Category: Religion
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Status Anxiety
Last night I saw Status Anxiety, an intelligent and entertaining two-hour British documentary (2004) written by Swiss author Alain de Botton. It looks at our ideas of success and failure, the anxiety we feel over our careers, the envy our peers evoke in us, and why it’s harder now to feel calm than ever before. Is success always earned? Is failure? What role does snobbery and envy play in our lives? What is the flip side of equality, individualism, and meritocracy? Where do our goals and ambitions really come from? And finally, how to get beyond all this. It’s based on the book by Botton with the same name, Status Anxiety. If you only have time for a condensed TED talk, see it here.
Category: Art & Cinema, Books & Authors, Culture, Economics, Humor, Philosophy, Politics, Religion, Video -
Is There Such a Thing Called “Religion”?
It frequently amazes me that so many people are able to debate the pros and cons of “religion” without ever defining what they mean by the term. What exactly is this thing called “religion”? Is there a meaningful cluster of concepts that can delineate it, allow us to talk about it as a stable-enough category of human behavior, and study it as a scholarly discipline using the best methods of science and reason? This is not a mere academic question. I, for instance, come from a land with a bewildering array of beliefs and practices that can pass off as “religion”, where there is no need to even believe in God or spirits to be religious. Indeed, what do we talk about when we talk about “religion”?
In this thoughtful essay, anthropologist Pascal Boyer, author of Religion Explained, argues that as an observable phenomenon, “religion, like aether and phlogiston, belongs in the ash-heap of scientific history”. Empirical studies of “religion” eventually boil down to studying “genuine natural kinds, like costly signaling, counter-intuitive concepts, monopolistic specialists guilds, coalitional psychology, imagined agents, etc.” which are “found in many other contexts of human communication, and [are] often not found in “religion””.
I do not know if many scholars of religion still believe in gods or spirits, but I know that a great many of them believe in the existence of religion itself – that is, believe that the term “religion” is a useful category, that there is such a thing as religion out there in the world, that the project of “explaining religion” is a valid scientific project. Naturally, many of the scholars in question will also say that religion is a many splendored thing, that there are vast differences among the varieties of religious belief and behavior. Yet they assume that, underlying the diversity, there is enough of a common set of phenomena that a “theory of religion” is needed if not already available. -
Ramadan and Zizek on Egypt
Must see. “The revolutionary chants on the streets of Egypt have resonated around the world, but with a popular uprising without a clear direction and an unpopular leader refusing to concede, Egypt’s future hangs in the balance. Riz Khan talks to Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek about the power of popular dissent, the limits of peaceful protest and the future of Egyptian politics.”
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The Roots of Mideast Terror
A brilliant lecture by Mahmood Mamdani, Herbert Lehman Professor at Columbia. He provides a necessary corrective to the mostly obtuse and ignorant discourse on Islamic terrorism in the U.S. (See also my related article based on his excellent book, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim.)
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A Tibet of the Mind
For Tenzing Sonam and “the generations of Tibetans now raised in exile, ‘home’ has taken on a complex tapestry of meanings.”
After 2008, the numbers of new refugees escaping to India was dramatically reduced, as China beefed up its border controls. Movement between the exile community and Tibet has also been curtailed. Nonetheless, the links that were established during the previous two decades remain vibrant and resilient. In the meantime, the Tibetan diaspora has spread across the world. Relatively large communities have taken root in New York, Toronto and various other cities in the US and Europe. For these Tibetans, home no longer automatically refers to Tibet. For all intents and purposes, it usually means Tibetan India, with its capital in Dharamsala, an indication of how strongly entrenched the exile Tibetan world has become and how separate its identity is to the homeland it set out to recreate and preserve.The strength and depth of this affinity to a home away from home was vividly illustrated by an encounter I had in eastern Tibet in the summer of 2006. I was travelling with my family through the Kham areas of Szechwan and Yunnan. On the streets of one dusty town, I was startled to hear my name being called out. A young monk I knew from Drepung monastery in South India was excitedly greeting me from across the road. He had escaped to India as a teenager, and had now returned home for a visit after nearly 15 years. Thrilled to meet a fellow Tibetan from India, the first thing he said was, ‘You must be missing sweet tea! I brought some with me. Come home and I’ll make you some.’ As anyone who has travelled in Tibet or China knows, outside of Lhasa and some of the larger towns in central Tibet, sweet tea made in the Indian style is a completely unfamiliar concoction. Later, in the security of his home, he told us how much he missed India, not just the relative freedom that he enjoyed in his monastery but also the simpler pleasures of life, such as eating dosas and vadas. Although he was happy to have met his family after so many years, he said he could hardly wait to go back to India. ‘Home’, even for this second-wave refugee, was no longer his birthplace, but rather an abstract construct that had its physical roots in a foreign land.
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Readings from ‘Tablet & Pen’
An evening of music, poetry, and other readings inspired by the new anthology of literature, Tablet & Pen, hosted by its editor Reza Aslan (approx two hours). Though the anthology is about “literary landscapes from the modern Middle East”, it includes selections from South Asia. While most performances were quite good, particularly resonant to me were Ajay Naidu’s reading of a poem by Zeeshan Sahil (@ 33 mins), Kiran Ahluwalia’s singing (@ 38 mins), and Azra Raza’s reading of two poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz (@ 49 mins).
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MacIntyre on Money
John Cornwell introduces many central ideas of moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (whose work I haven’t read), including on economics. Thought-provoking ideas for sure, though some of them will raise eyebrows:
MacIntyre’s key moral and political idea is that to be human is to be an Aristotelian goal-driven, social animal. Being good, according to Aristotle, consists in a creature (whether plant, animal, or human) acting according to its nature—its telos, or purpose. The telos for human beings is to generate a communal life with others; and the good society is composed of many independent, self-reliant groups…. In philosophy he attacks consequentialism, the view that what matters about an action is its consequences, which is usually coupled with utilitarianism’s “greatest happiness” principle. He also rejects Kantianism—the identification of universal ethical maxims based on reason and applied to circumstances top down. MacIntyre’s critique routinely cites the contradictory moral principles adopted by the allies in the second world war. Britain invoked a Kantian reason for declaring war on Germany: that Hitler could not be allowed to invade his neighbours. But the bombing of Dresden (which for a Kantian involved the treatment of people as a means to an end, something that should never be countenanced) was justified under consequentialist or utilitarian arguments: to bring the war to a swift end….
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Morals Without God?
Excerpts from a fine essay by Frans de Waal (via 3QD):
We started out with moral sentiments and intuitions, which is also where we find the greatest continuity with other primates. Rather than having developed morality from scratch, we received a huge helping hand from our background as social animals. … At this point, religion comes in … While I do consider religious institutions and their representatives — popes, bishops, mega-preachers, ayatollahs, and rabbis — fair game for criticism, what good could come from insulting individuals who find value in religion? And more pertinently, what alternative does science have to offer? Science is not in the business of spelling out the meaning of life and even less in telling us how to live our lives. We, scientists, are good at finding out why things are the way they are, or how things work, and I do believe that biology can help us understand what kind of animals we are and why our morality looks the way it does. But to go from there to offering moral guidance seems a stretch.
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On Herotodus’ Histories
By Namit Arora
“This, however, I know—that if every nation were to bring all its evil deeds to a given place in order to make an exchange with some other nation, when they had all looked carefully at their neighbors’ faults, they would truly be glad to carry their own back again.” — Herodotus in Histories. -
On Caste Privilege
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)
An early goal of British imperialists in India was to create a class of local elites in their own image. They would be, wrote Thomas Macaulay, ‘interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.’ An elite class did emerge, not surprisingly from the socially dominant upper-caste Hindus of urban India.As early as 1873, the social reformer Jotirao Phule had criticized the early colonial model of ‘high class education’ for creating a ‘virtual monopoly of all higher offices … by the Brahmins.’[1] These elites, chin-deep in caste identities, saw themselves as innately superior to other Indians, mirroring the class- and race-based prejudices of the British. No wonder they got along so well. In fact, European Orientalists, armed with new theories about the origins of Sanskrit and the influx of light-skinned people into the Subcontinent, saw these caste elites as their long separated Aryan brethren. The latter, only too glad with this association, soon emerged as native informants and collaborators in interpreting ‘Indian’ society and culture, and in shaping a historiography that selectively glorified its past and framed it as largely ‘tolerant’, ‘spiritual’, and ‘nonviolent’, except when rudely disrupted by Muslim invaders.
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The Minangkabau: Mixing Islam and Matriarchy
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)
“In your marriage, who is the boss?” our driver, Arman, asked in a playfully provocative tone, like he was setting up the punchline of a joke.My partner and I looked at each other, laughed, and shrugged. Arman belonged to the Minangkabau, the society recognized among anthropologists as the world’s largest and most stable surviving matriarchy* (though some prefer to call it a gylany, matrix, matrifocal or matricentric society, or something else to avoid conjuring images of mythical Amazons). Knowing this, I presumed his question was part of a routine entertainment for tourists.
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Between Heaven and Earth
A most excellent article by Ronald Aronson on the false choice between god and science:
It is as subjects, indeed social subjects, that we know, we decide on truth, and we judge right and wrong. As social subjects we decide on the rules of “communicative action” in which these activities take place. And these rules include the existence of such a thing as objective truth, and the active belief that people are capable of arriving at it. If we are truth-seeking animals, we might of course ask how we got that way, but we must also ask what our truths are and what are the rules for arriving there.
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Tariq Ramadan on Muslims in the West
I liked this Al Jazeera interview by Riz Khan, in which Tariq Ramadan, Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford University, talks about a range of issues that relate to the experience of Muslims in the West. (via 3QD)
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Joothan: A Dalit’s Life
A review of a memoir by an ‘untouchable’ starting in the 1950s in rural Uttar Pradesh.
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily. This review won the top award in the 3 Quarks Daily 2011 Arts & Literature Contest. Read more about it here.)
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I grew up in the central Indian city of Gwalior until I left home for college. This was the 70s and 80s. My father worked as a textile engineer in a company town owned by the Birla Group, where we lived in a middle class residential quarter for the professional staff and their families. Our 3-BR house had a small front lawn and a vegetable patch behind. Domestic helpers, such as a washerwoman and a dishwashing woman, entered our house via the front door—all except one, who came in via the rear door. This was the latrine cleaning woman, or her husband at times. As in most traditional homes, our squat toilet was near the rear door, across an open courtyard. She also brought along a couple of scrawny kids, who waited by the vegetable patch while their mother worked. -
“Final Solution” by Rakesh Sharma
The 2002 communal riots in Gujarat may well go down as the darkest chapter in the first decade of 21st century India. An estimated two thousand Muslims were murdered, many burned alive. But what makes this a particularly dark event is the fact that it was methodically planned ahead and actively supported by the state government of the Hindu nationalist party BJP, led by Narendra Modi, still popular and in command in Gujarat. As this Human Rights Watch report, published a month later, notes: Between February 28 and March 2 the attackers descended with militia-like precision on Ahmedabad by the thousands, arriving in trucks and clad in saffron scarves and khaki shorts, the signature uniform of Hindu nationalist-Hindutva-groups. Chanting slogans of incitement to kill, they came armed with swords, trishuls (three-pronged spears associated with Hindu mythology), sophisticated explosives, and gas cylinders. They were guided by computer printouts listing the addresses of Muslim families and their properties, information obtained from the Ahmedabad municipal corporation among other sources, and embarked on a murderous rampage confident that the police was with them. In many cases, the police led the charge, using gunfire to kill Muslims who got in the mobs’ way. A key BJP state minister is reported to have taken over police control rooms in Ahmedabad on the first day of the carnage, issuing orders to disregard pleas for assistance from Muslims. Portions of the Gujarati language press meanwhile printed fabricated stories and statements openly calling on Hindus to avenge the Godhra attacks.
In almost all of the incidents documented by Human Rights Watch the police were directly implicated in the attacks. At best they were passive observers, and at worse they acted in concert with murderous mobs and participated directly in the burning and looting of Muslim shops and homes and the killing and mutilation of Muslims. In many cases, under the guise of offering assistance, the police led the victims directly into the hands of their killers. Many of the attacks on Muslim homes and places of business also took place in close proximity to police posts. Panicked phone calls made to the police, fire brigades, and even ambulance services generally proved futile. Many witnesses testified that their calls either went unanswered or that they were met with responses such as: “We don’t have any orders to save you”; “We cannot help you, we have orders from above”; “If you wish to live in Hindustan, learn to protect yourself”; “How come you are alive? You should have died too”; “Whose house is on fire? Hindus’ or Muslims’?” In some cases phone lines were eventually cut to make it impossible to call for help.
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The Blight of Hindustan
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)
An egalitarian ethos has not been a prominent feature of Indian civilization for at least a thousand years, when Buddhism began losing ground in South Asia. The dominant Hindu sensibility has long held that all men are created unequal, constituting not one but many moral communities, and possess varying natural rights and duties. The anthropologist Louis Dumont saw hierarchy as so central to Indian lives, whether in the family, the workplace, or the community, that he titled his 1966 treatise on Indian society, Homo Hierarchicus. Indeed, a host of hierarchical relationships—framed by traditional norms of deference, authority, and obligation—shape most Indians throughout their lives. In the Indian social realm, the primary institution of hierarchy is caste, or jati, of which thousands exist today. But where does caste, a blight of modern India, come from?The Origins of Caste
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Thapar on the Indo-Aryan Migrations
Here is a transcript of a 1999 lecture by Romila Thapar. She examines quite well the substantive evidence for the Indo-Aryan migrations into the Subcontinent in the second millennium BCE. Definitely worth a read for anyone interested in the topic (transcript has a few typos). Also see my earlier post, which I hope to turn into a more polished article, incorporating all that I have learned since about the topic.
Let me begin by saying the obvious, that the Aryan question is probably the most complex, complicated question in Indian history. And it requires very considerable expertise in handling both the sources and the questions that arise. The expertise consists of knowing something about at least four different fields, first of all archaeology, because a lot of the remains, of almost all the cultures, come to us from excavations and there is the continual attempt to try and identify such cultures with the Aryans…. I mean that it is not enough simply to say that you pick up a list of items from excavated sites and say that the Rigveda has some items, therefore … they are identical cultures. When I talk about archaeology I am also talking about the way in which the total society functions and how these elements are integrated.The second area of expertise is linguistics and here I would like to emphasize, very strongly, that it is not enough merely to know Sanskrit to be able to say that you can handle the questions that come up in the interpretation of the Vedic texts. There is now, since the last thirty years, there has developed a huge body of information which comes from a discipline called linguistics. Those in this discipline do comparative studies of different language structures…
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The Other Swastika
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)
When I visited India the summer I turned 9, my grandmother took my siblings and me to a jeweler to select pendants to bring back to the US. My brother and sister chose the gold-tipped tiger claws, still available easily and guilt-free in India in the 1970s. But I found the tiger claws too “gee whiz”; I wanted something that was meaningfully Indian. So the jeweler trotted out his line of large, bright silver pendants shaped either as Om or swastika. I was drawn to the pleasing aesthetics of the swastika designs, with their symmetry and regularity of line; the Om was alright, but it didn’t do much for me. Still, I had a difficult time deciding to bring home the swastika, waffling on the matter until it grew late and even the jeweler was losing patience with me. In the end, I came away with the Om, which languished never-worn in my dresser drawer for years until I simply lost track of it. Something about the entire episode never sat quite right with me, but as a child I couldn’t puzzle out why.I was probably in high school before it first dawned on me just what it was that kept me from the swastika that day: Growing up in an observant Brahmin household in the US (from which I’ve long since recovered), I felt an emotional dissonance around the symbol, which I associated with something like serenity, nurturance, and cosmic benevolence, and at the same time with “evil,” hatred, and genocide.
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What Would You Do?
The Indian caste system has long violated some of the most basic tenets of human dignity, inflicting untold
misery, humiliation, and injustice on too many for too long. In recent years, perhaps for the first time, those on the lowest rungs
of the social pyramid defined by caste have begun to write and tell their own stories,
bearing witness to their slice of life in India. These include the
Dalits (‘the oppressed’)—formerly ‘untouchables’—numbering one out of
six Indians. Theirs is not only a powerful new current of literature,
it is also a major site of resistance and revolt. Here is a poem by Omprakash Valmiki, a Dalit writer best known for his autobiography, Joothan, which I plan to review soon.
What Would You Do? If you
Are thrown out of your village
Cannot draw water from the well
Are abused
In the screaming, echoing afternoon
Told to break stones
In place of real work
Are given leavings to eat
What would you do?
If you
Are told to drag away
Animal carcasses
And
Carry away the filth
Of a whole family
Given hand-me-downs to wear
What would you do?
If you
Are kept far from books
Far from the threshold
Of the temple of learning
If you are hung up like Jesus
On a blackened wall
In the light of an oil-lamp
What would you do? -
Early Islam, Part 5: Epilogue
Part 1: The Rise of Islam / Part 2: The Golden Age of Islam
Part 3: The Path of Reason / Part 4: The Mystic Tide(This five-part series on early Islamic history begins with the rise of Islam, shifts to its golden age, examines two major currents of early Islamic thought—rationalism and Sufi mysticism—and concludes with an epilogue. It builds on precursor essays I wrote at Stanford’s Green Library during a summer sabbatical years ago, and on subsequent travels in Islamic lands of the Middle East and beyond.)
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Muslims discovered Greek thought hundreds of years before the Western Christians, yet it was the latter who eventually domesticated it. Why did the reverse not happen? Why did the golden age of Islam (approx. 9th-12th centuries)—led by luminaries such as al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Alhazen, al-Beruni, Omar Khayyam, Avicenna, and Averroës—wither away? Despite a terrific start, why did Greek rationalism fail to ignite more widely in Islam? In this epilogue, I’ll survey some answers that have been offered by historians and highlight one that I hold the most significant.
