| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Dr. Jai Maharaj" |
| Date: |
28 Nov 2005 01:52:29 PM |
| Object: |
POLITICAL SCIENCE EVANGELICAL STYLE IN AMERICA... |
POLITICAL SCIENCE EVANGELICAL STYLE IN AMERICA...
Forwarded message from Malolan Cadambi
[ Subject: Political Science evangelical style in America.....
[ From: Malolan Cadambi
[ Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2005
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/4469590.stm
"In other words these Americans, heirs to every
scientific advance in history, deny rational accounts of
how the world came to exist."
End of forwarded message from Malolan Cadambi
Dinosaurs, evangelicals and the state
By Justin Webb
BBC Washington correspondent
BBC
Saturday, November 26, 2005
Should the views of the religious right, many of whom are
Republican party supporters, be adopted by the US
government? In Washington, Justin Webb considers the
implications and asks whether politics and religion make
a good mix.
[Caption] Should dinosaurs and religion mix?
We are having dinner at the house of some friends who are
supporters of President Bush.
Their five-year-old son, a classmate of our children,
takes me upstairs to see his collection of dinosaurs.
Little Meade is a passionate palaeontologist and this is
a land of plenty so the room heaves with prehistoric
life.
I am suitably impressed, but unknown to Meade I am not
here to admire the bone structure of the dinosaurs.
I am in this room on assignment, because in modern
America Meade's dinosaurs are at the heart of the
travails of a political party and I need to find out
something about Meade's parents which will affect our
relationship.
I need to know what they told him about when the
dinosaurs existed.
Millions of Americans, most of them supporters of the
Republican party, believe that the world was created only
a few thousand years ago as per the account in Genesis
and the dinosaurs can only date from then, so the
Tyrannosaurus Rex romped around with Adam and Eve.
In other words these Americans, heirs to every scientific
advance in history, deny rational accounts of how the
world came to exist.
And Meade's parents - I know his mum teaches Sunday
school - might be among them.
I put the question to Meade: "When did the dinosaurs
live?"
[Caption] According to some, the age of the Grand Canyon
is open to debate
There is an agonising pause as he considers it. American
children are wonderfully earnest and Meade is not going
to be rushed.
Eventually he says it is in a book his Dad bought him.
We hunt the tome, find it, open the page and behold a
diagram which has been explained to Meade.
It all floods back.
The dinosaurs, he informs me with great authority and
aplomb, are millions and millions and millions of years
old. I could have hugged him and his parents; we are,
after all, inhabiting the same mental planet.
But many modern members of the Republican party,
including some in positions of great power, do not seem
to be living on that planet.
Central question
As the nation recovers this weekend from the worldly
pleasures of the wonderfully inclusive festival of
Thanksgiving, a festival which can appeal equally to
atheist and Bible-basher, it seems to me that the central
political question facing everyone here, far more
important than any to do with Iraq or the deficit or
Guantanamo Bay, is whether or not the Republican party,
after decades of flirting, has finally got into bed with
an irrational sect.
Describe an American as a Roman Catholic and you say
nothing about his or her political and social beliefs.
"In the state of Kansas they have succeeded
in getting the science syllabus altered so that
teachers can tell their pupils that God made
everything in its current form "
Left-wing flower-power Democrats can be Catholics, so can
right-wing socially conservative Republicans.
American Jews, Hindus, even Muslims are not politically
defined by their faith.
But evangelical Christians, operating inside the
Republican party, have coalesced their energies and their
resources around a set of beliefs on homosexuality,
abortion and Darwinism which place them on the
authoritarian right of every political question and at
odds with science. They are campaigning, for instance, to
tell visitors to the Grand Canyon that this wondrous
sight is not millions of years old, which it is.
Backlash
In the state of Kansas they have succeeded in getting the
science syllabus altered so that teachers can tell their
pupils that God made everything in its current form - a
change the National Academy of Sciences said "would put
the students of Kansas at a competitive disadvantage as
they took their place in the world."
This is serious stuff and Republicans who are not
evangelical Christians have in recent weeks been
organising a fight-back.
They have noticed two things. Number one, that the
zealots are spending more energy fighting Charles Darwin
than cutting taxes, and number two - and this is much
more important - that the zealots outside Kansas are not
receiving the support of the nation at large.
[Caption] Did the board lose the election because they
opposed evolution?
In the town of Dover, Pennsylvania, the local school
board managed this year to get warmed up, creationism
infiltrated into biology classes, and here is what
happened.
A couple of weeks ago all eight members of the board who
were up for re-election lost their seats.
"If there is a disaster in your area," the tele-
evangelist Pat Robertson told the people of Dover, "don't
turn to God - you just rejected Him from your city."
Mr Robertson is an important man: the former Attorney
General John Ashcroft teaches at his university, and his
views are sought on Supreme Court candidates and foreign
affairs.
Republican doubts
But should those views govern the Republican party?
Many members think not, particularly since President Bush
is himself in such dire trouble now.
He famously told an interviewer that when deciding to go
to war in Iraq he listened to the authority not of his
dad but of a Higher Father.
And, Republicans are daring to think, if not quite say,
out loud: "Look where that got him."
"From Our Own Correspondent" was broadcast on Saturday,
26 November, 2005 at 1130 GMT on BBC Radio 4. Please
check the programme schedules for World Service
transmission times.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/3187926.stm
More at:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/4469590.stm
Jai Maharaj
http://www.mantra.com/jai
Om Shanti
Hindu Holocaust Museum
http://www.mantra.com/holocaust
Hindu life, principles, spirituality and philosophy
http://www.hindu.org
http://www.hindunet.org
The truth about Islam and Muslims
http://www.flex.com/~jai/satyamevajayate
The terrorist mission of Jesus stated in the Christian bible:
"Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not so send
peace, but a sword.
"For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the
daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in
law.
"And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.
- Matthew 10:34-36.
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| User: "" |
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| Title: POLITICAL SCIENCE EVANGELICAL STYLE IN INDIA |
28 Nov 2005 01:40:17 PM |
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Should the views of the religious right, many of whom are bjp party
supporters, be adopted by the indian government?
http://www.newhumanist.org.uk/volume120issue1_more.php?id=1217_0_34_0_C
Intellectual Treason
by Meera Nanda Jan 07, 05
Meera Nanda uncovers an extraordinary coalition that is undermining
science
The second-term election victory of George Bush - and India's own
experience with Hindu nationalist BJP rule, off and on, through the
last decade - captures a dangerous moment in world history. We are
witnessing the world's first and the world's largest liberal
constitutional democracies, officially committed to secularism, slide
toward religious nationalism. By voting out the BJP and its allies in
the last election, the Indian voters have halted this slide, at least
for now - a heartening development, compared to the virtual take-over
of America by Christian evangelicals and fundamentalists.
The question that interests me in this electoral route to faithbased
governance is how this counterrevolution is actually accomplished, or
to put it differently, how the spirit of secularism gets subverted,
without any formal abrogation of secular laws. Unless we understand
the ideological mechanism of this sacralisation of politics, we will
not be able to combat the ongoing coups against secularism under
nominally secular democracies.
As a student of the history and philosophy of science, I have been
watching with concern how modern science itself perhaps the single
most powerful force for secularisation is being recoded as sacred,
either as affirming the Bible or the Vedas, or as lower knowledge of
dead matter, in need of spiritualisation. As an oldtime partisan of
the Enlightenment and scientific temper, I have been watching with
concern as my fellow intellectuals and activists, in the United States
and India, who identify themselves with social justice,
antiimperialism, womens rights and sustainable development, have
themselves paved the way for reenchantment or resacralisation of
science.
Many of the Hindutva arguments for Vedic science find a resonance with
the fashionable theories of alternative sciences and postcolonial
studies. Indeed, it is difficult to avoid the impression that
postmodernist and multiculturalist critics of modern science are
rediscovering and restating many of the arguments Hindu nationalists
have long used to assert the superior scientificity of Hindu sacred
traditions.
George Orwells doublethink bears an uncanny resemblance to the
wellknown Hindu tendency to eclectically combine contradictory ideas
by declaring them to be simply different paths or names of a shared
enterprise, as is the case with the amorphous grabbag of Hindu myths,
mysticism and philosophy, known as the Vedas.
Recall how doublethink worked in 1984: Words came to mean their
opposites: war meant peace, freedom was slavery, and ignorance
strength. History was endlessly revised to make the present look like
a confirmation of eternal, unchanging truths. Words, representations,
facts ceased to mean what they appeared to be saying. Shorn of any
definite and contestable meanings, words began to be used
interchangeably, hybridised endlessly, without any fear of
contradictions.
Under BJP rule, superstitions started getting described as science.
Hindu nationalists started invoking science in just about every speech
and policy statement. But while they uttered the word science which in
todays world is understood as modern science they meant astrology, or
vastu, or Vedic creationism, or transcendental meditation or ancient
humoral theory of disease taught by Ayuerveda. This was not just talk:
state universities and colleges got big grants from the government to
offer postgraduate degrees, including PhDs in astrology; research in
vastu shastra, meditation, faithhealing, cowurine and priestcraft was
promoted with substantial injections of public money. Nearly every
important discovery of modern science was read back into Hindu sacred
books: explosion of nuclear energy became the awesome appearance of
God in the Bhagvat Gita; the indeterminacy at quantum level served as
confirmation of Vedanta; atomic charges became equivalent to negative,
positive and neutral gunas, or moral qualities; the reliance of
experience and reason in science became the same thing as reliance on
mystical experience, and so on. Contemporary theories of physics,
evolution and biology were wilfully distorted to make it look as if
all of modern science was converging to affirm the New Age,
mindovermatter cosmology that follows from Vedantic monism. Evidence
from fringe sciences was used to support all kinds of superstitions,
from vastu, astrology, quantum healing to the latest theory of Vedic
creationism. Science and Vedas were treated as homologues, as just
different names of the same thing. Orwells Big Brother wouldve felt
right at home!
Another sign of doublespeak was this: On the one hand, the BJP and its
allies presented themselves as great champions of science, as long as
it could be absorbed into the Vedas, of course. On the other hand,
they aggressively condemned the secular and naturalistic worldview of
science the disenchantment of nature as reductionist, Western or even
Semitic and therefore unHindu and unIndian. Science yes, and
technology yes, but a rationalmaterialist critique of Vedic idealism
no that became the mantra of Hindutva.
Why this overeagerness to claim the support of science? There is a
modernising impulse in all religions to make the supposedly timeless
truths of theology acceptable to the modern minds raised on a
scientific sensibility. Scientific creationism among Christian and
Islamic fundamentalists is an example of this impulse. But while
Christian fundamentalists in America indulge in creationism primarily
to get past the constitutional requirement for a separation of church
and state, in India it is motivated by ultranationalism, Hindu
chauvinism and the nationalist urge to declare Hinduisms superiority
as the religion of reason and natural law over Christianity and Islam,
which are declared to be irrational and faithbased creeds.
Contemporary Hindu nationalists are carrying on with the neoHindu
tradition of proclaiming Hinduism as the universal religion of the
future because of its superior holistic science (as compared to the
reductionist science of the West.) Besides, it is easier to sell
traditions and rituals, especially to urban, upwardly mobile men, if
they have the blessings of Englishspeaking scientific gurus.
Granted, this business of Vedic science had been going on before
anyone had ever heard the word postmodern. But this Hindu nationalist
appropriation of science has found new sources of intellectual
respectability from the postmodernist, antiEnlightenment turn taken by
intellectuals, most radically in American universities, but also in
India.
What do I mean by postmodernism and how did it play out in India?
Postmodernism encompasses a wide variety of theoretical discourses,
touching on everything from literature and history to architecture.
What unites them is a suspicion of universal knowledge. Modern
science, being the ideal type of such knowledge, naturally became a
target of postmodernist critics. Sure, there were many critics of this
universal science, including prominent scientists themselves before
the advent of postmodernism, but their criticisms were leveled at the
abuses of science, not at its logic.
As disillusionment with the militaryindustrial complex grew in the
West in the wake of the Vietnam war and civil rights struggles, the
topdown model of development in India led to a radical critique of
science, in which its claims to objectivity and universality were
questioned. In India wellknown public intellectuals Ashis Nandy,
Vandana Shiva, Shiv Vishvanathan, Claude Alvares and others condemned
modern science as being innately barbaric, violent and even genocidal
because of its reductionism and its imposition of western interests
and values in collusion with westernised Indian elite. But the
critique of science and technology that emerged out of the socalled
Delhi school of science studies was not limited to uses or abuses of
science: it questioned the content and methodology of science as we
know it.
No one can deny that there are alternative, culturedependent
descriptions of nature: the world is full of a vast variety of such
descriptions. Given this diversity, can we not say that modern science
provides us a closer, a more approximate representation of nature
which is more adequately supported by evidence and logic? Not so,
according to its critics, because the standards of truth and falsity
are also relative to the form of life of a culture. To quote two
leading theorists of the social constructivist school: the labels true
and false are simply different names for cultural preferences. The
grand conclusion of this school of thought is that all ways of knowing
are at par because all are culturally embedded attempts to understand
brute reality. There is only one reality, different cultures approach
it differently, each of which is rational in its own context. (If you
replace culture with caste in this statement, you get the golden rule
of Hinduism that all paths to truth are different only in name)
Social constructivists do not deny that modern science has discovered
some truths about nature that are universally valid Newtons law of
gravity for example. But even these universals are seen as products of
the JudeoChristian and masculine assumptions of Western cultures. To
paraphrase Sandra Harding, one of the best known proponents of
feminist standpoint epistemology, other cultures are capable of
producing alternative universals of their own. Which cultures
universals get universalised and which ones are consigned to the
status of ethnosciences, is not decided by superior explanatory power,
but by superior political power. Wellknown scholars including Andrew
Ross and David Hess wrote books arguing that the line between accepted
science and heterodox sciences of cultural minorities is an arbitrary
construct reflecting cultural and ideological interests of those in
power. Dipesh Chakrabarty, a subaltern historian, expressed the
sentiment well when he wrote that reason is but a dialect backed by an
army.
Presenting India as source of alternative universals that could heal
the reductionism of western science became the major preoccupation of
Indian followers of science studies. Vandana Shiva wrote glowingly of
Indian views of nondualism as superior to western reductionism. Ashis
Nandy declared astrology to be the science of the poor and the
nonwesternised masses in India.
Prayers to smallpox goddesses, menstrual taboos, Hindu nature ethics
which derive from orthodox ideas about prakriti or shakti, and even
the varna order were defended as rational (even superior) solutions to
the cultural and ecological crises of modernity.
All this fitted in very well with western feminist and ecologists
search for a kinder and gentler science. Prominent feminist theorists
(led by Carolyn Merchant and Evelyn Keller) condemned the separation
of the subject from the object as a sign of masculine and dualist
JudeoChristian thinking. The history of modern science was rewritten
to decry the progressive secularisation or disenchantment of nature as
a source of oppression of nature and women. This naturally created an
opening for eastern cultures, especially India, where such
secularisation of nature is frowned upon by religious doctrines and
cultural mores. In the recent literature on Hindu ecology, the most
orthodox philosophies of Hinduism, including Advaita Vedanta, where
vitalistic ideas of lifeforce (shakti, Brahman) are embodied in all
species through the mechanism of karma and rebirth, began to be
presented as more conducive to feminist and ecological politics. The
deep investment of these philosophies in perpetuating superstitions
and patriarchy in India was forgotten and forgiven.
The critics went further: They argued that if, in the final analysis,
all representations of nature are cultural constructions, then
different cultures and subcultures should be permitted to construct
their own representation of nature. To judge other cultures from the
vantage point of modern science, as the Enlightenment tradition
demanded, amounted to an act of epistemic violence against the other,
as Gayatri Spivak called it. This became the foundation of what is
called postcolonial theory, which argued that leading lights of the
Indian Renaissance such as Nehru, Bankim Chandra and Ram Mohan Roy
were mentally colonised because they were seeing India through western
conceptual categories. Any change that challenged Indias unique
cultural gestalt, as Nandy liked to call it, was to be resisted.
All told, preservation of cultural meanings took priority over
validity. Objectively false cosmology of the other was not to be
challenged because it gave meaning to peoples lives. Any demand for
selfcorrection of local knowledges was routinely decried as a
rationalist witchhunt. The alternative to universalism was that of
critical traditionalism or borderland epistemologies. Cultures should
be encouraged to create an eclectic mix of different and even
contradictory ways of knowing. One need not reject modern science
altogether, but rather selectively absorb it into the Indian gestalt:
Contradictions were not to be questioned and removed, but rather
celebrated as expressions of difference.
The picture of science that social constructivism offers is tailormade
for the doublespeak of Vedic science. All the major conclusions of
science studies culturally different but equally rational paths to
truth, equation of universalism with colonialism and totalitarianism,
penchant for eclecticism and hybridity, and the condemnation of
disenchantment of nature end up restating the fundamental assumptions
which the nationalist neoHindus have always used to assert the
superior scientificity of Hindu metaphysics and mysticism. Postmodern
prophets who promise us a kinder gentler science do indeed face
backward to the spiritsoaked metaphysics of orthodox Hinduism, which
has, in fact, inhibited the growth of reason, equality and freedom in
India.
While the Abrahamic religions are wary of epistemological relativism
out of the fear of relativising the Word of God revealed in the Bible
or the Koran, Brahminical Hinduism (and Hindu nationalism) thrives on
a hierarchical relativism to evade all challenges to its idealistic
metaphysics and mystical ways of knowing. Rather than accept the
naturalistic and empirical theories of modern science as contradicting
the Vedantic philosophy which they actually do Hindu nationalists
simply declare modern science to be true only within its limited
materialistic assumptions. They do not reject modern science (who
can?) but merely treat it as one among the many different paths to the
ultimate truth, which is known only to the Vedic Hinduism.
By enshrining relativism as a source of empowerment of the weak,
social constructivist theory has unintentionally provided intellectual
respectability to the strategy of hierarchical inclusivism which is
the timetested method of Hindu apologetics.
Let me, very briefly, give some examples of this convergence between
supposedly emancipatory postmodernist deconstruction of science and
the clearly reactionary, chauvinistic doublespeak of Vedic science.
For starters, take attempts to decolonise modern science: by viewing
nature through local conceptual categories of women, nonwestern people
and other cultural minorities, Hindu nationalists see themselves as a
part and parcel of this postcolonial enterprise. They justify
developing a science in accord with the Vedic cosmology as an attempt
to decolonise the Hindu mind of western, Semiticmonotheistic
influences. Indeed, scholaractivists sympathetic to the Hindu
worldview, including Rajiv Malhotra and Koenard Elst routinely cite
the writings of Ashis Nandy, Ronald Inden and even Gayatri Spivak as
allies in a shared project of understanding India through Hindu
categories.
Like the postmodernist supporters of ethnosciences, they do not deny
that modern science has discovered some truths about nature. But they
declare them to be lowerlevel truths, because they merely deal with
dead matter, shorn of consciousness. Notwithstanding all pious
declarations of the death of the Newtonian world view of matter
obeying mechanical laws, the fact is that any number of rigorous,
doubleblind tests have failed to show any signs of disembodied
consciousness or mindstuff in nature: matter obeying mindless laws of
physics is all there is. But in the Vedic science discourse, the
overwhelming evidence for adequacy of matter to explain the higher
functions of mind and life are set aside as a result of knowledge
filtration by westerntrained scientists. Take the example of the
emerging theory of Vedic creationism (which updates the spiritual
evolutionary theories of Sri Aurobindo and Swami Vivekananda). Its
chief architects, Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson, claim that
Darwinian evolutionary biologists and mainstream biologists, being
products of the western ontological assumptions, have been
systematically ignoring and hiding evidence that supports the theory
of devolution of species from the Brahman through the mechanism of
karma and rebirth. All knowledge, they claim, parroting social
constructivism, is a product of interests and biases. On this account,
Vedic creationism, explicitly grounded in Vedic cosmology is as
plausible and defensible as Darwinism, grounded on the naturalistic
and capitalist assumptions of the western scientists.
Vedic creationism is only one example of decolonised science. More
generally, Hindu nationalists routinely insist on the need to develop
a science that is organically related to the innate nature, svabhava
or chitti of India. Indias chitti, they insist, lies in holistic
thought, in keeping matter and spirit, nature and god together (as
compared to the Semitic mind which separates the two). Hindu
nationalists have been using this purported holism of Hinduism as the
cornerstone of their argument: any interpretation of modern science
that fits in with this spiritcentered holism is declared to be valid
Vedic science while naturalistic, mainstream interpretations are
discarded as western. The overwhelming enthusiasm for Rupert
Sheldrakes occult biology (which builds upon the failed vitalistic
theories of Jagdish Chandra Bose) and the near unanimous recasting of
quantum mechanics in mystical terms are examples of the kind of
critical traditionalism and hybridity sanctioned by postmodernists.
But it gets worse. As is well known, Hindu nationalists have been keen
on proving that the landmass of India was the original homeland of the
Aryans and therefore the cradle of all civilisation. Vedic Aryans, on
this account, were the authors of all natural sciences which then
spread to Greece, Sumeria, China and other major civilisations in
antiquity. To substantiate these claims, all kinds of modern
scientific discoveries are read back into the Rig Veda, the most
ancient of all Vedas. But such boastful claims raise the question of
methodology. How did our Vedic forebears figure out the speed of
light, the distance between the sun and the earth and why did they
code it into the shape and size of fire altars? Similar questions
arise for the more general claims that are basic to Hindu metaphysics,
namely that there is a higher realm of ultimate reality (Brahman) that
cannot be assessed through sensory means. How did our Vedic forbears
know it exists and that it actually determines the course of evolution
of species, and makes the matter that we all are made of? How can you
experience what is beyond all sensory knowledge? But even more
important for the claims of scientificity of the Vedas, how do you
test the empirical claims based upon that experience?
Here one finds an incredibly brazen claim for relativism and the
cultureboundedness of rationality. Because in Hinduism there are no
distinctions between the spirit and matter, one can understand laws
that regulate matter by studying the laws of the spirit. And the laws
of spirit can be understood by turning inward, through yoga and
meditation leading to mystical experiences. Supporters of this
mysticismasscience argue that all science gains its coherence from
within its own culturally sanctioned assumptions; modern science puts
an artificial limit on knowledge as only that knowledge which can be
accessible to senses. Within Hinduism however, it is as rational and
scientific to take the nonsensory seeing that is mystical and other
meditative practices as empirical evidence of the spiritual and
natural realm. This purported scientificity of the spiritual realm, in
turn, paves the way for declaring occult New Age practices like
astrology, vastu, and quantum healing and even yagnas as scientific
within the VedicHindu universe. This defence of parity (i.e. equal
rationality) of the Vedic method of nonsensory, mystical knowing is
fundamentally a social constructivist argument: it assumes that all
sciences are valid for a given community that shares a fundamental
metaphysics.
Long ago, Julien Benda wrote in his La Trahison De Clercs, that when
intellectuals betray their calling that is, when intellectuals begin
to exalt the particular over the universal, the passions of the
multitude over the moral good then there is nothing left to prevent a
societys slide into tribalism and violence. Postmodernism represents a
treason of the clerks which has given intellectual respectability to
reactionary religiosity. With the best intentions of giving
marginalised social groups especially if they were women and if they
belonged to the nonwestern world the right to their own ways of
knowing, western academics, in alliance with populist Third Worldist
intellectuals, have succeeded in painting science and modernity as the
enemy of the people. Rather than encourage and nurture a critical
spirit toward inherited traditions, many of which are authoritarian
and patriarchal, postmodernist intellectuals have waged a battle
against science and against the spirit of the Enlightenment itself. As
the case of Vedic science in the service of Hindu nationalism in India
demonstrates, this misguided attack on the Enlightenment has only
aided the growth of pseudoscience, superstitions and tribalism.
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