Will the real “rationalist”, please stand up?
A letter to the Rationalists in India
Dear Rationalists,
I must state at the onset that what I say below may sound provocative but please bear with my insolence since as a common citizen I bear it out every day with you. After all , “tolerance” is what you stand for. Without much further ado, I shall get to the story which hopefully becomes our story by the time you reach the end.
As Veda asks Vikram “oru kadhai sollatuma sirs?”[ “Shall i tell you a story sirs?”]
Cutting to the chase, our Constitution demands that we develop “scientific temper” which is shoved down our throats by you and your machines of state. Now, from a limited grasp of human knowledge generated so far, I am yet to figure out if this is a certain propositional attitude or a psychological personality trait. In any case I can’t figure out either since you have neither set up a Department in Philosophy of Science anywhere in the country nor do you have any novel insights into the Human Psyche. At this point, I am compelled to suspect that this chest thumping about “rationalism” and “scientific temper” is either a dogmatic slogan or a feel good platitude. Let me tell you how and why it needn’t be that way.
Of course in trying to say what I intend to , I cannot lay out every single point though I would be more than happy if asked. This is due to the constraint of space and shrinking attention span. Despite of my best efforts, the story has snowballed into 5 pages. I plead for your patience and promise to make it worth it.
In regards to “rationalism” I can only talk about two strains that I have been exposed to- one local and one national. I shall label them the “Tamil Nadu strain” and “Secular-strain”. Of course there may be more strains. But as the vaccine experts tell us, the spike protein is all the same.
Now, what do I mean when I say “Rationalism” is dogmatic sloganeering as understood in India today. Take for example the axiomatic claims of leaders from DMK or DK ( ADMK has nothing novel in terms of thought to engage with). They range from outdated to outright silly.
First, the outdated.No serious scientist, biologist, or historian considers the “Wheeler Hypothesis” on Aryan-Dravidian hypothesis as tenable. In fact , they say that we have more reasons to believe in reverse migration. Even the much celebrated hegemonic “Marxist” historians of India have settled on Aryan migration as compared to Aryan invasion. In any case, they in their own words have admitted that they are not concerned with truth anymore. It is beyond my comprehension to understand whatever else they may be preoccupied with. I have my theories on this but I shall refrain and leave it for reflection.
Second , what to make of mind bogglingly silly claims such as Mesopotamians, Egyptians and Greeks were the ancient Dravidians whom the Aryan Brahmins invaded us from Central Asia. There is just so much to be said here but we shall skirt the issue for now. Of course there is also much to be discussed about discrimination of the downtrodden in our society. But let us stick to rationalism, for now. All in all, the messaging that emerges is that there is nothing that is worthwhile in Indian tradition and we are superstitious religious baboons. There is something disturbingly similar about this story and the description of India by the various Christian missionaries during British rule. Both parties say that they are the “rationalists” who have the message of “ You-Know-Who”. No problem , if one is a Christian Missionary. But it is hysterical when self proclaimed atheists transmute, into the prophets of the “God” that they openly abhor.
Where could we look for an explanation for such a perplexing psychological mechanism. Perhaps, the brilliant Carl Jung? Even simpler, the inspiring Jordan Peterson? Well, Patanjali’s yoga sutras would be much more comprehensive but I do understand that we have a fetish for imports. In any case, all is not lost and I believe that the effects of this strain can be alleviated with sufficient immunity which includes serious rethinking and honest reimagination. More on this later ( Perhaps, in another post).
Now, coming to the more deadly “secular strain”. Let me recount a personal experience in a high profile job interview. On my Detailed Application Form, I had mentioned performing magic as one of my hobbies. The representatives of the “secular state” who pontificated endlessly about scientific temper saw this more as a peevish “irrational” enterprise. One of them asked worryingly “you are not saying that magic is real, right?”. My response was “Of course magic is not real, no one claims that, But the proclivity of the human mind to wonder and to be awed is real”. He was somewhat satisfied with this answer but the Chairwoman smirked. I am quite certain that the Board saw me as justifying “irrationality”. Needless to say, I flunked the interview. In my experience, most servants of the secular state who brag about “scientific-temper” cannot say what it is. They simply reduce it to santimonious platitudes. This is nothing new that I am observing here. It is the ancient Socratic critique of sophistry and unearned virtue signalling;it is when lack of clarity masquerades as confidence. They have neither heard about “falsifiability” nor of Karl Popper.
I do not blame them either since neither the syllabus nor the training equips the so called steel-frame with actual “scientific temper”. I cannot possibly describe what it entails in this story . But to summarize, it involves a ruthless evaluation of concepts and sometimes even undermining of one’s own ideas in the pursuit of truth. Sprinkle the above with imagination and you get genius that outlives the individual’s time on earth. If our system had equipped them with such learning we would be reimagining the bureaucracy as an interconnected “Indra’s Net” or Gandhi’s “oceanic circles” on the lines panpsychism. I suppose, it is normal and natural for steel to be rigid and to rust. But exuding the stench of the rot so much to the extent of paralysing the common citizenry and poisoning Mother India cannot be excused.
This is not to say that there are no diamonds amidst the rusting-rotting steel. But the strength and opacity of the steel is so overpowering that the diamonds are either buried beneath( sometimes literally)or not allowed to shine. Others simply change their carbon properties to fit into the rotting steel network to protect themselves from such burial. Thus, it is totally understandable from one perspective but absolutely inexcusable from another.
Phew! rhetoric out of the way.
Now, some analysis.
If we see above, it is taken for granted that “we ought” to be scientifically tempered or “rational”. In other words , it is a “moral” claim. So as Hume asked , “Is it rational to be moral”? Now, Hume was what is called an “empiricist” or one who believes that the five sense organs are the only means of “knowing”. Of course I am simplifying but his basic point was that “human beings require reasons to be moral”. Why? The short answer is because morality constraints our “rational-liberty”. Which liberty? Among all answers or non-answers that I know, in John Locke’s own words “ God given liberty” or “Christian liberty”. Now, one step further. Which God? . Of course, the Judeo Christian one. So, this intuition of Life, Liberty and Property (later changed into pursuit of happiness in the American Constitution)has proper Protestant theological underpinnings. Most European philosophers like Locke were also theologians who rebelled against the excesses of the Church to curb reason. For a terrifying account on this, just ask Galileo or Bruno. For a milder version of the same,asking Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton would also suffice. Now, Hume of course was an “atheist” who rejected God and relied only on his senses. But how can his senses “justify” his intuition of “liberty”. They can’t, only his “reason” can since ideation is it’s explicit function. However, “rationalism” is a problem for Hume as well as other empiricists. Why? We need to go backwards in time to understand this.
The earliest rationalists were church fathers like St Augustine and Thomas Aquinas who used rationalism to “prove” that God exists by deductive reasoning. Why such an odd endeavour? Three reasons. One, the Muslims in Spain seemed to be a pain in the ass. They talked about “Aql” or reason . How the hell do we make them “believe” in Christ. Second, perhaps they had to make stopgap arrangements for a “literal” apocalpse which didn’t occur. Third, it was a strategic mechanism to rebaptize themselves by using “reasons” to stay relevent to the masses that they had gathered.
But where do they look for “reason” which they didn’t know of or care for till then? In the classical library of Antioch , amidst works of the “other heathen barbarians” of course. Thus, their understanding of the Bible seems to have been to rape and kill the heathen not only physically but also epistemically and psychologically. Ask, Hypatia and the Neoplatonists. Let us leave the physical aspect for now and move to the epistemic.
For example, the distortion of the Greek “logos” as “rationalism” of the “Church”. What is the difference between the two? The Greeks had a completely different epistemology (knowledge system) which they developed in dialogue with the Indian, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian Civilizations. Logos was more akin to Vedic Vak and mantra as opposed to “rationalism”. In the meantime, the abstract rationalistic tradition of the Church was coercing people to believe things they could not perceive with their organs. In other words, they were forcing people to undermine their own sense organs and “believe” in the “truth” of the Church. Truth here being reduced to a set of linguistic statements derived from “rationalism”, ordained by divine decree and executed by state-sanctioned fiat.
The Protestants who rebelled against the “fiat” aspect became the great thinkers of the enlightenment. These include Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza who denied the authority Church. However, they accepted the epistemic method of the church which is “Rationalism”. They famously advanced the ontological argument ( variants include cosmological argument and teleological argument) which “proves” the existence of God vis a vis “reason”. Now, Hobbes , Hume and Locke ( theorists of almost all modern conceptions of state from sovereignty to secularism to liberty to equality) saw the rationalists as deploying the same method as St Augustine who had advanced his own ontological argument for the existence of God. They were the Lucifers who rebelled against not only the “God”of the church but also “The God Idea” of the rationalists ( Locke, not entirely). The senses as a means to lay the foundation of society was advanced by them in the form of philosophical utilitarianism , economic materialism(free market capitalism) as well as moral “egoism”. In other words, this was their version of “scientific temper”. Now, how did that nightmarish experiment go?
Well, the two world wars that followed ravaged Europe and we now have nuclear weapons that can destroy the planet at the blink of an eyelid. Now, what?. Enter Immanuel Kant, the “saviour of mankind” as he is often glorified( I actually suspect that he did save Europe in some ways preventing the internal collapse that Marx had predicted.). Developing a critique of pure-practical reason, he flips Hume’s question “Is it moral to be rational?”. He says, scientific material-utilitarianism cannot be the foundation to build society since “reason”cannot even found itself . This age old argument of the Greeks Sceptics that he repeats with new intellectual concepts such as “apriori”, “noumena” and “phenomena”. With breathtaking intellectual gymnastics he arrives at the “profound truth” that “morality” needs to be the foundation of society. To sidestep all the difficult concepts of Kant, let me summarize. He says, we cannot rely on our sense organs and must piggy back to “reason” albeit by now knowing it’s limits. He formulates his “transcendental argument” which is an improvement over the “ontological arguments” of his predecessors. The consequences of this argument has given rise to Human rights, Gender rights etc..which no one in their right mind can oppose.
However, here is something interesting. The Neo- Marxists claim that these are the very mechanisms which keep the masses blind to their own chains. The moral-cultural of the bourgeoise capitalists like Kant, bribes the Proletariat masses with rights in the political realm while the massified pop-culture of capitalism attenuates them with sex, drugs and rock n roll . Thus, this twin mechanism becomes the new “opium “of the masses. As Nietzsche declared the Judeo-Christian God is dead . But is he? As Yuval Noah Harari acutely observes, he is resurrected in flesh and body by modern corporations in the form of brand worship and religious consumer culture. However, how did the Marxist project go? Ask, George Orwell, Dostoevsky and Alexandre Soljenitsyne who have bone-chilling descriptions ranging from the absurd to the surreal. Now this is a “kizhai kadai” or as we Tamilians like to say “a side story” which we shall be gripped by later.
Now, why this strange quarrel between rationalism and empiricism in western intellectual culture? The answer is so irritatingly simple- the Cartesian mind-body dualism of Descartes. As I noted before, it drew heavily from Christian theology. The mind being the realm of God and the body being the domain of the devil. The mind having access to “Kingdom of Heaven” while body being the object of “sin”. This depressing phenomena of disembodied human beings is something that Carl Jung points out to presciently in his various works. Another, small question as a prelude to another very interesting and worthwhile “kizhai-kadai”. Are rationalism and logical-empiricism the same ? The short answer is no. We shall explore the story of the audacious yet honest Vienna circle at some other time and space. In any case modern biology has shown psychosomatic disorders and incontrovertible interdependence between the two(mind and body). Moreover, it is generally agreed that mind is an emergent property of the body. Now, who was talking about the integration of mind and body centuries ago? Of course Yoga, and more recently Sri Aurobindo, J Krishnamurthy , and for our Macaulized palate, Carl Jung.
Now, my dear rationalists — “Do you see the problem?”. In actuality it should be a non-problem for the “Indian culture”. Moreover, we do not even understand why we have accepted “rationalism” as a “moral ought” especially when we do not have a semantic correlate for “ought” in our own native languages. We neither sentenced Galileo nor burned Bruno at the stake to fall for the lure of “rationalism”. We are in fact thrilled at the brilliance of a Newton, a Bertrand Russel and other great minds(with limits of course). Moreover, multiple communities have lived here together without “holy wars” or the dark ages even before the intervention of the “State-Church’s march of God on earth” that Hegel blushed about. Why then do we take the particular experiential axioms of the West as the “universal” truth?
As Nietzsche would say, these “moral” ideas have been drilled into our flesh and blood, that we are unable to think in any other terms. I locate this unnecessary and devastating double dynamic between “rationalism” and “empiricism” in the womb of the “The Enlightenment ” which has serious theological residue. As we all know, this time period also coincided with colonialism a.k.a. our collective torture and enslavement for over 200 years. I am quite certain the Buddha had something else in mind when he spoke about “Enlightenment”(Nirvana). Such has been the chimera of modernity which advertises and markets itself surreptitiously as a sudden historical break in the continuity of human experience.
Now, I do not deny the fact that it was a huge discontinuity. But the issue is, it has distorted and dismembered not only traditional modes of living but also our modes of thinking . This is perhaps what Mahatma Gandhi was trying to convey. Money , power and deceit cannot be the foundation for a sustainable society since it will structurally fall apart like the London Bridge that we learned as kids . Even after the decay of his body, the ghost of Thomas Babington Macaulay from London continues to haunt us .We are hopelessly left to speculate as to whether he was granted entry to heaven ( if such a heaven exists) for successfully deracinating the heathens or if he is burning in hell for the epistemic violence that he has unleashed on them.
What has been the price that we have paid for buying into the relentless seductive marketing campaign of the West? One, we cant even access the profundity of our own experiential wisdom without projecting our modern conceptions onto them. In doing so, we end up transforming Krishna of the Gita to Kant of Germany and Dharma into do-your-duty Deontology. For Indians abroad, Madonna from California becomes the founder of Yoga which now includes the Ashtanga of goat yoga, beer yoga, steam yoga etc..As a result, we are unable to abide by biblical wisdom which states “Render unto Kant what is Kant’s and to Krishna what is Krishna’s ”. Second, we are fighting battles which are not ours as they have no relevance to our heathen intuitions. In short, it will suffice to say that it has been disastrous in terms of human well-being for all concerned.
Our education institutions churn out endless supplies of social justice warriors who are well intentioned , but what is it that they are fighting and why? Justice, they say… But as Socrates asks, can one fight for something that one has no idea about? In other words, does it make sense to fight against injustice without knowing what Justice is? Modern philosophers like Rawls and Sen have attempted to give answers. But they repeat the same old wine of “normative moral oughts” or “modified semitic universal principles” in newer bottles.
In the mean time, the strains have now mutated on our body-politic into multidimensional variants that go by various names ranging from post structuralism to postmodernism. They particularly target the young and the wounded. This strain originated in France which was then transmitted to America where it has metastasized into multiple forms. From the outside, it seems like these strains have managed to grow into an irreparable and irredeemable pandemic. And as always America readily exports such products and pandemics to the “third world” which we also keenly consume and are consumed by. Except that , this is way more deleterious to our health than a Big Mac from Mcdonald’s. It not only eats away the body but speeds up the decaying process by driving a spear between the heart and mind. Post-modernists believe in nothing and are against everything since “Everything is nothing”.
Annoyed? But this is really their philosophical underpinning, trust me. To be against all “grand narratives”, they say. So far, so good. But almost every self-proclaimed post-modernist(with exceptions)that I have met is consumed by “ his/her own narrative”. It is best to call it nonsensical-narcissism. Perhaps I am a bit harsh….To use the kizhai kadai metaphor, they are interested only in kizhai kadais since every Kadhai expresses a desire of the powerful to oppress the weak ( which is a very myopic truth). But can one have any kizhai kadai without a “kadai” logically?
Of course they don’t believe in logic just as they don’t belive in gravity or earth or the stars since these are all the “oppressive facts” of science. The question is, do we get to “believe” in such things? It is one thing to say that we should pay attention to kizhai kadais and find space for them in the “main kadhai” but what it does is actually does is somewhat different. Multicultural centrifugalism powered by deadly linguistic fission ensure that the various kizhai kadhais tear away at the Main Kadhai destroying and distorting it beyond recognition. In other words, it decimates the diversity of “lived experiences” that it preaches by homogenising human beings in the name of equity, diverisity and pluralism. Ricocheting from being victimized by the “rationalist other” who secularised theology, they go on to theologise secularism. Derrida and Jacques Lacan deploy verbal mysticism which is only intelligible to members of these resurrected and reenergized church groups.This is what postmodernism does, repeat and imitate the hermeneutics of the church.
Instead of one church now, we now have a number of living-breathing churches in the form of various identity groups. Belong or be damned is the gospel that they preach and “political correctness” their weapon of choice. Otherwise, why divide human beings into 100 different categories while claiming to be against all categories?( btw these include two spirited, reindeer spirited, tooth-fairy etc Again, we are not alloweed to trust our reason or senses)Does this really help the oppressed find their space?. These methods of pretentious “deconstruction” and “creative misinterpretation”are sold as “knowledge” in our premier universities. Congrats! This holier than thou nonsense has ensured that we have now “progressed” from the domain of ignorance to that of plain delusion. Now, this is a much more devastating and painful kizhai kadai which we shall go into some other time ( I say this with due sincerity).
Meanwhile, thanks to all this, we have an allergic reactionary response via the emergence of another super-dominant strain which calls itself Hindutva. To me it’s hisses sound like hateful parseltongue; an echo chamber where a rising Voldemort fantasizes about wiping out the muggle “other”. It speaks jingoistically about “punya bhumi” and “janma- bhumi” . Now, who has been obsessed with the birth places of prophets? Maybe the answer would be evident if we looked into the ever recent yet everlasting Israel-Palestine conflict where both parties are hell bent on wiping out the other? This is a much more worrying kizhai kadai which will also be told when it is ready.
Finally, I have reached the end of my story and am exasperated. I hope you are too my dear rationalists. Once in a while, a long distance marathon is healthy for both the heart and mind. Please reflect on what has been said so far. Though ironical in tone, I have conveyed my message to the best of my cognitive abilities. Since “rationality” is your God and “rationalism” your religion , I urge you to question his place in our shared consciousness.
Sincerely and much lovingly,
A concerned human being of India and the World.
Sources: Sri Aurobindo, Kerry Hunter, Friedrich Nietzsche, SN Balagangadhara, Jordan Peterson, CK Raju, Hannah Arendt and many more who have enriched my life
Please also read a rejoinder by Bhuvani K-https://ammukupsc.medium.com/a-reflective-rejoinder-to-the-real-rationalist-article-52a09b2534a7
