Family, Political correctness, and Plato

 

Delhi ki Hawa lag Gayi hai …

 

My relatives have said that to me every time I’ve been back home. I’m sure yours have too, or some other variant of it. And the context is always the same. Some uncle or aunt would say something extremely problematic, throwing all political correctness out of the window. I’ll try to reason with them and the whole thing will eventually boil down to a lecture from my parents. After which I’ll remain frustrated for the rest of my stay. Sometimes, I don’t even have to go back home. The bane that is WhatsApp family groups are just as worse. They only serve two purposes – Collective wishes on birthdays and peddling problematic content. And this isn’t something limited to family, even friends back home don’t shy away from a sexist remark or outright homophobia. It’s like nails against a chalkboard. I desperately want to correct them but I know where exactly it would lead.

 

Hostility from them, Scolding from my parents, and growing alienation for me.

 

All conversations lead to something problematic. I mean, for once I would like to go home and just talk about the brilliance of Kishor Kumar or the joy that are Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s movies. But all the conversations eventually boil down to a screaming match. Whether it’s a sexist uncle, an aunt with her rampant homophobia, or a cousin whose entire perception of feminism comes from memes. It is so overwhelming that sometimes I don’t even know where to start. I find myself inept to illustrate to them the problematic aspect of their world view. 

A decade ago I used to spend every summer vacation with them and now every conversation with them feels heavy. It’s been five years since I started studying in DU and this pattern hasn’t changed a bit. And I’m sure you’re going through something similar. The frustration, anger, and sadness of not being able to express what you want, to make them see how they are being unkind to others. It keeps on growing and then you numb yourself to not feel it anymore.

 

Plot Twist: The problem lies with us.

 

Let me explain, let’s rewind to a few years back. Before you went out and got yourself educated. Before you even cared about all those causes you now claim to be an ally of. Before you were “woke”. You were a product of a similar socio-cultural milieu as your relatives. So, you had more or less a similar world-view as your relatives. I know it must be unpleasant to recall but you had your own set of prejudices and problematic notions too. And then you, with time and effort, you went through a process of unlearning. You questioned your own beliefs and saw the problem in them. You went through a tedious process of self-reflection and it helped you develop a more empathetic and deeper understanding of the society. And the process hasn’t stopped either. You’re not some perfectly politically correct being and neither am I.

It’s still going on and it will keep going on. One of the reasons you can partake in such exercise is that you opened yourself to the possibility of being wrong. You admitted to yourself that the world-view you’ve held for so long has some very visible flaws. You now have a very malleable world view that changes as you keep on educating yourself. And that is the purpose of education too – to enable you to think for yourself, to make you question your own belief.

 

No one is born a bigot, no one is born woke either.

 

The world view develops with time, exposure, education, and as a result of the environment we grow up in. However, we are quick to forget that. In our new-found knowledge and in our eagerness to share our “pearls of wisdom”, we end up challenging the long-held world-views of our relatives. The same world-view we shared a few years ago, now we are ashamed of it. I look back and realize numerous times when I ended up with a condescending tone in my attempt to show them how “wrong” they really. Nobody wants to be told they are wrong, even if they are. I mean look at you, I told you the problem lies with you a while back and I’m sure it pinched you a bit.

 

So, when we go back home equipped with our new-found worldview and then tell someone who has held a particular world-view for the past 40 years that they are wrong, we are bound to be met with hostility. It’s a natural reaction of the brain, to defend its belief system. You were privileged and lucky enough to move to another socio-cultural milieu and experience the world in a broader sense. You were lucky enough to broaden your horizon and now you want to help your relatives and friends broaden theirs. But you can’t teach someone something new by making them feel like an idiot. You can’t change worldviews with hostility and name-calling. It’s arrogant and conceited to believe that you are going to change people’s perspectives by giving a passionate speech or debating a topic to death. Now you are faced with a dilemma – you want to present a new perspective but you know you’ll be met with hostility if you do.

 

Plato in ancient Greece faced a similar problem. After witnessing the execution of his friend Socrates, Plato understood that blatantly challenging people’s world-view will be met with hostility. Thus, in book 7 of his work The Republic, he wrote his popular allegory of the cave. Plato wrote of a dark cave with no sunlight in which certain people are chained and all they can see is a wall in front of them. On that, there are shadows of objects cast by a fire behind them. To the cave dwellers, these shadows are the absolute reality. It is their truth. However, one day by chance one of the cave dwellers manages to break free from his chains and finds his way out of the cave. At first, he is blinded by the brilliance of the sun. But slowly his eyes adjust, and he begins to see the true form of things. He then understood the world in a better way. Out of compassion he heads back to the cave and tries to explain to his fellow cave dwellers what sun is. But now since he has gotten used to the bright outside, he stumbles in the cave. The cave-dweller looks at him with suspicion. His offers of explaining the light of the sun were met with hostility. The alienation grows and eventually the cave dwellers plot to kill him.

 

Plato believed that that was the fate of all who seek truth and try to share it with their fellow men. But Plato was a smart guy, and he figured a way around this dilemma. He called it “The Socratic method” out of compassion for his friend. His approach was not flashy or something that would convince people to change their world views in an instant. It wasn’t an approach that shamed people for their ignorance or took pride in its own newfound knowledge. Plato understood the dangers of arrogance and conceit. Rather, it was a kind and gentle approach that required immense patience and humility. It began with a general declaration of modesty, “I don’t know exactly how the world works but this is what I think” and then you ask the other person what they think. And gradually together you investigate the answer as two friends chatting over a cup of tea and sutta. Now chances are they’ll be painfully over-confident in their worldview, and they may give you some reductive regressive argument. This is exactly the part where you need to be extremely patient. Be gentle, if they go off-topic you must cheerfully redirect. Plato suggested that you must be ready to spend a lot of time having long chats with your fellow men, over days. Gradually unraveling and questioning their views, carefully redirecting their attention to tricky points. Don’t get me wrong, I understand there are some people so far devoted to their own world view that they are blind to anything new and might get extremely defensive when their belief system gets challenged, but not everybody is like that. There are people who with the right encouragement might see the error in their own ways of thinking.

 

The problem with Plato’s method is it takes a lot of time and patience. So, it seems quite impossible to even try. You don’t even spend as much time with your family in the first place. This would be true under normal circumstances but in this global lockdown, you have a rare opportunity to talk with your family about things you’ve been avoiding till now. I mean, both you and your parents can spend the entire lockdown staring at your phones, them forwarding WhatsApp group messages and you ridiculing them. But it would just increase the alienation. I am not telling you to argue with your parents. I understand the frustration and helplessness one feels when your family member spouts something problematic. The shame and guilt you’ve been trying to avoid. You’re not ashamed at them, you’re ashamed at yourself because once you thought exactly like them. But you’re not that anymore. You should be proud of who you are but not at the cost of being ashamed of who you were. Your worldview was limited, but you showed a willingness to change and here you are now. Be kind and patient with yourself, so you can be kind and patient with others. Perhaps what we can do is have a conversation with them, as we would do with a friend. Throwing away all the shame and guilt one feels because it would only lead to a rash reaction and hostility. Instead, we can be patient, humble, and gentle.

Because I‌ believe we all start somewhere in Plato’s cave.

 

But what do I know?

 

Mujhe toh Delhi ki Hawa Lagi hai bas …