Friday, April 9, 2021

Fist Full of Water

Political discourse in western countries is trapped in the narrow confines of a left-right world view. The cadence struck by this binary marches India sluggishly from subjugation to liberation. On the left step spring three foreign ideologies that actively seek the dissolution of the Indian Union and annihilation of its indigenous culture, on the right step rise a disorganized tide of the native ideologies that cannot practically define themselves. All that can be heard from far away shores are the rhythms, but not the reason for the stomp, clap, and shuffle of moving feet.

India does not dance to a two step tune. A country with thirty official languages, hundreds of unofficial ones that have over a million speakers, a galaxy of religious practices, local histories stretching back millennia, communal hierarchies, and clan rivalries can never produce a cultural duopoly, let alone a monopoly of power. Yet, academics and politicians in the west insist on engaging India with the same binaries that they use to trap their own countries and cultures. Demonstrate the inconsistencies that emerge when western standards are applied to the Indian experience to any western-educated Indologist, and you are guaranteed a screaming tantrum that would shame a five-year-old.

Power struggles are always convoluted and messy, but India’s political climate would cause Machiavelli, himself, to back away nervously. He was considerably wiser than most of India’s foreign suitors who, by sheer ignorance, malice, stupidity, or some combination there-of, believe they can define and control the Indian people. These ideologues are committed to some brand of expansionism, and while they are unable to directly control the country’s destiny, they use proxies in academia, media, and politics to exert considerable influence on India’s development.

It is into this churn that we must venture next, but before we jump onto wholly unfamiliar territory, we need to get a sense of the terrain. Key differences between Indian and Western terminology exist and must be mapped, to that end we need to take a detour into the weird country of pop-occultism and the even weirder country of modern American politics. For those of you who just felt your shoulder tense, please relax. This is just a mapping expedition, not a colonization effort.

Every serious occultist knows that magic is still practiced in our culture. The dark arts survived religious persecution, the expansion of rationalism, and just about any other disaster you care to name. Strangely enough there is nothing particularly supernatural that allowed real magic to survive. As every practitioner knows the rules of magic are simply the observation and categorization of natural forces, they don’t go away no matter how many witches you burn. Dion Fortune, the highly respected 20th century, British, occult practitioner and philosopher, defined magic as “the art and science of changing consciousness, in accordance with ones will.”

A stage magician makes a ball disappear by using slight-of-hand or misdirecting your conscious awareness. You see what he wants you to see and are entertained by the results. Philosophers were also quick to understand the limitation of perception and taught their students to explore that limitation through conscious inquiry. How do you know what you know? They are fond of asking. Politicians and propagandists use same principals to different effect by wielding words and symbols to sway the sub-conscious of whole nations to march them, as is frequently claimed, “toward greatness and glory.” The political instrument is less subtle than it’s stage magic peer, less benevolent than its philosophical peer, and simply hammers your sub-conscious mind into submission.

Each of these professions use the limitations of human consciousness to change our perception of the world, and the different methods of manipulating our perception gave rise to two tropes in modern pulp fantasy. Wizards and sorcerers muttering spells in secrete arcane languages, before shooting lighting out of whatever orifice magic lightening emerges from, or enchanting some unwary soul, is the most well known trope. I can tell you, from personal experience, the first trope is actually true to a degree. Occultists come up with secrete languages all the time, and it’s a point of pride for most of them to be impossible to understand by the public. The reason behind those secret languages is actually found in a second and lesser known trope known as the rule of names.

In many fantasy stories knowing something’s true name gives you power over the thing. A hero may discover the true name of a dragon, and promptly weaponize the lizard against whatever darklord happens to be wandering about. Particularly lazy writers cut the extra step out of the story and simply ensure the big-bad has a true name for the hero to discover, or even worse, ensure the hero is simply born knowing the true names of all things.

It should go without saying, and yet I find myself saying it, that nothing in life has a true name. Names are descriptions of characteristics, and characteristics change. Here, for example, we have a Lion, sharp in tooth and claw. Suddenly realizing that the Lion’s mum named him “Fred,” and yelling ‘Fred stop ripping me to shreds.” isn’t going to do you much good if Fred happens to be going at you with the tools of his trade. A lion is subject to its own internal reality, which are shaped by the particular circumstances of its life. To be a useful to us, any name we choose to apply to a lion or all lions must capture as many of the actual characteristics of lions as possible.

Words and names provide us lenses which we can use to navigate dangerous and uncertain environments. Magicians, like their political and philosopher counterparts, realized that the right word can change our perception of reality, and put that knowledge to use by carefully choosing names for their environments. That’s one secret of the rule of names, a carefully chosen name or word allows you to consciously modify your perception of a fluid reality, and opens new ways to navigate or interact with your environment that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. Knowing the secrete name didn’t give you power over the thing, but power over your perception of the thing. Names were purposefully kept secrete to prevent the uninitiated from gaining access to that perspective shift.

Academic culture grew on the discoveries of philosophy, and knew how words shaped perceptions. To no ones surprise the concept was given multiple names – first principles, collective bias, bigotry, prejudice, frame of reference, and etc…Systematic study of perceptive limitations were done, but the lessons were never popularly accepted among academicians. Their sub-culture is riddled with the people who use the rule of names like they’re a hero in a pulp fantasy novel. They painstakingly craft the most accurate name for an idea, as if by sheer accuracy they can manifest that idea in the real world. Willing the meaning of a name to manifest isn’t actually possible unless the name becomes common enough to change popular culture, but the moment the name becomes widely known it loses it’s accuracy, and the changes it effects may be far away from those intended by the original speaker.

George Orwell wrote in his classic essay on the English Language that “it is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of rĂ©gime claim that it is a democracy… Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way.” The more widely known a word, the more favored the concept a word describes, the more likely its meaning is to become contested. Any word that moves from person-to-person, country-to-country, mind-to-mind, will eventually lose the intent of its original meaning. Freedom can just as easily mean slavery, and slavery - freedom.

Descriptions of the world are always a three way negotiation between nature, culture, and desire. A speaker desires to convey a meaning and chooses their words to match their intent, intent is interpreted by a listener, and if the speaker and listener share a similar understanding of the world, then they can reach a common place. Whether the ground is actually there when the speakers reach it, depends wholly on the uncontrollable movements of nature.

Human society never accepted the weaker bargaining position in our endless negotiations with nature. We took the rule of names, our capacity to define, and built entire institutions to unify our desire and focus our intent to get a better position at the table. In one form or another every human society developed institutions of the mind to identify and define the movements of nature, and institutions of the voice to share to popularize those discoveries. In modern parlance, we call those institutions Academia and Media, the highly specialized organs of our society that manage and propagate our collective understanding, or narrative, of the world.

Scaling the rule of names into a narrative creates a second, and far more dangerous, problem. A definition, by its very nature, is an act of negation. We define everything as much by what it is, as by what it isn’t. Meaning, inevitably, every time we name something and give it place in our cultural awareness, we unintentionally define something out of our awareness. By monopolizing the channels of narration, a small minority can concentrate the awareness of a society to divert rivers, move mountains, or even walk on the face of the moon, but influence should never be mistaken for control. Monopolize the narrative long enough, and you’ll begin to believe you’ve discovered the true name of power. Outside your awareness, the environmental consequences of your success accumulate.

No political ideology ever escaped the consequences of monopolizing the narrative, and no political ideology ever will escape, since politics is simply the collective management of naming and negotiation. In the United States we can even see the breakdowns of negotiations between desire, culture, and nature in both the 2016 and 2020 elections. In the former case Donald Trump’s campaign took full advantage of the dissolution of the partnership between the Republican party’s desire and the culture of its supporters, then leveraged his victory there to defeat his Democratic opponents. Nature played a significant, but subtle role in the end of Dem-Rep duopoly. Nature took a far more prominent role in the 2020 elections when a global pandemic shifted the narrative out of the Trump Campaign’s influence, and allowed his opposition to convince popular sentiment that they were better suited to lead the negotiations with nature. In both cases the right and left wings found themselves in, to borrow a phrase from the communists, acting like reactionaries.

When India became independent it’s narrative channels were almost immediately dominated by anti-native ideologies, a term I use because these ideologies are violently antagonistic to native spiritual and philosophical traditions. These anti-native ideologies were well entrenched in the narrative channels, and used their positions to project themselves as the rightful inheritors of independent India to the world. Entire university departments and armies of writers across the western world were wooed to support the claims of the anti-native factions. To bolster their position they used the new anti-imperial and anti-colonial studies, which generated such an overload of muddled ideas and double-speak that anyone with a college education could gain support for their cause by using the correct jargon.

Within this swirling storm of self-interest, chauvinism, and wealth a truly strange alliance was born whose history we will eventually explore in detail. First among this faction were the scions of Nehru and the Congress Party, whose forebears were leaders of India's independence movement. Supporting them were the Communist Parties, collections of Christian Churches, and various Indian Islamic Associations. If this alliance seems absurd to the point of unreal, believe me, it gets stranger still. Communism, Christianity, and Islam are global ideologies with access to capital markets that span the whole world, against which the largely impoverished and internally divided native traditions had limited defense. Let the grim irony of this situation settle upon your mind, the alliance I’ve just describe is India’s “left-wing.” The self-same “left” that, in the western world perceives itself as the stalwart defenders of anti-colonial and anti-imperial sentiment are, in India, the swords of three vast global ideological empires.

Does political unity require cultural homogeneity? The calculated efficiency of the European expansion certainly demonstrates the value of enforced sameness, but does political unity actually require sameness? India is a dazzling panoply of color and sound, a world where, to quote the Zaptatista Rebels of Mexico, many worlds are possible. The Bharatiya Janata Party and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh certainly work toward a politically united state, but show little inclination toward imposing cultural unity. Despite the never-ending accusations of fascism and authoritarianism leveled at the RSS and BJP by their opposition, both seem disinclined to develop ancillary organizations that can dominate the narrative. Yet, despite this lack of investment, a million narratives are still rising and carrying the BJP to victory in election after election. That tide is India’s right-wing.

Nehru’s dynasty is in its twilight years, its heirs are hopeless detached from India’s masses. The communists too find themselves unable to win elections without support from Christian and Islamic orthodoxies. Meanwhile, the orthodoxies themselves struggle to prevent the Indian State, the physical manifestation of a resurgent cultural unity, from gaining enforcement capacity. Western activists, universities, and media organizations that oppose the Indic revival find themselves outmaneuvered by nationalist activists and native institutions.

If, however, you cannot determine where you stand it is difficult to gain a sense of direction. What do left and right actually mean to you? Are they descriptions of the role of government, a description of economic policies, a political tribe, or something else? The terms originated in France, where they described parties that sat on the right and left of an isle that ran down the center of the legislature. In England they describe the Tories, traditional representatives of the gentry, and Labor, the traditional representative of the small merchants and workers. In the United States they describe the Republicans and Democrats, each with their own long and complex histories. The characteristics of the words, the substance that gives them meaning, shift and move like sand in water. In India they define a struggle between the long suffering native traditions and the remnants of bygone empires, and those, dear readers, are two navigable coordinates upon our map - the Indic Revival and the Colonial Remnants.

3 comments:

  1. Thanks very much for this. What I know of India comes mostly from the writings of Paramahansa Yogananda and his SRF teachings. His love of India and her science of Yoga and the wonderful complexity of her culture give me hope for her future. The world really needs what India can offer; her roots go deep indeed.

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  2. I am awfully glad that you made yourself say it - "that nothing in life has a true name."

    This is key to much and worth remembering. Thank you very much also for helping outside eyes to see what might be there to see in India. :)

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  3. Jeffinwa, You're very welcome. One of the deep lessons of India I hope to draw out is how very diverse communities can live together in relative harmony. I think that'll be very useful for the western world just now.

    Scotlyn, It's an important lesson that mages risk forgetting, and is most certainly ignored by anyone with a strong ideological motivation.

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Fist Full of Water

Political discourse in western countries is trapped in the narrow confines of a left-right world view. The cadence struck by this binary mar...