Shunya's Notes

War and Peace

2012-01-23T17:12:16-08:00

It took me about one and a half months to read War and Peace. Tolstoy's magnum opus, first published in the 1860s, has been acclaimed as one of the greatest novels ever written, though the popular perception is that it is a very difficult book to finish reading. The length of the novel is clearly a huge barrier to reading it, though unfamiliarity with the historical context adds to the difficulties.

To appreciate the book fully, it is useful to recall the historical context. The story is set in the early nineteenth century, spanning the period from 1805 to 1820. Its main characters all come from the Russian nobility, and the narrative arc follows their fortunes, set against the backdrop of the tumultuous events surrounding Napoleon's invasion of Russia.

During the preceding century, Russia had emerged from being a relatively isolated country to being one of the foremost powers of Europe. During the reigns of Peter the Great (1696-1725) and Catherine the Great (1762-1796), decisive turns had been made towards Western European culture. Catherine the great considered herself to be an Enlightenment figure, and corresponded with the French philosophes such as Voltaire and Diderot. Diderot was present at her court (and drew a salary) for some time during the 1770s. The influence of the French language was so strong that it became the language of the nobility, some of whose members could not speak Russian.

Alexander I, grandson of Catherine the Great, became Tsar of Russia in 1801. In 1805, Russia went to war with Napoleon and lost at the famous battle of Austerlitz. After more battles with Napoleon's armies in 1806 and 1807, the Treaty of Tilsit was signed and there was an uneasy peace for 5 years. Russia was reluctant to comply with the demands of Napoleon's Continental System, by which he attempted to impose a European trade embargo on Britain. The peace was ended by Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812.

The French invasion of Russia began in June 1812, with over 400,000 troops. The Russians did not immediately give battle and kept withdrawing until they were in the vicinity of Moscow. The battle finally took place at the village of Borodino (near Moscow) in early September 1812, and tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides lost their lives. Though the French won the battle and went on to occupy Moscow, it was an incomplete and pyrrhic victory. Much of Moscow was set on fire, most likely on the orders of the city governor. This was a continuation of the scorched earth policy of the Russians. Tsar Alexander I refused to negotiate with Napoleon.

In October 1812, Napoleon began a retreat from Moscow. The retreat, by all accounts, was horrific. Supply lines, quite inadequate to begin with, were disrupted by Russian guerrilla attacks. The bitter Russian winter claimed many lives. Fodder for horses was scarce. Weak horses either died or were slaughtered for food by the starving soldiers. This led to the abandoning of cannons and wagons, further weakening the ability of the French army to fight the Russians. In early November, Napoleon learned of a coup attempt in Paris. He promptly abandoned the army and raced ahead to Paris. In the end, only about a tenth of the original troops actually made it back to France, all others having died or been taken prisoner by the Russians. Russian casualties were no less tragic. About two hundred thousand soldiers died, with the death toll of civilians perhaps just as large. Death and destruction on a massive scale were the results of Napoelon's Russian campaign.

Given this background, one can easily imagine why this period must have loomed large in the imagination of Russian intellectuals throughout the later parts of the nineteenth century. Tolstoy's decision to choose this period as the setting of War and Peace was determined ultimately by his realization of the central importance of this phase of his country's history.

War and Peace can be regarded as several books combined into one. In its most novel-like parts, it is an absorbing story of the fluctuating fortunes of its main characters, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, Natasha Rostova and her brother Nikolai, and Count Pierre Bezukhov. Struggling with their desires and aspirations, buffeted by the storms of dramatic historical events and by their own missteps, they try to make the best of their lives. On the other hand, viewed as historical fiction, the book is an unparalleled description of warfare in general and of the various battles of the Napoleonic campaigns in particular.

Parts of the book, the ones where Tolstoy tends to be repetitious, are devoted to military history, especially to debunking much of war strategy and the "great man" approach to history. These could easily be separated from the book to form a treatise on nineteenth century history writing. Tolstoy's emphasis on contingency in history and his debunking of Napoleon's greatness, or his much celebrated "military genius", are all quite persuasive. He is also very dismissive of the elaborate battle strategies of the generals and their adoration by (military) historians. His version of events relies more on the unexpected happenings in the thick of battle. However, his alternative explanations of Russian victories, which include waves of spirit sweeping through the Russians or the decline in morale among the French, are vague and dissatisfying.

Ultimately though, the parts of the book that I recall with pleasure are the characters and their lives and fortunes. Tolstoy devotes considerable time and space to develop many of the characters we meet in the book, even though not all of them are central to the main story line. In particular, I was surprised by how well etched the women characters were. Apart from his heroine, Natasha, he devotes considerable time to Maria Bolkonsky, Prince Andrei's deeply religious sister, Natasha's mother, the Countess Rostova , Natasha's poor cousin Sonya, and the old Princess Anna Mikhaylovna, who is so keen on promoting her son Boris Drubetskoy's career. This attention to the women characters was perhaps the influence of Tolstoy's own wife Sonia, who had a major role in the plot development, writing, and publication of War and Peace.

Tolstoy's great success lies in creating characters who are instantly recognizable, even by readers separated from early nineteenth century Russia by two hundred years. While they belong to the nobility, their striving is not uncommon. Natasha, the heroine, initially depicted as a spirited, if somewhat flighty young girl, ages and matures through the novel as circumstances and her own errors complicate her life.

The intelligent and ambitious Andrei Bolkonsky, whose wife dies in childbirth, is disillusioned by war and by his own life, after being injured in the battle of Austerlitz. He is revived by meeting Natasha and falling in love with her. During his absence, Natasha is swept off her feet by the sleazy Anatole Kuragin, and she breaks off her engagement with Andrei. Pierre Bezukhov, friend to Andrei and Natasha, informs her that Anatole is already married. Only much later is Natasha re-united with a dying Andrei.

Pierre is himself a complex character. Illegitimate son and fabulously wealthy heir, he struggles with his attempts to understand the meaning and purpose of his life. Maneuvred into a joyless marriage with Helene Kuragin, he joins the Freemasons, tries to make the lives of serfs easier, joins the army, and is taken prisoner. Ultimately, he finds wisdom in Platon Karatayev, a fellow prisoner and peasant. This is Tolstoy's tribute to the earthy wisdom of native Russians, as opposed to the sophisticated and convoluted thought of the French.

The version of War and Peace I read is a 2005 Penguin Classics translation by Anthony Briggs. The translation is remarkably easy to read. According to Briggs, the smooth flow of the writing is a characteristic of Tolstoy's Russian prose. The text is also accompanied by footnotes, appendices giving us a chapter-wise summary, brief explanations of the battles, schematic maps, and a dramatis personae. I have to confess that I have tended to look down upon such aids to the reader, but in this instance, found them extremely useful. In addition, there are two essays, one in the beginning by the historian Orlando Figes serving as an introduction and one at the end by the translator. I found Briggs' essay very interesting, since he carefully outlines and justifies his approach to translation. I had no quibbles with his thoughts on translation, but somehow I still found his choice of a British dialect to render nineteenth century colloquial Russian into English to be jarring.

Tolstoy himself was insistent that War and Peace should not be regarded as a novel, and perhaps he was right. The debate about whether certain works of literature fit into neat categories or not is futile. I think it is easy to agree that War and Peace is a great work of literature. I have felt deeply enriched by reading it, and the fact that it can produce that feeling in a reader nearly one hundred and fifty years after it was written is a tribute to Tolstoy's genius.

Simon Leys on Liu Xiaobo

2012-01-17T00:00:00-08:00

In the NYRB, Simon Leys reviews No Enemies, No Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems by Liu Xiaobo.

The award of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 brought the name of Liu Xiaobo to the attention of the entire world. Yet well before that, he had already achieved considerable fame within China, as a fearless and clearsighted public intellectual and the author of some seventeen books, including collections of poetry and literary criticism as well as political essays. The Communist authorities unwittingly vouched for the uncompromising accuracy of his comments. They kept arresting him for his views—four times since the Tiananmen massacre in June 1989. Now he is again in jail, since December 2008; though in poor health, he is subjected to an especially severe regime. As Pascal said, “Trust witnesses willing to sacrifice their lives,” and this particular witness happens to be exceptionally well qualified in other ways as well, both by the depth of his information and experience, and by his qualities of intelligence and moral fortitude. ...

At the Oslo ceremony, an empty chair was substituted for the absent laureate. Within hours, the words “empty chair” were banned from the Internet in China—wherever they occurred, the entire machinery of censorship was automatically set in motion.

Foreign experts in various intelligence organizations are trying to assess the growing strength of China, politically, economically, and militarily. The Chinese leaders are most likely to have a clear view of their own power. If so, why are they so scared of a frail and powerless poet and essayist, locked away in jail, cut off from all human contacts? Why did the mere sight of his empty chair at the other end of the Eurasian continent plunge them into such a panic?

More here.

Alan Watts - What We Are

2012-01-16T00:00:00-08:00

A poetic rumination on our existence by Alan Watts. Strikes me as "scientifically-alert" Upanishadic metaphysics with dubious bits minimized.

Marglin on the Dismal Science

2012-01-15T00:00:00-08:00

I spotted a recent book, The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community, by Harvard professor Stephen A. Marglin, who apparently writes from a socialist-communitarian point of view. The book jacket says the following:

Economists celebrate the market as a device for regulating human interaction without acknowledging that their enthusiasm depends on a set of half-truths: that individuals are autonomous, self-interested, and rational calculators with unlimited wants and that the only community that matters is the nation-state. However, as Stephen Marglin argues, market relationships erode community. In the past, for example, when a farm family experienced a setback--say the barn burned down--neighbors pitched in. Now a farmer whose barn burns down turns, not to his neighbors, but to his insurance company. Insurance may be a more efficient way to organize resources than a community barn raising, but the deep social and human ties that are constitutive of community are weakened by the shift from reciprocity to market relations.

Marglin dissects the ways in which the foundational assumptions of economics justify a world in which individuals are isolated from one another and social connections are impoverished as people define themselves in terms of how much they can afford to consume. Over the last four centuries, this economic ideology has become the dominant ideology in much of the world. Marglin presents an account of how this happened and an argument for righting the imbalance in our lives that this ideology has fostered.

Watch this excellent interview with Marglin to get the flavor of his central arguments (62 mins), and read the first chapter of his book and some book reviews here (Guardian, Times Higher Education, etc.) and on Amazon.

Pollock on the Study of Classics in India

2012-01-14T13:04:52-08:00

In this insightful and alarming talk (~20 mins, also detailed in this pdf), Sheldon Pollock, professor of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Columbia University, describes the deep crisis in the study of the classics and classical languages in India, and why we should worry about it. Six million classical manuscripts lie unread in archives across India but today, Pollock claims, there aren't any noteworthy Indian scholars of classical literature, no one teaching pre-19th century works in major universities, and no journals being published. Many Indians did great work in early/mid-20th century, but "India has not produced another DD Kosambi. There is nobody in India today who has the philological and critical ... edge that Kosambi brought." If you like this talk, check out this interesting interview with Pollock during one of his India visits.

On Mothers and Others

2012-01-11T23:44:41-08:00

Anthropologist Melvin Konner reviews Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, who argues that "more than a million years ago, a line of apes began to rear their young differently than their Great Ape ancestors. From this new form of care came new ways of engaging and understanding each other. How such singular human capacities evolved, and how they have kept us alive for thousands of generations, is the mystery revealed in this bold and wide-ranging new vision of human emotional evolution."

It is possible to see Hrdy’s most recent book, Mothers and Others, as the third in a trilogy that began with The Woman That Never Evolved. It may be the most important. As she demolished, in the first, the idol of an evolved passive femininity, and in the second, the serene, always giving maternal goddess, in her third synthetic work she takes on another cultural and biological ideal: the mother who goes it alone. In our once male-dominated vision of evolution, we had the lone brave man, the hunter with his spear, and the lone enduring woman nurturing her young beneath the African sun; they made a deal, the first social contract, exchanging the services each was suited to by genetic destiny.

Hrdy has not been alone in challenging this myth. A conference and book edited by Richard Lee and Irven DeVore, although it was called Man the Hunter, showed that women brought in half or more of the food of hunter-gatherers by collecting vegetables, fruit, and nuts. This meant that, given the unpredictability of hunting success and the human need for plant foods, the primordial deal between the sexes was rather more complex than we thought. It also suggested that women had power in these societies; that men listened to them and decisions were made by consensus, not by male fiat as in more complex, hierarchical societies. ...

In Mothers and Others, [Hrdy] situates this pivotal mother-infant pair not in an empty expanse of savanna, waiting for a man to arrive with his killed game, but where it actually belongs, in the dense social setting of a hunter-gatherer or, before that, an ape or monkey group. Hrdy argues convincingly that social support was crucial to human success, that compared with other primates, humans are uniquely cooperative, and that it was precisely cooperation in child care that gave rise to this general bent.

More here.

Tyler Cowen on Stories

2012-01-07T20:58:47-08:00

In this amusing TED talk, Tyler Cowen explores how stories work in our lives—how we receive them, how we tell them to ourselves and to others, and what we should be wary of—even as he is conscious that what he is talking about is also just a story!

The Joy of Quiet

2012-01-06T21:37:44-08:00

Pico Iyer on the importance of cultivating a certain distance from our hyper-connected digital world:

We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating. And — as he might also have said — we’re rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines.

So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on any screen.

Addendum to My Gita Essay

2012-01-05T21:47:16-08:00

For many motivated readers, a favorite strategy for deflecting criticism of Krishna's dubious advice to Arjuna is to argue that, based on the events in the Mahabharata, the justification for the war is absolutely clear (in comments, one person saw it on par with the Allied case against Hitler!). I responded to this point in part 2 of my essay (Part 1, Part 2) but it's worth drawing attention to it again:

Some defend the Gita by saying that the Kauravas’ bad behavior made the war unavoidable and eminently justified. Perhaps, but that’s not the point. The point is about the quality of the arguments Krishna uses to persuade Arjuna to fight. If the best moral justifications for the war purportedly exist outside the Gita, and some of the worst inside it, what have we left? Given all the bad faith reasoning and the starkly instrumental view of human life in the Gita, which many saw through even in ancient times, what makes the Gita a work of wisdom? Why not get the Gita off its exalted pedestal in our minds and let it be an uncelebrated episode in the Mahabharata—an artful plot element in an epic work of literature?

However, the case for "just war" is not at all clear in the Mahabharata. It's debatable—and not black and white—which is exactly what makes the Mahabharata great. For starters, the standard rules of succession were inadequate for the situation at hand: Dhritarashtra is blind, so his younger brother, Pandu, is made the king. But then Pandu lands a curse and retreats to the forest with his two wives, leaving Dhritarashtra to rule instead. Yudhisthira is the oldest son in the family but he and the other four Pandavas are not really fathered by Pandu (due to his curse), rather Pandu's two wives find some "divine" lovers in the forest (!), raising questions about the royal Kuru lineage of the Pandavas. Nor did Pandu rule anytime during Yudhisthira's life. So as the first son of the long reigning and elder brother Dhritarashtra—who in his heart wants his son to be the king—doesn't Duryodhana, a warrior as skilled as any and an able administrator, have a claim to succession as well? I mean a reasonable case can be made, right?

Meanwhile Duryodhana's ambition grows and he wants the entire kingdom for the Kauravas, not just the better half of the Kuru kingdom that he will inherit. He loathes the Pandavas, partly because he saw them as uppity and mean to him in their youth, as princes are wont to be. So as an adult, Duryodhana is scheming and vicious to the Pandavas. But he can be kind to others, such as to the low-caste Karna. "Birth is obscure," he said, "and men are like rivers whose origins are often unknown." So while the Kauravas are not all-bad (it's worth noting that the elders, respected by both sides, end up supporting them, however reluctantly), the Pandavas are not all-good. The Pandavas spurn and insult Karna based on his caste; Arjuna's pride leads to Eklavya chopping off his thumb—and his hopes and livelihood. Draupadi taunts Duryodhana and his father's blindness. And why does Yudhisthira get so little flak for gambling and losing everything twice, including his half of the Kuru kingdom (after being forgiven the first time, he is foolish enough to play again), even wagering his own wife's body? What kind of man does that? Can we trust his judgment again with a kingdom? (And this when his real father is none other than the Lord of Judgment, Dharma.)

Is it any less obscene that while the Gita's Krishna goads Arjuna to fight the supposedly evil Kauravas, he has asked his own Yadava army to fight on the Kaurava side—because he wants to be officially neutral! Countless foot soldiers get killed—pawns in the dharmic imperatives of big men, which we are so eager to applaud. The Pandavas, too, break the protocols of war and we rationalize it, why? Further, was it, or was it not, in the public-interest to continue the 13 years of Kaurava rule? These are all legitimate readings, befitting great literature. I think people are too often blinded by their instinct to defend the side "God" is on, or they are too easily seduced by simple narratives of good vs. evil. Anyhow, that's my take this evening.
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Image: Screen grab from Peter Brook's Mahabharata showing (L->R) Bhisma, Gandhari, Dhritarashtra, and Drona.

The Bhagavad Gita Revisited - Part 2

2012-01-02T21:00:00-08:00

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)

Why the Bhagavad Gita is an overrated text with a deplorable morality at its core. This is part two of a two-part critique (Part 1 is the appetizer with the Gita’s historical and literary context. This is the main course with the textual critique).
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The Bhagavad Gita, less than one percent of the sprawling Mahabharata, contains 700 verses in 18 chapters. It opens with Arjuna’s crisis on the battlefield, right before the start of the Great War. Turning to his friend and charioteer, Arjuna cries out,

‘O Krishna, I see my own relations here anxious to fight, and my limbs grow weak; my mouth is dry, my body shakes, and my hair is standing on end. My skin burns, and the bow Gandiva has slipped from my hand; my mind seems to be whirling.’

Arjuna is one of the bravest warriors alive and this visceral physical response, it is amply clear, is not due to performance anxiety, or fear of injury or death. Rather, it arises from Arjuna’s grave doubts over whether he is doing the right thing. He and his Pandava brothers wanted a minimally fair share of their material inheritance, but the devious, stubborn, and unjust Kauravas rebuffed them repeatedly. Though his cause is righteous enough, Arjuna now feels that the ends do not justify the means. He continues,

‘O Krishna, I have no desire for victory, or for a kingdom or pleasures. Of what use is a kingdom or pleasure or even life, if those for whose sake we desire these things—teachers, fathers, sons, grandfathers, uncles, in-laws, grandsons and others with family ties—are engaging in this battle, renouncing their wealth and their lives? Even if they were to kill me, I would not want to kill them, not even to become ruler of the three worlds. How much less for the earth alone? … We are prepared to kill our own relations out of greed for the pleasures of a kingdom. Better for me if the [Kauravas] were to attack me in battle and kill me unarmed and unresisting.’

Who among us can fail to be moved by Arjuna’s anguish? Hopelessly confused, Arjuna pleads with Lord Krishna to show him the way. Krishna obliges, taking on the role of a teacher to help Arjuna figure out the right course of action, which Krishna believes is to fight this war. The wisdom of the Gita—and the claim that it remains a relevant guide to our inner battlefield—is inseparable from Krishna’s advice to Arjuna. So to evaluate the Gita, we need to evaluate the arguments Krishna uses to persuade Arjuna to fight. How good are these arguments?

I’m aware that my reading of the Gita—like every other reading of it—is subjective and selective; I know that there are other ways of reading it. I’ve approached the Gita as expository literature, using the same yardsticks of truth and beauty that I take to other literary texts. I agree with Eknath Easwaran, an admirer and well-known translator of the Gita, when he says, ‘To understand the Gita, it is important to look beneath the surface of its injunctions and see the mental state involved.’ I’ve tried to do the same. I know that the Gita is not ‘mere literature’ to millions of Hindus, including many of my family and friends. It is also sacred scripture, guide to practical wisdom, source of personal and social identity, cultural and national pride, and more. My intention is not to offend but this book review will likely unsettle many; a few will respond in angry and defensive ways. May they find in the Gita the wisdom to forgive my indiscretions.

Get Up and Fight!

Imagine the scene. Having charioted Arjuna into the war zone with two vast armies arrayed against each other, Krishna watches Arjuna’s meltdown. Baffled by it, Krishna proceeds to shame Arjuna by calling his meltdown a ‘weakness in a time of crisis’, which is ‘mean and unworthy’ of him. He urges Arjuna to ‘arise with a brave heart and destroy his enemy.’ Refusing to fight, Krishna warns, will lead to loss of honor, which is worse than death. Arjuna will lose the respect of others and be ridiculed by his enemies, who will taunt him and call him a coward. ‘What could be more painful than this?’

Krishna continues, ‘Considering your dharma, you should not vacillate. For a warrior, nothing is higher than a war against evil’. Such a war should delight Arjuna, for it will guarantee him a place in heaven. If Arjuna dies in battle, he will attain heaven; if he wins, he will enjoy the earth. So what’s his bloody problem? A red flag for me here is the fact that Krishna takes Arjuna’s duty for granted, avoiding the thorniest of all problems with duty: how does one know what it is? Later on in the Gita, Krishna reveals how he thinks about it: one’s duty depends on one’s place in the caste hierarchy, which is ‘based on [one’s] nature.’ ‘By fulfilling the obligations one is born with, a person never comes to grief. No one should abandon duties because he sees defects in them’ and ‘by devotion to one’s own particular duty, everyone can attain perfection.’

But Arjuna remains unmoved as Krishna tries to shame him, hold up rewards, and remind him of his duty. Arjuna simply cannot imagine fighting elders he reveres, like Bhishma and Drona. He is not sure where his duty lies. Doesn’t his duty as a warrior conflict with his duty to not slaughter his kin and elders? Isn’t there a point when the means of upholding dharma risk pushing one into adharma? Arjuna would rather spend his life ‘begging than to kill these great and worthy souls.’ His will paralyzed, he complains of ‘a sorrow that saps all his vitality.’ Krishna, realizing that Arjuna’s crisis is pretty serious, shifts his strategy. He wheels in some heavy-duty philosophy into his arguments.

Krishna could have argued that this is a ‘just war’, that Arjuna’s relatives are aligned with an evil large enough to justify killing them—but he does not. Both of them indicate that the cause they’re fighting for is to obtain for the Pandavas their share of the kingdom. If a larger cause is at stake—such as restoring righteousness on earth—Krishna neither elaborates one, nor invokes it to make a case for ‘just war’ in the Gita, preferring other arguments. So rather than offer up hypothetical reasons or apologia on behalf of Krishna, we should judge the Gita in light of the arguments for war that he does actually make in it, especially the ones he repeatedly makes—which is what I intend to focus on in this essay.

The Metaphysics of Detachment

The Gita’s core metaphysics is based on the Upanishads, which represent, in my view, a major milestone in the history of abstract thought and a great leap in conceiving our relationship to nature. At the risk of oversimplification, I’ll summarize the metaphysics of the Upanishads by saying that they speak of a formless and all-pervasive vital force, or Brahman, which is the Ultimate Reality beneath the world of shifting appearances. Our own life force, the Self, or atman, is but one manifestation of Brahman, and it has the same nature as the atman of other beings, such as a dog’s. Atman is immortal; after the death of a body it migrates to inhabit another body. Grasping the true nature of atman and its essential unity with Brahman is what enables one to attain Moksha, or release from the endless cycle of rebirth—a preeminent individual pursuit. To attain Moksha, one must penetrate his or her veils of illusion and realize the truth of Brahman—a bracing view of reality as it might appear to the ‘cosmic eye’. In this view, our dualist conceptions of the world fall away, revealing the deeply interwoven strands of the phenomenal world (some dualist ideas based on samkhya metaphysics also appear in the Gita). Nor are humans at the center of life or creation; in fact, particular human lives and concerns are seen as entirely insignificant in cosmic terms.

Krishna interprets this metaphysics to support a tangible objective, namely, persuading Arjuna to fight. Krishna’s is not the only possible interpretation, nor the most sensible one. Indeed, he belongs in the long line of shrewd characters who have bent metaphysics to their own ends. For instance, consider this interpretation: Krishna tells Arjuna that his sorrow is misguided. Those who grasp the true nature of reality, he says, ‘grieve neither for the living nor for the dead. There has never been a time when you and I and the kings gathered here have not existed, nor will there be a time when they will cease to exist. … The body is mortal, but he who dwells in the body is immortal and immeasurable. Therefore, Arjuna, fight in this battle.’ It is out of ignorance of the true nature of reality, he says, that we call one man a slayer, another man slain. ‘There is neither slayer nor slain. You were never born; you will never die.’ Krishna’s sleight-of-hand here lies in equating the people we care about with their atmans, and since atman is immortal, it matters not if their bodies are destroyed. ‘There could hardly be a better example of forked-tongue speciousness,’ wrote P. Lal (1929-2010), professor of literature and Indian Studies and translator of the entire Mahabharata into English, in the introduction to his translation of the Gita (1965).

Arjuna is still not sold, so Krishna presses on. O Arjuna, he says, ‘even if you believe the Self to be subject to birth and death, you should not grieve. Death is inevitable for the living … you should not sorrow.’ Every creature is unmanifested at first, is then manifested, and in time, is unmanifested again, so ‘what is there to lament in this?’ Krishna’s point is that if Arjuna’s arrow is what ‘unmanifests’ his uncle from earthly life, there is nothing wrong in it because it’s all part of a cyclical process. Ambedkar called this line of reasoning ‘an unheard of defense of murder’, adding that if Krishna was a lawyer today and pleaded such a defense for a client, there is ‘not the slightest doubt that he would be sent to the lunatic asylum’.

The Path of Selfless Action

The dialog continues. Krishna enjoins Arjuna to ‘seek refuge in the attitude of detachment … those who are motivated only by the desire for the fruits of action are miserable, for they are constantly anxious about the results of what they do.’ But in those who are detached, ‘all vain anxiety is left behind. There is no cause for worry, whether things go well or ill … thus they attain a state beyond all evil’ and attain Moksha. Several times he instructs Arjuna to ‘Act selflessly, without any thought of personal profit.’ This is to many, including Gandhi, the central teaching of the Gita.

On the face of it, this seems reasonable. What can be wrong with performing one’s duty without selfish desire and attachment? Self-control over one’s ego and passions are likely even good for one’s moral conduct. A thick skin against how others perceive our actions can sometimes be helpful. But a major problem lurks here. Krishna frequently talks about the duty that one is born into. ‘The distinctions of caste, guna, and karma have come from me,’ he says. ‘The responsibilities to which a brahmin is born, based on his nature, are self-control, tranquility, purity of heart, patience, humility, learning, austerity, wisdom, and faith,’ whereas ‘the proper work of the shudra is service.’ The problem is that Krishna never talks about the use of reason to figure out one’s duty—as the Buddha did—or to modify it in light of the potential and actual consequences of one’s action.

Without this corrective, the injunction to do one’s duty with total detachment serves only to bolster the doer’s equanimity, whatever the outcome. It becomes all about keeping the doer’s peace of mind, not about his impact on others. Rather than acknowledge that our worldly acts carry an ineliminable moral risk, the Gita says that this risk can be eliminated through a personal attitude adjustment. In this sense, the Gita’s idea of detached duty is less an ethical precept, more a self-help precept. As Easwaran writes: ‘Nishkama karma [selfless action] is not "good works" or philanthropic activity; [the latter] may benefit others, but not necessarily benefit the doer.’ And the Gita’s focus is relentlessly on the doer’s attitude while he dispenses his dharmic duty, not on what he actually does to others and its human impact. Krishna is thus able to ask Arjuna to perform ‘all actions for my sake, completely absorbed in the Self, and without expectations, fight!’ In The Idea of Justice, Amartya Sen too finds this problematic: ‘Krishna argues that Arjuna must do his duty, come what may, and in this case he has a duty to fight, no matter what results from it ... Why should we want only to "fare forward" and not also "fare well"?’

Krishna further elaborates what selfless action looks like and how meditation can help. ‘Those who cannot renounce attachment to the results of their work are far from the path’, he says. Those who conquer their senses, climb ‘to the summit of human consciousness. To such people a clod of dirt, a stone, and gold are the same. They are equally disposed to family, enemies, and friends, to those who support them and those who are hostile, to the good and the evil alike. Because they are impartial, they rise to great heights.’ They can control their turbulent mind ‘through regular practice and detachment’ to discover inner peace and joy by attaining union with Brahman.

Again, this stance is morally dubious and reflects the anti-humanistic sensibility that pervades the Gita. It may be good for achieving oneness with Ultimate Reality, but it is bad for moral life—it rejects the very idea that some actions have greater moral worth than others. It denies that some human bonds are more precious than others, which is part of what makes us human. This is the kind of detachment that can make moral villains out of men. It is a suitably desensitizing stance that can get a warrior to kill and feel no remorse, or to make us oblivious to each other’s human plight, as we pursue our given ideas of duty while upholding incoherent ideals like Brahman. As VR Narla put it, ‘while action without seeking some personal gain can be noble, action without any care for its evil consequences to other men [is] reprehensible, even diabolical.’

After all this talk, Arjuna longs to see a vision of Brahman. Krishna obliges and gives him a dazzling and ecstatic glimpse into cosmic reality, including his ‘radiant, universal form, without beginning or end’. While this is a brilliantly imaginative vision in many ways, Krishna unfortunately spoils it by infusing it with dubious morality. ‘I am time, the destroyer of all,’ Krishna tells Arjuna, ‘Even without your participation, all the warriors gathered here will die. Therefore arise, Arjuna; conquer your enemies and enjoy the glory of sovereignty. I have already slain all these warriors; you will only be my instrument.’ The war hasn’t even begun and Krishna says, ‘Bhishma, Drona, Jayadrata, Karna, and many others are already slain. Kill those whom I have killed. Do not hesitate. Fight in this battle and you will conquer your enemies.’ How comforting, to have the Lord of the Universe (or Ultimate Reality personified) issue a moral blank cheque to a man disinclined to slaughter his relatives!

The Path of Devotion

Krishna, now back in human form, tries another tack: Trust me! ‘Fill your mind with me; love me; serve me; worship me always,’ he urges Arjuna. In return, Krishna will take care of him. ‘You are dear to me,’ says Krishna. ‘Abandon all supports and look to me for protection. I shall purify you from the sins of the past; do not grieve.’ This is similar to the personal god in the mystical strains of many religions (e.g., Bhakti, Sufi), in which the mystic finds his rationality inadequate in knowing God and his design. Love and devotion—even rapturous ecstasy—help bridge the gulf the believer feels between himself and God. ‘By loving me he comes to know me truly,’ adds Krishna, ‘then he knows my glory and enters into my boundless being. All his acts are performed in my service, and through my grace he wins eternal life.’ But Krishna’s motives here are again dubious. He wants Arjuna to put all his faith and devotion in him and fight this war; in return, Krishna will ensure that no harm or anxiety befall him. The ostensible morality of the Gita, wrote DD Kosambi, is to ‘Kill your brother if duty calls, without passion; as long as you have faith in Me, all sins are forgiven.’

‘Many of the answers given by Krishna appear to be evasive and occasionally sophistic,’ wrote Lal. ‘Unable to satisfy a worried warrior’s stricken conscience with rational arguments, Krishna opts for the unusual—he stuns Arjuna with a glorious revelation of psychedelic intensity. He succeeds; [thereafter] Arjuna accepts whatever Krishna has to offer. Brain is overpowered by bhakti—but is it ethical to silence logic with magic?’ Arjuna, wrote Lal, is a ‘humanist hero who has risen above the demands of military caste and convention-ridden community. His plight on the field of Kurukshetra is not an abstract, condemnable intellectual perplexity that can be juggled away by "Cosmic Multi-Revelation." It is a painful and honest problem that Krishna should have faced on its own terms, painfully and honestly, and did not.’

Near the end of the Gita, Krishna ominously warns Arjuna: ‘If you egotistically say, "I will not fight this battle," your resolve will be useless; your own nature will drive you into it.’ Then almost immediately, he begins his closing remarks and makes a seemingly expansive gesture, ‘I give you these precious words of wisdom; reflect on them and then do as you choose.’ It’s the perfect opening to let Arjuna, without giving him a real choice, feel as if he is making his own decision. Arjuna promptly succumbs, a sad ending to the Gita. ‘You have dispelled my doubts and delusions and I understand through your grace,’ Arjuna says. ‘My faith is firm now, and I will do your will.’ At the end of the Mahabharata, nearly everyone on both sides is killed. The epic, writes Sen, ‘ends largely as a tragedy, with a lamentation about death and carnage, and there is anguish and grief ... It is hard not to see in this something of a vindication of Arjuna’s profound doubts.’

Not the Best of Its Age

How do the metaphysical and moral ideas in the Gita stack up against other contenders in its day, for example, the teachings of the Buddha and the Carvaka? Was the smart money back then on the Gita? These questions can provide us another data point alongside critiques based on modern standards.

Of course, as I noted in Part 1, there are a few morally good and many morally neutral injunctions in the Gita. Krishna occasionally urges the spiritual aspirant to do his work ‘with the welfare of others always in mind … guided by compassion.’ He adds that ‘when a person responds to the joys and sorrows of others as if they were his own, he has attained the highest state of spiritual union.’ However, such emphasis on others is conspicuous by its presence in the Gita, which otherwise obsesses over given duties, detached action, evenness of mind, avoiding certain passions (greed, anger, lust, etc.), piercing one’s illusions to find Ultimate Reality, and (for folks too simple to relate to Brahman) a total devotion to God. Further, Krishna seems not to notice any conflict between his morally good advice—for instance, to not ‘harm any living creature, but be compassionate and gentle; show good will to all’—with goading Arjuna to war and detached action. It’s almost as if the authors of the Gita felt compelled to acknowledge the ‘compassion meme’ of Buddhism (then growing at the expense of Hinduism) without thinking it through—the Gita neither articulates the basis for this compassion, nor reconciles it with Krishna’s advocacy.

That said, these empathic verses do leave the door open for a selective reading that is more charitable to karma-yoga, or the path of action. But it still remains a far cry from the Buddha’s central emphasis on compassion based on an active empathy with sentient beings, for they too suffer like us. He also advocated a far more egalitarian social ethics than the one implicit in the Gita. As historian Romila Thapar put it, ‘Had the Buddha been the charioteer the message would have been different.’ Going by the Dhammapada, he might have said: ‘They are not following dharma who resort to violence to achieve their purpose. But those who lead others through nonviolent means, knowing right and wrong, may be called guardians of the dharma.’ My goal here is not to score cheap points for the Buddha, or for Buddhism over Hinduism—I have no interest in doing so here, and this essay should not be read as such—Hinduism, as a living religion, is not what is written in an old poem; nor is Buddhism the same as the words of a teacher. My goal here is to evaluate the quality of ideas in the Gita in light of other ideas that were on offer to discerning people back then. For instance, here is how the Buddha approached dharmic duties and spiritual paths:

‘It is proper to doubt. Do not be led by Holy Scriptures, or by mere logic or inference, or by appearances, or by the authority of religious teachers. But when you realize that something is unwholesome and bad for you, give it up. And when you realize that something is wholesome and good for you, do it. ... Be prepared to let go of even the most profound insight or the most wholesome teaching. Be a lamp to yourself. Be your own confidence.’

Such ideas are alien to the sensibility of the Gita. Krishna instead wants all aspirants to ‘realize the truth of the scriptures’ and set their hearts on him and worship him ‘with unfailing devotion and faith’. Those who listen to him ‘with faith, free from doubts, will find a happier world’. The Gita’s Krishna wants us to live free from doubt, ‘in accordance with these divine laws without complaining, firmly established in faith’. Those who claim, ‘There is no God,’ are ‘demonic’ (an extremist position; two of the six schools of Hinduism embraced atheism back then). Nor are humans to be relied on to make up their own dharma. ‘Whenever dharma declines and the purpose of life is forgotten,’ says Krishna, ‘I manifest myself on earth. I am born in every age to protect the good, to destroy evil, and to re-establish dharma.’ Contrast this with the views of the Carvaka, a skeptic of the materialist school named after him, who had proclaimed centuries earlier that good and evil are mere social conventions; the soul is only the body qualified by intelligence—it has no existence apart from the body. Only this world exists, there is no beyond. The Carvaka held that the Vedas are a cheat; they serve to make men submissive through fear and rituals. Nature is indifferent to good and evil, and history does not bear witness to Divine Providence. Such qualitatively different worldviews coexisted with the one in the Gita.

Krishna frequently insists that a mind established in Brahman is free from delusion. One then lives ‘in peace, alike in cold and heat, pleasure and pain, praise and blame’. That Brahman itself is a grand delusion was something the Buddha realized centuries earlier, arguing instead that there is no objective, mind-independent reality that is accessible to us. In the second century CE, Nagarjuna explained why ‘reality’ inevitably depends on the cognitive structure of our mind, rather than on anything we can identify as fundamental, innate, or essential attributes of reality itself. In other words, there is no firm foundation to reach beneath the world of appearances. Nor is there a stable and unchanging Self. As our illusions fall away, we begin to see ourselves as contingent beings, inextricable from a reality that we shape and which in turn shapes us, rather than as beings able to detach ourselves to contemplate reality as it truly is (the so-called ‘view from nowhere’—much like the absurd, if poetic, Brahman).

Epilogue

The Gita adapted certain philosophical ideas that were surely revolutionary when they first arose and challenged the ritualistic Vedic religion. However, centuries later, in light of the contending intellectual and moral ideas of its day, it had assumed the role of a highly conservative tract, aligning itself with orthodoxy, authority, and hierarchy. Whereas I see the Mahabharata as great literature: many-layered, open-ended, and replete with the pleasures of a complex story, which also happens to have a decidedly anti-war sensibility. The Gita, as I noted in Part 1, was composed much later under the realities of a new age. It ‘is not an integral part of the Mahabharata,’ writes Easwaran. ‘It is essentially an Upanishad, and my conjecture is that it was set down by an inspired seer and inserted into the epic [later].’ To the extent it can be admired as a standalone text (a commonplace treatment, as standalone commentaries on it abound; there is even talk now of making it the first ‘National Book’ of India), it can be critiqued as one too.

In the context of the entire Mahabharata, the Gita can be read as a well-intentioned plot element (after all, the author felt the need to justify the war), where Krishna nevertheless comes off looking terribly disingenuous—he combines blatant anti-humanism with his authority and magical powers to brainwash Arjuna. (During the war, Krishna himself often does not do what he preaches in the Gita, though the gaps vary across versions of the story. Was it detachment from the war’s outcome that led him to repeatedly play foul and dispense murderous advice?) Some defend the Gita by saying that the Kauravas’ bad behavior made the war unavoidable and eminently justified. Perhaps, but that’s not the point. The point is about the quality of the arguments Krishna uses to persuade Arjuna to fight. If the best moral justifications for the war purportedly exist outside the Gita, and some of the worst inside it, what have we left? Given all the bad faith reasoning and the starkly instrumental view of human life in the Gita, which many saw through even in ancient times, what makes the Gita a work of wisdom? Why not get the Gita off its exalted pedestal in our minds and let it be an uncelebrated episode in the Mahabharata—an artful plot element in an epic work of literature?

Without drastic overlooking and embellishing (in the manner of Gandhi), I consider the Gita a poor moral guide to our daily lives. Why do so many people resist this idea? Perhaps they have neither read the Gita, nor any contrarian critiques; or they are being reactionary patriots about their heritage; or perhaps their faith in it is too strong. After all, which book deserves the sort of uncritical adoration that so many Hindus—especially among the highly educated members of the upper classes—have for it today?

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All Gita quotes in this essay come from Eknath Easwaran’s translation of the Gita, with embedded hyperlinks to a translation by the Bhagavad Gita Trust, which also presents every verse in Sanskrit, transliterated, commented on, and sung beautifully. Other online translations abound. The artwork in this essay was found via Google Images but the artists’ names were unfortunately not available.

Part 1 of this essay appeared on 05 Dec 2011. More writing by Namit Arora?
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How Universal Is the Mind?

2012-01-01T00:00:00-08:00

Human cultures have long evolved folk concepts to describe and explain human behavior. This essay "highlights the potential arbitrariness of how we've carved up the psychological realm—what we take for objective reality is revealed to be shaped by culture and language."

If someone asked you to describe the psychological aspects of personhood, what would you say? Chances are, you'd describe things like thought, memory, problem-solving, reasoning, maybe emotion. In other words, you probably list the major headings of a cognitive psychology text-book. In cognitive psychology, we seem to take it for granted that these are, objectively, the primary components of "the mind" (even if you reject a mind/body dualism, you probably accept some notion that there are psychological processes similar to the ones listed above). I've posted previously about whether the distinction between cognitive and non-cognitive even makes sense. But, here, I want to think about the universality of the "mind" concept and its relationship to the modern view of cognition.

In fact, this conception of the mind is heavily influenced by a particular (Western) cultural background. Other cultures assign different characteristics and abilities to the psychological aspects of personhood. Wierzbicka (2005) delves into this problem in detail. She argues that speakers of a particular language make assumptions about what must be universal based on their own ability to imagine doing without a certain concept. Important cross-cultural differences in meaning become lost in translation.... Cross-linguistic research shows that, generally speaking, every culture has a folk model of a person consisting of visible and invisible (psychological) aspects. While there is agreement that the visible part of the person refers to the body, there is considerable variation in how different cultures think about the invisible (psychological) part. In the West, and, specifically, in the English-speaking West, the psychological aspect of personhood is closely related to the concept of "the mind" and the modern view of cognition.But, how universal is this conception? How do speakers of other languages think about the psychological aspect of personhood?

More here (via The Browser, image source).

Thapar on Indian History

2011-12-31T18:02:08-08:00

An engaging conversation with historian Romila Thapar on some aspects of ancient Indian history, its distortion by colonial scholars, tussles between the post-independence secular and Hindutva camps, and how the past and the present continue to shape each other in India.

Graeber on the Origins of Money

2011-12-29T19:43:43-08:00

David Graeber, in Debt: The First 5,000 Years, explains how money came about in human societies and how different the facts are from conventional accounts of it in economic textbooks (that money arose as the natural next stage of the barter system).

Let me begin by filling in some background on the current state of scholarly debate on this question, explain my own position, and show what an actual debate might have been like. First, the history:

1) Adam Smith first proposed in ‘The Wealth of Nations’ that as soon as a division of labor appeared in human society, some specializing in hunting, for instance, others making arrowheads, people would begin swapping goods with one another (6 arrowheads for a beaver pelt, for instance.) This habit, though, would logically lead to a problem economists have since dubbed the ‘double coincidence of wants’ problem—for exchange to be possible, both sides have to have something the other is willing to accept in trade. This was assumed to eventually lead to the people stockpiling items deemed likely to be generally desirable, which would thus become ever more desirable for that reason, and eventually, become money. Barter thus gave birth to money, and money, eventually, to credit.

2) 19th century economists such as Stanley Jevons and Carl Menger [1] kept the basic framework of Smith’s argument, but developed hypothetical models of just how money might emerge from such a situation. All assumed that in all communities without money, economic life could only have taken the form of barter. Menger even spoke of members of such communities “taking their goods to market”—presuming marketplaces where a wide variety of products were available but they were simply swapped directly, in whatever way people felt advantageous.

3) Anthropologists gradually fanned out into the world and began directly observing how economies where money was not used (or anyway, not used for everyday transactions) actually worked. What they discovered was an at first bewildering variety of arrangements, ranging from competitive gift-giving to communal stockpiling to places where economic relations centered on neighbors trying to guess each other’s dreams. What they never found was any place, anywhere, where economic relations between members of community took the form economists predicted: “I’ll give you twenty chickens for that cow.” Hence in the definitive anthropological work on the subject, Cambridge anthropology professor Caroline Humphrey concludes, “No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.”

More here. Read an interview with Graeber and his related article on the topic, and a review of the book.

Top 10 Stories of 2011

2011-12-28T00:00:00-08:00

Here are the top 10 stories of 2011 according to al-Jazeera. They include: (1) The Arab Spring (2) Japan's triple disasters (3) The killing of Bin Laden (4) Drought in the Horn of Africa (5) Europe's financial crisis (6) Occupy Wall Street (7) The birth of South Sudan (8) UK riots (9) The Palestine papers (10) Final US withdrawal from Iraq. Suggest other stories if you don't agree with this list!

Seven Ways to Rescue Pakistan

2011-12-27T17:14:59-08:00

An interesting conversation between Indian politician Mani Shankar Aiyar and Pakistani physicist and political commentator Pervez Hoodbhoy, hosted by NDTV's Barkha Dutt at Tehelka-Newsweek's THiNK 2011 on 'Seven Ways to Rescue Pakistan'." Also check out some additional videos.

On Change in India

2011-12-24T00:00:00-08:00

An excerpt from Siddhartha Deb's portrait of contemporary India, The Beautiful and the Damned.

The highway out of Hyderabad towards Kothur village was still being worked on, with new overpasses and exits being constructed next to the lanes that were open to traffic. Vijay and I were halfway to our destination when we saw the man appear, standing in the middle of the road and waving us down. We were traveling fast, moving much too quickly to understand immediately what the man’s appearance meant. A few days earlier, on this same road, we had been stopped by two police constables. Assigned to guard duty at another point on the highway and left to fend for their own transportation, all the men had wanted was a lift. But the figure in front of us now was not in uniform, and his objective was far less clear, although I had the impression that he was part of the knotted confusion of people and cars that had sprung up suddenly on the smooth thread of the highway.

Vijay brought his tiny car to a halt, and the man loomed up in front of the windscreen, a dark, stocky figure dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. He put his right hand down on the bonnet of our car. In his left hand, he held an automatic pistol, its barrel pointing up at an acute angle.

More here. Read reviews of the book in the NYT and Himal.

Art and the Limits of Neuroscience

2011-12-23T00:00:00-08:00

Alva Noë on what neuroaesthetics—a field that studies art through the insights of neuroscience—can never tell us about art:

What is art? What does art reveal about human nature? The trend these days is to approach such questions in the key of neuroscience. “Neuroaesthetics” is a term that has been coined to refer to the project of studying art using the methods of neuroscience. It would be fair to say that neuroaesthetics has become a hot field. It is not unusual for leading scientists and distinguished theorists of art to collaborate on papers that find their way into top scientific journals. ...

... Neuroaesthetics, like the neuroscience of consciousness itself, is still in its infancy. Is there any reason to doubt that progress will be made? Is there any principled reason to be skeptical that there can be a valuable study of art making use of the methods and tools of neuroscience? I think the answer to these questions must be yes, but not because there is no value in bringing art and empirical science into contact, and not because art does not reflect our human biology.

More here.

Son of Blazing Glory

2011-12-12T00:00:00-08:00

Flash fiction by R Alexander

A cool breeze riffled several yellowed papers lying on Cyril's drafting table. Unable to concentrate for days, he had returned to an old vice, reminiscence, and sat now hunched over the slanted desk, elbows bent and sorting through a box of work from his college days: architecture textbooks, papers he'd written, and maps and plans for houses he'd once imagined. Brittle and crackling in the breeze, the papers he had lifted out and set aside were an irritation, and without looking up he stretched out his hand, picked up a stone he had there for the purpose, and placed it on the moving papers to still them. The stone, porous and grey, a relic of his dissolved marriage—his wife had been a hydrologist—felt warm from the sun that fell into this room through a long, high-arching window.

"This is all you've made?" The sound of this voice—it was unnecessarily loud—startled Cyril from his thoughts. The tone was cutting and judgmental.

He looked up. His father, Lambert, stood there, taller than he had been in life, smiling, beaming even, as though happy to see his only son. Two feathered wings stood out from his back, the cloth of his suit shredded at the scapulae. Cyril looked on in disbelief but also in awe. The wings were like those of a massive and muscular bird, and also somehow different, radiant and calming.

Noticing his son's fascination, Lambert smiled even more broadly. Then gesturing over his shoulder, he said with assurance, "They're what you'll have at my age."

The man had hair, again, too, a dark, slick sheen of hair, and wore a charcoal grey pinstripe, with a vest and black tie. "Age?" Cyril asked, his voice shriller than he had anticipated. "What is your age?"

The man frowned.

"You're dead. You don't have an age," Cyril said.

"Ah, yes," Lambert said sarcastically. "That's true. I'm ageless." He began to move about the room. Paunchy and pallid, his size, his bulk, became manifest as he moved. "This is your work now? Your life?" The large, powerful wings knocked a photo from off the mantle and gusted a stack of unpaid bills from off a filing cabinet. He stooped and gathered the large, framed, color photograph and stood up again, squinting at it and angling the glass to cut the glare.

"Where did you come from, anyway?" Cyril asked.

"I've sailed up to heaven and back," his father said. The sarcasm had muted. There was pride in this statement.

The wings commanded Cyril's attention; tightly folded as they were, they had a kind of gossamer purity. "You're an angel?" Cyril asked.

Lambert’s smile became wry and arrogant. "Why is that so surprising to you?" His eyes glittered. There was a luminescent quality about them, as if they reflected the light, as if there were no substance to them at all, giving them a look of vague otherness.

"That's not an answer," Cyril said. "You've come back from the underworld." Even Cyril wondered at the ease with which he was now able to challenge his father.

"Why do you call it the 'underworld?'" Lambert asked. "There is nothing over it." He smiled briefly at his joke then stopped to gnaw at a piece of loose skin on his lower lip. And smiling again he added, "Well, except, I suppose, metaphorically." He looked at his wrists and adjusted his cuff links. "But let's talk about something real, shall we? That wife of yours, for example, she was a real nice piece." He looked as though he were about to wink but then thought better of it. "Why did you ever let her go?"

Cyril naively believed his facial expression gave nothing away. "You never even liked her," he said. His voice narrowed. "You're the one who said I shouldn't take her too seriously."

"Oh, calm down." Lambert clucked his tongue and shrugged his shoulders. "She was a nice piece is all I'm saying." The wings moved slightly.

Loose papers fluttered into a pool of sunlight on the ground, Cyril looked down and noticed his father's wing-tip shoes and white spats. This Zoot-like fashion was the sort his father had aspired to but never had the guts to carry out when he'd been alive.

Lambert turned from the photograph and saw the quizzical look on his son's face. He placed the photograph face down on the desk. It slid slowly down the surface and came to rest at the lip end of the drafting table. He traded the photograph for the porous stone, picking it up off the stack of papers and seeming to examine it. The top sheet of paper motioned feebly but then seemed to lose its energy and lie still. "I'm just saying you drove her away, you know?"

"What?" Cyril asked.

"Don't you miss her?" Lambert set the stone down too.

"This is none of your business," Cyril said.

"You are my son," Lambert said as though announcing this for the first time. "I know you. You're lost in a labyrinth of nostalgia."

Cyril looked at his father, incredulous.

Encouraged, Lambert continued. "And I know, too, that you are the the child of a blazing glory." He raised his arms and his wings loosened and unfurled broadly.

Cyril saw his father's layered, scapular limbs, the fronded feathers, graying at their tips. There was no grace in them. Their residue, their dander, tickled his nose. "What are you even doing here?"

"I've come to get you." Lambert closed his eyes and sighed. "You're lost, and I can help you find your way. You could …." The words trailed off. He looked at his son and began again. "We could fly off together. We could fly higher than the clouds." He opened his eyes and smiled, looking out the curtains and into the bright, sunny sky.

"I can't fly," Cyril said.

"You can. You will. You'll see," Lambert assured him. "You can see everything, observe everything." His voice lowered and he added slyly, "You like that sort of thing." Then he continued, "The people below are small and silent. There are no human sounds from that height. No voices." Then he said, "It's wonderful. It's utterly unlike anything you've ever known." Motes swirled in beams of sunlight, following Lambert with elaborate affection as he moved about the room. "You are the child of an angel," he said. "Only aloft does the world repose before you like a painted map." He gestured with his hands, and his voice grew louder. "It's like you can see time," he said. "You can see time poured out before you like honey-sweet wine poured from an amphora!"

Cyril sat and took this in, imagining the past and future flowing together into the river of the present, flowing and knowable as though on a map, a map illustrated with dragons and mermaids and dire warnings of where not to go. With such a map, he could see the right path, he could correct his mistakes. "But how do I fly? I can't fly. I don't have wings."

"All you'll need to do is take a leap with me out this window, a leap of faith." His voice had grown resonant, stentorian, golden, almost, with encouragement. "Trust me," he continued. "The wings will come. Admittedly, there'll be an ache in your back at first, your trapezei and your rhomboids—the ripping is terrible—but, but …" He shook his head. "But, no, the point is …." Again the words trailed off. But then he added earnestly, "Just listen: you'll see." The smile became beatific, it seemed, and Lambert held his hand out in a gesture of offering. "Trust me. You won't regret it."

A pigeon fluttered down onto the window sill and began chirring. Its eyes were vacant and intense, its head bobbing as it marched in circles. The warm breeze felt real and present to Cyril. He looked out the window and thought it over.
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R Alexander writes fiction, poetry, and essays and lives in the Pacific Northwest.

How Doctors Die

2011-12-11T12:10:44-08:00

This thought-provoking article by Ken Murray, MD, asks: "How has it come to this—that doctors administer so much care that they wouldn’t want for themselves? The simple, or not-so-simple, answer is this: patients, doctors, and the system."

Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. He had a surgeon explore the area, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. This surgeon was one of the best in the country. He had even invented a new procedure for this exact cancer that could triple a patient’s five-year-survival odds—from 5 percent to 15 percent—albeit with a poor quality of life. Charlie was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice, and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with family and feeling as good as possible. Several months later, he died at home. He got no chemotherapy, radiation, or surgical treatment. Medicare didn’t spend much on him.

It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently. Of course, doctors don’t want to die; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits. And they know enough about death to know what all people fear most: dying in pain, and dying alone.

56 Worst Similes

2011-12-08T21:45:13-08:00

Ok, having revisited the Bhagavad Gita, it's time for some comic relief. Check out these similes:

Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the center.

He was as tall as a 6′3″ tree.

Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

More here (via 3QD).

The Bhagavad Gita Revisited - Part 1

2011-12-06T00:00:00-08:00

(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)

Why the Bhagavad Gita is an overrated text with a deplorable morality at its core. This is part one of a two-part critique. (Part 1 is the appetizer with the Gita’s historical and literary context. Part 2 is the main course with the textual critique).
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In mid-first millennium BCE, a great spiritual awakening was underway in areas around the middle Ganga. People were moving away from the old Vedic religion—which revolved around rituals, animal sacrifices, and nature gods—to more abstract, inner-directed, and contemplative ideas. They now asked about the nature of the self and consciousness, thought and perception. They asked if virtue and vice were absolute or mere social conventions. Personal spiritual quests, aided by meditation and renunciation of material gain, had slowly gathered pace. From this churn arose new ideas like karma and dharma, non-dualism, and the unity of an individual’s soul (atman) with the universal soul (Brahman)—all pivotal ideas in Hinduism.

Some of these innovations in thought soon made their way into the texts we now know as the Upanishads, setting them qualitatively apart from the earlier Vedas. All of this occurred in the context of great sociopolitical and economic changes, marked by the rise of cities, trade and commerce, social mobility, public debates, new institutions of state, and even some early republics. This was also the world of the Buddha, Mahavira, and Carvaka.

The Great War of Yore

By this time, versions of a Mahabharata story had been circulating for centuries. Perhaps inspired by a war that took place c. 950 BCE around modern Delhi (the date is tentative), the story, through oral transmission, took on a life of its own. In The Hindus: An Alternative History (2009), Wendy Doniger writes that the earliest bards who told the Mahabharata story came from a caste of charioteers, who served as drivers, confidantes, and bodyguards to the Kshatriya warrior-castes. While on military campaigns, they recited stories around campfires. (No wonder God is a charioteer in the epic! Even Karna is raised by a charioteer.) In later ages and in times of peace, many bards took their performance art to lay audiences in villages and folk festivals. The story also came to be recited during royal sacrifices, where the Brahmins slowly took over its delivery and evolution, eventually writing it down in Sanskrit. Its "final form" dates from 300 BCE-300 CE and ranges from 75K to 100K verses, seven to ten times the Iliad and the Odyssey combined. (Read an outline of the story here.)

The Mahabharata, writes Doniger, ‘is so extremely fluid that there is no single Mahabharata; there are hundreds of Mahabharatas, hundreds of different manuscripts and innumerable oral versions (one reason why it is impossible to make an accurate calculation of the number of its verses). The Mahabharata is not contained in a text; the story is there to be picked up and found, salvaged as anonymous treasure from the ocean of story.’ While these versions share the same narrative core—the struggle between two branches of a royal family, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, for the control of the Kuru capital, Hastinapura, culminating in a great civil war—around it ‘are piled high many volumes of lore and doctrine contributed by Indian thinkers and storytellers over centuries’, writes Sheldon Pollock, author of The Language of the Gods in the World of Men. Frustrated by this situation, scholars at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune, collated 1259 manuscripts from 1919-66 to produce a critical edition of the Mahabharata with 89K verses; it is this version that most scholars reference today.

The Mahabharata has been variously read as ‘history, poetry, moral law, and scripture’, though its central problematic, writes Pollock, is about power. ‘The dilemma of power—in the starkest terms, the need to destroy in order to preserve, to kill in order to live—becomes most poignant when those whom one must kill are one’s own kin. That is why the Mahabharata is the most harrowing of all premodern political narratives in the world: the Iliad, like the Ramayana, is about a war far from home, the Odyssey about a post-war journey home, and the Aeneid about a war for a home. The Mahabharata is about a war fought at home’, one in which both sides end up losing (to be precise, one side scores a pyrrhic victory). Having read all of these epics, I think another point of departure for the Mahabharata is that the heroes in the other epics are much less reflective; they live by a received heroic code and are not too motivated as individuals to seek self-knowledge or worry about the right thing to do. Which other epic has a hero as introspective and truth-loving as Yudhisthira, or as prone to ethical doubt as Arjuna, or as magnanimous as Karna?

What the Mahabharata does share with the Homeric epics is that it, too, has been reworked so heavily at different times that it is hard to extract reliable historical or sociological data from it. For instance, in 950 BCE, the estimated time of the war that inspired the epic, Kuru society was clan-based; chieftainship was based on both kinship networks and personal qualities; the extent of the Kuru domain, over whose control the war was fought, was a small region of the Ganga-Yamuna Doab. But the bards later injected kings into the epic who went beyond clan chieftains; these kings ruled over bigger territories and practiced heredity succession. The bards even magnified the war to apparently include all of the peoples they knew of. John Keay, author of India: A History, notes that the epic’s royal palaces too were upgraded to those of later times, with ‘pillared pavilions and marble halls, their interiors opulently furnished’, polished and shiny floors, untold wealth, and so on—descriptions that legitimized ‘the grandiose ambitions of later empire builders.’ That said, one aspect of the epic that likely goes way back is its view of the forest-dwelling clans of hunter-gatherers; the epic’s heroes encounter them in exile as raskhas or demons, some hostile and some who turn into allies—depictions that seem in line with ‘the presumed pattern of Aryan colonization and settlement’.

Clearly, lots of people contributed to the Mahabharata. Accepting Vyasa as its author has more to do with our need to personalize storytelling. Doniger writes that ‘non-Brahmins, people of low caste, were originally in charge of the care and feeding of the two great Sanskrit poems [the other being the Ramayana], which Brahmins took over only sometime later, one of many instances of the contributions of low-caste people to Sanskrit literature.’ The basis of caste was more fluid earlier, ranging from heredity to personal character, occupation, and even choice. Vyasa, himself a character in the story as the son of a ferryman’s daughter, is a half-caste. All this might help explain the polyphony and plurality of views that have survived in the Mahabharata—in its range of moral dilemmas, ideas of duty, flaws of character, conflicts of virtues and values—and why it continues to have such popular appeal in India. As Doniger writes, the Mahabharata remains a contested text, ‘a brilliantly orchestrated hybrid narrative with no single party line on any subject.’

The Celestial Song of God

The Bhagavad Gita (‘The God’s Song’), widely regarded as the philosophical core of the Mahabharata, was composed much later under the realities of a new age. It was merged into the epic’s later drafts, perhaps as late as first century CE. This means that the philosophy it espouses is often not in accord with the moral ambiguities of the larger epic. Presented as a Q&A style dialog between Lord Krishna and the warrior-prince Arjuna, the Gita channels certain ideas from the Upanishads and the newly ascendant Bhagavata sect (whose devotionalism is not prominent in the epic). It is an attempt to make esoteric philosophy weigh in on life situations that are easier to relate to, thereby elevating certain ideas.

In the opening scene of the Gita, Arjuna—repulsed by the thought of killing his kin and elders—suffers an emotional meltdown in the middle of the battlefield, right before the start of the great war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas. Despite his relatively righteous cause, he can’t see enough moral justification for the war and refuses to fight. ‘I do not see that any good can come from killing our relations in battle.’ (Some have compared this to Ashoka’s turning away from war, which likely preceded the composition of the Gita and may have inspired this framing.) The powerful immediacy of Arjuna’s crisis commands our attention. In about 700 verses that follow, Krishna explains to Arjuna why he must fight, using a dazzling array of ideas and tactics, many of which inspire people even today. Arjuna’s questions are large indeed: How do I know where my duty lies? How can I see the reality that lies beyond my worldy illusions? How can the restless mind attain lasting peace?

The Gita ends with Arjuna regaining his resolve to fight and overcoming his ethical concerns about the war. Eighteen days later, the war ends catastrophically; nearly everyone is killed. If you knew this but haven’t read the Gita, you might immediately suspect Krishna’s ‘wisdom’ and find more sympathy with Arjuna’s initial doubts about the war. Indeed, the arguments that Krishna employs to persuade Arjuna to fight often seem cold, too distant, manipulative, and even warmongering—unlike the rest of the Mahabharata which comes across as decidedly anti-war. Why then have so many thinkers waxed eloquent about the wisdom of the Gita, including Emerson, Thoreau, Gandhi, Nehru, Vivekananda, Radhakrishnan, Huxley, and Hesse? The Gita in fact occupies a place more exalted that most other religious texts in the world. Most Hindus, even today, accord it the cultural cachet of a work whose profundity is taken for granted. What then is so great about the Gita?

As with other ancient religious texts—perhaps more so than many others—one can weave a path through the Gita (while avoiding others) that can make it seem deep, inspiring, and even wise. It has some soaring verses that hit just the right universal notes. They emphasize the equal spiritual status of all seekers of truth. They exhort everyone to see the journey as the reward, not the destination. They disparage priestly rituals, and privilege self-awareness as a means of penetrating our veils of illusion—also defining higher and lower states of self-awareness and attributes thereof. Various verses downgrade selfish desire, pride, lust, greed, and the pursuit of power and sensual pleasure. Modern cosmologists may find profitable the advice to ‘Seek That, the First Cause, from which the universe came long ago.’

While not so novel in light of other South Asian philosophies of the day, especially Buddhism, such ideas would enhance any world religion. But they are not the whole story; the Gita in fact says a lot more. It promotes a specific ethical and metaphysical worldview, as it tries to answer the age old question: how to live? To properly evaluate the Gita, this worldview is what we should look at, not isolated verses taken out of context—many of which are flatly contradicted by other verses. What then are the dominant ethics of the Gita? What is the picture of reality that it promotes? Is the Gita as good a guide to everyday life (i.e., to our ‘inner battlefield’) as so many claim it to be?

What Song Do the Hindus Hear?

Many Hindus, including Mahatma Gandhi, have done highly selective and allegorical readings of the Gita. Gandhi even made it stand for peace and nonviolence. The message of the Gita, he wrote, is that spiritual fulfillment comes from selfless work; we must cultivate non-attachment to the outcome of our action—which doesn’t mean indifference to the outcome, only the lack of hankering after and brooding over it. If one follows this ‘central teaching of the Gita,’ he added without explaining why, ‘one is bound to follow truth and ahimsa [nonviolence]’. Gandhi translated the Gita from Sanskrit to Gujarati; in his introduction, he writes, ‘Krishna of the Gita is perfection and right knowledge personified.’ Shortly after though, he concedes that the Gita’s stance seems opposed to ahimsa, but then offers a painfully convoluted apology for it, citing different standards back then and calling for poetic license—going as far as saying that we don’t need to probe the mind of the author too much! This suggests that he had at least struggled with the Gita.

Gandhi’s case reminds us that what people take away from a scriptural text is inseparable from who they are and what they bring to it. Which makes me wonder about Swami Vivekananda who seems to have betrayed no struggle with the Gita, let alone the need for an apologia. Instead, with an almost thuggish glee, he coldly rubbished Arjuna’s doubt, calling it a case of fear, jitters, and unmanliness that Krishna promptly fixes by awakening his latent power. Radhakrishnan, beneath his scholarly veneer, is not much better; to him the pursuit of duty for duty’s sake is the unequivocal call of reason, and Krishna is ‘the voice of God echoing in every man’ (why not also Arjuna?).

Until its elevation by modern European scholars as the ‘Hindu Bible’—an aspect of their constructing ‘Hinduism’ as a coherent religion they could relate to—the Gita was revered by only a small minority of Indians. Sadly, it has attracted very little critical attention in modern India—I mean the kind that sacred books of many world religions have. In approaching the text, too few Indians have cut through the fog of reverence that surrounds it. Among them was the historian DD Kosambi (1907-66), who wasn’t too impressed by the Gita. In Myth and Reality (1962), he observed that a ‘slippery opportunism characterizes the whole book’. BR Ambedkar (1891-1956) saw it as Brahmanism’s response to the rising fortunes of Buddhism. In his essay, Krishna and His Gita, Ambedkar wrote, ‘The philosophic defense offered by the Bhagavad Gita of the Kshatriya’s duty to kill is, to say the least, puerile.’ The journalist and secular humanist VR Narla (1908-85) called its moral perspective ‘retrograde’. In The Truth About the Gita, Narla argued that the book condones violence and wholesale slaughter; Krishna was Machiavellian, who employed trickery, deceit, falsehood, intimidation, and blackmail to get Arjuna to overcome his moral qualms.

Written by mere mortals in a political setting but posturing as the voice of God, the Gita strives to imbue the reader with a host of ideas, beliefs, and values. Classics are ultimately defined by their ability to survive criticism. Critiques of the Gita, too, are necessary in every age, if only to know where we stand in relation to this pillar of cultural thought. My engagement with the Gita has persuaded me that it is an overrated text with a deplorable morality at its core, which should be confronted—not explained away or swept under the holy mat (admittedly, this is not as bad as sincerely trying to follow the morality of the Gita). Notably, its reflexive admirers even abound among the modern, educated Hindu upper crust, including those who live in the West.

In Part 2, I’ll probe the Gita more closely and also revive a critique of it that existed over two millennia ago, in the thought of the Buddha and then Nagarjuna. I hope that this line of inquiry will also disarm those Hindu religionists who tend to be ultra touchy about critiques of their sacred books from Western perspectives (some of which may well harbor Eurocentric biases). Meanwhile, for a quick refresher on the context and the themes of the Gita, watch this 10-minute clip from Peter Brook’s brilliant 1989 adaptation of the Mahabharata.

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Part 2 of this essay will appear on 02 Jan 2012. More writing by Namit Arora?
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Eddy Nahmias on Free Will

2011-12-05T00:00:00-08:00

Is neuroscience the death of free will? Not at all, says Eddy Nahmias (bio) in this well argued piece where he questions the simplistic notions of free will employed by neuroscientists.

Is free will an illusion? Some leading scientists think so. For instance, in 2002 the psychologist Daniel Wegner wrote, “It seems we are agents. It seems we cause what we do… It is sobering and ultimately accurate to call all this an illusion.” More recently, the neuroscientist Patrick Haggard declared, “We certainly don’t have free will. Not in the sense we think.” And in June, the neuroscientist Sam Harris claimed, “You seem to be an agent acting of your own free will. The problem, however, is that this point of view cannot be reconciled with what we know about the human brain.”

Many neuroscientists are employing a flawed notion of free will. Such proclamations make the news; after all, if free will is dead, then moral and legal responsibility may be close behind. As the legal analyst Jeffrey Rosen wrote in The New York Times Magazine, “Since all behavior is caused by our brains, wouldn’t this mean all behavior could potentially be excused? … The death of free will, or its exposure as a convenient illusion, some worry, could wreak havoc on our sense of moral and legal responsibility.”

Indeed, free will matters in part because it is a precondition for deserving blame for bad acts and deserving credit for achievements. It also turns out that simply exposing people to scientific claims that free will is an illusion can lead them to misbehave, for instance, cheating more or helping others less. So, it matters whether these scientists are justified in concluding that free will is an illusion.

Here, I’ll explain why neuroscience is not the death of free will and does not “wreak havoc on our sense of moral and legal responsibility,” extending a discussion begun in Gary Gutting’s recent Stone column. I’ll argue that the neuroscientific evidence does not undermine free will. But first, I’ll explain the central problem: these scientists are employing a flawed notion of free will. Once a better notion of free will is in place, the argument can be turned on its head. Instead of showing that free will is an illusion, neuroscience and psychology can actually help us understand how it works.

On Improving Modern Capitalism

2011-12-04T19:02:42-08:00

Here are two short articles worth reading. They illuminate two different aspects of what's wrong with modern capitalism:

Is Modern Capitalism Sustainable? by Kenneth Rogoff

I am often asked if the recent global financial crisis marks the beginning of the end of modern capitalism. It is a curious question, because it seems to presume that there is a viable replacement waiting in the wings. The truth of the matter is that, for now at least, the only serious alternatives to today’s dominant Anglo-American paradigm are other forms of capitalism....

Will capitalism be a victim of its own success in producing massive wealth? For now, as fashionable as the topic of capitalism’s demise might be, the possibility seems remote. Nevertheless, as pollution, financial instability, health problems, and inequality continue to grow, and as political systems remain paralyzed, capitalism’s future might not seem so secure in a few decades as it seems now.

Ethics and Inequality by Rob Reich and Debra Satz

Consider some facts: the 400 wealthiest Americans have more money than the bottom 50 percent of all Americans combined. Between 1979 and 2007, the incomes of the top 1 percent of the population grew by 275 percent while the incomes of the middle class rose only 40 percent. And according to newly released measures, a staggering one in three Americans, or 100 million people, suffer in poverty or near poverty.

These are startling facts, and the Occupy movement, with its references to “the 1 percent” and “the 99 percent,” has brought them to the fore of public consciousness. In response some critics have argued that the popular protest against inequality is inspired by mere envy, or an effort to inflame class warfare. We disagree. Inequalities can—in this case do—raise ethical concerns, and we think citizens are right to be outraged at the gap between the 1 percent and the 99 percent. We seek here to explain why these inequalities are so troubling.

A Brief History of English

2011-12-01T00:30:00-08:00

A profitable excerpt from a new book by Henry Hitchings, "The Language Wars: A History of Proper English":

No language has spread as widely as English, and it continues to spread. Internationally the desire to learn it is insatiable. In the twenty-first century the world is becoming more urban and more middle class, and the adoption of English is a symptom of this, for increasingly English serves as the lingua franca of business and popular culture. It is dominant or at least very prominent in other areas such as shipping, diplomacy, computing, medicine and education. A recent study has suggested that among students in the United Arab Emirates “Arabic is associated with tradition, home, religion, culture, school, arts and social sciences,” whereas English “is symbolic of modernity, work, higher education, commerce, economics and science and technology.” In Arabic-speaking countries, science subjects are often taught in English because excellent textbooks and other educational resources are readily available in English. This is not something that has come about in an unpurposed fashion; the propagation of English is an industry, not a happy accident.

English has spread because of British colonialism, the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution, American economic and political ascendancy, and further (mostly American) technological developments in the second half of the twentieth century. Its rise has been assisted by the massive exportation of English as a second language, as well as by the growth of an English-language mass media. The preaching of Christianity, supported by the distribution of English-language Bibles, has at many times and in many places sustained the illusion, created by Wyclif and Tyndale and Cranmer, that English is the language of God.

More here. Also check out my related essay on the spread and use of English in the postcolonial contexts of Africa and India.

Curiosity for Mars

2011-11-30T23:09:51-08:00

NASA just launched its newest Mars rover, Curiosity. This super cool animation shows how it will get to Mars and some things it'll do there.