Did God really Die after all?

To whatever degree he may have desacralized the world, the man who has made his choice in favor of a profane life never succeeds in completely doing away with religious behavior.

 ~ Mircea Eliade

Even as I type, postmodernism crumbles under its own unhealthy weight.  

Last year, free speech proponent Jordan Peterson said in an interview that communist principles had been spread in the western world under the umbrella ideology of postmodernism back in the 70s. Through its Marxist approach, the movement held the notion that truth and knowledge were entirely subjective social constructs and began to change societal values and beliefs so as to fit this premise. How did all the obscure social tinkering surface? In a wave of Identity Politics, Peterson claims.

Whether Dr. Peterson's argument is valid or not, the interview does get you thinking; both about the current dominant ideology of postmodernism itself and its resultant identity politics; indeed the very concept of identity as it occurs today.

Postmodernism is not easy to define, and perhaps that's where most of the trouble starts. It is distrustful of the theory that it is in itself, and espouses subjectivity to a point that any one definition attributed to it could easily be substituted for another. The broad, and most agreed upon definition, however, is that it has its roots somewhere in the later stages of the 20th century, and is characterised by skepticism, subjectivism, a distrust of reason and a sensitivity to ideology in political and economic powers.

Leaving aside Peterson's take on the matter, postmodernism came about as a natural evolution of modernism, the latter of which was primarily driven by an existential disillusionment with Victorian ideals of morality and social conventions-- and which, if one considers Peterson's argument, created a detour from the erstwhile political trust in Monarchy as a form of government after the first world war and left a window of opportunity for Marxist thought to take root. In a way, the contemporary postmodernist ideology only took this approach further with its radical discarding of any social constructs, theories and objectivity to the point of the present day rejection of reason.

One social construct that postmodernism abhors comes in the form of religion. To be more specific, organised religion and objective morality, both over which a debate has been raging for years; science finds itself in a conundrum similar to that of the chicken-egg kind. We simply do not know whether organised religion led to objective morality or whether it were the other way round.

In light of the above, one would imagine that postmodernism would have, ironically, been a philosophy characterised by rational thought. This was what most of us would have expected. The reality was just the opposite.

In Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane, the author describes how modern society is based solely on the profane and leaves no room for religion or spirituality, or what we may more broadly call 'sacred'. One could say that Eliade was right in this regard, and that postmodernism discarded what was held sacred about life in both a religious and a widely spiritual sense.

Or did it?

We can now drag Peterson's identity politics into the argument. A prominent fallout of postmodernist ideology is the social justice movement, which is driven by a staunch ethical motivation of equality and compassion for identities that they believe are 'oppressed'. Which is all well and good until you hold those ethics far too sacred and rigid as social justice warriors do and silence any opposition to your perspective. The irony is that the sensitivity toward this SJW ethical framework is remarkably similar to that toward religious ideals of the past. Today's society simply substituted the experience we would call God with another unassuming and strange sacred image. It reaffirmed the existence of 'gap' in human psyche that the god model previously fit.

In the past, human nature was characterised by a need for the sacred. This entity would not necessarily be the conventional image of a male god-head or the rarer sacred feminine, but could be attributed to a higher, omnipresent power that was inherent in every object. From a spatial interpretation, the sacred space has now become decisively abstract. It is now mental rather than physical. However, it is missing the the essential element of evolution and change. Its rigidity mirrors that of the most despicable part of old religion: the precept of self preservation.
Today, in this age, we have come too far to turn back to a conventional god-- it's a little like not being able to unsee a random assemblage of dots that form an image. Even the new age movement has been limping to give way to the radical atheism's deification of scientific fact.

We might have put aside childish and wishful notions of a traditional god-like entity and discarded the idea of a 'divine purpose' in life, but that hasn't stopped us from filling in a psychological gap and meeting our need for Purpose elsewhere.

We have only substituted the fairy tales with sanctified Identity, a tendency to prioritise emotions over facts, and a code of Marxist ethics.

Why Hindu Philosophy Matters, And Not Just To Fundamentalists

Rarely does one find an article that has no polite beginning. And yet, I put this one forth to the public as an exasperated plea. Could we please just learn about Indian-- well, to put it more blatantly, Hindu—philosophy, taking a logical, secular approach?

For armchair philosophers, YouTube presents a goldmine, with channels like The School of Life, Wisecrack and John Green’s CrashCourse. For those(like me) without a bookworm’s patience or a scholar’s attention span, these provide the best platform to explore different ways of thinking and approaches to life, the universe and everything—and, if not fully satiate, suffice to temporarily quench the existential thirst for meaning that so many of us experience more often than we’d like to admit.

There’s one problem with these educative sources, though, and it’s this: they all focus on western philosophy.

The issue with the Indian schools of philosophy is that many of them are inherently spiritual (if the word religious doesn’t quite capture it), and as a result they’re a touchy subject. Hot coals, they’ve been juggled with awkwardly in the past and we’ve ended up with burned fingers. Like Wendy Donniger’s book The Hindus, other attempts to understand the maze that Hinduism is have ended up resisted, criticised, deemed offensive and finally pigeonholed as having been a product of a ‘western’ construct and ways of thinking. To the open-minded, the fence sitters and the curious, the best approach to this conundrum is not to denounce these allegations, but to explore where they come from and whether they carry any weight at all.

Perhaps the reason why Hinduism as a way of thought, and the question of what Hinduism really is, has become such a sensitive topic is that people simply do not know enough about it. Most of us grew up in one of these three scenarios: a) A liberal family that hardly gave a hoot to critiquing religion -- or critiquing anything at all; b) A very religious home environment that discouraged any critical inquiry into religion or tradition in general or c) An English-speaking home where you were encouraged to question everything under the sun – including the bits that intrigued you the most -- but didn’t have the resources to do so because, well, none of them were in English.

Hinduism, much like other ways of thought (since that’s what it is believed to have been), tends to be criticised, judged or endorsed based on second-hand knowledge and watered down, half-baked bits of information we read for ourselves. This is why we find no secular or objective videos on Indian philosophy on the internet: because people either shy away from it due to lack of understanding or pursue it passionately with their own religious biases and underpinnings.

This, in turn, is responsible for the discrepancy between Savarkar’s Hindutva philosophy, and what many people believe to be its non-violent sibling: Hinduism. There has been no formal comparative study undertaken on the two to find out what each implies in light of the other. The nation is content to carry on in its way without a sense of cultural self-awareness.

And as recent events would have us believe, this is a rather dangerous path.

I am not as alarmed by what the government thinks (since its ties to the RSS are no longer hidden) as much as I am about what -- and more importantly -- how the layman does. After all, we have seen time and time again that an ideology, if not critically examined before being accepted, can wreak havoc. We have the historic example of Marist thought being implemented and failing miserably, and we have the more recent instance of Islam as an ideology taking a radically violent turn. I do not wish to say we must do away with ideologies such as these, I merely ask that we take the opportunity to examine our ideas with an objective sharpness so as to make sure they are free from biases or emotional investment, especially if they are intended for imposition on others.

The recent trend that has been emerging, more prominently among my peer group, the youth, has been the overwhelming endorsement of the phrase ‘Ahimsa Paramo Dharma; Dharma himsa tathaiva cha’, or ‘Non-violence is the ultimate dharma. So too is violence in service of Dharma’. While possessing a relatively sound, albeit caste-based argument in and of itself, the aspect that’s worrisome is that there is no single, concrete meaning for the Sanskrit word dharma, which could denote anything from eternal cosmic law to duty to righteousness. If the issue I’m hinting at isn’t evident yet, let’s look at that quoted line a little closer.

‘Non-violence is the ultimate dharma. So too is violence in service of Dharma’.

In the first sentence, dharma is the object; it is passively being defined as non-violence, or ahimsa. This is quite made clear and rather uncomplicated, although it does not explain explicitly what the word non-violence implies. From a simplistic approach, non-violence might imply an action that is the opposite of violence, the absence of such. Therefore we might include all peaceful or passive actions, words and thoughts as part of this category of ‘non-violence’.

What about the second half, however? Here, Dharma is the subject of the sentence. It is no longer the cleanly defined term of the first half of the saying. It now falls into the fluid realm of subjectivity. Dharma could now become the personal kind -- a duty. Or it could take the meaning given to it by a particular group of individuals. This is where things begin to get hairy, because now that group has a loophole to condone violence, carried out in the name of their belief, sanctioned by sacred ideology, and directed toward a transgression or non-conformity to their ideal of Dharma.

Why do we need Hindu philosophy, and why have I digressed so far to arrive full circle at the same point?

Because when this saying, lifted from the Mahabharata, is taken within its context, its meaning becomes more utilitarian; political and legal rather than social. Since Hinduism was largely based on the caste system, it follows that this adage also has its roots in caste. In order for a king, a Kshatriya, to live up to his dharma, his divine duty, he would have to punish and even execute criminals in order to secure the safety of his subjects (which was his responsibility), and to ensure that justice be meted out to them. All other castes, being home-makers, had a divine duty to protect their families, and therefore could use violence in order to prevent any harm done to their loved ones. This is perfectly rational. A Brahmin or sanyasi could not do the same, as to attain nirvana he would have to practise a strict code of Ahimsa, or total non-violence. His physical form was of no value as he was supposed to be connected to a higher power through his soul.

In this context, it becomes clear that the phrase is quite dated for today’s world, but may yet be applied to one’s personal life if it provides a sense of religious comfort. However, it is rather dangerous when used to fuel nationalistic pride. Who decides what kind of Dharma we are talking about here? Would adopting certain western ideals imply a threat to that Dharma?  Would criticism of the nation or government jar this ideal of Dharma? Perhaps a foreign threat of invasion, then? Or, simply, a meal that involves consuming a certain bovine species? When context is not kept clearly in mind, the ensuing though and action that flows from this understanding is not always rational.

 

I will not go so far as to suggest that Indian Philosophy be incorporated into school syllabi; doing so would imply coercion and doubtlessly many a student will most likely hate the subject. Perhaps the best course of action is for each individual to educate themselves on the topic as much as possible and examine their notions on the subject critically, or, as Comedian Tim Minchin would say, take your ideas out and ‘hit them with a cricket bat’.  And if you truly believe your argument to be sound then, by all means, share it. You may not find anyone who readily agrees, but you will be contributing to a healthy debate in society which is very important for us as Indians. We are, after all, a nation who prides itself on its diversity.

Image sourced from: http://ayurvedicbliss.com/what-is-ayurveda-2/