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 The Captive Mind


by Prof Syed Hussein Alatas

 
Problems of colonialism revisited

     By adopting an independent attitude in one's research, says Prof. Syed Alatas, one declines to be a  'captive mind' not only to scientific concepts but even to the West's conception of morality.
     Prof. Alatas, who introduced the idea of the captive mind in the early 1950s, revisited the critical  concept  at the Multiversity meeting in Penang.
IT WAS IN THE EARLY 1950s that I started doing some research on the 'captive mind'. My first publication on this theme was titled 'Some Fundamental Problems of Colonialism', which appeared in 1956 in a London journal called The Eastern World.

After the Second World War, we witnessed the independence of several states in Asia and Africa and one of the problems which I felt then was this tendency of our people to imitate the thinking of the West, a thinking introduced by the colonial power. For example, I noticed that during this time there was a heavy emphasis on the idea of 'development'. Simultaneously, there was the setting aside of important themes in the Third World. One of the things that they set aside was the religious leaders. They saw no function whatsoever for the religious leaders in the development programme. Development was purely a matter of government planners and economists. The function of other groups in the Third World was not seen and not highlighted. This is what I mean by imitation - not only taking up certain ideas, certain concepts which are introduced to us by the West but also, at the same time, setting aside things which are very important to the non-Western world. I think that this area should be explored.

I spent a lot of time in the 1960s on the theme of the captive mind but like any other theme in human history, its study is inexhaustible. It would require a long time, a long process involving many people to tackle various aspects of the problem.

One aspect which I did not have time to develop is the problem of the captor mind, or the capturing mind. I have concentrated so far on the captive mind because the captive mind is most urgent as far as the developing society is concerned. We are not concerned with the slaveholders. We are concerned with the enslaved because we all know that change can be achieved only if there is an awakening of the slave community. Without a change in the attitude of the slave community, there can never be any change.
 
As far as the slaveholders are concerned, they will not give away freedom just like that. It has to be wrenched from them. The slave must wake up to wrench his freedom from the slaveholder. Understanding the slaveholders was less urgent to me at that particular point of time than understanding the enslaved. Therefore I had concentrated then on the captive mind. But now, I think, this subject should be explored as well.

I also spent my time demonstrating. I believe that we cannot discuss or have a dialogue merely on a theoretical plane. We have to demonstrate. You cannot, for instance, settle the issue of beauty in a beauty contest (pardon me for using this example because I am not in favour of beauty contests) by discussing the theory of beauty. You can settle the contest by demonstrating to the people who the beautiful contestants in the line-up are. So you have to put your beliefs into practice in order to convince people.

Similarly, in the field of research, there is only one way to convince society of the need to get away from intellectual captivity and that is by doing some works which demonstrate that this is the kind of work which we want to have, which does not bear the stamp of intellectual captivity. Hence I wrote the book The Myth of the Lazy Native to demonstrate the kind of scholarship that was developed in the colonial period, which is no more applicable.

I believe that we should have our own scholarship. Having our own scholarship does not mean being ethnically biased. It does not mean turning the tables against the colonial powers and offering something of the same kind by way of a substitute. For instance, in history, the colonial historians wrote about our bad rulers, so what do we do - do we just reverse it? Do we just say that the guys they said were bad were in fact good? No. This would mean adopting their attitude and values in reverse. And that attitude is to me the summit of captivity because this would demonstrate that they have conditioned you to react exactly like them. The scholarship we have to develop is our own scholarship, with our own categories of analysis, giving a different picture and dragging out what they tried to hide. In other words, we have to offer a more complete and true picture, using values which are truly universal and truly moral.

I spent 11 years in Holland, part of the time as a student in the University of Amsterdam. I remember being continuously bombarded with the idea of the neutrality of the social sciences and with the theories of relativity in the social sciences. I resisted them as being nonsense. There is no such thing as objectivity without morality. We can have objectivity, but the research cannot be without morality.

For example, as a sociologist, I may have to study prostitution, or crime. I can study these subjects objectively in the sense that I study the subject as it is. I do not bring in my value judgement. Merely because I am not in favour of crimes, I will not try to paint all criminals black. I will not try to impose my subjective feelings of likes and dislikes on the criminals. If there is a deteriorating morality in a certain city, I will not blame the criminals for that. In my study I will not say that the city has become decadent because of the criminals. Social scientists should not be victims of that kind of intrusion of their own subjective value judgement. However, after studying the subject objectively, the question of morality comes in. Do we want crime to happen or not? Of course not! We study objectively the problem of crime because we do not want crime to develop. We want to find ways and means to reduce criminality.
The same thing is true for medical science. If a cancer expert studies cancer cells objectively, i.e. as they exist and their influence on the human body and he does not bring his private bias into the study, that is good. That is medical science. But that having been done, he has to ask himself the question - does he want to promote cancer? Is the purpose of his science to promote cancer? The answer is no. In that sense there is no science, whether social or physical or natural, without morality.

However, a certain trend has developed in the West to separate science from morality. The scientists say, 'Morality is not our business. We only study a subject, that's all. What happens later with our research is not our concern. That is the work of politicians. It's not our job.' That was the attitude of some scientists in connection with the dropping of the atomic bomb during World War II. The scientists claimed they were only involved in physics and how to construct the bomb. How the bomb was used was not in their hands and it was not their business, implying thereby that they were indifferent to and unconnected with the use of the bomb as an instrument of destruction.

Now some of our scientists and builders of countries of the Third World have also adopted a similar attitude and this is an example of the captive mind. The builders of atomic weapons in our countries - I do not mention the countries but we all know who they are - must be made aware that these are the consequences of their research. The builders of landmines must know that they are maiming little children because landmines are not being used in wars against soldiers but in guerrilla warfare against civilians. Villages are mined just to isolate them. This is going on in Burma, in Afghanistan, in Africa. We all know how many children have been destroyed by landmines. But the scientists involved in making the landmines are not concerned that landmines are used for civil war, for mining villages. They feel it is not their business. It is the business of the politicians who are using the landmines. That kind of morality is something which we from the Third World should reject. This is what I mean by adopting an independent attitude, not being a captive mind to not only scientific concepts but even to their conception of morality.

Not everyone in the West shares this opinion of research being apolitical and neutral. There are undoubtedly people in the West too who disagree with this amoral attitude of the functionaries. But they are in a minority. The majority follow this trend. So the ramifications around the areas of the captive mind are unlimited.

Another subject for study is to trace the historical origin of the captive mind. The origin of the captive mind is not parallel to colonialism. During the beginning of the colonial period there was no mental captivity. The phenomenon of mental captivity arose more or less in the 19th century, not before that. Before the 19th century there was no intensive intellectual contact of the colonised with the colonial power and there was no attempt by the colonial government to indoctrinate at this level. In the beginning they were only interested in making money.

A very clear manifestation of this phenomenon is in the history of British India. When the British came to India in the latter part of the 18th century, they had no vision of themselves as a colonial power. They were traders. Later they started building forts with the approval and support of the Moghul emperors, primarily to defend their interests against their own people, against thefts and against surrounding raiders.
They were not involved in producing British schools, spreading the English language, having control over the country and so on. This is discussed in a very colourful and clear manner by Harriet Martinov, in her book History of British India.

The Dutch took control of Java in Indonesia in the 18th century. However, they had started building forts in the 16th century, even conquering Batavia (today, Jakarta) where they had their own government. Yet, during that period there was no captive mind because there was no interchange.

It was only in the latter part of the 19th century that there was intellectual interchange, schools were started and they deliberately set up an institution called Balaypustaka to translate European works into Indonesian. They translated many European classics into Indonesian, including the famous work of the Russian writer Gogol, The Overcoat. So the attempt to spread ideas in Indonesia started in the 19th century. Thus, in 350 years of the colonial period, it is only in the latter part of the 19th century that we see the intellectual exchange or intellectual captivity. This is an indication that the intellectual captivity is not an epiphenomenon of colonialism, although it started with colonialism.
However, after political independence, this captivity became worse. It became much more intensive and much more widespread after independence, when there was no more colonialism. So the development of the captive mind has nothing to do with its origin in colonialism  Now we are free yet we are enslaved, mentally enslaved.

Even if you are depending economically on the West, it does not mean you must have mental dependence. For instance, the people in the West knew how to assimilate certain things from the East, without becoming mentally dependent on the East. The very fact that you are using something from another country does not mean you must be mentally dependent. If you use Chinese chopsticks in America it does not mean that Americans are conditioned in their thinking by the Chinese! But in our part of the world we are using a lot of Western goods and, at the same time, Western ideas. The assimilation of goods should not necessarily mean that you should assimilate other things - like ideas - which are not suitable for your region.

Take some recent examples from Malaysia. For years and years, we have been continuing with 'development', without investigating the kind of development we need. For example, when you develop, you cannot avoid or neglect the agrarian structure. Europe, Japan and all the leading industrial countries preserved the agrarian structure. They were very careful with the agrarian structure and later on developed their industrial structure without harming the agrarian structure. But we are developing our industrial structure while paying hardly any attention to the agrarian structure. Now we are coming back to it. We are forced to pay more attention to the agrarian structure. This is the kind of imitation thinking I am referring to.

Suddenly, a couple of years ago, overnight, the term 'K-economy' came to be used. Why? Because the Prime Minister used it. The media, ever ready, started beating the drums within a day. The term K-economy was on the TV, in the newspapers, everywhere. What is the meaning of this term? 'K-economy' stands for Knowledge economy. Why suddenly Knowledge economy? Is there any economy without knowledge? All the time in the West they have been planning their economy with a lot of knowledge. Everything has to be planned with knowledge. What then is the distinctive nature of K-economy? Nothing.

If you want to periodise in terms of economic history, for heaven's sake use a term that's really a term of periodisation. For instance, if you want to use the term 'computer economy' to denote an economy based on the use of computers, that is new. Knowledge economy means nothing. But just because it was invented in the West, it was taken over lock-stock-and-barrel without any critical enquiry. The purpose of introducing such terms is probably in the interest of domination. Because the moment you introduce the term K-economy, it is a tool of domination. You are made to feel you don't have enough 'K'. You must depend on them for more 'K' and so it is a term of domination.

We have to be aware of a trend which is dominant in the West, i.e. the need to dominate. Independent of whether they have colonies or not, there is a drive internally to dominate. This is very apparent in the social sciences. In the social sciences, particularly in the US, there are groups that want to dominate the rest. I was familiar, when I was a student, with the school of functionalism. Functionalism had to dominate all the campuses. Those who were not functionalists were sidelined. We should not imitate such trends. But I find that here also we have this trend, without being aware. We have also started becoming functionalists as against the structuralists.

We should have a scientific approach where we should be able to combine anything. If there is considerable contribution from a particular group, take it, combine it and synthesise it. We should not be victims of a particular trend. So the question of domination goes beyond a particular concept. It has also to be a trend of thinking and a philosophical trend. As you can see, there are many areas of the captive mind which we have yet to explore. #

Syed Hussein Alatas is director of the Institute of the Malay World and Civilisation, National University of Malaysia. He is the author of the ground breaking book "the Myth of the Lazy Native."


 
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INDEX

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Index page     Book review    The captive mind    Chinese words in Malay   Food guide   Hen or rooster?
Letter from Pulau Tikus   A people's constitution (2)     Poh Choo's wedding (9)   The war in the jungle(2)  


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 The Penang File Issue  43