children of a different domain9

The challenge is obvious.

I have been meaning to write a post for the past few weeks with that openings line. I wanted to reiterate how we are, in most aspects, narrative beings. The piece would then go on to try and explain why we seem to be in doldrums for the past few decades as a society. It is because the older frameworks or the 'founding mythology platforms' are not working and the new ones haven't taken shape/ become strong yet. One of the primary reasons the older mythologies do not seem to have the strength to hold us is because they only work if they are accepted/ 'believed in' by a critical mass (like a currency) and that has been corroded by the doctrine of individuality (which is probably the last of our most widespread myths)¹. 

The piece would then expand on what I have been doing over the last few years to stitch for myself a fairly cohesive platform to function more effectively. The new platform would be put together by the remnants of what I'd read, learnt, understood, imagined and it would find a way to take forward the best of my desires while also trying to explain the world (both internal and external) to myself. 

The more I think about it, the more I am inclined to see mental models as a software stack. And in that sense, a founding mythology platform is the Operating System. The assembly layer below is made up of intuitions and heuristics, and the hardware layer corresponds with the wiring of my brain. Similarly, going up the stack, the applications and web pages, are more local, specific and can be picked-up or discarded more easily.

I haven't written that piece because I have not been able to find the proper mechanism for elaborating and arguing on it. The reason I'm mentioning it here is if I don't get around to blogging about it later², I want this to be a marker of that idea and how engrossed I've been in it for the last few weeks³.

--

I have been reading a bit about evolution in the last few months. I had the following eureka moment earlier while walking⁴:

    a. It is said that the primary desire of every living being is to survive and procreate

    b. The mechanism used by living beings to propagate themselves is via genes

    c. Richard Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene, flips the axiom and says that it is the gene that wants to propagate and so uses us as vehicles to do that

    d. Let's call the characteristic of the gene that makes it want to propagate itself (I can sense that this formulation is wrong because genes probably aren't conscious and can't really "wan't") meme-ing

    e. A meme, usually, is used to refer to a unit of culture that behaves analogous to a gene

Now that I have this little conceptual framework, let me try to use this to interpret one specific aspect of my personality.

    a. I don't think I really want to have children. At this point in time. And I know there are atleast a few more people like me (trust me, I keep a lookout for them)

    b. But I also know I'm a biological being and it is evident that I'm driven by biological urges like hunger, sleep, physical comfort, sexual interest etc.

Then how/why is it that I don't want children. I see three possible explanations:

    a. The genes that drive me are a random mutation (of the more normal human variant) that doesn't want to propagate. This is a possiblity because mutations do happen (because of faulty copying) that could lead to these kind of'negative' outcomes. If that's true, nothing to talk about there.

    b. I see what is going on in the world, with the large scale suffering, political instability, climate crisis etc., and my cultural (culture here as opposed to nature) intelligence has taken over and is appealing to my 'better' instincts. This again seems like a possibility. It is this intelligence that stops us from eating too much sugar, from indulging in socially unacceptable sexual relations, from controlling our immediate impulses in favour of a longer well-being etc. But I also know that while powerful, cultural/social intelligence is not entirely sufficient so it needs to create an acceptable alternative to biological needs/desires (Like how we 'live' through movies and play out our desires as imaginations)⁷. But sooner or later, because of natural selection, people like this obviously die out and are replaced by those types who have more children. And assuming we are children of those children, our biological urges should overcome our cultural inclinations. And yet people like me are still being born. How come?

    c. And this brings to the core of my argument. What if, in the past few centuries, the world has seen a paradigm shift where memes have become more powerful than genes. 

    One is the sci-fi dystopian way of looking at it: genes evolved long enough for us to become sophisticaed enough to create the internet, and now the internet is filled with memes. The memes have the machines now to take over the world, so they don't mind us dying out and the machines, with increasing intelligence, will become smart enough to keep propogating the memes. 

    A less dramatic way of looking at it would be: Cultural artefacts/ memes are their creators' children too but of a different type. So instead of having kids (maybe 2/3) and taking care of them, and hoping they grow healthy and smart, and live long enough to copulate and pass on their (my?) genes further, people with this mindset want to create films/songs/books/scientific theorems that will propagate and live long enough to create derivatives of their own⁸. 

    Wouldn't that assure my immortaility as well atleast to a certain extent? And while nourishing memes needs work, it's probably less energy-intensive, needs less maintenance and I can spawn (conscious use of the word) way more of them and hope atleast one of them survives than keep all my eggs (ha!) in two or three human baskets.

I know this is a ridiculously simplistic, not to mention a primal/jungle-law view of the world, and my worldview is way more romantic than this on most days, but looking from the viewpoint of a certain kind of evolutionary logic, I don't think it's entirely inelegant.

¹ Like Venkatesh Rao once so beautifully put it, and I paraphrase, "There is nothing more commonplace in American society than the belief in individualism"

² This probably can be explained by my intermittent need to be seen as a more serious writer than a mere blogger, and so my refusal to part with what I think are major ideas/insights as just blogposts. Unsurprisingly, now, I never get around to doing that so I probably should resign myself/accept/celebrate that I'm a blogger and what is form but the easiest/malleable/longstanding way for you to put the happenings inside you out to the world

³ This part is just a diggression right at the beginning. The main content of this blogpost is the consciously small, to-the-point argument of the next part

⁴ Disclaimer - Please note, if it isn't clear from the stuff published on this blog already, most of what I know comes from magazine articles, cursory readings of Wikipedia pages, and occassionally a non-fiction book intended for a general audience. A lot of the knowledge comes peripherally as part of living in an information network⁵. So when I quote theories and technical terms, they are to be understood as representations in pop culture and drawing room discussions

⁵ Thank god for How to talk about books you haven't read which in true Post-Modern⁶ fashion, I'm talking about without reading

⁶ I don't mean whatever it means. I mean what I think others think when I use the term

⁷ I think masturbation is a good example. It is a coping mechanism against the internal pressure of having to find suitable, attractive mating partner all the time

⁸ As I write this, I remember one of David Eagleman's stories in Sum where people die twice: once when they die physically, later when everyone on earth who knows about them, by whatever means, dies too

⁹ Domain as in biological taxonomy. I wanted to use a more poetic term, like realm or empire instead of domain, but in line with the functional tone of the piece, stuck to the most prosaic of terms available

a bicycle for my mind

The Seen and the Unseen is not just my favourite podcast. It is, and apologies for my inability to come up with a more appropriate phrase now, the world feed I most look forward to across all media. I absolutely adore good conversations, and Amit Varma's podcast has given my way more than I could ever have asked for. He's recorded 215 episodes as of this week and I must've listen to about 50 (including the rare abandoned ones) and I thought I'd list my favourite conversations and highlight one or two memorable takeaways. 

So, in no particular order:

• Fixing Indian Education with Karthik Muralidharan- Probably, by a tiny margin, my favourite episode. Not only is the subject matter important enough to demand complete attention, on top of that Muralidharan's energy and optimism is infectious. Key takeaways, from memory: the sorting vs the human development functions of education, the ineffectiveness of increasing teacher salaries on teaching standards, implementation of vouchers to create dynamism and competitiveness among government schools. Also, Pareto principle is very useful- 80% outcomes come from 20% of the effort.
  
• What have we done with our independence with Pratap Bhanu Mehta- Prof. Mehta says something terrific and I paraphrase, "We usually blame our politicians for changing their statements. While a politician must have principles, we must remember that they do not have an autonomy over truth. It is their responsibility to listen to competing claims, arbitrate between them, and take them to positions of power. In that regard, a politician's willingness to backtrack on previous utterances is a feature not a bug. We should be more afraid of those in authority who steadfastly hold their opinions in the face of contrary evidence. Also, sometime in the last few decades, we mistook respecting others people with respecting all opinions.
  
• The Ideas of our Constitution with Madhav Khosla- Madhav is one of my favourite scholars, for his ability to convert seemingly boring Civics textbook stuff to thought-provoking philosophy. He also brings history back to life with terrific immediacy. From this episode, I remember two things: 1. If democracy was just about elections, then we wouldn't need such a big constitution filled with guidelines and rules. They would've just said, win elections and do what you want. 2. The Indian Constitution was created to be an edifying document. And its intention was to make us equal citizens by treating us as one.
• Who broke our Republic? with Kapil Komireddi- The genius of Nehru's (via Khilnani) Idea of India is that it is expansive enough to hold all the other ideas of India. It is, in my opinion, the highest manifestation of a liberal society because it accommodates, and celebrates, (almost) the entire spectrum of humanity.
• Jahangir the Curious with Parvati Sharma- There's this lovely bit where she conveys how quickly the Mughuls became 'Hindustan-ized' using a vivid illustration, and I paraphrase, "Babar, who never felt at home in India would go to Afghanistan and Uzbekistan at the slightest pretext. And there he would happily gorge on melons and pomegranates, claiming that they were the best fruits in the world. His great-grandson, 70 years later, when he went to Afghanistan and tasted melons, scowled and said that they were no match to the greatest fruit in the world- the mangoes of Hindostan."
• The art of narrative non-fiction with Samanth Subramanian- I absolutely love Samanth's writing, my favourite is this autobiographical sketch about quizzing, and in this episode he elucidates on how he designs his non-fiction pieces. Essentially, the quest is to identify the themes around the topic at hand and find angles to interpret them. Once those are in place, the piece must stitch a narrative through them.
• BJP before Modi with Vinay Sitapati- I find Sitapati to be an electrifying communicator of his work. I liked this conversation so much that I read Jugalbandi the following week and thoroughly enjoyed it. My key learning came when Sitapati said, "Our fears that we will end up in a Hindu Rashtra in the future are moot. We already live in a Hindu Rashtra. The BJP is not fascist. They do not need to abolish elections. Infact, the RSS/ BJP's one hundred year old project is to consolidate the Hindu vote. Once they have it, they will always be in the majority." Another useful framework for understanding BJP's thought process is their obsession with 3 things: 1. Hindu Unity 2. Sacred Geography 3. Demography and Elections. From his method of working, another nugget was, "Perfection is the enemy of production".
  
• A scientist in the kitchen with Krish Ashok- Another episode I absolutely loved and bought the book of. I am so grateful to Krish for demystifying and deromanticising the act/ art of cooking. And for unequivocally saying that there is no 'authentic' version of a dish. If you find something tasty and nutritious, then its good enough.
• Indian Society: the last 30 years with Santosh Desai- This was a lot of fun too primarily because I love listening to anything about India since the 90s. I remember Desai articulating something that I'd always felt but more succinctly, "The ceremonies and rituals of a court house exist to obfuscate and distract us from the fact that an individual, the judge, does not really have the moral right to pass sentence against another individual, the implicated citizen. The rituals of a modern, secular nation-state, then, are not very different from the ceremonies of a medieval kingdom."
  
• Political Ideology in India with Rahul Verma- Verma talks about the book he co-authored with Pradeep Chhibber on ideology in India and he argues that the western classifications of Left and Right (Social or Economic) don't apply to societies like India which are much more diverse. Instead, they point to four different axes (federalism vs centralism, reservation vs anti-reservation.. I can't remember the other two) and I found that a much more useful apparatus to differentiate between the ideologies (atleast on paper) of different political parties in India.
  
• The Gita Press and Hindu Nationalism with Akshaya Mukul- I discovered the podcast when I started reading Jaithirth Rao's The Indian Conservative on Juggernaut, didn't like it too much, but wanting to learn more about the conservative cause in India, looked up to see if he had spoken in a podcast. That's when I found his Seen and the Unseen episode, and finding him equally unimpressive there as well, abandoned that episode but I guess I must've liked Amit's style of interviewing enough to try another episode; This must've been around Oct 2019. And this is the episode that I selected and boy was it the right choice. It is still in my top 5 episodes of the show and it was an absolute blast listening to the conversation. Mukul's analysis of the Hindu Right's evolution was staggering both in its scope and lucid presentation. And my respect for him increased manyfold when I discovered, months later, that he refused to collect a prize for the book because it was being handed over by Modi.

Honourable mentions- I enjoyed these episodes as well but don't have/ remember one or two 'money insights'- The art of translation with Arunava Sinha, Srinath Raghavan's three episodes, Manu S Pillai's three episodes, Ramachandra Guha's Gandhi episodes, Matt Ridely's Evolution episode among many others. I'm actually surprised by how few episodes I've listed because I could spend hours talking about the stuff I've learned from the show but I guess this list will have to do for now. It's more a sign of my rusty writing than anything else.

That's my very succinct introduction, and a minor recommendation list, to the Seen and the Unseen. In all honesty, until I discovered this podcast, I had no idea a cultural artefact like this could be, would be, created about India today. For that, I'm filled with gratitude and appreciation for Amit. 

I have spent enough hours listening to the podcast while vacuuming the house, setting clothes out for drying, walking around Westmead/ Wentworthville, to the library, to the swimming pool, to Coles/ Woolies, to parks nearby, completely engrossed in one of the conversations and while I hope they have made me atleast a bit smarter, I'm sure they've captivated me immensely. It's been a pleasure and a blessing.