Subverting Global Myths
Vinoth Ramachandra
SPCK, 2008
Certain stories are culture shaping: since human consciousness is temporally extended (we are always thinking about what has happened, and what may happen in the future) our identity is shaped not by facts in isolation, but the narratives we weave from them. As Northrop Frye wrote, ‘Certain stories seem to have a particular significance: they are the stories that tell a society what is important for it to know, whether about its gods, its history, its laws, or its class structure.’
This is not a controversial idea. Christians, of all people, should be aware that narrative with which we most closely identify is the one which shapes our lives, our community, our practices. To fret over the fact that words like ‘story’, ‘narrative’ and ‘myth’ imply, on some level, ‘fiction’ isn’t to miss the point necessarily, but it does fail to appreciate that there’s more in the world than accounts of what happened which we can acquire and dispense at will. We are always interpreting, always trying understand and redescribe the facts.
So what happens when an individual, institution, or culture begins to engage in stories that have no relation to the ‘bare facts’ or, worse than that, develops stories that obscure and bury the truth? In this notable work, Vinoth Ramachandra wants to call time on myths in the fields of terrorism, religious violence, human rights, multiculturalism, science and postcolonial theory. The title of the book, Subverting Global Myths, may suggest a subtle undermining of these narratives, but don’t be deceived: Ramachandra is out to contradict and expose them in what is sometimes a quite unsubtle way – battering them with contradictory facts, or with the evidence that they fail to take into account. He does so in a polemical style that will prove either attractive or offensive to the reader, depending on his or her political sentiments before opening the book.
The first chapter on terrorism packs quite a punch. Rehearsing the history of American counter-Soviet foreign policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the 1980s, Ramachandra all but blames the US for the resurgence of Islamic militancy in the region: ‘The American taxpayer was also funding the vigorous program of Islamization… among the millions of refugees in Peshawar and the tribal trust territories. Pamphlets with Qur’anic texts were distributed in the madrasas, reviving the interpretation of jihad as holy war against the enemies of Islam, an idea that had lain dormant for centuries’. The myth that Ramachandra is after here is that terrorism is the preserve of non-state actors, or the ‘naïve belief that governments do not engage in acts of terror against their own citizens, let alone the civilian populations of other nations’. He rightly points out that the price of the west’s discourse of a ‘war on terror’ is to give licence to the likes of the Burmese military junta and Robert Mugabe to mount their own. Resolution to conflict comes not with rhetorical offensives or battles for hearts and minds, but when governments step back from their Orwellian language games, place their own military activity within a moral context (Ramachandra draws heavily on Oliver O’Donovan’s The Just War Revisited) and start to address the economic, social and historical issues behind conflicts. ‘The recent history of Northern Ireland, Egypt and Nepal’, he says, ‘have shown, the conversion of “terrorist” groups into peaceful political movements is often possible’. Only occasionally does the course which Ramachandra advocates begin to sound somewhat ingenuous: refusing to demonize terrorists and rejecting the use of terror, for example, may ‘pull the rug from under them’, but it would not disarm them.
Later chapters, though less politically charged, are no less controversial. Looking at the issue of human rights, for example, he makes the not unfamiliar case that it is only the Christian account of the created order which can provide the ontological grounding for a high view of human beings: ‘No pagan writer – whether Greek, Roman, Indian or Chinese – appears to have raised the question of whether human beings have an inherent value’. Secular human rights discourse is parasitic on the Christian vision of the value of human life. This is unexceptionable, but Ramachandra’s uncompromising defence of human rights may well leave some Christian readers squirming. ‘Human beings’, he says, ‘are so situated before God as to possess certain foundational rights’. Ramachandra is always trying to impress on his readers that the western experience is not normative for the global Christian community. To his credit, this means that he is unwilling to throw abstract theology in the general direction of any of these myths and run the other way. He is too concerned with people’s experience of life as it is lived to do that. The moral language of human rights, when it is rightly understood, is therefore a powerful tool to be used in defence of the oppressed.
There are a few complaints to be lodged against the book. Including a chapter on the academic backwater of postcolonial theory is a mistake, and diffuses the momentum that the book builds from the bigger issues that proceed it. On the same theme, and in the light of the events of the last six months, the lack of a chapter on economics is a significant omission.
More seriously, however, there is somehow a lack of self-awareness. In essence, Ramachandra is engaged in his own counter-myth making: as Julian Barnes puts it in A History of the World in 10 and a Half Chapters, he is keeping the true facts and spinning a new story around them. This gives us the impression that the book exists to ‘give it to us straight’. So, having drunk from the cup of postmodern narrative theory, he leaves it to one side, as if it does not affect him or his theological enterprise. But what does it mean that Christians have their own, competing myths? Ramachandra eschews the question.
This review first appeared in Third Way Magazine.
