A perspective on India - Culture and Identity

Disclaimer: I'm not a Hindutva sympathizer, and I'm a de facto Atheist, although I like to call myself a Naturalist, as the word "Atheist" slightly implies as if there's some deity over there and I chose to deny it :-) 

I don't have any trace of Nationalism or Patriotism, and I'm more of a "world citizen" kind of fellow, with a humanist ethical perspective (So you can understand that I discourage any kind of Absolutism or Fundamentalism). Currently, I'm very interested in effects of History and Culture on evolution of Ethics, Individual Identity and Politics, and came across this video today.

Long back, I visited the Janata Party website and I thought this guy is some Hindu fundamentalist. But looks like he's actually not. He could be what I can call a "Cultural Hindu", although I'm interested in his personal level of religiosity.

In this interview with an American journalist, he talks about
1. Caste system - history and present
2. Religious conversions - reasons, speculations and current scenario (Entrepreneurial evangelism)
3. Secularism in India
4. Terrorism
5. Indian identity vs Hindu/Muslim religious identity
6. History of India
7. Current relations with Pakistan, China

He is very knowledgeable, obviously. He also makes some very interesting points on these matters, especially in bringing the identity of India in people. Ambedkar wrote in similar lines in his essays, as I can recall. I think there are allegations against him for hate-speech against Indian Muslims, and a kind of Hindu Zionist attitude, but all I am interested in this interview is his perspective on the above issues.

I think Indian cultural identity and its trend in globalization should be given a different treatment compared to how western culture is treated, due to its diversity, disassociation with religious zeal, and constant reformations (rather digressive reformations) that happened over history. Whenever I read about culture and religion and globalization, I feel the situation in India is not addressed, even in a broader context. I think Indians have very complex perspectives in their cultural identity compared to those in western countries

My First Blog

29th February,2012.

Since morning I kept hearing the same sentence many times,

"Its 29th Feb, it comes once in four years and it is special, do something special today and make it memorable"

Finally at the end of the day I decided to write a blog.

Now, there is not much time to think and write.

Here is a simple HI to all who are reading.

"The Lord is my light."

This is written on the coat of arms of the University of Oxford.

Now in my first Blog too!

How to change our behaviour?

Below are some of the parts of report published by RSA on Transforming Behaviour Change.


The broad emphasis (of report) was on marshalling available evidence to reframe default human behaviour as social and automatic rather than individual and reflective, and to consider the social, political and economic consequences of the emerging alternate view.



Model of change is currently informed by six working ideas that have emerged from the foregoing argument

1. We cannot change ourselves without changing each other - Most behaviour change does not occur at the level of the individual alone. Not only do we rely on other people to achieve the changes we seek to make, but such behaviours spread through social diffusion, and there is no way of knowing where our influence ends.
2. Complexity is more often the solution than the problem - To navigate a complicated world, we need complex minds. We need to work on having a ‘relationship to our reactions’, and when faced with multiple perspectives we should be able to both differentiate and integrate them.
3. It is better to be reasonable than rational - Clear thinking matters, but the touchstone of our thought should not be abstract axioms and disembedded logic, but contextual sensitivity and concern for others.
4. Paying attention is good for you - We are what we attend to, and there are increasing demands on our attention. We need some resistance to the power of adverts and the allure of technology. To avoid becoming slaves to the information and tools we use, we need to learn to pay closer attention to what is going on around us, within us and between us on a regular basis.
5. If we want new habits we should work with our habitats - We are creatures of habit, but unlike most creatures we have considerable power to shape our habitats for purposes beyond our basic needs. Behaviour change is not mainly about willpower, but about using self-awareness to shape our environments so that our social and automatic brains align with our goals and values.
6. The brain is a stimulant - The brain is something we all have in common, and share an interest in. We use information about the brain as a socialising device to stimulate collective self-awareness. Through reflecting on the social and automatic nature of the brain, we learn how to change our behaviour for the better.

Consciousness Raisers

An excerpt from one Richard Dawkins's book..

In a science-fiction starship, the astronauts were homesick: 'Just to think that it's springtime back on Earth!' You may not immediately see what's wrong with this, so deeply ingrained is the unconscious northern hemisphere chauvinism in those of us who live there, and even some who don't. 'Unconscious' is exactly right. That is where consciousness-raising comes in. It is for a deeper reason than gimmicky fun that, in Australia and New Zealand, you can buy maps of the world with the South Pole on top. What splendid consciousness-raisers those maps would be, pinned to the walls of our northern hemisphere classrooms. Day after day, the children would be reminded that 'north' is an arbitrary polarity which has no monopoly on 'up'. The map would intrigue them as well as raise their consciousness. They'd go home and tell their parents - and, by the way, giving children something with which to surprise their parents is one of the greatest gifts a teacher can bestow.

It was the feminists who raised my consciousness of the power of consciousness-raising. 'Herstory' is obviously ridiculous, if only because the 'his' in 'history' has no etymological connection with the masculine pronoun. It is as etymologically silly as the sacking, in 1999, of a Washington official whose use of 'niggardly' was held to give racial offence. But even daft examples like 'niggardly' or 'herstory' succeed in raising consciousness. Once we have smoothed our philological hackles and stopped laughing, herstory shows us history from a different point of view. Gendered pronouns notoriously are the front line of such consciousness-raising. He or she must ask himself or herself whether his or her sense of style could ever allow himself or herself to write like this. But if we can just get over the clunking infelicity of the language, it raises our consciousness to the sensitivities of half the human race. Man, mankind, the Rights of Man, all men are created equal, one man one vote - English too often seems to exclude woman. When I was young, it never occurred to me that women might feel slighted by a phrase like 'the future of man'. During the intervening decades, we have all had our consciousness raised. Even those who still use 'man' instead of 'human' do so with an air of self-conscious apology - or truculence, taking a stand for traditional language, even deliberately to rile feminists.

The Wealthy Peasants

Note: To avoid comments like "An argument wins over the situation but loses the person", I shall be using the word 'argument' in this post as the logical points of view two persons were trying to establish in course of a friendly impersonal discussion, after which there's no screw-up of the relationship between them.

Lately, I'm not able to restrain myself from refuting people's arguments whenever I find them nonsense. Earlier, I would never bother how everyone else is thinking as far as it doesn't affect me directly. I dunno if I'm getting philanthropic or over-assertive gradually, but I'm not able to let go if people have an opinion that doesn't make any sense and I'm trying to give them counter-arguments from various points of view refuting the rationale on their opinion. This is definitely not the typical white-man's burden and I don't really have any metaphysical motivation for doing this.

When I started these arguments, I observed that people were not able to get convinced by some points of view and they get persuaded with some points of view. Some get convinced by analogies, some rebuke analogies as fallacies in the strictest definition of the argument; Some get convinced by scientific argument and some completely discard scientific argument; Some need further references to get convinced and some don't even try to look up other references. I would be discussing the reasons I observed why people don't get convinced for various arguments

# Bad Analogy
I dunno what the deal with people and analogies is. Most of us don't agree to anything unless we find some analogy for the argument. These people get convinced only by analogies. They just want a familiar story with a conclusion logically agreeable to the argument. They cannot comprehend the logic behind the argument, and they would rather get convinced by a story with hypothetical scenario. This is the case with most of us. One must use creativity extensively to discuss with these people

May be that's the reason why mythological epics are so popular compared to philosophical works. I would say analogies help us understand the basic argument, but we shouldn't confine ourselves to learning from analogies. Analogies are overwhelmingly persuasive, but it's really difficult to derive a proper analogy for many arguments.

# The Scientific Argument
I think scientific argument is the most convincing argument for any disagreement. Philosophical arguments rely more on the way the argument is articulated whereas scientific argument is persuading without the need of any smart articulation. In spite of this, I observed many people not getting convinced by the scientific argument. I might classify the reasons behind this as follows

1. Unable to apply general science: I think, to understand most of the scientific arguments, one needs to have a basic knowledge of how things work. A higher-secondary school level knowledge of physics, chemistry and biology would do the job. Even though many of us have studied these subjects and got good grades, we have a tendency to forget them when we drift to a different field of profession. 

I met this guy once who told me about Magnetic fields in human body that influence individual health and the ways to 'resonate' these fields with our surroundings to maintain a good nature-body synchronization. This guy has read about 'Germ theory' in his high-school, and probably might've correctly answered a question on it in his exam, and yet is trying to 'resonate' his magnetic field with 'mother nature' to maintain health.

We can see many science graduates who believe in "Cosmic vibrations (nice word) emitted from gems affecting human aura (which is non-existent)" and "Undetectable forces (again, non-existent) exerted by distant planets effecting human psychology on earth" in spite of their IIT-JEE standard knowledge on heat transfer and fundamental forces in the universe. Also, many believe that "1 molecule remedy diluted in 10³⁰ moles of water homeopathic remedies" work in spite of good knowledge in chemistry. Medical stigmas on HIV patients in general public in spite of basic knowledge in biology is another example.

The problem here is that, we try to separate everything as distinct entities and don't apply general science in our beliefs/opinions. When we practise this everyday, we gradually tend to refute any scientific argument, however obvious it might be.

2. Pseudoscientific arguments: In addition to the conclusive evident scientific arguments, we also have an equal (in fact, more) number of arguments that "sound scientific" but necessarily are not so. For eg., I can say the reason why we have seasons is due to the elliptical orbit of earth, and summer comes when earth is closest to sun and winter comes when it's farthest. This argument is considerably persuasive, but most of us (ironically, not everyone) know that that's not the reason why we have seasons. "Water memory" claimed by homeopathic doctors is another example of a pseudoscientific argument.

Sometimes, pseudoscientific arguments are used deliberately for marketing purposes. Lucky stone and birth stone consultants (they call themselves 'Gemologists' which is a completely different profession) use jargon like 'Vibrations' (as in Electromagnetic vibrations) , 'Human Aura'(as if it were a Thermograph) which doesn't mean anything in the sense scientists use it.

Generally, people get confused by these pseudocientific arguments and fail to understand which one's evident and which one's not. This is also one reason why people stop getting convinced by scientific arguments thinking they are not reliable.

# The Wiki Taboo
Whenever I give external references to people rather than hear the argument from me, most of them go through those and verify their argument. But there are some who think it's totally "uncool". They would refute encyclopedias and stick to their non-evident and non-referable argument. They say they would google it themselves if they ever want to verify. I would say if they ever googled it, they won't be sticking to the same irrational argument they have now. 

So, they never googled/wikied it, and when I  give an external reference, they say "I'll google it when I wanna verify". Hence the bottom line is that they never want to verify.

It makes me conclude this as a typical "resistance to change" behavior and unable to shift from their comfort-zone.

# I simply don't care
Saying "I simply don't care to know what's the fact" is really a powerful defense to stop the argument from further proceeding. I would say we really don't have a choice to care or not about the fact. It's a fact, and we have to know it.

If we don't care about knowing that earth is round, we might make a fool out of ourselves by joining 'Flat earth society'; If we don't care about  knowing that gems and stones don't affect human behavior and luck, we might be spending hard-earned money on getting the gems and wearing 2 rings on each finger. If we don't care about knowing homeopathic remedies are not medicines but just plain water/alcohol, we might end up using them for long periods of time and getting chronic for our ailments.

So "I simply don't care" means "I don't want to verify and I don't mind getting screwed up for my belief"

Finally, concluding the post, I think this constant refutation of logic and evidence to change our opinion/belief would make us, as Noam Chomsky calls it, "a bunch of shattered wealthy peasants". There are many things which we inherently believe without reasoning to ourselves why we do it or just because of authoritative indoctrination. We tend to assert those beliefs/opinions to ourselves by false conclusions from what we observe without questioning it and without thinking if an alternate evident, logical argument exists for it. After a point, we stop changing our opinions, however irrational they might sound, as we don't like to realize that we spent the rest of our life believing in nonsense.

I hope most of us won't become these "Wealthy Peasants" over a period of time!!

Should you quit Immutable?

If

• you don’t want to grow 
• or think you can’t/won’t be able to grow 
• or if you aren't open to change 
• or if you don't have a open mindset about different ideologies and culture 
• or if you believe in something which you think is absolute truth (having absolutely no doubt that you might be completely and utterly wrong about it) 
• or you aren’t ready to fail (the kind of failure from which recovery is relatively easy) a lot 
• or are very risk-averse 
• or you are ashamed about any aspect of your life 
• or feel that any other member of Immutable should be ashamed about any aspect of their life

then you should quit Immutable.

Hack your culture

Behavior is a virus. We spread our behavior to those around us, whether passively or on purpose.  

- Justin Kan

In this blog post Justin explains beautifully how to go about accomplishing goals you don’t even know how to begin. This concept is more widely and thoroughly described in the beautifully written book Change anything: The New Science of Personal Success.

Immutable tries to use this simple fact to its highest potential and I sincerely hope that we manage to achieve it.