Postcolonialism and the myth of Hindu “renaissance”

The roots of “Vedic science” can be traced to the so-called Bengal Renaissance, which in turn was deeply influenced by the Orientalist constructions of Vedic antiquity as the “Golden Age” of Hinduism. Heavily influenced by German idealism and British romanticism, important Orientalists including H.T. Colebrooke, Max Mueller and Paul Deussen tended to locate the central core of Hindu thought in the Vedas, the Upanishads and, above all, in the Advaita Vedanta tradition of Shankara. Despite the deeply anti-rational and idealistic (that is, anti-naturalistic) elements of Advaita Vedanta, key Hindu nationalist reformers – from Raja Ram Mohun Roy and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee to Swami Vivekananda – began to find in it all the elements … Read the rest

The Vedas as books of science

In 1996, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) of the United Kingdom (U.K.) produced a slick looking book, with many well-produced pictures of colourfully dressed men and women performing Hindu ceremonies, accompanied with warm, fuzzy and completely sanitised description of the faith. The book, Explaining Hindu Dharma: A Guide for Teachers, offers “teaching suggestions for introducing Hindu ideas and topics in the classroom” at the middle to high school level in the British schools system. The authors and editors are all card-carrying members of the VHP. The book is now in its second edition and, going by the glowing reviews on the back-cover, it seems to have established itself as a much-used educational resource in … Read the rest

Shanghai in January 1993 was hardly the Shanghai it had become a decade later, but most people – including me, a first-time visitor – had an inkling of the great flourish that was to come. It was a freezing Chinese Spring Festival, and although the streets were largely empty and most of the shops shut, one sensed its coiled, irrepressible energy. The flurry of commercial development and the boom in the city’s real estate market would begin later, and the vast, space-age business district of Pudong was still in its infancy, but the city was on its way to becoming the cornerstone of the new “China Century”.

Wandering through the streets, dazed by the cold and looking for breakfast, we … Read the rest

Women’s studies, African-American studies, gay and lesbian studies programs, and the moving of non-western and non-“traditional” studies in general out of the anthropology and sociology departments and into the academy on their own terms is the great success story of contemporary higher education. This advance has come along with, and in large part happened because of, the rising influence outside of philosophy departments of thinkers like Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour, and Judith Butler who pull on insights derived from the writings of Nietzsche. Nietzschean perspectivalism lies at the heart of the standard justification for culture studies. While the desire for the intellectual egalitarianism that accompanies perspectivalism comes from a good place, perspectivalism has well-known problems at its core that stand … Read the rest

Those of us in the “flyover” region of the Midwest were treated to a horrific spectacle yesterday clearly illustrating how sick our “culture” (and I use this word in its broadest possible sense) has become. Dennis Greene, 31, was convicted by a jury of murdering his 28 year-old wife, Tara. Greene was sentenced to life in prison for nearly decapitating the junior high school math teacher and mother of their seven-year old son, Chi’An, who witnessed the murder.

If this is not enough, there is more to the story. After the murder, Greene fled to his hometown of Chicago hoping to evade authorities. There he shot a “rap video” where he boasted of “killin’ da bitch” and “cut her neck … Read the rest

It is a story worthy of a great Romantic pen, how a few Celtic monks, cloistered on remote, wind-blown islands with only their prayer beads and a few nervous sheep for company saved Western Civilization. It was nothing less than a miracle that as the darkness descended upon Europe, Greek and Latin manuscripts were being first introduced to the Emerald Isle where generations of monks would dedicate their lives to copying and preserving the ancient texts. Later, descendents of these selfsame clerics would carry their precious cargo to European monasteries where the Italian, the German and the Frenchman waited to be enlightened.

A pretty idea, as I say, but about as genuine as the jackalope. A truer picture would show … Read the rest

Religious Fundamentalisms, Modernist and Postmodernist

Recently I was invited to a conference of scholars of science-studies at the beautiful, lake-side campus of Cornell University. The agenda of this conference was to examine the influence of science studies on the wider “polity and the world” outside confines of the Ivory Tower. The conferees considered the influence of their discipline on just about every social movement that dealt with such things as biotech and computers to music (or rather, sound, as in “sound studies”). Completely missing from the agenda, even in this post-9/11 world that we live in, was any reference to the family of reactionary social movements that is making full use of the core ideas of science studies. I refer … Read the rest

The hostility to science goes back for millennia. We don’t like brute facts, we don’t like having to check our wishes and hopes against the reality of how the world is. We’ll submit to the necessity for survival purposes, we’ll learn what we need to know of leopards and rabbits, fire and ice, but beyond that we want the right to believe our fantasies. ‘May God us keep/From single vision, and Newton’s sleep!’ said Blake, and Wordsworth agreed: ‘Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;/Our meddling intellect/Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:–We murder to dissect.’

But there is a new kind of animus that has become conventional wisdom in many universities over the past three decades. It goes by the … Read the rest

When Tony Blair first became leader of the Labour Party in 1994, the Sun
newspaper, a British tabloid, took to calling him ‘Bambi’, presumably in the
hope that the nickname would become established in the public consciousness.
It did not, of course, for it lacked any kind of resonance with what people
could believe about Blair. He wasn’t a child, his leadership was anything but
childlike, and he lacked the requisite number of legs to be a baby deer. Not
discouraged, the Sun was at it again in 2001, this time when Iain Duncan
Smith became leader of the Conservative Party. In what was probably a desperate
attempt to establish his man of the people credentials, it started to call … Read the rest

The rise of the precautionary principle in public policy and international
relations has called into question the role technological innovation should
be allowed to play in society. [1] According to the precautionary principle, no
novel technology, regardless of its benefits, should be deployed if it poses
risks to human health or the environment. [2] Under some interpretations
of the principle, these risks need not even be testable hypotheses, but may
merely be posited. [3] In the latter case, the principle merely
says that technological innovation is too dangerous to be allowed.

Critics of technological advance have also invented a doctrine which is antithetical
to the precautionary principle, and dubbed it the ‘technological imperative.’
In … Read the rest

Are all religions identical? Many people seem to think so, especially if they’ve taken a world religion course in college or read a Joseph Campbell book. They will tell you that all religions teach us to value life, to refrain from harming others, and to renounce selfishness. Therefore, so the thinking goes, all religions are identical in both content and purpose. The corollary assumption is that there can never be legitimate conflicts between religious beliefs, therefore all disagreements between followers of different religions must be fundamentally illegitimate. These conflicts allegedly stem from simple misunderstandings or unwillingness to admit common ground.

Such a view is certainly comforting, since it suggests that religious factions need only to listen to each other to … Read the rest

It is an article of the most unshakable faith that the personal, familiar, Montaignian–call it what you will–essay is minor stuff, a second-rate employment undertaken by bankrupt novelists and other failures. In literary rankings its place lay well below the novella and scarcely above the book review. “Essays, reviews, imitations, caricatures are all minor stuff,” wrote the New York Times critic in a recent review of a Max Beerbohm biography. In this conviction he has more support than a sports bra. Indeed, the personal essay’s most esteemed and acclaimed practitioners have to a man voiced misgivings about their trade. E.B. White called the essay a second-rate form. Cynthia Ozick, certainly one of the best contemporary essayists, may not specifically refer … Read the rest

Inferiority as a Luxury Item

Before the Industrial Revolution, artists and artisans would strive to make a work as perfect as possible. They used the technologies of their time to make as fine a product as their skill and limited technology allowed. Given the long painstaking efforts involved in creation, such items were few in number and available to only a minuscule number of elites. They were the crowning achievement of their time and brought great prestige to those fortunate few who owned them. Renaissance painters used the mathematics of perspective to create their trompe l’oeil (a French term meaning “trick the eye.”) David Hockney’s recent claim that some of the Renaissance artists achieved realism by using a camera obscura … Read the rest

The case for astrology

An expanded abstract of the article in Journal of Consciousness Studies Volume 10 (6-7), June-July 2003, pages 175-198 with four tables and 85 references. This particular issue of JCS is devoted to parapsychology and related matters, and is also available in book form. Details, abstracts, and the full article in pdf format are available at www.imprint.co.uk/books/psi.html. See also the user-friendly www.astrology-and-science.com/ for critical articles on astrology by the same authors and others.

Why astrology?

Astrology has one sure thing in common with parapsychology – a highly visible outpouring of market-driven nonsense that threatens to bury the work of serious researchers. Just as parapsychology to the ordinary person means ghost busting and psychic phonelines, so … Read the rest

Is there a conflict between science and humanism? Jeremy Stangroom thinks so. Science, he argues, is necessarily reductive, and reductive science undermines humanist ideas about phenomena such as consciousness or free will. Humanists, therefore, are forced to reject perfectly good scientific theories that don’t fit with their particular worldview. A good example, he suggests, is my own critique of what I call ‘mechanistic’ science. I am, apparently, a closet Lysenkoist (though I had always thought that such guilt-by-association argument itself smacks of Stalinist rhetoric).

To understand what is wrong with Stangroom’s argument, let us accept for the moment his claim that science will eventually show ‘the stuff of the inner life of human beings – consciousness, agency, will, sensation, etc’ … Read the rest

In Yichang, in central China, the site of the infamous and globally reviled Three Gorges Project, something strange is happening. After five days travelling along the Yangtze River, your correspondent is beginning to think that in itself, the Three Gorges might not have been such a bad thing after all.

The project – designed primarily to control flooding, improve navigation, and generate power – consists of the world’s largest dam in the middle reaches of the world’s third longest river, and has become something of a cause célèbre, uprooting over a million residents on the banks of the Yangtze and causing untold environmental damage.

Just before our party reached the mountain that is supposed to resemble a prone Chairman Mao … Read the rest

It’s not easy to write critically about humanism from a secular perspective.
The problem has to do with the fluid nature of the concept "humanism".
It has no single, precise meaning and there is little agreement about its constituent
elements. As a result, to criticise humanism is to run the risk of being accused
of a "straw-man" fallacy; that is, the fallacy of misrepresenting
a position or argument in order to make it easier to criticise. It is easy to
see how this might happen. Humanism isn’t any one particular thing. If
a good argument can be made against any one of the things, amongst others,
that it might be, then likely you’ll find that everyone disavows that
particular … Read the rest

The critics of modern life never cease to amaze us. Everyday there is a new
crisis of modernity that threatens our continued existence. Nowhere is this
more evident than in agriculture. We’re told that the use of pesticides is generating
soaring cancer rates, yet there is nothing in the statistics which confirms
this alarmist rhetoric. It is claimed that the Green Revolution led to a decline
in vegetable production. Never mind that in most areas where there were significant
advances in the production of modern grain varieties, there were also the largest
increases in non-grain consumption; and that the world’s population is eating
a more diverse diet than ever before. And also, never mind that without the
yield increases in … Read the rest

In these dark times holding out against the constant barrage of pop culture
has become more challenging than surviving a succession of carpet bombings.
Pop music seeps and swells from the ceilings and nooks of shops, offices, and
coffeehouses. Television sets are now permanent fixtures in airports, post offices,
saloons, and doctor’s offices – in fact, one dangled precariously above me as
I suffered a recent root canal, tuned to Oprah no less, which was far
more painful than the surgery itself. I commenced to pray the set would dislodge
from the ceiling and put me out of my misery, but Yahweh spared me – evidently
to continue His good work.

So much of popular culture is so indescribably bereft … Read the rest

Immigrant, ethnic minority, asylum-seeker – slivers of insinuation separate
the meanings of each term in contemporary Britain. Ethnic minority, black and
Asian, cultural diversity – clouds of obfuscation have distinguished contemporary
arts in Britain over the past 30 years.

That I draw an analogy between socio-political and artistic terminology is
not incidental: socio-political concerns have determined arts-funding policy
for the past three decades. Ever since, in fact, the publication of Naseem Khan’s
seminal report for the Arts Council in 1976, ‘The Arts Britain Ignores’. This
year sees the launch of yet another arts initiative, designed to heap attention
on ‘culturally diverse’ arts, aptly titled ‘decibel’ (noise). Why do we need
a showcase of ethnic arts? And what noise is decibel… Read the rest