Shunya's Notes

Revisiting the Idea of India — Part 2

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily.)

A two-part review of The Indian Ideology by Perry Anderson. Part 1 is here. The review appeared as "No Saints or Miracles" in the Himal Southasian print quarterly 'Are we sure about India?' (January 2013), and is reproduced with permission [this version is slightly modified].

Perhaps no single event has had a greater impact on the politics of modern South Asia than Partition, which created the nation-states of India and Pakistan, and later Bangladesh. The genocide it triggered forced the migration of 12-18 million people, the largest in world history, a million deaths, and a poisoned well of politics in the region. What were its causes? Which key players deserve more blame than others? Could it have been averted? Not only do perceptions differ sharply but most Partition narratives are steeped in nationalist posturing, demonization, and layers of taboo.

Last year, for instance, Jaswant Singh, a leader of the Indian right-wing party BJP and former defense and foreign minister of India, caused a storm with his biography of Jinnah. In it Singh assigned greater blame for Partition to Nehru and even praised Jinnah for his sundry qualities. No BJP official attended the book launch, after which Singh was summarily expelled from the BJP and his book banned in Gujarat. So while emotions still run high on the topic, it’s also true that at least among scholars today, Singh’s interpretation has gained ground. Yet few historians have offered a sharper account of it than Perry Anderson, who humanises many icons of Indian nationalism, restoring to them their rightful share of human follies.

One such icon is Nehru, a disciple of Gandhi with a crippling psychological dependence on him, but whose ‘intellectual development [was] not arrested by intense religious belief’. Nehru, a Brahmin, was born into a higher social class than Gandhi, a Bania. Nehru was not religious, had extramarital affairs, and ‘had acquired notions of independence and socialism Gandhi did not share’. That said, Nehru’s ‘advantages yielded less than might be thought’ and he ‘seems to have learned very little at Cambridge’, becoming ‘a competent orator’ but never acquiring ‘a modicum of literary taste.’ The Discovery of India, ‘a steam bath of Schwärmerei’ with a ‘Barbara Cartland streak’, reveals ‘not just Nehru’s lack of formal scholarship and addiction to romantic myth, but something deeper ... a capacity for self-deception with far-reaching political consequences.’ He combined qualities like ‘hard work, ambition, charm, some ruthlessness’ with ‘others that were developmentally ambiguous: petulance, violent outbursts of temper, vanity.’

To Save Everything, Click Here

The innovations of the last two decades, led by the Internet and mobile devices, have fundamentally altered the way so many of us live, work, and play. Is modern technology a problem or a solution—and why? How is the disruptive impact of the Internet shaping human societies and cultures, our values, ideas of Self, and relationships? What trends should worry us the most, and who should we hold responsible for them? The viewpoints here are perhaps as numerous as people themselves, even as we cluster them in categories like evangelists, pioneers, enthusiasts, skeptics, laggards, technophobes, curmudgeons, and so on.

Evgeny Morozov, an analyst of technological trends, has a new book, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. In it, he attempts a critique of a culture that worships technology as the great hope and savior of humanity. I just read an interesting exchange between Morozov and Farhad Manjoo, technology columnist for Slate. I might read the book though my impression from this exchange is that while attempts like Morozov's are badly needed and he does raise many good questions, in the end young Morozov seems to me simply out of his depth for the ambitious task he has taken on. Here are links to the exchange:

Entry 1: Manjoo's opening salvo against Morozov

Entry 2: Morozov on what Manjoo gets wrong about his book

Entry 3: Manjoo on why Morozov has Silicon Valley absolutely wrong

Entry 4: Morozov on why and how technology journalism needs to evolve

Of Bonobos and Men

Primatologist Frans de Waal has a new book, The Bonobo and the Atheist. Below is an excerpt from an early review in the New Republic (click photo for the Amazon listing; the Publisher's Weekly blurb is here).

Those familiar with de Waal’s previous books ... will recognize many of the same arguments resurfacing here, including the idea that human morality has biological origins. “Fairness and justice are … best looked at as ancient capacities. They derive from the need to preserve harmony in the face of resource competition.” De Waal uses the bonobo—a peaceful, sex-loving primate who may be as closely related to us, or more closely related, than the more Machiavellian chimpanzee—to attack the prevailing notion of human nature as selfish and violent, and that we are constantly battling to suppress our terrible “animal nature.” “Everything science has learned in the past few decades argues against this pessimistic view that morality is a thin veneer over a nasty human nature.”

What’s new here is that de Waal wades directly into the atheism-versus-religion debate, which he claims is often mistakenly cast as a science-versus-religion debate. He argues that a biologically evolved “bottom-up” morality obviates the need for the “top-down” morality imposed by religion. And yet, he sees science (and himself) as aligned with secular humanism, which is not necessarily anti-religion. He would like to see the influence of religion fade, but acknowledges that a moral code is not all religion provides: “The question is not so much whether religion is true or false, but how it shapes our lives, and what might possibly take its place.”

More here. Read more about the book and an excellent interview with de Waal here. Also see a review on NPR.

The Letters of Auster and Coetzee

Here is a review of Here and Now: Letters (2008-11), which gathers a correspondence between two friends: Paul Auster and JM Coetzee.

For potential pen pals, these two famous writers might seem at first an unlikely pairing. Auster, the younger by seven years, is an enthusiast, or certainly I’ve always thought of him that way: his fascination with coincidences and odd circumstances; his bottomless bag of anecdotes; his championing of out-of-the-way books and films that always end up being very good. Meanwhile Coetzee, the Nobel Prize-winning South African, seems more of a skeptic, a fastidious thinker and uncompromising moralist, who strips away social and political conventions in search of an ethics of essential experience. Yet whatever their differences, real or perceived, what quickly becomes clear in the pages of “Here and Now” is that they have far more in common than not.

They both love sports, for example, and the fact that they don’t love precisely the same sports, or love them for precisely the same reasons, is largely why they have so much to say to each other about them. Discussing the nature of sports’ appeal, Auster proposes they are “a kind of performance art.” Coetzee responds that his interest in sports is “ethical rather than aesthetic,” having to do with “the need for heroes that sports satisfy.”

More here (via 3QD). Also check out this very interesting excerpt from their exchange on sports. Two more reviews here and here.

'Storytellers' by Mo Yan

An endearing Nobel Lecture by Mo Yan, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012. Yan talks about his mother, his childhood, the town he spent his first 21 years in, the sources of his inspiration, his penchant for basing his characters on people around him, and more.

I was born ugly. Villagers often laughed in my face, and school bullies sometimes beat me up because of it. I’d run home crying, where my mother would say, “You’re not ugly, Son. You’ve got a nose and two eyes, and there’s nothing wrong with your arms and legs, so how could you be ugly? If you have a good heart and always do the right thing, what is considered ugly becomes beautiful.” Later on, when I moved to the city, there were educated people who laughed at me behind my back, some even to my face; but when I recalled what Mother had said, I just calmly offered my apologies.

My illiterate mother held people who could read in high regard. We were so poor we often did not know where our next meal was coming from, yet she never denied my request to buy a book or something to write with. By nature hard working, she had no use for lazy children, yet I could skip my chores as long as I had my nose in a book.

A storyteller once came to the marketplace, and I sneaked off to listen to him. She was unhappy with me for forgetting my chores. But that night, while she was stitching padded clothes for us under the weak light of a kerosene lamp, I couldn’t keep from retelling stories I’d heard that day. She listened impatiently at first, since in her eyes professional storytellers were smooth-talking men in a dubious profession. Nothing good ever came out of their mouths. But slowly she was dragged into my retold stories, and from that day on, she never gave me chores on market day, unspoken permission to go to the marketplace and listen to new stories. As repayment for Mother’s kindness and a way to demonstrate my memory, I’d retell the stories for her in vivid detail.

A controversy recently arose over Mo Yan's selection for the Prize, in which Salman Rushdie criticized Yan's political affiliations and was ably defended by Pankaj Mishra. See the entertaining public exchanges between these two one, two, three, and four.

Black Women, Rape, and Resistance

In late 2011, Danielle L. McGuire published a book that revisits the history of a certain "rape culture" in the United States, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance—a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power. The book recounts experiences of black women that have obvious parallels with the struggles of Dalit and Adivasi women in India today:

"The author gives us the never-before-told history of how the civil rights movement began; how it was in part started in protest against the ritualistic rape of black women by white men who used economic intimidation, sexual violence, and terror to derail the freedom movement; and how those forces persisted unpunished throughout the Jim Crow era when white men assaulted black women to enforce rules of racial and economic hierarchy. Black women’s protests against sexual assault and interracial rape fueled civil rights campaigns throughout the South that began during World War II and went through to the Black Power movement."

As this review relates, "African-American women had been victimized for centuries by white sexual violence in the South, but fear of reprisal kept most crimes from being reported, let alone prosecuted." In her review of McGuire's book, Jennifer Jensen writes:

McGuire argues that rapes of black women by white men were largely ignored by mainstream society due to an underlying racial and economic hierarchy. As a result, rape systematically subjugated the black race and also challenged black respectability. Black people—women especially—were under continuous public scrutiny. Consequently, when black women were raped, the unwarranted violent sex acts allowed society to blame the victim for the assault, which was attributed to deficiencies of their race. ... McGuire’s method contrasts media coverage against extant state or court documents. The result reveals how newspapers reported the rape cases, in what context the victim was portrayed, and any public outrage incited because of the inertia of law enforcement. The state and court documents illustrate the lack of legal recourse black communities had when women were raped and, more importantly, the legal barriers built into the system to subjugate black people through sexual racialization.

Read two more reviews of the book here and here. The second of these two reviews mentions the story of Taylor, "one of many black women attacked by white men during an era in which sexual assault was used to informally enforce Jim Crow segregation." Decades later at age 90, in words that are nothing short of haunting, Taylor grapples with why she was gang-raped. “I was an honest person and living right,” Taylor said. “They shouldn’t have did that. I never give them no reason to do it.”

Sex & Style in Murakami's 1Q84, A Review — Part 2

By R Alexander

This is part 2 of 2 of a review of Haruki Murakami's novel 1Q84. You can link to the first part here.

Structurally, non-realist narratives are no different from more standard “realistic” fictions. They create a narrative tension, often involving some sort of conflict, and then they resolve that tension in some way. What I’m addressing here is narrative structure, and what I’ve posited sounds simplistic, I suppose. Even if a story is non-realistic (as in, say, magical realism, surrealist fiction, slip stream stories, science fiction or fantasy, fabulist pieces, and whatever else), there is some sort of hook or some way that the reader can relate to what’s going on, and there is narrative tension built on conflict. In addition to this, stories provide a sense of closure, at or near their end. Non-realist stories tend to play with the conventions of these two aspects of story and to make that play an explicit part of the narrative. Kafka, for instance, tells the story of a person who turns into a bug. That story takes as its starting place an event that is impossible and also horrific. We can become involved in this story though, not because we are interested in entomology, but because we recognize something human in the situation. Sympathetic readers of the story will recognize that it is about, among other things, alienation, about the creaturely nature of our nature, and about family. So the story involves us in a very straightforward way. And the story has a very straightforward sense of closure at the end. The story ends with Gregor Samsa’s death and with changes that occur among the family because of it.

Writers of whatever stripe engage their readers in diverse ways. Gabriel Garcia Marquez' works, the sine qua non of "magic realism," plunge into family, history, and culture, into the relations of people among themselves and their struggle to achieve relationships or the way those familial, historical, and cultural relationships become entangled and complicated and fulfilled or frustrated. The dream-like fleetingness of Garcia Marquez’ style is itself part of what he is saying about the nature of those relationships. Likewise Salman Rushdie’s picaresque style enacts part of the argument he is making about the accidental sometimes indecent or inhumane shape human lives can be twisted into by historical and/or cultural forces. Samuel Beckett's pieces are musings on language, memory, and identity, and his works are like the mind at play. Borges is the master, invoking mirrors and libraries and labyrinths, and thereby taking up notions of perception, of quantum realities and the forking nature of time and causality, and of notions of historicity and knowledge. 

Curator of a Hollowed Conscience

Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal on the great short story writer, Saadat Hasan Manto, whose birth centenary was celebrated this year.

Saadat Hasan Manto ... once remarked that any attempt to fathom the murderous hatred that erupted with such devastating effect at the time of the British retreat from the subcontinent had to begin with an exploration of human nature itself.

For the master of the Urdu short story this was not a value judgment. It was a statement of what he had come to believe after keen observation and extended introspection. Shaken by the repercussions of the decision to break up the unity of the subcontinent, Manto wondered if people who only recently were friends, neighbours and compatriots had lost all sense of their humanity. He too was a human being, ‘the same human being who raped mankind, who indulged in killing' and had ‘all those weaknesses and qualities that other human beings have.' Yet human depravity, however pervasive and deplorable, could not kill all sense of humanity. With faith in that kind of humanity, Manto wrote riveting short stories about the human tragedy of 1947 that are internationally acknowledged for representing the plight of displaced and terrorised humanity with exemplary impartiality and empathy.

More here.

Style & Plot in Murakami's 1Q84, A Review — Part 1

By R Alexander

Haruki Murakami writes short stories and big novels where weird things take on strange importance:  a disappearing cat leads to a detective type adventure, ears are erotic, jazz and classical music beckons and have magically transformative properties, abandoned wells harbor mysteries. Metaphysics as meaning seems to loom over his work. With each book he writes and as the books get longer, greater and greater claims are made concerning their importance. His latest work, 1Q84, is being called his magnum opus, and a great work of world literature. The book is so long, in fact, that Random House hired two translators, Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel, to work on it simultaneously so they could get it to press in a reasonable time. 

1Q84 mainly concerns two people living in Tokyo in 1984 who, early in the novel, find themselves in a parallel or alternate universe. The novel’s title refers to one of the character's name for the alternate universe.  The “Q,” in 1Q84, stands for "question,” and there is apparently a sonic play on “Q” and “9” in the original Japanese, similar, I suppose to the orthographic play on or resemblance between the figures for “q” and “9” in English. 

Aside from this little play on “Q” and “9” in the title, however, Murakami’s prose style remains straightforwardly realistic. No GV Desani-style linguistic or cultural tom-foolery here. Murakami is well known for being the Japanese translator of Raymond Carver and F Scott Fitzgerald, and these influences, Carver’s in particular, are not hidden. In1Q84, Murakami does not depart from his characteristic style and themes. 

1Q84’s two protagonists are Tengo Kawana and Aomame. Tengo, a math teacher and would-be fiction writer, crosses paths with the assassin Aomame, during an investigation into a religious cult. The story’s action takes off when Tengo collaborates with a former cult member, a character called Fuka-Eri, in writing a novella that exposes the cult’s sexual rituals which involve paedophilia. The name of the novella is Air Chrysalis, and much of 1Q84 involves the collaborative writing of Air Chrysalis and the cult’s subsequent hunt for Tengo and Fuka-Eri and later also the hunt  for Aomame, who assassinates the cult leader and goes into hiding separately. But this hardly gives the real sense of the work. While the plot generally follows the outline of a straightforward thriller, Murakami’s baroque inventiveness twists the story into the bizarre. It is not simply that the book is set in a world that has two moons in the sky, where Japan has become a kind of police state, and where other “mirror universe” trappings appear, but there are the weird things that happen. The religious cult, for example, is based around a charismatic leader and his connection to “The Little People,” a troop of vaguely menacing Leprechaun-like entities who emerge, the first time we see them, from a dead dog’s mouth and who manipulate people and events.

Revisiting the Idea of India — Part 1

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily.)

A two-part review of The Indian Ideology by Perry Anderson. Part 2 is here. The review appeared as "No Saints or Miracles" in the Himal Southasian print quarterly 'Are we sure about India?' (January 2013), and is reproduced with permission [this version is slightly modified].

‘Nations without a past are contradictions in terms,’ wrote Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm. Precursors to every modern nation are stories about its past and the present — stories full of invention, exclusion, and exaggeration — which help forge a ‘national consciousness’. Historians, wrote Hobsbawm, have ‘always been mixed up in politics’ and are ‘an essential component of nationalism’. They participate in shaping a nation’s mythos and self-perception. In his vivid analogy, ‘Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.’ The more nationalist a historian, he held, the weaker his bid to be taken seriously as a historian.

But not all historians are equally complicit. Some are deeply skeptical of the dominant national histories and claims of nationhood. ‘Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation,’ wrote the scholar Ernst Renan. The skeptical historian may see value in nationalism, but she always sees a pressing need to inspect and critique its claims, assumptions, omissions, myths, and heroes. Scrutiny may reveal that a ‘cherished tradition’ is neither cherished, nor a tradition; likewise for supposedly ancient origins and customs, traits and virtues, arts and culture, and other qualities of life and mind said to define the essence of a nation and its people. This approach is especially common among Marxist historians (their analytical orientation defines the genre, not their views on communism). The best of them know that there is no ultimately objective history, but who yet seek to write history from below and attempt to expose the actual conditions of social life, including the divisions, conflicts and oppressions that plague any nation.

This, then, is the vantage point of Marxist historian Perry Anderson’s magnificent and lucid new work, The Indian Ideology. What does the title refer to? In his own words, it ‘is another way of describing what is more popularly known as "The Idea of India", which celebrates the democratic stability, multi-cultural unity, and impartial secularity of the Indian state as a national miracle.’ Anderson offers a critique of this idea.

Nationalism in India arose in the 19th century. A native elite, responding to British colonialism, began articulating a consciousness based on a new idea of India. Until then, despite civilizational continuities, the Subcontinent had no sense of itself as ‘India’, no national feeling based on a shared identity. Rival political units and ethnic groups abounded, divided by language, faith, caste, geography, history, and more. There was no historical awareness of the ancient empires of Mauryas or Guptas, or that the Buddha was Indian. This and much more of the Indian past would emerge via European scholarship, profoundly shaping ‘Hinduism’ and Hindu self-knowledge. Anderson surveys the rise of Indian nationalism and offers sharp vignettes of the minds and matters that drove Gandhi, Jinnah, Nehru, Bose, Ambedkar, Mountbatten and others. His analysis of the forces that led to Partition is astute and provocative. He assesses the performance of the independent nation-state and subjects Indian intellectuals to a withering critique for what he diagnoses as their comfort with ‘the Indian ideology’. Though not without shortcomings, Anderson has given us a masterwork of critical synthesis — trenchant, original, and bold — that should fuel discussion and debate for years ahead.  

Partition: Recovering Sylhet

For some time now, I've been digging into the partition of India: Urvashi Butalia's excellent, The Other Side of Silence on the experience of the women, children, and Dalits of Punjab (I hope to do a review soon), Remembering Partition by Gyanendra Pandey and Jan Breman, The Partition of India by Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh, and Stern Reckoning by GD Khosla (most partisan of this lot). I also recently saw the movies Tamas and The Train to Pakistan (both on YouTube) and plan to watch Silent Waters soon. While much new scholarship has appeared in recent years on the partition of Punjab and Bengal, little is known about "the third site of Partition — colonial Assam, and particularly the region of Sylhet." A friend pointed me to this article in Himal that has more on Partition historiography and the experience of Sylhet.

Sixty-five years after Partition, the scholarship that event generates is varied and contested. Now more than ever before, writers and researchers are questioning the heavy focus on Punjab and Bengal at the expense of the third site of Partition – colonial Assam, and particularly the region of Sylhet, which elected to join East Pakistan in a 1947 referendum. The history of Sylhet opens up new complexities beyond the typical discourse that sees Partition as primarily a matter of religious communalism.

The study of Partition’s more narrowly regional dimensions is a recent development. The first Partition historians – Michael Edwardes, Penderel Moon, David Page, V P Menon, G D Khosla, and others – focused on decolonisation and the high politics of the division of India, with a core focus on Punjab. Punjab had captured the popular imagination because of the enormity of Partition violence there, which completely clouded this first phase of scholarship. The 1960s saw another spurt of Partition studies, including debates on the emergence of communalism, and also the publication of the memoirs of many key political players with a hand in the events of 1947. Still, the main focus remained on Partition in the Indian west. Meanwhile, nationalistic scholars in India engaged in glorifying the new state and eulogising the post-Partition leadership. Little emerged on Partition’s impact in areas distant from the ‘core’ of north India and Punjab; Partition became a largely Punjabi experience and not, as it actually was, a story of both east and west India. Even until recently, many professional historians who have contributed immensely to the study of Partition – Mushirul Hasan, Ian Talbot, Stanley Wolpert, David Gilmartin, Alok Bhalla, Anita Inder Singh, Ravinder Kumar – have been loath to engage with the Partition experience in the east.

I also discovered 1947partitionarchive.org, where I came across this harrowing "eyewitness account" by Major Jagjit Singh.

The Indian Ideology

I recently drew attention to a remarkable set of essays on Indian history by Perry Anderson, which brim with sharp and novel insights. They have provoked a strong response from the Indian intelligentsia, both in support and in protest. The essays have just been published in India as "The Indian Ideology" available from Three Essays Collective. Here is the book description (I've just ordered my copy):

Today, the Indian state claims to embody the values of a stable political democracy, a harmonious territorial unity, and a steadfast religious impartiality. Even many of those critical of the inequalities of Indian society underwrite such claims. But how far do they correspond to the realities of the Union? If they do not do so, is that simply because of the fate of circumstance, or the recent misconduct of its rulers?

The Indian Ideology suggests that the roots of the current ills of the Republic go much deeper, historically. They lie, it argues, in the way the struggle for independence culminated in the transfer of power from British rule to Congress in a divided subcontinent, not least in the roles played by Gandhi as the great architect of the movement, and Nehru as his appointed successor, in the catastrophe of Partition. Only a honest reckoning with that disaster, Perry Anderson argues, offers an understanding of what has gone wrong with the Republic since Independence.

The ‘Idea of India’, widely diffused not only in the official establishment, but more broadly in mainstream intellectual life, side-steps or suppresses many of these uncomfortable realities, past and present. For its own reasons, much of the left has yet to challenge the upshot: what has come to be the neo-Nehruvian consensus of the time. The Indian Ideology, revisiting the events of over a century in the light of how millions of Indians fare in the Republic today, suggests another way of looking at the country. Marx, urging his contemporaries to ‘face with sober senses their real conditions of life’, furnishes an example of how that might be done.

An interview with Anderson has appeared in Outlook India. Asked to summarize the book, this is what he said:

You could say that, very roughly, it advances five main arguments that run counter to conventional wisdom in India today. Firstly, that the idea of a subcontinental unity stretching back six thousand years is a myth. Secondly,  that Gandhi’s injection of religion into the national movement was ultimately a disaster for it. Thirdly, that primary responsibility for Partition lay not with the Raj, but Congress. Fourthly, that Nehru’s legacy to Republic was far more ambiguous than his admirers will admit. Lastly, that Indian democracy is not contradicted by caste inequality, but rather enabled by it. This is a crude summary. Obviously, in each case, much more is said than this.

Tagore: An Interpretation

I came across this recent and promising intellectual biography of Tagore by Sabyasachi Bhattacharya.

Rabindranath Tagore: An Interpretation by Sabyasachi Bhattacharya is an attempt at an interpretative biography of Tagore. Instead of giving the mundane details of his day-to-day life, the writer weaves a fascinating account of Tagore’s struggle with the changing world around him. Bhattacharya’s basic motive is to unveil the life of the legendary figure while focusing on the intellectual evolution of his work. He tries to frame his work in the genres of biography and literary criticism — calling the result an intellectual biography. He admits that “to look at the interrelationship of the inner and outer life of Rabindranath Tagore is not easy for a biographer”.

Remembered as a poet and lyricist today, Tagore was also a thinker who greatly influenced his contemporaries and successors alike. The political and social atmosphere of his time helped form his philosophy of life. Empire and nation are two inseparable discourses that emerged out of the close contact between European imperialism and Third World nationalism.

A believer in the multi-faceted nature of humanity, Tagore was equally suspicious of imperialism and modern nation states and considered them as hindrances in cultural interaction. Although an eminent supporter of the Swadeshi movement, he never restrained from criticising the emerging discourse of nationalism in India for being guilty of chauvinism and parochialism. He believed in a balanced development of the individual, and by extension, the whole nation.

More here. Two more reviews appear here and here. I've just ordered my copy and hope to write a review at some point. I've been reading some additional works by Tagore lately, particularly his selected essays and his novel Gora, both of which I received as gifts from a friend.

Teju Cole on Naipaul

"Natives on the Boat", a sharp, sensitive vignette in which Teju Cole describes an encounter with VS Naipaul in a New York City apartment:

Our host drifted away, and Vidia and I continued chatting about this and that. Swift judgments came down. The simplicity in Hemingway was “bogus” and nothing, Vidia said, like his. “Things Fall Apart” was a fine book, but Achebe’s refusal to write about his decades in America was disappointing. “Heart of Darkness” was good, but structurally a failure. I asked him about the biography by Patrick French, “The World Is What it Is,” which he had authorized. He stiffened. That book, which was extraordinarily well-written, was also shocking in the extent to which it revealed a nasty, petty, and insecure man. “One gives away so much in trust,” Vidia said. “One expects a certain discretion. It’s painful, it’s painful. But that’s quite alright. Others will be written. The record will be corrected.” He sounded like a boy being brave after gashing his thumb.

The party was ending. I said, “This was not what I expected.” “Oh?” he said, some new mischief in his eyes, “And what did you expect?” “I don’t know. Not this. I thought you’d be surly, and that I’d be rude.” He was pleased. “Very good, very good. So you must write about this. You must write it down, so that others know. That would be good for you, too.” The combination of ego, tenderness, and sly provocation was typical.

Finally, after about twenty minutes, Nadira came for her husband. The hand lifted itself from its resting place on my knee. This benevolent old rheumy-eyed soul: so fond of the word “nigger,” so aggressive in his lack of sympathy towards Africa, so brutal in his treatment of women. He knew nothing about that. He knew only that he needed help standing up, needed help walking across the grand marble-floored foyer towards the private elevator.

The city below. At certain heights, you get vertigo, but you also see what you otherwise might not.

More here.

Tyranny of Merit

A few weeks ago I put up an excerpt from a book by Christopher Hayes, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, "a powerful and original argument that traces the roots of our present crisis of authority to an unlikely source: the meritocracy." In this book Hayes argues that meritocracy inevitably undermines social mobility as it increases inequality, creating a social order that perpetuates privilege, a self-absorbed elite, and institutional corruption. Below is an excerpt from a thought-provoking review by Samuel Goldman:

What’s to be done? One answer is to rescue meritocracy by providing the poor and middle class with the resources to compete. A popular strategy focuses on education reform. If schools were better, the argument goes, poor kids could compete on an equal footing for entry into the elite. The attempt to rescue meritocracy by fixing education has become a bipartisan consensus, reflected in Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” and Obama’s “Race to the Top.”

Hayes rejects this option. The defect of meritocracy, in his view, is not the inequality of opportunity that it conceals, but the inequality of outcome that it celebrates. In other words, the problem is not that the son of a postal clerk has less chance to become a Wall Street titan than he used to. It’s that the rewards of a career on Wall Street have become so disproportionate to the rewards of the traditional professions, let alone those available to a humble civil servant.

Hayes’s prescription, then, is simple: we should raise taxes on the rich and increase redistributive payments to the poor and middle class.

More here.

Animal Rights: Mapping the Debate

Carlo Salzani presents a brilliant overview of the current philosophical debate on animal rights by focusing on three authors of recent books. For what it's worth, I lean towards the viewpoints of Milligan and Garner, and not Francione's.

The heterogeneous galaxies of studies revolving around the issue of animal ethics agree on one point: nonhuman animals endure unacceptable levels of suffering due to human exploitation, and this suffering ought to be eliminated. For the rest, philosophers and activists working in this field agree to disagree: they disagree on the moral status of nonhuman animals, on the major goals of pro-animal activism, on the actions to be taken to ameliorate animals’ conditions, on the strategies to adopt, and on the results achieved by the various movements to date. The diversity of theoretical positions and practical approaches, and the growing number of works addressing the problem, have generated an intense internal debate. Two books published in 2010, Gary Francione and Robert Garner’s The Animal Rights Debate and Tony Milligan’s Beyond Animal Rights, help giving a sense of what is presently going on in philosophical circles and mapping the theoretical territory of the animal ethics discourse.

The two books certainly do not (and do not claim to) cover the entire territory, nor attempt to summarize the entire debate; rather, the three authors offer three distinct — and discordant — positions which, though all advocating a revolution in the human treatment of animals, are as distant as the stars in a constellation. Francione and Garner argue that the debate between abolition and regulation of the human use of animal is at the center of modern animal advocacy, and propose two solid and consistent set of arguments: Francione is in favor of the abolition of the human use of animals, while Garner defends a protectionist approach, according to which at least some uses of animals may be justifiable. Milligan, on the other hand, does not propose a thesis or a consistent “package,” but rather attempts a different approach which explores different issues in different ways without relying on fixed and one-dimensional baselines.

More here.

Joseph Anton, a Memoir by Rushdie

Salman Rushdie has written an autobiography in the third person. This New Yorker excerpt describes how his life changed after the fatwa:

Afterward, when the world was exploding around him, he felt annoyed with himself for having forgotten the name of the BBC reporter who told him that his old life was over and a new, darker existence was about to begin. She called him at home, on his private line, without explaining how she got the number. “How does it feel,” she asked him, “to know that you have just been sentenced to death by Ayatollah Khomeini?” It was a sunny Tuesday in London, but the question shut out the light. This is what he said, without really knowing what he was saying: “It doesn’t feel good.” This is what he thought: I’m a dead man. He wondered how many days he had left, and guessed that the answer was probably a single-digit number. He hung up the telephone and ran down the stairs from his workroom, at the top of the narrow Islington row house where he lived. The living-room windows had wooden shutters and, absurdly, he closed and barred them. Then he locked the front door.

Pankaj Mishra finds this memoir lacking in significant ways. His review resonated with my own assessment of Rushdie's life and work:

Certainly, Rushdie's neat oppositions between the secular and the religious, the light and the dark, and rational literary elites and irrational masses do not clarify the great disorder of the contemporary world. They belong to an intellectually simpler time, when non-western societies, politically insignificant and little-known, could be judged solely by their success or failure in following the great example of the secular-humanist west; and writing literary fiction could seem enough to make one feel, as Tim Parks wrote in a review of Rushdie's novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet, "engaged on the right side of some global moral and political battle".

Indeed, such complacencies of imperial intellectual cultures were what Rushdie had bravely attacked in his brilliant early phase. "Works of art, even works of entertainment," he had pointed out in 1984, "do not come into being in a social and political vacuum; and … the way they operate in a society cannot be separated from politics, from history. For every text, a context." No text in our time has had contexts more various and illuminating than The Satanic Verses, or mixed politics and literature more inextricably, and with deeper consequences for so many. In Joseph Anton, however, Rushdie continues to reveal an unwillingness or inability to grasp them, or to abandon the conceit, useful in fiction but misleading outside it, that the personal is the geopolitical.

How Culture Drove Human Evolution

In this engaging piece, Joseph Henrich argues that the rise of cumulative culture in our ancestral lineage contributed to our genetic evolution, starting as far back as 1.8 million years ago with the earliest of the Homo line, i.e., Homo habilis and Homo erectus. Henrich's approach differs from how most "people thinking about human evolution have approached this as a two-part puzzle, as if there was a long period of genetic evolution until either 10,000 years ago or 40,000 years ago, depending on who you're reading, and then only after that did culture matter, and often little or no consideration given to a long period of interaction between genes and culture."

The main questions I've been asking myself over the last couple years are broadly about how culture drove human evolution. Think back to when humans first got the capacity for cumulative cultural evolution—and by this I mean the ability for ideas to accumulate over generations, to get an increasingly complex tool starting from something simple. One generation adds a few things to it, the next generation adds a few more things, and the next generation, until it's so complex that no one in the first generation could have invented it. This was a really important line in human evolution, and we've begun to pursue this idea called the cultural brain hypothesis—this is the idea that the real driver in the expansion of human brains was this growing cumulative body of cultural information, so that what our brains increasingly got good at was the ability to acquire information, store, process and retransmit this non genetic body of information.

More here (via 3QD). You can either listen to a video of his talk or read its transcript. Also checkout a set of related papers.

Tim Parks on Copyright

In this insightful piece, Tim Parks looks at where copyright comes from and how to think about it.

Do I, as an author, have the right to prevent people copying my books for free? Should I have it? Does it matter?

“They have taken away my right to own a slave,” wrote Max Stirner, the opening words of the chapter on human rights in his great book, The Ego and its Own (1844). One paradoxical sentence to remind us that what we call rights are no more than what the law concedes to one party or another in any given conflict of interest. There are no rights in nature, only in a society with a legal system and a police force. Rights can be different in different countries, they may be notional or enforced.

Copyright then is part of a mass of legislation that governs the relationship between individual and collective, for the most part defending the former against the latter. You will only have copyright in a society that places a very high value on the individual, the individual intellect, the products of individual intellect. In fact, the introduction of a law of copyright is one of the signs of a passage from a hierarchical and holistic vision of society, to one based on the hopes and aspirations of the individual. Not surprisingly, the first legal moves toward creating the concept of copyright come in late seventeenth-century Britain.

More here.

The Revenge of the East?

(A review of Pankaj Mishra’s new book. Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)

A few hundred years ago, a powerful cultural force arose in Western Europe that would later spread out and overwhelm much of the world. Fueled by a new spirit of individualism, inquiry, and innovation, it furthered personal ambition, a materialistic outlook, and competitive self-interest. This cultural force produced—and was in turn amplified by—scientific progress, the nation-state, advances in military and maritime technology, an escalating hunger for profit and raw materials, and secular institutions in education, governance, and finance, such as the joint-stock corporation.

In the ensuing centuries, European adventurers would subject many older, tradition-bound, and self-absorbed civilizations in Asia to the ravages of this aggressive and disruptive cultural force—and incidentally, to its refinements. Indeed by 1900, a minority of white Europeans had colonized much of Asia, controlling not just its political and economic life but also its cultural life in shaping the natives’ idea of themselves. The road to this widely resented domination—which the colonizers justified at home with theories of racial and cultural hierarchies, the white man’s burden, and plain old lies—was paved with countless imperial intrigues, extortionate treaties and taxation, skirmishes, plundering, drug dealing, massacres, and crushed mutinies. As Joseph Conrad wrote in 1902, ‘The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.’

In his engaging new work, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia, Pankaj Mishra chronicles ‘how some of the most intelligent and sensitive people in the East responded to the encroachments of the West (both physical and intellectual) on their societies.’ What did they see as the threats and the temptations of the West? What modes of resistance and internal reforms did they propose to meet this challenge? Mishra’s remarkable story, mostly untold in Western historiography, opens up important new vistas on the colonial West and the trajectories of Asians, whether in imperial Japan, nationalist and communist China, India, or Muslim countries from Turkey to Pakistan.

Mishra on Naipaul

Pankaj Mishra's new book, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia, will be out later this month. Stay tuned for my review of it on August 13th. Meanwhile, this Guardian article by Mishra introduces some key ideas and themes from it. What I found most interesting in it was Mishra's take on Naipaul's famous 1990 essay, Our Universal Civilization. Below is an excerpt from Naipaul's essay:

Because my movement within this civilization has been from Trinidad to England, from the periphery to the center, I may have felt certain of its guiding principles more freshly than people to whom these things were everyday. One such realization ... I suppose I have sensed it most of my life, but I have understood it philosophically only during the preparation of this talk — has been the beauty of the idea of the pursuit of happiness. Familiar words, easy to take for granted; easy to misconstrue. This idea of the pursuit of happiness is at the heart of the attractiveness of the civilization to so many outside it or on its periphery. I find it marvelous to contemplate to what an extent, after two centuries, and after the terrible history of the earlier part of this century, the idea has come to a kind of fruition. It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. I don't imagine my father's Hindu parents would have been able to understand the idea. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist, and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.

Post-colonial leftist bulls have long seen lots of red in Naipaul's non-fiction. Here is Mishra's take on Naipaul and his essay above.

It was also during [the 1970s and 80s] that VS Naipaul's withering accounts of "half-made" postcolonial societies came to be hugely influential. Tracing Conrad's journey through the Congo, Naipaul claimed to see little difference between the imperialist and post-colonial eras. As he described it, the nihilism of Kurtz had been supplanted by "African nihilism, the rage of primitive men coming to themselves and finding that they have been fooled and affronted". Naipaul ignored cold-war machinations in the Congo just as he would later scant the brutal rule of Iran's shah in exchange for broad musings on the innate defects of Islam. Though quickly credited with ethnographic as well as literary authority, Naipaul offered mostly culturalist and pseudo-psychological generalisations – "Islam", for instance, was to blame for the incorrigible backwardness of Muslim countries, India was a "Wounded Civilisation" and of course "African nihilism" had done Africa in. These reductive accounts actually helped entrench, among even liberals, an ahistorical outlook on the non-west while confirming the western supremacist disdain for it. Speaking in 1990 to a rightwing think tank in New York, Naipaul evoked a widespread post-cold-war triumphalism by hailing the "universal civilisation" created by the west, which he claimed would blow away all rival ideologies and values.

The Social Conquest of Earth

EO Wilson's new book, The Social Conquest of Earth, has reignited an old debate about natural evolution, i.e., the level at which it occurs. In the dominant camp are folks like Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker who hold that evolution occurs via gene selection. In the other camp, folks like Wilson and Jonathan Haidt claim that evolution occurs at multiple levels, including via both gene and group selection. Notably, Charles Darwin himself supported the latter view in Descent of Man.

Not surprisingly, Dawkins and Pinker wrote hostile reviews. Dawkins lamented Wilson's "erroneous and downright perverse misunderstandings of evolutionary theory" and called Darwin's own support of group selection "anomalous". Other reviewers I've read include David Sloan Wilson, Steven Mithen, Jerry Coyne, and Leonard Finkelman. Wilson responded with a vigorous defense of his thesis in a NYT's Stone column. At least to me—a general reader, not a specialist in the field—Wilson's account seems entirely plausible and more than likely. What empirical observations might settle this dispute however seems less than clear.

Whatever the truth, what concerns me more about both camps is their penchant for, in the words of H Allen Orr, Darwinian storytelling. Evolutionary psychologists, who abound in both camps, often try to explain too much of human behavior, including our current morality, through evolutionary selection. While it is undeniable that our basic moral instincts come out of millions of years of evolution, it also seems to me that to explain the prolific range of our behavior, we should look more at the cultural edifice that our humanoid ancestors have developed relatively recently through symbolic language and the resulting explosion of speech, concept formation, and social learning.

Twilight of the Elites

Here is a supremely insightful excerpt from Christopher Hayes' Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy. Hayes describes the sordid underside of meritocracy (an ideology that is gaining ground around the world)—how it inevitably undermines social mobility as it increases inequality, creating an order that perpetuates privilege, a self-absorbed elite, and institutional corruption. A must read!

In order for it to live up to its ideals, a meritocracy must comply with two principles. The first is the Principle of Difference, which holds that there is vast differentiation among people in their ability and that we should embrace this natural hierarchy and set ourselves the challenge of matching the hardest-working and most talented to the most difficult, important and remunerative tasks.

The second is the Principle of Mobility. Over time, there must be some continuous, competitive selection process that ensures performance is rewarded and failure punished. That is, the delegation of duties cannot simply be made once and then fixed in place over a career or between generations. People must be able to rise and fall along with their accomplishments and failures. When a slugger loses his swing, he should be benched; when a trader loses money, his bonus should be cut. At the broader social level, we hope that the talented children of the poor will ascend to positions of power and prestige while the mediocre sons of the wealthy will not be charged with life-and-death decisions. Over time, in other words, society will have mechanisms that act as a sort of pump, constantly ensuring that the talented and hard-working are propelled upward, while the mediocre trickle downward.

But this ideal, appealing as it may be, runs up against the reality of what I’ll call the Iron Law of Meritocracy. The Iron Law of Meritocracy states that eventually the inequality produced by a meritocratic system will grow large enough to subvert the mechanisms of mobility. Unequal outcomes make equal opportunity impossible. The Principle of Difference will come to overwhelm the Principle of Mobility. Those who are able to climb up the ladder will find ways to pull it up after them, or to selectively lower it down to allow their friends, allies and kin to scramble up. In other words: “Who says meritocracy says oligarchy.”

More here.  Watch the interview with Hayes after reading the essay. I have previously discussed many of the problems with meritocracy and how they can be mitigated in my essay What Do We Deserve? (Hayes extends the analysis to an exciting new level using recent examples).

Stannard On the Reach of Science

If Stephen Hawking and Lawrence Krauss incline you to the view that physicists today are philosophically naïve, read Russell Stannard.

We said earlier that the job of science is to describe the world. In order to do this, we have to observe it to find out what kind of world it is. But having made the observations (done the experiments) what we write down in our physics textbooks is a description of the world itself, regardless of whether one happens to be observing it. Bohr, and other adherents to his so-called Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, claimed that this was not so. What has been written down is not a description of the world at all, but a description of acts of observation made on the world. All our customary scientific terms such as energy, momentum, position, speed, distance, time, etc. -- they are terms specifically for the description of observations. It is a misuse of language to try and apply them to a world-in-itself divorced from the action of an observation. It is this misuse of language that leads to problems like that posed by the wave/particle paradox. Which is not to say that the world-in-itself does not exist outside the context of someone making an observation of it. Rather, as Werner Heisenberg asserted, all attempts to talk about the world-in-itself are rendered meaningless.

Not that there is anything new in this. The philosopher Immanuel Kant had long ago asserted that one could know nothing about the thing-in-itself. (So much for the death of philosophy.

Finally we ask whether the scientific enterprise, even in this more limited domain of describing only interactions with the world rather than the world itself, might one day achieve complete knowledge. I think not. After all, what do we do our science with? Our brain. But how come we have a brain? It is something that evolved in response to the need of our ancestors to find food, shelter, and avoid predators. It enabled them to survive to the point where they could mate and pass on their genes. The brain was part of their survival kit. Why therefore should anyone think that such an imperfect instrument should be capable of mastering all knowledge regardless of whether it has any relevance to survival?

More here.  Also see a related interesting piece by Gary Gutting, Can Physics and Philosophy Get Along?

A 50-Year Plan for Energy

In this TED talk, Amory Lovins, an energy researcher, lays out a plan for a whole new private-sector energy industry that will save trillions while decimating fossil fuel use, creating jobs, reducing oil conflicts, and growing the economy. For more, visit ReinventingFire.com.