Symphony of Science - 'Our Place in the Universe'

Lyrics

[Narrator]
With every century
Our eyes on the universe have been opened anew
We are witness
To the very brink of time and space

[Robert Jastrow]
We must ask ourselves
We who are so proud of our accomplishments
What is our place in the cosmic perspective of life?

[Carl Sagan]
The exploration of the cosmos
Is a voyage of self discovery
As long as there have been humans
We have searched for our place in the cosmos

[Richard Dawkins]
Are there things about the universe
That will be forever beyond our grasp?
Are there things about the universe that are
Ungraspable?

[Sagan]
One of the great revelations of space exploration
Is the image of the earth, finite and lonely
Bearing the entire human species
Through the oceans of space and time

[Dawkins]
Matter flows from place to place
And momentarily comes together to be you
Some people find that thought disturbing
I find the reality thrilling

[Sagan]
As the ancient mythmakers knew
We're children equally of the earth and the sky
In our tenure on this planet, we've accumulated
Dangerous evolutionary baggage

We've also acquired compassion for others,
Love for our children,
And a great soaring passionate intelligence
The clear tools for our continued survival

[Michio Kaku]
We could be in the middle
Of an inter-galactic conversation
And we wouldn't even know

[Sagan]
We've begun at last
To wonder about our origins
Star stuff contemplating the stars
Tracing that long path

Our obligation to survive and flourish
Is owed not just to ourselves
But also to that cosmos
Ancient and vast, from which we spring

(Visit http://symphonyofscience.com for more science remixes)

The Wall of Falsehood

Imagine a huge wall of lies, erected brick by brick, to split a city of truth for carving up a fantasy enclave of untruth. This seemingly impregnable wall has lured many, including the elite, and dismayed many others. Neither of them have ever visualised the fall of this concrete barrier of falsehood, until it collapses and is reduced to piles of debris, like a pack of cards, when hit by just a breeze of truth and freedom.
This metaphorical wall harks back to a real and apparently impenetrable wall that was thought to exist forever until it fell twenty years ago when men and women surged forward to escape from the ideology of untruth. The Fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 was cataclysmic for Communism, for it marked the beginning of the end of the totalitarian ideology in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Europe. The Cold War ended with the collapse of the Wall and the Western liberal democracy has since been widely embraced as a good model that can ensure freedom, peace and prosperity. Of course, terrorism inspired by resurgent Islam is a major threat to liberal democracy and the conflict between the divergent values inherent in Islam and the liberal democracy raises the spectre of uncertainty and insecurity. But, as The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat says in his November 9 op-ed piece , Marxism, unlike radical Islam, seduced the elite of the West and rendered the liberal societies more vulnerable.
The day after the freedom-loving people celebrated the 20 th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, I had a feeling that I was witnessing the fall of another wall, not the tangible wall that was pulled down by the Germans, but an equally opaque though unreal one made up of bricks of lies. The byelections in West Bengal and Kerala saw the people chipping away at that metaphorical wall. The communists in the two Indian States have received severe drubbing at the hands of the people who saw through the wall of falsehood and gave an electoral verdict that they, both the people and the commies, truly deserved. The electoral outcome in the byelections is not going to mark the end of the communists in the two States. On the contrary, they will put up a brave face and sport more belligerence as they carry out their customary anti-American, anti-imperialist, anti-globalisation, anti-Manmohan Singh and anti-anything campaigns. It is a wonder that the two communist parties that have espoused the totalitarian Stalinist ideology have survived the Fall of the Berlin Wall.
From a different perspective, the communist parties in India are just debris of what used to be a strong and apparently unassailable communist movement that at one time appeared to be on the road to power through a battle of ballots. Feeding on people’s fears, the communist ideology could win the minds of both the unsophisticated and the elite for long, but as time goes by, the more intelligent among them become less susceptible to the scare-mongering. You cannot dupe someone for a long time.
The anti-computer agitation launched by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in Kerala in the 80s was a graphic illustration of the party’s lack of far-sigtedness and dependence on sloganeering. My generation of newly passed out college graduates were distressed by the party’s propaganda that computer would shrink jobs. What has happened is just the opposite of what the dyed-in-the-wool party apparatchiks have predicted. Now the same party funcionaries are carrying laptops. Years later, when the economy of India was liberalised, they forecast that the economic reforms would be disasterous as it would lead to a surrender of the country’s interests to the ‘imperialists’, by which they mean, the United States. The policies of liberalisation and globalisation, however, proved to be good for the country, by all standards. Their latest pack of lies, profusely used during the campaign for the byelections in the coastal areas of Kerala, is that the Indo-ASEAN Free Trade Agreement will badly affect farmers and fishermen in the State as it permits import of fish and farm produces from the ASEAN countries. The defeat of the commies in the three byelections in the State clearly shows that the people refused to buy the alarmist propaganda of any kind.
The walls of falsehood that the communists have erected have crumbled. It will take some time to clear the history’s debris and till then they will carry on with their old tricks to pull the wool over the eyes of the people.

Islamophobia and Islamophilia

Politically correct liberals never miss any opportunity to join Muslim leaders and writers to howl down anything that they perceive as anti-Islamic. The term 'Islamophobia' has come in handy for them to silence even fair criticism of Islam or Islamic practices while they dub strident and even violent reactions of Muslims as aberrations or as actions of the fundamentalist fringe. A recent op-ed piece in an Indian newspaper has once again brought the issue of Islamophobia to the limelight of public debate as it draws on the culture of victimhood so deep-rooted in the Muslim psyche.

The writer of the article is doing exactly what he feels is inappropriate to do: "conflate incidents which may be no more than just local difficulties and blow them up into an anti-Muslim conspiracy." The 'anti-Muslim conspiracy' is packaged in a different brand name so fashionable among Muslims leaders and their politically correct liberal supporters: Islamophobia. The community would have been served well if the author had highlighted issues that can allow the Muslim masses to do introspection and free them from this entrenched notion of being under siege. Portraying Muslims as victims of somebody's prejudices only helps perpetuate the siege mentality.

True, many non-Muslims everywhere have lot of prejudices about Muslims just as many Muslims everywhere have prejudices about non-Muslims. But presenting some of the instances of such prejudices as representing a form of irrational fear (phobia) goes over the top. Islamophobia is also a convenient tool to gag critics of radical Islam. As the British journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (who is a Muslim) says: "all too often Islamophobia is used to blackmail society." If somebody fears radical Islam and opposes Islam as an ideology of political control, she is likely to face the charge of being Islamophobic.

Take the Burqa issue, for example, that promises to become a major issue of cultural identity for Muslims, while the black veil that is increasingly becoming popular among the Muslims even in the Western societies is rightly viewed as a symbol primitive gender inequality and suppression of women. What is wrong if the French President Nicolas Sarkozy calls for banning wearing burqa in public in his country which cherishes all those secular Enlightenment values of human dignity, freedom and gender equality? If the same set of values prompted a British Minister to walk out of a Muslim wedding reception in protest against segregation of men and women attending the party and thus to highlight the primitive culture of gender discrimination, can we call his action Islamophobic? Should be tolerate all primitive practices in the name of accommodating the sentiments of the communities practising them? Suppose, an upper caste Hindu hosts a marriage reception where upper caste and lower caste guests are segregated. Is it ok and don't you find any problem attending that marriage?

The article refers to the expulsion of Tariq Ramadan as an adviser to the Dutch city of Rotterdam (whose Mayor is incidentally a Muslim) after he hosted a weekly TV show on Press TV which is financed by the Iranian regime that has brutally suppressed opposition protestors challenging the re-election of Ahmadinejad as Iran's president. Ramadan would not have been appointed as advisor to the city in the first place and Ahmed Aboutaleb would not have been elected its Mayor if Islamophobia in the Netherlands had been very strong. Another incident that the author mentions is the call of a right-wing party in Switzerland for a ban on the construction of minarets in that country. The party has only launched a signature campaign against the minarets and not resorted to any violent action that critics of Islam often face. We should not forget that the Dutch society turned suspicious about Islam after the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was hacked to death by a Muslim immigrant in Amsterdam on November 2, 2004 for his making a short film critical of Islam. Violent protestors in Pakistan burnt the British queen in effigy when Salman Rushdie was bestowed knighthood. A group of Muslim protestors recently resorted to violence to protest against a Kolkata-based newspaper for publishing an article that criticised religious intolerance including that of Islam. Danish cartoons of the Prophet of Islam led to violent protests by Muslims in many countries.

The term Islamophobia may be useful to intimidate anyone who wants to criticise Islam but it indirectly lends credence to primitive Islamic practices that strengthen the anti-Islamic prejudices. Islamophobia is not a self-evident and uncritical idea as there is no shortage of writers, Muslims included, who have dismissed as false the accusation that there is Islamophobia in the West. Those brandishing the Islamophobia word cannot be oblivious to the equally strong charge that many Western leaders are indulging in Islamophilia, a charge that is not wholly unfounded. In 2007, the UN passed a resolution calling on all nations to 'combat defamation of all religions, Islam and Muslims in particular'. Earlier, the British government, in a bid to appease Muslim leaders, passed controversial legislation banning 'incitement to religious hatred'.

British writer Kenan Malik says obnoxious arguments of people like Canadian writer Mark Steyn (who said 'if you can’t outbreed the enemy, cull ‘em') no more make Western societies institutionally Islamophobic than the actions of Mohammed Atta (who piloted the plane into the World Trade Centre) make Islam an institutionally violent religion. An international public opinion survey conducted by Globscan in 2007, more than 75 per cent of people in Britain felt that there was common ground between Muslims and non-Muslims.

The politically correct liberals who make a hue and cry about what they see as Islamophobia in the West were not heard expressing their outrage when a group of Muslim residents of the Malaysian city of Sha Alam on August 28 marched from a local mosque to the government office there carrying a severed head of a cow to protest against the government plans to relocate a 150-year old Hindu temple to their locality. The Allah Akbar-chanting protestors put the cow head at the gate of the office and spat on it and there was no response from the police personnel deployed there. This happened in an Islamic country often upheld as a model of tolerance, where the 32-year old Muslim model Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarno is facing Islamic caning punishment for the crime of drinking a beer, where two years ago, the Muslim-born woman Lina Joy's bid to convert to Christianity to marry her Christian boyfriend (inter-faith marriage is not allowed in Malaysia) failed, and where the Hindu woman Revathi Masoosai was forcibly separated from her Hindu husband and infant child and sent to an Islamic rehabilitation camp just because she was born a Muslim and therefore barred from leaving Islam.

It is puzzling to see bleeding-heart liberals keeping their silence about anti-Western sentiments in Islamic countries. There was no outcry in Islamic countries when Iranian president Ahamedinejad called for eliminating Israel. It was not a call from a crazy journalist like Mark Steyn but one from the president of a powerful Islamic nation.

Pseudosciences

A few years ago, I met a Yoga master in my town, a soft-spoken and lanky man in his seventies. On his persuasion, I attended his Yoga sessions for a few weeks. I think I paid no attention to what the old man was lecturing before every session began mostly attended by people above 50 with health problems ranging from diabetes to hypertension. But I could barely turn my attention away from his sermon on one occasion when he started speaking about 'Kundalini'. His refrain was that Kundalini (which he translated as libidinal energy) could be awakened by rigorous Yogic meditation by creating a vacuum inside the body through 'sushumna nadi' (which he described was a channel in the spine that could be visualised only in yogic meditation).

From the rapt attention that he was getting from his audience, one can easily recongnise that most of those sitting cross-legged in front of him were vulnerable to superstitious and paranormal beliefs and ideas. Is there something in us humans that makes us all easily gullible when we are confronted by weird beliefs that have no scientific basis? Why do even smart people often fall prey to modern forms of superstitions such as psychic connection, naturopathy, homoeopathy, herbal de-toxification, Reiki, life force, negative energy, positive energy, chiropractice, biofeedback, organic food...?

There is no dearth of miracles in religious mythology and religions inspire the masses not with sophisticated doctrines of theology but by appealing to their gullibility about miracles. Jesus Christ is believed to have walked on water without any props, turned water into wine and Muhammad is said to have ascended to heaven in a night journey known as Mi'raj. Those miracles happened long time back. In our own times, Sai Baba continues to bring out holy ash out of nowhere and politicians in India continue to consult astrologers, albeit secretly. Even as science has brought us progress which alleviated many of our problems and improved our health and increased our life expectancy, we still tend to rubbish science and scientific spirit and run after remedies and ideas unsupported by empirical evidence so dear to science. People drive cars, fly in planes and use mobile phones - things developed from technology based on science. But they are equally susceptible to irrationality as they simply turn to pseudosciences for relief, relaxation, wellness and happiness. Isn't it a a paradox and a mystery?

I am surprised when I find even educated people passionately defending Homoeopathy when I tell them it is a pseudoscience as it violates fundamental laws of science. When I asked one ardent advocate of Homoeopathy if he could prove any claimed pharmacological effectiveness of highly diluted Homoeopathic drugs, his response was weirder: that their pharmacological properties could not be tested in conventional labs exposed the limitation of those labs! In fact, he was admitting that the Homoeopathic substance, if tested in the labs, could not be distinguished from water, but he was not willing to abandon his belief, supported by his personal anecdotal 'evidence' and personal testimonies, that there was something in it which science could not understand.

Our vulnerablity to superstitions and our passion for paranormal things seem to stem from the human legacy of an inclination for finding easy and satisfying answers to what we feel as the unknown and the ungraspable. For example, we tend to attribute it to a psychic connection when we dream of someone and later comes to know that he dies at around that time. This legacy is the breeding ground where pseudosciences grow and perpetuate. For a rational person, a pseudoscience is easily distinguishable from science since the former is an idea that claims to be scientific though unsupported by any empirical evidence, however cleverly it uses scientific-sounding language to describe how it works.

Pseudosciences are unbelievably popular in areas of health care and they often appear as complementary and alternative medical systems that thrive without any scientific hypothesis or experimental data. The so-called health benefits of these systems are often accepted uncritically and these pseudoscientific practices will thrive as long we are driven by credulity. As Brian Dunning, the author of Skeptoid: Critical Analysis of Pop Phenomena says, human beings are naturally predisposed to be excited about any new weird stuff because we love the unexplained. His 40-minute video presentation Here Be Dragons identifies the 'red flags' that will help us identify pseudosciences.

Practioners of pseudosciences, according to Dunning, often use authoritative imagery (such as a lab coat, celebrity endorsement, certification from institutes and academies) to lend an appearance of credibility to their claims or invoke ancient wisdom (in the case of Chinese acupunture, Indian Ayurveda or Japanese Reiki) or appeal to our confirmation bias (our tendencies to remember events that coincide with our beliefs and ignore those that don't) or play on our inclination to confuse causation and correlation (we can say that eating rice causes black hair since people who eat lot of rice have black hair) or offer red herrings (often irrelevant piece of information that distracts from the topic, a tendency often found in conspiracy theories) or lay out proof by verbosity by offering huge volume of information, more claims and allegations on more subjects about more people and ideas than a person can ever possibly responds to or talk about mystic energy (using scientific word energy out of context) or allege suppression by authority (accusing the mainstream science of suppressing their claims and proofs) or brag that their products are all natural or attempt to secure ideological support (meaning political or religious backing).

Coming back to the question why we humans who are otherwise smart and intelligent are credulous when it comes to weird and supernatural beliefs Common argument is that they have placebo effects. Richard Dawkins, however, gives a Darwinian explanation to people's vulnerability to believe in things that are false such as religious faiths. He argues in The God Delusion that our propensity to believe in religion may be a by-product of our tendency to believe and obey our parents that natural selection has built in children's brains for survival benefits. The flip side of trusting obedience, according to Dawkins, is slavish gullibility: "The inevitable by-product is vulnerability to infection by mind viruses."

The new age superstitions are mind viruses that can infect the minds of even intelligent people because our vulnerability to such bizarre ideas and religious beliefs are by-products of our childhood credulity and deference to authority, which are cognitive mechanisms or adaptations such as romantic love, attachment and empathy that have evolved for purposes of survival. Evolutionary psychiatrist Andy Thomson develops this concept to explain the human susceptibility to belief in supernatural things. In his recent lecture Why We Believe in God, he says that human mind, an integrated collection of problem-solving devices, has evolved over deep time. Our vulnerability to supernatural things, according to him, is a by-product of our ancient childhood adaptation for credulity just as our craving for fatty food and sweets, for example, are by-products of our ancient adaptations for fat and sugar crucial for our survival.

In most people, credulity often goes hand in hand with a distrust for science and it achievements and argue that science does not know everything. No scientist has ever said that science knows everything and if science knows everything science looses its purpose. But the advocates of pseudoscience often accuse science of engaging in a conspiracy to suppress their findings. This argument is very vocal among Homoeopathic practitioners when they say that big pharmaceutical companies are suppressing the truths about Homoeopathy's efficacy because they (the pharmaceutical companies) are making huge profit. This argument cannot be more silly. Instead of indulging in the expensive conspiracy of suppressing the 'truths' about Homoeopathy drugs, these pharmaceutical companies can easily pocket hefty profit by making very inexpensive Homoeopathy drugs that are nothing but heavily diluted solutions on sugar pills.

As Dawkins says in his documentary Enemies of Reason, today a war is being fought against reason and medical advances are challenged with irrational beliefs. "A third of us now spend over 1.6 billion pounds a year on superstitious alternative remedies which, as far as the evidence can show, don't work." Another industry that is built upon celebrity endorsement and uncritical acceptance is organic food. It is a two-billion pound industry. A recent research by British scientists shows that organic food gives no extra nutritional benefits over the ordinary cheaper foodstuff. The whole idea of organic farming is nonsense, but many intelligent people are enamoured of the extra health benefits offered by organic food. The quantity of animal manure, the human waste and the plant residue required for organic farming is so huge that we have to cut down millions of acres of forests in the world.

Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution that revolutionised food production in the 1960, debunks in an interview in 2000 the very concept of organic farming as ridiculous: "At the present time, approximately 80 million tons of nitrogen nutrients are utilised each year. If you tried to produce this nitrogen organically, you would require an additional 5 or 6 billion head of cattle to supply the manure. How much wild land would you have to sacrifice just to produce the forage for these cows?" He also figures out that even if we can use all the organic material that we have and get them back on the soil, we can't feed more than four billion people.

Such debunking is necessary when when pseudosciences take advantage of people's gullibility. That requires a rational and sceptical world view.

Leszek Kolakowski

The Berlin Wall symbolised the Iron Curtain of communism that sought to project social reality through the prism of communist doctrines. The demolition of the wall on November 9, 1989 therefore marked the symbolic collapse of an evil ideology that sustained itself for decades in the erstwhile Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc countries in Europe through coercion and by creating a constant state of fear among their citizens.

The end of the evil empire that Marxists believed was impregnable has deflated their sense of certainty about history, social progress and future. Many Marxist sympathisers have tried to find relief by taking recourse to blaming Stalin and Stalinism for the 'setback' while hardcore Marxists in an attempt to put up a brave face have come forward to staunchly defend Stalinism. Communists of all colours today have no reason to continue their belief that the ideology that they passionately espouse is still relevant. Marxism as a social project is no more relevant than any brand of political or religions utopian ideas. Living as we are in the early years of 21 st century, we need no refresher course to understand that any doctrine that envisages an utopian society has a latent streak of coercion, terror and violence. We have seen this in Stalinism, Pol Potism, Maoism and in Talibanism.

Leszek Kolakowski, a dissident Polish philosopher and historian of ideas revered as an icon of anti-communism in Poland, is among the thinkers and writers whose exposure of the ideology has finally brought it down. Having spent half of his life in exile from Poland, he died in Oxford at the age of 81 on July 17, 2009. Kolakowski's three-volume Main Currents of Marxism is an exposition of his view that far from being an aberration, Stalinism is a logical end product of Marxism. Like Karl Popper (1902-1994) who was attracted to Marxism in his early years, joined the Social Democratic Party of Austria that fully espoused the Marxist ideology and then became disillusioned with that ideology, Kolakowski attacked the historicism of Marxism for what it is: a delusion.

Marxism has always claimed superior insight into the 'laws of history' and it was this 'insight' that often helped Marxists justify totalitarian communist regimes. Hegel and Marx, in Popper's view, are guilty of upholding the view that history has a pattern and a meaning that can be used in the present to predict and fashion the future. Kolakowski also hits hard at the Hegelian and Marxist belief in the 'laws of history'. In his 2003 speech upon receipt of the first Kluge Prize instituted by the Library of Congress in the U.S., he said: 'Human history is a collection of unpredictable accidents, and we can all easily cite any number of instances where an event that was clearly decisive in shaping the destiny of mankind for subsequent decades or centuries could have gone a different way than it did; there was nothing necessary in its happening or in its results.'

History is concerned with unrepeatable events that are unique and particular. The Marxist doctrine of historical materialism is based on a belief that there is a hidden evolution going on behind historical events. There is a trace of social Darwinism in this idea of evolution in history. Social Darwinists portray human history in terms of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, the selective adaptation that shapes the natural environment. Engels in his speech at the graveside of Karl Marx in 1883 said that 'just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history.'This half-baked attempt to fit the communist doctrine of progress in human productive activities and class struggles between the exploiting and the exploited into the social Darwinist theory of the 'survival of the fittest' (a term that Darwin never used) is battered by Kolakowski when he says that history is unlike the natural sciences as it does not try to establish general law guiding it. He says that 'there is no such thing as "the law of history,"in the sense of true and justifiable statements that would tell us that in certain well-defined conditions certain well-defined phenomena invariable occur.'

The whole edifice of Marxism is built upon this notion of the 'laws of history' that allows the Marxists to claim that Marxism is a science and that they can predict future evolution of historical events on a 'scientific' basis. Anti-Marxist thinkers like Kolakowski demolishes the edifice with their critical examination of its tall claims. There is hardly any prediction of Marx or Marxists that has not turned out to be falsse. Marx predicted that bourgeois society will vanish. It never happened. Communist Manifesto predicted that the working class, engaged in a struggle with the bourgeoisie, was the political force which would accomplish the destruction of capitalism and a transition to socialism. It sounds funny today. Countries having capitalist economies today are more democratic and open than communist or Islamic countires. Private profit, after all, is not so bad as Marxists would have us believe. In fact, it has become an impetus to innovation and entrepreneurial activity. To the disbelief of die-hard Marxists, social development has not moved according to the script drafted by Marx and Engels and experimented by Lenin and Stalin.

Just like any other political ideology, communism that inspired dreams of a classless society turned out to be a dogma whose enforcement required killing of its opponents, their deportation to Siberia or labour camps of the Gulag, establishment of the police state, torture, and censorship. The breaching of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago marked the crumbling of that ideology that appeared to have been here to stay for many many more years. Kolakowski is one of those brave thinkers whose portrayal of the true face of that ideology also played a great role in bringing it down.

Red Hypocrisy

The rugged electoral landscape of India doesn’t seem to offer any heartening idea of what the outcome of the country’s 15 th Parliament election is going to be. The three-cornered contest -with the centrist Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA), the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) and the Left-supported third alternative actively in the fray - is all set to throw up a fractured mandate and split the secular votes of the UPA and the Left parties and their supporters. 

It is too early to hazard any guess on the electoral outcome of the Parliament elections beginning on April 16. The Congress is hopeful of emerging as the single largest bloc in Parliament and is confident that it can form the government with its supporters. The BJP is also making its calculations to lead a government. The crucial question during the electioneering now is whether the Left-led third alternative comprising regional parties led by half-a-dozen Prime Ministerial aspirants can secure enough seats in Parliament so that it can seek the Congress support to stake claim to the gaddi in Delhi. We can expect the corridors of power in Delhi to be chock-a-block with power borkers of all hues engaged in bargaining and intrigues after the election. The Left-led by Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) will be playing its own role in the post-poll scheme of things and in the scheming.

Every party in the country has its own bagful of hypocrisy. But the CPI-M’s duplicity cannot be clearer as it struggles to reconcile itself with contradictions. The Left parties including the CPI-M gave outside support to the UPA government during the first four years of its term and then withdrew the support in protest against the Indo-U.S. nuclear issue. The CPI-M is now claiming credit to all the flagship projects of the UPA government such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme (NREGP) that assures 100 days employment for the rural poor and the Right to Information Act. But it faults the Congress for all the ‘neo-liberal’ and ‘pro-imperialist’ policies of the government.

The Left’s 'anti-neoliberal' and 'anti-imperialist' (read anti-U.S.) positions are always rhetorical. During the first four years of the UPA rule, the Left was just barking but not biting. It withdrew support when the nuclear deal reached its final phase. Let us recap the Left stand on the deal as the nuclear partnership underwent different phases of its evolution. The Prime Minister announced the nuclear deal with the U.S. during his visit in July 2005. After that India voted with the U.S. against Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) twice, thus endorsing the ‘imperialist agenda’ of the U.S. If it had been serious about its 'anti-imperialist' slogan, the Left should have withdrawn support to the UPA government then. Instead it intensified its opposition when the deal was in its final stage. But it then softened its stand on the deal in the wake of the Nandigram incidents in March 2007 and allowed the UPA government to proceed with nuclear safeguard negotiations in the IAEA as a trade-off. As a quid pro quo, the Congress was largely silent on the Nandigram issue.

So much for the anti-imperialist posturing of the CPI(M) or the Left. The double-speak of the CPI-M is unambiguously evident in its stand on globalisation which it treats as ‘imperialist’. Despite its opposition to globalisation, its governments in Kerala and West Bengal have no qualms about borrowing funds from funding agencies such as the Asian Development Bank and ideas from international consultancy firms such as McKinsey. The controversial SEZ Act was passed unanimously in Parliament in early 2005. The CPI-M-led government in West Bengal sought to suppress the agitation in Nandigram against its bid to acquire fertile agricultural land for an Indonesian company to set up a chemical hub. 

The CPI-M’s excuse for its duplicity is that it cannot fully apply its agenda in the States it rules because of the ‘neo-liberal constraints’. The flipside of the story is that the party that claims credit for the UPA government’s pro-poor NREGP did not implement a similar legislation in West Bengal (where it has been ruling for more than three decades) that can assure at least 50 days work to the rural poor. Lal salam (red salute) to the comrades.

Licence or Right?

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in his address to a group of Muslim girls in New Delhi on the occasion of the celebration of Milad-e-Sherif (birth anniversary of the Prophet of Islam) said that no one had the licence to ‘criticise or run down’ other religions. On the face of it, Dr. Singh’s words convey a secular and democratic principle that no one should badmouth any religion. Fair enough. In a decent civilised society, one is not expected to malign anything, let alone religion. But I feel rather disturbed by his statement that one should not ‘criticise’ other religions. Does that mean that one has the right to criticise one’s own religion?

Perhaps the Prime Minister’s good-intentioned sermon can be construed as meaning that criticism of a religion should come from within itself. If this logic is applied, a person belonging to Islam has no right to criticise practice of caste system in the name of Hinduism. The caste system, however, is constitutionally outlawed in India. But there are retrograde practices practised in the name of religions, such as polygamy allowed in Islam. Can women’s rights activists belonging to other religions criticise the practice of polygamy in Islam? If the answer is ‘no’, then all of us, Hindus, Muslim, Christians and those from other religions are heading towards a sanitised zone where everybody will strictly adhere to an unwritten code of self-censoring. If a religion demands that it be insulated against public scrutiny, it is all likely to have a set of beliefs and irrational practices that cannot stand the test of such a scrutiny. However innocuous Dr. Singh’s words may sound, they represent the voice of religious orthodoxy which is engaged in an all out battle against liberal secular democratic values that have surpassed retrograde value systems integral to different religions.

Dr. Singh’s advice also represents the scourge of cultural relativism that is often presented as intellectually fashionable in liberal democracies because it is defended in the name of multi-culturalism and based on philosophical postmodernism. Shorn of all its intellectual trappings, cultural relativism is nothing but revival of identity-based tribalism often repackaged as post-colonial and anti-imperialist quest of disparate marginalised social groups for authenticity. The idea of ‘universal humankind’, proponents of relativism argue, is just a concept of assimilation of the marginalised identities by the dominant identity. As author Irshad Manji, a critic of cultural relativism, says: "The entire world is steeped in politics of identity which compels talented individuals to conform to group thinking, to the religious, cultural and ideological correctness of their tribes.". This politics of identity highlights "different identities at the expense of different ideas", she argues in her conversation with Salman Rushdie who agrees with her. Rushdie debunks cultural relativism: "There is a sense in which multi-culturalism is an obvious fact. We live in multi-cultural, multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-faith world...That is not going to unhappen...But when it [multi-culturalism] decays into cultural relativism, that is, if you like, the end of moral sense...If it is your culture to impose cliterectomy on women, it is fine..."

Treating all cultures as equal goes against the Enlightment values that are universal. If a religious doctrine or prescription, which is against the values applicable to the entire humankind such as gender equality, human rights, equality before law, is still being practised by a section of the population, that doctrine or prescription is subject of scrutiny and criticism in a democratic society. If we choose to adhere to the Prime Minister's opinion, we have to keep mum even when, for example, a prominent Muslim leader (as happened in Kerala) openly defends polygamy citing reasons that are equally outrageous to men and women. In a liberal democratic society, every one has the right to hold such views provided he or she accepts the right of others to criticise them. No one can blame you if you believe privately that your religion isthe best religion, that your Holy Book contains all knowledge and answers to all problems. You cannot expect these beliefs to be protected from criticism if they are announced in public.

The authority of the Church that held absolute control over Europe from fourth to the 13 th century would not have eroded if its dogmatism and intolerance had not come under repeated intellectual attacks from freethinkers and scientific inquirers. The Enlightenment and its system of universal values would not have come into existence if the Church had been given the privilege of being outside the purview of critical scrutiny. The Church was the primary target of the Enlightenment as it inaugurated a departure from the religious authority. A major weapon used by Enlightenment thinkers was freedom of expression, though the Church fought back with blasphemy laws. The defeat of the Church in that battle was decisive in shaping modern emancipatory value systems that have defined our modern concept of democracy. If somebody asks us to forgo what the humankind has won through centuries of struggles, not for us to give that up as if it is a worthless gift that does not have any utility today.

The Bastion Under Siege

We may not admit it. Nay, we won't, lest we deny ourselves even our firm foothold in what we believe is our last bastion already under siege: our commitment to what we think is our inalienable rights that maximise our freedoms and happiness. Perhaps it is a matter of time before our embattled citadel of freedoms is trounced by those who don't give a hoot about what is valuable to us, namely, our right to freedom of speech, right to mind our own businesses, right to happiness and our right to criticise. Yes, we don't admit that all of us are set to loose the battle, because that is as good or bad as admitting defeat when the battle is not yet over. So we can afford to pretend that our cosy little walled city of joy built upon our cherished ideals of freedom, democracy and reason, is not facing the prospect of any imminent fall.

Let us ignore the latest assault in the form of a violent protest against a Kolkata-based newspaper. We will continue to pretend that the arrest of the Editor and the Publisher of the The Statesman for publishing an op-ed article that has 'hurt' the inflammatory sentiments of a religion and its followers is not a serious issue to reckon with. The arrest was just a formality as Ravindra Kumar and Anand Sinha, the editor and publisher of the daily, were charged under Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code that forbids "deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings". The arrest calmed the violent protests by some Muslim organisations in Kolkata against the newspaper that published the article in the first week of February. It was originally an article published in the British daily The Independent on January 28. There was no outcry in the Indian mainstream media against what they themselves know was a threat to the very raison d'etre of their existence. "If we were unable to fulfill this role [provide space to all view points], we would rather cease publication with honour than compromise our basic values." These words from a note issued by The Statesman in the wake of the backlash should have come from the collective consciousness of the mainstream media in India. But discretion is the better part of valour. Yes, we had better tell the truth in a language full of tact and circumspection, if that truth may hurt a significant number of people. That doesn't mean, we can argue by putting up a brave face, that we are surrendering our basic values. On the contrary, we are just pretending that we don't mind those values for the time being.

As I am keying in this post, I ask myself 'Who is this generic "we" that I think I belong to?' Can I belong to "them" who is opposed to "we"? Is it possible that both "we" and "them" are right? There is no absolute right or absolute wrong, I hear somebody telling me. Truth is just one side of the story or one among different stories, the voice tells me inviting me to "them". I am reluctant to accept the invitation, but I decide to go to their side for joining them to see their world view, which, as my relativist voice tells me, is just one way of understanding the world in which we live.

Seeing from this side of the divide, the bastion I left looks invincible, unassailable and well fortified. It is built upon strong foundations laid by Baruch Spinoza who has said that "pleasure is man's transition from a lesser state of perfection to a greater" and that the end of the state is "to lead men to live by, and to exercise, a free reason"; Voltaire who states in his Treatise on Toleration that "The man who says to me, 'Believe as I do, or God will damn you,' will presently say, 'Believe as I do, or I shall assassinate you': John Locke who has observed that the "end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom"; and Bertrand Russel who has written that "[T]he most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way."

There is comfort on this side of the barrier as it is full of certainties defined by the absolute authority of an absolute dogma. Relativism is a tactic. Firm conviction that 'God is on our side' is its hallmark and looked from this side, the other side, however strong it appears, looks divided, disoriented and always guilty. Democracy may be an alien idea on this side but there is no dearth of homilies meant for the other side: "Even in a democratic society with strong protections for freedom of speech and press, there are still limits that must be imposed", goes one; "as a society, we must take into account the sensibilities of others", blurts another. On this side, you are told what to eat, what to read, what cloth to wear, who we should talk to and who we should meet. There is always a Rubicon that you cannot cross, a belief that you cannot challenge, a thought that you cannot think...

Everything is black and white here. No doubting, no questioning, no debating. Free expression is permitted here as long as it doesn't challenge the dogma. Grand ideas that form the core values of the other side look ridiculous to this side. For those inhabiting this side, human rights, gender equality, freedom of thought and such other principles are not universally applicable ones. All human beings are not equal, but all cultures are, they say. Here they think that men have more rights than women and that men and women belonging to 'our' faith and culture are superior to those of other faiths and culture. Here they call for their culture that violates human rights to be treated as equal (if possible, even superior) to another culture that respects human rights as a universal value. Looking from the vantage point of certitudes, the citadel I have left to have a feel of its other side looks unsure of its own founding principles.

I am back to "our" citadel surrounded by "them" after the imaginative journey. It is clearly a matter of time before the night falls and those who guard the fortifications of freedom let their guard down. Have I already started hearing canons battering the walls built of bricks and mortar that we thought will withstand any assault? Knocks at my door? Have I already been gagged? Or is it just a nightmare? Am I afraid of people who believe that they have a monopoly on righteousness?

Are you scary? Sorry, I have no intention to make you scary. Let me conclude this with a funny story. Bjorn Atldax, a Swedish jeans manufacturer, has designed a jeans brand with an anti-Christian logo: a skull with a cross turned upside down on its forehead. He told The Associated Press that "I have a great dislike for organized religion."He says he wants to make young people question Christianity". He also told that that he has plans "to make something anti-Hindu because I think its caste system is awful." He said he was not considering any anti-Islamic designs because "there are already a lot of anti-Islamic sentiments."

Defending Free Speech

The 1979 English comedy film Monty Python’s Life of Brian was advertised in Sweden as “The film so funny that it was banned in Norway”. It is a religious satire that parodies the life of Jesus Christ as it tells the story of a young Jewish man called Brian Cohen who lives in the same era and location as Jesus Christ and is mistaken for the Saviour. A British magazine describes the film as the greatest comedy film of all time. The film has many hilarious scenes that can be dubbed blasphemous by Christians. After its release, the movie was banned for some time in a few countries like Ireland and Norway and some States in the U.S. But there was no street protest, no flag burning, no embassy attacks and no killing. In February 2007, the Church of St. Thomas the Martyr in Newcastle upon Tyne in England screened the film in the church, defying the opposition from some Christian groups. Rev. Jonathan Adams, one of the clergy of the church, defended the screening saying that the film was not mocking Jesus but highlighted hypocrisy and stupidity that can affect religion.

I often feel that our world would have been lot more peaceful and happier if there had been more people like Rev. Jonathan Adams who advocate and tolerate free speech that is so fundamental in secular democracy. Unfortunately, we have lot of clerics and priests who will incite mobs to attack expression of personal freedoms. Zealots as they are, they cannot be expected to behave differently. But I can’t understand when even sensible and secular-minded people argue that religion is outside the purview of criticism and satire in works of art and literature or in public discourse. Why should religion be given such a privilege? Should religion and religious issues be viewed as off-limits or too sacred to be satirised or criticised?

A secular democracy cannot function without a collective awareness among its adherents that their beliefs, however passionately they may hold them, are just opinions in the realm of public discourse. No belief or opinion or view is marked out as issues excluded from criticism or ridicule in this realm. You cannot expect such a realm of openness and debate in a country such as the erstwhile Soviet Union where Communism was the official ‘theology’ and where any expression of opinion or view that was against the official political dogma would be treated as blasphemous. Those who argue that religion should be respected and kept out of this realm of public discourse are tacitly acknowledging the privileging of religious dogmas when they say that nothing should be said or done that will hurt the sentiments of believers.

Like any other set of ideas and views, religion is not outside the dominion of public discourse. In fact, it is too important a subject to be excluded from public debate and scrutiny. If my neighbour gives away his under-aged daughter in marriage and justifies it in the name of his or her religion, I cannot simply say that it is a purely private issue. It is a social issue no less important than any other issues that come up for public debate in various forms, as a subject of satire, of public scrutiny and of critique. Should I respect the call for ban on stem cell research by some groups of believers and turn a blind eye to the fact that the research will have a great impact on treatment of ailments such as Parkinson’s disease? Should I ignore the social implications of religious beliefs on a naïve argument that I should not hurt the sentiments of the faithful?

A secular democracy allows room for dissent. If what I say can be proved to be defamatory under the secular law, I can be prosecuted and punished. But calling for my death is stifling free speech. The argument that we should censor ourselves if what we want to say or do is going to hurt the sentiments of believers is worse. If respect for established belief systems had been the thumb rule of every society, there would not have been much social progress.

Here is a quote from the satirical movie directed by Terry Jones that Rev. Jonathan Adams has allowed to screen in his church:

Wise Man #1: Ahem

Brian’s Mother: Oh!

(She falls over in chair)

Brian’s Mother: Who are you?

Wise Man #2: We are three wise men.

Brian’s Mother: What?

Wise Man #1: We are three wise men.

Brian’s Mother: Well, what are you doing creeping around a cow shed at two o’clock in the morning? That doesn’t sound very wise to me.

If anybody feels that his or her sentiments are hurt by this satiric dialogue and other similar scenes in the film, blame the sentiments that are so vulnerable to be hurt.

Mind and moral policing

I

Members of a right-wing Hindu group attacked and cut the hair of three couples on the last Valentine’s Day near Taj Mahal, that 17 th century monument to love built by Mughal Emperor Shajahan in memory of his favourite wife. The same day, a group of burqa-clad women belonging to a fundamentalist Muslim group in Kashmir vandalised a shop selling Valentine cards and a restaurant that attracted lovers. These instances of moral policing in India by fringe groups such as the Shiv Sena, Sri Ram Sene and the Kashmir-based Dukhtaran-e-Millat were meant to express their outrage against the trappings of ‘degenerate and promiscuous Western culture’ that threaten traditional religious values. A few weeks before, a group of Sri Ram Sene activists barged into a pub in Managalore in Karnataka State and roughed up girls sitting there.

On another Valentine’s Day 20 years ago, Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa calling for the death of Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses. That fatwa was arguably the first open war cry against individual freedoms in modern times. It marked the beginning of the practice of treating as blasphemy any expression of freedom that questions 'traditional values and religion'. The Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh who made a 10-minute film Submission which touches on the plight of women in Islamic societies was killed by a Muslim immigrant youth while he was bicycling to work on November 2, 2004. Author Ayan Hirsi Ali, who wrote the script for the film, has received several death threats. On May 10, 2007, a group of Sangh Parivar activists stormed into the Department of Fine Arts, M.S. University in Baroda in Gujarat, and vandalised a painting exhibition there. Majlis-e-Ittihadul Muslimeen legislators manhandled Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen in the Press Club in Hyderabad on August 9, 2007. The mind policing has begun to cast its menacingly long shadow on how and what we think and express. The free zones of cultural and intellectual expressions are growingly being encircled by expanding darkness of intolerance, bigotry and hate-speech.

Our civil liberties are under threat from the marauding forces of obscurantism out to put out anything that gives off sparkles of freedom: freedom of thought, of conscience, of religion and from religion. By extension, democracy itself is in danger of being engulfed by the advocates of culture fatwa of different shades. For, democracy ceases to be democracy if the foundational principles it is built upon collapse.

II

The narrative of 'religion or culture under attack' from practitioners of free speech and free thinking is an extension of the mindset that treats Western Enlightenment values of liberal democracy as inferior to ‘Our (non-Western) Culture’. This sense of ‘superiority’ allows them to be self-appointed crusaders to protect their religion and culture from the ‘corrupting’ influence of Western notion of free inquiry and freedom of expression. They fear that the influx of social changes that come with the universal values of gender equality, human rights, equal access to law and due process that are integral to the Enlightenment spirit of the West will undermine their ‘superior’ and patriarchal religion or culture. Central to this unsettling sense of an imminent threat to ‘tradition’ is the fear of female sexuality. For them the whole notion of ‘tradition’ crumbles if women come out and uphold their authority over their sexuality. What else could be the reason why obscurantist outfits sanctimoniously advocate the role of women in sustaining ‘tradition’?

What is good and what is not good for us is a moral question that we humans always ask in our daily life. We derive our morals from our collective idea of what is good and what is bad in the time in which we live. The collective idea has emerged from our shared experiences, achievements and progress. Slavery was acceptable centuries ago. Today, even denial of political freedom is treated as unacceptable. Philosophers and thinkers from Socrates to Galileo were faced with the charge of blasphemy. Killing or burning at stake people for their views is not an acceptable response in a liberal democracy. The right to freedom of speech is recognised as a human right under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

One cannot make a political call for restricting and limiting this freedom just as one cannot demand reversal of abolition of slavery. Slavery, restriction on freedoms, denial of human rights, totalitarianism and suppression of critical inquiry are now universally accepted as bad for humanity even as there are sections that entertained the desire to bring people back to the times when there was slavery or killing of people for blasphemy or inequality before law or suppression of dissent.

After Independence, India opted to be a liberal democracy modeled on British Parliamentary democracy. Despite all deficiencies, history has proved the usefulness of democratic exercise in India. The fundamental rights enshrined in the Indian Constitution guarantee civil liberties including rights to equality, right to freedom, right to freedom of religion, among others. There may still be inequalities in the country, but these fundamental rights have helped us overturn the social inequalities and abolish untouchability. If the advocates of ‘tradition’ had a stronger voice among the leadership of the freedom movement, we would still be living with those social ills. Thank goodness, the ancestors of moral and mind policemen of today were not strong then as they are not strong now. How many of us will want institutionalised caste system back, our freedoms restricted? Who among us want to live under the Taliban rule?

Imagine there was no Enlightenment. We would be living in a dark age where secularism, rationalism, human rights, liberal democracy, equal access to law, due process and freedom of conscience and expression meant nothing. We would not be free to read books we want to read, free to practise our faiths, to doubt dogmas, to discuss and to criticise. There would be no science, no technology, no life saving medicines, no eradication of mass-killing diseases. We would be living in the comfort zones of certainties set by ‘tradition’ and religious faiths. We would be living without electricity, computers, communication networks, the Internet... The list goes on.

III

Enforcers of culture and moral fatwas indirectly derive their inspiration from relativist ideas of postmodernism. For a relativist, there is no absolute truth, no ‘grand narrative’, as Jean-Francois Lyotard writes in Postmodern Condition (1979) and no universal criteria. There are only fragmented discourses and a variety of criteria. Modernism, on the other hand, is an offshoot of the Enlightenment which advocated reason as the primary source of authority. Reason replaced the absolute authority of religion and the state. It led to critical questioning of traditional values and morals. It established reason, freedom and democracy as primary values of society.

Postmodernist advocates of relativism look at Enlightenment value system as one among various value systems. For them, reason and critical inquiry form one way of understanding the universe and religion is just another way of understanding the same. Modern medicine is just another system, one among different systems of treatment. Science is just another story and scientific truth is just one kind of truth. Shamanism explores a different kind of truth. For a relativist, there are no superior or inferior value systems, there is no absolute good or absolute bad. In a relativist discourse, a society that is based on principles of freedom and democracy is not superior to another society that denies freedoms to its people in the name of culture, religion and tradition.

Relativism is unacceptable because it gives intellectual fodder to those who hold their tradition, religion and customs, however retrograde and dangerous they are, to be as good, if not better, as reason, democracy and rule of law. An intellectual battle against relativism is long overdue. Any retrograde tradition that allows its practitioners to take arms against freedoms and democracy is bad and any value system that ensures individual liberty and happiness is superior. We have to call a spade a spade.

New Year Musings

“As I turn the calendar to 2009, I put big question marks after terms like globalisation, capitalism and the world order in general in the backdrop of the scale of manufactured violence around the world.” I have quoted these words from an email from a friend of mine on the first day of the New Year. He was very pessimistic about any hope of change where the “language of force and violence is the only language the world has always understood and respected.” What he is driving home is that there is no scope for optimism as power politics and not social justice is the name of the game in our world. He referred to, among other developments, the killing of hundreds of people including civilians in the aerial attacks on Gaza by Israel. 

I was initially not sure how to respond to the mail and end it on a positive note. We humans have a tendency to hate the present and glorify the past. And it is not very easy to convince my friend that he was portraying his age in darker colours than it really deserved. I just replied to him that I am an optimist and that I don’t subscribe to the negative portrayal of the world.

Why? I feel luckier  to be living today than 50 years ago or 100 years ago when there were more bloodshed, cold-blooded executions without any due process, wars, conflicts, violence, gender discrimination and colour discrimination, apartheid and colonial aggression of worst kinds. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and democratic institutions have changed our lives the way our ancestors could not have imagined. Harvard Professor Steven Pinker, who is currently studying history of violence, says that probably we are living in the happiest and the most peaceful times in the history of our planet because the scale of conflicts and violence in contemporary world, deplorable as they are, is negligibly minimal when compared to bloodshed and cruelty in the past.

The greatest achievement of our time that has changed the way we live is the Internet and an array of new media it has brought about. The Internet, as we all know, is an openly accessible system that can evolve its standards and allow anyone who can use it the way he or she wants to use it. The Internet, more than any other human achievements, has led to the evolution of what is called an 'open information ecology', a permission-free world which denies the existence of national boundaries. As Jonathan Zittrain says in his book The Future of the Internet, the success of the Net-based new media and networks is largely because of the underlying generative technology of the Internet. It is not an innovation-stifling technology. Despite their potential for abuse, the new media and networks satisfy our democratic urge for access to information and freedom of expression that are fundamental human rights.


On several occasions, China has blocked access to Wikipedia and YouTube. Iran has also made attempts to control its citizens' access to the Internet and blocked access to online content that it sees as anti-Islamic. But people in these countries find ways to overcome Internet censorship.
Contrast the idea of Internet censorship with what Jimbo Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has set as the principle that drives the popular online encyclopaedia. He envisages a "world where every single person is given free access to the sum of knowledge." An important characteristic of Wikipedia, for example, is that thousands of volunteers from across the world come together and share information. The rules of what is acceptable and what is not acceptable in Wikipedia have emerged from the community of Wikipedians. Wikipedia, like other Web-based mediums, thrives on the culture of debate and discussion.

The participatory model of the Web-based mediums and networks encourages dialogue and not dogma. Unlike the conventional mediums such as the newspaper, television and the radio which presuppose a passive consumers, the online social networks and mediums serve little purpose if they do not have consumers who are actively participant.

So let me hail 2009.