----- Forwarded message from "Hughes, James J."
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From: "Hughes, James J." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 13:51:02 -0400
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED],
World Transhumanist Association Discussion List <wta-
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Subject: [wta-talk] Nerds,
religious fundamentalism & atypical personality in India
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[1]http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/04/nerds-are-nuts.php
Nerds are nuts
Reading [2]In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern
India, I
stumbled upon this passage on page 151:
...Whereas the Congress Party was dominated by lawyers and
journalists, the RSS was dominated by people from a scientific
background. Both groups were almost exclusively Brahmin in their
formative years...three out of four of Hedegwar's [the
founder, who
was a doctor -Razib] successors were also from scientific
backgrounds: M.S. Golwalker...was a zoologist...Rajendra Singh
was
a physicist; and K.S. Sudarshan...is an engineer....
Some quick "background." The [3]RSS is a prominent member of the
[4]Hindutva movement, roughly, Hindu nationalism. Some people have
termed them "Hindu fundamentalists," suggesting an equivalence with
reactionary religious movements the world over. There is a problem
with such a broad brush term: some proponents and adherents of
Hindutva are not themselves particularly religious and make no
effort
to pretend that they are. Rather, they are individuals who are
attracted to the movement for racial-nationalist reasons, they view
"Hindus" as a people as much, or more than, a religion. One
could make
an argument that the "Christian Right" or "Islamism" are not at the
root concerned or driven by religious motives, but, members of both
these movements would assert at least a pretense toward religiosity
almost universally.
With that preamble out of the way, I was not surprised that the RSS
had a core cadre of scientifically oriented leaders. This is a
common
tendency amongst faux reactionary movements with a religious
element.
I say faux because these movements tend to be extremely
innovative and
progressive in the process of attempting to recreate a mythic
golden
past. The militancy of some of the organizations in the Hindutva
movement, like the VHP and RSS, has been asserted by some Hindu
intellectuals as being...un-Hindu. Some of the early
intellectuals in
the movement admitted that they were attempting to fight back
against
Islam and Christianity by co-opting some of the modalities of these
two religions. The question becomes at what point does pragmatic
methodology suborn the ultimate ends? I won't offer an answer
because
I have little interest in that topic, at least in this post.
Rather, I
want to move back to the point about scientists and their
involvement
in "fundamentalist" religious movements. Scientifically trained
individuals are over represented within Islam in the [5]Salafist
Terror Network. As a child the fundamentalist engineer was a cut-
out
stereotype amongst the circle of graduate students in the natural
sciences from Muslim backgrounds that my parents socialized
amongst.
Ethnological research confirms that Islamist movements are highly
concentrated within departments of engineering at universities.
Engineers are also very prominent in the Creationist movement in
the
United States. If civilizations can be analogized to organisms,
then a
particular subset of technically minded folk get very strange when
interfacing with the world around us...and turn into
fundamentalists.
So why the tendency for technical people to be so prominent in
these
groups? First, let me clarify that just because technical folk are
heavily over represented amongst religious radicals does not
mean that
religious radicals are necessarily a large demographic among
technical
folk. Rather, amongst the set of religious radicals the technicians
seem to rise up to positions of power and provide excellent
recruits.
There is I think a socioeconomic angle on this. Years back I was
curious as to the class origin of different scientific
professions. I
didn't find much, but the data I did gather implied that
engineers are
generally more likely to be from less affluent backgrounds than
more
abstract and less practical fields like botany or astronomy. This
makes sense, engineering is one of the best tickets to a middle
class
livelihood, and it might necessitate fewer social graces (acquired
through "breeding") than medicine or law. As it happens, oftentimes
fundamentalist movements draw much of their strength from upwardly
mobile groups who are striving to ascend up from lower to
lower-middle-class status. Though the Hindutva movement in India is
mostly upper caste, it is not concentrated amongst the English
speaking super elite who are quite Westernized, but rather its
strength lay amongst the non-Western sub-elites (e.g., merchants in
small to mid-sized cities) or the petite bourgeois. Islamism in
much
of the world can be traced to the anomie generated by the
transformation of "traditional" societies through urbanization and
other assorted dislocations, and as peasants enter the modern world
Islamic orthodoxy is a way to moor themselves within the new urban
matrix and the world of wage labor. Similarly, the rise of the
Christian Right can be tied in part to the entrance of evangelicals
into the broad middle class as the Old South became the New
South and
air conditioning led to the blossoming of the Sun Belt.
But there are likely other factors at play which are not
sociological
or cultural, but individual. Fundamentalists tend to be
"literalists,"
and have a tendency to look at their religious texts as divine
manuals
which describe and prescribe every aspect of the world. In some
ways
this is a new tendency in our species, at least as a mass movement.
One can definitely trace scriptural fundamentalism to the
Protestant
Reformation with the call to sola scriptura, but in the West its
contemporary origin can be found in the reaction in the late 19th
century and early 20th century to textual analysis of the Bible by
modernists. The assault on the historicity of the Bible,
combined with
both mass literacy and a democratic culture in the United
States, led
inevitably to a crass literalism that birthed the peculiarities
which
we see before us in the form of Creationism and its sisters. A
literal
reading of the Bible leads to ludicrous conclusions, but if one
perceives that the game is all or nothing, then perhaps one must
assert the truth value of Genesis as if it was a scientific
treatise.
Religious professionals have often been skeptical of literalism
because a deep knowledge of languages and the translation process
highlights various ambiguities and gray shades, but for those
whom the
text is plain and unadorned by deeper knowledge its meaning is
"clear"
and must be take at its word. Scientists and engineers live in a
world
of axioms, laws and theories, which though rough and ready, must be
taken as truths for predictions and models to be valid. You make
assumptions, you construct a model, and you project a range of
values
bounded by errors. Once science is established you take it is as a
given and don't engage in excessive philosophical reflection.
This is
"[6]normal science." The axioms are validated by their utility
in an
instrumental fashion in engineering and model building. Obviously
religious truths are different. Plainly, the direct material
benefits
of religion, magic, is easily falsifiable. The indirect
benefits, the
afterlife, etc., are often beyond verification. A critical
examination
of the Hebrew Bible shows all sorts of fallacious assumptions. For
example, there is an implication that the world is flat and that
the
sun revolves around the earth. Though these contentions are not
defensible, there are a host of other assertions which are less
plainly incorrect, or at least seem to be refuted only by a more
complex suite of contingent facts (e.g., the historical sciences in
the form of geology and evolutionary biology falsify the creation
account, but these are complex stories which require acceptance
of a
chain of inferences). Obviously many religious people have a deep
emotional attachment to their faith. If one is told that one's
religion is based on a book, and that book plainly seems to imply
ludicrous assertions, how to square this circle? Many a scientific
mind simply accepts the ludicrous axioms and starts to generate
inferences. Consider the[7] Water Canopy Theory. Or, the Hindutva
ideology that Aryans originated in India, spread to the rest of the
world, and so brought civilization (the gift of the Indians). Or
that
Hindu mythology records the ancient use of nuclear weapons and
spaceships. There are even books like [8]Human Devolution: a Vedic
alternative to Darwin's theory. Strictly speaking much of this
work is
not irrational, insofar as it exhibits internal logical
coherency. The
axioms are simply ludicrous.
Which gets me back to the way scientists think: though some
scientists
are very philosophical, the way in which science is taught is often
not particularly focused on the nature and reasoning beyond the
axioms
given. PV = nRT. Why? There are quick primers in regards to the
root
of the Ideal Gas Law, but the key is to take this law and
utilize it
to solve problems. But what if PV = nRT is subjective, a
misinterpretation. Perhaps a cultural mix-up resulted in a
transcription error which introduced the gas constant, R. This
is an
idiotic question to ask in science. If you're taking a course on
the
kinetics of gases you don't have long discussions lingering upon
the
nature of motion and gas particles, those are assumed. In
contrast in
softer disciplines the very concept of "motion" an "particles" are
subject to critique because the objects of study are far more
slippery. Is it the "Red Sea" or "Sea of Reeds"? Does the Bible
refer
to Mary as a virgin or an unmarried woman? Does the color coding of
the Aryans and Dasas in the Vedas refer to literal differences in
complexion, or are they narrative conventions? Language lacks of
the
interpersonal precision of mathematics, and while [9]
uniformitarianism
has served us admirably in the natural sciences, the dynamic
nature of
idiom, phrase and speech within shifting context means that teasing
apart meaning from the records of the past can be a difficult feat
which requires care, erudition and common sense.
Up until this point I have focused on the way scientists work,
and the
necessity of background assumptions, and the relative short shrift
they often give to the "meta" analysis of background concepts.
Though
I don't want to push this line of thought too far, I will offer the
following illustrations of behaviors which I think are not totally
unlike the manner in which some fundamentalists behave. Someone
tells
a child to "pull the door behind" them. He proceeds to unscrew the
hinges and drag the front door across to the street to his house.
Siblings are told that there is life after death by their
parent. They
proceed to plan the death of one so that some confirmation of this
possibility can be ascertained. These two instances are real
examples
of individuals who exhibit Autism/Asperger's Syndrome. Anyone who
would behave in this way lacks common social sense. I believe
that a
disproportionate number of those who are attracted to
fundamentalism
tend to lack the same perspective and contextualizing capacity in
regards to their religious beliefs. If they can do some matrix
algebra
too, they're nerds. On a mass scale, consider that both Salafis
among
Muslims and Puritans among Calvinists debated whether all that
was not
mentioned within their Holy Texts as permissible were therefore
impermissible. I suspect that for most people common sense might
persuade one to the conclusion that these sort of debates imply
a lack
of a sense of proportion, frankly, of normalcy.
In sum:
* Hard core religious fundamentalists are somewhat atypical
psychologically
* Scientists and engineers are also atypical psychologically
* Some of the traits modal within these two sets intersect
* Resulting in a disproportionate number of scientists amongst
fundamentalists
* Science converges upon rock solid truths, which become the
axioms
for the next set of projections and investigations.
Fundamentalism
presents itself as axioms and clear and distinct inferences
from
those axioms. Both are fundamentally elegant and simple
cognitive
processes, but, the content is so radically different that the
outcomes in regards to truth value are very different
* Mass literacy and mass society, as well as the
decentralization of
authority and power, likely made fundamentalism inevitable
as the
basal level of individuals with susceptible psychological
profiles
could now have direct access to the axioms in question (texts)
* Just as some scientists tend to take ideas to their "logical
extremes" (e.g., the "paradoxes" of physics) no matter the
dictates of common sense, so some fundamentalists take the
logical
conclusion of their religious texts to extremes
* No matter the religion it seems that modernity will produce
faux
reactionary fundamentalism because of the nature of normal
human
variation combined with universal inputs (e.g., the rise of
normative consumerism, urbanization, etc.).
References
1. http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/04/nerds-are-nuts.php
2. http://www.amazon.com/Spite-Gods-Strange-Modern-India/dp/
0385514743/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-9954258-8060061?
ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1175666384&sr=8-1
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashtriya_Swayamsevak_Sangh
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindutva
5. http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2005/07/profile-of-salafi-jihadists.php
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_science
7. http://www.godandscience.org/youngearth/canopy.html
8. http://www.amazon.com/Human-Devolution-alternative-Darwins-
theory/dp/0892133341/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-9954258-8060061?
ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1175674970&sr=1-1
9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniformitarianism_%28science%29
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