Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

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RamaY
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by RamaY »

LokeshC wrote: Someone called me a conspiracy theorist on this very thread :). There is no conspiracy here. No people actively trying to keep us down. The colonizer and the colonized are like two sets of monkeys.

The colonizer monkeys used to put the colonized monkeys in a cage, with severe penalties for trying to escape. After both are trained in their roles, the cage is removed. The colonized monkeys will be afraid to step out and their safe option would be to stay in. The colonizer monkeys would actively and severely punish any colonized monkey from setting out. These are learned behaviors transmitted through generations. There is no one "actively" enforcing these behavior on people. It is automatic, involuntary and it is ever pervasive in any field, be it "indology", social sciences, administrative policy or electrical engineering.

Obviously it is an extreme hindrance that has stopped us from truly developing to our potential.
Bingo!

All that is required is for colonized monkeys to become self-aware and unshackle themselves intellectually and do what is natural for them. Next time the colonizer monkeys come to punish you for walking outside the boundary, just give them a nice Thappad and make Thappads as part of their genetic memory.
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by shiv »

Dharma is not as hi funda as people may think. Many Indians, many of us too, live dharma without even realizing it or seeing its value. The recomendation that a phase of life must be spent in education, another phase married (to a person of the opposite sex), working to earn a living, having children, educating children, looking after one's parents, helping children get married. Worship too is part of dharma. "Fighting evil", not telling lies, avoiding greed and lust, helping the weak, charity, compassion towards animals are all principles of dharma - even if one might quibble over definitions of "greed".

There are of course plenty of people who simply follow what is easy and convenient and ignore what is not. One could argue that looking after family (old or young) really ought to be a universally applicable value, but even educated Indians buy into western concepts of individualism and independence, which are western norms that are claimed to be universally applicable.

The above mentioned features of dharma are known (and practised to the extent possible) even among the poorest and most destitute people. Perhaps tolerating poverty and destitution is adharma. Poverty and destitution are issues that can be handled dharmically but only at "national/governmental" level. Individual roles are almost ineffective except in what they contribute by way of taxes.

Aspects of western universalism that promote individualism and the rejection of dharmic social norms are some areas where western universalism comes into conflict with dharma. In terms of dharma, western society for all its advancement is viewed in India with some suspicion and anxiety, even contempt.

The contempt of course is mutual. People who live in or experience western society are contemptuous of all the usual things that are considered wrong in India - poverty, filth, caste, you name it

But the fact is that dharma is not the cause of India being this way. Many Indians lay the blame for India's human condition on colonialism and social changes brought about by that. I think most of us know that it was a mixed bag at best. I am not going to speculate on whether there was more good than bad or vice versa. That still remains to be seen IMO. That is open to debate.

The other related question is, "If India's current condition cannot be blamed on dharma, can it be blamed on western universalism?" The answer depends on what we think the "universalism" was that we want to blame for India's current status. The easiest thing to blame is history rather than any specific western norm that degraded India, and India became "independent" after that degradation had already occurred. The point that Balu makes about Hindus being forced to declare themselves as following a religion probably did open the door for criticism of all things Hindu and "reform" by the removal of all the bad things that the "Hindu religion" practised. But how much has this contributed to the degradation of human condition in India and how much has the reform and change brought about by "modernization" helped India?

What degradations did India have at independence? We had a huge population, poverty, malnutrition, inequality, illiteracy, lack of public health and sanitation.

What degradations do we have now? We have a huge population, poverty, malnutrition, inequality, illiteracy, lack of public health and sanitation.

What has changed? Population is up by 400% but the "rate of growth" is down. Population is still growing though
Poverty - absolute numbers have probably increased since 1947, but the percentage is down as more people are now classified as "not poor" or even wealthy
Malnutrition: There is more food than ever before, Indians are growing taller and living longer than before, and yet, we probably have more malnourished people than in 1947 in absolute numbers. Some people say that the economic policies of the last 10 years combined with urbanization has made malnutrition worse
Inequality - I posit that social inequity has decreased although mal-distribution of wealth continues
Illiteracy- this is definitely down
Public health and sanitation - huge strides have been made. there is no comparison whatsoever. But we have more people and ever growing cities. Demand for water is up and India - which was 80% rural in 1974 is now only 60% rural - meaning that we have nearly 500 million people in cities.

What has this got to do with western universalism?

It appears to me that WU pushes for social and economic changes - some of which have already been deeply incorporated into India. But that does not seem to have done much for poverty and degradation. The science that we adopted and swear by has not turned India around in terms of poverty and degradation. Economic policies that are supposed to magically develop societies have not removed poverty and want - which remain pretty much the same or even bigger of you look at absolute numbers. If India had 250 million poor in 1947, we have more than that number today. And remember that Indians are now all equal by law - so there's a victory for universalism. After reservations and the Sachar report, no one can say caste based inequality has not been addressed. But the dent on poverty is zero when it comes to absolute numbers. We still have as many poor as we ever had.

Should "universalism" be blamed for this failure? Or should we blame old Indian/Hindu attitudes and practices that need to be changed?

Development in India is a never ending race. By developing one heck of a lot, educating a billion or more people since 1947, enlarging the economy many fold, producing more food than ever before, producing more milk than any other country in the world, India still has more poor, sick and destitute people than anywhere else in the world.

Western Universalism demands a certain definition of what a society should be like. Even after implementing the policies recommended for such a society and persisting with them for 67 years we still lead the world on poverty, want and disease in absolute numbers. China, that rejected freedom and democracy is better than India. Is this because WU is not good enough, or it it because we have not adopted WU as well as we should? Maybe if we strive harder and copy the west in every way by agreeing to all the trade and tariff demands, the non proliferation demands, the human rights demands etc things would magically improve?

Or maybe we should simply reject all recommendations made as universally applicable western norms and as LokeshC said "simply walk away". They ain't workin' 67 years is long enough
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by ramana »

LokeshC wrote:
shiv wrote:I have personally found it quite difficult to get these points across without sounding like a paranoid conspiracy theorist, but there are examples.
Someone called me a conspiracy theorist on this very thread :). There is no conspiracy here. No people actively trying to keep us down. The colonizer and the colonized are like two sets of monkeys.

The colonizer monkeys used to put the colonized monkeys in a cage, with severe penalties for trying to escape. After both are trained in their roles, the cage is removed. The colonized monkeys will be afraid to step out and their safe option would be to stay in. The colonizer monkeys would actively and severely punish any colonized monkey from setting out. These are learned behaviors transmitted through generations. There is no one "actively" enforcing these behavior on people. It is automatic, involuntary and it is ever pervasive in any field, be it "indology", social sciences, administrative policy or electrical engineering.

Obviously it is an extreme hindrance that has stopped us from truly developing to our potential.

The colonizer monkeys' behavior is what is known as fractal recursivity. The colonizer monkey acts as the colonizing oppressor on the colonized monkeys. The removal of the cage is the granting of Independence to the selected colonizer monkeys to perpetuate the colony.

Now think in those terms visavis India, Congress and Brutish.


NDA is the colonized monkeys who have thrown away the mental cages...
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by A_Gupta »

"If India's current condition cannot be blamed on dharma, can it be blamed on western universalism?"
The patient is sick - should it be blamed on Hinduism or Zoroastrianism? The question above could be a category mistake.
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by member_22733 »

ramana wrote:

The colonizer monkeys' behavior is what is known as fractal recursivity. The colonizer monkey acts as the colonizing oppressor on the colonized monkeys. The removal of the cage is the granting of Independence to the selected colonizer monkeys to perpetuate the colony.

Now think in those terms visavis India, Congress and Brutish.


NDA is the colonized monkeys who have thrown away the mental cages...
I dont know if NDA has truly stepped out of it. Modi does look like someone who managed to step outside the cage and I only wish his tribe increases.

The major point is as long as this colonizer/colonized automatic trained monkey behavior continues, we will still be colonized. We will still accept the west as our intellectual/economic master. Congress has ensured that this colonial slavery continues for another 60 years after 1947. If the Briturds ruled us until 1991, we would have looked exactly the same, only with a few more famines here and there. Preventing famine is the only thing CONmen did right.

The monkey business also percolates in other areas. The "Indic" part of India is quite OK with dynastic politics, where the family is more important than the system or the individual. This tradition has given the Ghandy family in India immense power. But unfortunately we bet on the wrong family. We bet on the family that benefited out of the colonial cage business.

Their actions clearly suggested that they were firmly held within those confines: Nehru had affairs with only brutish women, Indira married a foreigner, Rajiv married a foreigner., Raul Ghandy is dating a colombian wo/man and vacations abroad like he is more at home there. These are clear indications of the immensely personal and secret mental struggles that they had with themselves to get out of the cage, but they wanted to do it by changing their monkey allegiance. They wanted to turn themselves into colonizer monkeys to get out of their cage. They never cared about breaking down that mental cage for others, which is what true liberation and freedom is about. Thus they were nothing but colonizers.

None of them ever tried to bring their foreign spouses to understand and connect with India. None of them fought battles with the cage of the colonized mind. None of them really stepped out of that cage. This made Sonia Ghandy a very unique person. As a western woman, she was ALREADY part of the colonizing monkey and as a matriarch of the first family of a very family oriented India, she had the automatic approval of every Indian to rule India. She was, in the true sense of the word, an Empress. Every colonized mind in Congress looked at her differently than another Indian, as she was from the colonizer side. She used that to maximum advantage. The last 10 lost years were not just 'lost' years, they were the years where India was colonized again.

There are also other problems with the "cage":

Many people who have only "good" of India in their hearts can be seen having this automatic response. Recent case is a major RW tweeter : Saswati Sarkar, who is stuck up on the Smriti Irani's educational qualifications. This causes fission within the RW community, between those who have truly stepped out of the cage and those who are still in there. It is easy for the colonizers to drive a wedge b/w caged RW and free RW. AAP was such an attempt. There will be more. That is the first danger.

The bigger danger is when a person from the west understands the structure of the colonial cage. They have a few choices then, either try to free the caged monkeys, try to reason with the colonizer monkeys, just walk away, or use that to your advantage.

Trying to free the caged from outside never works if you are a westerner. That is because the caged will always see you as their natural master, even if you prove to them you are not. Trying to reason with the colonizer monkeys rarely works either. Since you are asking them to wrest power, you will be seen as a 'traitor'. One can walk away too, from the whole shebang and that would be a very reasonable choice.

The fourth one: Manipulating the monkeys to your advantage. That is the biggest danger that India will face in the future. These are people who understand the structure and play it to their advantage. I think Sonia is in this category. An intellectual war with these people is inevitable in the future if India has to develop and unshackle itself.
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by member_22733 »

RamaY wrote:All that is required is for colonized monkeys to become self-aware and unshackle themselves intellectually and do what is natural for them. Next time the colonizer monkeys come to punish you for walking outside the boundary, just give them a nice Thappad and make Thappads as part of their genetic memory.
Yes, they work on Thappad basis. Japan has slapped them, now they look at them as honorary whites. NoKo is another place that has tried to do so, but it isolated itself (so did Japan after the Meiji Restoration). China is doing that in its own way. So is Russia and Iran.

Now, who were the perpetual "axis of yeeeevil" that most of us believed in? China, Russia, Iran, Noko....
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by RamaY »

LokeshC garu,

We should call your model LokeshC Colonizer-Colonized-Cage-Thappad (LokeshC 3CT model) {Should go into BRF dictionary}

For example the Independent India would be

Colonizer - Sepoy Network
Colonized - Bharatiyas
Cage - Idea of India as British created artificial nation which didnt exist before 1947, that needs to shed its Hindu past thru Secularism and be part of Anglo-Saxon camp in geopolitical developments.
Thappad - Hindutva
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by member_22733 »

^^^ LOL! RamaY garu is trying to humble me :P

The cage extends far beyond what you described. It is a "fractally recursive" cage. It exists in academia, industry, public policy etc. There are layers of colonizers in each of these fields.

UN running campaign for environmentalism is the policy setter the gora side, Greanpeace in the Europe is the colonial enforcer, Greenpeace in India are the Colonial Sepoy enforcers.

Take any field in India. I personally know of these structures within the Engineering community. They seem to be very egalitarian, but they have the same structure: policy-setting/enforce/sepoy-enforce. They form almost automatically, because of the economic differential between us and the west.

For anyone to "walk out" of the cage, they would need to deal with the penalties that automatically come by breaking these structures. Modi walked out of that cage and one can see the amount of hatred and FUD that is heaped on him.

The most important and critical step towards post-colonialism is to setup structures that are safe places for anyone who walks away from the cage. That involves in setting up a parallel economy, parallel "knowledge exchanges", parallel funding centers that are completely disconnected from the enforcers of WU. We are not even close to that stage. True post colonial era has not even begun in India. If it occurs, it would be a true renaissance in India.
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by shiv »

A_Gupta wrote:
"If India's current condition cannot be blamed on dharma, can it be blamed on western universalism?"
The patient is sick - should it be blamed on Hinduism or Zoroastrianism? The question above could be a category mistake.
Absolutely right. And thanks for reading that ramble.

But the irony is that if neither Dharma or WU can be blamed for perceived Indian failures, can they be credited for successes? If we have 300 million illiterate, we have educated 800 million - so does WU get credit for that?

For any given socio-economic model, blame for failure must go along with credit for success. Neither Dharma nor WU can be blamed for failures. But they cannot be credited for successes either.

If we claim that western Universalism is something that is being mooted/imposed/pushed on us because it is a model that led to success in the west, the Indian experience shows that the model cannot be credited with that success as the absolute magnitude of our problems is bigger now than they were in 1947.

In fact one could ask if western Universalism is the cause of success in the west. And once again (as happened earlier in this thread) the answer is an emphatic NO. Western success did not grow out of western Universalism. In fact I think western universalism is a formula for failure of the west, but no one will believe that until they see that model failing.
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by shiv »

A_Gupta wrote:Balu again:
This policy systematically forced Hindus to prove that a particular practice was founded in `the true religious doctrines of Hinduism’. This happened, because the liberal colonial state would only tolerate a practice if the proper `religious authority’ had demonstrated that the practice really belonged to the realm of religion...

Following this route, the colonial legal policy of religious toleration gradually transformed the self-confidence and vibrancy of the Hindu traditions into a fanatical defense of their alleged `religious doctrines’...

Again, law spreads a typical Christian attitude in a secularized form: it forces one to defend one’s tradition as a religion, with its own sacred doctrines and sacrosanct sentiments. .
The Hindoos follow a religion that has one prophet called Manu. In his book, one of the Holy Books of Hindooism called "manu smriti", Manu codified Hindoo society and put some people at the top of the social ladder while others were forced to be untouchables or outcastes. This is what has led to wealth among some classes and extreme degradation among others. In Christianity everyone is equal in the eyes of God and such degradations cannot occur.

It is necessary to correct the degraded path taken by the followers of the Hindoo religion by legislating against egregious caste practices to make all people in society equal. Once that is done all inequality will disappear from India; the satanic rules of Manu followed by his priests will be removed and all Indians will rise out of their woeful state.

We have legislated against caste. We have reservations.

But still India in 2014 has more poor and more illiterate than in 1947. We have more malnourished children than ever before.

Was the "religion" the problem? Or is the solution wrong? Or have we all simply allowed ourselves to be led up the garden path by a bunch of con men?
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

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Shiv,

Hindu Dharma vs WU dichotomy you outline above is what S.N. Balagangadhara's blog post touched upon. Arun had posted it before, linked here again:

http://www.hipkapi.com/2011/03/02/on-co ... angadhara/
The above stance (conviction, attitude, call it what you will) generates two antithetical intellectual movements. (It is a kind of a pendulum swing during the course of the last two hundred years we are not rid of yet.) The first is a fiercely ‘nationalistic’ mode. It claims that the Indian culture had everything: from quantum physics to psychoneuroimmunology, and from the rockets to the nuclear bombs. It further claims that there is nothing wrong either with ‘the caste system’ or with the Indian ‘religions’. The second is its antithesis: it brands any attempt to interrogate the Indian traditions and the Indian culture in order to recover and understand our current experiences as ‘obscurantist’ if not downright ‘fascist’. It believes that the current state of our society clearly shows the need for: ‘abolishing’ the caste system because it is the cause of social injustice; ‘reforming’ the Indian ‘religions’ so that they become more responsive to the needs of the modern day world; ‘establishing’ more firmly a ‘secular state’ that guarantees the upholding of the liberal values, etc. Between these two extremes, there are a number of opinions (of various shades) that tell us that we should ‘absorb’ the best from both cultures. However, these shades have been cognitively uninteresting so far.
Then he talks of what I called "walking away from the imaginary colonial cage" in my previous few posts:
There is, however, a third participant in this debate today. Standing outside the spectrum defined by these two antithetical movements, this voice suggests that both the responses are fundamentally colonial in nature. It suggests further that both ways of talking are obfuscating the nature of our experiences. It says that the Indians today have difficulties in accessing their own experiences, and that their learnt ways of talking about their culture and society are responsible for this state of affairs. It tries to argue that one needs to break out of the centuries of descriptive straightjacket that confines our thoughts and distorts our experiences. It is, I believe, a voice of the future which pleads the case for an Indian Renaissance. I hope to make plausible why this voice is believable and is worthy of credence.
On either side of the dichotomy are people "influenced" by colonialism, and are thus still in the "cage". They can be manipulated and played with as they are emotionally vested on each side. What Balagangadhara says is the following thing:- If one is not "in the cage" and not "influenced" by it then one does not find oneself on either side of the dichotomy. This is true liberation, and achieving it makes one's experiences with their own cultures or other cultures deeper in a fundamental way. This kind of bonding was impossible to do before, when one's mind is colonized.
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by shiv »

LokeshC wrote: Then he talks of what I called "walking away from the imaginary colonial cage" in my previous few posts:
There is, however, a third participant in this debate today. Standing outside the spectrum defined by these two antithetical movements, this voice suggests that both the responses are fundamentally colonial in nature. It suggests further that both ways of talking are obfuscating the nature of our experiences. It says that the Indians today have difficulties in accessing their own experiences, and that their learnt ways of talking about their culture and society are responsible for this state of affairs. It tries to argue that one needs to break out of the centuries of descriptive straightjacket that confines our thoughts and distorts our experiences. It is, I believe, a voice of the future which pleads the case for an Indian Renaissance. I hope to make plausible why this voice is believable and is worthy of credence.
On either side of the dichotomy are people "influenced" by colonialism, and are thus still in the "cage". They can be manipulated and played with as they are emotionally vested on each side. What Balagangadhara says is the following thing:- If one is not "in the cage" and not "influenced" by it then one does not find oneself on either side of the dichotomy. This is true liberation, and achieving it makes one's experiences with their own cultures or other cultures in a deep fundamental way which was impossible to do before.
True. I read both Arun's Balu quote and your post.

What I have been trying to get at are the deep social changes made in India by the caged people who became leaders by ingratiating themselves with the British. The social changes made in India were made as "improvements" to India and an effort to "lift Indians out of Hindoo degradations"

Clearly all those social and economic changes have not lived up to their promise. if those changes were made with the snake oil promise of equality, development and wealth for all Indians based on the universally applicable values brought in by the British, the human development statistics of India should be glaringly clear to anyone who keeps half an eye open.

We still have more poor and more malnourished people than anywhere else in the world. What was gained by bashing Hindus and pushing universalism? The diagnosis was wrong. The solutions are wrong.
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

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shiv wrote:We still have more poor and more malnourished people than anywhere else in the world. What was gained by bashing Hindus and pushing universalism? The diagnosis was wrong. The solutions are wrong.
Correct. The diagnosis was wrong because no one had a clear view of the situation. Once you diagnose things wrong your solutions probably not going to work.

What was not gained by us was gained by the west. If India managed to get poverty alleviated in a scale you are talking about (using whatever means), the energy/food demands would have overwhelmed every possible source on earth, raising costs for the western lifestyle. Again, no one is holding us down consciously. But it is convenient for the west to propagate the old colonial guard in one way or the other, for prolonging true development in India.
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by shiv »

http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNA ... 67,00.html

The link above says poverty in India stands at 240 million rural poor and 72 million urban poor: total 312 million

In the 1970s India started with poverty of about 50% - and that is around 275 million out of 550 million. Our numbers are worse today.

Note that all the changes made in India are given credit for the improvements but no one talks about the fact that absolute numbers are now worse. We are not actually solving problems as we go along. The formulae for development we use are wrong. In fact aspects of "development" itself may be problem areas.

We are hell bent on applying universal solutions using universal ideals. Clearly a lot of bullshit is being promoted.
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by shiv »

Check this link
http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/china/overview
Yet China remains a developing country (its per capita income is still a fraction of that in advanced countries)and its market reforms are incomplete. Official data shows that about 98.99 million people still lived below the national poverty line of RMB 2,300 per year at the end of 2012. With the second largest number of poor in the world after India, poverty reduction remains a fundamental challenge.
By adopting western universalist ideals of freedom and democracy India is worse than China despite starting off with a lower population.

China itself is chasing other WU ideals and China is not getting there despite world beating numbers

Western universalist ideals do not actually provide answers for countries like India and China
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by RamaY »

shiv wrote:http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNA ... RTY/EXTPA/ 0,,contentMDK:20208959~menuPK:435735~pagePK:148956~piPK:216618~theSitePK:430367,00.html

The link above says poverty in India stands at 240 million rural poor and 72 million urban poor: total 312 million

In the 1970s India started with poverty of about 50% - and that is around 275 million out of 550 million. Our numbers are worse today.

Note that all the changes made in India are given credit for the improvements but no one talks about the fact that absolute numbers are now worse. We are not actually solving problems as we go along. The formulae for development we use are wrong. In fact aspects of "development" itself may be problem areas.

We are hell bent on applying universal solutions using universal ideals. Clearly a lot of bullshit is being promoted.
In 1857, Indian population was 200m. To make life easy Let's assume all 200m were poor.

In 1970s, Indian population was 550m with 275m poor. So 100yrs of British rule produced 75m new poor out of 350m additional population. That means British rule produced 20% poverty.

Now India's population is 1200m with 312m poor. That means 50yrs of independent India produced (312-275) 37m poor from the population increase of 650m that is a little above 5% poverty.

That means Western model is inferior to Indian model when it comes to poverty alleviation.
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by A_Gupta »

shiv wrote:Was the "religion" the problem? Or is the solution wrong? Or have we all simply allowed ourselves to be led up the garden path by a bunch of con men?
In reading about Rajendra Singh, his revival of traditional rainwater harvesting and the revitalizing of the rivers of Alwar, for example a reminder here:
http://indiatogether.org/environment/in ... jendra.htm

it appears (I need to verify0 that the British outlawed the collective efforts by the villages to create and maintain the rainwater harvesting system. They wanted the effort to be focused on canals. These laws apparently remained on the books after Independence. It took a Rajendra Singh to get people re-involved in solving their own problems.

I do believe the solutions India adopted were a bit misguided. For instance, primary literacy should have been given more focus than IITs. As M.K. Gandhi wanted, the villages should have been the focus of development. The law codes should have been examined for all laws meant to benefit the rulers over the ruled. Further, government should only be a facilitator, the real revival comes from people getting re-engaged in the collective efforts needed to improve their lives. In 1800, the schools were organized by the villages from village revenues (i.e., revenues exempted from being handed over to the local king or ruler.) The British destroyed that, taking all the revenue and then handing back funds for school or whatever. Now we have the sarkari school where since the paymaster and oversight is remote, the teachers don't have to show up at the school, but collect their salary anyway.

One of my venerable relatives who knows how to read government budgets and documents calculated a few years ago, that 90% of the development monies in the great state of Bihar are not used for development - and this is typical around the country, Bihar was just a worst case. Maybe bottoms-up development would have had just as much fraud and waste as top-down does. But I think there would have been more opportunity for local innovation and energy bottoms-up.
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by shiv »

Ironically, western universalism is a "moving target". The Christian universalism of the 19th century affected India in a particular way. The secular universalism of the latter half of the 20th century has had a different effect on India.

The Christian universalism of the 19th century enabled Europe to become what it did - a self appointed world leader whose own position and values were placed above and ahead of any of the older cultures. India specifically was given selective Europeanization - that is railways for holiday makers, consumer goods imported from Britain. India itself was simply a raw material, revenue and manpower source. The 19th century was a time of great enlightenment and industrialization of Britain (and Europe). The Indian boxwallah/elite class got a taste of Europe in a country that did not develop apace with Europe.

By 1947, India was a 19th century economy, whose leaders had absorbed 19th century British human values - with a contempt for the degradations of the Hindoo religion and the need for secularism and modernization by adopting Christian values of social change.

But in 1947 the west was moving into 20th century gear. The west was totally an industrialized society and the rebuilding after the wars kept them busy. Nazi depravity in the 1940s was a sort of repeat of the earlier 30 years war that ended with the creation of secular states. But after Nazi Germany the racist notions of European Christian superiority over other races was flushed clean. Industrialized European states finally threw off Christian morality and invented a new morality of individual freedom, female freedom, sexuality and female sexuality. These were developing well in the the west by the 1960s.

But in the 1960s India was still trying to enter the 20th century. Not enough industry to support an industrial economy. An agrarian economy with 80% of people in villages. No infrastructure, but IITs were there. Schools were difficult to find is smaller towns in the 1960s, but for those who got a school education colleges were there for the asking, but no jobs after that. 80% of transport tonnage was at least partly by bullock cart.

But in the 1960s India had set up a fairly robust public health system - and it was in the 60s that the entire population of India was inoculated against smallpox and the disease was eradicated in the 1970s. But that public health system chipped away at maternal and infant mortality and populations increased. In millions of rural homes, Indians of the 1950s and 60s, living 19th century lives received 20th century vaccination and antibiotics that led to a massive increase in population as huge numbers of people survived previously fatal illnesses. People started living longer as well because of this. Life expectancy in 1947 in India was 31 years!! :shock: It is now 64

The Indian government finally woke up in the 1970s.
http://countrystudies.us/india/34.htm
Implicitly, the government believed that India could repeat the experience of the developed nations where industrialization and a rise in the standard of living had been accompanied by a drop in the population growth rate. In the 1950s, existing hospitals and health care facilities made birth control information available, but there was no aggressive effort to encourage the use of contraceptives and limitation of family size. By the late 1960s, many policy makers believed that the high rate of population growth was the greatest obstacle to economic development. The government began a massive program to lower the birth rate from forty-one per 1,000 to a target of twenty to twenty-five per 1,000 by the mid-1970s.
When I Google to check for reasons for Europe's decline in fertility, the reasons that come up are decreasing numbers of marriages, and increasing "fragility" of marriages. Thiis is where Europe is heading into adharma, from an Indian viewpoint. Not sure if India is going that way. Be that as it may, here is some info about what decreased fertility is doing in different EU nations:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/ ... -stupid/2/
Essentially, Spain and other Mediterranean countries bought into northern Europe’s liberal values, and low birthrates, but did so without the economic wherewithal to pay for it. You can afford a Nordic welfare state, albeit increasingly precariously, if your companies and labor force are highly skilled or productive. But Spain, Italy, Greece and Portugal lack that kind of productive industry; much of the growth stemmed from real estate and tourism. Infrastructure development was underwritten by the EU, and the country has become increasingly dependent on foreign investors.

Unlike Sweden or Germany, Spain cannot count now on immigrants to stem their demographic decline and generate new economic energy.
So India is in a bind. If it keeps on increasing its population we can never catch up with western rates. if Indian populations start declining, we will look more like Spain than Sweden.

India is just entering the 20th century. I am not at all sure we should be, or that we can, head down the route Europe is headed in the 21st century. We need different goals. we cannot blindly copy western goals the way we have copy pasted the west for years, despite living in a different era.
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by member_22733 »

shiv wrote:India is just entering the 20th century. I am not at all sure we should be, or that we can, head down the route Europe is headed in the 21st century. We need different goals. we cannot blindly copy western goals the way we have copy pasted the west for years, despite living in a different era.
+1000. We need different solutions altogether. What I say here might sound like rinse-repeat, but I dont mind if I shout myself hoarse over this to be heard by everyone :)

There is a great post colonial writer called Frantz Fanon who was an Algerian Freedom fighter and a psychologist. Algeria had a messy war for independence with the occupying French mass-murderers (aka colonizers) diametrically opposite in nature from the one India had.

One of his lessons from the experience was the true liberation from any kind of structure of oppression that is placed on a population is fundamentally violent in nature. If it is not violent, the colonized middlemen, who wield immense power on the lumpen, would find one way or the other to hold on to their power in the new structure that replaces the colonialist structure. The violent liberation would terminate these middle men along with the colonizers. Along with Algeria, this happened in one more country : USA :)

We paid the price for "peaceful exit of the briturds" tangibly in the form of partition where millions were butchered. The intangible cost is what I outlined above paragraph. It manifests itself in the form of distorted policy encoded in archaic English law that was borrowed without much change from the briturds, a totally opaque law enforcement/adminstration system, the "district collector", "tehesildar", "taluk" enforcer/tax collector type roles, the irresponsible govt. babu who behaves just as he would have under a colonized rule where he was never responsible to the people, the crony capitalist with connections trying to exploit the opaque laws and make a quick buck by using contacts just as he would have during colonized rule etc. It is fractally recursive. I believe the existence of corruption in India in such wide scale is just because of this phenomenon.

The existence of this structure is what makes WU easily propagated in India. WU is a form of neo-colonialism, a form of "civilizing the savage brute" so to speak. When the whole administration infrastructure and the associated policy makers were slaves of the west just a couple of generations ago, it becomes very easy for the west impose the neo-colonial constraints due to its understanding of this structure. It does use it to the hilt for its own benefit. Breaking India project is an example.

To unshackle ourselves we need to
1) Create a parallel 'buffer economy' free from the shackles of WU (free from WB, UN etc).
2) Create parallel knowledge systems with individuals free from WU. This includes science, "social science", policy and administration studies etc. Have strict entry guidelines and tests. For ex: Anyone who spend more than 10 years of education outside India is not welcome.
3) Create an policy think tanks that drive policy using the knowledge generated from the above.
4) Create an industrial framework that derives its base from the WU-free knowledge systems and generates money for the "buffer economy"

It maybe a joke when it starts off, which is good because it would fly under the WU "threat assessment radar". However, its a positive feedback synergetic loop and thus exponential in nature. In about 50 years, we would have largely liberated ourselves.
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by A_Gupta »

Shiv, like Krishna said to Arjuna, I will say to you, you worry about things that need not be worried about. The decline in the average number of children per woman happened in Europe long before marriage became unfashionable.

Will India keep the institution of marriage or discard it, like the West? I offer no predictions
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by shiv »

A_Gupta wrote:Shiv, like Krishna said to Arjuna, I will say to you, you worry about things that need not be worried about. The decline in the average number of children per woman happened in Europe long before marriage became unfashionable.

Will India keep the institution of marriage or discard it, like the West? I offer no predictions
(Note to Arun - the following message was already 75% done by the time I saw your message - which I think has been posted within the last hour. It is not an exact response to your post - but related to it and indicates how I see the issue.)

The classic and oft-repeated cliché about outcomes in chaotic and unpredictable situations is the one about the "butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing leading to a cascade of events that culminates in a storm in New York". The point being made is that initial conditions matter a great deal for outcomes. Whether it is for cooking a meal or playing a football match, you cannot take very different initial conditions and expect similar outcomes. How can Indian planners expect India to achieve western style results in Indian society without even thinking about initial conditions? With 20-20 hindsight it all looks so, so dumb.

By 1945 Britain was a fully industrialized society. The entire society was hooked up by rail transport, radio and telegraph. By the time the antibiotics revolution (Penicillin, 1940s) hit the world's diseases, Britain, most of Europe and the US were industrialized, connected up and literate. Sanitation and water supply systems were in place. Public health information could be shared.

But even in the 1950s, over 80% of India was illiterate, and not connected up by radio or rail. Sanitation and safe water supply were generally absent. India was for most part (except Calcutta, Bombay, Madras) more like pre-1850 British society.

It was this society that saw the benefit of vaccination and antibiotics. "Indian killers" like smallpox,cholera, typhoid, plague and childhood diseases were brought under an unprecedented degree of control over a largely illiterate population living 19th century lives with no education, no roads, no rail, and mostly no radio. The Indian population boom hit this population and the information required to reduce birth rates did not start appearing on the scene till the 1970s. Most older BRFites including me were in college by then.

If it was literacy that reduced birth rates in the west, Indian birth rates and population had already hit the roof long before literacy and a decrease in birth rates started becoming applicable to India. The initial conditions in India when the population exploded were completely different from initial conditions in the west. What this means is that by applying the same solutions and assuming that the same dynamics wil occur in India as occurred in the west we are still unlikely to get the same results.

I do not expect, and I do not recommend that others should expect a uniformly developed "Europe-like" society in India in the foreseeable future. That can mean a lot of things, but for this post I will restrict myself to some population and economy dynamics. India will not achieve Europe like population growth rates, or even maternal and child mortality rates like Europe for the next 50 years (my estimate). India will continue to see a slow rise in population for the next 50 years. India will continue to have great prosperity and great deprivation for the next 50 years.

In short India will not be anywhere near the prosperous, fully developed European state of year 2000 even in the year 2064. This is what we have to adjust to and plan for. Increasing population and demand for resources will lead to social strife. How should wealthy Indians respond to social strife in India from desperately poor Indians. Should they strive for unlimited wealth and shut out the poor, or choose a socialist path, or choose a new and yet to be defined "dharmic path" based on principles of dharma where people do not endow themselves with excess wealth and choose excess consumption but give to society in return.

Should we respond to the foreseeable increase in population and continuance of destitution by doing what Spain and southern Europe did in embracing northern European liberal values that led to declining populations without the industrial development that northern Europe has to fund social programs with a declining population. Or should we again turn to dharma and mandate that social support is family support. The government cannot be mom and dad. Moms and dads come in families and family is important for social support, not a social security/Aadhar number?

We have choices to make now. To me assumptions based on what happened to the west may neither be right nor applicable. A major part of the problems faced by India is the caged Indian mind in media and planning and government that looks to the west for recommendations and solutions and sees western societies as the model to follow. And anyone who has suffered through my posts will know that this is not Hindutva speaking.
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by TSJones »

shiv wrote:Ironically, western universalism is a "moving target". The Christian universalism of the 19th century affected India in a particular way. The secular universalism of the latter half of the 20th century has had a different effect on India.

The Christian universalism of the 19th century enabled Europe to become what it did - a self appointed world leader whose own position and values were placed above and ahead of any of the older cultures. India specifically was given selective Europeanization - that is railways for holiday makers, consumer goods imported from Britain. India itself was simply a raw material, revenue and manpower source. The 19th century was a time of great enlightenment and industrialization of Britain (and Europe). The Indian boxwallah/elite class got a taste of Europe in a country that did not develop apace with Europe.

By 1947, India was a 19th century economy, whose leaders had absorbed 19th century British human values - with a contempt for the degradations of the Hindoo religion and the need for secularism and modernization by adopting Christian values of social change.

But in 1947 the west was moving into 20th century gear. The west was totally an industrialized society and the rebuilding after the wars kept them busy. Nazi depravity in the 1940s was a sort of repeat of the earlier 30 years war that ended with the creation of secular states. But after Nazi Germany the racist notions of European Christian superiority over other races was flushed clean. Industrialized European states finally threw off Christian morality and invented a new morality of individual freedom, female freedom, sexuality and female sexuality. These were developing well in the the west by the 1960s.

But in the 1960s India was still trying to enter the 20th century. Not enough industry to support an industrial economy. An agrarian economy with 80% of people in villages. No infrastructure, but IITs were there. Schools were difficult to find is smaller towns in the 1960s, but for those who got a school education colleges were there for the asking, but no jobs after that. 80% of transport tonnage was at least partly by bullock cart.

But in the 1960s India had set up a fairly robust public health system - and it was in the 60s that the entire population of India was inoculated against smallpox and the disease was eradicated in the 1970s. But that public health system chipped away at maternal and infant mortality and populations increased. In millions of rural homes, Indians of the 1950s and 60s, living 19th century lives received 20th century vaccination and antibiotics that led to a massive increase in population as huge numbers of people survived previously fatal illnesses. People started living longer as well because of this. Life expectancy in 1947 in India was 31 years!! :shock: It is now 64

The Indian government finally woke up in the 1970s.
http://countrystudies.us/india/34.htm
Implicitly, the government believed that India could repeat the experience of the developed nations where industrialization and a rise in the standard of living had been accompanied by a drop in the population growth rate. In the 1950s, existing hospitals and health care facilities made birth control information available, but there was no aggressive effort to encourage the use of contraceptives and limitation of family size. By the late 1960s, many policy makers believed that the high rate of population growth was the greatest obstacle to economic development. The government began a massive program to lower the birth rate from forty-one per 1,000 to a target of twenty to twenty-five per 1,000 by the mid-1970s.
When I Google to check for reasons for Europe's decline in fertility, the reasons that come up are decreasing numbers of marriages, and increasing "fragility" of marriages. Thiis is where Europe is heading into adharma, from an Indian viewpoint. Not sure if India is going that way. Be that as it may, here is some info about what decreased fertility is doing in different EU nations:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/ ... -stupid/2/
Essentially, Spain and other Mediterranean countries bought into northern Europe’s liberal values, and low birthrates, but did so without the economic wherewithal to pay for it. You can afford a Nordic welfare state, albeit increasingly precariously, if your companies and labor force are highly skilled or productive. But Spain, Italy, Greece and Portugal lack that kind of productive industry; much of the growth stemmed from real estate and tourism. Infrastructure development was underwritten by the EU, and the country has become increasingly dependent on foreign investors.

Unlike Sweden or Germany, Spain cannot count now on immigrants to stem their demographic decline and generate new economic energy.
So India is in a bind. If it keeps on increasing its population we can never catch up with western rates. if Indian populations start declining, we will look more like Spain than Sweden.

India is just entering the 20th century. I am not at all sure we should be, or that we can, head down the route Europe is headed in the 21st century. We need different goals. we cannot blindly copy western goals the way we have copy pasted the west for years, despite living in a different era.
Do you also want to reject western technology or more importantly the processes used to generate it? Serious question.
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by Agnimitra »

TSJones wrote:Do you also want to reject western technology or more importantly the processes used to generate it? Serious question.
Its a fair question (or rather challenge), to be expected.

Firstly, the thought processes that lead to scientific investigation and then its technological applications are not unique to Western Universalism of the religious or secular kind. Elements of the philosophy of Realism found in Western philosophy (religious and secular) are to be found in others like Madhva of India, Ibne Sina (Avicenna) of Persia, Zhang Zai of China. However, various other environmental circumstances lead to different trajectories in these various civilizations. In many cases, it was a self-imposed system of 'honour' and 'noblesse oblige' that prevented or moderated large-scale destructive applications of technology to kill off others most efficiently or perfidiously - the precise area in which certain colonial Westerners adopted a no holds barred attitude - thereby fueling a technological race with various ramifications.

Secondly, not all ramifications of that hypertrophic mechanized race have been positive, and it is too early to tell where "development" and wisdom are at odds with one another.
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by shiv »

TSJones wrote: Do you also want to reject western technology or more importantly the processes used to generate it? Serious question.
Interesting expression. "Western technology"

No one in his right senses would reject "tekne+logia" or the study of the art (of producing tools to help humanity in this case)

It is the application of technology that creates issues and difficult to answer questions.

The "West" deforested their lands and put up concrete cities. All major wildlife was killed off. The west are now where they are and they seem happy.

Should India too deforest its area as thoroughly as the west and finish off the largest competitors to human life? We are actually getting there, and it behooves the dharmic individual to ask if this is right or unavoidable. Are humans the "inheritors" of the earth?

I love shooting and guns. Hunting is illegal in India. I plink. But YouTube is full of videos of people demonstrating beautiful guns by shooting squirrels, birds and other animals considered "pests" - almost invariably from a western nation. In my backyard I lose over 50% of the fruits on a guava tree to squirrels. Shooting them would be a solution, but I don't apply that. In fact killing "pests" is not a popular way of dealing with crop loss in India which I presume leads to larger losses than in places where pests are simply eradicated. So should India eliminate pests, or should Indians be dharmic and allow animals to survive because they too have a right to life as we humans do. What is ownership of a crop?

i will stop with rhetorical questions because India still has choices and it has nothing to do with rejection of western or non western technology. But the list and the post length could go on and on.
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by Yayavar »

TSJones wrote:
Do you also want to reject western technology or more importantly the processes used to generate it? Serious question.
Modern science is not 'Western'. Science is science and technology is technology - not western.
Is Trigonometry only Indian maths then? or, Decimal system and Numerals only Indian? Why dont you refer to it always as, 'hey, use Indian Trigonometry to solve this problem'? Since Kanada is the first one to posit atomic theory and particle theory of light - what does it make it Indo-Physics? I'm sure you can find a lot of other examples of Indo-science and Indo techology or whatever region you are partial to.
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by TSJones »

The fact remains that ToT is of major concern for India.

For the US a lot of technology is generated by defense projects and research. The effect of this cannot be overstated.

do you reject the whole idea of a consortium of universities, research institutes and defense working hand in hand?

Or do you not consider that to be a product of western universalism (what ever that may be)?
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by Yayavar »

Technology is required and will be used...just not exactly the same way as it might be used elsewhere. Sophisticated space technology is used but not necessarily the same way or to the same aims as in (say) France or USA. In effect the standards for success and goals might differ, and at other times converge. There is no western copyright over cooperation among the Acharyas (profs/researchers) and the society in general, or the generals themselves.
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by shiv »

TSJones wrote:The fact remains that ToT is of major concern for India.

For the US a lot of technology is generated by defense projects and research. The effect of this cannot be overstated.

do you reject the whole idea of a consortium of universities, research institutes and defense working hand in hand?

Or do you not consider that to be a product of western universalism (what ever that may be)?
Many Indians believe that consortiums of universities in the US are merely a modern manifestation of what existed in India in places like Nalanda and Takshashila (Now a totally degenerate district called Taxila near ally city Islamabad) around 2500 BC to 500 AD. What they might work for is what is needed by society - so if military is the need then that is what they will work for.

As someone pointed out Nehruvian India set up IITs before the whole country got primary schools, but Nehruvian ideals believed that the world was headed for peace - which is why Indian Universities are geared for peaceful development activities, as is ISRO for that matter. That is also why India had laws preventing the export of weapons till very recently. That is set to change.

But let me give you an example of universalism and western universalism

Universalism: Nuclear weapons are destructive and the world would be better off without them
Western universalism: Nuclear weapons are destructive and the world would be better off without them except for the US, France, Great Britain and two other members of the P5 who joined the club before the rule book was created

What has this got to do with technology and transfer of tech.

When India broke the rules in 1998, the US placed sanctions on ISRO (an organization directed entirely at the peaceful use of space) and among the sanctions "dual use" items were dosimeters used by X ray department staff in hospitals. The latter are hardly high tech. But they were imported because "free trade" allowed the import of such items and some company in the US was selling them.

India asks the US for technology transfer much as it asks the Russians, the UK or France. Tech transfer is an article of faith. If it is refused - the clear signal to India is that the country will sell but wants to maintain the position of seller forever. It means that India needs to allocate resources for the development of tech that a country will not sell and that the seller country sees that technology as a tool of dominance whereby the supply of something can be cut off at will by way of "sanctions" depending on the political situation.
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by A_Gupta »

Capabilities versus ownership: There is the value of an automobile as a status symbol, a marker of wealth. There is also the convenience factor of being able to get from A to B on demand. However, if you want the capability of getting from A to B, personal ownership of automobiles is not necessary. But reasonable solutions to the problem of getting from A to B require collective effort, e.g., to build commuter rail. These are also less polluting and are better for the environment than automobiles.

In this way, the culture should teach that happiness is in part based on the things you are able to do, rather than the things that you own.
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by UlanBatori »

Here is irrefutable confirmation that all of Western Universalism is actually descended from yindoo Universalism onlee. Specifically, the whole Western Caste System:
There Are 7 Types of English Surnames — Which One Is Yours?

Many of us have surnames passed down to us from ancestors in England. Last names weren’t widely used until after the Norman conquest in 1066, but as the country’s population grew, people found it necessary to be more specific when they were talking about somebody else. Thus arose descriptions like Thomas the Baker, Norman son of Richard, Henry the Whitehead, Elizabeth of the Field, and Joan of York that, ultimately, led to many of our current surnames.
There are perhaps 45,000 different English surnames, but most had their origins as one of these seven types.

Occupational
... identified people based on their job or position in society. ..“Thomas Carpenter” ... worked with wood for a living, ...Knight bore a sword. Other occupational names include Archer, Baker, Brewer, Butcher, Carter, Clark, Cooper, Cook, Dyer, Farmer, Faulkner, Fisher, Fuller, Gardener, Glover, Head, Hunt or Hunter, Judge, Mason, Page, Parker, Potter, Sawyer, Slater, Smith, Taylor, Thatcher, Turner, Weaver, Woodman, and Wright (or variations such as Cartwright and Wainwright) — and there are many more.

This kind of name also gave a clue about whom a servant worked for. Someone named Vickers might have been a servant to Mr. Vicker, and someone named
Williams
might either have served a
William
or been adopted by him.

..In medieval England, before the time of professional theater, craft guilds put on “mystery plays” (“mystery” meaning “miracle”), which told Bible stories and had a call-and-response style of singing. A participant’s surname — such as King, Lord, Virgin, or Death — may have reflected his or her role, which some people played for life and passed down to their eldest son.

Describing a personal characteristic
...a person’s size (Short, Long, Little), coloring (Black, White, Green, or Red, which could have evolved into “Reed”), or .. (Stern, Strong, Swift). Someone named Peacock might have been considered vain.

From an English place name
.. where a person was born, lived, worked, or owned land. It might be from the name of a house, farm, hamlet, town, or county. Some examples: Bedford, Burton, Hamilton, Hampshire, Sutton.

From the name of an estate
Those descended from landowners may have taken as their surname the name of their holdings, castle, manor, or estate, such as Ernle or Staunton. Windsor is a famous example..
From a geographical feature of the landscape
Bridge, Brooks, Bush, Camp, Fields, Forest, Greenwood, Grove, Hill, Knolles, Lake, Moore, Perry, Stone, Wold, Wood, and Woodruff. Author Margaret Atwood is probably descended from someone who lived “at the wood.”
Patronymic, matronymic, or ancestral
Patronymic surnames (those that come from a male given name) include Benson (“the son of Ben”), Davis, Dawson, Evans, Harris, Harrison, Jackson, Jones (Welsh for John), Nicholson, Richardson, Robinson, Rogers, Simpson, Stephenson, Thompson, Watson, and Wilson.
Matronymic ones, surnames derived from a female given name, include Molson (from Moll, for Mary), Madison (from Maud), Emmott (from Emma), and Marriott (from Mary).
Scottish clan names make up one set of ancestral surnames. These include Armstrong, Cameron, Campbell, Crawford, Douglas, Forbes, Grant, Henderson, Hunter, MacDonald, and Stewart.
Signifying patronage
Some surnames honored a patron. Hickman was Hick’s man (Hick being a nickname for Richard). Kilpatrick was a follower of Patrick.
....
Discover your family story. Start free trial.
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by csaurabh »

Re: Shiv, and his observations regarding congenital berth defects in babies.

Nowadays I see many emails, FB, office boards etc. posts like this: My friends/neighbors/bla bla kid has a heart problem/liver transplant/bla bla operation will cost 5 lakh plz donate bla bla.

I wonder if this is a recent problem or it was just there all along and is just more commonly seen due to social media etc.

How often does it happen, and what are the chances of a kid surviving that kind of operation anyway. I am sure most of these cases would probably not go through due to lack of money. Those who survive, what happens to them later on, do they live a full and happy life or just constantly get bogged down with these issues? I don't have a medical background. It just seems somewhat a waste of money, is it heartless to think that way?.. Maybe if it were my kid I would not think in this way, I don't know..
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by Rony »

TSJones wrote:Or do you not consider that to be a product of western universalism (what ever that may be)?

Interesting ! One of the prominant features of the WU is to pretend that there is no WU. Many westerners have genuinely no clue about it and others who become aware if it (when told by others) either still have difficulty understanding it or pretend that it does not exist.

I sometimes visit a obscure western forum with full of WU dealing with religion and philosophy. Some admin posted "recommended books by experts" for "other religions" (Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism) but none for Christianity. The recommended books on Hinduism are (no surprises here) from Doniger, Nassbaum, Witzel and Pennington . When i replied that since this is a western forum catering to western audiences, it would be nice to list Malhotra's books as well in the recommended list( especially 'Invading the Sacred") so that the western audiences can read a scholarly perspective of their own biases in teaching Hinduism, my comment was deleted and the explanation given was "These books are from independent experts from reputed universities.Malhotra is not a trained religious scholar.He is a scientist.We don't carter to only westerners but to everyone. You posting in this forum by itself is the proof".
Last edited by Rony on 13 Aug 2014 18:40, edited 1 time in total.
UlanBatori
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by UlanBatori »

Shiv:
Relevant to your observations:
Stating that such obsolete laws can be misused, Prasad cited the example of the Sarais Act,1867, which says that “sarais” (lodges) must provide toilet facilities to the public. The minister said a five-star hotel in Mumbai was harassed by overzealous litigants to allow all outsiders to use its toilets as the hotel technically qualified as a “sarai” under the Sarai Act.
Many questions, hypotheses and conclusions come to mind, all of which would be ill-advised to post. :eek: Wonder what is the law that supersedes the above.
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by shiv »

csaurabh wrote:Re: Shiv, and his observations regarding congenital berth defects in babies.

Nowadays I see many emails, FB, office boards etc. posts like this: My friends/neighbors/bla bla kid has a heart problem/liver transplant/bla bla operation will cost 5 lakh plz donate bla bla.

I wonder if this is a recent problem or it was just there all along and is just more commonly seen due to social media etc.

How often does it happen, and what are the chances of a kid surviving that kind of operation anyway. I am sure most of these cases would probably not go through due to lack of money. Those who survive, what happens to them later on, do they live a full and happy life or just constantly get bogged down with these issues? I don't have a medical background. It just seems somewhat a waste of money, is it heartless to think that way?.. Maybe if it were my kid I would not think in this way, I don't know..
saurabh - some defects are moderately common. Some less so. Some defects are relatively easily correctable and can lead to a normal life. Others are more difficult to correct and some do not allow survival beyond a few years or decades. Some defects lead to lifelong disability and a burden on a poor family.

Many decades ago, as students, a classmate of mine, who actually went on to specialize in pediatric surgery later came out shaking his head after we all watched a long operation to separate a child that was attached at the hip to a headless dead twin. This chap had grown up in a village and said that if such deformed babies were born in a village the midwife would quietly ensure that the "baby did not survive". From the Christian moral viewpoint this is a sin. But from the viewpoint of a desperately poor farmer - the burden of a badly deformed child that is a simply another mouth to feed with no future - the "dai's" (midwife) action is correct. I don't think your views are heartless. They are an honest expression of what many people feel - I did post the example of a boy who fell 100 feet into a defunct borewell and his father, recognizing that he was likely dead after 4 days begged that his field in rural Karnataka should not be dug up, and that the boy's body should lie entombed there.
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by Rony »

Many points in this article can be applied to WU

What does it mean to be white?
I AM white. I have spent years studying what it means to be white in a society that proclaims race meaningless, yet is deeply divided by race. This is what I have learned: Any white person living in the United States will develop opinions about race simply by swimming in the water of our culture.

But mainstream sources — schools, textbooks, media and anecdotal evidence — don’t provide us with the multiple perspectives we need. Yes, we will develop strong emotionally laden opinions, but they will not be informed opinions. Our socialization renders us racially illiterate.

This illiteracy was evident in the debate about the Seattle Gilbert & Sullivan Society production of “The Mikado” and its casting of non-Asian actors in 40 Japanese roles.

To understand the crux of white racial illiteracy illustrated by the debate, consider a typical computer user. The user is proficient and knows all the basics — Word, email, spreadsheets. But when the user has a technical problem and tries to explain it to the IT department, communication breaks down. The user gets defensive, feeling talked down to by tech support. Tech support gets frustrated because the user doesn’t know how computers actually work and can’t comprehend its instructions.

Like a nontechnical user trying to understand a technical problem, our racial illiteracy limits our ability to have meaningful conversations about race.

Mainstream dictionary definitions reduce racism to racial prejudice and the personal actions that result. But this definition does little to explain how racial hierarchies are consistently reproduced.

Social scientists define racism as a multidimensional, highly adaptive system — a system that ensures an unequal distribution of resources among racial groups. The group that controls the institutions controls the distribution and embeds its racial bias into the fabric of society.

In the U.S., while individual whites might be against racism, they still benefit from their group’s control. Yes, an individual person of color can sit at the tables of power, but the overwhelming majority of decision-makers will be white. Yes, white people can have problems and face barriers, but systematic racism won’t be one of them.

This distinction — between individual prejudice and a system of unequal institutionalized racial power — is fundamental. One cannot understand how racism functions in the U.S. today if one ignores group power relations.


While the following do not apply to every white person, they are well-documented white patterns and beliefs that make it difficult for white people to understand racism as a system:

• Segregation: Most whites live, grow, play, learn, love, work and die primarily in racial segregation. Yet, our society does not teach us to see this as a loss. Pause for a moment and consider the magnitude of this message: We lose nothing of value by not having cross-racial relationships. In fact, the whiter our schools and neighborhoods are, the more likely they are to be seen as “good.” This is an example of the relentless messages of white superiority that circulate all around us, shaping our identities and perspectives.

• Individualism: Whites are taught to see themselves as individuals, rather than as part of a racial group. It follows that we are racially objective and thus can represent the universal human experience, while people of color can only represent their race. Seeing ourselves as unracialized individuals, we take umbrage when generalizations are made about us as a group. This enables us to ignore systemic racial patterns.

• Focus on intentions over impact: We are taught that racism must be intentional and that only bad people commit it. Thus a common white reasoning in cross-racial conflicts is that as long as we are good people and didn’t intend to perpetuate racism, then our actions don’t count as racism. But racism doesn’t depend on conscious intent. In fact, much of racism is unconscious. Further, when we focus on intent we are essentially saying that the impact of our behavior on others is irrelevant.

• White fragility: In a white dominant society, challenges to a white worldview are uncommon. The racial status quo is comfortable for us. We haven’t had to develop the skills, perspectives, or humility that would help us engage constructively. As a result, we have very little tolerance for racial discomfort and respond poorly.

Putting this all together, you get the outcomes we see in “The Mikado” controversy.

When actors audition, they are most often judged by white people, using white standards for roles written by white writers and intended for white audiences. The outcomes of a specific audition are the cumulative result of this historic control.

Precisely because the system reflects white interests and worldview, white people will not see any of this in racial terms. They are confident that we can represent all of humanity —
if no Asian actors apply, we don’t question casting efforts.

Because the egregious depictions of Asians in the opera are not intended as racist (and because so many whites enjoy these depictions), the racist impact is denied. When racism is pointed out, umbrage ensues.

The understanding of racism as a social system of unequal power is generally termed antiracism. An antiracism framework will help any white person become more racially literate and navigate most any racial conflict. We can begin by acknowledging ourselves as having a particular and necessarily limited perspective on race. That acknowledgment engenders humility rather than certitude.

Thinking in terms of structures and patterns, not individual acts or good and bad people, is foundational. Putting ourselves in situations that challenge and stretch our racial worldviews, while uncomfortable, builds our racial stamina.

Finally, we need to focus on impact rather than intent. On Aug. 18, the Seattle Repertory Theatre and the City of Seattle are holding a community dialogue about “The Mikado.” This is a great opportunity for whites to practice these skills.

Let me be clear. I don’t see myself or other whites as bad. Racism is a system that we did not create, but it’s one that we did inherit. We must take responsibility to see and challenge it both within and around us. The first step? Have some humility and listen.
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by shiv »

A lot of people - particularly in the media and in social sciences like to point out that there are "two Indias" - one a wealthy, educated India and the other a poor India. People tend to talk as if this should not be. People say that everyone should be equal. Everyone should have what everyone else has.

Why? Because they are universal ideals. Look at Denmark. Look at Sweden. The Netherlands. All equal. That is the way to be.

Really? Why should everyone be equal? Where does it say that everyone should be equal? In Marxist theory? In the Bible? Apart from a few small countries amounting to about 2% of the world's population, equality is not a feature of any human or non human population. Factors and statistics I have posted in earlier posts clearly show that equality will not be possible in India even when the youngest BRFites of today are old, and the older ones are dead.

Not only is "Two Indias" going to be a permanent feature, no matter how far you go back in history you will likely find that there was always "two Indias", the rich and the poor. We can take it as a given that two Indias is not going away anytime soon and stop losing sleep over it. No matter how much one self flagellates - you did not do it. You did not create two Indias.

Should you be doing something about it? Yes of course. Compassion for the poor and charity have always formed part of Indian culture. They are Indian universalisms. You can only do so much to help. Personal charity, service, voting for good governance etc. But remember the advice about doing your duty and not demanding to see the fruit of your labour. You ain't gonna see much because the poorest and the most destitute are exactly the population groups with no land ownership, poor water supply, high maternal and infant mortality, low literacy and large family size. Because of all these factors - these groups continue to enlarge. If the average Indian population growth rate is 21 per 1000 today - these groups are growing at 35 per thousand. There is absolutely no point in looking at these groups and saying 'These are x caste - which are dalits and therefore they are discriminated and therefore they are poor and destitute. Why not change their caste, or even religion. That should take care of their condition no?

That is exactly the nonsense that was foisted on India by evangelists and other universalist do gooders. India has spent too much time responding to critics about Hindoo practices and we have failed to see the obvious. We have always had poor people and we will always have poor people. Poor people will always want their condition to improve. You cannot improve their condition by diagnosing the cause of poverty as oppressors whom you don't like. If anyone bothers to look at the facts - neither disempowering the ("upper caste") oppressors nor declaring some groups ("lower caste/daleet) as oppressed has actually decreased the absolute numbers of poor and destitute in India.

If poor people ar dark complexioned in general, one could just as easily say that dark skinned people are incapable of being anything but poor. And even in India you will be right 80% of the time. 80% is enough to get you a first class in any exam modeled on the British system.

Constant India bashing on the lines of caste and religion leading to continued poverty is bullshit. Changing the religion is so easy in secular India - so if Hindoos cause poverty simply join some other religion that welcomes you. The truth of course is GIGO. It is utter bullshit and the people who perpetrated this massive con job on Indians now need to cover their asses by continuing their old fake story.

Poverty in India is set to continue. The causes of poverty on the ground are easy to see. Religion is not the cause. It is providing relief from that poverty that we need to aim at by providing some education and some jobs. Indians should continue to employ domestic helps, cooks, cleaners, ayahs, caddies, gardeners, delivery boys, chauffeurs and watchmen and people to wash cars. By doing that we are actually providing employment. OK - don't be exploitative,. Pay generously, give them time off - pay some extra money for their kids education. If a job can be done well by labor rather than by mechanization - use labor. But for fuks sake stop pulling in some foreign models as the way forward.
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by ramana »

Agnimitra wrote: Islamic Qabila tried to absorb civilized memes from all these other civilizations, but invariably did so in a reductionist way. So (after large scale destruction of previous knowledge resources) they were able to re-duplicate some of the artifacts of those civilizations, but could rarely ever reproduce the culture of knowledge production and investigation.
I submit Western Universalism also tried to absorb in a reductionist way the Egyptian, Greek and Roman civilizations and has failed. Reformation allowed reproduction of the artifiacts of those cilivilzations during the Renassinace period but is stuck on being unable to build on it.
Secularism has removed the Church from daily life but the umbrella of Abrahamic meme is still there and does not allow them to go beyond.

During the glory days of the Abbasaid dynasty it was Islamic Universalism that was the chant.

And before it was the Roman, Greek, Persian, Assyrian, Egyptian.

What we see is the old idea of Universal Empire without the religious cloak.
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by SBajwa »

Even a Muslim supari killer interviewed in the book "Maximum City" says what his "dharm" is - and that is a prayer and then doing his job of shooting someone, for which he is paid and protected.
Confused!!

Doing the assigned work is Karm.
Not doing the assigned work is Adharam after taking the money.

It is also aDharam to kill an innocent person for Arth (money). The moment you decide that you will kill some person for money you start committing Adharam.
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by member_22733 »

Warning: Long post related to science and engineering. :)

Here is an analogy about western universalism vs rest of the world:

Western Universalist thought process: We have to push the boundaries of technology by going farther into space before anyone else does.

Problem: Ink pens dont work in space due to lack of gravity.
Western Universalist solution (NASA): Do a lot of research and invent a ball-point pen where a ball rotates in a socket and disposes ink from one side of the socket to the other, thereby avoiding the need for gravity all together.
Russian solution: Use a damn pencil.

Pros:
1) Paradigm shift in writing. No need to carry around "Hero Ink Pens" with an "Brill Ink Bottle".
2) Now the ball-point pen is ubiquitous, it is mass manufactured and used pretty much anywhere from Somalia to Russia. Manufacturing is scaled up to such a levels that it is cheaper to get ball-point pens than food.

Cons:
1) Disruptive innovation causes traditional ink pen manufacturers everywhere to adapt or die. If traditional ink pen manufacturing was a strong hold of a country or people who are not friendly to the US... tough luck.
2) If someone has a competing idea (for ex: using capillary action, with a special ink instead of ball point), it is impossible for them to compete with the cheap cost of a ball-point. UNLESS they sell the idea to a ball-point pen manufacturer (or someone with a lot of money and access to the market).
3) Obvious environmental/energy demands required for manufacture.

This example is from science. Very similar in other stuff like social sciences as well.

Imagine if some smart Indian chap working in one or the other university/lab who was fed up of carrying his "Brill ink bottle" around came up with the ball-point idea. The first reaction from most folks would be
-- "Why would you want that?, Dont be lazy, my friend, carry that ink bottle with pride!!!!"
-- "You really think its going to work??!!!!"
-- "People in an advanced place like MIT also use ink pens! And you think you are better than them?"

The same people who say the above will be the first to adopt and show off their shining new ball-point pens when they are first imported from the west. "Oh Look!!! These fancy pens.... you dont even need an ink bottle. Isn't it amazing!!!"

Now any area where there are "sanctions" imposed by the west on India, things get interesting. ISRO, BARC are good examples. Cryogenic technology is an area where "sanctions" were imposed by the US on India.

The thing with getting ToT from the west is that you inherit the "current design" as such, where as the design goals for that particular design might have been vastly different from your requirements or capabilities. You might inherit the "current design" of a turbopump that was designed for a staged combustion cycle instead of a gas generator cycle, when you dont have the capability to adapt it to the other design. Or you might inherit a pre-burner design and discover that there is a valve in it that needs to open and close about 3000 times a second under 10000psi and you have no capability to design or manufacture it.

In such a case, the usually dismissive and closed Indians in these institutions become accepting and open to ideas from that smart chap, whose ideas would have withered away outside of a "sanction-free" environment much like the chap who came up with a ball-point pen idea.

The path charted after that is going to be long and bumpy, since there are a lot of capabilities missing from our capability matrix. It might take time for us to bring those ideas into fruition. But once we do so, the "design" we have becomes holistic. It is "designed" to meet our exact needs. More importantly, we have the capability to change/modify anything in that design.

This is what ISRO did with the staged-combustion CUS-25. Staged combustion cycle is one of the most difficult engines to master, but that is what our GSLV is designed on, and they did not want to change the design to gas-generator. So after 10 - 20 years of trial and error, they finally got it right. And its not just the rocket that matters here, it is the associated capability matrix that suddenly got opened up.

So we now have engines that are close to what the west had in the late 1960s. 40 years maybe a long time, but it is a blink of an eyelid for Human history. We have been roaming around for the last 100,000 years. Indic civilization goes back 6000 years. It did not take us more than 1% of that time to catch up with the west. If humanity is around and Indians are around in 6000 years from now, they will look back and say: "About 6000 years back, the west and the east developed a tool called cryogenic technology around the same time.", or maybe they wont even care about who invented it: Do we know who invented agriculture or the hunting spear?

However, AFAIK, Indians listening to the "Smart Indian Chap" for new ideas is a cottage industry, existing in only "sanctioned" areas with a strict technology denial regime. This cottage industry managed to churn out LCA, GSLV, Arihant etc. But what if we standardize the successful processes of this cottage industry and make it THE way to go about any new technology and replace the current way of importing "current design" from the west.

It will be difficult at first, things will move in fits and starts. But once the capability matrix expands, one should see an explosion in Indian products and Indian innovation. It will also be "need" based, instead of "lets-try-to-make-this-fit-our-needs" type engineering. Since development of tech and scientific understanding is inherently cross pollinating, what we develop might at one point be far more advanced than that of what the west has. There is one country that has already proved this: Japan.

In the 1800s if someone told the German race scientists that a small Island in East Asia would become one of the largest innovators and the largest economy of the world, they would have laughed it off. But Japan did just that, they absorbed the western tech, made it their own and expanded their capability matrix. The result today is that Japan has many technologies that the west has to catch up on.
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Re: Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

Post by shiv »

SBajwa wrote:
Even a Muslim supari killer interviewed in the book "Maximum City" says what his "dharm" is - and that is a prayer and then doing his job of shooting someone, for which he is paid and protected.
Confused!!

Doing the assigned work is Karm.
Not doing the assigned work is Adharam after taking the money.

It is also aDharam to kill an innocent person for Arth (money). The moment you decide that you will kill some person for money you start committing Adharam.
:D I think you are absolutely right

It's a long time since I read the book and if I recall, this killer also had a mother to care for which he considered part of his dharma. Dharma does not claim to give anyone step by step instructions of right and wrong in every situation. One has to decide what is right. Wanton killing for money is indeed adharma.

What is interesting to me is that dharma does offer some moral guidelines. The Ten Commandments too are moral guidelines. But I think a few thousand years of following one or the other have resulted in different types of societies because there are some fundamental differences in the moral guidelines.

In the first place the Ten Commandments lay down the identity of God in no uncertain terms. Of the ten, the top five commandments are about the identity of God and who should be worshiped. the bottom five could be something picked out of a list of what is dharmic.

See this image
http://www.dallasvoice.com/wp-content/u ... dments.jpg

But the top five make a huge difference. They right away tell you who is on your side and who is the "other". When it comes to "thou shalt not kill", the commandments can tell you that God is on your side and that he is not on the side of anyone who does not follow the top five. There is plenty to say that God basically punishes those who do not agree with him. That apart, God made man in his image and man is the most important creature - animals don't count for as much as man.

Indian society was not faced with such restrictions for many millenniums. Indian society has tended to allow many identities of God. Social rules have not come up with a rigid right to life for man alone, over and above other creatures. Man is simply one among other creatures as a living being. Because Hindus have followed these as their guidelines many things were and still are seen in India that are blasphemous, horrifying or absurd from a Christian morality viewpoint.

Go back to the example of a very poor man whose wife gives birth to a badly deformed child or one with a serious congenital defect that requires expensive care and maintenance. For that matter a man whose wife delivers an underweight, premature baby at 28 weeks rather than the full term 40 weeks. Should the man give up his work and family and pay for his child to be placed in a neonatal intensive care for 8 weeks at Rs 2000 a day? Or will the government do that for him? Or should he let nature take its course? The former happens in "civilized, developed" societies. The latter happens in "underdeveloped" societies. But even in the former - the money has to come from somewhere.

The reason why cows are allowed to sit in the middle of the road in India is not just that cows are sacred. In general even dogs in the middle of the road will be avoided by traffic. Taking a life, man or animal is wrong in the eyes of most people.

So here we have a society that allows a human child to die but allows an animal to survive and inconvenience humans. No wonder Indian society sees things differently from a society that has been moulded around Christian morality.

What do I think? I think human life is part of the biosphere and is no more important than animal life to the biosphere. It is my duty as a human to care for my own, particularly my family, but it is also my dharma to ensure that the biosphere stays healthy. This will cause moral dilemmas for me but my decisions will be based on the balance of the above moral guidelines that I hold.

if I held human life as the most important form of life and put all animals secondary to that, I am sure my decisions would be different. The decisions that such a person makes when faced with moral dilemmas would be different.
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