Thoughts 6 October 2021

 

An outstanding consideration of Keynes & his legacy.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

Market economies were not a distinct realm, independent of the state, operating according to their own principles. The rhythms of trade, their logic and mechanisms, had to be defined and supported by political authority. His [Keynes's] battle over reparations and inter-ally debt had made him a lifelong enemy of austerity—the doctrine that governments can best heal troubled economies by slashing government spending and paying down debt. When a government was burdened with too much debt, Keynes had come to believe, it was generally better to swear off the debt than to pay it off by burdening the public with a lower standard of living.

N.B. My insight is that all economics, or at least macroeconomics, is political economy.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

I am not suggesting that every Jew go and talk to a neo-Nazi, or that historians reconsider whether the Holocaust happened, or that psychiatry revisit the claim that homosexuals are mentally ill. The Constitution of Knowledge owes its efficiency to producing a body of knowledge, an archive of settled claims which do not need constant relitigating. The reality-based community is conservative, in the sense that it conserves what it has learned and reopens closed accounts reluctantly. When new evidence turns up or experts develop new arguments, then reexamining an established claim may be in order, but the vast majority of claims against settled knowledge do not deserve research budgets or investigative-reporting teams and are rightly ignored.

sng: To wit, it's all a matter of sound judgment, which, like all human endeavors, remains fallible. But we must work with what we've got, knowing all the time that we could be wrong. But not all probabilities of wrongness are the same.

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

His [Lorenzo Valla, Italian humanist, 1407-1457] project was to replace Scholastic logic and metaphysics with dialectic and rhetoric, as understood by Cicero, Quintilian, and Boethius. This involved a revival of the arguing on both sides of a question, the urbane skepticism and topical argument of classical rhetoric, in opposition to Scholastic “dogmatism.” As in Cicero, an emphasis on the likely followed. After dividing premises of arguments into the necessary and the likely, Valla draws distinctions among the latter. “But as long as the reason is not plainly true but half-true and half-certain, then the conclusion is not necessary but half-necessary, which when it has much force is called likely and credible, that is, exceedingly possible, and when it has scant force is called possible, that is, scarcely likely or credible.”

sng: Compare this thought with the preceding quote from Rauch. Thinking along the same lines?

Prometheus Rising

Robert Anton Wilson

As civilization has advanced, the pack-bond (the tribe, the extended family) has been broken. This is the root of the widely diagnosed “anomie” or “alienation” or “existential anguish” about which so many social critics have written so eloquently. What has happened is that the conditioning of the bio-survival bond to the gene-pool has been replaced by a conditioning of bio-survival drives to hook onto the peculiar tickets which we call “money”.

sng: Does money equal energy? Food? Status? Prestige? Love? Security? In some way, I would answer a qualified "yes" to each of these questions.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

[T]heir [poor Indians'] hardships were primarily derived from inequalities of wealth and power among Bihar’s [an Indian state] castes and from the corrosive effect of these inequalities, when combined with severe resource scarcities, on the state’s political institutions.

sng: If you're not worried about the growing inequalities here in the U.S. and the decline in the efficacy and legitimacy of our governments, then this is an example of why you should be.

Perennial Philosophy

Arthur Versluis

From the perspective of perennial philosophy, time is not separate from but manifests timelessness. The unfolding of patterns in nature has its origin in timeless numbers and geometry that, in turn, are principles radiating from the timeless realm of order prior to the cosmos that we see now.

The Science of Likability

Patrick King

When people subconsciously begin to associate you with positive moods and emotions, you are going to be the bell that makes people smile without realizing why

Thoughts for the Day: Monday 28 June 2021

 

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

Attention, however, intrinsically is a way in which, not a thing: it is intrinsically a relationship, not a brute fact. It is a ‘howness’, a something between, an aspect of consciousness itself, not a ‘whatness’, a thing in itself, an object of consciousness. It brings into being a world and, with it, depending on its nature, a set of values.

“Studies have shown that 90% of error in thinking is due to error in perception. If you can change your perception, you can change your emotion and this can lead to new ideas. Logic will never change emotion or perception.”

--Edward DeBono

“People prefer their sources of information to be highly correlated. Then all the messages you get are consistent with each other and you’re comfortable."

— Daniel Kahneman

One way to spot a poor thinker is to see how many of their decisions boomerang back to them. If poor thinkers make poor decisions it stands to reason those decisions will eventually create more problems. More problems consume more time, leaving them even less time to think about new problems.

The time used to correct poor thinking comes from the time that could be used for good thinking.

Good thinkers understand a simple truth: you can’t make good decisions without good thinking and good thinking requires time.

Good thinking is expensive but poor thinking costs a fortune.

--Farnum Street blog

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

The relevant sense of reasonable, and the phrase reasonable doubt, appeared in the sixteenth-century Scholastic, Suarez, while the reasonable man has an ancestor in the steady man of medieval canon law: If a man and woman are surprised by her father and compelled to marry, the man’s consent is null and the marriage void if the fear inflicted on him is such as would coerce a “steady man.”

Speculum Mentis

R. G. Collingwood

History is the knowledge of an infinite whole whose parts, repeating the plan of the whole in their structure, are only known by reference to their context. But since this context is always incomplete, we can never know a single part as it actually is.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

Most Westerners who travel in India find rickshaws discomforting. Although I have used them a lot over the years, in part because I sometimes feel safer to have company in strange parts of Indian cities, I have always found the experience morally jarring. Westerners tend to be big and heavy compared to Indians, and rickshaw drivers often have to use almost all their strength to move their machines with one of us on board. It seems reprehensible to sit in relative comfort on the back of a rickshaw while a nearly destitute person pedals one around for a few rupees. On the other hand, those rupees are vitally important for the driver, and it seems just as reprehensible to walk to spare oneself guilt.

N.B. This captures my feeling as well. We rarely used human-powered rickshaws, but when we did, I felt both uncomfortable but gratified to have given this man [sic] something (generous] towards his daily bread.

New Pathways in Psychology

Colin Wilson

[Alfred] Adler must be regarded as the fatherfigure of the new generation in psychology: [Victor] Frankl, [Abraham] Maslow, [Medard] Boss. What he called ‘the affirmative unfolding of the organism’ was, in fact, a recognition of the basic evolutionary drive of human beings, that man is an evolutionary animal, and that neurosis is the frustration of this evolutionary drive. In dealing with neurosis, Adler was less concerned to trace its roots in the patient’s childhood than to understand its meaning, what it was driving towards.

An Essay on the 'New' Existentialism

Colin Wilson

Heidegger, like Hemingway, claims that man only knows himself in the face of death or crisis (‘only a bullfighter lives his life all the way up’)—we may recollect, for example, Anna Karenina’s recognition, as she flings herself under a train, that death is the last thing she wants. This is the basis of their negative judgement on human life: that even the most intelligent of us are blinded by triviality until crisis shocks us awake (and by then it is usually too late).

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

The Chilean people had made a mistake in electing Allende—actually only a plurality of Chileans had been mistaken. Given what he knew, what he expected, and what he feared, Henry Kissinger was not going to let the mere fact of a free election stand in his way of dealing with a potential threat to the United States. “I don’t see why we have to stand by and watch a country go Communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.” The statement looks a lot different if one has the rise of Adolf Hitler in mind.

The Ingenuity Gap: Can We Solve the Problems of the Future? by Thomas Homer-Dixon

 

                                                 Publication date of  2000: still relevant? 

This past September, shortly after publication, I read Thomas Homer-Dixon's Commanding Hope (link to my review) because I'm a big fan of his work. I read his The Upside of Down shortly after learning about it, and I've read many of his shorter pieces (some of my notes here & here) and watched some of his presentations. And I read his first work intended for a general audience, The Ingenuity Gap--except I hadn't finished it! (This used to happen to me on occasion when I had a full-time law practice plus family, etc. You know how it is.) And, to be honest, one other excuse (weak) must be acknowledged visually:

Of course, my "current read" doesn't scowl at me or chastise me when I set it aside to "take a look" into another book. Oh, no! An uncompleted book just looks at me hauntingly, like a hungry puppy begging at the dining table, as it sits silently on my bookshelf or (more often these days) when it occasionally pops up on my Kindle as a specter from among the uncompleted books of my reading past.

Anyway, I got a copy of The Ingenuity Gap and decided to dig in, expecting that I'd still enjoy it, and this time I'll read it to completion! But then I paused. I looked at the publication date: 2000. Twenty years ago! A generation ago! It was published before 9/11, before the Crash of 2008, and before the rise of authoritarianism and the attendant decline of democracy and the rule of law in the U.S. and elsewhere. Would it still prove relevant, or would I find it dated by fast-changing events? Well, there's good news and there's bad news. First, the good news: this book is still timely and more than relevant. And the bad news? This book is still timely and more than relevant. And why is this "bad news"? Because Homer-Dixon catalogs examples of, and future prospects for, problems from which we can't extricate ourselves.  We create problems so perplexing and entangling that our ingenuity won't be able to tame them. Homer-Dixon describes his thesis: 

In this book I’ll argue that the complexity, unpredictability, and pace of events in our world, and the severity of global environmental stress, are soaring. If our societies are to manage their affairs and improve their well-being they will need more ingenuity—that is, more ideas for solving their technical and social problems. But societies, whether rich or poor, can’t always supply the ingenuity they need at the right times and places. As a result, some face an ingenuity gap: a shortfall between their rapidly rising need for ingenuity and their inadequate supply.

Homer-Dixon, Thomas. The Ingenuity Gap (p. 1). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Homer-Dixon explores his thesis via both arm-chair theorizing and field exploration, interviewing the wise and talking with the marginalized as he strives to come to grips with the scope of the challenges that he investigates. As a result of his investigations that he undertook on the verge of the twenty-first century, he concludes that 

In the twenty-first century, the growing disparities between those who adapt well and those who don’t will hinder our progress towards a shared sense of human community and erode our new global society’s stability and prosperity. The next century is likely, for this reason, to be a time of fragmentation and turmoil, of divisions and rivalry between winners and losers, and of humanity’s patent failure to manage its affairs in critical domains. Id., pp. 1-2.

Homer-Dixon explains his central concept--ingenuity--in the following summary: 

Ingenuity, as I define it here, consists not only of ideas for new technologies like computers or drought-resistant crops but, more fundamentally, of ideas for better institutions and social arrangements, like efficient markets and competent governments. Id., pp.2-3.

Homer-Dixon charts a course that will avoid readers branding him as simply a Cassandra or as a Polyanna. He notes and appreciates the advances and advantages of technology, the market, and Western modernity in general, but he declines to accept the rather naive optimism of technological optimists, such as Julian Simon (still perhaps the most prominent technological-economic optimist of the time). Homer-Dixon states his conclusion succinctly: 

But—and this is the critical “but”—we should not jump to the conclusion that the supply of ingenuity always increases in lockstep with our ingenuity requirement: while it’s true that necessity is often the mother of invention, we can’t always rely on the right kind of ingenuity appearing when and where we need it. In many cases, the complexity and speed of operation of today’s vital economic, social, and ecological systems exceed the human brain’s grasp. Very few of us have more than a rudimentary understanding of how these systems work. They remain fraught with countless “unknown unknowns,” which makes it hard to supply the ingenuity we need to solve problems associated with these systems. 

In this book, I explore a wide range of other factors that will limit our ability to supply the ingenuity required in the coming century. For example, many people believe that new communication technologies strengthen democracy and will make it easier to find solutions to our societies’ collective problems, but the story is less clear than it seems. The crush of information in our everyday lives is shortening our attention span, limiting the time we have to reflect on critical matters of public policy, and making policy arguments more superficial. Id., pp. 4-5. 

Perhaps you can see in the above-quote why I find Homer-Dixon's book still quite relevant and useful: he anticipates Donald Rumsfeld's description of the problems arising from the ill-considered Iraq War, the "unknown unknowns" (and they certainly exist in abundance). And Homer-Dixon's  remarks about technology and democracy could have been written today as we struggle with political developments in the age of Twitter, Facebook, and "Parler." 

I'll conclude this initial part of my review with Homer-Dixon's description of what the remainder of the book entails and how he structures it: 

These pages also tell the story of a journey of discovery—a quest—that took me around the world and to the farthest reaches of our knowledge. This journey was a search for the pieces of a puzzle—pieces that when fitted together would give me a picture of how we use our practical knowledge—ingenuity in all its variety—to adapt to rapid and complex change. . . . 

Because it’s a puzzle, each piece plays an important part, and I must describe them in detail. They include recent theories of turbulent systems, of Earth’s ecology and atmosphere, of the evolution of the human brain, of how we produce wealth, of the factors that shape and reshape our technologies, and of the forces behind war and terrorism. I tell a story about the many forms of complexity around us and about our biological capacity to grasp, manage, and benefit from this complexity. I also tell a story about how we are altering our planet’s most fundamental rhythms and processes. Six metaphors are woven through this story—metaphors of flight, faces, light, the night sky, pyramids, and water. For me, these metaphors have enormous emotional and spiritual power, and I hope they can aid us in answering one of the most basic questions humanity faces: How can we solve the problems of the future? Id., p. 7.

(Homer-Dixon's lucid explanations and summaries make quotation--perhaps excessive quotation--a constant temptation.) I'll limit my further discussion of the contents of this book to a couple of tales in the book that especially resonated with me out from among the many stories he shares, the many interviews and discussions he held, and the many ideas that he develops. 

The first tale in the book that I'll relate is his account of  UA flight 232 on 19 July 1989 (my mother's birthday). On that day, with 296 people aboard, while flying over northwest Iowa, what can only (and rightfully) be described as a freak accident occurred. Homer-Dixon describes the scene:

Twelve thousand meters above the U.S. Midwest, shards of the [tail] engine’s fan rotor cut through the rear of the aircraft, shredding its hydraulic systems. As fluid bled from hydraulic tubing, the pilots in the front of the plane lost command of the rudder, elevators, and ailerons essential to stabilizing and guiding the craft. Immediately, the plane twisted into a downward right turn . . . [and] was out of control. Id., p. 11. 

I will spare a further account of the incident except to say that to get that plane on the ground without a spiraling crash was an example of extraordinary ingenuity and professional deportment. Lives were lost, but enough were saved to label the result a miracle of sorts. But Homer-Dixon's point has nothing to do with divine intervention and everything to do with the benefits and limits of human ingenuity. It's an enthralling (and frightening) tale that sets the scene for other of his (less harrowing) accounts of ingenuity realized, or conversely, the failure of ingenuity to manifest a solution. 

The other portion of the book that struck me on a personal note was his account of his time in India. Homer-Dixon, an MIT-trained political scientist, began his career specializing in the relationship between resource scarcity and political violence and went to India to conduct research. His description of dealing with the Indian bureaucracy to access records is spot-on. My wife and I lived in India for nearly two years, and while I worked privately, she worked with government institutions. So while I had only limited (but more than enough) contact with the bureaucracy, my visits to her workplace and her after-work tales provided me vivid accounts and lasting memories about her encounters and observations. Hearing Homer-Dixon's tales of his struggles sparked a joy of recognition.) 

And during this early sojourn to India, he had photographed a young girl in Patna, and upon returning, he wanted to see if he could find her to update her situation.

So he traveled again to Patna after visiting Las Vegas --what a contrast! Here's what Homer-Dixon writes about his arrival in Patna: 

Heat. Everywhere there was heat. It surrounded and penetrated me. It defined the world around me. Sweat gushed out of my body, running in rivulets down my chest and the small of my back, gluing my shirt to my skin. Everything was tangibly hot: tables, chairs, and pens were weirdly warm to the touch, because everything outside my body was hotter than my body. The water in my bottle felt like soup on my tongue. Any movement of the air—a draft, a slight breeze—was a relief; while any movement of my body or mind was an effort. Physical action, thought, even consciousness itself seemed to take place in slow motion, weighed down and dulled by the relentless, inescapable heat. I had finally arrived in Patna. Unfortunately, it was early June, and my visit had coincided with one of the worst heat waves in India’s history. Every day, the temperature soared above 45 degrees Celsius, sometimes hitting 50 degrees, while hundreds of people across the country died of heat stroke, dehydration, and heart failure. Id. p. 365.

I never visited Patna, but we lived in Jaipur and spent time in Dehli, so when Homer-Dixon talks about oppressive heat, I know whereof he speaks. And, in addition, I can't help noticing how his account of his experience in India in the late 1990s with extreme heat anticipates the opening pages of Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future (2020), which is set in Uttar Pradesh (which lies between Bihar, where Patna is located, and Rajasthan, where Jaipur is located). Homer-Dixon continues his account of India, and he describes the political situation in India at the time of his visit. His description seems no different than what I perceived when we were there (2012-2014) and it's probably no different today, the rise of Modi and the BJP notwithstanding. He also continues to provide commentary about his latest visit to Patna and goes on to contrast that experience with his perceptions about Las Vegas. And while I've never been to Vegas (the desire is nearly nil), his frustration with Patna rang true, although, to be fair, overall, we greatly enjoyed our time in India; it's just that sometimes there were--as one friend put it--"heavy India days." Homer-Dixon writes: 

A wave of bitterness about India swept over me—it was a feeling I had experienced many times before, but Patna, at this particular moment, seemed to distill its essence. From the point of view of a rich, pampered Westerner, the people of Patna seemed to have capitulated to ugliness, wretchedness, and inhumanity towards each other. They didn’t do even the small things, like fix that front door, that would significantly improve their lives. The place was a technological, social, and moral calamity. It was a disgrace.

He then goes on to discuss the contrast between Patna and Las Vegas: 

If Las Vegas is one vision of the future of urbanized humanity, I felt, Patna is another. Both are extreme and disturbing visions, but both highlight distinct and very real aspects of humanity’s potential. Las Vegas is a vision of the future as a hedonistic, postmodernist fantasy sustained by the heroic application of ingenuity—a lobotomized world of distraction and diversion. Patna, on the other hand, is a vision of despair, cruelty, and vulnerability, where even rudimentary solutions to the technological and social challenges of everyday life are not provided. It is a place of the most grotesque differences in wealth between the rich and the poor where, paradoxically, even the richest aren’t able to enjoy things that members of the middle class in Western societies take for granted. True, they can hire lots of servants, because labor is cheap. But they can’t drink the water running from their taps, if their taps run at all. They can’t rely on a steady supply of electricity. They can’t escape the dust, filth, and pollution that constantly infiltrate their houses, making everything dirty and sometimes making them sick. And they live with a constant, subliminal sense of insecurity, because they are surrounded on all sides by the dispossessed. Most important, whereas in Vegas natural and social realities are usually kept at bay, in Patna they penetrate into the deepest recesses of people’s lives. Even for the richest residents, the heat, bad water, disgusting air, noise, and appalling disparities of the place cannot be avoided. And for the poorest, these things intimately define their lives and who they are. Id., pp. 368-369. 

But, as Homer-Dixon notes, India isn't without ingenuity and innovation, to be sure. But, unfortunately, it's built upon swiss-cheese sets of systems, social and technological. 

And, finally, Homer-Dixon finds the young girl he'd photographed some years before, and he reports on her situation and that of her family, a tale not without hope but with only limited potential for improvement. Homer-Dixon ponders his conclusions: 

I had come all this way in my travels and my learning and exploration. Now was the moment of truth: what did it all mean? Looking out across the Ganges, with a group of Indian children around me, their eyes scanning me in curiosity and silence, I understood that contradictions were at the heart of the story. These contradictions played themselves out on many levels and in many ways. Some were intriguing, and some were productive. Others were frightening. But whatever way these contradictions played out, they rendered the past, present, and future fundamentally ambiguous. I realized that there was no single right or correct interpretation of the world around us, no one answer to my quest, and no single, definitive arrangement of the pieces of the ingenuity puzzle. Id., p. 388-389. 

All of the above is just a small sampling of what this book contains. I've skipped over a lot of the theoretical and more abstract material which is intriguing and well-presented. Homer-Dixon exhibits admirable skills in his ability to move back and forth between his exposition of abstract and theoretical subjects and his compelling human narratives. This skill set gives this book (and his later two books) unique qualities. And as I alluded to earlier, I would have preferred that I'd have found this book less compelling than I did. I would like to have concluded that we humans had realized our predicament and taken affirmative steps to resolve the threats we face, not just to our family and friends, not just to our nation, or to our culture, or "the West," but to the entire world inhabited by human beings. Instead, it strikes me that Homer-Dixon's concerns expressed in this book are now more real, more compelling, and more frightening than when he first wrote it over twenty years ago. But to end on a more optimistic note, Homer-Dixon's account and his recommendations, more implicit than explicit--he tends to teach more by showing than by telling--remain valuable. And insights and recommendations are more valuable now than when he first shared them. Although this book stands alone, it can also be seen as a part of a trilogy along with The Upside of Down and Commanding Hope: a set of works published over the course of a generation that provide us with an extremely important and compelling way to think about our world and how we can--we should--we must--act within it. 

Riots in Jaipur, Kerala, and Throughout India: A Sad & Frightening Story

NYTIMES.COM

Protests Spread Across India Over Divisive Citizenship Law

Several people have been killed as the unrest spreads to new corners of the country, and security forces have cracked down.

I'm deeply saddened to read about the new anti-Muslim law in #India and the resulting violence. Both #Jaipur and the state of #Kerala--where C & I lived about a year-each during our two years in India--reported violence and deaths. In Dehli, where we spent a fair amount of time, the report suggests a police riot (and I suspect other places as well, although some held higher expectations of the #Dehli police). India has, I believe, the second-highest population of Muslims in the world (behind Indonesia), but Indian Muslims have been subject to a great deal of discrimination and mistreatment--including violence. When we were in Thiruvananthapuram (Trivandrum), Kerala, in 2014, Modi was elected prime minister, and I, and many others, thought his election didn't bode well for India and the fraught issue of religious tolerance. Where we lived in Thiruvananthapuram, we had a mosque, a surprising variety of Christian churches, and Hindu temples within a short walking distance of our apartment. And they seemed to play well together. (Of Jaipur, firmly in the center of the solidly Hindu-dominant north but near Muslim areas, I'm less surprised.)

The leadership of Gandhi, Nehru, and Ambedkar (the least known & under-appreciated of this founding triumvirate) attempted to form a religiously-tolerate nation-state, but that has been difficult, as it has been in the U.S. And as the U.S. still suffers the original sin of slavery, so India from its caste system. It's sad but not surprising that these troubles exist and that the BJP under #Modi would attempt to fan and exploit divisions. At one point Modi was barred from traveling to the U.S. because of his perceived role in anti-Muslin riots in #Gujarat in the early 1990s. So again, no surprise.

"A widespread belief is that the Indian government will use both these measures — the citizenship tests and the new citizenship law — to render millions of Muslims who have been living in India for generations stateless." (From the article below.) The words "render . . . stateless" should send a chill through anyone who's read Hannah Arendt or #TimothySnyder, among others. Such moves pave the way for genocide and less lethal forms of discrimination and horror. It's a very sad & alarming story to wake-up to.

Several people have been killed as the unrest spreads to new corners of the country, and security forces have cracked down.

Gun Island: A Novel by Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh’s most recent novel  Gun Island: A Novel, was a joy to read. 

One may quibble, I suppose, whether this book is best described as a novel or as a fable, but under either rubric, it tells a story that takes the reader on a fascinating adventure and that provides a much-appreciated perspective on our world.

The story revolves around a middle-aged Indian-American rare books dealer--Deen--who, during an annual trip to Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), becomes involved in a mystery. Or is it a revelation? Into Deen’s quotidian life in Kolkata come two women; one, a new acquaintance, Piya, is also an Indian emigre to America, and she’s a marine biologist. She’s a skeptical scientist committed to her research into dolphins in the vicinity of the Sundarban islands in the Bay of Bengal, near Kolkata. The other woman, Cinta, is a long-time acquaintance from Venice, a historian, who has experienced what we might call the “paranormal’ or the“super natural” in her long life. Finally, two young men, Rafi and Tipu, are introduced into the plot, and things begin to move--across continents. 

The confluence of the five main characters begins a chain of events that takes Deen to the Sundarban islands, back to his home in Brooklyn, to Los Angeles, to Venice, and onto a ship in the Mediterranean, all to solve a mystery. Or to pursue a vision.  The mystery arises from the legend of the “the gun merchant” (or ‘Bonduki Sadagar’ in Bangla) and “Manasa Devi,” the goddess of snakes and other poisonous creatures. Deen is prodded into exploring this legend in part because of his work as a young doctoral student who wrote his dissertation about a Bengali legend. Although quite reluctant, Deen is compelled by personal connections (realized and hoped for), and he agrees to investigate the claim that there is a shrine in a swampy Sundarban island dedicated to the goddess. The shrine, he hopes, will also provide a memorial of the struggle between the gun merchant and the goddess. Almost against his will, Deen is drawn further and further into discovering and reconstructing the tale of the gun merchant. 

But as Deen attempts to construct an account of the gun merchant, the natural world, the world of snakes and dolphins, for instance, keeps intruding in new and puzzling ways.  To the rational mind, what the characters are experiencing is a sea-change (in part quite literal) in the environment that forces creatures to migrate or die. The natural world and the super natural world keep manifesting in new and unexpected ways. “Super natural”? In a bit of coincidence (or synchronicity), at the same time that I read The Gun Merchant,  I read Jefferey Kripal’s The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind & the Future of Knowledge (2019). In his work, Kripal, a scholar of comparative religion, addresses what is often referred to as the “paranormal,” or as he suggests, the “super natural.” (My review in the works.) Of course, we’re dealing here with a work of fiction, but Ghose doesn’t open or close the door of explanation about what’s going on here;  instead, he leaves the door ajar for us to ponder what lies on the other side. In any event, the confluence of events, by coincidence or synchronicity, natural or “super natural,” comes to a climax on the Mediterranean as a group of illegal immigrants seek to improve their lot in life by coming to Europe. 

Through the course of the novel, we learn about the experience of immigrants, legal and illegal, human and animal. Some are impelled to move in the hope of a better life, others compelled to migrate just to survive in a rapidly deteriorating environment. While providing this account of our rapidly changing world--and the rapidly changing world of the gun merchant in the late 1600s--Ghose doesn’t preach. His story illustrates his points. The connection between the human world and the natural world (to the extent that they could ever be thought truly distinct) is displayed with such story-telling dexterity that Ghose needn’t exposit his themes or provide lengthy accounts from history. We watch the changing tides of history as we learn the story of the gun merchant and the adventures of Deen and his compatriots involved in bringing this quest to a conclusion. For me, it provided a compelling reading experience. 

India & the U.S.: Shared Experiences at the Founding

Stephen Greenleaf shared Mitch Horowitz's post.

48 mins · Bucharest · 

One of the many enjoyable aspects of our two years living in India was the opportunity it provided me to learn more about Indian history. Like all history, Indian history is endlessly fascinating and puzzling, both obscured and revealed by time, and it's the subject of endless debate and more than occasional attempts of kidnapping. History is the neverending story (unless we really muck things up).

Of special interest to me was the movement for Indian independence. I first read a biography of Gandhi in high school after seeing the end of a film about him (no, not the Ben Kinsley-Richard Attenborough bio-pic--I way older than that). Moving to Jaipur that first year allowed me to learn more about Gandhi, Nehru, and the less well-known but quite important Dr. Ambedkar. All three of these leaders were lawyers, and all were educated and trained in Great Britain. Nehru received his education at Harrow, Cambridge, and the Inner Temple; Gandhi trained as a barrister in London; and Ambedkar received Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University in New York (I hear it's a good school) and the London School of Economics, and he trained as a barrister at Gray's Inn. In short, all received extensive educations abroad.

Does this make them somehow less Indian? I think not. In fact, if anything it makes them more Indian, for India is an amazing agglomeration of religions, cultures, languages, and traditions that developed through centuries of intercourse with the wider world, both influencing and being influenced through its long history. As an American, I'm keenly aware of the model that Gandhi's non-violent resistance movement provided to Dr. Martin Luther King's civil rights movement, which was marked by non-violent resistance. Both men drew on a variety of influences: Gandhi on his native Hindu tradition as well as a deep knowledge of Islam and Christianity, the common law tradition, Ruskin, and Tolstoy; King on his native Christian tradition, Gandhi's movement, Thoreau, and the American Constitution.

Indeed, I can't help but note similarities between the founders of democratic, independent India and the founders of the American republic. Both groups were amazingly cosmopolitan in their learning and outlook. While the Americans received less of their education in Britain than their Indian counterparts (travel then was much more arduous), they were unquestionably educated in the British tradition and held significant cultural ties to Britain. Indeed, during the early period of unrest, their desire was for their rights as Englishmen. Both groups turned the highest ideals of the British back upon themselves. Of course, neither group was without fault. Certainly, the legacies of slavery in the U.S. and caste in India create problems yet today. The Indian founders (especially Ambedkar) attempted to deal with issues of caste more forthrightly than the American leaders did with slavery, but the residuals of these evils still create a distorting force field within their respective polities that each nation must continue to work to overcome.

Finally, in addition to their cosmopolitan outlooks and education, the founders of both nations were patriots. Their learning and cosmopolitan outlooks made them aspire to the highest standards for their respective nations. Their love of country--the defining aspect of patriotism--was without parallel. Compare this to the tawdry nationalism--the antithesis of patriotism--that plagues both nations today. Article author Aatish Taseer aptly quotes Nehru: " “Nationalism . . . is essentially an anti-feeling, and it feeds and fattens on hatred against other national groups, and especially against the foreign rulers of a subject country.” Neither nation is now in the grips of a foreign power, at least not a foreign state, but each of our nations is plagued by those who would deny their many varied citizens their rightful share in their highest ideals that these nations have embodied. Whatever the faults and shortcomings of our respective founders, each set has provided us, Indians and Americans, with models of probity, decency, freedom, and justice that we ignore at the risk of our lasting loss.

Mitch Horowitz

January 4 at 8:42pm · 

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Bravo @AatishTaseer for a long overdue reassessment of #Nehru, a figure educated by Theosophists & someone who could be viewed as India's Obama: a complex intellectual who fit in nowhere, and a man we desperately need today. His portrait hangs in our home.

Opinion | Learning to Love Nehru

I used to think India’s first prime minister was embarrassingly westernized. Now I see that he was one of our great thinkers.

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