Just a place to jot down my musings.

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Kultur und Kampf

This BBC article by philosopher John Gray begins with an autosummary: “Culture thrives on conflict and antagonism, not social harmony.” It then quotes the character Harry Lime from The Third Man:
In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
Provocative, but clearly false, as Gray himself admits. It wasn’t the violence of the Borgias that produced great art, but their patronage. (To what extent their patronage of the arts was a consequence of their murderous regime is harder to analyze.) There have been reigns of violence that have produced no art of great consequence—think of Mafia-dominated lands, or of the devastation of Khorasan by the Mongol armies. It’s clear that the link between great cultural products and violence is not as obvious as Lime (or Gray) claims.

But that’s not the most interesting part of this article—after all, Gray himself chooses to back off from Lime’s rhetoric after using it as a hook to draw people in. Rather, what is interesting is Gray’s conclusion: “Culture thrives on contestation and antagonism, not some dreary fantasy of social harmony.”

However, this “conclusion” is not warranted by Gray’s arguments. What looks like a careful argument is in fact a reinforcement of an old myth. Gray’s vision of culture as the cream bubbling atop a writhing, churning, chaotic conflict parallels the stereotypical picture of a lonely artist whose whole œuvre is a cri de cœur that pierces society’s carefully constructed façade. Both of these ideas are Romantic myths. And like all powerful myths they possess a kernel of truth and have deep roots extending into Greek culture: the Promethean myth of a man stealing primordial technology from the gods, and the notion of the agon, the contest in which two men struggled with each other, physically and mentally, for victory. The Greek conception of debate as agonistic and the Greek idea of (technological?) progress as something achieved by an act of violence have survived down to this day in myths such as the one Gray sketches out here. (I realized I’m treating the Greeks superficially here, and know that Greek culture was more complex than this.)

The reason I call this a myth is because Indic and Chinese civilizations (at least what little I know of the latter) take very different approaches to the question of whether culture emerges from conflict or harmony. Again, the point is not that culture can or cannot arise out of conflict—it is clear that it does sometimes, and it doesn’t on other occasions—but rather that “civilizations” have different attitudes towards the relationship between culture and conflict, and hold different myths dear to themselves that influence their perceptions of the world.

The Chinese case is rather interesting. The Hundred Schools of Thought flowered during the Warring States period when the political scene was a bloody mess, and it may in fact be possible to argue that at least some intellectual developments were in direct response to the chaos. Nevertheless, it is my limited understanding that Chinese philosophers have not normally followed a confrontational model of debate. Furthermore, the Tang and Song courts witnessed the flowering of Chinese art, literature, and philosophy (well, at least of the Neo-Confucian persuasion), and these were largely in response to sustained courtly patronage of these pursuits. But regardless of what the political scene was like, the story told is one of harmony, both within the individual and at the social level.

The Indic case also differs from the Western one. While Indic philosophy does parallel the Greek in largely following an agonistic model, the worldviews of the literati typically sought out harmony and resolution. The rasa theorists saw artistic appreciation as evoking stable emotional states in an appropriately receptive audience, and at least some theorists (Abhinavagupta? I’m rusty on this) thought that the different rasas were all underpinned by the śānta-rasa, a state of calm or repose. Again, I’m not claiming that the conflict model is invalid here, only that the ultimate emphasis of the Indic system is rather different. 

The same is also true of those works of Indic authors that may have had political messages that we may not be receptive to today (such as Kālidāsa’s Raghuvaṃśa), where too an ultimately harmonious relationship between ruler and universe, between text and context, is envisioned and enacted. To the extent that generalizations can be valid, it can be generally stated that Indic authors largely saw themselves as working in harmony with their tradition, and saw the purpose of their works not as critiques of their societies but rather as representations of it that would harmonize it with the vision of the ideal society that Indic intellectuals held. (At some point in the future, I shall try to stretch this point into a discussion of Bollywood.)

Ultimately, the point is not that Gray is right or wrong: it is that he remains within the bounds of a particular myth that is not universally accepted or acceptable. Other civilizations have looked at similar events and processes and drawn very different lessons from them, which have shaped their attitudes towards the world and their cultural products in very different ways. Vive la différence!


Sunday, August 12, 2012

“Albion’s Seed”: Notions of liberty in the US

The eminent American historian David Hackett Fischer has written colossal tomes that are daunting to even look at. His classic Albion’s Seed makes the argument at great length that modern American culture has been fundamentally shaped by four successive waves of migrations from different parts of the British Isles. These migrations brought with them their own distinct “folkways”, which took root in particular parts of the (eastern) United States and in particular strata of society. The book is vast, but this excerpt from the book contains short summaries of the ways in which the four folkways differed on the notion of liberty. I shall summarize the four summaries here so as not to overtax my poor brain.

In Fischer’s own words:
These four groups shared many qualities in common. All of them spoke the English language. Nearly all were British Protestants. Most lived under British laws and took pride in possessing British liberties. At the same time, they also differed from one another in many other ways: in their religious denominations, social ranks, historical generations, and also in the British regions from whence they came. They carried across the Atlantic four different sets of British folkways which became the basis of regional cultures in the New World. 
The first of the migrations was that of the Puritans, from eastern England to Massachusetts in the early 17th century. Their folkway was marked by what Fischer calls “ordered liberty”, and indeed used the word “liberty” to refer to four different ideas:
  • collective liberty: the ability of a community to make its own decisions
  • individual liberties: particular rights granted to individuals or groups that liberated them from otherwise binding constraints
  • “soul liberty”: the “freedom to order one’s own acts in a godly way—but not in any other”.
  • “freedom from the tyranny of circumstance”: guaranteeing everybody some level of protection from the worst that life could throw at them
The second migration, almost contemporaneous with the first, was that of a Royalist élite from southern  England to Virginia, who were accompanied by a large group of indentured servants. The most common notion of liberty here was a sort of “hegemonic liberty” that was available only to free-born Englishmen, which gave them not just dominion over themselves but also over others. It was thus possible to reconcile ideas of liberty with the practice of slavery in such parts.

The third was that of the Quakers from the northern Midlands of England to the mid-Atlantic, particularly around the Philadelphia area. This was a later migration than that of the Puritans, and thus exhibited a very different understanding of liberty. For the Quakers, what mattered most was “reciprocal liberty” that rested on their deep faith in “liberty of conscience”. As the Quakers had suffered greatly in England for their faith, they were willing to use the power of government to establish religious liberties in their communities in the Americas so as to prevent such tyranny from arising again. Their principle of reciprocity—fundamentally different from the Virginian Royalists’ hierarchical, hegemonic liberty—drew inspiration from the Christian Golden Rule. 

The fourth migration was that of the Scots-Irish (which seems a little bit too much of a catch-all to me, but then again I know nothing of this stuff), who came from different borderlands of Great Britain: the border between England and Scotland, the border between Northern Ireland and what is today the Republic of Ireland, and so on. These regions of the British Isles did not have strong centralized institutions, and the people living there were accustomed to “anarchic violence”. It was thus “natural” for them to bring to the Americas an abiding love of “natural liberty” accompanied by a deep mistrust of cultural outsiders. 


Saturday, August 11, 2012

Kṛṣṇa and the “field of vision”

cetaś cañcalatāṃ tyaja priya-sakhi vrīḍe na māṃ pīḍaya
bhrātar muñca dṛśau nimeṣa bhagavan kāma kṣaṇaṃ kṣamyatām |
barhaṃ mūrdhani karṇayoḥ kuvalayaṃ vaṃśaṃ dadhānaḥ kare
so ’yaṃ locana-gocaro bhavati me dāmodaraḥ sundaraḥ ||

Heart, stop fluttering;
Dear friend, stop torturing me!
Brother, let me see, just for a moment;
Cupid, spare me, just for a second:

        A peacock’s feather in His hair,
        water-lilies in His ears,
        bamboo flute in His hands—

He’s all I can see,
        Dāmodara the handsome.

This gorgeous verse, from the Rasamañjarī of Bhānudatta, has also been translated by Sheldon Pollock, although I cannot find my copy of the book right now.  What I love most about this verse—and what I find impossible to translate—is the compound locana-gocara

In terms of pure sound: its two halves are almost exactly identical prosodically, differing only in the third and sixth syllables (and that too only because the sixth must bear the added weight of the -sU case ending). Furthermore, the repetition of the -oca- sounds makes it delightfully delicate to recite. (Think “cellar door”.)

And in terms of meaning too, the two halves of the word work beautifully. The first, locana, can mean either the seeing organ, “eye”, or the sense itself, “eyesight”. It is also connected with such meanings as “illumination” and “lighting up”. The second, gocara, is even more fascinating. Etymologically, it is in fact a compound, go-cara, literally meaning “cow-pasture”. Through some considerable semantic drift, it comes to mean “field”, first literally and then metaphorically, encompassing such meanings as “scope”, “range”, sometimes even “topic”. A smart translation for locana-gocara would therefore be something like “range of vision” (taking into account the associations of “range” with cattle rearing).

But in the particular context of this verse, I really wanted something simpler. Kṛṣṇa isn’t just in the nāyikā’s range of vision, He becomes it. He is the pasture in which the cows that are her eyes roam, coming to rest at a few particularly succulent grazing spots—His peacock-feather, His ornaments, His flute. He is, simply put, all she can see.


Why pearls, and why strung at random?

In his translation of the famous "Turk of Shirazghazal of Hafez into florid English, Sir William Jones, the philologist and Sanskrit scholar and polyglot extraordinaire, transformed the following couplet:

غزل گفتی و در سفتی بیا و خوش بخوان حافظ

که بر نظم تو افشاند فلک عقد ثریا را


into:

Go boldly forth, my simple lay,
Whose accents flow with artless ease,
Like orient pearls at random strung.

The "translation" is terribly inaccurate, but worse, the phrase is a gross misrepresentation of the highly structured organization of Persian poetry. Regardless, I picked it as the name of my blog for a number of reasons: 
1) I don't expect the ordering of my posts to follow any rhyme or reason
2) Since "at random strung" is a rather meaningless phrase, I decided to go with the longer but more pompous "pearls at random strung". I rest assured that my readers are unlikely to deduce from this an effort on my part to arrogate some of Hafez's peerless brilliance!

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Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
—W.H. Davies, “Leisure”