Shunya's Notes

Atheistic Materialism in Ancient India

(Cross-posted as my new column on 3QuarksDaily, where it has received many comments. Also see a new announcement about the 3QD annual blog awards, the first one for the best science blog post. Nominate your favorites today.)
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Various societies at different times have dazzled with their bursts of creative and intellectual energy. Historians have a penchant for dubbing them Golden Ages. Examples include the Athens of Herodotus, the Baghdad of Haroun al-Rashid, and the India of the Buddha. But though India has long been famous for its "ancient wisdom", the few historical sources that survive shed woefully inadequate light on the Buddha's society. By contrast, far better portraits of classical Greece and Abbasid Baghdad are available to us.

Still, evidence at hand suggests that around 600-500 BCE, in parts of the Indo-Gangetic plain of north India, people were asking some very bold and original questions: What is the nature of thought and perception? What is the source of consciousness? Are virtue and vice absolute or mere social conventions? Old traditions were under attack, new trades and lifestyles were emerging, and urban life was in a churn, reducing the power of uptight Brahmins.

Philosophical schools flourished in a marketplace of ideas, and included chronic fatalists, radical materialists, self-mortifying ascetics, die-hard skeptics, cautious pragmatists, saintly mystics, and the ubiquitous miracle mongers. "Rivalries and debates were rife. Audiences gathered around the new philosophers in the kutuhala-shalas—literally, the place for creating curiosity—the parks and groves on the outskirts of the towns.... The presence of multiple, competing ideologies was a feature of urban living."[1] It was also an age of nascent democratic republics, which, like Athens later, did not ultimately survive the march of monarchy and empire.[2]

America, the Cold War, and the Taliban

(Cross-posted as my fourth column on 3QuarksDaily)

The US pulled out of Vietnam (video) in 1975 after more than a decade and a humiliating defeat. The war had been expensive, the draft unpopular, and too many white boys had come home in body bags. A strong antiwar mood had set in amidst the public and the Congress. Most Americans now believed it was never their war to fight. The Nixon Doctrine held that “Asian boys must fight Asian wars.”[1] At least in the short term, direct military engagement in the third world seemed politically unviable for any US administration.

Besides Vietnam, the US had fought and lost another war in Indochina – in Laos – but rather differently. This was a proxy war, sponsored by the US but led by Hmong mercenaries on the ground. It was waged in relative secrecy, far from “congressional oversight, public scrutiny, and conventional diplomacy.” The advantages of such a war were soon evident: “Even at the end of the war, few Americans knew that in Laos, the USAF had fought ‘the largest air war in military history ... dropping 2.1 million tons of bombs over this small, impoverished nation — the same tonnage that Allied powers dropped on Germany and Japan during WWII.’”[2]

In the 60s and 70s, anti-colonial and nationalistic struggles were cropping up in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Blinded by its anti-commie paranoia, the US saw even popular movements for social and economic justice as precursors to communism, their leaders as Soviet proxies, and was determined to combat and crush them. But, given the unviability of direct military engagement on so many fronts, proxy war was the only military option left to the US. There was one minor obstacle though: how to finance all these proxy wars? Many Congressmen asked awkward questions, especially after the disaster in Indochina. When they agreed to fund, they wanted debates and oversight. The idea of a new, recurring source of money — bypassing the Congress — gripped the minds of many.

A Treasure Trove of Archival Footage from Around the World

I recently came across a YouTube channel, the Travel Film Archive, with over 300 short videos featuring archival footage from around the world, from the city streets of Trinidad, 1938, to the Ituri Forest in Africa, 1929; from the New York subway, 1905, to the Sahara Desert, 1953, or Sri Lanka, 1932. Much of the footage is silent, with only title frames to describe the location or action, but some is accompanied by documentary style voiceover. One James A. Fitzpatrick, something like the Rick Steves of his day, is a frequent narrator.

The footage itself, along with the commentary, is a fascinating glimpse into the past, a window on how people lived 60 or 90 years ago. We see bits of fading or vanished cultural practices in their local context, from a time when they were still real: Native Americans in Idaho in full feathered regalia, participating in a drumming ceremony; Australian Aborigines painted in white stripes, throwing boomerangs; Alpine Germans carving wood and staging the Passionsspiele; young Tahitian women dressed to pass as their French colonizers; life in a Sinhalese village, when coconut was king and people remained happily unfettered by excessive clothing.

Though the commentary will strike the modern viewer as naive, amusing, or poorly informed about the world (perhaps even offensive), one can't also help but be impressed by the boldness of those who endured the foreign climates and conditions, huge heavy cameras in tow, to learn something about other peoples and produce what's clearly meant to be a mind-expanding educational experience for the millions back home, who would never in their lifetimes have opportunity for such adventure themselves. The power of such films to transport us and bring us the mysteries of the world today is damped by the ubiquity of images and information. But I imagine that in their day, these gems must have gone some way toward enriching the lives and minds of their viewers.

The collection also provides a window on how Westerners (mostly Americans, here, it seems) thought of Others in those days, how little they saw as they looked on so earnestly. What struck me generally, as I watched and sampled many videos, was the way that things have changed as much as they have remained the same.

The full range of videos is definitely worth perusing. Here are a few random highlights that may be of interest to readers of this blog:

Marco Polo's India

Returning home from China in 1292 CE, Marco Polo arrives on the Coromandel Coast of India in a typical merchant ship with over sixty cabins and up to 300 crewmen. He enters the kingdom of the Tamil Pandyas near modern day Tanjore, where, according to custom, ‘the king and his barons and everyone else all sit on the earth.’ He asks the king why they ‘do not seat themselves more honorably.’ The king replies, ‘To sit on the earth is honorable enough, because we were made from the earth and to the earth we must return.’ Marco Polo documented this episode in his famous book, The Travels, along with a rich social portrait of India that still resonates with us today:

The climate is so hot that all men and women wear nothing but a loincloth, including the king—except his is studded with rubies, sapphires, emeralds and other gems. Merchants and traders abound, the king takes pride in not holding himself above the law of the land, and people travel the highways safely with their valuables in the cool of the night. Marco Polo calls this ‘the richest and most splendid province in the world,’ one that, together with Ceylon, produces ‘most of the pearls and gems that are to be found in the world.’

The sole local grain produced here is rice. People use only their right hand for eating, saving the left for sundry ‘unclean’ tasks. Most do not consume any alcohol, and drink fluids ‘out of flasks, each from his own; for no one would drink out of another’s flask.’ Nor do they set the flask to their lips, preferring to ‘hold it above and pour the fluid into their mouths.’ They are addicted to chewing a leaf called tambur, sometimes mixing it with ‘camphor and other spices and lime’ and go about spitting freely, using it also to express serious offense by targeting the spittle at another’s face, which can sometimes provoke violent clan fights.

They ‘pay more attention to augury than any other people in the world and are skilled in distinguishing good omens from bad.’ They rely on the counsel of astrologers and have enchanters called Brahmans, who are ‘expert in incantations against all sorts of beasts and birds.’ For instance, they protect the oyster divers ‘against predatory fish by means of incantations’ and for this service they receive one in twenty pearls. The people ‘worship the ox,’ do not eat beef (except for a group with low social status), and daub their houses with cow-dung. In battle they use lance and shield and, according to Marco, are ‘not men of any valor.’ They say that ‘a man who goes to sea must be a man in despair.’ Marco draws attention to the fact that they ‘do not regard any form of sexual indulgence as a sin.’

Their temple monasteries have both male and female deities, prone to being cross with each other. And since estranged deities spell nothing but trouble in the human realm, bevies of spinsters gather there several times each month with ‘tasty dishes of meat and other food’ and ‘sing and dance and afford the merriest sport in the world,’ leaping and tumbling and raising their legs to their necks and pirouetting to delight the deities. After the ‘spirit of the idols has eaten the substance of the food,’ they ‘eat together with great mirth and jollity.’ Pleasantly disposed by the evening entertainment, the gods and goddesses descend from the temple walls at night and ‘consort’ with each other—or so the priest announces the next morning—bringing great joy and relief to all. ‘The flesh of these maidens,’ adds Messer Marco, ‘is so hard that no one could grasp or pinch them in any place. ... their breasts do not hang down, but remain upstanding and erect.’ For a penny, however, ‘they will allow a man to pinch [their bodies] as hard as he can.’

The Eichmann Within

Hannah Arendt's landmark Eichmann in Jerusalem documents the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi nabbed by the Israeli secret police in Argentina and brought to Jerusalem, where he was tried and executed. Arendt's clear-eyed reportage covered a good deal of the historical and moral territory of the Holocaust. By peering into the heart of a man and a system held synonymous with evil, she examined the very notion of the word: What exactly is the face of evil?

I've also watched (twice) Eyal Sivan's documentary on the trial of Eichmann, The Specialist, much of it courtroom drama that sheds powerful light on the man. Eichmann emerges as a self-absorbed mid-level bureaucrat, neither intelligent nor reflective, devoid of courage, deferential to authority, eager to please his bosses and quick to take pride in a job done well, and with no special antipathy towards Jews. Indeed, he seems quite ordinary in his insecurities, sentimentality, and the capacity to delude himself about his responsibility for the suffering of others.

Arendt's analysis of the banality of evil led Stanley Milgram to devise his now famous experiment to study the harm most ordinary people would willingly (without coercion) do to their fellow humans under a different configuration of power and authority. This is what he found:

I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

Milgram essentially confirmed Arendt's analysis. But today, almost two generations later, have things really changed? One might argue that today "there is greater societal awareness of the dangers of blind obedience", which might provide a bulwark against such evil. Well, a new study has just "replicated" Milgram's experiment and its findings are not encouraging. It'll be published in American Psychologist next month. For now, we have media reports (including this CNN video):

Replicating one of the most controversial behavioral experiments in history, a Santa Clara University psychologist has found that people will follow orders from an authority figure to administer what they believe are painful electric shocks.

More than two-thirds of volunteers in the research study had to be stopped from administering 150 volt shocks of electricity, despite hearing a person's cries of pain, professor Jerry M. Burger concluded in a study published in the January issue of the journal American Psychologist. "In a dramatic way, it illustrates that under certain circumstances people will act in very surprising and disturbing ways,'' said Burger.

More here (and here). Also check out this TED talk by Philip Zimbardo (23 min), where he discusses both the Milgram experiment and his own famous 1971 Stanford prison experiment which too showed ordinary people willingly turning into monsters, how these studies help explain Abu Ghraib, and his interest in understanding the counterpoint to Arendt's banality of evil, i.e., the banality of heroism.

What Confucius Said

(This essay was published in Culture Wars, the reviews publication of the Institute of Ideas, London, in Feb 2009.)

During the Cultural Revolution, millions of Red Guards rampaged at the behest of Chairman Mao to rid China of its "Four Olds": old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. They defaced ancient monuments, destroyed historical artifacts, burnt monasteries, persecuted traditional arts, and tortured minorities and "bourgeois thinkers", leaving half-a-million dead in their wake. A special venom was directed at things Confucian. Encouraged to question their parents and teachers (who were traditionally revered), youngsters were soon marching with slogans like: "Parents may love me, but not as much as Chairman Mao".

Regarded later as an unmitigated disaster even by diehard commies, this wasn't the first time a Chinese leader had turned against Confucianism. The very first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, who also commissioned the Terracotta Army, had launched his own great Confucian purge in the third century BCE. But such events are anomalies for Confucianism, which would revive, adapt, and thrive again (the longest slump was during the Tang dynasty), giving China a distinctive cultural continuity for almost 2500 years.

No person has left a deeper mark on Chinese culture than Confucius, who lived 2500 years ago in an age of social turmoil. He was a member of the scholar or professional class who managed to become a mid-level bureaucrat and sought to define and practice the art of ruling.[1] Though, like Plato, he had no success in the real world, he laid the foundation of a great deal of subsequent Chinese reflection on the education and comportment of the ideal man, how he should live and interact with others, and the forms of society and government in which he should participate.[2]

Like the Buddha, Jesus, and Socrates, Confucius too never wrote a word. Even the Analects of Confucius, considered closest to his thought, was compiled after his death by many generations of disciples. To understand what he inspired in China, a better approach is to read the Analects along with three exegetical works that form the animating core of Confucianism, i.e., the Confucian canon—the Book of Mencius, the Great Learning, and the Doctrine of the Mean.

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A striking feature of the Confucian canon is its overwhelming concern with life in this world. While there is an abstract Heaven and the obligation to respect one's ancestors, God is conspicuously absent. Nor is there much metaphysical wonder or concern with the origin of the universe, the nature of mind and matter (as in Buddhism), or death and beyond. Humans, according to Confucius, should waste no time in trying to understand the forces of heaven and the realm of the spirits, and concentrate instead on the problems of this world, best tackled through education and character development. Confucianism, in this sense, is less religion or speculative thought, more a humanistic discourse on personal and social conduct.

Dholavira: A Harappan Metropolis

(A longer version of the article below appeared in the Dec 2008 issue of Himal Southasian.)

The road to Dholavira goes through a dazzling white landscape of salty mudflats. It is close to noon in early April and the mercury is already past 100F. The desert monotones are interrupted only by the striking attire worn by the women of the nomadic and semi-nomadic pastoral tribes that still inhabit this land: Ahir, Rabari, Jat, Meghwal, and others. When I ask the driver of my hired car to stop for a photo, they receive me with curious stares, hoots, and giggles.

This is the Rann of Kutch, an area about the size of Kuwait, almost entirely within Gujarat and along the border with Pakistan. Once an extension of the Arabian Sea, the Rann ("salt marsh") has been closed off by centuries of silting. During the monsoons, parts of the Rann fill up with seasonal brackish water, enough for many locals to even harvest shrimp in it. Some abandon their boats on the drying mudflats, presenting a surreal scene for the dry season visitor. Heat mirages abound. Settlement is limited to a few "island" plateaus, one of which, Khadir, hosts the remains of the ancient city of Dholavira, discovered in 1967 and excavated only since 1989.

Entering Khadir, we pass a village and find the only tourist bungalow in town. It hasn't seen a visitor in three days; I check in and head over to the ruins. I've planned this for months; even the hottest hour of the day cannot temper my excitement for the ruins of this 5,000 year-old metropolis of the Indus Valley Civilization. While hundreds of sites have been identified in Gujarat alone, this is among the five biggest known to us in the entire subcontinent, alongside Harappa, Mohanjo-daro, and Ganeriwala in Pakistan, and Rakhigarhi in India.

At the site office, a caretaker and his friend are playing cards on a charpoy. They offer me a chair and a glass of water, cooled in an earthen surahi. On a wall are the mysterious inscriptions from the famous signboard of Dholavira, painted above contemporary motifs to suggest a continuity of sorts. I learn from the caretaker that the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) still excavates each winter, alongside researchers from overseas. Hundreds from the local village are then employed on site. He says he has learned directly from the experts and offers to be my guide. I readily agree but hope that as part of the deal, he will overlook the "Photography Prohibited" injunction I had noticed earlier—a perfectly exasperating habit of the ASI—else I would have to attempt a bribe. I am relieved when the caretaker does not press the issue.

Indigenous Aryans?

Two years ago on a train in South India, I struck a conversation with a middle-aged Indian from New Jersey, traveling to visit his parents. He worked as a researcher at Colgate-Palmolive and held an advanced degree in science. Early in our conversation, after I told him about my extended travel in India, he professed a deep interest in Indian history. He even taught it as a hobby to the kids of middle-class Indian immigrants like himself, "keen on taking pride—some self-respect and dignity—in the culture and traditions of their original homeland." *

Among the things he taught was the truth about the ancient Aryans in India. Aryans are a big lie, he said; they never came. Instead, there was a migration out of India to West Asia. The people of the Indus Valley Civilization—who spoke a proto-Sanskrit—were the sole precursors of those who later wrote the Vedas in Sanskrit, which has been shown to be the mother of all Indo-European languages. By this time, we were engaged in a vigorous debate. He marshaled "evidence" for his claims: no archaeological dig has revealed signs of an Aryan invasion; population genetics has not revealed the presence of foreign traits; Indus valley seals show the early worship of Shiva; fire rituals existed in Indus Valley culture. He recited names of people who had confirmed such findings and dismissed linguistic and philological data as contradictory and unscientific.

Not only was he terribly mixed up on dates, he also evinced a strong tendency to regard Hindu scriptures as vessels of literal history. When I pushed him, he claimed that Lord Rama lived 1,725,000 years ago, when he also built the Ram Setu to Lanka (click to read what an Indian software engineer in the US has to say about it—he represents an outlook shared by a fair percentage in this demographic). He even tried to prove the historicity of Lord Krishna, citing the submerged ruins of an Indus Valley settlement discovered off the coast of Gujarat in the 80s, which he claimed was Krishna's kingdom of Dwarka.

I looked around and noticed that our debate had become a spectacle and many strangers were staring at us. Since neither of us was going to budge, I tried to end the debate. Fortunately, our destination soon arrived, and we said awkward goodbyes. I reflected later that he had invoked scientific jargon to make his case, but, as with so many other Indian scientists, he had internalized only the authority of science, not much of its spirit. He was clearly able to compartmentalize his reason—so he could innovate and achieve results in his scientific profession—while remaining quite innocent of critical thought in other spheres of his life. I felt sorry for the unsuspecting kids this man was teaching twice a week. Upon his return to the US, he emailed me pointers to websites that supported his view of history. A quick web search revealed that he was a bona fide Hindu chauvinist, a card-carrying member of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS).

Few topics in ancient history are as disputed today as the role of the Indo-Aryans in ancient India—disputed less in the halls of scholarship committed to facts and the dialectical process, more by (largely Indian) religious, nationalistic, and postcolonial establishments. The trouble is that the latter have even infiltrated major US universities and have been so voluble that it is now hard to find real scholarship on this topic on the web. Google searches are full of the kind of pseudo-history that my fellow traveler dispensed, at times dressed in a sophisticated academic language. The uninitiated reader must often fall prey to it. One of my own professors from graduate school, Subhash Kak (currently head of the department of computer science at Oklahoma State University), whose academic research areas include artificial intelligence and quantum computing, is also a major revisionist historian of India and the author of several impassioned books on the topic.

This Way for the Gas, Ladies & Gentlemen

Tadeusz Borowski was 21 years old when he was deported to the cluster of concentration camps in southern Poland, collectively known as Auschwitz, in 1943. His fiancée had mysteriously disappeared one night; when he went to look for her, he was befallen by her same fate: entrapment by the Nazis, arrest, and deportation for participation in the Polish resistance.

     

Until that night, young Borowski had been a student of literature in the underground university of Warsaw. Since it was the Nazis' intention to enslave the Poles, secondary school and university were forbidden to them during the occupation. Still, thousands risked death and deportation, meeting in small groups in private homes in order to pursue their studies. (This was a system revived from an earlier time, as similar restrictions had been resisted by Poles under the Russian occupation some decades earlier, when Marie Curie had studied in the underground "Floating University" of Warsaw.)

Borowski had started to write early, publishing his dark poetry through the underground press during his student days. While at Auschwitz, he wrote lengthy letters to his fiancée in the women's camp, and immediately after the war he wrote several devastatingly stark short stories recalling his life in the camps. A selection of these letters and stories have been published and translated in a small volume with the English title This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (although his story by that name doesn't appear in the collection). Having survived two years, mostly as a high-level prisoner, in a place where surreal violence and suffering were normalized and experienced as mundane, Borowski's first-person stories are characterized by a brutal acknowledgment of the fact that such extremes of acceptance, of behavior, are, indeed, humanly possible. The penetrating honesty and deep compassion of his writing confronts the reader surprisingly, a mixture of darkness and wonder that opens more questions than it settles on the nature of the human beast and gives a more textured evocation of life in a Nazi concentration camp than any I've read before.

While working in a position of relative comfort as an orderly in the medical facility at Auschwitz, where prisoners are healed or used for experimentation, where infants' corpses are cataloged, he writes to his lover in the women's camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau about the normalcy of the absurd, the daily goings on around him. These letters constitute the heart of this collection. In them, as in his stories, he writes about death, about the lines of prisoners headed for the gas chambers, about other murders and tortures inflicted by prisoners or guards; he writes about love, about his dreams for the future, about the emptiness that encroaches upon them all. He writes about the exhilaration of a prisoner boxing match, the pleasure of listening to the prisoner symphony orchestra, the greedy desire of the men prisoners for the women of the "Puff," the camp brothel where women prisoners are both pimped and privileged by the camp authorities.

Vacation Break

Tis' the season for travel. Usha and I will be away for 15 days to Northeastern Europe: Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Our mutually negotiated itinerary begins in Warsaw and takes in Krakow, Oswiecim (Auschwitz/Birkenau), Zamosc, Kaunas, Vilnius, Trakai, Riga, Sigulda, Tartu, Tallin, and more. Consequently, new posts may not happen at all (unless of course VP springs into heroic rearguard action).

A terrific book I'm reading in preparation is Walking Since Daybreak by Modris Eksteins. Here is an excerpt:

Death of History

The understanding of human behavior in the past has always been the raison d'etre of history. Because of this, history has prided itself on being a progressive discipline. Historians like to think that they have been to the modern world what theologians were to the age of enlightenment. They have provided meaning. In so doing, they have made the world a better place. History has been not only a subject of study; it has been a moral force. History, one could argue, has been the essence of the Enlightenment project.