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Point
Counter-point

The second-biggest Shia spir­i­tual leader (who, per­fectly enough, I’ve never heard of) was quoted on NPR today from some­thing he said last Friday (2006−09−22) as say­ing that there is no “con­flict of civ­i­liza­tions”, only a “con­flict of igno­rance”.

Which is as near to cor­rect as any state­ment yet on the cur­rent West vs. Mid-East “blow each other up” gestalt. This phrase also appeared three years ago, by a Harvard Middle-Eastern stud­ies pro­fes­sor who was work­ing with a rel­a­tive of a 9/11 victim:

“I saw this con­flict not as a clash of civ­i­liza­tions — there are value sys­tems that extrem­ists on both sides share — I saw this as a con­flict of igno­rance of the other,” Asani said. “With Elinor, I think her ambi­tion and goal is to remove that igno­rance and cre­ate a bet­ter human-to-human under­stand­ing.” Ali Asani, quoted in “For bereaved mother, world is a big­ger place”

Even as I write this, I know there’s some right-winger out there (e.g. Ann Coulter) who’s fever­ishly imag­in­ing this demon­strates how ivy league intel­lec­tu­als who say things they don’t agree with are secretly in cahoots with the Islatermexunist men­ace — because the whole world must be one giant mono­lithic con­spir­acy of every­one you don’t like, and “com­mie Jews” just doesn’t gen­er­ate geno­ci­dal mania they think is needed these days.

I recently IM’d some­one who sounded inter­est­ing on an unnamed quiz/dating site, and was pleas­antly sur­prised to find some­one who made me feel dumb. Not that feel­ing dumb is good, just that it’s eas­ier to see the next plateau when there’s some­one there wav­ing at you.

Unfortunately, reach­ing that plateau involves track­ing down a par­tic­u­lar essay by Gayatri Spivak, pro­fes­sor of Post-colonial Studies at Columbia University. The essay itself is from 1988 1985, and it’s not on the web anywhere.

Which is the real mes­sage to pro­fes­sors every­where: if you want your writ­ing to be read by peo­ple other than your­self, your col­legues, and your grant com­mit­tees, please put them online, for free. Yes, Chomsky has a cadre of fan­boys to do such things for him (or at least, that’s my under­stand­ing), but he is also prac­tic­ing what he preaches regard­ing the respon­si­bil­i­ties of intel­lec­tu­als. He may have a cushier job than most aca­d­e­mics, but to my mind that sim­ply means that you should spend a few hours a week wrestling with a com­puter instead of, for exam­ple, a kiln or bag­gie of psy­clotrop­ics. Make web design/publishing your hobby until you get decent at it, then put your shit online so any­one with a net­work hookup or a lap­top can read it.

What I’ve man­aged to glean from reviews of Spivak tends to mir­ror my thoughts any­ways. As a bit of back­ground, I was intro­duced to rad­i­cal pol­i­tics through black nation­al­ism and white anti-racism, so what she’s quoted as say­ing regard­ing the essay doesn’t seem to be any­thing open for debate — par­tic­u­larly regard­ing those known within civil rights his­to­ries as “white lib­er­als,” and their inabil­ity to speak for any­one but them­selves. White peo­ple telling every­one else what they need to be doing, osten­si­bly for every­one else’s ben­e­fit. Where have we heard this bull­shit before? (Hint: It’s the same old racist “White Man’s Burden” that under­girded the whole global colo­nial enter­prise.) White rev­o­lu­tion­ists (love that term, Emma) can’t tell every­one else how to run their rev­o­lu­tion. Yeah, no shit.

But any­ways, with­out get­ting my hands on an actual copy of the damned essay, any read­ing I can come up with is just me rant­ing and rav­ing out of my ass, by turn, so to all you pro­fes­sors: put your stuff online so peo­ple like me can grok it, mmmkay?

Seriously, if you got into acad­e­mia for the money, you really fucked up some­where — prob­a­bly in think­ing that some­thing with zero repro­duc­tion cost can (or should) be commodified.