Standing up to the Age of Emotions

by Sajeeva Samaranayake

- on 11/16/2015

Featured image of Paris attack memorial courtesy Washington Post

NorwayJuly 23, 2011

A 32-year-old Norwegian suspect has been arrested after at least 87 people were killed in two
attacks in

Norwa
Colombo, Sri LankaJanuary 1996
Central Bank Bombing
courtesy onlanka.com

Puthukkudiyiruppu, Sri Lanka2009

An elderly Sri Lankan Tamil civilian sits among the rubble of a village
courtesy deccanchronicle

Colombo, Sri Lanka

1987

The Indian Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, ducks a rifle butt attack by a Sri
Lankan naval rating during a guard of honour, after he signed a
controversial peace pact with the Colombo government
courtesy Newindianexpress
Love must be learned,
And learned again and again;
There is no end to it.
Hate needs no instruction,
But wants only to be provoked
Katherine Anne Porter
We have left the Age of Reason behind. This is the Age of Emotions.
Precisely at what point we made the crossover can be left to historians. Yet
the moment the Al Qaeda manned jets crashed into the World Trade Centre
in New York and drew the First World irrevocably into a protracted state of
global warfare is as good as any. Daniel Golemans groundbreaking work
Emotional Intelligence had only been published 6 years before 9/11 in 1995.
Having celebrated the heights and achievements of human reason we are
now revisiting our own emotions and we dont seem to like what we see.

The logic and infrastructure of the Age of Reason like law and order,
impersonal justice and other strong arm methods will continue to be
employed by our old school political leaders but they will become less and
less relevant as this Age gathers momentum. Unable to meet our emotions
directly we are running away and the most convenient hiding places are
afforded by high tech weapons, warfare and policing. All these are State
responses.
Criminal trials, for example, are only concerned about who did what?
when and where but not WHY? Influenced as we are by the Cartesian
worldview of fixed entities and the individualized blaming culture of Anglo
Saxon Criminal Justice we see hatred as a personal quality that must be
found and corrected within the psyche of the individual human being. If
there is a crime there must be a criminal, and we find solace in a form of
justice that can reach out and punish that individual criminal.
Human rights became the new religion of a world desperate for legitimacy
after two horrific world wars. Its advocates have been increasingly
challenged by the intransigence of Governments in the Third World which
failed to measure up to their idealism. As a result they too have taken the
easy way out; copped out in a way, by resorting to the threat of a
prosecution at the International Criminal Court.
But is there, as these advocates try to make out, a problem with the world?
Is this world malfunctioning? Or is the problem more directly with the way
we are seeing the world?
This is a challenge which has been taken up by modern human
consciousness studies that seek to map not merely the rational domain

but the increasingly significant emotional and spiritual domains of the

human being. They have indicated with great clarity that the world, in
addition to its 101 problems is also suffering from the syndrome of partial
blindness. Lets take an illustration.
In our encounter with the Portugese we experienced the onslaught of
hatred and terrorism. The Dutch lured us with greed, bribery and
corruption. The British put in place structures of delusion that would
institutionalize both hatred and greed. The criminal process for example
was the perfect embodiment of institutionalized hatred.
The point to be underscored is this. Having collectively endured nearly five
centuries of emotional upheavals we are now beginning to see all three
poisons greed, hatred and delusion as the product and result of human
interactions. Where we would earlier state Dutch = Greed we would now
state Dutch + Sinhala Adigars = Greed, bribery and corruption. In this way
we can see the result, not merely as a behavioural defect of A or B but as
the product of a flawed relationship. We are now beginning to see that such
relations can acquire a life of their own. It is the interaction that produces a
result, for good or ill not the actor or actors alone. Generations have died
since the Dutch came and left, but we still see the same interaction
between foreign capital and local corruption.
In this post Einstein universe that is inter-connected and inter-dependent
we have begun to understand that there are no permanent entities but
only temporary phenomena that acquire their identity in relation to other
phenomena.
The dominant relational patterns keep recurring so long as we dont
undermine the energies of greed, hatred and delusion within.

We cannot deal with our legacy of hatred by pointing fingers at the

Government or the LTTE or the International Community. These are just
transient phenomena without a solid existence in reality.
The film Crash has demonstrated the futility of this labeling game by
turning its main characters from bad guys to good guys and vice versa as
the story progresses, shattering our normal thinking patterns and
assumptions.
So what must be done? We need to find the most effective antidotes to the
poisons of greed, hatred and delusion. We cannot run away from these
three things and find shelter in a make believe world built out of our own
concepts, generalizations and institutions. Neither the International Criminal
Court nor the Free and Independent Nation State can provide any refuge
from the three poisons. Afflicted by these three poisons we are all taking
different sides and positions based on our likes and dislikes ignoring the
fact that there are common enemies of mankind lurking within the shadows
ready to pounce at the first opportunity. Identifying and isolating this
common collective enemy is vital to our progress as human beings. Pitched
battles over war crimes are being fought by those with narrow agendas like
narrow nationalism, narrow religion, narrow human rights and narrow
justice. They are all equally unable to make sense of and include the views
of others. Although the military battles between the Government and LTTE
are over their name calling and hateful emotions keep the war alive.
One extreme form of justice justice for the victor is sought to be
countered by another extreme form justice for the victim. Neither by
itself can satisfy the larger demands of truth and peace. Nor can we reject
either of them as they are both deeply felt emotions. What is false is the
belief that they are incompatible demands; and that they cannot co-exist;

that we as Sri Lankans cannot integrate the moral imperatives of both

within a national framework of justice and reconciliation.
We have to examine our own history. And if we are to be at peace with
ourselves we must do this of our own free will. Deeply felt emotions of any
one of us cannot be neglected and orphaned. The basic rule of the Age of
Emotions is this: unless we respect emotions, unless we stop cultivating
negative and destructive emotions emotions will not respect us. In fact
they will destroy us.
Posted by Thavam