. In fact, it was well recorded since the beginning. Most of the immediate successors of Prophet Muhammad died as victims of assassination by rival Muslim groups. When Islam was split into two major factions, the Sunni and the Shiite, things did not become better. The Sunni-based Abbasid caliphs who ruled from Baghdad from 750 to 1258 imprisoned and killed Shiite leaders almost on regular basis. The conflict became communal. The last decades of the tenth century witnessed anti-Shiite violence in and around Baghdad. Today’s carnage is not an entirely different story.

In case you want to find another contemporary story of savagery, you can find it in Suketu Mehta’s excellent book, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found; in the book, Hindu fanatics cold-bloodedly murdered their Muslim friends.

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Such “absurd horrors” are indicative that intolerance is nothing but a rejection of the Other.

Allow me to adopt philosophical lingo here. “The Other”, as a philosophical concept, refers to anything that does not belong to me, or anything I see as being different from me.

Dealing with the Other is a precarious business. From time to time, I see it (“them”, “her”, or “him”) as a threat. Hence, my act to eliminate them/her/him. But there is another kind of intolerance and the manner is much subtler: I grasp the Other into my being or dissolve them/her/him into my identity. Sometimes I do it either because I think I care for the Other – for example, to invite them/her/him to the road of salvation; or I do it because of my selfish bent. As follows, my relationship with the Other is sought as a fusion. The Other disappears as “other”.

This takes place especially in the zeal to convert others into one’s belief, or bring them into one’s cultural idioms. One paradigmatic instance is the story of Francesco Pizarro who entered the Inca’s territory in Peru in 1532. With one hundred Spanish conquistadors and one man of the Church, Brother Vicente, Pizarro met with the Atahualipa, the King of the Inca, at the city center of Cajamarca.

The Spanish delegation announced that they came to ask Atabualipa to renounce his gods. Vicente persuaded him that the God of the Spaniards, Jesus Christ, was the right one. The man of the Church generously opened the gate of salvation to the heathen. But the King refused the offer with contempt. Therefore, the Christians showed their supremacy; they used their guns. The shootings, the slaughter and the ensuing panic killed 1500 people. Atabualipa was arrested. After a period of detention he was asked whether he would like to die a Christian or a heathen. If he refused to be baptized, he would be burned alive; if he opted for Christianity, he would be strangled. He chose the latter.

Is such a violent act of intolerance an inherent propensity in religions?

Mark Juergensmeyer, who wrote Terror in the Mind of God, thinks so. He says, “Within the histories of religious traditions - from biblical wars to crusading adventures and great acts of martyrdom - violence has lurked as a shadowy presence.” In religion, writes Juergensmeyer, there is “a strain of violence that may be found at the deepest levels of religious imagination.”

As I see it, this is not an adequate explanation. Religious imaginations do not come out of the blue; they are born and shaped by social interactions and historical legacies. Thus they cannot be the origin of the “strain of violence” Juergensmeyer talks about. One good example is the thirty-years war of religion in Europe (1618–1648) between Catholics and Protestants. The bloodshed and the destruction were not entirely the outcome of religious arguments. In fact, after 1635 the war was no longer about religious difference. It became purely political. Cardinal Richelieu, who was the real ruler of Catholic France, determined to arrest the growth of Habsburg Catholic power by interfering on the side of the Protestants.

What I am trying to point out is that there is probably a different, perhaps deeper, reason why intolerance has always been with us.

** *

In my more philosophical moments, I came across the name of Emmanuel Lévinas. He was a Lithuanian-born French philosopher and Talmudic commentator. He is universally regarded a leading thinker of our time on the question of the Other.

The core of Lévinas’ thought begins with the encounter with another person. In the encounter, Lévinas says, the Other impacts me unlike any worldly object or force. Of course, I can see that another human being is “like me,” acts like me, appears to be the master of her conscious life. But there is something else, Lévinas argues. In an era that extols knowledge, technology, and the conquest of nature – which is also an era that legitimizes the State’s control on multiplicity of lives, we tend to see, in Lévinas’ words, “the relationship with the Other is generally sought out as a fusion”.

In other words, we tend to grasp the Other, or to comprehend it/him/her, or reduce the Other into an object of knowledge. Meanwhile, one crucial thing is repressed or forgotten, i.e. the possibility of encountering the Other like being in “a game”. As Lévinas puts it, it is “a game with something slipping away”. It is “a game absolutely without project or plan” but “with something other, always other, always inaccessible”. Thus the definition of the Other is “always still to come”.

From this position, the basis of our ethics is to recognize the Other as beyond our grasp. It is an ethics against hubris — against the claim that we can legitimately oblige the Other to deny her/his/their difference or to cease being “other”.

One can argue that this is an extravagantly generous proposition to the Other. But I think this is a powerful antidote to the poison of intolerance. The venom normally creeps into our hearts and minds little by little as we desire to render other persons present and comprehensible – when we make them an object of intellectual or physical conquest.

Put it differently, the genesis of our intolerance is our insistence on being able to put the Other in a conceptual frame, which often is a façade of stereotype. We start being intolerant when we claim that we can lock the Other inside the identity we construct for them/her/him as a way to put ourselves the centre of the discourse.

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As we all know, identity is almost like a sacred word in this part of the world. In South-East Asia, communities and nations were born out of identity politics. It is common to hear a society’s leader advocating the need to rediscover and underpin communal (or national) identity – of course, with the usual warning against the danger of foreign influences or globalized sin.

In the Indonesian language, the official word for identity is jati diri”. “Jati” means “true” and “diri” means “self”. I find such a reading of identity problematic, since it implies that one can really get “the truth” of one’s self. As any Freudian analyst will readily point out, the “self” is never a complete picture. As subject, I am always split. My consciousness is only a tip of an iceberg of the unconscious.

To see identity as “the truth of the self” also implies a premise that there is a quality essential to an ethnic or religious group (e.g, “Indonesians are fun-loving, easy going people”, “Singaporeans are boring workoholics”) – as if the quality comes from something beyond history unchanged by time and space.

It is a good thing that this kind of “essentialism” has been under attack in the last twenty years.

First, in general, the notion of a national or communal character is actually a project – perhaps a hidden project — in the politics of recognition. To use an Indonesian case, the idea of “Java” and the idea that Javanese are an elegant, subtle, and allusive ethnic group is actually the invention of the 19th century. It was promoted by one of the royal houses in Central Java, as a way to cope with the onslaught of the Dutch political control over the area. In short, the so-called “Javanese character” is not an essential but a contingent thing.

Second, when we speak of identity actually we speak of identification – which is a perpetual process. To see one’s identity is always to see it as a difference – something generated by comparison; and there is always an endless chain of comparative position in our relationship with the rest of the world. My favorite quote is from James Baldwin, the Afro-American writer who lived in Europe for ten years since 1948, who says, “I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself”.

With the same notion of “meeting” and “encounter,” Baldwin sees identity as not something you carry within yourself from the outset. “An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates”, he says.

For this reason, he refuses to see identity as something one should hold zealously. For him, identity is like “the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self”. In which case, he adds, “it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one’s nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned.” For Baldwin, one should have “the power to change one’s robes.”

Today, the so-called “fundamentalists” are normally groups of people too scared to cope with the relentless movement of history. They refuse to acknowledge the contingency of one’s identity as defined by a religious faith. To borrow Baldwin’s metaphors, they refuse to see Islam, Christianity or Hinduism as “the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self”. They see religions as something eternally built in one’s precepts and practices. Inevitably, they also refuse to let “the garment be loose”. They believe that power grows out of the persistence of pulling the identity tight.

Many of them are by no means violent. But by tightening their own identity, they tend to see in the Other a threat – a threat to the very identity they think they are made of. To deal with such a threat, they construct different worlds of thought and behaviour into fixed entities – and, in Voltaire’s words, “declare their eternal damnation”. The “fundamentalists” reject to treat the relationship with the Other as, to borrow Lévinas’ metaphor, “a game with something slipping away”.

Needless to say, the underlying theme is antagonism. In short, intolerance.

** *

Now it is about time I shall talk about the role of journalists in this antagonistic time. I am going to be brief about it, since I think most of us who are here are no stranger to the profession.

As I see it, journalism is a cognitive process constantly driven by difference. News implies novelty. Novelty is equal to otherness. If there is a “moral law” working inside a journalist’s ambition, it is a call to be open and to be true to the voices on the other side of the playing field. What we call “facts” is nothing but records of the infinite multiplicity that is our world, our life, our being.

That’s why when they say facts are sacred, we must add that facts are sacred because they should be free from the desire to construct human life into a single entity. And we all know, if life were one, a Big One, it would produce monotony. It would need no journalism. It would make our world as boring as a room in a hospital’s Intensive Care Unit.

Thank you.
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Goenawan Mohamad’s talk organized by the Temasek Foundation and the Nanyang University’s Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Singapore, April 14, 2010.