As in Gandhi, NATO’S Emporium, genocidal khaki
Satori under the Modi tree
As in Gandhi, NATO’S Emporium, genocidal khaki
What’s the difference between a fact and a value judgement? The answer, of course, is ‘Miaow’ – at least, if you ask my neighbor’s cat.
Suppose the cat to be speaking for Hume or Kant or Moore or some other such non-tabby. Let M be the set of all instantiations of Miaow meanings re. fact value hiatus as cognized and received in a given decision context by Roberto Unger. The question arises, is there any fact, in that decision context, which, with some Bayesian probability, is also a value judgement? Suppose there is only one possible way the world can be such that a given fact is true iff a semantically identical deontic proposition is implemented. Here, the value judgement is the condition for the fact. Relaxing the assumption of only one possible world, we can get a Bayesian debate re. the probability that a value is a fact, based on the available M which is uniquely resolved for every Unger.
In this sense, Unger’s M, for some given decision situation, includes the null element. Is it possible to classify all value judgments according to how close they come to the nearest possible fact? If so, M is well ordered provided values are. This suggests a relationship to stochastic dominance in inference based decision theory such that for some given ‘value-aversion’ or ‘fact-aversion’, we can devise a heuristic which has the effect of turning any value judgement into a factual statement with an ‘error term’ related to distance from the null element. In other words, if one fact is a value judgement and it is possible to rank value judgements according to how different they are from the ‘closest possible’ fact, then all value judgements are facts with a bigger or smaller error term and are, for any given degree of value aversion or adhesion, more or less stochastically dominated.
Another approach, which might converge on the above, is to think of Putnam fact/value entanglement as legitimating mixed strategy choice. In this case considerations of Evolutionary stability yield a ranking over M.
2) some sort of ‘real’ Time which evolves and so isn’t really many fingered and has no truck with that Possible Worlds bullshit- i.e. this is a brutalist ‘anything goes’ Presentism, wholly at odds with the fin de siecle, fin du globe, Proustian pathos of Bergsonian duration and which, as such, only attracts Tim Maudlin or Lee Smolin type Soft Left senile delinquents.
Essentially, in Unger’s conception of Time, nothing inter-personal is conserved, Noether’s theorem gains no purchase, so we know the system is dissipative- it throws away information. But, that’s the same thing as erasing the fact/value distinction. But in that case Smolin, Woits et al needn’t actually do any Physics to say String theory is not even wrong because human beings have no right way to agree something is wrong. Thus the only game in town is declaring a theory to be ontologically dysphoric because it isn’t dedicated to ‘making itself at home in the World’- itself constrained to be Unger’s moral gymnasium.
One of the great and abiding pleasures of Religion is the chance to denounce everybody else as a blaspheming, heretic of an apostate who is going to burn for ever and ever in Hell fire because they are so evil and stupid as to pretend that it makes no difference if you say ‘God is really really nice’ as opposed to ‘God is like real real nice, dude.’ Clearly, it is totally Satanic to say the one whereas it is a sign of election to say the other.
This ‘takfirism’- i.e.denouncing all and sundry as apostates- is a perfectly harmless past-time and occurs within all nice, well conducted, households. Baby says ‘Mummy is takfir coz she won’t let me eat dirt, waahn!’ Mummy says ‘Hubby is takfir coz he refuses to buy a new dishwasher.’ Hubby says ‘wifey is like totally takkir because she beats me in her sleep.’ Cat says ‘Miao miao takfir miao miao’.
Essentially, the assurance that everybody else is going to burn in hell fire makes it that much easier to put up with their little foibles.
In every small town and village in India, brothers denounce each other as takfir, teachers denounce the Head Master as takfir, peons denounce their bosses as takfir, it’s a great social glue and enduring source of hilarity.
The U.K Chair of ‘Friends of al Aqsa’, Ismail Patel, thinks, however , that takfirism equals ‘Islamic’ terrorism.
He writes–The term ‘Islamist’ is a political ideology and is unhelpful when employed in this context. The more nuanced term of Takfiri is better suited, which is an ideology viewing liberal democracies as a challenge that corrupts, captures and exploits Muslim people and lands. However what sets them apart is that they view violence as the first and only choice to redress grievances. Historically, the Takfiris have posed violent threats to within Islam and Muslim leaders, and as early as the first century of Islam, they were responsible for assassinating the caliph. Being mindful of the disparity in power, the Takfiris today have relied on terror attacks with high visibility; something that has been termed ‘pornography of violence’. The idea is to entice the liberal states to address the attack with a maximum reciprocity that erodes the very basis upon which the latter’s ideologies are anchored. In effect the strategy is one of engineering a major implosion through a minor explosion.’
Is Ismail right? Was 9/11, ‘Takfiri? What about the 7/7 London attack & the Mumbai terror strike?
The reason given by the perpetrators for 9/11 was that American troops were defiling the holy land of Saudi Arabia. In response, America relocated its troops. 7/7 and the recent Greenwich attack are about British involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, the first of which has ceased and the second of which will soon do so. The Mumbai attack had an I.S.I signature and was intended to derail warming Indo-Pak ties by showing that the Democratic elected Govt. of Pakistan could not control the lunatic fringe.
But this suggests that terror attacks are rational and similar to military operations. Essentially, their purpose is to
1) drive the news cycle and thus gain salience as an obligatory passage point for ineressement
2) change the Cost Benefit calculus for the adversary.
Clearly, both objectives can be instrumentalized by
a) Nation States as part of a strategic notion of ‘force multipliers with plausible deniability’
b) Self important shitheads who enjoy talking shite.
If 9/11 was Takfiri, the demand would have been for the expulsion of all non-Muslims and symbols of non Muslim culture and life-style. Rather, it appears, 9/11 was motivated by the belief that the Saudi regime would crumble without American troops. Nothing of the sort materialised. The Saudis have successfully met the challenge and now appear to see themselves as champions of main stream Sunni modernising Islam rather than exponents of Ibn Taymiyya style Wahhabism.
It is true that in Algeria in the 90’s, there was a ‘takfiri’ type of jihad according to which anyone not killing everyone else was takfir and should be killed- but this craziness, even if not sponsored by the Regime, nevertheless is the reason it is still securely in place while Tunisia and Egypt have fallen and Syria and Yemen are tottering.
The truth is, some terrorists and killers believe those they kill are apostates but most don’t. In any case, tafkirism is only relevant when people belong to the same sect. It is irrelevant when the target belongs to a different religion. In the case of the first hundred years of Islam, all killing arose straightforwardly from a political power struggle. The Ridda wars were about which tribe would dominate and represented a return to pre-Islamic thinking rather than a development within Islam. The rightly guided Caliphs abhorred the shedding of Muslim blood by Muslims. Caliph Uthman could have saved his own life if he’d ordered his supporters to slay the rebels besieging him. Hazrat Ali was killed by a Kharijite still angry that he had not given the order to slaughter those Muslims who opposed him. It is not difficult to say the single word ‘takfir’. The rightly guided Caliphs could have elevated themselves to the level of Emperors or Dictators just by pronouncing this word. Instead, two of them were killed because of their principled stand in this regard.
Nobody suggested that those who were cruelly done to death at Kerbala were apostates- it is ludicrous to think so. Caliph Uthman wasn’t killed because his assassin thought him an apostate- I may mention that Hazrat Hasan & Husayn were among those protecting the Caliph’s house- the issue was purely political.
The reason there was no ‘takfiri’ bloodshed in the first century of Islam is because everybody knew the following story regarding Usama Ibn Zayd.
Despite his accomplishments in helping defeat the Roman army, he is best known as the person Muhammad admonished for killing a man who had got the best of the Muslims in battle and then when Usama approached him to take off his head, he pronounced the words one officially states to become Muslim. Thinking this was just an attempt to spare his life, Usama killed him anyway. When the news of this got back to Muhammad, he asked Usama, “Did you kill him in spite of his professing La ilaha illallah (There is no God but One)?” Usama replied, “O Messenger of Allah! He said it out of fear of our arms.” Muhammad said, “Why did you not cut his heart open to find out whether he had done so sincerely or not?” He continued repeating it until Usama wished he had embraced Islam only that day (so that he could be forgiven for whatever sins he committed before that). (Bukhari, Muslim, Ahmad, Tayalisi, Abu Dawud, Nasa’i, al-`Adni, Abu `Awana, al-Tahawi, al-Hakim, and Bayhaqi.)[2]
It may be that tafkiri terrorism is an issue for an avowedly Islamic state. However, it is not relevant at all to Britain except as a problem internal to the Muslim community.
A Muslim who believes- as most do- that only God knows who is or is not a hypocrite or a heretic or an apostate- i.e. there is no reason for internecine conflict- may still wish to wage war against the West because he believes that it is robbing Muslim countries of their wealth and spreading moral corruption. In fact, a non Muslim may join hands with the Muslim if they share the belief that the West is acting immorally and spreading evil ideas.
Takfirism is totally irrelevant.
Look at this ghazal of Mir Taqi Mir’s-
– ‘vājib kā ho nah mumkin maṣdar ṣifat ṡanā kā/
qudrat se us kī lab par nām āve hai ḳhudā kā
The first line is difficult to make sense of because there is a word-play involvng Arabic grammatical terminology- but it means something like- Though necessary (for salvation), finding the source of ecstatic praise of the name and attributes of God is highly improbable.
A: The learned sages inclined towards both options, some said Subhānallāh (Glory for Allah) is Masdar a verbal noun extracted from the verb Sabaha and some others said Subhānallāh (Glory for Allah) is an Ismul-Masdar again a verbal noun though it is not extracted from any verb i.e. Subhān (Praise) is a Hāla (State) of Wujud (Being) and has no verbal equivalent.
Prof. Pritchett & Prof.S.R. Faruqi’s commentary on this ‘gristly verse of Mir’s’.
The salient points are
1) vajib is taken to be ‘a thing without which something else cannot exist’- i.e. something necessary rather than contingent.
On this reading, Faruqi treats this couplet as straightforward speculative Metaphysics of a Universal kind. Following him, albeit with some reservations, Pritchett gives us this-
This may be meaningful- precisely because it is ‘Universal’- to Academic or American translators- they write worse everyday- but, to me, it is not intelligible,or indeed recognizable as being related to Mir’s couplet.
Vajib, for a cultured and devout Muslim from a Hanafi majority country- or indeed a Hindu from that country- must mean something more than ‘necessary’. It is that type of duty which isn’t made absolutely clear and unambiguous and which thus requires some hermeneutic effort or imaginative engagement on our part.
Pritchett writes ‘ṡanā kā maṣdar ṣifat = like the source/origin/ground of praise. Apparently the ṣifat has to apply to the whole phrase ṣanā kā maṣdar , because if we try anything else that annoying kā is left just sticking out impossibly. Faruqi Sahib says- ‘The idea is that just as the maṣdar of all substances (that is, their origin, the place to which they all have to return– that is, the place beyond which there’s nothing– that is, the Lord) is necessary, in the same way praise of the maṣdar (that is, praise of the Lord) too is necessary (that is, necessary in its own essence, not dependent for its existence on any other thing). And when that is necessary, then we cannot express it by means of words (which are only contingent, because their existence is dependent on something else).’
My response is– ” sana ka masdar sifat’ is illiterate- i.e. corresponds to no collocation. In any case, is it really true that sana (praise not necessarily restricted to the Deity) has a masdar in God? Does God do sana of anything?
Mir wasn’t illiterate. Nor was he a dark Theologian. What he is talking about is sana-e-sifat- which, for euphony, becomes ‘sifat sana’- praise, or ecstatic contemplation, of the attributes, a stage in Sufi mystical praxis.
Pritchett’s commentary draws attention to the two ka’s in the first line. One way of applying her ‘meaning-machine’ method is to think of the ka in ‘Vajib ka’ as an example of what Pierce calls ‘hypostatic abstraction’ by which an adjective or predicate- ‘honey is sweet’ – turns into an extra subject- sweetness is possessed by honey-, thus increasing by one the number of “subject” slots — called the arity or adicity — of the main predicate.
‘In this case an izafati construction- namely vajib-e-namumkin- has been broken up into vajib ka nah mumkin which by itself does sound awkward. The meaning however is clear. What is being denominated is the class of acts which, though necessary to Salvation, are not univocally obligatory such that failure to perform them can be recognized without ambiguity. In other words, something necessary is also multiply realizable such that entailment becomes ambiguous because the Piercian arity is either impredicative, fractal or impredicatively fractal but in any case inexact. For acts which are ‘farz’ but not vajib, not only is it the case that the acts are possible but those acts must necessarily come to be for those who are Saved and thus God is their source and place of return (masdar). Let us suppose it is necessary to say ‘Allah hu’ to be Saved. Clearly, Frances Pritchett is predestined to be Saved. Hence, during the course of her Doctoral viva voce (what? Jus’ coz the Rector of the LSE personally altered my diploma certificate to read ‘Confirmed Bachelor of Arts’ don’t mean I iz totally ignorant of what PhD types get up to) when the examiner said ‘Knock Knock’ and l’il Franny Pritchett replied ‘Who’s there?’ and the examiner said ‘Allah’ what happened next was predestined and as such its source and return was with God alone. However, notice that li’l Fran (whom I picture in a pinafore and pig-tails so as not to give way to lubricious thoughts) is not saying ‘Allah hu’ such that the sifat (‘Hu’) agrees with the mausuf (subject) derived from the ism masdar (derived noun) ‘Allah’.
If not for McDonald’s, then certainly for Islam, granted that what we know to be necessary (vajib) does not entail praise of the source of attributes, nevertheless, by nature rather than pious reason, we constantly observe that the name of God has come to the Beloved’s lips.
Mumkin, in the philosophical sense, means that which is possible but which carries no entailment properties. A mountain of gold is possible but its actual existence is not entailed nor is anything from us with respect to it demanded or required. I am not religiously obligated to deny it exists or to go looking for it or to buy bonds issued by its prospector.
Mumkin in the ordinary sense would give us- ‘Just from what we know to be necessary for our salvation it is not probable that the ecstatic practice of praise to the name and attributes could take its origin or find its completion in God (i.e. the attributes are more like prosopoi and thus no hesychastic practice is essential for Salvation for the reason given by Barlaam of Calabria) .’
In other words, the devotional practice under discussion is supererogatory. In the second line, the proof is given- The name of God came upon her lips- how? Not from what she considers necessary for her salvation, but because Nature itself, when in ecstasy, cries out the name of God.
Prof Faruqi says- Without the power of the Lord it is not possible that His name comes to the lips. If the Lord would not so wish, or the Lord would not exert his power, then capacity does mankind have to invoke His name? The meaning of lab par naam aanaa can also be, in addition to ‘to mention’, ‘to remember’.Now the interpretation emerges that if we remember the Lord, then this is His power. For khudaa kii qudrat there are three meanings. One is the one that has been mentioned above, that this is an expression of the Lord’s power. Reference has also been made to the second meaning, that if the Lord so wills, only then can we bring his name to our lips. The third meaning is exclamatory, that if his name comes upon our lips, then that is his power. That is, that if even deaf-mutes like us, or even sinners like us, remember him and mention him, then if this isn’t the power of the Lord, then what is it?
Moreover, in the whole line is hidden the meaning that if the Lord’s name comes to our lips only through the will of the Lord himself, then if we don’t remember him, what sin do we commit? To encompass so many meanings within a verse of praise [;hamd] is a difficulty fit for Mir alone. On the basis of its fineness of meaning, the troublesome entanglement of the first line (or rather its weakness of poetic structure [na:zm], which is very rare in Mir) becomes acceptable.
The problem here is that Faruqi is missing out all the philosophical subtlety in Islam and thus reducing Mir’s couplet to imbecility and antinomianism of a cliched, Orientalist, Omar Khayyam type. It is sheer imbecility for a Muslim to say ‘if we don’t remember the Lord (i.e. pray regularly) then we don’t commit any sin’. This is like saying ‘If I don’t wash my hands after going to the toilet, I don’t breach McD’s code of conduct. They have no right to sack me. Why? Because they have the power to force their employees to wash their hands after taking a dump. Yet, I was an employee when I took the dump. I was still an employee when I failed to wash my hands. Only after I emerged from the bathroom with shit stained hands was I sacked. No failure of mine occurred. The failure was McDonald’s. They didn’t use their power to make me wash my hands while I was still in the bathroom.’
Faruqi’s reading of this couplet cashes out as
1) Mir was stupid. If he thought he was a Muslim it was only because he was a stupid Indian donkey.
2) Mir wasn’t a Muslim. He was just too cowardly to come out and say so.
What’s wrong with saying Mir or Ghalib or whoever was a Muslim? What’s wrong with saying Urdu is a proper Muslim language? Are you worried that this hands an easy victory to Hindutva nutjobs like me? If so, it still behooves you to give the hate-mongers a walkover every-time on those questions where they are logically in the right. Not to do so damages the ethos of what you seek to defend. Moreover, our nature, of itself, is brisk to beat anyone who thinks being Right creates Might- so that’s entirely forgivable.
What is unforgivable is treating dead Brown Men as illiterate imbeciles unable to profit by the philosophical hermeneutics of the very traditions they enriched. Why? Because them Dead Brown Chaps were good poets- at least in comparison with the merely brain-dead Brown person writing this-
The parrot’s mirror wakes Heaven’s Rage
Who puzzles Pillaiyar breaks Shuka’s cage
Wanly I wonder at the audacity of the theft
The Morning of the World- Sun bereft
Neo-liberalism differs from Classical Liberalism in that it has no class basis and therefore can be indifferent to the dilemmas of Classical Liberal Political Theory. In its Anglo-American incarnation, Coase’s theorem justifies eliding issues of ownership while Game theory, as developed by Nash, Aumann, Shapley, Muth, Schelling etc, justifies dropping the notion that a particular class must have a certain dominant ‘virtue’ or ‘drive’ and thus it is important to conserve that virtue or drive by promoting a certain set of values.
Like me, Sanjay Subhramanyam, the author of ‘Is Indian Civilization a Myth?- is a middle aged Tam Bram of repellent aspect and ludicrously half-baked views . Still, notwithstanding such epigenetic drawbacks, his ancestral heritage also included an evolving, Neurath’s raft type, concept of territories where it was permissible to sojourn or settle without loss of caste- i.e. injury to the Manes & thus hysteresis related harm to the commonweal- as opposed to other territories where the matter was either doubtful or definitely reckless. The same was true for Kashmiri Kauls, Bengali Babus, Jalandhari Joshis and so on. Essentially, India has developed immunity to the idiocy of hereditary Brahmins & aleatory Shramans. We are welcome to emigrate- Mother Ind will thank us for it- but forbidden to appease the Ancestors solely by recycling witless shite in our new abode because to do so would be to become a Mephistophelian Cross Roads demon offering Faustian pacts to that new Oikumene’s Credentialist Academy or crapulous Shatter zone.
Taken together, Bhraminical notions of permissible settlement areas and peripatetic fora for prattling shite, generated a ‘ship of Theseus’ like notion of Indian Civilization that a plurality of Pan Indian Castes autonomously subscribed to and sustained for millennia.
Unfortunately, Sanju Baba doesn’t believe that Civilizations can be like the ship of Theseus- i.e. something which abides though all its components are swapped out and replaced- rather he is the Vasco da Gama of a very different type of Ship- something which passes for Scholarship but which is actually a ghostly caravel out of ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ or some other such Disneyland attraction, by a meretricious recourse to which, History professors discharge their child-minding duties at American Colleges.
The shameful aspect of it is that Sanju isn’t actually a proper, Kal Penn type, stoner American Sophomore but a P.G. Woodhouse reading desi transplant. In other words, the fellow started off as a feeble & four eyed Gussie Fink-Nottle same as the rest of us.
Suppose Sanju Baba had asked his granny- ‘Pati, what is Indian Civilization? Is it a myth? Did the British invent it? Or was it the Turukas? Kindly enlighten me due to I iz writing a book on the topic.’
Amitava Kumar has written a line worthy of Naipaul-
‘In conversation, Leela would speak of herself as a journalist and an actress. I felt that she mistook ambition for achievement, and I began to like her less.’
But Naipaul wrote as a foreigner, a journalist; Kumar & Mishra et al, aren’t foreigners, they are Biharis. Amitava was just a few years older than Leela, he probably had relatives or colleagues who had been ‘Communist Party workers’ and thus it was perfectly natural for Leela to ask him for help in getting a scholarship to train as an actress. What possible ‘achievement’ as opposed to ‘ambition’ could Leela have had as a recently married woman in her early 20’s?
When Naipaul writes of ‘mistaking ambition for achievement’ it is within a larger framework of passing judgment on a Development model of a specific Rostovian ‘Nation Building’ kind. What wider framework underpins Kumar or Mishra’s Naipaulian cadence? Is it the reflection that jhollawallah types in Patna are somehow even more pathetic and ludicrous than jhollawallah types at J.N.U or Ivy League?
Kumar invokes Rashomon. Why? Has this something to do with Kurosawa’s own political beliefs? Or is it just that a b&w film from 1950 is the proper lens through which to view Patna because…urm… well, Bihar is just so damn backward yaar. They have just this one mall and it’s located on Boring Road. Seriously. That’s the name of the road. Every other alleyway and cul de sac gets renamed M.G. marg or J.P chowk, but when you have an actual great big thoroughfare called Boring road, the Biharis refuse to change its name to something more boring yet. Is it just me or do other people think mebbe them dehati bhaiyyas, with their exquisitely Buddhist sense of humor, have been laughing at us all these years?
Can an ‘informed consent’ procedure- as in Medical practice, where the Doctor has either more information than the patient, or else superior dispassion, thus creating an asymmetry which problematizes a relationist, as opposed to substantivist, Ethics – operationalize the Kantian categorical imperative? Manson & O’Neill say no, but Alasdair Maclean disagrees.
(Vide Autonomy, Informed Consent and Medical Law: A Relational Challenge, By Alasdair Maclean)
What are the salient features of the Doctor/ Patient game w.r.t Informed Consent?
1) The Doctor, in seeking informed consent for a particular therapy, is- consciously or not- advancing a particular Scientific Research Program (SRP) in which he has invested all of himself, or indeed borrowed more than he can ever amount to, by reason of an absolute or comparative advantage in specializing in that particular therapeutic practice. This advantage may have arisen by chance or else it might have been acquired through the arduous or aleatory travails of the Doctor’s own subjective, Bayesian, trajectory evaluative of different therapies.
By enrolling the patient in a particular therapeutic regimen, a data-set is augmented which privileges the SRP the Doctor himself is professionally invested in. In other words, just by seeking informed consent, a self-regarding element has entered the equation. To cancel it out would require the Doctor to play Devil’s Advocate for alternative therapies, or the null option, at least as well as if he had an acquired, absolute or comparative advantage in each of those therapies and invested exactly the same amount of time and passion on espousing and nurturing each.
A related point is that it may be the case that different therapies place different weightings on the components of well being and hold different opinions on what symptoms are malign or, indeed, disabling,
This being the case, the very nature of the information/disapassion asymmetry between Doctor & Patient militates for the former’s heteronomy. The Kantian Doctor needn’t quit Medicine- he could still sign my sick note and prescribe my Viagra- but must give up on seeking ‘informed consent’ as opposed to simply hanging out his shingle and touting for business like any other tradesman.
2) The patient’s choice of therapist has both a psychological and a physiological effect. It may be that there is a trade-off between short-term dysphoria and long term physiological healing such that the Quack is initially more effective than the Doctor. If the Patient’s ‘time preference’ is an objective datum, does a Kantian Patient have a duty to consult the Quack and tell the Doctor to go hang? Clearly, ‘time preference’ itself would be determined by life expectancy. However, the certainty of imminent death might lead to meta-preferences dominating the decision process in an unpredictable way.
Both the ‘Doctor’s dilemma’ & the ‘Patient’s trilemma’- which relate to hysteresis effects arising from information exchange- militate for a mixed strategy or, what cashes out as the same thing, some internal psycho-drama whose output is stochastic. This means that ‘informed consent’ looks operationalizable but only at a macro level leaving Kantian relationism pointing mutely at Tardean mimetic heteronomy.