Somnath Batabyal
Occidentally Yours
Black Adder: When good ol’ Mr Bean deflated western hubris!
By Somnath Batabyal
French philosopher Baudrillard (yes, the one who inspired the Matrix movies and passionately disavowed them) had a thing for humour. To him, the ability to laugh was a dangerous weapon; it mocked power, stripping apart carefully constructed narratives. Watching an episode of Black Adder the other night, I was reminded of this often ignored purpose of comedy.
For those in the dark, Black Adder is a ’70s British television series, written and acted in by Rowan Atkinson – made famous by his Mr Bean creation. Atkinson as the Black Adder appears throughout certain epochal moments of English history. In this particular episode in the Elizabethan era, he is a nobleman trying to teach his servant simple additions. The man fumbles and Atkinson wryly remarks that “even the apes of the Indus” have mastered basic arithmetic while this Englishman, though a lowly commoner, cannot.
In one line, Atkinson manages to cut through the hubris of the West that stunted imagination, which forces us to believe that modernity somehow started with European Enlightenment. Atkinson acknowledges and laughs at the Eurocentricism, which ignores the Safavids, Abbasids, Muslim Andalucia, the Mughal Empire and the Ottoman and indeed the Indus Valley civilisation that were all flourishing even as Europe groped around in the Dark Ages, waiting for its Renaissance.
It is important, this lesson. Much of the distress we see around us today, the crisis of capitalism, is directly derived from this Westcentric view of the world. The Enlightenment gave the moral impetus for colonialism, the white man’s burden of civilising the world. The Industrial Revolution made the havoc of capitalism and its logic – that we all work selfishly for our own gains – global. We all became ‘rational’ human beings in a Utilitarian age, beavering away for profit. It was this same logic, Western supremacy that allowed for the neo-colonisation of the colonies by the United States – this time in the garb of development. “We want you to be like us; own more cars, burn more petrol, extract minerals, build skyscrapers,” they said and we followed.
Except that there is less and less petrol to burn, excavating minerals ravage the earth. It displaces millions and cause earthquakes. America-styled development means more air conditioners, more refrigerators, a TV for every bedroom; unfortunately they also mean a bigger hole in the atmosphere. If all of our cities were to be as developed as say New York or LA, we would need six or seven more planets. Colonialism and neo-colonialism were carried on the back of exploiting others. There is very little left to exploit. The third world doesn’t have its colonies.
Black Adder: Rowan Atkinson
What Atkinson therefore hints at is the dominant power behind hegemonic narratives, what that brilliant Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adiche calls the “danger of a single story”. It is this single story which has told us that modernism meant being ‘enlightened’, that selfishness was ‘rational’, that development should only mean linear, economic progression, the earth be damned.
In one of his lesser known essays, Rational Fools, the economist Amartya Sen rubbishes this logic of selfishness. He evokes the reasoning behind collective bargaining and trade unions, tradition and family, community life, to reveal other stories. Sen, like Adiche and Atkinson, is warning us of particular narratives which drown out multiple ways of thinking, of the myriad ways our lives can be led.
Yesterday, the Western leaders celebrated the fact that Greece, after dangerously lurching, voted in a Right wing party and have momentarily chosen to stay within the Euro. A democratic country was besieged and its citizens forced through continuous international pressure to make choices no rational human being would want to make. Austerity, poverty, lack of political legitimacy stares Europe in the face. The charade of supremacy is over. It is for the rest of us to shake off the single story and rediscover the many ways we knew of living on this earth.
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Somnath Batabyal is Fellow at the University of Heidelberg. A former journalist, he is interested in news production practices in Indian media. His book, Making News: Behind the Scenes at Star News and Star Ananda, was published recently by Routledge. When not following such lofty pursuits, he dabbles in fiction and is experimenting with graphic novels.
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This column appears in Sunday Guardian as Nomad Notes and can be read at http://www.sunday-guardian.com/artbeat/atkinsons-comedy-deflates-western-notions-of-superiority