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  • Prestige journals and their prestigious mistakes

    On June 24, the journal Nature Scientific Reports published a paper claiming that Earth’s surface was warming by more than what non-anthropogenic sources could account for because it was simply moving closer to the Sun. I.e. global warming was the result of changes in the Earth-Sun distance. Excerpt:

    The oscillations of the baseline of solar magnetic field are likely to be caused by the solar inertial motion about the barycentre of the solar system caused by large planets. This, in turn, is closely linked to an increase of solar irradiance caused by the positions of the Sun either closer to aphelion and autumn equinox or perihelion and spring equinox. Therefore, the oscillations of the baseline define the global trend of solar magnetic field and solar irradiance over a period of about 2100 years. In the current millennium since Maunder minimum we have the increase of the baseline magnetic field and solar irradiance for another 580 years. This increase leads to the terrestrial temperature increase as noted by Akasofu [26] during the past two hundred years.

    The New Scientist reported on July 16 that Nature has since kickstarted an “established process” to investigate how a paper with “egregious errors” cleared peer-review and was published. One of the scientists it quotes says the journal should retract the paper if it wants to “retain any credibility”, but the fact that it cleared peer-review in the first place is to me the most notable part of this story. It is a reminder that peer-review has a failure rate as well as that ‘prestige’ titles like Nature can publish crap; for instance, look at the retraction index chart here).

    That said, I am a little concerned because Scientific Reports is an open-access title. I hope it didn’t simply publish the paper in exchange for a fee like its less credible counterparts.

    Almost as if it timed it to the day, the journal Science – Nature‘s big rival across the ocean – published a paper that did make legitimate claims but which brooks disagreement on a different tack. It describes a way to keep sea levels from rising due to the melting of Antarctic ice. Excerpt:

    … we show that the [West Antarctic Ice Sheet] may be stabilized through mass deposition in coastal regions around Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers. In our numerical simulations, a minimum of 7400 [billion tonnes] of additional snowfall stabilizes the flow if applied over a short period of 10 years onto the region (~2 mm/year sea level equivalent). Mass deposition at a lower rate increases the intervention time and the required total amount of snow.

    While I’m all for curiosity-driven research, climate change is rapidly becoming a climate emergency in many parts of the world, not least where the poorer live, without a corresponding set of protocols, resources and schemes to deal with it. In this situation, papers like this – and journals like Science that publish them – only make solutions like the one proposed above seem credible when in fact they should be trashed for implying that it’s okay to keep emitting more carbon into the atmosphere because we can apply a band-aid of snow over the ice sheet and postpone the consequences. Of course, the paper’s authors acknowledge the following:

    Operations such as the one discussed pose the risk of moral hazard. We therefore stress that these projects are not an alternative to strengthening the efforts of climate mitigation. The ambitious reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is and will be the main lever to mitigate the impacts of sea level rise. The simulations of the current study do not consider a warming ocean and atmosphere as can be expected from the increase in anthropogenic CO2. The computed mass deposition scenarios are therefore valid only under a simultaneous drastic reduction of global CO2 emissions.

    … but these words belong in the last few lines of the paper (before the ‘materials and methods’ section), as if they were a token addition to what reads, overall, like a dispassionate analysis. This is also borne out by the study not having modelled the deposition idea together with falling CO2 emissions.

    I’m a big fan of curiosity-driven science as a matter of principle. While it seemed hard at first to reconcile my emotions on the Science paper with that position, I realised that I believe both curiosity- and application-driven research should still be conscientious. Setting aside the endless questions about how we ought to spend the taxpayers’ dollars – if only because interfering with research on the basis of public interest is a terrible idea – it is my personal, non-prescriptive opinion that research should still endeavour to be non-destructive (at least to the best of the researchers’ knowledge) when advancing new solutions to known problems.

    If that is not possible, then researchers should acknowledge that their work could have real consequences and, setting aside all pretence of being quantitative, objective, etc., clarify the moral qualities of their work. This the authors of the Science paper have done but there are no brownie points for low-hanging fruits. Or maybe there should be considering there has been other work where the authors of a paper have written that they “make no judgment on the desirability” of their proposal (also about climate geo-engineering).

    Most of all, let us not forget that being Nature or Science doesn’t automatically make what they put out better for having been published by them.

  • The usefulness of good grammar

    Why is good grammar important?

    In the Indian mainstream media at least, it appears that readers won’t penalise reporters and editors for imperfect use of grammar and punctuation. To be clear, they will notice – and many will avoid – bad writing; at the same time, readers are unlikely to credit articles that got their grammar and punctuation pitch-perfect. In short, good grammar doesn’t seem to improve return-on-investment but bad grammar reduces it.

    This isn’t surprising: English has always been much of India’s second language, especially among its middle class. The premium placed on perfect grammar is much lower than that placed on simply being fluent with the language at the intermediary level. In most instances, in fact, the value of better grammar is and remains an unknown-unknown.

    However, what I like most about perfecting the use of grammar and punctuation is that doing so provides a sort of polish to the text that greatly improves its readability. This is somewhat like the attention Apple pays to the UX of its iPhones: it isn’t just that the hardware-software synergy is excellent or that the designs make the UI look exquisite; it is that, like good grammar, Apple ensures the tiniest details are in line with the overarching experiential philosophy, so that the user moves with equal ease through different parts of the phone. In the same way, without good grammar, the text becomes a bit of a bumpy ride.

    It’s the cost of this bumpiness that seems to determine whether or not better grammar is linked to the publisher’s stature.

    Within the iPhone metaphor, design perfection is closely associated with the iPhone’s reputation as a premium item, the same way the appropriate use of language is associated with publications like The Baffler and The New York Review of Books (but not The New Yorker, for reasons described here), which bank on literary as well as narrative correctness to appear, and read, classy.

    However, this aesthetic is seemingly confined to mainstream publications in the West and, in India, to magazines that are okay with presenting the sort of English that is as classy to the discerning reader as it seems elitist to the one who hasn’t spent a lifetime among books. To the latter, text laden with the uneven use of grammar isn’t bumpy reading at all as much as something that reads just fine. So the publisher that publishes such writing isn’t penalised for it.

    Then again, is it fair to judge grammar’s value according to its financial implications? It makes sense with iPhone and design: a flawed UX is quite likely to precipitate a decline in sales, and sales is what Apple – like any corporation – lives for. It also makes sense if you have a publisher like Times of India in mind. But how do things work at The Wire?

    As with any nonprofit news publication that runs on donations from readers, good grammar and punctuation offer The Wire a way to render our articles more gratifying as long as the exercise remains cost-effective. But when it comes in the way of a more valuable target, such as higher volume, it becomes secondary if only because our resources are painfully finite. To prevent this from happening in the longer run, we must couple the quality of writing with the notion of public interest itself. So we come to the more important question: could good grammar be in the public interest?

    At first, good grammar seems almost unnecessary, indulgent even, until you consider the connections between good writing and thinking. Being able to compose complex sentences anticipates room to compose complex thoughts and allows us to assimilate complex ideas. We may not need language itself to think, but insofar as we wish to instrumentalise the communication of complex ideas as a weapon against anti-intellectualism, we must become and remain fluent with how grammar and punctuation allow us to nearly exactly communicate semantic formations constructed by the mind.

    In fact, it would be safe to dispense with the “nearly” as well: we cannot communicate ideas more complicated than what our language affords us. Therefore, the more versatile our language is and the better we are able to use it, the more opportunities we give ourselves to accommodate new ideas and fight against bad ones.

    There are limitations, of course, such as with a lot of academic writing these days that is dense for density’s sake. But short of that, not making efforts to improve the way we use the rules of grammar and the opportunities of punctuation could mire us deeper and deeper, in a world becoming more vast by the day, in knowledge that is only becoming more stale and – as many scholars have recognised – in attitudes more anti-intellectual. Of course, not everything there is to learn has to be so complicated and most of us will almost certainly expend our lives still exploring the simpler realms, but in the overarching scheme, exposing ourselves to the more challenging aspects of language will equip us to go wherever we may as a society.

    This is also an admittedly circuitous justification for the continued use of good grammar – given humankind’s now-famously short attention span – and one that we may not always remember on the level of the day-to-day. But just as with good grammar, the usefulness of good grammar only shows itself with prolonged use, and this should be easier to remember.

  • Why are we going to the Moon again?

    At 2:51 am on July 15, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will launch its Chandrayaan 2 mission on board a GSLV Mk III rocket from its spaceport in Sriharikota. The rocket will place its payload, the orbiter, in a highly elliptical orbit around Earth. Over the next 16 days, the orbiter will raise its orbit in five steps by firing its thrusters. After that, it will perform an injection burn and travel Moonward for about a week, before entering into an elliptical orbit there. Then the orbiter will lower its altitude in multiple steps and then deploy a lander named Vikram.

    The lander will descend over the lunar surface and touch down on September 6 or 7 this year. Once ISRO scientists have performed basic health checks to see if everything is okay, Vikram will release a rover named Pragyan onto the lunar soil.

    This will be the exciting start of Chandrayaan 2, India’s most ambitious space mission to date. Pragyan will spend two weeks on the Moon collecting scientific data about different characteristics of the natural satellite, after which its batteries will die.

    If Chandrayaan 2 is successful, it will have placed the first Indian rover on the Moon’s surface. The mission will also signal India’s first big stride towards the Moon, paralleling that of other countries around the world eyeing the body as a stepping stone to deeper journeys into space.

    The US, Europe and China all envision the Moon as a pit-stop between Earth and Mars, and hope to build permanent stations on the body. Indian officials have expressed similar hopes.

    Such missions are bound to be extremely sophisticated, and extremely expensive.  Chandrayaan 2 alone cost India Rs 978 crore, and the upcoming human spaceflight mission Rs 10,000 crore. These costs are unavoidable – but they could be reduced by focusing on robotic missions instead of human ones. For example, Russia plans to have a Moon base by 2030 whose primary agents will be robots, with some humans to help them.

    Chandrayaan 2 is India’s most complex robotic mission till date. At a recent press conference, K. Sivan, the ISRO chairman, acknowledged contributions from industry and academia to the tune of incurring 67% of the total cost. Given such resources are the bare minimum required to make an interplanetary journey work, the first countries to undertake these trips will also be some of the world’s richest countries – or groups of countries that have decided to work together with space exploration as a common goal.

    ISRO could consider regularly reserving a few payload slots for instruments from countries that don’t have space programmes on missions to accrue diplomatic advantages as an extension of its ongoing efforts. That way, we can symbolically take more countries to the Moon and Mars. A South or Southeast Asian Moon mission, if it ever happens, could have significant R&D benefits for India’s scientists and engineers, even ease the financial burden on ISRO and perhaps edge out behemoths like China.

    According to Sivan, Chandrayaan 2 will have a payload of 14 instruments: eight on the orbiter, three on the lander and two on the rover. Thirteen of them will be India’s, and one from NASA (a passive retroreflector).

    At the moment, going to space has two purposes: research and development. Research precedes development, but development triggers the race. Scientists have built and launched satellites to understand the Solar System in great detail. But if someone is rushing to go to the Moon or Mars in the name of exploiting resources there to benefit humankind, it is because someone else is also doing the same thing.

    It’s understandable that nobody wants to be left out, but it’s equally important to have something to do when we get to the Moon or Mars besides winning a race. Right now, Chandrayaan 2 is being billed as a research mission but a similar purpose is missing from ISRO’s messaging on Gaganyaan. As Arup Dasgupta, former deputy director of the ISRO Space Applications Centre, asked: “What do we hope to achieve after we have waved the Indian flag from orbit?”

    In fact, it is not clear what will happen after Chandrayaan 2 either. ISRO officials have said that the organisation plans to build its own space station and also hinted that it might send Indians to the Moon someday. But we don’t know what these people will do there or if it also plans to send astronauts to Mars. Even the Moon seems desirable now only because it appears to be in speculative demand.

    Most of all, we don’t know how all of these plans fit together to make up India’s spaceflight ambitions for the 21st century. We need a unified vision because these missions are resource-intensive, and won’t be worth the money and effort unless there is a longer-term version to help decide what our priorities should be to maximise resource utilisation. It will also allow us to be opportunistic (like Luxembourg) and regain the first-mover advantage instead of staying also-rans.

    For example, ISRO also needs its allocation to build, launch and operate Earth-observation, resource-monitoring, communication, navigation and scientific satellites, to build and launch different kinds of rockets for the launch services market, to develop new spaceports and to design and build components for future missions.

    If we wish more bang for the buck, then each launch must carry the best instruments we can make, backed by the best infrastructure we can set up to use the data from the instruments, and feed the best channels to use knowledge derived from that data to improve existing services. There are multiple opportunities for improvement on all of these fronts.

    Further, a space or interplanetary mission isn’t just for scientists, engineers or businesspeople. In a not-so-drastic break with tradition, ISRO could for example index and organise all the data obtained from the 13 Indian instruments onboard Chandrayaan 2 and place them in the public domain to benefit teachers, students and other enthusiasts. It could incentivise ISRO to improve its data analysis and translational research pipelines, both of which are clogged at the moment.

    There’s no greater example of this than the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) and NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN), which were launched at almost the same time in 2014. While we hailed MOM for its shoestring budget, MAVEN has contributed to a larger volume of scientific data and knowledge, almost as if just getting there wasn’t exactly enough.

    For now, we are all excited about Chandrayaan 2, and rightly so. The ISRO viewing gallery in Sriharikota will be packed with visitors on the night of July 14, the news media will be abuzz with live updates from July 15 onwards, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi will likely be following it as well. The organisation’s public outreach cell has also awakened from its famous slumber to post a flurry of updates on its website, social media and YouTube.

    But there will always be exciting missions coming up. After Chandrayaan 2, there is Aditya L1, Gaganyaan, a second Mars mission, a Venus orbiter, reusable launch vehicles, the small-satellite launch vehicle, heavy-lift launchers, etc., plus the ‘Space Theme Park’. None of these should distract us from whatever it is that we’re aiming for, and right now, that isn’t clear beyond an aspiration to stay in the picture.

    The Wire
    July 4, 2019

  • Fanning the flames

    This is the second tweet I’m seeing phrased like this. It lacks context and is provocative, perhaps deliberately? It seems to encourage detention centres to find a cheaper way to house asylum seekers instead of saying this is bad no matter what the costs involved are. The article itself is better. On particularly hot and/or controversial topics, such as immigration, many people often tweet or post links to articles on the topic to be seen to be engaging with it instead of actually engaging with it (such as by reading it and then sharing their original comments).

    Some publications like to take advantage of this because such behaviour promotes the article’s circulation, potentially exposing it to more readers and making it a part of social media conversations, or flame wars. It’s all neither right nor wrong but I think it’s unethical: feeding poorly qualified arguments to a mob is like fanning the flames, then basking in their warmth. Even if Vox isn’t deliberately doing that here, it’s careless to assume its tweet will be interpreted one way when it hasn’t provided the necessary context for that to happen.

  • Assuming you speak Hindi…

    I can’t use the terms ‘Gaganyaan’ and ‘Vyomanaut’ or ‘Gaganaut’ in place of ‘Indian human spaceflight mission’ and ‘Indian astronauts’ because of the bad taste the use of Hindi leaves on my tongue these days. I speak Hindi when I am in Delhi, and I am there often, but the moment I am expected to speak it in a context where such an expectation shouldn’t really exist, my brain automatically stops parsing Hindi words. So when a cab driver asks me where to go in Hindi in Delhi, that’s okay, but it’s not at all okay when a customer care agent in Mumbai calling someone in Bangalore assumes Hindi is the lingua franca.

    It is a somewhat understandable attitude prevalent in North India, where almost everyone speaks Hindi and it’s a safe bet to assume you will be understood if you spoke it, but I don’t buy this as an excuse. Why? Because the underlying assumption has been rendered more and more offensive by the Bharatiya Janata Party – the assumption that everyone speaks it, and if they don’t, then they should. Well, if I should, then I am not going to.

    The words ‘Gaganyaan’, ‘Vyomanaut’ and ‘Gaganaut’, as well as ‘Mangalyaan’, are reprehensible for the same reason. It’s not clear whether ISRO named them or the government but somehow they ended up with Hindi/Sanskrit prefixes.

    I suspect the government was involved for three reasons. First, the Hindi/Sanskrit names have been foisted only on the most prestigious missions of the Indian space programme, and not on the likes of Cartosat, Risat, Astrosat, Scatsat (which certainly deserves a better name), etc. Second, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been known to rechristen missions, as he did with the IRNSS (by changing its name to NAVIC), as if he’s branding them with the stamp of his rule. Third, it was Modi who used the term ‘Gaganyaan’ when he announced the spaceflight mission in his Independence Day speech last year.

    ISRO could simply have called these supposedly flagship missions by their English names, but in Hindi, it sounds as if the organisation is sucking up. CMB Bharat roused the same suspicion. It’s a proposal for a space science mission led by scientists from the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune. If it is approved, built and launched, CMB Bharat (blech) will study an extremely old volume of radiation still lingering in the universe from the time of the Big Bang. My question is about why the scientists behind the proposal saw fit to call it ‘CMB Bharat’ over ‘CMB India’. Is a file with this name on it likelier to catch the attention of the higher-ups?

    Hindi is India’s official language but so is English. And if English has been taboo because of its colonialist associations, then Hindi is taboo now because of its Hindutva associations.

    Frankly, I don’t know what the alternative could have been, but I would personally have preferred that they had gone with English over Hindi (more reasons enumerated here). India still has a colonial hangover problem in many ways but that stopped being a good-enough reason to reject the language long ago. After globalisation, especially, being able to speak English has meant access to better education and better jobs. What rewards does being able to speak in Hindi bring, other than letting you wander around in North India?

    The government’s bias towards Hindi might have made better sense if English hadn’t been in the picture or if this was 1948. But here we are in 2019, and English is very much in the picture. If it is a bridge language that India’s administrators-in-chief seek, then it must be not implemented as such without the approval of all state governments (since states have been linguistically demarcated in India) and not in a way that edges out any of the other languages from their rightful place in the public consciousness.

    Most of all, that obnoxious assumption should be shot and buried.

  • Solutions looking for problems

    There’s been a glut of ‘science projects’ that seem to be divorced from their non-technical aspects even when the latter are equally, if not more, important – or maybe it is just a case of these problems always having been around but this author not being able to unsee it these days.

    An example that readily springs to mind is the Bharati intermediary script, developed by a team at IIT Madras to ease digitisation of Indian language texts. There is just one problem: why invent a whole new script when Latin already exists and is widely understood, by humans as well as machines? Perhaps the team would have been spared its efforts if it had consulted with an anthropologist.

    Another example, also from IIT Madras: it just issued a press release announcing that a team from the institute that is the sole Asian finalist in a competition to build a ‘pod’ for Elon Musk’s Hyperloop transportation concept has unveiled its design. On the flip side, Hyperloop is a high-tech, high-cost solution to a problem that trains and buses were designed to address decades ago, and they remain more efficient and more feasible. Elon Musk has admitted he conceived Hyperloop because he doesn’t like mass transit; perhaps more reliably, his simultaneous bashing of high-speed rail hasn’t gone unnoticed.

    Here is a third example, this one worth many crores: the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) wants to build a space station and staff it with its astronauts. The problem is nobody is sure what the need is, maybe not even ISRO, although it has been characteristically tight-lipped. There certainly doesn’t seem to be a rationale beyond “we want to see if we can do it”. If indeed Indian scientists want to conduct microgravity experiments of their own, like what are being undertaken on the International Space Station (ISS) today and will be on the Chinese Space Station (CSS) in the near future, that is okay. But where are the details and where is the justification for not simply investing in the ISS or the CSS?

    It is very difficult to negotiate a fog without feeling like something is wrong. We built and launched AstroSat because Indian astronomers needed a space telescope they could access for their studies. We will be launching Aditya in 2020 because Indian astrophysicists have questions about the Sun they would like answered. But even then, let us remember that a (relatively) small space telescope is too lightweight an exercise compared to a full-fledged space station that could cost ISRO more money than it is currently allocated every year.

    Sivan’s announcements are also of a piece with those of his predecessors. In fact, the organisation as such has announced many science missions without finalising the instruments they are going to carry. In early 2017, it publicised an ‘announcement of opportunity’ for a mission to Venus next decade and invited scientists to submit pitches for instruments – instead of doing it the other way around. While this is entirely understandable with a space programme that is limited in its choice of launchers, this pattern has also prompted doubts that ISRO is simply inventing reasons to fly certain missions.

    Additionally, since Sivan has pitched the Indian Space Station as an “extension” of ISRO’s human spaceflight programme, we must not forget that the human spaceflight programme itself lacks vision. As Arup Dasgupta, former dy. director of the ISRO Space Applications Centre, wrote for The Wire in March this year:

    … while ISRO has been making and flying science satellites, … our excursions to the Moon, then Mars and now Gaganyaan appear to break from ISRO’s 1969 vision. This is certainly not a problem because, in the last half century, there have been significant advances in space applications for development, and ISRO needs new goals. However, these goals have to be unique and should put ISRO in a lead position – the way its use of space applications for development did. Given the frugal approach that ISRO follows, Chandrayaan I and the Mars Orbiter Mission did put ISRO ahead of its peers on the technology front, but what of their contribution to science? Most space scientists are cagey, and go off the record, when asked about what we learnt that we can now share with others and claim pride of place in planetary exploration.

    So is ISRO fond of these ideas only because it seems to want to show the world that it can, without any thought for what the country can accrue beyond the awe of others? And when populism rules the parliamentary roost – whether under the Bharatiya Janata Party or the Indian National Congress – ISRO isn’t likely to face pushback from the government either.

    Ultimately, when you spend something like Rs 10,000-20,000 crore over two decades to make something happen, it is going to be very easy to feel like something was achieved at the end of that time, if only because it is psychologically painful to have to admit that we could get such a big punt wrong. In effect, preparing for ex post facto rationalisation before the fact itself should ring alarm bells.

    Supporters of the idea will tell you today that it will help industry grow, that it will expose Indian students to grand technologies, that it will employ many thousands of people. They will need to be reminded that while these are the responsibilities of a national government, they are not why the space programme exists. And that even if the space programme provided all these opportunities, it will have failed without justifying why doing all this required going to space.

  • The ‘could’ve, should’ve, would’ve’ of R&D

    ISRO’s Moon rover, which will move around the lunar surface come September (if all goes well), will live and and die in a span of 14 days because that’s how long the lithium-ion cells it’s equipped with can survive the -160º C-nights at the Moon’s south pole, among other reasons. This here illustrates an easily understood connection between fundamental research and its apparent uselessness on the one hand and applied science and its apparent superiority on the other.

    Neither position is entirely and absolutely correct, of course, but this hierarchy of priorities is very real, at least in India, because it closely parallels the practices of the populist politics that privileges short-term gains over benefits in the longer run.

    In this scenario, it may not seem worthwhile to fund a solid-state physicist who has, based on detailed physicochemical analyses, fashioned for example a new carbon-based material that can store lithium ions in its atomic lattice and has better thermal characteristics than graphite. It may seem even less worthwhile to fund researchers probing the seemingly obscure electronic properties of materials like graphene and silicene, writing papers steeped in abstract math and unable to propose a single viable application for the near-future.

    But give it twenty years and a measure of success in the otherwise-unpredictable translational research part of the R&D pipeline, and suddenly, you’re holding the batteries that’re supposed to be installed on a Moon rover and need to determine how many instruments you can pack on there to ensure the whole ensemble is powered for the whole time they’ll need to conduct each of their tests. Just as suddenly, you’re also thinking about what else you could’ve installed on the little machine so it could’ve lived longer, and what else it could’ve potentially discovered in this bonus time.

    Maybe you’re just happy, knowing how things have been for research in the country in the last two decades and based on the spaceflight organisation’s goals (a part of which the government has a say in), that the batteries can even last for two weeks. Maybe you’re just sad because you think it could’ve been better. But one way or another, it’s an inescapably tangible reminder that investments in research determine what you’re going to get to take out of the technology in the future. Put differently: it’s ridiculous to expect to know which water molecules are going to end up in which plant, but unless you water the soil, the plants are going to start wilting.

    Chandrayaan 2 itself may be lined up to be a great success but who knows, there could come along a future mission where a groundbreaking instrument developed by an inspired student at a state university has to be left out of an interplanetary satellite because we didn’t have access to the right low-density, high-strength materials. Or where a bunch of Indians are on a decade-long interstellar voyage and the captain realises crew morale is dangerously low because the government couldn’t give two whits about social psychology.

  • A religious environmentalism

    June 5 was World Environment Day, which is presumably why an article entitled ‘Hindu roots of modern ‘ecology” was doing the rounds on Twitter, despite having been published in 2016. In the article, its author Viva Kermani writes,

    Centuries before the appearance of the likes of Greenpeace, World Environment Day, and what is known as the environmental movement, the shruti (Vedas, Upanishads) and smruti (Ramayana, Mahabharata, Puranas, other scriptures) instructed us that the animals and plants found in the land of Bharatavarsha are sacred; that like humans, our fellow creatures, including plants have consciousness; and therefore all aspects of nature are to be revered. This understanding, care and reverence towards the environment is common to all Indic religious and spiritual systems: Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. Thus, there is ample evidence to show that the earliest messages of the importance of the environment and the need for ecological balance and harmony can be found in ancient Indic texts.

    Overall, Kermani argues that Hindus are essentially all environmentalists and that many species of plants and animals thrive in India Bharat because of Hindus’ reverential attitude towards them. The second argument is easier to swat away, especially when it shows itself as the following contention from the same article:

    That India today is home to 70% of the world’s tigers – our country has some 2,500 tigers in the wild – is because the tiger is considered divine, a vahana of the Durga and present in any form of Durga iconography. Tigers have been wiped out in Java and Sumatra, the great islands of Indonesia across which, the majestic big cat once roamed freely, for Indonesia was once Hindu.

    Kermani has clearly mixed up cause and effect here. Tigers don’t survive because they’re represented in Hindu iconography; they’re represented in our iconography because they were already here before the Hindus got here. More importantly, tiger populations in India are increasingly threatened by linear projects, mining activities, dams and river-interlinks. If the tiger was so important, shouldn’t the streets of Puri and Varanasi be swimming in Hindu protestors right now?

    The reason Greenpeace and World Environment Day showed up was because religious importance alone is useless. It’s fine to claim primacy but to claim such primacy is also relevant is the problem. It’s not. What’s the point of repeatedly saying you invented something when clearly the invention doesn’t even work anymore? It’s hard to believe, as a result, that exercises of this nature are anything more than a form of intellectual indulgence. With some editing, they might be better served as messages of hope, inviting Hindus to look beyond the red herrings of Islamophobia and nationalism and towards sustainable living practices.

    However, my issue with Kermani’s argument is deeper. While she makes a case for why Hinduism was also a very early first manifestation of environmentalism (albeit by placing the blame for our general ignorance of this factoid at the feet of Christianity), it’s not a useful environmentalism – nor is that of Greenpeace or, for that matter, the likes of PETA, etc.

    Hinduism’s authority is scriptural; modern environmentalism’s authority is scientific, at least it should be. We shouldn’t have to pay attention to the needs of the non-human occupants of this world because a higher authority thinks so but because we know why it is important to do so. The centroid of our ecological morals should be located, at least in part, within humanist, social, naturalist and empirical frameworks, instead of taking sole recourse through divine proclamations that we’re not allowed to challenge, let alone overthrow.

    Scriptural authority doesn’t allow our responsibilities as the alpha species on Earth to evolve with what we know. For example, it makes sense to destroy some members of an invasive species that have colonised foreign ecosystems (aided, often inadvertently, by human activities) before they displace and endanger their native counterparts. For another, it’s perfectly reasonable for forest-dwellers to cut trees down for firewood and other resources. However, Hinduism would condemn the man who does either of these things, at least according to Kermani.

    She continues:

    Even today, Bharat is blessed with a rich biodiversity, because of the spiritual connectedness that Hindus have with nature. That there exists sthala vriksham shows that trees were intimately associated with spiritual tradition (In Sanskrit, sthala is a place, especially a sacred place, and vriksh is tree). Every temple is associated with a tree and every tree is associated with a deity and a story. The more well-known examples of sthala vriksham include the Kadamba at the Meenakshi Sundareswarar Temple in Madurai and the vanni tree (khejri in Hindi) at the Magudeshwara Temple at Kodumudi. The famous mango tree at the Ekambereshwara Temple at Kancheepuram is believed to be more than 3,000 years old!

    These are as much places of worship as they are lightning rods for discriminating against the lower castes. Non-Brahmins are proscribed from reading the Indic texts that Kermani is so fond of quoting; during most of its existence, especially in the post-Vedic period, the tenets of Hinduism rendered the members of such castes to be socially dead and unfit to use Sanskrit (apart from perpetrating various other brutalities). Hinduism is not an inherently ecological religion; it is inherently discriminatory, and an environmentalism feeding and drawing from its practices will only exhibit the same afflictions.

    But even if Hinduism had been a wholly inclusive religion, our sense of why it’s important to save our trees shouldn’t come from there. The practice of environmentalism has many stakeholders and they contest its purpose along different trajectories, according to different needs, their geographical locations, their cultural values, etc. In this muddle, which is necessary by design, it’s important that we are more adaptable than we are prescient, more equitable than munificent, and more progressive than prescriptive. These guidelines are as such antithetical to religion by definition.

    Of course, this doesn’t mean one must reject all the environmental aspects of Hinduism, or any other religion for that matter; instead, Hindus’ views on what it means to be environmentalist mustn’t be limited by what Hinduism considers appropriate, although this isn’t likely to be the case.

    If you’re wondering why I chose to write about an article that appeared on a website peddling the typical far-right pro-Hindutva viewpoint, it’s that this endorsement of Hinduism as an environment-friendly entity stems as much from among conservatives as liberals, and that as much as either group would like to assert Hinduism’s credentials in this regard, such ‘spiritual environmentalism’ is, at least in part, an oxymoron.

    (One last point, on a different note: Kermani writes towards the end,

    Today, under the principles of the Chaos Theory, the commonly known as the Butterfly Effect – where a creature as delicate as the butterfly, by flapping its wings, sets up a series of reactions, by first causing some changes in the atmosphere, can end up causing a storm. This is nothing, but the Hindu understanding of karma, that all actions are connected and are part of the universe and that our actions affect not just other humans, but also nature, of which we are a part.

    As it happens, chaos theory is not just the butterfly effect, and the butterfly effect is not concerned with the interconnectedness of all things. Instead, it is a metaphorical example of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to their initial conditions. For example, the trajectory of a pendulum changes drastically over time even if its starting position is moved only slightly. In the same way, the tornado in the metaphor could have been precipitated by a distant butterfly flapping its wings as much as, say, an eagle high up in the sky.)

  • A Q&A with blinders

    The following comment grates on multiple levels:

    Here’s Mohandas Pai, a Hindutva fanatic known to have a pH of 1, issuing a ridiculous comment against The Hindu, which was simply reporting a statement issued by a Hindu organisation. And then there’s V. Vinay, a far gentler mathematician and entrepreneur, choosing to make a teaching moment of Pai’s question, as if it had been asked with honesty and/or carried any legitimacy.

    Pai is deriding The Hindu and calling it a hypocrite for consuming wood to create its newspapers as much as the people quoted in its report are requesting the temple in Puri to stop consuming wood to construct chariots for its famous annual procession. Inasmuch as there is some sense in both groups tempering their requests with considerations about the importance of newspapers and of religion and their respective potential to offset the downsides of environmental degradation (such as by promoting collective action against wanton degradation or by providing a moral crutch against which to seek support in a dangerous world), Pai’s response is rhetorical, and rabid. Vinay’s quote-tweet, in turn, exposes this rabidity to 8,500 more people without making any additional attempt to characterise it as witless and trollish.

    In fact, his tone-deaf response – to estimate the amount of wood one copy of The Hindu requires to print – clothes Pai’s comment in the dress of legitimacy it doesn’t deserve. And at the end of his purely academic exercise, Vinay wonders if people should be reading newspapers at all, with no thought for their ability to galvanise different sections of society, especially the lower ones whose members still access the news offline, in support of or in protest against common causes. Indeed, I would have expected anyone else other than Pai to have considered similar arguments (as opposed to judgments) in favour of organising the rath yatra before disgorging reactionary nonsense and attempting to shut a newspaper up. But that’s been his style.

    If Vinay intended his exercise to teach his audience anything, it is that partial answers can sometimes be worse than completely wrong ones (and that less socially conscious scientists are prone to them, although Vinay has never seemed like one). He has simply homed in on a question, unmindful of the context in which it was presented, and answered it without giving any thought to why it was asked, what answering it would mean, and in fact if there might have been a choate way to answer it if only one had looked beyond the insular logics of material economics.

  • Of reason and realism

    Laurie Penny writes on Longreads:

    Remember the U.S. presidential debates of 2016? Remember how the entire liberal establishment thought Hillary Clinton had won, mainly because she made actual points, rather than shambling around the stage shouting about Muslims? What’s the one line from those debates that everyone remembers now? It’s “Nasty Woman.” What’s the visual? It’s Trump literally skulking around Hillary, dominating her with his body. It’s theatre. And right now the bad actors are winning.

    This paragraph is on point. Many left-liberal intellectuals frequently pen opinions, editorials and commentaries for the popular press and assume, by the self-assessed weight of their arguments, that the conservative, right-wing reader must be convinced of the superiority of the authors’ philosophies and switch sides. This never happens. Specifically, it doesn’t happen 90% of the time because the authors aren’t good writers, and the ensuing back-and-forth swiftly descends into semantics. And it doesn’t happen 10% of the time because the bhakt reading the article isn’t there for the points. You can write and write and write but – as Penny proves – the theatre of fascism will always overtake the finest discussion of ideas.

    I’m neither a scientist nor a philosopher, but I have often wondered if ideas from scientific realism can help make sense of the empirical information we have. It is possible the liberal intellectual assumes her audience will behave, at the individual level at least, the way she herself does; this is a reasonable assumption that we all make in our day-to-day lives: for example, we excuse a friend’s anger in a moment of frustration because we rationalise it away based on lessons we have learnt from our own experiences. Similarly, the author presumes that, since she believes she can be swayed by reason, the reader will be swayed, too, and the author’s commitment to reason becomes – in the author’s mind, at least – a common platform upon which writer and reader will stage their debate. However, the flaw in this worldview is that the bhakt is, almost by definition, inimical to reason (irrespective of whether he is in all aspects of his life unreasonable) and does not mount the stage with the same aspirations.

    Now, scientific realism (in its semantic interpretation) holds that science’s claims about scientific entities – “objects, events, processes, properties and relations” (source) – should be taken literally, as if they correspond to the actual natural universe itself instead of to a natural universe we perceive with our senses. The significance of this statement is better illustrated by a counter-example: anti-realists would contend that if we cannot see electrons with the naked eye, then science’s claims about their existence don’t pertain to their actual existence but instead provide ways to instrumentalise the claims to aid our interactions with observable entities, such as an electric fan.

    Similarly, the liberal intellectual behaves like an anti-realist, seeking to explain deviant social phenomena in terms she can understand and rejecting what she cannot observe herself instead of, and like a realist might, allowing ideas that don’t conform to her worldview to exist on their own terms, outside the realm of her scholarship and trivialised because their rules don’t submit to the logic of hers.

    Acknowledgement as in the latter case is important to enable meaningful engagement, such as it is willing to look beyond the identity and aspirations of one’s own group. More importantly, classifying what is beyond one’s didactic reach as fictions – even useful fictions, as the committed anti-realist might – is flawed the same way scientism prizes an economic logic at the cost of morals and ethics. The belief that there may be other ways to make informed choices but that they will ultimately have to be subsumed within one’s worldview prevents oneself from a) designing appropriate policies to govern them; b) expanding one’s own library of knowledge to include what could well be a legitimate alternative, and c) acknowledging the strength of the alternative on its terms instead of addressing it as a primitive form of one’s own politics.

    So unable to see beyond her own allegiance to reason, the scholar assumes constantly that it can and will triumph, while her diminished sense of the external world prevents her from acknowledging a different set of motivations for people on the ‘other side’. Over time, the left-liberal collective begins to reject and ignore their existence altogether, dismissing their motivations and sensibilities with counterparts that the individual rooted in the primacy of logic, reason and civility can actually assimilate. This way, the left-liberal group keeps up its mindless performance of engaging with the right when in fact it is not engaging at all.

    I don’t present all of this as criticism, however, because the primary function of an intellectual creature is to intellectualise, in whatever form: through speech, essays, dramatisation, etc. The act of intellectualisation, in turn, presumes that one’s interlocutor is capable of receiving knowledge so organised and assimilating it themselves. Without this caveat, intellectualism becomes solipsistic and free speech, insofar as it seeks opportunities to change minds and set society on the path of enlightenment, becomes purposeless. So while there are people who are willing to reason and debate and argue, they must do so; but where people resort to whataboutery, shooting-the-messenger and ad hominem, reason alone – if at all – will not hope to succeed.