USING MODULE 17 IN A TRAINING PROGRAM

CULTURAL RIGHTS

GO TO SECTION I - MODULE 17

This module should help trainees begin a process of thinking about culture while working for economic and social issues.

Suggested Method

¨      Passage for discussion: The following passage can be given for discussion in small groups.  The participants should identify their conception of cultural rights while working on economic and social issues:

Human rights are one window through which one particular culture envisages a just human order for its individuals.  But those who live in that culture do not see the win­dow.  For this they need the help of another culture which sees through another win­dow.  Now I assume that the human landscape as seen through the one window is both similar to and different from the vision of the other.  If this is the case, should we smash the windows and make structural collapse-or-should we enlarge the view­points as much as possible and, most of all, make people aware that there are-and have to be-a plurality of windows? This latter option would be the one in favour of a healthy pluralism.  This is much more than a merely academic question.  There can be no serious talk about cultural pluralism without a genuine socio-economic political pluralism . . .

The need for human pluralism is often recognised in principle, but not often practised, not only because of the dynamism which drives the paneconomic ideology linked with the megamachine, to expand all over the world, but also because viable alterna­tives are not yet theoretically worked out.

An intermediary space should be found for mutual criticism that strives for mutual fe­cundation and enrichment.  Perhaps such an interchange may help bring forth a new myth and eventually a more humane civilisation.  The dialogical dialogue appears as the unavoidable method . . .

If many traditional cultures are centred on God, and some other cultures basically cosmocentric, the culture which has come up with the notion of Human Rights is de­cisively anthropocentric.  Perhaps we may now be prepared for a cosmotheandric vi­sion of reality in which the Divine, the Human and the Cosmic are integrated into whole, more or less harmonious according to the performance of our truly human rights.1

¨      Another passage for discussion: The following statement, which is based on a contempo­rary event, could be given to facilitate discussion on the question of culture and links with socioeconomic and political issues.

Is This the New Millennium?

It is perhaps as well to remember that the hype which surrounds the millennium, to be celebrated either in AD 2000 or 2001, is around the millennium associated with only one calendar.  The coming of this millennium is calculated from the Gregorian calen­dar, the evolution of which followed the previous Julian calendar connected with Caesar, as well as some events linked to the life of Christ and the concerns of Pope Gregory XII.  Who knows, therefore, whether there isn’t another calendar waiting in the wings?

Despite the widespread use of the Gregorian calendar in today’s world, there are many other calendars which continue to be used in daily life and their millennia have other points of time.  The Buddhist calendar for example, is dated from the ma­haparinirvana or death of the Buddha, about which date there is a controversy.  The generally accepted dates are 486/483 BC, although 544 BC is also used.  On the basis of these dates, the Buddhist calendar entered its second millennium in about 6^th-5th century of the Gregorian calendar.  The start of the second millennium of the Islamic calendar, calculated on the date of Mohammed’s flight from Mecca to Medina in AD 622 would have been much later.  Thus between the Buddhists and the Muslims, a substantial part of the world’s population frequently observes a different calendar.  And there are many others as well.

There is one Hindu calendar in which the present age-the Kaliyuga-is the fourth and the last segment of a larger time-cycle-the Mahayuga which, has a span of 4,320,000 human years.  This is more part of a cosmology than a working calendar. . .

If the date of the millennium varies for different people, what does have a similarity of meaning is that which we associate with the concept: the millennium as the end of a major period of time and the beginning of another. There was a time when for Christians and Buddhists the millennium symbolised the coming of a millenarian dream, a luminous future based on a new world order where perhaps the poor would finally inherit the earth.

The word "millennium” is drawn from Christian belief.  It is referred to in the last book in the New Testament of the Bible, the Revelations of John, which is a book of prophecies.  It is said that Jesus Christ will return to rule the earth for a thousand years, a rule that will reinstate virtue and wipe away the tears of the oppressed.  This was in a sense compensation for the persecution suffered by the early Christians in Roman times.  By extension the term millennium has come to be used for any period of a thousand years.  Thus historians have happily appropriated the decimal ordering for periodizing long histories into millennia and centuries.

What is essential to the millennium is not merely a play on calendrical numbers but the hope that the period holds for the oppressed to be relieved of their oppression.  And who will do this but a savior-figure?  The concept of the return of the savior-figure at the end of a time period or for a specific time period is common to many tra­ditions and seems to come into prominence in the early centuries AD when there is a blossoming of such figures in many of the religions of the time.  This might have to do with the common universe of discourse which in those days reached out from In­dia to the eastern Mediterranean and to central Asia, an area where the exchange of goods paralleled that of ideas.  Time concepts, cosmologies and theories on astron­omy were part of this exchange . . .

A time period, born out of the old, is associated with the coming of a righteous rule. But prior to that, a period of persecution or decline of the doctrine or of the order as­sociated with particular religious or social traditions is envisaged.  This need not have actually happened, but it is required for the coming of the utopia. The downward swinging and the upward turn are inevitable in cyclic theories of time, but it is even more interesting that they occur in what is taken to be the linear time of Christian tra­dition.

The Christian and the Buddhist millenarian dreams are concerned with relieving the persecution of the poor and the oppressed and rewarding those who have been faithful in adversity.  The Vaishnava dream relates to restoring the rights of those castes which have lost out in the change and those who have fled can return to utopian con­ditions.  These millenarian dreams seem to have faded from the projection of the cur­rent millennium, on the cusp of which we now stand.  This projection remains uncon­cerned with the ethics and justice expected of the New World, but is aglow with what it sees as the potentialities of technological advance and the magical profits of the market, all enticingly packaged in commercial advertising and the attractions of con­sumerism.

Whatever its calendrical source may be, the millennium has a meaning other than being just a notch in time period of the universe. It is the point at which we should pause and consider the human condition.2

¨      Women and Cultural Rights: A trainer could also begin the discussion on this module by raising a question regarding women and cultural rights.  The participants in small groups or through a brainstorming session should delineate the positive and negative contribu­tion of culture to women.

This would lead to discussion of the role of culture in society and also clarify that the question of culture cannot be ignored while dealing with women’s rights, including their economic and social rights.