Fr. Victor Ferrao
Excess and transgression cross each other. Often excess can be framed as a transgression when viewed through the prism of Aristotle’s queen of virtues. Moderation depicts excess a transgression and marks it as a sin. The logic of sin combined with Aristotle’s principle of moderation had a hold over our society but its power has steadily waned in our days.
Today we seem to be living-out a post-sin scenario as the sense of sin seems to be lost on horizon. While Aristotle’s principle of moderation has failed to become our inner guiding voice, we seem to have steadily given our allegiance to another value that operates as an alternate queen of virtues in our society. This new queen operates clandestinely but effectively subverts and undermines all other virtues in our society. The reigning capitalist economy has enthroned use-value and has dethroned moderation of Aristotle and opened the flood gates to all forms of excess in our society. The flood gate does operate like our sluice gates which regulate and permit only excess that produces use-value into our society.
This suggests that our society is profoundly censored by use-value. This is why French thinker of excess, George Bataille becomes important to understand and draw insight into our society.
Today the older censors like caste, religion and education that significantly played their role in the production of our society are brought under the sway of use-value. This does not mean that they have stopped being influential in our society. Their influences still exist but they are structured and directed to meet the goals set by the use-value regime that controls everything around us.
The logic of use-value expels other ways of being Goans as useless, eccentric and mad. It has disfigured Goa and Goanising.
Goansing in pursuit of use-value has led to the de-goanisation of Goa and therefore the reigning mode of goanising is largely de-goanising us and Goa. Use-value of everything has become primary force that leads our goanising and hence has become a question of concern. The rate race to chase the use-value has rendered older ways of being Goan non-existent.
We have lost value of selfless service and hence our traditional communitarian modes of celebrations of weddings, feasts and funerals are disposed in favour of outsourced mode of organising our celebrations. Food is catered from outside by commercial suppliers and celebrations are no longer in our homes and neighbourhoods but have been shifted to commercial open spaces that exists for profit. We have opened our arms to excesses of the market and closed our doors to the excesses of Goan-ness. Now only those forms of Goan-ness that are marketable can survive.
Even our traditional occupations are steadily losing their use-value and are almost extinct. We have succumbed to the standards of use-value and have expelled that which is deemed as useless. What market considers use-less belongs to another economy. It is the economy of selfless giving. This economy was the backbone of Goa but today has been steadily replaced by market driven use-value.
This regime of use-value is an eye in the sky that is keeping a watch over our society and we are steadily lured to think that we have a gain in our loss.
Everything that does not fit into the use-value driven of society marked by social Darwinism is viewed as eccentric and absurd and therefore is thought to expelled and abjected as foreign body from our society. This submission to reign of use-value is visible in the manner in which we sell our land resources to the highest bidder. It is also manifested in the way Machiavellian ego-centric politics is generated in our society.
One might see it being played out both in the in-migration and out-migration or manner in which the coffers of the temple are made available to a select elite. Hence, it is urgent that we find emancipative responses to our use-value driven society. The excesses of use-value that has filtered selfless giving as banal in our society needs to be checked. Hence, we are challenged to embrace what is counted as madness and excess by the measure of the use value. Christian love and Gandhian satyagraha and ahimsa are good to tools to derail the reign of use-value. We have to enter the economy of selfless giving that is genuinely Goan. Such an economy may be viewed as wasteful by the proponents of the market capitalist society. What they call wasteful expenditure indeed has disruptive force that can become a remedy to our afflictions.
We already have great figures like Mahatma Gandhi, Ambekar and Phule, etc in our country who can be called as models of wasteful investment. Their’s was not a wasted life. They show how wasteful spending of life builds a society. To resist use-value laden regime, we need to embrace the rebellion of love that will effectively puncture the all seeing eye of use-value adorning our skies.
