What I find really interesting about this is that, in a certain sense, it doesn’t matter at all. It is entirely possible to take the categories we are presented with unquestioningly, and use them to structure our appreciation of Carnatic music — indeed, that is precisely what pretty much everybody in the audience had done until today. Of what use, then, is such historical investigation?

This question is of immense importance, not just for the relatively obscure field of South Indian classical melodic structures, but for the entirety of the South Asian (and hence South Asian American) effort to make sense of our heritage. For a variety of reasons (largely attributable, in my opinion, to the epistemic rupture caused by colonialism), we have been cut off from older ways of thinking and living, and are hence struggling to make sense of our past as we march towards the future. The question we need to ask ourselves, as TMK has done in this field, is very simple: does history matter? Do our past customs and traditions mean something to us? Are they worth preserving and investigating?

I should clarify that there are two things that can be meant by “disregarding” history.

1. The first is to actually believe that all the categories we use to understand the world, all the texts we have, everything we call “culture” or “tradition”, are eternal and unchanging. This view is deeply problematic and leads to severe, crippling misunderstandings of our past and therefore our present. This is not what I’m talking about here.
2. I’m more interested in the second possibility: that we acknowledge our past, accept that things were different and things have changed and things will change, but then consciously decide that there is no present relevance to studying the past. This is more like saying, “sure, R.D. Burman’s music came before A.R. Rahman’s and may have influenced it, but I’d much rather listen just to ARR, or for that matter, to that new DJ in that new up-and-coming club down the street.”

The second choice is a historically conscious choice to choose to disregard the effects of our past on our present and our future. And it will have moral, ethical, political, even aesthetic consequences. (Well, most things do, but you’d need history to tell you that!) What are those consequences, and are we okay with them?

I’m curious to know what y’all think about this matter. I’ve been thinking about other formulations of this question off and on for a while now, and those of you who know me probably know where I stand on the matter I’d love to hear from you all.

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Beware of becoming delimited by a specific knotting and disbelieving in everything else, lest great good escape you … Be in yourself a matter for the forms of all beliefs, for God is wider and more tremendous than that He should be constricted by one knotting rather than another. (Fuṣūṣ 113)

A “knotting” is a literal translation of the Arabic word Ibn `Arabī uses here, which can be translated more conventionally as “belief system” or “ideology”.

He who counsels his own soul should investigate, during his life in this world, all doctrines concerning God. He should learn from whence each possessor of a doctrine affirms the validity of his doctrine. Once its validity has been affirmed for him in the specific mode in which it is correct for him who holds it, then he should support it in the case of him who believes in it. (II 85.11)

I don’t want to give the impression that these two passages exhaust Ibn `Arabī’s vision of “religious diversity,” or even that this English translation is an accurate representation of his original work, for he is a tremendously complicated thinker and highly verbose writer. Many great, spiritually inclined thinkers from very different backgrounds have spent many, many years over the centuries trying to understand his work, both in its grand design and in its many details. It is always terribly easy to read into someone’s work our own “knotting” (to speak Ibn `Arabī’s language), which is unfair to both them and to us.

However, these passages did speak to me, and for that reason alone I wish to share them (un-analytically!) with everyone.

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Before I dive into a new thought for this week, I wanted to reiterate the working definition of “morality” that we tentatively agreed upon, and in doing so quickly summarize what I remember of the discussion. (Please feel free to correct me, and to mention all the other details I’ve forgotten! I would feel terrible if I left someone out.)

• As Aneesh put it, a person’s moral framework is his/her view of the world, a system of determining what is “right” or “wrong” to the person.
• As Madhura expressed it, this view of the world can, may, and perhaps even should change with time.
• As Anjali’s and Sarvagna’s points about Two-Face and his coin of destiny showed, there is a distinction between what a person decides is moral and how that person goes about deciding what is moral. It is perfectly possible to go through life choosing our path at every moral fork by flipping a coin; what matters is the commitment we make to following through with the outcome of the coin flip.
• Indeed, as Sarvagna argued, the choices one makes of what situations to “flip a coin for” are themselves moral, reflecting an underlying “moral compass”, so to speak. (Evolutionary ethics / moral universals, anyone?)
• And finally, as Priya’s question at the beginning of the discussion revealed, what is “moral” here is what each one of us regards, whether consciously or subconsciously, as absolutely fundamental to our understanding of the world itself.

As discussions go, this was a substantial step forward, and I’m glad we got to discuss it in detail. There are two other questions, however, that we did not get enough time to address in the discussion after we discussed this idea of morality:

1. How does this system of morality fit in with our understanding of Dharma?
2. What happens when two different systems of morals clash?

I want to open up discussion on Question 2 in the particular context of an individual’s personal system of morals clashing with what his particular social context agrees is moral. I emphasize this context because it brings up the thorny question of cultural and moral relativism, and I want to see if we can address it in a dharmic context. I present two scenarios, and I’d like to hear your opinions on both of them.

Scenario the First:

A person sincerely believes that all red-headed women over six feet tall are spies trying to engineer a takeover of his country, and mounts a systematic campaign to kill them all. Society, shocked by his obvious insanity, locks him up in a mental asylum forever.

Scenario the Second:

A person sincerely believes that those who support and enforce untouchability are immoral and evil, and mounts a systematic campaign to kill them all. Society, shocked by his obvious insanity, locks him up in a mental asylum forever.

Is there a distinction between these two scenarios? If so, on what philosophical or moral grounds do you distinguish between them? To what extent is your response universalizable (if, that is, you think it should be)? And is there a role for Dharma here?

I look forward to reading your comments.

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First of all, I’m not entirely certain that  ”the larger good can probably be defined in terms of each person following and living up to their own, individual conceptions of [what ‘good’ means to them].” And the reason is precisely the wrinkle raised by the two questions G, Saba, and Sid brought up in their insightful comments. I paraphrase them here thus:

1. Do all human beings necessarily have something that resembles a sense of morals? And further, how much of this is subjective and how much is objective?
2. Assuming that all human beings have a sense of morals, what is its source?

And, what does any of this have to do with “dharmas” or “Dharma”? I don’t have answers to either question, but the very fact that we’re trying to struggle with positing an answer suggests to me that defining the larger good in this “additive” manner is problematic. For one, this gives rise to the usual question: if person X truly, sincerely believes that it is his moral duty to break person Y’s nose, should he be allowed to do so? And does one’s response to the question depend on what the source of person X’s belief is?

But stepping back from the debate for a moment: do these questions matter at all? If we are trying to come up with a reasonable basis for a personal sense of morality, I submit that these two questions are unnecessary. But if we decide that it’s not enough to set our own beliefs on a firm footing, and in fact need a (near-)universally applicable moral system, then we’re in a much more complicated position. To make things a bit more manageable, let’s consider only those moral systems that are “dharmic” in a broad sense.

As far as I can tell, the idea of Dharma does not fit neatly into a deontological or a virtue ethical or a consequentialist framework. It is a framework based around the idea of a duty no doubt (characteristic of deontological ethics), but it also values the actor’s intentions (something that virtue ethics emphasizes) and does not disregard the action’s actual outcome (the central plank of a consequentialist position). Particularly in our modern understanding, it is in the peculiar position of making universal claims—everybody has a dharma to follow—while staying deeply sensitive to particular contexts. (I say “modern”, because I’m pretty sure that in Vedic India the problem of what one’s dharma is was less complicated than it is today, given that it was largely defined by one’s social class and gender.) I’ve already expressed my thoughts on the aporias this setup raises, but I don’t consider the mere existence of aporias reason enough to abandon a moral system—the other frameworks all have their own problems too, after all.

What is the source of such a Dharma? While some specific theistic religious traditions in South Asia no doubt ground the power of Dharma within God, I don’t think this is necessary at all. It’s more likely that Dharma was in fact understood as cosmic order that was replicated in social order and perhaps within the individual’s mind/body too (I’m merely repeating the traditional belief in there being fundamental connections between the macrocosm of the universe, the mesocosm of the Vedic sacrifice, and the microcosm of the individual here). Now different myths portray particular gods intervening in this order in order to restore it, which suggests that maintaining this order is difficult. However the underlying belief seems to be that so long as people fulfill their dharmas (whatever they may be), Dharma continues to exist; as they used to say, “dharmo rakṣati rakṣitaḥ“ ( or (D/d)harma, protected, protects).

Where does Pinker come in here? Evolutionary ethics is provocative, but not something I find entirely satisfying—just because humans “are” a certain way does not ipso facto mean we “ought” to be that way. However, both Dharma and evolutionary ethics will disagree with the statement “If there is no God, all is permitted.” Neither Dharma nor evolutionary ethics really needs a God-figure for their own validity; and in fact the old Vedic/Hindu idea that there is in fact a cosmic order could be squeezed into the idea that some basic human “morals” have evolved or that social or ethical structures are “emergent”.

I’m still beating around the bush here, and I apologize, but I’m still trying to think through this for myself. A few things I haven’t said clearly enough yet:

1. I’m still not certain what importance I give to the individual’s wellspring of morality. If it is in fact the case that human beings do share some moral universals, then I’m pretty sure that most religious/ethical frameworks will cover all these universals (although they may prioritize them differently).
2. I’m still not certain what importance I give to an ethical framework’s origin (neither its self-proclaimed origin nor our scholarly understanding of its coming to be). Regardless of whether an ethical framework’s origin is divine or humanistic or evolutionary or what-have-you, I think what matters is how well this fits an individual’s “moral bent,” so to speak.
3. I do think that abstract discussions on morals and the right, while fascinating and totally worth pursuing for their own sake, sometimes serve as much to cloud as to illuminate. Personally, I don’t think discussions of morals and the like work entirely at the level of the individual, mostly because I think the “individual” is more of a social construct than modern Western thinking acknowledges. I’m not denying human agency here, but I’d like to use this as an opportunity to re-inject the “community” (whatever that may be!) into the discussion of morals. I don’t think the ancients would have it any other way.

And on that note, Happy Deepavali! May the torch of Dharma illuminate our lives, and may we always hold that torch aloft together.

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How is any of this relevant to my blog post? I’ve been thinking about two other discussions happening on other posts here, on dharma(s) and on the (non?)necessity of belief in God, and find it darkly illuminating that both of these discussions pivot around the same, fundamentally unexplored, center: what is our source of scriptural/ethical guidance today, and why is whatever our source is in fact our source? I think this really does speak to a transformation/epistemological rupture/whatever-you-call-it in the practice of what we call Hinduism today over the last couple of hundred years, in which traditionally unquestioned, unquestionable sources have been quietly pushed away into a dark corner.

The reason I found the Srivaishnava innovation so thought-provoking was that this particular South Indian movement had managed to deal with a similarly disorienting displacement in religious thought in South India over a millennium ago in such an new-yet-age-old way. The movement appealed to a wide base of Tamil speakers through its adoption of a corpus of beautiful Tamil devotional poems; and yet by maintaining an equally strong affiliation with Sanskrit the movement’s theologians were able to engage in dialogue with intellectuals from other traditions all over South Asia. Furthermore, the movement’s seemingly egalitarian step of declaring the Tamil corpus a “Dravidian Veda” is in fact a tacit acknowledgment of the fact that, in those times at least, only the Vedas had the power of canon, of unquestionable scripture.

This historical example is of value to us modern Hindus in two ways: First, it demonstrates that in the past the notion of a “scriptural canon” has been flexible (if heavily contested), which suggests the lesson that we modern Hindus can potentially coalesce into smaller, more particularized (and dare I say more coherent?) communities around particular scriptural sources of knowledge—whatever these may be.

Second, it demonstrates that there was an “acceptably Hindu” way of investing such a canon with authority (in other words, of canonizing a particular scripture), by establishing an equivalence of the scripture to the Vedas. This is a little trickier to translate into modern terms, because we first have to ask ourselves the question “why the Vedas?” I don’t know the answer, but it strikes me that an answer that has nothing at all to do with the Vedas will end up meaning a religion that is no longer “Hindu” in some deep sense of the word. (Not that there is anything intrinsically wrong in this position, of course — there is no reason why we have to allow ourselves to be bound by historical particularities.)

However, regardless of what text or texts we may regard to be the unquestionable center, I think the existence of such a center and of equivalences with that center is nevertheless valuable. (And it could be argued that a work like the Vedas, whose actual content we are growing less and less attached to over time, is for this precise reason the kind of center that can hold a diverse set of groups together.) This way, a number of more cohesive (and coherent?) religious communities can nevertheless recognize the existence of other Hindu communities and thus recognize their own participation within a broader Hindu religious/cultural framework.

Apologies for what is a not entirely coherent, cohesive post (rather like this tradition!). I guess the questions I’m trying to ask are:

1. Does this framework of innovation in the guise of traditionalism hold true for Hindu movements in the past?
2. Should such a framework hold true for the future? And supposing it should, then:
   1. What (sorts of) texts would be good points around which communities could rise?
   2. Should we continue to rely on the Vedas being the unquestionable, unquestioned center of the framework, or should we consider different texts (at the cost of no longer being Hindu in a sense)?
3. Where could such a framework go wrong if we use it with an eye towards the future? What could possible alternatives be?

These are hard questions, but then where would we be if we stayed away from all the hard questions?

And just to spice things up a little, I’d like to suggest tentatively that this community we have at Swadharma already satisfies the first condition in a matter of speaking: instead of a common textual source we are bound by a common commitment to think our way through these questions.

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