A Purely Natural Theology

(First published at Desicritics)

As soon as I finished reading The Varieties of Scientific Experience – A Personal View of the Search for God, an anthology of Carl Sagan’s 1985 Gifford lectures in Natural Theology, I wanted to grab every person on this ‘pale blue dot’ planet by the shoulders, and ask him/her to read it. Sagan was a man who, per Ann Duryan, the book’s editor, “spoke extemporaneously in nearly perfect paragraphs”. Here’s a typical passage.

‘By far the best way I know to engage the religious sensibility, the sense of awe, is to look up on a clear night…every culture has felt a sense of awe and wonder looking at the sky. This is reflected throughout the world in both science and religion. Thomas Carlyle said that wonder is the basis of worship. And Einstein said, “I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.” So if Carlyle and Einstein agree on something, it has a modest possibility of even being right.’

This is about as poetic as Kabir, Meera and Bulle Shah will ever get.

Sagan’s tone in these lectures is benign and almost avuncular; only the patently prissy would accuse him of disrespect. His gifts as a science writer are many. He has a keen eye for the beauty in every facet of human inquiry-literature, art, science of course, and even religion. He has the sort of wit that pokes to tickle, not to hurt. For instance, when pointing out the obviously anthropocentric view of the afterlife, he recites Rupert Brooke’s Heaven. And here’s a snippet from a post-lecture Q&A session.

Q: What is your opinion on the nature of the origins of intelligent life in the universe?

A: I’m for it!

The book is rich in poetry (that of rhyme as well as reason), artists’ depictions of astronomical phenomena, and of course those breathtakingly wondrous NASA photographs. Sagan dazzles us even when citing numbers - a couple of hundred thousand million suns in the Milky Way, ten to hundred times as many galaxies in the universe, and an equation attempting to estimate the number of intelligent civilizations in our galaxy. Above all, his clear yet sophisticated ethics give these talks a halo of nobility. For instance, he rejects miracles not because they’re absurd but because, following Democritus and Hume, the likelihood of nature changing its course is much smaller than that of a person lying. Or consider his nuanced take on the preserve-destroy conflict innate in civilizations.

‘ [It is] a conflict within the human heart…between the bureaucratic, hierarchical, aggressive parts of our nature, which in a neurophysiological sense we share with our reptilian ancestors, and the other parts of our nature, the generalized capacity for love, for compassion, for identification with others, who may superficially not look or talk or dress exactly like us, the ability to figure the world out that is focused and concentrated in our cerebral cortex.’

Note the “superficial” and “exactly”, implying that the similarities among different peoples far outweigh the differences; and the references to “reptilian ancestors” and “cerebral cortex”, as evidence of his commitment to a purely natural theology.

Speaking in 1985, the heyday of Reagan and the Star Wars, Sagan constantly returns to the nuclear threat and warns us that we have (still true, I gather) nuclear weapons capable of destroying our species many times over. And this is a scientist’s warning, so he duly backs it up with some morbid math on how many warheads it’d take to get to doomsday. Here he is championing the ethical legacy of such heavyweights as Spinoza, Einstein and Russell - not just in their espousal of laws of nature as the only plausible god, but also in their compassion and pacifism.

By itself, atheism is a negative and that very fact weakens its sales pitch. It’s no co-incidence that the word consists of a negating prefix followed by two harsh syllables; it is supposed to signify a rejection of something. What we want is something we can embrace, something positive. Sagan offers a recipe for that. Take what is best in religion: the deep questions it seeks to answer, the compassion it seeks to advocate, and the poetry it touches upon. Add what is best in science: the persistent chipping away at the wall of ignorance; the humility and awe of knowing that we live on a planet of a sun in the ‘boondocks’ of a galaxy (to use Sagan’s imaginative expression) that is itself a miniscule part of the universe. Cook this mixture in Sagan’s funny, lucid and lyrical prose, and what you get is a literary feast of a book.

On Jodhaa Akbar and Dismissive Reviews

I like Ashutosh Gowarikar. He stands out among contemporaries because of his commitment to a forgotten fact about cinema: technique must give in to the story. (Ingmar Bergman : "People don't see a picture, people see people"). His cinema is old school-it relies mostly on its cast, dialogues, intense close-ups and suchlike. It's more theater than cinema.

Granted, Jodhaa Akbar is longer than necessary and editing is not Gowarikar's forte. But the movie has a lot going for it.

Take Gowarikar's vision, for instance. Here is a director who uses a poilitical marriage between two people in history to reflect on the political marriage between two religions. Mark the bold interruption of a Maulanah's harangue on Islamic purity by a Krishna bhajan; Akbar's constant snides to said Maulanah, insisting upon the separation of huquumat from mazhab;and the use of semi-transparent curtains depicting the known-yet-unknown "other", with whom one happens to be welded by history. Show me one Bollywood film in the last decade to so depict the Hindu-Muslim equation.

Much of Gowarikar's screen spacetime is occupied by his actors. The characters get to speak through their dialogues, faces and their bodies. Which is why Ila Arun leaves a riveting impact, Aishwarya Rai is poise personified, and as Gowarkiar's center-of-most-frames-muse, Hrithik is simply outstanding. He embodies his director's vision of Akbar: a virile, romantic, individualistic emperor.

A truly perceptive criticism comes from Amrita Rajan, who wishes (as I do) that the darker side of power had made Akbar grayer than he is in the movie. One line (again, note how theatrical it is - Hrithik moves closer to the camera, occupying centrestage, and delivers this monologue), "Why do my near and dear ones fall under my sword's shadow?", just isn't enough.

Here, for completeness, is the brilliant Baradwaj Rangan's characteristically insightful review.

Jodhaa Akbar has all the grandeur and pomp of a Bollywood historical romance. Perhaps we, the audience, have moved away from such theater. Gowarikar's film is perhaps too much like the theatrical Mughal-e-A'azam, and our sensibilities are too multiplexed to appreciate that. It's way too easy to be dismissive of commercial Bollywood romances; engaging a filmmaker on his own terms, however, takes something else-something that our supposedly cinema illiterate (and therefore more egalitarian) audience seems to have.

An Idiot's Guide to His Politics

(First published at Desicritics)

An uncle once teased me that at some point in time, the word 'idiot' used to refer to one who does not vote. I'm going to be thirty and have never voted. I did try once. On a typically sweaty Mumbai morning, I diligently queued up at a municipal school to get my voter's ID. As luck would have it, I was fourth from the counter when they shut shop. Since then, laziness and a strong dislike of queues have prevented me from exercising adult franchise.
The recent US primaries and the nomination of prime ministerial candidates in India have made me feel terribly left out. In true spirit of active citizenry, therefore, I decided to voice my opinions. Idiots are people too, and a minority at that, so I wanted to speak on their behalf.
Since politics is about rationalization of one’s preconceived biases, here are my cop-outs for being an idiot.

Sensitivity:
The simpleton narrator in Pu La Deshpande’s Asa Mee Asaamee confesses to being equally convinced by opposing ideologies. This is often true of me. I find myself agreeing with both the Left and the Right on many fundamental issues.
Take capitalism, for instance. It is both ruthlessly opportunistic and (hence?) extremely effective. People fall on the political spectrum depending on which of these two aspects they emphasize. Arundhati Roy’s rhetoric sometimes moves me as much as that of [fill in your favorite libertarian blogger here]. I don’t disagree with either, the respectable word for which position is ‘centrist’, I guess. But ‘centrist’ suggests an equanimity that I am far from. Instead, this confusion disturbs me no end and makes it nearly impossible for me to take sides. It’s a bit like being the dyslexic agnostic insomniac (with due politically correct respect to all of the above) who stays up all night worrying if there is a dog. Besides, one good book is worth a lot more than all political ideologies combined.

Individualism:
Behaviorists must attribute this one to me being the only child. Having no siblings left me with a lot of time that I spent looking out of the window daydreaming. As a result, I am not too big on the communal thing. I have never understood why I must choose or form a clan to belong to, and then defend its every action to death; it is tiresome and evidently dishonest, and yet most political discourse revolves around justifying one’s own group and condemning the other.
It’s not that I don’t have group loyalty; I fire up my communal passion for the Indian cricket team (and the advantage there is that the more we love our team, the more we criticize it), but no political party has seemed that important to me.

I prefer voters who have immediate, self-centered reasons to choose their candidates - like a friend who voted for his local BJP MLA because the guy kept roads in his neighborhood free of potholes. Now there’s a concrete reason. To me, such voters seem less self-deceptive and far more sensible than ideologues.
I read somewhere that more Americans voted for American Idol than for their President. Is it any surprise they did? I mean, if the satisfaction of one’s opinion being counted for something (and that is what most of us are after in democracies) can be had for a musical contest, why vote for a cacophonous one whose outcome will inevitably leave you feeling more powerless?
The only idealistic voter whose convictions I understood (and frankly envied) was another friend who always voted for the Humanist Party in Mumbai- a front floated by working middle class people without big money or campaign. His sagely response to the mockery of my BJP/Congress loyalist friends was, “I know they’ll never win.” This irony made him a tragic hero in my eyes.

Skepticism:
This is perhaps the biggest reason I have never sworn allegiance to any side and it may have something to do with the fact that the first novel I remember reading is Orwell’s Animal Farm. For one thing, I’m not too fond of words with capitalized beginnings-President, Prime Minister, God, names of countries and states, corporate titles, Party, Communism and Capitalism - they seem to beg uncritical reverence.

Another thing that makes me uneasy is people flaunting their pride in some or another purely accidental fact. Are you proud to be [fill in identity of choice]? Well, that’s a moot question if there ever was one. Pride in oneself is best earned. Of course, one can’t discount her birth in a certain place and station in life. In my case, however, that makes me humble, not proud, for I know that I owe much of what I have to where, when and to whom I was born.
Perhaps a better question is if I like being [identity of choice here]. Mostly, yes. In any case, this whole pride thing is just posturing and chest thumping of the sort that our cousins in the animal kingdom indulge in; it’s a pity they don’t have language to give it a righteous spin.Another capitalized word is ‘I’, and I’m too skeptical to take myself so seriously as to passionately advocate anything. Bert Russell comes to the rescue, “I would never die for any cause. What if I am wrong?” These days, however, bookstores and blogs are packed with everything from passionate pleas for one’s own ideology to brazen browbeating of another, and most of them speak in an in your face, doctrinal tone. Skepticism and the humility it brings are no longer in vogue.

These, then, are an idiot’s justifications of his politics: I don’t vote not because I’m uninterested, but because I can’t bring myself to: it’s just not in my constitution.
The human drama in politics fascinates me as much as the next guy, but to my film and fiction fed mind, real politics seems too much like loud theater to suspend my disbelief. To quote Woody Allen, “Life doesn’t imitate art; it imitates bad television.”

Who knows? Someday, this idiot might just wisen up, get off his high horse and get used to voting for the lesser of two evils. My constitution, after all, is open to change. It isn’t spelt with a capital ‘C’.