Nationalism as a Mental Construct: The Linguistic Basis of the Sinhala-Tamil Conflict

Nationalism as a concept could be the concern of political scientists, but is it purely political in nature? Are there neurological connections that revolve around one of the highly evolved capacities of human beings as compared to other species; that is the ability to use language for communication? It is only because we are endowed with a machinery of cognition that receives and analyzes information from the external world and initiates us into identifying and assigning a set of characteristics to the objects and ideas we encounter in our everyday encounters with the multitude of events of the world. Karl Popper hinted towards the dichotomous relationship between ‘nominalism’ and ‘essentialism’, with the aid of which we classify and label the entities around us. While the debate between ‘reason’ and ’emotion’ has stayed alive for thousands of years tracing its origin to the antiquity coinciding with the heydays of the Hellenic glory or the ancient times of the Nyaya-Mimansa school of Indian philosophy, scholars and thinkers have shown a strong tendency to separate out the ‘objective’ from the ‘subjective’, a necessary corollary of the distinction between ‘reason’ and ’emotion’. The difference could be very well transposed upon the difference between ‘objects’ and ‘ideas’. Hence, one needs to attempt at unravelling the emotional-psychological basis of nationalism.