Balu's Response
There are two fundamental reasons why I not only wrote this column but wrote it the way I did. The first, of course, was to invite Jeffrey Kripal for a discussion: not on his knowledge of Bengali, not about the accuracy of his interpretation of texts, not even about the scientificity or otherwise of psychoanalysis as a discipline. The issues have deliberately been framed in more general terms, so that one can discuss whether what Wendy and her children produce could, under any charitable interpretation, at all be considered as knowledge. Whether or not he participates in such a debate will tell one much regarding his own convictions about what he is doing in the academy.
There is a second reason, which is far more important in my eyes. Many, many Indian intellectuals have often repeated the western claims about our traditions. At the beginning of the last century, this ‘illustrious’ list was headed by Raja Rom Mohan Roy. Today, many other some less well-known, some better-known have joined the parade. In the discussions of the last few weeks, we have had some people (like Gaurang Bhatt, for example), who use western ‘atheistic’ arguments to challenge the Indian traditions. Well, I have accepted the challenge: I was a student of the Natural sciences, I do believe that the research I am doing is scientific in the best sense of the term. Precisely *because* of this, I do not accept that my sisters’ (or any one else’s, for that matter) dedication in going to temples, having the Archakaas do the puja by reciting Aashtottaramas or Sahasranaamams in such temples, exhibit either superstition, blind belief or stupidity. I am willing to defend my point of view on strictly rational grounds, not by giving an ‘interpretation’ of their ‘beliefs’ but by putting across interesting ideas about western and Indian cultures.
On this column, we are not restricted to discussing Kripal’s writings, which we were on his. I have cast my net wider because I think the time has come for us to re-examine many of our pet-beliefs in a different light. Whether my aim will succeed or not, I do not know. At least you should know that I am not waiting for Jeffrey Kripal to grace our discussions.
Friendly greetings
If you or anyone else wants to get an idea about the kind of project I have now been working on for nearly two decades, an e-mail would suffice. Thanks to Arun Gupta, the ‘immature version’ of the project is now available as a Word document. Please keep in mind that it is the first hesitant formulation (I have not got down to writing a newer version as yet) of a project, which has so far resulted in one book and another (whose final version is being drafted) that, I hope, will come out soon. The *only* obligation that you or any other interested person is under, if you want this document, is this: please write back your responses, if and when you have any. Be kind when you react: it is an ‘immature’ version; be critical in your comments: I still stand behind much of it, even if I were to formulate many things differently.
No, I am not pleading the cause of any kind of relativism. This is a bit complex to say in a few lines and yet make myself understood. Let me try nonetheless. In the African case you speak of, there are three issue involved: (a) some *kind* of a description of what you see; (b) some kind of *evaluation* that you presumably want to make; and (c) the issue of whether you contribute to human knowledge by doing either of the above.
Ad (a). To keep the discussion simple, let us call these kinds of descriptions ‘facts’. Are your ‘facts’ a contribution to human knowledge? In one sense they are; the way any description of anything by any body is a ‘fact’ and thus knowledge. One needs, and one has, a way of not wanting to call every piece of ‘fact’ as knowledge. Hence, we can reformulate the issue: does it contribute towards building a scientific theory of cultural differences? Do your observations in some African country tell us what *makes* their drinking habits and body decorations into a cultural difference? And how these and other differences allow us to say what the ‘African culture’ is? In other words, not every fact, because it is a fact about people from another culture, is interesting from the point of view of building a scientific theory.
Ad (b). The evaluations you make is interesting only because it might tell you or someone else about the evaluative standards you use. Unless one’s study is about such standards, it is pretty uninteresting what or how exactly you evaluate.
The point of trying to understand people from other cultures is not to compare or evaluate them, but to understand why and what interesting ways we are different. Comparisons and evaluations are mostly uninteresting even at an individual level. (X is more intelligent, or more handsome, or more rich than Y. So what?) How could they then be interesting at a cultural level?
Regarding your first point. Of course, there is a difference between being born in some culture and trying to understand the same while coming from another. But that does not mean that one cannot understand a culture unless one is born into it. It is like saying that the only way to understand ‘neurosis’ is by being a ‘neurotic’ oneself. Obviously, I cannot buy it: why can I not understand Christianity without being a Christian? If I cannot, even a process such as religious conversion would be impossible. History would be impossible too, as well as the possibility of social sciences. One needs to give extremely good reasons why one cannot understand a culture without being born in it.
Regarding your second point. I think you have *misread* me. Here is what I say: “I do *not* accept that …reciting Aashtottaramas …exhibit(s) … superstition, blind belief or stupidity.” That is to say, I am saying *just the opposite* of what you think I am saying. You had me worried there for a moment, you know!
Personally I was wondering how long it would be before this question came up. I am glad it has. Welcome to the discussion LittleBearBhakta!
You ask: “Is this truly a case of cultural forgetfulness? Dr. Balu, is it possible that by the time you were a teenager, the post-colonial "Victorian" ethos was already so much a part of you that you HAD to be ashamed? In other words, doesn’t your shame say more about your westernization than it does about Indian mores and religion?”
The questions are complex; they are wrongly posed; there is at least one right answer. And it will be longish. Here goes.
1. I *did not say* I was ashamed. I said I was *embarrassed*. (I said my brother was ashamed after reading Rajiv Malhotra’s article.) A very important difference - a ‘difference that makes a difference’. The feeling of embarrassment was tied to the ‘explanation’: it made me and others appear *foolish*. It embarrassed us by trivialising our experience. The embarrassment was also partly tied to the inability to say why this description was wrong.
2. In many cultures, especially in the Indian case, it is important to understand that stories are *not* explanations. They are neither true nor false because they do not describe ‘factual’ events; they do not claim that they do either. Unlike the Bible, the Puranas do not have to be true or known to be true for them to play the role they do in the Indian culture. The Indian myths neither allegorize virtues nor are they ‘disguised’ histories. In other words, the presuppositions of your question (common ones in the western scholarship since the Enlightenment) are *false* and based on ignorance about the genre of the myth and the roles they play. (I can only assert these claims having argued them elsewhere.)
3. As an example, consider a group performing a ‘rain dance’. When you ask them why, in all probability you will get to hear a story. The most frequent explication (whether given by anthropologists or from philosophers or whoever) that one gets to hear is this: this group is providing an explanation about the performance of their rain dance. Assume for a moment that this is indeed the case and see what happens as a result: you are transforming the members of that group into a bunch of idiots. Is one to really think that *they believe* that their jumping up and down in some specific manner is the *cause* of the rains? Do you really think that if they were such fools, their culture could have survived at all? Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his reflections on Sir James Frazer’s ‘The Golden Bough’, posed the same issue in the following way: why then is the rain dance performed *only* during the rainy season? Perhaps, you would do well to think Wittegenstein’s question through.
4. Let me sketch you a context where the story about Shiva and his Linga would be told. Imagine, just to anticipate a point I will shortly make, a *family gathering* in India, and a *child* asks this question: “Amma (mother), why is it that Shiva is ‘worshipped’ (done puja to) only in the form of Lingam, Brahma not at all, whereas Vishnu has so many different temples with so many avataara’s?” The mother, assuming she was at home with her traditions, would tell her the *exact same story* you cite. She would perhaps use formulations like “Shiva ‘mixed’ with the wives of the sages” or some such thing. If the child wants to know what this ‘mixing’
entails, the mother would continue without embarrassment or without being perturbed: “you will know about it, when you grown up.” If the child did not know what ‘lingam’ meant, the mother would say “what your brother has between his legs”. No one in the audience would either feel shame or embarrassment with *this* story, my friend. I have been both the listener and the ‘bard’ in my *own family* on many such occasions that I am pretty sure that any number of others would resonate with this sketch. In other words, there is *no* cultural forgetfulness involved, any more than not knowing that ‘linga’ *also* means penis.
5. It is important to keep in mind the question to which this story is an answer: why is Shiva worshipped in the form of Lingam, unlike Vishnu? It tells us how something came to pass, provides intelligibility to doing the puja of lingam. The most important point here is this: *this story is not censored* in the Indian traditions. This dovetails with an extremely important question that Venki raised in his post (#43) on ‘The Tantric Truth of the Matter’: “If indeed there exists a paradox between the Bengali texts and the translation, how do you explain it? Why are the "unspeakable" secrets acceptable in Bengali but not in English translation? Why censorship only in English?” I leave it to you, my LittleBearBhakta, to ponder on these questions. I cannot hope to provide you an answer in the confines of this post.
6. In other words, there is no ‘cultural forgetfulness’ involved here. If the mother tells this story without ‘shame’ or embarrassment, the ‘Victorian’ values are not involved in this situation. What are involved are questions like: what are stories in the Indian culture? How are they told? What do they do? Etc. To do ‘cultural hermeneutics’, one needs to do this *kind* of research *before* writing books.
7. About the possibility that I was already ‘westernized’ by the time I became a teenager. Even this question is wrongly posed. I am not claiming that there is some ‘authentic’ Indian culture, which lives somewhere or lived somewhen in India. Such a culture, even if it exists or existed, does not concern me. I am interested in the Indian culture as it *exists* today: including the aftermath of the Islamic and the British colonization. I am child of *this* culture, and this is the one I am trying to understand. The Indian ‘Diaspora’ in the US is *as much* Indian as some peasant living somewhere in a far-off village in India; they both belong to the Indian culture. Neither this peasant nor the Indians in the US is ‘more Indian’ than the other. My problem is not: who is the ‘authentic’ Indian or what is the ‘authentic’ Indian culture? My question is about the 21st century India, and its present culture, which has absorbed many things, adapted many things from other cultures in many different ways. It is this set of Indian traditions that interests me. Was I ‘westernized’ by the time I was a teenager? Who knows, or even who cares? What would it mean to say that I was ‘authentically’ Indian or that I was ‘quasi-westernized’? Surely, the issue is not about some kind of ‘purity’ here. What else is it? Consequently, when I speak of my past, I speak of the past of those who were brought up like me. If we were all partly ‘westernized’, then the culture I am talking about is this ‘partly westernized’ Indian culture. An age long gone by, if it ever existed, does not give me sleepless nights; what does is what is happening now. Thus, when I say I want to understand Indian culture, I am not harking back to some ‘golden age’, my friend, but India as I know it today. To understand this India, I need to understand how her traditions are *lived* today, not what they perhaps meant one thousand years ago.
8. Therefore, let me sum up my answers to your questions. I was not ashamed. The story you cite is known to many, but it does not embarrass them. It is irrelevant whether I was partly ‘westernized’ or not. My embarrassment tells something about my culture (i.e. what stories are, etc), something about the inability to answer the trivialization, and so on. I hope this answer is sufficient to provoke a thoughtful answer from your side
In a way, and in some sense, I do agree with you that one’s acquaintance with a culture is useful in writing about that culture. It is not sufficient, of course (think of the nonsense written by most anthropologists during the last 100 years on other cultures); nor are there any compelling reasons to believe that it is a sine qua non to understanding cultures. However, I am not challenging the claim that the context of the person might be relevant to producing knowledge.
However, the reason why I want to bend the stick the other way has to do with another question that often, not always, underlies this debate. That is about who the ‘authentic Hind’ or ‘the authentic Indian’ is. The greatest strength of our culture lies in the fact that this is a non-question as far as our traditions are concerned. Even though I have now spent nearly as many years outside India as I have spent inside, I do not feel an ‘outsider’. Nor am I considered as one by the members my family, for instance, most of whom have never left India in their lives.
This is not just a question of my family alone. Outside of Bangalore, there is a ‘swamiji’ with an ashram and all that. People from different parts of India come to have his ‘darshan’ and he gives ‘upadesha’ almost every day. Most people do not know his name, and he is simply called ‘the Belgian Swamiji’. He is from Belgium, came to India about two decades ago, and set up his ashram there. The Indians, who come to visit him do not consider him any less of a ‘swamiji’ because he is a Belgian, and me any more of an ‘Indian’ because of my looks. It does not make any sense, in such a context, to ask the questions: who is the ‘authentic’ Indian? Me or the ‘Belgian swamiji’? Both of us are Indians; both to ourselves (I suppose) as well as to the others. It is this strength that we should not sacrifice, when we challenge people from other cultures when they ‘study us’ and write their tracts.
It is always a pleasure to read those who call a spade a spade. Invariably, the issues get formulated in such a way so that a good discussion ensues. If I have any complaints about your post, it is that you are still a bit unclear. I will come to that, but first things first.
1. Your ire focuses on the issue that I usurp the right to speak for the community. Let me lay this fear to rest: I am *not* speaking for the community. To the question, ‘Who speaks for the Indian traditions?’ my reply is simple: *anyone, everyone, whoever feels like.* (Of course, I do not consider the question very sensible, but that is a side-issue for the moment.) I have said as much in my posts on this column (e.g. #26 and #31) and I wish you had read them before indicting me.
Having said this much, let me also say that my discussion with Jeffrey Kripal and you is not about the moral right to speak in the name of the community but whether such speeches *constitute knowledge*. In other words, I *evaluate* what someone says about the Indian traditions for its veracity and it is here that I find Kripal falling way short. And, unless some arguments are forthcoming, I am afraid, so do you.
2. If I understand you well, this is what you are saying in your third paragraph: In ancient India, there was a fertility cult; our ancestors *knew* that it was a fertility cult; Lingam was a symbol for the phallus then; it continues to be one even when may millions are ignorant of this now; and that the Modern Indians’ attitude to sex is inhibiting because of which they do not see the symbolism.
To keep the contrast between us stark, here is what I say: Lingam is not a symbol of anything or anybody. Lingam is *how* Shiva’s puja is done (as against, say, how we do puja to Vishnu) by the Indians. You tell me that this *factual claim* is wrong and that by saying what I have just said, I project my present to ‘explain’ the past. Very well.
2.1. In the first place, I want to draw your attention to the issue that I am not providing any interpretation, whereas *you are*. You are the one who tells me that I doing something *other than* doing puja to Shiva, viz., I am doing puja to a ‘symbol’ that, in its turn, belongs to a fertility cult. Therefore, I am justified in asking you why you think so. Why did our ancestors take to doing puja to a symbol instead of saying straightaway that they do puja to the penis, irrespective of whose penis it is? It could not be because they were ‘prudish’ or ‘repressed’. You point out that, in fact, they were not and that *we are*. If women did move about bare-breasted then, and we gave the world the ‘Kama Sutra’, surely they would not have been inhibited in saying that they worshipped penis? Why did they have to ‘invent’ a symbolism for the penis, deny that it was merely a penis and cook up the utterly fantastic story that it was the Shiva linga? If the modern day Indians were to cook this story up, one could understand it within *your* framework. Yet you say, most Indians do not even *know* they are worshipping a symbol, whereas or ancestors did. Well, my friend, you need to make this plausible to me and to the others: why ever did our ancestors take to ‘symbolisms’, cook up fantastic camouflaging stories that hide the ‘true’ meaning, instead of simply saying what I say? Why this devious route and not a direct insistence that one worships penis irrespective of its form or size?
Until you come with a satisfying story that explains the ‘deviousness’ of our ancestors, I think I am justified in saying this: we do what our ancestors did too, i.e. do puja to Shiva in the form of the lingam. Because this simple story does not satisfy you and you need the complicated talk of fertility cults and symbolisms, I am justified in my scepticism until that stage when you come up with a satisfactory story. At this moment, no one has; I do not believe you will either. But I am and remain open. (You will, of course, understand that I am adopting a scientific and rational attitude here: when two explanations of the ‘same’ phenomenon exist, one chooses the simpler to the more complicated. They call this the ‘Occam’s razor’ argument.)
2.2. In the subsequent two paragraphs, you talk about the Greek, the Nordic and the Indian ‘mythologies’ to make a point, which escapes me. Is it to say, to cite you, “incest, rape, human sacrifice, and so on are all presented painted over by some brush in antiquity that sought to depict these things in kinder light.”? If it is, I face two problems. (a) One problem is a carryover from the previous one: why did they need to? I mean, why a ‘kinder’ light? You need to have some theory of the ‘growth and development’ of human civilizations to make the claim you do. I await the reading of this theory. Again, I know of no such theory, which is even remotely interesting but I am willing to give you the benefit of doubt: perhaps you have succeeded in doing something that others before you have failed in doing. (b) Why do you assume what you have to prove? I mean, you *assume* that myths are ‘disguised’ histories: these ‘early’ societies practised incest, rape and human sacrifice and that the myths spoke of them indirectly. Why did people from these societies take to writing about these actions, which must have been rather ‘common’ those days if one were to follow the drift of your argument, in the form of ‘myths’ instead of simply writing histories of their own cultures? Why the disguise again? In other words, since you are claiming that myths are ‘oblique’ narrations of social practices, you need to make plausible why *all human cultures* (as you put it) take to such oblique narrations? I have briefly touched on what I think stories are on this very thread (#28), so it is up to you to show where I am wrong and why you are right.
3. In your last paragraph, you invite us to realize the immensity of the deception practiced by Ramakrishna if, as Kripal is made to claim in your story, the saint turned out to be paedophile: “If he was, think of the magnitude of deception that has taken place to keep this fact from being revealed to the public.” Kripal’s ‘evidence’ comes from the Bengali texts, which have been reprinted in their millions. Who is practising deception on whom? It is not at all obvious to me what you want to say.
4. There are, finally, your claims about the ‘static’ nature of Indian society (and culture?) and the Indian tendency to transform human beings into gods. I simply take these statements for what they are: table-thumping and flag-waving. Should you want to defend these positions with arguments, I would be willing to enter into a discussion where I will defend an *opposite* point of view. But I await your arguments on this score.
(a) To do justice to the complexity of your first question, it requires more than a single post. Consequently, you will have to be satisfied with a brief answer. Is there a ‘wannabe Indianism’ in our attempts to understand our tradition? I am not sure: may be there is, may be there is not. Of course, the question is why is this relevant? Whatever the motives or the contexts of any individual writer why should that be an argument for either accepting or rejecting or even putting his opinions on hold? The way I see it, the nature of the phenomenon is of another level altogether: I think that the intellectuals from India will increasingly be confronted with the question of what it is to be an Indian. There are many reasons for it: the political, the social, the economic as well as cultural. In fact, I think that this is not merely an Indian phenomenon but an Asian one. Today, the centre of gravity (in economic, geo-political terms) is slowly shifting towards Asia, a non-white, non-Christian culture. That is why you and I (and many others like us) are discussing these issues passionately on Sulekha. To us, these issues are not ‘abstract’; it is very much a part of our daily life (in the appropriate sense of the term). When I was started working on these issues some two decades ago, I could count the number of interested people on the fingers of my one hand. Today, two decades later, look at what is happening: we are discussing, with a passion born out of our daily experiences, what appears from the outside as *esoteric* issues. But it is not ‘esoteric’ to us, is it? I think the scale, depth, and the intensity of these discussions (both in India and outside) transcend any ‘wannabe Indian’ motive.
(b) If you want the document I wrote some 17 years ago, all you need to do is send me an e-mail. I will send the document by return post. This applies to everyone, and not just you.
(c) Is Sulekha planning on collecting my posts? I do not know, I suspect it will not happen for some time. Thanks for your interest in any case: who knows, one day it might just happen!
It is a bit difficult to figure out how to answer your questions without writing a long disquisition. However, let me try.
1. The first point is the difficulty involved in specifying what the “real meaning of an experience” consists of. Asking an insider would not help us here: the insider may or may not know what the real meaning of his/her own experience is or even how to go about putting it in words.
2. Assuming that the first problem somehow gets solved, the second problem lies in the *multiplicities* of such meanings: if people differ on what any particular experience means to them (for instance, what doing Puja to Ganesha means to my brother does not mean the same to my sister), which should we choose and for what reason? This problem is virtually unsolvable, especially when you take the interpretations of the past into consideration as well.
3. This is not an ‘insider/outsider’ issue. If we emphasize the ‘real meaning of lived experience’, it confronts the ‘insiders’ as well as the ‘outsiders’ because neither will have a privileged access to the meanings of *other* lived experiences. (I might *assume* that I have a privileged access to my brother’s experience. But this is a just an assumption. By the same token, Jeffrey Kripal might argue that he has spoken to thousands of people and that, therefore, *assumes* he has a ‘more’ privileged access than I have. Both our assumptions are just that; unjustified assumptions. In my view, they are also unjustifiable.)
4. If we have to get out of this quandary, we need to do something radical with respect to what counts as knowledge and what does not in the field of ‘social sciences’. My response has so far been to *accept* the best criteria of rationality and scientificity that the study of the history and philosophy of (natural) sciences has brought forth. Not only do I believe that it is possible to build theories in the field of ‘humanities’ that answer these criteria; in fact, I claim *I already have*. In my book, I have developed hypotheses about religion that can be tested the way you test any hypothesis in, say, physics. (Of course, I also have an ‘explanation’ why it had not happened so far. But that is another issue.)
5. In the book I am now currently writing on ‘ethics’ (it develops an understanding of the Indian ethics and contrasts that with the western normative ethics), the same attitude is present. As far as I can see, my theory about ‘ethics’ can be tested in exactly the same way as well.
6. With respect to what stories are to a culture. This is a question of having some kind of a theory about ‘cultural differences’, the ways in which, say, the Indian culture differs from the western one. Accounting these differences will include, inter alia, such issues as the role of stories in that culture. One of the crucial tests for evaluating your claims about any culture, including the Indian culture, is the extent to which your theory makes *sense* of the experiences of the Indians without denying, distorting, or transforming those experiences. To come back to my favourite example: such theories about the Indian culture must do what Galileo’s theory did. Not tell us we are hallucinating or wrong about our *experiences* (as though the experiences could be false!), but show us *why* we experience the world the way we do.
7. Such a stance places a high *demand* on an intellectual: not everyone who writes about some culture or another is *capable* of producing knowledge. Stands to reason. Not everyone who studies physics is capable of doing research in physics either. The exact same thing is applicable to the humanities and the ‘social sciences’. Wendy and her children, in this sense, are not producing knowledge just by reading some books, going to India on extended holidays, and picking up some random nonsense and say that it is an ‘interpretation’ of Indian culture. There is a difference between being ‘erudite’ (or appearing to be one) and producing knowledge. My quarrel with Jeffrey Kripal, as I make clear in my column, is whether he *has* produced knowledge. I have argued he has not and that he cannot. It is up to him to show that contrary is the case. As you no doubt know, he has not.
Beloo, I do not know whether this answers your question or not. I hope it does. If it does not, please do not hesitate to say what you disagree with. And, when you do so, may I request you to just address me as ‘Balu’ and not add titles to my name? As I told someone sometime ago, I know I am ancient and ready to be a fossil in a few years time. Until then, please let me feel merely old! Adding titles remind me uncomfortably of the future that awaits me!
(a) At the moment, the dispute is not about the *correct* answer as yet. If you were to ask 100 knowledgeable Indians about the ‘thondam’ of Ganesha, you are probably likely to get 50 different answers, all of which are ‘satisfactory’ in some sense or the other. From this situation, you can go one of the two ways. One is what *appears* to us as the more familiar way: which of the 50 answers is the right one? The second is to ask ourselves the questions: why do all these answers appear acceptable? What does this tell about what a question is and what answers are in the Indian traditions? In other words, we take the ‘facts’ that our cultures present us with as ‘problems’ that require solutions.
(b) Why do we want to do this? It is because how we ‘understand’ our culture is thickly overlaid with what other cultures have told us about ourselves. Consequently, we misunderstand ourselves. We need to do research and yet more research in order to understand ourselves and the others. What is taking place on this board is an attempt to create a space for research and not prematurely close it, as it has happened so far.
(c) You ask: “Will there be a situation where this body of knowledge steers itself beyond academic doubt?” If you mean by this, whether a situation will come, where this study can be called ‘scientific’, my answer is ‘yes’.
You begin your post #84 by speaking about ‘dissent’ and being an Indian. As far as I know, no one has been asked to prove his/her identity on this column, any more than any labelling has taken place. (Besides, as Karna #85 points out, how do check the ‘identity’ of a poster on a board like this?) I wish you would not make these unfortunate insinuations any more.
1. Regarding the point about you ‘meandering’ (as you put it) through mythology. I still have not got the point from this post. In my previous post, I asked you whether the point I thought you were making is also the point you wished to make. If it was, I had raised two issues. You have not tackled them.
2. You say: “Balu questioned me about phallic symbolism. Why did the ancients not say they worshipped a phallus directly, he asks? As I pointed out, phallic symbolism is a part of most early religions.” You do realise, I hope, that you are not answering my question. You may point out whatever ‘symbolism’ that takes your fancy. If you want a rational discussion, however, you need to tell me (a) what the problem is; (b) what your solution to that problem is; (c) what arguments you proffer in defence of the solution; (d) what evidence there is for either the answer or the arguments. Simply providing a list of ‘interpreted’ sentences does not constitute arguments. I still await answers to my questions.
3. I am not sure I understand you properly, when you say: “The lingam and the yoni (the curved shape around the lingam) in Hindu depictions represent sexual union and the depictions are stylized.” I do not see *how* this could *represent* sexual union. The lingam’s head is in the *wrong* position to have a sexual congress: if it depicts anything at all, one will have to say that it shows a penis growing out of the vagina and *not* entering it. (Perhaps, it represents the ‘penis envy’, to use Freud’s terms, of ‘the female’?)
4. You end that paragraph thus: “Sex must have seemed as mysterious to the ancients (as it does now to the moderns) and early cultures display the different attempts made to capture its spirit.” In all honesty, I do not know what you are talking about. What *is* mysterious about sex? Are you talking about the modern obsession with what is called ‘sexuality’, in which case this *is* purely a ‘modern’ phenomenon, or are you talking about ‘sex’? If anything, ‘sex’ must have been the most natural thing to the ‘ancients’: as normal as anything else, even less ‘mysterious’ than the scarcities and bounties (of crops) they encountered in their world. May I ask why you claim sex was ‘mysterious’ to the Ancients and how you argue for this? Equally, what is the ‘spirit of sex’ that they tried to capture? The mystery about the state and size of the penis?
5. You go on to say: “We make gods men (and give them a birthplace), and make men gods. Balu asked for evidence of this statement.” I did not ask for ‘evidence’ and besides, as your next sentence says, you are providing evidence either: “If he read between the lines, the meaning would have been apparent. But let me be more explicit.” Surely, providing ‘evidence’ is not the same as saying what you ‘mean’! And then you go on about the ‘ignorance of the masses’ and so on. I miss the relevance of this paragraph.
In sum, your post #84 does not contribute to any discussion in anyway. I *must* agree with Karna’s assessment (#85), I am afraid.
In your #95, you continue with a mode of writing, which is almost prohibitive of any rational discussion. Let me show you what I mean.
6. In the tree of logic you want us to visualize, you say, whether fact or fiction, “mythologies/scriptures” (your words, not mine) are either illustrative or non-illustrative (whatever this phrase means) of a culture. Very well. And then you say: “If non-illustrative of culture, there should be no argument that any depictions or representations demean a particular culture, since it is non-representational by assumption.” Who is saying that Ramayana is demeaning the Indian culture? Or the Puranas? What does it mean to say that the Bible is “illustrative of a particular culture”? What are you talking about? When you want to ‘do’ Logic, my friend, it is advisable that you are not so woolly when you write. Ambiguities and equivocations will *not* provide you with theorems; they merely provide a reader like me with headaches! Like this one: “we come to the conclusion that, all mythology/scriptures, whether based on facts or fiction/fictionalized, are inherently representational or culturally illustrative.” Am I to assume that ‘representational’ means ‘culturally illustrative’? Is this applicable only to ‘mythology/scriptures’ or to all ‘fictions’? Is it limited to the ‘Ancients’ or can I include ‘Star Wars’ as well? Why one and not the other, and, if both, what is ‘representational’ or ‘culturally illustrative’ in the ‘Star Wars’ saga and ‘whose’ culture is being represented and why do you say so? Please, S B, instead of making sweeping statements that say very little, could you focus on answering questions?
7. You say: “Taking positions like, this is neither true nor false, other than being a cop out, is to distance oneself from actually exploring the complex themes, the dramas played out, the pain and exultation behind the tales.” Well, I have *argued* in my publications that stories are neither true nor false (because they are models, as the word means in Model Theory). If you disagree, I would like to see some *arguments* and not just hand-waving.
8. You also say: “The pattern I’ve noticed in this column is this: deny the truth and support the fiction.” And what is ‘your’ truth? “Again, I maintain, to take a position of “neither true nor false,” “needs no explanation,” is the sort of wash that we should guard against.” Why is it ‘wash’ or why should we guard against? You ask rhetorically what you have been doing. I do not know. But I can tell you what you have *not* been doing: *provide arguments*. You can seek all the ‘meanings’ you want from your scriptures/mythologies but, please, do not pontificate. Whether a ‘sap’ or a ‘wise man’, neither characterization moves me either way. But I do dislike people preaching sermons.
The questions you are raising are much trickier than they appear at first sight. There are several issues, none of which is very clear to any of us: the notion of ‘meaning’, the structure of ‘experience’, the idea of multiple ‘realities’, and so on. Many gifted people from all over the world are struggling (and have struggled) to say what all these ‘things’ are. I do not think that we will be able to find satisfactory answers on this thread for these large issues. Therefore, let me scale them down to the proportion of this thread and the articles that have generated my column.
1. Taking the ‘best’ examples of knowledge we have (which are the theories from the natural sciences), we would like to know whether there can be knowledge of cultures and people. If it is knowledge, we would also like to know whether they could satisfy the criteria of rationality, inter-subjectivity, scientificity, etc. There are two sub-issues here, as they are relevant to us.
1.1. Assuming that our theories in Physics are not false, would there be gravitational force in the Cosmos (or on our planet) whether or not there was a theory about it? This is the question about the ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’ of our theories. If we say ‘yes’, I do not see how one can say the opposite, then the truth or falsity of, say, Aristotelian theory is *not* dependent on the ‘consumer’ of that theory. Of course, once upon a time, people believed it was true but this ‘belief’ does not *make* Aristotle’s theory true. (In Western Europe, people once believed that witches not only exist, but that they also had sexual intercourse with the Devil. There were ‘eye witnesses’, who provided graphic descriptions of the sexual organ and sexual prowess of the Devil. We would be hard put to call it ‘true’ today in Europe or in India around the same time, irrespective of what these people thought then.) That human beings believe different stories to be true, which later turn out to be false, does not make ‘truth’ relative to an audience. What it does is to make the belief-in-the-truth-of-a-theory relative to the ‘consumer’. This is the issue about the ‘objectivity’ of theories. That is: could we have theories about human beings and cultures that are ‘objective’ in this sense? I think so. That is why the discussion with Wendy and her children: they are not producing *knowledge*.
1.2. Of course, if there were to be no different cultures or human beings, there would be no theories of cultures either. But this does not vitiate my point. If there was no Cosmos, there would be no gravitational force either. Presuming their existence, could we be ‘objective’? Yes.
2. About the multiple meanings for the Puja of Ganesha. Of course, there is no one ‘meaning’ to this act either now, or before, or in the future, as far as Indians (and the Westerners) are concerned. But that is not being disputed. The dispute arises when some meaning is alleged to portray the ‘experience’ of a culture, when all it does is distort and deny the experience it is said to portray. However, there is an interesting question here, which is best illustrated using a contrast. In the Catholic Mass, there are *limits* on what it could be said to mean to a believer. These limits are set by the Catholic theology and belief. (For instance, to a believer, it *cannot* mean celebrating the Devil.) The puja of Ganesha does not set any such limits to the person who does this puja. (But if someone comes and tells me that I cook sweets on Ganesha Chaturthi because it expresses my ‘subconscious’ desire for Oral Sex, I am justified in challenging this claim as an ‘explanation’ of my cooking the sweets.) Here is the question: what is puja in the Indian traditions, if it does not have a particular meaning, and there are no limits on what it means? One thing is already clear: it cannot mean ‘worship’! These are the kind of questions I would like to ask; not what ‘interpretation’ one gives to some action or the other. The answer I give should be capable of being ‘tested’ in the Indian culture. Then, I will have begun producing an ‘objective’ theory.
3. Would my answers be meaningful to the audience? If they are not, my answers will not be understood by some ‘audience’, but that would not render my answer either false or subjective. In other words, even though to test the truth of a theory one has to understand the meaning of that theory, it does not mean that the truth of the theory *is* its ‘meaningfulness’ to the audience. They are different.
4. To understand the above point better, consider your question: “If no one had read these columns, would there have been any production of knowledge?” You should actually reverse the question to get the import of your own worry: “Would what I write become false, assuming that it is not now, if no one had read these columns?” “Is what I write non-knowledge just because some audience does not read what I write?” If you say ‘yes’, then you would be denying historical facts: the misunderstood genius, who was ahead of his/her time.
5. In other words, I do agree with you that “meaningful knowledge is actually created when the reader (consumer) engages with the content/book/article that the author wrote (produced)”. But this does not tell us anything about the ‘truth’ or ‘falsity’ of the content: after all, false theories *are meaningful* too (otherwise, we would say it is ‘nonsense’ and not ‘false’).
6. None of this means that experience has to be put into ‘neat boxes’ as you put it. Nor does it imply that I am not comfortable with multiple meanings of the Puja of Ganesha. I am. You are. All Indians are. So, what does this about our culture? This is my question.
As I warned you in the beginning, this is all a bit philosophical. I hope I have not given you a headache!
1. You start your post thus: “I think it is very sad that Balu thinks that to compare a Siva Linga to a penis is to trivialize the Linga.” May I comfort you? You can compare anything with any other thing: I do not object at all. Consequently, you need not feel sad. Such comparisons do not trivialize, and that is not what I am saying. I say that if someone comes and tells me that I am *not* doing puja to the Shiva Linga but ‘worshipping’ the penis instead, then he/she is trivializing and denying my experience. I am sure you will agree that these are entirely two different things.
2. You go on: “That means for all his fancy throwing around of names of various schools of philosophy both eastern and western, and myths and metaphors, (he really twists himself into some pretzel positions with his words!) he basically trivializes his own penis.” Frankly, this is puzzling. I do not know what names of which schools I have thrown around, or even what myths and metaphors I have spoken of (are you sure we are talking about the same piece of writing? By the way, what is a ‘pretzel position’? I am unfamiliar with this turn of phrase). Am I trivializing my penis? I do not know, even though you seem to! I am very honestly interested why you say this: perhaps, you would care to explain this in your subsequent post?
3. You say that you have read Kripal’s two books carefully. You did well; I wish you had shown me and others the same courtesy as well. You attribute things to us without caring to find out whether any of us here do indeed say those things. Like for example, when you say, “actually Kripal is being more respectful of Hinduism than you type of men are when you get all upset about the possibility that sexuality might be considered sacred.” I do not know which one of us has said it. Whether sexuality is ‘scared’ or not is not even the point of discussion. Where did you read this? Better put, why do you read this into the discussion?
4. You suggest too that “mystical experience in ALL religious traditions involves sexual imagery” and that we belong to that group of “very hung up MEN who cannot stomach their own sexuality, their own bodies, not to mention the bodies of women they both love and hate simultaneously, so they have to censor those ecstatic experiences that involve a complete UNITY of body, mind and spirit.” Even though these sentences invite it, I will not become polemical. But I do want to invite you to consider inverting the first sentence-fragment thus: “sexual experience in ALL religious traditions involve mystical imagery”. Why would you prefer your formulation to this inversion? (This is just an experiment, not an expression of my alleged ‘position’.) Perhaps, you would then care to reconsider your sweeping categorization.
5. You end your post, Rati Gupta, with this advice which I shall cherish: “And you, dear Balu, for all your long and complicated journey in life, have not put together one simple fact: That Creation is sacred and creation comes into being from the union of male and female energies on all levels. I suggest you read up on tantra, your own cultural heritage, before you start throwing stones.” I will follow your suggestion, but I beg to differ on one score though: I am not ‘throwing stones’ either at the ‘sinner’ or while living in a glass house. I merely seek knowledge.
Wonderful! You have come very close to the heart of the real problem, as far as I am concerned. Therefore, do you mind if I reformulate in my own words what I take the issues to be? Of course, that might lead me to say things you do not mean, or do not want to say. Should that happen, please let me know, will you?
1. To begin with, there is the feeling that scientific explanations, with their emphasis on rationality and objectivity, are reductive in nature. Wherein lies the *root* of this feeling? Let us say that some physical theory describes the motion of a snow flake gently floating down to earth or a rose petal lazily spinning in the air. Or that some branch of human genetics computes the probability of a particular human child being born with absolutely dark eyes or ones that are brilliantly blue. Is either of these two explanations reductive in nature? Not quite: their mathematical calculations tell us very little about the laziness of the petal or about the brilliance of blue eyes, it is true, but it is not their ‘job’ to do so. If you want to relish descriptions of an autumn evening or a spring morning, you do not open Feynman’s Lectures on Physics, do you? You go elsewhere. In other words, the theories in the natural sciences are not ‘reductive’ in the sense that they do not reduce the *beauty* of a particular sunset to the motion of earth around the Sun even if they explain sunrise and sunset.
2. The current crop of the so-called social sciences does precisely the above. While ostensibly about human beings, their psychologies, their societies and their cultures, the tales they tell shine forth in the splendour of a monochromatic dullness. (Most of us know something or the other about explanations from these so-called social sciences, so I will not try to give examples.) Why? Here is the first possible reason: they have to give reductive explanations because they are ‘scientific’ and ‘objective’. Without ‘reducing’ human beings into objects, one cannot do science and the existing social sciences merely follow the scientific ‘method’. This reason does two things simultaneously: (a) it ‘explains’ the fate that has befallen the social sciences and humanities; (b) it *justifies* the poverty of these theories by blaming it on the nature of human beings and the nature of ‘science’. We have silly sociological theories and stupid psychological ones, because it is in the nature of human beings to defy being objectified; science cannot work any other way. As I say, this is but one way of looking at the so-called social sciences today. Needless to say, this is *the* dominant mode as well.
3. There is also another way, my way, of looking at the issue. *This is how western culture has been studying human beings, their societies, and their cultures all this while.* There is nothing remotely ‘scientific’ about either this venture or its results. The justification they provide (see 2b above) is an expression of an empty pretentiousness: because ‘we’ have not been able to study human societies and cultures differently, the intellectuals from the western culture pontificate, no one else can. The limits of our culture are also the epistemological limits of human beings. Surely, they say, if *we* have not succeeded, that is because no one can! Why do I say that this is the way of the ‘western culture’? What has this culture to do with the monochromatic formalism I spoke of earlier?
4. When Christianity met (or meets) other ‘religions’ (especially ‘the heathen religions’ like ‘Hinduism’, ‘Buddhism’, ‘Sikhism’, ‘Jainism’ and so on), there is only *one way* it can describe them: these ‘religions’ do not worship ‘God’ but the ‘Devil’. We are the heathens and the pagans, and the differences (subtle or gross), if any, between these religions are at best those that exist within the heathen religions. Of course, there are ‘rays of light’ to be found in the heathen religions too: but that is accounted for by the fact that these religions are the corruptions and degenerations of the ‘primal’ religion that God (of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob) gave to Man. (The same story is told by Judaism and Islam as well, but I will not talk about either of them now.) Over the last two thousand years, Christianity has worked out immensely sophisticated notions of Man, society, and so on. These notions have become a part of our daily language-use: whether you speak English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, or whichever other European language. That is not all.
5. These Christian ideas about Man and his psychology, society and culture, have become the *presuppositions* for what we call ‘social sciences’ and the ‘humanities’ today. (In my book, I describe this process which I call the ‘secularization’ of Christianity in detail.) They are so deep and so pervasive within the western culture that they sit *limits* to the western imagination itself: it is not simply possible for this culture even to *imagine* that other ways of thinking and going-about the world are possible. The so-called social sciences today, endlessly embroider this theology: all peoples and cultures (except themselves) are heathens. If this is all they tell, it is, one must admit, pretty boring. Indeed so: everyone and everything (excepting the western culture) are the same, and the most ‘interesting’ things are to be found in the western culture. Whether you speak of politics (from ‘dictatorships’ to ‘democracy’), knowledge (‘science’), settling human disputes (‘Law’), welfare of people (from ‘slavery’ to ‘capitalism’), or whatever takes your fancy, it transpires that the western culture has them all. What they do not have at the moment, they say, is what they have *lost* (i.e. had them ‘once’). All other cultures end up becoming pale or erring variants of the western culture, in exactly the same way our ‘religions’ are pale and erring variants of Christianity.
6. Of course, it does not stop there. Why has the western culture *reduced* the other cultures to a pale and erring variant of itself? That is because, *it is so*: it is *epistemologically impossible* that human cultures are different in any way *other* than how the western culture has described them! It calls this *reduction* ‘science’: ‘objective’, ‘value free’, and what not. Philosophers and social scientists endlessly assure us that it cannot be any other way. Beloo, this is not ‘science’ but bad, baaaaad Christian theology. It has become ‘secularised’, become established in the universities with professorial chairs, grants, and doctorates and what-have-you, but it remains as dully monochromatic as its religious original: Who is Ganesha? The minion of the Devil. Who is Saraswathi? The minion of the Devil. Who is Krishna? The minion of the Devil. Who is Sharada? The minion of the Devil. What do we do? We worship idols, whether made of stone or clay. We are mentally deficient: that is the reason why we worship cycles, cars, the pen (Aayudhapuja), the cow and the crow, the naked fakir and the stone penis. Not only are the Indians guilty as charged: *all* heathen cultures are that as well. The Egyptians, the Mayans, the Africans, the Thais, the Japanese … The list extends to all cultures and all peoples who are not Jewish and Muslim. (These two are ‘deficient’ in their worship; they might be heretics but not heathens.) If this is the litany, you can have only one reaction: Ho Hum! (A huge Yawn!)
7. The ‘varieties’ and ‘differences’ in human cultures get reduced to the same: they are all versions of worshipping the Devil. The so-called social sciences are on this track. This is not a simple expression of racism, western superiority or Orientalism (even if they are all that). Rather, it has to do with what western culture is, what its ‘social sciences’ are, and what the relation is between these two and the religion that Christianity is.
8. In other words, this is how I ‘explain’ the reduction that the co-called social sciences indulge in: the reduction occurs not because they are objective and scientific explanations, but because they are secularized theological claims. Until recently, I was in the strict minority of one in the republic of ‘learning’ but I do not believe that you need to win two-thirds of the vote to decide about the truth or falsity of scientific theories. So I soldier on, certain that I have good arguments and an exciting research programme; where possible, I try to show that my story is more interesting than any other that exists in the market-place. In the long run, I know that this story will win out; until such stage, there are the words: “Karmanyeevadhikaaraste, Maa Phaleshu Kadaachana”.
9. From all of these, it follows that I am not trying to compare our culture with the western one any more than I want to compare, say, ‘Hinduism’ with Christianity. But what I do want to do is to understand both: our culture and the western one, our traditions and the western Christianity. It is not enough, if it is a ‘true’ understanding that I merely *think* I am right. You and the others must not only understand what I say, but you must also be sure that it is not merely my personal prejudices that get bundled together as an ‘explanation’. In other words, you should be able to ‘test’ my theory in any number of ways: from checking it against your own experiences to drawing conclusions from my arguments that I am not even aware. That, Beloo, is what knowledge and objectivity all about: am I ranting and raving, or am I saying something worth thinking about and exploring further?
10. As an unrepentant heathen, I do not believe in the truth claims of Christianity that it is ‘the true’ religion. As a member of the Indian culture, I do believe that alternative (more realistic, more factual and more productive) heuristics exist in our culture that will help human cultures to understand each other. As an intellectual, I believe that developing them is my priority. As a scientist, I believe that if what I say is knowledge, it will also be like what scientific knowledge is: tentative, hypothetical, and ‘testable’ (in a broad sense). And, finally, as a human being, I do not believe that knowledge reduces the complexity of the world but teaches us instead to truly appreciate how marvellous we and our worlds, both natural and cultural, really are.
Dear Ramesh,
It is not possible for me now (either in this post or as a column) to do justice to the questions your raise. That is primarily because a great deal of ground has to be cleared before one can tackle issues of inter-cultural communication in a satisfactory manner. However, I will try to approach the issue of “denying our experience” in a different manner than what I have done hitherto. (I will presuppose that you have already read my answer #126 to Beloo. I will build further upon that post.)
1. Let us begin with one of the minimal conditions for inter-cultural (verbal) communication. And that is: people should be able to have conversations with each other. It is legitimate to claim that one does not need to know what a ‘conversation’ is in order to have a conversation. Therefore, whatever else we may want to say, it would be very difficult to maintain that there is no conversation in other cultures. Equally difficult would it be to hold that some cultures are inferior to others regarding their practice of conversational activity. In other words, our intuitions do not allow us to assert either a factual or a normative claim, which would either deny the existence of conversation in other cultures or suggest that members from some cultures are incompetent conversationalists.
2. The western culture has produced several theories about and several theorists of conversation. These theories are the results of research into the nature of conversation. Such theories shed light on the nature and properties of conversation. Some of the famous maxims of conversation are known (and practiced?) by many of us. Strange though this suggestion might sound, we have learnt such maxims in the West *after* we left India. As examples, consider the following two maxims: ‘Be relevant’ (or ‘be to the point’) and ‘Be brief’. [Some of us are probably under the impression that these ‘maxims’ of conversation are ‘efficient’ or ‘business-like’ and that they help us ‘get on’ with our lives better. I will come back to this point later.]
3. Whatever these theories do or do not, they should at least help us affirm the points made in the first paragraph. In order to see *how* our theories of conversation help us relate to them, let me introduce the following scenarios set in the Asian continent. (All of them true, all narrated to me by the Europeans and a few any numbers of time. That is why I have structured the scenarios the way I have.).
3.1. As a white man and foreigner, you are a teacher in an English class in China. All of a sudden, one fine day, the Chinese director of the school drops in during the afternoon and requests to speak to you. After nearly a quarter of an hour, during which time the director has praised your work and qualities sky high, and just when you thought that he was coming to the real point of his visit he politely takes leave. You know that what he said was not ‘what he came to say’; nevertheless, you also realize that ‘something’ has been said. (This is the experience of an American, who suffered a nervous breakdown after living for about two years in China under these conditions.)
3.2. As a white man and foreigner, you are travelling somewhere in Asia (say, Thailand). Intending to take the public transport, you go to a bus stop and enquire a native passer-by when the next bus is due. The native consults his wristwatch, assures you that you could expect it any minute and moves along. An hour and a half later, while still waiting for the same bus, you spy the same native returning from his errand. Furious, you collar him and ask him the same question. Though a bit surprised at your rage, when the native gives the same answer, you realize that you have been had: that guy had no more clue about the bus timings than you had!
3.3. As a white man and foreigner, you are travelling on a train in India. Seated next to you is a Brahmin, eager to strike up a conversation and impress you with his learning. Your sensibility is shocked by the poverty in India, and by the existence of 'untouchability' in that culture. Outraged and incensed by the indifference that Indians show to poverty and suffering around them, you quiz this Brahmin about why he is unmoved. The Brahmin assures you with great solemnity that most of the 'beggars' you have seen are really no beggars at all, but, to the contrary, rather wealthy. Many, in fact, are wealthier than either of you. In support of this fact, the Brahmin tells you a tale (an anecdote) about some beggars who turned about to be the greedy rich in disguise! Regarding the lot of those beggars who are not cheaters, he merely shrugs his shoulders and says that it is their karma. You are utterly shocked by both the flimsiness of his 'explanation' and by the total lack of humanity in that Brahmin. Both of you know that the 'anecdote' was a figment of his imagination.
Each of the three scenarios is a part of our folklore: almost each traveller and tourist who has been to Asia will have some such tale to tell.
4. There will not be much of a controversy, if we identify all three as conversations. That is to say, two or more people are involved; there was some kind of a question and answer, some exchange of information in some context or the other. We do not suppose that one needs to be knowledgeable about conversation theory in order to identify that a conversation has taken place. And yet, were we to look at some of the existing theories about what conversation is, we are led to some nontrivial and startling conclusions: *it would appear either that there has been no conversation at all or that in each of them some or other ‘maxim’ has been violated.*
5. In and of itself, this piece of knowledge is not startling. But it does become so when we take into account that these types of conversation are not exceptions but standards, and that they all are examples from non-western cultures!
In the first case, for example, the Chinese director was neither brief nor relevant; in the second, the native was violating the 'cooperation principle' and was lying; in the third the same holds true as well.
6. Our theories of conversation, then, generate the conclusions that other cultures either do not know how to have a conversation or that they always violate the norms of conversation or, even more crudely put, most of the time only westerners are competent conversationalists. This is a logical possibility, to be sure; but there is something utterly implausible about such conclusions. Our conversational 'theories' generate such conclusions because of some assumptions they make. Let me try and identify just three of them.
7. *The first assumption*: Common to all (or nearly all) theories of conversation is the assumption that conversational relations (like, say, that of 'relevance') hold between beliefs. (I do not mean religious beliefs, but beliefs of any kind.) That is to say, the semantic relations between propositions constitute the main area of inquiry. (Some statement A is relevant to some statement B: therefore, ‘relevance’ has to do with the meaning of the statements A and B.)
*The second assumption*: Theories of conversation do not refer to the fact that it is people who indulge in conversation; yet, one intuitively thinks that it is human beings who indulge in conversations. These two ideas are not (necessarily) opposed to each other. That is, the distance between the theories and our intuitions is bridged (often) by a metaphysical assumption, which is highly culture specific: only human beings have beliefs. Or, at least: human beings embody beliefs.
*The third assumption*: With respect to this property of embodying beliefs, there is a third assumption about the nature of persons. This says that humans are equal with respect to this property.
8. The first assumption allows you to 'discover' relations between beliefs; the second and the third assumptions enable you to develop a general theory of what it is to have a conversation. If this caricature is even approximately true, we can raise the question now: *What if there exist cultures and societies, where none of the above assumptions are true?* That is, what if there are cultures and societies, which do not make this kind of a distinction between human beings and the rest of nature; to whom the 'observational' term, viz., human beings turns out to be a very 'theoretical' term? Clearly, in such cases, our theories of conversation break down. By the same token, they cease being universal in the sense of being theories of *human* communication.
9. What I would like to propose is that this is indeed the case: *in each of the scenarios* sketched above, what we see is the breakdown of our theories of conversation. In these cultures, the kind of conversation held depends on exactly *who* the participants are; the 'relevant' answer to a question depends upon just *who* is asking the question and *who* is doing the answering. What is a relevant answer to a question in one conversation need not be a relevant answer to the same question in another conversation.
10. The above considerations are enough for me to raise two general points: one about us and the other about inter-cultural communication. Let me begin with the first. Why do we Indians, so proudly at times, accept ideas from conversation theories (even if we do not know where they come from) with so little reflection? In fact, I have had people preaching to me that we Indians are a ‘garrulous’ lot and that we better learn from the western culture the virtues of being relevant, brief and to the point. Why so little understanding of the issues involved? Why the urge not to think our own experiences through and look at our own inheritance and culture? I do not want to praise the Indian culture as the best form of life; but I do want to say that it is our form of life and just as ‘valid’ as any other form of life. Let us learn all we want to and can from the West: I have learnt a great deal already and continue to do so. But that is possible only if we do not denigrate either of the two cultures. (This is a huge issue, and I hope to return to this some day.) Personally, I am only glad that I have learnt to know them both so intimately.
11. If we continue along the lines of the thoughts sketched above, we see that the theorists of inter-cultural communication have not even begun to suspect the kind of problems involved in thinking about the theme. No wonder the problems of inter-cultural communication, instead of going away, return with a vengeance. Because, as the earlier points will have hinted at, the entire discussion is not about inter-cultural communication at all but about *intra-cultural communication*. Better put, the whole issue is about the monologue the western culture has within itself and other cultures have to merely play their scripted role. *How should different cultures speak both to the West and to each other within the framework of the western culture?* Obviously, this is not merely a cultural, political or an economic question but one that arises within the theories of conversation!
12. In other words, the “denial of our experience” takes place in more forms and fashions than we understand. While we protest about it in one area, we acquiesce to it in another. This is something we need to keep in mind. It has already become a long post, longer than I intended, but such is the nature of the issues. Besides, what is ‘wordiness’ between Indians; there is no need to be either brief or to the point! Right?
Friendly greetings
Dear V C,
Three remarks.
1. The bit about ‘rain dance’ occurs in my reply to Jeffrey Kripal. Your reformulation is not the question I raise. My question was about the nature of stories, whether they should be seen as ‘explanations’ or not.
2. In #169 you ask the question: “can a culture have a few superstitious practices (such as engaging in rain dance) while being successful on the whole?” Even though this is not my question, I wonder what you mean by ‘a superstitious practice’. In a way, you answer this question indirectly in #175, when you say the following and italicize it: “I do think that an atheist has done something remarkable/noteworthy/creditable in refusing to believe in a myth/ simplification.” Am I to assume that a superstitious practice is some specific practice of the one who believes in some specific superstition?
3. If yes, I am a bit puzzled. Because I do not want to wander-off from the theme of the discussion, I would like to ask you a question. Is your fascination of Skinner’s behaviourism a personal one, or is it also a professional? Being more than reasonably literate in the history and theories in psychology, I cannot but help being puzzled by the ease with which you use intentional predicates. If it is a personal fascination, you need answer none of the questions I raise. In that case, your posts become self-explanatory. If it is also professional, that is, if you are an academic and/or teach and do research in psychology, I would like an answer to my questions.
Dear VSM,
It is not my normal practice to enter into the kind of discussions your post invites. Yet I do it, because of your explicit request. You say: “All of you please bear with me and simply state the flaws in my argumentation.” I presume that yours is a genuine request and hence my reply.
1. Here is how you begin your argument. “From a purely human observational point of view, I can clearly see that all of the above are saying the EXACT same thing and yet CLAIMING that they are indeed different and hence better, and thus trivializing and hence embarassing each others' personal experience and thus commiting the exact same crime they have accused wendy and kripal etc of committing???” What is wrong with this argument? Well, the following.
1.1. You say in the above quote that some people (among whom you mention me explicitly) are saying the same thing and are yet claiming they are different. *Assume* for a moment that this characterization is true. (That is, we assume for the sake of the argument that this premise is true.) What follows from this premise? According to you the following: “and hence better, and thus trivializing and hence embarassing each others' personal experience and thus commiting the exact same crime they have accused wendy and kripal etc of committing.” Logically, what you say do not *follow* at all. Even if I say the ‘same’ thing and claim I am saying something different, the fact that I say something ‘same and yet ‘different’ do not make what I say better. (E.g. Assume you say ‘It rains’ in English, and I say ‘Het regent’ in Dutch. Both of us are saying the same thing, i.e. these two sentences mean the same. Yet we are saying something different: you speak in English and I use a Dutch sentence. From this it does not *logically* follow that what I say is ‘better’.) So, your statement ‘hence’ better does not follow as a logical inference. ‘Thus trivializing’. How does the Dutch sentence ‘trivialize’ the English sentence? It does not: they are merely two different ways of speaking two different natural languages. So, this inference (‘thus’ trivializing) does not follow logically either. “‘Hence’ embarrassing each others’ personal experience” does not logically follow either. (Another ‘kind’ of example: If I say I like the taste of coffee and you say you do not, this does not trivialize or embarrass either us or our experiences.) And “‘thus’ committing the exact same crime..” This conclusion does not *logically* follow either because the previous conclusion was not a logical derivation. From this, it *logically* follows that your reasoning is not *valid*. That is to say, your conclusions do not follow from the premise, if one uses valid rules of inference.
1.2. Even if your argument is not logically valid, it could be *true*. That is to say, each of the steps in your argument could be an empirical truth about the individuals. Well, you do not know me; nor do you know anything about my motives. I can also say that they are false. That means to say, the individual statements (‘thus trivailaizing’, ‘hence embarrassing’, etc.) you make are also *empirically false* in this case.
1.3. If your argument is neither logically valid nor empirically sound (i.e. true) then such an argument is both invalid and false.
2. Here is what you say in the subsequent paragraph. “Balu even went on to suggest that he is trying to change the way people see things. This while he clearly states that he is still trying to formulate a way of understanding his own people, and then the western people, without knowing who his own people are. He has only so far, in all his writings, without exception, said that the west is wrong and onto a conspiracy to prove us all to be heathens, without once saying what he understood about his own people?If one wanted to learn football would you actually learn football or learn how it is different from soccer?”
I have not spoken (nor implied) about any kind of ‘conspiracy’ by the West to ‘prove’ us as heathens. It is a matter of history, according to the Jewish, Christian and Islamic religions, that the Indian traditions exemplify heathen practices. It is also a matter of their theology. Both statements can be easily checked.
You seem to suggest some kind of a problem (an inconsistency?) between ‘trying to change the way people see things’ and ‘understanding my own people’. Let us leave aside the question whether or not ‘in all my writings’ (I presume you are talking about my posts alone) I speak about my understanding of my own people. Hitherto, my focus has been to invite people to reflect upon the possibility that the way they are ‘taught’ to look at their own experiences might well be different from what they experience. In order to make this invitation sound plausible, I have provided some reasonable considerations. I am not trying to change the way people “see” things: I invite them to say what they “see” because I believe that some say things they “do not see”. I do not see why such a cognitive attempt is either wrong or inconsistent or even why I need to understand my own people in order to say what I do say.
3. Your subsequent paragraph about India uses the word ‘trivialize’ in a different sense than how I use it in my article. I am not talking about one group trying to ‘make fun’ of the other. Rather, I am talking about what happens to our experience when a theological explanation (from the Islamic and Christian theologies) is used to re-describe our experiences. Consequently, *if * you see your paragraph as a criticism of my claim, then you are wrong, because your criticism rests upon another meaning of the word ‘trivialize’ than my usage. One could even say that it is irrelevant and hence wrong if seen as a critique.
4. Because I do not get the import of the paragraph where you speak about your hurt and Gandhi, there is pretty little I can say, except to remark that I do not see how it is a part of any argument in the sense your previous paragraphs are. However, it is my impression that you have some problems with ‘stereotypes’ (as you understand them) and that it upsets you.
5. Your penultimate paragraph asks us not to ‘judge’. It is not clear what the force of judgement is to which you object. When I listen to someone (today) insisting that the earth is flat or that the Sun revolves round the earth, I judge that this person (in all probability) does not have much of an idea about the physical theories. Because I am not sure, I try to find out what his arguments are. If they do not cognitively satisfy me, I judge that he is wrong. I do not see what is wrong with this kind of judgement. Equally, I do judge that Hitler is an immoral human being. I do not see what is wrong with this kind of moral judgement either. You might want to say that one ought not to judge the ‘worth’ of a person. Frankly, I do not understand what such a sentiment wants to say. I cannot judge whether the life of some X or Y is worth living, simply because I have no way of judging it either way. Nor can I say anything about the worth of human existence. (From which perspective? The cosmic perspective?) If some person were to ask me whether it makes any difference to the Cosmos whether the human race exists or not, I would not know how to go about answering this question. Consequently, any answer will do as far as I am concerned.
6. It appears to me, VSM, that there is some kind of an insight you are struggling to express. (Especially when you speak of Jesus, Gandhi and so on.) It *could* be the case that you are saying something like the following: we should live the way we find it fit to live and not spend time either criticizing others or reforming them. You find that this is the *wrong way* (both cognitively and morally) to live. *If this is what you are saying*, it is an important insight. However, its field of applicability lies elsewhere. Some day, hopefully on this Sulekha board itself, I will take up this insight and show how important it is, and what is important about it. However, if you are saying this (I do not know), then my writings are *all the more important for you*: they try to explain why you have difficulty in expressing this insight properly. The language and the theory we have absorbed from the West *actively* prevent us from even formulating our cultural insights.
7. Let me end this post by responding to Satya’s remark in #208. In response to your post, he says the following: “Every one of us believes our own viewpoint to be the best one: such is human nature.” This is not quite how I would put it. Let me, therefore say what I think with respect to this issue.
7.1. Whenever I formulate a theory, I believe that my description is ‘true’. If I thought that it was ‘false’, I would not write what I write. This is a belief about the status of my description and its relationship to the part of reality I describe. Let us call this the ‘object-level’ belief.
7.2. Relative to this, I also have a meta-level belief about my own theories. Do I believe that my theory is ‘the truth?’ No, I do not. As a student of the history of the natural sciences, I know that there has no single theory that can claim this status. A better theory has come along and displaced the older theory. This has been the story of scientific progress. I believe that I am doing science. Therefore, I believe that, one day, a *better theory* will come and displace my own. According to the best criteria of rationality and scientificity we have today, I do think that my theory is *better* than any others that exist currently in the market place. That is why I defend my theory. It is also my *hope* that another, better theory will come into being in the near future. If it does happen, I will have succeeded in my aim: *because* of my theory, a better theory comes into being. That means to say, my labour has been scientific in nature and has contributed to the furthering of human knowledge. That is all what I want: to contribute to human knowledge. However, one needs to remember that my theory can only be displaced by a theory that is *better* than mine.
7.3. In other words, both the object-level belief about my theory (that my description is a ‘true’ description) and a meta-level belief about the same (that my description is hypothetical and tentative) are present in me in so far as it is a scientific endeavour, which is human. I want to believe I am both: scientific and human.
Dear Kannan,
Here I was wondering whether you had disappeared from the face of the world because there was nary a sound from you. Nice to know you are alive and kicking! Welcome back to the discussion! About your queries.
1. Am I making a distinction between western epistemology and some other epistemology? If you mean epistemology in its philosophical sense, i.e., the enquiry about the nature and limits of human knowledge, I do not quite think so. Perhaps, my research would add and/or modify some of the widely held claims by a majority of philosophers. Some questions might turn out to be unintelligible or wrongly posed, some new issues might arise, but I do not see my results as an *alternate* epistemology that would be different from every theory propounded in the course of the western intellectual history.
2. It is true I emphasize that the majority of the social sciences take a particular experience of the world for granted and assume as ‘universally true’ the assumptions that structure such an experience. Not only do I identify these premises as Christian theological in nature, but also criticise them. Of course, I do not stop at just criticising them but go further in an attempt to provide an *alternative* theory. What does this imply with respect to the limitations of my own theory? The answer has to do with two things.
2.1. What exactly is the nature of my criticism? Firstly, I criticise these theories for not being ‘scientific’. That in two senses: (a) I say they are secularised Christian theologies. (b) And that they are not scientific because they are not cognizant of this. Secondly, now comes the important question: *could they have been any different?* According to my story, *they could not have been*. Since you are reading my book, I can put this answer in another way: the western intellectuals were *constrained* by their culture (the nature of religion and its relation to the western culture) to theorise how they did. In other words, I do not call it *their failure*, even though it is a cognitive failure, when looked at as an issue of producing knowledge (i.e. as an epistemological issue). If one were to pose the issue abstractly, i.e. without taking the real and historical dynamics of producing scientific knowledge, then exactly the same criticism (i.e. the constraints of the culture) would have been applicable to whoever theorised first. If Indian culture had developed the ‘social sciences’ first, it would also have been hampered by its *cultural constraints*.
2.2. However, this cognitive failure of the western culture provides an extremely important reference point (or provides one set of problems) thanks to which I can *escape* the constraints of my culture and become subservient only to the dynamics of producing scientific theories. That is to say, the development and replacement of my theories will be subject to the dynamics that govern any scientific theory, and *only to that*. Let me make this abstract answer concrete by taking two examples of my theory production: one from the book you are reading and the other from my forthcoming book.
My theory of religion answers two questions *simultaneously*: what is the nature of religion? Why did the western intellectuals see religion in every culture? The answer to one is also the answer to the other. No ad hoc assumptions intervene in the process of answering the first question and deriving the answers to the second. In other words, the *cognitive failure* of the western culture is a problem I have to solve and the solution to this problem has to be derived (in some appropriate sense) from my theory about that phenomenon which they failed to understand. (This must be done without adding ad hoc assumptions.)
The western ethical traditions transform us either into immoral peoples or moral cretins. To show that we are neither, I need to develop a theory of ethics that (a) shows that there are ethical traditions in the Indian culture; (b) explains the western ‘theories’ of ethics and the corresponding perception. That is to say, my theory of ethics will *include* the western ‘theories’ as its limiting case. Under specific assumptions, I must show how you can go from a theory of ethics I develop (which, I claim, is the Indian ethics) to the western ethics. [To use a historical example: Einstein’s theory enables one to ‘derive’ the Newtonian theory as its limiting case and under specific assumptions. In my book on ethics, I have done this. Currently, I am beginning on the final version of this book; so, this is what *I think* I have been able to do. I will have to wait and see whether it lives through the final version.]
3. In other words, my story (though drawn from my culture) *has* to account for sets of theories that are constrained by the western culture. It is not simply a story about how we ‘experience’ the world. It not only does more; it is forced to do more if it aspires to be scientific. Such a scientific story, then, can be developed by any one from any culture (see my declaration at the beginning of the target article); if it is replaced, it will be because the better theory will do the job better. In other words, my story will become subordinated to the dynamics of scientific growth and progress of science. That is why, as I see it, the ‘Indian Renaissance’ (I am really charmed by *Satya’s* characterization) is of significance and importance not just to us but to the human community and human knowledge.
Trusting I have answered your questions,
Friendly greetings
During the course of the discussion, the issue of "rain dancing" has featured regularly and different points of view have been presented. No doubt, VC’s position is the most unambiguous. He considers it to be a "superstitious practice", the implication being that it is irrational to believe that dancing *causes* the rain to fall (e.g. #187, #210). Others such as *Satya* feel that there is something wrong with this "explanation" and try to find alternatives. The dance ‘invites’ the rain he says, or, he emphasises that the behaviour is not based on "beliefs and worldviews", but on "their experience of Nature" (#203). I am puzzled by what he means when he says that rain dancing is based on a culture’s experience of nature, but I believe that he is right when he says that it is not based on some belief or worldview (see further). Yet others take up the suggestion and claim that the dance is a "formalized, socialized and traditionalised expression" of "life as art" (Vrikodara #211). Hermione hasn’t decided which camp to choose yet and suggests doing a test first: "Does it rain every time the Native Americans do a rain dance?" (#215) (Assuming that such a test is worth performing.)
At first sight it seems that VC has the strongest case: no reasonable people on earth can buy the story that dancing actually causes rain to fall. I am not willing to buy it. However, it is a fact that in some cultures people *do* perform ‘rain dances’. However, to explain the ‘rain dance’ by attributing a ‘causative story’ is to trivialize such an experience. To quote Balu in his reply to Kripal: "you are transforming the members of that group into a bunch of idiots". When this happens, people such as *Satya* or Vrikodara rightly feel a sense of wrongness.
In an attempt to shed some light on this matter, I would like to refer to a debate between the famous Dr. Livingstone and a Tswana ‘Rain Doctor’. The discussion, of course, is about the ‘rain dance’:
"Medical Doctor [i.e. Livingstone]: So you really believe that you can command the clouds? I think that can be done by God alone.
Rain Doctor: We both believe the very same thing. It is God that makes the rain, but I pray to him by means of these medicines, and, the rain coming, of course it is then mine.
…
Medical Doctor: I only think you are mistaken in saying that you have medicines which can influence the rain at all.
Rain Doctor: That’s just the way people speak when they talk on a subject of which they have no knowledge. When first we opened our eyes, we found our forefathers making rain, and we follow in their footsteps. You, who send to Kuruman for corn, and irrigate your garden, may do without rain, we cannot manage in that way". (Cited in J. & J. Comaroff: *Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa*, The University of Chicago Press, 1991, p. 210-211)
I would like to invite the reader to take these sentences at face value. It is clear that the ‘rain doctor’ *agrees* with Livingstone that he does not *command* the clouds. Only when he performs the ritual and the rain comes only *then* does he consider the rain his. In other words, the ‘rain doctor’ does not claim a *causal relationship*. He only says that he considers the rain his, when he has done the performance and if it then starts to rain. But this is not how Dr. Livingstone understands the matter. The ‘medical doctor’ insists that there can be no medicines which can influence the rain to fall. That neither of the two understand each other becomes clear when we look at the response of the ‘rain doctor’. He gets irritated and refers to what his forefathers *did*. Livingstone is looking for an answer to the question *how it is possible* that the dance cause rains to come and wants an *explanation*. As far as the rain dancer is concerned, the discussion is not even about creating water. Consequently, irrigation is *not an alternative* as far as he is concerned. For him, the discussion is about continuing what has always been done in his culture. Hence his claim "When first we opened our eyes, we found our forefathers making rain, and we follow in their footsteps". In other words, it is about what his people *do*; for Livingstone the discussion is about what the Tswana people *believe*.
It is here that Wittgenstein’s observations become relevant, indeed. He says: "The very idea of wanting *to explain a practice* … seems wrong to me. All that Frazer does is *to make them plausible to people who think as he does*. It is very remarkable that in the final analysis all these practices are presented as, so to speak, pieces of stupidity. But it will never be plausible to say that mankind does all that out of sheer stupidity." (From "Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough").
I will not go into the issue of stupidity again, but I will focus on the other things instead. As far as Wittgenstein is concerned, the problem - i.e. the distortion of other cultures - is caused by a desire to *explain* a practice. Trying to explain a practice by referring to a theory or belief, is the ‘only’ way for *us* (the Westerners) to make the others *plausible*, i.e. to make sense of them. In other words, for us Westerners, for some actions to be coherent, a story, a belief, a theory, or worldview is needed which *lends* coherence to the actions. That actions can derive their consistency from actions themselves is an option which is clouded by the constraints of the Western culture.
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The discussion about the rain dance is in danger of getting derailed and one might end up missing the forest for the trees. This post is an attempt to link this issue with the larger concerns of the target article and the discussions of the past few weeks.
1. The general pattern that has come to the fore is that Wendy and her children (including Jeffrey Kripal the reply to whom is the target article) *systematically* portray the Indian traditions in an unfavourable light, even when compared to how religions like Christianity, Islam and Judaism are portrayed. This claim is made in several articles, independent of whether these religions and the Indian traditions are true or false, whether they are irrational or rational, and so on. The discussion is not, as Rajiv Malhotra pointed out some time ago (see Tapori’s post #267 for the links), about the truth-claims of these religions and traditions but about their depictions.
2. Because this is a *systematic phenomenon*, the obvious question is about the ‘why’. One of the possible explanations is that these portrayals are ‘Orientalist’, ‘racist’ and ‘Eurocentric’ in nature. My point is that this explanation is not adequate because it ends up transforming *all* writers, who provide such descriptions into ‘racist’, ‘Eurocentric’, ‘Orientalist’ as the case may be. These writers include not just the western scholars but many, if not most, Indian ones as well.
3. I account for this state of affairs by suggesting that the modern social sciences are secularised Christian theologies. One cannot draw on this fund of ‘knowledge’ and contribute further to it without, in some sense, becoming ‘theologians’ as well. In several posts, I have provided some considerations to make this extravagant claim appear less counter-intuitive. Before my argument can become plausible, I need to solve many cognitive problems; before it becomes worthy of further research along the lines I suggest, some *alternative* conceptualisations have to be provided. In my book on religion I believe to have done both.
4. In the target article, and in several of my replies, I go further along this line. If what I claim is true, one has to show that the same holds good for Kripal as well. That is to say, one has to show that he cannot possibly have produced knowledge about Ramakrishna Paramahamsa or his mysticism. Again, one possible way of doing it is to challenge the truth-claims of psychoanalysis. (That is, one can try to show why this discipline is not a science.) But this would not be sufficient for my purposes. I need to show that he *could not* have produced knowledge and that his stance prevents him from even recognising this fact. I do this by showing that his object of study is *not* the experience he claims he is studying: his ‘explanations’ trivialise and distort the Indian cultural experience, which is his object of study.
5. There is something more that requires doing. If social sciences cannot produce knowledge, this must be true whether they study the western culture or ‘non-western’ cultures. I suggest that it is true by showing (or suggesting, if you find that I have not ‘shown’ it adequately in my post) that attempting to explain the ‘origin of religion’ by appealing to a set of *natural causes* distorts his object of study. As I put it, atheism *is* a philosophical option, but if one embraces it to study the origin and nature of religion, *one cannot do science*. To become a theist and study religion is to do theology and not science. In other words, I point out that he faces a dilemma and that, by virtue of this, he could not be contributing to human knowledge by doing what he does.
6. Of course, this unsatisfactory state of affairs about the nature of social sciences has not gone unnoticed in the western intellectual history. Even though, as far as I know, no intellectual has argued (or seen) this case in it’s *generality*, many people have responded to many aspects of this situation in many different ways over a period of time. Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Austrian philosopher, is one such. He was dissatisfied with the nature of philosophical enquiries in the western culture and tried to arrive at some understanding of the nature of philosophical problems and their purported solutions. His writings are not systematic elaborations in the form of a theory; he formulates some of his startling insights in at times condensed, at times cryptic manner.
7. Sir James Frazer wrote a multi-volume work called ‘The Golden Bough’, an ‘anthropological’ compendium of stories-cum-explanations about certain kinds of practices in cultures. Wittgenstein wrote down some of his remarks, which were published (posthumously, if my memory serves me right) as ‘Remarks’ on that book. (I am not sure whether he read all the volumes, or read only the abridged edition of Frazer’s book.) In any case, he does not find the Frazer’s ‘explanations’ satisfactory because they transform all ‘non-western’ cultures into *idiotic* ones (my term, not his). Amongst other things, he considers Frazer’s discussion of the rain dance in that set of ‘Remarks’.
8. This is where Willem’s post #254 comes in. Wittgenstein notices that Frazer tries to ‘explain’ the practice of rain dancing by attributing some sets of *beliefs* to the people whose practice it is. The attribution of such beliefs, says Wittgenstein, ‘explains’ human practices only by trivializing them (my words, not his). That is to say, they ‘explain’ the *practice* of rain dancing as an *expression* of some sets of beliefs. He calls such an attempt a ‘sickness’ (his favourite metaphor). He points out too that this ‘explanation’ is not satisfactory because it cannot *explain* why these people perform the rain dance only during the rainy season. (Of course, one can give any number of silly explanations, including the ‘explanation’ that the performers are ‘conditioned’ to perform the rain dance during the rainy season. What Wittgenstein was talking about was a non ad hoc explanation.)
9. Willem brings out another kind of objection, which is misunderstood by *Satya* in his #272. Willem is not implying that irrigation is unknown to the ‘native American Indians’ in his analysis of the conversational fragment he cites. *He is saying just the opposite*. He is saying something like the following: one could suggest that rain dances are performed because the performers need rain water for their crops. (And, of course, they believe that their jumping up and down in some manner will *cause* the rains to come. This is what Frazer’s ‘explanation’ amounted to.) So, if these people are ‘taught’ about irrigation, then they will become ‘rational’ (or ‘scientific’ as the case may be) and get an insight into the ‘superstitious’ nature of their practices. Willem is drawing attention to the fact that *this argument is wrong*. The ‘rain doctor’ knows about irrigation and says that this has *nothing to do with* the rain dance. In other words, one should not further ‘explain’ the rain dance by speaking about the ‘need’ for rain water either.
10. The general point about the example of the rain dance is this then. Here too is a practice *distorted* by the kind of explanation that is provided. It is important to understand what is being said and what is not. Neither Wittgenstein nor Willem is arguing that some practice in a culture is beyond criticism *just because* it is a practice in that culture. (Yay Bee Dee #260 understands it this way.) They both are saying something like this: make sure that your ‘explanation’ of a practice does not *distort* the practice; do not confuse a *distorted description* of a practice with its ‘explanation’.
11. In other words, this rain dance example is a further illustration of the fact that social sciences (in the case of Frazer, the discipline in question is anthropology) are unable to provide knowledge. (This is an illustration, not a ‘proof’ for the claim.) They seem to think that a distorted description is an ‘explanation’ and in the process of providing such a description, they transform human practices into “pieces of stupidity”. Again, this does not mean that there are no ‘stupid’ practices in human cultures. This is not the issue. The issue is: *is it plausible to accept that all the practices of entire cultures are pieces of stupidity?* Wittgenstein did not think so: “it will never be plausible to say that mankind does *all that* out of sheer stupidity.” I agree with him.
Balu
Dear V C,
Frankly, I do not get you: either the points or the purpose of your posts. Your #274 has more the tone of a taunt than anything else: I ask a question to Tapori about his perception of the discussion (because he had expressed some concerns about the direction the discussion was taking), and you wonder whether *I might not have* considered other possibilities because I do not like them! Clearly, I have stepped on your toes somewhere along the way. If that is the case, may I ask your forgiveness?
Your recent post #280 is another case in point. Are you objecting to the universal quantifier (‘all’) when I formulate the issue? Or are you proposing some kind of a ‘functionalist’ explanation of cultural practices? [That is, do you want to say that the cultural practices which survive do so because they fulfil some needs? Or that the function of a cultural practice is to satisfy some need?] Or are you saying that cultural practices have reasons for their existence? (In which case, I do not see the purpose of the scare quotes around the word ‘reason’.) Perhaps, you simply want to say you disagree with me? Or is it something else? I do not know.
If you are objecting to the universal quantifier in my formulation (#278) of the issue, let me strengthen it: I do not believe that *any* cultural practice (i.e. a practice that has survived and been transmitted through successive generations) should be explained by attributing beliefs to its practitioners in such a way that the beliefs make the practitioners come out stupid. Why do I say this? There are primarily two reasons: our ignorance and the principle of ‘charity’. Let me explain.
(a) Our ignorance. We know very little about how cultures come into being, how they reproduce themselves and how they disappear. Until such a stage, where we are able to discuss each cultural practice (like rain dance, for example) individually, we should avoid making a virtue of our ignorance. One could come up with any number of explanations to day to explain a cultural practice like rain dance. Without exception, they would *all* be ad hoc in nature and, as such, the opposite of what a scientific explanation is. Therefore, my criticism of such explanations is to show their ad hoc character and, where possible, identify what makes them ad hoc. The purpose? To move forward in order to develop a science of cultures and cultural differences.
(b) The principle of charity. While both intelligence and stupidity are not exclusive prerogatives of any one particular set of people belonging to any one culture, explanations that attribute causal beliefs to the practitioners of, say, the rain dance do make an entire culture appear stupid. How? Assume for a moment we attribute to the people who perform the rain dance the following belief: they believe that their dance causes the rains to come. Precisely because of our ignorance about the dynamics of cultures, we are forced to make this attribution more general and say that *such is their notion of causal forces* that they believe in the causal efficacy of their rain dance. (We have no way, at the moment, to limit our attribution *only* to performing the rain dance.) Then the question becomes: are they not aware of the operation of causal forces? Do they not know that the boats are caused by their work on wood? Are they not aware that rains come when they do not dance and, therefore, that there are (at least) other causes? Do they have the concept of cause at all? So on and so forth. Because the practice is transmitted over generations, and it is considered important by that culture, we will be forced by the logic of our argument to extend the same attribution to the *culture as a whole*. Consequently, the entire culture is made to appear stupid. They may not have our (current) natural sciences, but my principle of charity tells me not to *assume* their stupidity because of this. In other words, I assume they are as reasonable as any other group of human beings. If it was as simple as believing in the causal efficacy of their dance, surely, I believe, many intelligent people in their culture would have questioned it, ridiculed it, and so on. My principle of charity tells me that if it has survived, then that is not because they have no notion of cause and causal forces. (Besides, I think such a group would not survive as a group for any period of time.) This is the principle of charity: assume that the other person (group, culture) is at least as reasonable as you (your group, your culture) and try to understand them thus. Consequently, my objections rest on at least on these two grounds.
(c) How defensible is this position? How ‘scientific’ is this? This is a philosophical assumption in whose favour I have some evidence. It is, however, important to note that this assumption functions as a *heuristic* of research and *not* as a premise in my arguments. Consequently, if my research forces me to say that some culture X or Y is stupid, I would do so. But that result must be scientifically demonstrable.
Have I explained myself sufficiently V C? I do hope that the apology, together with this explication, will make you desist from taking pot-shots just for the heck of it. Of course, the previous sentence is written under the assumption that you are indeed taking pot-shots. I might be wrong, but, forgive me, I cannot make sense of your posts any other way.
Friendly greetings
Balu
I have partially answered your question in my post to V C (#281). What *Satya* provides is also an ad hoc explanation of the rain dance. One might be more sympathetic to it; it does not violate the principle of charity. But neither makes it any less ad hoc.
Let me answer your question by means of an illustration. Consider the following sentence plucked from a larger paragraph: “A NA sees him/herself as part of that delicate harmonic balance.” The kind of knowledge of cultures I seek, which is scientific, must be able to answer at least some of the following questions: What kind of knowledge does this culture have of Nature? In what way does this show Nature to be a ‘delicate’ balance? And harmonic in nature? How is this knowledge gained and transmitted? Is it different from the theories in Natural sciences? If so, in what lies the difference? How can it be tested? Is Nature a whole composed of parts? Why should there be a ‘balance’ between its parts? Or is it an aggregate of objects, events and processes? How can we decide one way or another? And so on and so forth.
At the moment, no one is anywhere near to answering these kinds of questions with respect to any culture. Many, in fact, deny that a science of cultures is possible at all; most postulate some kind of a divide between the natural and social sciences.
I believe that there are many hindrances that require to be won in our quest for knowledge of human beings and their cultures. One of the biggest, I have found, is the current crop of ‘social sciences’. Amongst other things, they hinder the development of a social science by encouraging ad hoc arguments. Not only are they full of them; they also propagate the idea that being ‘scientific’ is nothing other than having an opinion on some matter and having some ‘arguments’ in its favour. Actually, if you were to go and maintain this attitude among the Natural Scientists, no one would take you seriously. Yet, among us it has become the summum of ‘rationality’ and ‘scientificity’.
I hope to have answered your question.
Friendly greetings
“"neti, neti" works only with the greatest of intellects. We lesser mortals need an "it is thus".” Lovely. I wish the implied suggestion about my intellect was true. I mean, who would not like to belong to the greatest of intellects? I certainly would, if only it was true!
There is a ‘model’, a ‘it is thus’. I have written a book on religion (and its relation to a culture), whose hypothesis you can test the way you would test any similar hypothesis in any of the natural sciences. It also explains some of the things I have spoken of, including such things as the ‘secularisation’ of Christian theology. I have almost finished working on an ‘it is thus’ about western ethics and Indian ethics; one of my friends is working on half of an ‘it is thus’ about the caste system, and so on. In another five years or so, many of my doctoral students will have also published a few ‘it is thus’ on a wide variety of topics. Together, all these works lay the groundwork for going beyond ‘neti, neti’. (By the way, you do know that it is a cognitive strategy that works for *anyone* desirous of knowledge?)
Dear *Satya* and Vikram,
Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful! You guys have raised what is probably *the most* important set of questions so far. (*Satya*, you write in #292 that you are a woman. My apologies for addressing you as a ‘he’ so far. By the way, at times - this is the second time - you show an unbelievable capacity to jump steps and go to a problem that ‘should not’ be obvious!) I am not sure how to go about answering them and remain intelligible to a non-academic audience at the same time. I am going to do my best; if I fail, please prod me further: the cluster of questions is far, far too important to lose track of.
1. I am going to reformulate the questions but let me begin doing that by making the problem is *even more complex* than it is now. Let us begin in a very intuitive way and ask ourselves this question: where do we encounter ‘cultural differences’? In human contacts, of course. What kind of human contacts? *In inter-individual contacts*. That is, we see (or sense, or intuit or whatever) cultural differences in our contacts with *individual* human beings. You do not meet ‘the western culture’ but individual Americans, Germans, French, etc. Neither do these individuals meet ‘the Indian culture’: they meet individual Indians (or, even better, a ‘Madrasi Brahmin’, a ‘Gujerati Baniya’ - even these are general categories but I use them just to get the point across.) And yet, we appear to see cultural differences in these contacts. How to make ‘sense’ of *this experience*? Let us first see what is partially involved to truly appreciate the complexity of our ‘perception’.
1.1. Each individual human being is a complex combination of at least four aspects. There is his biological (or genetic) inheritance; there is his ‘social’ inheritance (whether he is from the Middle Ages or from a capitalist society); there is his psychological makeup (let us say his ‘personality’); and there is his cultural upbringing (whether he is a Madhva Brahmin or a Lingayat, say). When we meet individuals, in many different ways we notice these *differences*: the biological, the psychological and, after some time perhaps, ‘the social’ and ‘the cultural’. Let us bracket the biological away so that the situation becomes deliciously complex. Let us agree to use the following ‘words’ (they are just words for now) in order to go ahead and raise the problem. Let us call the ‘social aspects’ of a person the ‘sociality’ of the person; the psychological aspects the ‘personality’ of the person; and the ‘cultural’ aspects the ‘culturality’ of the person. Thus we meet individual human beings and see the differences between ourselves and the other human beings. What kinds of differences do we see?
1.2. Let us say you come across someone like the following: a Belgian who is living in America driving a Japanese Car. He is married to an African, loves Chinese music and is crazy about Indian food. He prefers jeans, wears a tie, is a bit short-tempered and has a terrific sense of humour. Each week he goes to the ‘Unitarian Church’, calls himself an atheist and a behaviourist (sorry, VC!), and is a nuclear scientist. And so on and so forth. Let us say, you are just his opposite in many things, and yet you become friends (so that you get to know each other well). In other words, you notice many differences (more than you can *say*) between yourself and this person.
1.3. From among all these differences, which express his sociality, which his culturality and which his personality? And for what reasons are they that? Notice that you cannot ‘solve’ these questions by giving definitions of what ‘culture’ etc. mean to you. Every one of us has the same freedom to define the terms any which way we want and your definition is my counter example. Nor can you undertake some kind of a statistical survey to answer them because it is not evident what you are looking for. Does the above person belong to one ‘culture’, many ‘cultures’, or to none? Are his ‘personal traits’ personal, social, cultural or biological? The answer that it is both ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ is not adequate in our case. We need to know what ‘nature’ is and ‘nurture’ has at least three aspects in this case: his personality, his sociality and his culturality.
1.4. Put even more sharply, but in general terms: *what makes some difference, any difference, into a cultural difference as against, say, social or psychological difference?* (Somehow, in our contacts with individual human beings, we *must* have answered this question, even if none of us know what that answer is. Otherwise, we could not see ‘cultural’ differences.) Normally, one would expect Anthropology to have answered this question. But you are going to come out bitterly disappointed if you were to seek the answer either in their ethnographic texts or in their ‘theoretical’ treatises. They do not even *ask* this question, let alone solve it. (Sorry Vrikodara, another ‘neti, neti’!) Their ethnography presupposes cultural differences without saying what they are; their theoretical tracts still have not progressed beyond disputes about definitions of ‘culture’ and silly ‘theories’ about ‘human culture’.
1.5. My research project, which I call ‘comparative science of cultures’ (actually it sounds better in Dutch and German than it does in English) *begins* with this question: what makes some difference, any difference, into a cultural difference?’ I discovered that to answer this one has to develop a *theory* of cultural differences and my study of the western culture and the Indian one (sliced along several different themes) begins the process of developing precisely such a theory. The ‘iti, iti’ answer (that I have now) can be given in a single sentence, but one cannot understand it without understanding the theory I am building. (‘Cultural difference is the *how* of using the mechanisms of socialisation’.)
2. What I have discovered during the last two decades is this then: to say what is ‘cultural experience’ requires taking recourse to a theory about cultural differences. That is to say, it is one thing to ‘experience’ cultural differences, but it is a task of an entirely different magnitude to *say* what this experience consists of or what makes it ‘cultural’. I do not know whether the sequence of events that I describe in my reply to Jeffrey Kripal (the target article) struck you as odd or not: I say I am developing conceptual tools to ‘access’ my own experiences and interrogate them. That is, to *speak* of our experiences as ‘cultural’ experiences we need theories that enable us to make this distinction (between ‘cultural’ and ‘non-cultural’ say) and explain cultural differences. Otherwise, we can just keep talking any nonsense that comes to our head and insist that such an experience is ‘cultural’. (Many, many discussions on this thread are ample illustrations of this tendency. Every one is an ‘expert’ on saying what a ‘cultural practice’ is, why it is/could be a ‘superstitious’ practice and such like without even having the faintest idea of what is being talked about!)
3. Consider Vikram’s sensing of the problem: “What’s more, the insider/outsider dichotomy itself might be too simplistic. After all, to say, “you've got it all wrong” implies that you do in fact theorize within a framework of presuppositions. But in the case of multifarious India, is it even possible to extract abiding universals? One's presuppositions might vary from region to region, from caste to caste.” Right on!
What I am saying goes further than this: it varies from individual to individual and that is true with respect to all cultures and not just the Indian one. The insider/outsider distinction is *empty* when it comes to *saying* what cultural differences are: it is the task for building a scientific theory about specific cultural differences, and to build such a theory the passport of a person is strictly irrelevant. (See my declaration at the beginning of the target article.) So, can we ‘extract abiding universals’? (Vikram’s question: see the citation above.) No, we cannot and that in two senses. (a) Any theory we build will be hypothetical (the way scientific theories are), and not abiding in any sense of the word. (Besides, cultures themselves are dynamic entities: they evolve and change, do they not?) (b) We will not be ‘extracting’ some universal facts that require accounting. (Philosophically speaking, developing a scientific theory in our case is not the task of inducing some general patterns from trillions and trillions of facts. It would be impossible. I will simply state this baldly.)
4. If that is the case, how do we go about *identifying* the problems requiring solutions? I have partially answered it in my reply to Kannan (post #247). Here, let me just add another aspect: we must be truly thankful that Kripal and his forefathers exist! They give us one objective aspect of the problem. Instead of talking about it in the abstract, let me give an example. (Vrikodara, take heed! Here comes the cooked up example.)
4.1. We notice that, in the hands of Kripal, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa’s mysticism becomes an expression of homo-eroticism. Most of us do get upset and express this as well. One reaction: an *unscientific response* is to do what Rati Gupta, B S and Gaurang Bhatt did. Convinced of their own intelligence and of our utter stupidity they come up with some third-rate ‘atheism’ as though they have re-discovered the wheel all on their own. That is, they do not even sense the problem. Second response: not being geniuses like them, you and I sense something has ‘gone wrong’ somewhere. This is the first step. What has ‘gone wrong’? We start reading around, say, the articles from Rajiv Malhotra and Sankrant Sanu. What do we find out? This way of talking does not appear to be confined to Kripal alone. Therefore, there is a reasonable suspicion that it might not merely be an expression of an individual idiosyncrasy of Jeffrey Kripal. This is the second step. Let us say, we assume that it is the syndrome of Wendy’s children. So, we read a bit more, from different people, from different periods of time (say the travellers’ reports about India). They say the same things, but use a different imagery and a different jargon. This is the third step. We see that it is not *merely* a question of Kripal’s idiosyncrasy or *merely* a question of Wendy’s child syndrome (even if they are both) but that it encompasses people’s reports from the western culture as well. This is the fourth step. May be, it has to do with ‘the western culture’. At this moment, we merely have an intuitive idea of what ‘western culture’ is. So, we read a bit more: say, what the Islamic rulers and writers said about our traditions. We see that they said more or less the same things. This is the fifth step. So, it could be all of the above and yet might have something to do with what ‘religion’ is. (After all, both Christianity and Islam are religions.) Then, because we are Indians, we read and reflect about what we said about Christianity and Islam. We do not appear to have said similar things at all. This is the sixth step. Two possibilities open up: either our ‘religions’ are special; or, they might not be ‘religions’ at all. Then you start reading about religion and thinking again … This process continues until you are able to formulate a tractable problem and come up with a testable hypothesis.
4.2. We are not ‘inducing’ anything by first collecting trillions upon trillions of facts. We are doing research that is hypothesis driven, and which is being tested at every step. But what was the starting point? The ‘feeling’ that something is ‘wrong’ (cognitively wrong, that is) with Kripal’s description of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. Of course, my description above is cooked up in the sense that our research is never that simple or that straightforwardly progressive and cumulative. There will be false starts, blind alleys, inabilities to see the ‘obvious’ at times, etc. But that is a process of all scientific enquiries.
4.3. To *discover* that stories like Kripal trivialize and distort our experience (however simple that formulation might sound) required scientific research that has stretched for nearly two decades now. This is not the beginning point, but one of the results of research. (That is why I do not respond to posts like those of B S and others. They have no clue what I am talking about, and they apparently do not want to stop and think why someone is saying it, or what he could probably mean by that.) However, this is merely autobiographical. Today, the *results* of my research can *become* the starting points for a new, the younger generation of intellectuals. This is what scientific research enables. On this, I pin my hopes.
5. Let me quote *Satya*’s questions in entirety: “So shouldn't social science (in this instance, a science of culture) seek to explain what we observe or perceive of different societies (in this instance cultures)?
The question, when it comes to culture, is whose perception and how do we define that perception? What we observe of the physical world is pretty much the same irrespective of our own culture, but when we make observations about societies (and cultures), what we observe, how we perceive seems to differ from observer to observer, and more widely between outsiders and insiders. So whose observations are the social scientists supposed to explain? And how do they define what that perception is? Do they have to take the perceiver's word for it? Or better put, don't they have to take the perceiver's word for it?” Let me now see which questions I have answered, and which I have not.
5.1. The first question. Yes, the science of culture should indeed *explain* what we perceive. We also seem to *perceive* cultural differences even where we cannot (without such a science) *say* what we perceive.
5.2. The other sets of questions she raises have been partially reformulated and partially answered. Let me, nevertheless, state one general point. Even though the natural world is invariant, the *way* we experience this world is, somehow and to some extent, dependent upon the theories we use to *say* what we experience. (There is a huge debate about this issue, and it is not yet settled one way or another. We do not, as yet, even have a decent theory of perception. Research, for example, in Computer Vision is trying to simulate some aspects of perception of objects and motion etc). This is true for our cultural world too: we can say what we *see* depending upon what ‘theories’ we bring to bear on what we see and say. Dependent to what extent? This is not a philosophical question, but one for scientific research. The theories about cultural differences have the *onus* of answering this question partially as well.
This has become a very, very long post. My apologies. But the questions are so important that I could do nothing else.
Dear Arun,
As long the thought about our possible idiocy occurs in one's downer moments, it is healthy: it makes one all the more sceptical and critical of one's own theories. But that is no reason to feel dragged down *by this thought*: if we are able to take the first steps, even if hesitant and tentative, that is a good thing. The first steps, however unstable and tottering, remember, are a *preliminary* to walking, running and later sprinting. So, our first steps should not be used to *criticise* our desire to walk or even of our abilities to do so. On the contrary. It shows that we *are* going to walk. So, from whence the feeling low or of feeling down?
Recollect that there is also an excellent astrologer amidst us: remember *Satya* heralding that the Indian Renaissance has begun? She is right; she was not predicting the future but characterising the *present*.
As far as the Chinese are concerned. No, their travellers did not say what the Christians and the Muslims said about us. Besides, how could there have been a Sanskrit *cultural* empire for nearly a thousand years, stretching all the way to the borders of China, without wars, conquest, conversions, church, or whatever else the West required to build a Latin and Christian Empire?
Besides, remember another thing too, something which I wrote of. We are *also*, (in some senses) the descendents of Vishvaamitra. If he could create the three worlds, surely, creating a couple of theories cannot be beyond our means, after all!
So, cheer up, ol' chap! we are a long way away from becoming senile or idiots!
Dear Kannan,
You ask two sets of questions: one about a possible inconsistency (and you also show me how to avoid it) and the second, which is more clarificatory in nature. Let me begin with the second first.
1. You are fairly accurate in representing the gist of my argument. But I am not sure why you use the notion of historical accident as an “escape hatch”. The situation is really very simple. I am merely describing one of the ways in which scientific theories grow. Let me use an example. (I am using it because it is such a lovely example, and is attributed to one of the greatest geniuses Mankind has ever produced. Nothing more is implied.)
It appears that Sir Isaac Newton was frequently complimented for being the greatest genius the world had ever known. One of his replies is alleged to have been the following: “Even a pygmy sees further than the giants if he stands upon their shoulders. And I, Sir, stand upon the shoulders of giants.” The extraordinary humility apart, there is something very important to what Newton is saying: his theory would not have been there, if the theories of Copernicus and Galileo were not there before him. It is, of course, a historical accident that certain people preceded Newton. This allowed Newton, however, to write his Principia.
In a way, this is all I am saying. Thanks to the writings that exist today, I can build my theory. The errors and mistakes (or however one characterises them) provide me with the problem-situation. Why certain errors are systematically committed? This is one question. The second question is with respect to the nature of the phenomenon they studied where these errors exist. All I am doing is developing a hypothesis that links these two together: for instance, I say, it is in the nature of religion (this is one aspect) that it makes those who have it want to see religion in all cultures (this is the second aspect). Taken together, the hypothesis not only tells us what religion is, but also explains the errors of the previous generations.
Perhaps, another example would explain why there is nothing extraordinary to what I am doing. If there is a systematic error committed by people in identifying a certain colour under artificial light, your hypothesis will explain both why people commit the error and, at the same time, why some colour appears differently under artificial light.
Of course, in my case, cultures and their descriptions are involved and not colour perception in natural and artificial light. But that has to do with the nature of the domain that is being investigated. For the rest, they are symmetric as far as their cognitive structure is concerned.
In other words, I am saying that my ‘Indianness’ is no barrier to building a theory about cultural differences because I have the work of previous generations to lean on. Without them, I could not have done what I have done so far. I can only be grateful to them for this.
2. In a way, I have almost answered your inconsistency. Even here, a certain reformulation is needed. You see, I do not think that there is anything called a ‘scientific methodology’ that one can follow in order to produce scientific theories. (In fact, no historian or philosopher of repute has spoken in such terms for more than 100 years. Many scientists may still do so; certainly most ‘social scientists’ do so. But this is an old idea from the 19th century, which has been rightly discarded today.) Therefore, I do not claim that any one who follows the scientific methodology will improve upon my results. This is not so important to your argument either. So, if we remove this unnecessary sentence fragment from your question, this is how it looks like:
“I think you are vulnerable to much criticism on this front because your simultaneous claims that (a) Western anthropologists could only have got it wrong, and (b) that anybody, (even a Western anthropologist or social scientist), can get it right and improve upon your theories … appear to be contradictory.
“How can (a) and (b) apply simultaneously unless you are the very first investigator in the history of social sciences who has … got it right? You are entirely entitled to claim this and defend this position but you will obviously be challenged.”
You will see straight away that, when the unnecessary sentence-fragment disappears, the contradiction is not that strong: (a) Western anthropologists could only have got it wrong; (b) anybody, (even a Western anthropologist or social scientist), can get it right. These sentences say that they got it wrong so far (and it could not be any other way) and they can get it right from now on. All that is required is that between ‘then’ and ‘now’ a more correct theory has entered the picture. I claim that it has: my theory is able to do more (much more) than any other theory in the market place. And that, to develop and build upon this theory further, one does not have to be an Indian or anything else.
My individual person enters into the picture only if someone wants to know why Balu wrote ‘The Heathen …’ and other books (which he, hopefully, will write!). Then Balu’s Indianness might become important. It is like asking the question why did some particular scientist, and not another, discovered some proof or the other. Then, the individual biography might become important.
Will my theory be challenged? I hope so. Otherwise, there is no hope of scientific progress. Where would science be, if there was no criticism and disputation? But the thing to note is this: my theory can be challenged, improved, rejected, modified, etc. the*same way* you do any or all of these things in the natural sciences. The same, however, cannot at all be said of the competitor ‘theories’, whether of a Wendy, of a Kripal, of a John Hicks, or of a Ninian Smart. There is no way you can empirically test any of their ‘theories’.
Once this is understood, what does it matter who is first or the last? What matters is the growth of human knowledge and the growth in understanding that ensues.
Friendly greetings
Not quite. ‘Culture’ is a notion that belongs to a general theory of culture. (Among other things, it will have to talk about human culture, proto-culture and such like.) I am not building a general theory of ‘culture’, whether human or animal.
Because I am talking about empirical cultures (notice the plural), my fundamental term is the compound word ‘cultural difference’. I characterise this as a ‘difference in configurations of learning’. Therefore, ‘a culture’ (notice the singular) is ‘a configuration of learning’.
Dear Tapori,
Your questions are not clear enough to me to answer them. So, this post is to clarify your questions. You seem to ask whether the evolution of games could be used as a model to study the way societies (or rules in society) evolve. Assume we could. Why would we want to do this? It appears to make the task doable. We can then study the history of the last 100 years or so of these societies, instead of studying their histories of the last 1000 years or more. Is this the worry? I do not see why I have to study the history of the last 4000 years to understand modern India. To the extent past becomes relevant (my research into some particular question will tell me whether the past is relevant, if so which part of the past is relevant, and how far I need to go in understanding the issue I want to understand), only to that extent do I need to study the past. The general statement ‘we are what we are because of the past’ is true. But this is also a general statement. How far into my ‘past’ do you need to go in order to understand my present? That depends on which part of the present you want to understand and what this ‘understanding’ means in the context of your research. The same applies to a study of cultures and societies.
Is the model of games useful in understanding evolution of some aspect of society? If you use ‘games’ in a very, very general sense (viz. there are players, strategies, end-results, and such like), then it might. There is a flourishing branch of mathematics called ‘Game theory’ that has been used to study many things in nature and society: from the evolution of rules and norms to seeing evolution itself in Game-theoretic terms. I need to warn you that its notion of games is a technical one and involves two or more ‘players’, who follow certain strategies for ‘winning’ to which a certain pay-off is coupled. While it has uncovered certain interesting dilemmas in societies, I do not find it as fruitful as its practitioners claim. (But I suspect this is not what you have in mind.)
I am not sure whether this is what your questions are about. Could you please clarify further?
Dear Tapori,
What are you trying to do? Make me feel silly for writing long posts or for writing in an academic style?! You do not have to apologise for your lack of ‘eloquence’: we are having a conversation, which means we need to understand each other, and this is not a contest for judging literary styles and capacities!
Dear *Satya*,
You raise far too many issues; some can be answered here, some have been dealt with elsewhere, some can only be dealt with later… At the risk of sounding vain (a mere assurance about the absence of vanity is all I can give), I do think that you should read at least two things I have written: the ‘immature’ version of my project and ‘The Heathen…’ The one I can send you through e-mail (thanks to Arun Gupta) but I need an e-mail address to which I can send it. The other, you can get it through the inter-ick up the issues I can address myself to here, and leave the rest for the time being. First some general points though.
1. I do not want to indulge in a discussion about Behavioural Psychology either on this forum or on any other forum. It is to waste of time I do not have. Let me very briefly state where I stand with respect to that discipline. In its early days, it was useful in providing some insights into animal behaviour. I share the dominant consensus regarding its status today: it is obsolete. It does not quite have the status of ‘phlogiston theory’ but it is pretty close to the latter. I have suffered through many writings of Skinner and his disciples, but I have neither the time nor the interest to discuss their ‘theories’ now. This means, I am going to skip over issues involving ‘shaping’, ‘conditioning’ and such like.
2. There will be other issues I cannot discuss in any detail: the nature of scientific and ad hoc explanations and such themes from the philosophy of science. At best, I could make some bald claims and leave them there.
3. Even with respect to your question (c), I need to skip certain things (for instance, explaining why the question is posed wrongly). You will need to bear with all these limitations.
Having got some of the preliminaries out of the way let me turn to your post.
Here is your first concern: “Someone, let’s say her name is Wendy, comes along and sniggers ‘when you worship the lingam, you worship a phallus’. You…identify Wendy’s statement as an ‘ad hoc’ explanation. You counter: ‘No, I do puja (very loosely translates to ‘worship’) a lingam and lingam has many different meanings’. Couldn’t Wendy argue that your explanation is ‘ad hoc’ too?”
Two reformulations. (1) I do not identify Wendy’s statement as an ‘ad hoc’ explanation. I say that it trivializes what I am doing by providing a distorted description of what I do. (2) Here is what I say: “I am doing Puja to Shiva.” No discussion about ‘Lingam’ or its many meanings. This is a *wrong* way of conducting a discussion. She cannot, therefore, argue that I am giving an ‘ad hoc’ explanation because I am not giving an ‘explanation’ of what I am doing but merely describing it.
Let us sketch some scenarios in order to see what conversational moves are there in such a discussion. (1) She sees me doing ‘something’ and asks me what I am doing. (2) I say I am doing Puja to Shiva. From here on, two possible threads of discussion open up. The first thread goes like this. (3) Either she asks ‘why’ I do it: I say, it is our tradition, or that I am a Bhakta of Shiva, or because my mother said I should, or whatever else happens to be the case. Or she asks me why Shiva has the form he has: either I tell her the story from the Puranas, or provide her a ‘sthala purana’ (i.e. a story about that particular temple) or I say, ‘this is how we do it’. (4) Let us say, she pursues the story from the Puranas and asks me ‘So, you are worshipping the Lingam of Shiva’. I say, ‘yes, indeed, this *is* Shiva Lingam’. (5) Being persistent, she goes further: ‘do you know what ‘Lingam’ means?’ and I reply ‘well, yes, I do know some of its meanings as we use it in our language’. (6) Suppose she isolates one meaning, say, phallus and asks me: ‘So, you say you are worshipping Shiva’s Lingam’. I reply, unperturbed, ‘yes, but I said so already: this is Shiva’s Lingam. That is why we call it Shivalingam and not, say, KuberaLingam’. In this thread, where I am using Indian words, she cannot even come close to saying what she wants to.
Suppose at step three, we switch to speaking in English. (3’) She asks what ‘puja’ is and what ‘lingam’ means. Here is what I would say *today*: “‘Puja’ is best understood as a ritual; as far as ‘Lingam’ is concerned, I suggest you see it as ‘the form’ in which this ritual is performed to Shiva”. Again here, two possible threads open up: the first where she ‘contests’ my translation and the other where she accepts it. Let us pursue the second thread to begin with. (4’) ‘Why has Shiva taken this form?’ Because I am not trying to be polemical, I tell her our stories from the Puranas and say it is one of the stories from our tradition. And I add, ‘to perform puja to Shiva *means* to perform the ritual to this form’. Because my description has the form of a definition (Shiva puja=ritual to this form) no sensible discussion about it is possible. (5’) She can come up with *another* definition, but then, I say ‘yes, but that is not my definition’ and the discussion is over. On this thread, where we are discussing in English, she cannot say what she wants to either.
Let us now suppose she contests my translation given in step (3’). How is she going to do it? (4’) “But you are wrong. ‘Puja’ is ‘worship’ and ‘lingam’ means ‘penis’. Therefore, you are ‘worshipping a penis when you say that you are doing puja to the Shiva Lingam’”. Here is what I would say *today*: “You see, the English word ‘worship’ comes basically from Christian theology where one worships either the God or the Devil and nothing else. Under no interpretation of such a theology could one consider Shiva as ‘God’, leaving us with only one possibility that Shiva is either the Devil or his minion. Is this what you want say: that we are worshipping Devil or his minions? In that case, Wendy, we are not discussing a translation issue but a Christian theological one.” Again, two threads open up: either she denies it or asks for further explication. Let us take up her denial first. (5’) “No, that is not what ‘worship’ means. It means ‘reverence’. I am not a Christian, I was born a Jew; I know nothing of Christian theology even though I was married to one for some time.” I would say the following today: “Wendy, I would be willing to accept your definition of ‘worship’. But if I do so, I must do violence to other people and cultures: the Jewish, the Christian and the Muslim. From your definition, it would follow that they are not ‘worshipping’ God at all! And further, they cannot. In all these cultures, one can show ‘reverence’ to the elderly, the king, knowledge, the powerful, etc. To say that they show ‘reverence’ to God in the same way is to transform all of them into ‘idolaters’, which, according to their theologies, is the greatest sin! I am sorry, but your translation of ‘puja’ is not a mere linguistic issue.” Again, the discussion shifts to another level. She cannot pursue this line of enquiry either.
Let us say she asks for explication, the other thread in step (4’). How can the discussion proceed? (5”) Here let me bend the stick in favour of Wendy. “But every Sanskrit-English dictionary, and every Indian teacher in Sanskrit who knows English, translates ‘puja’ as ‘worship’. Are you saying their knowledge of either languages is deficient and *you are the only one* who knows how to translate ‘Puja’ correctly?” Being a reasonable person, I would not get offended by her rhetorical attempts to make me appear ridiculous. I would say the following: “You see, Wendy, we all learnt English through Indian languages and were taught that ‘Puja’ means ‘worship’. We give the meaning of ‘Puja’ to the English word ‘worship’. The first generations of translators ‘decided’ to translate ‘puja’ as ‘worship’ because they were convinced that we are ‘idolaters’ and ‘worshipped’ the Devil and his minions. So, you see, we have to discuss the historical issues involving colonialism and what it means to a culture like ours in order to satisfactorily resolve the issues of translation. That is all I am saying. Shall we do so? Have your read ‘The Heathen…’?”
Thus I can go on sketching several other scenarios of the possible conversational moves open to Wendy in conducting such a conversation. In none of them can she induce the *cognitive wrongness* that was induced in me when I was a boy of 14. She simply does not have the cognitive ability to come up with an explanation that can trivialize my experience *any more*. Let me just pen a few reflections about this state of affairs, because it is very important to realise what has happened *consistently* throughout these conversations.
(A) The first thing to notice is that, in all these scenarios, I am *defining* the terms of the debate. She is unable to do this with respect to what *I am doing*.
(B) I am able to do it *because* I am knowledgeable about the western culture. That is, I am not ignorant of the western culture the way I was when I was 14 or 24. Therefore, I am able to *tell* her that she does not understand her *own* culture as well as I understand hers.
(C) My principle of charity forbids me from transforming any culture, whether hers or mine, into a *bunch of idiots*. My conversational move in (5’) makes me *defend* the Jewish, Islamic, and Christian cultures because of this principle. Of course, the same principle makes me defend Indian traditions as ‘reasonable’ ones too.
(D) I am not making use of any fancy defensive ‘explanation’ - some or another kind of ‘symbolic’ explanation - (or even any ‘explanation’) that many Indians come up with to defend their own traditions. Such ‘explanations’ arise out of ignorance: both of their own traditions and, above all, of the western culture. They have very little *understanding* of the subjects they talk about, but the ‘conviction’ they know what is there to know is matched by none. (Some of the discussions on Sulekha have made this very obvious.) Most English-speaking Indian intellectuals are a pompous and empty lot: they talk and argue for the sake of doing so, and believe that ‘knowledge’ is a matter of providing citations and references to books. (I will be writing the article I promised you, as an answer to your question, where I will take up this issue in some detail.) But they have no depth of understanding regarding either their own traditions or those of the West. They are like the JNU ‘intellectuals’: empty, sanctimonious, convinced of their own intelligence, but full of hot air.
(E) “To understand my mother”, I wrote in the target article, “I needed to understand my mother-in-law”. What you see in my imaginary conversation with Wendy is an exemplification of this realisation. There will be no Indian Renaissance without breeding a *new* set of intellectuals. The current lot is not even worth the paper on which they write and produce so much nonsense. This might sound a harsh judgement. Undoubtedly, there are some fine individuals among them; I know a few of them personally myself. But this is how I look at the issue.
I wanted to say more. But that can wait. What I want from you is to reflect upon your question, which I have cited at the beginning of this article, in the light of what I have written in this post. I would like to hear of those reflections before I proceed further to tackle some of the other questions.
Friendly greetings
Balu
Your question: Is it desirable to have a model that can simulate social and cultural changes? I cannot see what good reason there is not to find it desirable. It would be eminently desirable. It will take some time though before we get there, but we will surely get there. Thanks to computers, we have a possibility of talking realistically about simulation. However, we have to still go a very long way before we are able to do so. We need to build some theories about social and cultural change and evolution; we need to develop suitable algorithms for simulating these changes; we need to develop more and different kinds of logics (non-monotonic ones) than exist today; we need to simulate some relevant aspects of human reasoning process … It is only now that we are *beginning* to simulate the evolutionary process and have developed some kinds of algorithms to do so. We need to overlay this with developments (hardly understood today) about social dynamics and cultural dynamics. And then study what could happen. So, it is definitely going to take some time. In all probability, we will first start simulating some fragments of social or cultural reality first (after all, this is what modelling means).
(a) It has always been my dream (and some kind of vague conviction that it can be done) to simulate the growth of ‘the Indian caste system’: I think a fundamental aspect of the ‘caste structure’ is recursive in nature. The only thing (!) one has to do is to isolate the principles (probably they will be four or five at the most) and use something like the genetic algorithm to simulate its growth, disintegration and recombination. (This is probably the *only* way to check the ‘truth’ of any theory about the nature of the caste system.)
(b) I think some aspects of the western culture are susceptible to a simulation as well. I think that the dynamics of its ‘norms’ and this culture’s basic strategies of social co-operation can be simulated. The empirical history would be the check for the accuracy of such a simulation.
(c) If both (a) and (b) can be done, then we can simulate an aspect of ‘colonialism’ as an interaction between (a) and (b). Again, we have the colonial history functioning as a check about what is simulated.
So, if this is your question, this is where I stand with respect to simulation. In all probability, simulation is *how* we can test the ‘truth’ of theories about the social and cultural world. That we have not been able to do this so far has more to do with the state of our knowledge than with the nature of cultural and social realities.
Friendly greetings
Balu
Dear Tset,
There is something very funny about us Indians. Intelligent people prefer to call themselves ‘village idiots’, whereas the real idiots go around calling others ‘stupid’! (Just to help you place me, I call the second group ‘stupid’! Go figure, as the Americans say.)
In a way I have taken up this issue in my reply to Tapori and Vrikodara in #328. The only thing I want to add here is about the Chinese. There is another way to look at the feeling we have with respect to the (mainland) Chinese. What if it has nothing to do with age of the culture but with a fundamental *structural similarity* within the Asian culture? What if there is something called the ‘Asian culture’ the way one can speak of the Western culture? Prima facie, there is some ‘evidence’ (of sorts) that makes this appellation plausible. How could traditions that we call ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Buddhism’ so easily *migrate* across the whole of Asia? Remember this happened without any kind of centralised authority (military, political, economic or religious) enforcing it on the entire continent. The travelling ‘mendicants’, so many thousands years ago for heaven’s sake, ‘carried’ these traditions outwards. A plausible hypothesis would be: there must be something fundamentally similar (structurally similar?) between the different Asian cultures that makes them into the Asian culture. How about this: the strategy of social interaction is the same within the Asian culture? That is, one could speak in terms of the western way of ‘going-about’ (i.e. strategies of social interaction that characterises the western culture) and the Asian way of doing so. If only one could ‘isolate’ these strategies of social interaction today, we have the necessary formal tools (at this moment) to start simulating them tomorrow!
Friendly greetings
Dear Vrikodara,
Your question: “In the context of puja, does Shivalinga denote or connote anything other than Shiva, in particular "phallus"? A Wendy says "Yes", a Balu says "No". For some person, not on this board, there is not a dialog; it is a reading of Wendy, a reading of Balu - how to decide between the two answers, which one represents the truth about Hindus?”
Depending on the patience of the visitor, a number of answers are possible including an identification of the nature of the dispute.
1. In the context of the Catholic mass, do the bread and the wine mean or refer to anything other than the flesh and blood of Christ? The Catholics say ‘yes’ (this is their doctrine of ‘transubstantiation’), the Protestant says ‘no’. How to decide between the two answers and which one represents the truth about the Catholics? Or does one want to say, which one represents the truth about Christianity? Or does one want to say, which one represents the truth about the world? Notice that, in each case, the dispute is *not* about the meaning (connotation) or the reference (denotation) of the word ‘bread’ and ‘wine’: it is a theological dispute that *appears* to be about the meaning and reference of words. So, how to decide between the answer in this case? Depends on your theology.
2. In the context of Christian worship, does the word ‘The Bible’ connote or denote anything other than the word of God, in particular a book? One says ‘yes’, the believer says ‘no’. Is this about the meaning or reference of the word ‘The Bible’? In *English*, the word ‘The Bible’ does not mean ‘a book’. It is a *name*. What does it name? A book. Any book? No. All books? No. Only books? No, because it could be a *scroll* too. So, some books, some scrolls and even some ‘recitations’ could all be called ‘The Bible’. Let us go further. Could one use the word ‘The Bible’ to name any of the above in different languages? Well, yes. So, what does the word ‘The Bible’ name? Something that is ‘the same’ irrespective of the language, or the form this ‘something’ assumes. ‘The Bible’ names this. So, what is the dispute about? The one who says that ‘The Bible’ denotes or connotes ‘a book’ is *fixated* on the physical shape of some book he saw somewhere and somewhen without even thinking his own claim through. So, one does not even have to refer to what the believers believe in order to show this. How to decide between the answers in this case? Depends on your understanding of what language is with respect to its use sociologically.
3. In the context of physics, does the word ‘mass’ denote or connote an invariant or a variable? A Newtonian says an ‘invariant’; an Einsteinian says a ‘variable’. For some one who does not know Physics, there is no dialogue. A reading of a Newton and a reading of Einstein. How to decide between the two readings, which one represents the truth about the physicists? I am sure we can elaborate on these ourselves. What is the dispute about? The truth of the reading has to do *not* with the community of physicists, *not* what any group says at any given moment of time, *but with* what a scientific theory is and how one chooses between competing theories.
These three examples are enough to illustrate the following: what *appears* as a dispute about the meaning and reference of words can be about things that have absolutely nothing to do with either the denotation or the connotation of the words. This is the first thing one will have to tell someone who is not on the board. Having said this, we can now focus on what the dispute is between a Wendy and a Balu.
4. In the context of puja, does Shivalinga denote or connote anything other than Shiva, in particular "phallus"? Does ShivaLinga ‘mean’ phallus? No, of course not. (‘Linga’ might, but not ‘Shivalinga’. But I will come to this.) Does the word mean ‘the phallus of Shiva’? Yes it does. In what way, precisely? The only way of answering this question is to circumscribe the reference first. Let us assume the existence of an entity ‘named’ Shiva. Let us assume too that he has a phallus. Then Shiva Linga names the phallus of Shiva. However, if it refers to such a *unique* entity as ‘the’ phallus of Shiva there can be only one such. (Shiva does not have infinite number of phalluses; and Shiva is an entity different from Durga, Ganesha and, say, a mortal called Balu.) So, do we do puja to this *unique* entity? That cannot be the case: there are finitely many shiva lingas in India and outside. So, what we do puja to is not a *unique* entity which is ‘the’ phallus of Shiva but a ‘form’ (or ‘representation’) of this unique entity.
What kind of a ‘form’ is this? It cannot connote or denote the ‘material’ of which ‘the’ phallus is made of. Whatever be the material out of which ‘the’ phallus of Shiva is constructed, it cannot be simultaneously constructed out of stone, aluminium, marble and so on. So, it will have to be the ‘shape’ of ‘the’ phallus of Shiva. Therefore, if something is to be a ‘Shiva linga’ at all, it *must* have a shape of ‘the’ phallus of Shiva and that shape must be invariant across Shiva lingas.
The very same devotees of Shiva, however, do puja to ‘Jyothirlinga’ and ‘Aatmalinga’ too. They are Shiva Lingas as well. Either one denies, pace the above argument, that these two are Shiva Lingas at all, or one has to say that these Lingas have the same ‘shape’ as ‘the’ phallus of Shiva. Neither of these two possibilities is true. The first is empirically false (both synchronically and diachronically); the second is to literally ‘see’ phallus where there is none, in ‘light’.
The only possible conclusion: Shivalinga cannot possibly refer to the ‘shape’ of ‘the’ phallus of Shiva. It is a *form*, which has little to do with the ‘shape’ of Shiva’s Penis. (Of course, no one has seen the ‘shape’ of that particular penis except S B!) Thus, for the lack of an alternative (at this stage of the discussion), we have to settle for the following: ShivaLingam is the ‘form’ in which we do Puja to Shiva. Apparently, this mind-numbing (linguistic and philosophical) tour merely tells us what our grandmothers told us in all their simplicity: we do puja to Shiva in the form of Linga.
Of course, one can go further in such a discussion along any number of other lines. It is not my intent and, I presume, neither yours to do so. Hopefully, this goes some way to clarifying the question you raised. The issues and the disputes are not so arbitrary any more than they are merely questions of alternate readings or etymological fights. Other substantial issues are involved and it is not an ‘undecidable’!
Friendly greetings
Balu
A very quick reply. First, it is clear what you ask of me. Second, I do promise to return to this theme in at least some detail in the near future. Third, I want to briefly tell you something now. Seeking a solid ground is not searching for some kind of faith. You might feel a bit disoriented, but back then when you were an atheist, you discarded it and searched for something else not because you felt disoriented but because you found that atheism was not enough. So, the first thing to notice in your search for a ground is that such a search might have nothing to do with ‘feeling’ disoriented but in thinking that you are. You say you are seeking solid ground and, if I may continue using that metaphor, in the process of finding it you have taken false starts, toured blind alleys, stumbled, fell and even hurt yourself. If you have done all this to come to where you are now, Cynical, have you realised that you could not have done any of these things *if you were not already standing on solid ground?* In a way, this might be a good description of what my project is about: to show you that you are on solid ground already and that you always were! All I want and can do is to remove the blinkers and help you see that you are on solid ground and that you have been on it all along. This is an assurance I want to give you before I try to persuade of it in the near future.
I will give a short reply to the others soon.
Thank you for inviting me to stay awhile (#292). Not that I intend to leave so soon. After all, the discussion is more than just enjoyable, it is instructive as well. Only I wasn’t sure how to respond to your queries and at what level. I felt that in your answer to my “rain dance comment” you touched upon a very important issue (#272), but I was unhappy with the form it took. In a follow-up teaser you express your concerns thus: “could distortions simply be the result of missing something they don’t know? And what then are the implications of such distortions to the well being of mankind? Might we (by distorting) be blocking access to, and gradually destroying knowledge that has been encoded into the social practices of other cultures?” Finally, you address the same issue again in your comment #325 and rephrase it in terms of cultural practices having “intended purposes”. Again I am unhappy with the formulation of this question because it occludes a very important, if not *the* most important issue of a comparative science of cultures: Is it possible *to learn* from other cultures? If it is, what *can* we learn?
Do not expect me to answer these questions. They are not the kind of questions that can be answered straight away; even if they could, the answers wouldn’t make much sense today. However, because your concern *is* very important, let me try to address it in a general way.
You will remember that in an earlier comment I have spoken about Europe’s “Oriental Renaissance”. Looking back at this period, one cannot but be impressed by the enormous dynamism created and the amount of intellectual energy applied to the field of “Oriental studies”. What fuelled the dream of the minds of many giants across Europe was the expectation of learning from the East, and, by doing so, *transforming the culture of the West!* Remember, their point of reference was the period in European history we now call “Renaissance”. One aspect of this period was the rediscovery of the Classical texts. But this discovery was linked with many other (r)evolutions in the culture of the West. Just think of the domains of arts and literature, philosophy, science, etc.
Therefore, even though energy was applied to collecting *the texts* of the eastern cultures, what made it all sensible was the expectation that they contained *insights and knowledge* from which the West could *learn*. I am absolutely convinced that the Europeans were correct when they thought that they could *learn* from other cultures. This is also what we should bring into consideration when we turn to books such as Schlegel’s *Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Inder* (On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians; first decade 19th century). The German Romantics just gave a favourable expression to a sentiment that was deeply rooted in the culture of the West. Indians possessed a *wisdom* the West didn’t have, and was therefore worth exploring.
Perhaps, we should regret that they were seeking *wisdom* instead of *knowledge*. The *wisdom* of the East turned out to be clouded in mysticism and hence only accessible - if at all - to mystics themselves. Of course, one could claim that the mystical is very important and that it was acknowledged by geniuses such as Einstein. (This is what Sankrant Sanu did in one of his comments on his column (#69) in order to defend why it is important to read the Upanishads.)
Being neither a mystic, nor a genius, what do I get? What is it that I could learn from the East? When one turns to contemporary social sciences, the answer is obvious: *nothing*. Surely, I didn’t give up my Catholic faith with its beliefs in the Immaculate Conception of Maria or Jesus’ Ascension to replace them by others such as the doctrine of metempsychosis. No, I will not give up *Western* science (natural science, that is) and accept the belief that rain is piss of the gods. And no, I do not believe that jumping up and down causes the bladder of the Gods to leak.
For the same reason *Satya*, I am very unhappy with your attempt to make sense of the practice of rain dancing. You claim that the “Native Americans see the Universe as the manifestation of an intricate natural harmony”. I am willing to believe you, but what does that mean? You say: *A NA sees him/herself as part of that delicate harmonic balance. Native Americans do not see themselves as distinct from Nature. The elements act on Man, and Man also acts on the elements. It isn't a struggle of who conquers whom. Rather, both Man and every other element of the Natural World influence each other, and every event that occurs, from the tiniest raindrop to the biggest tornado, is part of a logical pattern emerging from the interplay of those influences. As Chief Seattle said of Man and the Web of Nature. 'Whatever he does to the Web, he does to himself’.” You expand on this theme by giving the example of building houses.
The point that I want to make is this: if the explanation is true, we *do not* need Native American culture to know that. Our situation is this: as human beings, we think that cultures are worth studying *because we have the feeling that we can learn from them*. I am absolutely convinced that this feeling is correct. None of the social sciences address this feeling. On the contrary, everything we get is a distorted description trivializing the experience other cultures.
Thanks to Balu’s research project, we begin to see *why* the West couldn’t possibly have learned from other cultures. Its religion forced the western culture to see others as its *inferior variants*. About this issue much has been said already. Here I will make one thread explicit that is implicit in what I have said so far.
I emphasised that the Europeans searched for texts and expected to gain insight and knowledge. But look at what happened. Holwell, for example, translated the *Shastas* to prove the soundness of Indian thinking (in his *Interesting Historical Events, Relative to the Provinces of Bengal, and the Empire of Indostan*, 1765). By doing so, he merely proved that the Indian thinkers shared the European insights into the nature of God. However, he was forced to describe contemporary India unfavourably. The texts which contained these valuable insights were very old. Since then, corruption had played its role. What kind of corruption? The rituals of the Indians and their stories. That is, everything we associate with *Hinduism* - the religion of the Indians. So what did Holwell learn that he didn’t know before? Nothing! Christianity had already told him that there was only one God who created earth. The missionaries who did not fail to describe the Indians as *Devil worshippers* had already told him that the Indian culture was corrupt.
Now let us return to Wittgenstein’s remark. He says that “the very idea of wanting to explain a practice seems wrong to me”. What kind of explanation was he thinking of? The one Frazer provided of course. What did Frazer provide? Stories, beliefs, worldviews, etc. which were believed to *explain* the practice, that is, *cause* of these practices, so to speak. What else did Wittgenstein say? All that Frazer does is to make the practices plausible “to people who think as he does”. I invite you to consider the possibility that Wittgenstein was not just thinking about other *individuals*. In fact, research reveals that what Frazer did, was the dominant way of doing in *the West*. In other words, one could paraphrase Wittgenstein’s remark thus: All that Frazer does is to make practices plausible to *people in the West*. In other words, Wittgenstein is making an observation about the culture of the West. What does his insight boil down to? That people in the West search for *beliefs*, of which the practices are an expression, to make sense of practices. Livingstone asked the rain doctor why he *believed* that dancing caused rain.
The next step must be obvious. What if there are cultures where beliefs have nothing do to with how people go about in the world (i.e., they are not *constitutive* of this going about in the world)? If they do exist, it must be obvious that they must possess other *kinds of knowledge*, i.e. kinds of knowledge that differ from what we are familiar with. Does it make sense to think so? I believe it does. Balu has offered an intriguing and convincing beginning in his book, where he explores and makes sense of this idea. The gist of his arguments cannot be summarised within the confines of a comment.
Yes, other cultures do possess knowledge. And, yes, current social sciences do block access to that knowledge. Do they also destroy it? I do not think so. What is needed, however, is a theory explaining cultural differences. That this will come I am sure of. In fact, as you yourself said, the Indian Renaissance has already begun.
Willem Derde