"We will not sacrifice the liberties we cherish or hunker down behind walls of suspicion and mistrust," said United State President Barack Obama at the Pentagon on September 11 while commemorating the victims of attacks on the country by a group of Islamic terrorists that day nine years ago.
Those words carry special weight in the backdrop of divisions in the U.S. over the proposed mosque and Islamic cultural centre near Ground Zero and the planned (later cancelled) event of Quran burning by a pastor. Passionate debates kicked up by these issues ahead of the 9/11 anniversary are a clear reminder that religious fervour that propelled those terrorists to fly hijacked planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon will continue to be a target of public outrage, scrutiny and even derision and contempt. They also show that attempts to invoke Islamophobia - to counter genuine and not-so genuine expressions of concern about the religious frenzy driving people to kill innocents - hardly succeed in silencing those who are prepared to talk about religious ingredients that they fear are still making some people violently crazy.
Islam is in the news these days, no matter whether it receives bad or good press. In this age of modernity and openness facing threat from forces that are committed to undermining them, the second largest religion can be seen, on the one hand, as either battling all those negative images reinforced by both acts of terror carried out by small fringe groups among its adherents and also retrograde customs practised in its name by many of its followers or, on the other hand, as a faith being showcased for whatever inherent qualities it claims to have, depending on which side of the argument you are inclined to. But whichever way one looks at Islam and the question whether it is compatible or not with modern universal values, one can't resist comparing it with other major religions. Both those calling for close scrutiny of Islam vis-a-vis the practices that are antithetical to the modern values and those defending their faith seek to present their arguments by underlining this comparative approach.
Authors sceptical of the proposed mosque and cultural centre near Ground Zero including atheist Christopher Hitchens and Irshad Manji, who calls herself a reformed Muslim, have singled out the so-called moderate Muslims (like Imam Feisal Rauf, the man behind the Islamic cultural centre in New York which includes the prayer hall for Muslims) for their censure of their tendency to delude themselves when they talk about their religion. Hitchens says that tolerance of a religious faith is not synonymous with free exercise of religious practices that are incompatible with contemporary democratic values. Manji points out that "thanks to its [the cultural centre] provocative location the nation will scrutinize what takes place inside." And she asks the Imam certain questions which include this one: what the centre will teach about homosexuals, agnostics, atheists and apostasy?. That is another way of asking for, what Hitchens calls, 'domestication' of Islam.
Countries with secular constitutions have laws to supersede religious prescriptions that go against the modern values. Other major religions have undergone the process of being tackled by the secular constitutional values. Islam cannot be an exemption. True, most Muslims are certainly not adherents of retrograde commands and passages in their sacred texts. But if you show them the sheer irrelevance of those prescriptions in the age of democracy and modern values, many of them will end up blaming 'incorrect' interpretations of the tenets of Islam. They will also invariably throw a red herring in their argument: other religions also have passages equally reprehensible to modern tastes. Here the comparison of Islam with other religions takes all the characteristics of denialism. When somebody points out some issues about Islam, they tend to say that some other religions also have same issues.
That calls for another comparison. What will be the response of a non-fundamentalist and non-fanatic Christian or Jew when asked if he/she upholds the terrible things written in the Bible. The answer will be NO in no uncertain terms. The Bible is also filled with many acts of crimes and barbarism, but no sane Christian today will endorse them. Are there Salman Rushdies and Ayan Hirsi Alis living under murder threat for their critique of Christianity or Judaism?
Perhaps the success of the democratic system lies in this climate which encourages comparisons. Democracy asks of a person to reconcile himself/herself with the idea that his/her best religion or ideology cannot claim special insulation from criticism and scrutiny, especially when lot of bad things are carried out in the name of that religion or ideology. President Obama’s juxtaposition of the liberties the West cherishes and the walls of suspicion and mistrust is only a political way of extending the comparative approach. The liberties that he admires are far better than and superior to the culture of suspicion and mistrust that he condemns.
Sunday, 12 September 2010
Thursday, 12 August 2010
Conspiracy Theories
When Lehman Brothers went bankrupt in 2008, a story that made the rounds was that some senior Jewish executives in the investment bank founded by Jewish immigrants from Germany in 1850 transferred $400 billion to three Israeli banks. The story was picked up by anti-Semitic blogs and web forums and now forms part of the folklore of conspiracy theories involving the Jews, Israel and the U.S.
The Lehman Brothers conspiracy theory, like the earlier libel widely circulated especially in some Arab countries that the Israeli Mossad knew in advance about the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and warned all of the Jewish employees in the twin towers not to come to work that morning, fits neatly into the Jews-are-trying-to-dominate-the-world mythology so fondly cultivated by anti-Semitic groups of all hues. Generally conspiracy theories are ignored by the mainstream media and the general public for what they are: just unfounded conclusions with no evidence to back them. But such weird theories are often live topics in drawing room discussions or during cocktail hours. They are the gossips the educated today.
Many of us have had personal experiences of being in informal gatherings where we have no option but to question, in vain, one or the other participant backed by few others bombarding one conspiracy theory after another. It is very difficult to counter those who believe in conspiracy theories for the simple reason that they are supported by no evidence and are conclusions based on either selective interpretation of facts or prejudice. A very popular conspiracy theory that has many takers is that the Apollo Moon landing was stage-managed by NASA. When I heard this Moon landing hoax story from an educated person recently, I understood why Buzz Aldrin lost his temper when accosted by a Bible-toting Moon landing conspiracy theorist and punched the latter in the face, though there are punching arguments against the Moon hoax myth (See Phil Plait, the Myth Busters, David Adam). It is, however, astonishing to find that some six per cent of Americans believe that the Moon landings were faked.
No conspiracy theory is as awe-inspiring as that related to Illuminati, originally a movement of freethinkers established in Bavaria in 1776 and attacked by its critics as a group engaged in a conspiracy to overthrow European governments of the time. In contemporary circles of conspiracy theorists, Illuminati refers to an alleged conspiratorial group controlling the world through governments and corporations for the establishment of the New World Order (NWO). These NWO conspiracy theorists often refer to the Great Seal of the United States and its motto ‘Novus Ordo Seclorum’ (new order of the ages) as a proof that there is a plot to take over the world.
The first time I heard of Illuminati from passionate advocates of conspiracy theories, who were trying to figure out all the major events such as 9/11 attacks, invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and the terror strike in Mumbai, among others, in terms of a grand plot hatched by the secretive group, I felt like quitting the discussion and keeping mum. The argument was that the most powerful intelligence agency in the world, the CIA, did not gather any intelligence information on the 19 Arab youths who hijacked four commercial airlines and hit the WTC and Pentagon and, therefore, the 9/11 attacks were pre-planned. The commonsense counter-argument that a conspiracy of that scale required hundreds of people for its planning and execution and, therefore, less likely to be kept secret did not cut much ice with them as they switched to the topic of global financial crisis to claim that it was engineered by the U.S. to enforce its domination over the global economy.
Not all conspiracy theories are that funny either. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forged document that claims a secret Jewish cabal plotting to take over the world and made public in 1905, was debunked in 1921 by Philip Graves, a correspondent for the London Times, who exposed that it was plagiarised from a 19th century fiction. But Adolf Hitler used the Protocol to fuel anti-Semitic feelings among the Germans and as a death warrant against the Jewish population.
Why many people are so passionate about the conspiracy theories? The conspiracy theories are attractive because they are simple. Every development in the world, however, complex and incomprehensible, becomes simple and comprehensible when it is seen as part of an agenda or a conspiracy by a group of powerful people.
Sunday, 13 June 2010
Non-sense, absurdity, textuality: a critique of post-modernist bullshit
"If one examines the postcultural paradigm of consensus, one is faced with a choice: either reject Lyotardist narrative or conclude that the task of the poet is deconstruction, but only if the premise of Batailleist `powerful communication’ is invalid; if that is not the case, Baudrillard’s model of Lyotardist narrative is one of “textual Marxism”, and therefore fundamentally dead. It could be said that the subject is interpolated into a subdialectic destructuralism that includes narrativity as a totality. The characteristic theme of Abian’s analysis of nationalism is the bridge between sexual identity and class."
This quote is from the essay 'Feminism, conceptualist feminism and nationalism' by Barbara I.L. Tilton, Department of Literature, Cambridge University. If you can make head or tail of this passage, you are lucky, but I am among the majority, I presume, who are baffled after reading these, jargon-packed, syntactically correct sentences that signify nothing. I must confess that during my college days as student of English Literature I was attracted to postmodernist ideas that I did not understand. At that time, modish poststructuralist, postmodernist and culture studies-driven theories were starting to destory literary studies in the English Departments of universities in India as elsewhere. Now that the destruction is over, very few English Literature teachers in colleges and universities can write with clarity about anything in good English that others can understand. Anything they write is filled with obscurantist jargons such as textuality, narrativity, linearity, inter-disciplinarity, paradigm shift, hegemony, hemeneutics, discursive, transgressive, subculture, postcolonial, postcultural, post-Marxist...
'Good English? What is that?' You can anticipate this question from a postmodernist English professor if s/he happens to read the above paragraph. 'Good and bad are social and linguistic constructs and your privileging of good over bad reveals an ideology of domination', s/he may retort. For the postmodernist, good or bad and other such binary opposition concepts are part of the Western Englightnment thought that needs to be dismantled or, to use a term that will endear me to the postmodernist sect, deconstructed. Translated in English that many of us can understand, what they mean (no offence meant) is that the meaninglessness of 'postmodern metatwaddle' (courtesy Richard Dawkins) is the result of your privileging of meaning over absence of meaning. Good and bad or meaning and meaninglessness, for example, are just descriptions of representation and any representation is mediated by language, culture and ideology, they will add.
Gone are the days when English professors would laboriously teach us tools and methods of appreciating literature which enabled literature students to cultivate an interest in books and reading as also in creative writing in English language. They would also introduce the students to a world of other literary traditions including Greek drama, European literature and Americal literature, among others. The character of English Departments in this part of the world has changed significantly. The Department of English Literature at the local university in my region, for example, has been renamed Department of Studies in English. That changeover allowed the professors influenced by postmodernist and Marxist critical theories to look at literature as a (battle) field where one can observe one dominant meaning trying to dominate multiple other meanings, one dominant ideology trying to dominate multiple other ideologies, and so on and so forth. Literary works, for the postmodernists, are textual discourses no different from laundry lists. (Please don't accuse me of misrepresenting the postmodernists. For them, every representation is a misrepresentation - since there is no representation unmediated by language - and an attempt to enforce the dominant ideology's hegemony in a perpetual power play among competing ideologies).
During my college days, I was also passionate about the fashionable French philosophers and writers such as Michel Foucault, Jaques Lacan, Jaques Derrida and other postmodern, poststructuralist writers and philosophers. Their ideas, as they are taught by our postmodernist professors, have an attraction because they are nihilistic. There is no absolute truth for the postmodernists, no universal values either. The idea that there are universal norms, they say, is a product of the Enlightenment which they seek to demolish. Can't we call Osama bin Laden a postmodernist because he also has a nihilistic world view and he is also a proponent of the theory deconstruction which he converted into a philosophy of praxis on September 11, 2001?
The bubble of postmodernist nonsense, however, burst with l'affaire Alan sokal. In 1996, Prof. Sokal, a physicist at the New York University, submitted a paper with a postmodernist title 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity' to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern culture studies. The paper was crafted as a spoof of fashionable postmodern writings. It was a hoax article written in trendy postmodernist style full of scientific blunders that even a student of physics could have found out. The editors of the journal, though, were so engrossed by the right-sounding postmodernist and leftish jargons in the paper that they could not see it was a hoax. In a detailed article that was published in Lingua Franca, Prof. Sokal exposed the hoax saying that the paper was "a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense". Not surprisingly, the 1996 Ig Nobel Prize for literature was rightfully bestowed on the Social Text editors, Andrew Ross and others.
In 1998, Prof. Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Physics profesor at the University of Louvain in Belgium, pubished their book Intellectual Imposture, which blows up the intellectual credentials of postmodernist thinkers including Lacan, feminist 'philosopher' Luce Irigaray and sociologist and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard. The book as well as the hoax was a wake up call that literature and other humanities departments of the universities and colleges cannot afford to ignore.
The passage that I quoted at the beginning of this piece is taken from a meaningless essay randomly generated by a computer programme, Postmodernism Generator, developed by Andrew C. Bulhak of Melbourne. The author of the essay, Barbara I.L. Tilton, is fictitious. Whenever you visit the programme at http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/, it generates an essay in postmodernist style. If you want to bamboozle editors of another postmodern journal, you can submit one of the 4414335 (last count) essays generated by the computer programme since its installation on February 25, 2000. Good luck.
(I found the cartoon posted above when I google-searched for an image to go with this piece. I don't know where it was originally published.)This quote is from the essay 'Feminism, conceptualist feminism and nationalism' by Barbara I.L. Tilton, Department of Literature, Cambridge University. If you can make head or tail of this passage, you are lucky, but I am among the majority, I presume, who are baffled after reading these, jargon-packed, syntactically correct sentences that signify nothing. I must confess that during my college days as student of English Literature I was attracted to postmodernist ideas that I did not understand. At that time, modish poststructuralist, postmodernist and culture studies-driven theories were starting to destory literary studies in the English Departments of universities in India as elsewhere. Now that the destruction is over, very few English Literature teachers in colleges and universities can write with clarity about anything in good English that others can understand. Anything they write is filled with obscurantist jargons such as textuality, narrativity, linearity, inter-disciplinarity, paradigm shift, hegemony, hemeneutics, discursive, transgressive, subculture, postcolonial, postcultural, post-Marxist...
'Good English? What is that?' You can anticipate this question from a postmodernist English professor if s/he happens to read the above paragraph. 'Good and bad are social and linguistic constructs and your privileging of good over bad reveals an ideology of domination', s/he may retort. For the postmodernist, good or bad and other such binary opposition concepts are part of the Western Englightnment thought that needs to be dismantled or, to use a term that will endear me to the postmodernist sect, deconstructed. Translated in English that many of us can understand, what they mean (no offence meant) is that the meaninglessness of 'postmodern metatwaddle' (courtesy Richard Dawkins) is the result of your privileging of meaning over absence of meaning. Good and bad or meaning and meaninglessness, for example, are just descriptions of representation and any representation is mediated by language, culture and ideology, they will add.
Gone are the days when English professors would laboriously teach us tools and methods of appreciating literature which enabled literature students to cultivate an interest in books and reading as also in creative writing in English language. They would also introduce the students to a world of other literary traditions including Greek drama, European literature and Americal literature, among others. The character of English Departments in this part of the world has changed significantly. The Department of English Literature at the local university in my region, for example, has been renamed Department of Studies in English. That changeover allowed the professors influenced by postmodernist and Marxist critical theories to look at literature as a (battle) field where one can observe one dominant meaning trying to dominate multiple other meanings, one dominant ideology trying to dominate multiple other ideologies, and so on and so forth. Literary works, for the postmodernists, are textual discourses no different from laundry lists. (Please don't accuse me of misrepresenting the postmodernists. For them, every representation is a misrepresentation - since there is no representation unmediated by language - and an attempt to enforce the dominant ideology's hegemony in a perpetual power play among competing ideologies).
During my college days, I was also passionate about the fashionable French philosophers and writers such as Michel Foucault, Jaques Lacan, Jaques Derrida and other postmodern, poststructuralist writers and philosophers. Their ideas, as they are taught by our postmodernist professors, have an attraction because they are nihilistic. There is no absolute truth for the postmodernists, no universal values either. The idea that there are universal norms, they say, is a product of the Enlightenment which they seek to demolish. Can't we call Osama bin Laden a postmodernist because he also has a nihilistic world view and he is also a proponent of the theory deconstruction which he converted into a philosophy of praxis on September 11, 2001?
The bubble of postmodernist nonsense, however, burst with l'affaire Alan sokal. In 1996, Prof. Sokal, a physicist at the New York University, submitted a paper with a postmodernist title 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity' to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern culture studies. The paper was crafted as a spoof of fashionable postmodern writings. It was a hoax article written in trendy postmodernist style full of scientific blunders that even a student of physics could have found out. The editors of the journal, though, were so engrossed by the right-sounding postmodernist and leftish jargons in the paper that they could not see it was a hoax. In a detailed article that was published in Lingua Franca, Prof. Sokal exposed the hoax saying that the paper was "a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense". Not surprisingly, the 1996 Ig Nobel Prize for literature was rightfully bestowed on the Social Text editors, Andrew Ross and others.
In 1998, Prof. Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Physics profesor at the University of Louvain in Belgium, pubished their book Intellectual Imposture, which blows up the intellectual credentials of postmodernist thinkers including Lacan, feminist 'philosopher' Luce Irigaray and sociologist and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard. The book as well as the hoax was a wake up call that literature and other humanities departments of the universities and colleges cannot afford to ignore.
The passage that I quoted at the beginning of this piece is taken from a meaningless essay randomly generated by a computer programme, Postmodernism Generator, developed by Andrew C. Bulhak of Melbourne. The author of the essay, Barbara I.L. Tilton, is fictitious. Whenever you visit the programme at http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/, it generates an essay in postmodernist style. If you want to bamboozle editors of another postmodern journal, you can submit one of the 4414335 (last count) essays generated by the computer programme since its installation on February 25, 2000. Good luck.
Sunday, 6 June 2010
The Myth of Ancient Wisdom
"Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fulness and completion? Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence then this worship of the past?" Ralph Waldo Emerson
Human tendency to adore ancient wisdom as sacrosanct often comes up as innocuous attempts to idealise the past as pristine and wholesome when compared to contemporary life. One often hears people authoritatively declaring that science is skin-deep while wisdom bequeathed to us by our ancient traditions is far richer than what science and technology and modernity have bestowed us. The best way to overcome the problems wrought us by scientific advances, says the apologist of ancient wisdom, is to reconnect ourseves with our traditions and traditional knowledge which science has sidelined in its march to enforce its hegemony of rationality.
The portrayal of science as just one way of understanding the reality and its corollary argument that there are multiple ways of understanding it often gain credence in social circles. Such a depiction of science is based on the argument that the ancient wisdom that represents different modes of understanding is no less important than the rational way of understanding that makes science what it is. It is well said, except that it is not true. Let us see why.
The fetishism of ancient wisdom runs deep even in the minds of people who are otherwise so passionate about their dependence on gadgets that science and technology has produced. In everyday life we can't even imagine what life would have been, had there been no science and technology. But many of us have no problem rubbishing science and technology for all the wrong reasons. Their criticism of science stems from a wrong idea that science is supposed or claims to know everything.
If you criticise science for not knowing everything, you are barking up the wrong tree, because science has never claimed that it knows everything. It is true to say that science does not know everything, but it is equally true that science has made us know many things which we did not know in the past. Calling science skin-deep is just a rhetorical exercise because science is not known to have ever claimed that it can or does know everything. Knowing everything is not the business of science. Science is not a religious dogma that claims to know everything.
The love of ancient wisdom and suspicion of science stem from the general human inclination to show fascination towards the unknown. Science is always sought to be confronted by the question of the unknown just to make it seem helpless and powerless while trying to unravel the unknown even as science has unravelled many unknown phenomena and continues to do so. Since scientists are generally not polemicists, the vociferous pseudo-scientific arguments built on the idea of the unknown always seem to receive high prominence.
Is ancient wisdom worth our paying serious attention to? Let us face the facts. Very little was known in ancient times about our universe or human anatomy or anything that was very useful for the mankind. It was scientists who unravelled the unknown and unknowable mysteries that defined people's understanding of life and universe in the ancient times. If ancient wisdom is to be taken as a sacred truth, we will still be living on a flat earth, burning witches for our real and imagined problems, practising blood-letting to cure our diseases and happy with an average life expectancy of 40.
Fifty million people died of the Spanish flu at the end of the World War II. Smallpox is believed to have killed half a billion during the 20 th century alone. In the 20th century, tuberculosis killed an estimated 100 million people. If we were still practising ancient healing methods that are part of what we call ancient wisdom, millions of people would still be dying of diseases caused by deadly viruses and bacteria. Discovery of penicillin, and not the folklore ancient wisdom, saved from death or amputations tens of thousands of soldiers with infected wounds during the World War II.
Giving too much importance to tradition and culture that are integral to the idea of ancient wisdom is a futile exercise. We have to look at the present problems as challenges that can be solved by applying our knowledge based on rational inquiry and empirical experiments, and not by what we have been bestowed by our forefathers. Don't think that ancient wisdom is a key to understanding all or any of our contemporary problems. The only key to unlock the mysteries and the unknown is the rational inquiry and experiments which have made our life easier, happier and more livable than what life was in a hunter-gatherer society.
Human tendency to adore ancient wisdom as sacrosanct often comes up as innocuous attempts to idealise the past as pristine and wholesome when compared to contemporary life. One often hears people authoritatively declaring that science is skin-deep while wisdom bequeathed to us by our ancient traditions is far richer than what science and technology and modernity have bestowed us. The best way to overcome the problems wrought us by scientific advances, says the apologist of ancient wisdom, is to reconnect ourseves with our traditions and traditional knowledge which science has sidelined in its march to enforce its hegemony of rationality.
The portrayal of science as just one way of understanding the reality and its corollary argument that there are multiple ways of understanding it often gain credence in social circles. Such a depiction of science is based on the argument that the ancient wisdom that represents different modes of understanding is no less important than the rational way of understanding that makes science what it is. It is well said, except that it is not true. Let us see why.
The fetishism of ancient wisdom runs deep even in the minds of people who are otherwise so passionate about their dependence on gadgets that science and technology has produced. In everyday life we can't even imagine what life would have been, had there been no science and technology. But many of us have no problem rubbishing science and technology for all the wrong reasons. Their criticism of science stems from a wrong idea that science is supposed or claims to know everything.
If you criticise science for not knowing everything, you are barking up the wrong tree, because science has never claimed that it knows everything. It is true to say that science does not know everything, but it is equally true that science has made us know many things which we did not know in the past. Calling science skin-deep is just a rhetorical exercise because science is not known to have ever claimed that it can or does know everything. Knowing everything is not the business of science. Science is not a religious dogma that claims to know everything.
The love of ancient wisdom and suspicion of science stem from the general human inclination to show fascination towards the unknown. Science is always sought to be confronted by the question of the unknown just to make it seem helpless and powerless while trying to unravel the unknown even as science has unravelled many unknown phenomena and continues to do so. Since scientists are generally not polemicists, the vociferous pseudo-scientific arguments built on the idea of the unknown always seem to receive high prominence.
Is ancient wisdom worth our paying serious attention to? Let us face the facts. Very little was known in ancient times about our universe or human anatomy or anything that was very useful for the mankind. It was scientists who unravelled the unknown and unknowable mysteries that defined people's understanding of life and universe in the ancient times. If ancient wisdom is to be taken as a sacred truth, we will still be living on a flat earth, burning witches for our real and imagined problems, practising blood-letting to cure our diseases and happy with an average life expectancy of 40.
Fifty million people died of the Spanish flu at the end of the World War II. Smallpox is believed to have killed half a billion during the 20 th century alone. In the 20th century, tuberculosis killed an estimated 100 million people. If we were still practising ancient healing methods that are part of what we call ancient wisdom, millions of people would still be dying of diseases caused by deadly viruses and bacteria. Discovery of penicillin, and not the folklore ancient wisdom, saved from death or amputations tens of thousands of soldiers with infected wounds during the World War II.
Giving too much importance to tradition and culture that are integral to the idea of ancient wisdom is a futile exercise. We have to look at the present problems as challenges that can be solved by applying our knowledge based on rational inquiry and empirical experiments, and not by what we have been bestowed by our forefathers. Don't think that ancient wisdom is a key to understanding all or any of our contemporary problems. The only key to unlock the mysteries and the unknown is the rational inquiry and experiments which have made our life easier, happier and more livable than what life was in a hunter-gatherer society.
Friday, 14 May 2010
You Can't Have The Best Of Both Worlds
“All is peaceful in the little Gaulish village we know so well, and, as usual, everyone is cheerful and friendly…”
So begins one of the Asterix comic series that narrate the adventures of the people of the village of ancient Gauls holding out against Roman occupation. They do so with the help of Getafix, the venerable village druid, whose magic potion gives the drinker superhuman strength. The story of these indomitable villagers led by a chief whose only fear is that “the sky may fall on his head tomorrow” attracts us because it is the story of underdogs taking on the mighty Romans.
This comic fantasy world created by Rene Goscinny and Albert Uderzo could have been in the mind of Arundhati Roy when she started writing Walking With The Comrades about her visit to the forest near Dantewada controlled by Maoists. Laying out a script of an unequal struggle between the antagonists, she says: “On one side is a massive paramilitary force armed with the money, the firepower, the media, and the hubris of an emerging Superpower. On the other, ordinary villagers armed with traditional weapons, backed by a superbly organised, hugely motivated Maoist guerilla fighting force with an extraordinary and violent history of armed rebellion.”
Despite the attractions inherent in her portrayal of the cuckoo land of armed rebellion by local tribals led by the Maoists against the mighty Indian state, one finds it very difficult to read through the whole essay, written in a prose that uses all the story-telling techniques at her disposal, unless one – like her – lives in a fancy reality where the Indian state is a monster and the Maoists the epitome of a struggle for good.
This narrative perfectly fits her esoteric world of the forces of good rebelling against the forces of evil. The only problem with that narrative is that it can also be taken as a denial of that black and white world where the state tyranny is encountering people’s resistance which she represents. She wants us to believe that India is a state controlled by instruments of tyranny. But the very fact that she can write the essay and get it published in a prominent magazine without courting any trouble that normally one expects of a monster state contradicts her view that India is a country, which calls itself a democracy, with a Constitution that is unjust and unfair.
The problem with Arundhati Roy is that she enjoys the freedoms enshrined in the Constitution to give vent to her wrath against the state which, for its part, does not suppress her (or people of her ilk), even when she has gone so far as endorsing the Maoist violence that will undermine the very democracy without which she could not have said what she said.
Roy can’t have the best of both worlds, can she? If she thinks that she can express her views – however subversive they are – freely in this country and faces no trouble for that, it is a clear sign that India has yet to metamorphose itself into a state of tyranny. Before we rush to see the landscape of her battleground that separates her dreamland full of guns and IEDs and the badlands of tyranny, we should ask her if she is sure that all the democratic institutions in the country have failed so completely that there is no other option but armed struggle. What will happen to her if she is in a real state run by instruments of tyranny – Iran or North Korea, for example?
One gets the impression that Arundhati Roy’s real purpose is to shame people living in territories far away from that landscape of armed insurgency and violence. The rest of us with ‘liberal conscience’ are living off a myth that “the war in the forests is a war between the Government of India and the Maoists, who call elections a sham, Parliament a pigsty and have openly declared their intention to overthrow the Indian State.” Since the country is already a monster, the people with ‘liberal conscience’ are enjoying the fruits offered by that monster unashamedly, fruits that are harvested from the homelands of the poor tribals who have been deprived and dispossessed, she seems to imply.
But the rest of the country with ‘liberal conscience’ is yet to be convinced that India is already what she portrays it to be. The fact that the rugged landscape is not without its peaks and valleys defy her simple but romanticised format where the state is engaged in a conspiracy to make the tribals aliens in their own homelands and the latter backed by the Maoists are carrying out an armed rebellion to stop it. The rest of India with ‘liberal conscience’ is not convinced because they use the moral scale to see that Indian democratic experiment, however deficient it may be, is way far better than the absolutist and collectivist ideology of Maoism. In her passionate admiration for that kind of ideology, she chooses to ignore that democracy is a continuous political experiment based on reason.
Progress comes from human choices of better alternatives. And democracy is definitely a better alternative than armed insurrection that will subvert that democracy. “Common, buddy”, somebody may tell me, “are you not as passionate about democracy as Arundhati Roy is about armed rebellion?” He or she may advise me to read Foucault to know that my idea of democracy itself is nothing but a dominant belief system accepted as common knowledge that defines what is right and what is wrong. My belief system, he or she may say, is just my way of seeing the world.
Yes. Arundhati Roy and people of her ilk thrive in the free-floating postmodernist fantasy land, where there is no moral scale to differentiate good from bad, right from wrong, democratic experiment from totalitarian systems, because the moral scale itself is, for them, nothing but what defines power and hegemony. We are all engaged in a never-ending drama of power and resistance, they may say.
The comrades she walked with in the Dandakaranya forest are not the Gaulish villagers resisting the Romans, nor are their guns and IEDs the equivalent of Getafix’s magic potion that can give them superhuman powers. The villagers in the comic series forget their troubles at the end of every adventure against the Romans and are re-united for their traditional banquets, celebrating, among other things, the end of hostilities. In the script laid out by the Maoists, there is no end of hostilities, but a perennial war, violence and bloodshed.
So begins one of the Asterix comic series that narrate the adventures of the people of the village of ancient Gauls holding out against Roman occupation. They do so with the help of Getafix, the venerable village druid, whose magic potion gives the drinker superhuman strength. The story of these indomitable villagers led by a chief whose only fear is that “the sky may fall on his head tomorrow” attracts us because it is the story of underdogs taking on the mighty Romans.
This comic fantasy world created by Rene Goscinny and Albert Uderzo could have been in the mind of Arundhati Roy when she started writing Walking With The Comrades about her visit to the forest near Dantewada controlled by Maoists. Laying out a script of an unequal struggle between the antagonists, she says: “On one side is a massive paramilitary force armed with the money, the firepower, the media, and the hubris of an emerging Superpower. On the other, ordinary villagers armed with traditional weapons, backed by a superbly organised, hugely motivated Maoist guerilla fighting force with an extraordinary and violent history of armed rebellion.”
Despite the attractions inherent in her portrayal of the cuckoo land of armed rebellion by local tribals led by the Maoists against the mighty Indian state, one finds it very difficult to read through the whole essay, written in a prose that uses all the story-telling techniques at her disposal, unless one – like her – lives in a fancy reality where the Indian state is a monster and the Maoists the epitome of a struggle for good.
This narrative perfectly fits her esoteric world of the forces of good rebelling against the forces of evil. The only problem with that narrative is that it can also be taken as a denial of that black and white world where the state tyranny is encountering people’s resistance which she represents. She wants us to believe that India is a state controlled by instruments of tyranny. But the very fact that she can write the essay and get it published in a prominent magazine without courting any trouble that normally one expects of a monster state contradicts her view that India is a country, which calls itself a democracy, with a Constitution that is unjust and unfair.
The problem with Arundhati Roy is that she enjoys the freedoms enshrined in the Constitution to give vent to her wrath against the state which, for its part, does not suppress her (or people of her ilk), even when she has gone so far as endorsing the Maoist violence that will undermine the very democracy without which she could not have said what she said.
Roy can’t have the best of both worlds, can she? If she thinks that she can express her views – however subversive they are – freely in this country and faces no trouble for that, it is a clear sign that India has yet to metamorphose itself into a state of tyranny. Before we rush to see the landscape of her battleground that separates her dreamland full of guns and IEDs and the badlands of tyranny, we should ask her if she is sure that all the democratic institutions in the country have failed so completely that there is no other option but armed struggle. What will happen to her if she is in a real state run by instruments of tyranny – Iran or North Korea, for example?
One gets the impression that Arundhati Roy’s real purpose is to shame people living in territories far away from that landscape of armed insurgency and violence. The rest of us with ‘liberal conscience’ are living off a myth that “the war in the forests is a war between the Government of India and the Maoists, who call elections a sham, Parliament a pigsty and have openly declared their intention to overthrow the Indian State.” Since the country is already a monster, the people with ‘liberal conscience’ are enjoying the fruits offered by that monster unashamedly, fruits that are harvested from the homelands of the poor tribals who have been deprived and dispossessed, she seems to imply.
But the rest of the country with ‘liberal conscience’ is yet to be convinced that India is already what she portrays it to be. The fact that the rugged landscape is not without its peaks and valleys defy her simple but romanticised format where the state is engaged in a conspiracy to make the tribals aliens in their own homelands and the latter backed by the Maoists are carrying out an armed rebellion to stop it. The rest of India with ‘liberal conscience’ is not convinced because they use the moral scale to see that Indian democratic experiment, however deficient it may be, is way far better than the absolutist and collectivist ideology of Maoism. In her passionate admiration for that kind of ideology, she chooses to ignore that democracy is a continuous political experiment based on reason.
Progress comes from human choices of better alternatives. And democracy is definitely a better alternative than armed insurrection that will subvert that democracy. “Common, buddy”, somebody may tell me, “are you not as passionate about democracy as Arundhati Roy is about armed rebellion?” He or she may advise me to read Foucault to know that my idea of democracy itself is nothing but a dominant belief system accepted as common knowledge that defines what is right and what is wrong. My belief system, he or she may say, is just my way of seeing the world.
Yes. Arundhati Roy and people of her ilk thrive in the free-floating postmodernist fantasy land, where there is no moral scale to differentiate good from bad, right from wrong, democratic experiment from totalitarian systems, because the moral scale itself is, for them, nothing but what defines power and hegemony. We are all engaged in a never-ending drama of power and resistance, they may say.
The comrades she walked with in the Dandakaranya forest are not the Gaulish villagers resisting the Romans, nor are their guns and IEDs the equivalent of Getafix’s magic potion that can give them superhuman powers. The villagers in the comic series forget their troubles at the end of every adventure against the Romans and are re-united for their traditional banquets, celebrating, among other things, the end of hostilities. In the script laid out by the Maoists, there is no end of hostilities, but a perennial war, violence and bloodshed.
Sunday, 11 April 2010
New Age Syndrome
The idea of a quest for meaning of life and inner power has gained increasing currency in our contemporary age. Pay a passing visit to your local book shop if you doubt this and you can't escape seeing large number of books by New Age motivational gurus occupying prominent space in its book shelves waiting to be picked up by readers seeking inspiration, solace, comfort and healing.
These wisdom-packed inspirational best-sellers seek to fire up an urge for self-search for meaning and inner spirit in the minds of individuals, presenting their motivational skills as a spiritual exercise that they think can deliver people from their overarching sense of a reality that is chaotic, drab and ordinary. The New Age spiritual fad appears in different shades in different authors and in their different self-help and inspirational titles, but they all target an expanding segment of consumers in the market of success and happiness. The motivational techniques of most of these self-help gurus rely on their sexing up of the term 'spirituality' to make it nice and perhaps more attractive than what organised religions make of it.
The demand for such books has increased in India over the past few years so much so that 20 to 30 per cent of books sold by book shops belong to what is known as the mind, body and spirit category. The best-sellers such as Robin Sharma’s The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, Deepak Chopra’s The Ageless Body Timeless Mind and How To Know God, Shiv Khera’s You Can Win, Living With Honour and Freedom Is Not Free, Stephen R. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and The Eighth Habit are selling like hot cakes in the country. Many of these books are now available in regional languages across the country. Alternative New Age therapies and healing practices such as yoga and meditation are also attracting growing number of people.
While most of the so-called New Age masters parade concepts culled from Eastern mysticism, some like Chopra even use jargons of quantum mechanics to invoke notions of well-being, balance and control in life. In their own different ways, they offer tools for 'megaliving' where ‘Perfect Life’ is described as an achievable goal, “a life filled with joy, accomplishment and pure bliss”, provided we realise our inner potential which is “slumbering deep inside, waiting to be tapped and tested.” Generally speaking, god-power is replaced by mind-power in the New Age teaching: "Will is the king of mental power. When you master your mind, you master your life. Mental mastery starts with being able to control every thought that you think." (The Monk, p. 150). Every goal of an individual is achievable if she changes her thoughts and thus changes her life. The motivational teachers tell us how our thoughts have the power to change reality if we follow the techniques they provide. They hammer home the message that we have infinite and limitless powers which we have to unlock to get out of our ordinary life lived in ordinary reality.
They thrive because they present themselves as having mastered the techniques to overcome one of the greatest difficulties that individuals often experience: making major decisions of life. Every choice has a meaning and there is no coincidence in life, they suggest. Deepak Chopra’s empowerment workshop titled ‘SynchroDestiny’, his official website says, teaches us “how to harness the creative power of coincidence”. Coincidences are shown to be just messages that, if understood properly, allow us to live life at a deeper level.
One of the prominent features of the New Age spirituality is the soothing language its proponents use. It is a language that also attracts people disillusioned with traditional religion and its personal god. If you are part of an immortal cosmic mind, what is the point in believing in a god who lives out there in the sky? The modern preachers of New Age variety alleviate our fears with false comforts that are equipped to trigger a feeling that we are worthy of being infinitely happy. The New Age spirituality also plays with the counter-culture narrative that modern science and technology has brought about “alienation, fragmentation and isolation” (Deepak Chopra in an interview). They blame modern science and its ‘arrogance’ for everything that went wrong in the modern world and project quantum physics as something that justifies their version of good-looking spirituality. To them, quantum mechanics validates ancient Eastern wisdom that human mind is part of a cosmic universal consciousness.
Gary Zukav has already popularised this idea with his 'attacks' on the Newtonian physics and its perception of the universe as a great machine set into motion from the moment it was created. Everything has been pre-determined in the Newtonian physics, he says. “The status of men is immeasurably more dismal than it was before the advent of science. The Great Machine runs blindly on, and all things in it are but cogs.” (The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of New Physics, p. 26). Contrary to Newtonian physics, he says, quantum mechanics tells us that our knowledge of what governs events on the subatomic level is not nearly what we assumed it to be. Its philosophical implication, according to him, is that not only do we influence our reality, but, in some degree, we actually create it.
In the 2004 documentary What the Bleep Do We Know that promotes the New Age spirituality, one of the interviewees says: “It [science] says we are outside of our universe, that we are alone, that we are separate and that we are a sort of lonely mistake on a lonely planet on a lonely universe…And we are now realizing that this view, this view of separateness is one of the most destructive things. It is the thing that creates all the problems in the world.” Physicist Victor J. Stenger, author of Quantum Gods, calls this New Age fad ‘quantum spirituality’ which is nothing but use of jargons from quantum mechanics to argue that there is a cosmic mind and that human mind can affect the material world. Even on the quantum level, he says, human mind doesn’t make things happen.
The very idea of an inner quest for the meaning of life is infectious in our age thanks to the popularity of the New Age spirituality which claims to offer us a new view of the world and of ourselves. The notion of self-fulfillment and meaning the New Age masters market in attractive packages to reach their target audiences informs much about our age that tells us we can all become who we want to be. The sensuous appeal of their best-sellers is hardly veiled as they flaunt techniques of fulfilling our dreams and highest desires, restoring balance in our life said to be disturbed by modern work culture and way of life, and nurturing the leader in us. Central to the self-delusion they inflame in the minds of individuals is the idea that we can be better than what we are and do greater things than what we are doing as there are no limits to our goals and achievements.
Many of these modern fantasies of success, according to Alain de Botton, British philosopher and author of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, are “the products of a democratic, optimistic world that insists that everyone might be a great writer and a happy worker – and yet does very little to create comfortable conditions for those who aren’t able to measure up to such lofty goals.” In reality, he says, it is work that gives us “relatively achievable smallscale goals”, and frees us from the thought of death and eternity
In a way, the New Age motivational gurus amplifies whatever disillusionments the modern age has brought with it and puffs up our normal desire for achievement by fulfilling “relatively achievable small-scale goals”. They speak of empowerment by asking us to delve deep into our inner self and power to overcome a life lived in absolute waste. They induce fallacies with their placebo pills of wisdom, comfort and console and make the individual think that she is much loftier than she is and is therefore entitled to have a greater personal happiness and enrichment.
These wisdom-packed inspirational best-sellers seek to fire up an urge for self-search for meaning and inner spirit in the minds of individuals, presenting their motivational skills as a spiritual exercise that they think can deliver people from their overarching sense of a reality that is chaotic, drab and ordinary. The New Age spiritual fad appears in different shades in different authors and in their different self-help and inspirational titles, but they all target an expanding segment of consumers in the market of success and happiness. The motivational techniques of most of these self-help gurus rely on their sexing up of the term 'spirituality' to make it nice and perhaps more attractive than what organised religions make of it.
The demand for such books has increased in India over the past few years so much so that 20 to 30 per cent of books sold by book shops belong to what is known as the mind, body and spirit category. The best-sellers such as Robin Sharma’s The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, Deepak Chopra’s The Ageless Body Timeless Mind and How To Know God, Shiv Khera’s You Can Win, Living With Honour and Freedom Is Not Free, Stephen R. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and The Eighth Habit are selling like hot cakes in the country. Many of these books are now available in regional languages across the country. Alternative New Age therapies and healing practices such as yoga and meditation are also attracting growing number of people.
While most of the so-called New Age masters parade concepts culled from Eastern mysticism, some like Chopra even use jargons of quantum mechanics to invoke notions of well-being, balance and control in life. In their own different ways, they offer tools for 'megaliving' where ‘Perfect Life’ is described as an achievable goal, “a life filled with joy, accomplishment and pure bliss”, provided we realise our inner potential which is “slumbering deep inside, waiting to be tapped and tested.” Generally speaking, god-power is replaced by mind-power in the New Age teaching: "Will is the king of mental power. When you master your mind, you master your life. Mental mastery starts with being able to control every thought that you think." (The Monk, p. 150). Every goal of an individual is achievable if she changes her thoughts and thus changes her life. The motivational teachers tell us how our thoughts have the power to change reality if we follow the techniques they provide. They hammer home the message that we have infinite and limitless powers which we have to unlock to get out of our ordinary life lived in ordinary reality.
They thrive because they present themselves as having mastered the techniques to overcome one of the greatest difficulties that individuals often experience: making major decisions of life. Every choice has a meaning and there is no coincidence in life, they suggest. Deepak Chopra’s empowerment workshop titled ‘SynchroDestiny’, his official website says, teaches us “how to harness the creative power of coincidence”. Coincidences are shown to be just messages that, if understood properly, allow us to live life at a deeper level.
One of the prominent features of the New Age spirituality is the soothing language its proponents use. It is a language that also attracts people disillusioned with traditional religion and its personal god. If you are part of an immortal cosmic mind, what is the point in believing in a god who lives out there in the sky? The modern preachers of New Age variety alleviate our fears with false comforts that are equipped to trigger a feeling that we are worthy of being infinitely happy. The New Age spirituality also plays with the counter-culture narrative that modern science and technology has brought about “alienation, fragmentation and isolation” (Deepak Chopra in an interview). They blame modern science and its ‘arrogance’ for everything that went wrong in the modern world and project quantum physics as something that justifies their version of good-looking spirituality. To them, quantum mechanics validates ancient Eastern wisdom that human mind is part of a cosmic universal consciousness.
Gary Zukav has already popularised this idea with his 'attacks' on the Newtonian physics and its perception of the universe as a great machine set into motion from the moment it was created. Everything has been pre-determined in the Newtonian physics, he says. “The status of men is immeasurably more dismal than it was before the advent of science. The Great Machine runs blindly on, and all things in it are but cogs.” (The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of New Physics, p. 26). Contrary to Newtonian physics, he says, quantum mechanics tells us that our knowledge of what governs events on the subatomic level is not nearly what we assumed it to be. Its philosophical implication, according to him, is that not only do we influence our reality, but, in some degree, we actually create it.
In the 2004 documentary What the Bleep Do We Know that promotes the New Age spirituality, one of the interviewees says: “It [science] says we are outside of our universe, that we are alone, that we are separate and that we are a sort of lonely mistake on a lonely planet on a lonely universe…And we are now realizing that this view, this view of separateness is one of the most destructive things. It is the thing that creates all the problems in the world.” Physicist Victor J. Stenger, author of Quantum Gods, calls this New Age fad ‘quantum spirituality’ which is nothing but use of jargons from quantum mechanics to argue that there is a cosmic mind and that human mind can affect the material world. Even on the quantum level, he says, human mind doesn’t make things happen.
The very idea of an inner quest for the meaning of life is infectious in our age thanks to the popularity of the New Age spirituality which claims to offer us a new view of the world and of ourselves. The notion of self-fulfillment and meaning the New Age masters market in attractive packages to reach their target audiences informs much about our age that tells us we can all become who we want to be. The sensuous appeal of their best-sellers is hardly veiled as they flaunt techniques of fulfilling our dreams and highest desires, restoring balance in our life said to be disturbed by modern work culture and way of life, and nurturing the leader in us. Central to the self-delusion they inflame in the minds of individuals is the idea that we can be better than what we are and do greater things than what we are doing as there are no limits to our goals and achievements.
Many of these modern fantasies of success, according to Alain de Botton, British philosopher and author of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, are “the products of a democratic, optimistic world that insists that everyone might be a great writer and a happy worker – and yet does very little to create comfortable conditions for those who aren’t able to measure up to such lofty goals.” In reality, he says, it is work that gives us “relatively achievable smallscale goals”, and frees us from the thought of death and eternity
In a way, the New Age motivational gurus amplifies whatever disillusionments the modern age has brought with it and puffs up our normal desire for achievement by fulfilling “relatively achievable small-scale goals”. They speak of empowerment by asking us to delve deep into our inner self and power to overcome a life lived in absolute waste. They induce fallacies with their placebo pills of wisdom, comfort and console and make the individual think that she is much loftier than she is and is therefore entitled to have a greater personal happiness and enrichment.
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