The two provincial council elections held on 23 August were won by the government on an unambiguous war platform. "Say yes to war against terrorism" was the regime’s battle cry; "I want a mandate for a fight to the finish" was the President’s demand. The battle cry was endorsed and the mandate validated by the overwhelmingly Sinhala public of the NCP and Sabaragamuwa. Nevertheless, interestingly, there is a yawning intellectual divide opening up between Lanka’s urban classes, young people and modernist elite, and the UPFA’s mainly rural power base. This is a sociological phenomenon, unfolding right under our noses, and it is worth a pause. Actually it is a class phenomenon as well but no more of that for a moment; many of my readers are loveable and gentle soft-core intellectuals, uncomfortable with hard categories.

The dichotomy of values is not a PA versus UNP divide though it may overlap it to a degree. It is also certainly not a simple replay of the 1956 culturally resurgent Sinhala petty-bourgeoisie versus westernised English educated elite standoff, though again outward looking modernism and insular nationalism do map the variance. The emerging intellectual dichotomy that I perceive may be separated by counterpoising two short-term political frames. Is preventing abuse of power, correcting appalling governance and reigning in out of control corruption more important, or is prosecuting without hindrance, the war to exterminate Tamil terrorism, the principal task of the day? Should pluralism, devolution and ethnic power sharing, or should the nurturing of a constitutional dispensation that guarantees the continuity and hegemony of the Sinhala-Buddhist unitary state, be the fundamental premise on which the national question should be resolved? Is economic growth and regional economic integration a way out of the present imbroglio, or must war be given priority and won before grave macroeconomic anxieties are addressed?

Let us leave aside charlatans and crooks, numerous though they be, and focus on core concepts. At core, I then hypothesise, that behind short-term attitudes there is a fundamental distinction in world view that underlies Lanka’s emerging intellectual divide. As said this divide does not track a PA-UNP differentiation with any exactitude, the pro-government old left and many anti-UNP intellectuals fall into the pluralist, ant-racist and modernist camp, while a whole bunch of corrupt, self-seeking UNP defectors have sold themselves for portfolios underneath a chintanaya which they once alleged to despise.

The dichotomy mirrors a westernised-elite versus Sinhala educated intelligentsia split even less. For example Sinhala is the home language of the vast majority of the middle class and educated opponents of insular ideology. Furthermore, whether the motive is consumerism, employment prospects or attraction of the outside world, a large fraction of today’s youth, I mean Sinhala educated youth, won’t so much as stop to give the time of day to blinkered nationalists.

Let me pick up a quotation or two to fortify these two points. Writing in the Sunday Times of 24 August, Kishali Pinto Jayawardene says "It is the worst of times for never before have the assaults on basic freedoms of life liberty and democratic space been so prolonged and pervasive or accompanied by such comprehensive subversion of democratic rights". Phew! Now I have never met the lady though I am one of her regular readers, but it would surprise me greatly if anyone told me that she was a hardcore UNP fellow traveller. The article goes on to add "(T)his is also the best if times for it is precisely now that ordinary decent citizens will be tested to the utmost in regard to their determination to speak out against injustice and to rally against the most profound wrongs being committed in the name of patriotism and national security".

I need hardly update Lankan readers of what Gunadasa Amerasekara, Nalin de Silva and Weerawansa will have to say about their version of the juxtaposition between ‘injustice and profound wrongs’ on one side, and ‘patriotism and national security’ on the other. What we are witnessing therefore is a deep and unbridgeable clash of value systems, a clash of civilisations.

Just one more quote and I will move on. In a recent article I argued that since Lanka cannot solve its national question within its own physical and ideological domains the best way out is greater regional economic and political integration, especially with India. I proposed that this was the way to make the ethnic standoff less problematic; a kind of ‘withering away of the national question’. The piece appeared in the website Groundviews; but what I want to draw attention to is one of the ensuing ‘blog’ responses – I not quite sure of what a ‘blog’ is, but I don’t want to expose my age and ignorance by asking.

Anyway, here is what a certain Dhammika Dharmawardhane posted on the site: "It is quite clear from this article you have deep dislike and hatred for Sri Lanka. Only a mad man would write it. You have clearly identified yourself as one. I do sincerely pray for Sri Lanka, my country that you live elsewhere. People like you don’t deserve ever to live in my beautiful, sovereign country. And may the gods be my witness, if you do live in Sri Lanka I pray that the powers be (sic) see your blog post". Now let the rest of us pray that this gentlemen’s prayer that a white van should visit me will go unanswered, but that’s not the point. The point is that there is not only a profound difference of ideology and attitude; it is also about the vehemence of emotion that these differences evoke. The emotional responses are two-sided, and like Janus, look both forwards and backwards; hatred on one face as per the charming Mr DD, and the modernists contempt for ignoramus nationalists on the other.

There is an outpouring of both scholarly and popular writing about whether the Vijaya story is mere myth or grown on real events; it makes great reading but I am no wiser whether the legend bears roots in history. Archaeologists digging deep in Anuradhapura are unearthing fascinating finds; apparently there were folks on the island a millennium or more before the people we now call Sinhalese or Tamils crystallised. It seems that today’s ‘ethnic difference’ is only a latter day linguistic distinction; the DNA of the two so-called races may well be as jumbled together as that of street dogs copulating on either side of Bataramulla junction. But none of this matters one whit in the real world of class politics where class and group actors selectively choose their myths in order to fashion the ideological tools essential for the accomplishment of their current and concrete historical tasks.

Somewhere Marx remarks: "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. Thus the awakening of the dead serves the purpose of glorifying new struggles, not of parodying the old, but of magnifying the given task in the imagination, not recoiling from its solution in reality, but finding once more the spirit for new struggles, not making a ghost walk again". What this means is that classes and communities fight out the struggles corresponding to their present day concrete material interests by selecting and shaping ideological instruments dug up from the past. Does anyone think that if the DNA of the Sinhalese and Tamils were proved to be stuff from the same gene pool, or if archaeologists prove that pre-Pandukabaya there were just one assortment of peoples who differentiated later, the civil war would end and the national question solved as though by magic? That would be facile!

I have not the space here to spell out how the interests of the rising post-colonial Sinhala petty-bourgeois and those of the Tamils, both indigenous and upcountry, came to lie on a collusion course. Idealist scholars impute these modern conflicts to imagined differences, materialists look for concrete conflicts of interest in the social and economic (land, apportionment of scarce resources, class and employment, business opportunities and privileges) world. But I am getting a little side tracked here; the purpose of this tangential aside was only to make a point analogous to the conflict between dated and modern value systems which is my topic for today.

Eventually, value systems that are not in tune with the changing dynamics of the modern world will be vanquished, though they could well do a lot of damage before they disappear. Nor will modernism make any sense until it acknowledges that addressing the material needs of the poor and the underprivileged is the central task to which its technological prowess and the strength of its rational world view need to be directed. Otherwise modernism will continue to leave the rural poor prisoners to ideological atavism. If modernity amounts to impoverishment of the poor, if market forces destroy their secluded world but fail to put prosperity in its place, then the great majority will remain in the grip of traditional racists and cunning opportunists.

Apart from material benefit, however, modern values must also have indigenous roots if they are to blossom. I will conclude with a brief reference to an article by Silan Kadirgamar in the Jaffna College 185th Anniversary (2008) souvenir. Kadirgamar argues that the school "had a major influence in transmitting western liberal values, and democratic and nationalist ideas" he calls the school the major centre for the flowering of these values. But the telling point is this: "The products of the institution were not culturally divorced from the people of the Peninsula, in contrast to the English educated elite that emerged in the Western Provinces and in Colombo in particular". He attributes this to the school’s insistence on the inclusion of substantial Tamil language and literature components in the curriculum and "(T)he very ‘Indianness’ of the Gandhian movement which struck responsiveness amongst the English educated in Jaffna both young and old". I am wont to add that the tight structure and compactness of Jaffna society and the limitedness of social mobility and economic change in the relevant period, also made it easier. Nevertheless, there is a lesson here for those who want to take Lanka out of these Dark Ages into a modern world to learn.