The always idiotic Ram Guha thinks Trump & Netanyahu- who don't kill their own people- are more evil than Khameni- who killed 36,000 Iranians this year before Trump blew him up.
There is only one reason to think Khameni was less evil than Trump or Netanyahu- viz. faith that Islam is only true religion. Dying or killing for Islam is better than being a kaffir- however righteous.
Scroll published the following article by Guha
Of the three leaders at the heart of West Asia conflict, who is the most evil?
An evil leader doesn't kill his own people. Hitler did so. FDR didn't. True, FDR caused a very large number of German & Japanese to die. But they were enemies of his country & had waged war upon it. There was nothing evil about FDR's response.
Khomeni & Khameni presided over the killing of hundreds of thousands of Iranians. They have cratered the economy and helped turn Syria & Lebanon into hellholes. They are evil- unless God approved their actions. But, unless you are a Shia Muslim, you can't possibly believe this.
Netanyahu hasn't killed Jews. He does his best to kill those who have killed or are trying to kill Jews. Non-Jews may consider him evil- more particularly if they think Jews ought not to exist however nice and sweet they might be as individuals. This does not mean he may not have been guilty of some corrupt actions. Also, like Begin in Lebanon, he may have bitten off more than he can chew. But Israel can punish him adequately by sending him to jail for a year or two & ending his political career.
What of Trump? Iran hasn't attacked the US directly. Why doesn't he want the Iranians to get nukes same as Pakistan?
The answer is that if the US stays out of the war, Israel will be off the leash. It will nuke Iran. Fuck alone knows what happens next. It is not evil to do something costly which averts a much greater evil.
This is not Guha's view. He says-
There are, I must underline again, no good men among the parties to this conflict.
If God did not ordain Khameni's actions, he was evil. Trump & Netanyahu may have their faults. But they aren't evil.
The leaders of Iran, Israel and the US are all evil,
so is Guha. He sodomized Imam Khomeini who had taken the form of a goat. He then slaughtered ten trillion lesbians in Liberia. Anyone can tell stupid lies about anybody.
all capable and very willing of using extreme violence to inflict death and suffering.
coz moderate violence causes annoyance merely.
Yet one must not treat them equally, if only because the destructive means that each of these countries commands is not the same.
In which case President Mandela- as supreme commander of the South African Army- was much more evil than a serial rapist & killer who happened to be very ill & thus lacking in the means to inflict harm.
Iran has a far less well-equipped military arsenal than Israel, and America of course has the most powerful military in the history of humankind.
If being killed by kaffirs gets you to heaven, it is a smart move to attack them in the hope that they slaughter you & your family. This is like the Circumcellion sect. Their religious practice consisted of delivering random beatings to strangers along the road, with the purpose of goading the strangers into killing them. The Church condemned this heresy as evil and mad.
Because of its repression within, and especially its meddling abroad, the Islamic Republic of Iran cannot be treated as an altogether innocent victim in this conflict.
It is attacking Saudi Arabia, UAE- even Qatar & Oman. Khameni wanted to outdo Saddam. This won't end well for Iran. The Saudis & Emiratis are going to spend a shit ton of money to get a nuclear deterrent of their own. Iran, already running out of war, will run out of breathable air. The place will be a radioactive dust cloud.
Yet Netanyahu’s Israel and Trump’s America are guilty in far greater proportions, if only because they have at their command far more powerful means of devastation, as well as the willingness to use them on vulnerable and innocent human beings.
So, Guha is saying that if you have a powerful army and will use it in self-defence, then you are evil. FDR was more evil than Hitler because America was stronger than Germany. The Pope has the Swiss Guard. He is more evil than some child rapist currently incarcerated.
Was Guha always stupid or did writing about Gandhi destroy his brain?
It is difficult for Hindus to admit that the persistence of the caste system caused those of an older generation to have an unconscious belief that some people have different 'capabilities'- or even 'functionings'- than others. You can't expect a Dalit to have the same ability to reason or a Muslim to be able to function in any other than a burqa-burqa-jihad manner.
Non-Indians might not understand this aspect of the Indian intellectual. Consider the following essay titled
Against Amartya SenBy Emmanuelle BénicourtAmartya Sen is often portrayed as a different economist. As a Nobel Prize recipient in 1998, he serves as a reference for both mainstream economists (“neoclassical”) and their adversaries (“heterodox”).
He is neo-classical in the Arrow-Debreu tradition. He is 'normative' not 'heterodox'.
He is accredited with reconciling the unemotional approach of economists with the humanity of philosophers, as is reflected in the titles of his works (On Ethics and Economics, Inequality Reexamined, or Development as Freedom, to name just a few).
Nothing wrong with being a normative economist. The instrumental value of your work- i.e. whether it causes the Government to do things you want- justify it. Sen could point to welfare schemes in India- e.g. MGNREGA- as being directly linked to the work he (or Jean Dreze) had done.
The “capability approach,” which is at the heart of Sen’s analyses of poverty, development, and inequality, is portrayed as uniting these two disciplines in a way that surpasses conventional approaches to economic analysis.
If there were some way to determine capabilities objectively then we would be half way to figuring out a way to raise them. This would be very useful to Society. We'd know which 12 year old to invest in such that, within 10 years, some open STEM subject problem is satisfactorily closed. It may be that there is a young Kenyan girl who, if taught the right subjects by the right tutors, could invent faster-than-light travel within a couple of decades. By the year 2050, humans would be colonising distant planets.
To some extent, a capabilities approach is being implemented in all well run countries. There are 'talent spotters' in sports, music, but also maths & science. Moreover, there are methods by which one's capabilities can be raised through special training or nutritional supplements or, maybe, A.I based implants or nanotechnology.
Sadly, if you think 'lower class' people (like Modi) have lower capability & functioning, then you might favour endless discussion and no decision making because it is pointless to try to raise the condition of people who are stupider than shit.
Given the consensus this author garners, there is a paucity of critiques of the theories he propounds.
I think he was critiqued in India by people like Bhagwati.
Yet such critiques would be merited. This is the objective of the present paper, which summarizes Sen’s main analyses and positions, and seeks to identify the problems they raise on both the theoretical and the practical level. The main difficulty in studying Amartya Sen stems in particular from the terms he uses for the core concepts in his theories, which are often words of his own invention.
No. They are ordinary English words but with an odd, casteist, Indian intonation.
While these may bestow his writings with an aura of scholarship, they make reading and understanding his work particularly arduous. This paper will first provide a brief overview of Sen’s two core notions, namely “functionings” and “capability,” and then seek to determine what distinguishes his approach from conventional approaches. Next, the focus will turn to Sen’s ethical approach. Lastly, Sen’s positions regarding economic policy will be examined, with consideration given to his underlying ethical and theoretical perspectives.
The “Capability” Approach
One of the tenets of Sen’s analysis is his refusal to assimilate well-being and utility (which Sen sometimes calls happiness, sometimes satisfaction, and sometimes describes as a ranking according to a scale of preferences). Sen considers utility-based approaches to be reductionist as they only take into account the psychological or mental consequences of owning goods in terms of the happiness or satisfaction they provide, [1] and not the actual well-being of individuals (the standard of living attained thanks to these goods).
You can't tell me a Muslim Dalit can get utility from a computer. If he can't chop its head off & turn it into kebabs, he isn't interested mate. Ghanchis, like Modi, won't take a sword to their laptop but will try to squeeze & squeeze it so as to release the oil it contains.
From Goods to Functionings
The concept of capability, which was first proposed by Sen in 1979 (Sen 1982), is intended to account for human characteristics more accurately than the conventional approach in economics, which is based on utility. To define capability, Sen begins by representing individuals through a set of goods they may acquire (an “entitlement set”). However, Sen rejects the standard reference to “commodities” and prefers instead that of the “characteristics” of commodities. For example, instead of considering goods such as apples, peanuts, rice, or beef, Sen prefers to base his analysis on their nutritional value, their taste, and so on.
Coz he comes from a country where some won't eat beef and others won't eat pork & so forth. The Brits had a complicated way of working out what items needed to be procured to maintain a given number of workers from various castes, creeds & regions. Obviously, you couldn't expect a person of the carpenter caste to function in the manner of a person from the mason caste.
However, this change in perspective does not make it possible to account for what individuals are, or do, thanks to the characteristics of these goods. Sen therefore also endows each individual with a set of what he calls “utilization functions,” which convert the characteristics of goods into “functionings” (Sen 1985), which are defined as the “doings and beings” of an individual.
India did change greatly over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century and early Twentieth century. The Great War showed that capability and functioning wasn't really caste based. However, older attitudes prevailed in rural places like Shantiniketan where Sen was born and where he went to school.
The effective functioning of a particular individual will therefore depend on that individual’s choice of a set of goods (transformed into characteristics), as well as on that individual’s choice of utilization functions.
Thus, during the Second World War, Europeans in Calcutta protested against the requisitioning of air-conditioners for the Army VD clinic. Whites can't function without AC. This doesn't mean you should replace them with darkies. They lack executive capability. Give them nothing but clerical work.
Thus, Sen intends to incorporate human diversity into the analysis of well-being as these utilization functions translate inter-individual differences into doings and beings that can be attained thanks to the characteristics of goods. [3]
Indians of my generation don't believe this because we have seen that capabilities and functionings have changed greatly since the days of our grandparents. It isn't really true that if an Iyer eats a biryani and drinks brandy that he will necessarily turn into Mani Shankar Aiyar. Clearly Iyer genetics changed in the Sixties.
This may sound rather obscure, which is indeed the case. Yet it may also be what explains Sen’s popularity (we all think it is profound, although we do not understand much of it).
Sen was at his intellectual peak in the late Sixties & early Seventies- the time of 'the Club of Rome' & 'limits of growth' & Soylent Green ('they making food out of people!'). The Government may have to take over everything on 'Spaceship Earth' & strictly ration nutrients. Obviously, high capability people who need caviar & champagne to function must be accomodated.
Nevertheless, those familiar with neoclassical theory may recognize such concepts, as they merely reproduce the conventional neoclassical approach, albeit dressed in a different vocabulary.
The neoclassical approach assumes that market-makers spontaneously arise. What if that isn't the case? Then there is no alternative to Central allocation of everything. To preserve our material standard of living, we need to pretend 'Capabilities' is about poor people- not our need for caviar & champagne to continue to function.
Capability and Choice of a Particular Lifestyle
Functionings therefore replace the goods (or their characteristics) found in standard approaches in economics, and in particular in microeconomics. As in microeconomics, these functionings can be combined by a person who makes a choice, and it is based on this combination of functionings that Sen defines “capability,” which is conceived as the freedom to choose functionings.
We are free to choose to be high caste. Dalit Muslims are free to chose to have the smallest entitlement.
As Sen writes in The Quality of Life,
The life that a person leads can be seen as a combination of various doings and beings,
only if we actually knew what 'doings' and 'beings' obtain. Sadly, even the greatest biologists and chemists and so forth don't have this knowledge. If they did, they could turn me from an elderly cretin into Terence Tao with the body of Beyonce.
which can be generically called functionings.
Okay. I see what Benicourt is getting at. Still, if you come from a place with a backward, occupational, caste system you think of people as being the function they perform. Back in the Seventies, I had a Professor who took an early morning job cleaning toilets for five years so as to fund the purchase of a house suitable for his disabled wife. No doubt, he was pondering arcane subjects as he performed this menial activity. Our respect for him did not fall when we learned of this. It increased.
These functionings vary from such elementary matters as being well-nourished and disease-free to more complex doings or beings, such as having self-respect, preserving human dignity, taking part in the life of the community, and so on.
The function of the priest is to be fat. The function of the coolie is to be a walking skeleton.
The capability of a person refers to the various alternative combinations of functionings, any one of which (or rather any combination of which) the person can choose to have.
Sen uses the term 'choose' in the farcical manner that Commies used the word 'freedom'.
In this sense, the capability of a person corresponds to the freedom that a person has to lead one kind of life or another.(Nussbaum and Sen 1993, 3)
The high caste is free to be high caste. Thee low caste can choose to have a shitty existence instead of not existing at all.
Similarly, in Development as Freedom, Sen explains that, “A person’s ‘capability’ refers to the alternative combinations of functionings that are feasible for her to achieve.
For example Rahul has the functioning of being the first born son of his daddy who was the first born son of his Mummy who was the only child of her Daddy. This is called 'having the capability to be India's PM.'
Capability is thus a kind of freedom, or the substantive freedom to achieve alternative combinations of functionings (or, to put it less formally, the freedom to achieve various lifestyles)” (Sen 2000, 74–75).
Which depends on money. But would a properly casteist society have anything so vulgar? Nehru promised to 'Brahminize' India. It is only banias who care about money.
In fact, the essence of Sen’s approach by no means constitutes a departure from mainstream economics (whether microeconomics or neoclassical economics) since all of these assume that individuals make free choices (of “functionings” rather than goods) subject to constraints (through “capability” instead of income).
Sen's appeal is that it doesn't mention money. Translate 'capability' as 'caste' & you get his point- though you may be too ashamed to say so.
The Capability Approach and Neoclassical Theory
Moreover, Sen does not hide his intention to situate his analysis within the neoclassical theoretical framework developed by Kenneth Arrow and Gérard Debreu (1954). For example, in Development as Freedom, Sen explains that, “I have, in fact, demonstrated elsewhere that in terms of some plausible characterizations of substantive individual freedoms, an important part of the Arrow-Debreu efficiency result readily translates from the ‘space’ of utilities to that of individual freedoms, both in terms of freedom to choose commodity baskets and in terms of capabilities to function” (Sen 2000, 117–119).
This is because the Arrow-Debreu price vector encodes all relevant information & has no Knightian Uncertainty. But, suppose an omniscient, omnipotent God ordained a caste system then Sen is being perfectly reasonable. You can only choose to be and do according to your caste.
This begs the question of what prices—as well as supply and demand—may be (and mean) in such a market.
Everything is exactly what it has to be such that there is only one 'efficient cause'. This is an occassionalist Universe.
Nevertheless, the main point here is that Sen fully and unreservedly adopts the Arrow-Debreu model. As Sen stated at a conference held by the French Economic Observatory (Observatoire français de conjoncture économique—OFCE) in Paris, he is a mainstream economist, so we should not expect too much from him in terms of methodology or analytical frameworks, since his approach does not provide an alternative path to mainstream economics.
Traditionally, Welfare Econ was taught together with Public Finance. Mathematical economists separated them. The result was that Welfare Econ turned to shit.
But what about Sen’s approach in terms of philosophy and, more specifically, the solutions he offers from an ethical perspective?
Multiple Ethical Criteria
Sen’s widespread popularity stems not from his academic writings,
but from his being a darkie.
which are not particularly accessible, but from his work intended for the general public, in which he adopts an engaging viewpoint, in particular with respect to the issue of poverty and to ways of resolving it.
Anybody can pretend to care so much for the poor that they say stuff like 'it isn't enough to buy every poor person a nice mansion, one must also consider whether they need training in sodomy so as to achieve more intense orgasms.'
Ethics boils down to forming criteria that enable a choice to be made between various situations, after having ranked these situations according to these criteria.
That's economics. Ethics is about becoming a better person with nicer preferences.
One of the major ethical doctrines is utilitarianism, which values any action or institution according to its propensity to increase—or decrease—the happiness of the community. Drawing solely on one criterion—general happiness—thus makes utilitarianism a monist ethical doctrine.
Sadly, because we live under Knightian uncertainty, regret minimization is better.
Sen departs from this doctrine, which, implicitly or explicitly, is adhered to by most economists, because he considers its vision of well-being to be excessively one-dimensional.
Nobody knows what happiness is.
According to Sen, the happiness criterion neglects individuals’ other values, which he purports to incorporate with the use of functionings and capabilities,
Nobody knows what either of those two things are. We do know about money. Maximise that by all means.
thereby providing a better assessment of well-being. This is equivalent to adopting an ethical framework comprising several criteria, for which Sen uses the term “pluralism.”
Sadly nobody knows what any of those criteria are. Still, if you are high caste, fuck you need knowledge for?
Critique of Monism
In Inequality Reexamined, Sen writes that, “While being happy may count as an important functioning, it cannot really be taken to be all there is to leading a life (i.e., it can hardly be the only valuable functioning)” (Sen 1982, 54).
Dalits can be happy. That shows happiness is overrated. Some Dalits become billionaires because they great entrepreneurs or the invented cool stuff. This shows that money & entrepreneurship and inventing cool stuff isn't really anything to be proud of.
Thus valuable functionings are seen to be the basis for a life worth living. While happiness features among the factors that constitute a “valuable life,” it is not the only factor—hence Sen’s critique of utilitarianism.
Was Bentham a Baidya? No. He had no caste. Fuck him.
In Development as Freedom, Sen states that, “To insist that there should be only one homogeneous magnitude that we value is to reduce drastically the range of our evaluative reasoning.
There should be at least five castes. Modi is very evil because he wants to create just one homogenous caste of people who work hard & feel a sense of duty to the common good. This is why we must reject Hindutva & back the Dynasty.
Romila Thapar's life-long mission was to ensure than ancient Indian history was no fun. Smart students would run away from it. The theory was, this would prevent them from embracing Hindutva ideology & Indian nationalism.
Psyche magazine has an article by Raghu Karnad- one of the founders of the Leftist 'the Wire' titled
Romila Thapar: doyenne and dissenter
Romila, like her elder brother, was close to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. Indeed, she was said to be Sonia Gandhi's adviser on Indian culture.
The great historian came of age at the end of British rule in India.
Provincial autonomy had been granted when she was 4 years old. If the Muslims hadn't objected, a Federal India could have been cobbled together by 1937. Incidentally, Thapar's family had to run away from their ancestral homes in Lahore.
Thapar belongs to the Nehruvian age. 'Glimpses of World History', by Nehru, came out in 1934. Nehru was greatly impressed by the Harrapan civilization. He visited Mohenjodaro in 1936. The Indian ego got a boost by the demonstration that its civilization was coeval with those of Egypt & Mesopotamia.
Kids of the period read HG Wells & Durant- whose 'the case for India' came out in 1930.
Now 94, she continues to defy a regime
which was democratically elected. Modi is not a dynast. No wonder, she is against him.
determined to forget the pluralism and dissent of India’s past
There was none during Indira's Emergency. Thapar didn't raise a peep against it though she now claims she didn't sign some letter praising Indira & thus was investigated by the tax-man. The truth is, there was no such letter & the tax man was investigating everybody with 'benami' property & undeclared income.
...Change and continuity are rival ways in which historians can conceive of and narrate the past. It is tempting to use the same terms in thinking about Thapar’s own life.
Or her family's life. They started off as loyalists of the Windsor dynasty and ended up as loyalists of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty.
For people my age, Romila Thapar has been a star historian for about as long as we’ve been sentient.
But nobody can recall reading her shite. Basham- we remember. Keay, Dalrymple & French- we still enjoy. True, we still turn to the older Indian historians to get a fuller picture.
She has taught and published across the tenures of every Indian prime minister, from Jawaharlal Nehru to Narendra Modi.
So has Amartya Sen. Both are useless.
Larger arcs of time than usual are to be found in her histories, but also in her reminiscences.
Because she is as old as fuck.
The past is outsize in the problems she considers as a scholar as well as those she confronts in her life.
She hasn't had a lot of problems in life. Daddy paid to send her to England. Perhaps a phoren degree would be preferred to a fat dowry since educated women could get good jobs in the big cities.
Would Thapar become a barrister & earn good money? No. She became an academic. Nothing wrong in that. She could marry a colleague. Academics get a lot of holidays. Ayahs are cheap in India.
She came of age at the end of an era, that of British rule in India.
British rule could have ended in 1924.
As a woman and a scholar, she broke deliberately from convention and precedent.
Over the course of the Nineteen Thirties, more and more upper class Hindu women had pursued education instead of getting married off in their teens.
In a country searching for the best use of its freedom, she found the best use of her own.
Because she was stupid, she studied and taught a low IQ subject. Her first degree was in English but to go further in that subject (at that time) you needed Latin, Greek, French and also had to learn Anglo-Saxon & so forth. If she had done History in India, she would have been forced to learn Sanskrit & Persian & Arabic. The good news about studying Indian history abroad is that you don't need to know much about India. You can rely on secondary sources & get extra marks for being a genuine darkie.
Now, late in her life and her career, as religious nationalism
which triumphed in 1947
and authoritarianism
which peaked in 1975
tear apart and transform India,
There is no 'tearing apart'. Transformation is on the basis of rising productivity & life chances.
she is witness to yet another historical rupture,
Rahul is a cretinous coward. That is why he refused to become PM & lead his party to victory in 2014
and a new regime in which she is both a figure of dissent and a scholar of it.
She is neither. Nobody gives a flying fuck about her. Why? It turned out she had no evidence to back up her claims re. the Ram Temple etc.
In October 1986 Romila Thapar & 12 other JNU historians wrote an angry letter opposing the committee formed for Sri Krishna Janmasthan at Mathura. They claimed that Hindus and destroyed Jain & Buddhist temples but Muslims had seldom done so. Sita Ram Goel showed this claim was nonsense. Thapar & Co were not able to controvert the evidence he presented. The Indian History Congress (IHC), was a Marxist outfit and as such had every right to oppose the construction of temples because God is a fucking Jewish Capitalist as was proved beyond doubt by Prophet Kali Marks & Spencer. What was odd, was that it began passing resolutions almost every year, from 1984 onward, urging the government to 'protect' the Babri Masjid. It was this double standard which stuck in the craw of the Indian intelligentsia. It is one thing to be against organized Religion. It is another to suck up to the fucking Ayatollahs.
Which is why, to many Indians, Thapar is a national treasure, and to others she is a traitor.
She is an upper-class lady from a family close to what was the ruling dynasty. True, she was useless as a historian but, maybe, she was only pretending to lurve Islam. After all, she could be considered a Partition refugee who had to be sycophantic to the powers that be.
In 1947, the year of independence and partition in the subcontinent, Thapar was 15, in her final year at convent school in Poona, and class prefect. She was told it would be her privilege to lower the Union Jack and raise the new flag on the school grounds. She would also have to give a 15-minute speech. That threw her into a tizzy. For several nights, she lay in bed worrying about what to say: what did it mean to be Indian, outside of the British Raj?
The same thing as it had meant in 1930 at which time the British made it clear that the country- which was already a member of the League of Nations- would move towards Dominion status. To be fair, she might not have understood what such big words meant.
Thapar was born in 1931 into an elite
self-made & quite wealthy but not elite. They weren't royals.
class of Punjabi Khatris, one well-rewarded for its service to the British Raj. Her father was a doctor in the army, so Thapar spent much of her early childhood in the rebellious North-West Frontier, on British India’s border with Afghanistan.
It is still rebellious. Pakistan has been fighting a war with Afghanistan this year.
Home was the hill-fortress of Thal. From there, her father would drive to practice in nearby villages, and Romila would go with him, spending hours cloistered with Pashtun women, acquiring from them a love of rings and silver jewellery. The family later moved to cantonments: Peshawar and Rawalpindi along the North-West Frontier, and later Poona, in peninsular India.
If she had any literary talent, she could have written about this.
Every winter without fail, Romila would travel to Lahore to spend the holidays with her cousins in her grandmother’s large home. Lahore was the capital of the province of Punjab, and a byword for the urbane mingling of India’s faiths and cultural abundance.
Kipling had given it a certain glamour. It was doing well economically. Punjab was exporting wheat to global markets.
It was the twin city to Delhi, only 250 or so miles away.
Back then, Delhi was a backwater. Like Lala Hardayal, you did your first degree at St. Stephens & then went to Lahore University.
In 1947, however, when the country was divided into India and the new state of Pakistan – the gruesome condition of its independence – her grandmother’s house, the city of Lahore, and half of Punjab were severed from India.
Why? Will Karnad- or Thapar- admit this was because Muslims have no love for kaffirs? No.
For a year, the province was convulsed with atrocities, as its residents were driven in terror across a new border, into the nation-states where they now ostensibly belonged; Muslims west into Pakistan, Hindus and Sikhs east into India. The ethnic cleansing had started months earlier, but it was off the leash by August 1947, when young Romila lay sleepless in bed.
Army families would be safely evacuated. They would gain compensation in the form of property confiscated from Muslims who had fled or whom the Custodian of Evacuee property believed were 'intending' to leave.
What did it mean now, to be Indian?
Hindu. If you were Muslim, you stayed in Lahore.
A hint at one answer was inscribed on the flag she would raise on the morning of 15 August. Its central device was an archaeological motif: a spoked wheel, or chakra,
Guess what a Hindu Emperor is called? 'Chakravartin'. Nehru's dynasty saw itself in this light.
found on a ruined pillar in Sarnath. Rediscovered in the 19th century, the inscriptions on this pillar, and others like it, had helped reveal a picture of an ancient empire, that of the Mauryas.
There was plenty of information available about them from Jain & Sinhala chronicles, Greek travellers & the Arthashastra.
At its peak in the 3rd century BCE, the Mauryan rulers held sway over most of the subcontinent, under a sort of philosopher-king, Ashoka.
He was an able warrior & administrator. Milinda could be called a philosopher.
The discovery of Ashoka and the Mauryas had been a balm to the ego of colonised India.
No. The previous celebrations of the Vedas, Manusmriti etc. had been that balm. Nobody gave a shit about Buddhism. However, 'ahimsa' (non-violence) was a convenient doctrine if you were a loyalist or genuinely grateful for 'Pax Britannica'.
It meant that, like the Europeans and the Persians, Indians too had had an empire of the classical age, strong but enlightened;
Europeans already knew this because of a Macedonian bloke named Alexander. Hindus, of course, had longer memories of ancient dynasties which had ruled vast territories.
Rome but also Greece. In 1950, the 2,000-year-old symbols of Ashoka became the chosen emblems of the modern republic of India.
It replaced Gandhi's spinning wheel. Sadly, the sexy figurine of the Harappan dancing girl wasn't used.
History was unfolding all around her. But in the early years of the republic, history – let alone ancient history – was no subject for a bright young person.
It never was. If you were smart you did STEM subjects or, at the very least, became a lawyer or got into the ICS & other covenanted services. In the Fifties, it is true, it was the mathematical economist who had the securest path to power & influence. Manmohan was a two term Prime Minister.
The country was building its way out of colonial backwardness with infrastructure and industry.
This had started under the Brits.
The ‘temples of modern India’, said Nehru, were hydroelectric dams.
The first such was built in 1897.
Thapar was a precocious student, but she was at a loss for what to do with herself.
She was too stupid to do STEM subjects. Sad.
In her high-ceilinged living room, which seems almost built out of countless books and the mementos of her career, Thapar recalled her unsteady start – the girl before she found her tiger.
The reference is to her nephew who was a tiger conservationist.
‘I agonised,’ she said. ‘What should I do? What should I do? Bored the hell out of all my father’s friends because they’d come to see my parents and I’d sit there and say: What do you advise me to do? What subject should I take up?’
Why not medicine? There was always a need for female doctors. Also, her daddy was a doctor.
It was always certain that Thapar would receive a higher education, but it was far less clear that she’d have a profession or career. Her mother was a college graduate, but had never been allowed to work outside the home.
Perhaps, if her husband had been a Civil Surgeon, she would have been a teacher at the local Government Girls school. She is likely to have become its Principal.
Romila’s older sister was married and a homemaker. Her father was patient, but he was always clear: ‘Ultimately, you have to get married. We have to find you a husband. Just try not to be difficult about it.’
Fair point. Either you have an arranged marriage or you end up eloping with some Muslim Lothario. Nehru's sister had done so. Mahatma Gandhi himself had to break up the marriage.
In 1953, Thapar escaped to London,
she was sent there by Daddy. There was enough money for either a degree or a dowry- not both. Thapar chose well. Hubby might turn into an alcoholic.
enrolling in a programme in history at SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies,
though Indian history was better taught in India.
where she became a favourite of A L Basham
He had a degree in Sanskrit from SOAS & did his PhD on the Ajivikas. Though his attainments were slender, he wrote well and had a genuine interest in religion & spirituality. He married an accomplished Bengali lady & had a daughter.
, one of Britain’s leading Indologists. His classes were so specialised – and undersubscribed – that they became, in effect, personal tutorials.
SOAS was a gentleman's club. It was said that Professors had Intelligence connections. Sadly, these weren't with the KGB. Why? They were too stupid for it to be worthwhile recruiting them.
Her adventures outside the classroom were just as educational. To a young Indian woman raised in stuffy cantonment towns, the sheer autonomy – and the fun – was amazing. The buzzy cosmopolitanism of London, Thapar later wrote, left her ‘utterly intoxicated’.
It left me actually intoxicated. Thapar wasn't a lush.
She was invited by friends to go hitchhiking in Provence, France. They visited Roman ruins and slept in hostels that were often no more than barns, with bales of hay to spread out as beds. On the roads, the small automobiles rarely had room for three, so they would wave down trucks, ‘these huge camions’, and squeeze in on the wooden bench on which the drivers slept at night. It was a summer she had never imagined she would experience.
Meanwhile, back in India, there were highly educated Indian women who were making common cause with the revolting masses in places like Telengana.
When her undergraduate programme came to an end, her father wrote to say that he was out of funds. She would have to come home and – here she paused – ‘get married’.
i.e. he had enough funds to buy her some basic sort of groom- if not a horse & carriage. Perhaps, the hope was, she would get married to a nice White Professor
In turmoil, Thapar wrote to her elder brother, Romesh. He replied with a line she still enjoys repeating. ‘He said: Marry if you must, but not if only turnips are available.’
Her brother was doing well. At the very least, she could make a living as a journalist.
‘That clinched it.’ Here was a reason to discontinue tradition. She applied for a doctoral fellowship, proposing – almost to her own surprise – to study Ashoka.
A safe option.
Some in the committee grumbled; they believed the subject was done to death.
But SOAS mainly attracted thickos. You can't expect them to do any original work.
She won her doctoral award anyway. She went to ‘Bash’ to tell him the news.
He was a nice man & loved India.
‘He looked at my face and said: Why are you looking so depressed? I’ve never seen you look so depressed.’
‘I said, I’ve got the fellowship.’ She mimicked a voice of despair: ‘I’ve got to become a historian.’
Fair point. The life of a young historian is one of drudgery & diminishing returns.
In Ashoka, Thapar had a subject who harmonised with contemporary society and its concerns.
No. What 'contemporary society' was concerned with was land reform. But for this to be effective, you had to understand how things had gotten to the present state. The Brits, after all, had taken over an already existing system. Was this also the case with Akbar & Allaudin? It was pointless to go back much further than that.
The Ashokan inscriptions, inscribed in rock-faces and pillars – most in the Brahmi and Kharosthi scripts, but a few in Greek and Aramaic – are among the oldest legible writings found in the subcontinent. Among much else, they tell this legend: after witnessing a great carnage at the battle in Kalinga (modern-day Odisha), Ashoka repented his imperial wars.
The Kalingans got their revenge under the Jain King, Kharevail.
Moved by the teachings of the Buddha, he began to propagate a code of non-violence, the Buddhist dhamma.
Why did other 'universal' Emperies adopt 'universalist' Religions at around the same time? The answer was that such religions spread literacy & this was helpful for creating an Imperial bureaucracy. Furthermore, universal religions suppress thymotic strife of a clannish type.
His edicts call for mutual tolerance between bahmanam-shamanam: that is, between the orthodoxy of Vedic Brahminism, with its sacrificial rituals and hereditary priesthood, and newer, distinctive beliefs like those of the Buddhists and Jains, which swayed followers toward self-salvation through an ethical code.
There were Hindu monastic orders. Indeed- 'Vratyas' may have existed in Vedic times.
Thapar immersed herself in the inscriptions, and the philology – the close reading of ancient languages – that informed earlier work.
Do Indians consider her a good Sanskritist? No. Her English, however, is perfectly serviceable.
She was also alert to newer methods becoming available from adjacent social sciences.
She was too stupid to absorb them. Econometrics is mathematical.
She grew comfortable with her identity as a historian, knowing that the discipline – its rigour of research and writing – ‘would give direction to my great need for autonomy’.
There had been more rigour in Indian history departments in the Fifties- which is why Ranajit Guha didn't get a PhD from Calcutta. Romilla was a nice, well connected, lady whose brother was an influential Lefty. Thus she had to be tolerated.
She still had a taste for physical adventure, and increasingly, an eye for what the historian might learn from actual landscape.
Indian landscapes? No.
In 1957, halfway through writing her dissertation, she was invited to be an assistant on an expedition to the Buddhist cave-sites at Maijishan and Dunhuang.
Which aren't in India.
She travelled in the interiors of revolutionary China, then on the eve of the Great Leap Forward, dancing the foxtrot with Russian engineers, playing table-tennis with monks and revolutionary guardsmen, and eventually even shaking hands with China’s premier Zhou Enlai and Chairman Mao himself.
This was the time of 'Pancheel' & Hindi-Chini bhai bhai.
In Xi’an, she visited the monastery of Xuanzang, a 7th-century pilgrim to India, and a great friend to modern historians because of the priceless chronicle he left of his travels. Thapar, alone on an upper balcony, looking out over the monastery and the land, felt an uncanny sensation: the ‘sweep of past centuries’ made palpable around her.
Though the same could be said of the Delhi landscape.
Back in Beijing, she was eager to meet Chinese academics to discuss what she had seen.
But she didn't know Chinese. Also she hadn't seen much.
‘The questions were broadly concerned with what they were doing to protect the ancient sites, and whether the new society that they were organising after the revolution was what they had wanted,’ she told me. She found them reticent. The previous year, Mao had urged that ‘a hundred flowers bloom, and a hundred schools of thought contend.’ Already this brief window for dissent was closing. In a diary she kept at the time, Thapar noted the rising noise of the party’s rectification campaigns – disciplinary actions to enforce the party line.
Thapar learned her lesson well. Follow the party line but also appear to be an utter imbecile. Otherwise, they might insist you join the Party & hand over a portion of your wages.
Historians had begun to face vague but chilling accusation of being ‘Rightist’. (One of them, Xiang Da,
who died during the Cultural Revolution. He was 66 years old. The Tujia ethnicity, to which he belonged, suffered severe famine related mortality during the Great Leap Forward.
an authority on the Dunhuang murals, had allegedly remarked that a hundred flowers were not blooming in the field of Chinese history, but only five, and they all said the same thing.) To Thapar, the shift in the scholarly climate ‘was sad, and somewhat shattering after our time and work.’ She wrote: ‘So far there have been no tanks and no bloodshed. But will it stop at this?’
No. Communism is utterly shitty. Still, they might seize power in India. Better be a 'useful idiot'.
Thapar’s dissertation was published in 1961 as Aśoka and the Decline of the Mauryas.
Like Chinese Empires, Indian Empires declined because of monsoon failure or other climactic reasons.
It was groundbreaking work, veering away from modes of historiography that dominated the study of ancient India at the time. Influentially, she explained Ashoka’s dhammic code of tolerance as a moral but also an imperial ideology: one that ‘borrowed from Buddhist and Hindu thought’ but also served to hold together a humongous empire.
It was like Alexander's 'homonoia'. China took a different part by creating a bureaucracy with its own ideology & paideia.
In the 1950s and ’60s, Nehru’s India, a large, poor and increasingly riotous democracy, was trying to do something similar – to hold state authority and dissent in balance,
No. It was kicking the shit out of dissent- if this could be safely done. The problem was that lack of revenue meant State Capacity was low- more particularly because the State was doing stupid shit.
without falling apart. Thapar saw herself naturally included in its project.
The project of doing stupid shit.
With her doctorate complete, she returned to Delhi. Many of the extended family there, she found, viewed her study abroad as ‘a kind of finishing school’.
She had learned how to use fork & knife. Hopefully she would not kill cows and eat them.
‘They said, What are you doing now?
Killing cows? No? Well that's all right then.
‘And I said, I’m teaching.’
Set up a private school & you can make good money. Look at Bimla Nanda. Not only did she marry a well connected America (who founded Fabindia), she set up an elite pre-school (Playhouse) for New Delhi's posh kids. This meant everybody had to be very nice to her otherwise their grandkids might end up being taught Hindutva by darkies.
‘Oh, so you’ll become a school mistress.’
The headmistress of an elite school is a person of great consequence. IAS officers will ensure she gets a big building plot & plenty of cement etc. If you want a summer home in Kashmir, the rules will be bent so you can do so. On the other hand, if you end up as a College Professor, nobody will give you the time of day.
When her brother Romesh came up from Bombay to see her, though, he put a word in their father’s ear. He told him: ‘Please remember, you are not to treat her as an unmarried daughter. You have to treat her as you would a professionally qualified son.’
Don't forget, the country is moving to the Left. Having a female Leftie academic in the family can be very helpful to us- provided we suck up to the dynasty.
Romesh had always understood her, she said, but ‘I was very, very impressed with that.’
He had the savvy to ingratiate himself with Indira.
The sweep of Thapar’s work in the 60-odd years since then is not easily conveyed.
save by saying it was moronic shite.
Since Aśoka and the Decline of the Mauryas, she has produced more than two dozen other volumes, which established her as the doyenne of her period – early India – and of the subcontinent’s history at large.
She says early India was shit. That's why Indians must be content with a recent India that is shit.
Moving beyond dynastic history, she enquired into the formation of early Indian social structures: kingship, caste groups, religious sects, early states and their economic forms.
No she didn't. Why was there convergent evolution of jatis over such a large stretch of territory? Thapar has no answer to this question. Sadly, the answer is game-theoretic & explains such variation as existed. Thapar was too stupid to go in for this.
Alongside the study of classical, usually Sanskrit, texts, her generation of historians went to work with archaeological and social-scientific methods. Over the 1960s and ’70s, as Indian history ‘moved from being Indology to a social science’, many of Thapar’s ideas became paradigmatic in the field.
Only for useless cretins.
In 1970, she joined the faculty of a new university founded in New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU),
she was previously a Professor at Miranda College- which is part of Delhi Uni. Nothing wrong with that at all. Plenty of smart girls took History & then passed the Civil Service exams.
a pioneer in interdisciplinary teaching and critical inquiry. Today, it is regularly ranked as India’s best university.
It is a central university- in other words, it will be taken over by the hacks of the ruling party.
At the same time, Thapar had brought her critical approach to another exercise: writing new textbooks for Indian schools.
Under the dynasty. Now a different party is in power, those textbooks are being rewritten. Nobody cares.
The existing curricula taught history as a fixed sequence of events, for students to recite like catechism, she said. Thapar thought they should teach explanations for historical phenomena and change, and how historians reach those explanations.
She didn't know those explanations because they are game theoretic.
This wasn’t as easy as it sounds – ‘I would much rather write a PhD thesis all over again than write another textbook for children,’ she later said – but it was an important, not to say patriotic, undertaking.
It was anti-Hindu- more particularly anti-Brahmin. Thapar is a Kshatriya & tolerates Buddhism because its founder was a Kshatriya.
She never married. At one point, while she was in her 40s, her mother urged her to adopt a child. It could be a girl, her mother said; daughters do more to look after you in your old age. ‘I thought about it quite seriously,’ Thapar told me. Her mother even offered to help raise the child, since Thapar was busy, ‘rushing around giving lectures here, there and everywhere’. Ultimately, she chose not to. ‘I said: no, I think it would be unfair on the child. I wouldn’t be able to give it – give her – the kind of attention that I would like to give a child.’
Good for her. Daughters must lead their own lives.
Thapar was in her 50s by the time India’s feminist movement arrived in strength in the 1980s.
It was pretty strong in the late Sixties & Seventies when a woman took over the running of the country. I'd say Nandini Satpathy was the first radical feminist to become Chief Minister (in 1973).
She is a committed feminist (visiting Paris, she would lay flowers at the grave of Simone de Beauvoir)
French women got the vote 20 years after the first Indian women got it.
but never felt a need to ‘write volumes on the status of women’ herself. ‘Some of us could just live a free life and, through the way we lived and talked and claimed our rights, we could make people think.’
What made people think was Indira forcibly sterilizing millions of poor men.
She taught at JNU’s Centre for Historical Studies, as professor of ancient Indian history, until her retirement, mandatory at the age of 60, in 1991. She is now a professor emerita there. Her career did not slow. After her retirement, colleagues honoured her with a Festschrift, or tribute: Tradition, Dissent and Ideology (1996). Nearly three decades later, with Thapar still active, a younger generation produced another: Questioning Paradigms, Constructing Histories (2019).
They are as useless as she is. Anyway, it was the 'Subaltern' school which most flourished. Indeed, post-colonial theory seems to have had quite an impact on Western Campuses.
After her ostensible retirement, she wrote Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300 (2002), which found a wide lay readership, despite the few concessions Thapar makes to genial or accessible prose. She was awarded honorary doctorates from leading universities on four continents, among them Oxford, the University of Pretoria and the University of Chicago. She twice declined the offer of a Padma Bhushan, a high civilian honour given by India’s central government, saying she preferred to ‘accept awards from academic institutions or those associated with my professional work’. In 2008, she shared the million-dollar Kluge Prize given by the US Library of Congress: the first woman, and the first scholar not living in the West, to ever receive it.
It had only been introduced in 2003. The other female to get it is African-American.
Thapar’s public lectures and events still fill up auditoria. On a Monday evening last July, I arrived at one such event – a panel discussion of ancient cultural ties between India and Rome – to find a crowd of Delhi gentry outside the gate, incredulous at not being allowed in. It was a full house, and then some; inside, people were already seated in the aisles and there was no room left even to stand.
The Indian upper middle class likes buying books but doesn't read them. Instead, they claim to have received 'darshan' from the author. When I was a kid in Delhi, the landlord of my Uncle's house in Karol Bagh would often reminisce about his meetings with Wallam Shake-peer & John Milton in London- where he himself had received a diploma in shoe-making. He did offer me one good piece of advise- 'don't read English books. They are filled with filth. I own all English books but won't let anyone read them'. Naturally, this encouraged me to read Shakespeare to get to the naughty bits.
The organiser, the conservation architect Ratish Nanda, tried to mollify the crowd, most of whom belonged to a class of citizens not used to being refused. Nanda suggested that we take a sundown stroll in the restored Mughal garden next door.
In July? Fuck that. A nice air-conditioned auditorium is preferable.
Some of us agreed. Drifting around the park, we confessed to each other how funny it was to feel this anxious to attend an academic panel discussion.
with air-conditioning
An hour later, as we circled back, a handful of people were still at the venue’s gates, fighting to get in, attempting various forms of influence on the security guard. That was a show worth watching, too.
Arre, you duffers are not knowing, I am Walliam Shakespeare! Romillaji was my student in London. That's why she spick Inglis gud.'
‘I guess it’s a good sign,’ said one person, ‘that she still has so many fans.’
Fuck fans. Airconditioning is the way to go.
A common way to speak of Thapar is to say she is an institution.
not a latrine
And, like many Indian institutions – universities, courts, the Constitution – Thapar has spent the past decade under attack.
No. Everybody understood all three were crap decades ago. IITs & IIMs are a different matter.
As a historian, Thapar’s main confrontation has always been with Hindu nationalism, or ‘Hindutva’.
Her people had to run away from Lahore. Naturally, they harbour an animus against the religion of the people who took them in.
The historiography she’d helped pioneer often broke up the frames of earlier history-writing, including a particularly rusty meta-narrative: India as the home of a timeless Hindu civilisation, ancient and continuous, but threatened since 1000 CE by Muslim invaders and tyrants.
From whom Thapar's family had to flee once Muslim power revived & the Brits exited.
This binary picture of the past – an ancient Hindu sublime and its medieval Islamic inversion – originated as a colonial theory,
No. It originated when Hindus were massacred or forcibly converted unless they fled to Hindu majority areas. This happened with the advent of Islam in the sub-continent. Thapar witnessed it for herself.
one that justified benevolent British rule displacing the Mughals.
British rule was a golden period for Thapar's family- not to mention the dynasty.
By the 20th century, it had become the gospel truth of Hindutva.
Because it was true. Why not pretend that the Greeks were instigated into throwing out the Turks by evil Britishers like Lord Byron
In 1977, a conservative-led alliance
It included the CPM
took power in India, bringing Hindu nationalists into the central government for the first time.
Hindu nationalists have predominated in the Congress party. When Nehru became Prime Minister, the Muslim population of Delhi was 33 percent. Within a year it was down to 5 percent. True, at a later point, Muslims became a vote-bank for the Dynasty. But they were still harassed by the Custodian of Enemy property- if they were rich- or massacred if they were poor. Rajiv's genius was to slaughter Sikhs as well. He won a huge majority.
A burst of official censure of school history textbooks followed with some withdrawn or their distribution reduced, including ones written by Thapar. The alliance soon failed, but the Bharatiya Janata Party (the BJP), the electoral wing of the Hindu nationalist movement, was set to grow steadily in strength.
Because it was less shite than the other Janata parties.
In its first full term, in the early 2000s, the BJP resumed its campaign to correct, in school textbooks, what it saw as the entrenched historiographical bias against ‘Hindus’, one that had left them diminished and demoralised.
It was a godsend for the BJP.
Thapar spoke up in protest, and was drawn into controversy, and so into the harsh limelight of the culture wars.
Sonia, remembering her brother's close relationship with Indira, turned to her for advise on Indian culture. At the time Congress was in alliance with the Left & it was thought an anti-Hindu bias would appeal to those atheists.
Hostility toward academic historians had
always been around. People still read history books by the earlier generation of nationalist Hindu historians. They didn't read- or couldn't understand, if they did read- the worthless shite churned out by Leftists.
‘revived with the BJP government in 1999’, Thapar told me, ‘and with even more concentration since 2014’. That year, Narendra Modi led the party back into power, where it has stayed for more than a decade. To many of its supporters, and some of its opponents, the 2014 mandate was an event as transformative as 1947.
Only because Rahul refused to step up to the plate. Either the Dynasty must rule or it must appoint a proxy- like Manmohan- to do it for them.
The Modi regime has fought its history wars from the outside in.
No. It has better things to do. There were plenty of elderly Hindutvadis willing & able to make mincemeat of the Leftists. This was shown by the Ayodhya judgment.
Its grand narrative has returned, mainly through a mandate to creative industries; Hindi movies, popular publishing and TV news have all fallen in line.
Because they are profit-driven. If Lefty shite doesn't sell, drop it.
The historical genre in Bollywood is now dominated by a rolling spectacle of Hindu heroics against lurid Islamic savagery, as in Chhaava (2025), one of last year’s highest-earning Bollywood films. Professional historians have not yielded as easily.
Nobody cares, since nobody has heard about them.
Many have been quiet. Others, like Thapar, ready to dispute these caricatures of history, have become targets themselves.
Not really. We know her family was close to the Dynasty. Nothing wrong with that. The question is whether she gave Sonia good advise. She didn't.
First they came for JNU. The university is famed for having a Left-leaning student body, equally keen to read and to march.
It was subsidised by the Central Government. But, Indira beat the shit out of students when they tried to wag their tails. Abhijit Bannerjee himself was carted off to Jail though he was very well connected.
In 2016, the government began a long campaign to tame the radical campus. Police entered JNU following an on-campus protest for Kashmir,
which were a godsend for the BJP. They now rule Delhi. Congress & the Left have all but disappeared because of Shaneen Bagh & 'tukde tukde'.
and later arrested three of its student leaders. When one of the students was taken to court, the police stood back while Right-wing lawyers kicked, punched and humiliated his supporters for cameras.
Lawyers also beat up the police. The Police Commissioner refused to take action because he was retiring & feared bad publicity. This demoralized the police who were slow to react against anti-Hindu mobs at the time of the Trump visit. This too helped the BJP.
On primetime TV, news anchors used doctored video-clips to carry out a Grand Guignol of the ‘anti-nationals’ of JNU. The students were accused of sedition, which can lead to a life sentence. One of them, Umar Khalid, was working on a doctorate in history.
He is now a 'history-sheeter' like Sharjeel Imam. Kanhaiya Kumar, has abandoned his buddies & has joined Congress.
On campus, Thapar joined a series of protest teach-ins, which drew an audience of thousands. She knew what would come. Neither her measured, methodical style nor her international prestige would protect her from it. She began receiving threats and abuse over the phone – these continue, mostly over email. The same year, Mumbai Police provided an escort when she visited the city to give a lecture. By 2019, even the administration of JNU – where she had taught for 20 years, and been an emerita for almost another 30 – was asking Thapar to show them her CV in order to review her position.
Nobody cared.
On line, a widening campaign denounces her as a ‘saboteur’, a ‘failed Marxist Ghazi’ (ghazi is a medieval term for a crusading warrior for Islam),
it is the title of Ataturk. Asim Munir certainly thinks of himself as a Ghazi.
or in the phrase of a 2025 piece in the Organiser magazine, an ‘architect of intellectual treason’. ‘Thapar’s cabal,’ one web editorial recently had it, ‘disfigured the psyche of at least three generations … by poisoning Indian history.’ So far, there have been no tanks. Much of the force of intellectual intimidation in India remains anonymous, digital and decentralised.
I used to receive rape threats when my Twitter handle was 'Honeytits Cumbucket'.
It has been easy to treat Thapar, who exemplifies a class to which I also belong – of English-speaking Leftish liberals – as an effigy of a subversive, ‘anti-national’ elite.
Thapar's family was important. Girish Karnad's family- not so much.
It is even easier because of her sex. ‘I get abused not for the history I’m writing, but for being a woman. There’s a very substantial quantity of that,’ she said. ‘There are, for example, interviews on YouTube – with comments. There are some really horrible things, pornographic, sexist.’ In this regard, she said: ‘Being a woman has been tough.’
Only if you actually are a woman. I had no great difficulty being both a woman and a cat.
I don’t say so, but I suspect she hasn’t seen the half of it. (She does not use social media.) But she must have thick skin.
She is a thicko. SOAS didn't attract smart people.
‘Not too thick, but thick enough,’ she said. ‘Thick enough to keep on going.’
She wasn't embarrassed when her side lost the Ayodhya case. This is because she knew her 'evidence' was a pack of lies.
The real cost of her public stance, she thinks, has been time. She still has work to do, but India’s new establishment is crowded with ersatz historians, pandering to fantasies and resentments, and ‘when startling statements are made, then the next lecture I give, I tend to address that,’ she sighs. ‘It’s not that it’s taking up very much time, but the little it has taken up I would rather have spent on major questions.’
You have to be smart to tackle major questions. Thapar is a thicko.
Through her career, she has made a sustained study of the lineage of intellectual dissent in India.
It exists without any lineage.
From the Ashokan edicts, Thapar discerned that dissent was a salient feature of ancient India.
This like saying 'defecation was a salient feature of ancient Mayan Civilization. The lineage of defecation had to do with having a Mummy and a Daddy, both of whom took dumps from time to time'.
(In fact, it was evident in the history of religions everywhere, she had said, and India was no different.) Here it was enshrined in early philosophy, which even described a system of constructive debate resembling dialectics: between poorva-paksha (the thesis) and prati-paksha (the antithesis), from which confrontation there may evolve siddhanta (the resolution).
Indians had logic. So did everybody else. Defecation, however, was confined to the ancient Mayans.
‘My generation of students was brought up to believe that there was no dissent in the Indian past,’ Thapar has said.
She is mad. My Mum's generation was brought up to believe that Buddhists dissented from Brahmanism & Bhakti saints dissented from Buddhism etc. etc.
‘Everybody agreed with everybody, and it moved seamlessly from one point to the next.’
Nonsense!
The early Orientalists had portrayed ancient India as a scene of drowsy, sensual stasis.
No. They had portrayed it as a wealthy & highly productive territory with big cities & ports and vast armies.
On that basis, nationalists built their own view of harmonious Indic civilisation free of any kind of internal conflict.
No. Nationalists gassed on about great Kings fighting other great Kings. The Mahabharata isn't the story of a Sorority sleep-over. It is the tale of what led up to a great battle & its tragic outcome.
‘The tradition of dissent is not intended to bring solace. It is rather a justification for the right to dissent, and a support for doing so’
By contrast, the tradition of defecation, does bring solace. Contra Thapar, there is no justification for carrying on a tradition- e.g. that of sacrificing your first born to Ba'al- which doesn't bring any fucking solace at all.
Her study of pluralism, schism and conflict within Indian structures of religion – bahmanam-shamanam onwards – punctured a hallowed image of pre-Islamic India as a continuous zone of enlightened consensus.
Indians made a distinction between 'matam' (dogma) and vigyan (science or praxis). If the vigyan is the same, maybe the differences in matam don't greatly matter. One may say that Umasvati-Nagarjuna-Sankara are 'observationally equivalent'. The Shraman is just a Brahmin who doesn't want to get married. What matters is whether some Prince or Guild will pay for his upkeep.
‘What I have been interested in all along is the social roots of religion,
in which case, it is helpful if you are yourself religious & participate in congregational worship
which I’ve used in my history,’ she said. ‘And therefore I’m accused of being anti-Hindu, which is the wrong accusation because it’s not that I’m anti-Hindu but I’m showing another dimension of religion, which is not liked by the worshipper.’
She is Kshatriya. She says 'boo to Brahmins!' Nothing wrong in that. But it isn't History.
In 2023, she published a short book on the subject, Voices of Dissent.
Sarkari sycophant thinks she is a dissident! But she wouldn't have been if Rahul hadn't been both cowardly & supremely incompetent.
She is not satisfied. ‘That’s my one regret – that I didn’t spend more time on that subject,’ she said. ‘I’m trying to suggest that we’ve deliberately ignored the dissenting tradition. It was a very strong one.’
It was and is wholly inconsequential.
The question of dissent sounds through many parts of her life: as a line of scholarly enquiry; as a personal principle and orientation in public; and as a habit to encourage in younger Indians, many of whom won’t remember the more expansive, voluble country that India was prior to 2014.
It was ruled by nice Italian lady. Maybe, if Rahul marries a nice Persian cat, that pussy will rule India for him.
Today it is a more brittle society, trained to exalt a mythical past of piety, conformity and order.
Modi has replaced dissent with defecation. Bastard has even built toilets for rural women so that they can stop dissenting and start defecating! Chee, chee!
To claim a tradition of dissent here is an act of dissent in itself.
Only in the sense that to claim there was no tradition of defecation in India, prior to Modi, is to shit the Professorial chair you occupy.
I asked Thapar if the long view was a source of solace in a stifled, oppressive time.
Who is stifling either of these nutters?
‘The tradition of dissent is not intended to bring solace,’ she replied, in classic, unsentimental style. ‘It is rather a justification for the right to dissent, and a support for doing so, and with reasons for doing so.’
Rights are only meaningful if linked to remedies under a vinculum juris or bond of law. India recognises various right to dissent- including that of a Judge who doesn't share the majority view. But, for the matter to be justiciable, there must be a clear violation of an immunity- e.g. if the Bench says 'such and such historian must not get any employment or remuneration from the Government'. The State can appeal this while those named may also request judicial review. This appeal can certainly be based on the utility or public purpose served by expressing a view the Bench finds opprobrious.
It must be said, there are certain matters- e.g. sedition, hate speech directed at a particular community- where 'dissenting' views are heavily punishable under Indian law.
I’m 50 years younger than Thapar, and I’ve also spent my life in India. A single milieu – the Gandhian-Nehruvian experiment in pluralism, rights and social democracy
which ended with partition. India is unitary. Still, till there is a uniform civil code, we may say there is a degree of pluralism.
– shaped us both,
Thapar's education in London shaped her.
though her generation was the first to come of age within it, and mine may be the last.
Both Gandhi & Nehru had shit for brains. That is why their policies were abandoned.
What we embody is
stupidity
a contradiction, an identity crisis, or – in the reigning discourse in India – a kind of betrayal.
No. You are simply stupid.
Thapar is an Indian born into the colonial house of the English language,
This shithead hasn't heard about the US of A. Guess what language they speak there? It stopped being a colony in 17 fucking 76.
and into its liberal, international mores.
Actually, it was the Tories who passed the 1935 India Act.
But she has lived in India, studied it, and served in its institutions throughout her life.
No. She did not live in India while studying Indian history in London. How stupid is this shithead?
As a historian, she defies Hindu nationalism and its slanted ideas about the past.
Because she has slanted ideas of her own.
And she is better versed in the Sanskrit epics, the Vedas and the shastras than any critic who might come at her for being ‘a Hindu hater’.
Nonsense! Every fucking Hindu Pundit or Acharya or Upadhyaya is better versed in such things. But so are a lot of STEM subject mavens.
Her scholarly authority and prestige have been pressed into service, again and again, to defend those who are less well protected.
She failed on every occasion. Good historians don't make absurdly false claims.
In early 2020, she visited the women’s protest encampment in Shaheen Bagh, a semi-industrial outskirt of New Delhi. It had become the heart of a massive, country-wide movement to affirm India’s Constitution and its inclusive principles.
The Muslims there objected to non-Muslims, fleeing Islamic persecution, getting refuge in India. They failed. The BJP gained. Congress & the Left were wiped out.
In the conclusion of Voices of Dissent, Thapar wrote about being moved by the dignity of the women there, and their eloquence, without recourse to religious rhetoric.
They lost. Get over it.
With its non-violent ethos, and the crucial participation of women, Shaheen Bagh took her back to her own ‘very youthful participation’ in India’s freedom struggle.
She is lying. She didn't participate in it at all. I, on the other hand, was repeatedly arrested for shitting on Lord Curzon's head.
‘I felt after many years that I was witnessing a form of dissent that was somehow taking off from the roots of anticolonial nationalism,’ she wrote.
Because she was as stupid as shit. Her own people would not have been allowed to claim Indian citizenship if the Shaheen Bagh demand had been implemented in 1947.
Two weeks after her visit, however, the popular movement was stilled by a bloody, orchestrated riot in New Delhi.
Some Muslims were paid to start it because of Trump's visit.
Umar Khalid, the graduate student Thapar had stood with in 2016, had been a gentle and galvanising figure in the protests.
He was useless. At one time, people thought he could be used to split the vote, on a caste/creed basis, in some constituency with a strong Left infrastructure. But he was too crazy & stupid. The future lies with Owaisi who is a nationalist.
He was arrested, with other young Muslim leaders, under terrorism charges. Since September 2020, he has been in prison, without his trial having even begun. This January, a bench of India’s Supreme Court declined to uphold Khalid’s right to bail.
Because there is a prima facie case against him. Incidentally, India's draconian law in this respect dates back to the mid Sixties.
At this late stage in her career, and her life, Thapar fights a rearguard action for both dissent and historical scholarship.
i.e. she continues to repeat the same stupid lies.
She is not alone, but it is an increasingly lonely battle. With it comes the solitude of age. Time steals friends away, and physical frailty makes it harder to stay in touch with others. In December 2024, five months before the death of her nephew, Thapar lost one of her closest friends, Shirish Patel
who studied something useful at Cambridge.
, an engineer and urban planner devoted to Mumbai. He and his wife ‘were the kind of friends one thinks aloud with and doesn’t pause, you know’, she said. ‘I miss that very much indeed.’
Clearly, she found Karnad a cretin in comparison to Patel.
For Hindus, religion provides continuity. Moreover, the history of religion shows how collective action problems can be solved such that 'public signals' create superior Aumann correlated equilibria. Thapar was too stupid to understand this.
A good historian has company in his old age. It is the company of those who have said and done the best things in the best manner. Spivak spent her life amongst fools.
;... in a sense, continuity is a very meaningful way of living. I don’t mean that you should be completely stuck with it, and keep on thinking: What was it like in the past? and Am I carrying the past? The past goes on with you, without you even being aware of it. But there is something in that continuity that gives you the confidence that life will carry on.’
Hinduism & India will carry on. No thanks to her or Sen or other such shitheads.
In her generation, at least in India, Thapar is an outlier.
No. She was a nice enough lady of the sort who taught at Miranda House.
... Thapar still goes out into the world, with younger people at her side, to oppose the mounting wave of spurious history.
Sadly what she produced was shocking spurious.
Mornings tend to be quiet. She has company from the birds, she said, mostly magpies and bulbuls.
She always was bird-brained.
They arrive at the bowls of grain and water set out on Thapar’s veranda. Squirrels come too, and her dog, Bulleh,
Bulleh Shah? That's offensive to Muslims.
tries his luck for a bite of her breakfast. A recent guest is the ghoos, the bandicoot rat, who emerges from her hole in the corner of the garden, to the bulbuls’ distress. Occasionally, too, there is a long-tailed garden lizard, who approaches the very edge of the veranda. ‘It stands still and looks up at me, and I look at it,’ Thapar said, ‘And we go on out-staring each other, until it finally decides, This is no fun, and goes away.’
Thapar tried to make Indian History 'no fun'. Indians did 'go away' from it- if produced by cretinous Indian Leftists. But they still read Basham's 'the wonder that was India'.
Why does justice matter? The simple answer is that people can trust each other and even trust themselves more when they live in a just society. This means many more mutually beneficial transactions and relationships exist while there is less 'free riding' when it comes to public goods. Econ theory deals with this under the rubric of the theory of externalities, preference revelation, incomplete contract theory, mechanism design, fair division, concurrency etc.
Another answer is that justice in cuddly and sweet. Injustice is repugnant and yucky. This lines up notions of merit goods and demerit goods and not saying mean things about fat people. Also, as the Bible says, if you kids make fun of a baldie like me, bears will come and eat you.
A theory of Justice does not have to define Justice but it does have to have a clear idea of what constitutes injustice. This can't just be stuff which is deplorable in itself like the fact that people get old and then they die. It has to be the case that some one did something bad to someone else or failed to do something good for them which they were obliged to do. You could certainly say, 'it's unfair that Rich peeps got money and us poor people don't got none.' But your proposal to kill the rich and take their money isn't a theory of Justice. It may be a part of an ideology or a political strategy or an economic plan. The problem is, that sort of plan can get you killed.
Suppose there are laws which say the Government must prevent people from getting old or dying, though the law would be involved, Justice would not. I don't dispute that the State has a duty to chop our heads off and shove them up our poopers while chanting Satanic incantations so that we call get resurrected as immortal beings but this is a religious matter with political overtones. Justice however requires that everybody else gets their head chopped off before me because I had asthma as a kid and still suffer from dandruff.
Substantive outcomes are one thing- e.g. everybody getting their head chopped off so as to be resurrected- but procedures to achieve those outcomes may be just or unjust. Consider Djikstra's dining philosophers. They have agreed where to sit and what they will have to eat and drink. However, there is a shortage of spoons and so they need to devise a rule for cutlery sharing. It turns out there is no 'canonical' rule which everybody would agree to. It is a mathematical fact that they will starve to death- even if they each live for one trillion years- if they first try to find an equitable rule for cutlery sharing. This is known as the 'concurrency' or 'race hazard' problem.
Around the same time as Djikstra's work was becoming known, Kuhn propounded the 'no neutral algorithm' thesis. Essentially, if you have more than one policy objective then there is no 'neutral' or 'canonical' or 'natural' way to settle on a algorithm (i.e. rule or deterministic decision procedure) to choose the policy instrument. McKelvey's Chaos theorem makes essentially the same point. In a multi-dimensional decision space 'agenda control' can settle on any outcome however bad. But all this is obvious. The number of policy instruments should be at least equal to the number of policy objectives. You may get lucky and kill two birds with one stone. But you can't do environmental protection with that stone. You can only kill a bird for your dinner. True, you can decide to kill older birds or ones which are 'invasive' or something of that sort. But that involves restricting stone throwing. It is a separate problem which has to be dealt with separately.
The above considerations are all blindingly obvious. They don't bother us much in real life because two types of 'uncorrelated symmetries' obtain-
1) what went before in our own society which we know works up to a point, and
2) what is working well in a society which used to be like ours but is now better off because of some institutional change they have made. We can't choose between abstract conceptions which have no 'concrete model' because of 'value plurality'- i.e. absent any empirical evidence, we can't say which value matters more in that it must be lexically preferenced before any value can be realized- e.g. if we have nothing to eat we won't value Beauty- but we can choose between concrete models which we know are feasible because at least we know making the choice won't prevent us from being alive.
Obviously, if you are really itching to kill some particular group of peeps and to grab their cool stuff, you could have a revolutionary theory of justice. Sen admits this-
To be sure, members of any polity can imagine how a gigantic and totally comprehensive reorganization might be brought about, moving them at one go to the ideal of a fully just society.
In Sen's ancestral East Bengal, this involved killing or chasing away Hindus like himself. Whatever happens in Mamta's Bengal, Sen should be safe enough in Amrika.
A no-nonsense transcendental theory can serve, in this sense, as something like the grand revolutionary’s ‘one-shot handbook’. But that marvellously radical handbook would not be much invoked in the actual debates on justice in which we are ever engaged.
Why not? Soviet Jurisprudence was based on such a handbook. The rule was simple. Look at the class origin of the two people involved in a dispute. Kill the more bourgeois one.
Anglo Saxon jurisprudence tended to go the other way. The guy with deeper pockets and better lawyers wins. But nobody gets killed. Sad.
Questions on how to reduce the manifold injustices that characterize the world tend to define the domain of application of the analysis of justice;
Nope. The domain of application of justice begins where that of policy leaves off. There is a doctrine of 'political question' or 'executive privilege'. Policy may tackle injustice in diverse ways one of which is passing laws on the basis of which people can approach the courts.
the jump to transcendental perfection does not belong there.
But it can do in policy. There have been Revolutionary regimes which applied 'one-shot handbooks'. They may also have had 'Revolutionary Courts' to supplement the activities of the apparatchiks.
It is also worth noting here the general analytical point, already noted in the Introduction, that the diagnosis of injustice does not demand a unique identification of ‘the just society’,
nor does it involve anything else. I'm going bald. That's unjust! You may say 'it is your karmic punishment for making fun of baldies in a previous life.' My reply is 'karma is unjust! Fuck you karma! Fucky you very much!'
On the other hand, there is always some unique identification of 'the just society' which can be assigned to any particular 'diagnosis of injustice'. Clearly, a just society would do genetic engineering and perform interventions such that people like myself would be spared the dreadful fate of male pattern baldness. Also our dicks would be bigger.
since a univocal diagnosis of the deficiency of a society with, say, large-scale hunger, or widespread illiteracy, or rampant medical neglect, can go with very different identifications of perfectly just social arrangements in other respects.
But this is the same type of injustice as arises when some men go bald. Only if there is an easily available remedy which is being callously or maliciously withheld does an 'injustice' arise. A society where everybody is starving may have perfectly just social arrangements. Indeed, that might be the problem. Less Justice, more food should be their motto.
The fact is Sen has no 'transcendental' - i.e. a priori- reason for saying things which he doesn't like (e.g. widespread illiteracy) are unjust. There was a time when everybody was illiterate because writing hadn't been invented. How could there be an a priori reason for concluding the thing was a 'manifest injustice'? The day may come when we have rocket ships which can take us to other Galaxies. Do we really suffer a 'manifest injustice' because they are not currently available?
Saying 'I wish we had x' does not mean x is required for Justice to prevail.
Even if we think of transcendence not in the gradeless terms of ‘right’ social arrangements, but in the graded terms of the ‘best’ social arrangements,
We would have done nothing meaningful. Right means best means optimal means totes cool in this context.
the identification of the best does not, in itself, tell us much about the full grading, such as how to compare two non-best alternatives,
Only if we don't want it to. The thing is easy enough in practice. We agree I should marry Beyonce coz she be hot and has lots of money. Sadly, my choice is between an elderly Russian hooker who wants a British passport because she does not like Putin and an equally elderly Japanese hooker who believes she is the reincarnation of Sada Abe. She too wants a British passport but only because she thinks she can become the Leader of the Conservative Party by killing me and slicing off my penis and carrying it around with her till the Daily Mail backs her Prime Ministerial ambitions. In this case, it is obvious that I should plump for the Russian hooker. Fuck. I left it too late. The lady has set her cap on Rahul Baba.
nor does it specify a unique ranking with respect to which the best stands at the pinnacle; indeed, the same best may go with a great many different rankings at the same pinnacle.
Or not, if that's how we want things. Pareto's revolution was to show utility was immeasurable. He proposed to replace it with ophelimity which means the same thing in Greek. One may simply speak of 'profit' or the Von Neumann 'payoff' vector.
Pareto's point is that there is no pinnacle. There are merely rankings for specific purposes. If you have more than one purpose, there is no non-arbitrary ranking. But, that's cool coz uncorrelated asymmetries obtain and so the bourgeois strategy- which is eusocial in a certain sense- will always have some arbitrary element e.g. who owns what or which 'value' must be lexically preferenced for survival. Thus, at times, discourse on justice must be interrupted because it is vital to survival to quit the room because I just farted. At other times, it may be vital to discourse on justice because the alternative is listening to me talk about my love life.
To consider an analogy used earlier, the fact that a person regards the Mona Lisa as the best picture in the world does not reveal how she would rank a Picasso against a Van Gogh.
Yes it does. She may say different but fuck should we listen to her for? My point is that mathematical considerations of 'uniqueness' or 'canonicity' or 'naturality' etc. are themselves arbitrary. There is no Archimedian point from which category theory can itself become categorical. A person may say 'this choice sequence' is mine but our choice sequence can assign a different choice sequence to them. That person may choose to adopt the one we propose. Only if we are considering a bunch of overlapping law-less choice sequences could we even dream of saying any ranking is 'informative'. But who is to say what is or isn't a law-less choice sequence? If the thing is 'law-like' then it is defeasible- i.e. could be improved in some non-deterministic way.
It is quite possible that when I become a gazillionaire, I get the best Art expert to buy me a bunch of pictures. I like Moaning Liza and mention Pickarso. The expert says 'No. You want Van Gogh and Klimt. Also you iz Gay. Stop pretending. ' I discover soon enough that the dude is right.
The search for transcendental justice can be an engaging intellectual exercise in itself,
if you find wanking too cognitively challenging- sure.
but –irrespective of whether we think of transcendence in terms of the gradeless ‘right’
Which is what we do when we think our Mummy is the bestest Mumsy-Wumsy in the World.
or in the framework of the graded ‘best’ – it does not tell us much about the comparative merits of different societal arrangements.
Because nothing tells us much save by arbitrary stipulation or by reason of a pre-existing 'uncorrelated asymmetry'.
Consider the following. It was published 13 years ago as the description of a book titled 'Against Injustice- the new Economics of Amartya Sen.' Has that new Economics actually achieved any victory 'against injustice'? Did it end the unjust aspects of the 'war on terror'? Did it combat the unjust aspects of Obama or Europe's or Japan's plan of recovery from the financial crash? Was it worthwhile in any way whatsoever?
Traditional theories of justice as formulated by political philosophers, jurists and economists have all tended to see injustice as simply a breach of justice, a breakdown of the normal order.the international dimension of justice, which for Rawls cannot involve redistributive social justice, (is) a conclusion his critics regard as perverse. If inequalities within societies need to be justified,
they don't, if is obvious that without those inequalities there would be mass emigration of the talented or mass immigration of the parasitic or criminal
surely the far greater inequalities that exist between societies cannot be ignored.
Those inequalities are not ignored. You look around and see a country doing better than your own and try to emulate it. You may hire a stupid Bengali but only so as to laugh at the little man when he tries to teach you economics as if it weren't common knowledge that his people are all starving to death or getting ethnically cleansed by better fed Muslims.
Rawls responded to such criticisms in an important partial revision to his theory, The Law of Peoples. His definition of a "people'' requires that it have a moral nature and political institutions; he argues that there is no "global people'' and therefore no basis for global redistributive justice. His critics have not been convinced.
But those critics did not split their pay-check with the custodial staff or even their own teaching assistants. They only pretended to be into 'redistributive justice' so as to get paid.
Sen is also much engaged by the problem of global justice,
He was secretly robbing the rich countries so as to feed his own starving people. Batman caught him but let him go after Superman intervened with an impassioned speech about the true meaning of 'Truth, Justice, and the American Way.'
but he sees this as symptomatic of much wider problems with Rawls's project, and The Idea of Justice can be understood as an attempt to respond to these wider problems. Indeed, the book almost takes the form of an implicit dialogue with Rawls and the Rawlsians, and it is worth noting that Sen has dedicated this work to John Rawls.
Rawls was White and came from a rich country to which Sen eagerly immigrated to so as to earn more money.
To follow Sen's argument it is necessary to spend a little time setting out the shape of the Rawlsian project. The starting point is that whereas much political philosophy in the mid-twentieth century was concerned with language and the meaning and use of words, Rawls harked back to an older tradition by focusing on substance.
That older tradition was Racist. It said that Indians and Africans were savages. No crime is committed when a more advanced people exterminate or enslave savages. Even Bertrand Russell believed that a war against less developed people was always just. However, by the mid-Fifties- when Sen was at Cambridge- he said the following on the BBC-
The acquisition of the Western hemisphere by white men was one of the causes of the supremacy in world affairs which they enjoyed for some centuries. They can hardly recover this supremacy by new colonizing efforts after the old pattern, because there are no longer large regions that are empty or nearly empty awaiting the coming of vigorous and enterprising men. In quite recent times the words “colonial” and “colonialism” have acquired new meanings. They are now habitually used to denote regions where the governing class is white but not Russian, and the bulk of the population is of some non-white race. Western ideals of freedom have been propagated throughout the world by Western instructors and have produced an unwillingness to submit to alien domination which in former times was either non-existent or very much weaker.
Naughty, naughty Mr. Nehru. If only your Daddy hadn't sent you to Harrow, India wouldn't have turned into such a shithole.
Although only military conquest compelled Gaul to become part of the Roman Empire, its population, after conquest, acquiesced completely and did not welcome the separation from Rome that came in the fifth century.
What is the sub-text here? Gauls were Celts. They were White. Whites naturally emulate the superior culture. Darkies get a bit of education and then get rid of their White masters with the result that they soon revert to cannibalism.
National independence, which has become an obstacle to colonization, seems to modern men a natural human aspiration, but it is, in fact, very modern and largely a product of education.
In darkies. Whites naturally get civilized when they come in contact with a more developed type of White. Darkies may get a bit of education which turns them against their White masters but the result is horrible.
If the human race is to survive, nationalism will have to come to terms with a new ideal—namely, internationalism. I do not see how this new ideal, which will concede to each nation internal autonomy, but not freedom for external aggression, can be reconciled with the formation of new colonies, because empty regions can no longer be found. Perhaps the Antarctic continent will be made habitable, and this might prove an exception, but I think it is the only one
Russell was clearly bat-shit crazy. But he did represent the grand Whig enlightenment tradition.
Throughout history colonies have been among the most powerful agents for the spread of the arts and science and ways of life that constitute civilization.
Ivy League Universities must take over that role. Otherwise them darkies will eat us.
For the future, it seems that mankind will have to learn to do without this ancient and well-tried method.
Coz darkies got a bit of education and turned on their just and proper masters.
I think mankind will have to depend, not upon force or domination, but upon the inherent attractiveness of a civilized way of life.
As opposed to sex, drugs and rock and roll.
The Romans when they overcame the Greeks were at a much lower level of civilization than those whom they defeated,
not really. The Greeks had a more ornate literary culture and, thanks to Alexander, had created a big Empire which however had disintegrated. Still, there were some very luxurious Hellenistic courts where Kings married their sisters and then the sisters fucked any virile invader who would kill off their hubby-brother or Uncle-Daddy.
but they found Greek civilization so attractive that, from a cultural standpoint, it was the Greeks who were the victors.
In Byzantium- sure. Then the fucking Muslims turned up. Sad. Still, the Teutonic races did well out of the Western Empire.
Those among us who value culture and a humane way of life must school ourselves to learn from the Greeks rather than from the Romans.
More pederasty, less of this business of building aqueducts.
If this is to be done successfully, we shall have to eliminate those harsher features of our way of life which have repelled many alien nations with whom we have had contact.
Stop lynching uppity niggers. They are too stupid to understand it is for their own good. Why not make them teach Social Choice theory instead? Since they are too stupid to understand Russel's paradox, they will waste their lives while we have a good laugh at them.
Missionary and soldier have hitherto played equal parts in the diffusion of civilization. For the future, it must be the missionary—taking this term in a large sense—who will alone be able to carry on the work.
This is how Sen was seen. He had been taken to Cambridge and converted into a model nigger. Hopefully, he would return to preach the faith. That way, Whitey would remain in charge though, no doubt, the darkies would be too stupid to notice. Justice must blind those whom it can not otherwise serve.
Returning to the Carnegie Council article we find that whereas the analytical philosophy of the Fifties was about Russel's type of justice- except it couldn't say so in so many words lest the wogs take umbrage- Rawls had a more moralistic, or Christian, end in view. His critique of Utilitarianism is similar to Aristotle's objection to Plato's understanding of all types of association being alike and only being different in degree. Instead, the Koinonia Politike- or political community- of its essence must concern what is incommensurable or essentially diverse. However, 'distinctiveness of persons' does not matter provided there is 'transferable utility'- i.e. you can pay off or threaten distinct persons to stop being so fucking distinct and just get with the program already.
Thus, while most philosophers asked how the word "justice'' is generally used, Rawls is much more ambitious: he wants to be able to say that such-and-such a social arrangement is or is not "just.''
Rawls thinks there is a 'basic structure' to Human Life. There isn't. Aristotle was wrong. Darwin was right. Only the fitness landscape matters. But it is radically uncertain. Public deliberation can't reduce Knightian uncertainty. However the market can provide hedges and mechanisms of various sorts one of which is the 'Stationary Bandit' that is the State.
His aim is to
shit higher than his arsehole. The poor fool thought he understood maths stuff. He didn't.
create "ideal theory,'' a standard against which actual policy choices, when they arise, can be judged. He begins by defining justice as "fairness''
but was ignorant of mathsy 'fair division' under Knightian uncertainty. The answer is 'get insurance against calamities. Don't agree that everybody should get the same cake slice. Think of the moral hazard.'
and then, in A Theory of Justice, describes a procedure for cashing out this notion. Employing the well-worn concept of a "social contract,'' but with some twists of his own, he generates the principles for establishing just institutions in a society: equal liberty for all,
In which case, there is a 'hold-out' problem. Why sign on to a contract without maximizing consideration received? Rawls might say 'as a reasonable person you should want to do this' but we reply 'you eat dog turds. That's totes unreasonable dude. Fuck is the matter with you?'
fair equality of opportunity,
which only an omniscient God could ensure. I could have had the opportunity to be Prime Minister of India if only Rajiv had married me instead of Sonia.
and material differences to be justified only on the basis that they benefit the least advantaged.
a movable feast. Rawls forgot about disutility. At the margin, there is someone in work who will quit her job if the entitlement of the 'least advantaged' rises. The problem here is that whereas monetary reward is easily verifiable, disutility isn't.
These are quite radical principles (although socialists object that they still allow for substantial differentials) and they are taken to be of universal relevance.
Did Rawls divide up his pay packet with the least advantaged on his campus? Did anybody? If not, the thing had no fucking relevance whatsoever.
In his earlier work, Rawls holds that only liberal societies organized on these lines can be described as just, although later, in The Law of Peoples, he does acknowledge that some non-liberal societies could be, if not actually just, at least "well ordered'' and "decent.''
Very kind of him I'm sure. To be fair, some non-liberal societies have acknowledged that Rawls would make a decent punching bag in a well ordered world.
Sen accepts the general proposition that justice should be understood as fairness,
Though that is not how it is understood. A thing may be fair but unjust and vice versa. Two strangers on a train may decide to kill each other's wives so both have an alibi. It would be unfair if one reneged after the other killed his spouse. But it would be contrary to justice for a Court to compel him to complete his side of the bargain.
but finds many features of Rawls's model troubling
As an economist he should have simply said 'behind the veil of ignorance, we choose collective insurance same as we do in real life. That way, if the worst happens, we are covered.'
—and troubling for reasons that students of international ethics will have no difficulty in recognizing and sympathizing with. First, there is the contractarian nature of Rawls's work, which requires us to see justice as the product of an agreement among members of a clearly defined society; Sen agrees with those critics of Rawls who find this problematic under modern conditions.
It is crazy shit. Firstly, such a contract would be 'incomplete' because of Knightian uncertainty and thus 'anything goes'. Secondly, there would be a hold-out problem. Anyway, absent consideration passing, no contract is binding. I agree that we must all suck off homeless dudes. But after laughing heartily at your face which is dripping with cum, I refuse to do any such thing. There is no actual contract. No consideration passed. Any way, the thing was repugnant.
Rawls assumes for the purpose of his model that societies are discrete, self-sufficient, self-contained entities into which people are born and which they leave by death. This is clearly not the case in reality, and, even if it were, decisions made within one society can have serious consequences for others—one only has to consider the issue of environmental degradation to see that this is so. The point is that if justice is defined as the product of a contract, the interests of non-contractors—foreigners, future generations, perhaps nature itself—may well be neglected.
This is why justice is not defined as the result of a contract. Positive law is law as command. Either the thing is enforced coercively or it is a dead letter.
This is actually a common criticism of Rawls and Rawlsians, and Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge have suggested that perhaps the whole world should be regarded as a "society'' for the purposes of this social contract.
International law does exist for some purposes but it grants legal personality to a variety of entities while denying it in an arbitrary manner to certain other similar entities.
As Sen points out, however, this will not do—the idea of society presumes a degree of global unity that simply does not exist.
For some purposes it may do to a superior degree than national unity in specific cases.
It is the very idea of basing justice on a contract that is problematic, not the details of the contract.
So, embrace Legal Positivism. That's the sensible course.
Rawlsian critics of Rawls are generally much less concerned with the second feature of A Theory of Justice that exercises Sen—namely, Rawls's emphasis on the importance of "ideal theory,'' or what Sen calls a "transcendental'' approach to justice, the desire to create an account of justice that is universal and necessary, that applies everywhere, and at all times.
Individuals are welcome to have or lack this. The thing makes no difference to anybody- except a few pedants swindling their students by pretending to teach them something useful or valuable.
Sen doubts that a single account of this kind is either possible or necessary. There are many possible theories of justice. In the beginning of the book he tells the engaging story of three children, Ann, Bob, and Carla, who are quarreling over the fate of a flute (p. 12). Ann claims the flute on the basis that she is the only one who can play it, Bob claims it because he has no other toys to play with whereas the others do, and Carla's claim is based on the fact that she made the flute in the first place. All of these statements are taken to be true,
Why? Only one is objectively verifiable and represents an 'uncorrelated asymmetry'. We can get evidence that Carla made the flute. We can't be sure, given enough practice, that Ann is the only one who can play it or that Bob will always remain poor and deprived of toys. Thus only one claim can be taken to be true. The 'bourgeois strategy' prevails.
and Sen's point is that one can produce intuitively plausible reasons for giving the flute to any one of the children. Utilitarians—and for different reasons, Aristotelians—would favor Ann,
No. They would favor Carla. The disutility of making the flute must be balanced by the utility of getting to dispose of it. Aristotelians have no reason to favor the idle. If Ann wants the flute let her pay for it.
10 egalitarians Bob,
till Carla complains that now she has no toys and so Bob must be deprived of the flute though Carla is then forced to give it back and so on and so forth.
libertarians Carla, but the real point here is that there is no reason to assume, as Rawls and most of his followers do, that we have to decide which of these answers is the right one. Sometimes there is simply a plurality of "right'' answers.
Not in this case. There was only one 'uncorrelated asymmetry' of a verifiable, common knowledge, type because of 'Knightian Uncertainty'. Carla, unable to sell her flute, may become a sublime flute player. Bob may inherit vast wealth from his Uncle, who unbeknownst to us, had just dropped dead. Ann may already be infected with a deadly virus.
The idea that there is only one kind of just society—a liberal society defined by principles set out in Rawls's model—and that all others represent a falling off from this ideal does not seem a plausible response to the pluralism that undoubtedly exists in the modern world.
But that pluralism ceases to be a problem if 'transferable utility' exists- i.e. people can be paid off or threatened till they get with the program.
Staying with the critique of "ideal theory,'' Sen also contests the practical value of establishing an ideal in this way.
Actually, in the absence of any agreement to the contrary, a Court would award equal shares. This could be changed in a Rawlsian direction- i.e. more for the worst off- so the 'ideal' has cash value.
Sen's shite has none.
In defense of ideal theory it is generally argued that an account of what a just world would look like gives us a yardstick against which to measure particular policies, but Sen observes that this is much less helpful than it might seem at first sight. In practice, we measure one possible policy against another possible policy, and not against an ideal.
No we don't. We do what is in our interest. True, if we are paid to do some measuring then we pretend to do some measuring. But we would do the same if we were paid to do grok some supposed ideal.
Sen uses another simple analogy to make the point: if asked to say whether a van Gogh or a Picasso is the better painting, it hardly helps to be told that da Vinci's Mona Lisa is the best painting of all time (p. 101).
Nonsense! We have a simple rule. Art peaked in da Vinci's time. Van Gogh is closer to that peak than Pickarso.
This is not a particularly good analogy, since what constitutes a "better'' painting is unclear, but the point Sen is trying to get across is clear enough—namely, that pursuing justice is actually about making comparisons; we ask ourselves whether this policy will make the world a somewhat better place as opposed to that policy, and an ideal world contributes very little, if anything, to this process of comparison.
Rubbish! If we are being paid to do comparisons and we know the guy paying us has a fetish for one type of shite then we use that information strategically.
The third point Sen raises against Rawls and the Rawlsians concerns the importance they place on establishing just institutions.
Why establish institutions? Why not just sit under a tree talking? Whitey should stop establishing things. Just sit under tree listening to nice Bengali babus till you starve to death.
The basic idea here is that if you can get the institutions right you do not need to worry about actual human behavior;
Very true. If the institution where you teach is properly conducted, your students won't stab you. Sen left India for the UK just when students in India were getting to be a little too stabby stabby.
essentially, the assumption is that, as Kant put it, even a "race of devils'' could, if intelligent, produce just institutions and a just society.
Kant was German. His idea of a just society would still be a fucking nightmare to everybody else.
This position is, of course, particularly problematic at the international level, where the institutional structure is weak by comparison with the sovereign state.
People in sovereign states still get stabbed. It is doubtful that Rawls went around insulting Mafiosi or Hell's Angels.
This has led some Rawlsians to propose highly implausible, and probably undesirable, shifts toward global government (consider, for example, Thomas Pogge's notion of a "democracy panel,'' which would determine whether particular regimes were democratic and thus deserve to be treated as sovereign and entitled to dispose of their natural resources),
Pogge has now been condemned by hundreds of fellow ethicists for sexual harassment. Apparently, he was trying to achieve Global Justice by getting his dick into the vagina's of people from poor countries in return for career advancement.
This is perfectly consistent with earlier views of how civilization is spread by White dicks. The women who objected to it were, as Pogge said, 'petit bourgeois' 'feminists'.
while other political philosophers, most notably Thomas Nagel, have recently declared that global justice is simply impossible to achieve given the implausibility of such schemes.
Nagel may feel he is too old to achieve global justice with his dick.
Here Sen is particularly innovative and illuminating. Drawing on the Sanskrit literature on ethics and jurisprudence, he outlines a distinction between niti and nyaya; both of these terms can be translated as "justice,''
Niti is policy. Changes in sentencing policy may be decided by legislatures. However, justice is separate and independent.
but they summarize rather different notions (pp. 20ff.). Niti refers to correct procedures, formal rules, and institutions;
Not in Indian or Anglo-American jurisdictions. The Judiciary must decide for itself what is or isn't 'due process' or in conformity with the 'basic structure' of the constitution.
nyaya is a broader, more inclusive concept that looks to the world that emerges from the institutions we create, rather than focusing directly on the institutions themselves.
Policy focuses on outcomes. Justice does not. It resolves conflicting claims- e.g. of guilt or innocence- but without caring what the real world would be. Thus a surgeon may be sent to the gallows for killing a criminal to harvest his organs to save the lives of good people.
Sen sees this distinction as visible in European thought. Such theorists as Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and, most recently, Rawls look to the establishment of correct institutions,
because these guys were doing political philosophy. They weren't economists.
while such writers as Adam Smith, Wollstonecraft, Bentham, Marx, and Mill take a more comparative approach, looking holistically at social realizations that are certainly the product of institutions, but also of other factors, including human behavior.
An absolute monarchy can pursue laissez faire or feminist policies just as a democracy could be Marxist or employ a Benthamite Social Planner.
There was a small market for books of a certain type and some pedants or pamphleteers made a little money of it. Sadly, Rawls and Sen and Pogge and Habermas had little understanding of the world in which they lived in. They were merely pedants who were part of a credentialized Ponzi scheme which has now collapsed.
Smith's work in The Theory of Moral Sentiments is particularly important to Sen because, from within this second Enlightenment tradition that Sen values, it offers an approach to the notion of "fairness'' that is highly attractive.
It was certainly highly attractive to the good folk who conquered Bengal and traded in black slaves.
Whereas Rawls employs an elaborate fiction in order to arrive at his notion of fairness (contractors are supposed to choose principles under a hypothetical "veil of ignorance'' wherein they are ignorant of certain key facts about their own position), Smith asks instead, what would an "impartial spectator,'' someone (or several someones, because there could actually be numerous impartial spectators surveying the scene from different vantage points) observing from the outside, make of a particular state of affairs?
Nothing of interest precisely because they have no skin in the game. Obviously, if what they say is not to our liking then we accuse them of being highly partial. Why would they want to stand around to dispute our accusations? When Sen was accused of misconduct did he really want all sorts of 'impartial observers' turning up to testify? No. He stood on his rights.
This is much less cumbersome and complicated a notion than that of the original position, and it has the added advantage of not pretending to be a precise exercise.
Actually, the 'original position' yields a precise outcome which is the same as the fundamental principle of all contract law- not just Social Contract theory- viz. there is no contract without passing of consideration. In other words, everybody says 'either pay me immediately or fuck off. I'm not signing shit'.
It invites us to trust our capacity to identify injustice, if we can but project ourselves out of our natural partiality for our own interests.
This is Shantideva's 'paratman parivartana'- or 'swopping selves'. If you aint a Yogi of some very advanced type, you can't do it & you also can't know anyone who can. In other words, like Rawls's proposal, Sen's proposal falls at the first hurdle.
Throughout The Idea of Justice, Sen invites us to engage in public reasoning in pursuit of justice,
this is done by lawyers in courts- not shitheads teaching shite.
not by reference to some kind of ideal, but in very practical terms,
which lawyers are briefed about by their clients. Confidentiality means they have access to the truth in a manner the rest of us do not.
comparing the impact of particular policies, and reflecting on the way things are done in the name of impartiality and fairness. He invites us to consider social arrangements as wholes, to assess their impact in broad comprehensive terms without becoming obsessed with procedures or formal rules—in short, to embrace nyaya rather than niti,
Nyaya means 'Justice'. Niti means 'policy'- i.e. stuff which political leaders decide. Replace the Executive with the Judiciary & the result would be as disastrous as substituting advocates for surgeon in hospital theatres.
Smith rather than Kant.
Fuck Kant. He was a kretin.
This kind of public reasoning can no longer be confined to particular societies but must now be global in scope and range. Fortunately, the very interdependence that demands that we take into account the interests of others also helps us to see things from their perspective. Sen recognizes that this will not be easy. There is no ideal to guide our discussions, and the comparisons he invites us to make will cause us to question our own interests, which is never comfortable. Still, in his own work, and indeed in his own life, he offers us a paradigm of what it means to be a global impartial spectator.
Sen, like Arrow-Debreu, makes crazy assumptions such that nobody would need to learn human language or get an education. Everything that can be known or done is already coded into the vector of future prices. I don't need to DM threatening to beat you up for getting my fiancee to elope with Rahul Baba. There would be some sort of instantaneous emoji denoting this which would be beamed directly into your brain in return for my collecting some dog poop for Amartya Sen to eat.
Arrow-Debreu world is anything goes. The real world isn't because information asymmetries are uncorrelated. This enables us to say that proposals for 'different societal arrangements' are mischievous. It would be unjust to pursue them in the same way that it would be unjust to bite our own heads off so as to protest Uranus. This does not mean that the feasible trajectories for our Society can't be graded. They can- but not now, never now. The Owl of Minerva takes wing only after dusk has fallen.
