If you have not learnt to laugh at yourself, every critic will annoy you, if not turn you into a paranoid. Laughing at oneself is recommended to keep us sane, or at least balanced. Taking oneself over seriously is bound to lead to a life filled with depressions and stresses.
We should not forget that since the very first stages of our life, our very dear mothers patted us, but were our active critics, when they taught us what not to do. That is the process of socialization which seeks to adapt every newcomer to the family and social environment. As the pyschoanalysts would say, that is how superego functions.
Over time we have a built-in police inspector inside us. If not, the society judges the persons as freaks or abnormal, and in some cases diagnoses them as autists. They are deemed to require treatment, and some form of detention in cases of violent resistance.
It is not only the individuals that are subjected to such a process of socialization to ensure the stability of a community. Larger, class-differentiated societies function very much along the same lines. A renowned Italian political theorist, and founder of Euro-communism, Antonio Gramsci, named it “hegemony”, which ensures the “good behavior” of the “subaltern” groups, without the need of visible external violence. He developed his thoughts in his 29 prison note-books or Quaderni del carcere [http://bit.ly/1SjtqXE], while he was jailed for life by Mussolini.
Gramsci’s writings lay bare the tools of hegemonic control in the western society. He describes how the dominant classes favour certain types of religious and educational institutions, or how certain cultural activities are promoted. For instance, the Portuguese in Goa during their four and half centuries of colonial rule relied upon the Catholic Church and the religious orders, particularly the Society of Jesus, which led the vanguard of their missionary drive, for disciplining the natives. The Inquisition was another notorious instrument for the same purpose.
Curiously, and in line with the present discussion about critics and critique, a core principle of the Jesuit spirituality and formation is expressed in Latin as agere contra, meaning to counter the natural tendencies that are not helpful to attain the goals defined in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola. No surprise if Jesuits trained that way gained the fame of “special forces” of the Church and of the regimes that sought its alliance. The Society of Jesus was banned and restored at different times, depending upon who, when and why some hated and others appreciated its efficient and dedicated services.
The Western powers have fine-tuned this process of social stability, aimed at preventing social disruptions provoked by the modern capitalist institutions, by promoting what is termed “civil society”, which auto-regulates itself and submits itself to the rule of law. Obviously, it is never made very explicit that the laws are tools for promoting and safeguarding the welfare of some groups in the society.
The newly independent countries, generally the former colonies, are regarded as underdeveloped for not having a functioning “civil society”, sufficiently tamed to recognize their state power and its collaboration with their former colonial masters. It also works the other way around, namely the states that curb the NGOs funded by Western powers to achieve subtly their neo-colonial interests, are denounced as undemocratic and violators of the rights of their civil societies. Recently, Russia and India, have come under such criticism of the West owing to their increasing legislative controls of foreign-funded NGOs.
While critics and critiques are essential to keep us always on our toes, helping to perform efficiently, and often also more cautiously, for our own good and also for safeguarding the rights of others, they can be viewed as obnoxious and unwarranted by the dominant interests that see their free rein and manipulations exposed. We know it from the distant and more recent history, how different versions of fascist and totalitarian states sought to silence their critics.
Nearly fifty years of Salazar’s dictatorial regime of his Estado Novo had succeeded in moulding the mentality of the nation under a state supervised church and education, with police vigilance to strike those who strayed from the recommended path. As a result of the survival of this system over a long period the young were trained right in their families to avoid political criticism and consequent trouble. As habits die hard, the older generations still have difficulty in accepting criticism, and a critic is quickly branded as unpatriotic and anti-national.
Referring again to the Jesuit spirituality, it stresses that agere contra is only possible with God’s gift of discernment, which one needs to pray for before any important decision. One can read more about it, in a humour-filled The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life (Harper Collins, 2010), written by James Martin, S.J. .
Critics and critiques are essential, but only if they are well informed, well intentioned, and more importantly, grounded on discernment. I would refer my readers to The Essential Guide to (Not) Responding to Critics by Jeff Goins [http://goinswriter.com/responding-to-critics/]
The writer is the founder-director, Xavier Centre of Historical
Research, Goa.
