Pakistani logic is based on 'ex falso quodlibet'- i.e. the notion that since anything at all can be deduced from a stupid lie, it therefore follows that one can claim to know everything by proclaiming an ipse dixit lie of the stupidest sort. This is fine so long as it is done in a circumscribed and self-interested manner. 'Restricted comprehension' is pragmatic and utilitarian. But, if you drink your own Kool-Aid and decide you are a Messiah of some universal sort, the result is you get crucified by your own people or else lead them into Gehenna. Indian logic, on the other hand, dictates that knowledge is merely the burden those who are serviceable must carry till they become useless and thus are released from its fetters.
Rushdie, accepting a peace prize from the Germans, opts for Pakistani logic when he speaks of
two jackals: Karataka, whose name meant Cautious,
It means a crow- a bird associated with artful theft or noisy denunciation. Crows may be cautious, but the jackal thus named has a thievish, sly, poison tongued, disposition. Prudence counsels against cultivating such qualities. Still, under some unnatural circumstances, such qualities may be rewarded rather than punished.
and Damanaka, whose name meant Daring.
No. The word itself refers to a particular fragrant plant. In this context, it means a successful sort of schemer.
They were in the second rank of the retinue of the lion king Pingalaka,
a cowardly lion frightened by the bellowing of a bull abandoned in a forest by a wealthy merchant's feckless servants
but they were ambitious and cunning. One day, the lion king was frightened by a roaring noise in the forest, which the jackals knew was the voice of a runaway bull, nothing for a lion to be scared of. They visited the bull and persuaded him to come before the lion and declare his friendship. The bull was scared of the lion, but he agreed, and so the lion king and the bull became friends, and the jackals were promoted to the first rank by the grateful monarch.
So, this story is about fear on the one hand, and avarice on the other. What does this remind us off?
Rushdie should have shown a proper caution when it came to Islam. So should we all. Avarice proved our undoing- as counting the costs of the 'War on Terror' we are all obliged to recognize.
Unfortunately, the lion and the bull began to spend so much time lost in conversation that the lion stopped hunting and so the animals in the retinue were starving. So the jackals persuaded the king that the bull was plotting against him, and they persuaded the bull that the lion was planning to kill him. So the lion and the bull fought, and the bull was killed, and there was plenty of meat, and the jackals rose even higher in the king’s regard because they had warned him of the plot. They rose in the regard of everyone else in the forest as well, except, of course, for the poor bull, but that didn’t matter, because he was dead, and providing everyone with an excellent lunch.
The bull was out of place in the forest. He had been abandoned there and left to fend for himself. He should have got the fuck out and found a new master who would look after him.
What is Rushdie saying to the Germans? Don't muck around with Islam. Remember what happened when you thought despoiling the Jews was a good idea?
Rushdie himself was doing fine till he thought the Holy Prophet could be as safely attacked as some Indian or Pakistani politician or as American foreign policy.
This, approximately, is the frame-story of On Causing Dissension Among Friends
this is 'bheda' as an 'upay'- i.e. a policy expedient designed to split up a hostile coalition
, the first of the five parts of the book of animal fables known as the Panchatantra. What I have always found attractive about the Panchatantra stories is that many of them do not moralise.
No. The Vyavahara Sutras regulate conduct but that conduct is context specific. The wealthy merchant observes proper rituals and pursues wealth by proper means- that is Aachaar or Vyavahaar and represents eusebia or dharma. But he does it in a proper setting. He follows good 'Niti' or policy. Thus, he does not linger in the forest but proceeds to the town where wealth is properly won. The bull should have made his way out of the forest instead of becoming best mates with the lion. There is nothing wrong with friendship but it is not politic to make friends with creatures who habitually feed off the flesh of your kind.
Rushdie didn't understand that animal stories from Aesop etc, are didactic with respect to policy, not ethics or customary morality. They feature 'Lokayata' (practical reason) maxims which show that Sittlichkeit or customary morality is only applicable within their own appropriate contexts.
Like the Mahabharata, or the Arthashastra, the Panchatantra is game theoretic- i.e. refers to strategic behaviour. In the above case, the bull and the lion, though from different worlds and with different interests, may enjoy each other's company. But this is not a 'Nash equilibrium'. The Lion is actually better off by eating the herbivore which made the mistake of lingering in the forest. The best move for the bull, irrespective of the actions of the wild animals of the jungle, was to get out of the fucking jungle not stick around in a place where his sort of beast got eaten.
They do not preach goodness or virtue or modesty or honesty or restraint.
They preach common sense, without which virtue fucks up big time.
Cunning and strategy and amorality often overcome all opposition.
Only if that opposition is stooooopid. If you are a bull from a cow worshipping society don't fuck off to the forest to hang out with lions.
The good guys don’t always win. (It’s not even always clear who the good guys are.)
It is always ultimately becomes clear who was doing good to us. If you are smart, you can work out who this is likely to be as you go along. Being smart and prudent and decent can result in your getting a reputation for being smart, prudent, and decent with the result that it becomes easier to ally with other smart, prudent, decent peeps.
For this reason they seem, to the modern reader, uncannily contemporary – because we, the modern readers, live in a world of amorality and shamelessness and treachery and cunning, in which bad guys everywhere have often won.
Ancient readers lived in a nice world. We live in a fucking horrible world. That is why reading ancient books about the ancient world feels uncannily contemporary. Rushdie's Pakistani logic is impeccable.
I have always been inspired by mythologies, folktales and fairytales, not because they contain miracles – talking animals or magic fishes – but because they encapsulate truth.
Wisdom. Not truth.
For example, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, which was an important inspiration for my novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet, can be told in fewer than 100 words, yet it contains, in compressed form, mighty questions about the relationship between art, love and death. It asks: can love, with the help of art, overcome death?
No. Don't be silly. Science, however, may one day permit Dr. Frankenstein to resurrect his bride. She fucks off with Dracula. Sad.
But perhaps it answers: doesn’t death, in spite of art, overcome love?
That's divorce, not death. People still love spouses who passed away. Rushdie has much to learn about human beings.
Or else it tells us that art takes on the subjects of love and death and transcends both by turning them into immortal stories.
No it doesn't. Art does not want to transcend love. It is not the case that Romeo & Juliet is Shakespeare's prolegomenon to Kantian shite.
Those 100 words contain enough profundity to inspire 1,000 novels.
Shite ones, sure.
... what does the world of fable have to tell us about peace?
Nothing. The ruling class was trained in martial arts. Keeping the peace means being able to kick ass.
The news is not very good. Homer tells us peace comes after a decade of war when everyone we care about is dead and Troy has been destroyed.
No he doesn't. Wars get prolonged if warriors do stupid shit. But, Helen- whom we care about- and Odysseus and so forth, do survive.
The Norse myths tell us peace comes after Ragnarök, the Twilight of the Gods,
No. It says the Earth is destroyed after it. But it rises again and the cycle recommences.
when the gods destroy their traditional foes but are also destroyed by them. The Mahābhārata and Ramayana tell us peace comes at a bloody price.
Everybody understands that blood is shed during a war. When it ends there is peace. But having a superior threat point means there need be no fucking war. Peace comes at the price of having a kick ass standing army. This needn't take up more than three or four percent of National Income.
The Indian epics show that there can be very long periods of perfect peace under well conducted Empires where the warrior class is cohesive and excel at kicking ass.
And the Panchatantra tells us that peace is only achieved through treachery.
Fuck off! It shows game theoretic stuff like 'Byzantine generals' which is about avoiding catastrophic failure and arises even in engineering, O.R, and Political Economy's mechanism design. Rushdie studied stupid shit at Uni and then spent the rest of his life writing shite more puerile than the Panchatantra which is the first Sanskrit text kids read. After puberty they get into Kalidasa or, if wifey is difficult to please, the Kama Sutra.
But let’s abandon the legends of the past for a moment to look at this summer’s twin legends: I’m referring of course to the movie double-header known as Barbenheimer. The film Oppenheimer reminds us that peace only came after two atom bombs, Little Boy and Fat Man, were dropped on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki;
They cut short the war in the Pacific. But they didn't change the outcome. What nukes did, once the Soviets got them, was to create a game theoretic 'balance of terror' which kept the peace well enough. Von Neumann, whose mathematical work helped design the A-bomb, also formalized game theory. Not studying mathsy stuff of that sort meant that Rushdie was actually more ignorant and backward than any illiterate camel-jockey.
while the box-office monster called Barbie makes clear that unbroken peace and undiluted happiness, in a world where every day is perfect and every night is girls’ night, only exist in pink plastic.
But GI Joe was equally plastic. There could easily be a crossover between Barbie world and GI Joe world. My memory is that the Barbie Liberation Organization switched voice boxes between Barbies and GI Joes back in the early Nineties. The film 'Barb Wire', with Baywatch babe, Pamela Anderson- riffed on this theme.
Rushdie isn't just ignorant about India and Islam. He also doesn't get American popular culture.
And we speak of peace now, when war is raging, a war born of one man’s tyranny and greed for power
which man? The Supreme Guide? Don't be silly.
and conquest; and another bitter conflict has exploded in Israel and the Gaza Strip. Peace, right now, feels like a fantasy born of a narcotic smoked in a pipe.
No it doesn't. Kill enough Muslims- unless they have nukes- fast enough and frequently enough and we will have no problem.
Peace is a hard thing to make, and a hard thing to find.
Unless you have lots of nukes.
And yet we yearn for it, not only the great peace that comes at the end of war,
the small peace comes after hostilities cease. The great peace is death.
but also the little peace of our private lives, to feel ourselves at peace with ourselves, and the little world around us.
Soldiers, during a war, can have peaceful private lives.
It is one of our great values, a thing ardently to pursue.
Not at my age. Essentially, if your wife is still beating you after your hair has turned grey, it is likely that you are a little too ardent for your own good.
There is also something decidedly fabulist about the notion of peace prizes. But I like the idea that peace itself might be the prize, a whole year’s supply of it, delivered to your door, elegantly bottled. That’s an award I’d be very happy to receive. I am even thinking of writing a story about it, The Man Who Received Peace as a Prize.
War is costly. The vast majority of human beings receive this prize every day of their life. Rushdie, I suppose, has 'been in the wars' but only because he was too cheap to get a Mossad bodyguard or, at the least, an elderly lady with a pistol in her purse to watch his back.
I imagine it taking place in a small country town, at the village fair, maybe. There are the usual competitions, for the best pies and cakes, the best watermelons, the best vegetables; for guessing the weight of the farmer’s pig; for beauty, for song, and for dancing. A pedlar in a threadbare frock-coat arrives in a gaily painted horse-drawn wagon, looking a little like the itinerant confidence trickster Professor Marvel in The Wizard of Oz, and says that if he is allowed to judge the contests he will hand out the best rewards anyone has ever seen. “Best prizes!” he cries. “Roll up! Roll up!”
There is a problem here. Anybody at all would be welcome to hand out prizes to anyone he thought was deserving. The existing competitions go ahead and the existing prizes are awarded. Any member of the public can make additional or alternative awards.
And so they do roll up, the simple country folk, and the pedlar hands out small bottles to the various prizewinners, bottles labelled Truth, Beauty, Freedom, Goodness, and Peace. The villagers are disappointed. They would have preferred cash.
But they would get that in any case. Rushdie doesn't seem to get that the guy giving out the prizes gains a reputational or other benefit. The thing isn't purely altruistic.
And in the year following the fair, there are strange occurrences. After drinking the liquid in his bottle, the winner of the Truth prize begins to annoy and alienate his fellow villagers by telling them exactly what he really thinks of them.
This would have happened even if he had been drunk it by accident or if the thing was the curse of a bad fairy. Incidentally, I'm always telling home truths of a type which get me shunned.
The big disincentive to telling the truth is having your fucking head kicked in. What the winner should do is to act as an oracle or a witness of contracts or something of that sort. A purely alethic agent- or one who has a reputation as such- can be useful and can earn good money.
The Beauty, after drinking her award, becomes more beautiful, at least in her own eyes, but also insufferably vain.
I'm insufferably vain. I'm as ugly as shit. The more beautiful Beauty should move to a bigger town and marry the Duke.
Freedom’s licentious behaviour shocks many of her fellow villagers, who conclude that her bottle must have contained some powerful intoxicant.
But Freedom is not licentiousness. A slave could be a drunken lecher. A truly free man suffers no addiction.
Goodness declares himself to be a saint and of course after that everyone finds him unbearable.
Good people don't do that. On the other hand, I am very very good which is why I should be appointed Pope.
And Peace just sits under a tree and smiles. As the village is so full of troubles, this smile is extremely irritating, too.
So what? Lots of people are irritating. Anyway, kicking the peaceful fellow might be a good outlet for hostility and frustration.
A year later when the fair is held again, the pedlar returns, but is driven out of town. “Go away,” the villagers cry. “We don’t want those sorts of prizes. A rosette, a cheese, a piece of ham, or a red ribbon with a shiny medal hanging from it. Those are normal prizes. We want those instead.”
Nonsense! Each of those potions could be useful in particular contexts.
The difference between the Panchatantra and Rushdie's shite is that the former is properly thought through. Wisdom is based on 'Economia'- good management of a discretionary accommodative type.
I may or may not write that story. At the very least, it may serve lightheartedly to illustrate a serious point, which is that concepts we think we can all agree to be virtues can come across as vices, depending on your point of view, and on their effects in the real world.
No concept is a virtue. It is a different matter, there can be different conceptions of a particular virtue. What Rushdie has written is nonsense.
My fate, over the past many years, has been to drink from the bottle marked
'Prancing Ninny' not
Freedom, and therefore to write,
like a prancing ninny
without any restraint, those books that came to my mind to write. And now, as I am on the verge of publishing my 22nd, I have to say that on 21 of those 22 occasions, the elixir has been well worth drinking, and it has given me a good life doing the only work I ever wanted to do.
It has cost him an eye. He also had to spend a lot of time in hiding.
On the remaining occasion, namely the publication of my fourth novel, I learned – many of us learned – that freedom can create an equal and opposite reaction from the forces of unfreedom.
What Indians learned was that Rushdie was too stupid to play the Kashmir card so as to keep the Islamic knife from his throat
I learned, too, how to face the consequences of that reaction, and to continue, as best I could, to be as unfettered an artist as I had always wished to be.
He had wanted to be a Great (hyphenated) American Novelist. That is exactly what he got to be. It is only just and fair that a prancing ninny gain acclaim amongst infidels for shitting on his ancestral religion.
I learned, too, that many other writers and artists, exercising their freedom, also faced the forces of unfreedom, and that, in short, freedom can be a dangerous wine to drink.
What we learned was that writers and artists were narcissists with an infantile world view. The best prose is now produced exclusively by STEM subject mavens.
But that made it more necessary, more essential, more important to defend,
I suppose Zelensky is an artist who wrote much of his own material. He is defending freedom. Rushdie & Co are having a wank.
and I have done my best, along with a host of others, to defend it. I confess there have been times when I’d rather have drunk the Peace elixir and spent my life sitting under a tree wearing a blissful, beatific smile, but that was not the bottle the pedlar handed me.
There is a Nobel Peace Prize for those who have done something to reduce hostility and end conflict.
We live in a time I did not think I would see,
Rushdie was so stupid, he didn't get that writing a 'Rangila Rasul' type book would put his life in danger. He thought the Queen could send a gunboat to Iran and the Ayatollahs would grovel to her Britannic Majesty.
a time when freedom – and in particular, freedom of expression, without which the world of books could not exist – is everywhere under attack from reactionary,
as well as Communist
authoritarian,
as well as Anarchist
populist,
as well as elitist
demagogic, half-educated,
as opposed to 'epistocratic' or Straussian
narcissistic, careless voices;
his own
when places of education and libraries are subject to hostility and censorship; and when extremist religion and bigoted ideologies have begun to intrude in areas of life in which they do not belong.
White countries? Is that what Rushdie means? The trouble is that there's been a lot of 'coloured' immigration even into Germany.
And there are also progressive voices being raised in favour of a new kind of bien-pensant censorship, one that appears virtuous, and which many people, especially young people, have begun to see as a virtue.
Or as a way of gaining countervailing power over their teachers.
So freedom is under pressure from the left as well as the right, the young as well as the old. This is something new, made more complicated by our new tools of communication, the internet, on which well-designed pages of malevolent lies sit side by side with the truth, and it is difficult for many people to tell which is which; and our social media, where the idea of freedom is every day abused to permit, very often, a kind of online mob rule, which the billionaire owners of these platforms seem increasingly willing to encourage, and to profit by.
Rushdie is a millionaire who has profited by this sort of shite. Still, at least he got stabbed.
The outrage that was expressed after the attack on me was born of horror that
local Muslim nutters might slit our throat next
the core value of a free society had been viciously and ignorantly assaulted
After the War, Germany was partitioned and occupied. The core value of a free society was denied it with salutary results.
What do we do about free speech when it is so widely abused?
We should not listen to a fool like Rushdie. Free speech is a 'Hohfeldian immunity'. If its violation is a justiciable matter, then we need to see that remedies are more accessible and effective. Talking bollocks, as Rushdie does, is either futile or actively mischievous.
We should still do, with renewed vigour, what we have always needed to do: to answer bad speech with better speech,
This is like saying that we must answer bad people stabbing good people by ensuring that better people get stabbed.
Good speech should be answered by better speech. Bad speech should be actively marginalized and rendered adversely selective such that it finds its interlocutors are drooling imbeciles.
to counter false narratives with better narratives,
No. It is not sensible to counter a fairy story with a more polished literary production. We need to replace 'just so' stories or a paranoid type with alethic Structural Causal Models which enable better mechanism design or better tech such that outcomes improve.
to answer hate with love,
No. Answer Hate by farting loudly in its face. Don't give it a blow job and call it darling.
and to believe that the truth can still succeed even in an age of lies.
why not believe that fairies can still succeed even in an age of computers?
We must defend it fiercely and define it broadly.
Cretins like you must be told to fuck off. We need smart young peeps to work out better ways forward.
We should of course defend speech that offends us, otherwise we are not defending free expression at all.
Why not defend assholes who fart in our face?
To quote Cavafy, “the barbarians are coming today”,
Cavafy's point was that there were no fucking barbarians. We waste our time pretending they are going to show up.
Rushdie doesn't understand Cavafy anymore than he can understand a Satyajit Ray film. It's not that Rugby did a number on him. It's just that he was as stupid as shit. Maybe his Dad emigrated to Pakistan because he realized his son and heir had a genius for Pakistani logic.
and what I do know is that the answer to philistinism
the word Palestinian is derived from 'philistine'. Oddly they were a Greek, not a Semitic people.
is art,
Arnold said Culture. The more general answer, at least in Germany, was Paideia. Savage nations have some arts though they may not be very refined.
the answer to barbarianism is civilisation, and in a culture war it may be that artists of all sorts – film-makers, actors, singers, writers – can still, together, turn the barbarians away from the gates.
Rushdie used to pretend he knew about Islam. He is now pretending to know about Sanskrit and South India. But what he represents is not culture or art. It is laziness and stupidity. Still, the guy has lost an eye. He is entitled to virtue signal a little. There are far more repugnant 'artists' and 'intellectuals' his age who were born in Bombay. But they are mainly Hindu. Sadly, Rushdie remains a 'Paki' in our view. No Pakistani has ever shat upon Hinduism or India as thoroughly as Cambridge graduates of the most exalted Brahminical or Kayasth or Khattri lineages. Come to think of it, they would also be more ignorant of Sanskrit. Also, let us fact it, though we may make fun of Pakistani logic, none but the Buddhijivi utterly butchers Reason's sacred kine.
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