Shunya's Notes

You Think, Therefore, You Can

Neurobiology tells us that when we think or feel, a host of neurons in our brains fire electrical signals. It turns out that certain thoughts—like wishing an object to move spatially—and certain emotions, have electrical signatures that can be identified by external sensors attached to our heads. This discovery is not new. What is new is an inexpensive headset from Emotiv Systems that can "read our minds" and issue commands to machines. Check out the video below and ponder both the positive and negative possibilities of this technology.

Confucius and Modern China

An interesting article on China's emerging political culture by Daniel A. Bell, professor of ethics and political philosophy at Tsinghua University, Beijing. A communitarian at heart, he has written perceptively about the so-called Asian values and against the universal pretensions of western liberalism. He is also the author of China's New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society.

Four decades ago, it would have been suicidal to say a good word about Confucius in Beijing. Confucius was the reactionary enemy, and all Chinese were encouraged to struggle against him. Chairman Mao himself was photographed on the cover of a revolutionary newspaper that announced the desecration of Confucius’s grave in Qufu. My own university was a hotbed of extreme leftism.

How times have changed. Today, the Chinese Communist Party approves a film about Confucius starring the handsome leading man Chow Yun-Fat. The master is depicted as an astute military commander and teacher of humane and progressive values, with a soft spot for female beauty. What does this say about China’s political future? Confucius bombed at the box office, leading many to think that the revival of Confucianism will go the same way as the anti-Confucius campaigns in the Cultural Revolution.

But perhaps it’s just a bad movie. Confucius received the kiss of death when it went head-to-head against the blockbuster Avatar. A vote for Confucius was seen as a vote against the heroic blue creatures from outer space. In the long term, however, Confucian revivalists may be on the right side of history.

More here. To get a better measure of the man, check out this 2008 video interview (17 minutes; the interviewer is a tad painful!).

UPDATE: Here are two more articles of related interest. One by Mark Lilla, One Set of Shoulders: China's Hidden Revolution, and another by Perry Link, Waiting for WikiLeaks: Beijing's Seven Secrets. Beneath Link's article, read the comments by Jack Cameron (esp his second one), which I suspect Bell might agree with strongly. Also interesting is Stanford Encyclopedia's entry on Communitarianism, written by Bell.

Bollywood's India

Here is a lecture on Bollywood by Rachel Dwyer, Prof of Indian Cultures and Cinema at the University of London (Nov 09). You may find it worth watching for its sociological insights, or even just to learn what a leading scholar of Bollywood now says about "Hindi cinema as a guide to modern India" in under an hour (rest is Q&A). For South Asians, a bonus might be the many nostalgia-inducing clips from old Hindi movies. (Bollywood scholarship is apparently hot, says this article.)

The Life and Times of Evert Cilliers

Here is an excellent piece by one of my co-authors at 3QD, Evert Cilliers: ‘The World Cup, My White Africaner Skin, My Fascist Parents, Mandela, Obama, and Forgiveness’. Evert grew up in South Africa, left some decades ago, and now lives in the US. I learned a good deal about South Africa from his personal journey and from the everyday human details he relates. I particularly liked his take on the life he had in the upper crust of white society, his relationships, and various episodes from his past. His writing has a couple of things that are rather rare: honesty and heart. The piece is long for a blog post but definitely worth it.

Five weeks ago I said to my brilliant girlfriend: “I'd like to see my father before he dies.” She said: “Congratulations.” She'd been asking me on and off for two years whether I'd like to go and visit him where he lives in Cape Town, South Africa, and my stock answer had always been: “I don't have the slightest interest in ever seeing my father again.”

So what changed?

You here at 3quarksdaily know me as a passionate ranter against our irresponsible elites (for my favorite screed ever, google this title: “Government Is Not The Problem, Private Enterprise Is: The Global Terrorism Of Al Qaeda, BP And Goldman Sachs”). However, that's not what I'm up to now. This time out, I'm autobiographical. Personal. Self-revelatory. Unbuttoned. A la Moll Flanders. Or Paris Hilton. Confessions of an Opium Eater or something, at double the length of my usual rants.

I made the big Gauguin move of my life two decades ago, when I walked out on my South African Jewish Princess wife in our seven-room, three-bathroom apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Except I didn't go to Tahiti. I went to a garret on Manhattan's Lower East Side. For fifteen years, while I was poor and wrote, wrote, wrote my seven unpublished novels (and became the 90s slam poet Evert Eden), my ex-wife and I didn't communicate. Then, out of the blue, I got a call from her.

"I'd like to see you,” she said.

"Why?” I asked.

"I'm dying.”

More here.

The Majestic Plastic Bag

(The Majestic Plastic Bag: A Mockumentary, via The Browser)

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.

Later, when these elites opposed the British, they used the same language of political rights and liberalism that the Europeans preached at home but didn’t practice in their colonies. It was this class, led by Anglicized lawyers and bureaucrats, that succeeded the British. In the first Indian Parliament in 1952, Brahmins, who comprise less than 5 percent of the population, cornered almost 25 percent of the directly elected seats; altogether the upper castes, about 20 percent of the population, claimed over 85 percent of the seats.[2]

In a representative democracy, the idea of ‘representation’ implies that a politician, say, an upper-caste Hindu male, can and should fairly represent the interests of the entire electorate, including the lower castes, religious minorities, and women. But one can persuasively argue that this did not happen in the early decades of the Indian republic. Deep disparities along caste lines remained; religious minorities grew alienated and even declined socioeconomically; the vast majority of women remained marginal as before in political and economic realms. India was effectively a democracy of the few, by the few, for the few.

Since the 1970s, India has seen the rise of caste-based politics. Built on the idea that only a member of your own (or proximate) caste can represent your interests, its primary driver was the failure of upper-caste politicians to represent the lower castes, and the latter realizing the power of their vote. Votes began fragmenting along caste lines, not the least because—besides being central to one’s social identity—caste had long shaped one’s share of opportunity, deprivation, and discrimination in life.

When the lower castes began mobilizing and putting up their own candidates, the elites grew anxious and began decrying the rise of caste-based politics and ‘vote banks’. ‘So regressive!’ they complained, ‘a betrayal of the spirit and ideals of democracy!’ But of course, being founders and long-time practitioners of a supremacist politics of caste, with hardly an egalitarian bone in their bodies, they had played a rigged game all along, starting with language itself. ‘Vote banks’ were others, created by the new ‘caste-based parties’; the elites didn’t see their own upper-caste folk as a ‘vote bank’, though they all voted for upper-caste parties like the Congress and the BJP. A sense of entitlement prevented them from seeing that they had, contrary to a democratic ethos, long monopolized political power and opportunities based largely on caste. So now, their anxiety over the emerging caste-based politics betrayed, above all, a visceral fear—fear of the ‘impure’ masses, fear of losing their privileges, fear of being overrun by the boors. In no area is this anxiety more evident than in the debate on caste-based affirmative action, aka reservations, in public sector jobs and college admissions.

Writing in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Frantz Fanon lamented ‘the unpreparedness of the elite, the lack of practical ties between them and the masses, their apathy, and, yes, their cowardice at the crucial moment in the struggle.’ These elites, he wrote, ‘simultaneously resisted the insidious agenda of colonialism and paved the way for the emergence of the current struggles.’

Fanon had in mind the post-colonial elites of North Africa, but his remark is no less apt for the Indians. India needed a real program of socioeconomic justice—via, say, land reform, universal education, and fighting caste discrimination. What legislation the elites did pass they didn’t push far enough. Instead, they consolidated their domination over politics, the economy, education, cultural institutions, and the media—for instance, the richest 10 percent monopolize more land now than in 1951.[3] Having done quite well for itself, self-congratulation has come easy to this class. In an attempt to restore some balance, this insider, dear reader, will now relate to you its benightedness.