What motivates individuals and collectives to kindness/generosity rather than violence/destruction? How does Deo’s story speak to these universal themes in particular ways?
For obvious reasons, I was very intrigued by Deo's attraction to and experience with philosophy at Columbia (181-188). Throughout the book, Kidder illustrates the ways in which Deo's story manifests the "philosophic mind" that finds the "strength in what remains" of Woodsworth's poem that is the epigraph of this book (look on the page before the table of contents). I am drawn to these few pages about his time at Columbia, because of their explicit ties to this class but also because of the way they show the sophistication of Deo's understanding of "good" and "evil"--of his ability, despite all of his traumatic experiences to neither forgive or blame but to try "to understand what had happened to me" (182). To be the Thinker rather than the Reactor and in that way to begin to formulate a response through action. These few pages bring up many important themes--pick one (from what I list below or something of your own choosing or even continuing to draw the thread of the themes/questions we used in the last class), find other places in the book that connect and why you are drawn to this aspect of Deo's story as told by Kidder.
Deo's argument with the professor about human rationality versus animal "instinct": "How could the instructor say that all animals were stupid, that they didn't think, that they had no free will? Maybe we human beings didn't understand their languages. Maybe we hadn't evolved that far. . .What about Rwanda, what did that say about human rationality?" (185). There is a lot embedded here including the fact that he was in an educational environment where he could even have the possibility of challenging and engaging "authority" in this way. (Also note that we will also be reading Hannah Arendt on Eichmann and the "banality of evil" [186]).
His thinking process about the "catastrophic violence" he had experienced is very significant. He sees human misery as a root cause for the "evil" that had ensued, "a precondition too often neglected by scholars: little or no education for most and, for those who did get it, lessons in brutality; toil and depravation, hunger and disease and untimely death. . ." (187). Deo's ability to grapple with his own trauma on such a philosophic level is remarkable: "even the leaders, he imagined, were probably deeply unhappy, exercising power that had no basis except guns and machetes, so as not to become victims of power themselves, so as to survive" (187).
This is not an excuse for those who took up machetes instead of saying, "no", but a way of understanding that lifts him out of that cycle of survival, to a different way of being and moving forward.
The idea of doubt of not being rigid in one's thinking or ideology. Deo said that through philosophy, he trained his "mind to be flexible. . . to leave room for uncertainty." His point about there not being formulas and that we learn through trial and error, through the process of thinking and acting and thinking. Also his closing point in this chapter about finding his own "peaceful corners" (188).
So many echoes already from our first two class conversations. . . go where you are most curious to go.
