Non-Western Worldview

[A_Gupta]

Sanjay M,

This is a long answer, but the best answer that I can give about West vs. non-West is:

http://www.cultuurwetenschap.be/VCW/fil ... ase....pdf

(or click on download file on this page
http://www.cultuurwetenschap.be/VCW/pub ... /section:1

)

-Arun

[JE Menon]

Tx Ramana for that link and putting it up here. An excellent read with many particularly French nuances to the observations. I especially like reading the French take on things because they often have unique perspectives to offer, no doubt borne from their own experience of interaction with Islam and other faiths from the first Islamic incursions into France and onwards. A couple of issues I would dispute though:

>>Its internal mental structure is caving in. At any rate in Kabylia and in Lebanon.

Unfortunately, this is far from the case. I am not sure what he is drawing upon when he says this, perhaps his personal experience in these areas, but if so my own has been quite different. I have been extensively to both these areas. As a matter fo fact just over the past 10 days or so, I was in Sfax, Sousse, Hammamet and Tunis, and am posting this right now from Beirut which is almost a second home (which I love by the way). There is, in my mind and based on my personal observations over these years, little to show that there is any "caving in" if by that he means any significant change in the foreseeable future. I expect more of the same. There is a tendency for people to actually conflate and confuse different things, and perhaps this is one of those situations, but perhaps not.

The Berbers are a proud people and they retain their identity in very very difficult circumstances, but that is an ethnic issue. They will defy being defined as Arabs, but not as Muslims (at least not for the most part). But, note this, they are also far more "liberal" in their observation of Islamic ritual and injunctions; hence the "fairly" open societies of Tunisia/Morocco/Algeria - all of which has much greater numbers of Berbers than, say, neighbouring Libya or Egypt. The Berber language Tamazight struggles to survive, though many berbers speak it at home. Again these should not be seen as absolute descriptions but rather general tendencies. You will find radical Islamic Berbers, just as you will find utterly liberal "Sunni Arab" Maghrebis.

>>three factors will eventually bring about its downfall : Freedom; Rationality; Affectivity

Actually, to fairly large extent these factors existed in non-Muslim countries even in other periods. This is not something especially new. What is different, however, is that the power differential is now so vast. In other words, even during the periods of the reconquista and crusades, the power equation was far more even. It could have gone either way. Today, if there is a general war, not the sort of pussy-footing going on now, there is no question who will win. What I mean is that the total population of Muslim majority countries can, in theory, be wiped out literally overnight, and there is nothing they can do about it. Not yet.

This is the reason why we do not have a harassment of non-Muslim populations on the scale we would have, if - to cut to the chase - both sides did not have nukes. That is why we have the suicide bomber, which is basically a scratch on the surface of the non-Muslim body politic. But these scratches persist. It will be our fault if we do not recognise these scratches for what they are, they are the bitter fangs through the bars showing the snarling anger of a caged animal which will not hesitate to strike if let out.

And it can only be let out if the nuclear genie is passed on beyond the one that has it now; the key to the lock on the cage is already inserted. This is the meaning of Pakisatan. The world must beware.

[ramana]

^^^^I think the guy wrote it in the 1850's.

[JE Menon]

It says it's from a talk he gave in 1998 Feb.

Of course, if it is in fact from a write up in the 1850s it only goes to show how wrong he was. But it's not. I suspect the "West" was a bit more level-headed then.

[gpati]

Ramana garu, how accurate are Brahmagari predictions? In one Telugu paper I read an article about him. He was very much displeased by conversions by force/sword and has prophesied that Islam would get extinct in near future. Also, his favorite disciple was a muslim converted back to hinduism.

[D Roy]

That "France and Islam" piece is one EJ compilation, if there ever was one.

Yeah I have a bigger d**k 10 to your 1. take that sucker.

Both figures are false of course.

[ramana]

X-post...

quote "Acharya"
---------------
But the question is why in the first place would they want to give false information about India and Indians/Hindus for the last 50 years. Or Even for 100 years
-------------------
As I understood based on my reading, Americans inherited their views of Indians from the British and the Missionaries. You are one of the very well read BRFites and would have a good grasp of the entire relationship. It would be tough to get something worthy of say Wikileaks, but the Liberals/progressives/ultra leftists who scorn at the religious right could (or would have) unearth some of the information. There should be no room for doubt that there has been and still is an institutional bias against India. We have material to support that conclusion. As you are aware, all countries have been changing or evolving; so which direction is USA heading and how much role does religion play and how does it affect India are issues that some of BRF members, who have the ability to see further than people like me, could (and have been) analyze or elaborate to us.

In my younger days, when I had even less info on hand, I knew USA aligned with Pakistan. I would think if anything were to happen to India, USSR would step in to help. I never knew the background information or the "whys". Now with the information available on the Internet and days at BRF, I have been able to read some of the reasons and actions. Knowing the underlying motives would be very interesting and informative.

Swamy,

Congratulations on your scholarship... your write-up is definitely a keeper and goes some way towards illuminating possible connections between the West's civilizational attitude to India, and the foreign policy practiced by the pre-eminent Western power towards modern India.

Going on to root causes, though... I have only glimpsed scattered evidence of what may lie beneath all of this. I don't claim to be an expert at all... with all humility, let me say that the search is only beginning for me, and that I feel privileged to belong to BR, a community with several individuals who may contribute to its advancement.

Here is what I think I have uncovered so far. No citations, references etc. yet... those are a long way off. But just to begin with.

When we think of Western schools of thought in the modern world, many of us are wont to group them into essentially two categories. The Capitalist and the Socialist is what we could call these in the context of social, political and economic outlook. The Anglo-American and the Slavic, (loosely speaking) in terms of ethnic or civilizational perspective. The Judeo-Christian and the Post-Orthodox, (again loosely speaking) in terms of religious perspective.

The Anglo-American school of thought we all know very well... it is what most of us refer to as the "West" in terms of primary civilizational identity. Their economic attitudes were shaped by the likes of Alexander Hamilton and Adam Smith; their political attitudes by such figures as Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill; and their ideological attitudes by a compact between Protestant Christianity and Judaism (not always easy, but it hangs together well enough for most purposes.) The Roman Catholic Church is largely aligned with the Anglo American school, and its adherents have considerable influence especially in the United States; however, we must needs see the RCC here as a sort of subsidiary power. Since the days of German and Italian reunification, the Papacy lost any semblance of real political or military power; a decline in fortune that began with the collapse of Spain under Philip II, and continued to completion with the wars of Garibaldi (the Pope was the most fervent opponent of Italian reunification, and prevailed upon all manner of monarchs from Napoleon III of France to the Austrian Hapsburgs to fight the unificationists on his behalf, but failed to retain any temporal power for the Vatican eventually.)

The other school is in disarray following the end of the Cold War, but easy enough to recognize. Its economic attitudes in the last century were shaped by Marxist dialectical materialism; its political attitudes by Leninist Bolshevism; and its ideological perspective by a series of thinkers from Engels to Mao. There is currently a struggle within this camp as to how to redefine itself and its purposes for a new century, but its key ideology-- socialism-- is very much alive in Europe as well as in present-day Russia, though it takes variously libertarian and authoritarian forms in different societies and political entities.

These schools are both well known to us, and broadly occupy the "right" and the "left" of the Western economic, political and ideological spectrum today. It's easy to forget that in the modern era, there had ever been any other.

However, at the turn of the last century, there were in fact three schools of thought in the West. The third "school" was still inchoate at the time it was bludgeoned into comatose hiatus by the other two around the middle of the last century; it still had not consolidated itself, indeed it had never found a powerful enough state to speak for it until the 1930s, and when it did, that state turned out to be on the wrong side of history for a variety of political reasons.

In this third school I include parties that were given neither to the ways of the Anglosphere nor the Russosphere; and more importantly, had limited if any ideological affinity to either Judeo-Christianity or Socialism. I include movements as diverse as Norse Paganism, Gardnerian Wicca, the Order of the Golden Dawn and the Theosophical Society. All these movements hinged around the search for a deeper, lost truth and source of identity that had been suppressed by the post-Constantinian rise of Christian Imperialism. Yet many remained on the fringes of their respective societies, marginalized and trivialized as occult absurdities by the far more powerful adherents of Judeo-Christianity or Socialism. Even today, anyone bandying these names around is considered to be some kind of conspiracy theorist... so I list them here with the utmost temerity. Hear me out though.

As it happened, there was a time when this third alternative to the two pre-eminent schools of thought, began to acquire the degree of ideological momentum required to coalesce into a materialistic or political philosophy. Importantly, this process was driven by the work of several German thinkers of the 1800s and early 1900s... Nietzsche, Hegel, Heidegger... all of whom were influenced to some degree by the writings of Friedrich Max Muller.

Max Muller began as an orientalist of the pre-Modern colonial tradition, but soon found himself genuinely fascinated by the living body of knowledge represented in Dharmic civilization. It is important to note that many other "third-school" movements also looked to Indic traditions as a source of inspiration, wisdom and even memetic/civilizational ancestry, including the Theosophists and the Golden Dawn.

What emerged from this...and this is why I consider it a distinct, third school set apart from either Judeo-Christian Anglo-Americanism or Socialism...was a realization among sections of Western society that Sanatan Dharm might indeed be the key to the further evolution of human society; and that they, in the European West, had ancestral links to the civilizational cradle of Sanatan Dharm that far predated either the ideological tyranny of Judeo-Christianity or the historical negation innate to Socialism.

In other words, the Third School I am referring to looked neither to Jerusalem nor to Rome as the ideological urheimat of the West... much of it looked, instead, to India.

This was complete anathema to both the Anglo-American Judeo-Christians, and the Marxists. As long as these third-school movements remained scattered at the fringes of society, they were easy to malign and ridicule. However, as it happened, the third school came to influence a political movement powerful enough to gain mastery over a pivotal European country.

A very extreme form of third-school ideology, albeit highly distorted through the prism of an autocratic cult of personality, found a dramatic political manifestation in the National Socialist Workers' Party.

It is not easy to trace the connections between Indic civilization and Hitler's Nazism. For one thing, both the Judeo-Christians and the Socialists of the West have relentlessly bludgeoned Hinduism with the threat of demonization by association... so that we have become fearfully apologetic of even trying to draw a connection. That is not our Swastika, we say; those are not our Aryans. For another, India was not in a position to assert herself politically or even ideologically over those European movements that might have looked to her for inspiration; we were abject, a British colony. So it was only prudent, if ironic, that we sent our strongest and brightest to fight against the National Socialists on behalf of our British oppressors.

Nonetheless, the connections do exist. Read Savitri Devi's "The Lightning and the Sun" for clues.

Following the utter destruction of Nazi Germany at the end of the Second World War, the two victorious schools of thought... Anglo-American and Russian Socialist... took every measure to ensure that nothing resembling Nazism would ever gain enough ideological currency to become a serious contender for Western political power again. The Holocaust of Jews proved a useful pretext for the stamping out and systematic demonization of everything Nazism was associated with... it enabled the Anglo-Americans to claim moral superiority, implicitly by virtue of a solidly Judeo-Christian and "democratic" ethic, over the crazy mass-murdering occultists who had dared to venerate heathen symbols and ideas in righetously Christian Europe. For their part, the Russian Communists went about negating the historical context of everything associated with Nazism just as Communists and Socialists will distort and negate any piece of history inconvenient to their worldview to this day.

Ultimately, the philosophical contribution of Germany to Western thought was cauterized and summarized by the elegant and non-threatening trifecta: "Godel, Escher, Bach." A sanitized version for the Anglo-Americans to appreciate in the twentieth century; though the Russian Communists even rejected these three figures as elitist emblems. Meanwhile, the industriousness, innovation, and genius of the German people are ascribed (in the Judeo-Christian narrative) to their "Lutheran work ethic." Period. No hint that they ever had any other civilizational influences besides.

Today everyone remembers Hitler the jew-hater, the madman, the warmonger. That is the legend that has been drummed into worldwide public consciousness at the behest of WWII's victors. Everyone thinks of Hitler as somehow especially evil, notwithstanding the fact that his Holocaust was dwarfed by the Americans in the process of seizing their continent from its natives; by the British many times over, in India and their other colonial possessions; and by an array of twentieth-century Socialist despots from Stalin to Pol Pot.

Hitler may have been a warmonger and a racist; but he was also a lover of animals and a vegetarian. These ideas did not come from any Bible or Torah. They came from something the Judeo-Christians and the Socialists alike fear far more terribly than they do one another (for indeed, Marxism is no more than an extension of Abrahamic/Semitic ideology, another "reformation" of Western social and political thought ultimately contrived to justify brute-force imperialistic expansion and the subjugation of other peoples.) They come from Dharma.

Was Hitler Dharmic? To some degree he was, although he did many Adharmic things and paid the price for them. It is true, of course, that much of WWII German military tradition remained imbued with Christian symbology, the Iron Cross and so on, hearkening back to the Holy Roman Empire and more recently reinforced after German unification under a Kaiser with quasi-spiritual "divine right". But that may only be because the full import of Nazi ideology, specifically its third-school aspects, had not had a chance to sink in to German civil society before the Germans went out to war. It is also true that the Church, specifically the Roman Catholic Church, collaborated with his Holocaust; but let us remember that the RCC had been more or less a rentier power since the reunification of Italy, with the Pope hanging his hat on whichever power seemed pre-eminent in Europe in the hope of patronage.

But none of that is the issue here.

The issue here is
1) that a third school of thought existed in the West at the turn of the last century, distinct from both Anglo-American Judeo-Christianity and from International Socialism;
2) that the adherents of this school explored ideological foundations for European civilizational identity in Dharmic civilization... ideas that were extremely threatening to both Judeo-Christianity and Communism;
3) and that, with the end of the Second World War, it was demonized by association with Nazism and consigned to ideological oblivion. For the next several decades, at least.

When India became independent, it could not have been far from the minds of both the Anglo-American and Communist thinkers, how tremendous a fascination Indian civilization had exerted on their fellow White Europeans, not very long ago at all. It escaped the notice of neither the Christian Church nor the Jewish international business elite that even in an absence of temporal power, while India herself suffered the throes of slavery and misery, the power of Dharmic civilization to shape the imagination of the West had remained profound.

What would happen now if India were allowed to re-establish the social, the political, the economic power of that Dharmic civilization as well? Merely on the strength of her ancient philosophical wisdom and devoutly preserved spiritual traditions, India had managed to influence the West in the early modern age while still under the British jackboot. Now suppose she gained what the Capitalists and Communists alike understood to be *real* power... material power?

It has never been a secret to any sincere student of History that Dharmic civilization has been the pre-eminent cultural foundation of Asia, its influence immediately perceptible from Tibet to Indonesia to the Philippines and Japan, and historically discernible in regions of West and Central Asia despite the best efforts of Islamic marauders to scour it away.

The real secret that the West has been keeping from us is the degree to which Dharmic civilization had influenced a great diversity of spiritual, philosophical, social and even political institutions in the West itself... from the Theosophical Society of Blavatsky and Annie Besant to the National Socialist Workers' Party of Adolf Hitler. Western "right" and "left", Anglo-American and Slav alike have no greater fear than that this will happen again; and that this time, there will be a Civilization-State with real temporal power seizing the helm of her destiny.

The Third School still has its adherents today... such intellectuals as Koenraad Elst, Francois Gaultier and David Frawley continue the tradition, though they are little known outside their circles of scholarship. If the Third School ever re-asserts itself in the West, it will be thanks to the tireless and dedicated efforts of men and women such as these, who carried the torch through the decades of obscurity.

I hope this begins to suggest the possibility of an answer for you, as it has for me. If you arrive at one, let me know... I'm a very long way from learning the whole truth myself.

[Abhi_G]

Rudradev mahashay,

Very nice exposition of the history of the "third" school in "europe". But I am a bit surprised that you referred to Savitri Devi in your writing. Irrespective of the fact that many German philosphers (even American) took inspiration from Sanatana Dharma, associating our ancient tradition to hitler in any way is a big self goal IMHO. It is pure abhorrence that would prevent me to do any kind of association to nazi germany - however pagan, however animal loving they might have been. So when a Hindu searches desparately for something about the swastika in front of attacks by the left and the right of the european ideologies, it is logically justified to say that the nazis usurped the traditional ancient symbol and Hindus had absolutely no control (let alone any responsibility). And in fact Elst had written quite damning articles on Savitri Devi to delink any form of association between SD (Sanatana Dharma) and nazis.

http://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org/arti ... vitri.html

I am therefore a bit confused by your post.

[svinayak]

The book is
The Saffron Swastika (2 Vols.)
by Koenraad Elst

In this book, Dr.Koenraad Elst has presented his wide-ranging study of Fascism, Nazism, Communism and the Hindutva movement. He has drawn the conclusion that "Hindu fascism" like "Loch Ness monster" is merely a combination of words which may produce some sound and fury but which signify no observed reality.

http://www.indiastar.com/rameshrao.html
http://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org/arti ... iDevi.html
The eternal return of Nazi nonsense:Savitri Devi's last writings

http://www.savitridevi.org/

[Rudradev]

Rudradev mahashay,

Very nice exposition of the history of the "third" school in "europe". But I am a bit surprised that you referred to Savitri Devi in your writing. Irrespective of the fact that many German philosphers (even American) took inspiration from Sanatana Dharma, associating our ancient tradition to hitler in any way is a big self goal IMHO. It is pure abhorrence that would prevent me to do any kind of association to nazi germany - however pagan, however animal loving they might have been. So when a Hindu searches desparately for something about the swastika in front of attacks by the left and the right of the european ideologies, it is logically justified to say that the nazis usurped the traditional ancient symbol and Hindus had absolutely no control (let alone any responsibility). And in fact Elst had written quite damning articles on Savitri Devi to delink any form of association between SD (Sanatana Dharma) and nazis.

http://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org/arti ... vitri.html

I am therefore a bit confused by your post.

AbhiG-ji, thank you for your kind words.

Perhaps I was not sufficiently clear in my post, about the fact that there are three very distinct and separate ideas to consider here:

1) The fact that National Socialism drew inspiration from certain interpretations of SD made by its leading philosophers. These interpretations may have had very little to do with the way SD is, or ever was interpreted in India; but the fact is that they do exist, and we should recognize this despite our knee-jerk reflex to be defensive about the connections. It is specifically in pointing out the existence of the connections themselves that I referenced Savitri Devi.

Recognizing the connections doesn't mean that we celebrate or approve of Hitler's actions. However, failing to recognize them because Judeo-Christian propaganda makes us overly defensive and apologetic (about events that we had nothing to do with,) serves only to conceal from common Indian consciousness a fundamental truth: the extent to which SD influences existed not only in Nazism but across an entire spectrum of third-school social, spiritual and political movements in the "West" in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

For example, the Theosophical Society couldn't be further apart from the Nazis ideologically... and indeed we owe them a debt for the service of Dr. Annie Besant in our freedom struggle. Yet, they too have the Swastika in their emblem, and coincidentally tilted at a 45-degree angle just as the one on the Nazi banner was: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Theosophicalseal.svg

2) The fact that malicious Judeo-Christian and Socialist propaganda seeks to twist the reality of SD influences on the Nazis into a bogus reflexive argument: the myth that because SD influenced Hitler who did evil things, therefore SD is evil and its assertive adherents in Modern India are influenced by Hitler. This is utterly fallacious and it is what Elst effectively dispels in his "Saffron Swastika".

The Indic influence on Third-School movements in late 19th- early 20th century Europe was completely passive. There was no advertisement, no proselytization involved. India was in no position to promote its civilizational heritage abroad, being ourselves enslaved by the British. Indians had no role in actively shaping the various interpretations of SD in the West during that period.

There is, to my mind, no question of a "self goal" here. We would be much better off not even playing football on a field stacked against us, with biased referees who continuously move the goalposts. When we get defensive about the Nazi connection to the Swastika, that is the game we are buying into.

The Swastika is an emblem that is part of Sanatan Dharm's vast commonwealth of knowledge, a gift to all humanity from the wisdom of our civilization. Like all of SD it was open-source, freely given and free for all to take. It predates both the Theosophists and the Nazis by thousands of years. For that matter, the so-called "Star of David" was part of Hindu civilizational symbology long before it was "usurped" by the king of some obscure desert tribe to inspire them along campaigns of genocidal conquest lovingly detailed in the "Old Testament".

IMHO it is shameful that we must pay lip service to the narratives of Judeo-Christians, Communists or anyone else by loudly declaiming that Hitler "usurped" our Swastika. SD is eternal. Hitler is irrelevant, except as an illustration of SD's influence in Europe at a certain period in time. Why should there even be an implicit acceptance of responsibility by us for the consequences of Hitler's actions? Certainly we can recognize this, if only between ourselves in a discussion about "non-Western world view."

3) The fact that differences of personal and intellectual opinion exist within all schools of thought; so it shouldn't surprise us that they would exist in the Third School as well. Goldwater and Kennedy disagreed thoroughly though both were Anglo-American Judeo Christians. In the Socialist camp, Stalin's quarrels with Trotsky culminated in assassination. That does not change the essential nature of both those schools of thought.

Likewise, Elst may have his disagreements with Savitri Devi, but both are undeniably of the Third School. It is for each individual to decide for himself, or herself, whether Elst or Savitri Devi is correct... as it has always been with SD, the espousal of any interpretation is a matter of personal choice.

I personally agree with Elst in that Savitri Devi ultimately purveyed the myth of "Aryan Invasion Theory" which has been quite effectively disproven. I tend to believe that the call of the Indian ideological urheimat to European third-school adherents, in fact, derives from very early migrations in the opposite direction... such as Brihaspati has addressed very lucidly in this post: http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... 07#p924607

On Nazism, my personal opinion is that Hitler did many Adharmic things; but that many others of the same period, such as Winston Churchill, were far worse than Hitler by any yardstick. From an Indian point of view, the consequences of Hitler's war were not a bad thing. An exhausted Britain had to quickly wrap up its Raj and get out of the subcontinent... if they had had the luxury of more time and more money, they might have sowed the seeds of division more thoroughly than they did before leaving, and Pakistan might have been far more than Jinnah's moth-eaten state.

There are things vastly more abhorrent to me than Nazism, including the living Judeo-Christian and Socialist imperialisms that are actively trying to undermine our civilization and deny us the realization of our destiny today.

I do agree with you that if hounded by Westerners about the "Swastika-Nazi" connection, a Hindu's best option today is to make the "usurpation" argument as a justification. But let us realize that this is, in fact, a sad commentary on the extent to which our civilizational narrative has been viciously subjugated by the Judeo-Christians and the Socialists of the world today. Let us not be fooled ourselves by the absolutism of alien narratives that depict Hitler as archvillain and Churchill or Stalin as heroes by contrast... those aliens had their own agendas behind shaping these narratives, remember.

Let us, instead, look to a future when we can speak to the entire world as a civilization that has no need to justify itself to anybody. When we can proudly teach our children a narrative we choose for ourselves.

[ramana]

A book by Sir Francis Bacon " A new Atlantis"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Atlantis

Supposed to be the underpinnings of the New America

[SwamyG]

Likewise, Elst may have his disagreements with Savitri Devi, but both are undeniably of the Third School. It is for each individual to decide for himself, or herself, whether Elst or Savitri Devi is correct... as it has always been with SD, the espousal of any interpretation is a matter of personal choice.

Having seen him write and talk to other Hindus in some yahoo groups and his other writings, for now, I am sticking with Elst.

[SwamyG]

Acharya ji: Elst's book is not available online. Are there any other research documents comparing and contrasting "Islmic Terror" and the so-called Hindu terror?

[svinayak]

Acharya ji: Elst's book is not available online. Are there any other research documents comparing and contrasting "Islmic Terror" and the so-called Hindu terror?

That book is two volume and is more than 600 pages. It will not be online and it would be a good idea to buy it since he covers topics from the period before independence and during British days of manipulation.

[svinayak]

I posted this since this will determine the future of the image of the west.
Serious thinkers are emerging from the current confusion


http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/rel ... rally.html

Glen Beck dismisses non-religious Americans in rally

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James Kirk Wall, Author of To Be an Agnostic: An Agnostic Approach to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness

Glen Beck and I share a great admiration for the Founding Fathers of the United States. We celebrate their wisdom, character and integrity. I watched much of Beck's “Restoring Honor” rally in Washington D.C. on C-SPAN expecting a focus on the best ancient virtues, American values and how we can get the right representatives and leadership in Washington to take us on a better course. What I received instead was an evangelical preacher and a constant drum beat of how we need the Western religious concept of God in our lives.

We need to recognize our place with God. God is king. We should show our children how we kneel and pray to God. Look to God. God is the answer. The reason things have gotten bad is because we have turned away from God.

Knowledge and wisdom has led to Beck’s realization of the greatness of our country. When it comes to learning about American history his mind is a sponge. Unfortunately when it comes to religion there seems to be no willingness to learn and explore any alternative views. His mind has solidified around a belief that there can be no other answer than to be religious for a bright American future. Is Beck speaking from wisdom, or does he think he knows what he does not know?

History is an endless roller coaster ride of good and evil while ancient religious text remains static. Would a devotion of the entire population of the United States to the Western concept of God make this country better? Does a commitment to God in countries in the Middle East make them stronger? Does the rapid rise of China as the world’s second greatest superpower have anything to do with religion? Would the world be a better place if everyone was Christian like Mel Gibson?

[ramana]

I think Secularism is Christianity with out Jesus. The problem is with Christianity they feared the hereafter from Jesus. In Secularism, there are no such fears and hence no limits.

[abhischekcc]

^ Many years ago, I siad the same thing about socialism

ramana, you should read the book 'Black Mass' by John Gray - about how the post christian politics of the western world is really a derivative of the christian world view.

[ramana]

X-post.. Gives a critique of the Western penchant to normatize the others thru the rubric of social norms....

CURRENTS
A Weird Way of Thinking Has Prevailed Worldwide
By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS
Published: August 25, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/world ... ed=1&fta=y

CORTES, CANADA — Imagine a country whose inhabitants eat human flesh, wear only pink hats to sleep and banish children into the forest to raise themselves until adulthood.

Now imagine that this country dominates the study of psychology worldwide. Its universities have the best facilities, which draw the best scholars, who write the best papers. Their research subjects are the flesh-eating, pink-hat-wearing, forest-reared locals.

When these psychologists write about their own country, all is well. But things deteriorate when they generalize about human nature.

They view behaviors that are globally commonplace — say, vegetarianism — as deviant. Human nature, as they define it, reflects little of the actual diversity of humankind.

This scenario may sound preposterous. But if a provocative new study is to be believed, the world already lives in such a situation — except that it is American undergraduates, not flesh-eating forest dwellers, who monopolize our knowledge of human nature.

In the study, published last month in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan — all psychologists at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver — condemn their field’s quest for human universals.

Psychologists claim to speak of human nature, the study argues, but they have mostly been telling us about a group of WEIRD outliers, as the study calls them — Westernized, educated people from industrialized, rich democracies.

According to the study, 68 percent of research subjects in a sample of hundreds of studies in leading psychology journals came from the United States, and 96 percent from Western industrialized nations. Of the American subjects, 67 percent were undergraduates studying psychology — making a randomly selected American undergraduate 4,000 times likelier to be a subject than a random non-Westerner.

Western psychologists routinely generalize about “human” traits from data on this slender subpopulation, and psychologists elsewhere cite these papers as evidence.

In itself, such extrapolation is hardly fatal. Freud built his account of human behavior from his work on patients in Vienna and generalized for the world. So many great analysts of human nature, from Aristotle to the Buddha, reached for transcendent human truths despite limited contact with the range of humanity.

The Canadian study’s claim is not to invalidate all extrapolation so much as to suggest that American undergraduates may be especially unsuitable for it.

The study’s method was to analyze a mountain of published, peer-reviewed psychology papers. It found evidence both of a narrow research base and of the eccentricity of that base. Among the many peculiarities of the usual subjects who serve as “universal man” are these, the study found:

American subjects disproportionately prize choice and individualism. In a survey of six Western societies, only Americans preferred a choice of 50 ice creams to 10. Studies have found that Americans are all but alone in giving newborns their own room.

Americans are also peculiar in the so-called Ultimatum Game, in which a subject receives money and must make an offer to share it. The second subject can accept or reject the offer, but if it is rejected, neither subject gets paid.

Americans playing the game are fair in the extreme, making higher offers than most. But they are also outliers in another way. In various places, including Russia and China, psychologists observe the rejection of excessive generosity — a demurring when offered too much. This behavior is absent from American undergraduates.

The study’s list goes on and on. Westerners tend to define themselves by psychological traits, and non-Westerners by relationships. In some languages, including English, directions are built around the self (“Take a right after the church”), while in other languages, they refer to immovable objects (“It is behind the church”).

Americans are worse than many at overcoming common optical illusions about the length of lines. But they are better than East Asians at recalling an object when the background changes, perhaps because the latter focus on context.

[Sanjay M]

Latin America too feels it should not be seen as a backyard

http://www.economist.com/node/16990967

[Arjun]

I love the way the NY mosque and Koran burning issues have brought home to Americans some home-truths they imagined themselves to be immune from...

BR's patented 'equal- equal' concept seems to be gaining currency among thinking Americans ! Here's an article that calls it 'both sidesism' !!....http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/ ... ona-charen

[Sanjay M]

The established phrase for that is "moral equivalency"

I've heard Krauthammer using it for 20 years

[ramana]

X-post..
Another book is "Indo-German Identifcation". by Robert Cowan

It gives avery clear track record of how the Europeans viewed the idea of India and sought to get out of Judiac origins theory. It has later chapters where they go voer the top.

Google Books:

Indo-German Identification

The big idea is there were two main streams in Europe: Latinification and Germanism.

Latinification as it was already normatized by Judeo-Christian ideas had the early lead and did not question the Bibilial account for they benefiteed from it.

The Germanism was reaction to the Latinised monoploy and sought to assert itself. The first concrete step was the Holy Roman Empire which was Germanic. This is approximately 9 centuries after Rome conquered the Goths who are Germanic. Later it launched Protestant movement which led to Church Reformation. The English who are really Latinised derivatives managed to colonise ahead of the Germanic landlubbers and confined them to the continent. The war of 1760 saw the rise of Prussia, Russia as continental powers.

The events of WWI and WWII are part of the Germanic breakout of the older Latinised/Roman imperial order.

[ramana]

Der Speigel says:

How Middle Eastern Milk Drinkers Conquered Europe
In Neolithic age. What that means is to be pondered?

[ramana]

When we looka t Western Empires the idea of colonies distinguishes them. Ancient Roman, Spanish and Britsh Empires are of same lineage. Holy Roman Empire which was Germanism did not have colonies. ITs was basically a unification process.

American Empire is empire without emperor (dynastic succession) and colonies. They rely on 'free trade'.

Now all those Star Wars Inter-Galactic councils make sense.

[KLNMurthy]

All others, atleast read Part I Section I

Hegel's Philospohy of Historypdf

also read the section on India. Explains a lot.

[ramana]

All others, atleast read Part I Section I

Hegel's Philospohy of Historypdf

also read the section on India. Explains a lot.

For the rest of the people, please explain what you learned about India?

[KLNMurthy]

Hegel's Philospohy of Historypdf

also read the section on India. Explains a lot.

For the rest of the people, please explain what you learned about India?

It is OT for this thread, and I'm not sure where it belongs. Very briefly (as I gathered from a quick skim), Hegel is saying Hindus have a more natural and free religious philosophy compared to the more artificial and totalitarian Chinese one, however, Hindu philo provides no basis for morality, or virtue; this explains why (acc. to Hegel) Hindus are kind to animals but cruel to humans, have no concept of truthfulness, and are generally immoral(these things are stated as facts). There's lots of other similar stuff, some of it more opaquely written and some less so.

Reading Hegel, I could join the racist paramparic dots to Abbe' Dubois, Lord Curzon, Monier Williams, Katherine Mayo, and modern-day Western and Indian social science types who despise Indic culture to varying degrees. If I am not mistaken, Hegel is foundational reading for much of social science study.

[RajeshA]

Hegel and Kant are the big names in Western philosophy!

[brihaspati]

Although OT, there are parallel undercurrents within western philosophy - besides Hegel or Kant, like Nietzsche. Should we also not consider what he says about the "west", Christianity, "morality", power, etc? From wiki, which is a good summary : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche


In Daybreak Nietzsche begins his "Campaign against Morality".[48] He calls himself an "immoralist" and harshly criticizes the prominent moral schemes of his day: Christianity, Kantianism, and utilitarianism. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche called the establishment of moral systems based on a dichotomy of good and evil a "calamitous error",[49] and wished to initiate a re-evaluation of the values of the Judeo-Christian world.[50] He indicates his desire to bring about a new, more naturalistic source of value in the vital impulses of life itself.

In both these works, Nietzsche's genealogical account of the development of master-slave morality occupies a central place. Nietzsche presents master-morality as the original system of morality—perhaps best associated with Homeric Greece. Here, value arises as a contrast between good and bad, or between 'life-affirming' and 'life-denying': wealth, strength, health, and power, the sort of traits found in a Homeric hero, count as good; while bad is associated with the poor, weak, sick, and pathetic, the sort of traits conventionally associated with slaves in ancient times.

Slave-morality, in contrast, comes about as a reaction to master-morality. Nietzsche associates slave-morality with the Jewish and Christian traditions. Here, value emerges from the contrast between good and evil: good being associated with other-worldliness, charity, piety, restraint, meekness, and submission; evil seen as worldly, cruel, selfish, wealthy, and aggressive. Nietzsche sees slave-morality born out of the ressentiment of slaves. It works to overcome the slave's own sense of inferiority before the (better-off) masters. It does so by making out slave weakness to be a matter of choice, by, e.g., relabeling it as "meekness."

Nietzsche sees the slave-morality as a source of the nihilism that has overtaken Europe. In Nietzsche's eyes, modern Europe, and its Christianity, exists in a hypocritical state due to a tension between master and slave morality, both values contradictorily determining, to varying degrees, the values of most Europeans (who are "motley"). Nietzsche calls for exceptional people to no longer be ashamed of their uniqueness in the face of a supposed morality-for-all, which Nietzsche deems to be harmful to the flourishing of exceptional people. However, Nietzsche cautions that morality, per se, is not bad; it is good for the masses, and should be left to them. Exceptional people, on the other hand, should follow their own "inner law." A favorite motto of Nietzsche, taken from Pindar, reads: "Become what you are."

More relevant for this thread is his use and construction of the Brahmin, "Manu" and his "law", as a kind of source for all enlightenment and perhaps even a barely conscious mechanism to deconstruct the "western/Christian" claim to "superiority".

I will try to post some relevant material : though not sure if it will be relevant here. We are not discussing India's nationhood as yet, are we?

[naren]

Although OT, there are parallel undercurrents within western philosophy - besides Hegel or Kant, like Nietzsche. Should we also not consider what he says about the "west", Christianity, "morality", power, etc? From wiki, which is a good summary : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche

Sorry for OT. Swami Vivekananda spoke on similar lines and thought it might be useful for those interested.

Now what is that good which is to be pursued? The good for him who desires Moksha is one, and the good for him who wants Dharma is another. This is the great truth which the Lord Shri Krishna, the revealer of the Gita, has tried therein to explain, and upon this great truth is established the Varnâshrama[3] system and the doctrine of Svadharma etc. of the Hindu religion.

अद्वेष्टा सर्वभूतानां मैत्रः करुण एव च ।
निर्ममो निरहंकारः समदुःखसुखः क्षमी ॥ ( Gita, XII.13.)
—"He who has no enemy, and is friendly and compassionate towards all, who is free from the feelings of 'me and mine', even-minded in pain and pleasure, and forbearing"—these and other epithets of like nature are for him whose one goal in life is Moksha.

क्लैब्यं मा स्म गमः पार्थ नैतत्त्वय्युपपद्यते ।
क्षुद्रं हृदयदौर्बल्यं त्यक्त्वोत्तिष्ठ परन्तप ॥ (Gita, II. 3.)
—"Yield not to unmanliness, O son of Prithâ! Ill cloth it befit thee. Cast off this mean faint-heartedness and arise. O scorcher of thine enemies."

तस्मात्त्वमुत्तिष्ठ यशो लभस्व जित्वा शत्रून् भुङ्क्ष्व राज्यं समृद्धम् ।
मयैवैते निहताः पूर्वमेव निमित्तमात्रं भव सव्यसाचिन् ॥ (Gita, XI. 33.)
—"Therefore do thou arise and acquire fame. After conquering thy enemies, enjoy unrivalled dominion; verily, by Myself have they been already slain; be thou merely the instrument, O Savyasâchin (Arjuna)."

In these and similar passages in the Gita the Lord is showing the way to Dharma. Of course, work is always mixed with good and evil, and to work, one has to incur sin, more or less. But what of that? Let it be so. Is not something better than nothing? Is not insufficient food better than going without any? Is not doing work, though mixed with good and evil, better than doing nothing and passing an idle and inactive life, and being like stones? The cow never tells a lie, and the stone never steals, but, nevertheless, the cow remains a cow and the stone a stone. Man steals and man tells lies, and again it is man that becomes a god. With the prevalence of the Sâttvika essence, man becomes inactive and rests always in a state of deep Dhyâna or contemplation; with the prevalence of the Rajas, he does bad as well as good works; and with the prevalence of the Tamas again, he becomes inactive and inert. Now, tell me, looking from outside, how are we to understand, whether you are in a state wherein the Sattva or the Tamas prevails? Whether we are in the state of Sattvika calmness, beyond all pleasure and pain, and past all work and activity, or whether we are in the lowest Tâmasika state, lifeless, passive, dull as dead matter, and doing no work, because there is no power in us to do it, and are, thus, silently and by degrees, getting rotten and corrupted within—I seriously ask you this question and demand an answer. Ask your own mind, and you shall know what the reality is. But, what need to wait for the answer? The tree is known by its fruit. The Sattva prevailing, the man is inactive, he is calm, to be sure; but that inactivity is the outcome of the centralization of great powers, that calmness is the mother of tremendous energy. That highly Sattivka man, that great soul, has no longer to work as we do with hands and feet—by his mere willing only, all his works are immediately accomplished to perfection. That man of predominating Sattva is the Brahmin, the worshipped of all. Has he to go about from door to door, begging others to worship him? The Almighty Mother of the universe writes with Her own hand, in golden letters on his forehead, "Worship ye all, this great one, this son of Mine", and the world reads and listens to it and humbly bows down its head before him in obedience. That man is really—

अद्वेष्टा सर्वभूतानां मैत्रः करुण एव च ।
निर्ममो निरहंकारः समदुःखसुखः क्षमी ॥ ( Gita, XII.13.)
—"He who has no enemy, and is friendly and compassionate towards all, who is free from the feelings of 'me and mine', even-minded in pain and pleasure, and forbearing." And mark you, those things which you see in pusillanimous, effeminate folk who speak in a nasal tone chewing every syllable, whose voice is as thin as of one who has been starving for a week, who are like a tattered wet rag, who never protest or are moved even if kicked by anybody—those are the signs of the lowest Tamas, those are the signs of death, not of Sattva—all corruption and stench. It is because Arjuna was going to fall into the ranks of these men that the Lord is explaining matters to him so elaborately in the Gita. Is that not the fact? Listen to the very first words that came out of the mouth of the Lord, "क्लैब्यं मा स्म गमः पार्थ नैतत्त्वय्युपपद्यते—Yield not to unmanliness, O Pârtha! Ill, doth it befit thee!" and then later, "तस्मात्त्वमुत्तिष्ठ यशो लभस्व—Therefore do thou arise and acquire fame." Coming under the influence of the Jains, Buddhas, and others, we have joined the lines of those Tamasika people. During these last thousand years, the whole country is filling the air with the name of the Lord and is sending its prayers to Him; and the Lord is never lending His ears to them. And why should He? When even man never hears the cries of the fool, do you think God will? Now the only way out is to listen to the words of the Lord in the Gita, "क्लैब्यं मा स्म गमः पार्थ—Yield not to unmanliness, O Partha!" "तस्मात्त्वमुत्तिष्ठ यशो लभस्व—Therefore do thou arise and acquire fame."


Now let us go on with our subject-matter—the East and the West. First see the irony of it. Jesus Christ, the God of the Europeans, has taught: Have no enemy, bless them that curse you; whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also; stop all your work and be ready for the next world; the end of the world is near at hand. And our Lord in the Gita is saying: Always work with great enthusiasm, destroy your enemies and enjoy the world. But, after all, it turned out to be exactly the reverse of what Christ or Krishna implied. The Europeans never took the words of Jesus Christ seriously. Always of active habits, being possessed of a tremendous Râjasika nature, they are gathering with great enterprise and youthful ardour the comforts and luxuries of the different countries of the world and enjoying them to their hearts' content. And we are sitting in a corner, with our bag and baggage, pondering on death day and night, and singing," नलिनीदलगतजलमतितरलं तद्वज्जीवितमतिशयचपलम्—Very tremulous and unsteady is the water on the lotus-leaf; so is the life of man frail and transient"—with the result that it is making our blood run cold and our flesh creep with the fear of Yama, the god of death; and Yama, too, alas, has taken us at our word, as it were—plague and all sorts of maladies have entered into our country! Who are following the teachings of the Gita?—the Europeans. And who are acting according to the will of Jesus Christ?—The descendants of Shri Krishna!

source

[Rudradev]

Here is my very simplistic take on what Hegel is trying to say.

First I will try to (simplistically) define some of the terminology Hegel uses when deconstructing the nature of societies in his "Philosophy of History."

He says there is essentially a relationship between two elements in any society: Substance and Spirit. The quality of that relationship in a particular society determines the degree of self-awareness, and of self-realization that a nation has achieved.

Substance is the power (that of government, law, formalized religion and canon); the mechanism of authority that a society exerts over the individuals within it.

Spirit on the other hand is the collective expression of all the individuals' Will (which is distinct from the Substance, and which exists within the society over which the Substance has power.)

Hegel writes with a Westerner's bias. To him, the relationship between Substance and Spirit is most highly developed in the west. There has been (1) a recognition in Western society that Substance and Spirit are distinct and separate, (2) a reconciliation between these two elements which has created a balance that is, if not optimal, then still better than anywhere else in the world. The gifts of the Age of Enlightenment to Europe: Reason, the Scientific Method, Democracy, Modern Economics, Industrialization and Colonial Domination of the rest of the world...are proof of this for Hegel.

It is through this lens that Hegel looks at Eastern cultures.

In terms of China, Hegel says that there is a lot of strong, formalized Substance. However, there is no room given to the expression of Spirit at all. Whatever laws of morality, etc. exist, are encoded and enforced by the authorities behind the Substance. They do not at all derive from Spirit, from the individual wills of a truly advanced and cultured people to behave morally based on their own understanding of society.

So in China, the dichotomy between Substance and Spirit has not even been recognized, let alone reconciled. Instead, Substance is formalized in such a way that the Emperor (Central Authority) is identified as the ultimate father figure, the singular source of all morality, law. governance and social structure. Spirit is virtually absent; the people are like children in a very authoritarian family, and when they follow the rules, it is because the Substance compels them to... not because their Spirit has empowered them to enter into a negotiated social contract with the Substance (as in the West.)

In essence, China is the perfect anthill. Uniformity is emphasized (as it is today with the imposition of an artificial "Han" identity.) Individual will is so completely suppressed in this nation-as-family model that it does not even occur to the people that Spirit has any legitimacy.

Coming to India, Hegel begins by saying India as a society is "advanced" relative to China, because Spirit is recognized and the dichotomy between Spirit and Substance is also recognized.

However, he is very critical of the form that Spirit has taken in India. According to Hegel, our pantheism, our belief in Brahman and the divine spark of all things, cripples our objectivity, destroys our useful perspective. The aspect of our Spirit that emphasizes Maya, the transient nature of objective reality, and the aspiration to ultimate transcendental release from the prison of self (Hegel calls it "annihilation") is most disturbing to him. In his view, the Indian version of Spirit has created a rigid and morally bankrupt Substance where, in letting go of objectivity, we have let go of any moral standards as well. Our spirituality is imagination run riot, with no mooring, no anchor, and no basis on which to form a workable moral code as a foundation for society.

The Indian Substance is defined by such texts as the Manusmriti at the social level, being responsible for a devolution of society into many divided castes. Hegel says that this division into castes has corrupted and weakened the individual will (for example, while other societies talk of bravery as a universal virtue, the Hindu talks of "bravery as a virtue of Cshatriyas.") This has led to an abdication of moral responsibility for the condition of our society's Substance as a whole.

And in political/governmental terms, Hegel reports that the Indian Substance is similarly marked by completely arbitrary, barbaric and immoral conduct. We are cruel to those we consider our inferiors (lower castes, women) and cower tremulously before those who vanquish us. In fact, our very divisions, our very elevation of pantheistic arbitrariness and chaos to the level of institutionalized Spirit and our possession of turbulent, treacherous, caste-divided polity in lieu of Substance... have meant that we ended up being eventually vanquished and conquered by everyone who came by.

Hegel spends a long time seeming very frustrated at our lack of what he considers an "objective historical record", even while he admires our scientific, mathematical and philosophical prowess as a civilization. To him it is maddening that our history seems to be largely myth and fable, devoid of dates and facts, a "weakness" he ascribes again to our Hindu lack of objectivity.

I will say one thing for Hegel (even though his views aren't going to make him very popular on here.)

Namely, he has a Westerner's clear bias, but not a Judeo-Christian bias. In fact, even in the West, he considers Christianity a "negative religion" (in the vein of Nietzshean thought) because the "God" of guilt who presides over Christianity is in fact a mechanism of restricting the individual Will, a damper on the Spirit.

It is unfortunate that in his analysis of Hinduism, he seems to have completely missed a number of important things. Did he ever, for instance, read the Bhagvad Gita? When he lambasts our society's "abdication of morality" I have to wonder if he ever came across "karmanyei va dhikaar aste, ma faleshu kadaachana."

In a number of ways Hegel has missed the point in his analysis of India. But I don't know if we can entirely blame him. Given the state of the India that he was looking at while writing this, what evidence could he see of Dharma as a positive and valuable thing? His analysis and conclusions may be hugely flawed but some kernel of veracity in his observations, for both India and China, are hard to deny. If Hegel was remiss in not reading the Gita, surely we ourselves were remiss in our lack of living it. We cannot let the jibes of Westerners make us so ossified with defensiveness as to deter us from exploring and questioning ourselves... if we did, how "Dharmic" would we be?

We have to realize that Indian society is at a new epoch of its development today. What we believe about the value of all that is Indic, is true, and it is the core of our Spirit. Nothing else can fuel our way forward.

However, the observations Hegel made of contemporary India, flawed though his perspective may have been, were no less true for him. It will not do to always be defensive, always be looking over our shoulder for embarrassing bits of present-day reality to emerge even as we insist that everything the Westerner says is wrong. The corrupted Substance Hegel saw in the India of his day, lingers on in many of its symptoms in the India of the present day. The future can be built on the past, indeed must be predicated on the wealth of wisdom that our past has bequeathed us; but it cannot merely be a recreation or revival of some ancient past (which, after all, landed us in a very unenviable recent past which Hegel observed.) Look back, learn what we can... but move only forward.

Enough OT. On China, Hegel observed that the artificial nature of Substance subsuming Spirit completely would eventually lead to conquest and downfall at the hands of the West (as a matter of "destiny".) He was right, of course. A bankruptcy of individual will made the Chinese "family" a broken family, with the "children" turning into opium eating coolies and hapless victims of Western and Japanese depradations.

Today another artifice, the 23rd Dynasty, stands in the place of the Manchus who were Hegel's contemporaries. There is still no nation there, merely the Substantive superimposition of an authoritarian "family" norm covering up a complete suppression of Will. Apparently, as Hegel observes, the burning of books, murder of intellectuals, and destruction of inconvenient historio-cultural record is something that goes back all the way to the time of Shih Huangdi. It has never saved them before. It will only accelerate progress through the cycle for them this time around.

It is the Tibetans who are, even by Hegel's standards, a relatively advanced civilization, a people closer to true nationhood than the Chinese in their present form could ever aspire to be. They have indeed recognized the distinction between Substance and Spirit and in their own way, given expression to both. Today the Tibetans are a Nation without a State. Meanwhile, China, as we know, is a State that will never be a Nation. "Families" who stay together purely out of an externally-imposed sense of obligation or duty, rather than through an exercise of individual will, are doomed invariably to disintegration.

And tomorrow is another day.

[RajeshA]

Rudradev ji,

As always, a good write up!

[ramana]

Am going to x-post the Hegel posts in the non Western WOrld view and in India Forum.

[KLNMurthy]

Rudradev ji,

As always, a good write up!

[not responding to anyone here as such, but simply expressing some thoughts triggered by the discussion. Seems it might have some slight relevance to the thread, but by all means remove it if it is too OT;]

I am not against philosophy, when taken the right way good philosophy can provide good insights. But not all philosophy is good philosophy, let alone good science.

Any philosophy has to have certain elements, organized with a certain structure, to be called a philosophy, i.e., it has to meet some syntactic requirements. A properly trained schoolkid can produce a syntactically correct philosophy, just as a 10 year-old can write a computer program. Whether the underlying ideas are valid, the methodologies are properly spelled out and can be replicated, etc. are different questions.

Philosophical treatises can be seductive, especially if they seem to give a feeling of intellectual respectability to people's personal prejudices and preferences. This leads to a notorious form of circular reasoning: India is conquered, India is in a degraded state, therefore it means that Indians are a degraded people that are bound to be conquered, because, well, they have degraded and useless ideas. (Could it have been that an unfortunate defeat at the hands of an unusually cruel and brutal enemy inflicted a trauma that led to a collective degradation? No, that would mean accepting that Indians are human, which is not the point of the exercise, is it?) There is no real interest in being objective, accounting for the diversity, etc. By packaging up the messy memetic reality of people's conceptual thinking, which probably developed in an evolutionary way over time, into something pithy and catchy, an impression can be created that some useful understanding has been arrived at, when all one might be doing is to dress up one's own prejudices, and cater to the prejudices of the reader.

Hegel probably did read the Gita (I would guess in some kind of early translation), but the importance of packaging the information therein into his philosophy supersedes actually understanding it, or recognizing that to Indics Gita might mean something entirely different than to him. Even modern-day scholars such as Wendy Doniger interpret, with great and widely-accepted authority, the Gita as a justification for warfare and the killing of relatives, and hence as further, even more conclusive proof of the fundamental immorality of the Indic. Hegel would have been, if anything even more deeply prejudiced and less inhibited in his unacknowledged prejudice against Indics. He certainly displays a level of shallowness, and slightness of knowledge that would give Doniger a run for her money.

To balance it out, the fact that he and maybe Nietzsche and others portrayed Christianity in a less than flattering light shouldn't be any occasion for celebration, or for condoning the flawed approach and methodology of his work. It is not as though he did rubbish work when it came to Hinduism and somehow did scrupulous scholarly and scientific work with Christianity. Both semitic religions and Indic religions, to different degrees, are messy, complex and contradictory affairs in practice, and the doctrines, where they are codified, are hardly consistent or coherent. To take one simple example--Christianity is said to be the philosophy of slaves, contrasted with masters who are hard working, pursue wealth & power etc. An easy counterexample is Calvinist doctrine in Christianity which is famous for preaching, very successfully the work ethic, and the idea that material rewards will accrue to the deserving Christian. There are plenty of others, enough--if one were inclined to the idiom--to label Hegel, Nietzsche et al as Christianophobes, analagous to Islamophobes.

The same holds with his hifalutin critique of Chinese culture and system. We may feel that his philosophy validates our loathing of present-day Chinese national behavior, and puts that loathing on a grander pedestal, and perhaps similarly for Christianity, but at the same time, we also note that his formulation of Indic culture is obviously shallow rubbish. So, why wouldn't his critiques of the Chinese and Christians be equally invalid? Note that Chinese culture and Christian culture may actually be bad and loathsome, but we just can't say that on the basis of Hegel's writings, and have to come up with our own intellectual formulation of the thesis and be prepared to defend it in debate.

To keep Hegel in perspective, he preceded the nonsensical social science theories of the 19th & early 20th centuries, which basically codified racism and led to massive upheavals in the 20th century. So, the philosophy of Hegel is an academic curiosity at best, an illustration of the primitive state of Western social science thought of that time. I see no validity to giving these fellows' work any more importance than that.

Perhaps the one practical use that I find for Hegel is to recognize that his undeservedly exalted position in the minds of students of social science and philosophy explains to some extent how irrational self-hating attitudes get perpetuated among the Indian elite. This is what I had in mind when I made my initial comment that Hegel's writeup on Indic culture "explains a lot."

Of course, it isn't just Hegel, he's just one of the prominent representatives of a "type." there has been (and continues to be, in slightly disguised form) a steady drumbeat of the conquering race (their own characterization) droning on about the wicked and cunning Hindoo, the upright Musalmaan, the just European, and on and on. Is it any wonder that half the Indics hate themselves and their culture, the other half reactively hate the haters, but still eagerly lap it up when these domineering voices in our collective cranium happen to let drop the odd derogatory comment about their pet aversions of the day like Chinese culture, Christianity, or of course Islam. All it means is that for 100% of the Indics, these primitive third-rate Western intellects are not humans but gods who have the ultimate authority to define us to ourselves.

[RajeshA]

Like all philosophers, Western philosophers, are important because of the questions they pose, new views they propose through which to look at the world, different mental frameworks they create.

They may however be useless at imposing those mental frameworks onto reality or interpreting the world through their views, simply because they too are prone to their own prejudices, captive to their own perspectives and endowed with less than sufficient grasp of the complexity of reality.

[ramana]

X-Posted...

Ozzy is still fun, cant believe he is a family man!! I still remember his hilarious answer on why he bit that bat on stage - just felt like doing it, because he had nothing to do in that dark box. btw, he seems to have slowed down a bit after that ATV flip.


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Forget Ozzy, the one they should really study is Lemmy. He's older than Ozzy and done at least as much drugs and alcohol, if not more. However, unlike Ozzy, he is articulate, still has his wits about him and is still rocking hard.....
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True. He has a fetish about Nazi memorabilia too. I never liked Ozzy with his strange nasal voice. Himesh Reshamia of rock music.
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Not just him, ALL whites, who are not hippy/pagan (including liberals), have varying degrees of that fetish. Check out east european bands and even the mainstream US hard-rock crowd for their art works. Too many Iron Crosses and skulls for my comfort! Nazism represents a pinnacle of well dressed, highly efficient, benis power of the paler sort. In these peoples' minds it had no-nonsense and easily understandable Baygone spray solutions for a lot of the problems - big industrial facilities for cleansing etc. Alluring.

Despite their quirks, idiot secular-ayatollahism and constant put-downs by anglo-saxons, IMO, only France as a culture seems to have resisted this urge to glorify well dressed mass-murderers in a crypto-fashion*. Their soldiers still dress modestly, compared to the pretty boys of rest of NATO. My high regard for the only military dictator of any decency, General de Gaulle keeps going up, the more I watch the rest of the west behave. He, rather single-handedly seems to have resisted the urge for benis-thinking in algeria and made the french sit up and think of their dharma. And he died a rather dignified death in a modest dwelling in deep France. Good for him

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* Luc Besson's Fifth element was a resounding, near frame-by-frame parody on Hollywood/Pentagon's crypto-nazi dress fetish, by having sloppy jernails leading the fight against a weird alien. That alien operatic singer who can really sing and the overweight, deaf "superstar" is a fine caricature of elvis type megastars Though a bit over the top, Simon Pegg's Hot Fuzz was also good take on the over the top situations and law enforcement imagery that America projects.

[ramana]

X-posted...

SwamyG posted....

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/ar ... epage=true

By the 4th century B.C., Asia had begun its first cycle of economic growth and power. This was the reason why Alexander the Great decided to travel eastward to establish an empire. At that time there was nothing worthwhile to the west of Greece. On the other hand, to the east of Greece was Persia, and beyond Persia were rich kingdoms in India and China. A Roman Emperor once complained that Rome had to import all its luxuries from India and China, but had, in turn, nothing to offer these Asian countries. In fact, until the 1820s, Asia accounted for 60 to 75 per cent of the world's Gross Domestic Product.

Asia is not a continent that can be brought together like the European Union. Historically, culturally and climatically, it falls into five distinct categories: East Asia, Indo-China, Central Asia, the Indian Ocean and West Asia regions. In the past, these regions were all integrated by the Silk Route. This is why I have titled this speech “The Return of the Asians” — because contrary to common opinion, what we are witnessing today is not the rise of Asia but the return of the Asian countries to recapture the global economy.

The first cycle of Asian dominance was crushed, above all by the rampant forces of European colonialism, and then by the Industrial Revolution which led European manufacturers to look to Asian markets for their manufactured goods. Thereafter, for the greater part of the 19th and 20th centuries, Asia was turned into a captive market for European industry. No Asian country other than Japan benefited from the Industrial Revolution. As a result, by 1940, Asia accounted for only 20 per cent of the world's GDP.

In a reversal of fortunes, however, the affluent western consumers of the 1970s enabled Japan and the four Asian Tiger economies — South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan — to emerge as low-wage manufacturing bases for consumer goods. The story of the return of the Asians begins here. The next phase was in 1979; the year which ushered in the Thatcherite revolution. I remember listening to Margaret Thatcher at the Commonwealth Summit of 1979 explaining her policies for promoting economic competitiveness. That same year, Jiang Zemin, who succeeded Deng Xiaoping, visited Singapore and Sri Lanka to study free trade zones there. That visit paved the way for the creation of special economic zones in China. This was the start of the migration of industries to China as many firms decided to relocate in China in order to remain competitive. Thereafter, China became the workshop of the world. China, which produced barely a few thousand air-conditioners in 1978, today manufactures nearly 50 million air-conditioners. In addition, half of the world's microwave ovens, one-third of its television sets, 70 per cent of its toys and 60 per cent of its bicycles are manufactured in China. Chinese exports in 2005 was worth $1.15 trillion.

Watching a television programme on the Shanghai Expo a few weeks ago I was reminded of my visit to Shanghai in 1979. Today the Mao jackets have been replaced by designer styles and labels. Global hotel chains have sprung up in Shanghai. The teeming bicycles and Red Flag cars have been traded for international car brands — and they are manufactured in China. There are ultramodern airports and ingeniously-designed expressways. And Pudong — which was a swamp at the time — has become a futuristic city.

In 1992, I visited New Delhi just as India was awakening from its economic slumber. Prime Minister Narasimha Rao and Finance Minister Manmohan Singh had just announced an economic re-structuring programme that ended India's socialist economy. The collapse of the Soviet Union had left them with no other option. At that time, Bangalore was for us a holiday destination. And Hyderabad was famous for its biryani. I met with the Tatas who were preparing a new strategy to face liberalisation. Companies such as Reliance, Wipro and Infosys were just starting out. Indians proudly informed me that they had earned $200 million from IT exports. Today, as much as China is the centre of global manufacturing, India has become the international hub for global service industries. India's IT and outsourcing exports amount to over $40 billion. The economic resurgence of China and India has also paved the way for the emergence of Thailand, Indonesia, Pakistan and Vietnam as manufacturing bases.

This shift of world economic power from the West back to Asia is highlighted in the Asian Development Bank Key Indicators (for Asia and the Pacific) for 2010. Today, the Asia-Pacific accounts for 36 per cent of the world economy. Europe comes second, and North America, third. Within Asia, over 65 per cent of the GDP comes from three countries — China, India and Japan. It is predicted that Asia will be the main driver of global growth over the next two decades with a newly emerging Asian middle class of nearly 1.5 billion. Since 1980, some 400 million Chinese people have transcended the poverty line. By 2030 the Chinese middle class is expected to exceed 600 million. In number terms this will be the largest middle-class group in the world, comprising the world's third largest consumer market. India will be the fifth largest market in the world with 520 million consumers. It is this demographic transformation of 1.5 billion Asian middle-class consumers that will fuel global economic growth.

This trend has been evident during my visits to India over the last two years. There has been a channelling of new products specifically aimed at the Indian low-income domestic market by Indian entrepreneurs. The best example of this is the Nano car that costs around Rs.1 lakh, which targets the lower middle class. It is the Indian version of Ford's Model T.

This is what I call the return of the Asians. The Asia of 2050 will be similar to the Asia of the mid-17th century which dominated the world in terms of total wealth — what we call GDP today — despite the fact that some of the European countries had a higher per capita GDP. Similarly, by 2050, most of Asia will be middle-income economies while the West will constitute high-income economies.

However, the return of the Asians will not be an automatic phenomenon. Nor can it be allowed to be confined to economic growth. The success of the region depends on correct political decisions and appropriate action being taken by governments and civil society — if it is not to be a flash in the pan. In the remaining part of my speech I propose to speak on the key issues that will require our attention in the years to come.

At one time the regions of the Indian Ocean were the richest in the world — even richer than East Asia. This was what compelled Elizabeth I of England to send an ambassador to the court of the Mughal Emperor Akbar the Great in the 16th century. The wealth of the Nizam of Hyderabad in the 19th century (valued according to the present day) will be $200 billion, four times the wealth of Bill Gates.

Once the sailors had mastered the Asian monsoons, the merchants wove a web of trade across the seas. It was a maritime crossroads bringing together traders from the Mediterranean, Arabia, South Asia and China. The kingdoms of South India, Sri Lanka and Sri Wijaya rose to prominence due to two reasons. One reason was merchandise exports. The second was the fact that they were the centres for trans-shipment from the East to the West.

By 2030, not only will India become the world's third largest economy, it will also be the world's fastest-growing major economy. Indonesia, the successor to Sri Wijaya, will become the fifth largest economy, overtaking Russia. By then the combined GDP of India and Indonesia will be $39 trillion — the same as the predictions for the U.S. during this time. Add to this the fast-growing economies of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Tanzania, Mozambique and Uganda on the one hand, together with the Gulf oil economies, Singapore, Brunei, Iran, Myanmar, South Africa, Kenya and Australia, and you have a cocktail of rapid growth.

Unlike East Asia and the Pacific which has APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation), the Indian Ocean has no regional mechanism for trade and economic cooperation. The Indian Ocean Rim Association for Regional Cooperation (IOR-ARC) has been a non-starter. This is a serious omission since the potential for growth in the second half of the century lies in this region. One reason for this is the predicted increase in its population — an additional 500 million by 2050. Furthermore, the lower income levels of the Indian Ocean region gives a natural advantage to Indian enterprises that have already commenced designing low-price products and services to reach lower-income rural consumers. The Asian Development Bank calls this response in production to low-income demands ‘frugal innovations', and foretells its prospects of reaching East African coasts, thereby creating new trade linkages.

Given such exciting possibilities, it is time that the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), and the Commonwealth that has 19 members in the region, initiate discussions to seriously consider this new alignment of trading nations, and create a formal mechanism to bring together Africa, Asia and Australia, the three continents that border the Indian Ocean. Those of you who are part of civil society can make people-to-people contact within this region and thereby complement regional level economic cooperation. Rotary International should take the lead in bridging the continents of the Indian Ocean.

This is the first part of the text of a speech made by Sri Lanka's Leader of the Opposition and former Prime Minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, at the South Asia conference of the Rotary International in Bangkok on November 27.

[SwamyG]

Rajiv Malhotra commenting on "Who owns Yoga" topic @ HuffPo. Who onws Yoga?

The Transcende­ntal movement was started by Emerson who read Hindu texts and wrote about them as part of formulatin­g his new philosophy­. This led him to formally resign as a Christian minister and to denounce Christiani­ty at a famous speech at Harvard, which caused him to get banned from Harvard. His successors in Transcende­ntalism, both Walt Whitman ("author of Leaves of Grass) and Thoreau, were deeply immersed in Hindu writings. Then this kind of work in the west was taken up by the American Theosophis­t movement that later moved its headquarte­rs to India. Then comes Swami Vivekanand­a and has a huge impact at Harvard and Chicago, among other places. Numerous Vedanta Societies get started across America as a result. Parmahansa Yogananda came to USA in the early 1900s and starts the hugely successful Self Realizatio­n Fellowship­. This process has a long history. The 1960s new age was filled with influentia­l gurus, and Swami Satchitana­nda was the one who inaugurate­d the Woodstock festival alongside the Beatles and Ravi Shanker. I am preparing a series on books on this encounter of Indian spiritual traditions in America over the past 200 years and its deeper dynamics.

[ramana]

In high school I read this Emerson Poem

Brahma

Its very famous for its great imagery. Non-understanding fools have parodied it a lot.

It has the essence of the Gita in a few lines.

Brahma

If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near,
Shadow and sunlight are the same,
The vanished gods to me appear,
And one to me are shame and fame.

They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

The strong gods pine for my abode,
And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

1856 [1857]

[ramana]

Has anyone seen a critical appreciation/review of Egyptian art over the many centuries to see how they depicted humans and everyday life? My thesis is the antipathy of the Western art prior to Renaissance towards human depiction is a result of the Egyptian practices.