Scarcity Trap

When we need something urgently, our mind starts focussing on that thing instead of seeing its long-term outlook. Consumed by what we don’t have, we often ignore other important things in life and make bad choices.    

Brandy, a thirty-something lady from Detroit, Michigan, was fired from her job after she once mistakenly used her company credit card to buy diapers for her child. Being the breadwinner of the household, losing the job wreaked havoc on her financial conditions.

In America, statistics suggest poverty is decreasing, but hunger is actually rising, and when your child is hungry, you don't care where the food is coming from. With no solution in sight about how she was going to meet her daily needs, credit card bills kept piling up and pushed Brandy into heavy debt crisis. Poverty compounds itself in several ways than just incurring debts.     

An NPR’s podcast on Hidden Brain channel that I recently listened, in which Brandy is one of the persons interviewed, also discusses about Katie, a young girl who is too busy achieving professional successes. Instead of spending free time on relaxing and doing other important things in her life, she began to focus only on things related to her success at work. In Katie’s case, scarcity was brought on by a lack of time.  

One of characteristics of scarcity is that it draws significant amount of attention to itself. Focus on oneself brings benefits, but it has huge costs, too, and that adds up to the scarcity trap. When you are lonely, you tend to adopt certain behaviour that in the short term aids you manage that scarcity, but in the long term only makes things worse.  

There are psychological connections between scarcity and how we react to that crisis. Experiencing scarcity leads to biases in the mind that only exacerbates a difficult situation. In their book Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (2013), sociologist Sendhil Mullainathan of Harvard University and Eldar Shafir, behavioural scientist and psychology professor at Princeton University, explain that ‘just as food possesses the minds of those starving, scarcity steals mental capacity wherever it occurs—from the hungry, to the lonely, to the time-strapped, to the poor.’     

Mullainathan further suggests that ‘our solutions always struggle because the underlying problem is so complicated’. While social scientists focus deeply on the economist of poverty, they tend to pay much less attention to the psychology that creates the problem. ‘The mistake we make in managing scarcity is that we focus on one side of the calculus’, the book concludes.           

Scarcity is a trap. Building cognitive capacity to identify scarcity and realise that we are afflicted by tunnel vision - a condition in which we are consumed by intrusive thoughts and focus on what we don’t have while ignoring other important things in our life - may help us find a way out.

On Dissent

An act of dissidence is eventually solitary. It’s the result of a choice taken in the solitude of a person’s conscience. The same was the case with the dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who disappeared on 2 October after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to obtain documents for his marriage. Weeks later, Saudi authorities admitted that the journalist - who had been close to the Saudi royal family for decades but went into self-exile in the US following crackdown on dissident in Saudi Arabia – was killed inside the consulate.          

‘In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot,’ said Czesław Miłosz, a Polish poet, writer, and diplomat, in his Nobel Lecture in 1980. ‘And, alas, a temptation to pronounce it, similar to an acute itching, becomes an obsession which doesn’t allow one to think of anything else,’ he goes further to say.   

Khashoggi, who, after moving to the US, had been penning a column for the Washington Post, was publicly critical of Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, as well as of the Saudi military intervention in the ongoing Yemeni civil war. Khashoggi regularly wrote columns criticising the policies of the Saudi crown prince. His killing, according to the Saudi Arabia’s public prosecutor, was premeditated - most certainly aimed at silencing and eliminating yet another dissenter.

Dissent has predominantly been linked to the activity of thinking critically and questioning the established notion of authority, meaning, and truth. A key question today is about what roles dissent should play in democracy or any other form of political arena or governance.

For Immanuel Kant and Plato, dissent was important for developing the ability of individuals to inspect their lives in relation to others or collective ability for public reasoning. Even more recent philosophers, including the nineteenth-century liberals like JS Mill, the twentieth-century critics of liberalism like Foucault, and those belonging to the Frankfurt School, termed dissent as a vital good.                   

While many see the acknowledgment of dissent identities as essential to a healthy democracy and a wide-ranging pluralist political culture, others fear that dissent may lead to the fragmentation of socio-cultural and political system.

Curbing freedom of speech and cognitive diversity and silencing dissident are a dangerous stride towards Orwellian oppression.

The Presence of Absence: on Losing a Cuddly Quadruped

Anatole France, a French poet and novelist, said that a part of one’s soul remains unawakened until one has loved an animal.

One of my colleague’s dog died of a disease a couple of weeks ago, and when I suggested, like her mom also did, that she get another pet to recuperate her distress caused by the quadruped’s demise, the idea, to her, was inconceivable. We all think that the people we love are invaluable and irreplaceable – the same goes for pets.          

The dog’s ailment began a few months ago when he suffered an injury around his nose, and the wound became chronic up to a point veterinary physicians were unable to help him survive and advised that he be euthanised to relieve the suffering. The dog, however, died, without needing euthanasia, days later.                      

A pet, be it a cat or a dog, often embodies a child, a good friend, or a long-term companion. Pets live enough time in our lives to actually enter and dwell in our heart, and become a part of our family and daily life. The death of a pet often forms a void in our hearts and lives, somewhat akin to losing a friend or a family member.   

The healthiest way to deal with the pet loss is to remember him or her by keeping the memories of the cuddly quadruped alive. My friend buried her dog under a tree in her house lawn, where he often used to play, with a large candle - that, she said, remained lit on the grave for three days - and a headstone engraved to memorialise the beloved companion.

Summer’s Flit

While living in Brabant, in the south of the Netherlands, in 1884, Vincent van Gogh, wrote to his younger brother Theo, about how he perceived the seasons in colours, and described summer as ‘the opposition of blues against an element of orange in the golden bronze of the wheat’.

Summer Evening (June 1888) by Van Gogh

Van Gogh thought of summer to have a deep-seated symbolic meaning. His fascination with summer continued even years later when he moved to Provence and, thoroughly under the spell of the harvest of the wheat, produced several works that captured the essence of summer days in southern France.                  

If spring is the season of new beginning and regeneration, summer is the period of youth - the time of romance, fullness, growth, and limitless potential - something well portrayed by Mark Twain in his Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer stories (it is the summer when Tom helps Huck, who finds his ‘civlised’ life confining, escape and explore the world outside).

In the poem Insect Life of Florida, Lynda Hull mulls over how the hot summer days appear to be endless and how the rains on hot days make her transiently forget the cruelty of love:         

Afternoons, showers drummed the roof,

My parents silent for hours. Even then I knew

Something of love was cruel, was distant.    

Summer Evening (1947) by Edward Hopper

While it is scientifically not known whether the notion of ‘summer love’ is really real or it has just become a part of our collective consciousness, at least art and literature love hot, long summers, as evident in scores of films, songs, paintings, novels, and poems. Even Shakespeare, the ‘Bard of Avon’, was no stranger to the importance of summer as the season of the forcefulness of the passions:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.  

Cloudless sky, sunny days, creeks and streams flowing in their fullness, roadsides kneaded in grass, trees laden with leaf, poppies, and goldfinches, sparrows, and robins squeaking and squawking: the fulsomeness of life is more vivid in summer than any other season.         

But if there is flowering, sweetening, and ripening, as the summer ends, there is also putrefaction. Autumn takes a light-footed leap, wiping out all symptoms of summer, which it now looks like was the evanescent mist that hung over a tree on which hope and love lived in unison.

The end of a season is like the irreversible course of growing up.

To the Lighthouse

A lighthouse is a mystical place. Lighthouses are among the most striking and captivating historical buildings we have. They represent a range of emotions and ideas: beauty, isolation, romance, danger, security, fear, home, sacrifice. Lighthouse stories characterise some of the classic themes used by storytellers since centuries.

Mukilteo Lighthouse Park, Washington state

Why do lighthouses move our romantic core? Tall, unsmiling towers are reassuring as they are there to help mariners in treacherous waters reach a safe harbour. A tower holds dual symbolism: on the one hand, it’s mighty, phallic, and erect, denoting strength. On the other hand, it is feminine - suggestive of an enclosed space, a fenced sanctuary, and a safe haven.   

Philosophically, a lighthouse symbolises individual consciousness.  It’s like ‘a light in the darkness of mere being’, in the words of legendary psychiatrist Carl Jung. Lighthouses remind us of the link we all have to each other, and show us how we can aid each other in a time of urgency.

‘Lighthouses may have come to be seen as brilliant beacons but they are also cenotaphs, marking deathtraps that for centuries devoured mariners along the continent’s coasts,’ wrote Nathaniel Rich, an American novelist and essayist, in a 2016 article in the New York Review of Books.     

A ferry departing the Mukilteo Light on the Puget Sound

Technological advancement means lighthouses are not rather as important for sea navigation as they were in the past. (However, the US Coast Guard still considers lighthouses aids to navigation. According to an estimate, up to seventy per cent of the United States' 800 or so lighthouses are still operational today.) There is still something about lighthouses that inspires both fascination and awe.

Even though we have been slowly extinguishing our lighthouses, and most of which are seldom operational these days, they remain culturally and symbolically commanding, and retain a strong hold on our imagination.

A Better World?

Sometimes we feel as if there is no end to the big global challenges that we face. Income inequality, epidemics, carbon emissions, air pollution, large population lacking clear water, xenophobia, gender inequality, human rights violations, economic migration, refugee crisis, terrorism, nuclear weapons, unemployment, social unrest, autocratic leaders – and the list goes on.

YouGov, a global public opinion and data company, in 2015 conducted and published a survey, asking participants ‘All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse?’ The results were unsurprisingly depressing. In the UK, only four per cent thought things are getting better, and in the US, the figure was only six per cent. Even in Australia and Germany, two among the world’s most peaceful countries, only three per cent and four per cent, respectively, thought the world was getting better. Hardly anyone thinks that things are getting better.  

Better Tomorrow by Yuumei

On the other hand, we see indications of hope, optimism, and positivity. The number of the world’s population living in extreme poverty has considerably decreased since the nineteen-fifties. Majority of people are literate, homicides and war deaths have decreased, life expectancy has risen, democracy is flourishing in more countries today, and more countries today are contributing to global growth, with several nations transitioning to middle-income status.   

Assessing the situation of the world is harder than it sounds. Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard University, in his book Enlightenment Now: The case for reason, science, humanism, and progress, argues that the world is, in fact, getting better and better. If not in every way, things are getting better in many ways that we often overlook.

The power of bad news is monstrous. Memory is selective. We remember bad incidents more than we remember good ones. Likewise, negative news receives more attention from us than positive news do. It is easy to be pessimistic about the world and to think that nothing is getting better. Following daily news is not a parameter to ascertain how the world is changing. Progress, our most important product, is a slow process that seldom makes the headline.

If the empirical evidence is to be believed, on almost all of the dimensions of material well-being -health, literacy, poverty, human rights, and freedom - the world at present is a better place than it was a century or even fifty years ago. The need is to communicate to the widest audience possible that technical, political, and socio-economical efforts are in fact yielding a very positive impact.

Nietzsche’s Sovereign Individual

Are we free?

I may want to eat some cookies (first-order desire) now, but I also may not want this (second-order desire) due to reasons related to my being health-conscious. My will is free only if I can make any of my first-order desires the one upon which I act. 

We feel we choose, but we don’t. As per the science of conscious intention, free will is illusion. Schopenhauer and Einstein both said that a human can very well do what he wants, but cannot will what he wants. 

Nietzsche, in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), blamed customary morality for limiting humanity by making our actions predictable. He argues that it’s possible for a person of autonomy to exist beyond customary morality. He talks about a concept known as sovereign individual, describing him as ‘the ripest fruit on its tree, like one to itself, having freed itself from the morality of custom, an autonomous, supra-ethical individual’.         

In order to be a sovereign individual, Nietzsche said, it is necessary to give style to one’s character. Doing that is possible by examining our weaknesses and strengths and then put them into a concrete and artistic plan in which they appear as art and reason, and in which even weaknesses please the eyes.

By following only the herd morality, one will never be able to develop a strong will. One must rise above herd mentality - by dominating one’s lower desires and bringing them entirely in balance with one’s will - to become a creator of oneself. Achieving sovereignty as an individual is an excruciating job.

Although Nietzsche suggested that becoming a sovereign and free self is possible, neurologists have plenty of reasons to be sceptical about philosophical ideas concerning free will. The concept of free will, along with Nietzsche’s sovereign individual, finds no support in science, but remains an important ideal. Free will may be an illusion, but belief in it can be healthy, given that we are aware of the fact that there are various factors influencing our behaviour subconsciously. 

In an interview with the Paris Review, Isaac Bashevis Singer once said, ‘the greatest gift which humanity has received is free choice. It is true that we are limited in our use of free choice. But the little free choice we have is such a great gift and is potentially worth so much that for this itself, life is worthwhile living.’

‘It’s raining, but I don’t believe that it’s raining.’

As the saying goes, ‘everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.’

Producing around 100,000 chemical reactions and 50,000 thoughts, the human brain, the command centre of our nervous system, is a natural wonder. With this titanic processing power, we tend to believe that our judgement would be vastly precise, but that’s far from the truth.

We have long been curious about the circumstances in which it’s right to believe. The key source of this allurement is the desire to believe something for which we have inadequate evidence.    

What gives you the right to believe whatever you want to believe? What gives you the right to believe that climate change is a hoax, or you’re racially and morally superior because you’re white, or the Earth is flat? Such right to believe is a negative right. If your mind is closed, it’s not open for learning.

‘It is raining, but I don’t believe that it is raining,’ as G E Moore, an English philosopher, in the 1940s, said, concerning absurdity. Moore's paradox emphasises on our unwillingness to acknowledge of ourselves that we occasionally believe false things. Our pride grooms us into wanting to be correct at all times.

We know we’re wrong when we choose not to believe in the vital goodness of, and the truth about, humanity but, frankly, we don’t care, because it helps us to be content or happy by believing in what’s wrong.

At MoMA

According to Sturgeon's law, ninety per cent of everything is crap. I recently visited MoMA in New York, and, guess what, like what most of the people having inadequate understanding of contemporary art would believe, I thought Sturgeon, an American science fiction writer, was right in his adage. You would browse a floor after another of the museum and fail to breed much familiarity between your traditionalistic taste for art and what a modern art museum, like MoMA and London’s Tate Modern, has to offer.

The Birth of the World by Joan Miro

Julie Mehretu, Laura Owens, Trevor Paglen, Martin Puryear, Lisa Yuskavage, Anicka Yi, Martin Assig, Dan Graham, and the list goes on. Who are they? I don’t know any of them. I never heard of them, I never read about them. A wide array of drawings, photographs, statues, paintings, and all sorts of weird objects that most of us cannot relate ourselves to... What’s the point? What’s the point of all these? What’s the point of modern art?          

What make a piece of art good are the standards we hold it to. The meaning of art is often static. Not art, but its style and concepts change their meaning through time. Contemporary art is essentially a break-off from classical ideas as it challenges the accepted concept of beauty. Trying to understand modern art from our traditionalist perspective is a mistake most of us make.

The Lovers by Rene Magritte

To understand art, one needs to recognise the raison d'etre of the piece, and then evaluate it by those standards. The same applies to contemporary art, which is bad, ugly, and meaningless only if we see it through the lens of a traditionalist. Modern art doesn’t connote representation for representation's sake, but rather stimulates us to look from different vantage points.  

Modern art is about the exploration of and setting new standards of ideas, visions, and creativity. It is the art of our time. Connecting with it often requires more of us. 

The Wheel of Ixion

Life is like a treadmill, and, even more so the ‘wheel of Ixion,’ as Schopenhauer said. A wheel that never stands still. Schopenhauer uses the wheel of Ixion as a symbolism to describe our incessant will to satisfy our desires.

Ixion, the king of the Lapiths in Greek mythology, attempted to seduce Hera, the wife of Zeus, who rules as king of the gods of Mount Olympus. Ixion was punished for this crime by binding to an ever-spinning wheel of fire. Ixion's suffering was eternal.

To Schopenhauer – who was possibly the only prominent philosopher to declare himself a pessimist, happiness was just a fleeting state of not suffering. Samuel Beckett makes this disillusionment more exciting in his novel Watt, which is known for its philosophical and grim humour and deliberately unidiomatic English:

‘The Tuesday scowls, the Wednesday growls, the Thursday curses, the Friday howls, the Saturday snores, the Sunday yawns, the Monday morns, the Monday morns. The whacks, the moans, the cracks, the groans, the welts, the squeaks, the belts, the shrieks, the pricks, the prayers, the kicks, the tears, the skelps, and the yelps.’  

We always find ourselves on a fiery wheel of Ixion that keeps spinning.

Social Media, the New Cocaine

If sitting is the new smoking, social media is the new cocaine.  

About social media, a former Mozilla employee, during an interview with BBC’s Panorama programme this week, said that ‘it's as if social media companies are taking behavioural cocaine and just sprinkling it all over your interface and that's the thing that keeps you like coming back and back and back.’

As a saying about advertising from the nineteen-seventies goes, if you're not paying for the product, you are the product. They addict you, record your viewing habits, and then trade your time, i.e. sell your data to advertisers.

Every day, three billion Snapchat snaps are exchanged, three hundred and fifty million photos uploaded on Facebook, and close to a hundred million photos shared on Instagram. That mindless scrolling through our social media feeds! That endless checking of our phones!  Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Snapchat, Tumblr, Pinterest, Reddit. The list is not exhaustive.      

They say their aim is to help you connect with the world, although conversely we have lost the real connection. We have books – iBooks, Kindle, etc., but we don’t read them. We have hundreds of friends, albeit on Facebook and other social media platforms, but we don’t talk to them. The more online friends we have, the less real friends we have.

A report by the Education Policy Institute in the UK last year suggested that moderate use of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media channels may have some benefits for children in building up their resilience, developing their social skills, and also enabling them better access to emotional support and help.

But then some things in moderation don’t work. Social media, for most of us, is one of them, hence we invent syndromes such as ‘Facebook Addiction Disorder’ and ‘Facebook depression,’ and their bogus solution (one of which is called digital detox). It’s a collective failure. 

Historical Sense

One thing that history teaches us is how tough it is for us to control it.

TS Eliot, in his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, says that 'the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence'. Historical sense is a belief that past is not something that is lost or void. The past cohabits with the present.        

A major demerit the lack of historical sense holds is uncritical observance to present-day attitudes, particularly the penchant to understand past events in terms of modern values and concepts. We exaggerate our present problems unrealistically in terms of seriousness and importance to those that have occurred in the past. We erroneously believe that current situations are much worse than they had earlier been.   

We often fail to acknowledge that the present modifies the history as the history modifies the present. 

As Adam Gopnik puts it, the only wisdom history supplies is historical wisdom. 

Silent Spring

Books talk in a very interesting manner. Like trees, hills, birds, and creeks, books have power to provoke thoughts, teach, and captivate us. Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring (1962), a contentious environmental classic, while she battled breast cancer. In the summer of 1963, when she was fifty-six and dying of her ailment, she appeared before a Senate committee to testify on pesticides, upon being lambasted by lobbying groups and some in government for being too alarmist in her book to describe the adverse impact of pesticides on the environment.

A senator told Carson at the time, ‘every once in a while in the history of mankind, a book has appeared which has substantially altered the course of history.’ Published more than fifty-five years earlier, Silent Spring is extensively credited with support launch the environmental movement. Carson argued that DDT and other synthetic pesticides, and insecticides were being used in reckless quantities without concern to their impact on the environment, animals, and human health. In her book, she warned of severe consequences for the environment if their use continued to propagate.  

An illustration used in the first of a series of three articles - excerpts from Silent Spring - published in the New Yorker in 1962   

Silent Spring starts with a fable about a town - ‘a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to be in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards, where white clouds of bloom drifted above the green land.’ And then, she snappishly introduces a strangely ominous paragraph:    

'Then, one spring, a strange blight crept over the area, and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community; mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens, and the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was the shadow of death.’                     

The ‘evil spell’ was DDT and its aerial spraying. The synthetic chemical - invented in 1939 to kills fire ants and mosquitos in the US - not only killed bugs but also threatened fish and bird population and could nauseate children, Carson argued. ‘The most alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment is the contamination of the air, earth, rivers, and seas with dangerous, and even lethal, materials,’ she wrote in her celebrated book. She suggests that we should not pursue to control nature through chemistry, in the name of progress.

The use of DDT was banned in the US by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1972, eight years after Carson died after battling long against breast cancer. In today’s metamodernist era, when the public confidence in government and business leaders is subsiding, Carson’s life serves as an example of one person’s brilliance to stir up positive change. Silent Spring underscores the potential for encouraging others to thoughtful action and to protect plants, animals, and organisms. 

What does philosophy do, anyway?

Does god exist?

What’s reality?

Do we have free will?

What happens after death?

What’s the best moral system?

The list of basic philosophical questions, answers to which philosophers have failed to give even after two thousand and five hundred years of philosophising since Ancient Greece, is long. Such is philosophy. It has never answered a question, never found a solution to a problem.

Philosophy is pretty useless… entirely useless. But then a great number of other grand things in life are also pointless. Art is purposeless. Music is unavailing.

The very purpose to engage in philosophy is to spend time with the very wisest, most perceptive, and weirdest people to have ever lived among us. Also, it’s immensely comforting to realise that however silly, half-baked, and witless the philosophical questions sound, some genius philosophers have most likely discussed or asked them before.

The School of Athens, representing philosophy, by Raphael

Around two millennia ago, Seneca said that philosophy casts and constructs the soul. It commands our life and monitors our conduct. It sits in the driving seat and directs our bridleway as we dither amid uncertainties. Philosophy reaches where science cannot. It has a license to surmise about everything – from epistemology to metaphysics, and in the process of doing it, philosophy comments on and attempts to interpret some of the deepest existential questions.

Answering questions is not philosophy’s liability. Even if philosophy intends to answer something, it simply cannot be answered because there are questions that lie beyond the ambit of our comprehension. However, in Philosophical Progress: In Defence of a Reasonable Optimism (Oxford University Press, 2017), Daniel Stoljar contends that although we revisits the same philosophical topics again and again, the questions we raise about those subjects alter from one time to another, and are gradually being answered.  

Left Behind

‘There is a story behind everything. How a picture got on a wall. How a scar got on your face. Sometimes the stories are simple, and sometimes they are hard and heartbreaking’, says Mitch Albom, in his celebrated philosophical novel For One More Day. Not all stories have lucid opening, middle, and conclusion. Somehow or other, some narratives happen to begin but have no end in sight. This is a story of an eight-year-old boy, named Wang Fuman, who lives in an impoverished, remote village in Yunnan province of China and walks three miles through streams and mountains to get to his school every day.          

On an icy morning in January this year when ‘Little Wang’ reached his school after venturing the usual 90-minute trek, with his eyebrow, hair, and eyelashes, as well as his insubstantially thick winter jacket covered with frost – making him resemble a walking snowman – he immediately became a subject of amusement for his classmates. His hands were swollen and cheeks sharply red and chapped, however.     

A teacher at the school snapped some pictures of the boy and sent them to a few individuals. The teacher or someone else posted those photographs on social media. Thousands of users of the Chinese microblogging website Sina Weibo shared the pictures, whereas they received hundreds of thousands of likes elsewhere on Chinese social media, making the boy an internet sensation within days.

Soon, along with words of sympathy for the hardship of the boy and praise for his fortitude, barrages of donations of warm clothes, heating system, and money to his school and charities poured in. The boy and his family also received cash, toys, books, and clothes. Wang’s father – a migrant worker who worked around 250 miles away and usually visited home twice a year – was offered an employment in his village so he could afford to be with his family.

As many as 95 per cent of school kids at Gaida Primary School in Luodian in Guizhou province of China are left-behind children. (Photo courtesy: People's Daily Online) 

Little Wang is a ‘left-behind child’ – one of more than 60 million children in the countryside of China whose parents, mostly migrant workers, are forced to leave their homes and live in cities to earn livelihood. Wang lives in a dilapidated house with his grandmother and a sister who is two years older than himself. His mother left the family two years ago after growing frustrated with deprived conditions and failing to make ends meet.

While Wang’s internet fame may have comparatively assuaged his family’s difficult socio-economic conditions, his story unfolds the unfortunate situation of tens of millions of left-behind children living not just in China but across the world. A report released by a Chinese NGO in 2017 suggested that around one-third of rural students in China were left-behind children. Even more upsetting, the report anticipated that as many as ten million rural students of the country could have been forsaken by both of their parents.   

The stern circumstances are believed to be causing left-behind children to experience development problems related to mental health, behavior change, and emotional insecurity. Equally pressing to contemplate is that leaving these children behind entails an augmented risk of puncturing the social structure that holds rural communities together. While Wang’s story may have diminutively helped promote social awareness of the poverty scowling at children in poorer, remote, and rural communities, there are millions of other children whose misery finds no voice or representation to put before the world.  

With children accounting for around half of the extreme poor of the world (forty-seven per cent, to be precise, according to UNICEF), more – substantively more – should be done to ensure that they are protected from vulnerabilities and have adequate access to social care and services they need.

Language and Identity: Catalan Case

Language functions as a carrier for culture. The very concept of a culture is rooted in its language. On language, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of the most prominent poets and philosophers of the Romantic period, said that it is the armoury of the human mind that contains the trophies of the past and the weapon of its future conquests. Language is the mold that surrounds our cultural identity. The culture is carved in our language – the primary method of identity.

      

John E Joseph, Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, in his book ‘Language and Identity’ (2004) defines linguistic identities as ‘double-edged swords’. While acting in a constructive manner to give individuals a sense of belonging by representing an ‘us’ opposed to a ‘them’, it also becomes easy for linguistic identities to demonise themselves. A language’s cultural allegiance also gives rises to regionalism, which often converts itself into a political ideology, and, on occasions, separatism.

      

Catalan case  

On one day towards the end of the summer of 2012, an unwonted development occurred in Catalonia, an autonomous region of Spain. Under the slogan ‘Catalunya, nou estat d'Europa’ (‘Catalonia, new state in Europe’), up to 2m Catalans gathered in central areas of Barcelona, bringing the city centre to a standstill for hours.

The rally – the largest ever organised in Catalonia since La Transición (the Spanish transition to democracy) following the death of the Spain’s military dictator Francisco Franco in 1975 – marked the culmination of a series of protests called ‘Marxa cap a la Independència’ (‘March towards Independence’) that had begun in June that year to demand independence of the region from Spain.

This was not the first time Catalans poured into the streets en masse as part of their independence movement. The political movement started in nineteen-twenties, though the movement in modern days had its seeds sown in 2010 when the Constitutional Court, Spain’s highest judicial body, annulled parts of constitutional regulations granting Catalonia powers of self-rule. The move has since prompted protests on various occasions over these years.

The issue significantly escalated in the second half of 2017, with unprecedented events such as independence referendum held in October and the Constitutional Court declaring it illegal, the imposition of Spain’s direct rule on Catalonia, arrests of several regional government officials, and regional elections in December in which pro-independence parties won a majority.                            

Catalan separatist flag outside the regional government headquarters in Barcelona (pic courtesy: Reuters/Juan Medina)

The separatist sentiment in Catalonia has long been fuelled partly due to the perception that Spain threatens Catalan linguistic identity by attempting to ‘hispanicise’ the region. Catalan language was banned for around forty years during the dictatorship of General Franco, who came into power following the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939. The tyranny of military rule not only impacted Catalonia politically but culturally as well. As democracy returned in Spain in the nineteen-seventies, Catalans have contributed by letting flow their time and money into safeguarding the centuries-old language.  

Death of linguistic identities and cultures occur in severe cases of marginalisation. Fortuitously, it is not the case with Catalonia. Catalan ideologies about their identity can be viewed in two ways: language-and-identity and language-and-territory, with the former sharing more an emotional link with language and the other implying that Catalan language should be the one practiced as the main language in public settings. Catalonian’s law mandates the use of Catalan language at schools, hospitals and public sector offices.

In comparison with majority of socio-political and cultural movements that are based on race and ethnicity, language has played a crucial role in firmly determining a Catalan identity. Conversely, a pivotal part of the Catalan identity is not only the local language, but the fact that Catalans are amicably bilingual in both Spanish and Catalan. The Catalan Institute for Statistics suggests that more than fifty percent of Catalans adjudge Spanish to be their native language despite the fact that over eighty percent of the regional population can speak Catalan.

Amid an unceasing, heated pro-independence movement and nationalist parties coming back in power in regional parliament, the time may be ripe for Catalans to realise that secessionism is bad not just for Catalonia but also Spain, as well as Europe. There are constructive social elements such as pluralism and integration that Catalans ought to hold in high regard rather than embracing separatist groups. Multiculturalism and multilingualism can not only aggrandise socio-economic opportunities but also counter marginalisation and culture decay of the region.