The Nun Revolution

The ongoing strike by nuns in Kerala against the church is attracting a lot of attention.  Many who are loyal to the Catholic establishment say that the fact that the nun did not complain for several months and apparently 'yielded' to the Bishop's sexual demands suggests that their relationship might have been consensual and that the nun cried rape only when something went wrong between them.  But listening to the nuns accounts shown on TV, it certainly seems that there is another explanation why the nun did not protest initially.

We need to consider the powerful tradition of Catholic indoctrination of nuns - that is based on implicit obedience, total respect for the priestly hierarchy and devotion to the church duties.   From the day a nun is ordained in the church, she will undergo deep indoctrination in the virtues of order, obedience, compliance and devotion.  And disobedience or rebellion is treated as the greatest vice and is virtually unthinkable.   Therefore when a nun encounters a lecherous priest who makes sexual advances, her first instinct would be to protect secrecy and honour of the church - because she is trained to value the sanctity and image of the church than to assert her own fundamental human rights against sexual harrassment. Therefore it is easy to force an indoctrinated and devout nun into sexual activity by a priest - because the nun's prime instinct would be NOT TO cause a commotion and malign the church's image - hence she cannot scream or fight openly or run out of the convent shouting for help. This inherent weakness of the nun owing to religious indoctrination has been serially exploited by the male priests - and  in the history of the Catholicism at least in India - nuns have seldom rebelled openly against the church. There may isolated instances like Sister Jesme, but being alone, she could be easily be discredited by attributing insanity. In this instance, complaining against a bishop is a very drastic step for a nun especially when she is alone. If there is company of several nuns, it would be easier.  It does seem that the bishop in this case had misbehaved to varying degrees with several nuns and this is why the nuns were able to network and ventilate their painful experiences among themselves and finally muster enough courage to come out into the open.

The Catholic Church is a very successful business establishment that makes its wealth through its hospitals, schools and colleges -and probably through .  Its greatest advantage is the special brand of workers - the nuns - who work totally free. Incredibly,  in India, even a nun who is a cardiologist cannot take any money for herself. All her salary goes into the bank account of the church. Of course, they are given free accommodation and free food and when they get old and ill they will be nursed by younger nuns.  In contrast, priests, bishops and cardinals are allowed to have salaries, make money for themselves and have complete financial freedom and individual ownership rights.  In the Catholic Church, male priests are masters even from the time they join while the women (nuns) are expected to be totally obedient and servile and work without pay for their entire lives.

Now, in Kerala, for the first time, the nuns are engaged in what seems like a Marxian conflict where the capitalist-worker division is drawn between the sexes - the oppressed workers (nuns) vs the masters (priests). Now, I don't see how this will resolve without the entire organization - in its current form of priestly bourgeoisie ruling the nun proletariat - disintegrating in Kerala.  The unique economic system of the church that is a mix of capitalism, fedualism and slavery would need to give way to conventional social-democratic capitalism - as  happened in Western Europe in the twentieth century - with the church - in the absence of totally disciplined nun-workers who don't need to be paid - finding it impossible to sustain the profitability of its educational and healthcare business. 

What am I?

The I exists only in language and thought that is made of language. I exists in my parent's accusation that 'I' didn't do something.  It is in situations like my parent accusing me of not doing something that the consciousness of 'I' becomes acute because of the pain that goes with the accusation. I is the 'thing' or the 'free willing morally responsible agent or the soul' that is responsible for not doing whatever my parent said I didn't do. It is that thing that is interpreted as worthless and inferior on account of it not doing what my parent accused it didn’t do.   What exactly is this 'I' that my parent says didn't do that every worthy person ought to have done?.  It is not this body.  It must be the brain. Which part of the brain?  It is the part of the brain that has the ability to act freely and by its own volition and moral responsibility. Which is this part of the brain? Is it the prefrontal lobe of the brain? Is it some focus within the prefrontal lobe?  Is it made of nerve cells? Or is it the programmed software that the focus in the prefrontal lobe runs? Is it the neural hardware or the software that it runs? Or is it something that is distinct and separate from the brain tissue that is free and morally responsible and that prods the brain tissue to act hovering over it in a non-material form - something that may be called the  'soul'?.  If this soul is an energy that acts on the brain tissue to make it function, then it must be material - as energy and matter are interchangeable. If the soul is not an energy and something 'spiritual' like consciousness itself, it will be completely distinct and separate from the body and the brain tissue.  And therefore this soul will not be the brain, neural tissue or any part of the body. The brain is a computer. It is programmed or conditioned by the genes and the information that it is fed into it as it goes through life.

Thus, if there is a soul, it has nothing to do with the body and brain that was obtained through biological evolution and inheritance down the genetic line. The soul need not feel guilty or ashamed of the body and brain it is connected to.

If there is no soul and decisions are a result of software programming in the neural tissue and the thought of being responsible and willing freely is also a thought that is part of the software and what I feel I am doing is actually a nature-determined action that my brain computer is made to do with the appended thought that whatever is executed in the brain computer is done freely by the thing called 'I".  This is followed by conditioned thoughts that say 'I must be responsible, I am guilty, I should be ashamed' etc making the 'I' seem more real.

The long and the short of it is that the I is not any part of the brain or body. If it is software, it is unreal and a delusion. If it is spiritual and animating the brain, then again it is separate from the brain and body.

That the 'I' is the body or the brain is not true.  The I does not exist in a material form as energy or energy residing inside material tissue  - aside from the controversial possibility that it is a free-willing morally responsible soul and in which case also, it is free from the body.  It is the confusion that the ‘I’ is the body (or the brain) that causes problems.

The Loyalist's Dilemma

Justice means everyone getting a fair deal, food and all the basics of life from birth.  If one supports justice unconditionally, it is imossible to support, with the same unconditionality, one's ruler, religion, party, ideology or nation - as they all may entail conflicting demands.   If the Pakistani is good and just, should we, as an Indian, support the Pakistani or an Indian who is bad and unjust?  This question underpins the difficult dilemma of the loyalist who is enjoined to place the love of his leader, his nation, party or religion above everything else.

It seems to me that all politics and all religions practiced in any part of the world is almost the same - with only superficial differences.  In the final analysis, the primacy of ideology is surrendered to the all-enveloping need of rulers for achieving maximum power and wealth.  The liberal parties of the world may be talking more about equitable and just distribution of individual liberty, power and wealth. But so long as victory of own party leaders and not victory of the just and honest candidates is the aim of a party, it doesn't matter if a party is called liberal and just, it simply becomes another ruler-serving party.  Could there ever be a time when a party - be it the Congress, the BJP or the Communist Party - supports a just action regardless of whether it emanates from their party or the opposition party?  When a legislator roots for justice and not for his or her party being elected to power, the current system of competitive party politics, that is essentially a fight between their leaders for power and wealth, can no longer be sustained.  When legislators and citizens work for justice, there can be no party, religion, tribe, community or nation.  In a just world, all efforts are aimed at the well being of the individual. The opposite situation is when all efforts are aimed at the well being of the rulers - that is indeed the current state of affairs.   For any activity, there can only be one direction to aim for, as two aims in different directions cannot but conflict with each other.

Victory of the individual's interest is what constitutes justice.  Victory of the ruler alone is incompatible with victory of the individual. Rulers always aim for power and when they do this, they rob the individual of freedom.  Power manifests when one individual thwarts the freedom of another.  Power is born over the dead body of freedom. And if 'ruler' is defined as someone who wields power, then ruling of the kind we are familiar with will inevitably deprive the individual of freedom.  Can there be a ruler without power?  If the ruler is committed to justice - that is equal or equitable and just distribution of resources, he cannot become powerful and therefore he cannot become a ruler.  He will be a champion citizen who supports justice, but will not enjoy any privilege over other individuals.  Therefore what the world needs is not  usurpers, rulers and tyrants, but champions of justice.  Buddha, Jesus, Lincoln, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr - were all to varying degrees of completeness, champions of justice more than they were rulers.  But selfish tyrannical rulers have nearly always followed these champions of justice and usurped their legacies. In the name of the champion, the rulers deceive and exploit people.  They create dogmas, holy books, institutions of authority, legal codes that support the power of the rulers.  They claim they follow the champion of justice, but what they do actually is to oppress justice and amass power and wealth for themselves.  The Buddhist monks did this to Buddha.  The Churches did this to Jesus. The Republicans did this to Lincoln.  The Congress party did this to Gandhi.   Perhaps Obama is doing this to Martin Luther King Jr.

I think the way forward is fairly clear.  We cannot lead good lives if we continue to be royalists and nationalists, supporting our flags and our rulers whatever they do.  Our history is full of kings and queens who valued expansion of their empire a noble thing to do and have successfully brainwashed the people who also shared these values.  They conditioned their subjects to sing praises of their armies that invaded neighboring lands  killing people and destroying the homes of those who happen to live outside a line, but otherwise live the same kind of lives as them with parents, children, hopes and dreams.

We cannot lead good lives if we blindly follow our rulers' exhortations to support our country unconditionally even if they are on to something clearly against justice.  The Germans in the first half of this century fell for Hitler's German White Nationalism.  If all the Germans were thinking clearly and supported justice instead of their ruler, the disaster of the World War would not have happened.  As a citizen, therefore, it is clear that our commitment should be to justice and not to the rulers.  The most shocking realization is that the Nation, the Flag, the Party are all symbols that represent the ruler and not justice.  If we commit ourselves to justice, all divisions will just vanish and then we will be fully in confrontation with the onerous responsibility to deal with the rotting injustice on this entire earth.  We can be good, we can be loving, we can be sane only if we address the world's problems in one piece.  It just won't work to make ourselves, our family, our house, our garden better when we don't do nothing to clear the garbage on the street or the filth in the river.  Just as we need to be responsible for the cleanliness of our city or village and not just for the cleanliness inside our homes, we need to be responsible for the problems outside the arbitrary geographical segment that we call our nation - that only means the area of land the tyrants (the Rajahs, the Sultans, the Mughals and the Governor Generals of the East India Company) who ruled us in the past were able to wrest possession from his fellow neighboring tyrants.

National Anthem and Democracy

Humanity has been ruled by individuals who have used power over the majority to sustain own vanity, luxury and pleasures. Kings were tyrants as were military dictators. They lived in splendor even as their subjects languished in poverty. They corrupted our values of justice in such a way that we felt their riches were what they deserved and God had bestowed on them. As to their power over us, their cultural henchmen interpreted that God had entrusted the responsibility of ruling us with them. Different kings and tyrants throughout the ages had different explanations of the divine sanction of their powers, riches, superiority and nobility. These were very often intertwined with the beliefs of theology and religion. Religion was organized to reinforce the notion of divine sanction of the monarch's autocracy over us.

As kings and queens, they expected implicit obedience from their subjects and their soldiers. They wanted us to fight and die for their wars. These wars were always motivated by their vanity, greed and jealousy with neighboring kings. Yet, when they fought, they wanted people to regard the wars as glorious, inevitable and valorous. A king who plundered another country and caused untold suffering to the natives was called a 'conqueror'. To conquer a land became a noble act indicating the 'greatness' of the king. Alexander who raided the countries to the east of him as far as India in a march of unspeakable violence and immorality (causing deaths of large numbers of people and soldiers) became 'Alexander the Great'. The king who gave expression to his lust for supremacy and greed by annexing neighboring lands was lauded as a 'great' and 'powerful' king by historians. Nobody dared to call such kings plunderers, looters and robbers that they were, in fact, judged from the real nature of their actions. Of course, the stories of such kings were laced with accounts of occasional magnanimity, forgiveness and charity - to lend credence to what would otherwise be preposterous assertions of nobility.

All these kings who wanted their subjects to be implicitly loyal and obedient - devised various disciplines of symbolic obedience, deference and expression of loyalty. The national anthem and the flag were the most prominent among these. The idea was to reinforce psychological conditioning of deference and submission to the authority of the king. They were measures consistent with the principles of Pavlovian conditioning - in that every time the flag was flown or the anthem sung emotions of pride in the ruler or his kingdom, loyalty and submission to authority became reinforced in the subjects. A few relevant lines of the English National Anthem will make it apparent how the anthem was worded to reinforce submission and implicit loyalty to the monarch:

God save our gracious Queen
Send her victorious
Happy and glorious
Long to reign over us
Scatter her enemies
And make them fall
Confound their politics
Frustrate their knavish tricks
the choicest gifts in store
On her be pleased to pour
Long may she reign...

The stress, as can be seen, is on making HER victorious, happy and glorious so that SHE can reign over US. Subjects pray to God that the choicest gifts in store be poured on HER. It is easy to understand how subjects will be conditioned, by constant repetition of these words, to surrender their own welfare and safety for the victory and glory of their ruler.

When the transition was made from monarchy to democracy, there were a few things that should have been reviewed for their relevance in the changed circumstances. The national anthem to which the citizens are demanded to stand up in obeisance is one. What we now have is a democracy. The word 'rule' is itself meaningless in a system where we decide to live together in an self-organized cooperative way. For self-governance, what we need is to organize a law and order system that will ensure that none of us harm others in any way, that none of us would break the laws that are necessary for a peaceful and happy social life. This means the basic requirements of life will be distributed to all, no one will be allowed to starve or be homeless. There shall be no infringement of individual freedom, privacy and rights of any kinds between us.

The concept of the metaphorical personalized 'Nation' as the object of patriotic devotion was the inevitable result of carrying over the psychological condition of deferential obeisance to the monarch to democracy. When we started making a system of self governance in the form of a republic, we should have gone for a comprehensive makeover of the concepts of governance in a manner that was suited to democracy rather than persisting with the concepts that had relevance only in monarchy. Instead of doing this, we tried to adapt and accommodate the monarchic values and institutions to fulfill the altered requirements of democracy. In a monarchy, a king was the central figure. Therefore we created the supremely redundant office of the President. However, because we could not give him any power, he was inevitably reduced to a glorified rubber-stamp. Those we elected became equivalent to the advisers of the monarch - and they were called, appropriately, ministers who had, in monarchic days, the job of ministering to the ruler's wishes. For the monarch, God was a necessary concept that endorsed and sanctified his authority over the people. When we transitioned to democracy, the idea of the 'Nation' - often personified as the 'Motherland' - replaced God. The holy scriptures of God were replaced by the Constitution that was imbued with a due amount of sacredness. Naturally, we also retained the flag and the national anthem that symbolized and were used for the reinforcement of the conditioning of people to submit to the rule of the monarch with implicit obedience.

Democracy is a system that upholds the full freedom and human rights of every individual. It cannot discriminate between individuals who live on either side of an imaginary line that is the scar of wars fought by rulers of the past. Therefore, democracy can be committed only to the whole world and its entire people. It is just not possible for a democrat to be partisan to people living in an arbitrarily demarcated area of the globe. If we believe in democracy, the idea of 'our nation' would already have been transcended. Those who believe in democracy and in the responsibility of the law and order system that we the people of the earth have collectively devised to look after our interests and safety, cannot be nationalistic.  In order to be effective, the law and order system cannot be restricted to a geographical segment of the world. For example, the laws necessary for the control of epidemic diseases or global pollution would need to be followed by everyone in the world. There is no point in having a law and order system that is applicable only to the geographical segment that we refer to as our nation.

Once we are committed to the unconditional freedom of the individual that is the essence of democracy, we would, of necessity, become committed to global law and order. Democracy cannot reign within fragmented individual nations sustained by violent sentiments of jingoism and xenophobia. Democracy is, by its very nature, global and will transcend the divisions of mankind into nations, religions and other political demarcations that are created only so that ambitious leaders can control them for their personal benefits.