Samir Chopra's Blog, page 92

Hot, Bothered, and Devout: The Religious Policing of Sex

Yesterday, I posted a review essay on a pair of books by SN Balagangadhara and Rajiv Malhotra that critique the field of “Indian studies.” In my essay I attempted to place into some context the recent controversy over the recall from circulation of Wendy Doniger‘s book, The Hindus: An Alternative History.

Amongst the many charges leveled at Doniger’s writing is that she has “hurt” the sensibilities of devout Hindus. This accusation is often made against many modern scholars of Hinduism; Balagangadhara and Malhotra are part of this chorus. Thus, in my essay I noted the former’s critique of Jeffrey Kripal and Paul Courtright‘s  psychoanalytical takes on the mysticism of Ramakrishna Paramahansa and the legend of Ganesha and his conclusion that Kripal and Courtright were “indulging in mischief” and doing “violence” to “the experiential world of the Hindus.” Malhotra, of course, has been vigorously accusing Doniger of a variety of sins: her treatment of sexuality and sexual themes is one of them.

So, rather unsurprisingly, a centerpiece of these critiques is the offense caused to religious sensibilities by that which is supposed remain between the sheets.

I think we are entitled to be suspicious that whenever Hindus—in India, or elsewhere— or other devout folks–all over the world–get offended by academic or cultural responses to their religion, it invariably has something to do with sex, the one business that gets everyone hot and bothered under their cassocks and lungis. Reading Balagangadhara’s language of “violence” against Hindus, one would imagine the darkest depths of anti-Hindu sentiment had been plumbed. Rather disappointingly instead, it turns out Hindus are like religious prudes everywhere: sex and their gods or their saints do not go together; they are chaste, virtuous, asexual creatures. What a letdown for the civilization that gave us Khajuraho.

By saying this, I do not mean to diminish the ascetic strains in Hinduism—like those pointed to, ironically enough, by Wendy Doniger—but rather to combat the impulses present in the responses to the scholarship of Kripal and Courtright that seek to cover up the erotic and sexual strains in Indian culture at large. Such stereotypical and clichéd outraged responses are, after all, not even in accord with Indian cultural mores. Risqué versions of tales taken from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata often make the rounds in India; there are too, among the young ‘uns, dirty ditties galore about its characters to be sung out loudly and coarsely. Those who sing them, and tell lewd jokes by the dozen about characters from the great Hindu epics, don’t seem to be hurt by their activities.

Balagangadhara and Malhotra owe us an explanation of why so many Indians do not seem perennially offended by such practices. Could it be the vaunted Hindu tolerance and syncretism—spoken so glowingly of by Malhotra—is found here in the implicit understanding that powerful cultural and mythological imaginaries are unlikely to be diminished by a few academic theses? Intolerant reactions do not sit well with the picture these two worthies paint for us of an endlessly patient and resilient tradition.

Unsurprisingly, Balagangadhara and Malhotra, and their fellow “outraged”, claim to speak for too many, and seek to control discourse. Some things never change. For all the exalted theistic conceptions that the supposedly devout seek to foist on us, they descend all too quickly from the sublime to the sordid, from lofty metaphysical conceptions to just good old scoldings about dirty talk. There is nothing new in this outrage; just a tired old policing of sex.

SN Balagangadhara and Rajiv Malhotra on Reversing the Gaze

On 12 February, Penguin India announced it was withdrawing and destroying—in India—all published copies of historian Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History (2009). Penguin’s decision came after reaching an out-of-court settlement with Shiksha Bachao Andolan, which, in 2011, had filed a legal complaint objecting to sections of Doniger’s book. Amidst the vocal expressions of concern over the damage done to free speech and academic freedom in India were also thinly-veiled suggestions that justice had been done, that the right outcome—the suppression and quelling of an academic work that supposedly offended Hindu sensibilities—had been reached. A prominent voice in this choir was of one Rajiv Malhotra, who noted on his Twitter account that Doniger was merely the ”idol of inferiority complex Indians [sic] in awe that white person studies Hinduism,” that Penguin’s withdrawal of her work was justified in a world in which “media bias” in an “intellectual kurukshetra [sic]” had led to a “a retail channel controlled by one side.”   

This dispute over Wendy Doniger’s work is merely the latest instance of a long-running contestation of how best to study India and all things Indian.

The philosopher and statesman Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan noted in the preface to his two-volume opus Indian Philosophy (1923) that the “modern aesthete” dismissed Indian philosophy and its associated cultures as “chaotic clouds of vapor and verbiage”; he then moved on to provide a sympathetic explication of its central systems and principles that would be both comprehensible to the Western mind and suitably respectful of Indian philosophy’s intellectual contributions to philosophical discourse at large. While comparisons with Western philosophy were unavoidable, they did not have to begin with the premise that Indian philosophy needed to merely play catch-up to it. In more recent times, the philosopher Daya Krishna sought to achieve, if not a synthesis, then at least a dialogue between Western and Indian philosophy that would show their mutual relevance, their ability to influence each other’s most central debates, all the while emphasising the latter’s distinctive formulation of classic philosophical problems.

Such exegeses and analyses—conducted by insiders and directed outwards as a form of resistance—need not be merely academic exercises; they have been used to combat ideologies—such as colonialism, imperialism, and their notorious offspring Orientalism—which rely on the systemic denigration of indigenous intellectual traditions.  But these contestations do not always proceed straightforwardly; sometimes the putative pushback might only serve to replace one ideology with another.

For well over a decade, SN Balagangadhara (most recently in Reconceptualizing Indian Studies, Oxford University Press, 2005) and Rajiv Malhotra (most recently in Being Different, Harper Collins, 2013) have been engaged in projects superficially similar to those of Radhakrishnan and Krishna. Malhotra—an Indian-American entrepreneur turned “speaker and public intellectual“, and full-time founder-director of the US-based Infinity Foundation, which funds “Indic studies”—has been a long-term critic of Western academic studies of India, accusing its practitioners of an unrepentant Eurocentrism, of applying irrelevant modes of scholarship to phenomena best studied by indigenous modes of inquiry, of demeaning Indian religions, and, in general, of undermining India politically by fixating on its internal dissensions and crises. Malhotra’s polemics have not gone unanswered, most notably in the philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s sharp retort that they showed “disregard for the usual canons of argument and scholarship” and were merely “a postmodern power play in the guise of defense of tradition.”  Balagangadhara, professor of philosophy at Belgium’s Ghent University, has written extensively on the history and philosophy of religion; these studies feature extended critiques of sociological and anthropological studies of India and have acquired considerable notoriety in both the Indian and the Western academy. While the philosopher Vivek Dhareshwar recently claimed he has engendered “a new research milieu” for those studying India, the historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam has described his work as “confused.” Balagangadhara’s influence has not remained confined to academic boundaries and has made its way into modern Indian political discourse. This is visible in his controversial claims that the caste system and discrimination based on it are non-existent, that the twelfth century Vachana movement—often regarded as an intellectual voice for Dalit struggle—was instead unconcerned about the caste system because of its insignificance; and in his student Dunkin Jalki’s suggestion that the victims of the Kambalapalli massacre—seven Dalits who were burnt alive in Karnataka’s Kolar district in March 2000—were ill-served by the “misplaced ideology” of Kannada progressives who indicted caste-based discrimination as a motive for the killings. (The high-caste accused in the case were acquitted.)

There is thus a broader, edgier, cultural dimension to the contested scholarship of both these writers, one that makes it more relevant to thinking about modern Indian political life than your garden-variety journal article or academic monograph. Here, the alluring hint of fundamental paradigm subversion is balanced by the possibility of reactionary fulmination disguised as sincere protest.

Both Balagangadhara and Malhotra suggest that the Western gaze is infected with a “colonial consciousness” which has permeated our understanding of Indian culture, philosophy, social modes of being and politics; insofar as those engaged in studying India—whether Indian or otherwise— resist adopting an “Indian perspective,” it is because of this pervasive consciousness. Both claim Western categories and the insistence on their universalism have so shaped discourses surrounding Indian philosophy, thought and culture that these can only offer a critically crippled and weakened alternative to the Western intellectual tradition. The East can, at best, appear as a pale aspirational shadow of the West; philosophical learning and moral edification run only from the West to the East. Balagangadhara and Malhotra seek to reverse the gaze, to turn around the evaluative lens—philosophical, moral, or social-scientific—back towards the West, away from its perennial focus, the East.

Thus, Balagangadhara calls for a “reconceptualization of Indian studies”: to stop using Western intellectual frameworks—like “social science” and its associated paradigms—for studying Indian phenomena, which demand instead, for their understanding and analysis, indigenous categories and concepts. As a result, the disciplines of anthropology, history and sociology—as employed by those who study India—might find the basic methodologies and assumptions used for framing their subjects of study disrupted. Balagangadhara’s approach resonates with Malhotra’s notion of purv-paksha, a classical dialectical approach to debate wherein its participants understand and adopt their opponents’ perspective in order to be able to refute it. To kick-start such a process, Malhotra seeks to establish conceptual distinctions between “dharmic traditions” and the intellectual paradigms of the West so as to eschew a facile universalism. Unless the West views the East on its own terms—and “respects” it rather than merely offering it “tolerance”—the present asymmetrical state of affairs remains in a depressing limbo.

Balagangadhara and Malhotra find common ground in the claim that our understanding of Hinduism is constructed through the Orientalist lens. In his previous book The Heathen in his Blindness (1996), Balagangadhara advanced this argument as part of a broader thesis that religion is not a universal phenomenon but rather a Western—specifically, Christian—construct foisted upon colonial subjects, one resulting in a prejudiced evaluation of Indian culture, mores and morals. Colonial/Orientalist scholars took Christianity to be the archetypal religion—a system of beliefs equipped with theistic doctrines, deities and practices; religion was presumed a cultural universal; and the complex and varied practices observed in the Indian subcontinent were then shoehorned into this mould. Hinduism appeared as but a depraved Christianity mired in idolatrous practices, its followers were indicted of systematic adherence to false beliefs, and a romantic vision emerged of a stagnant, childlike India, caught in the caste system’s inexorable vice, a land crying out to be rescued by the West cast as saviour, bringing succour to the heathen.

The critique Balagangadhara and Malhotra mount in their new work builds on these older rejections of Orientalism and centres on the following: how might we conceive India, Indian philosophy, Indian culture and the dharmic traditions, once we have prised ourselves loose from the Orientalist vise that Edward Said eloquently described in his seminal work? In evaluating their work, we might ask in turn: Does a new Indian philosophy, a new paradigm for Indian studies understood broadly, one that educates the West, emerge from these works?

Their analysis—while possibly attractive enough in the abstract—is often found wanting in its concrete details, and at times lines up disconcertingly with reactionary Hindutva fundamentalism. Mere alignment with the theses of a reactionary movement is not enough to indict an argument. But it pays to be cautious when such an alignment does occur. Philosophical arguments can be, unsurprisingly, applied—by those convinced of their plausibility—to political ends.

A Constructed India

Balagangadhara claims that because of the refractive and distorting Orientalist lens, Western scholars saw social ills and targets for reform everywhere: for instance, the evils of the caste system and the pernicious priests who sat atop its hierarchy. Thus, these do not exist but are, rather, “constructions” of Orientalist social science. The term “Dalit”, in this view, only serves to obscure the diversity of those various ethnicities the term describes.

Such claims amount to a milquetoast defence of the caste system. For against such putative rebuttals one must balance the appalling record of caste-based violence in India. Such violence is no fiction—its victims are real, and mourned over on a regular basis. And the best understanding we possess of its causes invariably points us to caste-based animosity. Describing such tangibly real phenomena as mere “constructs” is not benign; as the Dalit activist and writer Devanur Mahadeva has written in response to Balagangadhara, arguing that tools for social justice such as “equal education, democracy and secularism” are merely “constructs of Western/colonial influences” may help implement an agenda of “totally erasing all that from our society.”

Like many in the Hindutva fold, Balagangadhara expresses discomfort with the permissiveness of modern Indian secularism. This is explicit in his claim that secularism permits under its ambit a predatory form of evangelical conversion in India. But the argument against proselytisation—roughly, that because the Hindu does not seek to recruit converts while the Christian does, laissez faire secularism merely sets up the former for indoctrination—is a paternalistic one.  Will ignorant, gullible adivasis be taken in by the trinkets of the missionary and be unable to put down the Bible? In any case, a secular state has no business intervening to prevent proselytisation; doing so is a coercive exercise against free speech.

Balagangadhara also blames state secularism for the rise of Hindu fundamentalism. This is a variant of the Hindutva argument that secularism is alien and foreign to India, that its introduction was bound to create a backlash. As Balagangadhara says, “Secularism creates religious violence.” Such conclusions only bolster those who would construct a nation based on a static, preconceived Indian identity grounded in Hinduism rather than letting it dynamically emerge over time through interactions between its varied groupings and cultures.

Balagangadhara’s critique of supposedly Orientalist scholarship appears least plausible in the chapter ‘Open Letter to Jeffrey Kripal’ and in his reactions to Paul Courtright in the chapter ‘Are Dialogues an Antidote to Violence?’ These scholars had carried out imaginative reconstructions through a psychoanalytical lens of, respectively, the mysticism of Ramakrishna Paramahansa and the legend of Ganesha, thus earning them the considerable ire of many Hindu organisations and academics, who found the invocation of sexual repression and trauma in their analysis offensive and disrespectful to Hindu sensibilities. Balagangadhara attempts to justify the chorus of ire by means of a pair of tortured arguments that such treatments are essentially caricaturing and trivializing and that cross-cultural dialogues—between cultures separated by the systematic misunderstanding directed by one at the other—promote violence rather than ameliorate it. Balagangadhara concludes that Kripal and Courtright are “indulging in mischief” and doing “violence” to “the experiential world of the Hindus.”

These critiques are fundamentally misguided. The kinds of analyses conducted by Kripal and Courtright are common in literary theory; applying psychoanalysis to canonical texts, whether fictional or not, can provide illuminating alternative readings. We might ask: Can their narratives and characters’ actions be understood as manifestations of unconscious, repressed desires and traumas? Scholars and teachers of Freud and psychoanalytic theory often emphasise its creative aspects without necessarily claiming that psychoanalysis is an exact science seeking to uncover the truth about a text. With that ecumenical perspective in mind, one takes its claims as fuel for the imagination. Indian myths and religious texts are not immune from such open-ended investigation and exploration, the very hallmark of the freewheeling inquiry encouraged academic freedom.  To imagine malice and disrespect in these invocations and employments of sexual themes—as Balagangadhara and Malhotra do—seems revelatory of deep-rooted insecurities.

An Indian Way of Thinking?

We might take Balagangadhara and Malhotra to be engaged in providing an affirmative answer to AK Ramanujan’s memorable question of whether there is an Indian way of thinking. (Ramanujan thought this emphasis provided one of several possible formulations of his original question; we could, after all, concern ourselves instead, with wondering whether there was an Indian way of thinking, or an Indian way of thinking.) Insofar as they point out the existence of the Orientalist lens, note the possible distortions it may induce, and highlight the distinctive worldviews present in the diverse theories and practices subsumed under the diverse body of thought that contemporary Western scholarship labels “Indian philosophy and culture”, they continue Ramanujan’s investigative project and deserve our attention. Where they deviate from this project—by relying on dubious premises or philosophically untenable claims or because they do not possess the latitudinarian vision embodied in Ramanujan’s work or in that of other scholars of Indian philosophy such as Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Daya Krishna or Ramchandra Gandhi—their work is internally incoherent and has unpleasant political ramifications. At such junctures, we have to seek our answers to Ramanujan’s questions elsewhere, perhaps in arguments that what we consider “Indian” or “Western” are hybrids undergoing recontestation and reconfiguration on an ongoing basis. We could then understand such terms as already outmoded by the modern world, already revelatory of older frameworks.

Turning now to Malhotra, one notices that while he advocate greater respect of Indian dharmic traditions in the work of Western academics, he sometimes does not seem similarly inclined toward the subjects of his reversed gaze. Malhotra, all too often, relies on a narrowly conceived history of the West as consisting solely of bouts of colonial and imperial conquest, and on implausible claims about the achievements and sophistication of Indian philosophies and cultures. (A “knowledge byte” on his website proclaims: “Cultures originating in desert [sic] lack fertility of soil & mind. Not industrious. Spread by looting others, cultural colonialism & genocide.” This unsubtle reference to the cultural traditions of the three great monotheistic religions is reductive in the extreme.) Moreover, Malhotra’s plea for genuine respect as opposed to mere tolerance is sullied by his tirades against Indian-American academics and South Asian studies scholars—as in his terming them “useful pets,” ostensibly faithfully parroting Orientalist talking points. During a public debate in 2004 with historian Vijay Prashad in Outlook magazine, where Malhotra interrogated a varied set of theses of the so-called “Indian Left”—such as its conception of the Indian nation-state and its understanding of Indian history—similar rhetorical missteps had made an appearance.

By contrasting the principles of dharmic traditions with those of Western intellectual tradition—the marriage of Greco-Hellenistic thought with Christianity, and the modern philosophy that emerged from the Enlightenment—Malhotra does provide some useful distinctions between Eastern and Western philosophies. While emphasising these differences, Malhotra also insists that certain key Sanskrit terms defy comparison with or incorporation into Western categories because they are essentially untranslatable. There is no acknowledgment, however, of a prominent debate in twentieth-century philosophy of language: the possibility of untranslatability.  WVO Quine suggested translations between languages were always indeterminate; Donald Davidson suggested in turn translations were always possible and indeed, if one was not forthcoming, we would suspect we were not dealing with a language at all. How do these claims affect Malhotra’s? We do not know, for he does not consider them. Moreover, this untranslatability, if granted, creates a problem for Malhotra’s project: if such is the case, then what hope for communicating Indian philosophical concepts to the West? There is little chance, after all, that Sanskrit will become the medium of global philosophical discourse.

We might also wonder why the sophisticated culture associated with the dharmic traditions was so easily colonised by a Western culture that Malhotra sees as far inferior. Malhotra, after all, does not speak of “dharmic philosophies” but rather of “dharmic traditions”—that is, actual practices rather than abstract principles. An explanation couched in the bloody histories of colonialism and imperialism and their aggressive and intolerant attitudes is an incomplete one; the intellectual traditions and practices associated with particular cultures should ensure their survival in the face of external adversity. Malhotra’s analysis emerges as a highly idealised, theoretical one, only superficially applicable to its actual socio-empirical manifestations.

At times, the opposition Malhotra sets up is a tenuous one. In his exegesis, the dharmic traditions include all Indian schools of philosophical thought, but he does not take a similarly broad approach to Western thought, which has ranged from idealism to radical empiricism and pragmatism. Instead, the picture painted of the Western philosophical tradition—almost exclusively positivist and reductionist—is a traditional caricature. Such descriptions have been outmoded for a long time now, thanks to that tradition’s vigorous self-examination and critique over the past century or so, if not since earlier. Similarly, the all-too-quick dismissal of post-modernism as vacuous nihilism fails to account for the sharp critique it may provide of ideologies Malhotra is opposed to. Malhotra thus misses out on an opportunity to enlist philosophical allies in his endeavor. And in insisting on such sharp distinctions, Malhotra misses another point:  those who choose to engage with both Western and Eastern thought are not necessarily seeking a synthesis of the two into a new intellectual paradigm, but rather looking for commonalities and intersections that might illuminate both.

As such, Malhotra foregoes opportunities for serious philosophical engagement with either Eastern or Western thought. This brings us to the central problems with the intellectual projects at hand.

The Point of it All

As the historian Satadru Sen pointed out to me in conversation, there are two broad points that run counter to the kind of gaze reversal Balagangadhara and Malhotra attempt.  First, their attempt founders on some ineluctable facts. Orientalist gazes reflect uncomfortable historical realities of power; the East is scrutinised by this gaze because the West, to put it bluntly, conquered it. The philosophical and theoretical apparatus of its gaze was that of a civilization that had asserted its will over another. No such conquest underwrites this attempt to examine the West through an Indian lens, especially when Indian scholars themselves by and large do not rely on Indian philosophical or theoretical analyses to study the world or their own societies. Indeed, there is at this point in time, no unconquered, un-Orientalised Orient to deploy against the West. The fact of conquest does not grant the West the right to objectify. But still, whatever came before its encounter with the East has been transformed at a very fundamental level by this fact. So again, there is now no authentically Indian or indigenous lens that can be brought to bear on the West.  The contexts within which our discourses take place are those largely constituted by the Western intellectual tradition; Balagangadhara’s and Malhotra’s philosophical idioms—couched in English—belong to it. The contemporary exercise of reversing the gaze—in particular, in the manner sought by Balagangadhara and Malhotra—seems like a thought experiment destined to fail.

Second, the “Indian culture,” “Hinduism,” and “dharmic traditions” referred to by Balagangadhara and Malhotra are left mysteriously unspecified. We might wonder how inclusive these terms are. Those who assume the existence of these broad and abstract categories can all too easily marginalise others who might not share their unspoken definitions of them. The group Balagangadhara claims to be speaking for—the “majority of Indians”, the “men and women” who “protest” the “violence” done to them by academic studies of “Hinduism”—enjoys hegemonic status. Those who suffer under that hegemony— women, adivasis, Dalits—might put forward very different understandings of what they would consider acts of “violence” directed against them, and might not, for instance, mind the inducements of conversion.

Here is a challenge for “Indian studies” as advocated by  Balagangadhara and Malhotra: to not take refuge in imagined glories of systems understood in the abstract, independent of their actual historical application and manifestations, or indulge in implausible apologia for manifestly real social ills. Rather it must reckon with the history of this nation, one in which English has emerged as a language in which Balagangadhara and Malhotra seek to communicate and one whose study requires a more inclusive view than they seem to exercise.

The Empire State Building: From Picture to Window View

I’m writing this post on the second floor of the CUNY Graduate Center (to be more precise, in the library). My desk is by a window, and looking out from it, I can see the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street. That confluence of streets, of course, marks the location too, of the Empire State Building, its imposing lower sections visible to me from my vantage point. And today, like on many other past occasions, I’m struck by this reminder of one of my life’s central journeys.

I grew up in India, brought up by parents who furnished my life with many reading materials. Among them were two sets of encyclopedias: one titled The World Around Us and the other, Lands and Peoples. Each contained six or seven volumes, one for each continent or so (depending on their clustering schemes).

The World Around Us series was a personal favorite of mine; in it, a pair of youngsters, a brother and sister pair, were taken on a flight around the world by their father–I wonder what their mother did in the meantime–and talked through their travels by him. Their erudite, cosmopolitan, and humorous parent would introduce them to geography and culture and all of the rest, effortlessly traveling through time and space as he did so. Early in their travels, our intrepid youngsters landed in New York City; the central illustration in that chapter was an illustration of the Empire State Building, which was, at the time of the encyclopedia’s printing, the tallest building in the world.

I read through the multiple volumes of The World Around Us on seemingly innumerable occasions; no matter how many times I did so, I was always transfixed by that image of the Empire State Building. It seemed impossibly huge, soaring up and away from the streets and people who lay at its feet. It captured everything that seemed dramatic and dreamy and inaccessible about America: that land where the gigantic, the dramatic, the amazing and the stupendous seemed so commonplace. I was staggered to read of its height, the number of its floors, the speed of its completion. So otherworldly did it seem that I was surprised to learn that there were offices and possibly apartments inside it; surely such a structure could not be made mundane by the presence of mere humans inside it?

When I arrived in New York in 1987, I was stunned to see the Empire State Building was not visible when you were in Manhattan; I had emerged from the Long Island Railroad Station at 34th Street and Eighth Avenue, and as I walked around, had suddenly found myself standing next to it. Manhattan’s other buildings all too easily obscured its frame. The building was more easily visible from elsewhere; perhaps from New Jersey, for instance, where I would spend the next six years gazing at it across the Hudson.

I’ve now lived in New York City for twenty years; many of its attractions have become commonplace to me. But not the Empire State Building; it stands there, reminding me of the passage of time, of my movement here from a land far away, of a journey in several dimensions. I had never dreamed that picture in that encyclopedia would someday become a weekday vision.

Bagdikian on the Media’s Corporate Values and Overreliance on Official Sources

I’ve owned Ben Bagdikian‘s  The Media Monopoly for some twenty years, and have only just managed to get around to reading it. The edition I own dates back to 1987; its analysis of the growing monopolies in media ownership and their pernicious effect on political life in the US ring truer than ever before.  As I noted on Facebook this morning, it’s a “depressing read.” That mood is created by our knowledge that the situation now, in 2014, is only qualitatively and quantitatively worse.

Bagdikian’s analysis is comprehensive and his critiques plentiful. Today, I’m going to point you to just one component of his analysis of the worrying reflection of corporate values in American news:

Despite raised standards in journalism, American mainstream news is still heavily weighted in favor of corporate values, sometimes blatantly, but more often subtly in routine conventions widely accepted as “objective.” One is overdependence on official sources of news….[O]veremphasis on news from titled sources of power has occurred at the expense of of reporting “unofficial facts” and circumstances. In a dynamic and changing society, the voices of authority are seldom the first to acknowledge or even to know of new and disturbing developments. Officials can be wrong.

Overreliance on the official view of the world can contribute to social turbulence. Unable to attract serious media attention by conventional methods, unestablished groups have had to adopt melodramatic demonstrations that meet the other media standards of acceptable news–visible drama, conflict, and novelty. If they are sufficiently graphic, the news will report protests, demonstrations, marches, boycotts, and self-starvation in public places (though not always their underlying causes). But in the end, even that fails. Repeated melodrama ceases to be novel and goes unreported. Social malaise or injustice often are not known, by officialdom. Unreported or unpursued, these realities have periodically led to turbulent surprises–such as the social explosions that came after years of officially unacknowledged structural poverty, continuation of racial oppression [race riots in the 1960s], or damage from failed foreign policies [the revolution in Iran].

Over the years, the exaggerated demand for official credentials in the news has given the main body of American news a strong conservative cast….Where there are not genuinely diverse voices in the media the result inevitably is an overemphasis on a picture of the world as seen by the authorities or as the authorities wish it to be.

Bagdikian’s critique certainly puts modern critiques of the blogger into perspective; they remain part of the trend alluded to above.

As I noted in my mini-review of David Coady‘s What to Believe Now: Applying Epistemology to Contemporary Issues, (Blackwell, 2012) his work, which offers a spirited defense of bloggers, rumors, and conspiracy theories in Chapters 4 (‘Rumors and Rumor Mongers’), 5 (‘Conspiracy Theories and Conspiracy Theorists’) and 6 (‘Blogosphere and Conventional Media’), is:

[U]nified by two closely related themes, the importance of free public channels of communication and dangers of overcredulous deference to formal authority.

Coady thus points out how our politics is impoverished by an epistemic virtue gone wrong: we seek to be conscientious believers but end up believing too little. Bagdikian’s prescient analysis finds adequate philosophical support here.

Shame, Rage, and Fascism

Jonathan Lear, in the course of a memorial address to the American Philosophical Association–dedicated to Bernard Williams–noted:

For Williams, shame needs to be conceived in terms of its inner psychological structure, in particular, in terms of internal objects and our relations with those objects. The basic experience connected with shame is of being seen in some kind of bad condition by an observer whose judgment matters. But: ‘Even if shame and its motivations always involve in some way or another the idea of the gaze of another, it is important that for many of its operations the imagined gaze of an imagined other will do’. This is what is involved in shame’s being an internalized emotional capacity, not merely an occurrent emotion in childhood in embarrassing circumstances.

Now, if shame is to function as a complex psychological phenomenon and if it is partially constituted by the imagined gaze of an internalized other, then we will have to admit that this internalized other is, to a significant degree, operating unconsciously. For we need to account for more than the relatively simple phenomenon of consciously experienced feelings of embarrassment before the consciously imagined gaze. In particular, we want to account for experiences that we take to be shame-filled, though they are not consciously experienced as such.

From there on, Lear is off and running, as part of his establishing that:

Williams’ approach to ethical life requires that we turn to human psychology; and the form of psychology required will have to be of a broadly psychoanalytic bent.

The unconscious operations of shame, of course, are of especial interest to therapists and their clients because of their peculiar and particular phenomenological manifestation: feelings of shame are visceral, tinged with a sense of abject humiliation, which, if not allowed to find expedited expression, may be directed outwards in ways intensely damaging to not just the subject but to those around him. Shame is intensively corrosive.

So shame and rage often go together. No one, it seems, is quite as angry, violent, or  murderous as the shamed one. When those feelings congeal into the  basis for a political ideology, they can become more broadly dangerous.

Fascism thus begs for psychoanalytic investigation; some of its central claims–like those of an imagined glorious past, lost to the machinations of a devious Other–rely on the creation of a social and political superego that instills shame in its adherents. The world becomes a stage populated by reminders and monuments of this humiliating defeat, grinning and leering from every corner. The associated shame is relentless in its invidious presence; the only escape from its sensations is a removal of those objects–humans included–that offend. Mere removal will not do, of course. The sensations of shame might only be assuaged by violent, destructive actions.  These become even more frenzied when it is realized that, shamefully, the Other was never a worthy opponent, never one that should have been victorious. The more this inferiority is emphasized, the greater the shame, the greater the rage.

It’s not just ethical life that requires a moral psychology with a psychoanalytic bent; so does politics.

Sandor Clegane, The Hound, on the Hypocrisy of Knighthood

A Song of Ice and Fire‘s Sandor Clegane, the Hound, is a vile man, a murderous mercenary who knows no scruples. But his impassioned rants against the hypocrisy of the knights of the Seven Kingdoms–besides providing him with some wonderful lines–give him a little redemptive touch.

In A Storm of Swords, before his battle with Beric Dondarrion, as he is accused by the Brotherhood without Banners (AKA the Knights of the Hollow Hill or The Forgotten Fellowship) of atrocities committed by the Lannisters, the Hound fights back:

“You server the Lannisters of Casterly Rock,” said Thoros.

“Once. Me and thousands more. Is each of us guilty of the crimes of others?” Clegane spat. “Might be you are knights after all. You lie like knights, maybe you murder like knights.”

 Lem and Jack-Be-Lucky began to shout at him, but Dondarrion raised a hand for silence. “Say what you mean, Clegane.”

“A knight’s a sword with a horse. The rest, the vows and the sacred oils and the lady’s favors, they’re silk ribbons tied around the sword. Maybe the sword’s prettier with silk ribbons tied round the sword. Maybe the sword’s prettier with ribbons hanging off it, but it will kill you just the same. Well, bugger your ribbons, and shove your swords up your arses. I’m the same as you. The only difference is, I don’t lie about what I am. So kill me, but don’t call me a murderer while you stand there telling each other your shit don’t stink. You hear me?“

After he has cheated a ferryman of his fare by falsely promising to pay him on his ‘knight’s honor’ and is accused of breaking his vow, the Hound says:

Knights have no bloody honor.

Later too, the Hound lets an innkeeper know he does not want to be thought of, or addressed as if he were, a knight:

“I don’t want no trouble, ser,” the innkeep said.

“Then don’t call me ser.”

The Hound is right, of course: there is little distinction, often, in the behavior of sellswords and knights (as Sansa Stark painfully finds out);  the vows of knighthood are all too easily broken.

In leveling these charges against the exalted figure of the knight, Clegane forces a confrontation with the uncomfortable truth that renders the distinction between mercenary and professional soldier a tenuous one: both are in the business of killing.  The mercenary’s acts are all too quickly prejudged as driven by little more than selfish considerations but the soldier may often be granted the privilege of elaborate ideological cover for his actions.

This fragility of the distinction between ‘the man who fights for cause and country’ and ‘the man who fights for purse alone’ suggests a greater moral responsibility on the former.  But as the Hound sagely–if crudely–points out, all too often soldiers (and their leaders) are content to merely dress up their actions with puffery and bombast and pompous proclamations of codes of conduct. It is the easiness with which those may be discarded that is the target of the Hound’s ire. And it should be ours too.

On Almost Drowning

I’ve almost drowned twice. Once during the whitewater rafting trip I described here a while ago. The other occasion came many years before, on a school trip in India, close to a river known for its fearsome flooding, for the toll it often extracts when its swollen waters disdain its banks and make their way over the neighboring lands: the Teesta.

In my high-school sophomore year–the tenth grade–I traveled to Kalijora in West Bengal on a schoolboy expedition. We were to spend a weekend in a forest service bungalow, swimming in the local rivers, hiking through the forests nearby, cooking our own food. It would be three days of blessed relief from school discipline and regulation.

When our bus dropped us off at our digs, close by the Teesta, situated on a cliff next to its banks, we stopped to stare at it in some awe. The summer rains had turned it into a beast. Readers of George Martin‘s A Song of Ice and Fire will be able to imagine what we saw if they remember this passage from A Storm of Swords when the Hound, Sandor Clegane and Arya Stark are confronted by the river Arya takes to be the Blackwater Rush – on their way to Walder Frey‘s castle:

The tops of half a hundred trees poked up out of the swirling waters, their limbs clutching for the sky like the arms of drowning men. Thick mats of sodden leaves choked the shoreline, and farther out in the channel she glimpsed something pale and swollen, a deer or perhaps  a dead horse, moving swiftly downstream. There was  a sound too, a low rumble at the edge of hearing, like the sound a dog makes just before she growls.

Years later, when I would see the Cheat River–in flood–in West Virginia during the rafting trip I described in the post linked to above, I thought of the Teesta again.

The Teesta was fed by a tamer tributary that ran below our bungalow; our plan was to use its considerably more inviting waters for our aquatic escapades. We strung up two ropes across its banks, separated by about fifty yards or so; our hope was that anyone knocked off his feet and carried downstream would be able to use the ropes to arrest his otherwise swift passage to a watery death. We stayed above the first rope; we had two shots at being rescued.

Those ropes saved my life. On the first afternoon, rather foolishly, long after my mates had gone left the tributary and climbed back up the rocky flight of steps to our kitchen for a cup of tea, I stayed on, swimming and wading, reluctant to leave its cool waters for the all-enveloping muggy heat that awaited me once I stepped out from them.

And then, suddenly, I was tumbling. I was knocked off my feet and carried downstream in a flash. As I frantically tried to regain my balance to stop being washed out to the frighteningly visible Teesta, I stuck my hand up, and miraculously grabbed the second of the two lifelines.

The tributary’s current was fast, and my body was now strung out, my legs ahead of me, with my arm hanging on to the rope for dear life. I could not stand up; I could not pull myself back up over the rope to get my head and torso out of the water. I felt water flowing over my head and down again. I could raise my head if I tried and when I did so, I would catch a glimpse again of the Teesta’s brown, furious, roiling waters. They might have been a hundred yards away but they felt frighteningly proximal. I might have shouted a couple of times but to no avail. No one was around; I was alone. If I was washed out to the Teesta, it would be a while before my absence would be noted; I doubted my body would ever be found.

I don’t know how long I stayed in that position; it could not have been too long for I surely would have been exhausted and let go. But somehow, I rolled over and pulled hard on the rope to become upright. Incredibly enough, I found a foothold nearby from which I pushed off into slightly calmer waters, from where I made for shore.

Exhausted and beat up, I walked quietly back up for my tea. No one asked me where I had been; I hadn’t been away that long.

It had felt like a lifetime though.

The Black Absence in Academic Philosophy

Jason Stanley recently posted the following interesting status message on his Facebook page:

The first sentence of this article is “Nationwide, just over 5 percent of all full-time faculty members at colleges and universities in the United States are black”. If that is so disturbing as to give rise to this headline, what are we to say about the fact that fewer than 125 members of the 11,000+ members of the American Philosophical Association are black. If *just over 5 percent* is disturbing, what about *1 percent*?

I’d call that statistic disturbing several times over. It’s not a new one to me, but its capacity to induce deep discomfort does not go away. There’s no two ways about it: philosophy, as an academic field, does not seem up to the task of accommodating black students or faculty.  A problem as severe as the numbers indicate is not amenable to easy solutions either.

At Brooklyn College, our department has twice played host to black professors–Lewis Gordon and Tunde Bewaji–for visiting positions that lasted for a year. The enrollment of black students in their classes–Philosophy of Culture and African-American Philosophy–was through the roof; we had never seen as many black students register before for a class. This suggests one immediate step: the hiring of black faculty.  (Brooklyn College has failed to hire a black philosopher, so we aren’t doing too well in his regard.)

But black faculty will have first been black students earning Ph.Ds, which brings us to the problem of the lack of black students in philosophy graduate programs. During my graduate school years, I can only remember seeing one black student in the twenty or so graduate level courses I took; he simply disappeared after a while. All the usual suggested solutions still seem worth a shot: aggressive recruitment, careful, close mentoring. I have no idea, honestly, what steps major graduate programs nation-wide are taking in this direction.

Just getting black students into philosophy programs will not help if they find their curricula to not be of interest.  One possible way to get black students interested in philosophical curricula–at the undergraduate level for starters–is to bridge it for them somehow. For instance, Brooklyn College offers a class called ‘Philosophical Issues in Literature’ which is taught as a Upper-Tier core course. A variant of this could be ‘Philosophical Issues in African-American Literature’; it would serve to introduce black students to epistemic, ethical, metaphysical, and political issues through that canon. (Philosophy departments, of course, would have to get over their uptightness about philosophy only being taught from ‘classical texts.’) Given this introduction they might then be inclined to see what the ‘regular’ or ‘mainstream’ philosophical tradition has to offer them.

Of course, as Stanley noted, philosophy departments also could and should:

 [T]each the extremely rich tradition in African-American Philosophy, especially in Political Philosophy. Start with David Walker‘s *Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World*, go through to Du Bois‘ *The Souls of Black Folks*, and Alain Locke. CLR James‘s *The Black Jacobins* is a brilliant way to think about the contradictions of liberalism. There is tons of great political philosophy and aesthetics there. [links added]

These changes to curricula and hiring and retention practices are still just scratches on the surface. What is perhaps needed is a deeper and more fundamental change, a reconceptualization of the nature of philosophical inquiry and practice. For that, Kristie Dotson‘s paper “How is this Paper Philosophy?” (Comparative Philosophy 3:2) makes for very useful reading. I hope to write more on it soon.

Professional Academic Philosophy’s Blind Spots

A few years ago, I read an email–or a post on an online forum, I am not sure–written by a very accomplished senior philosopher (a logician to be precise.)  In his argument, the logician–adept at providing mathematically elegant proofs of recondite logical problems–seemed to have committed at least two logical fallacies in the first paragraph of his ostensible argument. The topic of the discussion: women’s place in academia.

It was not the first or the last time I noticed the Ironic Absence of Argumentative Rigor in Professional Philosophy When it Comes to Women (or indeed, Any Topic That Threatens Male Privilege.) This observation of mine can be made more general, perhaps even cast as an exception-free law of sorts: professional training in philosophy is no bar to, and indeed might even increase the probability of, sloppy argumentation on topics of personal and political interest.

There is now, once again, in the world of professional academic philosophy, a renewed debate about sexual harassment and sexism (here; here; here; here); once again, many of my academic colleagues–especially the female ones–are dismayed by the plentiful display of very unphilosophical and unsympathetic prejudice by many accomplished  and senior male philosophers. They are right to be dismayed; but they should not be surprised.

For as long as I’ve been a member of this discipline, it has bred a very particular sort of arrogance. This is manifest in many ways: sometimes it is the resolute conviction that philosophy alone–and sometimes only its analytic, science-worshipping component–provides the royal road to Truth; sometimes it is the assertion that no other discipline engages with philosophical problems; sometimes it is the implicit claim that its students and practitioners are the best equipped with argumentative dialectic and clarity and rigor in written and oral expression. The philosopher stands above all, best equipped to provide lofty judgments on all matters of human endeavor and thought. His education, his methods, his intellectual tradition has outfitted him admirably and ideally for this task.

The contrast between this confident, narcissistic self-assessment is only heightened by the actual, empirical manifestation of these supposed capacities: all too many professional philosophers reveal themselves to be narrow-minded pedants whose conception of human inquiry and motivation is remarkably impoverished. And all too many travelers on the Royal Road to What There Really Is are rapidly undone when arguing about political issues that might possess an emotional or sexual dimension. Keep matters confined to a closely specified and formally clarified sphere; you might see rigor on display. But let matters spill out into an issue in which positions are often underwritten by prejudice and you will suddenly observe philosophical acumen take its leave.

I do not doubt pedants and hypocrites are plentiful in other academic disciplines; I have had the misfortune of encountering many of them myself. But the gap between the self-image, between the professed claims to loftier things, and actual ground realities makes philosophy’s situation just a tad more sordid.

Cleaning up the muck takes much longer when those entrusted with the task continue to screw-up, all the while convinced they can do no wrong.

Losing and Gaining Citizenships

I became an American citizen more than fourteen years ago. Ironically, my decision to do so was prompted by my leaving the US–for what was supposed to be a two-year stint as a post-doctoral fellow in Australia. I was then a permanent resident of the US, equipped with the famed ‘green card.’ Subject to certain restrictions, I could travel in and out of the US but not wanting to deal with the INS hassling me during my extended stay overseas, I decided to apply for naturalization.

In taking on American citizenship, I lost my Indian one. From then on, I would need a visa to travel to India. My feelings about this state of affairs, as can be imagined, were mixed. (As a post from last year indicates, I’ve paid a certain price for this decision.) On one hand, I had not lived in India for over thirteen years and seemed unlikely to return to take up residence any time soon, if ever. My academic career often required me to travel–for conferences, for instance–and possessing a passport that meant fewer trips to consular offices was always going to be a blessing. More to the point, I had spent those same thirteen years in the US and was enmeshed in its life and politics (and tax regimes). On the other, losing my Indian citizenship felt like a significant distancing from a shared past and culture and history, from family and home. I don’t know if I ever thought of it as a betrayal of any kind–though some unkind friends of mine did urge this interpretation on me. I did however feel I had self-consciously turned my back on an older me.

But at the time, I don’t think I gave the loss much thought at all. I had been thirteen years gone from India; notions of ‘home’ had grown more confused in my mind. I did not find myself in the grip of an existential question of any sort, but rather, considered myself to be dealing with a far more mundane concern: which travel document would work better for me? Because I had become stranded in a voluntary exile of sorts, because my identity had become a more confused entity, questions of citizenship did not feel as infected with nationalist or nativist urgency as they might have.

As I was sworn in on that cold December morning in 2000, I realized it was the first time I had deliberately chosen the citizenship of a nation. My Indian one had come to me by birth; my passport had been mine to ask for; a set of allegiances lay waiting for me to take on. Here, I had inserted myself into the process of gaining a nationality; previously, I had been born into the role. My older passport had been the culmination of a long series of experiences that had reinforced my nationality; my newer one was the first indication of my newer one, the first contributor to the building of a new edifice of identity.