A small sample of statements by leading lights of Western feminism (WF):
(via @DeepikaBhardwaj on twitter to explain why she is not a feminist as she states in the last line of the picture above)
If these statements represent a more violent expression of a widespread but latent fear and rage among the persecuted women of some western societies, then it is both fair and useful to also analyze Western Feminism as a counter-terrorism doctrine. This suggestion should not be surprising, as the facts unearthed in the aftermath of 'India's Daughter' video show, the per-capita rate of violent crime against women in such societies are orders of magnitude worse than India (with significant under-reporting in most societies). Of course, India clearly has an emerging problem, but one that should and is being tackled boldly, and perhaps with a lot more wisdom, by women leaders in its society. More on that later. A limited point raised in this blog is this:
WF must also be analyzed as a counter-terrorism doctrine because, as data will show, there exists ample evidence to suggest that it was created to counter gender chauvinist terror inspired by History-centricAbrahamic male-dominated theology adopted in those societies. Terror victims respond violently by attacking the other gender, with scant or no regard for collateral damage in terms of destroyed families, innocent lives lost, and cultures exterminated. At best, the WF approach tolerates the male who accepts 'defeat', just like the MCP tolerates women who do the same, resulting in a constant state of tension that boils over repeatedly. In fact, one could say, that the WF members have become male gladiators for all practical purposes, in order to be successful in executing their adharmic counter-terrorism strategy. And this strategy, which looks more like a race to the bottom, is being promoted and marketed in all parts of the world as 'progressive'.
On the other hand, the Indian response is dharmic, and focuses on harmony and restoring balance via mutual respect, rather than myopically and foolishly thinking in terms of order versus chaos, of triumphant victor tolerating sore loser, and seeks to return the feminine to the highest place in the society it has traditionally occupied. This article is a good place to start. For a detailed comparative analysis of the idea of mutual respect in dharma versus Abrahamic ideology, read Rajiv Malhotra's book Being Different'. The data has shown (read the books by Dr. R. Vaidyanathan, or the talks by S. Gurumurthy on this subject, for example) that the practical success of the traditional Indian economy (Mahalakshmi), its learning models (Saraswati), and its strength against aggression (Durga), are because they are rooted in the divine feminine. Thus, it seems clear to me that these particular choices of Lakshmi, Saraswati, Durga arose
from the actions of ancient Indians who were actually practicing this successful approach, i.e., ground up, and in turn
these deities served as exemplars for future generations to follow and be successful too. The ideas of eco-feminism, Yoga, vegetarianism, etc. that have become popular in the west, especially among women, also come from dharmic India. This is not surprising, since the very idea and source of strength is Shakti, which is important in the dharmic traditions of India. One can also understand the Indian versus western response as that of a Yogi versus the Gladiator.
Should one respond to gender-based fault-lines in societies by widening them using a counter-terrorism doctrine to achieve victory? or should one employ a dharmic solution to achieve harmony? Seems like a no-brainer.
I would've sworn that Wendy's book on the 'Hindus' was 'an alternate history'. I
rechecked the amazon book title, which said : 'alternative history'.
Why is this distinction important? Wendy, like most western academics born and brought up in English,
choose their words smartly. Grammarist.com (or any one of the popular grammar sites) notes:
The
implicit claim in Wendy's title is that her book does not seek to
replace what existed for thousands of years, but provides an alternative for
today's confused Hindus, 95% of who live in Nehruvian India. An India
where the assertion of being a proud practitioner of Hinduism, a
religion that offers genuine mutual respect instead of mere tolerance
like Abrahamic faiths, is considered "communal".
Fantasy is not a valid alternative
If
God gave Wendy Doniger lemons, you really do not want to know what she does with
it. One of the assumptions that Wendy's silly books relies on is that some Sanskrit words can have multiple, context-driven interpretations and she can freely choose
whatever suits her psychology ("stuck
in the anal-genital chakras"). Wendy's
Child Syndrome. Alternative does not mean "anything goes". Alternative re-tellings of the Ramayana and Mahabharata cannot be mapped into some Star-wars or Lord of the Rings type fantasy. An alternative driving route cannot send you to a different destination. A necessary
condition for any alternative interpretation of Hindu concepts and
methods is that it be dharmic. Hinduism, like Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism, is a dharmic thought system. Unfortunately, Wendy's approach is dharma-nirpeksha,
i.e. utterly indifferent to dharma. Dharma has
contextual interpretation that is neither frozen as a commandment or
fatwa, nor is it "anything goes" that degenerates into moral relativism.
Wendy & her children lack the cognitive capacity to comprehend such profundity. An adharmic alternative can only really
be a perverse substitute that seeks to wipe out rather than serve dharma. An alternate
history that mocks natives as savages is a precursor to cultural genocide.
Facts = Data aberrations = noisy signal
Shoddy scholarship is not just Wendy's problem. Mentally colonized
Indian intellectuals (sepoys) have shown that they are not just clueless but
also careless. The so-called intellectual output toward creating an alternate history, produced by an entire
generation of India's leftists, from Romila Thapar and Amartya Sen, down to those lower in the ranks
like Ramachandra Guha, etc., is defined by mediocrity: sloppy research, use of
meaningless adjectives, unquantifiable claims, and a lack of scientific
rigor. Unlike scientific and engineering journal papers, here the conclusions come first, and the reasoning is whatever is
necessary to justify the conclusion. There appears to be some kind of a mental condition that fails to recognize that facts are
... facts and that if something happened, it did happen (some so-called 'right wing' columnists too have fallen prey to this). But no. It is possible
for sepoys to time-travel and alter what happened. And it is justifiable to do so because such facts are merely an aberration, a blip in the radar that does not, and should not be allowed to, derail their grand narrative.
The Invader Avatar Theory
(update March 2015: Refer Rajiv Malhotra's 2015 Jaipur Lit Fest video for this)
If
the ancient Indian civilization is advanced, it cannot have a Hindu
origin since Hinduism is backward. So it must have come from outside.
So add a "n" to Arya and invent the Aryan invaders. Then a succession of "invader avatars" who show up every few centuries to give India what it needed, from Vedas to Mughlai cuisine to sports to liberalism. Any factual evidence, be it genetic, linguistic,
archaeological, astronomical, economic data, which contradicts the IA theory is but an
isolated violation, a series of coincidences that do not invalidate the overall
narrative. If Hindu leaders perform social service, then it cannot have
Hindu origins and must have been borrowed from the Christian west or
Islam, because Hinduism is fully of exotic mysticism and represents a self-centered, out-worldly quest for Moksha,
and does not have or even require philanthropy. If Nehruvian India
failed, it is because of Hinduism and their "Hindu rate of growth", not
because of Nehru's corrupt Stalinist policies that has ruined the nation. If
unimpeachable data is shown that dharma civilization was a dominant in major measurement indices for most of the thousand-plus years prior to
colonization, this too is an aberration - some white noise,
and the overall signal-to-noise ratio of their IA theory is strong. If Marxist-Leninist-Maoist politics has produced untold misery all over the
world, and yet is blindly imported by sepoys and used to destroy the economy and society of Kerala and Bengal in India, that too is an
aberration, and merely improper implementation of a sophisticated IA concept. Hinduism cannot be reformed by a Sankara because Hinduism
is fossilized. If it is reformed, then of course, it cannot be Hinduism, which
by definition is fossilized, so this has to be some neo-Hinduism that is the invention
of a nationalist-minded Vivekananda after learning from the USA (read 'Indra's Net;).
Hinduism, like India the nation, never existed until recently, yet this same
Hinduism, even without existing, miraculously managed to destroy
Buddhism and Jainism, as Arun Shourie pointed out recently. If a Babasaheb
Ambedkar who spoke up for Dalits against persecution is venerated, the fact that he
became Buddhist and remained true to his dharma (like Arun Shourie) and
even wrote in praise of Advaitic Hinduism and 'Hindutva', is dismissed as an
aberration.
Heads I Win, Tails You Lose
If Islamic genocidal maniacs like Aurangazeb killed more
than four million Indians, that too is an aberration, since
he was more like Shakespeare who went wrong only towards the end of his
reign when office-pressures were mounting (credit: William Dalrymple). If Tipu massacred or forcibly converted hundreds of thousands of Hindus,
then that is an aberration, since he was secular on the average because
he left a couple of Hindu temples intact (read this recent book for reasons). Balance! Reminds me of Pam Shriver who described a 0-6, 1-6 tennis match against Martina Navratilova: "it was a very balanced game. I broke serve once, and held once". Detailed
first-hand accounts by neutral Westerners and Europeans against such
fundamentalist maniacs who've committed mass-murder of Indians cannot be accepted since they are biased. Heck,
blow-by-blow accounts by personal biographers of these tyrants are not
acceptable because they don't really mean what they saying, unless they
are speaking of non-homicidal contributions, if any. However, the neo-Hindu
oxymoron propagated by western 'missionaries in mufti' like Paul Hacker
and Ursula King is perfectly balanced and acceptable to Ramachandra
Guha, Ashutosh Varshney, Pankaj Mishra (who won a $150K sepoy Baksheesh recently), Romila Thapar, etc.. The stuff of Wendy and children from the west is lauded and praised as a
scholarly alternative. The racist colonial missionary myth of "Aryan-Dravidian" is
acceptable. Anything said against the Hindus in any book, by anybody is
acceptable; neutrality, objectivity, fact-checking be damned. The conclusion drives the cherry-picking of data. Such is the world of
social "science" and humanities! If no data remains after
all this pruning, then their IA theory is proposed
as something that actually happened, and taught to Indian school kids to create the next generation of mentally colonized Indians.
In
every instance, it is clear that the aim is not to provide an
alternative picture, but an alternate narrative that is written to erase evidence and replace it with pet theories. What is the mental condition that drives sepoys to such dishonesty?
(The basis for some of the info interpreted above is derived from the works of original Indian thinkers, including Rajiv Malhotra, Arun Shourie, and S. Gurumurthy)
Why?
The
Islamic mauraders and Western colonizers murdered, raped and pillaged India for
centuries. Yet the vast majority of India - the hundreds of millions of
ordinary Indians held on to their dharma. They endured mind-boggling
physical torture and mental trauma, yet their spirit was intact, their 'Mano bal' (morale) remains alive, thanks
to dharma, the very basis of anti-fragility. As Ajit Doval asks and answers: "When is a war over? The war is over only after we win". The Hindus have protected their itihasa and dharma, and with the guidance of Rishis like Rajiv Malhotra and fact-driven thinkers like Gurumurthy, they will continue until they prevail. The only irreversibly damaged people? The sepoys. They rejected dharma, thereby
allowing their intellects to be repeatedly molested, their deepest thoughts
to be violently penetrated by Hinduphobic thinkers. Consequently, their deflowered minds have collectively produced ZERO original, truly
alternative Indian thought, but given birth to tons of mutilated, bastardized alternate
ideas of India and Hinduism that are dead on delivery. I have only pity for sepoys. Truly tragic victims of colonialism.
[as always, this article is a work in progress ...]
Note: This post is not to be viewed as a 'celebration' by the Hindu society of 'succeeding in surviving continually for a very long time'. After all, a cockroach has also survived for a long time. Barely surviving is not a cause for high-fives. Indeed as Rajiv Malhotra says:
"I have too many times responded to this false belief as an instance of what I have coined the Moron Smriti.
Dharma's space and share went down by 80% over the past 1500 years.
Imagine your company CFO saying, "Congratulations, boss! We lost 80% of
our marketshare, share price, revenues, but guess what? We are still not
bankrupt! Isn't that cool?""
Rather the attempt here is to recognize the key concept of integral unity present in Hinduism that gives it its unsurpassed resilience and ability to constructively harness 'disorder' in the hope that it helps shape the future of Hinduism in a positive manner.
Anti-Fragile
Reading Naseem Taleb and following this interview is interesting.
"Linda Geddes: In your new book you talk about things being "antifragile." What do you mean exactly? Nassim Nicholas Taleb: When you ask people what is the opposite of fragile, they mostly answer something that is resilient or unbreakable—an unbreakable package would be robust. However, the opposite of fragile is something that actually gains fromdisorder. In the book, I classify things into fragile, robust, or antifragile...
...
LG: How would you make something antifragile? NNT: If antifragility is the property of all these natural complex systems that have survived, then depriving them of volatility, randomness, and stressors will harm them...
"
Note the highlighted terms used to represent what to the West essentially is some form of "chaos". Readers of the book "Being Different: India's Challenge to Western Universalism", will most probably grasp the meaning of the title of this post relatively quickly. Empirically, it is well known that Hinduism and India's Dharmic civilization has managed to not just survive but continually thrive for 5000+ years. There is a lesson to be learned here. Furthermore, Hinduism has withstood the onslaught of invaders who practiced and imposed barbaric versions of Abrahamic ideologies for more than 800 years on India, but remarkably, with relatively little success. Reason: They could not decipher the "chaos" and "disorder" within Hinduism required to cause it to disintegrate. The path of least resistance employed to conquer Hinduism led them into a maze and a series of dead ends. In comparison, almost the entire middle east was converted to Islam within a few decades using similar methods. Similarly, Europe and the United States witnesses a rapid conquest of paganism centuries ago, and presently, a steady decline in Church membership in the last century, despite enjoying a monopoly in the religious market and unprecedented and robust material prosperity. Why?
Although a lot of this post focuses on religion and philosophy, this is not just a religion versus religion comparison on resilience. This is more a civilization versus civilization comparison.
Integral Unity
Dharmic thought systems' organic Integral Unity, as opposed to the Judeo-Christian approach of synthesizing unity makes it anti-fragile. In BD, Rajiv Malhotra points out: "... All dharmic schools begin by assuming that ultimately the cosmos is a unified whole in which absolute reality and the relative manifestations are profoundly connected. Western worldviews, by contrast, have been shaped by a tension between the absolute status of Judeo-Christian historical revelations on the one hand and the knowledge produced by a highly dualistic and atomistic Greek metaphysics and Aristotelian binary logic on the other".
Chapter 3 of this book shows precisely how the organic and integral unity-based Dharmic traditions are anti-fragile in contrast with the Judeo-Christian one that is based on various inorganically synthesized coalition of ideas, which is inherently fragile (i.e. a Jarasandha Model). As far as chaos, Rajiv Malhotra notes: "Sri Aurobindo, the great Indian yogi and philosopher of the twentieth century, said that since unity in the dharmic traditions is grounded in a sense of oneness, there can be immense multiplicity without fear of collapse into disintegration and chaos. He went on to say that nature can afford the luxury of infinite differentiation, since the underlying immutability of the eternal always remains unaffected. In the West, chaos is seen as a ceaseless threat both psychologically and socially – something to be overcome by control or elimination. Psychologically, it drives the ego to become all-powerful and controlling. Socially, it creates a hegemonic impulse over those who are different. A cosmology based on unity that is synthetic and not innate is riddled with anxieties. Therefore, order must be imposed so as to resolve differences relating to culture, race, gender, sexual orientation and so on ..."
Thus is clear from this passage that Rajiv Malhotra perceives this inability of the West to embrace chaos as a major fault line. Interestingly, Gurumurthy, India's brilliant investigative journalist, and Hindu thinker in a recent talk in Bangalore said "the west has nationalized the family and privatized the state". The fear of chaos has breached the western family's living room and bedroom.
The Bandhu Principle
So how exactly does Integral Unity make Hinduism anti-fragile? To that we turn to the Bandhu principle, which is described in 'Being Different' as follows:
"Bandhu is a concept used to explain how the whole and the parts are held together in integral unity. All aspects of the world stem from a common ineffable source, and what we perceive as nature is but a pointer to a higher reality. There is interlinking among the various faces of this reality, such as sounds, numbers, colours and ideas, and this interlinking is bandhu....
Furthermore .... Not only does each discipline presume this unity; so does the relationship among disciplines. All the arts and sciences are interrelated and may be seen as manifold ways in which human nature, itself an emanation of cosmic unity, expresses itself. One discipline contains and reflects the others. Delving deeply into any one of them eventually leads to similar integral principles and structures..."
Thus "... Bandhu accounts for the survival of dharmic spirituality, for even when certain disciplines and practices were destroyed, other disciplines encoding the same principles survived and helped revive the overall tradition."
The West is slowly beginning to see the benefits of such highly decentralized 'anti-fragile' designs - something that India always had used, and informally understood for thousands of years. The study of complex network systems in the aftermath of the West's financial collapse of 2007 reveals some interesting preliminary results [see this 15-minute video]. The talker notes the high degree of centralization of ownership as well as the high levels of interactions between the nodes in the network.
This interview reiterates why it is extremely important for Hinduism to survive in its original form and context without bad Western translations, uncredited appropriations, digestion, and new-age makeovers. Among many other things, it also provides crucial answers, feedback, and examples to some of the most complex practical and dire problems facing societies in the worldtoday and in the future. Next, let us look at the nature of the "Black Swans" that Hinduism may face in the future.
Black Swans and the anti-fragile future of Hinduism
The Amazon book description says "Antifragile is a blueprint for living in a Black Swan world." Let's go back to the interview once again.
"LG: Does all this connect to your black swans?
NNT: Those are rare events with extreme impacts that lie outside the realm of regular expectations because nothing in the past can convincingly point to their possibility. The global financial collapse is one example ...
LG: How do we get out of the way of these rare catastrophic events? NNT: We can't measure the probability of rare events because small measurement errors will cause those predictions to explode. The real point of my book The Black Swan is not to talk about the weird things that can happen but to be able to identify how resistant and robust you are to computationally small probabilities..."
Yes, Hinduism (or more accurately, Dharmic Civilization) has survived a few totally unexpected and incredibly hostile attacks, albeit at a very heavy price paid in terms of a Dharmic decay in Hindu society. The questions that it faces today are
- can this decaying Hindu society that was once a vehicle of integral unity be induced to implode?
- what if Dharmic Civilization is attacked by an adversary that simulates the Bandhu principle? This is precisely the method of inculturation being adopted by the Church in India.
- How can this anti-fragile exemplar survive such a viral attack?
Broadly speaking, it seems that the Church has employed three different types / stages in their attack on Hinduism:
Stage 1: 1757 - 1857 : Overt Missionary tactics to convert natives as a de-facto and active government policy. One of the tangible victories of the 1857 war of Independence was to strongly discourage the use of this type of a frontal attack.
Stage 2: 1857 - 1947 : Government-sanctioned methods to impart Church-friendly / Western-Universal, convent-English education and the destruction and marginalization of native traditions, teaching, and training methods.
Stage 3: 1947 - present: The political freedom gained by India ended the blatantly pro-Abrahamic methods but not the Western-Universalism that Gandhi fought against. The WU controlled media and educational material contains ample anti-Hindu messaging that largely encourages the rejection of Hindu philosophy using textbooks riddled with straw-man arguments.
Furthermore, distributed stealth-marketing methods employing native force multipliers (inculturation and converted Christian transmitters). This, by far, has the maximum chance of success and empirical results can confirm this. This approach attempts to destroy Hinduism:
a) from the inside-out, by
b) employing not just a single central agency, but a union of varied agents having diverse talents, and in pursuit of their own objectives, and
c) outwardly simulates a Hinduism-like integral unity.
Note that (c) is just a simulation and obfuscation since this ploy is merely another (admittedly clever) instance of synthetic-unity at work given the history-centric core of the adversarial sections of the West. In stage-1 and stage-2, the Hindu society, either willingly or reluctantly, joined hands with the India's Islamic society to repel Western universalism, but paid a heavy price in terms of territorial and demographic losses apart from enduring a cultural genocide. How it will be able to defend itself against this novel inside-out attack is an open question. However, the heartening news is that the books "Breaking India" and "Being Different" have
a) deciphered the mechanism, tactics, and to some extent, also understood the strategy employed by the adversary
b) Prescribed some methods and techniques that can be employed toward preserving the DNA of the ultimate anti-fragile system of the universe.
----------- Update 1 (December 5, 2012)
The video of the brilliant lecture by Gurumurthy in Bengaluru last week (alluded to earlier in the original post above) is now online. The first 15-20 minutes of the talk is especially interesting in that it reveals the "anti-fragile" nature of Indian civilization's native, self-governing, entrepreneurial, decentralized, eco-friendly, pluralistic economy that is neither Darwinian-Capitalistic or Socialist/Marxist. The Bandhu principle appears to extend to the 'Hindu business model' as well. This is contrasted with the West's fear of 'chaos' that inevitably converges toward a centralized ownership model (either the government, or a few private organizations), which is evident from the empirical observations in the 'who controls the west' video in the above post. Per Dr. Vaidyanathan (who also spoke that day), more than 90% of Indian work-force is self-employed. Amazing resilience!
The resilience of this native Hindu economy as described by Gurumurthy is best captured within the first 5-10 minutes of the followup to this talk by M. R. Venkatesh. I have embedded that video as well, below for the sake of completion.
----------- Update 2 (December 13, 2012)
This update comes thanks to the insightful questions asked of the thesis by an anonymous commentator. The robustness and fragility of History-Centric (HC) versus Dharmic cultures are compared side-by-side, and some hypotheses postulated.
Robustness and Anti-fragility of History-Centric Cultures
A HC faith's only but glaring weakness is its complete dependence on history. This results in a Synthetic but not Integral Unity (Ref: 'Being Different' book). All additional theology are derived dependencies and extensions of this HC core. This resembles a "Star-wars Death-Star" model. If the core is damaged beyond a point, the system implodes. History-Centrism is a non-regeneratable resource. If their history is discredited or erased, that culture will disappear. Consequently, it is a strategy that even a low-grade threat to their HC objects (e.g. religious structure/holy book/prophet) must receive a disproportionately severe response. HC faith based cultures are designed to be robust, so their first line of defense is tight. They have the support of oil-rich countries or Western nations with strong
military, economic, and information base. Hypothesis: Working HC-systems are typically very (strategically) robust to make up for the poor anti-fragile properties that make them vulnerable to implosion.
The best way to take down such a system is an open question and is left to the reader.
Comparative Analysis of Hinduism
As already argued, Hinduism has been super anti-fragile in the past. The response to an attack on its religious resources typically elicits a disproportionately muted response. Temples damaged, texts and concepts distorted, Yoga, Ayurveda, Advaita digested, etc.., eliciting nothing more than a whimper and grumblings. Thus Hindus have been been terribly complacent about their primary line of defense for decades, and this has hurt them badly. Furthermore, a major emerging threat is the systematic attack (Stage 3) on Hindu Gurus all over the world. Unlike HC theologists whose main task is to memorize 'HC Smriti' (Claim: A machine is sufficient to replicate and teach all necessary HC theology??), the wise Guru carries with her or him, the 'DNA' of Hinduism that can be used to re-generate and propagate Dharmic concepts and inspire future leaders of the nation (Can we even count the number of patriotic Indian leaders inspired by Swami Vivekananda?).
Hypothesis: Working Dharmic systems (e.g. Hindu society) today are typically non-robust that leaves them vulnerable to sustained pressure. They have excellent anti-fragile properties that have been understood by adversarial HC systems.
Update 3: Dec 21, 2012 -----------------------------
Perspectives on Indian History: The anti-fragile nature of India's cultural unity (Sanskriti) comes out really well in this insightful and superb presentation (Jijnasa Charcha) by Sandeep Balakrishna. This Google-docs link may look better. In particular note the empirical comparison with HC-dominated Europe. You can view the Jijnasa Charcha on Youtube here (turn the audio way up). This is a 5-part video, that is well worth listening to.
Update 4: January 9, 2012
------------------------------
Updated terminology in a few places.
Update 5: January 11, 2012 ----------------------------------
Added introductory note and reference to Rajiv Malhotra's coined phrase "Moron Smriti".
Update 6: August 08, 2014 ------------------------------------
anti-fragility of Hinduism (and dharmic systems, in general) also appear to be related to its allostatic nature ~ 'unchanging, perhaps even getting stronger, by adaptively changing' without sacrificing dharma. Here's a tweet by the @macroresilience twitter handle:
Update 7: May 3, 2016 ------------------------------
Briefly updated content.
(via @DeepikaBhardwaj on twitter to explain why she is not a feminist as she states in the last line of the picture above)
