{"id":50665,"date":"2015-12-31T16:23:20","date_gmt":"2015-12-31T22:23:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=50665"},"modified":"2015-12-31T09:10:26","modified_gmt":"2015-12-31T16:10:26","slug":"hysteria-morals-and-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2015\/12\/31\/hysteria-morals-and-politics\/","title":{"rendered":"Hysteria, Morals and Politics"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><em>R Chandrasoma<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>Let us begin with a few words about Hysteria. This a conditon of trance or transient behavioural aberration induced by powerful external stimuli such as a deep rhythmic drumbeat with plaintive or emotional singing to a large and frenzied audience. Under these circumstance some young wome lose all sense f propriety and behave in emotionally uncontrolled ways. Dancing, writhing the body and throwing off personal clothing is characteristinc of this hysterical state. Indeed, \u2018\u2019bali\u2019 and \u2018thovil \u2018 ceremonies in Sri Lanka use this technique of deep rhythmic drumming and vigorous dance to induce hysterical state referred by the natives as \u2018Avesa kereema\u2019 In mediveal Europe a Dance called the \u2018Tarantelle\u2019 was used to shake off hysterical states in young women. These are preliminaries\u00a0 &#8211; Let us get to the main point.\u00a0 At\u00a0 concert recently held in Colombo the deep rhythms and plaintive and movingly emotional singing induced a hysterical state in some unfortunate young women that led to the public discarding of clothing and bizzare behaviour that outraged the moralists who were not part of the audience and missed the causative context.<\/p>\n<p>The affair w9ould have passed unnoticed but for the fact that the Presient of Sri Lanka \u2013 no less \u2013 saw this saga of the disorderly young women as\u00a0 sybmbolic of the moral decay that has our Buddhist country in its thrall. While this proposition may or may not be true, it is sad to fing the President rushing to conclusions on the moral state of our nation based on a false reading of the supposedly incriminating data. The womwn concerned was possessed and acted in a manner that caused offence to arm-chair moralists but few others.. No moral rule was broken as she had lost possession of her senses and acted as a hyperexcited automaton. That this piffling incident was made the occasion for the moral condemnation of a nation by its anointed leader must astonish all good citizens of trhis country. A President must \u2013 first and foremost\u00a0 -understand and heal. To act according to the drum-beat of an imagined moral order is mere pandering to popular sentiment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>R Chandrasoma Let us begin with a few words about Hysteria. This a conditon of trance or transient behavioural aberration induced by powerful external stimuli such as a deep rhythmic drumbeat with plaintive or emotional singing to a large and frenzied audience. Under these circumstance some young wome lose all sense f propriety and behave [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-r-chandrasoma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50665\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}