Moral victories are useless in a Dharma Yuddham

'Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right' - Salvor Hardin (Issac Asimov, Foundation series).

After a recent retaliation by the Indian army, Pakistan now seeks a moral victory. Incredulous.

https://twitter.com/ANI_news/status/550628803412623361

Laughable as this sounds, such moves will have plenty of support from their support base amongst the leftist and secular sepoy ecosystem in India and both the left and right wings in the west - despite India losing the life of yet another soldier in this latest unprovoked attack. This "no first use" type policy is costing the democracies of the world, in general, and India in particular, a lot of precious lives. Despite every attempt at peace by India over the last 60+ years, Pakistan has continued its diabolical attempts to bleed India, even if it has had to sacrifice its own children in Peshawar to achieve this vision. Why?

At its core, Pakistan is a 3-D printed artifact, a synthetic unity enforced by a violent ideology and thus in a constant state of tension that can only be released by periodic acts of Himsa. And clearly, these acts are increasing in both frequency and amplitude. Unlike India, which is characterized by a viable integral unity based on dharma, Pakistan as a single entity has no basis in reality. In fact, many thousands of people from east and west Pakistan migrate back into India, seeking refuge from the Frankenstein that they themselves constructed. Like a USSR, it is inevitable that a stable peace and equilibrium can only be achieved by disaggregating such a synthetic unity into its organic, more integral constituents. Attempts to bring about such a sustainable peace genuinely represents ahimsa since it will reduce tensions, minimize the harm and alleviate the misery in the region, and thus should not be discouraged but actively encouraged by all the peace loving peoples of the world. To feign ignorance over what is happening in Pakistan may seem moral, but it is certainly not dharmic. If India truly believes in 'Ahimsa paramo dharma', then it needs to act accordingly, and not based on flaky Abrahamic notions of morality. In a dharma yuddham, there can be fairness, but no compromise. Rather than continuing to endure Himsa to gain some non-existing moral upper ground that nobody cares about, India must, like Lee Child's Jack Reacher, seriously consider getting its retaliation in first - to save dharmic lives and rip apart the synthetic unity of a Jarasandha that has made its hostile intent and actions abundantly and repeatedly clear.

Digestion of Hinduism: A Self-Study

Introduction
This is the first update on an ongoing self-study to improve my own understanding of 'digestion' using the example of Yoga. This is work in progress.

'Digestion' is a term coined by Rajiv Malhotra. My reading is that it represents the calculated misappropriation of methods and concepts from Indian (dharmic) knowledge systems, which are subsequently reassembled and integrated into an existing western or non-dharmic framework with the final goal of maintaining or enhancing the latter's balance of power, and if necessary, discarding the original dharmic method/concept/source/context as redundant and obsolete. Rajiv Malhotra explains this via the tiger-deer metaphor, which is discussed in other blog posts and in his forum.

Background
(Read 'Being Different' book for the complete and accurate details)
Fundamental Christianity, like its Islamic and Judaic counterparts, are history-centric systems. In more general language, their core is dogmatic and tied to a finite number of unique supernatural top-down intervention(s) in human-recorded history. On the other hand, Indic religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism are based on Dharmic thought systems that are not history-dependent. Dharma is a Sanskrit non-translatable that roughly means ~ 'that which sustains or upholds'. I view dharma as 'that which is essential', and Sanskrit as the best available language to explain the essence of the cosmos. Though there are significant and deep metaphysical differences between these different dharmic systems and a pluralism of their dharmic sub-variants, they all adhere to a common set of Dharmic truth claims, including Punar Janma (rebirth) and Karma (cause and effect). All these systems believe in one more forms of Yoga as a dharmic path to reach the ultimate truth without external crutches or textual/historical artefacts.

Being Different
Dharmic truth-claims are permanently irreconcilable with a history-centric core.  For example, if Christianity becomes dharmic, the idea of original sin, the need for a son of God, intermediary prophet, etc. become totally irrelevant. Dharma and Dogma are incompatible. Islam, and Judaism have similar issues. Furthermore, these history-centric religions are themselves incompatible with each other, since each rejects the other's record of unique divine interventions in history. Thus there is also a need for a HC systems to augment it's own idea inventory to appear superior to its HC competitor when they fight for global market-share.

Why Digestion and Not Complete Borrowing?
If the HC west were to attempt to openly borrow and adopt authentic Yoga, it would immediately clash with their dogmatic core, because Yoga as path of achieving self-realization, represents freedom from history and history-centrism (a full chapter in Rajiv Malhotra's book 'Being Different discusses this). Hence, Yoga in its original form, meaning, and context cannot be adopted by the west unless they give up their HC dogma. The Yogasanas may help them look better, feel healthier, but they cannot proceed beyond that to reach higher levels of consciousness without seriously comprising their dogmatic beliefs. Thus openly acknowledging and borrowing Yoga poses an existential question. What to do?

Visit India as students, humbly learn from Gurus for years. Then take a step back, analyze Yoga, de-construct it and strip it down to smaller components. Then pick and reassemble those pieces that are not in conflict with their dogmatic core, to synthesize a bastardized or cannibalized version of Yoga, and reject the rest as waste material.

This mangled synthesis of "Yoga" is initially considered as generic knowledge, and not unique to dharmic systems, but is eventually retro-fitted and back-traced to some obscure Western source, over time. Thus, history-centricity is preserved, while also allowing their followers to get real but highly limited benefits of Yoga, while still keeping them dependent on prophets and supernatural interventions. To increase the comfort level, "Yoga" practititioners can mechanically chant "Hallelujah" or "A.Hu.A", or recite the Torah instead of the essential and profound 'Om'.

Interestingly, look at the reverse case. Dharmic thought systems can happily and openly borrow from progress achieved by western science and technology since it is compatible their dharmic 'operating system' core that is based on the scientific idea of cause and effect. No digestion is required and the original ideas are neither distorted, nor misrepresented. Science has always been compatible with dharma, but not always with a HC core.


Summary
To summarize, Digestion is a method of:
1) extracting the 'nutrients' out of a dharmic concept,

2) discard the crucial dharmic constituents itself as unnecessary waste,

3) reassembling non-dharmic nutrients to synthesize a new distorted concept (rename it as "Christian Yoga, Christu-natyam for comfort and acceptance) that is of limited use and importantly, is fully compatible with history-centric dogma,

4) obfuscate, alter, or delete the original context, depth and meaning of the concept (e.g. the true, deep meaning and intent of Yoga and Bharatanatyam is lost)

5) deny credit to the dharmic primary source, and erase it over time, and even sell the mangled form back to Indians


Outcomes
I count at least two crucial practical benefits of digestion to the west. Let's use HC Christianity as an example.

Once we have a Hindu-DNA enhanced Christianity , there is
OUTCOME 1) SIGNIFICANT REDUCTION IN EFFORT TO FORCE OR COERCE CONVERSIONS OF HINDUS.

OUTCOME 2) REDUCED MOTIVATION FOR DOGMA-FOLLOWERS TO TURN DHARMIC


why? Aren't these positive outcomes?

To see (outcome 1), History-centric religion will now have all the externally observable equivalent features contained in Hinduism - Christian Yoga, Christunatyam, Christian Veda, Jesus Pooja, etc.  The myth of sameness becomes incredibly strong. The message to dharmic peoples will simply be:
YOU DO NOT EVEN NEED TO CONVERT ANYMORE. WE ARE THE SAME. PLUS WE DO NOT HAVE CASTE/COW/SATI/DOWRY PROBLEMS. YOU MERELY NEED TO UPGRADE.

For (outcome 2), the message to dogma-followers will be:
YOU DO NOT NEED TO CONVERT OUT OF YOUR FAITH. WE ALREADY HAVE EVERYTHING DHARMIC FAITHS HAVE, AND WE ARE MODERN.

To summarize, hte net outcome of digestion is that the HC system gets stronger, and the dharmic system gets weaker. Thus a digester like Phil Goldberg will have no problem criticising conversion because:

After digestion is complete, there is no need to coerce and convert! Digestion allows HC religions claim equivalence and even superiority in features and benefits, even though they are only superficially the same as dharmic religions. The myth of sameness becomes incredibly strong.

Furthermore, since these digested concepts are delinked from dharma, existing dharmic systems will be seen as obsolete relics of a bygone era that never contributed much, and fit only for a museum. Where are the original native thought systems of Africa, North America, Australia, Middle East? They have been digested into one of the history-centric systems. Only India still remains their unfinished business, and barely so, because of the remarkable anti-fragile properties of Hinduism.








How Phil Goldberg made the Vedas Kosher
Now take the case of Phil Goldberg. His ideas and views have been covered in the 'hitchhiker's guide to BD' blog. His American Veda book deliberately makes no mention of Hinduism. anywhere. Why? This is not mere semantics. His audience is the west. His goal, as he himself has openly stated is that the western peoples can retain their existing (history-centric) faiths but be able to get the benefits of 'sprituality' (without caste/cow/sati/dowry etc). Thus, the only way out for him to be successful while also achieving this goal is employ digestion. Platitudes at other times keeps the Indians convinced that all is well and hunky-dory.

Digestion (as a strategy) relies on treating Hindus as useful idiots.

To summarize, we can now see that Goldberg's actions results in:

a) The original Vedas being stripped of their context, ideas appropriated and digested into an "American Veda" that is 'kosher' and compatible with history-centrism dogma.

b) The full meaning,and context of the original, Hindu Vedas get diminished over time and eventually lost.

c) The AV becoming a ready-to-consume all-American, self-contained reference textbook for Vedic ideas that gives it's readers a comfortable western interpretation of dharmic concepts. See how Hinduism is bypassed? This can only result in further degradation of Hindu dharma's 'brand' in the west, which Phil Goldberg does not see as his problem.

d) Any random person can latch on to this approach as a cookie-cutter to create a Scientology Veda, or a Timbuktu Veda, and sell books, patent, commercialize, and make money. A lot of "Yoga" methods have been similarly appropriated, commercialized, patented, and even weaponized by the Pentagon (e.g. Yoga Nidra). Just like the west has "paddle boat Yoga, Power Yoga, Aqua Yoga, ...".
 
e) Note that this digested multiplicity does not represent genuine and dharmic pluralism, since such proliferation is dharma nirpeksha (sans dharma), thereby only leading to corruption and adharma in the form of egoistic patent quarrels, practitioner injuries and disillusionment, marketing wars, greed, etc. 
 
f) Furthermore, since the west controls the global discourse, these mangled meanings and definitions become the accepted ones, show up in Wikipedia, western school textbooks, and eventually accepted by the leftist-controlled textbooks consumed by Indian students.

g) Net result, as Rajiv Malhotra states: the history-centric tiger has eaten up the deer, the deer nutrients are converted into tiger DNA, making the tiger stronger. What is left of the dharmic deer is a pile of poop.


Phil Goldberg Celebrated in India
How have the dharmic deer welcomed folks like Phil Goldberg?
Some samples that I am aware of:

1) He was invited to give a talk organized by Ms Nirmala Seetharaman's foundation, which was promoted by a prominent RSS intellectual/spokesperson. Attempts to contact Ms. Seetharaman on twitter prior to this talk got zero response.

2) His HuffPost article that condemns conversion was reproduced on a reputed Indian website (IndiaFactsOrg) that promotes dharma. Note that these articles in themselves are not a problem and such sites have every right to publish any material they deem worthy. However, such articles help Hinduism very little, but boosts the digester's credibility a lot. As Rajiv Malhotra tweeted "it is like Rahul Gandhi talking about evils of corruption". Does Hinduism need a 'facts lecture' from the Goldbergs of the world to tell us that the coerced conversions represents a clear and present danger to India?

3) Monetary funding from Sanathana Dharma institutions.

4) Have his book cited as an shining example of positive Hindu influence on the west, even by strong 'Hindutva' proponents, when all that AV really does is to make it easier for the west to remain rooted to dogma by incorporating useful (intellectual/textual but not the deep dharmic) benefits of Hinduism.
 
Note: I look forward to IndiaFactsOrg uncovering the complete facts about digestion of dharmic ideas and methods, and disseminate it to a wider audience.


Questions to Ponder
1. Do some Hindutva giants and organizations even realize that they are celebrating an end-product that is Hindu-DNA enhanced Fundamental Christianity and not some pluralistic western branch of Hinduism as they foolishly believe it to be?

2. That this history-centric Christianity running on digested Hindu energy needs even less effort to convert dharmic peoples to their side, while also keeping their own followers bound in Dogma?

3. How is the cause of dharma served by celebrating this digestion?

Not just Phil Goldberg, Rajiv Malhotra has identified several westerners who have digested (for example) Aurobindo's ideas, repackaged it to suit Western audiences, and are now paid high fees and invited back to India by big companies to "educate" their management trainees.

The dogmatic tiger's conquest is being celebrated by dharmic deer.

Part-2 of self study is continued here.

Hinduism: The Ultimate Anti-Fragile

[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 from disorder. 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 world today 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.

 

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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.

Being the Same and Being Different: The Paradox of Sameness

In the second installment of the series that explores the concept of 'Synthetic Unity' of the West versus the 'Integral Unity' of Dharmic India that was introduced by Rajiv Malhtora in his book 'Being Different', we focus on the alluring idea of 'sameness' that everybody loves to talk about (e.g. Aman Ki Asha :). We noted in the introductory article that a homogeneous "same" Pakistan has collapsed whereas a "all different" India has thrived. Similarly, Europe's relatively short-lived multiculturalism experiment is on the brink of failure while cultural diversity thrived in ancient India and has survived so far across centuries.

This leads to the following paradox:

Why should 'being different' bring more cohesiveness than 'being the same' ?

On the surface, it is not unreasonable to expect that 'being different' that is so visible in India should naturally divide whereas the 'sameness' that is so visible in the west should unite. In fact, this was precisely the thought process that permeated and drove the U.S foreign policy toward the post-colonial subcontinent in the 1950s. In the book 'Being Different', Rajiv Malhotra notes that the then secretary of state John Dulles (as in Dulles airport, Washington D.C) backed a monotheistic Pakistan 'that was true to one master' over 'polytheistic' India that 'served many masters' and was thus deemed more likely to be unreliable and untrustworthy. However, when we dig deeper and get the root of the how humans react to multiculturalism, we notice that:

1. Every individual is different by birth and by circumstance. Given a pair of individuals who want to be "multicultural" in the western sense, when push comes to shove, the expectation is that the person deemed 'weaker' has to explicitly or implicitly admit inferiority and adopt the culture of the 'stronger' person and get digested. Both persons in the quest for sameness suffer from difference anxiety, the resolution of which ends in some form of violent conflict. This is a fundamental problem with expecting 'sameness'.

2. Difference anxiety caused by the need to enforce sameness in the west is a real issue. For example Brewer (1991) in a highly cited research article argues:

that the composition of an individual's social identity necessitates a trade-off between the need for assimilation and the need for differentiation. This is in contrast to previous models of social identity who assumed that individuals aim at maintaining some balanced level of similarity with other people on a uni dimensional similarity/dissimilarity scale.

The key implications of the theory lay in its dynamic aspects, as it is argued that individuals continuously take corrective actions to maintain an optimal compromise between the two needs. For instance, a person feeling too unique might achieve more assimilation by joining a group and making comparisons with in-group members (and finding similarities). Alternatively, a member of a large overly inclusive group might try achieve distinctiveness by making inter-group comparisons. Such actions are undertaken until the individual reaches an equilibrium, that is when his/her needs for assimilation and differentiation are equally activated. 

As pointed out by Brewer (1999) in later work, this has implications for the study of prejudice and inter-group processes as one can ask if "in-group preference and loyalty can exist without spawning out-group fear or hostility"
3. Here is another example of difference anxiety in the American context: Morrison et al (2009) define multiculturalism as "the belief that racial and ethnic differences should be acknowledged and appreciated" and notes that such an objective "has been met with both positive reactions (e.g., decreased prejudice) and negative reactions (e.g., perceptions of threat) from dominant group members".


4. Such a unity achieved by birth-based discrimination,  forcible or pressure-based digestion, submission, and fueled by difference anxiety rather than a mutually respectful debate is at best synthetic and tenuous and one that is constantly prone to fissure, while the goal of sameness remains elusive. In the Hindu epic Mahabharata, this inherent weakness of synthetic unity is demonstrated by the example of King Jarasandha, who was born in two halves at birth and spliced together, and grew to be among the strongest and the most ruthless kings in the world, yet was killed in single combat by Bhima (with the help of Krishna) by exploiting Jarasandha's synthetic unity.

5. To further explain the difference between Western synthetic unity and Dharmic Integral Unity, here is an interesting online article (thanks to @brazenpixy), where the author says:

"Separation causes uselessness, but much of Western civilization is based on separating the parts. One date is separate from another, history separate from math which is separate from biology. It's a world view we inherited from Newton and Descartes, so useful in many ways and disastrous in others. However, there has always been an alternative view of the universe as a single, totally interconnected system. You'll find that in Eastern traditions, American Transcendentalism, and at least some aspects of quantum physics."
6. In direct contrast, Dharmic thought systems are characterized by an integral unity that recognizes that infinite variations in the cosmos (specie, race, ethnicity, language, ..) are merely the manifestation of the same (and there is no "other"), and is thus able to accept and work with the multiplicity (Maya) in the universe without any stress or difference anxiety. India's multiculturalism has for milliennia been based on such Dharmic thought systems that share this fundamental concept, and it has worked pretty well. In other words, 'being different' is a more natural manifestation than 'being the same', and multiculturalism is achieved here by focusing on being equal while being different, which is best achieved via self-realization and mutual respect, rather than mere tolerance, external conversion, and digestion. Furthermore, as Rajiv Malhtora notes, being different is a powerful way of not being digested. Mahatma Gandhi's 'Hind Swaraj' also echoes this same idea, and he practiced 'being different' more than most in recent times.


7. The beautiful Sanskrit verse that best resolves this paradox of sameness and captures the essence of the Integral Unity of Dharmic India that spans the infinite multiplicity of the cosmos is given in the 'Being Different' book of Rajiv Malhotra (source used for Shloka and translation below is here):

Purnam-adah purnam-idam
purnaat purnam-udacyate.
purnasya purnam-aadaaya,
purnam-eva-avashishyate

That is infinite, this is infinite;
From that infinite this infinite comes.
From that infinite, this infinite removed or added;
Infinite remains infinite