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.

Asian Food for Thought

Growing up in India, I ate meat only a handful of times until I left home for college. My mother, a moderately pious Hindu, had a deep aversion to eating animals and wouldn’t allow meat in her kitchen (I also remember her kindness and sympathy towards the ragged animals that shared our city streets: cows, dogs, horses, goats, cats, donkeys, and even occasional elephants and camels). My father was vegetarian for the most part, except when, on rare occasions, he pretended to enjoy a few morsels of meat. I think he did this despite himself, mostly to project the public image of an adventurous, cosmopolitan man. If no one were looking, I’m sure he would have picked a vegetarian option ten times out of ten.

The only times I ate meat was when my older sister brought home a chicken or mutton (goat meat) dish from a friend’s place, or cooked it herself on a Sunday morning on a kerosene stove in our courtyard. When she cooked, my task was to procure the meat. I would bike up to the butcher’s shop and await my turn, squeamishly eyeing the goat carcasses hanging on hooks, and gallantly ask the man for ‘the best cuts,’ to which he always replied, ‘only the best for you, son.’ Washing and cleaning the meat, I felt a strange exhilaration—I saw it not as food but as the flesh and bone of a dead animal, hacked to bits just hours ago. Mother allowed my sister to use only the most beaten down utensils from her kitchen and later instructed the maid to scrub them clean thrice as long.

Still, my parents encouraged us, holding meat to be salutary for growing kids. Their attitude later struck me as similar to Gandhi’s own during his early struggle and experimentation with eating animals. Gandhi saw meat as a contributor to the enviable vigor, material progress, and sturdier physiques of people from the West, while battling his own and his society's traditional dispositions against it.

I was introduced to eating fish and prawns in college. Thereafter, living outside India, I began eating other animals too—cow, pig, turkey, crab, squid, etc. I had non-vegetarian food several times a week and it became a key part of my cooking repertoire—I acquired a bevy of fans for my spicy lamb curry and barbequed chicken. On my travels, I even sampled lobster, shark, snail, venison, guinea pig, and wild boar. But in the ensuing years my meat intake began to decline. I came to relish it less and less. About eight years ago, I gave up eating mammals, and now almost always choose vegetarian. Long live tofu, beans, lentils, and the huge range of Indian vegetarian cuisine.

The View from Gaza

Here is an outstanding documentary by Al Jazeera reporters Ayman Mohyeldin and Sherine Tadros, who were in Gaza during the recent Israeli-Palestinian war. Watch it for a glimpse of how the brutal Israeli assault was experienced by ordinary Palestinians (~45 mins; via 3QD).

Who Speaks for Islam?

Here is an interesting debate between two Muslim women in the US: Irshad Manji and Dalia Mogahed. Manji, a vocal critic of Islam, sees herself as a reform Muslim; it is easy to understand why young Muslims in the West, as well as those fearful of Islam, would be drawn to her. Mogahed identifies herself as a mainstream Muslim who is "passionate about moderation."

I found Mogahed's analysis of the Muslim world more illuminating, including her response to whether Islam is a religion of peace, and how radicalization is so often rooted in politics but then takes on the language of religion. I did squirm a bit when she referred to Prophet Muhammad's wars of conquest as models of just wars. She also showed remarkably little enthusiasm for ijtihad—even when led by qualified Muslim clerics—rooting instead for classical religious scholarship and its more liberal interpretations of Islamic faith and jurisprudence.

More articles by Mogahed: Muslim true/false and What Makes a Muslim Radical. (Video via 3QD.)

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.’

India's Dangerous Divide

Ramachandra Guha in the Wall Street Journal:

If the first tragedy of the Indian Muslim was Partition, the second has been the patronage by India's most influential political party, the Congress, of Muslims who are religious and reactionary rather than liberal and secular. Nehru himself was careful to keep his distance from sectarian leaders whether Hindu or Muslim. However, under the leadership of his daughter, Indira Gandhi, the Congress party came to favor the conservative sections of the Muslim community. Before elections, Congress bosses asked heads of mosques to issue fatwas to their flock to vote for the party; after elections, the party increased government grants to religious schools and colleges. In a defining case in 1985, the Supreme Court called for the enactment of a common civil code, which would abolish polygamy and give all women equal rights regardless of faith -- the right to their husband's or father's property, for example, or the right to proper alimony once divorced. The prime minister at the time was Rajiv Gandhi. Acting on the advice of the Muslim clergy, he used his party's majority in Parliament to nullify the court's verdict. After Rajiv's widow, Sonia Gandhi, became Congress president in 1998, the party has continued to fund Muslim religious institutions rather than encourage them to engage with the modern world.

More here. Also check out Guha's conversation with Charlie Rose. 

Wade Davis on the Human Imagination

In this beautiful TED talk, Wade Davis, anthropologist, ethnobotanist, National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, author, documentarian, and photographer takes us on a tour through the wild ranges of the human imagination as manifested in the breadth of human mythology and cultural life. As members of the same human family we all share the same raw human genius and imagination, he reminds us, and while some have chosen to apply that to developing technologies, others have applied it to other mysteries of existence. Different ways of life and mythological systems are not failed attempts at being modern—at being us—but merely different human responses to the essential human questions: what does it mean to be human and alive.

"All peoples are simply cultural options, different visions of life, itself.... making for completely different possibilities of existence," he says. And as such, the breadth of human cultural variation is a treasure trove of imaginative insights and knowledge. If we discard our human diversity, we lose a hundred thousand years of accumulated knowledge and wisdom about ourselves and our planet. Modern western culture is hardly 300 years old, he cautions, and it's folly to imagine that in those 300 years we've learned as much as we need to face the challenges of living.

By way of example, he tells us about—and treats us to some stunning photography of—several completely different indigenous cultures from around the globe, including the following:

Polynesians, who can read wave patterns the way a forensic scientist reads fingerprints, enabling them to identify land that's far beyond the horizon. Wade suggests, "If you took all of the genius that allowed us to put a man on the moon and applied it to an understanding of the ocean, what you would get is Polynesia."

Buddhists, who have spent 2500 years engaged in empirical discovery of the nature of mind.

Andean peoples, whose engineering prowess and intimate familiarity with their sacred mountainscapes guided the building of their great cities. Their ancient lore is alive today, enacted in ritual, including, for one tribal group, the annual performance of a breathtaking, high-altitude marathon—undertaken by boys who are pumped up on coca—that affirms the strength of their community.

(video 19 minutes) Here's more on Wade Davis at TED. Wade Davis is actively involved in educating people about the richness and value of human cultural diversity. To this end he maintains a website, Cultures on the Edge.

Candles in the Dark?

Beyond Belief, an annual symposium that seeks to promote the constituency of reason in society, was held this year from October 3-6 in La Jolla, CA. One weekend recently, I watched all 44 of its talks and panel discussions now available online (each about 25-30 mins). The theme this year was Candles in the Dark. Participants were asked "to propose a Candle — a potential solution to a problem that they have identified in their area of expertise or informed passion." The symposium was organized around sessions that focused on science's contribution to five human preoccupations: politics, morality, happiness, money, and law.

If the anthropologists stole the show in 2006, this year belonged to the lawyers, or rather law academics who actively seek to incorporate science in their methods. By far the smartest group of people in the room, they evinced the most nuanced understanding of the difference between science and metaphysics in general, and the limits and ethical implications of neuroscience research on criminal law, in particular. Other presentations I enjoyed came from Jonathan Haidt, Beatrice Golomb (her animated talk on how money is corrupting medical research was also the scariest), Philip Zimbardo, and Jonathan Glover. Strategies for promoting science in the public sphere—via Washington lobbies, media outreach—were presented and debated but only peripherally mentioned was the one I think can make a more fundamental impact: a "next-generation Carl Sagan" to seduce young minds by showing them the wonder and power of science, using the best available multimedia and teaching aids.

The least inspiring session was the opening one on Human Flourishing/Eudaimonia. Disquisitions on happiness somehow managed to neither define happiness, nor how to measure it. Individual speakers who irked me the most included Patricia Churchland, a snake oil seller at the crossroads of neuroscience and philosophy, and whose thesis was effectively destroyed by a sharp observation from Nita Farahany, a lawyer; Sam Harris, the Dick Cheney of the symposium, who understands neither science nor religion but is wholly unaware of it. Why does he get invited every year? For the tawdry drama he adds to the proceedings? Peter Atkins, a textbook example of what a scientist without humility can become. Last year he fatuously proclaimed the impending demise of philosophy and the coming reign of science, adding that "We've got to get rid of philosophy because it is really such a ball and chain on progress ... a philosopher is really just a nuisance." Choosing Atkins to end the symposium with his talk was a real downer.

The first two symposiums (2006, 2007) were dominated by scientists taking cheap potshots at religion and sparring over it. This year's format made that difficult but the symposium's lack of diversity remains a serious problem—nearly all of the participants continue to be white Anglo-American atheists to whom religion means Abrahamic rule books. Excluding a handful of multidisciplinary researchers, intellectual breadth also remained a problem—many scientists demonstrated yet again that outside their narrow specialties, they aren't necessarily smarter than their hairdressers. Some new faces I'd like to propose for the symposium next year include H. Allen Orr, Mark Lilla, Reza Aslan, Ashis Nandy, Nicholas Maxwell, Jill Bolte Taylor, Amartya Sen, Meera Nanda, Jonathan Spence, Sudhir Kakar, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Hubert Dreyfus, and some thinkers from East Asia.

The 2008 Shunya's Notes Best Speaker Award at the Beyond Belief Symposium goes to Amanda Pustilnik, a brilliant woman who conducts research and teaches in the area of law and neuroscience at Harvard Law School. She spoke about where neuroscience can make a contribution to legal doctrine (video below, 17 mins).

Views on Mumbai Terrorism

In this past week since terrorists struck Mumbai, a lot of Indians have poured their hearts out in newspapers, magazines, and blogs. A lot of their writings are angry, hawkish, and nationalistic; many are gushing, mawkish, and oozing with purple prose; a handful offer vignettes of courage or heartfelt pain. Below are some of the more significant and less popular viewpoints I've encountered:

Enough is Enough by Badri Raina:

"As I have listened to the outrage pouring out from a diverse assortment of some celebrity Mumbai citizens whose haunts habitually remain restricted to the affluent South Mumbai—a zone of peace and prosperity that has had its first rite of passage to the ugliness that afflicts the rest of the city, indeed the rest of India, and rest of the world—I find myself asking the question "who is it saying ‘enough is enough', to whom, and why now"?" (thanks to Ruchira Paul)

Mumbai Atrocities Highlight Need for Solution in Kashmir by William Dalrymple:

"In the months ahead, we are likely to see a security crackdown in India and huge pressure applied to Pakistan to match its pro-Indian and pro-Western rhetoric with real action against the country's jihadi groups. But there is unlikely to be peace in South Asia until the demands of the Kashmiris are in some measure addressed and the swamp of grievance in Srinagar somehow drained. Until then, the Mumbai massacres may be a harbinger of more violence to come."

The Fires in South Asia by Vijay Prashad:

"Bombay is not virginal. It is experienced. But this violence has struck at the heart of the enclave of the elite. When they say that this is Mumbai’s 911, it is true. This is an attack into the heart of the zones of comfort in Indian cities. Other dates resonate in other neighborhoods. Some of them refer to events forgotten or unresolved: killers remain at large, justice remains unfulfilled. Almost a thousand people died in the riots of 1992-1993. They died in places like Dharavi and Pydhonie. Two hundred thousand Muslims fled the city in its aftermath"

Fresh Blood from an Old Wound by Pankaj Mishra:

"[In a phone call, a] gunman invoked the oppression of Muslims by Hindu nationalists and the destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya in 1992. Such calls were the only occasions on which the militants ... offered a likely motive for their indiscriminate slaughter. Their rhetoric seems all too familiar. Nevertheless, it shows how older political conflicts in South Asia have been rendered more noxious by the fallout from the “war on terror” and the rise of international jihadism."

Democracy Now's panel discussion hosted by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez:

"A discussion on the attacks in Mumbai ... with South Asian History professor Vijay Prashad, New York City-based activist Biju Mathew, veteran journalist and commentator Tariq Ali and award-winning activist and journalist from Mumbai Teesta Setalvad."