I tweet therefore I am

Why is the western world obsessed with dead, white men?

While walking  down the street at 2 am yesterday , my friend Ben mentioned that he was writing a paper on ancient Greek philosophy, which got me thinking: why all the ruckus about the likes of Aristotle, Plato and Sophocles?

Did the Greeks usher in modern, western civilization as we know it? Probably. But what about Oriental civilizations? Confucius was definitely a force to be reckoned with. While Persian gave birth to great writers, politicians and thinkers, notably Rumi, whose works often take a backseat to ‘Rhetoric‘ or ‘The Republic‘. So, why are students in US universities denied an education which gives equal importance to the works of these great minds, whose ideas and theories are on par with the complex nature of thought espoused by ancient Greeks?

It’s unfortunate that I lack knowledge about acclaimed Bangladeshi thinkers. I generally turn to The Daily Star for high-quality, contemporary analysis and social commentary. Yet, I’m left at a loss for historical accounts and thoughts about the evolution of Bangladeshi society. I am familiar with Rabindranath, Nazrul and Biddasagar, but I can only assume that there have been countless academics from Dhaka University, the Bangla Academy or those who migrated to Shantiniketan, with intimate knowledge of the history of Bengalis. Beyond personal apathy, the lack of information and scholarly articles accessible to the public  makes it difficult for one to go on a personal quest of cultural self-discovery.Unfortunately, this same reality makes it easy for political parties to alter history at will. But that is a story for another day. Of course, there are solutions, namely digitization. The digitization of scholarly articles on JSTOR has made it possible for the college students of today to write papers overnight, and perhaps Bangladeshi universities should invest in digitizing their publications and archives of information. Maybe learning about Bengali philosophers and thinkers might just replace the hours I spend on facebook. Or maybe not.

Philosphy itself=lots of time + great imagination.  It’s true that ancient Greeks are credited with having asked some tough questions: Why are we here? What is life? Does faith exists? How do we control the masses? etc. The way I see it, if every human being on the planet were  given a lifetime’s worth of time and no access to the internet, I’m sure a few ordinary folk could crank out a couple of universal and might I say generic, questions.

I’m sure that if Aristotle had access to the internet, he too would have a Facebook profile. Plato would most definitely be on myspace and Sophocles, one of the earliest great thinkers who had more enemies than friends, may have been one of the loner pioneers of  Live Journal. If ancient greeks knew about modern day, social networking site, what do you think that they would say?