[Originally posted as comment on this excellent article by greatbong]
You know what riles me most is this Kashmir vs. “rest of
It really breaks my heart to see no one among our “intellectuals” has the cojones to call this Azaadi nonsense for what it is, a Islamist movement to obliterate the kaffir past and unambiguously belong to the community of faithful i.e. Ummah.
Look guys just admit it already, I am a freaking genius. Here is what I wrote way back in 2007,
Islamic fundamentalism is a bigger menace than communist thuggery. It is a tiger which one should not be riding.
And in 2008
As I pointed out earlier, the rise of Islamic politics in
Things are turning out exactly as I feared it would. It is a good read, even though it has the usual “I am a pox-on-both-the-houses independent thinker” greatbongish disclaimer.
The bad news is things are going to get worse, the good news is we don’t really care.
(From where we left )
Now it is my contention that failure of Indian state is a result of our inability to resolve the tension between Individual and Citizen. Let's see why is that so.
Of the two roles Individual is naturally predominating. This is because, self interest is more deeply ingrained in human genes. In order to bring the balance between the two, cultural training to suppress selfish instinct and reinforce altruist one is required. I believe that we have simply failed to form a culture which imparts such training.
There are quite a few reasons for this. First around six decades under totalitarian rule of Gandhi-Nehru dynasty have spawned a culture of scarcity, thus ensuring that even any natural altruistic instinct is eradicated, result, at social level, it is everyman for himself.
Second factor is the mechanism whereby cooperation and by extension altruism is strengthened. This mechanism is the affinity that an individual has towards others. Now this affinity is strongest among members from the same gene pool, next to genes, it is dependent of shared culture, religion, language and decreases as the social interaction decreases. The other factor affecting affinity is the power differential among members. All things remaining constant greater the power difference, which is reflected in social status, lesser the affinity. Thus people with same social status have greater affinity among themselves than among unequal status.
This has unhappy implication for Indian democracy. As a consequence of caste system even at local level Indian society is highly stratified and hierarchical, this is why while there is affinity within the caste group, the affinity between two different caste group is much weaker. Add to this caste hierarchy and historical social inequality in form of caste discrimination due to it, and the result is a society is where there is a high level of distrust and more important resentment and anger among different castes groups situated in the same locality.
This combined with the first factor has two consequences first the more benign one unless the underlying conditions change politically Indians will continue free loading, the more alarming concern however is the struggle for resources between different caste groups is leading to a powder keg situation where all that is required for conflagration is a small provocation, which may make phrase a million mutinies literally true.
(Or why Youngistan is bad news)
Good evening (or a bad one, I don't care either way). Those of you who visit this blog to actually read it (instead of looking for Tanushree Datta's photos) might have noticed one theme, among many, of the political posts, viz. while Indian entrepreneurs have succeeded, Indian state has been a massive colossal failure. Now while this observation, call it contradiction or paradox or whatever you like, has its epigrammatic moment, it has kind of bothered me, but it's only been recently that I understood why. The way it is put, it gives the impression that Indian state and the Indian entrepreneur are distinct, an obviously misleading impression, as the Indian state represents (or is supposed to represent, at any rate) Indian people! Taking this to conclusion it's the failure of state is actually that of Indians.
This raises further question, viz. why have Indians failed to establish functional democracy (as opposed to what exists which can be best characterized as cargo cult democracy). There is no single factor to explain this. Yet one factor, significant enough, has been the inability (and as a consequence failure to frame specific institutions of state to address it) to understand the dual role of an individual in a democracy.
Before that a minor digression to explain the title. In classical physics matter and energy are considered to be distinct phenomena with particle a characteristic of matter and wave a characteristic of energy. Quantum physics shattered this picture, tuned out matter and energy are different aspects of the same phenomena, with wave actually representing probability distribtuion of locating particle in space.
In the same way a man has two roles in all forms of democratic society, one as an individual, the other as citizen.
It is expected that man as individual will work for himself, if we want to be retentive about it, the technical description for such behavior is optimization of self defined utility function. Now entrepreneur as an individual seeks to maximize his well being, the way he does this is by creating value, which ultimately benefits others, however the main objective remains self interest.
This can be contrasted with man's role as citizen. Citizen is better understood as a part of the social experiment, and therefore it is his responsibility to ensure that all the social institutions, ( including state) function to ensure the welfare and prosperity of the society as whole. Again if one wishes to be retentive about it, this roughly means the optimization of aggregated utility functions.
One more digression is required here. The use of "self defined" may suggest that the utility functions are arbitrary, and that is true if one goes by logic alone. However historical evidence and our experience suggest otherwise. Not being a credentialed expert I can only speculate that for a healthy society the utility function somewhat resemble the Maslow's hierarchy*. Here healthy society means any society which, in addition to the previous qualification, is fit enough to survive in present and also in future, the time scale being civilizational. This then suggests aggregation of individual utility function must be combined with an utility function which applies to the society as a whole. Again this is just my speculation, but this will mean addition of religion and philosophy to Maslow's hierarchy.
It is not difficult to see that there is inherent contradiction between these two roles, with Individual being a self centric role and Citizen an altruistic one. The resolution of the tension between these two roles is the key to a functioning democratic society.
(To Be Continued ...)
* Yes I am hooked on Maslow's hierarchy. Hey don't judge me at least I don't snort Data unlike Data Nazi.
Here is a confession. I find the level of political discourse in Indian blogospehre quite underwhelming. The problem is that the interlocutors tend to be tunnel visioned, missing out the big picture in their argument. Consequently the arguments tend to be limited to exercise in logical correct, an examination of X follows Y follows Z. And yet the chain of causation, no matter however long or however convoluted, must end up somewhere. This beginning is the first principle. Now people talk about first principles all the time, but what no one realizes is that first principles by very definition are not established by reasoning. In fact if we strictly adhere to logic, the very notion of first principles seem quite arbitrary, the chain of cause and effect being turtles all the way down. A prime example of such an argument being this post (though someday I intend to rebut it, that day is not today) As it happens though first principles are not arbitrary, anchored as they are in human psyche, his instincts and belief system. To give an example, my first principles, for lack of any better words, are traditionalism and cultural nationalism. Now I didn't happen to stumble upon these principles by accident, but because identification with tradition and culture is an aspect of human instinct. Same must go for liberals and libertarians. Identifying what motivates the politics is therefore as important as the actual politics. Any investment in such an endeavor will be worth its while for we will be better placed to appreciate why people think the way they do, and why it is futile sometimes to engage in debate.
* Argument from motivation
Welcome back ladies, gentlemen and indeterminate life-forms in the back. For sake of social appearances I hope you are comfortable around here, and let’s just move on. In the second part (first part here) of this edition of LaS (i.e. Life and Something), we will discuss gay marriage. As some of you might be aware, in what is considered a major victory to proponents of same sex marriage in US, District Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker overturned California proposition 8 an amendment which declared that "only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California”. According to the judge, proposition violated the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment of United States constitution.
Not being an expert on American constitution, I will not dispute the legal reasoning behind the verdict. Also unlike most of the opponents of same sex marriage in US, I don’t think that legalization of same sex marriage is solely capable of destroying traditional marriage in US. Having said that, I think it is a bad idea, further it is latest in a series of bad ideas starting from no fault divorce, which have weakened marriage as a social institution. Even further this series of bad idea has its root in western notion of individualism.
To see why is that so, let’s begin by examining the two arguments in support of same-sex marriage, first is that traditional marriage is discriminatory in nature, that is ofcourse true but then so are almost all the relationships, state usually does not recognize a woman as father of her children, same way as much as a man may want he can not be mother of his children.
In short state doesn't define relationships, society does. State merely recognizes the societal definitions, for otherwise the legislation becomes needlessly convoluted. If tomorrow America society recognizes marriage between same sex couple, then state should follow the changed mores.
Here it is important to note that this issue is fraught with slippery slope, the argument presented above is usually countered by the supporters of same-sex marriage with the poser that whether same criteria of social acceptance should be applied to interracial marriage. To this the counter poser by opponents is if the criteria of non discrimination should also apply to incestuous or polygamous marriage. There is no satisfying argument to either of the posers, which is rooted in logic.
However where logic fails, observation comes to the rescue. The observation is this, any society, formed anywhere in world, since the beginning of civilization, has without exception defined marriage as a relationship involving one man and one woman.
The reason for this also answers the second argument in support of same sex marriage, which goes like this, "Just because same sex marriage is legal doesn't mean that normal couple with stop loving each other". The answer to this is, "What has marriage got to do with love ?". Marriage is about forming a committed, and hence stable familial unit. This is because almost all societies found out by hit and trial that a committed and stable familial unit, ceteris paribus, a. ensures the best upbringing of younger generation and b. is the most stable building block for larger society.
In other words, marriage is less about love of two individuals towards each other and more about claim of society towards individuals. When individuals reject any claim of society on them, which, in nutshell, is Individualism, the institution of marriage loses its raison d'etre, and from these its a long slide to irrelevance, aided by attempts to redefine it according to whatever the intellectual fashion of the day.
PS You know what just don't bother, read this post instead, from the archives of Jane Galt
