GYANOPROBHA

SYNERGY OF BARBARISMS

The publicity blitz accompanying the release of Tony Blair's book has several levels of irony. 

Firstly, it is an ironic comment on the state of international politics that the heads of states of two of the major liberal democracies in the world have waged war with the ostensible purpose of bringing democratic freedoms to Iraq and Afghanistan, and have enjoyed complete immunity for the enormous destruction and mayhem that they have wreaked in both countries (to say nothing of ancillary attacks in other countries like Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia in pursuit of a vague and quixotic "war on terror"). It is even more ironic that according to the standards that their countries' laid down at Nuremberg in 1945, these heads of states would qualify to be charged and tried as war criminals. And it's more ironic still that the supposedly democratic world seems powerless to bring these criminals to account, thanks to the complicit silence of the mainstream media in educating the public about their criminality, and their stenographic repetitions of, and indeed outright support for, their mendacity, racism and violence. 

That's what enables Blair to make millions as author and speaker strutting about the globe, dispensing advice and admonition to all and sundry on the self-proclaimed righteousness of his psychopathic stance as leader of a supposed democracy. His tawdry role as Middle East "Peace" Envoy coincides precisely with the further consolidation of the occupation and destruction of the Palestinian people by a succession of psychopathic Israeli regimes spurred on by the self-appointed inheritors of the Western Enlightenment tradition. Meanwhile, all attempts to hold Blair to account for his criminality founder on traditions of politeness and propriety (or hypocrisy) in western political discourse. 

The trouble with this kind of criticism of current versions of Anglo-American "liberalism" is that it is often confused with support for the thoroughly odious Islamic extremism that it has nurtured (but not always created) in various parts of the world. To criticize the Israeli occupation of Palestine or the US/NATO invasion and occupation and destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq is - through some kind of intellectual legerdemain - too often taken as support for Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, the Taliban and various terrorist outfits emanating from Pakistan. Few seem to notice that this aggressive "liberalism" of neocons like Blair and Bush and their ideological soul-mates is supported ideologically and financially by the no less odious Christian and Jewish extremists - who are the Christian and Jewish mirror images of the Taliban in the US and Israel. Apparently, colonialism and racism and apartheid are somehow respectable in these "liberal" circles, including - sadly but predictably - among the Hindu right in India, as long as it appears in the guise and shape of Zionism in Israel. 

The barbarism of the neocons (in which I include all those who think it's a good idea to wage wars in other countries in the guise of a global war on terrorism, but actually to defend their interests against threats both real and imaginary) and the barbarism of extremist groups using the garb of religion to further their own egregious aims both nourish each other with the oxygen of publicity, and hog the attention of the media, distracting the public from far more urgent and important struggles to make the world a more liveable place. Thus it comes about that successive US regimes have persuaded their public that the Taliban in Afghanistan  are a serious enough threat to the US to warrant invading that country and waging a war there for nine years costing thousands of lives both Afghan and US, and billions of dollars in resources. Thanks to the media, few Americans apparently care that the effect of this war has been to entrench the Taliban more firmly in power and destroy any prospect of a peaceful life for millions of Afghans for the foreseeable future, enrich the military and other contractors and the armaments industry, all at the expense of the health, education and well-being of current and future generations of American citizens. 

Notice what is happening in Pakistan: the US is aiding and arming a pseudo-democratic (but effectively military) regime in Pakistan in the guise of enlisting its support against terrorism, while this aid is being spent by the Pakistani regime on fighting an internal civil war which is designed to create more terrorists (including the heroic predator drone strikes on civilian populations from the safety of Kansas and West Virginia). Both donor and recipient have developed incentives to continue this killing spree in the name of fighting the very terrorism whose flames are being fanned by their actions. Consider the synergy between the military-industrial-congressional-thinktank-university-media complex in the US/NATO countries and the military-jihadi complex in Pakistan, and follow the money. Ask yourself who is gaining by all this. Notice similar synergies developing elsewhere, e.g., in the alleged Peace Talks between a Palestinian quisling and his US and Israeli masters while ordinary Palestinians continue to lose their homes to settlements, and keep getting killed for reasons which only rarely pose a threat to Israeli citizens. The war on terror has expanded, not shrunk, because it has evolved into a political project to keep people in a permanent state of insecurity in which they would feel  compelled to support policies to protect them against imagined terrors. 

I would predict that the politics of the 21st century will be characterized by the Synergy of Barbarisms rather than by the Clash of Civilizations. But the synergy of barbarisms cannot be broken by a counter-alliance of another set of barbarisms, but by an alliance of civilizations. Between the extremes of ideologies there is the silent majority of mostly apathetic, but mostly decent people who care principally about their own futures and that of their children and their own communities. Yet they feel powerless and insecure in the face of vast political and economic issues when these become their own private problems. The violent faces of Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism do not represent the vast majority of such people, many of whom are the adherents of these religious traditions. Nor do their religious texts speak unambiguously about the need for compassion, kindness and mercy in dealing with suffering engendered by the different problems that beset our world today. But they provide a narrative, language and symbolism for what are essentially worldly (secular) conflicts born out of the confusion and insecurity that economic, historical and political forces beyond their control have created. These anxieties are felt in different forms and for different reasons both among powerful elites as well as among powerless and marginalized masses. These threats and fears then present opportunities for neocons to exploit  "Pearl Harbour" moments of insecurity to disseminate perceptions of threats to so-called security or "national interests" that will help them initiate invasions and killing sprees in the name of peace, security, democracy and development. In reality, all that improves is the wealth of those invested in this permanently elusive, but ultimately destructive, search for security. 

Yet there is enough in various religious traditions to propel a search for peace and justice and a better world that secular ideologies, with their absence of any sense of the sacred, have so far failed to provide. There is a need for ordinary people (civil society) to get together across national boundaries to commence dialogues aimed at peace. Let's talk, eat, make music, worship together; visit each other's homes, help each other out in times of distress. Let's not wait for governments to do these things, because the indications are that the only things they are interested in is arming each other against threats that they themselves manufacture, or are manufactured for them, to keep us frightened and pliant. Therefore it is absolutely imperative that foreign policy be taken away from the stranglehold of states - most of which often behave as if they have an incentive to continue the killing and destruction. Let's re-read all significant texts, re-assess all sources of wisdom. Let's use them to build traditions of dissent that will use the oldest civilizational narratives known to humanity to stop the killing and destruction and live in peace with justice. Yes, let's use religion as a political resource, but to renew, rebuild and heal our civilizational inheritance, not destroy ourselves with our barbarism. 

THE "THREAT" OF ISLAMIC DEMOCRACY

William Dalrymple's comment in the Guardian's Commentisfree blog has attracted the usual hysteria from roving bands of Islamophobes, but makes a plausible case for the view that the real impetus behind the growth of political Islam has been the search for a popular response to western policies in the Muslim world. If you take a look around the countries of west Asia, you are likely to see western support going to monarchies like Jordan, Saudi Arabia or the Gulf States, or to an electoral dictatorship called Egypt. Democratic opposition to western policies in the region takes the shape of support for Islamic parties. Dalrymple cites Hamas in Palestine and the Hizbollah as the most dramatic examples of parties that win popular support, but the basis for their support are the capacity for these parties to support social welfare programs that the state has failed to provide, and the fact that they form the focus of the resistance to Israel, the main western "representative" in the region. Dalrymple notes that Bush's desire to be a missionary bombardier for democracy has indeed worked in a destructive, perverse way: popular anti-western resistance forces have coagulated around Islamic parties not because of their Islamic teachings, but because they provided the only credible resistance to western destruction.

But do these Islamic parties really represent an alternative to western economic domination and to the injustices of global capitalism? Dalrymple writes that "the religious parties tend to be seen by the poor, rightly or wrongly, as representing justice, integrity and equitable distribution of resources." But these parties have never had to actually run a government, except, locally in Lebanon. And when they did in Afghanistan, they were a disaster, both socially and economically. So it's difficult to judge their potential as alternatives to the present order of immiserising capitalism. Judging by the record of Islamic parties like the AKP in Turkey, which has also gained in strength in the last elections mainly because the opposition lacked a credible program, it seems possible to combine successful economic management according to the Washington consensus - high growth, lower inflation, a business-friendly economic climate - with programs that address the needs of the poor, at least to a limited extent, and in the medium term.

Dalrymple's key insight is that political Islam wins by addressing secular concerns - the standard of living, stable jobs, quick compensation for war damage, active resistance to armed attacks by western forces - and not by conjuring up visions of paradise attained through violent jihad, which is the Islamophobe's standard version. This has the reassuring implication that the motivation for political Islam does not come from the desire for a theocracy, but from the desire for worldly justice and well-being.

But try telling that to the Kemalist elite in Turkey! To them modernity can never have an Islamic definition, only a western one. Therefore, AKP's successful economic management and their desire to join the EU is a facade or veil, concealing the desire to ultimately create an Islamic theocracy governed by the sharia. For the Kemalist, to be a believer in European secularism, but to be turned away at Europe's door for being a Muslim country, poses a painful dilemma, only resolvable by Turks trying to be as western as ever. But the only judges of Turkish westernness are the Europeans, with their secularism and liberalism and enlightenment and human rights and democracy and humanitarian intervention. Unfortunately for the Kemalists, most Turks want the human rights, democracy and the worldy benefits of capitalism, but still see themselves as being Muslim too. In the present context, this brings constant reminders of western double standards and hypocrisy.

This hypocrisy has been brilliantly captured in a satirical posting responding to Dalrymple's comment from one Rasher101. It's well worth quoting in full. (I now find it's been deleted by the moderator. Shame on you, CiF!)

Surely the time is right for military intervention to bring democracy and freedom to the American people?

These poor people languish under a corporate dictatorship in which financial moguls decide on who they can or can't vote for, in which so-called 'elections' are morass of gerrymandering, registration irregularities and outright fraud, and in which a student can be dragged away and tasered for asking the wrong question. This is a country in which people can be locked up for years without trial, in which the government can spy on its citizens as it wishes, and in which tens of millions of people are abandoned to live wretched lives with minimal wages and no healthcare. America is also a regime reputed to possess Weapons of Mass Destruction - and it has used them in the past. It is not only a threat to the world's security but a blight on the world's conscience. The case for military intervention is overwhelming.

It is clear that, by removing the deeply unpopular American regime, by ending the threat from American WMD and by bringing free and fair elections to the American people we would be making the entire region of North America and the North Atlantic much more stable. By invading and occupying America to create a free and democratic state we would be establishing a friendly nation in the heart of North America. This would be an example that would spread, particularly to Britian and Israel, nations with their own history of violence and aggression and who also threaten global security.

The initial invasion would have to be followed by a nation-building exercise as Americans are trained in critical thinking, free speech and democracy. Americans have been subjected to a nationalistic and simple-minded press and media for decades, to the extent that many are no longer aware of even the basic geography of the world, never mind its social and cultural diversity and complexity. Many have even degenerated into religious fundamentalism. Their education and training would therefore take years, and so it is realistic to expect that we would be obliged to maintain 'enduring bases' throughout America to maintain an overwatch role and to ensure that the Americans make the right choices.

Our liberation of the American people would surely be welcomed with flowers and with cheers as our tanks and soldiers marched through the rubble of their cities. Yes, many Americans would die, but collateral damage happens in all wars, however noble (not that we would be counting American deaths!!). Americans, with their gun culture and school shootings and death penalty and mass incarcerations, are much more used to violence and death than we are. They don't feel the same pain when their children are killed and maimed - they're used to it. It really doesn't bother them as much. Sure a few thousand Americans would be shot at our checkpoints, and thousands more would die under our bombs. But that's the price of freedom. Don't worry about it.
The costs of the intervention would not be too great. I estimate $2 billion over three, four - not more than six months. After that America should be in a position to refinance its own reconstruction (overseen by us, of course). It is true it might be difficult to get UN Security Council approval for this intervention, as justified as it is, but we should go ahead anyway. After all, we know our cause is just, that WE are right, and that those predicting disaster are just communist cowards.

Oh, wait! I just found out that America reached peak oil in 1969 and that its current reserves are small and dwindling rapidly. My bad! Forget the whole thing!!

HOW AND WHY IS SECULARISM IMPORTANT?

A poor illiterate young man man who hawks food on pavements in a city helps his teenage wife to complete her school education and train as a software engineer. The wife is eventually hired by a major IT company.

Add to this little story the fact that both come from a conservative community that lives in a slum in an Indian city, and in which the girls are married off early, and are discouraged from continuing their education.

Is it at all relevant to the story that they are Muslims? Is it relevant that they are shown (in the Al Jazeera vignette below) as non-secular (they are shown praying together for continued success once they move to another city) ?

Why, and in what respect, and to what extent is secularism important?

These questions about secularism and religious identity become even more pressing in another story from Al Jazeera. This concerns Rewati the Muslim mother who converted to Hinduism to marry her Hindu husband, and who is consequently incarcerated in an Islamic rehabilitation centre and prevented from rejoining her husband, while her daughter is taken by her parents to be brought up as a Muslim.

Here we have members of a Malaysian Muslim community who reject the secularism of the constitution that allows individuals freedom of religion. Do these individuals speak for the entire community? It appears that in Malaysia, ethnic Malays are Muslim by definition, and are therefore subject to the operation of sharia law which criminalizes apostasy for Muslims. Effectively, this means that the freedom of religion guaranteed in the constitution is only available for people of other religious communities. Yet there are individual Muslims who reject this enforced identity.

I have earlier expressed myself against the kind of secular fundamentalism that criminalizes people or excludes them from public life on the basis of public expressions of religious identity or affiliation such as a head scarf or a beard. The case of Rewati in Malaysia shows clearly how even systems of religious law could have the same effect of restricting individual freedoms and turning oppressive in other ways. The sharia and similar systems of religious law in other traditions either need to be abandoned in favour of secular laws, or need to be reformed to permit people to exercise freedom of religious practice and identity without fearing social ostracism and oppression.

In general, most communities today are multi-ethnic and multi-religious, and it is becoming increasingly difficult for individuals to identify consistently with all the values and cultural attributes of any one community. Moreover, the values and cultural attributes themselves are in the process of change at an unprecedentedly rapid pace. Laws need to recognize and reflect this pluralism. To have a legal system that criminalizes apostasy is to continue with anachronistic systems of social sanction and control.

To return to the case of Fatima Bi and her husband, their story seems to break all stereotypes common among Hindu Indians about Muslims. Not only that, notice that the recourse to religious rituals to secure worldly success is something that cuts across religious boundaries. The secular-minded might throw up their hands in exasperation, but the fact remains that for most people in the world, the secular and the religious are closely intertwined, not only in their lives as private individuals, but also as members of communities. For most people, the secular - the need to survive and succeed economically, the search for material comfort, convenience and efficiency, the search for pleasure and the good life - is usually embedded, in ways that are not immediately obvious - in the meanings and purposes of life that are provided by religious narratives. Therefore to insist on the relegation of religion to the private sphere, as if it's an embarrassing bathroom habit, is a mistake, and a terrible one, as the Malaysian example of allowing the sharia to dictate the religious affiliation of Muslims so poignantly illustrates.

In the recent past, religion - meaning religious language, symbolism, myths and stories, and systems of belief - seem to have been used mainly to spread homicidal hatred. Would it not be much better to encourage a dialogue between religions, as well as within religions, so that religious resources are mobilized for the political task of building freer and fairer societies in ways that most people understand?

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!

"FAITH NO BAR"- RELIGIOUS IDENTITY AND PUBLIC LIFE

Mukul Kesavan provides yet another instance where the secularist insistence that religious identities should be irrelevant in public life fails. He argues that that when we ignore the religious identity of public figures, it desensitizes us to indices of success in overcoming religious prejudice and discrimination. When we ignore the Muslimness of Sania Mirzas and Irfan Pathans in our midst, we fail to note that "in one sphere of public life, competitive sport, religious identity is no obstacle to success".

Actually, secularists don't deny that religious identities are irrelevant in public life, but assert that they should be. For instance, secularists do not ignore the Hinduness (or the Hindutva) of the Sadhvi Rithambars, the Praveen Togadias and the Narendar Modis, nor the Muslimness of the Imam Bukharis. For secularists, it is precisely the religious identities of these public figures that provide the poisonous fuel for their political careers. This is perfectly consistent with the secularist axiom that religion is the root of all evil, and the expectation that religious motivations in politics can only do harm.

But this secularist belief in the essential harmfulness of religious motivations in public life is deeply one-sided, if not altogether mistaken, and not only in the way that Kesavan describes. Religious paradigms can be powerful resources for bringing human societies into harmony with nature, for curbing the rampant predatory greed and violence that characterizes modern economic life, and for the creation of a more socially just order. As long as secularists remain in denial about the powerful potential of religious ideology to do good rather than harm, they will continue to espouse the kind of secular idolatry that led to the pilgrimages to Lenin's mausoleum in the Soviet Union, and to the personality cult built up around Atatürk in Turkey even today. When religion is banished from the public sphere, it has a tendency to return there in pathological forms. Moreover, the critical transformative resources that religious ideologies can provide are no more available to deal with social breakdown.

I see the current intellectual ferment in the Islamic world (see discussions here, here, here, Tariq Ramadan's website, and the review by Pankaj Mishra in the New York Review of Books vol.52 no.18 - subscription required) as a welcome sign that the public role of religion in Muslim societies can be revaluated. A similar discussion should open up in India within the Hindu traditions (including Jainism, Sikhism and Buddhism), because we should not let the Praveen Togadias and the Narendar Modis and the Imam Bukharis define the agenda for the public role of religion.

DEATH OF SECULARISM

Every now and then one sees a comment on the demise of secularism. Here, for instance, are Elaine Cassel reviewing two recent publications about the influence of the religious right in America, and, earlier, Gary Wills ruing the decline of secular enlightenment values and calling for a re-dedication to them.

Speaking here as an agnostic, adhering to no religion, but endowed (I think) with what William James called a religous "germ", here is what I believe:

In brief, unless those who espouse Enlightenment values get over their disdain of religion, or of the religious impulse in the vast majority of  the world's population, including especially the poor, the secular will always be at war with the religious, and the Karl Roves and the Osama bin Ladens of the world (VERY secular people!) will continue to hijack religious sensibilities - one of the most powerful motivations for people everywhere - for their own nefarious purposes.

Every religion has within it the potential to act as a force for the good, and in very worldly ways - healing the sick, feeding the hungry, alleviating human suffering, "building Jerusalem" (to use the Christian tradition), or Ramrajya - roughly translated as the Kingdom of God (to use my own - despite my disavowal of it). With the notable exception of Quakers and liberation theologians (and perhaps a few others I am missing - confining myself to the Christian tradition), why have the vast majority of secular-minded people allowed themselves to forget this? We constantly hear of the religious right - why is there no religious left?  Why do secular people insist on comparing religion at its worst with the best of secular enlightenment, as if the comparison could not be reversed? What have secular enlightenment ideals done for the poor, dispossessed and suffering? Why not look at Auschwitz, Hiroshima, the two world wars and the secular horrors such as communism and its counterpart and supposed antidote, US-style "free-markets-and-democracy", forced on countries all over the world?

The reason, I think, is that historically, with rare exceptions, religion has generally been a weapon in the wrong hands. Consequently,  people who were fighting for social justice or peace historically found themselves usually opposing those who wielded this weapon. Consequently, secular-minded people have generally identified religion as the source of many of the social ills that they saw themselves fighting.

The real battle is not between the secular and the religious camps, but between the dual strands within each of dogmatism and desire for domination on the one hand, and compassion and the desire for justice on the other. But we should now recognize that religions, like most other ideologies and belief systems, including secular ones, can be a mirror for both. Neither religious nor secular ideologies are immune from dogmatism or from grotesque misrepresentations of the ideals they represent.

Those of us who regard ourselves as secular need to find common ground with religious people (i.e., the majority) for our common worldly ends - living in peace and creating a fairer world, and not leave it to the Karl Roves, L K Advanis and other secular maniacs to appropriate religious ideals.

MUSLIM TURKEY AND SECULAR, MODERN EUROPE?

Turks are discovering yet again - ironically, this time under a government with Islamic roots that has pushed the country closer to Europe than any previous secular government - that the Europe they wish to join is less secular and modern than they had thought.  Atatürk forcefully pushed Turkey into adopting European standards of dress, comportment, public life and politics. Now his children want to claim European ideals as their own, while the Europeans are busy trying to unburden themselves of the commitments that their ideals demand.

Chancellor Schröder  welcomes the choice of Cardinal Ratzinger for the Papacy on the grounds that he is a German - but why should it matter to a modern country? Isn't modernity all about transcending such tribalisms, and appointing the person with the right merits for the job?  And Turks have  realized that the Vatican has chosen a Pope who opposes the entry of their country to Europe on the grounds that it is Muslim - but why should that matter in a secular Europe? Isn't secularism about keeping religion as an institution confined to the private sphere of family and personal life?

Something seems to have gone wrong if those who claim to be the mantle bearers of the Enlightenment, with its legacy of modernity, universal humanity and secular values, still choose to identify with people, not on the basis of their humanity, but on the basis of their nationality. Something has gone wrong if the religious identity of a people is used as an excuse to exclude them from joining a political and economic union. It may be that  the Pope does not speak for the people of Europe in rejecting the Turks because they are Muslims. But then certainly no European public figure, to my knowledge, has disavowed the Pope's stance.

Is secular modernity to harsh, too "clean" an ideal for humanity? Or has something happened (apart from imperialism, the two world wars and the cold war, and the triumph of capitalism) to divert Europe from its own ideals?   

Perhaps the metaphysical silence of the Enlightenment itself allows this paradoxical situation to arise. Perhaps secular modernity as a basis for politics is as mistaken as Wittgenstein's initial search for a language that perfectly mirrors the world.  Perhaps it's time for  non-European traditions of thought to seek their own secularism for present times, and define their own modernity. Clearly this cannot be done as if the west didn't exist or can't be a part of this search, or as if there is some single, monolithic and essential non-west.

In other words, those outside Europe should heed Gautam Buddha's final words to Ananda: "Seek your own salvation with diligence"; but through dialogue with all parts of Europe that are open to such dialogue.

PHILOSOPHICAL COUNSELLING

What does one tell a forner student who writes in some desparation that she may be losing her mind, that nothing seems real or certain anymore, that she is beginning to doubt her own existence, that nothing seems to matter anymore?

Well, here is my "answer", for what it is worth. I have edited it for reasons of privacy, from two separate e-mails that I sent her over a few weeks. That's why it might sound disjointed.

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You may be depressed, but you certainly haven’t lost your mind! The thoughts that you are thinking – that nothing makes sense any more – are more common than people care to confess. But the very fact that you have chosen to put them down in an e-mail to me shows that you are trying to look at them with some kind of distancing and objectivity. You may be feeling like a woman drowning, with nothing to hold on to that might keep the head above water, and running out of breath. But you are probably just like a person who hasn’t learnt how to swim properly and has just strayed into the deep end of the pool, and finds that he can’t find the bottom without going under completely. These sorts of situations almost always sort themselves out, after some thrashing and flailing about. But anyone with any kind of sensitivity to life must thrash about from time to time.

Your mother is right, things do really start to make sense later, but that isn’t very helpful, because they need to make sense now. What your mother probably meant is that one’s worldviews about things become more stable and confident with age, when one has seen more of life, and is better able to sort out different contradictions. Nevertheless important contradictions remain even when one is older. So if you are seeking a philosophy of life from me that guarantees relief from pain and disturbance, or that relieves you from the experience of having to struggle with life, I can’t supply you with one!

All I can tell you is this:

We are intensely and radically social beings - that is how we are biologically and psychologically constituted. So interaction with other people matters.

What matters even more is the recognition that our minds are forever active in grasping both material things and ideas, and are always remembering, anticipating and expecting things from other people as a result of this interaction. This constantly troubles our minds and keeps them chasing expectations and running away from aversions. This is the source of both our creativity as well as our misery.

Most of the time we are unaware of how powerfully our thoughts and emotions agitate our minds. Most of us have very little control over them. If you really want to become aware of this, just sit quietly for half an hour and try to focus your mind on your breath as it enters and leaves your nostrils, and see how long you can do that without other thoughts pulling your mind away in all sorts of other directions. Once you become aware of this, you begin to realize that our minds are constantly agitated by thoughts, and we are like a swimmer caught in the swirling currents of thought, with very little control of our own movements. If you do this for long enough, you become aware of anger, greed, hatred, aversions of all kinds, but also of deep insights and feelings that you never thought you had. You cannot see the bottom of a pot of water if you always keep stirring the water (especially if the water is muddy); but let the water be still and the mud settle to the bottom, and you can see through the water clearly. Similarly, you need to calm the agitation of the mind (and let the “muddy” ideas and thoughts settle to the bottom) if you want to see clearly in it. This is a struggle, because it doesn’t happen easily.

Now what does all this have to do with finding one’s feet again? Once you begin examining your own mind, you will begin to see that ideas like freedom and happiness away from other people are illusory, and exist only as sources of confusion, like a mirage. Other people, as I said, are important, because they are the ones who make any idea of freedom and existence meaningful. It’s because of other people, too, that care, kindness, compassion, responsibility, respect and such things are important, especially when they seem most absent in the world. To me, the state of the world is the most convincing evidence that they matter, and matter urgently, because the misery everywhere is fundamentally a consequence of our collective failure to live as individuals and communities and nations, and conduct our public affairs, according to these principles. (Of course there are other causes, too, but I’m speaking of fundamental ones.) But they are important not only for other people, but also for oneself, partly because they lead to one’s own feelings of well-being (a scientifically attested finding).

This kind of advice often sounds like pie-in-the-sky, airy-fairy, moralistic sermonizing. Well, try LIVING as if nothing matters. You won’t be able to. You might live, as many others do, as if the only things that matter are one’s own happiness, satisfaction, convenience, power, status, or wealth. After all, this is what our public institutions encourage. But the single-minded pursuit of these things, although often apparently successful, almost always imposes a psychic cost, and it’s very doubtful if they bring happiness. If power, status and wealth were worth pursuing, how come surveys have shown that the most powerful and wealthy people feel so deeply insecure? If convenience and satisfaction were such worthy aims, how is it that technologies that promise them (succeed) at one level deny them (fail) at another? Mind you, I’m not advocating seeking a monastic life, but I’m pointing out the illusory nature of certain things that we are seduced by. Happiness, in my own experience and observation, certainly doesn’t come by running after it. It may come from living life with careful and compassionate attention to what we do and to others around us.

Most people are morally confused, and have always been. Read literature and history, they are rich sources of human experience and insights that go beyond one’s own. What they both show is that good and evil may not be parts of the fabric of the world, but they are creations of our minds, and possess a certain reality, because they motivate and provide standards and examples for our actions. To say that they are illusory is therefore both true and mistaken at the same time.

As for God, there is either nothing to be said (because nothing CAN be said) if one regards God as part of the universe. Or if one regards God as a source of psychological comfort, there is nothing MORE to say. Or if one regards God as a creation of the human mind that enables us to speak of something that is literally otherwise un-speakable, then what I have to say is this: God is the infinite-dimensional projection of human BEING and human capacities and qualities. Conversely, we humans are the four-dimensional projection (in space-time) of God: just as a solid three-dimensional object casts a two-dimensional shadow on a flat surface, so we are God’s “shadows”. Another more common way of saying this is to say that all human beings have a “divine spark”.

The human mind has certain unique qualities and capacities – humor, art, music and mathematics and the capacity for metaphysical insights are all uniquely human, language and morality probably less uniquely so. These capacities have probably emerged from the unique complexity of our neural networks. But they have given our species a unique ability to look at the world and the universe, including ourselves, and to make sense of it all. However dimly we perceive these things, and however tainted by error and misjudgment our stories about the universe and ourselves might be, we are capable of both correction and self-deception, of waking to the truth, as well as shutting ourselves out of it, like the people in Plato’s cave. God may or may not be part of these stories – I think it’s a matter of taste whether one finds stories without God compelling or not - but what matters is that we need metaphysics for everything else to make sense.

The confusion we all feel from time to time is from a temporary loss of our metaphysical moorings. Confusion happens when the consequences that we anticipated because of our metaphysics didn’t happen, or when the vectors along which we ran our lives have led us into situations or circumstances we didn’t want or anticipate. I suspect something like this has happened to you. Examine what has turned out to be other than you expected. What fundamental assumptions have turned out to be wrong? Your body continues to be a temple for your mind, so take good care of it, even if you don’t have time for sports. Your mind has capacities and qualities for sorting things out that you never suspected, so give it some chance. Your mind has also the doorway to something that you, like all of us brought up in modern, scientific-industrial cultures, are taught to neglect and ignore – your spirit. So give yourself some chance to discover it......

In response to your question “Do I exist?”, I don’t really have much to say in reply, except to advise you to stop worrying about the reality of your own existence. Who is the person reading this e-mail at this moment? Who is the person struggling through her confusion? I have two distinct responses to this, but hopefully both will help you to stop this worry.

(I may not convince you to see things my way, because we’re talking metaphysics here, not science. The truth of the things I talk about here are insights from experience and self-examination and personal experimentation. Check them out for yourself and see whether they are true.)

On the one hand, if you claim that your existence is an illusion, then that only makes sense in the context of reality, just as white only makes sense in the context of black. If everything were illusion (as well it might), that illusion WOULD be our reality, just as the reality of the fish is the water in which it lives without recognizing it as water separate from other things. WE know it’s water, and that there is a world outside water, but we aren’t fish! To claim that what you are experiencing is an illusion, you would need to be aware of a reality other than what you experience (which you would ALSO call an illusion because you claim that EVERYTHING you experience is illusion!).

On the other hand, trying to find a definite answer (or stopping point) to the questions “Who am I? Who is feeling this pain? Who is even asking these questions?” may result in a blank, rather like the error message you get in a calculator when you divide by zero. That’s because it’s very difficult to discover an I, SEPARATE from the world. Look at the bubbles in the water of a bubbling stream, or the water droplets in the spray of a waterfall. For how long do they have an existence separate from the stream they arise from? Can a bubble or a drop of water separate itself from the stream or the waterfall, even as long as it exists as a bubble or drop? (This analogy obviously has its limits, but you get the picture, don’t you?)

What I’m trying to tell you is that there is in fact no self separate from the world. We are constituted by, and to some extent constitute or construct, the world we are in. We are a holomorph of the world – the entire world reflected and repeated in a drop of it! Whether this engenders a sense of claustrophobia, as if you are entering a very small enclosed space from which there is no escape, or whether this gives you a sense of freedom, is like the choice between two different perceptions – duck, rabbit? old woman, young woman? - that we discussed long ago. 

You write: “I don't want to give up on anything before I find satisfactory answers for my questions. I know there wont' be answers for all of them, but just even knowing that there are no satisfactory answers is a good enough answer. But I have to know if there is a point to life. Maybe there isn't. If there isn't then it will be my choice to pursue my life, maybe to make a point by myself. Maybe to enjoy, to see it just as a one time chance.”

Well, I think I have lived my life so far in just this way, and I’ve found it to be well worth it! Whether there is a point to life or not depends on how you choose to live it.

TWO REACTIONS TO BUSH'S VICTORY

Ben Tripp has written a delightfully vituperative piece addressing his fellow Americans on the Bush victory in Counterpunch. I was enjoying the incandescent wit and anger when it struck me that, even though it's addressed to Bush supporters, the piece wouldn't be read by most of them beyond the first few words. So its REAL audience is people like me who would agree with it.

And that's true of pretty much ALL the stuff that appears on the internet. There is hardly ever a meeting ground in cyberspace (the only exception I know of is Open Democracy) where people from two opposite ends of the spectrum of political opinion meet. This is less so of TV, but there the debates are either biased against one side, or rendered meaningless because in the short span of time available, each side seems interested not in a debate, but in restating their main points. Or both sides share the same assumptions to such an extent that it's a "debate" only between two positions of a narrowly defined spectrum of opinion.

However much I enjoyed reading the Tripp piece, I have to say that the Tripps of the world have no chance unless they start talking to the people he castigates as "poltroons" and succeeds in changing their mindset. Otherwise, he is just mirroring their blindness.

And here is another one in the NYT by Garry Wills, ruing the death of Enlightenment values, and pleading for a rededication to them.

Speaking here as an agnostic, adhering to no religion, but endowed (I think) with what William James called a religous "germ", unless those who espouse Enlightenment values get over their disdain of religion, or of the religious impulse in the vast majority of the world's population, including, especially, the poor, the secular will always be at war with the religious, and the Karl Roves and the Osama bin Ladens of the world (VERY secular people!) will continue to hijack religious sensibilities - one of the most powerful motivations for people everywhere - for their own nefarious purposes.

Every religion has within it the potential to act as a force for the good, and in very worldly ways - healing the sick, feeding the hungry, alleviating human suffering, "building Jerusalem" (to use the Christian tradition), or Ramrajya (to use the Hindu one), which roughly translates as the Kingdom of God . With the notable exception of Quakers and liberation theologians (and perhaps a few others I am missing - confining myself to the Christian tradition), and Swami Agnivesh from the Hindu, why have the vast majority of secular-minded people allowed themselves to forget this? We constantly hear of the religious right - why is there no religious left? Why do secular people insist on comparing religion at its worst with the best of secular enlightenment, as if the comparison could not be reversed? What have secular enlightenment ideals done for the poor, dispossessed and suffering? Why not look at Auschwitz, Hiroshima, the two world wars and the secular horrors such as communism and its counterpart, US-style "free-markets-and-democracy" forced on countries all over the world to fight the communist menace?

Those of us who regard ourselves as secular need to find common ground with religious people (i.e., the majority) for our common worldly ends - living in peace and creating a fairer world, and not leave it to the Karl Roves and other secular maniacs to appropriate religious ideals. The real battle is not between the secular and the religious camps, but between the dual strands of good and evil within each.

The inclined plane of morality

It seems almost a truism that doing the good or the right thing is often more difficult than doing the opposite. Acting to do right or good seems to require more effort than doing wrong – the effort being spent in trying to overcome one’s own inertia, or the hindering pull of consensus, or the desire for some sensual or emotional gratification. It may be that doing good also has its own payoffs, but these have to be counterbalanced again the “drag” exerted by the choices not to do good, or to actually do evil.

It is for this reason that I have often regarded our efforts to act morally as analogous to moving an object up an inclined plane. Just as objects placed on an inclined plane more “naturally” roll down the plane than up it, so do we human beings more naturally tend to be dragged down the plane of morality by our natural biological and psychological endowments.

Of course, the characterization of anger, lust, greed as “evil” and a “drag” down the inclined plane is itself a “construction” of our minds – they have no objective existence as part of the fabric of the world, except to the extent that our minds themselves are part of the universe. Nor do the concepts of good and right. So shorn of this imposed grid of moral judgment, the inclined plane is simply a recognition that we have certain tendencies to behave in certain ways (that we call wrong or evil) as a result of the evolutionary inheritance of our biological or psychological programming. To behave and act in certain other ways (that we call right or good) is also potentially available to us, but these ways require a conscious choice and effort of overcoming our natural programming.

What we have naturally is, on the one hand, a set of forces dragging us “down” towards “wrong” and “evil” – the forces of “gravitation” and “friction” if you like - that act on the object lying on the moral inclined plane. On the other hand, we also have a mind and a brain that allows us the potential to act “rightly” and to do “good”.

This may seem an elaborate and pretentious way of saying something that is well recognized in certain religious traditions – that humans are naturally evil. But I am suggesting that our potential capacity for goodness is also natural. For instance, most of us, unless we are psychopathic, probably have a natural resistance to hurting or killing our own kind, and do so only under somewhat special circumstances, even if their frequency makes it seem as if we kill naturally. Similarly, we also seem to have the natural capacity to recognize the distress and happiness of others, including other beings, and we regard it as a mark of psychopathology when we fail to do so.

This natural potential for goodness, or at least the forbearance to do evil, resides in our capacity to transcend and override our biological and psychological programming. It is probably part of what is referred to in religious language as the divine spark hidden in human beings. All religious traditions that I know of may be regarded as elaborations of the ways in which this divine spark can be lit. The urge to go up the inclined plane of morality is a manifestation of this divine spark, this desire to transcend one’s merely human limitations and reach out towards divinity. The effort required for this transcendence is what makes it difficult, and much religious teachings and disciplines are about the development of the potential capacity for transcendence.

What I am also suggesting is that the religious impulse in human beings – the impulse to discover the divine spark, the impulse for transcendence – may also be a feature or a consequence of our consciousness that flows from certain of our neurological features, and therefore part of our natural inheritance. This also implies that our capacity to spin out notions of good and evil, of morality, of transcendence and divinity, may - much like the spider’s capacity to spin webs in different places - be a reflex of our natural inheritance. The recognition of divinity – an ontological extrapolation of our humanness to a being higher than ourselves – may be inherent in the way in which our minds work. This may not be reflected in an explicit recognition of God: even humanists and atheists are known to strive to exceed their own human limitations, and so struggle up the inclined plane of morality.

I have speculated here about the natural origins of morality and religion, but not, I hope, in a reductive way that suggests that they are nothing but the manifestation of something more fundamental. I have for some time been increasingly impatient of attempts to reduce religion and morality to false consciousness, a desire for a father figure, a product of memetic evolution, and goodness knows what else. I find these reductions misleading and insufficiently respectful of the complexity of what the reductions seek to explain. But I nevertheless find increasingly fascinating both the attempts to search for a perennial philosophy, and finding links between it and the worlds of neuroscience and psychology.