GYANOPROBHA

A TEACHER'S HOPE

As a teacher and a human being, I struggle to be hopeful about the future. But I am close to giving up. I am beginning to think this insistence that teachers need to be hopeful is also a red herring. Teachers need to be truthful above all, but I find it difficult to be hopeful and truthful at the same time. 

And here’s what I have noticed about myself: I have lost the capacity to be surprised by anything in politics any more. Each change appears to be for the worse, in absolutely predictable or explicable ways. What does surprise me is the occasional good news: the growing sense that there is a crisis (accompanied by the bad news that no one has any faith in any solutions any more). Ordinary people – as I discovered on a trip home to an India still recovering from the terrorist attacks in Mumbai – are still surprisingly capable of responding with compassion and empathy, although a disconcertingly large proportion of them still continue to wish for death and destruction on Pakistan, Muslims, Christians, tribals, dalits...and anyone who dissents from their dominant self-image of a resurgent, powerful India. 

Post-communism and post-modernism have left us unable to deal with a post-capitalist wreckage and construct something worthwhile from it, except in small groups. The World Social Forum has lost its way, if it was ever on the way to anything at all. It’s passé to say that there is no left left any more. But do right and left matter any more? Liberal democracy, feeling itself threatened by a terror that it has itself helped create, has quite simply now become the new fascism..."O Liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name!" cried Madame Roland as she passed a statue of liberty on the way to the guillotine during the Jacobin terror. That's an exclamation that has rung like a death knell around the world since the end of the 20th century. 

We are facing a catastrophe as a species, and the most urgent task for us humans is to find a way to survive. I am not quite sure whether we would be good for the earth if we do, but that’s another argument. I am trying to move towards constructing an inventory of ideas that can help us as a species to survive the coming catastrophe. The new test for ideas or ways of living could be: does this help our survival as a species or does it doom us to collapse? For some ideas, the choice seems clear. But for others, how can we be certain in advance? The Green Revolution was once touted as an idea that would prevent hunger for all who suffered from it; now some suspect it may have made hunger worse for some while assuaging it in others. Education - in the sense of schooling - is beginning to look like another idea whose time has gone, except for those, fewer in number every year, for whom it remains a passport to upward social mobility. 

I think the only sensible thing left to do is to prepare – culturally, cognitively, emotionally, materially – for the great cull of the human species that the world is likely to see in the 21st century and the next. Gather together traces of lost knowledge and ways of being and doing that may help us weather the oncoming tragedy, devise creative ways of surviving when we are hit by catastrophe, create repositories of wisdom from whatever we still have access to, pass them on to our children. Education (not schooling) now takes on a more urgent purpose than ever before: the survival of the human species, and the preservation of the impulses that helped us survive and flourish. The question is whether these impulses can be separated neatly from those that propel us towards self-destruction. 

Teaching needs to be de-professionalized, so that every one can be a teacher and learner at the same time. The usual modes of education, which served us well to teach us silence in the face of suffering and obedience to the needs of power, need to be firmly abandoned. Schools as we know them now will either die off into irrelevance or be radically re-structured. But don’t expect our leaders or our existing institutions to lead us in this, because they are part of the problem. 

IN MEMORY OF HOWARD ZINN

Howard Zinn's recent death reminded me what an inspiration as a teacher and an intellectual he has been to me. 

A former student of mine reminded me today that I had sent her this passage at a time when she was struggling to find some balance between optimism and realism. I found in it a source of strength in my own struggles to avoid giving in to cynicism and find a reason to go on teaching future adults.

"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."

SOME THOUGHTS ON "MORAL EQUIVALENCE"

Human rights activists have often been taken to task by media commentators, government officials and ministers, and even members of the chat-show public, for being equivocal - or seeming to be - in condemning maoist violence, even while the activists condemn state violence. What seems to annoy these people the most is that almost always, the activists' condemnation of maoist violence appears to be phrased with qualifications. "Of course, we certainly condemn maoist violence," activists often say, adding, "But you have to see this in the context of the violence- especially the structural violence - of the state."

At this point, the activists are accused of slyly approving or morally justifying maoist violence by suggesting that state violence could provide an explanatory context for it. Furthermore, activists are accused of creating a "moral equivalence" between the state security forces and the maoists by demanding that maoist violence be "seen in the context of " state violence. Two commentators accuse activists of creating a moral equivalence "between the damage chemotherapy causes and the cancer it treats".

But what does this term "moral equivalence" really mean? Apparently, this term originates from the title of William James's 1910 essay The Moral Equivalent of War. Not having read this essay, I can't quite grasp the connection between the title of the essay and the way the phrase "moral equivalence" is used. But more helpful perhaps is Jeane Kirkpatrick's use of the term in attacking critics of US foreign policy for seeing "no moral difference" between the the actions of the Soviet Union and those of the US government. Applying this sense to the Indian debate between human rights activists and their critics on the issue of maoist violence vs. state violence, it is easy to see what the critics mean: that the activists see "no moral difference" between maoists and the Indian state in the way each side deploys violence in the furtherance of their aims, when in fact there are several moral differences (at least according to the critics of human rights activists)

1. The state is assumed to be in a morally superior position because it is supposed to enjoy a legitimate monopoly on violence. The maoists on the other hand usurp the right to use violence in furtherance of their supposedly heinous end - the overthrow of the Indian state.

2. The state's actions are supposed to be based on the constitution and the rule of law, whereas the maoists reject as oppressive both the constitution and the rule of law that it defines.

3. The state is supposed to have the backing of the demos, expressed through the electoral process. The maoists have refused to engage in electoral politics. Where they do enjoy support, it is sometimes exacted through coercion and fear, and sometimes earned through winning hearts and minds by exploiting the disaffection of their supporters with the agencies of the state, and sometimes through a combination of both.

Against these arguments, it is necessary to note a few others.

a. The state monopoloy of violence often loses legitimacy when it is exercised with little regard for proportionality, for the dignity of the victims, or when it fails to distinguish between innocent bystanders and active threats. The state often deploys its violence in a manner that forces people to turn to the state's opponents for protection from the state. The state's violence thus turns the alleged cure (or 'chemotherapy') into the catalyst for the cancer by encouraging its rapid spread. In the relatively rare cases when the forces of justice and accountability kick in, it takes years for the guilty to be punished, or for the victims to obtain redress. 'Justice delayed is justice denied' is a trite shibboleth that has apparently been forgotten by those responsible for the administration of justice in India, but realized everyday by those are meant to receive justice. It's possible to argue that the state might commit mistakes occasionally in the heat of the moment. But the patent inability of the state to learn from its mistakes - despite National Human Rights Commissions, comissions of inquiry into actual incidents, and the continued recording by human rights organizations of acts of state criminality -  suggests that the criminality of the state is not an aberration, but a structural feature.

b. I have argued earlier that the state's legitimate monopoly on violence - however necessary it might seem - needs to be exercised with the greatest care to prevent it from degenerating into a monopoly on criminal behaviour. In the case of the Indian state, this care seems to be largely absent. So what we have in, for example, Operation Green Hunt, is a state deploying public funds to violently suppress one group of its citizens - usually the most economically vulnerable and socially and politically the least powerful - whose rights under the Constitution are being violated in order to satisfy the desires of another, far more economically and politically powerful, group of citizens.

c. The state's agents are in a sense even more culpable for any criminal behaviour they engage in than the maoists, precisely because their actions need to be held to a higher standard of legality than that of criminals. The state is supposed to be an upholder of the law and a protector of the citizen. It cannot be claimed in defence of the state that the protection of the citizen from the criminal requires criminal action.

d. Far from asserting that there is no moral difference between maoists and the state, human rights activists are in fact insisting on the precise opposite: that the state - by virtue of its basis in the popular will, as well as by having its actions defined by reference to laws - has, except in the most extreme cases when it is itself under attack (such as in Mumbai last November), the obligation of not engaging in criminal behaviour while protecting citizens. Precisely for the reasons outlined in 1-3 above, human rights activists insist that there is, and should be, a normative difference between the state and the terrorists it fights against. This difference is eliminated when the state engages in indiscriminate criminal behaviour.

Critics of human rights activists, on the other hand, seem to be willing to accept all state actions as legitimate and morally justified if they rid society of terrorists and criminals, irrespective of the context or circumstance. It is the critics, therefore, who are drawing an illicit normative equivalence between the terrorist/criminal and the state by insisting that the best way for the state to deal with terrorists is to become terroristic itself. In practice, as I have tried to argue here, there is no moral equivalence, nor should there be.

RETURN FROM THE FIVE MONTH HIATUS

So...why the long silence?

Well, two main reasons (apart from sheer fatigue and laziness).

Let's start with my hesitation to cast a public light, however dim, on Binayak and his family while they recovered from their two-year ordeal. After the initial flurry of interviews on the mainstream TV channels and newspapers, Binayak and his wife Ilina went into hospital at CMC Vellore, attended by their older daughter Pranhita. The check-ups there revealed that Binayak himself indeed had a heart condition, as was diagnosed while he was in prison, but was not in any imminent danger if he took care of his health. The real shocker was the detection of cancer in Ilina, his wife of thirty six years, whose health had been worsening through the two-year ordeal. Since then, she has had a couple of operations, including one to remove the cancerous organ, and has been undergoing chemotherapy for the last few months. Fortunately, the prognosis is said to be good, since the cancer was detected early.

Throughout these months, Binayak has occasionally made public statements on various occasions to draw attention to the need for abjuring violence on both sides of the conflict between the state and the Maoists, and expressing his abhorrence of both Maoist as well as state violence. Predictably, in the context of recently announced security operations to deal with the maoist menace, he, along with other intellectuals with a similar message, is drawing the wrathful ire of various media commentators for maintaining a "moral equivalence" between the "cancer" and its painful "chemotherapy", or for being a secret admirer of the maoists. I hope to write more about these arguments in subsequent posts.

The other reason for the silence has been that there has been too much to write about, but too little time in which to write it. Various professional and personal commitments have left me little time to write as frequently as I would have wished. My computer contains a folder full of comments that I had started on but had to abandon, mostly in the area of politics, but also in education. So let me summarize some of the issues that I would have liked to write about if I had the time.

In the realm of politics, I have observed with a mixture of unease and schadenfreude, and even some faint hope, the collapse of the BJP. It doesn't take a genius to see that on economic matters, there isn't a great deal of difference between the Congress and the BJP. Both are wedded to a development model that is friendly to large corporate business and the "people-like-us" middle (or PLUM) class (blogging, twittering, English-speaking, web 2.0 friendly, with regular jobs paying a decent five-figure monthly income or more - yes, I mean people like me) at the expense of the poor and the destitute who make up about half the population of the country. So it's not surprising that they see eye to eye on the need for responding violently to the resistance to their shared development model among the people on whom development is to be forced. (Maoism/naxalism is irrelevant to this, because the violent suppression of popular resistance to the corporate version of development pre-dates even "maoism 1.0" of the 1967-77 era).

I suspect that the main appeal of the Congress for PLUMmers and "Bleeding Heart Liberals" (a term of abuse from the right for people like me with my views on secularism and tolerance) is a cultural one: I find the shrill and violent majoritarian victimology of the BJP and its so-called "parivar" utterly abhorrent.  If the BJP had defined its Hindu identity even partly in terms of a concern for the rights of the poor, the malnourished and the powerless, and looked for common ground with people of other religious communities, I might have looked for some common ground with them. Note that there is no strong positive reason to prefer the Congress, they simply come off better by comparison to the odious BJP. The problem with the Congress, moreoever, is that it has yet to shed its image as a party that is opportunistic and cosmetic in its commitment to secularism - recall November 1984, and its failure to deal firmly with the criminals in the rising rightwing BJP in the late eightiesand early nineties. Its espousal of the Muslims often appeals to the most retrograde sections of the Muslim leadership, and shows little substantial progress in dealing with genuine grievances of Muslims (which in most cases are similar to the grievances of other oppressed sections of the people).

Internationally, the conditions of life for more and more ordinary people in India, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel/Palestine, Congo, Darfur, Somalia, Ingushetia...I could add half a dozen more countries...have gone steadily from dire to catastrophic. The prospects of economic and political recovery in the US, where a cabal of "banksters" (a richly evocative neologism) appears to have enriched itself at the expense of the taxpayers by taking over the treasury and the central bank, seems more illusory than ever. The US is also the country that now spends more on weapons and war than all other countries in the world collectively. Which leads me to ask: why are so many people paralyzed into apathy and inaction, or consumed by manufactured hatred, or driven to such suicidal extremes of  humiliation and despair that they blow themselves up in marketplaces, railway stations and offices? What kind of world can today's young people look forward to as adults?

Such questions have also compelled me to engage once again with what it means to be a teacher when the whole world seems to be headed towards disaster in a few decades.  Has there been a time before within the memory of generations still living when hope for the future seemed as illusory as it does now? Most students whom I teach, as well as many of my colleagues, seem to believe that the world should simply be accepted as it is. For most of them, the function of education is to train the next generation for success in the world as it exists, not to clutter their minds with ideas of how to change that world. I remind them that if past generations had accepted the world they found as it was then, the girls among them might not be in school, nor might all people have the right to vote equally. I remind them that if they don't change their world for the better, others will, and in directions that my students may not always seek. Yet already this sounds too simplistic and unconvincing. Recent history as well as current events also tell me that the most significant attempts to change the world for the better amounted to attempts at re-engineering societies to a design conceived by an elite and self-aggrandizing caucus of intellectuals, politicians and business people, and have usually ended in tragedy or farce, but always in horrendous human suffering.

Looking around me now, I wonder what we should tell the generation we are educating. What should we educate them to be and do? And why should they believe us when we tell them not to lie, cheat and steal, and to deal honestly with people, and be compassionate to those who happen to be suffering? Why should they believe us especially when the message from business leaders, politicians and celebrities of various kinds seems to value "success" or "victory" at any price, when almost anything can be justified in the name of the freedom of the market, or of the national interest, or of power, privilege or personal gain? 

Part of a reassuring answer is that each generation has always worried about the next in similar ways, yet we have not only survived, but many individuals seem to have managed to do so with their individual moral compasses more or less intact. And this is true not just of individuals, but also occasionally when individuals have acted collectively. Binayak's release on bail is an example of this, but also a reminder that our systems of justice are not working for many others.  Another part of the answer is to note that the ongoing wars and conflicts have merely confirmed - more plangently than ever - the need to be truthful and compassionate and honest, and to treat claims of victory and success in these conflicts with the greatest suspicion. What I believe we should educate our students for is to add to the cacophony of voices for change, to help create new models for human flourishing and the affirmation of life, to seek to build peace, conviviality and justice. However many the faults of the United Nations, and whatever the arguments about the means to achieve them, its Millenium Development Goals and Universal Declaration of Human Rights remain almost universally agreed concrete expressions of these aims, and can constitute the driving force for an entire educational curriculum. The increasing rapidity of change, and the dire necessity of confronting it, makes such a curriculum a matter of survival, not some imaginary luxury.

Despite the "encircling gloom" with which I struggle, I find occasional gleams of light, life and laughter. The birth of our granddaughter in January this year has given me many occasions to re-live the pleasures of watching a young life grow in consciousness and awareness, but differently now, in ways too numerous to mention, than when we first became parents. The delights of playing with her and making her acquaintance have also sharpened the inevitable poignancy of separation, though mitigated somewhat by our attempts at conversation on Skype. Also unlike when our own sons were growing up, I am much more troubled now about their future, and so also about the future of our granddaughter. But was it not ever thus?

In a house which becomes a home,
one hands down and another takes up
the heritage of mind and heart,
laughter and tears, musings and deeds.
Love, like a carefully loaded ship,
crosses the gulf between the generations.
Therefore, we do not neglect the ceremonies
of our passage: when we wed, when we die,
and when we are blessed with a child;
When we depart and when we return;
When we plant and when we harvest.
Let us bring up our children. It is not
the place of some official to hand to them
their heritage.
If others impart to our children our knowledge
and ideals, they will lose all of us that is
wordless and full of wonder.
Let us build memories in our children,
lest they drag out joyless lives,
lest they allow treasures to be lost because
they have not been given the keys.
We live, not by things, but by the meanings
of things. It is needful to transmit the passwords
from generation to generation.

(Antoine de St. Exupery)

MAHABHARATA AND SALWA JUDUM

Almost as if in response to my exchange with Nitin Pai (although surely an unintended coincidence), Professor Nandini Sundar, professor of Sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, and a student of tribal history and society in Chhattisgarh, has written a comment on the war between the maoists and the state. Certainly worth reading in full.

Of course, she excoriates both the Maoists and the state for their violence, and therefore probably fails the Pai test for being on the "right" side of the naxal conflict.

THE LEGITIMACY OF STATE VIOLENCE AND THE "MORAL EQUIVALENCE" OF ITS CRITICS

The Tehelka article I referred to in my previous post has attracted some comment from the bloggerazzi, especially the laptop bombardiers for India Shining. I made the mistake of responding to one of them in Blogger News Network, written by one Yossarin, who also writes a blog called Offstumped. Instead of dealing with the substantive points made in the article, the posting smears Tehelka as a promoter of Naxalism by picking imagined inconsistencies and omissions in the reporting. My comment is followed by Dr. Munas' and of my brother Dipankar's. Yossarin copies these comments from BNN to Offstumped where others pile in.

They say one should never wrestle with a pig: it leaves one as filthy as the pig, and the pig enjoys it. The same appears to be true for most of the comment writers on Offstumped, who illustrate the warning that the so-called democracy of the internet will be undermined by anyone with a laptop and half a pea for a brain. Many of them seem unable to read or write, or concentrate on the issue. They think their attempts at sarcasm or humour will somehow either be mistaken for insightful comment and careful reasoning, or compensate for its lack. Read the responses and judge for yourself.

An exception seems to be Nitin Pai writing on Acorn, also named the Indian National Interest (perhaps thereby aligning itself with the The National Interest in the US, a flagwaver of the neocon Zionist right-wing fraternity with which many highly educated Indians living in the US seem to find close ideological affinity). He refers briefly to Dr. Binayak Sen in a review of Sudeep Chakravarti's Red Sun. Pai seems undecided whether to commend the book for its coverage, or condemn it for being an unwitting but "well-intentioned pawn" in the "Naxalites' insidious war".

His larger question - and an important one - is how to respond to challenges to the state's "normatively legitimate monopoly on violence". He condemns the left for creating the ideological climate in which Naxalism seems legitimate or is deemed an insignificant threat. The liberal human rights activists who condemn state violence however are different: although Pai concedes it's reasonable to criticize the government for human rights violations, they "inadvertantly end up batting for the Naxalites". He goes on: "In the psychological war, NGOs and human rights groups end up strengthening the Naxalites to the extent they add fuel to the fire of disillusionment and disaffection. Rights activists and do-gooders would do well to heed the old injunction primum non nocere—first, do no harm." So what should these well-intentioned do-gooders do? They should (says Pai) condemn the violence of the naxalites as strongly as they condemn state violence, and accept the state's legitimate monopoly on violence.

"...to be taken as bona fide, such individuals and organisations must unequivocally condemn Maoism and violent armed struggle. They must also unambiguously accept that only the state has the normative legitimacy to use violence.In other words, there is no room for moral equivalence: it is fair to criticise the government and government officials for their failings. But it is necessary to make the distinction between the State’s legitimate right to the use of violence and the Naxalite’s [presumably illegitimate] armed struggle."

In other words, while the government may be criticized for their violations of human rights, or for their "failings", one must not support challenges to their legitimate right to use violence, and must indeed condemn such challenges unequivocally. Failure to condemn amounts to support, in Pai's thinking. "You are either for us, or against us." Moreover, Pai's refuses "moral equivalence" between the violence of the state and the violence of those who oppose it (e.g., the naxalites). He insists on the condemnation of any opposition to state violence, but is willing to allow only criticism of state violence.

But by silencing those who are non-violent critics of government (as the state has done in Dr. Sen's instance, and there may be others), and those who advocate non-violent solutions within the laws and insist that the state operate within the Constitution, the state effectively strengthens the maoist argument that violence is the only effective remedy, and that the law is only for the rich and powerful. Lending credibility to its opponents is not what the state should be doing, unless it wants chaos and mayhem for its own cynical reasons.

This is in fact also the argument of author of Red Sun Sudeep Chakravarti. Pai himself quotes him: "Having him in jail allows the state government and police a victory in the face of organisational and security disasters on the ground. But this is a pyrrhic victory. It stifles a moderate voice, and has done nothing whatsoever to curtail or solve in any way either the raging Maoist rebellion in Chattisgarh or issues of development" (This quote has mysteriously gone missing from the article as it appears in Acorn, but appears in an e-mail version that has been forwarded to me by Chakravarti).

My response to this position is set forth in my comment on Acorn, but here I would like to examine this issue more closely.

1. Why does the state have a monopoly in the right to use violence? Presumably to carry out its function (delegated to it by popular representation in a democracy) of maintaining law and order. But if in the execution of this function, the state exercises unreasonable and unrestrained violence, can it still retain its legitimacy? Is this right an absolutely legitimate right, or is the legitimacy conditional upon reasonableness and restraint? If the legitimacy is absolute, then we are defenceless against the state's arbitrary misuse of violence, should it occur (and let's not pretend this is an imaginary hypothetical).

2. What kinds of violence does the state have a monopolistic right to use? Would rape and torture be regarded as legitimate? Destruction of property? What about starving entire villages, or forcibly removing their inhabitants into concentration camps? The massacre of large numbers of people? I have a feeling Pai doesn't want to constrain the hands of the state in the exercise of its legitimate right to violence. Yet, he insists, people who resist state violence should be condemned for their resistance, because it challenges the state's monopoly on violence. Now, I have never been subjected to any kind of violence by the state, but I'm not sure that my response to state violence would be a resigned acquiescence. What would Pai's be, I wonder, if the state security forces raided his village, raped his kin, destroyed his crops, or tortured him for information, or just for amusement? (I hope Pai doesn't resort at this point to denying that of any of these things have happened - all he has to do is read history books, the reports of the human rights organizations, or even sometimes of governments themselves. They can't all be lying! And it doesn't matter which state, because the argument is not specific to the state.) Can Pai concede that his reactions to such horrendous treatment would be the human one of either running away, or of fighting back? But I'm willing to bet it will NOT be to support the state violence directed at him and his family because he feels obliged to uphold its legitimacy!

3. Why does Pai never concern himself with what causes the violence, either by the state, or by non-state actors? Is this not a factor in assessing the state's legitimacy in its use of violence? Or is this legitimacy unconditional again? In his posting, he acknowledges the cause, but only in passing: "The Naxalite movement thrives on disillusionment and disaffection. It collects unaddressed grievances and unredressed complaints and channelises them into anger against the “Indian State”. It tells rape victims, dispossessed tribals and bullied villagers that the target of their ire is not the local landlord, policeman or politician but that abstraction called the “State”." But the state is not an abstraction for the disaffected and disillusioned: it takes the concrete shape of the protectors of their oppressors. Again, Pai reveals that he is incapable of asking himself: what should the rape victim, dispossessed tribal or bullied villager do? Is it because they are in fact abstractions for him, to the point where he is unable to put himself in their shoes?

4. Pai might wonder why I can rustle up so much empathy for the victims of state violence, but not for the state. In his exchange with my brother Dipankar, he asks whether Binayak has ever "unequivocally condemned the Naxalites, especially the use of violence and armed struggle towards the pursuit of their goals." Binayak has been reported as having favoured dialogue (I'm unable to supply the reference at this point) rather than violence in addressing the issue of maoism, and has counted both the victims of maoist as well as state violence in the report that he is supposed to have prepared with his colleagues. I don't know whether he has done exactly what Pai regards as essential to the credibility of activists like him.

But from whom would you reasonably expect a greater responsibility in upholding law and order - the state, or those who fight it? Binayak's work as a human rights activist was to insist on the application of law and adherence to the constitution. That's why when he was in contact with Narayan Sanyal, he was scrupulous in his adherence to the rules and regulations. There were no meetings with the undertrial prisoner that were not specifically approved by the jail authorities. In his advocacy of the rights of undertrials, he was insistent on the protocol set out by Justice D K Basu for the treatment of such people by the police. It is the police that is deficient in its meticulous adherence to the law. Binayak is in jail for pointing this out in gruesome detail.

5. In a reply to my comment that has appeared while I was composing this post, he accuses me of "moral equivalence" and "apology for violence". So let me be clear. I abhor violence of all kinds - both by Naxalites AND the state - just as Nitin says he does. This is why I wish the government would not act (under the guise of development, or security) in ways that force people to resort to it, and I wish the naxalites would find a non-violent way of liberating people from oppression (if that is what they are doing, which I very much doubt). But the acceptance of legitimacy of state violence cannot be unconditional, as I have tried to argue above.

Finally, I would like to make a disclaimer in order to pre-empt silly, fallacious and annoying interpretations of my criticism of state terrorism as support for the maoist or other terrorists who oppose the state: I DO NOT SUPPORT THE MAOISTS.

I do not support them because I reject their resort to violence. The only violence that I subscribe to is the reactive violence of self-defence. I do not regard the pre-emptive or proactive killings of class enemies or of those refusing to collaborate with the maoists, or killing those collaborating with the state either actually or apparently, as falling within the category of self-defence. Furthermore, the same questions that I raise in point 2 above with regard to state violence, apply with appropriate changes to maoist violence.

I also find their aim of seizing state power unacceptable because there is little evidence that their state, if established, will be any less inclined to misuse power than states that have been established in the past by similar ideologies. Nor do I find that they have articulated a vision of a society that would be preferable to comparatively benign capitalist democracies such as the Scandinavian ones. They don't even approximate a state like Cuba where, despite restrictions on freedoms of expression and association, there is a vibrant cultural life, and standards of living at least do not condemn people to a life of destitution and indignity.

I admit that it is easy for me to take this position because I have never personally been thrown off my land or house because the government wanted it for development or the landlord wanted it to repay a debt. Nor have I ever had to look for work on an empty stomach every season while I watch my children starve, nor had the women in my family been raped by passing policemen or thugs of a superior caste. But as the reactions of victims to such oppression demonstrates, a resort to violence is not often the first thought that automatically springs to their minds, but how to escape from the oppression. The violence of the maoists is, at least initially, if not always later, a response to the suffering and injustice caused by the oppressive landlord or money-lender, or the corrupt official. If there were effective non-violent means of redressing such injustice or oppression, they would would probably not need to resort to violence. Besides, the resort to violence against the might of the state, knowing the inequality of the power, cannot be easy. Although I find untenable the claim that the violence of victims of oppression and suffering is somehow justified MERELY because they are victims, the resort to violence by maoists seems by all accounts to reflect the fact that all non-violent avenues of redressing grievances and removing oppression and injustice have failed. So while I find the methods of the maoists morally abhorrent because they cause violence and suffering, I wonder what one is supposed to do when the institutional or legal alternatives to violence are so weak, scarce and ineffective?

THE P A R T s OF DEMOCRACY

My brother's arrest has given me much cause for reflecting on the nature of the the democracies that we - the privileged and comfortable - now live in. Many often defend the notion that India is the world's largest democracy. I sometimes say so myself, recalling how successfully mass popular opinion in 2004 proved to be the undoing of the BJP at the centre as well as of the TDP in Andhra Pradesh. In both cases a smug and arrogant punditocracy had badly underestimated the power of mass opinion. The US - and I here I mean the people AND their government - regards itself as a democracy, as does the UK. Israel, too is widely regarded as the only democracy in the middle east, despite the prevalence of war crimes and apartheid against the Palestinian population in the territories that it occupies, and that it claims as part of Eretz Israel. Turkey, the country where I now live, also regards itself as a democracy, with some justification. All these countries have the formal institutional attributes of a democracy - a parliament, a supposedly independent judiciary and executive, and periodic elections where popular opinion is supposedly expressed. They also claim to have what are commonly regarded as two other invariable concomitants of a democracy - free markets and the rule of law. Indeed these countries regard themselves as so committed to free markets, democracy and the rule of law that they are prepared to sacrifice the lives of their own citizens (and many times more the lives of others) in their name.

In a recent graduation speech to the students of the UC Berkeley Department of Rhetoric, Mark Danner referred to the term "war on terror" as a "rhetorical construction", implying that it is a discursive device that shapes and channels perception, reasoning and emotions in ways that obscure rather than illuminate the truth. In the same sense, the ideas of freedom (as in "free markets"), democracy and the rule of law, in whose name the "war on terror" is being fought, are also rhetorical constructions.

What "rule of law"? My brother's arrest was reportedly ordered by the Secretary of Law in Chhattisgarh under the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act 2005 (CSPSA), and the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act of 1967, modified in 2004. Further charges under sections of the Indian Penal Code of 1860 [sic!] were added later. Yesterday his judicial remand was extended for fourteen more days, yet he has not been formally charged in court. My brother has been working for most of his adult life for and with the powerless and disenfranchised workers, tribals and peasants of Chhattisgarh, sometimes even helping the state design a low cost health care system in villages. Recently he reported on the way the state-created vigilante tribal movement called Salwa Judum was killing and raping other tribals suspected of maoist sympathies in collaboration with "security" forces. These well known facts need to be recited to ask the question: WHOSE freedom and security are being protected by these laws? Furthermore, why do we, as citizens of a free and supposedly democratic country, still need a Penal Code designed by our former imperial rulers 147 years ago? You have to wonder about the law making process in our country if a law as egregious as the CSPSA can be passed all the way to the President and approved. Protests by organizations like the PUDR seem to have no effect in improving the scrutiny of such laws by those who are charged with the duty to do so.

What "freedom"? The freedom of the market in our country appears to be maintained through the bondage and deprivation of those who cannot play in it. The purpose of the state's security apparatus seems to be to deploy its legitimate monopoly of violence in favour of investors and corporations, and of the politicians that are in bed with them, not to protect the rights and property of citizens, whoever they are. Why does the Salwa Judum movement or the maoist insurrection even exist? As the work of people like my brother has revealed, it is because the tribal, dalit and the landless peasantry in many parts of India are being pushed off the land by the state to make way for "development" - industries, infrastructure like roads and dams, the exploitation of natural resources like minerals and forests. It is not lack of "development" and "socio-economic backwardness" that has created the insurrection, but the expropriatory nature of "development" itself. Compensation exists only in name, and is derisory compared to the loss of livelihood and dignity that accompanies such assertions by the state of its rights of eminent domain. And why do we expect the powerless victims of our "development" to respond to such expropriation by simply protesting peacefully, or passively accepting their fate? Because "you cannot make an omlette without breaking eggs"? Whose eggs get broken, and who gets to eat the omlette?

What "democracy"? Any close study of actually existing democracy the world over will show that the mere presence of the forms of democracy - elections, parliament, judiciary, executive - is not enough to ensure its substance. The real substance of a democracy is difficult to create, and fragile even when created. It consists, in my opinion, of four PARTs - Participation by ALL citizens (not just the more powerful or privileged among them) in public life and decision making, Accountability of power by those appointed to exercise it to those in whose name it is exercised, Responsiveness of the state to the demands of all of civil society, and Transparency of the processes by which all power is exercised. Democracy in this substantive sense cannot exist until the state functions as a servant of the people and state executives view their work as serving the people. My guess is that it should be possible to trace the failures of democracy in many countries to the lack or inadequacy of one or more of these four PARTs. Even where democracy is well entrenched in form, it is frail in substance, as the recent regression into corporate oligarchy in Britain and the US has shown. History will probably show that all so-called democracies have actually swung unevenly between an imperfect or incomplete substantive democracy with its four PARTs, and dictatorships of various kinds, both benign and malign.

G H von Wright's reservations about modernity

Here is something von Wright wrote towards the end of his life - in October 1990, to be precise. I could call it the pessoptimist's manifesto.

Postscript to “Science and Reason”. Written in 1990 by G. H. von Wright as a reaction to all the negative critics of the book published in 1986.

Translated from the Norwegian by Rasmus Kamper
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“Science and Reason” appeared in the autumn of 1986. As I say in the preface, the book is an extended version of a lecture prepared for the symposium arranged the year before by the European Science Foundation in Colmar.

To the author's astonishment the book caused widespread reaction - or perhaps more precisely stir - first in Finland, thereafter in Sweden. The stronger reactions were altogether negative. They also got a somewhat official stamp by first being put forward during the Finnish Science Days in Helsinki in January 1987. I myself was absent, but the reactions were certainly conveyed by the press, especially by the social democrat press, where one of them, for lack of arguments, employed altogether incredible abuse against the author. I cannot say I was hurt, but I felt a bit uneasy by such a level in a debate that attempted to be, if not cultivated, then at least to some extent cultural. The debate has not changed my personal relations to those who were involved.

In Sweden, the daily Svenska Dagbladet paid attention to the book with one review and no less than 18 articles about the book's theme. As suspected, the level was overall higher in Sweden than in Finland. Nevertheless, the wisdom in much of what was written, led my thoughts to Holberg's Erasmus Montanus.

What sparked these highly emotionally charged reactions? Apparently I touched some weak spot, by calling into question something that one was bound to take for granted, unless one intended to question the foundation of our way of life and thinking. Some actually felt they could see the acts of cruelty carried out by Pol Pot's regime in the extrapolation of my way of thinking. The ongoing integration of the globe into the technological life style, market economy, consumption and ideology of growth was the path of progress. It had to lead towards better conditions for human beings all over the world. True, the goal was still far in the future, and there were rather disturbing indications as to our progress. But the path was already charted, and no real alternative was within sight. The idea that technological developments along with industrial forms of production perhaps were about to undermine the biological conditions for mankind's continued existence, was - and had to be - unimaginable. Nothing seemed to have provoked my readers more than the suggestion that mankind perhaps had chosen a path, which rendered her unfit as a biological species for this world, and which could lead to the extinction of the species.

What I have said above may give the impression that I intend to appear as a prophet of doom with my book. However, this is not the case. I make no predictions about the future. Pindar's words, as I quote in the preface, have surprisingly been confirmed by the recent years events.

The reader should take the book’s subtitle seriously: "Attempt at an understanding". I have always felt a strong need to comprehend the world I am born into. A starting point for my thinking has been the rapid and extensive changes in our external conditions caused by the technological development. For someone born and raised after the Second World War, the changes must appear considerably less and therefore more natural than for someone having a conscious life stretching back to the nineteen-twenties. The changes have mainly been caused by the development of science. Research has, so to speak, become the industrial society's most important force of production (produktivkraft), to make use of Marxist terminology. This situation did not apply to the technological innovations laying the ground for the early industrial revolution in the nineteenth century. But that this would happen at a later point in time, had been foretold (as in a dream) ever since a modern understanding and a scientific picture of the world developed in the late renaissance and baroque. The dream itself was an expression of a certain view about man’s place in the world, a certain view with roots in our Judeao-Christian civilization and - ultimately - in religious mythology and saga. Other cultures have created other pictures of man, and their intellectual and scientific activities have had a far more practical adaptation than ours.

To someone who has dedicated his life to science, insight into these connections is also of personal significance. Not only does it help him to comprehend his own time better, but also to better understand himself and his complicity in what happen.

Some critics have claimed that I do not draw a sufficiently positive picture of the scientific advances in our century. However, I think they are evaluating the situation wrongly, and that is because of two reasons that are connected.

One reason is the enormous technological development since the Second World War, and in particular, high technology's constantly growing dependence on and relation with advanced science. The border between pure and applied science, between science and technology, is about to blur. Then technological innovations appear as easily as scientific advances. To land on the moon or transplant a heart becomes, according to this popular opinion, examples of scientific success. But this is an illusion. Surprisingly, the theories behind many of our most recent and most spectacular technological miracles have their origin in ideas conceived and framed during the three centuries between Galileo and Einstein - a period of time, which in the future, as I see it, will be distinguished as a rounded epoch in the history of science.

The other illusion has to do with the integration of science into economic life made possible by technology. Research is imperative for the development of products in industry, which in its turn is needed to maintain and improve prosperity. In this way, the question about research and education has in quite a different way than earlier become an object of public discussion. We concentrate on science. But a consequence of this is that science, to a lesser degree than earlier, lives and develops according to its own internal rules. More often it conforms to the economic and political conditions of society. Pathetic declamations about the freedom of research and the intrinsic value of the search for truth far too often conceal this fact.

Of course, science has recorded important achievements in the latter half of this century too. The most important is the breaking of the genetic code. The new insights into the living cell can be said to be a counterpart to the experimental interference in the atoms inner core, which happened at the beginning of our century. Both discoveries did open revolutionary technological prospects. The first became reality by the mastery of the atomic bomb and nuclear power. The latter initiated preparations for the interference and manipulations that have lead to changes in the genetic structure of plants and animals. The former discovery frightens by its threat of massive extermination – intentional or accidental. The latter makes mankind the master of creation in a more pervasive manner than all earlier control over and manipulation of nature.

Considered as changes in the scientific world picture, both atomic explosion and genetic manipulation are nevertheless less profound than the changes in the ideas about space and time, and matter and causality, which was caused by the theory of relativity and the quantum theory. However it isn't out of the question that similar changes in the scientific world of concepts are about to occur also today, although they do not rest on equally spectacular theoretical constructions as those encountered by the turn of the century. I do not think of the holistic ideas that I refer to in the book. It is still difficult to estimate their impact on the scientific way of thinking. A line of development within mathematics and theoretical physics has become known under the popular name Chaos Theory. It has taken off in recent years, but the origin goes as far back as to the nineteenth century. It is related to the study of irreversible and non-deterministic processes in certain dynamical physical systems. The study has contributed to the undermining of the ideas characterizing the classical scientific world picture. I can imagine that there reside rudiments of new patterns of thought here, which gradually also will change the requirements of rational understanding. These requirements have led to the well-known difficulties in the interpretation of the meaning of some microphysical theories. Therefore, the prolonged crisis in the foundations of physics will perhaps not be overcome, but will merely stop being troublesome to the mind.

It can be worthwhile to note that the two events in the domain of science which I find most important today - the mapping of the gene and the study of unstable dynamic systems - partly have had opposite impacts on what in general is called our world picture. While the last study weakened the impact from previously deterministic conceptions, the first has given nourishment to a new form of determinism. I think among other things of the chances of diagnosing hereditary predispositions for diseases, and to prevent and in other ways control their development through genetic manipulations, thereby reducing the scope of coincidence. The fate of the individual seems both predetermined and possible to anticipate in a new way. This insight has psychological consequences, and, if genetic manipulation on a large scale becomes reality, also social effects. The structure of entire populations can be shaped through systematic manipulation of the individuals’ inherited genetic codes.

The technological advances and innovations have, as a matter of facts, rendered problematic mankind's relation with nature. The problem also has an ethical dimension that recently has become even more important. Is it correct to use arms with such a huge capability of destruction as the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki? If not, how shall one avoid a repetition? Is it correct to interfere in the foundation of life in the way genetic engineering and advanced surgery are now in the process of making a reality? If not, what control over the scientific achievements can safeguard us against abuses? The answer to the last question is still altogether dim. Perhaps the problem is not solvable. The hefty debate about for example medical ethics demonstrates that the question has been raised. But I allow myself to be skeptical of the practical effects of the intelligent and philanthropic researchers attempt to answer them. Ethics has become a catchword and a fashion. With that comes the risk of the problems becoming institutionalized. That would make them less accessible to insight and common judgment.

Another area where the relation between man and nature has become critical is the rapid and enormous strains on the biosphere re[resented by the industrial technology together with high standards of living in the .industrial world and the increase in population in the developing world. It is not anymore merely a matter of pollution of air and water, deforestation and desertification. Those processes of nature created by mankind – such as depletion of the ozone layer and the greenhouse effect - have become global threats against the continuation of life, and perhaps they are irreversible. Yet only five years ago one spoke very little about these dangers.

During the years that have passed since Science and Reason was written, one has become far more conscious about environmental issues. Certainly, an atmosphere of what I will denote as environmental hysteria is prevailing. Researchers are shouting in chorus that something must be done, and even the most ignorant populists and politicians drape themselves at present in green.

I will not, of course, spread doubt about the importance of discussion and research, and even less about the significance of protective measures. One cannot help noticing that the hullabaloo also evokes sarcasm and laughter. On the one hand the players agree completely that the boat navigates towards the cliffs where the shipwreck threatens. On the other hand a comprehensive powerlessness prevails, perhaps also aversion toward changing the course. I will try to explain myself a bit more clearly.

We speak about an acceptable growth. However, as this is usually understood, it embodies a contradiction. Continuous damage to the environment has to lessen, and destructions of the type we now are witnessing in different parts of the dissolved USSR, must if possible be repaired. The excessive consumption in the rich countries must be reined in, and the poor part of the world must be prevented from sinking deeper into misery. But at the same time the growth in the industrial world must continue. One will not allow lowering the standards of living, forcing people to give up the thousands of new toys, for instance in the form of electronic equipment, which the high-tech industry is pouring at an accelerating pace onto a constantly expanding market. It has been said that these two opposite trends imply each other. Without growth, no leveling of prosperity. The train of thought is not difficult to follow, and partly correct it is as well. Nevertheless, I do believe that in the longer term this will lead us towards a frontier, which we will be unable to return from. The biosphere simply cannot endure the growing stress and strain caused if this controlled program of growth is realized.

This is what I believe. How it goes, nobody can know. I could provide a great many reasons to support my belief, but I will not do so here. The concluding claim is that the contradiction I see in the concept of an acceptable growth can only be resolved through a motion in the opposite direction or through something that could be called a cooling down of the world economy. People in the industrial world have to learn to live a scantier life. They have to give up needs they have taken for granted; needs that without doubt they could do without.

Can the trend turn and take such a course? In theory yes, of course. But how is that in practice?

It is not possible to turn history back to let's say the nineteen-thirties, and proceed from the then prevailing level as if nothing has happened. Such regressions are perhaps not altogether unknown in history. But they are probably impossible in our times, which are full of rapid changes in production methods and organizational changes. There is, so to speak, nothing to relapse to. An attempt to lower consumption and cool down the economic depends on a number of changes. No economic expertise can imagine the depth and extent of these problems. Therefore, no political leadership can risk creating such changes. A relocation of the production from producing all that the wealthy countries comfortably could do without, without having to suffer, to produce the useful goods the poor part of the world needed, would either lead to mass unemployment or call for sacrifices that only a small minority might think of embarking upon voluntarily. An attempt at carrying this thought to its logical conclusion could be useful. Supposedly a good many including myself would think that this alternative would be politically and psychologically unreasonable.

In view of these contradictions and difficulties it is difficult to believe in a sensible and methodical solution of mankind's dilemma. It's tempting to resign and allow everything to proceed as hitherto. I believe that such a resignation over fate already has happened in people's heart, although the mouths continue to confess/profess a hope. We will probably still keep hearing these confessions for a long time in the form of resolutions from international congresses, symposiums or committees, agreements about reduced emission and attempts on re-establishing a nature which already is being plundered. All this takes place at one table while there are negotiations at another table about wage increases and tax reductions and about different initiatives to stimulate the economics and strengthen company’s international competitiveness. As long as growth is the all-important goal, decisions made at the last table will complicate or render impossible the wishes at the first table.

The pessimism expressed in “Science and Reason”, has over the years deepened in me. I cannot anymore stand up and defend reason as a hope for mankind. That of course does not mean that I have given up reason in personal considerations or in relations to my fellow human beings. I still urge the small circle I can reach through my words to reasonable reflection.

A frequently recurring accusation against the author of “Science and Reason” is that the expression of pessimism in itself creates uneasiness and seems to paralyze and prevent action. In a certain sense this is probably correct. But I find it far more irresponsible - and at the same time paralyzing - to assert an optimism which involves quietly allowing everything to proceed as usual in the conviction that eventually the problem will probably be resolved by the means of further research and new technologies, and in the balance between supply and demand of the free markets. It appears that governments have sunk into what we may call an optimism of impotence or powerlessness, keeping the populations they govern in a similar state of trance. One has to fight this false optimism to the best of one’s ability. But I do not believe one can rid oneself of it before having experienced the desperation that on sober consideration of mankind’s situation must follow. Certainly, this is how I view it.

A thought that has been expressed in the writings of many cultures and religious mythologies is that only through times of trial and suffering can man acquire the wisdom that can lead to changes in its way of life. Such suffering can hit a human being in many ways. It can be caused by war, plague, hunger and violent natural disasters. It is not unimaginable that we stand on the threshold of a time where suffering on a large scale will pour over us. The global order of the world appears more and more as an unstable system of the freakish and unpredictable kind, similar to what science has recently started to observe. Who could for instance have known that the huge empire in the east would collapse in such a short time and practically disappear from the political map? Or that the force of a revealed religion in our enlightened time would prepare a global confrontation which threatens to upset the foundations of the world economy? At the same time, the western national states are disintegrating under the pressure of economic and political forces demanding integration and uniformity. A situation not unlike the one that prevailed on our continent before the dawn of modern times is about to emerge. It might be instructive to consider ourselves in this remote mirror.

Helsinki, October 1990
Georg Henrik von Wright

CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS? AN EXCHANGE WITH MO

MO to GP

I went to one of those flashy PR meetings at the Supreme Education Council (I still can't get past that title without thinking of Star Trek) last week wherein someone went on and on about the brave new world of wonders the reform in Qatar represents. I wonder.

The same day, Al Jazeera wrote an editorial against the educational reform in Qatar which was based on the old language and imperialism argument: Because English is the medium of instruction in the new reform, Arabs will lose their cultural identity. It might be worth thinking about if the students in the schools actually attended and embraced English to any degree at all. As it is, "What's up?" as a greeting is about as much American Imperialist English as students in high school can muster. As for being able to give an answer to any form of hello in English, it's rare. They all look like stunned deer caught in headlights. The "What's Up?" is something they hear on TV. And there's little risk of the girls going much further in their study of the language because they have no interest in learning anything, whether it's English or Arabic or math or science. They are barely literate in their own language. But the Qatar government is insisting upon a Western educational system. The problem is, the government wants Westernization minus the critical thinking part. The Islam of the Gulf is a fundamentalist Islam that rules out all incursions into dissent. No one openly thinks out loud, or voices any individual point of view. Point of view is already defined ahead of time, so no one is willing to waste time on things (in classes for example), like questioning strategies, or in meetings, on discussion of an issue. The issue is finished before it arises, but oddly, everyone seems to ignore whatever is mandated and does whatever she wants to do. This doesn't emerge as revolutionary subversion because it's too self serving, but seems to be a reflex based upon the oppressive nature of Islamic culture in the Gulf. What happens day to day is quite ugly because the only way to dissent is to be subversive -- to say one thing and do another, and do it under cover (the veil is of course is the best symbol of this Dumb and Dumber mediocrity). The result is minute by minute chaos, melodrama, tears and threats, and general accusations detached from any particular issue. In other words, everything is taken personally. I spend the greater part of each day trying to get teachers to work together, to find common ground, but it always, always backfires. So where's the worry about imperialism and the English language?

GP to MO

So much of what you say resonates with me, that I need to reflect a bit to offer you a contrary view.

A traditional Islamist might say: “Well, you’ve had dissent and free speech for two hundred years, and look where that’s got you. You people think freedom to dissent means the freedom to insult and disrespect others gratuitiously, controversy in your societies takes the form of people in entrenched positions talking past each other. Your so-called enlightenment was not so much a socratic dialogue in search of truth as a trashing of established certainties associated with the monarchy and religion. The heads of state in two paragons of liberal democracy – the US and the UK – are arguably war criminals, by western standards laid down in Nuremberg and Geneva, yet the rare attempts by dissenters to spread this view are weak and faltering in your “free” media.

We, on the other hand, value public order and keeping up the appearance of agreement even when we disagree. Our forms of dissent are part of what your anthropologists have called the “weapons of the weak”. That’s why we tend to show our disagreement in ways that westerners find hypocritical and dishonest. But we don’t have a monopoly on these vices, as your politicians and media have demonstrated with such clarity in recent years.

You have been claiming values of liberty, equality and fraternity since the eighteenth century, but your actions since then have rarely exemplified these values, especially in other parts of the world, but even in your own lands. You now bring democracy to us with DU ammunition, and bombs, and forced starvation. You allow dissent and critical thinking only within limits allowed by your elites.

Yes, we have our problems, but we would like to look within our own religious traditions for solutions, as you should look within your own. That is where we have much more in common.”

The Qatari search for a western educational system is actually a search for selected western ideas and technologies that will serve their interests, not for what the west claims as its values, but clearly does not take seriously. The west that the people in your account see is usually not the free-thinking, dialogic, open-minded, self-critical west. So don’t expect a desire to learn English to represent a desire to appreciate Chomsky or Thoreau or Blake. It is instead a desire to acquire some of the power associated with the world’s English-speaking elite, not to inherit its dissenting traditions. I think you are judging the worst of the east with the best of the west, and naturally you find it wanting.

Of course there is dissent and critical thinking in their societies, as you will discover if you talk to intelligent, reflective people outside your circle of school teachers, who bear the burden of reproducing the official culture. But it is dissent that has to be understood on their terms, not through western eyes. And it will occur at their pace. And perhaps it’s taking the form – as it has historically always done in Islamic societies – as re-interpretation (”ijtihad”), rather than open questioning of authority. Much of this is taking place in a largely invisible and unacknowledged dialogue with the west.

Have you watched the Doha Debates? Such debates would be remarkable even in the west, but they are being sponsored by the Qatari Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development, headed by a woman who I think is a member of the Qatari royal family!

MO to GP

I sent you my outburst because I had hoped you would give me a contrary view that would help me right now during a time of rather high frustration. An intellectual discourse within Islam does of course exist, but Qatar is exceptionally venal and materialistic. As for the Emir's wife. She has become a hopeful figurehead in many ways, but unfortunately has alienated herself from the majority of Qatari women. It's the West that champions her. The Qatar Debates - yes, I do watch them. They are not, however, what the public here is interested in. My experience of the Islam of the Gulf has not been pleasant, nor should it necessarily have to be as it's not my culture, but the human rights abuses I see here are the worst I've seen anywhere.

SCIENCE AND RELIGION - UNITED IN A MÖBIUS STRIP?

Religion is often taken to mean "blindly following a belief system". Religion is regarded as what motivates people to kill others, or be dogmatic and closed minded. I acknowledge that this is what people often do in the name of religions, but does that define what religions are? Can't religions also help people to live together peacefully and work towards building a better world. Doesn't Islam have a strong emphasis on social justice and welfare? Doesn't Buddhism make us aware of human suffering and how we can change our own psychology that reinforces it? Doesn't Christianity enjoin that we should love even our enemies?

Why don't we consider the possibility that religions are the systems of belief that help people to make sense of the spiritual aspects of one's experience, just as science helps us to make sense of the natural world. And the two worlds may not be as separate as they seem to be. For most of man's existence on earth, they have not in fact been seen as separate, and the latest findings in neuroscience may yield the links between the world of the spirit and that of nature that the ancients took for granted. But this is still controversial.

Notice that when traditional religions are abandoned, then substitute religions appear to take their place, complete with rituals and ideologies and institutions. And dogmatism is by no means the monopoly of the religious.

I agree that religion is open to abuse. But then which system of ideas is not? Some would say that even science is: notice the billions of dollars spent on developing weapons and other means of doing deliberate harm to human beings. Notice how much we have allowed the products of scientific research to destroy the planet. But that is not science at its best.

I think religion at its best is a system of beliefs that expresses - i.e, imagines, tells stories about - the best that human beings are capable of, and is based on systems of inner examination that have been around for a long time. The question is: should religion (understood in this sense) be something that should be confined to the individual/private sphere and not be allowed to enter the public sphere? I am not at all sure that this is possible, or even a good idea. No one claims that science ought to be restricted to discussion among scientists in laboratories. A similar demand should not be made of religion.

Religion, like science, needs to influence our values. It needs to inform public policies such as in economics and education (NOT as in countries where religious or other ideological dogmatism has been allowed to dominate political discussion). And religion ought to be subjected always to public and critical scrutiny by vigilant citizens, just as scientific research should always be discussed by an educated public as well as by scientists themselves. We need religious ideas to understand our inner selves just as much as we need scientific ones to discover and understand the outer world.

Religion originally began as a quest to understand the world - both inner and outer. With the development of scientific understanding, science has provided the tools and concepts for understanding of the outer world. Religious ideas began to be replaced by scientific ideas in our understanding of the world outside our selves. But in the inner world - the world of mind, soul and spirit - science has been able to make very little progress so far. Psychology - in some forms, at least - represents attempts to apply scientific concepts and tools of understanding to areas where they are inappropriate or of limited use. They are about as effective in understanding the inner world as religious ideas have been in understanding nature. But I think the scientific exploration has just begun of a journey which many religions have mapped a long time ago through rigorously empirical methods. Through research in neuroscience, scientists may at last begin to say something significant about matters that have been understood in religious systems of beliefs for a long time through methods of inner exploration.

Ultimately, I don't believe in a conflict between science and religion. One goes outward and tries to understand nature. The other goes inward, and tries to understand the human soul and spirit. I think they are both equally important, but represent two opposite journeys that originate in the human mind, but also meet back in the mind, like a Moebius strip. But unless we understand both clearly, they both cause enormous trouble!