Freedom and Compassion

(Note: I started writing this post a long time ago, when there was a huge controversy over the Shiv Sena protesting (violently, or at least threateningly, if I remember correctly) about what someone posted on Facebook. I revisited it now, while looking through posts I’d saved as drafts. It’s one I’ve wanted to complete for a long time, and into which I’ve put quite a bit of effort. With ‘India’s Daughter’, the documentary on the ‘Nirbhaya’ case being banned, I think this is a good time to update it and post it. I have a lot to say on this topic, so I’m making this a multi-part post. I may meander quite a bit, and the posts may not be perfectly linear, or perfectly narratively coherent. Caveat lector.)

I have noticed that a controversy over what someone said, wrote, sang, or depicted receives media attention every few months in India. Most often, these are small and only locally relevant, even though they often draw national attention. Less frequently, the controversies engage the attention of a significant part of the nation, and are national in scope.

The examples that I can remember off the top of my head are: the Indian churches’ protests against the movie adaptation of Dan Brown’s ‘The Da Vinci Code’, the protests by various caste parties against the lyrics of a song from the movie ‘Aaja Nachle’, the (international) controversy against Salman Rushdie’s ‘The Satanic Verses’, the protests against historical or scholarly writing critical of Islam (the examples are too numerous to mention – a good starting point is ‘The Calcutta Quran Petition’), the protests against and personal harassment of M.F. Husain, and most recently the Shiv Sena’s protests against material hurting their sentiments on Facebook.

In each case, the protesters had their way, the speech they deemed offensive was banned, and the state’s power was deployed on their behalf against its authors. ‘The Da Vinci Code’ had its climactic moment interrupted (and ruined) by a forcibly-inserted disclaimer, the ‘Aaja Nachle’ song had the controversial lyrics cut out, Rushdie was forced to recant publicly in the face of death threats, ‘The Calcutta Quran Petition’ was banned and its authors arrested, M.F. Husain was hounded out of India, and the Shiv Sena’s critics were arrested.

(I think all of these instances of censorship lack merit, with the spectacle of mass protests becoming more and more farcical as the internet allows for uncontrollable freedom of speech and anonymity. Maharashtra partially shutting down because somebody said something on Facebook is foolish and sad, but it is also wickedly funny if you know the slightest thing about the internet. I further think that in most of the examples I mentioned above, the intent of the author(s) wasn’t to hurt a community’s sentiments, and that they wouldn’t know at all how to react if 4chan or Anonymous decided to actually do so.)

In the ensuing discussions and debates, I have often heard the argument that speech should be free, but that this freedom comes with responsibility to use it wisely; those who say this often go further, and also add that speech shouldn’t hurt the sentiments of others or cause disharmony. (The disharmony is usually religious or caste-based.) Sometimes they state a stronger form of the same argument, saying that speech should be free only as long as it’s responsible and doesn’t hurt the sentiments of people or cause disharmony. Either of these forms is often (but not always) followed by a criticism of the speaker for being irresponsible. I thought that this was a self-contradictory message, asking: if speech is restricted like this, how is it free?

Seeing that it was often politicians or partisan public figures who talked like this, I also thought they were pandering to a constituency, or taking a side – of the churches, a caste, a religious community, or a linguistic group and its associated political party – without overtly supporting violent censorship. This was sufficient to explain why politicians, committed ideologues, or partisans would say so. I recently came across this argument in the comments sections of newspaper articles, and I remember having heard it in person (though rarely), where motivated pandering didn’t explain it. I have since understood this view better. (I do not agree with it, and still think it’s wrong.)

Here is what I hypothesise: that those who honestly make such arguments do not think that the right to free speech is fundamental the way the right to life is. They see that any speech which a caste, religious, linguistic, or other such group finds offensive often leads to violence and protests from that group, specially when that particular identity is politically significant in addition to being personally meaningful. Seeing that, they conclude that such expression is irresponsible. Finally, I think it’s plausible that they also believe the original claim – that it’s simply wrong to say something which could make someone else feel bad, even if is the only consequence such speech has on the world – and they are simply saying so.

If this is true, I infer that they think of freedom of speech as a privilege with associated duties, and not as a right at all. I disagree with this opinion of theirs for two reasons. I value the freedom to speak freely in particular, and the freedom to own and control your vocal cords, writing/drawing hands, or other parts of your body in general (with the constraint that everyone, and not just I, have these rights), as good things to have in themselves. Secondly, I think that such a view assigns the responsibility for violent protests (or other consequences, like property damage) of controversial speech to the speaker and not those who materially/physically committed them. This is an unprincipled exception to the general rule that an actor is responsible for his actions, and certainly his crimes.

(I can think of one way of steelmanning this view, though at the cost of modifying it so much I’m not sure its original proponents would agree with it any more. The steelmanned view: that though free speech is in fact a right (or at least should be), there are powerful political groups who will respond violently to critical speech and expect to get away with it due to the weakness of the state, and a large number of individuals who neither understand nor even accept the right of others to speak freely, and will respond violently to anything they hear that they’re offended by. These groups are either politically motivated or immature (or both), and thus any speech that they deem offensive carries the risk of causing them to become violent. Thus, freedom of speech should be treated as a privilege that imposes on those who enjoy it a ‘heroic responsibility’ to think of the consequences of saying anything at least for now, while simultaneously making efforts (probably through the state’s power, using compulsory education) to make people accept freedom of speech and make them think that its forcible suppression is illegitimate.

I can argue against this steelmanned version, but until I have some proof that someone believes it, I don’t want to.)

I conjecture that many who think like this simply haven’t understood free speech. The entire purpose of protecting people’s rights when they speak freely (and to speak freely) is to protect unpopular speech. If someone says something that’s an opinion held by a majority and socially well-accepted and uncontroversial (or held by a powerful political group), his rights are unlikely to be violated because of that; and if they are, those who violated them are likely to be punished quickly and efficiently. Most people feel that it’s right and just to punish the violator in such a case, and I surmise are built that way, and that it’s the default for people and groups (which can be as small as a group of friends, or a tribe, or as large as a country with millions of people who share roughly similar opinions because they get information from the same sources (usually broadcast media)). It is people who say things that are unpopular whose rights need to be protected, as very few people (if any) are likely to have any sympathy for them. There are many reasons something said could be unpopular, its being “irresponsible” just one of them.

(I’ll be charitable and assume that those who say that they object to something because it’s irresponsible are sincere, and aren’t trying to find any means to force the person they disagree with to stop saying things they don’t want him to say, and picking the accusation of irresponsibility because they believe it’ll be the most effective at doing this. Even if they are, there is a difficult question that they should answer – who decides what’s responsible and what irresponsible? They’ll almost certainly find this question frivolous when first asked, as to them it’s (probably) just obvious that some things are irresponsible and some responsible in the same way some things are red and some blue, without scope for disagreement. The question remains, though, until they give some way for others to verify how responsible it was of someone to say a particular thing. They could claim that there’s some objective, independently verifiable algorithm to decide whether something is responsible or not. This just pushes the question back by a level, but doesn’t answer it – because what if someone disagrees with that algorithm? Cases like yelling ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre sidestep this question by being instances of other crimes, such as malicious fraud in this instance.)

Speech is consequential, and what someone says can change who has power, or how much of it they have. (Power is a social construct. Strength is not. A gun provides you the strength to send metal projectiles flying at very high speeds. But it only gives you power over someone else if that someone is afraid of what you’ll do with the strength the gun gives you.) In groups or societies in which those who have power aren’t checked from violating human rights, and in which public opinion matters to who has power, speech is tremendously powerful, and literally a matter of life or death. I surmise this is the case in tribal groups, and in some types of repressive states where the power of those who have it is dependent on maintaining a mythology of some kind. (Such as North Korea, or Saudi Arabia.)

In India, many political groups’ power depends on whether they’re perceived as strong or weak, with those seen as weak being less likely to win elections. In India, many people perceive that someone who is made fun of or insulted is weak/pathetic/unworthy. (A plausible reason: if that group was strong or powerful, nobody would dare make fun of or insult it, because they’d be too scared to, due to fear of retaliation.) I surmise that this is so because India is still a ‘honor’ society in this respect. ‘Honor’ is fragile, and being insulted or made fun of without retaliating indicates that you’re weak and without ‘honor’. Thus, it is in most political groups’ interest, specially those whose power is local (linguistic), or caste-based, or in some way insecure, to make sure that they’re perceived as strong by intimidating anyone who makes fun of or insults them – or even criticises them. This is what I think happens with the Shiv Sena, the caste parties, the linguistic parties, and religious groups. This also explains why the easiety way for a new political party to be taken seriously is to violently attack its (strategically weak) targets quickly. I think this is why, for instance, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena attacked non-Marathi people in 2008 – it showed that they were both physically and politically strong enough to engage in violence without being immediately crushed by the authorities, which demonstrated their power, and their ‘honor’ as well (in being willing to act, and act directly, to achieve their goals). (Wikipedia has an explanation of the difference between ‘honor’ and ‘law’ cultures. Many people in India are part of a ‘honor’ culture, and judge political parties on that basis. I think this explains why the behaviour of so many political parties is not just disgusting or shocking, but also fundamentally incomprehensible to Indians who have grown up in a ‘law’ culture, as is the popular support that such behaviour often generates afterwards. I know that I found it incomprehensible when I was younger, and even now I understand it intellectually, not intuitively. The few ‘honor’ intuitions I truly understand (though not agree with) are incredibly difficult to put into words without sounding ridiculous, or like a caricature.)

In a society in which individuals are free to make their own choices, and are financially independent enough to do so without having to worry about their livelihood, what someone says can make such individuals choose differently than they otherwise would have, and thus speech is consequential for familial and interpersonal choices too. I’m not planning to delve into freedom of speech and familial and interpersonal choices (though I may – but probably won’t – change my mind in a future post).

(Nirbhaya addendum: One of the defense attorneys for the perpetrators of the Nirbhaya rape case said (I quote from memory) that if his daughter had permarital sex, he’d douse her in petrol and set her on fire. I don’t think he’d take kindly to her being exposed to the writings of sexually liberated women who own and take responsibility for their own sexuality, or to anyone telling her that she can make her own sexual choices once she’s an adult; I think he may consider it justifiable to murder anyone who tried to persuade her so.)

(Freedom of speech is a concept that’s one level above judgements of the appropriateness of any particular speech act. I’m going to discuss this distinction – and how discussions and debates in India often miss the point by not understanding it, and consequently not understanding the idea behind protections on free speech itself – in Part 2.)

Humans have a tendency to blame circumstances or other people for the bad things that happen to them. (They’re right only some of the time.) When a government clearly gives both authority and responsibility to individual people (or groups that people can think of like individuals), it allows people to blame those people for everything bad that happens. This is (one reason) why dictatorships and monarchies are unstable when the people have the power to overthrow the government – the clear allocation of responsibility means that there is a person everyone can blame and rally against, and try to overthrow.

One reason democracy is stable is because it is far less affected by this tendency. People in a democracy are told to blame themselves for the actions of their government, because they chose it by voting for it. Those who didn’t vote for the government they’re blaming can’t blame just the government, but instead are told that they are in the minority. And when enough people get angry enough/dissatisfied enough, elections allow people to replace the people they blame with others, making them feel better, and not giving them anyone to blame for more than a very short time.

(Another reason democracy is stable is because the permanent bureaucracies that actually take the day-to-day decisions don’t make any individual person responsible for decisions, and so don’t provide anyone with a clear target for their tendency to blame others.)

I feel (without any rigorous backing) that there are two ideas of what it means to ‘grow up’ and be an adult.

One idea of an adult is a person who has wholeheartedly accepted the ideas of his peers* about what an adult is, and whose behaviour confirms to those ideas. (These are vague ideas that are not clearly defined. Often, there are multiple roles, such as ‘father’, ’employee’, ‘wife’, ‘young man’, or ‘retiree’, and anyone who confirms to one of these is classed as an ‘adult’. These roles are also not clearly defined, and can only be inferred by peers based on behaving in ways that rarely necessarily follow from the actions needed to actually carry out the role, but which indicate to others that the person who behaves that way is playing that role. For example, a husband and wife who very carefully plan ahead before having a child, and ensure that they shall be simultaneously able to take excellent care of their child while continuing to lead their previous carefree lifestyle, shall not be looked upon as ‘responsible parents’ by their peers, because they do not behave in the way their peers expect ‘responsible parents’ to behave, even though such a couple are vastly more responsible than those who didn’t plan ahead at all.)

The other idea of an adult is a person who has outgrown their peers’ ideas about this. A metaphor for this view: as the snake sheds its skin when he outgrows it, neither attached nor averse to it, so does a man grow up when he sheds his peers’ expectations and ideas of his role; he doesn’t define himself by identifying with them or rejecting them, either.

I favour the latter view. The former is ritual, the latter maturity.

*peers: the group of people he most often or consistently socialises with. This could be his family and close friends, his co-workers, his co-religionists if he is a member of a religion whose rituals also require socialising with a fixed group (like communal prayer, most prominent in Christianity and Islam), a voluntary social group of some other kind, his classmates, or his peers on an internet forum.

I think that a huge part of my time has gone into a form of procrastination I will call meta-action or meta-work. A working definition of a meta-action is: an action not aimed directly at achieving a goal, but at ‘helping’ actions that are. Mutatis mutandis for meta-work. (Neither of these is bad. But I procrastinated, and deceived myself into thinking that I was doing something at least useful by convincing myself that I was meta-acting or meta-working.)

I have identified some patterns of this type of procrastination in myself. The first is reading about a subject that I’m interested in rather than just picking up the books and learning the subject itself. There are quite a few subjects (unrelated to my profession as a programmer) that I want to study, and have wanted to for a long time. AI, complexity theory, mathematics (there are large gaps in my mathematical understanding), physics (at least the basic minimum), and Austrian economics. In each of these, I think I have spent an order of magnitude time reading about the subject, on various blogs, internet forums, and just randomly on the internet, than on studying the subject itself. With complexity theory, it was mostly on the Godel’s Lost Letter and Shtetl-Optimized blogs. For mathematics and physics, I’ve left them on the backburner for a long time, but often when I felt the old curiosity, I procrastinated on the Physics Forums. For Austrian economics, it was on the Mises Institute and Zero Hedge websites (and for politics, on many paleocon/neo-reactionary blogs, mostly descendants of Moldbug). Sometimes, I procrastinated by buying books which I then didn’t read, or didn’t read beyond the first few chapters. In each of these fields, my goal is to get a basic understanding – enough to satisfy my curiosity – and that’s all; there is nothing further I stand to gain by this pursuit. If I simply pick up the books in my library and read them, that will be enough to get me most of the way to this goal.

Another, which I have seen in my job(s), is time that I have spent time doing meta-work that didn’t actually help in any way with my actual work. I am less certain about how useless this was, as I don’t know whether the meta-work paid for itself, but I think that it mostly didn’t. I think I did too much of it without sufficient thought, and it ate away at large parts of my time. In retrospect, I justified most of this to myself on the grounds that it would help me do my actual work faster. I think that in a few cases it actually did, but only very rarely. I definitely did procrastinate quite a bit by doing this.

Finally, I have sometimes procrastinated by planning. A completely ungrounded plan with little to no connection to reality is a daydream, and I gave that up quite some years ago. But plausible plans that I don’t actually execute are also a form of procrastination, specially when I spend time on building them in my head. Their flaws and ungroundedness are much harder to detect, as they’re all ‘reasonable’ and ‘doable’, or at least plausibly so. But simply making plans is a way to stave off desire and curiosity, a form of procrastination.

All of these usually hide some insecurity or fear, or sometimes impatience. Thinking back to the times when I was not learning a subject, but reading about it, I think I was scared of being interrupted, and by the magnitude of the task. I know, rationally, that it’s not any bigger a task than many others I have done before, but the fear was still there. I think it’s because of a self-image of myself as intelligent, and encountering difficulties understanding something – even something which I know is supposed to take time even for those who are intelligent – is a blow to that image, and consequently everything based on it (the fulfillment of most of my goals and desired require that I actually be intelligent, and many of my memories and choices are influenced have been influenced by this self-view). Another obstacle to starting is the impatience caused by this self-view. When at work, I’ve noticed that my unproductive meta-work phases coincided with being faced with a challenge I didn’t quite know how to handle. (So far, I have handled them all by facing them.) I think the fear there is based on two images – a self-image of myself as a ‘great programmer’, and a fear that asking for help would hit that self-image, and that other people would no longer think I was that ‘great programmer’, which would lead to a cascade of ill-defined or ill-thought-out but certainly horrible consequences: being laughed at, getting fired, never finding another job, never finding another good job, getting deported for not having a job, or being ‘exposed’ as a ‘fraud’.

(Aside: this reminds me of the classic three fetters; I think this is one pattern in which they interact. Identity view lay at the root, and due to self-doubt, I resorted to ineffective and superstitious action. However, I think doubt does not include self-doubt in their context. Meditation has helped me see these patterns and their roots.

I think a major problem in seeing through them was that I am, by objective definitions of the term, lucky enough to have significantly above-average intelligence.)

These methods of procrastination also made the problem worse, by feeding these fears and insecurities by giving in to them, and turning them into habitual patterns. I am breaking out of these habits, by acting differently, but it took courage to write this post, as these are deep fears, and I did not find facing them easy.

I think the time spent I procrastinating like this was a massive waste. (I think meta-action and meta-work are useful, but only when I feel the need for them is due to an actual problem I’m facing in my learning or work. I also think occasionally stopping and taking stock to see if there are any subtle inefficiencies in the way I’m learning or working, which would repay the meta-action or meta-work required to correct them. And I think being alert/mindful at all times that I can will help me work and learn better, without giving in to insecurities or these habituated patterns.) I suspect that if I had spent the time on actually studying the subject, I would have by now almost certainly achieved my basic goal of fundamental understanding. In fact, I think that if I had spent the time I did reading about complexity theory on actually studying it, I would be ready for a Ph.D. qualifier exam in the subject.

Though it is customary in a post like this, I am hesitant to make pronouncements about what I will do in the future. They felt too formulaic to me when I was writing, and too much either grand pronouncements or projections of what I wanted to happen. I thought of writing, “I want to eliminate these patterns”, but I’m afraid that fighting them is merely another distraction. Instead, I want to and have decided to simply study these subjects instead of wasting any more time. I want to succeed perfectly, never choosing to again procrastinate like this. I hope to succeed. I will see what happens.

Historical research is controversial in India. The subjects of controversy that I am most aware of are (in chronological order): the Aryan invasion theory, the religious character of the country and the tolerance of its culture throughout history, the nature of Muslim rule, the nature and importance of the Maratha empire, and the British era in most of its aspects. I’m sure there are many more. The Indian Council of Historical Research has been a controversial body during BJP rule, accused of saffronising textbooks. After reading Arun Shourie’s “Eminent Historians”, I think the body has been political throughout its entire existence.

Based on what I know of India and of the epistemology of history, I think this is inevitable. It is only the physical facts of history that can be ascertained with any confidence by using the natural sciences – and the confidence we place in them is dependent on how confident we are of the efficacy of the methods of the natural science employed to that end. The actual task of comprehending those data requires specific understanding, and this is an understanding which is fundamentally individual in character. “Group” narratives exist not in themselves, but as agreements on the subjective interpretation of these raw data. Therefore, a “rational” history, or “Hindu” history, or “Dalit” history of India differ only in their interpretation of such physical data presented to them, and cannot legitimately differ on matters of physical fact.

I think that the Indian government should leave the conversion of raw historical data into intelligible historical narrative to individual citizens, and restrict itself only to the task of gathering these raw data (and independently verifying them) and making them available to every citizen. If the government does not wish to let go the ICHR and its functions, it can preserve them by having a separate body responsible for historical interpretation and narrative-building; what makes such a body different from the present ICHR is that other citizens interested in history will also have access to the same corpus of historical data on an equal footing. This data-gathering function is not (or, at least, should not be) controversial, and has the further advantage that such a clear separation between narrative and physical history allows the work of data-gathering to not be hindered by political controversies. Given that the internet exists, I further think that every primary source and datum should be universally available (in an appropriate form – for instance, multiple photographs and a 3D model of physical artifacts, scans of documents, and so on for others).

(I know that the question of what this fact-focused body should investigate is going to be determined by narrative. I suspect that the most useful way to investigate the physical facts of history is to attempt to provisionally go with the narrative which is most likely to lead to more facts; for instance, following up multiple primary sources, all of whom agree that there existed a great palace at location X, by actually going to X and seeing if there was a palace there, if necessary digging around a bit. I also think an exhaustive, street-view-like imaging of all of India – a technologically-equipped mapping of what is under the ground – will very probably show up the locations of a lot of buried buildings and artifacts.)

[The bases of my view of the epistemology of history can be found in the following:

• Human Action, Chapter 2
• Epistemological Problems of Economics, Chatpters 2 and 3
• Theory and History, Chapters 8-10 and 12-15]

Addendum: I think that ideally, governments should leave history alone, as historical research isn’t one of their legitimate functions. What I propose above is a compromise applicable to the Indian government, and in general to governments which are unwilling to let go. It makes historical research more efficient, cleaner, fairer, and I think freer, while still letting the government continue its narrative-making.