Category: Philosophy
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The Mystic Tradition of India
This is Namit Arora’s foreword to When I See, I Sing: Verses in Translation of Baba Farid, Namdeo, Kabir and Rahim, translated by Pavitra Mohan. First published on Scroll.in.
Humans have always had a remarkable diversity of religious experiences. Across time and cultures, spiritual practices—whether animistic, mystical, ritualistic, or ascetic—owe much to a common human desire to connect with something greater than oneself. These practices include prayer, fasting, sacrifice, self-mortification, festivals, pilgrimage, meditation, art, music, and dance. Whatever the form, such quests for meaning, transcendence, and connection reflect a universal human impulse.Among these diverse expressions of spirituality, mysticism is prominent in many world religions, particularly in Hinduism (Bhakti), Islam (Sufism), Judaism (Kabbalah), and Eastern Christianity. It has especially thrived in regions from the Middle East to the Indian subcontinent. Scholar and philosopher Majid Fakhry describes mysticism as rooted ‘in the original matrix of religious experience’—born from an intense awareness of God and the realisation of one’s insignificance without God. This leads the mystic towards a central goal: the dissolution of the ego (fana) and total surrender to God. By shedding their egoistic self and discovering the divine presence within, mystics strive for greater self-realisation. In this transformation, writes Fakhry, ‘man becomes dead unto himself and alive unto God.’
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Herbert Fingarette on mortality
What is the point of it all, asks Herbert Fingarette, a philosopher, in this moving reflection on life and death. He “once argued that there was no reason to fear death. At 97, his own mortality began to haunt him, and he had to rethink everything.” (18 mins)
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INDIANS: A Book Trailer
My sales pitch for Indians, or as they euphemistically say in the industry, a ‘book trailer’. 🙂
A shorter book trailer with just music (and on-screen text) is here. To learn more about the book, click here.
Category: Anthropology & Archaeology, Art & Cinema, Biography, Books & Authors, Culture, Economics, Environment, History, Justice, Philosophy, Photography, Politics, Religion, Science, Travel, Video -
What Are We Made Of?
A brilliant, accessible talk on Quantum Fields by David Tong. It reminds us how bizarre, mysterious, and awe-inspiring our universe really is!
In the same lecture series are Philip Ball on Quantum Mechanics, Andrew Pontzen on Dark Matter (Q&A), and Harry Cliff on the Higgs Boson.
Happy New Year!
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What Freedom Means
(This essay appeared in Outlook India on the occasion of India’s 72nd Independence Day. It’s now also on Medium.)
Freedom is the ability to pursue the life one values. This view of freedom is inclusive, open-ended, and flexible. It embraces our plural, evolving, and diverse conceptions of the good life. It also admits other long-standing ideas of freedom, such as not being held in servitude, possessing political self-rule, or enjoying the right to act, speak, and think as one desires.Some people naively equate freedom with an absence of social restraints. But should I be free to do whatever I want? Should I be free to pollute the river, not pay any taxes, or torture the cat? To play loud music on the metro, not rent my apartment to Dalits, or incite hate or violence against other groups? I hope not. My freedom requires limits, so that others may enjoy their freedom. Edmund Burke held that freedom must be limited in order to be possessed. A freer society is not necessarily one with fewer social restraints, but one with a wisely chosen set of restraints as well as provisions, such as public education, healthcare, and ample safety nets for all.
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The Paradox of the Belief in a Just World
(An excerpt in The Wire from the introductory essay of my new book: The Lottery of Birth)
In this extract from The Lottery of Birth: On Inherited Social Inequalities, Namit Arora parses through the fiction that he is the sole author of his success and the wilful blindness among Indians about their inherited privileges.
A leading ideological fiction of our age is that worldly success comes to those who deserve it. Per this fiction, the smarter, more talented and disciplined men and women, with some unfortunate exceptions, come out ahead of the rest and morally deserve their material rewards in life. The flip side of this belief is of course that, with some unfortunate exceptions, those who find themselves at the bottom also morally deserve their lot for being – the conclusion is inescapable – neither smart nor talented nor disciplined enough.
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The Lottery of Birth
Friends, I’m pleased to announce my first book, ‘The Lottery of Birth: On Inherited Social Inequalities’. This collection of fifteen essays has been in the works for over seven years, and includes extensively updated versions of many essays that first appeared in other online or print venues. Published by Three Essays Collective, the book is now available worldwide. I hope you will give it a look and spread the word. I can arrange a complimentary copy for anyone interested in reviewing the book on any forum. Simply send me a message with a mailing address.
A New Book on Inequalities in IndiaThe Lottery of Birth: On Inherited Social Inequalities by Namit Arora
Publisher: Three Essays Collective | April 2017 | Paperback, 300 pages | Kindle | Excerpt
Purchase: From Publisher (free shipping) | Flipkart | Amazon IN, US, UK, FR, DE, IT, ES | B&N -
The Reality of Artificial Intelligence
A great deal of fear, excitement, and hype has lately grown around Artificial Intelligence (AI). This is partly because advances in machine learning keep surprising—and even overtaking—us in a growing number of domains, such as disease diagnosis, driving, language translation, and complex forecasting. To add fuel to fire, AI enthusiasts keep making dramatic claims about the imminence of Singularity, human-level AI, super intelligence, and the threat of machines taking over the world and even enslaving us! How warranted are these claims? We owe it to ourselves to better understand both the current state, the potential, and the limitations of AI, to separate hype from reality, and to reflect on the problem of AI philosophically—so we can focus on the actual challenges we’re likely to face as AI becomes more common.AI can certainly improve human lives on many fronts, but this promise coexists with the fear that AI will cause havoc in labor markets by not just appropriating more blue collar work, as industrial automation has been doing for decades, but even a lot of skilled white collar work. This disruption—which will further concentrate wealth and create jobless hordes and cause new social upheavals in nation-states—will likely occur and needs to be taken seriously. What makes AI-led disruption different than earlier waves of technological disruption is that earlier the loss of manufacturing jobs was met by the rise of services sector jobs, but this time the latter too are at risk, with no evident replacement in sight. This is a recipe for jobless growth, with GDP and unemployment rising together—a grave problem that may well require disruptive solutions.
As for the more dramatic claims about AI, my view, which I articulated in The Dearth of Artificial Intelligence (2009), remains that even if we develop ‘intelligent’ machines (much depends here on what we deem ‘intelligent’), odds are near-zero that machines will come to rival human-level general intelligence if their creation bypasses the particular embodied experience of humans forged by eons of evolution. By human-level intelligence (or strong AI, versus weak or domain-specific AI), I mean intelligence that’s analogous to ours: rivaling our social and emotional intelligence; mirroring our instincts, intuitions, insights, tastes, aversions, adaptability; similar to how we make sense of brand new contexts and use our creativity, imagination, and judgment to breathe meaning and significance into novel ideas and concepts; to approach being and time like we do, informed by our fear, desire, delight, sense of aging and death; and so on. Incorporating all of this in a machine will not happen by combining computing power with algorithmic wizardry. Unless machines can experience and relate to the world like we do—which no one has a clue how—machines can’t make decisions like we do. Unless machines can suffer like us, they will not think like us. (Another way to say this is that reductionism has limits, esp. for highly complex systems like the biosphere and human mind/culture, when the laws of nature run out of descriptive and predictive steam—not because our science is inadequate but due to irreducible and unpredictable emergent properties inherent in complex systems.)
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The Lottery of Birth
Announcing a new book on inequalities in India
Title | Author: The Lottery of Birth: On Inherited Social Inequalities | Namit Arora
Publisher: Three Essays Collective | April 2017 | Paperback, 300 pages | Kindle e-book
Purchase: Publisher site (free shipping worldwide) | Amazon IN, US, UK, FR, DE, IT, ESAn egalitarian ethos has not been a prominent feature of Indian civilization, at least since the decline of Buddhism over a thousand years ago. All people, it is believed, are created unequal, born into a hierarchy of status and dignity, and endowed not with universal but particular rights and duties. This has greatly amplified the unfairness of accidents of birth in shaping one’s lot in life. Despite a long history of resistance, such inequalities have thrived and mutated, including under European rule, modernity, and markets.
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More Than An Atheist
Nirmukta is running a series on Facebook in which people are invited to submit a photo and briefly comment on being “more than an atheist”. An editor invited me and Usha and asked, “can you send a pic in which both of you are together? It would be great to feature more couples.”
Here’s the comment and pic that Usha sent in:
I grew up in a relatively tolerant, liberal, Hindu family. We were taught that Hinduism accommodates atheism, and both my parents professed (mildly) to be atheists. Nevertheless, in my childhood, we regularly did pujas at home, recited Sanskrit prayers, and listened to or read the Hindu myths. But many of my earliest encounters with Hindu mythology awakened a rage in me, an anger at the way the stories made me feel as a girl. Long before I could understand these feelings or the reasons for them, Hinduism and Patriarchy became inseparable in my experience and understanding. And very soon, instinctively, I rejected both. At the same time, I grew up in an extremely conservative, backwards, and religiously overwrought small town in the American West, where friends and classmates regularly tried to pull me to their churches—Mormon, Catholic, Methodist, Baptist—each of them vying to save my soul in all the wrong ways, without a shred of actual human sensitivity. By my pre-teen years, I’d already abandoned all organized religion as useless, alienating, and corrupt. I wanted, instead, to discover a system of ethical beliefs that was meaningful to me. -
On the Politics of Identity
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily and Raiot.)
The highs and lows of identity politics, and why despising it is no smarter than despising politics itself.
Our identity is a story we tell ourselves everyday. It is a selective story about who we are, what we share with others, why we are different. Each of us, as social beings in a time and place, evolves a personal and social identity that shapes our sense of self, loyalties, and obligations. Our identity includes aspects that are freely chosen, accidental, or thrust upon us by others. -
‘What do we deserve?’ A Talk Hosted by Nirmukta, Chennai
Below is a talk I gave at Thinkfest 2015 to a classroom-sized audience on 26 Jan, 2015 (90 minutes). It was hosted by Nirmukta, dedicated to promoting science, freethought and secular humanism in South Asia. (NB: the audio in the first few minutes is choppy but fine thereafter.)
The topic I chose is “What do we deserve?” For our learning, natural talents, and labor, what rewards and entitlements can we fairly claim? This question is particularly relevant in market-based societies in which people tend to think they deserve both their success and their failure. I explore the fraught concepts of “merit” and “success”, and what outcomes we can take credit for or not. I present three leading models of economic justice by which a society might allocate its rewards—libertarian, meritocratic, egalitarian—and consider the pros and cons of each using examples from both India and the U.S. (Also read a companion essay to this video, and read a report on Thinkfest 2015.)
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Ronald Dworkin on the Right to Ridicule
I really like the clarity and point of view in this short 2006 essay by Ronald Dworkin, American philosopher and scholar of constitutional law. The essay is relevant in light of both Perumal Murugan and Charlie Hebdo incidents.
So in a democracy no one, however powerful or impotent, can have a right not to be insulted or offended. That principle is of particular importance in a nation that strives for racial and ethnic fairness. If weak or unpopular minorities wish to be protected from economic or legal discrimination by law—if they wish laws enacted that prohibit discrimination against them in employment, for instance—then they must be willing to tolerate whatever insults or ridicule people who oppose such legislation wish to offer to their fellow voters, because only a community that permits such insult as part of public debate may legitimately adopt such laws. If we expect bigots to accept the verdict of the majority once the majority has spoken, then we must permit them to express their bigotry in the process whose verdict we ask them to accept. Whatever multiculturalism means—whatever it means to call for increased “respect” for all citizens and groups—these virtues would be self-defeating if they were thought to justify official censorship.Muslims who are outraged by the Danish cartoons note that in several European countries it is a crime publicly to deny, as the president of Iran has denied, that the Holocaust ever took place. They say that Western concern for free speech is therefore only self-serving hypocrisy, and they have a point. But of course the remedy is not to make the compromise of democratic legitimacy even greater than it already is but to work toward a new understanding of the European Convention on Human Rights that would strike down the Holocaust-denial law and similar laws across Europe for what they are: violations of the freedom of speech that that convention demands.
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Thinkfest 2015
It is my honor to have been invited to speak at Thinkfest 2015 in Chennai on January 26. “Thinkfest is the annual programme organized by Chennai Freethinkers, a regional group of Nirmukta, during which science popularizers, humanists, and freethought activists are invited to share their ideas with the general public.” Read more about the event and the schedule. The event is open to all but requires registration.
The topic I’ve chosen is “What do we deserve?” For our learning, natural talents, and labor, what rewards and entitlements can we fairly claim? This is a question of particular relevance in market-based societies in which people tend to think they deserve both their success and their failure. I’ll explore the fraught concepts of “merit” and “success”, and what outcomes we can take credit for or not. I’ll present three leading models of economic justice by which a society might allocate its rewards—libertarian, meritocratic, egalitarian—and consider the pros and cons of each using examples from both India and abroad.
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Advice to a Young Artist
By Namit Arora
I first thought of writing this after watching an interview in which an author was reverentially asked, ‘Sir, what would be your advice to a young artist?’ The author turned his nose up and gave a pat, patronizing answer but the question stayed with me. How would I answer it? I didn’t have an audience of young artists in mind. I began with little notes and they grew organically. I considered naming this, more aptly, Notes to Myself, but then opted in favor of honoring the inspiration. I wrote and abandoned the first draft in 1997. Such writing is best thought of as ‘under construction’; still, with some reluctance, I publish here an updated version accrued over a few years. I trust it’ll serve as a quiet record of a personal history. ( —Dec 2001)
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Provincializing Academic Philosophy in the West
Academic philosophy in the West, especially in the U.S., suffers from a sickness that’s increasingly evident—the sickness of parochialism. A few have raised their voices against it but a new salvo to confront the sickness was fired by a grad student called Eugene Sun Park, who quit his philosophy program and wrote an essay titled Why I Left Academia: Philosophy’s Homogeneity Needs Rethinking. An excerpt below.
Philosophy is predominantly white and predominantly male. This homogeneity exists in almost all aspects and at all levels of the discipline. The philosophical canon, especially in so-called “analytic” departments, consists almost exclusively of dead, white men. The majority of living philosophers—i.e., professors, graduate students, and undergraduate majors—are also white men. And the topics deemed important by the discipline almost always ignore race, ethnicity, and gender. Philosophy, it is often claimed, deals with universal truths and timeless questions. It follows, allegedly, that these matters by their very nature do not include the unique and idiosyncratic perspectives of women, minorities, or “people of culture.”“Astoundingly, many professional philosophers are perplexed as to why there aren’t more women and minorities in philosophy. While there may be no single reason why philosophy is so lacking in diversity, the fact that it is lacking is blatantly clear when we compare philosophy to other humanistic disciplines.
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Workshop: Know Thyself – Styles of Thinking, Learning, and Being
Where: Adianta School for Leadership & Innovation, New Delhi.
When: Tuesday, 14 November, 2014; 10 am – 6 pm
Instructor: Namit Arora
_____________________‘Know Thyself’ was an inscription on the frieze of the temple of Apollo at Delphi in ancient Greece. Self-knowledge is an honest and significant understanding of oneself and of what is perhaps the most profound question of all: ‘who am I?’ Knowledge of self helps us to embrace ourselves as we are, with all our flaws, and to see the world as it exists, in all its tainted splendor. ‘The man who is aware of himself’, wrote Virginia Woolf, ‘is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.’
Adequate self-knowledge is key to a fulfilling professional life and to the flourishing of our social and intimate relationships. In this workshop we’ll reflect on the many personal and social ingredients of self-knowledge and identify ways in which we can each augment it for ourselves. Through short videos, readings, and classroom discussion, we’ll also explore various styles of thinking, learning, and being—including our own—and how we can harness them to further our self-awareness and to find greater purpose and meaning in our professional, social, and personal lives.
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On Wittgenstein and Rorty
Here are two wonderful essays I found in the archives of Prospect Magazine. The first essay, from 1999, is by Ray Monk, British philosopher and biographer of Wittgenstein, who Monk calls “the greatest philosopher of [the 20th] century”. In it, Monk explores why “At a time like this, when the humanities are institutionally obliged to pretend to be sciences, we need more than ever the lessons about understanding that Wittgenstein—and the arts—have to teach us.” (Also check out this excellent essay by Stuart Greenstreet on his two major works, personal life and beliefs, as well as Wittgenstein, a quirky, brilliant film by Derek Jarman.)
Nearly 50 years after his death, we can see, more clearly than ever, that the feeling that he was swimming against the tide was justified. If we wanted a label to describe this tide, we might call it “scientism,” the view that every intelligible question has either a scientific solution or no solution at all. It is against this view that Wittgenstein set his face. Scientism takes many forms. In the humanities, it takes the form of pretending that philosophy, literature, history, music and art can be studied as if they were sciences, with “researchers” compelled to spell out their “methodologies”—a pretence which has led to huge quantities of bad academic writing, characterised by bogus theorising, spurious specialisation and the development of pseudo-technical vocabularies. Wittgenstein would have looked upon these developments and wept.There are many questions to which we do not have scientific answers, not because they are deep, impenetrable mysteries, but simply because they are not scientific questions. These include questions about love, art, history, culture, music—all questions, in fact, that relate to the attempt to understand ourselves better … Wittgenstein himself described his work as a “synopsis of trivialities.” But when we are thinking philosophically we are apt to forget these trivialities and thus end up in confusion, imagining, for example, that we will understand ourselves better if we study the quantum behaviour of the sub-atomic particles inside our brains, a belief analogous to the conviction that a study of acoustics will help us understand Beethoven’s music. Why do we need reminding of trivialities? Because we are bewitched into thinking that if we lack a scientific theory of something, we lack any understanding of it.
Category: Philosophy -
Workshop: Critical Writing III – Write Your Professional Obituary
Where: Adianta School for Leadership & Innovation, New Delhi.
When: Tuesday, 19 November, 2013; 10 am – 6 pm
Instructor: Namit Arora
_____________________Listen up, young professionals! Chances are that you chose your profession for a host of reasons: perhaps you were lured by its financial rewards; perhaps you chose its promise of daily joy or intellectual adventure; perhaps you saw it as a means to positively impact the lives of your fellow humans. Or perhaps, as is fairly common, you didn’t choose your profession as much as it was chosen for you by peer pressure and family expectations. Whatever your mix of reasons, you are now immersed in it and wonder—occasionally if not often—about the professional path and the milestones you ought to pursue.
Now imagine you’ve reached the end of your professional life. You’re looking back and reflecting on what you’ve achieved. How would you like to sum it up? In other words, what would you like your professional obituary to read like? Central to this imaginative exercise are questions like: given that life is short and you will die, what pursuits are worth devoting 40-50 hours a week to and why, what measures of success and rewards should you value, and what might it cost you to get there (as in opportunity costs, psychic costs, etc.). In “Critical Writing III — Write your professional obituary”, we’ll explore this subject matter through critical readings, group discussions, and hands-on writing (leading to your 300-word professional obituary). After this workshop, you may well have some answers, or at least more clarity on the questions you’ll need to resolve in order to evolve and attain your long-term professional aspirations.
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On Eating Animals
The latest issue of the Humanist magazine (July-Aug ’13) has a slightly modified version of my essay from last year.
Clearly, most people don’t even know about the horror and pain we inflict on billions of birds and mammals in our meat factories. But there’s no good excuse for this, is there? It’s more likely that we don’t want to know—can’t afford to know for our own sake—so we turn a blind eye and trust the artifice of bucolic imagery on meat packaging. Some see parallels here with the German people’s willful denial of the concentration camps that once operated around them, or call those who consume factory-farmed meat little Eichmanns. “For the animals, it is an eternal Treblinka,” wrote Isaac Bashevis Singer (who also used to say he turned vegetarian “for health reasons—the health of the chicken”).Predictably enough, many others are offended by such comparisons. They say that comparing the industrialized abuse of animals with the industrialized abuse of humans trivializes the latter. There are indeed limits to such comparisons, though our current enterprise may be worse in at least one respect: it has no foreseeable end. We seem committed to raising billions of sentient beings year after year only to kill them after a short life of intense suffering. Furthermore, rather than take offense at polemical comparisons—as if others are obliged to be more judicious in their speech than we are in our silent deeds—why not reflect on our apathy instead? Criticizing vegetarians and vegans for being self-righteous—or being moral opportunists in having found a new way of affirming their decency to themselves—certainly doesn’t absolve us from the need to face up to our role in perpetuating this cycle of violence and degradation.
