EPW Special Articles
February 11, 2006 How Modern Are We?
Cultural Contradictions of India's Modernity
This essay examines the intellectual sources of the cultural
contradictions of India's modernity. Rather than bring religion under the
limits of scientific reason, India has witnessed a steady co-option of science
into the spirit-based cosmology and epistemology of "the Vedas." The history,
the logic and social consequences of this counter-Enlightenment are examined.
Meera Nanda
Berlin, 1783. A debating club called Berliner Mittwocchgesellschaft (the
Berlin Wednesday Club) invited its members to respond to this question: What
is enlightenment? A strenuous debate followed. The philosopher Immanuel Kant
joined in the fray with his well known essay, Answer to the Question: What Is
Enlightenment? This is how Kant characterised what was distinctive about the
ferment of ideas sweeping 18th century Europe: Enlightenment is mans
release from this self-incurred immaturity [which is] his inability to make use
of his understanding without direction from another
Sapere aude! Have courage
to use your own reason! that is the motto of the enlightenment. I The
reader might justifiably wonder why an essay about India in the 21st century
should begin with what Immanuel Kant wrote back in the 18th century. What
possible relevance can these musty old European debates have for India today?
I believe that the transformation of reason brought about by the
scientific revolution that so impressed Kant and other Enlightenment thinkers
holds the key to the fulfilment of the programme of disenchantment and
secularisation everywhere. Kants call of Sapere aude! was simultaneously an
invocation of a new standard of reason meant to challenge all a priori truths
that we accept out of faith, cultural conditioning or overt indoctrination.
Once we understand the transformation of reason that the scientific revolution
and the Enlightenment set in motion, we will be in a better position to
understand why modernity in India has this feel of incompleteness,
superficiality and even schizophrenia. Modern India has embraced the end
products of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment in the west
namely, modern technology and a liberal-secular framework of laws encoded in
the Constitution. But it has done so without challenging the cultural authority
of the supernatural and mystical world view derived from the idealistic strands
of
Hinduism. If anything, from its very beginning in the Bengal renaissance,
Indias project of modernity has evolved within a uniquely Indian inclusive
style of counter-Enlightenment. By counter-Enlightenment I mean only this: in a
stark contrast to the Enlightenment project of bringing religion within the
limits of scientific reason, the Indian counter-Enlightenment has tended to
subsume or co-opt scientific reason within the spirit-based cosmology and
epistemology of the Vedas.1 Since independence, India has created an
impressive workforce of scientists and engineers, many of them doing fairly
advanced science which meets the standards of excellence in the best
laboratories in the rest of the world. But Indias science has not evolved out
of a critical engagement with the religious commonsense that still pervades the
cultural life outside and often inside the labs. Modern ideas and
innovations are being incorporated into a traditional Hindu world view, without
diminishing
many of its starkly irrational, occult and pseudo-scientific tendencies.
II Let me illustrate what I mean by the superficial and schizophrenic nature
of Indian modernity. I reproduce here an excerpt from a short essay titled Is
India a Science Superpower? I wrote for Frontline (September 10, 2005):
The next century belongs to India, which will become a unique intellectual
powerhouse
capturing all its glory which it had in millennia gone by, Dr
Raghunath Mashelkar, the director general of Indias Council of Scientific and
Industrial Research declared in Science earlier this year. Thomas Friedman, the
New York Times columnist and author of the recent bestseller, The World is
Flat, agrees that India, with its talented yet low-cost brainpower, is on its
way to becoming the innovation hub of the global economy. Not to be outdone,
the British weekly New Scientist, has dubbed India the worlds emerging
knowledge superpower
What does not make sense, however, is the radical disconnect between the
dreams of becoming a science superpower, and the grim reality of the
mind-numbing superstitions and life-threatening pseudo-sciences that are
thriving at all levels of the Indian society. Indian scientists may well be the
most sought-after workers in the global economy, but many behave as if what
they do inside their laboratories has nothing do with the supernatural and/or
spiritual truths that pass as scientific explanations of natural phenomena
in the rest of the society
..
Do I exaggerate? Here is a report on the six weeks I spent in north India this
summer:
In early May, throughout the countryside in northern India, thousands of
children, mere girls and boys, were married off on Akshay Tritya, a day
considered astrologically auspicious for marriages and other new ventures. The
rare social worker who tried to prevent child marriages, had her hands chopped
off by those bent on defending their hoary traditions. There are, of course,
many complex social and economic reasons why child marriages still persist in
India in significant numbers. But these secular motives come with full
blessings of our priests and astrologers who have declared the bright sun and
the moon on the third day of the month of May to be auspicious for new
ventures, including child marriages which are supposed to bring good karma to
the parents of child-brides.
Meanwhile, astrology was getting a corporate makeover to appeal to the
modern, urban middle classes, who were being bombarded with advertisements by
the World Gold Council to celebrate the auspicious alignment of the stars by
buying some more gold jewellery.
If you thought that scientists, especially space scientists, would have
something to say regarding the astrological logic underlying popular traditions
(old and new), well, think again. While the country was gearing up for Akshay
Tritya, Indias top space scientists were busy seeking the blessings of Lord
Balaji at the Tirupati temple for a safe launch of the polar satellite launch
vehicle. A miniature model of the rocket was laid in the sanctum sanctorum of
the temple and prayed over by priests in the presence of 15 scientists, led by
the space-agency chief, Dr G Madhavan Nair. Scientists, who have not let go
their own security blanket of gods, can hardly be expected to question the
comforting but false illusions astrologers sell to ordinary people.
Meanwhile, the many satellites that Indias space agency has launched in the
past were busy beaming TV programmes selling wild, unsubstantiated health
benefits of yoga and Ayurveda, delivered in a heady brew of spiritualism and
Hindu nationalism. Indias most popular tele-yogi, Swami Ramdev, has amassed a
fortune selling his Divya yoga on the TV. Interspersed with the swamis calls
for awakening desh kaa svabhiman (national self-respect) by teaching crore
saal purana vigyan (science dating back 10 million years), one finds totally
unsubstantiated claims about the power of yogic postures, deep breathing and
his own Ayurvedic concoctions for every ailment known to humankind including
cancer, heart disease, diabetes, glaucoma, obesity
What is remarkable is that all these reason and evidence defying traditions
come wrapped in the fancy dress of science. On my visit to Chandigarh, my
hometown, I heard an Arya Samaj preacher exhort the devotees at an open-air
public discourse held right outside my house (with loudspeakers set at full
blast) to read the ancient Vedas to learn all the sciences known to humanity.
(He was discoursing on how to succeed in the modern world with its prized
high-tech jobs!) Astrology, yogic ideas of prana and kundalini and even the
ideas of reincarnation, karma and varna (i e, caste order) are justified in the
language of modern physics and evolutionary biology. All these ancient
metaphysical speculations are proclaimed to be Vedic sciences (i e,
empirically testable and logical within the metaphysics of the Vedas) and they
are supposed to have been belatedly rediscovered by modern science. What we
have here is pseudo-science in its purest form, that is, religious dogma,
lacking
rigorous scientific evidence and plausibility, dressed up as science...
Everything Vedic is scientific and every science known to human kind only
affirms the wisdom of the Vedas. Indeed, claims of the innate scientific
temper of the Vedas occupy a place of pride in the Hindutva assertions of Hindu
superiority over Islam and Christianity, which are declared to be merely
faith-based creeds. Science, vedically interpreted, is feeding into Hindu
chauvinism. III That the Vedas are conflated with science as we know it
today will hardly come as news to anyone who knows anything about India. This
is routine business and has been going on since the very introduction of modern
science and technology in India, dating back to the 18th century. (Indian
rationalists, in comparison, have never enjoyed the same degree of cultural
hegemony. The marginalisation of rationalism in Indias cultural politics is a
topic for another day and another essay.) Most Indians pause to think
about this streak of scientism in modern Hinduism,2 just about as much as
fish pause to reflect upon the water they live in which is not much at all.
It has become a part of the commonsense of modern, science-educated,
English-speaking Indians to treat the teachings of popular gurus, yogis and
swamis as vaguely scientific, and therefore modern. Indian scientists, for
the most part, have not challenged the religious uses of science: they tend to
keep their laboratory lives and their personal lives in separate water-tight
compartments. Our public intellectuals and social critics, meanwhile, have been
more exercised about the real and imagined scientism of the modern Indian
state, than about the scientism that pervades modern Hinduism. I believe that
we need to pay closer attention to Hindu scientism because it is a symptom of
the deeper cultural contradictions that afflict Indias modernity. We pride
ourselves in being modern, yet we trample upon the first principle of
modernity, namely, to draw principled distinctions between science and
metaphysics, or between verifiable knowledge of tangible material entities
occupying space and time, and the intuitive knowledge of intangible soul-stuff
god, brahman or any form of subtle spiritual energy that is not
accessible to the five senses all human beings share alike. The sapere aude
spirit that Kant was talking about meant just this: to divest metaphysicians,
theologians and priests from making existence claims about supernatural powers,
and conversely, using existence claims of natural sciences to affirm
supernatural or spiritual powers. The point of the Enlightenment project was
not to destroy religion, but to limit what it could say about nature and how it
could use the authority of nature to defend its dogmas. Modernity in India
lacks the spirit of sapere aude, understood as setting limits on the authority
of religion, as separating the realms of science and religion in the larger
culture.
If anything, India has followed an exactly opposite path, absorbing more and
more of science into the traditional teachings of the Veda, Vedanta, Yoga
Sutras and Ayurveda. Indeed, as I will argue below, India has taken a uniquely
inclusive (read co-optive) route to the classic phenomenon of
counter-Enlightenment or reactionary modernism.3 IV In order to
understand Indias unique style of counter-Enlightenment, we must first be
clear what we mean by the Enlightenment. Without getting entangled in the many
nuances of the European Enlightenment, we can keep three general propositions
in mind. To being with, the Enlightenment refers to a historical epoch which
began with the English Revolution in 1688 and culminated in the American
Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the French Revolution in 1789. There
was no one unified movement called the Enlightenment that swept through all
of Europe simultaneously. There were, rather, a series of debates and critiques
directed
against the authority of inherited intellectual and religious traditions.
These debates took different shapes and forms in different national contexts,
affecting all of western Europe and northern America to a lesser or greater
extent. In all cases, these movements were supported by the rising class of the
industrial bourgeoisie. In Protestant England and America, the Enlightenment
took place largely in alliance with the church, while in largely Catholic
France, the church was relatively less hospitable to new ideas. Led by a new
class of intellectuals who made a living by writing for the grub street
(newspapers, periodicals and cheap novels) and by giving lectures and
demonstrations on current sciences in coffee houses and pubs, Enlightenment
ideas found a receptive audience among the reading public.4 Secondly, for
all the national differences, the movements included in the rubric of the
Enlightenment were marked by, to quote Alan Kors, the editor of a new
Encyclopedia of the
Enlightenment, an increasingly critical attitude toward inherited
authority,
a sense that armed with new methods and new powers, the human mind
could re-examine claims upon it
including the claims of religion. This was not
a rejection of authority per se, but of arbitrary authority whose sole claim
upon ones mind or body was its having withstood the test of time.5 Sapere
aude dare to know was the motivating force behind the entire movement,
and was used by British freethinkers as their rallying cry much in advance of
Kant.6 Third and finally, notwithstanding all the postmodernist attacks, it
is still possible to defend the Enlightenment as the precondition for any kind
of progressive politics. As Stephen Bronner writes in his spirited new book,
Reclaiming the Enlightenment, nearly all aspects of modern life, especially
the ideals of personal autonomy, tolerance, secularism and reason, developed
against the backdrop of Enlightenments protest against the exercise of
arbitrary power, the force of custom and ingrained prejudice [that] justified
social misery.7 On this reading, it was the Enlightenment that made real the
ideals of modernity that were only latent in the Renaissance, the Reformation
and the scientific revolution. Enlightenment, then, is considered by many
intellectual historians as the true beginning of modernity. V Against this
background, let us return to Kants motto. Why did he make sapere aude the
courage to use your own reason the distinguishing mark of his times? After
all, the Age of Enlightenment was hardly the first to apply the power of reason
to comprehend nature and society. Human beings in all societies and in all
epochs have exercised the powers of observation, logic, and experimentation,
along with imagination, insight, myth and magic to understand and materially
manipulate the force of nature. What was so special about reason in the Age of
Enlightenment that Kant would turn it into a rallying cry for
freedom? While the philosophers of the Enlightenment exhorted their fellow
citizens to live by the light of reason, they were simultaneously redefining
reason by setting limits on what can legitimately be known, given the kind of
sensory apparatus and reasoning powers human beings are endowed with. The
philosophers and architects of the age of reason, from Locke and Hume in
England; to Voltaire, Diderot and Montesquieu in France; Kant, Lessing and
later Marx in Germany; and Jefferson, Paine and Franklin in the US, were
impressed by the success of the scientific revolution, especially the
disciplined empiricism of Newton. His famous laws of force and universal
gravitation emerged out of patient and careful observation of comets, planets,
objects in motion and transmission of light. Newton, in other words, derived
his first principles from the empirical investigation of phenomena. This, to
the philosophers of the Enlightenment, was in refreshing contrast to the method
of theologians
and metaphysicians who started with infallible, divine revelations and
proceeded to deduce the knowledge of physical phenomena from them. They
recognised full well that Newtons observations themselves required
metaphysical grounding that is, a belief in the existence of order created by
god. But what they found remarkable was that Newton used this metaphysical
belief as a springboard for empirical examination, rather than as an a priori
truth to explain material phenomena. Newtons method became the paradigm of
reason for the Age of Enlightenment. The philosophers denied most strenuously
that it was possible to make any factual claims about the world based upon
pure reason by which they meant Gnostic intuition, mysticism, direct
realisation or revelation, that is, any means of knowing which cannot be
validated by sensory experience. Only those objects in the phenomenal world
(to use Kants vocabulary) that correspond to human categories of space, time
and causality
can possibly become objects of our experience, and human knowledge can only
extend to these objects. We have no possible way of knowing the objects of the
noumenal world (to use Kants vocabulary again), the things-in-themselves
that lie outside our mental categories of space, time and causality. This meant
that supra-sensible entities like god, absolute consciousness, soul, vital
spirit, etc, which lack extension in space and time forever lie outside human
abilities to know them. We can therefore make no empirical claims about this
supra-sensible or noumenal world, neither can we use our knowledge of the
noumenal reality to explain the phenomenal world.8 This world view did not
exactly deny the existence of supernatural forces or ultimate realities, but it
limited them to the world of noumena, totally beyond the reach of human
experience. Such forces could be accepted as allegories, as poetry, even as
necessary fictions to defend our moral intuitions about good and evil, but
they could not provide foundations for knowledge of the natural world. This
was a monumental change. So far human history, science, or natural philosophy,
had existed within the limits of religion. Henceforth, religion could exist
only within the limits of scientific reason. This was the philosophical core of
the Enlightenment, the rallying cry of the moderns against the ancients.
This transformation had far-reaching consequences, not just for the conduct of
science, but for the evolution of a democratic and secular public sphere. As
the new historiography inspired by the path-breaking work of Jurgen Habermas
has established,9 the empiricist revolution in the conception of reason was
hugely important in the creation of new ideals of publicness, open in principle
(though not in practice) to all, in which all authority was open to critical
scrutiny on the basis of evidence accessible to ordinary human faculties of
sensory perception and elementary logic. Gradually, the old
taboos which derived their force from natural law, which was supposed to
express divine will, lost their powers to persuade. Depending upon the
historical balance of forces between the church and the throne, and the
allegiance and strength of the bourgeoisie who derived their wealth from
industry and commerce, different degrees of secularisation took place in
different societies, a process which is still in progress. VI Just as
surely as day is followed by night, the Enlightenment was followed by the
counter-Enlightenment. The proclamation of the autonomy and authority of
testable, sensory knowledge, over and against revelations, mystical intuitions,
miracles and all forms of extra-sensory knowledge was resisted by the keepers
of faith everywhere.10 There are primarily two routes the
counter-Enlightenment has taken through history: the less-travelled path of
outright refusal, favoured by the orthodox observant communities, and the more
popular and politically-correct option
of co-option through indigenising or relativising the norms of reason,
favoured by religious/cultural nationalists on the one hand, and the
postmodernists and multiculturalists, on the other.11 The great refusal can
be seen in the enclaves of traditionalism and orthodoxy in some heradim Jewish
communities in Israel and the US, the Amish and among the separatist sects of
evangelical Christians in the US. But this option of just saying no to the
larger secular culture is becoming rarer and harder to maintain in the world
increasingly permeated by modern technologies and new ideas.12 Cultural
relativism that is, not an outright refusal but a reinterpretation of the
norms of empirical science within ones own civilisational or national culture
has been the preferred mode of most of the illiberal, counter-Enlightenment
movements, notably the fascist movements in Germany and Japan in the 20th
century, down to the religious fundamentalisms of the 21st century. Assorted
fascists, Christian and Islamic fundamentalists and our own Hindu nationalists
cannot be categorised as old-fashioned anti-modernists who want to take their
societies back to some primitive pre-modern, pre-scientific age of faith and/or
magic, insulated from global developments in science and technology. They are
more properly described as reactionary modernists, a term coined by Jeffery
Herf in his 1984 intellectual history of the Weimar and Nazi Germany.
Reactionary modernists, in contrast to backward-looking golden-age
pastoralists, say yes to modern technology, but no to the Enlightenment
norms of scientific reason. They succeed in mixing a robust modernity and an
affirmative stance toward progress with dreams of the past: a highly
technological romanticism.13 Reactionary modernists, in other words, display a
great enthusiasm for technological modernisation, overlaid with a deep aversion
to rationalism, secularism and individualism that comes with modernisation. They
want the fruits of modernisation, without the pain and joys of cultural
dislocations that modernity brings. The question before all reactionary
modernists is how to use the technological products of modern science, while
rejecting its world view and its norms of reason. The solution has been to
remove scientific reason from the world view of the Enlightenment, a world view
of reason, intellect, internationalism, materialism and redefine it in the
jargon of authenticity, community, and heritage. The claims of science and
modernity are not rejected out of hand, but only translated into an
ethno-scientific vocabulary. Universalism of science is not denied in favour of
anything goes kind of relativism, but modern science is deemed to be only one
of the many other equally universalisable ways knowing. The importance of
subjecting beliefs to experience and evidence is not denied, but what
constitutes evidence and experience is made relative to the metaphysical
categories of the
rest of the culture. While something called science is celebrated, it
invariably ends up re-affirming and legitimising the traditional common
sense of the culture, derived largely from the dominant religious tradition.
VII Translating the empiricist tradition of modern science into the jargon of
mysticism derived from Patanjlis Yoga Sutras and monistic strains of Vedanta
has been the hallmark of neo-Hindu counter-Enlightenment. Declaring the Vedas
to be based upon direct realisation of higher realities, and therefore
another name for science, was the work of the thinkers of the Hindu
renaissance, notable among them being the Adyar theosophists, Swami
Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo and Servapalli Radhakrishnan. Contemporary
descendents of these 19th-early 20th century Vedas-as-science thinkers include
the many monks of Ramakrishna missions around the world, Vedic creationists
of Krishna Consciousness and well-know personalities like Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
and Deepak
Chopra and their many clones and/or admirers in the west as well as in India.
The saffronisation of history, including the history of science, that we
experienced under the reign of the Sangh parivar was a political expression of
this long-standing conflation of the Vedas with modern science. Like other
reactionary modernists before them, neo-Hindu philosophers seem to accept the
challenge of the Enlightenment. They accept that with the success of the
scientific revolution, as Radhakrishnan put it in his Hindu View of Life, the
centre of gravity in religion has shifted from authority to reason. But and
here is the rub they define the non-sensory, intuitive or mystical
experience, the so-called pure reason, to be actually referring to real,
causal entities and/or energies which can be directly seen, or heard by
altering your consciousness through yoga: mystical insight is interpreted as an
empirical experience of natural order. They argued that what the yogis
experienced in here in their minds actually corresponded with realities out
there, and by experimenting with their inner selves, Vedic adepts can come to
know and control external reality. Indeed, neo-Hindu and Hindutva writings are
replete with references to the Vedas as describing empirical facts and law of
nature that were actually seen and heard by the mythic authors of the Vedas
through the process of yogic meditation alone.14 In other words, while
neo-Hindu philosophers accepted the Kantian emphasis on using ones own
reason and not the authority of priests and holy books, they rejected the
limit the empiricists had put on the powers of reason. The empiricist tradition
that flowered during the Enlightenment had steadfastly denied that one can make
any substantive claims about reality based upon pure or non-sensory reason
alone. Neo-Hindu philosophers insisted that within the holistic world view of
Vedanta, in which consciousness permeates all matter,
non-sensory, meditative knowledge of ones inner self can give you insights
about the ultimate reality of the material world. While the Enlightenment drew
a line between sensory and non-sensory perception, neo-Hindus rejected this
line and insisted that mystical experience constituted a valid empirical
experience. How was this interpretation of mysticism as providing valid
empirical knowledge defended? Here we find striking similarities with the
postmodern theories of all knowledge including modern science as being
paradigm-bound, a construct of specific metaphysical assumptions, which serve
the interests of power over nature and society. Neo-Hindu thinkers have
asserted that the Kantian restriction on sensory knowledge as the only
legitimate source of knowledge is a construct of the dualist world view of
Abrahamic or Semitic monotheistic religions in which god/divine consciousness
is separated from brute matter. Because the Hindu tradition does not separate
matter from
spirit but considers all matter living and non-living as the embodiment of
vital energy (prana) or consciousness (brahman), it is considered
perfectly legitimate within the Hindu tradition to treat mystical realisation
of the spirit in our own selves to correspond to the spirit, or essence, of the
rest of the universe. And, Vedic science apologists go on to insist that
because a reductionist materialist-empiricism is an aberration of the
Abrahamic faiths, anyone who accepts its validity suffers from mental
colonisation and trying to semitise Hindu dharma.15 This defence of mystical
empiricism, unfortunately, got a big boost from the idealistic interpretations
of quantum mechanics popularised by Fritjof Capra, Mahesh Yogi, Deepak Chopra
and Amit Goswami in recent years. So, how modern are we, really? If modernity
means a differentiation and separation between science and religion, between
sensory experience and the mystical experience of metaphysical realities, we
in India have a long way to go. Rather than challenge the authority of private
mystical experiences of our holy men and women with the evidence and logic
that is available to ordinary men and women in everyday walks of life, we have
dignified mystagogy with the name of holistic science. We have been playing
word games, rationalising and pretending we-know-it-all while, in fact, we do
not. VIII But one can sympathise with all that I have said above and still
ask: So what? What is so terribly wrong with the scientism of neo-Hindu gurus,
intellectuals and believers? By presenting ancient wisdom in scientific terms,
are they not encouraging Indians to study science and develop a scientific
temper? By refusing to separate consciousness from matter, are they not
avoiding the sterile materialism of the west? Besides, why crusade against
superstitions anyway? Isnt it true that irrationality can coexist with good
science as, say, in America, the worlds undisputed leader in
science? Others advise that as long as you have secular institutions and laws
in place, popular superstitions are not worth worrying about. Still others
insist that rather than fight mere ideas in peoples heads, we should fight
for a socially just society: secularisation, they say, will naturally follow
the lead of political and economic reforms. I do not deny that there are
specks of truth in most of these caveats. One cannot simply reason a just and
secular society into existence; scientific temper alone can only take you some
distance. A rationalist offensive against superstition and pseudo-sciences can
only be meaningful if it is a part of a larger political movement that can meet
peoples aspirations for existential security and justice in this life, rather
than in some future birth, in some future sata-yuga. I agree that it is not
people who need to be made more rational, but that social systems that thwart
rationality and creativity need to change. I even grant that
at least initially, under colonialism, Hindu scientism did serve a useful
purpose: it gave us the much-needed confidence to confront colonial stereotypes
of irrational and mystical India, and it made the pursuit of science
sufficiently non-threatening. But over time, Hindu scientism has morphed into a
full-blown pseudo-science with nationalistic overtones. There are relatively
harmless but self-indulgent New Age-ish aspects of the mind-matter holism that
are becoming increasingly popular among the urban sophisticates in India: a bit
of yoga here, some vastu there, with Ayurvedic potions thrown in for good
measure. But this is the same world view which also justifies the traditional
logic of innate karmic purity and hierarchy, and which legitimates the
paranormal spiritual powers of god-men and soothsayers. I understand that
some kind of superstitious thinking will always be with us: that is perhaps an
unavoidable consequence of the human imperative to find explanations, right or
wrong. Granted, also, that there is no need to declare a war on every idea
that does not meet the standards of scientific justification, for human beings
do not live by reason alone. But as long as superstitions and pseudo-sciences
enjoy the kind of cultural hegemony, patronage and linkages with nationalism as
they do in contemporary India, they remain a political force to reckon with. In
view of their pervasive social influence, they cannot be treated as matters of
personal belief. It is sometimes argued that rationalisation and
secularisation of world views will follow, pretty much on their own, in the
wake of technological and economic modernisation, and therefore no special
engagement with the content of peoples beliefs is needed. Indeed, even
well-meaning secularists are weary of criticising religious beliefs as elitist
and disrespectful of ordinary people. But there is no evidence that
modernisation of infrastructure and economic relations alone, or by itself, can
bring
about a secularisation of beliefs. Beliefs, especially those beliefs that
answer our existential questions regarding death and birth, misfortune and good
fortune, right and wrong, have a life of their own. Beliefs dont simply lie
down and die when the social context changes: instead, they mutate, and adapt
to the new social context. The planetary configuration of Akshay Tritya, to
take an example cited above, did not cease to be auspicious for modern Indians,
many of whom have grown rich on jobs in the high-technology and scientific
research and development. Rather, it is mutating from a day that was considered
auspicious for child marriages into a day that is auspicious for conspicuous
consumption of gold jewellery. But the underlying idea that stars can confer
auspiciousness on human actions remains intact. India today is witnessing a
resurgence of many old superstitions and rituals couched in pseudo-scientific
language to appeal to modern sensibilities. Economic and
technological modernisation, then, is no guarantee of a secular culture. The
creation of a secular culture requires active engagement with the religious
common sense of the people. It is also true, as some scientist friends have
suggested, that good science can exist and even thrive in otherwise
superstitious societies. It is true that modern science has become relatively
autonomous of the larger culture. It has developed a naturalistic metaphysics
and an empiricist methodology of its own which is often at odds with how the
workings of nature are interpreted in the rest of the culture. It is possible
for scientists trained in the culture of their own arcane specialisation to do
great science, without ever having to engage with the religious interpretations
of nature that prevail outside the walls of the lab. The two cultures simply
dont seem to talk the same language, even though they, in fact, often offer
competing explanations for the same phenomena (e g, Darwins evolution by
natural selection, and spiritual evolution as propagated by integral yoga
of Sri Aurobindo and his followers, or the Vedic creationism through the
agency of karma and rebirth, as propounded by the followers of Krishna
Consciousness). But, while science can thrive in otherwise irrational
societies, there is a huge price to pay for the gap. It is not a coincidence,
in my opinion, that a majority of Americans who believe in divine creation over
Darwinian evolution should have believed the Bush administrations completely
bogus case linking Iraq with terrorism: in both cases, there is a faith-based,
rather than evidence-driven, reasoning at work. In both societies, there is a
need for scientists to stand up for critical reasoning and sound evidence both
inside and outside the laboratory. The need to speak up for, defend and
advocate scientific temper is far greater in India where superstitions and
pseudo-sciences have a far deeper hold on the popular psyche and where they
often
make a difference between life and death, between dignity and indignity of
caste and other hierarchies. To conclude, Indian modernity will remain
incomplete and schizophrenic until the time it is animated by the spirit of
critical reasoning. Kants motto: sapere aude! Have courage to use your own
reason! remains as vital for India today as it was in his own time. Special
pleas to spiritualise nature and science in the name of Vedic holism may make
us feel superior over other faiths and cultures, but it will not help us shed
our own prejudices and superstitions. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Notes
[This is a much revised version of the paper that appeared in Eastern
Quarterly, Vol 3, Issue II, July-August 2005, pp 75-85.] 1 In modern
Hinduism, "the Vedas" have come to mean a loose, miscellaneous category of
texts which refer not only to the four canonical Sanskrit Vedas, but to all
kinds of post-Vedic, extra-Vedic and even anti-Vedic texts. Neo-Hindu gurus and
intellectuals have honed the tradition of claiming Vedic origin of, or at
least Vedic parallels with, any idea that they find useful for perpetuating an
essentially spirit-based and hierarchical cosmology of the Vedas and Vedanta.
For a hilarious (but misleading and dangerous) example, see Deepak Chopra's
best-seller, Quantum Healing, Bantam Books, New York, 1989, where he puts a
spin of quantum physics on developments in neurosciences as if they were merely
re-stating the spiritual truths known to Vedic rishis.
2 By scientism, as it appears in religious apologetics, I mean the positivist
belief that if religion is to be made respectable and meaningful, it must be
"scientific", that is, its metaphysics and epistemology must meet the standards
of empirical testability that apply in modern science. This leads to recasting
traditional metaphysics in scientific-sounding theories. Rather than use the
empirical methodology of modern science to challenge metaphysics, and create a
non-metaphysical, non-supernatural basis for religiosity as was the intent of
logical positivists and empiricists scientism in the hands of religious
apologists turns modern science into a vehicle of traditional metaphysics.
Hindus are not alone: American Protestantism also has strong strains of
scientism. For a comparison, see 'Secularisation without Secularism?' in my
Wrongs of the Religious Right: Reflections on Science, Secularism and Hindutva,
Three Essays Collective, New Delhi, 2005.
3 Here I continue the dialogue I began regarding the place of science in
Indian culture in my earlier work, notably, in Prophets Facing Backward:
Postmodernism, Science and Hindu Nationalism, Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2004,
and my more recent 'Response to my Critics', Social Epistemology, Vol 19, no 1,
2005, 147-91.
4 Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
UK, 1995.
5 Alan Kors, Preface, The Encycopedia of the Enlightenment, Vol 1, Oxford
University Press, New York, 2003.
6 For a fascinating study of the Enlightenment in Britain, see Roy Porter, The
Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment, WW
Norton, London, 2000.
7 Stephen Eric Bronner, Reclaiming the Enlightenment, Columbia University
Press, New York, p 7.
8 While Kant provided a defence of empiricism against the radical scepticism
of Hume, he also limited empirical knowledge to the phenomenal world only and
denied the possibility that we will ever know if empirical knowledge of
phenomena corresponds to the structures of the real world, the world-in-itself.
As Kant himself admitted, he had set limits on science to make room for faith.
Ernst Cassirer's classic The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, Princeton
University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1951, is still one of the best explorations of
the implications of Kantian philosophy for the Enlightenment.
9 Jurgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, MIT Press,
Cambridge, 1989.
10 Isaiah Berlin's writings remain the best starting point for understanding
the opposition to the Enlightenment. See Isaiah Berlin, 'The
Counter-Enlightenment' in The Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Vol II,
Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1973.
11 I have shown the overlap between Hindu nationalist and postcolonial views on
science in my earlier writings. See note 3.
12 See Martin Marty and Scott Appleby, The Glory and the Power: The
Fudnamentalist Challenge to the Modern World, Beacon Press, Boston, 1992 for a
good description of the enclaves of orthodoxy.
13 Jeffery Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in
Weimar and the Third Reich, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1984.
14 For a classic statement of yoga as a source of knowledge and control of the
natural world, see Vivekananda's exposition of Patanjli's Yoga Sutra in his
well known lectures on raj yoga. Critical reflections on this kind of
"spiritual empiricism" are few and far between. But see Willhelm Halbfass, 'The
Concept of Experience' in India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding, SUNY
Press, Albany, 1988 and Anantanand Rambachan, The Limits of Scripture:
Vivekananda's Interpretation of the Vedas, University of Hawaii Press,
Honolulu, 1994. For a stinging critique of treating mystic experience as having
ontological references, see Agehananda Bharati, The Light at the Centre:
Context and Pretext of Modern Mysticism, Ross Erikson Publishers, Santa
Barbara, 1982.
15 I have been at the receiving end of these kinds of slurs from Hindutva
supporters.
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