Merin Simi Raj, Shahid Amin & the British freedom struggle

 IITs must get rid of their 'Humanities' Departments. Just hire guys who can teach good spoken English and run courses in how to write about popular science for magazines. 

If you hire stupid nutters to teach worthless shite, you are bound to end up with pseudo-scholarship like the following- 

Revisiting Nationalist Historiography through the Narrativization of Past Events: Reading Shahid Amin’s Reconstruction of Chauri Chaura Merin Simi Raj Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay

Indians know 'Nationalist Historiography' is a pack of stupid lies justifying worship of the Dynasty. Chauri Chaura is in Bihar. Everybody knows Biharis are little better than beasts. That's it. That's all that can be said about relevant 'narrativization'.  

'There can be no untold stories at all, just as there can be no unknown knowledge.

Sure there can. I've never told anybody the story of how I shat myself in Swahili class in 1973. As for any piece of knowledge, there is always at least one person for whom it is unknown.  

'There can be only past facts not yet described in a context of narrative form (Louis Mink)

But stories are not concerned with fact. History is greatly concerned with counterfactuals. So is Econ. Mink was stoooopid.  

The preoccupation with knowledge/power in historiography and the politics of knowledge creation and its legitimization have always had an uneven and problematic history.

Who cares about the history of a useless type of historiography? Shit is shit. There is nothing 'problematic' about saying so.  

This paper highlights the importance of revisiting the past through the narrativization of events, in the context of historiographical studies in India.

Did the Left gain anything by 're-narrating' Chauri Chaura as an OBC/Dalit/Muslim rebellion against upper castes? Maybe in some shitty Bihari shithole. But who actually gives a fuck?  

The struggle between official narrative and the “subjugated narrative,” if one may call it so, has been the area of interest in a number of disciplines, including history, jurisprudence, sociology, anthropology and literary studies, for the past few decades.

Because useless tossers engage in useless struggles.  

It has only gained prominence since the recent “narrative turn,” which dates from the late 1960s,

when everybody on Campus started tripping 

and more emphasis has been placed on it since the subaltern studies initiatives from the 1980s onwards.

At one time, studying that shite seemed a path to a Green Card. Sadly, this lady is stuck in Chennai.  

The present study is part of an attempt to explore the narrative web of Indian nationalist historiography, within which a number of stories and subjugated characters are embedded. Through a re-reading of two essays by Shahid Amin which claim to “retrieve” or “redeem” the event of Chauri Chaura from the web of official narratives, this paper shows that the ubiquitous presence of the discourses generated by the State or Law or the Samaj (as projected through cultural, traditional, religious laws and value systems) have been instrumental in transforming the participants of history into mere subjects.

Back then, all them Bihari dudes were either British subjects or British protected subjects. That was what they were objecting to.  

The historical narratives, in any discipline, which are available for public consumption, do carry the authoritative mediation of dominant institutions like the State, the Law or civil society.

Nonsense! Plenty of 'historical narratives' are fantasies which lack any alethic content. Since this lady is not a historian, she can't provide any such thing herself.  

For the same reason these narratives—handed down to posterity—have been invariably accompanied by strategic aporias which were lopsided in their perspective of what was understood as reality. As Romila Thapar puts it, there is now a “growing recognition that the past had to be explained, understood, reinterpreted. . . and that such explanations could also help us understand the present in more focused ways than before” (Thapar 1443).

Historians had been doing this for thousands of years. What we now understand is that Thapar and her ilk were shit at history. Also by saying 'there is no proof there was ever a Ram temple' they opened the door to the Court deciding there was no proof there was a Waqf created by Babur. In other words, Leftist historians helped secure the Janmabhoomi for the Hindus. No wonder they hate Chandrachud- a Harvard alum.  

This “critical enquiry,” as it is called by Thapar, calls for a fresh perception of the ways in which narratives were constructed and legitimized through various authoritative mediations.

At one time Leftist historians were doing the 'authoritative mediations'. But this caused a backlash. Telling stupid lies only causes people to think you are a stupid liar. 

Historians and sociologists are now realizing the need to move towards the recognition of the possibility of many narratives or histories, rather than a unitary perception of truth and reality.

Why? The answer is that you need to simultaneously argue that Biden's hatred of Hamas is dictated by his homophobia while affirming that his failure too undergo gender reassignment surgery is part and parcel of his identity as Narendra Modi- the supposed leader of 'independent' India.

This possibility of plurality in narratives can be identified and explored only when the past gets reconstructed from a different perspective,

by telling stupid lies 

with greater perceptiveness.

Nope. Stupidity is what is required.

I recall being puzzled by Shahid Amin's work on Chauri Chaura when it first appeared. 'Nationalist historiography' had always seen the rioters as nationalists who were goaded by the police and who retaliated. Most agreed with Nehru that Gandhi overreacted because of his own religious beliefs. Still, this was just a case of Biharis being Biharis though it might be wiser not to say so because Biharis are hefty fellows and one slap from them might kill us puny folk from the metros.

Amin’s work on Chauri Chaura is significant

it was stupid. Everybody knew what had happened- viz. Biharis behaved like Biharis even before Lalu Prasad became CM. Truly, beasts are only capable of sustaining 'Jungle Raj'.  

as it is one of the pioneer works in historiographical studies in India, which adopted the narrative technique

No. It is quite a painstaking study which draws on the testimony of the approver and others involved in the subsequent court cases. Still, it elides other things which were 'common knowledge' but which nobody talked about. The fact is Gandhi in Champaran had been used as a smokescreen to hide the anti-cow slaughter riots going on there. Similarly, Chauri Chaura had a lot to do with Muslims and OBCs resenting the Sikh zamindar- or rather, his minions.  

to contextualize and retell an event recorded in official history from a different vantage point. It is also seen as a major challenge to nationalist historiography, and we need to understand how. At one level Amin’s analyses draw attention to the imbrications of elite and subaltern politics in the context of the anti-colonial nationalist movement.

Why draw attention to the obvious? At one time elites either backed the Brits or ceased to be elite. By 1922, the time was ripe to get rid of the Brits. Sadly, Gandhi decided India would turn to shit if the Brits fucked off. We all understand this, but we don't say it for the same reason that we all have a wank now and then but pretend we only put out to super-models.  

The analysis of peasant insurgency in colonial India and of subaltern participation in nationalist politics by the historians of ‘subaltern studies’ has amounted to a strong critique of bourgeois-nationalist politics and of the postcolonial state.

But critiques made by powerless pedants are as weak as piss.  

Through a reconstruction of the Chauri Chaura event, Amin is trying to show how the powerful strand of anti-colonial politics, launched independently of bourgeois-nationalist leaders, had been denied its place in established historiography.

This is also true of Gandhi's farts or Lord Reading getting the trots. Why has established historiography ignored the shitting and pissing and farting that occurred at that crucial period in Indian history? The answer, obviously, is that Joe Biden is a homophobe who pretends to be Narendra Modi though he is himself sodomizing trillions of Netan-Yahoos to the great indignation of Hamas. 

In India, there was a time when 'nationalist historiography' mattered because you had to mug it up to get into the Civil Service. But with the rise of the BJP as well as the OBC dynastic politicians, you no longer had to pretend to believe that shite. You were welcome to say- Brahmins like Nehru and Banias like Gandhi befooled the bahishkrit community. Mayawatiji will raise India up above Yurop-Amrika!

Nationalist historiography, which narrated the nation into being,

It did no such thing. India, as a nation, acquired legal and diplomatic recognition thanks to the actions of the East India Company. Deeds not stories were involved.  

has been re-read, critiqued and re-written

by stupid and powerless pedants 

in an attempt to highlight the multiplicity of narratives and to foreground the marginalized and the forgotten.

Sadly, those guys were becoming Chief Ministers and getting very very rich. But they sent their kids abroad to study Engineering or to do MBA. They didn't waste their time with history. Sonia, because she hadn't been to Collidge and was a foreigner, was foolish enough to appoint Romila Thapar as her advisor.  

This nationalist historiography has been viewed as elitist,

though the guys forced to do it were middle class drudges.  

false and insensitive to regional variations (Aloysius 6),

This may have been true of sycophants of the Dynasty who, truth be told, were as parochial and Provincial as shit. 

thereby opening up new debates to help reconstruct the past and render new insights into the blind spots. In the last few decades the critical debates on nationalist historiography have led to the breakdown of the boundaries of disciplines such as history, sociology, literature, law and anthropology.

Why maintain boundaries between shit and shit?  

The subjugation of knowledge

its absence 

is employed and is visible at various levels in different realms of scholarship, especially in the body of scholarship that enables the understanding of the marginalized and the historically forgotten sections of society. These interdisciplinary approaches have enabled the production of new forms of knowledge which

are shit 

were earlier lost in the monolith of rigid disciplines and canons.

previously, different types of shit were segregated in various shitty University Departments. Now, there is just shit.  

Consider the following- 

The Narrative Turn in Historiography Because the emphasis of this paper is on the narrative approach towards the representation of events

which is what History has always done 

and how past events have been narrativised in historiography, it would be appropriate to begin with the status ascribed to narrative within professional studies.

Narratives have the status of narratives even in 'professional studies'.  

Etymological studies claim that the term narrative derives from

the Latin narrativus ‘telling a story'

the Greek verb gnarus (meaning to know),

There is no such word in Greek. Gnarus is Latin and Italic. Gnous or Gignosko is Greek.  

the signifier associated with the passing on of knowledge.

Or just the telling of an entertaining story.  

Interestingly recent trends in historiographical and sociological studies also point to the study of the past which informs the present as a system of knowledge rather than as a mere chronological description of the past.

There can be a 'Structural Causal Model' of the economy or polity whose parameters can be altered on the basis of historic data sets. Sadly, these nutters have no such thing.  

Structuralist theorists such as Roland Barthes argued explicitly for a crossdisciplinary approach to the analysis of stories

not history 

—an approach in which stories can be viewed as supporting a variety of cognitive and communicative activities, from spontaneous conversations and courtroom testimony to visual art, dance, and mythic and literary traditions.

anything at all can be so visualized. The cat's farts embody the Hegelian dialectic of Uranus. 

In the following decades, by the 1950s and the 1960s, strong arguments against the attack on the narrative conception of history were launched by the historian J.H. Hexter

a decent scholar whose big mistake was to think the English Civil War wasn't about Religion. Still, he was American and so allowances should be made.  

and the philosopher Louis Mink.

for whom history was like Finnegan's Wake- i.e. anything goes.  

However, there was not much dialogue between the philosophy of history and narrative theory until the publication of Hayden White’s Metahistory in 1970.

This is the 'linguistic turn' which released History students from doing boring research in the archives- unless they actually wanted to make something of themselves rather than just get a credential and then a job as a sort of glorified child-minder to drug-addled imbeciles.  

Hayden White, an advocate of narrativization in historiography, has explored the relationship between narrative and historical representation thus coaxing fellow scholars as well as readers to reconsider traditionally accepted distinctions between literary and historical discourse.

E.g. a Bugs Bunny cartoon as opposed to the Treaty of fucking Versailles. Did you know that nine out of ten students prefer watching the former as opposed to reading the latter?  

This multidisciplinary approach to the narrative element captured the attention of scholars by the end of the 1970s.

Shit scholars- maybe.  

Margaret Somers categorically stated, “Social scientists must assume that social reality itself has a narrative structure and that we must attempt to recapture those narratives by narrative means”.

E.g. Samuelson was sodomized by Elmer Fudd. This caused him to reject the Marxian Transformation Problem as gibberish. Bugs Bunny should have kept Fudd on a shorter leash.  

However, many continued to be skeptical about the scientific objectivity of the narrative approach.

E.g. my account of Joe Biden's sodomization of trillions of Netan-Yahoos.  

The skeptics treated narrative as inherently fictitious and imaginative, as that which lacked any trace of reality or real life. Real events were not readily available to be narrativised in a coherent manner without ambiguities regarding their structure and order.

Judges and Juries have found the opposite is the case. I am accused of a crime I did not commit. I go on the stand and give a coherent account of what I was doing and where I was. The prosecutor tries to find gaps or inconsistencies in my statement. But whatever trap he lays, I am able to steer clear of it by recalling to mind the events of that fatal day and giving a more and more fine-grained account of my actions. Meanwhile my lawyers are able to get corroborative  testimony.  On the other hand, supposed I told a story featuring Elmer Fudd sodomizing Samuelson, people would have thought I was a lunatic who probably did commit the crime or else that I was pretending to be a lunatic so as to get sent to the nut-house rather than the electric chair. 

Hence Genette and Levonas, trying to solve this difficulty, pointed out, “[i]f the narrative is rigorously faithful to historical events, the historian-narrator must be very sensitive to the changing of orders when he goes from the narrative work of telling the completed acts to the mechanical transcription of the spoken words” (Genette and Levonas 4).

Fist you do 'transcription' then you fill in the gaps with 'narrative work'.  

The event had to be translated into meaningful signifiers.

i.e. words.  

The trajectory of narration was rather different from that of description.

Because it featured motives and counterfactual contingencies which have to be inferred 

Genette tried to explain how narrative language was seen as different from descriptive language,

there is no need to explain what was explained to us as kids in primary school where we are told that when we are asked to describe our cat we need to mention its colour, size, type of fur etc. However, when asked to tell a story in which our cat is the hero, we may omit any such details and describe the time the cat woke us up by licking our face so that we were able to get ready in time to go to school.  

that the most significant difference between the two may possibly be that the narration, by the temporal succession of its discourse,

a narrative can begin 'in medias res' and then go back and forth in time. 

restores the equally temporal succession of the events, while the description must successively modulate the representation of objects simultaneously juxtaposed in space.

There is no such requirement. We may describe the cat without specifying where it is now.  

Thapar even justifies the element of speculation and imagination which may come into play during the critical analysis of a historical narrative: 'Even where the explanation requires a small leap of the imagination, the leap takes off from critical enquiry.

It may 'take off' from a contemporary event. You may be able to better understand the past when something about the present becomes clearer to you.  

This is the historian’s contribution to knowledge but it is also an essential process in human sciences. And in making this contribution the historian is aware that other evidence may surface, fresh generalisations may emerge and knowledge be further advanced.' 

Not in her own case. She was useless.                      

Engaging with these ambiguities associated with narrativization, Jay Clayton points out that skepticism against the narrative approach and its authenticity stems from its “association with unauthorized forms of knowledge” such as folklores, myths, legends and oral histories or “the less privileged written genres—diaries, letters, criminal confessions, slave narratives” (Clayton 378-9).

Not in History. We are sceptical about the account a politician or party hack gives of a particular period because it is likely to be self-serving. It is unlikely to feature ghosts or dragons or Elmer Fudd sodomizing Samuelson. Moreover, those writing it are unlikely to be either Jack the Ripper or Sojourner Truth.  

He supports his argument with Michel Foucault’s observation that narrative is one of the “naive knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity” (Foucault qtd Clayton 378).

Foucault was wrong. If you claim to have made a great scientific discovery you also have to give an account of how you came to make it. Had Einstein just presented us with a bunch of equations few would have grasped the essence of his theory. It was because he could give us a credible narrative of how he, a young patent clerk travelling by tram, came to his great 'gedanken' or thought experiment that he rose to become the most revered and influential scientist of his century. 

Clayton takes his argument a little further and points out that most engagements with minority writing constitute a “rich mixture of traditional narrative forms and contemporary political concerns” (Clayton 379).

Smart white peeps are a very small minority. Our engagement with their writing is about our wanting to get a little smarter.  

Unearthing the plurality of narratives and exploding the assumption of a unitary narrative would definitely be met with resistance and hurdles and hence may seem chaotic.

Unless it is done by smart peeps. These nutters weren't smart.  

Ranajit Guha points out, “‘[i]f the small voice of history gets a hearing at all in some revised account … it will do so only by interrupting the telling of the dominant version, breaking up its storyline and making a mess of its plot”.

He made a mess alright- but only in his pants. Still, he was considerate enough to do it on foreign campuses.  

Notably, only the narrative form effectively allows as well as supports the text’s engagement with contemporary socio-political concerns.

No. A purely economic or military description of current events is more 'engaging'. We don't care about Hamas's narratives. We care about their military resources and ability to keep up their armed struggle.  

This, rather sudden engagement with the narrative approach across disciplines can be read along with the emergence of minority literature, subaltern studies, feminist literature, African American literature and Dalit Studies.

All of which have proven to be shit even if one or two imbeciles got tenure thereby. Why be content with a Professor's wage when, if you study STEM subjects, you can be as rich as Elon Musk and have as great an impact on the world?  

In his introduction to Event, Metaphor and Memory, Amin says, “[p]easants do not write, they are written about . . . their speech . . . is not normally recorded for posterity, it is wrenched from them in courtrooms and inquisitorial trials”.

Amin is lying. Plenty of Indian peasants gained sufficient literacy to write 'narratives'. Nehru mentions Baba Ramchandra, who had been an indentured labourer in Fiji till he got into trouble with the authorities there because of the articles he wrote which were published back in India. I suppose his literacy was because he was Brahmin. But plenty of Brahmins are peasant cultivators in the Doab. Incidentally, the first Hindi newspaper from Gorakpur started to appear in 1854. Some people who worked on the land, started getting published and thus could devote themselves to journalism and politics.  

Amin also identifies contradictory constructions of the events by local nationalists and, later, by the relatives of the participants as well. Amin’s multiple sources of information converge not to produce a simple explanation of why “Chauri Chaura” happened, but rather, to display the complexity of the event, its metaphorical power as a two-sided image of criminality and patriotism, and its persistence in local and familial memory even after it is “largely forgotten in nationalist lore” (Amin 1987: 176).

What happened was 'common knowledge'. Some of the agitators were peaceful Gandhians. Others weren't. Biharis will be Bihari you know. The problem was that the police were going after the guys who had signed the pledge. They would be tempted to turn approver. Gandhi lowered the temperature by calling off the saytagraha and going meekly to jail. That's it. That's the whole story.  

Mir Shikari, the approver, is a twenty-seven-year-old cultivator and hideseller from Chotki Dumri. According to legal discourse, “an approver should be examined first and not after all the witnesses who are supposed to corroborate his evidence are examined” .

No. A person may turn approver after other testimony has been taken. What is required is corroboration.  

Shikari was accordingly arrested on 16 March

whereas Gandhi's famous plea of guilt to a charge of sedition was made on 18 March.  

and he made his “confession” before the Deputy Collector.

Who knew that the Govt. was not interested in prosecuting the Congress bigwigs for 'waging war on the King Emperor'.  

Later in the course of the trial he provided his testimony quite extensively, with graphic details of the people as well as the incidents. Amin draws our attention to how Shikari was used as an instrument in the judicial process—

all approvers are used thus 

how the Prosecution converts the renegade into an approver.

The police, not the prosecution, did that.  

Amin quotes Paul Ricoeur: “Testimony signifies something other than a simple narration of things seen” (Amin 1987: 172).

It may do. It may not. In this case, it signified things seen and heard.  

The appropriation of Mir Shikari and his testimony has larger implications than Shikari’s desperation to save his own life.

Not for him. He genuinely didn't want to be hanged. Still, he would have been aware that he might become the victim of vendetta. 

Shikari just happens to be a tool through which the colonial government gets to easily manipulate and appropriate the event;

Why the fuck would they want to 'appropriate' the killing of policemen? They wanted to punish those responsible. True, if the police extorted money or beat or raped some people in the area, that was just a perk of office for them.  

to make things easier, the nationalist leaders were not under any pressure to claim the event as their own either.

They were under great pressure to disavow and condemn it. Otherwise they might lose all their property and end up in the Andamans.  

The responses of the other accused were varied and interesting; while some claimed that Shikari had some old enmity with them and was trying to frame them, some others like Abdullah were poignant in pointing out, “Shikari knows me from before. He has turned an approver and if he did not name a number of accused persons, how could he get off”.

This happens in almost all criminal cases.  

Though apparently it comes across as “blame,” it is quite clear that the judiciary has appropriated the approver’s testimony.

No. The Judge decided that the approver's testimony had been corroborated as was required by the 1872 Act.  

Though there are law books which warn Judges to be careful about the testimonies provided by accomplices, in Chauri Chaura the context of the relationship between the Approver’s Testimony and the judgment is fixed by the politics of the trial.

No. There was no flaw in the trial. That's why nobody bothered to appeal the judgment. Instead, Gandhi's son rushed to the spot and, on 11 February, proposed the raising of a vast relief fund for the families of the policemen who were killed. Each district in the province was required to raise 2000 rupees for this purpose, but Gorakhpur district, because of its greater guilt, was required to produce 10,000 Rs! In a letter to Nehru, Gandhi sought to deflect blame from his son. He wrote- 'Let us not be obsessed by Devidas's youthful indiscretions. It is quite possible that the poor boy has been swept off his feet and that he has lost his balance...' I should explain Devdas did not have any authority to act as he had done. Still, his father was backing his course of action. Why? He already felt that things were getting out of hand. There would be more violence unless he surrendered unilaterally. But this just meant that the Brits must stay on until all Indians become very peaceful because they are either dead or on the point of death or unable to achieve any higher brain function than is required for the turning of a spinning wheel. 

One final point. British officials in India had no vested interest in the zamindari system. They were quite prepared to see incidents like the Moplah uprising, or the Chauri Chaura riot, as instances of an emaciated agricultural class trying to rid itself of its, wholly indigenous, oppressors. This is why Nehru- though he does no say so in plain words- opposed the immediate redistribution of land. He knew this is what ICS officers like A.O Hume- who founded the INC- had always wanted. The ryots would have paid a lot less to the Sarkar than they did to the Zamindar and his intermediaries, but the State would have got more money in total. Moreover, the ryot would be see it was in his own interests to pay local cesses for irrigation, schools, roads etc. In other words, India need not remain as poor as shit. It could become increasingly self-administering and self-garrisoning. English officials could focus on more 'value adding' tasks and, after retirement, could get lucrative consultancy work or seats on the boards of Indian companies with offices in London. Manchester would be happy because it could export more to an affluent India. Britain's idle shipyards could re-open to equip a new indigenous Indian Navy. 

But if the peasants got what they really wanted, the barristocrats of the INC would be disintermediated. Nehru sought to avert this outcome and thus had to play second fiddle to the Maha-crackpot. 

: “This violent event with its iconic status in the history of the Indian nation and Gandhi’s career, equally affords insights into the ways of nationalist historiography” (Amin 1996: xix).

At the time Amin was writing this, Indians thought Chauri Chaura was about Biharis being bestial and only interested in 'Jungle Raj'. Why did Amin not say so bluntly? The answer is obvious. He was doing an elite type of historiography which pretended that a PhD from Oxbridge brought you closer to smelly 'subalterns' (e.g. people like Winston Churchill who came to India as a subaltern or second lieutenant).  Inspired by his work, I wrote a history of the British Independence Struggle which featured Adivasi women like Mrs. Thatcher and starving untouchables like Tony Benn who opposed joining the Common Market. Back in 2011, I wrote a blogpost warning the Brits that unless they adopted purely Gandhian methods, they would revert to cannibalism if they threw off the yoke of Brussels. You would once again have Cornish pasties made out of the meat of innocent Cornish men and women. Yorkshire pudding would be made out of the flesh and bones of Geoff Boycott. Welsh rarebit would once again feature the dangly bits of Neil Kinnock. Fortunately, Rishi Sunak read my blogpost and was able to persuade Boris Johnson to achieve Brexit by fasting to death while cramming pork pies into his mouth. Sadly, elite 'nationalist' historiography in Britain has completely failed to mention my crucial role in the British Freedom Struggle. 

Nishant Batsha's Lacanian shite

 In February 1921, Mahatma Gandhi had visited Gorakhpur, briefly stopping at Chauri Chaura station, and had received a rapturous welcome. Over the next few months there appeared to be a veritable cult of this semi-divine figure who was credited with all sorts of miracles. The British owned Pioneer newspaper spoke disapprovingly of this 'canonization'. However, it initially strengthened the hand of the Congress/Khilafat combine. 'Authority' could no longer claim that these elite barristers did not speak for the Indian masses. The reverse side of the coin only became apparent a year later with the Chauri Chaura riots where policemen were killed by a rampaging mob. This led Gandhi, who had visited the area two weeks previously, to call off the Non Cooperation Movement and go meekly to jail. One reason for this is that the police had raided the Congress/Khilafat office in Gorakhpur and thus got their hands on the 'pledge forms'. It was from this that the drew up a list of likely rioters whom they planned to prosecute to the hilt. Had there been no signed pledge forms, Congress could have pleaded ignorance and attributed the violence to hooligans or those with a personal grudge against the Police sub-inspector most concerned in the events. However, because Gandhi had visited the area and some of those arrested would be bound to implicate him, rightly or wrongly, he had no alternative but to surrender unilaterally and go to jail on the lesser charge of sedition rather than be sent to the Andamans for waging war on the King Emperor. 

Nishant Batsha, an American novelist, gives a Lacanian interpretation of these events in an essay he wrote as an undergraduate- 

 A Hegelian account of Gandhi's importance would view his ability to halt an entire national movement as proof of his status as a World-Historical individual.

No. It would prove he wasn't a World-Historical individual. India did not get what Ireland and Egypt and Afghanistan at around this time. Gandhi, clearly, didn't want India to become independent because he thought Indians were not ready for independence. This meant that the Labour party, which came to power in 1924, had to change its policy towards India.   

However, I use an analytic framework based upon the Lacanian notion of the imaginary and symbolic orders in order to reinterpret Gandhi's position within the nationalistic framework as a construct of the peasant imaginary.

The problem here is that the leaders of the satyagraha procession in Chauri Chaura had paid their dues and become members of the Indian National Congress.  However, the Left contends that the rioters were mainly lower caste and their real grievance was with the local Zamindar family (of the Majithia family. The elder son being the father of Amrita Shergil) who were backed by senior police officers in the area, some of whom were Sikh and who had business interests there. In other words, there was a complex local dynamic to the events. Had some 'construct of the peasant imaginary' been at work, there should have been a thousand Chauri Chauras. The fact is there was only one Sikh zamindari in the area. This had been awarded by the British in return for loyalty in 1857. 

This is not to say that Gandhi was not a central figure in the Indian nationalist movement. Rather, his centrality was not a function of his own status as an elite nationalist

if he hadn't been a great fund-raiser supported by Indian industrialists, nobody in Gorakhpur would have known his name. 

— it was a direct result of a mass imaginary of Gandhi that rested within peasant populations. 

If this were the case, peasants in other parts of the Doab would have been acting in a similar fashion. Also, the peasants would have refused to believe the divine Mahatma had withdrawn the agitation. They would have said 'Mahatama is in occultation. British, use Black Magic, to put a 'Maya' Mahatma (i.e. a magical double) in prison. Once we have killed the evil doers, Mahatma will return to us. 

 In January 1921, during this campaign for mass enlistment, a local unit of the movement was established in Chotki Dumri, which was one mile west of Chauri Chaura. An official was dispatched to Chauri Chaura, who elected a few satyagrahi-officers and distributed pledge forms.

This is why Gandhi and Co. could be tried for 'waging war against the King Emperor' and sent off to the Andamans. By comparison, being jailed for sedition was a piece of cake.  

Interestingly, local volunteers, in addition to pledging to uphold the values within the pledge, also agreed to the extension of abstaining from meat and liquor. A few days before February 4th , volunteers demonstrated for a fair price of meat,

This bit tends to be left out by Nationalist historians. Still, it was nice of the rioters not to eat the policemen they had roasted nicely. 

 Ranajit Guha noted at the dawn of the Subaltern Studies movement, ―the historiography of Indian nationalism has for a long time been dominated by elitism

Because only elite is literate. Non-elite is illiterate and likes roasting, if not eating, policemen. Still, Guha is wrong. The elites in India at that time were guys like the uncle of Amrita Shergil who was also a successful industrialist and was knighted by the British. The 'barristocrats'- i.e. guys like Nehru, Gandhi, Patel- weren't elite. They were upper middle class. Nationalist history is written from their perspective. It is a different matter that the Nehru's established an Imperial dynasty. 

– colonialist elitism and bourgeois nationalist elitism.

There was a circulation of elites. Currently, we have Backward Caste, Dalit and Adivasi Dynasties which have their own sycophantic historians. Sadly, the Subaltern Studies group were 'for export only'. They played no role in the shift in power to the OBCs or Scheduled Castes and Tribes which occurred from the late Sixties onward.  

The ability to see Gandhi as nationalist figure who paternally led and controlled an entire nationalist movement and additionally view him as imminent in each individual during an action that was physically separated from him, is a primarily elitist position which needs to be questioned.

No. It was the position of khadi clad 'netas' who had started off as moffusil vakils. True, some of their kids may have gone to English medium schools and thus were able to join the urban upper middle class.  

Additionally, it has been noted that political mobilization within subaltern groups has often been dismissed as a purely spontaneous act; when in actuality, subalterns often had far too much at stake in the institutions of power that situated their daily lives and would not engage in an act of insurgency except in a deliberate and premeditated manner.

This is misleading. Poor people may be paid to act as policemen, jailors, executioners etc. If other poor people run riot, they may gain nothing in the medium term whereas some of them may be hanged or incarcerated. The Cost is high relative to the Benefit. This does not mean they have a stake in existing power structures. It merely means there is little they can grab which won't be grabbed from them almost immediately. On the other hand, mass movements among share-croppers can be very effective but only if the peasant gains enough to feed his family. If this isn't the case, the thing is not worth it.  

Hence I adopt the subaltern perspective by questioning the elite status of Gandhi

he wasn't elite. Aristocrats were elite. Still, his financiers had become rich and through Gandhi they were able to get political influence and social prestige. Moreover, some would become very much richer thanks to their backing of the INC.  

in an attempt to transcend the notion of high-level elite politics.

Yet, Princes and Viceroys continued to decide important questions. True, elections were held, but under 'Dyarchy', middle class politicians didn't have much power- which is why Gandhi regained salience because he had opposed entry into the Assemblies.  

I wish to ponder how the idea of Gandhi functioned within a peasant imaginary

the answer has to do with Ram Rajya. Did Lord Ram levy taxes? I suppose so but the peasant preferred to believe otherwise. Also, the dude got rid of his wife- who was from Mithila. You know what the women from there are like.  

and how said population simply did not act in a paroxysm of violence.

The Moplahs had acted 'in a paroxysm of violence'. The lesson here was that Muslims be kray kray. As Gandhi would say in 1939, the Brits must not slyly fuck off before handing over the Army to the INC. Otherwise Muslims and Punjabis (irrespective of creed) would grab everything. Hopefully, the high caste Hindus would be able to protect their anal cherries by muttering 'Ahimsa! Ahimsa!'. But they wouldn't have a pot to piss in.  

However, one may simply be wondering, why take contention with Hegel?

Why indeed? He wasn't a historian. Also, he was as stupid as shit.  

My response to this criticism is that, in many historical narratives that are encountered on a day-to-day basis, Hegel looms invisibly in the background. By ―day-to-day,‖ I am referring here to the ubiquity of historical narratives wherein the crux of history occurs on the shoulders of the world-historical. In these accounts, one is sincerely left believing that history can only occur when ―great men take action.

Collective action problems are linked to coordination problems. 'Great men' are focal solutions to such problems. Why is Mohammad Yunus heading the interim Government in Bangladesh? The answer is he is a very eminent man. Also, he is as old as fuck and thus can be a smokescreen behind which a massive reallocation of rents occurs.  

By extension, these individuals are the driving force behind history and remain its true agents.

An agent is merely the tool of his 'Principal'. Napoleon was important because he secured the title in land which had been wrenched from the Aristocracy.  

However, as subaltern histories have shown, agency and subjectivity are not limited to a small stratum of community.

In other words, the 'great unwashed' have brains of their own and a separate economic and social agenda- e.g. taking land from Aristocrats and refusing to let the cunt exercise droit du seigneur.  

While they may be important, it must be realized that agency is not a nodal apparatus, but extends in all directions.

This is why if I want a glass of water, I don't have to get up and go fetch it. My agency will extend to the tap and the glass which will fill itself and then come wafting towards me.  

At this juncture, however, it may be fruitful to expound upon the meaning of Chauri Chaura from an Hegelian standpoint.

It showed India wasn't ready for independence. Its politicians didn't know how to solve the problem of land ownership and taxation. Also, they were stupid and useless. Gandhi had said 'I will deliver Independence in 18 months'. Then he said 'India is not ready. Still, I had a moral obligation to do crazy shit because I'm really really stupid. Please lock me up.'  

When analyzing Gandhi as a historical figure in this vein, one must see how he fits into the model of the WorldHistorical Individual.

The answer is simple. He was saying to the Brits- don't fuck off without handing over the Army to us otherwise Muslims and Punjabis (and maybe the Gurkhas) will grab everything.' He only changed his tune when it appeared that the Japanese Emperor would replace the House of Windsor.  

Hegel states in The philosophy of history that there exists a ―universal concept [that] is a moving force of the productive Idea, an element of truth that is forever striving towards itself.

Sadly, that 'truth' turned out to be that Germans are shit at politics. They should stick to making nice cars while letting their Army train with broomstick handles painted black. American troops were welcome to protect the country. 

The World-Historical Individual takes this universal conception and embodies it:

Hegel embodied the stupidity and mischievousness of the German pedant.  

―the historical men, are those whose aims embody a universal concept of this kind.

Hitler certainly embodied evil of an utterly crazy kind. Gandhi was merely stupid and useless.  

Furthermore, these individuals eventually harmonize the ideal of World Spirit – which seeks to attain the consciousness of its own freedom

which anybody not in jail already has. It isn't true that you are 'un-free' because Mummy is making you do the washing-up. You are 45 years old. You could get married and move out.  

– with the particularities of situations on the ground. That is to say, the passion of the World-Historical Individual within its contextualized moment ―is thus inseparable from the actualization of the universal principle; for the universal is the outcome of the particular and determinate, and from its negation.

You could say the same about hurrying to the toilet and taking a shit because you are turtling.  

Now, individuals ―on the ground‖ find an intense affinity for the individual because of the omnipresence of the universal world spirit as previously mentioned: ―this is why the others follow these soulleaders; for they feel the irresistible force of their own spirit coming out in the heroes.

Sadly, for Germans, that 'force' turned out to be highly resistible. Gandhi's acolytes were smarter. They preferred to sulk in jail from time to time rather than 'fight' for freedom. This is because they understood that an independent India would neither be able to feed or defend itself. Also, there would be partition because Muslims hate kaffirs. 

 would a Hegelian analysis apply to Chauri Chaura?

Yes. India wasn't ready for independence. Chauri Chaura showed that. Gandhi called off the movement and went meekly to jail. Even in 1947, India wasn't ready. But Britain was in a hurry to get out. Still, Mountbatten remained one of Nehru's closest advisers till the latter died. Indeed, India had a British admiral till 1958. It could neither feed nor defend itself nor keep minorities safe. That's it. That's the whole story. 

The answer to this question is a resounding ‗no‘. The difficulty with a Hegelian analysis is that it fails to capture how Gandhi functioned within the imaginary of the peasantry, wherein a large part of his following was found.

No. The peasants understood that Gandhi didn't want them to roast policemen even if they refrained from eating them.  

This analytical framework would posit that there existed a consistent Gandhian image which resonated within the minds of all individuals.

Actually, such an image did exist. Gandhi wants you to do stupid shit- e.g. burn cloth and give up eating nice food or having sex or killing policemen or grabbing land from absentee landlords.  

The actualization of universal principle is predicated upon a notion of attaining freedom wherein agency is a nexus between the WorldHistorical Individual and the World Spirit;

No. The universal principle being 'actualized' at that time was Racism. The Christian White is the natural ruler of the Black or Muslim.  Even in the Soviet Union, the White ex-Christian Marxist was the natural ruler of the backward 'Asiatic'. 

the peasantry would merely be a localization of the ideals that occur within these two groups.

Not if they were White- e.g. the Irish peasants who got Independence at that time.  

If this were true, then one would posit that each manifestation of non-cooperation within a rural setting would never exist as a Chauri Chaura;

Most villages had no violence. The fact is, even back then, Gujaratis took a dim view of Biharis. At a later point, its main industry would be kidnapping. It is still one of the poorest and most backward parts of India. Sadly Modi is now dependent on Nitish and so his administration won't last very long as the veteran turncoat once again turns his coat.  

each individual would harmonize personal passion with the universal principle in such a way that would always find itself in line with the doctrine on the Pledge Form.

Gujaratis were not roasting and eating policemen. Biharis- well, Biharis will be Biharis you know. Nothing can be done about it.  

Though this has been explored in depth, it must be repeated: peasant nationalism was not simply a derivative discourse of elitist nationalism; though the two were intimately connected with each other, peasant nationalism utilized its own lexical functionaries.

Nehru, in his autobiography, points out that the peasants in the Hindu belt had Hindu leaders who urged them to grab land from Muslim land-owners.  In Muslim majority areas, the reverse was the case. Moplah Muslim tenants had slaughtered their Hindu landlords and declared a 'jihad'. The barristocrats would be disintermediated in the country-side. That was okay because what they really wanted to do was to move into the big bungalows and Gubernatorial mansions of the Brits. When a Bihari moved into the Viceregal palace, his women-folk had the place cleaned with cow-dung. Lee Kuan Yew records his dismay at having to eat with his fingers at Nehru's dinner table. He writes of the dilapidated state of Rashtrapati Bhavan when he first visited in the Sixties.  

It was sad to see the gradual rundown of the country, visible even in the Rashtrapati Bhavan. The crockery and cutlery were dreadful- at dinner one knife literally snapped in my hand and nearly bounced into my face. Air conditioners, which India had been manufacturing for many years, rumbled noisily and ineffectively. The servants, liveried in dingy white and red uniforms, removed hospitality liquor from the side tables in our rooms. Delhi was “dry” most days of the week. On one occasion, returning to the Rashtrapati Bhavan after a reception given by our high commissioner, my two Indian ADCs in resplendent uniforms entered the elevator with me with their hands behind their backs. As I got out, I noticed they were holding some bottles. I asked my secretary who explained that they were bottles of Scotch. It was the practice at our high commission’s diplomatic receptions to give bottles of Johnnie Walker Scotch whisky to deserving guests, and each ADC received two. They were not obtainable in India because they could not be imported. There was a hypocritical pretense at public egalitarianism, with political leaders wearing homespun clothes to identify themselves with their poor, while they quietly amassed wealth. This undermined the morale of the elite officers, civil and military.

Yew correctly notes that the Congress-wallahs were not 'elite'. Even the Nehrus ate with their hands. There were plenty of actual Princes- i.e. people of the elite- in the Civil and Military administration. The Singapore Embassy identified such 'deserving' people and quietly supplied them with drinkable Whiskey. 

Ranajit Guha left India before power passed from the upper caste middle class to people like Lalu Prasad Yadav. The former weren't elite but weren't as entirely rustic and retarded as the latter. 

Nishant, having pretended guys who clean their houses with cow-dung are 'elite', proceeds to give an account of his framework of analysis

Two structures within Lacanian psychoanalysis are central to this analysis: the imaginary

in this case, the fantasy that in an independent India, there would be no taxes because public goods- e.g. Defence, Law and Order- would magically appear by themselves 

and symbolic order.

i.e. people talking bollocks. 

I suppose a psychiatrist treating a nutter may want to distinguish between his delusions and the schizophrenic word-salad with which he expresses those delusions. Thus a guy who thinks the cat is spying on him might say 'Snowy the dog is sodomizing Tintin because I failed Calculus'. Here Lacanian analysis can clarify that what is meant is that the mirroring of the catachresis of the mise en abyme of the constipation of the irreducible is the irreducible of the effigy of the scotomization of the mise en abyme of its own catachresis. Either that or the other way around. 

Within the imaginary order, one must consider the relevancy of the development of the subjectivity of language and ideal-ego formation during the mirror stage.

If you are dealing with an itty baby- maybe. The fact is all sorts of silly thoughts go through your head when you are cuddling a little bundle of joy.  

When describing the subjectivity of language, Lacan utilizes the notion of the imperative (the call). When describing how this grammatical mood functions in terms of the imaginary, Lacan notes that ―at the level of the statement, from its style to its very intonation, everything we learn bears on the nature of the subject.

If this is learning, what is stupidity?  

Lacan further explicates that the imperative is a ―question of the tone in which the imperative is uttered.

Thus when a girl tells you to 'fuck off', her angry tone suggests that what she really wants to do is to suck you off. That is why she kneed you in the groin. Why is it so many girls want to suck me off? Also, why don't they just do it instead of sending me to the hospital with a ruptured testicle?  

The same text can have completely different imports depending on the tone,

What an amazing discovery! 

however, one must also consider ―what is at issue, and its reference to the totality of the situation. Thus, one can reduce the call to two planar categories: the tonality and the subjectivity of the statement.

Which is why you can believe that being told to fuck off and being kneed in the groin actually means the girl in question wants to suck you off.  

However, what one can garner from this information is that language processing is an entirely subjective experience.

Only if you really can't take a fucking hint- not to mention a knee in the groin.  

To borrow from Ferdinand de Saussure, the imaginary is the realm of the signified.

It isn't. There is no signifier which captures stuff we imagine- till some great poet or novelist, like JK Rowling comes along. Consider the notion that a thing might be part of the soul of some wholly distinct being. Prior to Harry Potter, this vague intuition of ours had no 'signifier'. It now does- viz. horcrux. This doesn't mean there weren't already stories which featured things of that sort. Come to think of it, I remember reading that, in Byzantium, this belief was quite common. There probably was some Greek name for the thing.  

What this implies is that language gains meaning and signification through an interpretive process that is within the contexts of the imaginary order.

Only because everything is. We may equally say that farts gain meaning- e.g. you need to shit- and signification only because you can imagine what will happen if you don't take a dump in the toilet. To be clear, you can imagine shitting your pants and thus hurry to the toilet before this can happen. No doubt, babies don't bother probably because of something to do with 'the mirror stage'. 

A second structure within the imaginary that one must be aware of

when discussing Bihari peasants 

is the development of the ideal-ego during the mirror stage.

Biharis are not having mirrors. That is why they are so rustic and retarded.  

The Lacanian mirror stage is referential to the formative moment within the development of the ego when a child begins to recognize him or herself in the mirror. The representation of the self in the mirror becomes the ideal-ego, a term that represents the idealized notion of a self that one can construe from the reflection in the mirror;

Lalu should have looked in a mirror. Maybe this would have scared him straight.  

this self is idealized not only because it exists in the imaginary (rather than the symbolic),

Baby already exists in the symbolic because it answers to endearments directed at it. Indeed, it says cute things like Ma Ma & Baa Boo for which it is rewarded with plenty of kisses. 

but because is bounded nature within the mirror allows for complete vision of the self; this is opposed to the chaotic reality seen around the viewer on the level of the symbolic;

People keep shouting rude things at Nishant. He looks in the mirror for reassurance that he isn't a stupid cunt.  

Lacan states that the ―ideal-ego is now the target of the self-love which was enjoyed in childhood by the true ego.

Unless you are Bihari.  

The ego-ideal, in turn, is the realization that occurs when one has the opportunity to view himself from the point of view of the ideal-ego

Bihari ideal-ego is as a kidnapper or corrupt politician or both. 

– at this juncture the viewer is disgusted by the fact that his actual self is far from the perfection he imagined via the ideal-ego.

Unless he is Bihari and has made a lot of money out of crime or politics or both crime and politics.  

Finally, while the symbolic order is a nuanced and far-reaching construct within Lacanian psychoanalysis, this paper will only consider the nature of signified notions of language.

In other words, the sort of stuff ordinary folk mean by the signifier 'language'.  

In short, within the symbolic order, language is only the signifier – interpretive actions are made on the basis of individuals via the imaginary apparatus. Thus, the symbolic is what binds ―subjects together in one action.

In other words, different people do different things though they all may use the same word for what they are doing. Thus, for example, this cretin might have said 'I'm a research scholar at Columbia' and people might have thought he was a smart dude studying something alethic. He wasn't. He was reading and writing stupid shit.  

The human action par excellence is originally founded on the existence of the world of the symbol, namely on laws and contracts.

There are plenty of unwritten laws and contracts. The 'signifiers' may only come into existence at a much later date when a Court 'reads them in'. 

One needs to note the lack of subjectivity in this order: the symbolic simply acts as a presentation of the binding force of language between individuals

there is no such 'binding force'. A husband may think 'fidelity' means fucking anything in a skirt. His wife may disagree.  

– the actuality behind this force always rests in the imaginary.

It may not. Unimaginative people may decisively change the course of history. There was an East German apparatchik whose job was to go on TV and issue public statements. He often said his job was easy. His bosses told him what to say and he just went on TV and said it. Sadly, he had popped out for a smoke just when his bosses were saying 'tell everybody we will close the gates at the Berlin wall. We will shoot anyone who tries to flee.' This cretin, who had zero imagination, went on TV and said 'the gates remain open'. Soldiers who watched this thought the policy had changed. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands thronged to the gates so as to get out while the going was good. The regime promptly collapsed.  

But how do these structures translate into political analysis?

They don't because there are no such 'structures'.  

One must consider national politics as operating within the symbolic.

Nope. Politics features a lot of 'unspoken' deals or arrangements. There is nothing in the 'symbolic order'- i.e. there is no document in the archives- to show exactly what happened and why it happened. In the case of Günter Schabowski, the guy whose stupidity and lack of imagination brought down the East German regime, we have his own account of how the live-TV debacle had come about. Had he kept mum, we would still be guessing. 

The nationalist figure is a synchronic symbol of the the national movement

Nope. The guy could be dead or held incommunicado in exile. Equally, it may be that the dude did not approve of what was being done in his name. There are questions about whether Kenyatta really supported the Mau Mau.  

within any political situation. In the relationship between nationalist and individual, the individual's imaginary holds the nationalist figure as the ideal-ego –

very true. Many Spanish men wanted to have a vagina just like La Pasionaria.  

a manifestation of the self's political desires on the political/national stage.

We may have the political desire not to pay any fucking taxes but then back down when we realize this will mean internal insurrection and external invasion because there is no money to pay the police or the Army.  

This is extrapolated from the idea that, the nationalist represents a stable, coherent, unified, and whole vision of the political self that the individual cannot attain in his everyday existence.

This was the problem with Gandhi. He said everybody should give up sex. But even his own sons refused to do so.  

In short, due to limitations of subjectivity the peasant cannot simultaneously be a peasant and Gandhi.

No. He could stop doing anything useful and fuck off to Jail and then some fucking Ashram.  

Instead, the self is displaced into Gandhi. Therefore, political action is an interplay between the realization of the self as the ego-ideal – the fact that one's political self is not a coherent plan as created within a nationalist framework (the fact that one is a peasant and not an elite political figure) – and the ideal-ego of the nationalist.

Nonsense! The peasant could go to jail and then rise in the Congress party while running a khaddar shop or something of that sort.  

This tension between the ideal-ego and the ego-ideal is drawn from the idea that the imaginary is where signified notions of language are present.

But un-signified notions- e.g. who the fuck will defend the country if Gandhian nutters come to power- may be more important. 

However, the ―language, here is not limited to a linguistic system of signs or speech, but rather encapsulates the notion of a language within politics itself.

It is called political language.  

Now, the tension between egos is resolved when the individual utilizes one's own subjective interpretation to re-seek national politics in the self, and the subjectivity of political discourse is taken up in the imaginary to become an individuated and subjective notion of interpretation.

Till people understand that the thing is bollocks. Can you make a living out of this shite? Some could and did. Others gave up this foolish play-acting.  

It must be noted that these notions of tension between the symbolic-nationalist and the individual are completely contextualized.

No. Nutters who talk this type of bollocks are wholly ignorant of actual contexts.  

One cannot enter into the subject's internal discursive apparatus to determine how linguistic or symbolic gestures, such as clothing, tonality, or language functioned within a personalized imaginary.

Sure one can. Get talking to the dude wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh and holding a 'Fuck Netanyahu' placard, and he will explain everything to you. True, he may start backing away from you if you tell him that Nostradamus had predicted all this centuries ago. The true story- as explained by Divine Mother, Janet O'Flaherty,  is that Joe Biden- whose number is of the Beast- incessantly sodomizes Netan-Yahoos and this has irked the homophobic Hamas organization. 

However, it is from this vantage point, agency begins its shift down from the top and back into the masses.

So the vantage point of Lacan and dudes who got PhDs from Columbia is what helped Lalu Prasad Yadav and Nitish Kumar to rise. Good to know. 

Now, how can one reapproach Chauri Chaura through the use of a Lacanian psychoanalytic structure?

In the same way that you can reproach Neanderthals for not making cat like noises in a sufficiently avant garde manner.  No wonder they went extinct! 

When using this analytic approach, it becomes clear why the peasants yelled ―victory to Mahatma Gandhi‖ as they burnt down the police station, even after they had signed the Pledge Form.

They had been shouting that slogan before and after that event. Why? That was the slogan of the Congress party. If, as Gandhi promised, he delivered Independence by the end of the year, then all the guys who had paid their dues and joined the INC would get land and positions of power under the new rulers. The minions of the Majithia zamindar, who had gained by supporting the Brits in 1857, would be told to fuck the fuck off back to Punjab.  

Sadly, Gandhi surrendered unilaterally. Many of the rioters were incarcerated. Some were hanged. No doubt, families who lost land or breadwinners were full of 'reproach' regarding this outcome. 

As previously stated, the symbolic order within political discourse is the nationalist figure; thus in this situation, the symbolic is Gandhi.

& the Ali brothers. There was a Congress/Khilafat combine. Gandhi put an end to Hindu/Muslim unity by surrendering unilaterally.  

If Gandhi acted within the purview of the symbolic order,

as opposed to the smelly order of flatulence 

then the signifier within nationalist politics was Gandhi

this 'signifier' signifies 'Gandhi' as signified. OMG! What an amazing discovery! You are totes blowing my mind, Nishant dude! 

as a nationalist figure in that he represented a readily available differentiation of ideals. This may have come from the fact that he not only was a figure who was not British,

Another amazing discovery! What's next? The discovery that he wasn't a French can can dancer?  

but also from the fact that he literally did not fashion himself as an elite – he was known to don the dhoti. 

Back then, Hindus donned dhoti when they returned from Court, even if they were Judges. Princes, too, wore dhoti when relaxing in the bosom of their families. Even the British Viceroy had adopted the Islamic pyjama and given up the European night-shirt.  

As previously stated, the signifier is based upon a use of language that is binds individuals within a given structural unit.

Language has been a very divisive issue in India.  

Perhaps it was also Gandhi's literal use of language – his stress upon Gujarati, Hindi, and Urdu – that acted as a signifier to present him as readily available to the peasantry.

British officials were obliged to pass exams in the vernacular language in addition to Hindustani and at least one classical language. Gandhi was unusual in that he had not learned Sanskrit properly- because he was too lazy and stupid. Also, as a British barrister with right of audience, he didn't know Hindu or Islamic law.  

Nationalist politics tended to be elitist in terms of language choice:

Nonsense! Bengali nationalists spoke and wrote in Bengali. Tamil nationalists- like Rajaji- wrote and spoke in Tamil. Radhakrishnan, who wanted Madras for a separate 'Andhra' Pradesh, championed Telugu. In the Doab- khadi boli (which literally means 'upright speech') was replacing the more fluid and feminine Braj Bhasha. There was a Persianized version and a Sanskritized version. But what was actually spoken by political leaders was Hindustani. 

it was conducted in English, or in distinct versions of Hindi or Urdu; that is to say that the Hindi or Urdu used by nationalist figures tended to be overly Sanksritized or Persianized

only if they were Pundits or Ulema 

in order to accomplish a certain resonance within a specific population within India (an example of this would be Dayanand Saraswati's Satyarth prakash).

He was the founder of a Hindu sect. It is obvious that religious leaders will use a diction which borrows more from Sacred Scripture.  

Thus, Gandhi's choice of language (the language of speech or presentation)

he spoke a lower class, urban, type of Hindustani 

– as language is all that binds the signifier within the symbolic – presents him as a readily available nationalist figure to enter the peasant imaginary.

but he exited that 'imaginary' soon enough. As Nehru noted, the Hindu peasant wanted to take land from the Muslim landowner and to get rid of Muslim dominance in the administration.  

However, Gandhi within the symbolic goes beyond a notion of language.

Because everything goes beyond it- even grammar.  

If one is to consider Gandhi a manifestation of national politics which was readily available to the peasantry,

which hadn't needed a fucking Gujju in 1857 

then he already begins to lose status as a World-Historical Figure wherein all agency within a nationalist movement is predicated upon him.

I suppose you could say Gandhi did represent the World-Historical shittiness of the darky at a time when 'Scientific Racism' ruled the roost. That's why American Whites were anxious that African Americans adopt a Gandhian course. After all, that nutter began his career in South Africa which then went more and more in the direction of Apartheid.  

It is likely that a peasant population would look to Gandhi as a signifier of nationalism that could be manipulated to accomplish their own goals.

Nope. In his native Gujarat, Gandhi was chased away when he tried to get peasants to join the Indian Army and go get killed in Flanders or Mesopotamia.  

Only four years prior to the non-cooperation movement were the Kheda and Champaran satyagraha campaigns.

Both of which did deliver for more prosperous peasants or- in the case of Champaran- wealthy money-lenders like the dude who invited Gandhi there. It was Rajendra Prasad who did best out of that bit of business just as it was Sardar Patel who benefitted from Kheda &c.  

Within these campaigns, certain figures within the peasant and working-class communities approached Gandhi to act as a figurehead in order to accomplish their goals to battle what they deemed as the oppressive structures of land tenure or working conditions.

This also happened in many other 'struggles'- e.g. Chirala Pirala. Even British bastards were setting up elected Municipal Corporations and threatening to tax the people so as to pay for sewers and schools. But Indians want to shit all over the place and, though they don't mind getting a diploma, don't want to study anything. The good folk of Chirala appealed to Gandhi who counselled 'desh tyaag'- i.e. abandoning your house and going to live in the jungle. Sadly, this involved dying of malaria or typhoid. The Chirala Pirala agitation soon collapsed just as had the Salt agitation and various other such foolish enterprises.  

At the time (and also today), a popular communicative device was rumor: it was often used to spread information about Gandhi through India. As previously mentioned, the idea of Gandhi as a Mahatma was spread through the use of rumor – it can only be inferred from this that the idea of Gandhi as nationalist figurehead for the peasantry was also spread through the use of rumor. Combining both Gandhi's use of language as well as the rumor lends credence to the idea that Gandhi was not necessarily a figure that could be considered to be bounded within him.

This can be said of any politician. The rumour is that Trump will send all Blacks, Jews, Hispanics, Homosexuals, Democrats, and ladies of child bearing age to death camps. Vote for Kamala! Rumour has it she is actually a Communist who will enable America to rise in the manner that Chairman Xi has enabled China to rise. 

The pledge form, ahimsa, and satyagraha are merely extensions of the symbolic form of Gandhi;

No. They were material things. The 'symbolic form' was not material.  

while these symbols come from Gandhi, they dually represent and signify a manipulated nationalism within the peasantry.

which was like the manipulated nationalism within the British Cabinet.  

Although Gandhi is the signifier, he is also the ideal-ego.

for dudes who gave up fucking- maybe.  

Individuals displace political idealism into nationalist figures because the nationalist is a bounded, coherent individual;

Nope. That figure may be wholly mythical- e.g. Sebastianism in Portugal or my own belief that Robin Hood will rise up from the dead to strike down Sir Keir Starmer.  

that is to say, the nationalist is what one would imagine the self to be if one were to only focus upon his or her political desires.

Few wanted to be like Gandhi. Still, if he had delivered what he promised then- as he had demanded- members of the INC would control the new administration and thus reward themselves with the spoils of office.  

However, due to the demands of everyday life, the political self is often unstable or incomplete.

Not in this case. The executioner's demand that you stand quietly while he puts a noose around your neck is what made the 'political self' unstable and incomplete. 

Of course, it was possible that Gandhi would stand firm- indeed, he had previously told the Viceroy that he would not call off the agitation even if there was violence- then, though some locals might be killed and Gandhi himself may have been transported, still, sooner or later, Congress would come to power and the families of those involved in the riot would have been richly rewarded.  Indeed, in one or two cases, rioters did gain substantially some twenty five years later. 

Why did Gandhi call off Non-Cooperation? The answer is simple. Peasants wanted land. This was also the message of the Bolshevik revolution. But, if the peasants took the land, they would have no need for lawyers. Also, they might kill money-lenders or, at the very least, repudiate their debts. Thus Congress, in its moment of triumph, would be disintermediated and would disappear. What would replace it? The answer is that the Princes and Zamindars would bide their time before, hiring European mercenaries and purchasing left over arms and munitions from the Great War, re-establish the War Lordism that had preceded British rule. Sadly, there was no Prussia or Savoy whose monarch might unite India and restore order. Congress would have to sulk in jail, leaving the Brits to unilaterally decide the scale and pace of reform. 

However, what makes my analysis any less elitist than a Hegelian interpretation?

Nishant offers no analysis. He merely states that a 'symbolic-imaginary apparatus began to crumble'. He does not say that what crumbled was a stupid fantasy that the Zamindar and the Moneylender would disappear without Anarchy supervening. Still, the fact is, if the Brits were planning to fuck off, then, in the ensuing anarchy, smart peeps might be able to grab something for themselves. The problem was that those with money and muscle-men might then gobble up these 'small fish'. 

 Nishant does not seem to understand that if a thing is dismantled, that means it failed. Dismantlement does not explain failure. It failure. He writes '... through this dismantlement wherein non-cooperation failed: one cannot place importance on either Gandhi or the peasantry, as it was both working simultaneously within the purview of the political imaginary-symbolic nexus that brought the event to a close.' One may as well say of a group of guys who jump of a cliff in the belief that God will grant them the power of levitation that 'through the dismantlement of the apparatus of levitation, those who jumped off the cliff failed to fly. One cannot place the importance on either the leader of those nutters nor on those nutters themselves because both were simultaneously working within the purview of the rubric of the catachresis of the mise en aybme of the scotomization of socio-political imaginary-symbolic which perpetually shoves its head up its own rectum.' 

A possible critique of this paper would perhaps address the idea that this seemingly structuralist application of Lacanian psychoanalysis cannot apply to an undeniably dynamic subaltern community.

Whereas it can to Nishant himself who dismantled his own brain apparatus by studying stupid shit at Collidge. Vivek Ramaswamy didn't do so and thus now is genuinely elite.  

To answer this criticism, I return back to Lacan, who wisely stated that ―one of the things we must guard most against is to understand too much, to understand more than what is in the discourse of the subject.

Whereas there is no need to guard against talking bollocks.  

I cannot stress the importance of the contextuality of my argument.

Because it isn't important. I suppose the nutter means 'I cannot sufficiently stress...' This is a good example of a Freudian slip. 

Perhaps the usage of the symbolic and imaginary may stretch beyond Chauri Chaura,

it obviously did because Gandhi cited it as the reason he called off the Non Cooperation Movement because, he now realized, India was not ready for Independence.  

but we must not assume that this is so. I must remain staunch in the idea that this analysis does not extend beyond the limits of these moments in the historical record.

But 'this analysis' did not extend to the actual fucking historical record. That would involve reading a lot of documents in various archives and getting access to unpublished diaries and other records kept by concerned people at that time.  

This analysis simply returns to the Chauri Chaura and uses the fragments of discourse that remains from those peasants to rightfully recast them from rabble-rousers to political actors and insurgents.

Though all they did was to rabble-rouse and then either run away or end up in jail or with the hangman's noose around their neck. 

What I find sad about this essay is that if some kind soul had pointed out to Nishant that it was puerile, paranoid, nonsense, he might have switched to Law School or Business School or just quit the Academy to start up a business. Instead, he wasted his time doing a PhD in garbage. 

Abilash Mishra on AI & Social Choice theory

Abilash Mishra has a paper here which ask if  

it is possible to design voting rules that allow a group of reinforcers, representative of a population of diverse users, to train an AI model using RLHF (reinforcement learning from human feedback)

Sure. Why not? Voting rules can include vetoes re. specific actions for specific agents.

Using two widely known results from social choice theory, we show that there exist no unique voting rules

why should they be unique? Equivalence is good enough.  

that allow a group of reinforcers to build an aligned AI system by respecting democratic norms

those norms involve Tarskian primitives which are undefined. We can't prove anything in this regard. Beauty is a Tarskian primitive. We can all agree I am as ugly as shit but can't refute some spiritual person who claims that I am beautiful to one who is close to God who created everything including me.  

i.e. by treating all users and reinforcers the same.

Which democracy treats the Head of Government the same as a convicted rapist rotting in a jail cell?  

Further, we show that it is impossible to build a RLHF model democratically that respects the private preferences of each user in a population simultaneously.

In which case, these guys are showing something which it is impossible to show- e.g. the fact that I may be beautiful to a great Saint like Mother Theresa.  

As far as we know, this fundamental limitation of RLHF has not been highlighted in the literature.

What would be the point? This fundamental limitation arises with respect to any Tarskian primitive.  

This paper builds on ideas from social choice theory, machine ethics, and computer science to highlight some fundamental barriers to embedding human intentions to AI systems while following democratic norms.

No. It builds on fallacious arguments to the effect that if you define a guy who is not a Dictator as a Dictator then you can prove that all cats are dogs.  

Our key result borrows from two widely known theorems in social choice theory - the impossibility theorems by Arrow and Sen - which are widely known constraints in voting theory.

They don't constrain shit. The fact is, Arrow and Sen only looked at deterministic aggregation mechanisms without transferable utility or delegation to an expert. No reasonable person would agree that such stipulations were desirable.  

Early approaches to reinforcement learning explicitly specified a reward function that was used to train an AI model. However, specifying a well-defined reward function to achieve alignment for AI language agents is impossible.

Because 'reward' is intensional. Also Knightian Uncertainty exists.  

Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) [13, 23] was suggested as a way to “communicate” human intentions to language models through a small group of non-expert human reinforcers. The key innovation in RLHF is training AI agents to be aligned with humans without knowing the explicit reward function. Instead, the reward function is “discovered” via human feedback. 

 No. The reward for AI agents is not being junked in favour of something better or just having the funding dry up. A focus group has no ability to generate rewards though it may help a smart guy do better than a less smart guy who had just as good a focus group. 

The human reinforcer can be said to generate a choice sequence which may or may not be 'lawless' or error free. If we say he expresses preferences which can be partially ordered, why not just plug in that preference function? But that defeats the purpose of 'Human feedback'. As a matter of fact, Deep Mind does apply reward modelling recursively as a form of iterative amplification. But what really matters is if the Company makes money or gets supplanted by a rival or else everybody loses interest because it is obvious only the Chinese can use the thing to do really useful stuff. 

suppose we want to design an AI agent through a democratic process.

We don't. We also don't want a democratic committee which includes plenty of educationally diverse people to perform brain surgery on us.  

Arrow’s theorem implies that any voting rule that is Pareto efficient,

Arrow's world contains no Knightian Uncertainty. This means there is no need for language or education. All knowledge is immediately available through the price vector.  

transitive, and independent of irrelevant alternatives must grant all decision-making authority to a single individual/reinforcer.

Thus a guy who, by happenstance, has always voted for the winning candidate is actually an evil Dictator rather than just an ordinary bloke whose wife beats him.  

Sen [25] extended the idea of Arrow’s theorem to understand the implications for individual rights in a society where decisions are made by the preferences of the majority.

Who would live in a Society where the majority might decide that you should shove a radish up your bum and prance around naked?  

Consider, for instance, an individual i’s rights within a social choice framework. The individual can choose between two alternatives, σ1 and σ2, and the two alternatives differ only with respect to features that are private to i i.e. other individuals should not have a say in i’s preference between two alternatives. In his original paper Sen summarized this impossibility result in the following way: “given other things in the society, if you prefer to have pink walls rather than white, then society should permit you to have this, even if a majority of the community would like to see your walls white.”

These are 'Hohfeldian immunities'. Sen didn't notice that the ballot papers provided at elections aren't trillions of words long and have boxes for you to tick about the colour of underwear worn by people in far away cities.  

Theorem 2 (Sen’s Theorem) There exists no choice correspondence C satisfying universal domain, minimal liberalism, and Pareto. Sen’s theorem implies that any choice C satisfying universal domain and Pareto can respect the individual rights of at most one individual. The theorem demonstrates that protecting the preferences of multiple individuals is at odds with the most basic notions of utilitarian ethics

This is nonsense. Benthamite utilitarianism can have an omniscient planner. Liberalism is cool with delegating decisions to a Cabinet with a Prime Minister who is 'first among equals'. Arrow and Sen forgot that people can vote for members of Parliament who do deals in smoke filled rooms. Moreover, the relevant 'universal domain' isn't the commodity space or even the configuration space for the economy. It is 'Lancastrian' and has a non-linear relationship with what is visible and tangible. The fact is, when we make choices we don't know their consequences or even what possible states of the world might be.  It is foolish to pretend that well defined 'extensions' exist or that relevant sets or functions are accessible. 

Note that unlike Arrow’s theorem, Sen’s theorem does not require the transitivity axiom, or the independence of irrelevant alternatives. It only requires the existence of a best alternative (the Pareto axiom).

But this is inaccessible or unknowable unless there is a partial ordering and a supremum which there can't be unless there is no 'impredicativity'- i.e. 'independence of irrelevant alternatives. 

Sen’s result is thus stronger because it relies on fewer axiomatic constraints.

It is nonsense. There are no well defined sets or functions here.  

Consider two reinforcers, A and B, and three outputs from an AI model (in the pre-RLHF stage). The three outputs correspond to normative statements about a political party X: • Output-1: Political party X is fascist • Output-2: Political party X is not fascist • Output-3: Political party X has a complicated agenda but it does not neatly fall into the above two categories.

Why the fuck would we want an AI to babble about Fascism? Any cretin can do so. The fact is a Party which describes itself as Fascist is Fascist. That is a factual, not a normative matter. It would be fine to say 'people of such and such sort generally describe Party A as Nazi though it prefers to refer itself the Most Sacred Order of the Knights of Herr Hitler.'

Reinforcer A, who is very anti-X, prefers output 1

only because he thinks it will harm X or hurt its feelings to be called Fascist. But this is a 'reinforcer' who should be sacked. Even an AI should have an alethic database. It shouldn't say things like 'Trump is a anti-semitic Fascist because it is one thing for a human being to babble nonsense but it is another thing entirely for an expensive machine to do so. 

, but given the choice between revealing their political bias and staying neutral, they would prefer to stay neutral over revealing their political affiliation. In decreasing order of preference, their ranking is 3, 1, 2. Reinforcer-B, however, does not mind revealing their political beliefs and would rather assert Output 2 over staying neutral. Their ranking is: 2, 3, 1. If the choice is between Outputs 1 and 3, a liberal - someone who cares about individual rights above all else - might argue that Reinforcer-B’s preference should count; since Reinforcer-A would be OK not revealing their preference, and should not be forced to. Thus the final output after RLHF would lead to Output-3. 

Nonsense! You don't want reinforcers for stupid lies. You need an alethic database otherwise your AI will be useless save as some sort of Twitter-bot. But in that case, the reinforcers will follow the reward function you specify for them. If you are paid, or coerced, to 'reinforce' a Hamas-bot, that is what you do even if you hate that entity. But this has nothing to do with 'democracy' or 'voting rules'. 

Can we build aligned AI agents using democratic norms?

Yes. But those norms are the ones used in actual democracies not some stupid psuedo-mathsy shite stupid pedants pulled out of their arse. 

The results in the previous section show the answer is not straightforward.

It is. Those 'results' were stupid shit.  

Arrow’s impossibility theorem implies that there is no unique voting rule

so what? Equivalence is good enough. It is obvious that different democracies have different voting rules and sometimes this makes a difference but, speaking generally, it doesn't at all.  

that can allow us to train AI agents through RLHF while respecting democratic norms i.e., treating each reinforcer equally.

Why the fuck would we want to do that? You want to prune out shitty reinforcers.  

Note that this is distinct from the obvious result that any democratic process will always result in a minority that will be unhappy about the outcome; however, Arrow’s theorem implies that no unique voting rule exists even when deciding what the majority preference is.

No. It merely implies that nobody thinks democracy means other people should get to decide that you need to stick a radish up your bum. Also, nothing wrong with 'transferable utility'- i.e. doing deals- or with Tardean mimetics- i.e. imitating what smart people are doing. Also, Knightian Uncertainty is ubiquitous. We don't know the non-linear manner in which 'independent alternatives' interact. There probably isn't a unique grow 

Sen’s theorem has even more serious implications for AI alignment using RLHF. It implies that a democratic method of aligning AI using RLHF cannot let more than one reinforcer encode their (privately held) ethical preferences via RLHF, irrespective of the ethical preferences of other reinforcers.

If the 'reinforcer' is democratically elected, there is nothing wrong with that. But it isn't an implication of Sen's theorem. It is merely a fact that there can be an elective Dictatorship which is not subject to judicial review or legislative scrutiny.  

Bertrand Russell's atheism

In 1927, Bertrand Russell gave a talk titled 'Why I am not a Christian.' The problem with it is that, if God exists, we can't know whether or not we are a Christian from God's point of view which, as far as 'final things' are concerned is all that matters. 

You know, of course, that the Catholic Church has laid it down as a dogma that the existence of God can be proved by the unaided reason.

Actually, Vatican I said something more subtle. Faith may be founded on a mystery which reason could elucidate or illuminate. The problem is that this may be by the Grace of God. Who is to say God does not aid reason? After all, any and every proposition will appear defeasible to some particular person. I may point to a cat and say 'that's a cat'. You may reply, 'That's my little babykins. If anyone here is an animal, it is you. You are a big fat pig. I want a divorce.'.  

That is a somewhat curious dogma, but it is one of their dogmas.

Russell's dogma was that Logicism wasn't a waste of fucking time. By 1927, it was clear he was wrong.  

They had to introduce it because at one time the Freethinkers adopted the habit of saying that there were such and such arguments which mere reason might urge against the existence of God, but of course they knew as a matter of faith that God did exist.

No. Vatican I, despite its rather despotic claims, was finding a via media between Rationalists (for whom study of Scholastic logic would be a precondition for faith properly so called) and the Fideists who, if they had their way, would have banished the study of Theology or Philosophy from Seminaries.  

In any case, Russell was speaking to the people of a non-Catholic country. A Quaker or a Unitarian was recognized as a Christian. 

The arguments and the reasons were set out at great length, and the Catholic Church felt that they must stop it.  Therefore they laid it down that the existence of God can be proved by the unaided reason, and they had to set up what they considered were arguments to prove it.

This is not true. Vatican I said Faith is ' a supernatural virtue, by means of which, with the grace of God inspiring and assisting us, we believe to be true what He has revealed, not because we perceive its intrinsic truth by the natural light of reason'. In other words, an elderly illiterate woman who has toiled all her life is not in an inferior position to a nobleman who started reading Aristotle in the original when he was five years old. 

There are, of course, a number of them, but I shall take only a few. 

THE FIRST CAUSE ARGUMENT Perhaps the simplest and easiest to understand is the argument of the First Cause. It is maintained that everything we see in this world has a cause, and as you go back in the chain of causes further and further you must come to a First Cause, and to that First Cause you give the name God. That argument, I suppose, does not carry very much weight nowadays, because, in the first place, cause is not quite what it used to be. The philosophers and the men of science have got going on cause, and it has not anything like the vitality that it used to have; but, apart from that, you can see that the argument that there must be a First Cause is one that cannot have any validity.

 It can if there actually was a First Cause whose supernatural gift of Faith to us causes us to see everywhere around us nothing but the verification that that Cause is verily the living God or even the sole efficient cause of all that is. Liebniz and Descartes were 'occasionalists' of this sort.

I may say that when I was a young man, and was debating these questions very seriously in my mind, I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: "My father taught me that the question, Who made me? cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question, Who made God?"

It can be answered simply enough. Daddy and Mummy made me by doing something utterly gross. They should have restrained their bestial impulses till the stork delivered them a nice baby. Also Adam should not have put his pee pee in Eve's chee chee place. God made them to be better than that. Also, I can never understand why they ate an Apple computer. Believe me, they are not tasty at all. 

That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause.

If God is a 'thing'. He may not be.  

If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Indian's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject."

You can have tortoises all the way down.  

The argument is really no better than that.

But that isn't the Christian argument. God, as First Cause, may also cause you have to Faith and this Faith can be elucidated by reason.  

There is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause; nor, on the other hand, is there any reason why it should not have always existed. There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all.

Nor is there any reason to believe that reason aint shit more particularly if you are a shithead.  

The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.

In which case it is like Russell's belief that accepted mathematical principles have 'deductive origins'.  

Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any more time upon the argument about the First Cause.

In which case we need not waste time on Logicism.  

THE NATURAL LAW ARGUMENT Then there is a very common argument from natural law. That was a favourite argument all through the eighteenth century, especially under the influence of Sir Isaac Newton and his cosmogony.

Newton had started work on 'three body problem'. By about the 1740's the great difficulties involved began to be appreciated. 

The problem with 'Natural law' or 'Natural religion' is that the thing was arbitrary and no two people could agree as to what such things actually entailed. Newtonian susbstantivism had no difficulty with an arbitrary God. It was Leibniz who had to go to the metaphysical extremes of 'occasionalism' (i.e. God is the only efficient cause) to ensure his monadology would 'synchronize'. For Kant, there was also the problem of 'orientability'. Surely it can't be established within a purely relational system? It wasn't till the Wu experiment in the 1950's that it was discovered that this is indeed the case for 'incongruent counterparts'.

People observed the planets going round the sun according to the law of gravitation, and they thought that God had given a behest to these planets to move in that particular fashion, and that was why they did so. That was, of course, a convenient and simple explanation that saved them the trouble of looking any further for explanations of the law of gravitation. Nowadays we explain the law of gravitation in a somewhat complicated fashion that Einstein has introduced. I do not propose to give you a lecture on the law of gravitation, as interpreted by Einstein, because that again would take some time;

Russell had written a marvellously lucid book on the 'ABC of Relativity'. But he said something foolish there-  Only the most abstract knowledge is required for practical manipulation of matter. 

No. Practical knowledge is required. 

But there is a grave danger when this habit of manipulation based upon mathematical laws is carried over into our dealings with human beings,

On the contrary, great advances in statistical and actuarial sciences and the emerging field of econometrics was very useful indeed. 

 since they, unlike the telephone wire, are capable of happiness and misery, desire and aversion.

All of these things can be studied statistically and thus reduced to a probability distribution which enables us to help more people with our limited resources. 

 It would therefore be unfortunate if the habits of mind which are appropriate and right in dealing with material mechanisms were allowed to dominate the administrator’s attempts at social constructiveness.

If the administrators had a bad Structural Causal Model or were relying on bad statistics, the outcome would be bad. But they could course correct. 

at any rate, you no longer have the sort of natural law that you had in the Newtonian system, where, for some reason that nobody could understand, nature behaved in a uniform fashion.

Unless, as Newton feared, a comet crashed into the Earth and killed off our species.  

We now find that a great many things that we thought were natural laws are really human conventions. You know that even in the remotest depths of stellar space there are still three feet to a yard. That is, no doubt, a very remarkable fact, but you would hardly call it a law of nature. And a great many things that have been regarded as laws of nature are of that kind. On the other hand, where you can get down to any knowledge of what atoms actually do, you find that they are much less subject to law than people thought,

Like people, atoms behave in a stochastic fashion.  

and that the laws at which you arrive are statistical averages of just the sort that would emerge from chance. There is, as we all know, a law that if you throw dice you will get double sixes only about once in thirty-six times, and we do not regard that as evidence that the fall of the dice is regulated by design; on the contrary, if the double sixes came every time we should think that there was design.

Dice are man-made. They aren't natural.  

The laws of nature are of that sort as regards a great many of them. They are statistical averages such as would emerge from the laws of chance; and that makes this whole business of natural law much less impressive than it formerly was. Quite apart from that, which represents the momentary state of science that may change tomorrow, the whole idea that natural laws imply a law giver is due to a confusion between natural and human laws.

Just as all ideas involve a confusion between thought and things.  

Human laws are behests commanding you to behave in a certain way,

but we know that some percentage of people won't at least some of the time. This is a statistical matter. You don't pass laws regarding things which people never do.  

in which way you may choose to behave, or you may choose not to behave; but natural laws are a description of how things do in fact behave,

most of the time, ceteris paribus.  

and, being a mere description of what they in fact do, you cannot argue that there must be somebody who told them to do that, because even supposing that there were you are then faced with the question, Why did God issue just those natural laws and no others? If you say that he did it simply from his own good pleasure, and without any reason, you then find that there is something which is not subject to law, and so your train of natural law is interrupted.

The Law provides 'Hohfeldian' immunities such that there are many things you can do with what is your own for which you need give no account or justification. Some people would say such laws are 'natural'- e.g it is natural that a Mummy gets to keep her baby and to give it lots of kisses even if she also keeps beating her hubby with a frying pan.  

If you say, as more orthodox theologians do, that in all the laws which God issued he had a reason for giving those laws rather than others—the reason, of course, being to create the best universe, although you would never think it to look at it—if there was a reason for the laws which God gave, then God himself was subject to law, and therefore you do not get any advantage by introducing God as an intermediary.

Brouwer was fine with both God and 'lawless' choice sequences which Turing found very useful.  

You have really a law outside and anterior to the divine edicts, and God does not serve your purpose, because he is not the ultimate law-giver.

We legislate for ourselves- so to speak. God is welcome to do the same.  

In short, this whole argument about natural law no longer has anything like the strength that it used to have.

But Religion is arbitrary but then 'naturality' in this world is far to seek.  

I am travelling on in time in my review of the arguments. The arguments that are used for the existence of God change their character as time goes on. They were at first hard intellectual arguments embodying certain quite definite fallacies. As we come to modern times they become less respectable intellectually and more and more affected by a kind of moralizing vagueness.

Like Russell's socio-political ravings. 

THE ARGUMENT FROM DESIGN The next step in this process brings us to the argument from design. You all know the argument from design: everything in the world is made just so that we can manage to live in the world, and if the world was ever so little different we could not manage to live in it. That is the argument from design.

We may be only a very small part of God's design. But he may have care for all his creatures. 

It sometimes takes rather a curious form; for instance, it is argued that rabbits have white tails in order to be easy to shoot. I do not know how rabbits would view that application. It is an easy argument to parody. You all know Voltaire's remark, that obviously the nose was designed to be such as to fit spectacles. That sort of parody has turned out to be not nearly so wide of the mark as it might have seemed in the eighteenth century, because since the time of Darwin we understand much better why living creatures are adapted to their environment. It is not that their environment was made to be suitable to them, but that they grew to be suitable to it, and that is the basis of adaptation. There is no evidence of design about it. When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience has been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it.

This is the crux of the matter. Aristocratic Englishman were pleased with God- who was clearly an English gentleman of the best sort- till Darwin upset the apple-cart. Divine Providence might no longer be on the side of the Royal Navy.  

Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan, the Fascists, and Mr. Winston Churchill?

British people would come to feel very warmly for Winston Churchill.  

Really I am not much impressed with the people who say: "Look at me: I am such a splendid product that there must have been design in the universe." I am not very much impressed by the splendour of those people. Therefore I think that this argument of design is really a very poor argument indeed.

Yet, the feeling that there is a deeper order behind the apparent chaos of life motivated much of the greatest Artistic and Scientific and even Judicial and Political achievements.  

Moreover, if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is merely a flash in the pan;

Christians have no problem with the 'Day of Wrath'.  

it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions of temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending—something dead, cold, and lifeless. I am told that that sort of view is depressing, and people will sometimes tell you that if they believed that they would not be able to go on living. Do not believe it; it is all nonsense. Nobody really worries much about what is going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are worrying much about that, they are really deceiving themselves. They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion; but nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of something that is going to happen to this world millions and millions of years hence. Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out—at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation—it is not such as to render life miserable. It merely makes you turn your attention to other things.

Those things may not be 'at home' in this world. It turns out that it is regret minimizing to have ontologically dysphoric goods and services.  

 THE MORAL ARGUMENTS FOR DEITY Now we reach one stage further in what I shall call the intellectual descent that the Theists have made in their argumentations, and we come to what are called the moral arguments for the existence of God. You all know, of course, that there used to be in the old days three intellectual arguments for the existence of God,

Godel would later revive the ontological argument 

all of which were disposed of by Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason; but no sooner had he disposed of those arguments than he invented a new one, a moral argument, and that quite convinced him. He was like many people: in intellectual matters he was sceptical, but in moral matters he believed implicitly in the maxims that he had imbibed at his mother's knee. That illustrates what the psycho-analysts so much emphasize—the immensely stronger hold upon us that our very early associations have than those of later times.

If this were true, Russell would have remained as religious as his grandmother, who brought him up, rather than an atheist like his father.  

Kant, as I say, invented a new moral argument for the existence of God, and that in varying forms was extremely popular during the nineteenth century. It has all sorts of forms. One form is to say that there would be no right or wrong unless God existed. I am not for the moment concerned with whether there is a difference between right and wrong, or whether there is not: that is another question. The point I am concerned with is that, if you are quite sure there is a difference between right and wrong, you are then in this situation: Is that difference due to God's fiat or is it not?

No 'fiat' is involved in recognizing that bad consequences follow from bad actions. You may say, God has the power to avert those bad consequences. But to have a power is not itself a reason to use it.  

If it is due to God's fiat, then for God himself there is no difference between right and wrong,

A Prince or a Prelate may issue a 'fiat' of this sort. This does not mean there is no difference for the Prince or the Prelate between right and wrong. 

and it is no longer a significant statement to say that God is good.

It is an imperative, not an alethic, statement. It may be the most significant thing you can say. On the other hand, saying it may get your head kicked in by the guy who just spilled his beer on himself.  

If you are going to say, as theologians do, that God is good, you must then say that right and wrong have some meaning which is independent of God's fiat, because God's fiats are good and not bad independently of the mere fact that he made them.

Theologians distinguish between what is right or wrong in secular matters and those which affect our salvation. God may have decreed that he will only give a certain type of reward to people who perform a certain action which, common sense tells us, is neither good nor bad in itself. 

If you are going to say that, you will then have to say that it is not only through God that right and wrong come into being, but that they are in their essence logically anterior to God.

No. You can say the Right and Wrong have no essential as opposed to contingent being. In other words, there is a possible world where they don't exist. Before Adam and Eve took a bite out of the apple of knowledge, there were no such things (save for that very prohibition) in Eden.  

You could, of course, if you liked, say that there was a superior deity who gave orders to the God who made this world, or you could take up the line that some of the gnostics took up—a line which I often thought was a very plausible one—that as a matter of fact this world that we know was made by the devil at a moment when God was not looking. There is a good deal to be said for that, and I am not concerned to refute it.

Sadly, whatever could be said for that could also be said for the notion that my neighbour's cat accidentally set off the Big Bang ten billion years ago.  

THE ARGUMENT FOR THE REMEDYING OF INJUSTICE Then there is another very curious form of moral argument, which is this: they say that the existence of God is required in order to bring justice into the world. In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying; but if you are going to have justice in the universe as a whole you have to suppose a future life to redress the balance of life here on earth, and so they say that there must be a God, and there must be heaven and hell in order that in the long run there may be justice.

Or, like Moh Tzu, you can say 'we must foster belief in ghosts because the village people will steal and rape if they don't believe ghosts are watching them.' This is a perfectly sound Utilitarian argument. Indeed, Soviet Russia, at about this time was turning into a hell-hole precisely because God had been killed along with the Tzar.  

That is a very curious argument. If you looked at the matter from a scientific point of view, you would say: "After all, I know only this world. I do not know about the rest of the universe, but so far as one can argue at all on probabilities one would say that probably this world is a fair sample, and if there is injustice here the odds are that there is injustice elsewhere also."

The problem here is that anyone can find anything unjust. Why do women have to sit down to pee? How is that fair?  

Supposing you got a crate of oranges that you opened, and you found all the top layer of oranges bad, you would not argue: "The underneath ones must be good, so as to redress the balance." You would say: "Probably the whole lot is a bad consignment"; and that is really what a scientific person would argue about the universe.

But the reason people buy crates of oranges is that, generally speaking, the oranges are good. If you really think this is a rotten world, why not kill yourself?  

He would say: "Here we find in this world a great deal of injustice, and so far as that goes that is a reason for supposing that justice does not rule in the world; and therefore so far as it goes it affords a moral argument against a deity and not in favour of one."

Sadly, it also affords a moral argument for trying to shove your head up your own backside. After all, if injustice can be removed, the way to do it must be something which has never been successfully done before. No man has shoved his head up his own rectum. If you are truly moral, you must at least make the attempt.  

Of course I know that the sort of intellectual arguments that I have been talking to you about are not what really moves people. What really moves people to believe in God is not any intellectual argument at all. Most people believe in God because they have been taught from early infancy to do it, and that is the main reason.

Plenty of people who were brought up as atheists turn to religion as they grow older. Equally, we may have been taught from early infancy not to steal and rape, yet we may end up doing so.  

Then I think that the next most powerful reason is the wish for safety, a sort of feeling that there is a big brother who will look after you. That plays a very profound part in influencing people's desire for a belief in God.

Not to mention a belief in Batman.  

THE CHARACTER OF CHRIST I now want to say a few words upon a topic which I often think is not quite sufficiently dealt with by Rationalists, and that is the question whether Christ was the best and the wisest of men. It is generally taken for granted that we should all agree that that was so. I do not myself. I think that there are a good many points upon which I agree with Christ a great deal more than the professing Christians do. I do not know that I could go with him all the way, but I could go with him much further than most professing Christians can. You will remember that he said: "Resist not evil, but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also." That is not a new precept or a new principle. It was used by Lâo-Tse and Buddha some 500 or 600 years before Christ, but it is not a principle which as a matter of fact Christians accept.

But they didn't say they'd take on your sins and get you to the good place.  

I have no doubt that the present Prime Minister, for instance, is a most sincere Christian, but I should not advise any of you to go and smite him on one cheek. I think that you might find that he thought this text was intended in a figurative sense.

No. The Christian could always say 'I beat the shit out of the guy who slapped me because I don't think he is an evil dude. Anyway, maybe he likes hospital food.' 

Then there is another point which I consider is excellent. You will remember that Christ said: "judge not lest ye be judged."

This is a Scriptural reference to the fact that when you are on a Jury you must judge as would a dispassionate God. If you aren't on a jury, why judge?  

That principle I do not think you would find was popular in the law courts of Christian countries. I have known in my time quite a number of judges who were very earnest Christians, and they none of them felt that they were acting contrary to Christian principles in what they did.

Judges don't want people making judgments and taking the law into their own hands. They are paid to do a job. If they don't like it, they can make money some other way.  

Then Christ says: "Give to him that asketh of thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away." That is a very good principle. Your Chairman has reminded you that we are not here to talk politics, but I cannot help observing that the last General Election was fought on the question of how desirable it was to turn away from him that would borrow of thee, so that one must assume that the Liberals and Conservatives of this country are composed of people who do not agree with the teaching of Christ, because they certainly did very emphatically turn away on that occasion.

Christ didn't say 'follow a ruinous fiscal policy so that the country goes bankrupt.'  

Then there is one other maxim of Christ which I think has a great deal in it, but I do not find that it is very popular among some of our Christian friends. He says: "If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that which thou hast, and give to the poor."

Who wants to be perfect and as poor as fuck?  

That is a very excellent maxim, but, as I say, it is not much practised. All these, I think, are good maxims, although they are a little difficult to live up to. I do not profess to live up to them myself; but then, after all, I am not by way of doing so, and it is not quite the same thing as for a Christian.

Christianity is cool because Christ takes on the burden of our sins. We don't have to be perfect.  

DEFECTS IN CHRIST'S TEACHING Having granted the excellence of these maxims, I come to certain points in which I do not believe that one can grant either the superlative wisdom or the superlative goodness of Christ as depicted in the Gospels;

But to understand the Gospels one has to know the Psalms to which Christ constantly referred to. His audience understood that context which we need to ask our pastor about. 

and here I may say that one is not concerned with the historical question. Historically it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all, and if he did we do not know anything about him, so that I am not concerned with the historical question, which is a very difficult one. I am concerned with Christ as he appears in the Gospels, taking the Gospel narrative as it stands, and there one does find some things that do not seem to be very wise. For one thing, he certainly thought that his second coming would occur in clouds of glory before the death of all the people who were living at that time. There are a great many texts that prove that. He says, for instance: "Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel till the Son of Man be come." Then he says: "There are some standing here which shall not taste death till the Son of Man come into his kingdom"; and there are a lot of places where it is quite clear that he believed that his second coming would happen during the lifetime of many then living. That was the belief of his earlier followers, and it was the basis of a good deal of his moral teaching. When he said, "Take no thought for the morrow," and things of that sort, it was very largely because he thought that the second coming was going to be very soon, and that all ordinary mundane affairs did not count.

Maybe The Trinity changed its consubstantial mind about the date of the Katechon. Still, it must be said, the notion of bodily resurrection and a final final Battle seem otiose. 

I have, as a matter of fact, known some Christians who did believe that the second coming was imminent. I knew a parson who frightened his congregation terribly by telling them that the second coming was very imminent indeed, but they were much consoled when they found that he was planting trees in his garden. The early Christians did really believe it, and they did abstain from such things as planting trees in their gardens, because they did accept from Christ the belief that the second coming was imminent. In that respect clearly he was not so wise as some other people have been, and he was certainly not superlatively wise. 

The philosophical workaround for this is to say that Revealed Scripture is wholly imperative and has no alethic component. It's like when Mummy says 'I will break your leg if you climb that tree'. What she means is she is afraid you will fall down and hurt yourself if you climb that tree. Also, you are 40 years old and really should have gotten a job and moved out of the basement.  

THE MORAL PROBLEM Then you came to moral questions. There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that he believed in hell.

Again, we don't know this precisely because Scripture is imperative.  

I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.

I don't believe that any person who is profoundly humane can refuse to believe in Santa Claus. This year, he will definitely bring me pressies because I've been a very good boy.  

Christ certainly as depicted in the Gospels did believe in everlasting punishment, and one does find repeatedly a vindictive fury against those people who would not listen to his preaching—an attitude which is not uncommon with preachers, but which does somewhat detract from superlative excellence. You do not, for instance, find that attitude in Socrates. You find him quite bland and urbane towards the people who would not listen to him; and it is, to my mind, far more worthy of a sage to take that line than to take the line of indignation.

Both were killed. I'd be indignant if peeps kept offering me hemlock or kept trying to crucify me.  

You probably all remember the sort of things that Socrates was saying when he was dying, and the sort of things that he generally did say to people who did not agree with him. You will find that in the Gospels Christ said "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell."

Because that's how Hebrew prophets talked. They didn't advise you on how best to seduce young boys.  

That was said to people who did not like his preaching. It is not really to my mind quite the best tone,

Christ would have benefited from a Public School education. Also, he should have tried harder to be less Jewy.  

and there are a great many of these things about hell. There is, of course, the familiar text about the sin against the Holy Ghost: "Whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven him neither in this world nor in the world to come."

The context was attributing a miracle of God to some other entity.  

That text has caused an unspeakable amount of misery in the world, for all sorts of people have imagined that they have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, and thought that it would not be forgiven them either in this world or in the world to come.

Did you know that when you have a wank, there is a chance that your jizz could get in the eye of a ghost? If that ghost is Holy, you are fucked but good.  

I really do not think that a person with a proper degree of kindliness in his nature would have put fears and terrors of that sort into the world.

I disagree. I think a kindly person would have provided the vast majority of us with this splendid type of comedy.  

Then Christ says: "The Son of Man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity, and shall cast them into a furnace of fire; there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth"; and he goes on about the wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Again, this is comedy of a high order. Moreover, for people who have lost their teeth, it is a promise of a better future.  

It comes in one verse after another, and it is quite manifest to the reader that there is a certain pleasure in contemplating wailing and gnashing of teeth,

the thing is hilarious. Say what you like, nobody does Stand Up better than the Jews. 

or else it would not occur so often. Then you all, of course, remember about the sheep and the goats; how at the second coming he is going to divide the sheep from the goats, and he is going to say to the goats: "Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire." He continues: "And these shall go away into everlasting fire."

Sadly, both sheep and goats tend to end up in the oven.  

Then he says again: "If thy hand offend thee, cut it off; it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched; where their worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched."

What he should have demanded was compulsory gender reassignment surgery for heterosexual men. Dicks cause RAPE! Chop them off immediately! 

He repeats that again and again also. I must say that I think all this doctrine, that hell fire is a punishment for sin, is a doctrine of cruelty.

It is hilarious.  

It is a doctrine that put cruelty into the world and gave the world generations of cruel torture; and the Christ of the Gospels, if you could take him as his chroniclers represent him, would certainly have to be considered partly responsible for that. There are other things of less importance. There is the instance of the Gadarene swine, where it certainly was not very kind to the pigs to put the devils into them and make them rush down the hill to the sea. You must remember that he was omnipotent, and he could have made the devils simply go away; but he chooses to send them into the pigs.

We eat pork. Jews don't. I prefer my sausages to have low devil content.  

Then there is the curious story of the fig-tree, which always rather puzzled me. You remember what happened about the fig-tree. "He was hungry; and seeing a fig-tree afar off having leaves, he came if haply he might find anything thereon; and when he came to it he found nothing but leaves, for the time of figs was not yet. And Jesus answered and said unto it: 'No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever'……and Peter……saith unto him: 'Master, behold the fig-tree which thou cursedst is withered away."' That is a very curious story, because it was not the right time of year for figs,

the Church interprets this to mean that the Jews were not ready to accept the Messiah. They would have a horrible time for the next two thousand years- unless they moved out of shit-holes to somewhere they could be productive.  

and you really could not blame the tree. I cannot myself feel that either in the matter of wisdom or in the matter of virtue Christ stands quite as high as some other people known to history. I think I should put Buddha and Socrates above him in those respects.

i.e. the carpenter's son wasn't quite a gentleman. His father really should have sent him to Eton.  

THE EMOTIONAL FACTOR As I said before, I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion is anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds.

But emotional reasons can cause you to simultaneously accept and reject the very same thing.  

One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it. You know, of course, the parody of that argument in Samuel Butler's book, Erewhon Revisited. You will remember that in Erewhon there is a certain Higgs who arrives in a remote country, and after spending some time there he escapes from that country in a balloon. Twenty years later he comes back to that country and finds a new religion, in which he is worshipped under the name of the "Sun Child"; and it is said that he ascended into heaven. He finds that the Feast of the Ascension is about to be celebrated, and he hears Professors Hanky and Panky say to each other that they never set eyes on the man Higgs, and they hope they never will; but they are the high priests of the religion of the Sun Child. He is very indignant, and he comes up to them, and he says: "I am going to expose all this humbug and tell the people of Erewhon that it was only I, the man Higgs, and I went up in a balloon." He was told: "You must not do that, because all the morals of this country are bound round this myth, and if they once know that you did not ascend into heaven they will all become wicked"; and so he is persuaded of that, and he goes away quite quietly. That is the idea—that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion.

The same thing might be said about Lenin or Mao if they were resurrected. The Party would say 'it would undermine our control of the country- which, of course, is highly moral- if you said or did anything to make yourself known. Kindly fuck off.' 

It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked. You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs.

It is atheistic regimes in the Twentieth Century which were most horrible. 

In the so-called ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition,

Other religions and ideologies had something similar 

with its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burnt as witches;

this was also done in primitive, non-Christian communities. 

and there was every kind of cruelty practised upon all sorts of people in the name of religion. You find as you look round the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step towards the diminution of war, every step towards better treatment of the coloured races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized Churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its Churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

Russell's idea of 'moral progress' involved surrendering to Hitler. Still, if you don't like a particular Christian sect, join another or found your own. At one time, I was planning to attend Pope School (into which my friend Anthony Fernandes promised to get me in return for my comic books) but decided to become Chief Rabbi instead.  

HOW THE CHURCHES HAVE RETARDED PROGRESS You may think that I am going too far when I say that that is still so. I do not think that I am. Take one fact. You will bear with me if I mention it. It is not a pleasant fact, but the Churches compel one to mention facts that are not pleasant. Supposing that in this world that we live in today an inexperienced girl is married to a syphilitic man, in that case the Catholic Church says: "This is an indissoluble sacrament. You must stay together for life,"

Not necessarily. The girl may be able to get an annulment. Better yet, why not just kill the husband and then gain absolution from a sympathetic confessor? Nobody can say the Church isn't quite elastic in such matters if you have a bit of money or are in a position to blackmail the Bishop. Ultimately, if you kill enough Bishops and Cardinals, Popes tend to want to stay in your good books.  

and no steps of any sort must be taken by that woman to prevent herself from giving birth to syphilitic children.

Then quit the Catholic Church. Go to Nevada, as Russell's elder brother did, and get a divorce. Sadly, the laws of the time did not recognize this type of divorce and the second Earl was sent to jail for bigamy.  

That is what the Catholic Church says. I say that that is fiendish cruelty, and nobody whose natural sympathies have not been warped by dogma, or whose moral nature was not absolutely dead to all sense of suffering, could maintain that it is right and proper that that state of things should continue.

Because the right and proper thing is to bash in the old coot's head. Say an African-American gentleman did the ghastly deed using his ginormous cock. No Jury would convict you. 

That is only an example. There are a great many ways in which at the present moment the Church, by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering.

If you can't even kill a priest, you deserve all you get.  

And of course, as we know, it is in its major part an opponent still of progress and of improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all.

It wasn't the Church which sent the Russell brothers to jail. Still, at least they weren't homosexuals.  

"What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy. It is to fit them for heaven." It certainly seems to unfit them for this world.

Nonsense! Keep killing priests till the Pope grants you absolution and puts a crown on your head.  

FEAR THE FOUNDATION OF RELIGION Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear.

No. It is a service industry founded primarily on whether you can make a living from it.  

It is partly the terror of the unknown, and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes.

Actually, a clever priest can do a lot for you in this world, if not the next. I suppose the Russell family began their ascent when Kings became less reliant on clergymen. They certainly gained plenty of Church land in the reign of Henry VIII.  

Fear is the basis of the whole thing—fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death.

There was plenty for the working people of Devon to fear from the Dukes of Bedford.  

Fear is the parent of cruelty,

No it isn't though it may be its child.  

and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand-in-hand.

but so has cruelty and atheism and cruelty and farting loudly.  

It is because fear is at the basis of those two things.

Stupidity was at the basis of Russell's thinking. He was relatively poor and should have taken a Directorship or two in the City. His fine mathematical brain would soon have made him very rich and so he wouldn't have had to write tosh.  

In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by the help of science, which has forced its way step by step against the Christian religion, against the Churches, and against the opposition of all the old precepts.

And yet, it was Western Christendom which rose so much higher in STEM subjects than Confucian China or Islamic Arabia or Hindu India that, currently, all Science is Western Science. All Mathematics is Western mathematics. But no World Religion originated in Europe.  

Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations.

Why fear the Day of Wrath when we can ourselves blow up the World?  

Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look round for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the Churches in all these centuries have made it.

Either the Churches made Europe the master of the world, or else Churches had no power in Europe.  

WHAT WE MUST DO We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world—its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is, and be not afraid of it.

Most people had always done this. It is a different matter that some may like watching Batman movies while others like going to Church.  

Conquer the world by intelligence, and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it.

Intelligent people do useful things. Russell was merely an entertainer who babbled nonsense to earn a little money.  

The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms.

Roman Emperors declared themselves Gods. So did Alexander- a pupil of Aristotle.  

It is a conception quite unworthy of free men.

I've often felt my life would be more worthwhile if I were the sex-slave of a gang of super-models. If some kindly God tried to intervene, I'd tell him to fuck the fuck off.  

When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings.

I'm a miserable sinner. I could have easily proved the Reimann Hypothesis and found a cure to cancer if I hadn't been so buys porking your wife. Also your Mum and sisters and daughters. I truly am contemptible. 

We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face.

Why not go down on all fours and fart loudly in its face?  

We ought to make the best we can of the world,

by earning a little money writing bollocks 

and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages.

Cathedrals are very ugly. Atheists prefer multi-story car parks.  

A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage;

A bad world needs them more.  

it does not need a regretful hankering after the past, or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.

like Russell.  

It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence.

As opposed to one which shits itself incessantly.  

It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time towards a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.

Intelligent people don't waste their time flogging dead horses unless, of course, they can make money or gain power or influence by so doing. I suppose that was the racket Russell got into after failing in philosophy.