Is the psychological distance between people shrinking or growing? - V

When you have a feeling that you might already understand something, but are not quite sure, you tend to go searching for information that will confirm your suspicions. When you find that confirming piece of information, you become satisfied that you were correct all along and you stop searching. Once you believe you’ve made sense of something, you feel that you need not continue your efforts and you stop your pursuit of new knowledge. When you depend on the Internet for information, such conformation bias is all-pervasive.

The search sector has tremendous power to determine what we see, where we spend, how we perceive the information we find, etc. In The Black Box Society, Frank Pasquale quotes George Dyson as saying in his book Turing’s Cathedral, “Facebook defines who we are, Amazon defines what we want, and Google defines what we think.” Eventually people may give algorithms the authority to make many important decisions. An illustration is the change in how we choose books in a bookstore and how we choose books in Amazon. When people go to a bookstore, they flip through one book and read the first few sentences of another, until some gut feeling connects them to a particular title.

In the Amazon virtual store, a message pops up and tells them: “I know which books you liked in the past. People with similar tastes also tend to love this or that new book.” Devices such as Amazon’s Kindle are able constantly to collect data on their users while they are reading books. Your Kindle can monitor which parts of a book you read quickly, and which slowly; on which page you took a break, and on which sentence you abandoned the book, never to pick it up again. If Kindle was to be upgraded with face recognition software and biometric sensors, it would know how each sentence influenced your heart rate and blood pressure. It would know what made you laugh, what made you sad, what made you angry. Soon, books will read you while you are reading them. Such data should eventually enable Amazon to choose books for you with uncanny precision.

On one side is Google’s well-known motto – ‘Do no evil’. On the other hand, its former CEO Eric Schmidt once said that “Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.” In Black Box Society Frank Pasquale says, ‘It is probably more accurate to say that he and other Silicon  Valley leaders don’t want to be caught crossing the creepy line. As long as secrecy can be used to undermine market competition and law enforcement, they will be emboldened to experiment with ever-creepier, more intrusive, and even exploitative practises.’

Algorithm driven programs popularize more extreme views. People with more extreme views are more likely to express their feelings through clicks, likes and postings than moderates. Over time, the algorithm figures out which box you fit into and tailors suitable results towards you. (It will be called 'enhancing user experience' . And when you couple this with the future of fake news, you will have a mess.) Moderates will give a lot fewer data points for the algorithm to work with and so the targeting will be less precise.

The way Google’s search function operates ensures that people live in their own bubbles and are satisfied that the fragmented knowledge they get represents the whole truth. Google installs a cookie in your computer by default and collects the maximum possible information. Google knows the general location of the user from the IP address and his tastes and preferences from his previous usage pattern. Google will customize its search results according to such information so the results for the same search string at different locations and different users may not be the same.

Hiding behind labels like ‘objectivity’ and ‘neutrality’, Google creates a new reality by the way it slices and presents reality. Google ranks pages according to the number of links they get and they proclaim that their search results show that ‘democracy on the web works’. But some have the resources to generate more links perhaps by paying influential sites  to link to it. There are many ways to game the system. Evgeny Morozov writes in To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, ‘The neutrality defense is bunk – and the sooner Google itself acknowledges this and finds a way to exercise its newly found powers responsibly, the fewer mistakes . . . it will commit in the future.'

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal in August 2010 (quoted in Googlisation of Everything), Google’s chief executive officer, Eric Schmidt, said, “I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next. . . . We know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are.” As Google learns more about our search histories, and customizes the search results through its estimation of our interests, we will increasingly find ourselves in a bubble. You will never encounter the unexpected, the different, the ‘Other’. You will only get information that fits your prior beliefs.

There are ways to remove customization but most people are not technically savvy enough to perform the necessary actions so they are stuck with Google's default option which is to gather whatever information is possible about an individual. Siva Vaidyanathan says in The Googlisation of Everything, ‘Over time, as users in a diverse array of countries train Google’s algorithms to respond to specialized queries with localized results, each place in the world will have a different list of what is important, true, or “relevant” in response to any query.’ So although information has been made available to everyone in theory, walls get built up in practice.

We tend to think that when people take decisions after discussing an issue in a group, an 'average' of the group view emerges. But this is not what happens. People take more extreme views when in a group rather than when they are alone, a phenomenon known as group polarization. Many studies from different parts of the world have shown the phenomenon of group polarization in action. For example, after a group discussion, people already supportive of a war become more supportive, people with an initial tendency towards racism become more racist. This phenomenon also occurs in online discussion.

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump said  that a man who tried to rush the stage during a rally had ties to ISIS. When he couldn’t produce any evidence,  he said that all he knew about it came from what he saw on the Internet. When the most powerful man on the planet believes the information on the Internet, it can't be comforting. As Clay Shirkey says in his post A Speculative Post on the Idea of Algorithmic Authority, ‘There’s a spectrum of authority from “Good enough to settle a bar bet” to “Evidence to include in a dissertation defense”, and most uses of algorithmic authority right now cluster around the inebriated end of that spectrum…’

More data makes us feel that we can make more accurate predictions. But those predictions change human social and political behaviour thus negating  those same predictions soon after they are made. Thus more data will make the world more complex and unpredictable than before. I keep recollecting a statement by Gandhi in Hind Swaraj – 'I am prepared to maintain that humbugs in worldly matters are far worse than the humbugs in religion.' And the ‘silly’ old man was right (which doesn’t surprise me anymore). Ironically, the 'modernist' vision of Nehru has become controversial while the 'obsurantist' Gandhi has become more relevant. Joseph Brodsky writes in Less Than One:

There is something in the consciousness of literati that cannot stand the notion of someone's moral authority. They resign themselves to the existence of a First Party Secretary or of a Fuhrer, as to a necessary evil, but they would eagerly question a prophet. This is so, presumably, because being told that you are a slave is less disheartening news than being told that morally you are zero. After all, a fallen dog shouldn't be kicked. However, a prophet kicks a fallen dog not to finish it off but to get it back on its feet. The resistance to those kicks ...comes not from a desire for truth but from the intellectual smugness of slavery.

Is the psychological distance between people shrinking or growing? - IV

The difference between ancient myths and modern ones is that the latter are peddled as true. Among these modern myths is the assumption that replacing people with machines running complicated algorithms will give unbiased outputs. You are often told that systems are more objective and less prone to prejudice than human judgment. Many companies are turning to machine learning to review vast amounts of data, from evaluating credit for loan applications, to scanning legal contracts for errors, to looking through employee communications with customers to identify bad conduct.

Unintended consequences are the norm rather than the exception in human endeavours and delegating decision-making to machines is no exception. In 2016, for example, an attempt by Microsoft to converse with millennials using a chat bot plugged into Twitter famously created a racist machine that switched from tweeting that “humans are super cool” to praising Hitler and spewing out misogynistic remarks. This was a system that  learnt through interaction with users and bias arose based on the biases of the users driving the interaction. In essence, the users repeatedly tweeted offensive statements at the system and it used those statements as the input for later responses.

In Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Yuval Noah Harari says that high-tech Silicon Valley gurus are creating a new universal narrative that legitimizes the authority of algorithms and Big Data. He calls this novel creed “Dataism”. According to Dataism, 'Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, a stock-exchange bubble and the flu virus are just three patterns of dataflow that can be analyzed using the same basic concepts and tools. The proponents of the Dataist worldview perceive the entire universe as a flow of data and we are already becoming tiny chips inside a giant system that nobody really understands. The nature of AI algorithms makes it so that we won’t know how or what the system is doing, or how it’s so damn good at predicting and choosing things.'

We may thus be gradually ceding control to algorithms which will make all the important decisions for us. But, as Cathy O’ Neil says in Weapons of Math Destruction, an algorithm is just 'an opinion formalized in code'. We tend to think of machines as somehow cold, calculating and unbiased. We believe that self-driving cars will have no preference during life or death decisions between the driver and a random pedestrian. We trust that smart systems performing credit assessments will ignore everything except the genuinely impactful metrics, such as income.  And we have the belief that learning systems will always ultimately enable us to find out the truth because ‘unbiased’ algorithms drive them.

Using machine-learning technology for accomplishing various tasks is attractive but it doesn't eliminate human bias; it just camouflages it with technology.  In an ideal world, intelligent systems and their algorithms would be objective.  Yet there are many more potential ways in which machines can be taught to do something immoral, unethical, or just plain wrong. Machine bias or algorithm bias is the effect of erroneous assumptions in machine learning processes. Models of human behaviour often use proxies which are questionable and depend on the biases of the modeler. The models are generally opaque and businesses guard them as intellectual property defended by legions of lawyers.

These algorithms have large effects in the real world which can have unfortunate consequences with some beginning to describe data science as the new astrology. Technocrats and managers make debatable value judgments that have their biases written all around them. Complicated mathematical models reframe subtle and subjective conclusions (such as the worth of a worker, service, article, or product). One opaque model feeds into another and could affect your whole life. For eg., a bad credit score could mean that you may not get a house, buy a vehicle or get a job. The techies then claim that it is objective “science” based on measurable data which is supposed to be accepted unchallenged. As long as the algorithms are secret, you will never know what kind of of social sorting is taking place.

Can a computer program be racist?  In ‘predictive policing’, historical data about crime is fed into an algorithm and this gives police information about future crime. The system is in use in countries like the US and China. But predictive tools are only as good as the data they are fed. As an article says, Predictive Policing Isn’t About the Future, it’s about the past, These systems are based mostly or entirely on historical crime data held by the police which are a record of how law enforcement responds to particular crimes, rather than the true rate of crime.  Hence these data are contaminated by underlying biases about where to deploy police and what type of people commit crimes thereby strengthening these biases. Forecasts are only as good as the data used for their training.

A machine learning algorithm is used by judges in over a dozen states in the US to make decisions on pre-trial conditions, and sometimes, in actual sentencing. A study found that the algorithm was two times more likely to incorrectly predict that black defendants were high risk for recommitting a crime, and conversely two times more likely to incorrectly predict that white defendants were low risk for recommitting a crime. This difference could (and did) result in handing out tougher or more lenient sentences to convicts.

In an article Beware the Big Errors of 'Big Data', Nassim Nicholas Taleb warns that spurious correlations will increase with the voluminous jump in data collection. The huge increase in the haystack will make it harder to find the needle. As Tim Harford, says in the article Big Data: Are we making a big mistake?, ‘Because found data sets are so messy, it can be hard to figure out what biases lurk inside them – and because they are so large, some analysts seem to have decided the sampling problem isn’t worth worrying about. It is.’

The industries involved in various activities like search or credit hide their methods in secret algorithms. The “privacy policies” of various firms are written to their advantage at the expense of the consumer. I have yet to come across anybody who reads them. People mechanically click “I agree” when confronted with “terms of service” agreements since protesting against any clause in them won’t be of any use. The dice is heavily loaded against them. Now there is a  “unilateral modification” clause that lets companies change the agreement later, with no notice to the persons affected. Frank Pasquale writes in The Black Box Society:

We cannot so easily assess how well the engines of reputation, search, and finance do their jobs. Trade secrecy, where it prevails, makes it practically impossible to test whether their judgments are valid, honest, or fair. The designation of a person as a bad employment prospect, or a website as irrelevant, or a loan as a bad risk may be motivated by illicit aims, but in most cases we’ll never be privy to the information needed to prove that. 

What we do know is that those at the top of the heap will succeed further, thanks in large part to the reputation incurred by past success; those at the bottom are likely to endure cascading disadvantages. Despite the promises of freedom and self-determination held out by the lords of the information age, black box methods are just as likely to entrench a digital aristocracy as to empower experts.

Is the psychological distance between people shrinking or growing? - III

A great mystery of our hyper-connected digital age is that we seem to be drifting apart. Things like mobile phones and social media as also the unending working hours and traffic jams have accelerated the atomisation of the individual. Deep friendships have been replaced by screens, gadgets, and bleary-eyed couch-potato stupor. People seem more self-absorbed, more individualistic, less empathetic. They communicate more, but there’s less communication with the people they’re actually around. They’re ignorant, because many of them don’t feel the need to educate themselves outside their little world.

When visitors come, I see that when adults are in conversation, the children are often in their own worlds keeping on playing with their mobiles. (They are afflicted by the modern disease FOLO: Fear Of Losing Out.) It is no wonder that they don't know many of their relatives. A family friend said that once she saw her daughter chatting with a friend on Facebook. On checking who it was, she found that the friend was a neighbour who lived next-door. Even when told that it would be better to hop across and chat with her friend in person, she continued to use Facebook.

The widespread hypnotisation of TV, laptops and mobile phones has reduced social interactions. When I was growing up in Jamshedpur, I recall a lot more interaction among acquaintances. Almost every weekend, I used to visit some friends or relatives with my family or they used to come over to visit us. Now  I don't even know some people in the apartments block where I live. A relative who stays in the Gulf and visits India frequently, visits his relatives every time. He was telling us that some relatives told him that he comes from the Gulf on a short trip and meets them but they are rarely able to meet some of their neighbours. George Orwell writes in his essay Pleasure Spots:

Much of what goes by the name of pleasure is simply an effort to destroy consciousness. If one started by asking, what is man? what are his needs? how can he best express himself? one would discover that merely having the power to avoid work and live one's life from birth to death in electric light and to the tune of tinned music is not a reason for doing so. Man needs warmth, society, leisure, comfort and security: he also needs solitude, creative work and the sense of wonder. If he recognised this he could use the products of science and industrialism eclectically, applying always the same test: does this make me more human or less human? 

He would then learn that the highest happiness does not lie in relaxing, resting, playing poker, drinking and making love simultaneously. And the instinctive horror which all sensitive people feel at the progressive mechanisation of life would be seen not to be a mere sentimental archaism, but to be fully justified. For man only stays human by preserving large patches of simplicity in his life, while the tendency of many modern inventions - in particular the film, the radio and the aeroplane - is to weaken his consciousness, dull his curiosity, and, in general, drive him nearer to the animals.

Tech enthusiasts looked to search engines as an extraordinary democratization of the Internet. But that is only half the story. The online world also spawns murketing, unfair competition, and distortions of reality that may be having the opposite effect. Whenever you hear the word ‘secret’, your antennas should be up. In a moment of of weakness, the government conceded the Right to Information Act. Since then, it has been trying to correct its error.

Bankers will hide their risk behind complex securities. There will be various accounting tricks for short term gains. Obligations would remain on balance sheets for some purposes, and off them for others. In the article Why is finance so complex?, Steve Randy Waldman says, ‘Finance has always been complex. More precisely it has always been opaque, and complexity is a means of rationalizing opacity in societies that pretend to transparency.’

In many countries, computerized exchanges made it possible to gain or lose fortunes within seconds, Thus even the length of  the wire connecting your computer to the server of the stock exchange is vital for maintaining one's competitive edge, as Michael Lewis explains in Flashboys. Such information advantage can only be obtained by the wealthy who will also be able to employ economists to give sophisticated reasons for why such fixing of markets will benefit you. After all, he who pays the piper calls the tune.

Existing power structures are strengthened by obfuscation. Powerful, wealthy companies will hide information by providing too much of it. If a firm is asked for some information, it could inundate you with tens of thousands of pages of data. Investigators are in effect trying to find a needle in a haystack and waste a lot of time and effort in the process. Meanwhile the institutions will self righteously quote Louis Brandeis’s comment that “sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants”.

When large, wealthy companies can do nothing to refute the mountain of evidence against their products and practises, they will employ ‘experts’ to create confusion, uncertainty, and doubt in the minds of the public. In 1969, an internal memo within the Brown and Williamson Tobacco company stated that “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also a means of establishing controversy.” Uncertainty and doubt always tend to maintain the status quo and give people an excuse to continue doing what they really want to do.

The same strategy has also been used to make it appear that no one really knows whether climate change is real or what might be causing it.  Many people read about the results of the study, but never probe into how the study was actually done.  People could then say, “If nobody knows, I might as well continue to drive my SUV, eat my burgers and live just as I always have.” More investigation may reveal that studies of this sort typically have strong financial ties to the industry that is selling the product although the concerned firm will always deny that they influenced the report. As Humphrey says in one episode of Yes Minister, 'He that would keep a secret must keep it secret that he hath a secret to keep.' In Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Yuval Noah Harari says:

In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the twenty-first century censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. We just don't know what to pay attention to and often spend our time investigating and debating side issues. In ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore. 

Is the psychological distance between people shrinking or growing? - II

I once heard an interview with Salman Rushdie in which he said that he drove across many nations while coming to India in his youth. I think the route included countries like Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Such a journey would no longer be possible today not only because some places along the route are war-torn but also because the border controls have become much more rigid. Most likely, the traveler would find himself being charged with being a spy and thrown in jail somewhere. George Orwell wrote in  You and the Atomic Bomb:

We were once told that the aeroplane had ‘abolished frontiers’; actually it is only since the aeroplane became a serious weapon that frontiers have become definitely impassable. The radio was once expected to promote international understanding and co-operation; it has turned out to be a means of insulating one nation from another. 

A survey in the 1980s showed that about 1/6 of the communities in India could not be classified into the conventional religions. A more recent survey showed the fraction of communities with such interleaved pieties has reduced to 1/9. The census contains a certain number of specified boxes and you can tick only one of them. A nation-state thus over time makes the fuzzy boundaries between communities more rigid. This sharpens the 'us' vs 'them' feelings thus making these communities more susceptible to the ploys of modern 'riot specialists' who engineer communal tensions for political gains. (See Creating a Nationality.)

It is said that various crude social barriers have broken down before the march of modernity and more rational, secular values have improved relationships. But this may not always produce good results. For instance, inter-dinning between Hindus and Muslims was frowned upon a century ago but now this taboo has largely disappeared. A Muslim riot victim commented, 'Previously, we didn't dine together but our hearts met; now we dine together but our hearts don't meet.' (Quoted in Regimes of Narcissism, Regimes of Despair by Ashis Nandy.)

The various online sites that  have come up ask many intricate caste details. I happened to see a couple of these sites where a couple of relatives had registered. They had a caste menu which mentioned many castes and sub-castes that I had never heard of. I am told that educated NRIs take care to specify caste requirements in their matrimonial ads. The numerous T.V. serials portray only upper-caste life-styles.

It has been found that in survivors of partition riots, even among those who had to undergo terrible sufferings, there exists a residue of fellow feeling towards the other community. One would have expected the younger generation, who didn't live through partition, to be more tolerant of the other community but the reality is the opposite. This is because the older generation still has some memories of the time before partition when the two communities had learned to live together in spite of their differences. The younger generation doesn't have such memories but has just heard stories about the partition horrors and are prisoners of the rhetoric of the nation-states of India and Pakistan.

In the current process of development, all the costs are borne by one section of the population and benefits go to another section so inequalities will keep increasing in the guise of 'national interests'. Ashis Nandy once said that there is a difference between the poverty in olden times and the poverty of today. In olden times the desires of the rich and the poor did not intersect but today they have the same expectations on drastically different levels of income. This kind of 'development' will not further national interests as the state claims but will intensify social tensions.

The sociologist Robert Merton had expressed this idea by his "Strain Theory" by which he sought to explain the phenomenon of social deviance. He said that criminality was not caused by sudden social change but by a social structure that holds out the same goals (wealth, power, status, enlightenment) to all its members without giving them equal access to the legitimate means (well-paid jobs, good education) to achieve them. Merton suggested that high levels of such maladaptive behaviour were evidence of an unhealthy cultural imbalance between goals and means and an unequal distribution of opportunities to achieve wealth legitimately. Deviance, including criminal behaviour, is therefore a normal adjustment to an unequal society.

It is often said that modern forms of travel like aeroplanes have made people more mobile and hence even people who live far away meet frequently. But actually, the increased speed of travel has made interactions more superficial. For example, a person travelling from London to Mumbai for a business meeting will stay in a five star hotel, have meetings in plush rooms, visit malls and fly home after a week thinking that he has had a glimpse of India.

There was an extensive maritime trade network operating in the Indian Ocean region for over a millennium till the 15th  century. The various peoples of the subcontinent, southern China, eastern Africa, etc. had established strong maritime trade with each other. When these people took items like spices, silk , rice, etc. to  other countries in the Indian Ocean region, they had to remain there for months waiting for favorable winds to return home. This resulted in their developing deep ties with the local communities.

The peaceful tradition came to an end with the arrival of the Portuguese who demanded the expulsion of Muslim traders from Calicut. This took the rulers of the region by surprise since nobody had ever tried to compel anybody by force of arms. They tried hard to reach an understanding with the Europeans but found that their choice was ‘between resistance and submission; co-operation was not offered’. As is to be expected, the superior armed might of the Europeans won the day and since then, for the last 500 years, the Indian Ocean region has remained a contested area. Amitav Ghosh writes in In an Antique Land:

Within the Western historiographical record the unarmed character of the Indian Ocean trade is often represented as a lack, or failure, one that invited the intervention of Europe, with its increasing proficiency in war. When a defeat is as complete as was that of the trading cultures of the Indian Ocean, it is hard to allow the vanquished the dignity of nuances of choice and preference. Yet it is worth allowing for the possibility that the peaceful tradition of the oceanic trade may have been, in a quiet and inarticulate way, the product of a rare cultural choice…

Is the psychological distance between people shrinking or growing? - I

It is said that we live in an interconnected world. Due to globalization the nations of the world trade more with each other and their welfare depends on the welfare of other nations. People travel more and the Internet has made communications easier. But there are forces in the modern world which push in the opposite direction.

The world today faces a rising tide of nationalism.  Nationalist and populist leaders have emerged around the world, ranging from nations as different as the affluent United States, poverty-stricken Philippines and ‘the rising giant’ India. The Internet has helped fuel nationalistic feelings. Revisionist historical literature spewing ethnic and religious hatreds, that would have been difficult to get earlier, are now easy to find online. People in the diaspora give spirited support to various regressive, nationalistic groups. Secure in the knowledge that they themselves will not feel the effects of any increase in violence, they can afford to be more nationalist, bloodthirsty, and irresponsible.

At first glance, the insistence of leaders on always putting their own country first seems good and the obvious thing to do. Nationalism has always been a seductive ideology, not just among us Indians, but for people across the world. But what nationalism does best is to create a sense of “Us vs Them” in nearly every case. The dangers of nationalism are well documented in history and well explained by George Orwell in Notes on Nationalism. His main observations are:

• By ‘nationalism’ I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’. But secondly — and this is much more important — I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests. 

• Nationalism…is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.

• A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige. ...his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations. He sees history, especially contemporary history, as the endless rise and decline of great power units, and every event that happens seems to him a demonstration that his own side is on the upgrade and some hated rival is on the downgrade. ...[He]is able to stick to his belief even when the facts are overwhelmingly against him. Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also — since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself — unshakably certain of being in the right.

• All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. ...Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side. 

• Every nationalist is haunted by the belief that the past can be altered. He spends part of his time in a fantasy world in which things happen as they should …and he will transfer fragments of this world to the history books whenever possible. ...Material facts are suppressed, dates altered, quotations removed from their context and doctored so as to change their meaning. Events which it is felt ought not to have happened are left unmentioned and ultimately denied….

• Indifference to objective truth is encouraged by the sealing-off of one part of the world from another, which makes it harder and harder to discover what is actually happening. ...The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs. ...All nationalist controversy is at the debating-society level. It is always entirely inconclusive, since each contestant invariably believes himself to have won the victory. Some nationalists are not far from schizophrenia, living quite happily amid dreams of power and conquest which have no connection with the physical world.

• All the way through I have said, ‘the nationalist does this’ or ‘the nationalist does that’.…but we deceive ourselves if we do not realize that we can all resemble them in unguarded moments. …and the most fair-minded and sweet-tempered person may suddenly be transformed into a vicious partisan, anxious only to ‘score’ over his adversary and indifferent as to how many lies he tells or how many logical errors he commits in doing so. …One prod to the nerve of nationalism, and the intellectual decencies can vanish, the past can be altered, and the plainest facts can be denied.

• There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when ‘our’ side commits it. Even if one does not deny that the crime has happened, even if one knows that it is exactly the same crime as one has condemned in some other case, even if one admits in an intellectual sense that it is unjustified — still one cannot feel that it is wrong. Loyalty is involved, and so pity ceases to function.

• Whether it is possible to get rid of them I do not know, but I do believe that it is possible to struggle against them, and that this is essentially a moral effort. It is a question first of all of discovering what one really is, what one's own feelings really are, and then of making allowance for the inevitable bias. ...The emotional urges which are inescapable, and are perhaps even necessary to political action, should be able to exist side by side with an acceptance of reality. But this, I repeat, needs a moral effort, and contemporary English literature, so far as it is alive at all to the major issues of our time, shows how few of us are prepared to make it.

Once nationalism spreads past a certain point, it will tend to degrade the overall quality of political debate, and therefore of political thought. In Nineteen Eighty-four, Orwell produced a whole vocabulary to describe this process of thought: blackwhite, crimestop, doublethink, goodthink. Nationalism often transforms into racism and xenophobia. Gandhi had no qualms in saying that nationalism was another word for imperialism. We ought to rethink our attitude towards nationalism and curb much of the enthusiasm that goes with it.

Ignoring religion in politics is a mistake - IV

In Mohandas, Rajmohan Gandhi, mentions Arundhati Roy saying that Gandhi introduced religion into politics and in the hands of lesser individuals that followed, its misuse was inevitable. The first half of the story is not true. Religion was already a part of the Indian political scene before Gandhi returned to India in 1915. In the late 19th century, Syed Ahmad Khan had charged Congress with benefiting Hindus and harming Muslims. In Bombay, Muslims felt frightened when Tilak mobilized Hindus around religious festivals. Bengal was partitioned into Hindu-majority and Muslim-majority parts in 1905. The Muslim league was founded in 1906 to look after the interests of Muslims and wanted a separate electorate. Rajmohan Gandhi writes:

Between a politics that pretended that religion was absent from India and a politics that squarely faced religion's hold, Gandhi chose the latter, and tried to remind all concerned that true Hinduism taught goodwill and that true Islam,  Sikhism and Christianity did the same. One survey suggests that he made the right choice, and also that without him, intolerance would have been even stronger in both Hindu India and Muslim India. 

Gandhi’s prayer meetings were a unique experiment in bringing people together. They did not require a building, they did not bring in priests and were not restricted to people of a particular faith. They combined devotional practice and song with discussions of group and national issues. During the Calcutta riots at the time of Partition, if there was an objection to reading some verses from the Koran, Gandhi would drop it from the schedule. In his talk later, he would discuss that very objection and at the end of his talk, the protester would often withdraw his objection.

Even critics of Gandhi's method of mixing religion with politics said that his prayer meetings had a calming effect. After he brought the Partition-related riots in Calcutta under control, an awed Mountbatten wrote that Gandhi did alone in Calcutta what 50,000 troops couldn't do  in Punjab. Gandhi uses the word 'religion' several times in different contexts in his seminal text Hind Swaraj. For eg., he says, 'It is contrary to our  manhood if we obey laws repugnant to our conscience. Such teaching is opposed to religion and means slavery.' This gives the impression that he was a reactionary figure who was mired in the past.

This is due to a misunderstanding which Anthony Parel clears in Gandhi: Hind Swaraj and Other Writings.  In the original Gujarati text of Hind Swaraj, Gandhi uses the term ‘dharma’ which is usually translated into ‘religion’ in English. But ‘dharma’ has a much wider meaning than ‘religion’. Gandhi uses the word ‘dharma’ in two different senses throughout the text: ‘dharma’ as ethics and ‘dharma’ as sect. Most occurrences of the word ’religion’ in the English translation of Hind Swaraj should be read as ‘ethics’.

In Freedom in Exile, the Dalai Lama endorses Gandhi's view of religion when he says that 'any deed done with good motivation is a religious act'. He therefore sees no contradiction between politics and religion and says that religious people are morally obliged to help solve the problems of the world. He says that politicians need religion more than hermits. 'If a hermit acts out of bad motivation, he harms no one but himself. But if someone who can directly influence the whole of society acts with bad motivation then a great many people will be adversely affected.'

In his essay An Anti-secularist manifesto, Ashis Nandy writes that in the Western concept, ‘secular’ is used in the sense of being opposite to the word ‘sacred’. In the Indian concept, it is not opposite to ‘sacred’ but to ‘ethnocentrism’, ‘xenophobia’ and ‘fanaticism’. This Indian concept is what the leaders of the freedom movement adopted knowing the Western concept of secularism will not make any sense to an overwhelmingly religious population.

The separation of religion and politics has not kept religion out of politics. It has only resulted in the more unacceptable and anti-democratic forms of religion to gain more power and visibility. When we abandon symbols of religious tolerance, others appropriate them, which is what has now happened with Gandhi's legacy . Ashis Nandy says in "The Return of the Sacred: The Language of Religion and The Fear of Democracy in a Post-Secular World" :

For more than three millennia, human beings have invested some of their best cognitive and affective resources in the spiritual and the religious. That investment, in retrospect, might not have been uniformly wise and uniformly creative. But it has not been uniformly forgettable either. The investment in secular statecraft and secular public life, on the other hand, has been relatively recent and, though it has also often been immensely creative, it has been spectacularly destructive, too. 

In any case, the second set of investments can never compare with the three millennia of human achievement in the sphere of religion. Civilization, as we know it, is largely the achievement of the religious way of life, though we try hard to forget that part of the story. I say this as a non-believer who has invested some years of life in the study of the psychological and cultural sources of human creativity. 

Can we ignore or bypass these achievements for the sake of a theory of progress that seeks to wipe clean the pre-Enlightenment world or freeze it as a museum piece? 

Ignoring religion in politics is a mistake - III

The best example of someone using religion in politics is Gandhi. All his activities including politics were governed by the spirit of religion. 'You must watch my life, how I live, eat, sit, talk, behave in general - The sum total of all those in me is my religion.' He said that if religion is concerned with practical life, it is also concerned with politics. Religion, morality and ethics, for him, are closely interwoven. Similarly, politics was nothing but a major instrument of service to the people totally free from all games of power politics. Gandhi realized that he couldn't do even social work without politics.

Gandhi looked on religion in terms of experience rather than ritual practice. His perception of religion was not in any way connected with denominational religion. He finds major religious traditions giving people the moral material to frame their choices as they go about their daily lives. He does not accept the idea of a single 'best' tradition and maintains that each religious tradition speaks in its way of the shared experiences and problems faced by people living in that community.

He didn’t believe in just talk about religion but kept reminding people that actions speak louder than words. Things had to be done rather than merely contemplated. The exclusive cultivation of inwardness leads one to neglect the practical aspects of life which does not necessarily have a beneficial effect on society. He therefore does not advocate a retreat into the ‘cave of the heart’ like Indian holy men but the power of religion to move hearts must be used to bring people together when a course of action is being planned.

He re-interpreted Hinduism so drastically that it is not recognizable to many Hindus. Hinduism, for Gandhi, was not exclusive, but a broad and inclusive faith, a tolerant and open-minded religion, accommodating the best in other religions. He was ready to detect the same insight in men of  different faiths so he says, 'Khan Saheb Abdul Gaffar Khan derives his belief in non-violence from the Koran.' He retained his eclectic view on religion throughout his life. Here are a few quotes to show where he stood on religion:

• Hind Swaraj - Religions are different roads converging to the same point. What does it matter if we take different roads as long as we reach the same goal? In reality, there are as many religions as there are individuals.

• Speech in September 1927 - I believe that all the great religions of the world are true more or less. I say “more or less” because I believe that everything that the human hand touches, by reason of the very fact that human beings are imperfect, becomes imperfect. 

• Before March 12, 1940 - I do not regard God as a person. Truth for me is God . . . God is an Idea.   

• The Story of My Experiments with Truth - ..my devotion to Truth has drawn me into the field of politics; and I can say without the slightest hesitation, and yet in all humility, that those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.”

• October 1927, Young India - I do not believe in people telling others of their faith, especially with a view to conversion. Faith does not admit of telling. It has to be lived and then it becomes self-propagating. 

• September 1946 - "If I were a dictator, religion and state would be separate. I swear by my religion. I will die for it. But it is my personal affair. The state has nothing to do with it. The state would look after your secular welfare, health, communications, foreign relations, currency and so on, but not your or my religion. That is everybody's personal concern!" 

The heart can cause passions that can result in a course of action that can cause trouble. But to say that religion always causes conflict is an overstatement. All religions, even the most tolerant ones, can be used or misused and can include as well as exclude. After Independence and Gandhi's removal from the political scene (much to the relief of who Ashis Nandy calls the 'moderns', who were wedded to secular statecraft), the intelligentsia abandoned the field of religion as something that the poor, illiterate villagers pursued.

In the absence of the tolerant, inclusive interpretation of religion that Gandhi had provided, various regressive and exclusive versions of religion sprang up in the public sphere. By the 1980s these forces had become dominant and started speaking on behalf of all their co-religionists. This was easy since there were no competing ideas in the marketplace of religion. The few noises that the intelligentsia made giving an alternative interpretation of religion seemed merely reactive.

In his essay An Anti-secularist Manifesto, Ashis Nandy writes about these regressive forces: ‘Instead of making religious use of politics, they make political use of religion, turning it into an instrument of political mobilization within a psephocratic model – a model in which elections and elected ‘kings’ dominate the system.’ Instead of being a means of expressing cultural values, religion has become a legitimate instrument for perusing personal and group self-interest. Instead of private faith and public agnosticism, what has become dominant is public faith and private agnosticism.

Gandhi once said that 'religions are only as good or as bad as their professors make them out to be'. Hence Raimundo Panikkar said - 'the separation between religion and politics is lethal and their identification suicidal'.