Argumentative Indians

India is filled with incomplete dialectic. We have the left on one side and the right on the other side forever engulfed in this never ending tug of war on opinion. All there possibilities and counter-possibilities in the war of the Indian Intellectual. This all new to me, a world filled with an almost obstinate and bitter intelligentsia rigid in their thought.

No compromise - I feel sad that I’ve inherited such a world where an answer exists in the synthesis of the opposite assertions but every one is too proud to admit it. May be this is an historic symptom India has faced for centuries, if Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen is to believed in The Argumentative Indian. Or may be what Mr Sen is saying is Greek thought is all too new to us and we are all messed up now. Anyways, whatever it is we are now terminally unable to reach consensus.

Take the very large mohalla committee meetings [our parliament] we have for example - all that shouting, screaming, jumping up and down, protesting, discussing issues till the death isn‘t going to get us anywhere. Timed Action is.
India blogosphere is begining to reflect this incomplete Dialect where sets of bloggers have formed what seem to be blocs, catching each other on each others every move. I'm not stating example for doing this will only lead me into the battle field of forced dialectic.

"For human nature is such that if A. and B. are engaged in thinking in common, and are communicating their opinions to one another on any subject, so long as it is not a mere fact of history, and A. perceives that B.‘s thoughts on one and the same subject are not the same as his own, he does not begin by revising his own process of thinking, so as to discover any mistake which he may have made, but he assumes that the mistake has occurred in B.‘s. In other words, man is naturally obstinate; and this quality in him is attended with certain results, treated of in the branch of knowledge which I should like to call Dialectic, but which, in order to avoid misunderstanding, I shall call Controversial or Eristical Dialectic. Accordingly, it is the branch of knowledge which treats of the obstinacy natural to man. Eristic is only a harsher name for the same thing.

Controversial Dialectic is the art of disputing, and of disputing in such a way as to hold one’s own, whether one is in the right or the wrong—per fas et nefas.3 A man may be objectively in the right, and nevertheless in the eyes of bystanders, and sometimes in his own, he may come off worst. For example, I may advance a proof of some assertion, and my adversary may refute the proof, and thus appear to have refuted the assertion, for which there may, nevertheless, be other proofs. In this case, of course, my adversary and I change places: he comes off best, although, as a matter of fact, he is in the wrong."
- Arthur Schopenhauer, The Art of Controversy



Now Schopenhauer is telling me it's not our fault, polemics is in our genes. I don't know why most people see disagreement as natural process of thought. It defies cold logic. Thinking out loud when there is no right or wrong and because no answer exists eventhough people want one to exist, towing the other person into what you think is right seems utterly futile. This realization is leading to believe in Law of Eristic Escalation - where Imposition of Order = Escalation of Chaos.
Which could be interpreted as the second law of thermodynamics.
The second law of thermodynamics states that all work processes tend towards a greater entropy over time. Since the universe is tending towards a greater entropy , all work processes within the universe also tend towards a greater entropy.

So all this meandering brings me back to - if all thought is right and wrong at the same time why fucking argue about it all the time.Conserve you energy take it from the 19 year old.

Ok I see the paradox.




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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

HAH! Amen.

Aarushi said...

word. ditto. i couldn't have said it better. you rock.

Richa said...

It may be human nature and you face problems to convey your thoughts. But, with patience and understanding, things can work.