Well, my definition of a tragedy is a clash between right and right. Amos Oz
In class, we watched a twenty minute video addressing the issues of clashes of civilizations, my world vs. your world and the world, differences in mythologies etc
The video is extracted from TED talks and the speaker is Devdutt Pattanaik who is a ‘chief belief officer’. I had never heard of such a career before and so he immediately managed to capture my attention. Devdutt spoke a lot about different mythologies and beliefs and about how these lead to misunderstandings or clashes of civilizations. He also spoke about the ideas of my world verses the world and my world vs. your world. The presentation got me to think a lot about differences in cultures and conflicts between people.
My world is subjective and personal. It is based on my emotions, my beliefs, my dreams etc while as the world is objective and universal. It is based on facts and scientific evidence. The world is all about HOW thing work and HOW they happen, while as my world is all about WHY these things work and WHY they happen. I have asked myself the following question: ‘Which one of the two is more important?’ From what I understand, MY world is all about my opinions and beliefs on THE world and my feelings towards THE world. MY world and I are part of THE world. THE world would be meaningless to me without MY world. Then there is also YOUR world. Each person is unique as has unique beliefs, moral values etc based on their cultural background, upbringing, religion etc and therefore each person’s world differs from that of the next. Devdutt explains that we will always believe that what we know or claim to know is the truth and that in our eyes, our world is better than that of another person and our beliefs make more sense to us than those of another person. He claims that this misunderstanding and lack of open-mindedness leads to conflicts/clashes between civilizations.
I agree with him on these claims as all throughout history people have fought over religion for example. Every civilization claims that their religion preaches the truth. This is because of different understandings about why we are here and what the purpose of life is. Devdutt uses mythology and rituals as an example of the misunderstandings between people. I may believe that there is just one life and I therefore have to constantly seek success, while as someone from India may believe that he/she has many lives and therefore many chances to get it right and find his/her purpose. These opposing beliefs would be based on our religions and the different stories passed down to us from generation to generation. Your truth is likely to not even be considered as ‘truth’ by me and vice versa. Why is this? Why can we not live with the belief and understanding that there is not one sole truth but that in the world there are many truths? As humans, it seems to me that we have a constant desire to oppose other people’s opinions and impose our own beliefs on others. We constantly try to teach others about truth and yet do we ourselves really know what the truth actually is?
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