Principles be damned, whose side are you on? This seems to be the ruling philosophy of our public life. We all talk about principles, we invoke norms, we cite rules — but only after choosing whom to support. Rarely do we allow our judgement about who is right or wrong to be touched by the principles, norms or rules we extoll. No wonder, no one takes any proclamation of principles seriously.
As someone who is a stickler for procedures, I have often been at the receiving end of this sorry side of our public life. No one is willing to entertain a suspicion that I might have said something because it is right, correct or fair. It is not just our political life, which is especially charged at this moment. I have faced the same reaction in academia, government institutions as well as social movements. If you object to a proposal by a “friend” just because it is a poor proposal, you are sure to risk your friendship. If you support something right done or said by someone from the other camp, tongues start wagging — zaroor kuchh setting hai! That is what happened when I spoke up against hoisting of religious flag inside the Red Fort on 26 January, or against lynching of a Dalit Sikh man at Singhu border by some Nihangs. My visit to the family of a BJP worker who died at Lakhimpur Kheri is still held up as a proof of lack of loyalty to the cause.
So I was prepared for the usual reactions when I tweeted welcoming the Punjab and Haryana High Court order staying the arrest of BJP member Tajinder Pal Singh Bagga until 6 July. My tweet simply said: “The order should be welcomed, no matter what our opinion about the person. Sending police to arrest someone on a tweet is not done. Be it Jignesh Mevani or Rana couple, Alka Lamba or Disha Ravi, it is unethical and illegal to use police to torment political opponents.” You can check my timeline for the replies I received. The usual trolling was joined by AAP supporters, no less vicious than BJP ones — who assumed that I was taking out khundak (grudge) against Arvind Kejriwal. (As and when I support something the AAP does, it is read as a sign of a wish to come back.)
Looking beyond the personal antics
Many critics made valid points: that what happened to Bagga was nothing compared to what BJP governments have done to their critics, that the courts were far from consistent in protecting other victims in his position. Some of them assumed that I had forgotten Bagga’s past, especially his leading a physical assault on my friend Prashant Bhushan. Some of them insisted that given his low-grade trolling, the Punjab police had good reasons to give him its famous dose.
Without doubt, Tajinder Singh Bagga is what in polite English you’d call a ‘disagreeable’ character. The thesaurus offers you less polite options to choose from: rude, nasty, obnoxious, repugnant, disgusting. Worse, we don’t even know if this public persona is his real self. All we know is his reel self on social media. All we know is that he has made a political career and business out of attacking — physically and verbally — those targeted by the BJP. We just know him as yet another cardboard character — straight from a cartoon strip — that has arrived in our public life to meet the ever-rising demand for hatred, contrived and real.
How do you deal with someone like him? Ideally, he should be ignored. Stop feeding people like him with negative attention and they perish. Or, you could turn him into a meme, as satirist @roflGandhi has done, much to my delight. Or you could refute him — an ineffective and unwise option, to my mind — through fact-checking or counter-trolling. But can you set the police after him? That is the operational question in this instance.
Just consider the facts of the case. In March this year, Bagga wrote a nasty tweet, since deleted, in response to Arvind Kejriwal’s speech in Delhi assembly questioning the BJP’s promotion of the movie The Kashmir Files: “When 10 lakh ***** are born, one Kejriwal takes birth”. Disgustingly provocative the post certainly was. But would you say it is “criminal intimidation” or “promoting enmity between communities”? These are the charges under which the Punjab police, following a complaint from a local AAP functionary, booked Bagga. He dodged police summons to come to Punjab for “questioning”, a euphemism for mental and physical torture. The Punjab police, ever so focused on this one FIR, landed in Delhi to arrest him.
The drama that followed, involving Punjab, Delhi, and Haryana police, can only be called a farce worse than Bagga’s antics. The National Commission on Minorities, conspicuously silent on bulldozing of Muslim-owned houses and shops, was peeved at Bagga not being allowed to tie his turban. When the court opened at midnight for him, India’s criminal justice system looked like a joke. The Punjab and Haryana High Court order was a welcome end to this prolonged and pathetic public spectacle.
Noticing a nation-wide trend
This drama is being played all over the country, in what Shekhar Gupta calls Mutually Assured Detention. While the BJP leads in targeting its critics with the help of agencies, mainstream media and social media, the opposition-led governments have also taken a leaf out of the BJP’s book. They, too, use the standard recipe: file a frivolous complaint, slap draconian charges in the FIR, use the police to go after the target and teach them a lesson. The job is done before the case ever comes up for trial in a court of law.
That is why I cite the case of Jignesh Mevani. Now, it seems ridiculous to compare Mevani’s fight for justice and his courage of conviction with Baggas of the world. My point here is to remind us that the insidious trick used by the BJP in Mevani’s case is not different from that used by the AAP in the case of Bagga. Now that the AAP controls a police force for the first time (Punjab’s), it is happy to misuse it exactly as other governments. They have also targeted Kumar Vishwas and Alka Lamba on similar trumped up charges.
The Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government in Maharashtra is no different, as the recent case of MP Navneet Rana and her MLA-husband Ravi Rana demonstrates. Their proposed gimmick of reading Hanuman Chalisa outside the private residence of the Chief Minister could at the most call for preventive detention. But arrest under charges of sedition and spreading hatred between communities is plainly ridiculous. Such vindictive actions cast a shadow on other cases — the one against TV anchor Aman Chopra, for example — where the charge of spreading enmity between communities appear to be serious and worthy of a criminal trial.
Hence my plea to all those who are concerned about the endangered constitutional fiction called the Rule of Law: can we stick to principles, irrespective of the persons involved? Or am I whistling in the dark?
It has been a frustrating season. You’ve managed a scratchy 30, a couple of awkward teens and more ducks than a farmyard pond in a children’s picture book. Thoughts of retirement float into your mind, along with the existential terror of what might take the place of these long days on a green field under greying skies. Golf? God, no.
Then, finally, it seems like you’re in. Blue sky, no swing, flat track, friendly bowlers. You’ve done the hard work, wafting and missing outside off, surviving the early run-out opportunity. You’re starting to think the new socks might be just the talisman you needed. You allow yourself the luxury of hope. Along comes an innocuous delivery down the leg side. You flick at it, hoping for a glanced boundary, expecting the airy miss.
And then you feel it. A barely perceptible touch. Almost like the little electric tingle you get from a tooth that will soon need root canal work. The bowler begins to go up but has a change of heart. Was there really a noise? He decides to keep on the umpire’s side for now, saving one in the bank for the nip-backer that might just clip leg. Then he’ll give his lungs a workout. The young keeper was a little more convinced but stifled his shout when he saw the bowler’s lack of conviction. But the keeper is suspicious. He looks at you as if to say: “Did you? I think you might have…”
What do you do? Had you stroked your way to a nice 60, you might well nod, stick your bat under your arm and walk off, garnering goodwill and praise from all. But it’s not been that kind of season. You keep your head down and you ponder. I’m not sure any other sport has anything quite like this. There are plenty of opportunities for cheating in other sports and you can choose to reject them. Nudging your ball so it lies a little easier in the rough. Feigning assassination in the 18-yard box to win a penalty, then adding a flamboyant roll and clutching the face for the bonus of a sending-off. Calling “out” when your opponent’s backhand hits the line.
But walking is different. It isn’t cheating to stand your ground. There is nothing in the laws of cricket that says you can’t wait for the umpire to make a decision. But there are moral aspects to this case. The fact that the laws are silent on walking means it is – almost uniquely in sport – a purely moral issue. One for the philosophers, rather than the third umpire.
Let us imagine that the batter has felt that sickening click. He wants to do the right thing and is in a meditative, philosophical frame of mind. So he quickly reviews the history of Western moral philosophy to find some guidance from the greatest minds to have pondered the question of right and wrong.
Socrates
Ethics really gets going with Socrates, who changed the central question of philosophy from “what kind of stuff is there?” to “how should I live?”. His method was simple. He would find a person who claimed to be an expert in some area of ethical concern – the nature of, say, courage or piety or justice – and he would show them that everything they knew was wrong. But Socrates never actually answers the question of how we should live. The dialogues always end in a vaguely unsatisfactory way – not so much a hard-fought draw as match abandoned due to fog.
Ten commandments every club cricketer should follow
But a few linked ethical principles emerge. The first is that the pursuit of virtue is the only worthwhile goal in life. The second is that virtue is the only real good. Other things that may appear good – wealth, power, beauty – are illusory and will never bring happiness. Living a virtuous life is the only path to happiness. And the third is that every person does, in fact, want to be good. Only ignorance stands in our way.
Would Socrates have walked? The manner of his death tells us much. When he was put on trial for denying the gods and corrupting the young, he was found guilty and condemned to death. Although his friends offered to spirit him away, Socrates argued that it was only right for him to obey the laws of his city. He calmly took the hemlock and shuffled off to the great pavilion in the sky. So we can be sure that he would never question the umpire’s decision.
He would have walked. To do otherwise, to stay at the wicket to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of not being out, would be to betray his life’s work.
Plato
Socrates never gave a full account of what virtue actually is. That was left to his pupil, Plato. For Plato the world we perceive around us is an insubstantial shadow realm, a pale reflection or copy of the “real” world. This real world is made up of “ideas” or “forms” that act as a kind of template for the stuff we find around us in our world. As well as the original forms of material things such as triangles and beds, more exalted concepts such as beauty, virtue and justice also live in the world of the forms.
How do we know every vaguely triangular thing is a triangle, or that a blue object is really blue? It’s because, says Plato, we have the ideas of a perfect triangle and perfect blueness already in our minds, and we use this template to judge whether or not these shapes before us are blue triangles. The same applies to virtue. If we want to judge any act – for example, walking when we’ve nicked off – we simply compare it to the idea of virtue in our minds. The ideas of triangle and blue are already in our mind because, argues Plato, before we were born our soul lived in that world of the perfect forms and has a vague memory of what it knew there.
This last part is clearly nuts, but many philosophers still say ideas or forms do exist separately from their material embodiments, and that goodness or virtue must be one of these entities, and any act of virtue is such because it in some way copies or partakes in that form. Does this help us to decide whether or not to trudge back to the pavilion? The problem is that we still don’t know what this vague cloud of goodness is and how precisely it applies to our current dilemma.
In his most famous dialogue, The Republic, Plato argues that injustice comes when the separate sections of the soul or the state get ideas above their station – your opening bowler trying to convince the skipper that he’s actually a perfect fit for the No 4 berth. There are three parts to the state: the rulers, warriors and workers (or skipper, batters and bowlers). The subdivisions of the soul are: the rational part, which uses reason to guide our action; the appetitive, which keeps us alive by driving us to eat and drink; and the spirited, which gives us courage and urges us on towards honour and victory.
But how does this theory of justice apply to our dilemma? It’s hard to know. And – cards on the table here – although Plato is perhaps the most revered of all philosophers, I think he’s wrong on almost every important issue. But in general terms he, like Socrates, believed we should follow the laws of our particular state – anything else leads to chaos. I think Plato would have walked. However, he was also opposed to most forms of entertainment. He would have banned poetry, plays and any kind of music other than military marches, so he would probably have done away with cricket altogether. Wanker.
The Cynics
The word “cynic” – which derives from the Greek term for “dog-like” – has come to mean someone who “disbelieves in the sincerity or goodness of human motives and actions, and is wont to express this by sneers and sarcasms.” It’s not an attractive picture: the thin-lipped misanthrope, mocking good intentions, forever pulling away the mask of virtue to reveal the hypocrite behind. Perhaps you’ve played with a Cynic, witnessed that sneer of cold contempt, the assumption of superiority, the presumption that all decency and honour are merely a sham.
The Cynics lived simply, disdaining the trappings of wealth and worldly success, dressing in rags, sleeping rough, railing against the greed and materialism of the affluent. No convention was sacrosanct; no moral or religious tradition left unmocked. They believed in doing openly those things most of us reserve for the privacy of the bedroom or bathroom. But Cynicism was, above all, a creed devoted to achieving a virtuous life and their critique was a necessary, if destructive, first step to enlightenment.
What would the Cynics have said about walking? I’m afraid that they would have regarded the game itself as a ludicrous artifice. Diogenes (412-323 BC), the founder of the group, would have marched out to the wicket and defecated on the pitch, just short of a good length. No help there.
The Epicureans
These are one of the more misunderstood groups of Ancient philosophers. “Epicurean” has come to mean something similar to “hedonist” – someone who lives purely for pleasure. There’s something in that – the group’s leader, Epicurus (341-270 BC), did argue that the ultimate good is pleasure (as opposed to virtue, favoured by rival Platonists and Stoics).
However, it wasn’t the crude pleasures of the flesh he had in mind, but instead calm contemplation and philosophical speculation. And his main concern wasn’t with actively finding physical delights but with eradicating things that cause us mental or physical pain. Retreat from the hurly burly, find a quiet garden to cultivate. Fend off hunger by all means, but live modestly and keep your desires in line with your ability to achieve them.
Epicurus would have been most concerned about the mental consequences of not walking – the guilt, the anxiety, the fear of a confrontation with that angry bowler after the game. He probably would have walked and advised you to do the same.
The Cyrenaics
There was one group of ancient philosophers who were straightforwardly hedonistic. The Cyrenaic school, founded by Aristippus (435–356 BC), believed that the one thing you could know for certain was whether you were enjoying pleasure or suffering pain. The only good or virtuous things are pleasant sensations. The only bad things are unpleasant sensations. The past is gone forever and the future is unknowable. So live for this moment, eat, drink, and be as merry as you can. Frequent the pub and the bawdy house.
Aristippus and the Cyrenaics would say do not walk. Enjoy your time out there. Do anything you can to maximise the pleasure of batting. Lie, cheat, whatever you like. Because there is nothing else – no greater goods, no higher power.
The Sceptics
The Sceptics, a school that began with Pyrrho of Elis (360-270 BC), maintained that knowledge was impossible. Our senses are fallible and our intellect can lead us astray. For any issue, you can argue equally persuasively on both sides. Therefore the only rational option is to withhold your judgment. Decide nothing. Did you edge the ball? Impossible to say. To walk would mean that you knew that you touched it. You can’t know that, or anything else for that matter. So don’t walk.
The Stoics
The Stoics believed that everything is determined by an all-knowing, all-powerful god-like entity. Nothing happens by chance and nothing can be changed by human will. We are like dogs tied to a cart rolling uncontrollably down a hill. A foolish dog will whine and pull and skid and writhe; a clever dog will understand that the cart cannot be resisted and trot along beside it. Knowledge and wisdom can only help us understand the direction that fate is taking us and to conform our will to that outcome.
The Stoic virtues – prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance – are designed to help us endure the suffering that is inevitable in life. But we should take comfort from the fact that the ultimate destination is a good one. These are immensely useful thoughts for cricketers. Our sporting lives are full of woe. Yet we must, somehow, endure.
And walking? The Stoic’s belief that the universe is a well ordered place, guided in the right direction by a benign god, means they trust in fate. If the umpire hasn’t given it, that must be the right thing. To interfere would be like the dog resisting the pull of the cart. The Stoic does not walk.
Aristotle
Aristotle (384-322 BC) argued that every virtue is at the midpoint between two extremes represented by vices. For example, the virtue of courage is at the midpoint between the vices of recklessness and cowardice. Think of the quaking batsman backing away to square leg as one extreme, and the fool who goes out without wearing a box as the other. Or take generosity, which is at the midpoint between meanness and showy prodigality. Picture the skulking miser who never gets his round in after the game, and the show-off who flashes his Amex card and buys drinks for the whole bar. And then the modest fellow who buys a modest round for his mates and, in the rare event of a fifty, gets his jug in uncomplainingly.
Applied to walking, I’d suggest that the two extremes are the player who will stand his ground even when given out and the player who is fairly sure he has missed it but walks to be on the safe side. Aristotle would have walked only if he was pretty sure the umpire was about to give him anyway. Otherwise I think he’d stay.
As evidence, we can look at what happened when he, like Socrates, was threatened with prosecution for impiety. Rather than stay and take his punishment, Aristotle lifted up his skirts and fled. He’s a runner, not a walker.
Kant
We’re leaping forward a couple of thousand years to the 18th century and the greatest of all philosophers, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Kant strove to find a moral principle that any rational person would agree on. He hits on his “categorical imperative”, a rule that says: “Act always in such a way that your action could become a universal law.”
The example he gives is breaking a contract. If you agree to a contract and then break it, the categorical imperative asks that you imagine a world where it was a law of nature that all contracts were broken. In that world, nobody would ever enter into a contract and the whole institution of contracts would collapse. Your goal – to benefit by breaking your contract – would end in failure.
Or take lying. Lying is a useful strategy only in a world in which most people tell the truth. If everyone always lied, there would be no point in your lies. The categorical imperative says your actions must be checked against the following principle: what would happen if everyone did what you do? Even if lying were to bring some great benefit to lots of other people, you shouldn’t do it.
At this point people always come up with a counter example that makes the categorical imperative sound absurd. And the example they give is nearly always the mad axe murderer who knocks on their door and asks for the whereabouts of their intended victim, your best friend. The categorical imperative informs us that we must never lie and yet who could in conscience reveal the hiding place?
Rather beautifully, Kant anticipates this precise example and his answer helps to explain why he thought you cannot base a moral system on looking at the consequences of your actions. The trouble with consequences is that they are, by definition, in the future, and the future is unpredictable. You might lie to the axeman, telling him that your friend isn’t at home when you know he is. But, seeing the axeman at the door, the friend might already have slipped out the back. And now the axeman encounters him in the street.
In Kant’s view you can never be held responsible for the consequences of telling the truth, though you are responsible for the bad consequences of a lie. And there’s always the option of simply refusing to answer the axeman’s question or slamming the door in his face and calling the police. Refusing to walk could be seen as a type of lying. And lying breaks categorical imperative, so you have to walk.
But Kant gives another formulation to the categorical imperative: “Act always in such a way that you treat other people as an end in themselves, and not as a means to an end”. We should not view our fellow cricketers as the means to our own pleasure. They also have hopes, dreams and fears. You owe them the truth. Walk.
Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism is another type of hedonism. It declares that the only good is happiness and that happiness is a measure of the pleasure and pain we feel. The goal of life should be to maximise pleasure and minimise pain in any society.
Now, there are problems here. What counts as pleasure? Is there a hierarchy in which some pleasures (such as cricket) get more points than others (such as golf)? How do we measure these pleasures? Can we impose our judgments on others? Can we force people to be happy in accordance with our own conceptions of happiness?
Despite these problems, utilitarianism is the best hope we have for finding a genuinely rational way to think about morality. In any given situation we have a duty to ponder seriously on the likely consequences and to do our best to minimise harm and promote wellbeing. One possible advantage of Kant’s system is that we don’t have to think: we just apply the rule that says never lie. With utilitarianism, we have to continually assess the outcomes of our actions.
I’m not sure that this is a bad thing. To be a moral person we must constantly engage with these problems. And so the utilitarian would, on feeling that edge, quickly assess various factors: the state of the game, the nature of the opposition, their own mental condition, as well as that of the other 21 players. And he or she will then decide which choice will lead to the greatest happiness for the greatest number.
It’s not entirely straightforward but, there is something that may help in the decision-making process. As someone who has batted and bowled, I can confirm that the pain of being out is greater than the pleasure of taking a wicket. So, in most circumstances, the utilitarian does not walk.
Nietzsche
Anyone who thinks about morality these days does so in the shadow of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). Nietzsche argued with great force and panache that morality is always a matter of power, a way of asserting your will. What is right is what those in charge, or those who want to be in charge, say to preserve or enhance their own position in society. So morality, specifically Christian morality – all that talk about gentleness and cheek-turning – was a weapon forged by slaves and cowards and weaklings to combat the natural aristocracy of the bold and strong.
Nietzsche says we all have to forge our own morality. In this view there is nothing to stop the strong and the brave trampling over the weak and the dim. Nietzsche would not have walked.
So where does all this leave our poor batter, still suspended in that moment of judgment? I favour the utilitarians, but philosophy isn’t like maths or physics. The answers are always provisional. The argument never concludes. It’s a timeless Test. But to live a fully human life, a life that engages with the complexity and difficulty of our moral universe, you need to think through the options. So make a choice. What are you – Platonist? Cynic? Sceptic? Stoic? Aristotelian? Kantian? Utilitarian? Nietzschean? Come to think of it, those sound like a perfect set of franchise names for a new cricket tournament…
One of the great unexplained wonders of human history is that written philosophy first flowered entirely separately in different parts of the globe at more or less the same time. The origins of Indian, Chinese and ancient Greek philosophy, as well as Buddhism, can all be traced back to a period of roughly 300 years, beginning in the 8th century BC.
These early philosophies have shaped the different ways people worship, live and think about the big questions that concern us all. Most people do not consciously articulate the philosophical assumptions they have absorbed and are often not even aware that they have any, but assumptions about the nature of self, ethics, sources of knowledge and the goals of life are deeply embedded in our cultures and frame our thinking without our being aware of them.
Yet, for all the varied and rich philosophical traditions across the world, the western philosophy I have studied for more than 30 years – based entirely on canonical western texts – is presented as the universal philosophy, the ultimate inquiry into human understanding. Comparative philosophy – study in two or more philosophical traditions – is left almost entirely to people working in anthropology or cultural studies. This abdication of interest assumes that comparative philosophy might help us to understand the intellectual cultures of India, China or the Muslim world, but not the human condition.
This has become something of an embarrassment for me. Until a few years ago, I knew virtually nothing about anything other than western philosophy, a tradition that stretches from the ancient Greeks to the great universities of Europe and the US. Yet, if you look at my PhD certificate or the names of the university departments where I studied, there is only one, unqualified, word: philosophy. Recently and belatedly, I have been exploring the great classical philosophies of the rest of the world, travelling across continents to encounter them first-hand. It has been the most rewarding intellectual journey of my life.
My philosophical journey has convinced me that we cannot understand ourselves if we do not understand others. Getting to know others requires avoiding the twin dangers of overestimating either how much we have in common or how much divides us. Our shared humanity and the perennial problems of life mean that we can always learn from and identify with the thoughts and practices of others, no matter how alien they might at first appear. At the same time, differences in ways of thinking can be both deep and subtle. If we assume too readily that we can see things from others’ points of view, we end up seeing them from merely a variation of our own.
To travel around the world’s philosophies is an opportunity to challenge the beliefs and ways of thinking we take for granted. By gaining greater knowledge of how others think, we can become less certain of the knowledge we think we have, which is always the first step to greater understanding.
Take the example of time. Around the world today, time is linear, ordered into past, present and future. Our days are organised by the progression of the clock, in the short to medium term by calendars and diaries, history by timelines stretching back over millennia. All cultures have a sense of past, present and future, but for much of human history this has been underpinned by a more fundamental sense of time as cyclical. The past is also the future, the future is also the past, the beginning also the end.
The dominance of linear time fits in with an eschatological worldview in which all of human history is building up to a final judgment. This is perhaps why, over time, it became the common-sense way of viewing time in the largely Christian west. When God created the world, he began a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. As Revelation puts it, while prophesying the end times, Jesus is this epic’s “Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last”.
But there are other ways of thinking about time. Many schools of thought believe that the beginning and the end are and have always been the same because time is essentially cyclical. This is the most intuitively plausible way of thinking about eternity. When we imagine time as a line, we end up baffled: what happened before time began? How can a line go on without end? A circle allows us to visualise going backwards or forwards for ever, at no point coming up against an ultimate beginning or end.
Thinking of time cyclically especially made sense in premodern societies, where there were few innovations across generations and people lived very similar lives to those of their grandparents, their great-grandparents and going back many generations. Without change, progress was unimaginable. Meaning could therefore only be found in embracing the cycle of life and death and playing your part in it as best you could.
Confucius (551-479 BC). Photograph: Getty
Perhaps this is why cyclical time appears to have been the human default. The Mayans, Incans and Hopi all viewed time in this way. Many non-western traditions contain elements of cyclical thinking about time, perhaps most evident in classical Indian philosophy. The Indian philosopher and statesman Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan wrote: “All the [orthodox] systems accept the view of the great world rhythm. Vast periods of creation, maintenance and dissolution follow each other in endless succession.” For example, a passage in the Rig Veda addressing Dyaus and Prithvi (heaven and earth) reads: “Which was the former, which of them the latter? How born? O sages, who discerns? They bear themselves all that has existence. Day and night revolve as on a wheel.”
East Asian philosophy is deeply rooted in the cycle of the seasons, part of a larger cycle of existence. This is particularly evident in Taoism, and is vividly illustrated by the surprising cheerfulness of the 4th century BC Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi when everyone thought he should have been mourning for his wife. At first, he explained, he was as miserable as anyone else. Then he thought back beyond her to the beginning of time itself: “In all the mixed-up bustle and confusion, something changed and there was qi. The qi changed and there was form. The form changed and she had life. Today there was another change and she died. It’s just like the round of four seasons: spring, summer, autumn and winter.”
In Chinese thought, wisdom and truth are timeless, and we do not need to go forward to learn, only to hold on to what we already have. As the 19th- century Scottish sinologist James Legge put it, Confucius did not think his purpose was “to announce any new truths, or to initiate any new economy. It was to prevent what had previously been known from being lost.” Mencius, similarly, criticised the princes of his day because “they do not put into practice the ways of the ancient kings”. Mencius also says, in the penultimate chapter of the eponymous collection of his conversations, close to the book’s conclusion: “The superior man seeks simply to bring back the unchanging standard, and, that being correct, the masses are roused to virtue.” The very last chapter charts the ages between the great kings and sages.
A hybrid of cyclical and linear time operates in strands of Islamic thought. “The Islamic conception of time is based essentially on the cyclic rejuvenation of human history through the appearance of various prophets,” says Seyyed Hossein Nasr, professor emeritus of Islamic studies at George Washington University. Each cycle, however, also moves humanity forward, with each revelation building on the former – the dictation of the Qur’an to Muhammad being the last, complete testimony of God – until ultimately the series of cycles ends with the appearance of the Mahdi, who rules for 40 years before the final judgment.
The distinction between linear and cyclical time is therefore not always neat. The assumption of an either/or leads many to assume that oral philosophical traditions have straightforwardly cyclical conceptions of time. The reality is more complicated. Take Indigenous Australian philosophies. There is no single Australian first people with a shared culture, but there are enough similarities across the country for some tentative generalisations to be made about ideas that are common or dominant. The late anthropologist David Maybury-Lewis suggested that time in Indigenous Australian culture is neither cyclical nor linear; instead, it resembles the space-time of modern physics. Time is intimately linked to place in what he calls the “dreamtime” of “past, present, future all present in this place”.
“One lives in a place more than in a time,” is how Stephen Muecke puts it in his book Ancient and Modern: Time, Culture and Indigenous Philosophy. More important than the distinction between linear or cyclical time is whether time is separated from or intimately connected to place. Take, for example, how we conceive of death. In the contemporary west, death is primarily seen as the expiration of the individual, with the body as the locus, and the location of that body irrelevant. In contrast, Muecke says: “Many indigenous accounts of the death of an individual are not so much about bodily death as about a return of energy to the place of emanation with which it re-identifies.”
Such a way of thinking is especially alien to the modern west, where a pursuit of objectivity systematically downplays the particular, the specifically located. In a provocative and evocative sentence, Muecke says: “Let me suggest that longsightedness is a European form of philosophical myopia and that other versions of philosophy, indigenous perhaps, have a more lived-in and intimate association with societies of people and the way they talk about themselves.”
Muecke cites the Australian academic Tony Swain’s view that the concept of linear time is a kind of fall from place. “I’ve got a hunch that modern physics separated out those dimensions and worked on them, and so we produced time as we know it through a whole lot of experimental and theoretical activities,” Muecke told me. “If you’re not conceptually and experimentally separating those dimensions, then they would tend to flow together.” His indigenous friends talk less of time or place independently, but more of located events. The key temporal question is not “When did this happen?” but “How is this related to other events?”
That word related is important. Time and space have become theoretical abstractions in modern physics, but in human culture they are concrete realities. Nothing exists purely as a point on a map or a moment in time: everything stands in relation to everything else. So to understand time and space in oral philosophical traditions, we have to see them less as abstract concepts in metaphysical theories and more as living conceptions, part and parcel of a broader way of understanding the world, one that is rooted in relatedness. Hirini Kaa, a lecturer at the University of Auckland, says that “the key underpinning of Maori thought is kinship, the connectedness between humanity, between one another, between the natural environment”. He sees this as a form of spirituality. “The ocean wasn’t just water, it wasn’t something for us to be afraid of or to utilise as a commodity, but became an ancestor deity, Tangaroa. Every living thing has a life force.”
David Mowaljarlai, who was a senior lawman of the Ngarinyin people of Western Australia, once called this principle of connectivity “pattern thinking”. Pattern thinking suffuses the natural and the social worlds, which are, after all, in this way of thinking, part of one thing. As Muecke puts it: “The concept of connectedness is, of course, the basis of all kinship systems [...] Getting married, in this case, is not just pairing off, it is, in a way, sharing each other.”
The emphasis on connectedness and place leads to a way of thinking that runs counter to the abstract universalism developed to a certain extent in all the great written traditions of philosophy. Muecke describes as one of the “enduring [Indigenous Australian] principles” that “a way of being will be specific to the resources and needs of a time and place and that one’s conduct will be informed by responsibility specific to that place”. This is not an “anything goes” relativism, but a recognition that rights, duties and values exist only in actual human cultures, and their exact shape and form will depend on the nature of those situations.
A Mayan calendar. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
This should be clear enough. But the tradition of western philosophy, in particular, has striven for a universality that glosses over differences of time and place. The word “university”, for example, even shares the same etymological root as “universal”. In such institutions, “the pursuit of truth recognises no national boundaries”, as one commentator observed. Place is so unimportant in western philosophy that, when I discovered it was the theme of the quinquennial East-West Philosophers’ Conference in 2016, I wondered if there was anything I could bring to the party at all. (I decided that the absence of place in western philosophy itself merited consideration.)
The universalist thrust has many merits. The refusal to accept any and every practice as a legitimate custom has bred a very good form of intolerance for the barbaric and unjust traditional practices of the west itself. Without this intolerance, we would still have slavery, torture, fewer rights for women and homosexuals, feudal lords and unelected parliaments. The universalist aspiration has, at its best, helped the west to transcend its own prejudices. At the same time, it has also legitimised some prejudices by confusing them with universal truths. The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah argues that the complaints of anti-universalists are not generally about universalism at all, but pseudo-universalism, “Eurocentric hegemony posing as universalism”. When this happens, intolerance for the indefensible becomes intolerance for anything that is different. The aspiration for the universal becomes a crude insistence on the uniform. Sensitivity is lost to the very different needs of different cultures at different times and places.
This “posing as universalism” is widespread and often implicit, with western concepts being taken as universal but Indian ones remaining Indian, Chinese remaining Chinese, and so on. To end this pretence, Jay L Garfield and Bryan W Van Norden propose that those departments of philosophy that refuse to teach anything from non-western traditions at least have the decency to call themselves departments of western philosophy.
The “pattern thinking” of Maori and Indigenous Australian philosophies could provide a corrective to the assumption that our values are the universal ones and that others are aberrations. It makes credible and comprehensible the idea that philosophy is never placeless and that thinking that is uprooted from any land soon withers and dies.
Mistrust of the universalist aspiration, however, can go too far. At the very least, there is a contradiction in saying there are no universal truths, since that is itself a universal claim about the nature of truth. The right view probably lies somewhere between the claims of naive universalists and those of defiant localists. There seems to be a sense in which even the universalist aspiration has to be rooted in something more particular. TS Eliot is supposed to have said: “Although it is only too easy for a writer to be local without being universal, I doubt whether a poet or novelist can be universal without being local, too.” To be purely universal is to inhabit an abstract universe too detached from the real world. But just as a novelist can touch on universals of the human condition through the particulars of a couple of characters and a specific story, so our different, regional philosophical traditions can shed light on more universal philosophical truths even though they approach them from their own specific angles.
We should not be afraid to ground ourselves in our own traditions, but we should not be bound by them. Gandhi put this poetically when he wrote: “I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any. I refuse to live in other people’s houses as an interloper, a beggar or a slave.”
In the west, the predominance of linear time is associated with the idea of progress that reached its apotheosis in the Enlightenment. Before this, argues the philosopher Anthony Kenny, “people looking for ideals had looked backwards in time, whether to the primitive church, or to classical antiquity, or to some mythical prelapsarian era. It was a key doctrine of the Enlightenment that the human race, so far from falling from some earlier eminence, was moving forward to a happier future.”
Kenny is expressing a popular view, but many see the roots of belief in progress deeper in the Christian eschatological religious worldview. “Belief in progress is a relic of the Christian view of history as a universal narrative,” claims John Gray. Secular thinkers, he says, “reject the idea of providence, but they continue to think humankind is moving towards a universal goal”, even though “the idea of progress in history is a myth created by the need for meaning”.
Whether faith in progress is an invention or an adaptation of the Enlightenment, the image of secular humanists naively believing humanity is on an irreversible, linear path of advancement seems to me a caricature of their more modest hope, based in history, that progress has occurred and that more is possible. As the historian Jonathan Israel says, Enlightenment ideas of progress “were usually tempered by a strong streak of pessimism, a sense of the dangers and challenges to which the human condition is subject”. He dismisses the idea that “Enlightenment thinkers nurtured a naive belief in man’s perfectibility” as a “complete myth conjured up by early 20th-century scholars unsympathetic to its claims”.
Nevertheless, Gray is right to point out that linear progress is a kind of default way of thinking about history in the modern west and that this risks blinding us to the ways in which gains can be lost, advances reversed. It also fosters a sense of the superiority of the present age over earlier, supposedly less advanced” times. Finally, it occludes the extent to which history doesn’t repeat itself but does rhyme.
The different ways in which philosophical traditions have conceived time turn out to be far from mere metaphysical curiosities. They shape the way we think about both our temporal place in history and our relation to the physical places in which we live. It provides one of the easiest and clearest examples of how borrowing another way of thinking can bring a fresh perspective to our world. Sometimes, simply by changing the frame, the whole picture can look very different.
At the controls of driverless cars, on the end of the telephone when you call your bank or favourite retailer: we all know the robots are coming, and in many cases are already here. Back in 2013, economists at Oxford University’s Martin School estimated that in the next 20 years, more than half of all jobs would be substituted by intelligent technology. Like the prospect of robot-assisted living or hate it, it is foolish to deny that children in school today will enter a vastly different workplace tomorrow – and that’s if they’re lucky. Far from jobs being brought back from China, futurologists predict that white-collar jobs will be increasingly outsourced to digitisation as well as blue-collar ones.
How should educationalists prepare young people for civic and professional life in a digital age? Luddite hand-wringing won’t do. Redoubling investment in science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem) subjects won’t solve the problem either: hi-tech training has its imaginative limitations.
In the near future school-leavers will need other skills. In a world where technical expertise is increasingly narrow, the skills and confidence to traverse disciplines will be at a premium. We will need people who are prepared to ask, and answer, the questions that aren’t Googleable: like what are the ethical ramifications of machine automation? What are the political consequences of mass unemployment? How should we distribute wealth in a digitised society? As a society we need to be more philosophically engaged.
Amid the political uncertainties of 2016, the Irish president Michael D Higgins provided a beacon of leadership in this area. “The teaching of philosophy,” he said in November, “is one of the most powerful tools we have at our disposal to empower children into acting as free and responsible subjects in an ever more complex, interconnected, and uncertain world.” Philosophy in the classroom, he emphasised, offers a “path to a humanistic and vibrant democratic culture”.
In 2013, as Ireland struggled with the after-effects of the financial crisis, Higgins launched a nationwide initiative calling for debate about what Ireland valued as a society. The result is that for the first time philosophy was introduced into Irish schools in September.
A new optional course for 12- to 16-year-olds invites young people to reflect on questions that – until now – have been glaringly absent from school curriculums. In the UK, a network of philosophers and teachers is still lobbying hard for a GCSE equivalent. And Ireland, a nation that was once deemed “the most Catholic country”, is already exploring reforms to establish philosophy for children as a subject within primary schools.
This expansion of philosophy in the curriculum is something that Higgins and his wife Sabina, a philosophy graduate, have expressly called for. Higgins’ views are ahead of his time. If educators assume philosophy is pointless, it’s fair to say that most academic philosophers (unlike, say, mathematicians, or linguists) are still territorial, or ignorant, about the viability of their subject beyond the cloisters. If educators need to get wise, philosophers need to get over themselves.
Thinking and the desire to understand don’t come naturally – contrary to what Aristotle believed. Unlike, say, sex and gossip, philosophy is not a universal interest. Bertrand Russell came closer when he said, “Most people would rather die than think; many do.” While we may all have the capacity for philosophy, it is a capacity that requires training and cultural nudges. If the pursuit of science requires some cognitive scaffolding, as American philosopher Robert McCauley argues, then the same is true of philosophy.
Robots are leaving the factory floor and heading for your desk – and your job
Philosophy is difficult. It encompasses the double demand of strenuous labour under a stern overseer. It requires us to overcome personal biases and pitfalls in reasoning. This necessitates tolerant dialogue, and imagining divergent views while weighing them up. Philosophy helps kids – and adults – to articulate questions and explore answers not easily drawn out by introspection or Twitter. At its best, philosophy puts ideas, not egos, front and centre. And it is the very fragility – the unnaturalness – of philosophy that requires it to be embedded, not just in schools, but in public spaces.
Philosophy won’t bring back the jobs. It isn’t a cure-all for the world’s current or future woes. But it can build immunity against careless judgments, and unentitled certitude. Philosophy in our classrooms would better equip us all to perceive and to challenge the conventional wisdoms of our age. Perhaps it is not surprising that the president of Ireland, a country that was once a sub-theocracy, understands this.
Do you find yourself thrashing against the tide of human indifference and selfishness? Are you oppressed by the sense that while you care, others don’t? That, because of humankind’s callousness, civilisation and the rest of life on Earth are basically stuffed? If so, you are not alone. But neither are you right.
A study by the Common Cause Foundation, due to be published next month, reveals two transformative findings. The first is that a large majority of the 1,000 people they surveyed – 74% – identifies more strongly with unselfish values than with selfish values. This means that they are more interested in helpfulness, honesty, forgiveness and justice than in money, fame, status and power. The second is that a similar majority – 78% – believes others to be more selfish than they really are. In other words, we have made a terrible mistake about other people’s minds.
The revelation that humanity’s dominant characteristic is, er, humanity will come as no surprise to those who have followed recent developments in behavioural and social sciences. People, these findings suggest, are basically and inherently nice.
A review article in the journal Frontiers in Psychology points out that our behaviour towards unrelated members of our species is “spectacularly unusual when compared to other animals”. While chimpanzees might share food with members of their own group, though usually only after being plagued by aggressive begging, they tend to react violently towards strangers. Chimpanzees, the authors note, behave more like the homo economicus of neoliberal mythology than people do.
Humans, by contrast, are ultrasocial: possessed of an enhanced capacity for empathy, an unparalleled sensitivity to the needs of others, a unique level of concern about their welfare, and an ability to create moral norms that generalise and enforce these tendencies.
Such traits emerge so early in our lives that they appear to be innate. In other words, it seems that we have evolved to be this way. By the age of 14 months,children begin to help each other, for example by handing over objects another child can’t reach. By the time they are two, they start sharing things they value. By the age of three, they start to protest against other people’s violation of moral norms.
A fascinating paper in the journal Infancy reveals that reward has nothing to do with it. Three- to five-year-olds are less likely to help someone a second time if they have been rewarded for doing it the first time. In other words, extrinsic rewards appear to undermine the intrinsic desire to help. (Parents, economists and government ministers, please note.) The study also discovered that children of this age are more inclined to help people if they perceive them to be suffering, and that they want to see someone helped whether or not they do it themselves. This suggests that they are motivated by a genuine concern for other people’s welfare, rather than by a desire to look good.
Why? How would the hard logic of evolution produce such outcomes? This is the subject of heated debate. One school of thought contends that altruism is a logical response to living in small groups of closely related people, and evolution has failed to catch up with the fact that we now live in large groups, mostly composed of strangers.
Another argues that large groups containing high numbers of altruists will outcompete large groups which contain high numbers of selfish people. A third hypothesis insists that a tendency towards collaboration enhances your own survival, regardless of the group in which you might find yourself. Whatever the mechanism might be, the outcome should be a cause of celebration.
‘Philosophers produced persuasive, influential and catastrophically mistaken accounts of the state of nature.’ Photograph: Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
So why do we retain such a dim view of human nature? Partly, perhaps, for historical reasons. Philosophers from Hobbes to Rousseau, Malthus toSchopenhauer, whose understanding of human evolution was limited to the Book of Genesis, produced persuasive, influential and catastrophically mistaken accounts of “the state of nature” (our innate, ancestral characteristics). Their speculations on this subject should long ago have been parked on a high shelf marked “historical curiosities”. But somehow they still seem to exert a grip on our minds.
Another problem is that – almost by definition – many of those who dominate public life have a peculiar fixation on fame, money and power. Their extreme self-centredness places them in a small minority, but, because we see them everywhere, we assume that they are representative of humanity.
The media worships wealth and power, and sometimes launches furious attacks on people who behave altruistically. In the Daily Mail last month, Richard Littlejohn described Yvette Cooper’s decision to open her home to refugees as proof that “noisy emoting has replaced quiet intelligence” (quiet intelligence being one of his defining qualities). “It’s all about political opportunism and humanitarian posturing,” he theorised, before boasting that he doesn’t “give a damn” about the suffering of people fleeing Syria. I note with interest the platform given to people who speak and write as if they are psychopaths.
The effects of an undue pessimism about human nature are momentous. As the foundation’s survey and interviews reveal, those who have the bleakest view of humanity are the least likely to vote. What’s the point, they reason, if everyone else votes only in their own selfish interests? Interestingly, and alarmingly for people of my political persuasion, it also discovered that liberals tend to possess a dimmer view of other people than conservatives do. Do you want to grow the electorate? Do you want progressive politics to flourish? Then spread the word that other people are broadly well-intentioned.
Misanthropy grants a free pass to the grasping, power-mad minority who tend to dominate our political systems. If only we knew how unusual they are, we might be more inclined to shun them and seek better leaders. It contributes to the real danger we confront: not a general selfishness, but a general passivity. Billions of decent people tut and shake their heads as the world burns, immobilised by the conviction that no one else cares.
You are not alone. The world is with you, even if it has not found its voice.
New South Wales batsman Ryan Carters reads Aldous Huxley, backpacks in Central Asia, and is passionate about helping less fortunate youngsters complete their education
You'll read plenty about Ryan Carters over the next few years. Sure, you'll read about his cricket, which continues to tick along very nicely indeed, but many of those column inches will be about Carters himself. They will present the young Australian wicketkeeper-batsman as different. Different to modern cricketers, different to the sportsmen whose macho exploits and muddled platitudes fill the back pages, different even to other "normal" young men in their mid-twenties with their normal jobs and normal interests.
And it's true. So far, Carters has had led a cricketing life less ordinary. An on-field career started in his hometown Canberra before a move to Victoria and then, when Matthew Wade's presence provided few opportunities, a swap from Melbourne to Sydney, home to Brad Haddin and Peter Nevill, Australia's first-choice glovemen.
A curious move, but one that has paid off, not behind the stumps but in front of them as an opening batsman. In New South Wales' victorious 2013-14 Sheffield Shield season, Carters managed three centuries in his 861 runs opening the batting. The season just ended was less spectacular for state and player - a third-placed finish and 448 runs at 32 - but did contain one gem of an innings, 198 against Queensland shortly before the Shield broke up for its Big Bash holidays. The guy can clearly play and, as those moves suggest, is pretty fearless.
So, off the field. Why is he different to the rest? In the course of our 45-minute chat at the SCG, we cover ground over which my professional career had not yet taken me: Aldous Huxley's experimentation with mescaline and subsequent recollections in The Doors of Perception; the culture of Central Asian countries such as Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan; and the Australian gambling culture. For the record, the first is what Carters and his book club have just finished reading, the second is where he'll spend his off season travelling and exploring, and the third is the reason he feels his charity, Batting for Change, has enjoyed success so far. It's not, to say the least, all telly and Tinder, Nando's and nightclubs.
"Dougie [Bollinger] calls me 'the philosophy major'," Carters laughs, when asked whether he is a little different to his team-mates. "Which is actually false… because I'm majoring in economics!"
Indeed, away from the field, the studies that followed his cricket from Melbourne University to Sydney after a top-of-the-class school career, the philanthropy, and love of reading place him firmly in the "bookish" category alongside - among others - his friend Eddie Cowan and Cambridge grad Mike Atherton, who famously mistook the letters "FEC" graffitied on his Lancashire locker to mean "future England captain", when in fact the second letter stood for "educated" and the first and third were as coarse as the English language can muster.
"You get a few jokes about being educated," says Carters, smiling effortlessly but incessantly the whole time. "It's always been Nerds versus Julios in Australian cricket and I'm definitely on the nerds' side of that equation. I have a lot of interests that maybe aren't typical of sportsmen my age but I reckon a cricket team is basically a cross section of the different young men you encounter in society. Not everyone is some kind of jock and not everyone is from the same background."
Whatever his interests and whether they are similar to those he works with, it's clear that Carters has a pretty broad view of the world that filters into his cricket.
"Cricket provides an interesting and unusual schedule and this off season I'm going to take advantage of that. Every second week we're away playing a match interstate but now we have a load of time off. Usually I've used this period to study but this is the first time in the last five years that I've decided to get away from it all. First, I'm visiting Nepal, where Batting for Change worked last year. They're holding a tribute match to Phillip Hughes there in April [Carters' side, Team Red, won by one run], then in June and July, I'm playing club cricket for Oxford in the UK.
"But between that I'll take a month completely off the grid for the road trip through central Asia, just driving and camping. It's an important thing to do, to just reset, see where you're at away from daily demands. It's not the classic travel spot for guys our age but that's one of the reasons it appeals. We [two school friends] went to Mongolia two years ago and fell in love with that part of the world, so thought we'd try something else off the beaten track. You don't really know what you're going to encounter, which is exciting."
He admits that the breadth and depth of his extra-curricular interests mean he hasn't much time for cricket when he's not playing, which seems healthy. For all the book-worming, he doesn't read about cricket (although Cowan has recommended CLR James' Beyond a Boundary) and doesn't watch much cricket.
"I love the game, of course, but so much of my life is taken up playing and being involved in cricket that I spend more of my time outside of that doing other things rather than in the cricketing world. Watching cricket is not a chore, but is just not something I do every day. Off the field, I try to avoid thinking about the game, and I think that's a blessing.
"I'd be surprised if anyone could honestly say, 'I haven't made runs for four games but it's not affecting me psychologically', but the best I can do is get away from it for a while, re-engage with other aspects of life, come back feeling fresh and looking forward to playing cricket, as opposed to becoming consumed with it and getting stuck in that cycle of negative thinking. That's the theory behind this break, to be hungry again by September, when the Sydney Sixers have the Champions League. I reckon a break from the game will be conducive to getting the best out of myself."
As talk turns to Carters getting the best out of himself, it's impossible not to avoid Batting for Change, which this BBL season raised $102,431 for the education of young women in Mumbai, after the Sixers hit 47 sixes, with $2,179 pledged by donors for each one. A year earlier, Carters' old team, Sydney Thunder, had raised more than £30,000, used to build the three classrooms at Heartland School, Kathmandu, which Carters visited this month. These are impressive numbers but he's already looking at ways in which to expand his fundraising.
"Last time I got away from the game, on my trip to Mongolia, I wanted to start a charity initiative to partner my cricket to promote a cause that I care deeply about and use the stage that I'm at in my career, the people that we know, to find an opportunity to reach a big section of the public. The common theme of our projects - which change annually and are linked to the LBW Trust - [Learning for a Better World] - is educating young men and women - usually at a tertiary level - who otherwise wouldn't have the opportunity, as I believe education is the way to help people out of poverty.
"I learned a lesson that if you have an idea that you're passionate about, people will jump behind it - my team-mates but also donors from around the country who have been very generous in their donations and kind in their messages of support. It's certainly making every six the Sixers hit feel that bit more special!"
Carters, evidently, is ambitious in every sense of the word; in his charity work, in his embryonic plans for life after cricket, which one senses is likely to follow philanthropic, not political (as some have suggested) lines. He's clearly a cricketer apart, but speaking of his hopes, dreams and ambitions, both as boy and man, is a reminder that he's not that different at all.
"Growing up my dreams were all cricket-based," he says, grinning again. "I played loads with my brother and Dad in the backyard and loved watching cricket and always dreamed of being a Test cricketer, like so many others in Australia. Sure, I got more interested in the world, how things work, especially as I got older; politics, economics, philosophy, reading, but cricket was the one.
"I've achieved being a pro cricketer, which is awesome, and I'd be amazed by that if you'd told me that as a 12-year-old. But the Test cricket box isn't ticked, and that - along with remembering how lucky I am and to enjoy the game - is what's driving me."
From Interstellar to Batman and Star Wars the venerable religion has been the driving philosophy behind many hit movies. Why? Nirpal Dhaliwal in The Guardian Interstellar’s box office total is $622,932,412 and counting. It is the eighth-highest-grossing film of the year and spawned an endless raft of think pieces testing the validity of its science and applauding the innovation of its philosophy. But it is not so new. The idea which propels the plot – there is a universal super-consciousness that transcends time and space in which all human life is connected – has been around for about 3,000 years. It is Vedic.
When the film’s astronaut hero (Matthew McConaughey), declares that the mysterious and all-knowing “they” who created a wormhole near Saturn through which he travels to save mankind – dissolving his sense of material reality in the process – are in fact “us” he is simply repeating the central notion of the Upanishads, India’s oldest philosophical texts. These hold that individual human minds are merely brief reflections within a cosmic one.
McConaughey’s character doesn’t just talk the talk. He walks it, too. So, the multi-dimensional tesseract – that endlessly reflective prism he finds himself in as he comes to this realisation, and in which he views life from every perspective – is the film’s expression of “Indra’s net”, the Hindu metaphor which depicts the universe as an eternal web of existence spun by the king of the gods, each of its intersections adorned with an infinitely sided jewel, every one continually reflecting the others.
Hollywood’s eager embrace of Buddhism, yoga and other esoteric Indian systems is not new, of course. David Lynch is an outspoken exponent of transcendental meditation, Richard Gere follows the Dalai Lama and Julia Roberts affirmed her Hinduism in the wake of Eat, Pray, Love – a movie that tells the tale of a modern American woman’s journey towards peace through Indian spiritual practises that grossed over $200m. Hinduism can get the tills ringing even when it urges parsimony.
Nolan has long been a devout subscriber to the cause. A director famed for being able to get a multi-million dollar project off the ground with only his own name as collateral, he clearly knows the value of pre-existing brands such as Hinduism. His breakthrough hit, Memento, had Guy Pearce as an amnesiac whose unreliable consciousness is the faulty lens through which we see the story of a murder, told both in chronological and reverse order. This notion of distrusting individual reality and looking beyond it for truth was extended in Nolan’s Inception, in which Leonardo DiCaprio leads a team of psychonauts on a heist deep within the recesses of a billionaire’s mind – a spiralling adventure of dreams within dreams in which the laws of nature increasingly bend and warp – before finding its purest expression in Interstellar.
“Look at the first Matrix movie,” says producer Peter Rader. “It’s a yogic movie. It says that this world is an illusion. It’s about maya – that if we can cut through the illusions and connect with something larger we can do all sorts of things. Neo achieves the abilities of the advanced yogis Yogananda described, who can defy the laws of normal reality.”
Rader’s latest movie, a documentary about Paramahansa Yogananda – among the first gurus to bring Indian mysticism to America in the 1920s – has been a sleeper hit in the US. The film documents how influential Hindu philosophy is in American culture, with contributions from the likes of the yoga-devoted hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons. “There’s a big pent-up demand,” thinks Rader. “There are a lot of closet spiritualists who are meditating, doing yoga, reading books and thinking about a bigger reality. And now they can come out and say, ‘Yes, I’m into this.’Steve Jobs read Yogananda’s book once a year. He bequeathed a copy of it to everyone who attended his memorial. It helped inspire him to develop products like the iPad.”
But before Nolan, before the Matrix, before, even, the iPad, there was Star Wars: the film that opened mainstream America up to Indian esotericism more than anything else, with its cosmic scale and theme of a transcendental “force” that confers superhuman powers on those who can align with it. George Lucas was influenced by the mythologist Joseph Campbell, whose work A Hero With a Thousand Faces traced the narrative arc common to all mythic heroes that Luke Skywalker would embark upon. Campbell himself lived by his Upanishadic mantra “follow your bliss”, which he derived from the Sanskrit term Sat-Chit-Ananda.
“The word Sat means being,” said Campbell. “Chit means consciousness. Ananda means bliss or rapture. I thought: ‘I don’t know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don’t know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not, but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being’.” His mantra was the paradigm for Skywalker’s own realisation of the force, the sense of peace, purpose and power gained once he allowed himself to accept and unify with it. “If you follow your bliss,” thought Campbell, “you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.”
As his mastery of the force neared its peak, Skywalker comes perilously close to taking Vader’s sinister path. With this, Star Wars established the principle in Hollywood of superheroes having to overcome an inner darkness while battling an external enemy, and finding an enlightenment in the process. Nolan’s trilogy of Batman movies – in which a tortured protagonist struggles as much not to become his nemesis as to defeat it – have introduced a whole new generation to the Indian god-myths and the teachings of yoga that emphasise the priority of one’s internal journey while facing the challenges of the outside world. Next year, even younger recruits to the cause will feel the force of the new JJ Abrams’ Star Wars movie.
“Spirituality is the open-secret,” says Rader. “A lot of people know that if we quieten down we can tap into a deeper power. And the movies that tap into that, like Star Wars and Interstellar, are hugely popular. Audiences know what the film is telling them, they have a sense that this story is working on a deeper level. It’s telling them that there’s more to life than just the ordinary. That there’s something much bigger, and they’re a part of it.”
A philosophy to which many are keen to subscribe is what makes religions successful. Movies, too.
Ryan Carters: majoring in economics and aiming for a Test cap © Getty Images
Carters on his way to 198 against Queensland in the 2014-15 Sheffield Shield © Getty Images
Carters (standing, third from left) with his Team Red at the Phillip Hughes' Tribute match in Kathmandu © AFP
