Showing posts with label objectivity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label objectivity. Show all posts
Monday 18 December 2017
Friday 16 January 2015
Perspective on Charlie Hebdo, Peshawar killings; In maya, the killer and the killed
Emotional violence is not measurable. Physical violence is, which makes it a crime that can be proven and hence a greater crime, especially when emotional violence is directed at something as notional as religion
When the Pandavas invited Krishna to be the chief guest at the coronation of Yudhishtira, Shishupala felt insulted and began abusing Krishna. Everyone became upset, but not Krishna who was listening calmly. However, after the hundredth insult, Krishna hurled his razor-sharp discus and beheaded Shishupala. For the limit of forgiveness was up.
Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical weekly, published cartoons; offensive cartoons that I have never seen, and would never have, had someone not killed its staff. With that Charlie became a person, a victim, a martyr to the cause of the freedom of expression. We became heroes by condemning the killing. And so millions have walked in Paris to declare that they are Charlie.
Will there be a march where people identify themselves with Charlie’s killers? Is that allowed? Who are the killers? Muslim, bad Muslim, mad Muslim, un-Islamic Muslim? The editorials are undecided, as in the attack in Peshawar on schoolchildren. The victims there did not even provoke; their parents probably did.
The provocation in Charlie’s case was this: perceived insult to the Prophet Muhammad, hence Islam. Charlie, however, was functioning within the laws of a land renowned for the phrase, “Liberty, Equality and Brotherhood!” Islam is also about brotherhood (Ummah, in Arabic) and equality, though not so much about liberty since Islam does mean submission, a submission to the word of god that brings peace.
Managing the measurable
The two siblings, believers in equality and their own version of liberty decided to hurt each other, one emotionally, the other physically. Emotional violence is not measurable. Physical violence is. That makes the latter a crime that can be proven, hence a greater crime, especially when emotional violence is directed at something as notional as religion. Because we are scientific, you see.
The two siblings, believers in equality and their own version of liberty decided to hurt each other, one emotionally, the other physically. Emotional violence is not measurable. Physical violence is. That makes the latter a crime that can be proven, hence a greater crime, especially when emotional violence is directed at something as notional as religion. Because we are scientific, you see.
And here is the problem — measurement, that cornerstone of science and objectivity.
We can manage the measurable. But what about the non-measurable? Does it matter at all? Emotions cannot be measured. The mind cannot be measured, which is why purists refer to psychology and behavioural science as pseudoscience. God cannot be measured. For the scientist, god is therefore not fact. It is at best a notion. This annoys the Muslim, for he/she believes in god, and for him/her god is fact, not measurable fact, but fact nevertheless. It is subjective truth. My truth. Does it matter?
Where do we locate subjective truth: as fact or fiction? Some people have given themselves the “Freedom of Expression” and others have given themselves a “God, who is the one True God.” Both are subjective truths. They shape our reality. They matter. But we just do not know how to locate them, for they are not measurable.
We cannot measure the hurt Charlie’s cartoons caused the Muslim community. We cannot measure the Muslim community’s sensitivity or over-sensitivity. But we can measure the outcome of the actions of the killers. We can therefore easily condemn violence. That it caused hurt, rage, humiliation, enough for some people to grab guns, is a non-measurable assumption, a belief. Belief is a joke for the rational atheist.
The intellectual can hurt with his/her words. The soldier can hurt with his/her weapons. We live in the world where the former is acceptable, even encouraged. The latter is not. It is a neo-Brahminism that the global village has adopted. Those who think and speak are superior to those who beat and kill, even if the wounds created by word-missiles can be deeper, last longer and fester forever. Gandhi, the non-violent sage, is thus pitted against Godse, the violent brute. I, the intellectual, have the right to provoke; but you, the barbarian who only knows to wield violence, have no right to get provoked and respond the only way you know how to. If you do get provoked, you have to respond in my language, not yours, brain not brawn, because the brain is superior. I, the intellectual Brahmin, make the rules. Did you not know that?
Non-violence is the new god, the one true god. When we say violence, we are actually referring only to the physical violence of the barbarian. The mental violence of the intellectual elite is not considered violence. So, one has sanction to mock Hinduism intellectually on film (PK by Rajkumar Hirani and Aamir Khan) and in books (The Hindus: An Alternative History by Wendy Doniger), but those who demand the film be banned and the books be pulped are brutes, barbarians, enemies of civic discourse, who resort to violence. They are not as bad as the Charlie killers, but seem to be on the same path.
Role of the thinker
We refuse to see arguments as brutal bloodless warfare, mental warfare. We don’t see debating societies as battlegrounds. Mental torture, we are told, is merely a concept, not truth: difficult to measure hence prove. The husband who mentally tortures can never be caught; the husband who strikes the wife can be caught. We empathise with the latter, not the former (she is over-sensitive, we rationalise). Should the mentally tortured wife kill her husband, it is she who will be hauled to jail, not the husband. Her crime can be proved. Not his.
We refuse to see arguments as brutal bloodless warfare, mental warfare. We don’t see debating societies as battlegrounds. Mental torture, we are told, is merely a concept, not truth: difficult to measure hence prove. The husband who mentally tortures can never be caught; the husband who strikes the wife can be caught. We empathise with the latter, not the former (she is over-sensitive, we rationalise). Should the mentally tortured wife kill her husband, it is she who will be hauled to jail, not the husband. Her crime can be proved. Not his.
The thinker we are told is not a doer. The killings provoked by the thinker thus goes unnoticed. The thinker — the seed of the violence — chuckles as the barbarian, whose only vocabulary is physical, will be caught and punished while mental warfare will go on with brutal precision. When the ill-equipped barbarian even attempts to fight back using words, we mock him as the troll.
In Sanskrit, the root of the world maya is ma, to measure. We translate the word as illusion or delusion but it technically means a world constructed through measurement. Thus, the scientific word, the rational world, based on measurement, is maya. And that is neither a good or bad thing. It is not a judgement. It is an observation. A world based on measurement will focus on the tangible and lose perspective of the intangible. It will assume measured truth as Truth, rather than limited truth.
Those who felt gleeful self-righteousness in mocking the Prophet are in maya. So are those who took such serious offence to it. The killer is in maya and so is the killed. Those who judge one as the victim and the other as the villain are also in maya. We all live in our constructed realities, some based on measurement, some indifferent to measurement, each one eager to dismiss the other, rendering them irrelevant: The other is the barbarian who needs to be educated. The other is also the intellectual who is best killed.
Essentially, maya makes us to judge. For when we measure, we wonder which is small and what is big, what is up and what is down, what is right and what is wrong, what matters and what does not matter. Different measuring scales lead to different judgments. Wendy Doniger is convinced she is the hero, and martyr, who fights for the subaltern Indian in her writings. Dinanath Batra is convinced he is the hero who opposes her wilful misunderstanding of sanatana dharma. Baba Ramdev feels he has a right to demand the banning of PK. And the producers of the film respond predictably about the freedom of speech and rationality, as they laugh their way to the bank. Everyone is right, in his or her maya.
Every action has consequences. And consequences are good and bad only in hindsight. The age of Enlightenment was also the age of Colonisation. The most brutal wars of the 20th century, from the world wars to the Cold Wars, were secular. Non-violent thought manifests itself in non-violent words which give rise to violent action. The fruit is measurable, not the seed. To separate seed from fruit, thought from action, is like separating stimulus from response. It results in a wrong diagnosis and a wrong prescription. The killer does not kill thought. The thought creates more killers.
What goes around always comes around. Outrage over violence feeds outrage over cartoons. Hindu philosophy (not Hindutva philosophy) calls this karma. We don’t want to break the cycle by letting go of either non-violent outrage or violent protests. Ideas such as maya and karma annoy the westernised mind for they disempower them: they who are determined to save the world with measuring tools dismiss astute observation of the human condition as fatalism.
In his past life, Shishupala was the doorkeeper Jaya of Vaikuntha who was cursed by the Sanat rishis that he would be born on earth, away from Vishnu, for daring to block their entry. The doorkeeper Jaya argued that he was doing his job but the curse stuck and Jaya was reborn as Shishupala. Vishnu had promised to liberate him and to expedite his departure, Shishupala practised viparit-bhakti, reverse-devotion, displaying love through abuse. So he insulted Krishna, knowing full well that Krishna was Vishnu and would be forced to act. There is a limit to forgiveness. But there should be no limit to love.
Wednesday 6 February 2013
Standard & Poor's feels Justice's lash, but can the law ever conquer greed?
The
DOJ is making headlines with high-profile suits against Wall Street
firms, but singling out a few won't fix systemic wrongdoing
Standard & Poor's
faces a Department of Justice lawsuit alleging the firm succumbed to
conflicts of interest in their ratings for banks of mortgage-backed
securities. Photograph: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images
In politics, public humiliation can often be a useful motivator.
Take the Department of Justice, which was hauled over the coals in a
recent PBS Frontline documentary on its lack of vigor in Wall Street prosecutions. The DOJ has been on a rampage lately.
The DOJ has been reportedly planning to file charges against the Royal Bank of Scotland, and last night, it filed an actual lawsuit against Standard & Poor's for misrating mortgage bonds before the financial crisis.
The Department of Justice is also getting creative and taking a novel tack. Standard & Poor's and other ratings firms have long maintained that their ratings, which were opinions, were protected under freedom of speech; in essence, you can't kill the messenger. This has proven a bulletproof defense for years.
The DOJ, in its lawsuit, counters that S&P acted as a double agent by allegedly violating its own standards. Ratings firms are paid by banks to rate products created by banks – an obvious conflict of interest in many cases. Standard & Poor's, like other firms, promised objectivity.
Thus the DOJ has alleged that S&P, while purporting to provide objectivity, was working on behalf of banks that needed good ratings for bad mortgage securities. To support this allegation, the DOJ quotes several emails that show S&P fretting over losing business to Moody's.
DOJ v Wall Street: from zero to hero
This rampage is great … directionally. The DOJ generally has to go crawling to Wall Street, tentatively striking deals that won't hurt financial reputations too badly and the bottom line hardly at all.
So, who doesn't love a major character finally overcoming its low self-esteem and owning its power?
In movie terms, this is the equivalent of the nerdy librarian who doffs her glasses and shakes out her hair, at which someone must yell, "Why, Miss Jones, you are magnificent!" It is Beyonce, pointedly filing her nails in the video for "Irreplaceable", squaring her shoulders and declaring, "You must not know about me. You got me twisted." It is Patrick Dempsey growing from spindly tween idol into a silvery heartthrob.
Considering that the DOJ is trying to regain its swagger, it seems churlish to object that it still may not be thinking big enough. And yet …
The DOJ's approach is great, in theory. It's good for a prosecutor's reputation to rake one firm over the coals and humiliate it publicly. But the truth is, the effect is limited. Other firms, rather than looking at the embarrassed firm and thinking, chastened, "there but for the grace of God go I," instead think, "God, glad I'm not like that poor sucker who got caught for doing what everyone does."
The DOJ is the greatest prosecutorial force in the country. It has subpoena power – excellent for commandeering embarrassing financial documents – and just enough resources and publicity power to really strike fear into Wall Street wrongdoers. The SEC is too underfunded; the CFTC has a shorter reach. The DOJ is, in short, the only entity in the country with any hope of accomplishing anything in the way of white-collar law enforcement.
Why 'making an example' doesn't work
There is some method to striking fear into the hearts of villains. For one thing, villains always believe they are exceptional. This is the case on Wall Street as well. Anyone who does anything dodgy involving money is usually pretty self-aware. He never deludes himself into thinking, "Oh, I am not doing anything wrong." He thinks, instead, "The authorities will never be smart enough to catch me."
This is why singling out RBS, or UBS, or S&P, will never have the fearsome deterrent effect that the DOJ really wants. In fact, by going after the firms piecemeal, the DOJ may actually be encouraging future wrongdoers rather than turning them away from crime.
You see, the DOJ is going after one or two firms for actions that were widespread across the industry. Fixing interest rates was the work of thousands of people. It's safe to say that S&P was not the only ratings firm that fretted that it would lose fees if it started downgrading bonds. In fact, S&P, according to the emails provided by the DOJ, frequently worried that it was not keeping up with Moody's.
This is a familiar pattern in Wall Street cases: Merrill Lynch, for instance, packaged all those bad mortgage securities partly because it was trying to outdo the profits of Goldman Sachs.
Wall Street's culture of rule-breaking
The dirty secret of Wall Street is that it delights in evading rules – not just for profit, but also for sport. To keep its skills sharp. The finance industry is full of clever people who love nothing more than finding loopholes to subvert authority, whether of government or of their own head of trading. The reason Wall Street leaders are always yelling about the necessity of teamwork is because acting mostly in one's individual self-interest – and the interest of one's bonus payment – is almost always the rule.
So, yes, this sudden burst of enthusiasm from the DOJ is a great development. There's no question that it's good, for most of the populace, to see one of America's great prosecutorial forces finally pull its act together on one of the defining scandals of our age: the greed – and sometimes fraud – that turned the housing crash into a financial crisis.
Yes, it's late – in fact, it pushes the traditional statute of limitations on such cases – but at least, some of the gears are finally moving. "Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late," the supreme court Justice Felix Frankfurter once said, and he could have been talking about all these delayed actions.
It's also always fun to participate in the ritual of reading the hilariously self-incriminating internal emails that the DOJ captured. One of the best includes an S&P analyst sarcastically commenting that, after the crisis, the firm looked like something out of the 1980s hapless Wall Street comedy Trading Places:
Bond ratings now less relevant
Wall Street, of course, didn't need to see these emails to see which way the wind was blowing with the ratings firms. Most banks and trading floors stopped depending on official bond ratings ages ago, even though all the ratings firms retain excellent records on corporate and municipal bonds (in fact, anything that is not mortgage-related).
BlackRock, one of the favorite bond managers of the federal government, has boasted for years that it does its own analysis on potential defaults rather than rely on ratings firms. (BlackRock's founder, Larry Fink, was not coincidentally one of the creators of the mortgage-backed security.) Official ratings are often only a technical requirement, but rarely do many banks or investors rely on them any more – the same way those banks don't rely on the Libor interest rate any more.
Which is why the DOJ should cast its net wider. Ultimately, the DOJ lawsuit against S&P may make a splash, but it probably won't be a deterrent. The only thing that will do that is banks and investors forcing ratings firms to behave differently.
That's easy in times of calm, like now, but much harder in bubble times, when greed rules.
The DOJ has been reportedly planning to file charges against the Royal Bank of Scotland, and last night, it filed an actual lawsuit against Standard & Poor's for misrating mortgage bonds before the financial crisis.
The Department of Justice is also getting creative and taking a novel tack. Standard & Poor's and other ratings firms have long maintained that their ratings, which were opinions, were protected under freedom of speech; in essence, you can't kill the messenger. This has proven a bulletproof defense for years.
The DOJ, in its lawsuit, counters that S&P acted as a double agent by allegedly violating its own standards. Ratings firms are paid by banks to rate products created by banks – an obvious conflict of interest in many cases. Standard & Poor's, like other firms, promised objectivity.
Thus the DOJ has alleged that S&P, while purporting to provide objectivity, was working on behalf of banks that needed good ratings for bad mortgage securities. To support this allegation, the DOJ quotes several emails that show S&P fretting over losing business to Moody's.
DOJ v Wall Street: from zero to hero
This rampage is great … directionally. The DOJ generally has to go crawling to Wall Street, tentatively striking deals that won't hurt financial reputations too badly and the bottom line hardly at all.
So, who doesn't love a major character finally overcoming its low self-esteem and owning its power?
In movie terms, this is the equivalent of the nerdy librarian who doffs her glasses and shakes out her hair, at which someone must yell, "Why, Miss Jones, you are magnificent!" It is Beyonce, pointedly filing her nails in the video for "Irreplaceable", squaring her shoulders and declaring, "You must not know about me. You got me twisted." It is Patrick Dempsey growing from spindly tween idol into a silvery heartthrob.
Considering that the DOJ is trying to regain its swagger, it seems churlish to object that it still may not be thinking big enough. And yet …
The DOJ's approach is great, in theory. It's good for a prosecutor's reputation to rake one firm over the coals and humiliate it publicly. But the truth is, the effect is limited. Other firms, rather than looking at the embarrassed firm and thinking, chastened, "there but for the grace of God go I," instead think, "God, glad I'm not like that poor sucker who got caught for doing what everyone does."
The DOJ is the greatest prosecutorial force in the country. It has subpoena power – excellent for commandeering embarrassing financial documents – and just enough resources and publicity power to really strike fear into Wall Street wrongdoers. The SEC is too underfunded; the CFTC has a shorter reach. The DOJ is, in short, the only entity in the country with any hope of accomplishing anything in the way of white-collar law enforcement.
Why 'making an example' doesn't work
There is some method to striking fear into the hearts of villains. For one thing, villains always believe they are exceptional. This is the case on Wall Street as well. Anyone who does anything dodgy involving money is usually pretty self-aware. He never deludes himself into thinking, "Oh, I am not doing anything wrong." He thinks, instead, "The authorities will never be smart enough to catch me."
This is why singling out RBS, or UBS, or S&P, will never have the fearsome deterrent effect that the DOJ really wants. In fact, by going after the firms piecemeal, the DOJ may actually be encouraging future wrongdoers rather than turning them away from crime.
You see, the DOJ is going after one or two firms for actions that were widespread across the industry. Fixing interest rates was the work of thousands of people. It's safe to say that S&P was not the only ratings firm that fretted that it would lose fees if it started downgrading bonds. In fact, S&P, according to the emails provided by the DOJ, frequently worried that it was not keeping up with Moody's.
This is a familiar pattern in Wall Street cases: Merrill Lynch, for instance, packaged all those bad mortgage securities partly because it was trying to outdo the profits of Goldman Sachs.
Wall Street's culture of rule-breaking
The dirty secret of Wall Street is that it delights in evading rules – not just for profit, but also for sport. To keep its skills sharp. The finance industry is full of clever people who love nothing more than finding loopholes to subvert authority, whether of government or of their own head of trading. The reason Wall Street leaders are always yelling about the necessity of teamwork is because acting mostly in one's individual self-interest – and the interest of one's bonus payment – is almost always the rule.
So, yes, this sudden burst of enthusiasm from the DOJ is a great development. There's no question that it's good, for most of the populace, to see one of America's great prosecutorial forces finally pull its act together on one of the defining scandals of our age: the greed – and sometimes fraud – that turned the housing crash into a financial crisis.
Yes, it's late – in fact, it pushes the traditional statute of limitations on such cases – but at least, some of the gears are finally moving. "Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late," the supreme court Justice Felix Frankfurter once said, and he could have been talking about all these delayed actions.
It's also always fun to participate in the ritual of reading the hilariously self-incriminating internal emails that the DOJ captured. One of the best includes an S&P analyst sarcastically commenting that, after the crisis, the firm looked like something out of the 1980s hapless Wall Street comedy Trading Places:
"You should see how it is here. It's like a friggin trading floor. 'Downgrade, Mortimer, downgrade!'"
Bond ratings now less relevant
Wall Street, of course, didn't need to see these emails to see which way the wind was blowing with the ratings firms. Most banks and trading floors stopped depending on official bond ratings ages ago, even though all the ratings firms retain excellent records on corporate and municipal bonds (in fact, anything that is not mortgage-related).
BlackRock, one of the favorite bond managers of the federal government, has boasted for years that it does its own analysis on potential defaults rather than rely on ratings firms. (BlackRock's founder, Larry Fink, was not coincidentally one of the creators of the mortgage-backed security.) Official ratings are often only a technical requirement, but rarely do many banks or investors rely on them any more – the same way those banks don't rely on the Libor interest rate any more.
Which is why the DOJ should cast its net wider. Ultimately, the DOJ lawsuit against S&P may make a splash, but it probably won't be a deterrent. The only thing that will do that is banks and investors forcing ratings firms to behave differently.
That's easy in times of calm, like now, but much harder in bubble times, when greed rules.
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