Black Holes & M.M. Joshi's Retro Chic

There are some fights that do both sides no real good and Mr. Joshi and hisSancho Panza, the UGC Chairman Mr. Gautam, have picked exactly one of these intheir move to start funding astrology courses at Indian Universities. 

First things first. This move is brilliant politics for Mr. Joshi. His marketniche in the hyper-competitive world of Indian politics is that of the fearlessdefender of India’s ancient, whence necessarily Hindu, culture against the "self-hating,secularized/ westernized elite". Being attacked for coming to the defense ofVedic Astrology suits him just fine. 

There is anecdotal evidence for his tactical brilliance. A default faith inastrology is a part of the lives of many Indians. (Not just Hindus, of course,as in other matters involving the common culture. However Vedic astrologyinvolves an appeal to the classical Hindu tradition so in the following I willfocus on fellow Hindus.) 

As Mr. Joshi’s critics have, inevitably, attacked abelief in astrology as part of their response large numbers of people find theircherished beliefs mocked in public. They will likely respond by digging theirheels in on the other side of the debate. Perhaps they will even adopt Mr. Joshias their standard bearer in the national arena. 

Indeed, from Mr. Joshi’s perspective this move had the same compellingquality that Mr. Vishwanath Pratap Singh detected in accepting the Mandalreport. Sadly, it shares with that other masterstroke the feature that allIndians on both sides of the debate would be better off if it had never beeninvented. 

Its political logic notwithstanding, two actual arguments have been marshaledin support of the UGC’s move. Let me consider these in turn. 

Planets and People 

The first of these was nicely summarized by the underemployed K. N.Govindacharya who said (Times of India, May 28th): 

"This decision has, in fact, triggered a debate in the country as to whatconstitutes scientific temper. It is well known that gravitational force affectshuman beings. But just because science is still to evaluate and quantify theimpact of planets other than earth on human beings, should we dismiss thatpossibility? Science is a continuous process of learning. Till the recent past,scientists did not accept the existence of the fourth dimension or black holes.Even now we do not know whether sub-atomic particles are indeed particles, orenergy packets, or waves. Science is yet to tell us what exactly life andconsciousness are. Just because we do not know about a thing, let us not denyits existence." 

This paragraph illustrates nicely why Mr. Govindacharya is accuratelydescribed as an ideologue rather than as an intellectual, and why one fears thata little learning is a dangerous thing. He is deluded in thinking that scienceitself offers a basis for defense - on the contrary, the world-view of modernscience (for instance reviewed recently in Edward Wilson’s Consilience)is remarkably complete.

To begin with it is hardly the case that Science is yet to quantify theimpact of planets other than earth on human beings. The opposite is true - it isprecisely because the relevant gravitational effects of distant planets are tinycompared to the other forces that shape human biology that scientists areconfident that we can ignore them. 

To say that "scientists did not accept theexistence of the fourth dimension or black holes" is to falsely imply that themathematics of Lorentz invariance (which is what the recognition of time as afourth dimension was about) and that of singularities in general relativitytheory was available in the Vedas or anywhere else and all Einstein andChandrasekhar and colleagues had to do was to read them.

As for sub-atomic particles they are basis states for irreduciblerepresentations of the Poincare group in the Hilbert space of a quantum fieldtheory (Wigner) and from that mathematical statement follow properties that canbe characteristic of macroscopic particles or macroscopic waves.

It is conceivable that a future formulation will replace this ontology by oneinvolving a yet to be formulated "string theory" for the purposes ofunderstanding phenomena at inaccessible energies but it will not change thepractical utility of our current formulation for understanding everydayphenomena around us. 

The technical basis for this last assertion is the idea ofthe "renormalization group" whose spectacular development won Kenneth Wilsonthe Nobel Prize and this feature of our world is what has allowed theexponential, cumulative, growth of science despite dazzling changes in the "fundamentalontology" along the way.

As for life, the basis of heredity was established almost at one fell swoopby Watson and Crick in 1953 and some time in the next decade or two I expectthat the simplest organisms, such as bacteria, will allow an understanding oftheir behavior on the basis of their genetic code and the implied biochemistry.

Consciousness is more of a problem but there seems little reason to thinkthat it will not ultimately receive an explanation as an "emergent property"of particular complex systems as opposed to a fundamental ontologicalelement. 

Now Mr. Govindacharya may say, "But how can you be absolutely sure thatthere isn’t more to the story than you have allowed above? After all I learnfrom reading Karl Popper that science contains no true statements, onlyfalsifiable ones." 

The answer to that is that I can’t be absolutely sure that there isn’tanything else, neither can anyone else about anything else. For instance, Mr.Govindacharya can’t be absolutely sure that tomorrow Mr. Vaypayee won’tforgive him and dismiss Mr. Jaswant Singh to make way for him at the Ministry ofExternal Affairs. But he isn’t planning on this improbable event.

Likewise, India as a society shouldn’t plan on the much greaterimprobability that something will be found which will in some sense validate theconjectured connection between the destiny of individual humans and the motionof heavenly bodies, when a truly enormous body of existing knowledge indicatesotherwise. 

In response to Mr. Joshi’s move, three Indian physicists working in theUnited States: Shyamsundar Erramilli of Boston University, Harsh Mathur of CaseWestern Reserve University and Anupam Garg of Northwestern University havedrafted a letter protesting it on the grounds that astrology is not a scienceand hence should not be taught as one. About 300 people including this authorhave signed this letter with the more eminent signatories including theNobelists Sheldon Glashow (one of the discoverers of the "standard model" ofparticle physics) and Phillip Anderson (regarded by many as the greatest livingcondensed matter physicist).

If the list isn’t vastly longer it is simply because the drafters are firstrate scientists with other uses for their time. There is little question thatcentral proposition in the letter commands nearly universal assent among leadingscientists. Interested readers may wish to peruse thislink  for the text of the letter and the list of signatories. Theletter, modestly, confines itself to making the point that methodologies inscientific and astrological practice are completely different, but as I’venoted above substantive case is overwhelming on its own.

Supply and Demand 

A second rationale offered by Messrs. Joshi and Gautam is that there is ademand for trained astrologers, especially in Indian communities outside Indiawhich needs to be met. The Government of India, being the mai-bap of the Indiannation is duty-bound to respond to this. 

A kinder version, which is not what ison offer, is that in an open society surely people have a right to lead theirlives as they see fit as long as they do not actively harm others, and if theywant a steady supply of astrologers why shouldn’t they have it? 

To thislast sentiment I have no objection whatsoever. By all means let Hindu societynourish its traditional institutions, alongside all other groups in the Indianmosaic. I myself belong to the ranks of those who feel that the Nehruvianemphasis on a dry "scientism" as a prerequisite for economic prosperity wasmisguided and confused the need for an industrial culture with that of ascientific temper. 

More generally, little was gained by decades of organizeddisdain for traditional Hindu practices which mostly served to demoralize thecountry which should have been better occupied building a robust prosperity thatwould have ameliorated many more problems a lot faster. 

But it is crucialto remember that this stifling of Hindu civil society was a product not just ofPandit Nehru’s intellectual stance, but also of his supreme creation theNehruvian-bureaucratic state which sought to set up a Department with its OwnSecretary for every conceivable project and to outlaw all competitors. Thereforming spirit of the Indian freedom movement was killed off when every argument was forced to take its place in a cobwebbed file. 

I would cheer onMr. Joshi if he wants to undo this by freeing education and culture from thedead hand of state control. Let a hundred schools of astrology flourish - withprivate money - alongside a hundred private Universities where Vice-Chancellorscan focus on producing academic excellence instead of kowtowing before the entrylevel desks at the HRD ministry. 

But this is not what he wants to do. Instead hewants to perpetuate the Nehruvian paradigm and perhaps set up a second IAS (theIndian Astrological Service) . I can confidently predict that if he succeedsthis will be the end of a vital Hindu culture - nothing can survive bureaucraticparalysis. 

He need look no further than the difference between the twoAnglo-Saxon twins Britain and the United States. There is a Church of Englandbut it is in the United States that religious expression is far stronger,courtesy of a history of private arrangements. 

Oddly, this does nothing forthe State’s own long terms interests either. In common with Mandal, this movehas no natural limits - if it is seen as politically successful, every group inIndia will come to ask for its own traditional practices to find representationin public universities and such demands will be met by successor governments. 

Perhaps it is worse. With reservations at least one is forced mathematically tostop at 100%, with courses who is to say how many are enough. The net resultwill be to increase the flight away from public institutions - perhaps toInternet based education from private institutions in other countries astechnology improves. 

In sum, with a mai-bap like the Government of India,who needs enemies?

Conservatism and the Left 

Mr. Joshi is eager toremind people that starting with Mr. Nurul Hasan the Left engaged in exactly thepractices he is condemned for today. This is completely correct. Indeed the Leftwas perhaps even less impressed with science which is why for the better part oftwo decades starting with 1970 one could hear moronic incantations of vulgarMarxism ("all history is the history of class struggles") passed off associal "science".

It is worth remembering that the "prestigious"Jawaharlal Nehru University was founded with no faculty of mathematics or of thephysical sciences - and that leftist members of its professoriate argued againstthe eventual remedying of this egregious omission that has not been attempted byany university with pretensions to stature anywhere in the world. If thesciences in India survived the Left it is because they fled to specializedinstitutes. 

It is a truism as old as the hills that two wrongs do not makea right and mutatis mutandis that the replacement of left wing mediocrity byright wing mediocrity is not progress. Mr. Joshi is well within his rights toattempt to displace the left trade union that has controlled Indian academicpatronage for so long (a private conversation with the young, gifted scholarsthat populate many of Delhi’s colleges is all one needs to be convinced ofthis) but he should do so by opening up the system to genuine, partinternational, peer review and by looking for conservative projects that areintellectually defensible and for gifted people to man them. 

The left litanythat there aren’t academically talented rightists is ludicrous - it mistakesthe outcome of a system of rent-seeking and suppression for its causes and therecertainly isn’t a shortage of conservative intellectual projects.

 TheTragedy of Mr. Joshi 

With so much to be done, Mr. Joshi has chosen to fundcourses in astrology instead. Worse, he has brought into the open a conflict,between the collective import of contemporary natural science and one minorcomponent of the inclusive Hindu mix by which large numbers of Indians live,that could have been left well enough alone. 

It is not as if the Hindu in thestreet goes around under the delusion that he is a puppet of the heavens.Instead he does what he can, in common with fellow humans across the globe todeal with the complexities of life. What he faces is a complicated and shiftingenvironment, more treacherous in India than in some other places and lesstreacherous than in others. 

In negotiating a life’s journey through shiftingsands, armed with imperfect information, we all need some articles of faith, asense of destiny perhaps, and as part of Hinduism’s offering on this score,there is indeed the lore of astrology. Certainly Indian politicians who leadtheir professional lives in the snake pit that shames all others, need all thehelp they can get! But that as I’ve argued above is grounds for masterlyinactivity not foolish advance. 

It is hard to believe that Mr. Joshi hascome to this pass. When he took office, much was expected of him. He is aphysicist by training and that already makes him one of the very few people withscientific training to hold high public office anywhere on the planet. 

In an agebristling with technological and scientific issues in governance he should havebeen out ahead of his colleagues in framing questions and soliciting andsynthesizing the expert opinion needed to confront them instead of playing thephilosopher-king in speeches to captive audiences at National ScienceCongresses.

There is a new India headquartered at InfoSys and at the IndianInstitute of Science in Bangalore that has won respect worldwide and wouldwelcome him as their leader if he would listen to them and would promise toextend to the nation the basis of their success. With the help of this India hecould really go places. 

Thus far he has completely failed to capitalize onthis opportunity to move beyond the confines of Allahabad and the world of itsuniversity, once a proud institution - now a pale shadow with no presence in theinternational world of learning. This is truly a tragedy - not just for him, butfor India which could benefit from the talents of a man of undoubted nativeintelligence placed in so strategic a location. 

Perhaps it is not too latefor him to change course by taking a leaf out of the book of his fellow MP fromUttar Pradesh, the Prime Minister Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, who happily traded"Gandhian Socialism" for economic liberalization when responsibilitybeckoned. He can begin by firing Mr. Gautam and blaming him for the astrologyfiasco. As he has already fired the heads of the ICHR and ICSSR he has lots ofpractice, and this time he’ll even have reason on his side.

(The author is an Associate Professor of Physics at Princeton University)