BUILDING
SOVEREIGNTY, PREVENTING HEGEMONY:
The Challenges
for Emerging Forces in the Globalised World
International
and Multidisciplinary Conference in the framework of a commemoration of the
60th anniversary of the 1955 Bandung Asian-African Conference
Indonesia,
October 26-31, 2015
GOD, MORAL VALUES AND THE ELUSIVE CONSTRUCTION OF PLURALIST NATIONALISM IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH
A Science of Religion, based on an impartial and truly
scientific comparison of all, or at all events, of the most important […]
religions of mankind, is now only a question of time. It is demanded by
those whose voice cannot be disregarded. (E. J. Sharpe, 1975)
Modern Times
have reinforced several levels of tangible demarcations between Spirituality
and Religion. Scholars and the larger public may weigh the relative validity of
our introductory assertions: religion zeros on ontological fears, sin, and
transgression whereas spirituality rejects guilt and transcends turpitude
through the domestication of present circumstances. Religion obsesses with
boxing up human thought in rigid parameters while spirituality sprouts in the
matrix of unfettered individual consciousness. Religion demands performance
but spirituality is the art of being, is it not? Moreover, when
we think of it, religion feeds on angst where spirituality walks in confidence.
In essence, religion hijacks the mind of the fearful and the asleep whereas
spiritualty concerns itself with The Awaken Self.
In light of the dense evolution of
ancestral spiritual traditions, particularly as they have been engaging with
the political process in the nations of the Global South for the past six
decades or so, our framework defines religion broadly enough to engulf all
forms of individual/communal interactions with supernatural beings and
entities. Therefore, we welcome in our works the ideas elevating humanistic
religions, Religion without God/s, as they are namely manifested in ancient
Asian spiritual traditions.
What
is religion? What roles does it play in the affairs of mankind? The term itself
stems from Latin, religio, which means different things to different
people. Certain scholars see its etymology in notions like relegere (to
re-read, to reconsider, study again) or relinquere (to forfeit, to
abandon, to relinquish) or yet more commonly, religare in a more
functional sense so to speak of “to link” (connect, bind, unite, re-unite). The
latter level of significance has therefore come to impose itself as a somewhat
consensual basic understanding of what religion is: Humans, creatures,
discerning themselves as intricately linked to their Creator, God, Gods,
Superior/Supernatural Beings. Fundamentally too, we must insist, spirituality
and religion link us; you; me; to one another. One is entitled to ask if these
rather cerebral considerations are not cozy, useless academic discussions in relation
to our present concerns.
In
the interest of time, suffice it to say that the Bandung Era, 1955 – 1980,
consecrated the exalted triumph of far-Leftist nationalism against hegemonic
Western Imperialism in the twentieth century although it went much further in
attempting the reinvent The Future. Ancestral spiritual traditions and other
so-called revealed religions that have so voraciously taken hold of Global
Southern national communities, often mixed with systems of allegiance rooted in
ethnicity, have become to us with increasing clarity since Samuel P. Huntington
published The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order in
1995, the archenemies of ultraliberal ideologies. The resulting clashes are
manifested in all these wars; forty-two major conflicts upsetting the world at
the beginning of 2015 some people said. To state the obvious, we are all
stakeholders, willy-nilly, in these fights and desolations for the “control of
mentalities.” Where else would one search for meaning, for instance, when it
comes to the Global War on Terrorism unleashed by the Bush Administration on
the “Axis of Evil” (Cuba, Iraq, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, Venezuela,
Zimbabwe and others…) and its implications for peace and security on the planet
at the start of the third millennium?
The
focal question we are bringing to the Sixtieth Anniversary of the 1955
Afro-Asian Bandung Conference unrolls as such: can the nations of the Global
South mobilize the appropriate resources, in the same fashion as the “open society”
of secular Capitalism, to survive, grow, and prosper in the twenty-first
century in the absence of modern institutionalized values to carry them
through; and in the absence of qualified State structures to
deliver-on-short-notice the existential paradise Humanity has been yearning for
across time?
We
do acknowledge these day that the pulse of the world is hung up to the
schizophrenic power modern sovereign China is projecting on the world stage,
don’t we? We’re talking about the very China fashioned by the insights of the
Marxist-leaning convictions of Mao Zedong and his mentors and restive
companions in the stormy last two thirds of the twentieth century. Venerated by
millions of intellectuals and statesmen as a superior politician, the First Chairman
of the Chinese Communist Party is perceived in 1949 as a liberator, victor of
the corrupt, repressive, and dysfunctional régime of the Kuo-Min-Tang. Mao
embodied the promises of an alternative destiny, in the religious senses of the
word, (chance, future, opportunity, imminence) for the whole Chinese peasantry;
before ironically or not, morphing into a blood-splashed dictator, architect of
very demanding reforms that unfurled the fires and hunger and death on China in
the 1950s and on. Founding-Father of the People’s Republic of China, visionary
poet, revolutionary orator satisfied with austerity in his personal life, icon
of the Third World Project, Mao Zedong labored as others did in their own
lands, in order to try and address the conundrums of statesmanship in the midst
of the Cold War, inspired as he was by an approach of the Dialectics of
Materialism mixed with utopian, pseudo-cosmic visions of economic and cultural
headway for the majority (e. g.: “The Great Leap Forward”, “The Cultural
Revolution”). In the process, he claimed the right of life and death on
millions.
The
Great Helmsman was born in 1893 into a well-to-do rural family of practicing
Buddhists in the Hunan province. Mao’s father is stern and violent when it
comes to the business of childrearing. Mao’s mother is fervent in the adoration
of The Buddha. Therefore, the young man grows up believing in Buddhist dogmas
and attendant to required ceremonies until his adolescence. At that stage, he
emancipates himself from religious observance apparently in response to his
heightened intellectual, moral, and phenomenological encounter with Marxism
whose leading godfathers and shakers and movers are individuals such as Li
Dazhao (1888 – 1927) and Chen Duxiu (1879 – 1942).
During
his college years, Mao Zedong is trained in the arts of Education and works as
a librarian. He enjoys the privileges of excellent-quality schooling in
Classical Confucianism along with a solid dose of Western principles of social
science. The dynamic exposure to Marxism seems to have prompted in the man a
total rejection of bourgeois ideologies, feudalism, Imperialism, and cultural
elitism.
We
will also show in our deliberations that the towering personality of Soekarno
of Indonesia, central host of the 1955 Bandung Conference, supersedes that of
Mao when it comes to explorations of constructive new paths of syncretic
spiritualities to uplift the citizens of the Third World. Soekarno’s praxis
struggled passionately to reconcile Islam and Socialo-Communism.
Let
us be perfectly clear: to us, spirituality and religion, in the geographical
spheres of the Former Third World, are aptly perceived as the very last
“respectable” bastions of resistance to the hegemony of Liberalism, the
aggressive traditions of secularism namely those coming out of Hollywood and
the European Union, and the devastations of what Ex-Pope Benedict XVI-Joseph
Ratzinger used to call the “dictatorship of [cultural] relativism.” Such
considerations may well help us better understand why The Lord’s Resistance
Army of Northern Uganda is called what’s it’s called and why Boko Haram
is precisely named Boko Haram and why the “Islamic State in the Levant/Syria”
is specifically named ISIS/ISIL.
The
generic theme of our conference, “BUILDING SOVEREIGNTY, PREVENTING HEGEMONY:
The Challenges for Emerging Forces in the Globalised World” is providing us
with a much dynamic podium to investigate --next to and in consultation with
our colleagues in the HISTORY, CULTURE, ECOLOGY, ECONOMY, & POLITICS 5
other Working Groups of BANDUNG 60 www.bandungspirit.org
-- various facets of the lines of friction between the aspirations of
religion-based political movements and the policies of cultural and
economic liberalization prevailing in the darker nations
since the end of the Cold War.
Our
ambition is to incite from all continents the production of hypotheses by
activists and scholars who would promptly conduct research pertinent to the
clashing lines of engagement between Free Market and “modernization” policies
often controlled by the West on the one hand; and the push-back they face from
religion-based movements’ agency on the other, in the Global South for the past
sixty years.
- What
are the dominant spirituality/religion-based (political) movements in the
Global South today and what are their platforms?
-
What are the patterns through which these institutions cooperate, compete or
fight among themselves and/or against secular régimes in their respective
States and lands?
-
What are the ultimate motives pushing these movements to sometimes resort to
violence and terrorism in order to try and achieve their goals?
-
Who is behind the international networks that are advocating for and
bankrolling the “Revenge of God”?
-
What have been the personal (spiritual) trajectories of the leaders of the
South on the global arena since the beginning of the Bandung Era; and where are
the nemeses of their visions, such for instance in the case of The Great
Helmsman Mao Zedong, or, better yet, Soekarno of Indonesia?
-
What roles did the representatives of explicitly religious organizations at the
April 1955 Afro-Asian Conference of Bandung play to influence the agenda of the
Third World Project and what are the legacies of their ideas within the
ecosystem of the “developing world”?
-
Is institutionalized religion still necessary to the advancement of the
Sustainable Greater Good upon all The Earth? (Behold, we cannot put it
together, for indeed, it is together…)
-
Can the international Community stimulate in very practical ways the peaceful
emergence of hegemonic brands of pluralistic, progressive spiritualities?
- Et cætera, et cætera.
Mr.
Jean-Jacques Ngor Sène, Senegal/USA (Assoc. Professor. Dr., History, Chatham
University).
Mr. Dani,
Indonesia
Mr. Fortune
Afatakpa, Nigeria
Mr. Hamah
Sagrim, Indonesia
Mr. Julius
Gathogo, Kenya
Mr. Najib Azca,
Indonesia
Mr. Somboon
Chungprampree (Moo), Thailand
Mr. Thomas
Joseph, Tanzania
Mr. Zaenal
Abidin Eko Putro, Indonesia