What does Christopher Hitchens mean to me?

Christopher Hitchens (13 April 1949 - 15 December 2011) popped up on my horizon of intellectual heroes in the aftermath of 9/11, when I happened to stumble upon Noam Chomsky’s take on the events of that black Tuesday. Chomsky was one of my intellectual icons then and I thought he could help me understand the implications of the diabolic attacks that changed the world and – at a personal level – my life. A political animal myself at that time who liked to be identified with the Left and entertained strong opinions on matters that I thought (in those Leftish days) warranted my views, I saw myself seeking political explanations that would form a backdrop for me to analyse the real meaning or otherwise of the that perfectly co-ordinated attacks on the United Sates by a bunch of perfectly tuned and calibrated deadly jihadists.

An ardent admirer of Noam Chomsky and his brilliant linguistic theory of Transformational-Generative Grammar, I thought he could offer a clear assessment of what happened that day. But I found Chomsky utterly boring as he blamed the United States for the wickedness of the 9/11 attacks and Hitchens immensely interesting for his outright and honest analysis of the dangers of Islamic Jihadism. The latter’s rebuttal of the former in The Nation and the subsequent debate that followed were an eye-opener to the real dangers of what Hitchens rightly called Islamofascism. I still admire Chomsky the linguist, but his analysis of the 9/11 attacks and the threat of Islamism I thought has echoed the views of an intelligent Islamist apologist who would not hesitate to blame outsiders – the West, the Crusaders – for everything that went wrong in what they think is the perfect religion.

That debate was held in the backdrop of a growing sense of a civilizational clash between forces that represented freedoms, democracy and open-mindedness and their adversaries who thought that their holy book contained all the answers for guiding people for all times to come. Personally, the Chomsky-Hitchens encounter marked my departure from the ideological to the real. I loved Hitchens in that debate because he called a spade a spade. All the liberal values I have inculcated in me in the course of my formal and informal education have equipped me to visualise the real dangers of totalitarian ideologies such as fascism and communism. The excesses committed by these ideologies in the 20 th century were too real to be just wished away or presented as just a footnote to the history of the modern world. It was Hitchens who showed the world the fascist underbelly of Islam as a totalitarian belief system, not as a faith practised by millions of Muslims around the globe.

For me, it was a short distance from that realization to taking a fresh, critical look at the religion in which I was born. Having traversed that distance, I have come out of the old boxes which I thought I perfectly fit in. The result: I found myself emboldened to speak my mind, in my small circles of friends and family, on matters religious, especially Islam. It was not just to win debates but to demonstrate the process of my coming-out.

The Islam I was familiar with till 9/11 was built on a narrative that, in fact, erased all the bad stuff and is full of good stuff such as charity and brotherhood (no sisterhood). Even some bad stuff that was too obvious to be just swept under the carpet had been given honeyed explanations and interpretations. Any talk in family circles that remotely touched, say, the topic of polygamy in those days would be full of caveats by the elders in my family, the purpose of which was to tell us that men in the early days of Islam married many wives because of the large number of widows of Muslim men who had died in battles. It took me my post-9/11 interest in Islam, thanks to Hitchens as well as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji, to name a few, to realize that this narrative was a smokescreen and also to identify the blind spots that it was replete with. Hitchens in his international bestseller book, The God Is Not Great (2007), lays bare the mask or one of the masks thus:

“Not only did Islam begin by condemning all doubters to eternal fire, but it still claims the rights to do so in almost all of its dominions, and still preaches that these same dominions can and must be extended by war. There has never been an attempt in any age to challenge or even investigate the claims of Islam that has not been met with extremely harsh and swift repression. Previously, then, one is entitled to conclude that the apparent unity and confidence of the faith is a mask for a very deep and probably justifiable insecurity. That there are and always have been sanguinary feuds between different schools of Islam, resulting in strictly inter-Muslim accusations of heresy and profanity and in terrible acts of violence, naturally goes without saying.” (pp. 125-126)

I was born in a Muslim neighbourhood where this mask of ‘unity and confidence of the faith’ was uncovered more often than not with each person or family representing one school of Islam or the other claiming the heart and soul of what they all viewed as the perfect religion. The small sect of Islam I was born in and which entertained (and still entertains) the claim that it was (and is) the true recipient of the legacy of True Islam was at the receiving end of the 'accusations of heresy and profanity' by mainstream Muslims in my neighbourhood. In fact, I grew up with an awareness of factional fault lines getting sharper and wider. But, as Hitchens rightly notes in the book, what unites these warring sects of Islam is its claim that it is 'unimprovable and final’.

That sense of finality has certainly caused a cognitive dissonance in the Muslim psyche: how can a perfect and final religion be in a position where it has absolutely no leadership role in the affairs of the contemporary world? The only way to reduce the dissonance is to see the community as a victim of others - the West, the Crusaders. This denialism, an offshoot of the victimhood syndrome, has shaped the collective conscience of each of these sects and the characteristic feature of that conscience is hostility to the West. There may be differences in the degrees in which that hostility is manifest in different sects. But the overarching idea of an absolutely perfect Islamic alternative that these diverse sects seek to embed in the Muslim psyche is what the ideological Islamism pursues to cement the apparent differences with.

Another post-9/11 narrative that is still in the making is that Islam is a religion that appreciates individual liberty. That kind of personal Islam has to be appreciated and encouraged because it can be a better alternative to the violent jihadist strain in Islam whose victims are mainly Muslims. Perhaps, such initiatives may yield positive results in future. Their problem, however, is their vulnerability to confirmation bias. One already thinks that one’s religion is a beautiful religion and finds things to prove that it is and stays happy with that brilliant finding. But a religion that treats itself as perfect and final and its scripture as valid for all times to come cannot be easily made amenable to the fancies of a few reform-minded individuals unless they are prepared to disabuse themselves and their co-religionists of the perceived supremacy of their religion. My children would be living in a better world if such reform-oriented efforts succeed.

Islam is not the only target of Hitchens’ attack as he spares no religion from his sharp criticism and ridicule. The attack on the Twin Towers of New York just helped him focus on the jihadist ideology which he rightly branded Islamofascism. I salute him for his oratorical and literary skills to debunk dogmas and ideologies that stifle free speech. One of the world’s most influential public intellectuals, he will survive his death by continuing to inspire people like me who wish to live by Enlightenment values based on rational inquiry, freethinking, freedom of conscience, gender equality, basic human rights and dignity which we can find only in a true democracy. No revealed religion and no dogma can be an alternative to democracy. Let me toast a drink to the courage and intellectual honesty of Hitchens who refused to succumb to any notion of political correctness.

A great interview

New Age Marxism?

We are living at a time when we are told that there is a New Age perspective out there about everything. There is hardly anything this catchy label cannot be attached to. For instance, we have New Age therapy, New Age religion, New Age Physics and New Age everything. But the idea of a New Age Marxism never crossed my mind until I heard a recent speech of Sitaram Yechury, Marxist ideologue and Polit Bureau member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).

Mr. Yechury's address at a function on the Kannur University campus on November 26, 2011 was on predicted lines as it contained run-off-the-mill ideas which essentially say that Marxists have a better understanding of how a society functions and boast of having a perfect prescription for shaping a perfect society. His speech on the higher education policies being pursued by the Government of India expectedly accused the present dispensation of implementing neo-lilberal policies that help international finance capital maximise profit by commodification of education. It is all fine as it perfectly fits into the Marxist world view of what is good and what is bad.

But I felt Mr. Yechury was on the brink of a metaphysical quest uncharacteristic of a Marxist ideologue when he sounded New Age-y as he embraced some of the concepts that would have thrilled admirers of Fritjof Kapra or Gary Zukav. He was talking about the intellectual resource that India possessed for making the country an intellectual power house. To exemplify that, he recounted his recent visit to the Silicon Vally where he found a substantial number of Indians, especially people speaking his mother tongue, Telugu, manning the frontier technologies. He was told by one senior personnel in the Apple Computer that 'i' of iPad, iPhone and iPod stands for 'infinite loop' and that it was 'very similar to your Marxist concept of negation of negation'.

The idea of infinite loop developed by Steve Jobs, one of the founders of Apple and a cult figure whom many would describe as a New Age Mahatma or the spiritual guru of technology is very similar to the Marxist dialectical principle of negation of negation! Very interesting. Let me quote Mr. Yechury:

"When we talk of negation, people misunderstand it as a circle, saying that Marx has said that history repeats in circles. No. History never repeats itself in that sense but it replicates itself at a higher level. So, it is a loop."

That reminded me of the Caltech debate on March 14, 2010 featuring Michael Shermer and Sam Harris on one side and Deepak Chopra and Jean Houston on the other side. During the interactive session, which I watched on YouTube, Caltech Professor of Theoretical Physics Leonard Mlodinow asked Deepak Chopra if he would like to have a short course in quantum mechanics so that his (Deepak's) misuse of quantum notations could be corrected. Following is the short encounter between them:

Deepak Chopra: By the way today is Einstein's birth day (3/14), so we are at a very fitting place and it just occurred to me 3.14 is the first approximation of Pi which refers to infinity. So, as long as your point of Physics explanations help me understand infinity, I would be honored.

LM: We have to keep it (inifinity) local, though, and not non-local.

DC: Do you sir, believe in the infinite?

LM: I believe that I understand some of the concepts of infinite.

DC: Ok. Do you think that your mathematics requires infinite to explain things that you explain to the people?

LM: We use the concept of infinite quite a lot.

DC: Thank you.

LM: You are welcome...(Deepak's) use of term non-local was not correct.

DC: I think consciousness is non-local.

LM: You know I have never gone across the definition of consciousness that I understood. So maybe you can teach me something.

DC: (Consciousness is) a super position of possibilities.

LM: Well (laughs), all right, I know what each of those words mean. But still I don't think I know it.

DC: I am right now talking to a conscious being...

LM: I hope so.

DC: ...even though that conscious being is pretending to be a physicist...pretending in the larger context. You are an infinite being who has taken on the identity of a physicist in space and time.

Mr. Yechury is no Deepak Chopra, a medical doctor by profession, who has 'packaged Eastern mystique in credible Western garb,' to quot Time magazine, and built a successful enterprise of wellness industry. Sam Harris describes him as "the very definition of what we mean by pseudoscience". Mr. Yechury, for his part, is presenting the idea of infinite loop as an exemplification of the Marxist dialectics of negation of negation as if that 'law of dialectics' were perfectly applicable for all time and for all things.

His attempt (in my view) to further prove the validity of Marxist dialectics in what he called the 'battle of ideas' came when he dwelt on the invention of zero by the ancient Indians. Referring to Charles Seife's book Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, Mr. Yechury said that zero was a dangerous idea in the sense that it was impossible for people to conceive of nothingness. The opposite of zero was infinite, Mr. Yechury said adding that this was unity of opposites in dialectics. Asserting that nothing worked in modern science without zero and infinite, he said:

"Your entire calculus is tending towards zero or tending towards infinite. This concept of unity of opposites - between zero and infinite - was invented by our earlier generation for this world."

Nothing wrong there as far as he was just trying to prove that the Marxist dialectics was still relevant. But what really flummoxed me was his embrace of the New Age ideas of Tao of Physics to prove it. Was he laying the foundation stone for what may be called 'New Age Marxism'? He told the audience that Tao of Physics describes Shiva's Thandav as cosmic dance of subatomic particles. Referring to the huge Nataraj statue presented by the Government of India to the CERN (European Organisation for Nuclear Research) underground laboratory experimenting the Large Hadron Collider, Mr. Yechury said:

"This cosmic dance of subatomic particles, that Shiva's Thandav, how do we see it always? You have Shiva in that Nataraj statue, but he is always in a circle. If the cosmic dance of subatomic particles is the infinite, the infinite is always bounded by the zero....You cannot conceive of zero without the infinite. So there is nothing called nothingness without the completeness of the infinite or the completeness without the nothingness....This is dialectics of unity of opposites in Marxist terminology."

Mr. Yechury here is further seeking to secure endorsement of the Marxist dogma of dialectics, which is just a philosophical postulate just like any other philosophical postulate. From a metaphysical perspective, seeing everything as a process of motion involving strife between opposites (thesis and anti-thesis) is just what it is: philosophical speculation. But its validity is questioned when we apply it in the field of science. What is, for example, the opposite of the scientific truth that the Earth is round? Is there a synthesis to come out of the strife between thesis (Earth is round) and its anti-thesis (Earth is flat)? Or is it all just the dance of the dialectic?

'Dance of the Dialectic', by the way, is the title of a book authored by another Marxist intellectual who tries to rescue Marxism from dogmatism. Bertell Ollman, who authored the book, is more honest. Here is what he says:

"Dialectics is not a rock-ribbed triad of thesis-antithesis-synthesis that serves as an all-purpose explanation; nor does it provide a formula that enables us to prove or predict anything; nor is it the motor force of history. The dialectic, as such, explains nothing, proves nothing, predicts nothing and causes nothing to happen. Rather, dialectics is a way of thinking that brings into focus the full range of changes and interactions that occur in the world." (p. 12, Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx's Method, University of Illinois Press, 2003)

For Enlightenment Rationalism

There was a time when I thought that being a rationalist in Kerala was little better than being a member of a herd strictly controlled and guided by shepherds whose only claim to being what they were was that they knew the 'dialectics' of everything. Not any more. My recent association with the Kozhikode-based Science Trust has made me realise that true rationalists are those free-thinking individuals unwilling to subscribe to any ideology or thought-policing dogma or faith. A space for such individuals carrying no ideological labels is being carved out thanks to the efforts of rationalists and science-promoters associated with the Science Trust.

The one-day State-level gathering of rationalists and science-promoters held in Thrissur on Sunday (November 20, 2011) under the aegis of the Science Trust was the beginning of the effort to forge a forum of like-minded people committed to exposing irrational as well as pseudo-scientific belief systems ranging from alternative medicines to dogmas of all varieties including political and religious.

The inaugural speech by Babu Gogineni, the Executive Director of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, set the tone for the day-long proceedings of the gathering. He said at the outset that when we defend science we are defending civilisation. As far as India is concerned, the retreat from reason and rejection of science have been costly, he said emphasising that the stupidity will endanger our democracy. Practitioners of pseudo-scientific systems such as homeopathy also talk the language of science without any fear of being caught by law, he noted.

Mr. Gogineni also said that religion and religious orthodoxy are a major threat to human rights. The stronger the religious orthodoxy in a society, the worse the human rights records in that society, he said adding that the human rights and democracy could not prevail without the support of science. The higher superstition of belief in ideology is no less harmful than the baser superstition of religious faith in supernatural powers and belief in pseudo-scientific ideas, Mr. Gogineni pointed out. Observing that the objections to scientific mindset comes from different sources, he said that the major objection was that science does not talk about values. This is nonsense since there is the value of honesty in the very method of science as it is open to question and ready to correct if proved wrong, he said noting that science always updates our knowledge and convictions. According to Mr. Gogineni, those who defend science need not feel obliged to answer all frivolous arguments.

The presentation by Dr. C. Viswanathan on "'Pure rationalism and pre-scientific modes of thought" at the gathering was thought-provoking as he delineated the evolution of the concept of dialectics propounded by Heraclitus into dialectical materialism central to the Marxist ideology. He began his presentation with a quote from Michael Shermer that human beings are pattern-seeking primates. Differentiating rationalism from 'pure' rationalism, Dr. Viswanathan said that while 'pure' rationalism proceeds from concepts and axioms to phenomena, rationalism proceeds from phenomena to concepts and axioms. Science is rational because it examines phenomena to arrive at concepts and axioms.

Quoting Karl Popper's description of Hegelian dialectics as "real physical rabbits out of purely metaphysical silk hats," Dr. Viswanathan demonstrated examples of axiomatic pre-scientific thoughts as found in ancient Greek idea of the balance among 'four humours' being key to good health and similar concepts in Ayurveda. The idea of four humours was taken as an axiomatic knowledge and "pure" rational debates were held on this idea which, however, was not the result of any conclusion on the basis of evidence (it did not proceed from phenomena to axioms).

Dr. Viswanathan applied this distinction between rational and 'pure' rational approaches to demonstrate that dialectical materialism was axiomatic and therefore not rational. Here is my understanding of his explication of the concept of dialectic:

Heraclitus was the founder of dialectics as he propounded the idea that everything is in constant change as a result of inner strife and opposition. The concept of dialectics was given new life by Hegel. Union of opposites is the basis of the Hegelian concept of dialectics. "Dialectic" in Hegel is the method by which human history unravels as, in Hegel's view, history progresses as a dialectical process. Marx and Engels borrowed the three laws of dialectics codified by Hegel. For Engels, these three laws are discovered within nature. Engels just copied the Hegelian laws which are:

1. Law of unity of opposites

2. Law of transformation

3. Law of negation of negation

1. Marx and Engels observed that everything in existence is a unity of opposites. Electricity, for example, is characterised by a positive and negative charge and atoms consists of protons and electrons. Even humans are a unity of opposites of, say, life and death as every living humn being is also dying. Marxism says that everything contains two mutually incompatible but equally essential and indispensable parts or aspects. This is borrowed from Hegelian notion that unity of opposites in nature is the source of movement and change. But, according to Dr. Viswanathan, nature defies dialectician. Take the case of bacteria, for example. Death is not at all an essential part of bacteria. There is also no life and death for hydra. He says that dialecticians are superimposing a pattern on nature which does not have one.

2. The law of transformation states that continuous quantitative development results in qualitative "leaps" in nature whereby a completely new form or entity is produced. This is how quantitative development becomes qualitative change. Insignificant quantitative changes lead to fundamental qualitative changes in the form of a leap from one state to another. For example, while heating water, a one degree increase in temperature is a small quantitative change, but between 99 and 100 degrees there is a qualitative change when water becomes steam. Again nature defies the dialectical law, as Dr. Viswanathan shows. He says that water becoming steam is a continuous process in nature without any increase in temperature.

3. The law of negation accounts for the tendency in nature to constantly increase the numerical quantity of all things. Marx and Engels demonstrated that entities tend to negate themselves in order to advance or reproduce a higher quantity. Engels often cited the case of the barley seed which, in its natural state, germinates and out of its own negation produces a plant and the plant, in turn, grows to maturity, and is itself negated after bearing many barley seeds. Can we apply this barely example of the law of negation to a jack fruit tree, for example, asks Dr. Viswanathan. There are trees that continue to exist thousands of years refusing to be negated by its seeds, he shows.

Dialectical materialism, like homeopathic principle of 'like cures like' or Ayurvedic theory of 'dosas', is only an armchair enterprise, an exercise that proceeds from axioms to phenomena, he says. The true rationalism, that is, Enlightenment rationalism, proceeds from phenomena to axioms. The Enlightenment Project includes revolt against superstition, attack on dogmas and secularisation of institutions and ideas, among others. It is, as Diderot says, to change the way people think.

I came back from the gathering more enlightened.