Tag: communication

India in Transition: “The Rain that Chases Rhinos”: Community Crisis Communication in the Eastern Himalayas  

[by Mirza Zulfiqur Rahman, Center for the Advanced Study of India]

In the plains of Assam, different kinds of rain are often distinguished through vivid local expressions that reflect their intensity and impact on everyday life. One such term is “sagoli-kheda-borokhun” (the rain that chases goats). It refers to a light shower, enough to send goats hurrying into their sheds while people continue with their daily activities. As the rainfall intensifies, it may be described as “goru-kheda-borokhun” (cow-chasing rain), followed by “manuh-kheda-borokhun” (people-chasing rain), when even humans seek shelter from the downpour. At the extreme end of this scale of vernacular expressions of rainfall intensity lies “gor-kheda-borokhun” (the rain that chases away rhinos), evoking a deluge so intense that even Assam’s iconic one-horned rhinoceroses would retreat and look for shelter. With rapid urbanization and changing rainfall patterns, such beautiful expressions of rain have lost continuous usage, especially among the younger generation, who no longer name types of rains.

These expressions reveal the richly textured ways in which communities inhabiting the water-abundant landscapes of Northeast India have understood and interpreted rainfall. Their environmental imagination is shaped not only by the rains themselves but also by the sounds, movements, and rhythms of the ecosystems around them. Among the most evocative signs of the approaching monsoon was the chorus of frogs inhabiting the “pukhuris” (ponds), “khaals” (natural drainage channels), and “beels” (wetlands). Their persistent croaking, described locally as the rhythmic “tur-tu-rai” of an assembled army of frogs, would fill the night air. Hearing this familiar symphony, people would often remark that the rains were on their way.

In today’s times, such soundscapes have diminished considerably and the traditional knowledge of being able to predict rains by observing sounds and signs in nature have not been passed on. The familiar chorus of frogs on humid nights has grown noticeably quieter as ponds have deteriorated, wetlands have been drained, and traditional water bodies have gradually disappeared from the landscape. Here, I look at the languages and imaginations of communities, and how these interact with the annual rains and storms along the Eastern Himalayas, how they keep record of the changes in the climate patterns in their community lives through their vernacular depictions of storms and rains, and how the current climate crisis has clouded their traditional communication methods.

Water-Abundant Worlds

The Himalayan river-systems and the plains they nourish have always been regarded as a water-abundant environment, with monsoons, storms and rains forming an essential part of the lives and imaginations of communities living there. Nation-state borders, which straddle river-systems and regions across the Himalayas, bring in an additional layer of complexity to the various discourses of climate change disasters and patterns in the region, which are already exacerbated by infrastructural interventions on the river systems.

The languages and imaginations of Himalayan communities through which they describe the monsoons, climate change, storms, and rainfall patterns in their daily lives and natural environment, and how they are shaped by the interventions and narratives deployed by the nation-state in the Eastern Himalayas serve as critical crisis communication, often proving more useful and timely than government communication. The monsoon rains that stream in from the Indian Ocean currents and extend up to the heights of the easternmost fringes of the Himalayas bring most of the Himalayan river-systems to life. The monsoon clouds, after they enter Northeast India, play a veritable ping-pong between the low-lying rolling hills of the Patkai ranges and the towering eastern Himalayan mountain ranges, and the rains and storms that ensue from this match nourish the various communities, sustain the forests, and shape the landscape. This interaction forms an archive of climate disasters in the region.

Modern meteorological forecasting methods have greatly improved with scientific progress and modelling and availability of long-term data. However, from my research, it has been evident that the medium-range and long-range predictions of storms and rainfall patterns have low reliability at the local level, meaning state-led communication methods are not effective or timely. There are externalities of data collection challenges and reliability of what actually constitutes long-term data and the rapid infrastructure push and anthropogenic changes in the context of the fragile and ever-crumbling-and-forming Eastern Himalayas.

Bordoisila is the personified name given to an annual spring storm that ravages the foothills of the Eastern Himalayas, often spanning across Assam, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, and Bhutan. The community memory of Bordoisila is archived over time through stories of the storm returning to “her maternal home,” Assam, to celebrate Bohag Bihu, the mid-April spring festival, and accounting for the ferocity and devastation it regularly brings along, as well as the variation in timing of the storm’s arrival and when “she returns” after celebrating. Communities provide token offerings of festive food and clothing to Bordoisila, imploring the storm to pass by gently in “her path.” The variation in timing and ferocity of the storm is recorded in recent community memory as the personified storm managing to come home early this year as “she got to leave early from her workplace.” Originating in the Chotanagpur plateau and gathering force from the Bay of Bengal, she again returns in an angry mood as if “she was not treated well by her mother” with festive goodies and good food.

Personified Storms

Over years of research in the region, I have noted that communities rarely rely on modern meteorological forecasting information for the stormy season. They know it only by community memory and their sense of the ferocity of the storm when it passes by—among a series of spring storms—and declare that “she has finally arrived” and “she will soon return after celebrating Bihu.” It is along the trail of Bordoisila that the first wave of floods also arrives in Assam, and the traditional knowledge repository known as “Dakor Boson,” a collection of vernacular prose and poetry sayings, depicting how the coming monsoon and the ensuing agricultural cropping cycle will span out. The first floods were always celebrated with the Bihu dance, and the storm Bordoisila is revered despite its ferocity, as it brings the rain and nutrient-rich silt to nourish the overall landscape. However, with climate change and anthropogenic interventions, the language of climate crises has changed from a sense of celebration and reverence to utter despair.

Over the past several decades, Northeast India has witnessed profound shifts in its monsoon patterns. Periods of unusually intense rainfall have triggered devastating floods, while prolonged dry spells have brought drought-like conditions to many areas. In response to persistent droughts, communities across Assam have continued to observe customs such as frog-marriage ceremonies, invoking these creatures regarded as messengers of the rain-gods, to restore the rains through their renewed croaking. In Meghalaya, rainfall that used to last nine nights and days in a continuous rhythmic pattern, known as “slap-khyndai-miet-khyndai-sngi,” has, over recent years, lost its original community language emphasis, as such long-enduring rainfall patterns have diminished greatly.

Among the Idu-Mishmi of eastern Arunachal Pradesh, traditional ritual specialists are called upon to communicate with rain spirits, seeking their intervention both when the rains fail to arrive and when incessant downpours raise fears of catastrophic flooding. The Idu-Mishmi term for rain, “ayyo or ayyoyo,” carries deep cultural significance within these practices. Jibi Pulu, an Idu-Mishmi community leader and environmental activist, points to how different kinds of rainfall were once understood to perform distinct ecological functions in the forests of the Dibang Valley. Certain rains signaled the shedding of leaves, others supported flowering cycles, while some heralded the arrival of migratory birds that seasonally visited the region’s rich forest ecosystems. However, he observed that such patterns have become increasingly difficult to anticipate, as deforestation, climate change, and human intervention have disrupted environmental rhythms that earlier generations could interpret with a high confidence.

Many Idu-Mishmi elders similarly attribute the growing unpredictability of rainfall and the increasing occurrence of extreme floods on the Dibang River and its tributaries to a deterioration in the relationship between people and the natural world. They regard practices such as the indiscriminate slaughter of animals and the growing trend of winter picnics on dry riverbeds (where meals are prepared directly on the exposed riverbed) as acts that offend river spirits. In their understanding, these transgressions disturb the balance between humans and the spiritual forces inhabiting the landscape, contributing to erratic weather patterns and destructive flooding events. Some historic flooding events are referred to by communities with names of where such flooding originated, such as the “China-paani” of the year 2000 and the recent episodes of “Bhutan-baanpaani” along the Bhutan–Assam border. This vocabulary has expanded to include specific dam-induced floods such as Ranganadi-floods in Assam.

Culturally Grounded Approaches

The diverse linguistic expressions, traditional knowledge systems, and lived experiences through which indigenous communities across Northeast India understand rainfall, storms, climate variability, and recurring flood events deserve to be documented, connected, and amplified within broader conversations on environmental democracy and transboundary cooperation. Bringing these perspectives together can help foster more inclusive dialogues across the Eastern Himalayas and the Patkai mountain ranges, enabling local communities to participate meaningfully in decision-making processes concerning ecology, environmental governance, infrastructure development, disaster preparedness, crisis communication, and other issues that directly shape their everyday lives and livelihoods. For generations, communities have relied on close observation of their surroundings to interpret changes in weather and rainfall patterns, rhythms of rivers, and flood cycles.

As environmental transformations become more pronounced and traditional indicators grow increasingly uncertain, their ability to understand and articulate these changes offers valuable insights into the realities of climate change on the ground. Recognizing and engaging with such lived experiences, local knowledge, and environmental imaginations is, therefore, essential to strengthening civil society participation and building more democratic, responsive, and culturally grounded approaches to environmental governance in the region. Modern meteorological forecasting methods need to learn from traditional wisdom and social innovation and the vast archive of knowledge which have recorded past disasters and also can predict future ones. The rapid pace and scale of transformation along the Eastern Himalayas are rendering traditional knowledge systems incapable of providing climate solutions.

Mirza Zulfiqur Rahman completed his doctoral research on the Brahmaputra River Basin geopolitics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, and is currently a Research Associate at Heinrich Böll Stiftung, India and Visiting Associate Fellow at the Institute of Chinese Studies, Delhi, India. 

All photos courtesy of Mirza Zulfiqur Rahman.

[This is the second in a multi-part series published in collaboration with the Centre of Excellence for Himalayan Studies, at the Shiv Nadar University, Delhi NCR, a research center focused on the economy, borders, identities, environment, and regional geopolitics of the wider Himalayan region including the Hindu Kush and the Karakoram.]

Newspapers and the “Manufacture of Consent”

When we think about newspapers, various associations come to mind. Examples include Jeff Bezos purchasing The Washington Post or William Randolph Hearst inspiring Citizen Kane. Newspapers have, to some extent, devolved into a vehicle for propaganda, as described in Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion.

Lippmann is famously quoted for advocating the “manufacture of consent.”

Max Weber describes the economic function of newspapers:

The newspaper as an institution came into the service of commerce at an astonishingly late date.

The newspaper, as an institution, is not a product of capitalism. It brought together in the first place political news and then mainly all sorts of curiosities from the world at large. The advertisement, however, made its way into the newspaper very late. It was never entirely absent but originally it related to family announcements, while the advertisement as a notice by the merchant, directed toward finding a market, first becomes an established phenomenon at the end of the 18th century—in the journal which for a century was the first in the world, the “Times.” Official price bulletins did not become general until the 19th century; originally all the exchanges were closed clubs, as they have remained in America virtually down to the present. Hence in the 18th century, business depended on the organized exchange of letters. Rational trading between regions was impossible without secure transmission of letters. This was accomplished partly by the merchant guilds and in part by butchers, wheelwrights, etc. The final stage in the rationalization of transmission of letters was brought about by the post, which collected letters and in connection therewith made tariff agreements with commercial houses. In Germany, the family of Thurn and Taxis, who held the postal concession, made notable advances in the rationalization of communication by letter. Yet the volume of correspondence is in the beginning surprisingly small. In 1633, a million letters were posted in all England while today a place of 4,000 population will equal the number.

Max Weber, General Economic History, Collier Books, 1966 (Third Printing), page 220.

Herbert Hunt provides a useful overview of the newspaper as a political tool in his introduction to Honoré de Balzac’s Lost Illusions (French: Illusions perdues).

The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed the rapid rise to power of the periodical press. Journalism had been active — though dangerous to those engaged in it — during the Revolutionary period. Napoleon had kept the press under his thumb, as Giroudeau points out on page 235. The ‘freedom’ of the press was one of the most controversial issues both under the Restoration and the July Monarchy. Under Louis XVIII and Charles X the struggle between those who, like the Liberals and Bonapartists, wanted to keep the Revolutionary principles and gains intact, and the Conservatives of various hues, especially the ‘Ultras’, who wanted to put the political clock back, was an affair of major importance; likewise, under Louis-Philippe, the conflict between the spirit of stagnation and the parties in favour of ‘movement’. Balzac’s contention is that the majority of journalists under these three monarchs, instead of recognizing that they were called to a serious, even sacred mission, turned the Press into an instrument for self-advancement, prostituted principles to intrigue and used journalism merely as a means of acquiring money, position and power. He is reluctant to admit that there were great, responsible press organs, like Le Journal des Débats, Le Conservateur, Le Constitutionnel and, from 1824, Le Globe, which stood firm on principle; he is above all aware of the vogue which the petits journaux enjoyed after the fall of Napoleon, and of the role they played as political privateers.

The petits journaux were so-called because they were produced in smaller format than the important dailies or weeklies, which were more or less grave, staid and ponderous. They proliferated in Paris once the fall of the Empire had given a relative, though still precarious liberty to the Press — precarious because it was constantly threatened by the increasingly reactionary governments of the time. The politicians of the Right found it difficult to keep the newspapers under control even by such means as stamp-duty, caution-money, fines, suspensions and suppressions, the object of these being mainly to put obstacles in the way of would-be founders of hostile periodicals. The ‘little papers’, short-lived as they often proved to be, were much given to journalistic sharp-shooting. They preferred satire, personal attack, sarcasm and scandal-mongering to serious argument or the affirmation of ideals. They were mostly Opposition journals and were a constant thorn in the flesh of the Government. Balzac’s aim was to expose their addiction to ‘graft’, intrigue, blackmail and the misuse of the feuilleton, namely the bottom portion of the first page or other pages generally reserved for critical articles and frequently devoted to the malicious task of slashing literary reputations. Andoche Finot — the prototype of such later newspaper magnates as Émile de Girardin and Armand Dutacq, pioneers in 1836 in the founding of cheap dailies which relied on advertisement and serialized novels as a chief source of income — acquires a large share in a big daily and hands on to the equally unprincipled Lousteau the editorship of the ‘little paper’ he already owns. Balzac probably had Le Figaro chiefly in mind, a periodical which was constantly going bankrupt or being suppressed but kept popping up again under different editors. Hector Merlin’s royalist Drapeau Blanc, edited by Martainville, really existed, having been founded in 1819; so did Le Réveil. Other examples of ‘little papers’ before 1830 were Le Nain Jaume (Bonapartist), Le Diable Boiteux and Le Corsaire (both Liberal), Le Voleur, La Mode, La Silhouette, and, under Louis-Philippe, not only the phoenix-like Figaro, but also La Caricature, Le Charivari (ancestor of our English Punch), and once more Le Corsaire: a few among many. Louis-Philippe and his Cabinets were easy prey for these stinging gad-flies whose unremitting satire and innuendo remind one of the present-day Canard Enchaîné.

It is an amusing thought that, in the late twenties and early thirties, Balzac had himself been a contributor to these disreputable rags and sometimes had a hand in the running of them; for instance he had helped Philipon to found La Caricature. Throughout his career he contributed many novels in serial form to the more important newspapers, notably those founded by Girardin and Dutacq — La Presse and Le Siècle. But by the time he was writing A Great Man in Embryo he had left the petits journaux far behind him. He himself tried his luck as a newspaper-proprietor and editor: he bought La Chronique de Paris in 1836 and founded La Revue Parisienne in 1840. Both of these ventures failed. We can well imagine therefore what a large amount of bile was accumulating inside him. On the whole, reviews of his works appearing in periodicals had been hostile if not harsh. He suffered much from the disparagement of editors and critics such as Sainte-Beuve and Jules Janin respectively. He was always quarrelling with Émile de Girardin. And so he took his revenge. He had already made a preliminary attack on the periodical press in The Skin. And he followed up his attack of 1839 with his Monograph of the Paris Press (1842).

Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions, translated and introduced by Herbert Hunt, Penguin Books, 1971, pages xiv-xvi.

Balzac’s novel is very concerned with all aspects of journalism. For example, chapter 17 is titled “How a news-sheet is edited” and chapter 18 is a symposium on newspapers. Chapter 18 quotes a German guest who states, “I thank god there are no newspapers in my country.” (page 312). Another participant states, “In corporate crimes no one is implicated.” “A newspaper can behave in the most atrocious manner and no one on the staff considers that his own hands are soiled.” (page 314).

‘The influence and power of newspapers are only just dawning,’ said Finot. ‘Journalism is in its infancy; it will grow up. In ten years from now, everything will be subject to publicity. Thought will enlighten the world…’

Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions, Penguin Books, 1971, page 313.

‘Newspapers are an evil,’ said Claude Vignon. ‘An evil which could be utilized, but the Government wants to fight it. There’ll be a conflict. Who will go under? That’s the question.’

Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions, Penguin Books, 1971, page 313.

We should heed Vignon’s warning. Nazi Germany’s three main newspapers confirm this danger.

Countries and Deep Patternings: China

China’s High-Level Equilibrium Trap as a Concept

The Pattern of the Chinese Past
Mark Elvin
Paperback: 348 pages
Publisher: Stanford University Press; 1st edition (June 1, 1973)

The 1973 classic work in Sinology, Mark Elvin’s The Pattern of the Chinese Past gives the student an “exemplum” in the kind of scholarship that might be called “pattern-seeking.” Without such attempts, all of history becomes formless and shapeless and an endless parade of “routs and rallies,” and “crimes and follies and misfortunes” (in Edward Gibbon’s catchphrase).

Professor Elvin renders Chinese history through an economic perspective instead of using the common dynastic classification by attempting to answer three questions:

  1. What contributed to the continuity of the Chinese empire?
  2. Why was the Chinese economy the most advanced in the world from the Song dynasty (960-1279) up until the latter half of the Qing dynasty (mid-1800s)?
  3. Why did China fail to maintain her technological advantage after the mid-fourteenth century while advancing economically?

In the first section of the book, the author elucidates the staying power of the Chinese empire was due to the following factors. The economics of defense in relation to the size of empire and the power of its neighbors never became an extreme burden that it rendered the state impotent for any consecutively long period of time. It was always able to reformulate itself after a short disunity or rule by a foreign power of the whole, which only happened twice within a two thousand year period (Mongol and Manchu rule). Two other factors that contributed to the continuity of the Chinese state include a relatively isolated existence from the rest of the Eurasian landmass and the important placed on cultural unity, beginning with the first emperor’s destruction of local records in order to quell local loyalties (pp. 21-22). Both of these factors had been built up over time through a revolution in communication and transportation.

The second section of the book analyses the causes of the economic revolution that occurred between the 8th and 12th centuries and the technological growth that accompanied it. The transformation of agriculture, especially in the south, was the major impetus that fueled the economic growth of this period. This revolution in agriculture had four aspects.

  1. The preparation of soil became more effective as a result of improved or new tools and the extensive use of manure and lime as fertilizer.
  2. Seed improvements allowed for double cropping.
  3. Improvements in hydraulic techniques and irrigation networks.
  4. Specialization in crops other than basic food grains (p.118).

Improvements in transportation and communications were almost as important as agriculture in growing the economy. Water transport saw big gains and led to the golden age of geographic studies and cartography, with envoys traveling as far away as Africa. Money and credit matured during this time helping to expand the economy. Paper money made its first appearance in 1024. Improvements in science, medicine, and technology also occurred during this period. However, despite all these advancements, “this period was the climax and also the end of many preceding centuries of scientific and technical progress” (p. 179). Although the Chinese economy continued to advance from the 14th century on, albeit on a smaller scale, it was not accompanied by improvements in technology.

The last section deals with this phenomenon, describing the distinctive characteristics of this late traditional period (1300-1800), and then proceeding to point out why technological advancements did not keep pace with the growth in the economy. This period sees a rise of small market towns in the sixteenth century and a decline in contact with the non-Chinese world around the middle of the fifteenth century. Also, by the eighteenth century serfdom disappeared, aiding population growth, which had reached 400 million by the mid-1800s. Elvin interestingly points out that the highly sophisticated metaphysics that evaded Chinese intellectual thought during the Ming and Qing dynasties negated any deep scientific inquiry (p. 233). In the attempt to explain the lack of technological advancement, Elvin disputes a number of conventional explanations. Contrary to popular belief, there was enough capital during this period to finance simple technological advances, also there was minimal political obstacles to economic growth.

In short, Elvin believes “that in late traditional China economic forces developed in such a way as to make profitable invention more and more difficult. With falling surplus in agriculture, and so falling per capita income and per capita demand, with cheapening labor but increasingly expensive resources and capital, with farming and transport technologies so good that no simple improvements could be made, rational strategy for peasants and merchants alike tended in the direction not so much of labor-saving machinery as of economizing on resources and fixed capital. Huge but nearly static markets created no bottlenecks in the production system that might have prompted creativity” (p. 314). This condition is what he terms as a “high-level equilibrium trap.” The term “trap” to describe the condition of late imperial China’s technological advancement in relation to the economy is similar to Escape from Predicament, Thomas Metzger’s analysis of the “predicament” that confronted Chinese intellectual thought from the Song through to the end of the Qing dynasty. Both explanations have at their core the idea of late imperial China not being able to generate real sustainable progress internally, stating that it was the Chinese response to the Western threat in the mid to late 1800s that finally brought the needed change.

Education and Wittgenstein “Language Games”

It is instructive for a student to get a grip on the whole question of “language games” à la Wittgenstein, who says that these “games” (i.e., ambiguities) are central to thinking in general and thinking about philosophy in particular.

Let’s make up our own example and step back from the meaning of the preposition “in.”

The comb is in my back pocket has nothing to do with the “in” of “he’s in a good mood” or “he’s in a hurry” or “he’s in a jam or pickle” or “he’s in trouble.” Furthermore, in modern deterministic neuroscience language, a good mood is a footnote to brain and blood chemicals so that means that a good mood is in you via chemicals and not you in it.

Does the word “jam” here mean difficulty or somehow the condiment called jam? You don’t know and can never without more information (i.e., meaningful context).

Imagine we take a time machine and are standing in front of the home of Charles Dickens in London in his time say in the 1840s. They say he’s working on a new novel called Oliver Twist.

Someone says: a novel by Dickens is a kind of “fictional universe.” Shall we say that because Dickens is in his home (at home) in London (though in London is itself confusing since London as a city is not like a pocket to a comb or wallet) his fictional universe is “in” the universe which might be a multiverse according to current cosmological speculations? That’s not what we mean. The fictional universe of Dickens is a shared cultural abstraction involving his stories, characters, people absorbing his tales, his mind and our mind, books and discussions. A fictional universe is as “weird” as the other universe. The preposition “in” does not begin to capture what’s going on which is socio-cultural and not “physicalistic.”

We begin to intuit that everyday language which we use and handle as the most obvious thing in the world in constant use, is completely confusing once you look at it more clearly.

Einstein’s friend at Princeton, Kurt Gödel, looked into language as a logical phenomenon and concluded that it’s entirely puzzling that two people could actually speak and understand one another given the ambiguities and open-endedness of language.

A language-game (German: Sprachspiel) is a philosophical concept developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein, referring to simple examples of language use and the actions into which the language is woven. Wittgenstein argued that a word or even a sentence has meaning only as a result of the “rule” of the “game” being played. Depending on the context, for example, the utterance “Water!” could be an order, the answer to a question, or some other form of communication.

In his work, Philosophical Investigations (1953), Ludwig Wittgenstein regularly referred to the concept of language-games. Wittgenstein rejected the idea that language is somehow separate and corresponding to reality, and he argued that concepts do not need clarity for meaning. Wittgenstein used the term “language-game” to designate forms of language simpler than the entirety of a language itself, “consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven” and connected by family resemblance (German: Familienähnlichkeit).

The concept was intended “to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or a form of life,” which gives language its meaning.

Wittgenstein develops this discussion of games into the key notion of a “language-game.”

Gödel saw that language has deep built-in ambiguities which were as puzzling as math and logic ones:

Gödel’s (died in 1978) incompleteness theorems are two theorems of mathematical logic that demonstrate the inherent limitations of every formal axiomatic system capable of modeling basic arithmetic. These results, published by Kurt Gödel in 1931, are important both in mathematical logic and in the philosophy of mathematics.

Take any simple sentence: say, “men now count.”

Without a human context of meaning, how would you ever decide if this means count in the sense of numeracy (one apple, two apples, etc.) or something entirely from another domain (i.e. males got the vote in a certain country and now “count” in that sense).

When you say, “count me in” or count me out,” how does that make any sense without idiomatic language exposure?

If you look at all the meanings of “count” in the dictionary and how many set phrases or idioms involve the word “count,” you will immediately get the sense that without a human “life-world” (to use a Husserl phrase), you could never be sure of any message or sentence at all involving such a fecund word.

One task of real education is to put these difficulties on the student’s plate and not avoid them.

Linguistics as such is not what’s at issue but rather a “meta-intelligent” sense of language, written or spoken as highly mysterious with or without the research into vocal cords, language genes (FOXP2, say) or auditory science and the study of palates or glottal stops and fricatives, grammars and syntax.

Seeing this promotes deep education (i.e., where understanding touches holism in an enchanting way).

Education and the Movies: The Issue of Political Irrationality

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a movie masterpiece that is enormously educational not for the particular details of the story but for the phenomenon of politics as an outlet for personal problems: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a 1969 British drama film, based on the novel of the same name by Muriel Spark. Directed by Ronald Neame, it stars Maggie Smith in the title role as an unrestrained teacher at a girls’ school in 1930s Edinburgh.

Maggie Smith (whom you know from Downton Abbey as the aggressive matriarch) plays a romantically naive schoolteacher at a girl’s school in Scotland, 1930s. She has a “big time” crush on a handsome gym teacher whom she discovers in bed with one of the young girls—“Sandy” and has a kind of nervous breakdown or better, “image of the whole correctness of the world” breakdown.

The teacher sees newsreels of Mussolini in Italy and begins to think of him as a “romantic savior and ‘world-cleaner’ who will clean up the illegitimate situation at her girls’s school in Edinburgh and salvage her dignity and place and prestige and sense of how the world should be. On the one hand Miss Brodie talks about the girls of the school as ‘la crème de la crème’ but how does that comport with ‘Sandy’ and the male gym teacher sharing their beds with each other? The ‘cognitive dissonance’ (incompatibility) in Miss Brodie’s mind is causing her to break down and flee into fantasy land (i.e., Mussolini will restore the romantic world to the way it’s supposed to be). She goes deeper and deeper into this nutty vision of salvation and romantic re-balancing and at the end of the movie, ‘Sandy’ senses that she’s coming unglued and is borderline bonkers. Thus the title ‘the prime of’ can be thought of as ironical or sardonic since the teacher Miss Brodie is flipping out and ‘maps’ her romantic frustrations” onto Mussolini. This is what makes politics so dangerous (i.e., it serves as a “Rorschach test” for people’s inner irrationalities and yearnings and they “see” what they need to see).

Harold Lasswell (died in 1978) spent his life exploring politics and people’s private lives, order, sense of things, grievances, in such books as Psychopathology and Politics.  If you watch the movie The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie you will see how people use politics as a “screen” on which they project their emotions, grievances, hurts, humiliations, hysteria, anger.

Harold Dwight Lasswell (February 13, 1902 – December 18, 1978) was a leading American political scientist and communications theorist. He was a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago, and he was a professor of law at Yale University. He served as president of the American Political Science Association (APSA), of the American Society of International Law and of the World Academy of Art and Science (WAAS).

He has been described as a “one-man university” whose “competence in, and contributions to, anthropology, communications, economics, law, philosophy, psychology, psychiatry and sociology are enough to make him a political scientist in the model of classical Greece.”

Table of Contents for Lasswell’s Psychopathology and Politics Book

Introduction
Preface
I. Life-Histories and Political Science
II. The Psychopathological Approach
III. A New Technique of Thinking
IV. The Criteria of Political Types
V. Theories of Personality Development
VI. Political Agitators
VII. Political Agitators—Continued
VIII. Political Administrators
IX. Political Convictions
X. The Politics of Prevention
XI. The Prolonged Interview and Its Objectification
XII. The Personality System and Its Substitutive Reactions
XIII. The State as a Manifold of Events
Afterthoughts—Thirty Years Later
Appendix A. Select Bibliography
Appendix B. Question List on Political Practices
Index

(2016 reprint of 1930 edition. Full facsimile of the original edition.)

First published in 1930, this classic study of personality types remains vital for the understanding of contemporary public figures. Lasswell’s pioneering application of the concepts of clinical psychology to the understanding of power brokers in politics, business, and even the church offers insights into the careers of leaders as diverse as Adolf Hitler and, arguably to more recent figures such as Richard Nixon, Donald Trump and the Clintons.

Movies should be your off-campus alternate university. You should ask yourself does this movie and Lasswell’s notions of psychopathology in politics help me understand authoritarian leaders today and such bizarre phenomena as half-dead prisoners in Stalin’s gulags bursting into tears in March 1953 when they learned of his death. Why sob over the death of the man who’s murdering you and tormenting you and your family?