How and why did we let ourselves be buried
under our own physical and psychological trash- the 'we' refers here to most
Lebanese -? Without implicating ourselves in entrenching
the Orientalist caricatures of Southwestern Asian societies as incapable of
self-government, there are questions to be asked about quietist and conformist
tendencies, about the ostrich like behavior and the zombie attitude. These
questions do not lend themselves to easy answers. But engaging with them may
facilitate critical assessment of the prospects for sustainable change.
According to Patricio Aylwin Azocar:
"Ordinary men and women may often feel unmotivated to exert their
citizenship, either because they cannot tell the difference between the
different alternatives, or because they have lost faith in the political
classes, or because they feel that the really important issues are not in their
power to decide". As for the well-known poet Adonis, he reproaches the
deification of the political party, the ideology and the community - Adonis
opposes the sacralisation that colours and creeps into politics, turning
parliamentarians, ministers and other public servants into demi-gods, their
ideologies into gospels and political parties into quasi-sects.
Indeed, over the past decades, the legacy of
multiple wars in Lebanon, including hypermnesia, and paradoxically the tabula
rasa mentality and strategy, have produced in the minds of a good many Lebanese
the illusion that somehow “somebody” – the warlord, the zaim, the
political party, the sectarian community/belonging – but not the State (or the
embodiment of the common management of our diversity), can provide for ALL
needs, so why make much effort to fulfill what used to be considered in
practice (or are considered in the Constitution) the responsibilities of any
citizen?
As Larbi Sadiki describes Adonis in The
Search for Arab Democracy, he is in all of this “an iconoclast”. “His
predilection is for fluidity, plurality and provisionalism". The icons of Lebanese politics have all cultivated and
entrenched political iconolatry, and that iconolatry has been internalized by
many Lebanese - including university students and academics -, thus has weakened the case for citizenship. Adonis’s iconoclasm (desacralisation) seems therefore justified, but in my opinion, when it comes to the Lebanese
case, iconoclasm is not a generalized rebellion or a revolution - let us not forget the chaotic
outcome of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ in most countries where it occurred -,
but a change-making process located in multiple local and diasporic social-political
struggles already taking place.
Agents of dialogue, non-governmental
organizations, academics and activists have been trying their best, especially since the
1990s (and before), to raise awareness about the necessity of reforming the social-political
system and of finding solutions to numerous crises such as the economic,
environmental, cultural,…; crises of paradigms, identities, difference,
indifference, intolerance, belligerence, ignorance, oppression, fanaticism, and
of missionary zeal. However, if we want to shift from subjection, autocracy, blind faith, absolutism,
fixity, non-participatory polity and “denizenship” to citizenship and good
government, we will have to crawl out from under the trash, we will have to desacralise, we will have to
become iconoclasts, and by that I mean: we will have to start make use of the energy and
creativity of all these agents and encourage new initiatives, to serve our
society (and continue on serving) even from afar (Lebanese living in diaspora)
while continuing our primary missions, to pull up the stories of people who have been silenced, to
harness solidarity into forms of actions that would contribute to the
change-making process in an efficient manner, and to redirect the substantial
energy of our frustration - when our streets and lives are vanishing under
piles of garbage - and turn it into positive, effective, unstoppable
determination.
“If beyond hopelessness there is hope, I am
hopeful” (Elias Khoury). And I am calling on my fellow academics to further
publicize/disseminate their knowledge as a catalyst for social-political
change, to share and continue to share the myriad ways they use their expertise
to expand public discourse and promote social justice, human rights, peacebuilding and alternative diversity management approaches. Intellectual activism or public sociology - or social
justice education/ peace education - is an important form of activism that
should accompany street protests, boycott, peaceful demonstrations and
artistic/cultural events. It is about the democratization of knowledge, about
facilitating other forms of activism by giving people data and paradigms they
can reference to back up their positions on social and political issues (as Popkewitz and others have noted, “Knowledge provides the
principles through which options are made available, problems defined, and
solutions considered as acceptable and effective”), by fostering dialogue and constructive
criticism. It is about stepping out of the office and putting the accumulated
research to use. It is about ‘being professor’ as a social role, not just a
job, especially when the silence of many maintains injustice, which it
frequently does.
True that universities do more than influence
society, they are also shaped by it, they reflect the antagonisms and reproduce
them, they are contested sites where various agendas and desires are promoted
and through which power circulates to produce and legitimate certain kinds of
knowledge, experience and ways of knowing, but the academy in Lebanon is also inherently
an elitist hierarchical structure and most academics are worried about keeping
their jobs and getting tenure. Furthermore, as Henry Giroux notes, “Neoliberalism
assaulted all things public, sabotaged the basic contradiction
between democratic values and market fundamentalism (…), it also weakened any
viable notion of political agency by offering no language capable of connecting
private considerations to public issues…As democratic values give way to
commercial values, intellectual ambitions are often reduced to an instrument of
the entrepreneurial self, and social visions are dismissed as hopelessly out of
date”.
Yet despite these limitations and that of
self-enclosure of the Ivory Tower, there are already engaged Lebanese academics,
iconoclasts, and they are making a difference, but more need to engage beyond
their classrooms, books and academic journals, to be in the act of researching
people, themselves, the dynamics of oppression and the politics of social
interactions and injustices, to become aware of the people’s often unknowingly
complicit in the process of oppression, to create knowledge in and through meaningful
participation and action with others, to bring people together and contribute
to finding reasons of solidarity, to transform boundaries into spaces where
lives and pedagogies are constructed together in ways that work for social
justice and lead to powerful possibilities, and where dialogic and open-ended
praxis based on more collaborative and caring relationships is promoted.
