A Kizhai Kadai: “A Post Mortem of Postmodernism”
Hmmmm…. I did not think that I would write this Kizhai kadai first. However, backed by popular demand (that demand being two out of my 10 readers or so :P) I am embarking on this rather daunting task. Perhaps, it is also necessary given that it is the zeitgeist of the times we live in, the Ahriman worshipped by current pop culture. Though I try to manoeuvre around it given the kind of quicksand it is, I suppose I will inevitably need to step in given the ubiquitous cesspool that it has become especially in India. I shall narrate this kizhai kadai as a form of struggle against the quicksand while desperately trying to persuade those who step in that beneath lies no paradise but rather degenerating gradations of Dante’s inferno. Having managed to climb out of it luckily in the past, I shall step in again, to persuade. This time I do not run the risk of getting sucked into it since I know my way out from past experience. As mentioned before, this Kizhai kadhai is the Main kadhai as of now for all intents and purposes. It is like reading the Yoga Vashistam which is a part of the Ramayana but also a stand-alone text by itself . Hence, I will no doubt be constrained by the lack of space to tackle every single character, concept, and nuance.
Now, the kizhai kadai of postmodernism is not so easy to pin down. As I have written before, the strains have metastasized into multiple variants. However, it is possible to catch the shapeshifting pathogen which feeds on and is fed by a rather amorphous amalgamation constituted by the carcasses of it’s previous victims. To do so, we need to first weave a powerful Indra’s net using various threads which can nab it. We shall then cut it open being awed, annoyed as well as terrified at the poisonous amalgamation that constitutes it from the inside . The various threads used to weave the net will be as follows- Chronological, Psychological, Linguistic, Epistemic, Ontological, Logical, and finally personal.
Let me begin somewhat hesitantly by putting my foot into quicksand.
Chronologically, postmodernism was born in France. Let us hear this from the a postmodernist himself in his article, “How postmodernism became a scapegoat in the 21st century”. He says, “ Postmodernism is a broad movement that developed in the mid-to-late 20th century across philosophy, the arts, architecture, and criticism, marking a departure from modernism. The term has been more generally applied to describe a historical era said to follow after modernity and the tendencies of this era”. The first book was Lyotard’s “Postmodern condition” followed by the formidable troika of Foucault , Derrida and Lacan who gave it the nutrition and impetus to infect and pervade a whole generation.
As I noted above and as described by the author, it is more or less a “zeitgeist” supposedly with no concrete “grand narrative” and accommodating a “plurality of narratives”. Now, how does one respond to this. If it is not a philosophical stance, and merely a zeitgeist,we can safely say that it merits no attention and can be left at that. However, that is not how it behaves. Here, is a certain Indian heuristic- “Trust not what they claim rather examine what they do.” After all the British did claim that they intended to civilize and divinise us didn't they?
We can do this effectively by studying the effect that these high priests of “plurality” have on their naive adherents as they relentlessly assault and condemn the devil of essentialism . This shall become much clearer once we manage to weave the various strands of our net.
Back to the chronology, our fellow postmodernist says- “it acquired social and political content, in as much as the postmodern world was thought to be post-industrial, beyond class conflict, and increasingly beyond left and right”. So far, so good. However, let us now examine what it actually did.
As Camille Paglia narrates, “post-modernism” was a hot commodity in the 70’s , which the intellectuals readily made a career out of. They were shipped from Continental Europe to the land of the free and home of the brave. Being an infant, America lacked rich native intellectual traditions. Allured by big money in John Locke’s land with unlimited frontiers ( USA) and pervaded by an “existential meaninglessness” in Europe, our postmodern priests decided to take their gospel to new shores. Here, they could pontificate endlessly about the nature of power from their high chairs at Yale and Columbia while being thoroughly consumed and consummated by it. Meanwhile , the original zeitgeist of the 60’s shifted from Europe towards the the Orient vis a vis the rise of Osho, J Krishnamurthy, Jung, Gurdjieff etc. Of course, things went downhill for the zeitgeist as it evaporated into a whimper. The explosion of Osho followed by his drastic downfall as documented by a recent Netflix special does some of the explaining .In recent times, it peaks through an Eckhart Tolle or Deepak Chopra though without the vitality of it’s predecessor. At best, it is like the decimated spirit of Mallya’s Kingfisher as compared to a flourishing Cognac. In any case, this is another kizhai kadhai which I shall tell some other time.
Coming back to our priests, postmodernists took up plumb jobs at American Universities where they were welcomed with much adoration. This strain sensing the naivety of the host that lacked rich native intellectual immunity, metastasized and took over at an alarming pace. They conjured departments out of thin air like the rabbit out of a magician’s hat and then claimed that there is no “essential” difference between what people saw versus what they knew to be a trick. How is that possible? They exclaimed “essentialism is a myth and everything a construction of our minds”. Wow! Exotic and refreshing , isn’t it? But as we know exotic species often turn into invasive species, wiping out entire ecosystems.
This is what it did, successfully gnawed away at the initially promising intellectual potential that America displayed. It has now managed to become all encompassing, taking over American intellectual life as well as political and cultural life. In short , it has infected the body politic beyond measure splintering the country up into multiple fragmentary strains that compete with one other for “power”; deriving energy from a sense of victimhood. Being “othered”, resentment and rage throttles up the engine of social justice which runs on the biodiesel of trauma. However, the vehicles are like those from Fast and Furious, but on steroids. Like a buffed up Salman Khan they drunkenly bulldoze every pedestrian and every shop not sparing not even the black bucks that come in the way. How will they? After all healthy psychology and human biology are social constructions after all .
Instead of emphasising on an interdisciplinary curriculum, new cult departments were propped up which ensured the self-sustenance and longevity of this strain . Initially, the openness to this strain came from the cynicism that had set in after the World Wars in Europe and America. Now, it is omniscient and omnipotent while only being omnibenevolent to its adherents, threatening to discipline any other voice which is not a variant of itself. Refer to the experiences of evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Hayes , psychologist Jordan Peterson as well as behavioral psychologist Rima Azhar. Even stranger is that this strain doesn’t flinch before cannibalizing it’s own for not being virulent enough- Ask Bari Weiss, Margaret Atwood and JK Rowling. In any case, we see the chronology of how the deflection of the aforementioned zeitgeist towards the East paved way for the hegemonic rise of a cynically power driven cultural movement, which now pervades and shapes American academic life , political life and popular culture.
America being the global cultural hegemon, exports and spreads the pandemic to other nations infecting people everywhere. The goal apparently is to make the “World Flat” (Friedman) which only furthers the speed and degree of spread. One symptom of this is referred to in popular parlance as “Cancel Culture” . Though, a political talking point by Republicans , it definitely merits serious consideration. Now, one thread done, 6 more to go. We are just getting started.
Psychologically, the effects have been catastrophic. Statistics about millennials in America and the trajectory of pop culture movements tell a bleak story. For example, the Survey Centre on American life says that Americans have fewer friends than they used to. 15% of men and 10% of women have no close friends. Moreover, I have heard more than a few people say that the political divides are tearing families apart where people are unable to share a meal at the dinner table. I will not mention every single statistic here but they can be easily found on the internet. And I am afraid this may also be the case in India soon and it may as well be the case in our urban silicon valleys. These shining centres are most susceptible to the pathogen. I am beginning to see a slow but sure community spread over rural India, as the pathogen threatens to suck out any last drops of any deeper sense of meaning that they still embody, rendering their spirits into a dried up dessicated Sahara. As if the scorching of the physical space is not enough intoxicating them on the deadly postmodern spirit(literal and metaphorical)of Mallya is the apparent solution . What else can one expect when a movement is premised on the predicate of pure power. It is anti-reason, anti-science and anti-ideology claiming for itself the “othered” place of a destructive antichrist.
Counter movements and ideologies can help destroy with a certain blind moral force but their effectiveness depends on the power of construction, synthesis and harmonisation. The Americans especially must have learned this by now from Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya where conquest was easy but consolidation unbelievably onerous. Let alone coping with the side-effects of conquest driven regime change policies that show up in various forms namely, ISIS, Al Qaeda and Taliban. Perhaps, these postmodern strains adapted to the pre-existing condition of american exceptionalism by internalizing Morgenthau and Kissinger . That is, ruling by fear while perfidiously using the language of love , human rights and democracy.
It is possible that the “tyranny of Rationality” and the “Pig’s philosophy” of empirical utilitarianism brought out this strain in all it’s glory. The dryness of reason despite of it’s mind bending gymnastics lacks the vigour (“will to power”) to lay the foundation of a free society. Coupled with the hedonism of utilitarian materialism that preaches the gospel of feeding , fattening and fornicating, the western culture may have experienced a certain “Being and Nothingness” that Sartre and Simon torture themselves with. Of course this does not explain their embarrassing views on science. For example, listen to this cringeworthy argument by their comrade Latour- Ridiculing a science article which claimed that a Pharoah died of Tuberculosis, he snidely remarks that tuberculosis was only discovered in the 19nth century and hence a social construction. This insanity continues today with preposterous slogans like “Math and Physics are patriarchal and oppressive”; “ Human biology is a social construction etc”. It boggles my mind as to how this appeals to anyone at all especially to intellectuals in third world where there are serious ramifications for such disembodied armchair ramblings. More on this later.
Anyways, we saw in a previous article how this dynamic is itself a manifestation of Descartes’ Cartesian dualism of mind and body which has serious theological residue ( rationalism v empricisim) . According to the Big 5 personality test, people who code for trait openness find boundaries as restricting and structure as suffocating. Thus, unlike the scientists and conservatives, the liberals, the artists , the writers, the poets and the aestheticists may have found a certain naïve solace amidst the suffocation in such a “liberating” amorphous amalgam constituted and fed by their “alienation” and “trauma”. Hence, the relationship is one of mutual parasitism where both feed on the other. Except that thought parasites have real consequences on the body politic as it manages to outlive the bodies of its originators by feeding on their carcass growing stronger and jumping onto new naive hosts. Currently, gargantuan in form and vitality, it now hijacks every young naïve wounded host especially finding it conducive to attack at the sites of trauma. Two done, 5 more to go.
Linguistically, Noam Chomsky says the rant against essentialism is absolute nonsense. This is because biologically and evolutionarily we have linguistic structures no matter how much ever we are haunted by them. Otherwise, I could be a bee and bee could be me! Mellifluous to my poetic sensibilities but absolute rubbish to my analytical sensibility. If I had no “essential human nature” then I should have no problem turning into an amoeba at will while an amoeba should have no difficulty in metamorphosing into a rabbit by simply wearing the magical hat of postmodernism. No wonder these high priests murmur to each other with such absurd exotic occultism while actually just spewing nonsense.
Such a temptation came from the incredibly powerful “God” that science had become replacing the one of the church. Yes, the same One that Nietzsche declared dead a few decades earlier. Seeing the advances in modern science especially Physics which spoke about Quantum spookiness, Relativity, Wave- particle duality etc the intellectuals from the humanities and social sciences started mysticising language to make themselves “cool” and ‘relevant” on campus. Coupled together with the PR disaster in Western universities in regards to poor representation of women, minorities etc. they saw an opportunity to attack and occupy positions of power that they claimed to oppose. They dismissed everything including Milton’s poetry, Platonic philosophy, rationalism, empiricism, science etc as oppressive grand narratives.
As a result, they did produce some incredible works of Literature vis a vis Marquez’s magic realism, Cortazar’s surrealism and other interesting schools of art. But moving forward it has now spiralled into an absolutely cultish church-like elite enterprise where drawing squares and writing inanities is appreciated as art and literature respectively . Anyone who watched Thozha in Tamil, a remake of the French movie “The Intouchables” can relate to what I am talking about. Of course, the columns of Shobha De, Sagarika Ghose and Suhel Seth can also be looked at for further reference. To be fair, it still produces fabulous literature once in a blue moon. That is perfectly fine as a pastime for the rich and privileged in the first world, but what about the third world. Can we afford such luxuries, do we even have the time for such nonsense? These questions will be given serious reflection in the last section. 3 done, just 4 more to go. The next one is a bit difficult but a key strand for the construction of the net. If one is not able to follow, at least skim the summary of argument which accompanies it at the end.
Logically, SN Balagangadhara accuses Derrida of engaging in Dissimulation, Deceit, Dishonesty, Duplicity and Double-Dealing. I would urge all to read his incredible paper( link shared below) which strips down Derrida revealing the nakedness of the Postmodern emperor . I will just reproduce a couple of examples from his paper for our purposes below. Discussing Derrida’s lecture, Balu examines the following statement of the former;
“1. On the religious profundity of inconsistency
As a philosopher, let me begin with his ‘philosophical’ problem regarding the title of his talk, ‘deconstruction and the possibility of justice’: The conjunction “and” brings together words, concepts, perhaps things that do not belong to the same category. (Derrida, p.231)”
This is his frustrated yet funny response- “There are so many problems with this sentence that it makes one, were one not better informed, wonder about the quality of the French education system that produces professors like these. In the first place, it is a child’s game to make these items belong to one category: define a category in such a way that these three sit together there. In the second place, it is proven in Set theory that for any two (or more) objects one could construct a unique set. In the third place, bringing together concepts that should not be brought together is also called a ‘category mistake’ in philosophy. However, that mistake depends on what one takes to exist in the world, i.e. it depends on one’s ontology. But this branch is part of ‘metaphysics’, a discipline that Derrida fights against. In the fourth place, it is impossible to even linguistically make sense of how the conjunction ‘and’ performs this miracle. If it can, all I have to say is ‘God and I’, ‘God, Being and I’, ‘God and Cow’s milk’, ‘God and Holy Shit’, etc. to suggest that they all belong to the ‘same category’. God!”
This is Derrida’s second sentence, which speaks about how “and” does this
2) “A conjunction such as and dares to defy order, taxonomy, and classificatory logic, no matter how it operates..”.
Balu responds-“ Could one really be so dumb? In the previous sentence he had said that ‘and’ brings things together. If it does, then an ordering has come into existence. Obviously not the case, as we discover now, because ‘and’ dares to defy order. In so far as ‘and’ groups three items together, this linguistic particle classifies. No, it dares defy classificatory logic. As far as taxonomy is concerned, it depends on what taxa we are talking about: only Derrida can counterintuitively classify the word ‘possibility’ as ‘taxa’. It is a modal concept but, I suppose, you can also do a taxonomy of modal terms… In any case, no, it also dares defy taxonomy. Taken together, these two sentences contradict each other. Is Derrida so dumb that he not only contradicts himself but also makes it so painfully obvious by rendering the contradiction so visible? Perhaps not, if we know something important: contradictions do not make the sentences ‘non- informative’ or ‘nonsensical’. At a meta-level, contradictions are informative: they tell us that they are not making true or false claims about the world ( Remember this for later when we bring up Wittgenstein).
Balu continues, but Derrida is talking about the title of his lecture, something that exists in the world (on the banner of the conference, for instance); his talk is about something that happens in the world (deconstruction takes place in the world, does it not?). Further it is about a linguistic particle in a language (language is ‘present’ in the world, is it not?) and about a modal operator (in both language and logic, both of which are also present in the world, is it not?). That is to say, Derrida is talking about the world. Yet, at a meta-linguistic level, taken together, these two sentences tell us that they are not statements (whether true or false) about the world. Conclusion? Derrida talks as though his thoughts are about the world, while, actually, they are not. If it is not about the world, what else can it be about? (After all, he is talking about something or another.) He can only be talking about something outside this world, some- thing which can only be “addressed in a virtual, oblique or elliptical fashion” (ibid. p.261). “
Just bear it out, as this is the last sentence which lands the “knockout”.
3) why…deconstruction…(has)…the reputation…of treating things obliquely, indirectly, in indirect style… (ibid. p.244)- Derrida
Balu asks sharply- If Derrida is talking about whatever is outside the world, what is completely outside the world but has a complex relationship (of whatever sort) to the world, which includes everything that was, is and shall be? God, according to all the believers in the world, of course. Thus, you talk about God without talking about Him. Or, one can say, you can talk only obliquely about God. If this God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, is The One talked about, then such talks are
discourses on…the undecidable, the incommensurable or the incalculable, on singularity, difference and heterogeneity are also, through and through, at least oblique discourses… (ibid., p. 235, my emphasis)
He is also the ‘Just’ God. In fact, many have said that this God is justice personified. If that is the case, as the believers say it is, this God is also righteous. It is He who judges us, human beings. It is in His eyes that we have to be judged righteous. That is, we cannot judge whether others are righteous or not; nor can any human being judge himself. We cannot ascribe to ourselves the ability of judging ourselves as righteous human beings. To do so is to arrogate the powers of God to ourselves and we betray Him if we do that. Such ‘self-righteousness’ is not allowed of us. Look at the beautiful way Derrida formulates these core ideas (present both in Judaism and Christianity):
“while seeming not to “address” the problem of justice, has done nothing else while unable to do so directly but only in an oblique fashion. I say oblique, since at this very moment I am preparing to demonstrate that one cannot speak directly about justice, thematize or objectivize justice, say “this is just,” and even less “I am just,” without immediately betraying justice, if not law. (ibid., p.237, emphasis mine; in the footnote to this thought, Derrida adds: On the oblique, see my Du droit a la philosophie, esp. 71ff, and “Passions: An Oblique Offering”) “- Derrida
Irritated? So was I throughout my college especially in my literature classes until I found this gem of a paper a few months ago which opened a Pandora’s box of insights.
To summarize this paper, SN Balagangadhara charges Derrida with theologizing using secular language. This was in response to the secularization of Christianity by the rationalists which we discussed in the previous article. Derrida is also attractive to people in the West for much the same reason: he makes the familiar (secularized Christianity) look unfamiliar (his Judaism), makes the native (Christianity) into a foreigner (a slightly unknown variety of Judaism) and clothes this combination as their environment. Hence, the ambiguous responses to Derrida in the West: some Christian thinkers believe that Derrida is an attack on Christianity, yet others applaud him. Some recognize him the ‘intuitive’ sense he makes of their world, which is a secularized Christian world. Some are as impatient of Derrida as they are of theology. As Balu says “ if you work with the hypothesis that Derrida does an idiosyncratic Jewish theology in a philosophical language, you can just about predict the entire spectrum of the varying responses to his writings by thinkers in the West”.
Being a student of religious studies and political economy, I did intuitively sense the continuity between the various modern political philosophers and theology. But, I did not have the intelligence back then to see the similarity between Postmodernism and Theology given the verbal jargon jugglery. Such an exotic shapeshifter indeed!
We are more than half way through, just three more to go.
Epistemically, the methods used by postmodernists include “deconstruction”, “double reading”, “creative misinterpretation” etc that broadly fall under the category of Hermeneutics. This simply means reading into a text whatever one feels like since there is no “essential” meaning, only a plurality of infinite perspectives. This was the old debate between the Catholic church which claimed exclusive right to the Word of God (aka Bible) while the various protestant denominations broke away “secularly” to find their own interpretations by developing a personal connect to God. In contrast, Jordan Peterson argues that there only a limited number of practical perspectives which orients one appropriately in the world. Peterson with his Jungian influence ( who was in turn shaped by his yogic experiences in India) provides a fresh insight in that that there are only a limited number of ways of appropriate orientation in the world despite of the multiplicity of interpretations. He does not develop this further and ends up providing certain rules which are attenuated forms of Moral Christian Commandments in his artistically crafted “12 rules for life : An Antidote to Chaos” and it’s follow up “12 rules for life : An Antidote to Order”.
In any case, this is the problem with Hermeneutics, it confuses normative moral judgment with logical evaluative statements that can be tested by personal experience or experimental empiricism. So, what one does is say that there are multiple interpretations while offering up their “exclusive” interpretation. This is the sort of plurality where one “ought to” treat and accept Churchill’s racist interpretation of Gandhi as a half-naked fakir, Godse’s interpretation of him as the reason for the India- Pakistan split as well as Sardhar Patel’s “Mahatma” interpretation of Gandhi on the same plane. Since, there is and can be no criteria to judge or evaluate anything.
Let me give a more shocking example to my Indian friends who may be inclined to defend postmodernism on the grounds of plurality. Courtright, an Indologist believes he is giving a “Freudian interpretation” of the story of Ganesha which means that he is mapping the story of Ganesha to a particular linguistic interpretation of the texts of Freud. Kripal, for instance, “interprets” the sucking of the toes (by the Tantriks) as a symbol for oral sex while Wendy Doniger claims that Ramakrishna Paramahamsa hallucinated about Kali since he had gay fantasies about Vivekananda.
They say that all of these must all be treated equally without any discrimination since truths are relative. What does equal even mean here? Is it not true that there are gradations of truth. For instance, for the ancient people the fact that the world was flat was true, later a round earth became true, now we accept the geoid as more true , in future it may shift into something more accurate which we are ignorant of currently. Is it possible to say that they are all equally true and deserve the same degree of internalisation and validity? I am accepting truth here, as the correspondence theory of truth advanced by Aristotle and later improved upon by Alfred Tarski.
Pushing this further, should we consider Hitler’s moral spirituality on the same plane as Swami Vivekananda’s? Is this acceptable to anyone sensible? It is safe to say that such difficulties beg us to continually analyse and evaluate reasonably but with moral force and intuition for sure. Instead, postmodernists resort to trivialising such serious human difficulties by yelling truisms christened with a holier than thou attitude. Sanctimoniously claiming to have the mystical word of God and superficially professing equality before God for the oppressed, they go on to otherize and ostracise the “false” believers. In fact, there is no escape, it is quite the logical consequence of their epistemology. Our net is almost done, just a bit more ( Last two left).
Ontologically, postmodernists believe that only power exists in the world. Their Hermeneutical interpretation makes them see the world as power games that various groups play. Therfore, the right way to organize oneself would be to scream his own narcissisistic interpretation as loud as possible until the other submits in exasperation. This is what I mean by saying Political correctness is it’s weapon of choice and cancel culture the new inquisition ( better than the older violent ones for sure). Hence, one simply does whatever one feels like while raging about pluralism and justice. Socrates’, “ Knowledge is Virtue” is rendered into “Knowledge is Power”. There is no place for Platonic virtue or Kant’s normative value. Love, truth, goodness, altruism, ethics are all social constructions that deserve to be dismantled and dismembered systematically. Even better, if one can do it at universities where aspirations of effervescent youth can be transformed into existential dread. Drugs, depression, and dunces are the logical end products of such a movement. Again, just take a look at the statistics about the quality of life of millennials and youth around the world.
Phew ! All the major threads are done. Now I just need to add the personal thread which can add glimmer to our gloriously constructed Indra’s net. Kindly, bear with me for just a little more….
Personally, I have had a hard time with postmodernism though I was briefly enticed. During my college days in America, I was confronted by this pathogenic strain which had just begun to spread to the alien lands of Idaho from the more familiar lands of California and New York. It especially showed signs of virulence in Literature classes (with exceptions of course)though it was generally pervasive across disciplines in attenuated form. I was lucky to have a Professor, who taught the classics vis a vis Dialectics to whom I owe much of my current cognitive abilities . I remember that he had a very interesting approach to such postmodern tendencies. While never beating it down, he was careful in not exacerbating this strain in the classroom. He mostly manoeuvred around it while also occasionally immunizing the classroom with intellectual rigour when it threatened to get out of hand. He was of course a “cis gendered white man” as postmodernists would categorise while claiming to be against categories.
Of course, this language was not as developed or pronounced back then since the priests were still deciding on if such revelations can be taken to the masses. Coming back, his pedagogy of knowledge dissemination astonishes me till this very day. I suspect the grey hair, and quirky shirts meant that he had access to the playfully piercing daemon of Socrates whom he held in great reverence.
Whenever I brought up his arguments and methods to people( students and professors) who described themselves as postmodern, I was met with utter cynicism and disdain. They claimed that he had a white colonial agenda and that his mode of selecting thinkers expressed his supposed subterfuge. My experience of him was exactly the opposite — a man who was gentle, kind, sensitive, brilliant and most of all humble with all his idiosyncrasies intact( which is exactly what made him unique). I took a few classes to see if there was any validity to what sounded like conspiratorial theories powered by unbelievable cynicism and envious resentment. I was of course initially enamoured by Said, Lacan, Foucault , Derrida, Simon , Sartre and Frantz Fannon. However, after a few classes the exotic novelty ran out- I felt like neither the students nor the Professors knew what we were talking about. It was absolute verbal vomit that threw my neurological system in disarray. The cynicism and resentment weakened my heart and mind making me more susceptible to sink downward into the quicksand toward different degradations of the psychological Inferno.
But I was quite clear on what was being done, “moral posturing” with verbiage that none could understand. Hence, I understood early on that intellectual pretentiousness is a symptom of this strain along with moral posturing. Needless to say, I chose to get disinfected by staying away from such breeding grounds while also building my immunity by consuming other healthier options . This is to quickly recall the story of how I managed to get out of the quicksand promptly, realising its true nature. I can only say that, individual rays of knowledge manifesting from the shining light of Wisdom aided me in climbing out promptly by drying up the quicksand. Till this day , I am forevever grateful and humbled for having such wonderful teachers who transformed me with their rays of light by instilling in me the intution to recognize knowledge when I see it. Some luck I say!
Now , as you must have sensed, we have caught the shapeshifting pathogen with our magnificent net. Now, let us cut it open to see what it reveals.
Landing In India, and witnessing Indian intellectual culture , I was mortified; what was quicksand in the West had become a cesspool in India. Being the Big Boy, American body politic could ignore such gaping holes in its heart though in recent times it seems to be struggling from multiple strokes delivered by Trump, Kanon, Ku Klux, Antifah, etc . In India, on an already emaciated body politic (as a result of the protracted traumas of colonial experience), such cesspools ensure a certain coma while accelerating the decay. As Chomsky says, intellectuals in the third world speaking like unintelligible high priests has disastrous ramifications for their societies.
Indian intellectuals simply repeat mindlessly the stories of the British descriptions of India while pivoting skillfully with postmodern verbosity when asked for insights or solutions. Here in India, postmodernism is harnessed as a powerful rhetorical strategy to confuse and halt any serious discussion. Dialogues are normativized with mundane moral ought’s, while our own traditional knowledge is Anglicized and resurrected with the blessing of Macaulay’s holy ghost. As written previously, Krishna becomes Kant and Dharma becomes Deontology. The other postmodern tendency is to read Dharma as a underhand power mechanism to oppress dalits and women. Though there may be shades of truth to this, it does not occur due to the reasons that the British gave which was obviously driven by their Providential mission to divide and rule.
In fact, we could have listened sensitively to Draupadi , Ekalavya and Karna. Mari Selvaraj’s masterfully crafted “Karnan” can also tell us much about how these issues have gotten much more complex over a period of time. Of course, we also need to listen to Krishna, Valmiki, Ahalya etc for possible answers while striving to be sharp and creative ourselves. Given our deeply traumatising colonial experience, I see the proclivity towards postmodernism which blends in with it’s close cousin postcolonialism but I am yet to grasp how it appeals as a broader intellectual anchor to the Indian intuition. From above , it is perhaps the shapeshifting nature where one can abdicate all social and intellectual responsibility while being paid out of the people’s treasury and the modern day Privy purse ( one can trace their funding to all kind nefarious foreign organizations including the various churches). From the bottom it is our Colonial Consciousness, sadly. Boom! the animalistic forces of supply and demand meet at an equilibrium of thouroughly stagnating homeostasis.
Now, you may ask what is the problem with any of this .The problem is that we become puppets of the West by neither understanding ourselves nor the tendencies of the West. We are systematically emasculated and infected with these deadly strains on our already malnourished body politic. We construct all kinds of nonsensical and unintelligible doctrines such as Gandhian Marxism, Krishna’s deontology, Ecological postmodernism, Indian secularism etc. In other words, our naive goodwill ensures that this shapeshifting predatory pathogen pervades our brains, totally blinding us to it’s actual motivations despite of very clear manifestations. The Hermeneutical method ensures that we will never utilize our own native epistemic methods such as shravanam, mananam, svadhayaya, tapasya etc… In short, it acts as a barrier from even seriously asking the age old Indian question of “who am I” without sabotaging it with nonsensical Macaulized answers.
Some, often quote Wittgenstein who spoke about “language games “ as an argument for the kind of pluralism they espouse. Here, it would be relevent to remember the infamous heated Poker Chip episode between Wittgenstein and Popper where tensions erupted in pursuit of truth. Such was the pluralism advocated by the various Indian traditions as well, centuries ago. For example, Mandana Mishra’s wife, Bharathi perplexes the intensely logical Shankara with her terrific questions who had just defeated her husband in a legendary intellectual duel. It is this attitude that Amartya Sen eulogizes as the argumentative Indian. Of course, like Wittgenstein, Indians also did not believe that the unsayable should be condemned as nonsense. On the contrary, the things we could not talk about were those that really mattered ( also referred to as adhyatma in Hinduism and ultimate wisdom by Buddhism). Phenomenologists like Hannah Arendt talk about these things that matter much more powerfully and coherently as “the human condition”. While there is a space for realms that supersede logic which can be termed supra-logical ( poetry, art, music etc..) , becoming postmodernly illogical and idiotic is untenable and inexcusable.
Now, postmodernism does pick upon an important insight which is the contradiction and multiplicities of narratives that obscure one’s experience in the world. In fact, I do not deny that Foucault’s analysis of power, broke barriers in that it contested the traditional colonial ways of speaking about power. Said’s “orientalism” , Fannon’s “wretched of the earth” as well as “black skin, white mask” all have crucial insights. However, the answer ultimately offered is logically incoherent, intellectually abhorrent and morally farcical. Technically, it says — Since I see the world as flat, the world must be flat since I see it as thus . As Weinberg says- “All logical arguments can be defeated by the simple refusal to reason logically” . The ironical crown of arrogant ignorance does stand out indeed.
To be even more specific, the pluralism of postmodernism does not interconnect the various “selves” rather it individuates them and fragments them vis vis an attitude of pretentious morality masquerading as supposed intellectuality. From an Indian perspective, this pluralism can be redescribed as multiplying individual ahamkaras combining to emerge into parasitic groups ahamkaras( termed as the collective unconscious by Jung). These go on to compete with each other for obsessive “power” driven by the arrogance of asmitha. This is one of the major obstacles in accessing adhyatma or experiential knowledge since it is a text book case of avidya. It is the tyranny of the buddhi which Dostoevsky calls the “tyranny of cunning rationality”. This requires much more reflection and serious consideration which I will not be able to sketch out now, given the already long winding kizhai kadai. Let it remain as some nutritious food for thought.
Phew! Finally we have nabbed the shapeshifter, revealing it’s insides in all its amorphous colours. But what matters is that the sight and stench of this poison is crystal clear. The consequences of consuming this poison and being consumed by it, even more so, no matter how much it dazzles from the outside. While some amount of poison can heal like anti-venom, an excess can kill and it does kill slowly, steadily and surely.
In the end, I am left wondering if this effort will even impact those who refuse to hear and see with their own minds. Nevertheless, I persist. As TS Eliot, eloquently writes-
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.”
