Imagining Other Worlds

Will our encounter with alien life change everything?

Star-nosed mole. Image by Google

In 2009, Jonathan Foer in his mind provoking book Eating Animals wrote: “If we were to one day encounter a form of life more powerful and intelligent than our own, and it regarded us as we regard fish, what would be our argument against being eaten?”

Thought-experiments involving aliens, have been great mental tools to debate and answer several of the philosophical queries and moral dilemmas like these. Other similar speculations had heartened us to ask questions such as “How will religions stand the discovery of aliens?” “What sort of power hierarchies will emerge once we encountered extraterrestrials as we imagine them?” “What sort of moral obligations will we have towards our galactic neighbors?” The possibilities are boundless, but our imagination, as it turns out, not very much.

We seem to know a lot about alien life, thanks to sci-fi sensations of 20^th century. Sometime gluey eyed monsters, blue, green, usually with two hands, two feet and a head. How bloody anthropomorphic! For centuries, we have looked up at sky wondering about the presence of other worlds and possibly other lives. Put another way, we have done a good job in casting our own image unto the universe. Our inklings have never left the bounds of our earthly existence. And why not? Is not everything we have ever dreamed, penned and painted bears witness? From homo-fictitious to gods and supernatural.

This explains our quirky methods till date to hunt for our galactic brothers (or rivals). The short-wave radio waves which we hope to catch as a “sign” from outside world, which SETI has been doing for long. The biggest assumption being that the alien life must have technology advanced enough to send radio signals for communication. Too far-fetched? According to astronomer, Avi Loeb, we might as well search for spectroscopic signatures of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in the atmospheres of alien planets, in the hopes of finding fridge-using aliens. Or perhaps hairspray-using ones. And yet others propose to look for polluting cities, Dyson circles for electricity, nuclear-war torn planets. Sounds…familiar.

Any attempt at musing on alien life, is in actuality a musing about us, our own very selves. Our tribalism instinct has drawn our fear of an invading human-hating monsters. Same could be said about techno-phobias and artificial intelligences. And so, the philosophical queries and moral dilemmas reflect our own mental epidemics. We can shot our best guess, that earth-centric religions will have a very hard time grappling with the alien find. Most rabbis, imams and popes will be extremely disappointed at the non-mention of alien life in their holy books. Maybe, Golden Rule works, which basically states that you should treat others like you want to be treated, something used a lot in vegan ethics and animal rights arguments. Maybe, there are other better ways to organize society, than ours’ crude hierarchical ones. For science, however even finding a bacteria will be revolutionary. Any rudimentary form of life, will change everything. Maybe, that life form is so unfamiliar that we won’t be able to recognize it as life at all.  And maybe, we do happen to find legged and armed species, because in the course of earthling’s evolution, locomotion devices such as arms and legs have appeared and evolved separately and independently quite a times. Or maybe, we have been wrong all along and we should focus on finding other species on earth, which to our awe and even astonishment can be deemed as 'aliens' themselves. Nevertheless, whatever the case, it will be the ultimate test for our scientific understanding.

And so maybe, we should keep our fingers crossed and till then, let our imagination venture far.

On secularity, democracy and the Muslim World.

Credits: http://www.themideastbeast.com/gay-vandals-give-al-aqsa-mosque-rainbow-makeover-on-new-years-eve/

It has taken a few good weeks for me to gather my thoughts and conceptions on this acutely convoluted topic, and the gobs of intellectual confusion which surrounds its discussion, and so it was obvious that the subject demanded much speculation for it to result in something writable and tangible which makes sense.

This post will lay out some of the frameworks, which will help us answer some very important questions on the topic, and depending on the audience’s background, might aid us spark some debate as well.

The conversation about secularity and the Muslim world, is not new. It did not emerge recently, or out of thin air. In fact, many academicians and writers in the Muslim world have actively engaged themselves in recording the apparent political and religious hypocrisies of their respective countries and nations, some of whom I will mention here. And so, it would be foolish to assume that a continuing struggle for a democratic secular State is absent or non-existing, as that is what most social minorities and some writers and political commentators living in Islamic countries have been trying to push for.

Then, what explains the inability of the Muslim world to establish a stable long-form democratic State as Huntington had rightly inquired in his book, 'The Clash of Civilizations'.

Well, firstly those unorganized movements are extremely unpopular among the masses, the individuals who form the majority. And that is, frankly speaking very understandable. After all, their privileges and dispensations rests on their State, sponsoring their faith, which pretty much explains the eon back resistance to any attempt at disassociating religion from State. A very predictable, group dynamics behavior. And secondly and also most importantly, the presence of extremist factions in society which have always successfully managed to silence such voices before they even make it on public foregrounds. A problem, which remains widely ignored and unacknowledged by not only the Western intellectuals but also the academicians, writers and intellectuals in Muslim world. This is, then, no surprise that most of the serious dialogue and writings on these topics happen in West. In fact, most of the Muslims who have been vocal about their religious position happen to be based in West. And those living in Muslim countries, have to think a few times, before they open their mouths or write with their hands. And, so the ‘conversation’ in its truest sense, never actually happened in that it has not reached mainstream public discourse and also does not seem to happen anytime soon. The little ounces of dialogue which do happen in West, soon turn themselves into an orchestra of their own dynamics and histories, and their own political spectrum, from which you cannot expect decently fruitful outcomes, even though it is a great space for voicing ideas and a lot of significant work has emerged and flourished on the topic. 

What will follow, from here, are some of the arguments and cogitations which many of the former and present works highlight in response to the evolving theological basis for a theocracy, or a State declaring its official religion. Only when one bothers to dive deep into these waters, then one realizes how sorely muddy and mushy the whole business is with a palate full of variations and subtle adaptations.

Religious Secularity or argument from theology is a book, which I mentioned as a single idea even though it’s not limited only to this particular work, where Naser Ghobadzadeh begins by stating quite accurately the theological arguments commonly used for an Islamic State and even though he only touches the case of Iran and Shiite orthodoxy, his work still compiles many important points.

For a long time, the Islamic State and the idea behind it had claimed that religion is capable of offering solutions to governance and State in the modern age, just like it is capable of governing spiritual, social and economic lives of the believers. Modern ways of governance, it claims are insufficient and untrustworthy especially when they are run by human agency.

Not only, has this bombastic claim assumed unrealistic expectations of religion, but also seems to somehow ignore the hegemony and abuse by those who pretend to speak for God. The wrapping idea behind religious secularity is to protect religion from the exploitation by State.  It is to keep the State out of religion, rather than keeping religion out of State.

This works fine, unless we realize the whole point of secularism, in its traditional sense, which is to keep religion out of State is to protect the lives and rights of people rather than to protect religion, which frankly speaking, already enjoys a whole lot of protection in the Muslim world. But, he has a good reason to make this point, especially when he argues that deliberate top-down Islamicization has done nothing to improve the religiosity of people but rather it promotes hypocrisy and outward show which is a grave sin. And so, Islamic State fails in its intention to restore or improve the religiosity of people, rather it exploits, abuses, and make gross use of religion for its own purpose.

Above all, the lived experience of theocracy, mainly Iran has kicked some sense into the Muslim scholars and theologians, and even the growing number of public that it did not turn anything as rosy and heavenly as some have previously oh-so strongly claimed.

And so the swarming idea of religious secularity, aims to highlight the limitations of religion (something which will be outrageous to many) in socio-political realms, mainly the institutional separation between Islam and State, but not between religion and public life, which is true since you can never really disassociate religion from public life, even in the traditional sense of secularism. So far, so fine, but this surely would not convince someone who believes that religion is unbounded and limitless, mainly that it has answers to everything even to matters of governance.

 Arguments from history.

These refer to the set of arguments from both history and practice of religion historically. Mainly, that theological principles and ideas have themselves gone through many changes, through the contribution of different schools and scholars. And so codifying and implementing the laws of particular interpretation by a particular school, is a horrendous business. For, the very laws and principles have been arrived at by human speculation. Therefore the ‘sacred laws’ are themselves not free from human faculties.

Most Sunni puritans are of the view, that there once existed a ‘golden’ time, mainly the period of early Islam after the Prophet, in which they strongly insist, that the political, administrative and legal frameworks as upheld by the first Caliphs were of high reproducible standards. And so the institution of Caliphate, in theory and even in practice, can and should qualify as a viable way to rule a Muslim land. However, diving into Islamic history would reveal that it was nowhere near the case. Not only the early Caliphate states and their expansion dove into huge administrative chaos, but the leaders or the Caliphs in political power took many decisions of questionable religious nature. Neither their State was ideal from any sensible angle, nor did it confirm to highest standards of administrative and judicial realms. Instead, the whole business resulted in gigantic inter-faith conflicts among the Muslims, which continue in their crude forms today, which later saw some of the bloodiest events in history, climaxing with the brutal murder of Imam Hussain. The incident of Karbala, which has been fervently romanticized and remembered, was but a boggling act of terror. A prime example of the group dynamics, ideological splits and theological conflicts in the Muslim world. And so, it was never really golden, as many of the puritans strongly insist.

Moreover, given the seething sectarian and religious plurality in present-day nation States, if they are ever to co-exist under one roof peacefully, then the futility of the whole project of theocracy should very well become obvious, considering there have been marginalized Muslim communities who being brutally persecuted in their own home countries, have thrived and grown in West. Any discussion concerning secularism cannot exclude the long going sectarian conflicts, inter-faith violence and oppression of other Muslim sects and communities, mostly at the hands of majority. 

Why secularism has such a bad name in the mainstream Muslim thought?

 Mainly because of what secularism means, and what most Muslims think it means, which is anti-religiosity, or moving away from religion, as liberal academics of West define it. And the absence of a good translation of the word “secular:” in other languages explain the irrational hysteria which many of them exhibit, which illuminates why the concept remains alien to Muslim societies. Secularism, in its essence, does not mean move away from religion, as many think, rather it means, which I define it, as “being religious without being an asshole”. That is to practice religion without encroaching on the rights of others to practice their faith. It is this simple idea, which is at the heart of all secular discourse, and which took centuries of battle and blood, for the Christendom to realize and understand, the today’s West.

So what explains the inability of the Muslim world to establish stable long form democratic States?

Well, nobody can answer it better than Ahmed An-Na’im in his “Islam and the secular state: negotiating the future of Shariah”. There are several religious and political reasons behind it, mainly that there are many parts of theology itself which should be deemed as problematic by the Muslim communities, and debate should ensue regarding them. This includes some of the ways in which historical Islam, sees human reasoning and faculty. The inferior status of human reason in comparison with God’s knowledge which mandates the superiority of Shariah laws over man-made laws and the notion that human legislation will lead to social disorder because it is incapable of achieving an all-embracing grasp of the true needs of human beings. Thus the latter must inevitably submit to Shariah and to the sacred lawgiver if a genuine peaceful society is to be established.

“As long as the idea of an Islamic state is allowed to stand, societies will remain locked in stale debates about issues such as whether constitutionalism or democracy is “Islamic” and whether interest banking is to be allowed or not, instead of working to secure constitutional democratic governance and pursuing economic development. These fruitless debates have kept the vast majority of Islamic societies locked in a constant state of political instability and economic and social underdevelopment since independence”.

Furthermore, the widespread belief that secularism is a Western imposition, has rendered many to be skeptical, as if that’s a good enough argument in its self. However that perception is the result of propaganda of Islamist groups based upon the views of Abul Mawdudi and Sayyid Qutb in the 20^th century.

 But there have been a few instances, where a secular government did rule and attempted to secularize society. Well, they might be secular, but they were not democratic. Rather it was secularism under authoritative or dictatorial government, something which kills the whole point of secularism. The Pahlavi dynasty in Iran, the Musharaf’s rule in Pakistan, and several other instances where a ‘secular’ dictator has adopted a top-down policy. And from that, the Muslim world has been constantly changing hands from an authoritative secularism to authoritative Islamisization, from one kind of imperialism to another kind. It is then, no surprise that the Muslim countries have failed to maintain stable democratic institutions.

Democracy, is not simply a political system, rather it is a culture based on some common values and attitudes which take decades to inculcate and entrench in a society. It includes respect for individual freedoms, rights and liberties, equality of everyone before constitution, justice and fairness. And probably the most over-looked one, tolerance for debate, freedom of thought, opinion and speech, the very fuel for evolving and pushing societies forward, whose absence is one of the major reason why dialogue concerning secularism and religion only sees the air in limited academic and intellectual circles.

Arguments from Human Sovereignty.

You cannot possibly talk about freedom of religion, ideas and speech without brushing some of fundamentals of beliefs, which are contrary or at odds with human sovereignty. And this leads us back into the Enlightenment era and some of its most valuable ideas, which the West takes for granted today.

The idea that human rights and sovereignty supersedes the rights of Divine. That the respect for sanctity of human life comes above the sanctity of any ideology, religion or principle. And so the resources reserved should be spent on the protection and security of individual lives, rather than on protection of Divine rights, which is preposterous if you reason around it for an All-powerful, All-sovereign agency ought not to require it. And thus, it makes the need for heresy and apostasy laws completely irrelevant, from a constitutional sense as well as from a theological perspective, for Islam itself originated as a heresy to previous Abrahamic religions. Most of its religious offshoots, also started off as ‘heresies’ to its mainstream theological school, and still continue to be considered so.

However, this seems to be a far-fetched hard-to-digest scheme for someone who really and truly believes that God’s rights supersedes the right to live of humans. And above all, it is extremely difficult to dissect the dogmatic fringes of someone’s beliefs, which partly explains the failure of liberal folks to engage in careful arguments and convince the extremist factions of society. A task in which moderates too, fail rather miserably mainly because they themselves happen to harbor and even entertain similar ideas in their subtleties. You cannot really expect to have a dialogue with someone, whose first instant is to declare you a heretic, and thus invalidate all your arguments, as if damning the source automatically makes your arguments vile.

Nevertheless, a few have proposed on building a counter-narrative in response to Wahhabism or political Islam, to engage with and target a chunk of majority. This seems a handsome proposition, considering the ineffectiveness of other theological schools. It requires oodles of patience and time, but I am optimistic because dogma and self-righteousness can never hold the pillars of a healthy, functioning and thinking society. They make extremely shallow building blocks, plagued by insecurity, fear and ignorance.

However, that demands engagement with public, especially with the moderates, who form the over-whelming majority, and whose silence or rather ignorance, at the view-screen of horrific events carried out by the extremist factions, and their States in the name of Divine rights, seems to be extremely disappointing. But they are our only hope, which makes my fingers remain crossed. 

Statistagasm: The Statistics of Fate

Let big data read the palms of individuals....

Can you predict your own future? The question sounds horribly sawed and straight out of a poorly written prophetic guide. But, let’s rephrase it in a more specific way, “Where would you think you would be in a five years’ time?” And most important, what should follow is “Can you predict it, or know something about it in reality?” There are a few common responses to this question, which say something about how people, in general, view fate or the course of events in their lives. Some of them which I get frequently, depending on the type of person, are “No, future is not predictable”, “Yes, if you believe in your dreams, you can be there" or if you are religious “Yes, only God knows it”. A more interesting segment, however awaits when you ask them “Can you predict how many people would give the same answer as yours, beside the other ones?”

Well, as it unfolds, this might not be a very difficult task. In that, we can reasonably estimate how different people are going to respond to the first part. The response obviously relies on many facets such as the amount of control one might feel one has at a given time. But more important, it falls onto larger scaled phenomenon, such as culture and socioeconomics. A person sitting in West, where the cultural focus is on individual effort and ‘chasing your dreams’, is likely to think that future is predictable while someone, who happens to be born in a country plagued by poor governance would rather believe that outcomes in life are unpredictable.  It is not a random occurring that someone has chosen to respond one way or the other to the questions above, but instead it is embedded in a meta-statistical structure. Of course there are outliers, and of course there is a margin of error, which is precisely what differentiates statistics from prophecies, which can vary from a lot to negligible depending upon what it is which we trying to predict. If you are digging in to predict the response of a single individual, given that you know what is there to know about that person, then the margin of error would be very high. But if you are engaging to know the response of a particular group, or population, the predictability would sharply jump. In this matter, the lives of humans closely resemble the natural world, which, as you go at the smaller levels, become more and more unpredictable, and as you slide towards larger levels, let’s say at the Newtonian level, you begin to decipher patterns and laws.

So where will you be in a five years’ time? Or, how much will you be making at your job? Which life partner would you have? And how much happy would you think you would be with them? These are no questions for palm readers or crystal gazer, their answers clearly lay with good statistics and good philosophy. For example, dating patterns show that the US millennials are getting into relationships earlier than their ancestors were and are likely to go through an average of two long-term relationships and several mismatched dates and heartbreaks before arriving at “the one”. So, it should not come as a surprise that some would feel their relationship history is un-normal, when that is what most people are playing  around like. More interestingly however, on online dating platforms, people are more likely to hit those who belong to the same race, despite answering “it does not matter” in their response boxes, and to opposite sex, despite describing "bi-sexual" as their sexual orientation. It is easier and more useful to analyze online dating data than to take surveys and responses from people in the field, because the online dating show clicking and email patterns which reveal what is really going on, instead of merely asking a sample which often results in inaccurate responses. It seems like, that the fate happens to be rigged while arranging partners because it somehow always manages to set dates with those who fall near your class bracket, and also somehow with those who share your skin color.   

The performance in education and the amount one makes at his job are other facets of the larger scheme of things, which too seem to be rigged. This has been repeatedly shown, when we see that middle-classers outperform lower-classers in schools consistently no matter which country or culture. In South-Asian societies, the cultural focus in academic achievement is primarily ‘the more you hard-work, the more pleasant your grades will be’, something which is both disastrous and wrong from the view of policy-making. Differences in income of the households has profound impact on educational performance of the children in those households, translated from cumulative factors which seem minor to ordinary people. For example, research shows that lightening and temperature at the place of study influences concentration and therefore learning. Proper lightening and study place is recommended during focused study hours. Apart from that, getting someone to monitor your performance significantly reduces procrastination and improves lacking. Middle-class children are likely to have educated parents who keep track of their children’s performance, visit schools often, meet teachers, and are likely to hire coaches if their children underperform. They are also, likely to closely guard their children’s television time, computer games time, and are likely to encourage them to study beyond the scope of the syllabus. It seems like the “hard-work” phenomenon does not work quite well, when you have a noisy household, where you are interrupted every few minutes to do the house chores and where you don’t have any authoritative agency to keep you motivated. There is no co-incidence that the sprawling majority of the top colleges and universities are the middle and upper-classers. The drumming whole of the values of hard-work which are constantly bombarded into the popular ears, would work fine if everyone played by the same rules.

There were just some of the major superficial factors which contribute to educational performance, scratching the surface would uncover more significant variables, for example psychological and cultural ones. In households, where partners are in emotionally stable relationships, children are likely to perform better in the educational pursuits than in households with less stable partnerships. Children raised by single mothers who most often belong to lower rungs of society or adoption homes, are not only going to significantly underperform in schools, but have a high dropout rate and are also very likely to engage in criminal activities, such as drugs, violence and abuse. This has important implications for policies concerning abortion and birth control. The Donohue–Levitt hypothesis, shows the impact of legalized abortion on reduction in crime rates. People who repeat the ‘let the fate decide’ mantra should very well look at the probability of someone from an economically meek and psychologically unhealthy surroundings ‘making it’ around. What they don’t realize is that the fate which they so earnestly assert, is basically the structural forces which decide the life outcomes of individuals to a very large degree. This continues itself into the work lives, and an even greater gap in the incomes of individuals.

But these were the ultra bolded lines on a map, which many would feel are obvious to highlight (even though that’s not the case). What about the thin lines or subdivisions? In other words, how come inter-class, inter-group factors lead to differences in the incomes earned? Well, as it might unweave, these too are not that random. HBR often publishes studies showing salary differences between managers in the same occupation, in the same industry and even with same qualifications. There is of course, a whole complex web of factors feeding into one and another, but they are not non-traceable.  On individual level, for example, person-job fit can be an important factor in one’s job success which is the fit of personality traits of an individual with the requirements of the job. Now, whose fault is this that your genes happened to express themselves in a certain way to make your personality fit or unfit for the job you happened to find. You cannot possibly trace the genetic and phenotypical characteristics of individuals to predict whether they have the ability to smile most of the time, if they chose to be frontline managers. It might seem absurd, as it bears witness to a previous analogy, that on smaller scales such as at individual level, things become very unpredictable. There is still, however, a probability which determines the chance that your genes happened to be arranged in a certain way, to make up your personality traits both naturally and by training, which happened to be suitable for your job, and which now earns you way above mean of your industry, occupation and geography, but it would be ridiculously difficult to calculate.

Gleaning at the big picture, the crime and health statistics, in a similar way, help us look at the wider inferences. For example, measuring and comparing weight patterns across the world show that obesity has a high incidence rate in developed and developing countries. But this is not the end of story. In rich nations, people who are poor financially and socially, are more likely to be obese. Not only that, but weight is also found to be unevenly distributed among sexes, with women typically being more obese than men. There is also a correlation between higher gender inequalities with higher obesity of females. Now, all of this does not quite fit into the over-consumption of food theory because there is a stark difference between the quality of food consumed by different brackets of society. Lurking beneath are the high levels of stress, which cause hormonal disturbance which affect fat storage and metabolism. The incidence of diseases or crimes for that matter, are not population variant but also, more important, historic and structural. The incidence of violence and terrorism, as is now popular knowledge, a characteristic of poor and ill developed societies, but it is too unevenly distributed among areas and groups. The likelihood of violence is a lot more, within the same country, in areas historically disputed. Those areas are also likely to be least well off than the rest of country. Now, the cause and effect can work both ways, whether poverty leads to violence or violence perpetuate poverty, but the overall message is that no problem is isolated, one problem intricately feeds into the other creating a vicious cycle of all-time misery.

 

Now, let’s dissect the portion which this post is originally about. The statistics of fate. The probability hits which, many would say, you cannot control such as being born in a particular nationhood, race, or bracket, which is supposed to ‘just happen’. Well, by control, one should mean that an individual cannot control these occurrences, because when one wear telescopic glasses and affords a bird eye of view of the statistical terrain, the ‘controllable’ deem obvious. The probability of you being born in a country which are ranked high on development index, is basically the children born in those countries every year over the children born all around the world every year. And since, high ranked countries have low reproduction rates, the probability would be quite low. This might be an inaccurate measure because children being born are not equal to children who survive, and in countries who rank low on development index, the mortality rates are high but the population growth rates too are high despite more children dying, so there is more likelihood of being born in medium and low ranked countries. 

As you might have already guessed, this probability depends on the sprawling global inequality. In a world with more equal distribution of wealth, the probability of a child being born in downcast surroundings would be droopingly low. Yes, it is not the child’s fault in where he or she happens to be born, but it is very much the fault of the larger world dynamics which clearly determines the happens-to’s.  Of course, it does not end there, there are numerous systematic gaps which pronounce the decision of one fate over the other. Subsequently, it trickles down to thinner and less visible lines of the map, as the class, race, status, gender and ethnic gaps are bridged on. However, many would throw the query that what about the incidences which are not apparently the result of structural gaps, such as earthquakes or tsunamis, which are totally unpredictable and thus out of control. Well, of course that is true, but that is not how we are looking at the statistics. The problem does not lie in how many disasters hit the population, but actually how they impact it. The disasters are likely to do more damage in resource stricken areas because their rehabilitation take much longer, and sometimes is never initiated. The trick here, is not to never expect bad things, but to have a strong coping mechanism against those occurrences.

The underlying power of statistics is truly unthinkable, and touch the secluded grooves of information where ordinary eye cannot intrude. Maybe one day, we get to the position of predicting the unpredictable, as both the sources and quality of data improves. A time when big data is used to read and predict the fates of masses, a juncture where science does replace prophecy.  The whole anagram of ‘fate’, as some veiled plan, has consistently been used as excuses against bad governance, bad policies, bad economics, bad socials and most important, bad information and bad philosophy.

Between Hell and Heritage

The ingenious way how cultures trademark their intellectual heritage

Photo by Sam@Carlton School

Around the twelfth century, amidst the brooding courts-men of the Spanish Caliphate, a meekly figured man with a kind regard for both Aristotelian philosophy and popular ideals of his time, spoke on the vulnerability of the nature of truth. This, however did not earn him much respect, instead he was disdainfully thrown out of the court, and his philosophy labelled as impure and corrupt. That man, which is today hailed as Averroes did struggle quiet, in his time, to avoid problems with the Islamic authorities, moreover this was his unlucky moment.

A sophisticated view of the past would reveal that there is a plethora of similar instances, when the intellectual minority of a community or civilization got into screeching friction with the mass populace. This is not confined to only philosophy or the study of the natural world, but also art, poetry and music. Some of it, do make itself into the popular consciousness, but some of the more non-digestible forms remain seated on the shelves, yellowing and rotting with time, and only occasionally discussed in the academic squares.

Averroes, or more precisely, Ibn-Rushd was not alone in the staggering ‘clash of the philosophies’, there were many who were received and seen with contempt by the larger population in their own times, and even in times today. Amongst them, the more famous or rather infamous were Ibn Sina and Al-Farabi, who were considered “too deviant” that some scholars discussed their status as Muslims. Ibn al-Qayyim (1292- 1350) and other Islamic scholars, clearly declared them as extreme and disbelieving.

The history of intellectual developments, is not simply the history of the people. It is the history of class, caste, economics, and politics. To say that Egyptians made the pyramids, Indians wrote the Kamasutra, Westerners drafted democracy and freedom of thought, and Muslims made algebra would be an exceedingly immature and unsavory assessment of the past. Today, many Christians in the West would proudly boast about the “civilized” modes of thinking possessed by the westerners but they would surely not like to talk about how historically those civilized modes of thinking, which they take for so much granted came about in the first place. And they assuredly would not like to mention the incalculable exiles, torments and blood sheds of the free-thinkers and rationalist who gave and perpetuated the modern ideals by putting the Church’s teachings under scrutiny. But the way cultural trademarks rulebook works, the “credit goes to the whole Western civilization! Big round of applause, everyone”

The Kamasutra and other pieces of writings from the Gupta and subsequent periods, popularly regarded as the golden age of Hindu civilization too divulges a similar picture. The philosophical and sensual writings were the product by and for the elitist rulers and courtesans. The clergy and religious perception of the wider population resembled nowhere close to it. Indians did not write the Kamasutra, the people who had leisure, time in vain and tax money in their pockets did. The masses simply ploughed land, sowed seeds, prayed to gods and harvested food, only to give it away in the taxes.

                                                                                                                                        We don’t know how many Averroes were expelled or scorned at, and how many got into serious troubles, but it is vehemently celebrated as the “golden age of Islamic civilization”. Only a few however, will ever bother to dig and know, for example what al-Razi, whose contributions in chemistry and medicine were unmatchable at the time, thought about miracles and revelation.  And what his “heretical” works such as The Prophet’s fraudulent tricks, or On the refutation of revealed religion undertake about the wider orthodox conceptions.

This takes us back to the ingenious way how cultures mark their intellectual territories through panoramic generalizations and uniformity, throwing the scrupulous contextualization of history, politics, economics and socials far off in the reality dustbin, never to be hunted and picked out again.

The Extremism Dilemma

 Is our current counter-extremism policy effective enough to do what its supposed to do? 




Suppose you had to re-make the world order from scratch. After humans have discovered the rudimentary natural processes, they settle into loosely knit agricultural societies. They have the arrays of culture, of art, and of organized religion, which determines most aspects of people's lives, including political boundaries, law and socioeconomics. Soon, the scientific revolution hits, and there are drastic changes in the ways of life of people in terms of technology, heath and food. Science is starting to gain credibility and impact production and economics, but the political and social spheres are still largely dictated by Divine orders. On surface, the lives of people have changed, but they will still mercilessly execute anyone, who deviated from the orthodox route or who happened to be born in a household following a religion, different from that of the State's. Scientific revolution was not enough. What needed was a philosophical revolution, which could meticulously reflect upon the strands of culture, politics and theological teachings. What needed was an Enlightenment Movement, which could convincingly answer and argue questions such as "Why it is not right to execute people who happen to believe in a God, other than your own?" or that "why the State should be separate from Church?'

Today, many might take the liberal values of freedom and democracy for granted but back there it was a great challenge to convince someone about the sanctity of human life being more sacred than the Divine law, or that humans possess certain rights, which need to be respected. "Human rights" is a concept of modern thinking. It does not have a physical existence, you cannot touch or see rights, but it is a concept legitimated by a piece of paper called the constitution. One needs to put faith in the constitution to take human rights seriously. But the human rights are not only legitimated by the constitution, rather it is entrenched into the conscience of millions of people, who deeply believe in it with sincerity. The Enlightenment was not, then, the withdrawal of faith, rather replacement of faith from the Divine order to human capacity to do well and organize themselves. In other words, it was a shift from faith in faith to faith in reason. It was an announcement that some faiths are better than the others, and that some can genuinely improve human condition while others lead to hatred and dogmas. Even though faith in reason is faith but it is a very philosophically informed faith, which has a good argumentative basis.

Fast-forward to twenty first century in the Muslim world, which is plagued by fundamentalist ideologies and witnessing some of the horrendous examples of violence and hatred. A lot of literature has been expend on contemplating its causes and nature, and much confusion still surrounds the discussion. Some earnestly assert that it is political, concerned with land and wealth, while sweeping it aside that in puritanical forms of faith, politics is very much the business of religion. It is not facile to sketch a line on where politics starts and religion ends. As I mentioned earlier, people coming from a Western paradigm tend to take the separation between politics and religion for granted and therefore expect the same from the other side of the world.

Even though the Muslims are divided into modern nation states today, the tinges of democracy have seldom stepped in their national corridors, often frowned upon like some "uninvited guest". Although many had attempted to devise marriage between Islam and democracy, those 'many' were either seen largely with contempt, or their ideals conveniently molded to be digestible for the masses. But the groups harboring fanatical thinking, refuse to even stare at the exported ideas from "the land of the infidel" which indiscriminately puts the Christians, the atheists and the not-very-orthodox Muslims on the same plate. The Muslim liberals turn out to be largely ineffective in dealing with such out-of-hand ideologies. The West continues to mindlessly shell bombs on the 'whackos' and spend copiously on defense in the hopes that it will magically do something, while fulfilling the predictions of the fanatics and making them gain more support "Oh look! Were we not right? These crusaders will always remain the crusaders".

What the West is doing, is adopting an easy way out of the murk, more of a temporary fix, and while, comforting its own self that it has it under control. And the liberals just want the fanatics to simply "get it" as if, it was enough to convince them. The truth is, that the doors of discussions are mostly closed for the larger part of the Muslim world. It is easy to have a dialogue with the moderates, but nobody would want to 'sit and chat' with the puritans, for the fear of offending them, not even the moderates. How would you, for example, convince a Sunni supremacist who asks for the killing of those Muslims, who happen to differ from him theologically, given that he was raised since childhood to believe in his self-righteousness and a totalitarian view of Islam?

It presents as a great challenge to us, not only to the Westerners but more importantly to Muslim liberals and thinkers. It is not a political challenge, but a philosophical one. A trial, I would say, even tougher than that faced by the Enlightenment thinkers. How do you think the shift from faith in faith to faith in reason can happen? How do you convince someone, that dialogue is a better way than violence? How do you tell someone that his God's right cannot supersede the right of any human to live? It’s the hard problem, debating on such basic tenets which many deem as obvious. A person who is convinced that the Divine authority has ordained on him, the task of protecting His throne on earth, would not find it obvious to hold regard for the very life, whom his God warned against. Or a person who dismisses every argument on the grounds that it is a Judeo-Christian construct, would not be much fond of a civilized dialogue. One could start with challenging the fundamentals of the faith itself, but only if one remains alive to do that. How should we then, begin to address this problem? And how do we know that debating is a solution at all, why cannot we simply do away with military action? Because it is an ideological strife, a meme competing to take root, if one group gets defeated, another will rise.

This is not a 21th century, post-modern fundamentalism problem, this is history repeating itself, just with deadly weapons of modern origins and new organizational strategies, as if fanatical ideologies have found an outlet they were longing for. This is not to say, that fundamentalist faith was evenly prevalent throughout history, but that it is easier to politicize a religion and legitimize it using scripture than it is to de-politicize it. One such example, among many others is that of Zia’s reign in Pakistan, which successfully drummed puritanical fringes of faith using institutional means into masses, but decades forward, no one has been able to reverse the changes. The rule is not the same for both sides of the affairs. It is very easy to capitalize on the religious doctrines while turning the clocks back, but takes broken spines and slit tongues to overhaul it. 

Our current policy standing on counter extremism is based on fractured assumptions and bad theory. Even though the evidence is inconclusive, but the dilemma which lay before us require to make educated drafts on the thin films of evidence that we have. The enlightenment method might be humiliating, require oodles of patience and optimism or might not even work, but if you were to re-make the world, it is exactly how you make the philosophical jump. 

Is the universe God?

Since the time humans begun to look at their environment and ponder over its workings, they have imagined and dreamed of agencies beyond the physical macrocosm. Our ideas about God have evolved probably more than any other philosophy, from the naturalistic gods, to more elegantly engineered conceptions of dualistic God. The diversity in the supermarket of Gods is staggering, of all shapes, sizes and pretexts. Among them is the pantheistic divinity, which many trace back to Spinoza in his “The Ethics Concerning God”, but which in fact is as old as any other notion of God, pluming its roots in ancient Eastern philosophy. But Spinoza’s ideas were more atheistic rather than pantheistic, despite that, many continue to propose similar divine packages. The New Age enthusiasts, among others, assert fancy philosophical ideas, which plays on the argument of ignorance, to economize the gaps in our scientific understanding. Similar musings do creep up in science as well, because hey, science does not always get the brutal scrutiny it should.

The compartments of “consciousness” has much fuzziness surrounding it, which could easily be filled with conjecture and poorly founded conclusions. One such example is bio-centrism by Robert Lanza whose misinterpretation of quantum mechanics and fad philosophy “Is the apple still there, if you don’t look at it?” is appalling. It is basically the Chopda’s version of “the moon is not there until you look at it”. Yes, the color does not exist, but the light waves which produce that color do. Yes, the passage of time is an illusion but time itself is a fundamental property of universe. To make such a naive claim that the “universe out there does not exist, and is a figment of our thought” just regressively plays out logic. Where did the thought come from? It’s a dug hole with no end.

And here is the trap, God is too vague a term to even bring down to a narrow set of meaning. Natural laws are natural laws, choosing to call it God, would just be you having a hard time getting over it. What people often mean by God is “Anything that created the universe and us”, Oh, okay then, physical laws are God, whatever soothes your heart. Or maybe they mean “everything which we cannot control” in that, there is a higher structure that determines the outcome of events at a human scale. Things which are unpredictable and whose outcome cannot be known and which requires you to invoke a structure in order to make sense of them. But that ‘structure’ is basically the statistical probabilities in a certain range of outcomes, which many adore to call God. Then, some would ask “What’s the harm in naming God?” Well, nothing, just that you do not want to spell out the faculties of the world, and simply want them to linger in mystery for a bit more longer. 

Can homosexuality and Darwin be in one boat?

How does evolution make sense of seemingly anti-evolution behavior like homosexuality?

In his book, “The Descent of Man, and Selection in relation to Sex”, Darwin proposed a bombastic idea. Known as the theory of sexual selection, it could explain several traits and characteristics of a specie, in terms of their role in reproductive success. It famously includes the bright and decorative feathers of a peacock, which it uses to attract the female mate which is bland and dull. And it led to the now popular conclusion, that probably, art, poetry and music, were the tools of sexual selection to attract women, ending up in hot encounter in bed. Nevertheless, Darwin was right as far as the peacocks, and the pheasants and the guppies, and species who only have sex for reproduction were concerned.

But much has changed in our understanding of sexual behaviors in humans and other animals. Humans, as we know today, are hypersexual mammals who possess far more sexual capacity than is needed for reproduction. The human male has the biggest gonads in all primates, and the human female can have sex in non-ovulation periods and during pregnancy. Apart from this, humans engage in all sorts of non-reproductive sexual practices, including sodomy, oral sex, self-pleasure, genital rubbing and homosexuality.  This should raise an important “Why?”

But before that, let’s ask another question “What went wrong?” Well, the answer lies in the cultural context of the Victorian era, whose “straight, monogamous, puritanical sex” picture had impacted Darwin’s judgement about human sexuality. Also, we happened to meet the chimpanzees first, who are not only aggressive, but non-cooperative in their social arrangements and usually have sex for reproduction. It was later, that primatologists and ethologists came across other primates, whose social dynamics were starkly different than that of chimpanzees. And soon we begun to find other mammals, both primates and non-primates who engage in similar sexual behaviors.

So, how can evolution explain that?

The mammals wasting their time in sex with no reproductive outcome, and which should seemingly reduce their chances of survival because it does not leave them offspring. Right?

Well, wrong. This arises out of a heinous misconception about evolution that the individuals have to struggle for survival and carry their lineage. It’s the genes, not the individuals, which need to survive and get carried on. And the seeming “paradox of homosexuality” does not really exist, because the homosexuals are still reproductively fit and can produce offspring. But this takes us back to discussion above, why do humans, like bonobos and other primates, engage in non-reproductive sex?

According to E.O Wilson, human sexuality and that of other primates, can be well described as a bonding mechanism in interdependent bands. Humans, which are highly social beings, sexually promiscuous and who engage in sex for pleasure. The bonding maintains cooperation and mutuality between the groups, and increases the chances of gene propagation. The gene is still selfish, even though the individuals can form cooperative arrangements, and hold remarkable qualities of altruism.

Homosexuality did not serve any specific evolutionary function, as some in evolutionary psychology propose, in that men used to cuddle in winter and that is why you have gays, or that gays were better guardians of women and children when the men used to go out for hunt. These musings are based on questionable assumptions about human sexuality, mostly the Victorian ones, which simply compresses the staggering diversity of sexual practices in human cultures into one tiny gob, on which many of the hypothesis and theories in the social sciences and humanities today stand upon. Instead, homosexuality and other non-reproductive forms of sex can be seen as an evolutionary result of our high drive and social inclinations, as species, who enjoy sex for pleasure rather than reproduction. It reminds me of the female orgasm, which does not make any sense from a reproductive standpoint, even though many researchers had attempted to find an evolutionary reason, they failed miserably. Except that we know, that the orgasm is also an expression of pleasure which strengthens bond making and mutuality.

Before any plausible theory on this is to take birth, it is important to re-examine, and accordingly re-shape our picture of human sexuality. You cannot simply ignore, the “odd” sexual behaviors, and the supposedly rare practices of different cultures and arrangements. Once we have an accurate and representative picture of human sexuality and that of other primates, the puzzle joints should neatly fit in.

Portrait showing homosexual behavior in ancient Greece

Further Explore

Mota, Paulo  "Darwin's Sexual Selection Theory-A Forgotten idea"

http://www.uc.pt/en/cia/publica/AP_artigos/AP26.27.10_paulomota

Ryan, Christopher and Cacilda Jethá "Sex at Dawn". June 2010.

Wilson, Edward. "Sociobiology". 1975.