A warning to Writers: post-colonialism as opium

Writers, when they come to teach you the humanities, run away.

The divorce of dignity and method afflicts and impairs every system of thought. Law, for example, ceases to serve the ends of providing for human dignity if it restricts itself to a blind allegiance of rules, or to a rigorous imposition of doctrine. Dignity is the first victim of such tyranny.

The incapability of contemporary Islamic Legal Theory to attend to today’s problems is a consequence of the enthronement of particular methodologies to a level of authoritativeness simply due to said methodologies’ old age. What has happened, in time, is that today’s Muslim can find no feasible “Islamic” way of inserting the ideas of human decency into the status quo because the emphasis is on rules, not people.

Old rules, however, don’t give a cruel world a conscience. The result, today, is that there is only one Islamic culture – that of helplessness. Man suffers for the sake of adherence to words that have become sacrosanct because of how much dust has collected on them.

Apathy is the opposite of helplessness but is the child of the same father – stasis. Instead of emerging from a lack of things, as helplessness does, it occurs despite overabundance and luxury. Whereas the Muslim world’s inability to emphasize the value of a person leads it into a spiral of sadness and grief, modern American culture suffers from a similar disease which leads to a culture of apathy.

Consider this:

The pet-theories of the most prestigious scholars, are, on the whole, methodological masturbation.

They do not address the issues relevant to people-as-people – that is, issues of human freedom, human dignity, economic exploitation and social imperialism. Leftist theories center themselves around an attempt to deconstruct texts and discourse through the application of various theoretical perspectives – structuralism, post-Marxism, post-colonialism etc. These are big words that lead to small results.

They help a scholar meander his way through tens of thousands of words, through hundreds of years of history, without actually confronting the issues most relevant to today’s world. The single biggest example of this is what has followed from Edward Said’s book, Orientalism, which launched the post-colonialism movement.

In that book, Mr. Said managed to show that Western perceptions of non-Westerners were constructed in a peculiar manner, so as to give affirmation to the superiority of the Westerners over that of the Easterner. He looked at hundreds of manuscripts and scholars from the 18th and 19th century to make his point conclusive. What followed from Mr. Said’s inquiry was a continuation by a number of post-colonial revisionist scholars who went into more and more books to make the point that Mr. Said had already made.

A wonderful inquiry? Yes, by all means. Sadly, the eventual effects of post-colonialism have led to the entrenchment of apathy.

Look at how embracing the post-colonial method creates apathy, the belief that you’ve done your part just by doing some research. A young student reads Orientalism and provides his own post-colonial critique of major American and European texts. There’s an opium-like rush in taking control of the words of another author and showing all the hypocrisy and embedded racism in the words.

So high does one get from doing this that the young student tries to perfect this method so that he can apply a post-colonial reading to anything. And that is how post-colonial studies spreads. It is a narcotic – and narcotis needs addicts.

The problem with post-colonial studies is not that it equips a person to read and research critically. No, that’s a gift to be cherished. Rather, the problem is that post-colonial studies perpetuates the idea that one has done his part in attacking the status quo by showing that society’s perceptions have been constructed by racist texts in the past. Showing racism in books does serve a valuable function, but it is a function that is merely ancillary to the needs of the average under-represented and oppressed groups of society.

Post-colonialism and related disciplines are not teaching a whole generation of young students how to effectively offer creative solutions. Nor are they providing them with the means of effectively challenging the status quo except by a very indirect attack. It is one thing for me to be able to see and understand that the language I use to describe South Asia is laden with the vocabulary of the colonizer. It is yet another thing to write a South Asian short story or novel which sets forth new definitions of human nature, or of culture the way Marlowe and Shakespeare did.

Post-colonialism’s infiltration of major creative writing and English departments across the world means that potential writers, instead of creating works fiction and creative non-fiction, are becoming critics instead. A university, instead of teaching Shakespeare, teaches a literary critic’s version of Shakespeare. Literature loses its inspirational function.

The reading of literature becomes an academic exercise. And although the application of a particular theory makes one feel as if he’s accomplished something, the feeling is illusory. At the end of the day, he’s contributed nothing to the present except another footnote in the library stacks.

This phenomenon is not limited to post-colonialism; I use the example of post-colonialism because it shows that the groups of people most in need of the outlook of creative writers – third world countries and oppressed groups – are becoming subsumed in the meaningless application of the post-colonial method to as many historical texts as can be found. The result is that these groups are not advancing; they are violated repeatedly by the status quo but cannot find a voice.

Artists and literary heroes are the voice of a people. When all such potential heroes are busy in a circular intellectual argument, the end result is the world today – static. The most disheartening thing is that most of the (almost dogmatic) academic departments are bastions of the left, which is, in a perfect world, supposed to be the force of chnage.

This problem extends into philosophy and political theory as well – in fact, that is where it predominates. My greatest fear is that as the humanities become more global, the static vision of humanities which is caught in an endless Mobius strip of deconstruction will afflict other places in the world, placea where pure literature has not yet been assaulted.