Transcript Navigating the Asian Future: from Asian Thoughts

Navigating the Asian
Future:
from “Asian Thoughts”
Susantha Goonatilake
Royal Asiatic Society Sri Lanka
Today: The Shift to Asia
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Three hundred years ago, the dominant
powers in the world were in Asia.
Thereafter, the West became dominant.
Today a process is under way whereby Asia
will once again be the dominant player in
the world.
This will have deep repercussions in
academia, culture and knowledge.
The figures are impressive.
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If the 19th C was British, the 20th the American,
the 21st is shaping to be Asian. Already GDP of
China is number two in the world. China would
become the largest economy by 2038 and by 2040
India No. 3. Purchasing power parity (PPP)
estimates has already placed China as number one.
And Asia as a whole, from East Asia through
Southeast Asia to South Asia will be lifted up in the
coming years.
Contrast: 2-3% growth rate in 19th C
Britain, first industrial nation.
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Smaller countries:
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Singapore using niche advantages reached
nearly a 15% growth in 2010.
And possibly indicative of her economic
futures to come, Sri Lanka after over 35 years
of a war partly induced by an Indian proxy
invasion had in the last two peace years very
high performances at its stock exchange possibly the highest in the world.
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Major impact on geopolitics of
culture
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These economic changes will have a major
impact on the geopolitics of culture
including geopolitics of knowledge. This
presentation explores this aspect.
But the ability of the West to manage its
relative decline is central to issues of
culture.
"End of History"
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The high point of the US was the fall of the Soviet
Union and its aftermath as exemplified by the
book "End of History" by Fukuyama. Echoing
more serious "end of history" theses such as those
of Hegel and Marx it was triumphalist propaganda
at a brief moment.
Fukuyama wrote before the full rise of Asia was
apparent and before the full backlash from the rest
of the world on the US of the Neocons and
Theocons onslaught echoing the US Bible Belt
had begun.
Waging war for "democracy”
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Ignoring dictatorships of its own ME client states
the US set in motion the Neocon agenda to wage
war for "democracy” in non-client states. It was
helped by a new post-Cold War phenomenon, the
adoption of "A New Policy Agenda” whereby
Western funds poured into pseudo-political
organisations, unrepresentative NGOs on the
laudable agenda of democracy and human rights
(delivered by unelected appendages of Western
funds and often their embassies) .
US over extended
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The military cost has been heavy. With less than
5% of the world’s population the military
expenditure of the US is now nearly 50% of all
other countries put together
The US has over extended herself financially and
militarily in two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
With an internal financial meltdown, debt laden
America was being kept afloat by borrowing from
Asia.
There is talk of the Euro unravelling and with it
the partial break up of the pan European dream.
Latin America
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In Latin America the rise of new nationalist
governments has eroded the once
supremacy of the US. To tame North Korea,
the West has to virtually beg of the Chinese.
Once overlords of Asia, Europe and the US
are making realistic calculations to keep
with changes and are now sending political
and economic delegations kowtowing to
Asian political and business leaders.
US financial hegemony challenged
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The US financial hegemony that
consolidated the Bretton Woods agreement
after World War II, through the IMF and
World Bank is being challenged. The G8 has
been replaced by the G 20 and new
acronyms reflecting the ongoing geopolitical
changes such as Chinamerica and Chindia
have emerged.
Soft power
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The US and the West is in decline in relative
terms and in spite of a preponderant
military is unable to adequately undertake
wars and keep the empire going. It however
has soft power as an adjunct ally.
Soft power includes culture and it is this that
we shall explore further.
West’s soft power to be rethought
foundationally
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Soft power slogans such as "land of the
free" in the US national anthem or "Give me
Liberty, or give me Death!" of Patrick
Henry part of what has been called
American "exceptionalisum". hide ugly
realities.
One American "freedom“ is the "right to
bear arms" as enshrined in the Second
Amendment to the Constitution.
“Right to bear arms"
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This “freedom” came from the bandit gun culture
of early American settlers in their genocidal
program to grab others’ lands. Today sorry
remnants of the genocide of the First Americans
have been herded into settlements and denied selfrespect as reflected in pervasive drunkenness.
USA freedoms, rights and democracy were for
most of its existence limited only to white settlers,
actually to WASPS.
Soft power: propaganda and reality
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Only in the early 1960s was the invisible ceiling for
other whites broken when the Catholic John
Kennedy became president overcoming much antiCatholic sentiment. And only in the late 60s were
Afro Americans even granted the formal right to
vote.
There have since been advances in the US but even
here one has to shift the propaganda from reality.
Revealing is the comparison between the US and
China designated as a land of the unfree.
Soft power myths: most imprisoned
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In the US, one fourth of every Afro
American youth is in prison. One in 11
Americans would in their lifetime spent
some time in prison and at any given time
one in 100 US citizens are behind bars.
More than 2 1/2 million Americans are in
prison the highest prison population in the
world. More significant, the US has 25% of
the prison population of the world although
it has only 5% of the global population.
More prisoners in free US
than in China
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These figures are larger than the prison
population of China with four times the
total population of the US.
These dichotomies between myth and
reality about democracy and freedom has a
long lineage, in fact going back to the time
of the Greeks the presumed fountainhead of
Western democracy.
Civilisational fountainhead
exposed
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Only a few "citizens" had democracy in Greece
while the bulk had none such.
Contrast with some Indian republics during the
time of the Buddha, whose organization forms
were transferred into the Buddha’s own order of
monks - the Sangha - where decisions are made by
a vote. The Greek myth as civilisational fountain
head has been exposed by Martin Bernal as an
invention of the early 19th-century to support the
European imperialist project.
The Soft Shift to Asia:
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The Asian economic shift is occurring with
a global re-division of work. It replaces the
earlier relocation of brawn work towards
cheaper Asian countries (such as garment
industries)
There is a new relocation of brainpower,
and a shift in science and technology and
academia towards the Asian cultural region
The Soft Shift to Asia:
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This shift of science and technology to Asia
is occurring amidst a shift in less
measurable cultural spheres. The earlier
hegemonic blanket of Eurocentricism is
being lifted.
Thus some of the best novelists in English,
the primary carrier of globalization, are
today Asians. Designers from Hong Kong,
Japan and now Malaysians set Western
clothing fashions.
The global culture, it is a changing.
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The changes are not just in the passing fad and the
superficial. For well over 100 years at a more
abstract level there had been inflows of NonWestern philosophical ideas into the West.
Thus South Asian influences, predominantly
Buddhism, were noted by Dale as having had an
impact on the American philosophers William
James, Charles Moore, Santayana, Emerson and
Irving Babbitt.
Psychology
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In another discipline psychology, there have
been major inflows in recent decades of
Buddhist and Hindu ideas and practice.
The scientific validity of some of these
practices has been recorded in standard
Western academic publications. Thus
Buddhist mindfulness training finds an
increasingly important place in such fields
as cognitive therapy.
Higher practices in Buddhism
and Hinduism
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And in significant parts of the West
meditation and yoga (actually the higher
practices in Buddhism and Hinduism) have
gone mainstream with millions of followers.
And on a more trivial note, today in Britain,
once the land of the uneatable, the truly
national dish is South Asian curry.
Fashionable
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In the last decade it has become partly
fashionable among sections of the Western
glitterati to define themselves as Buddhist.
India has considered Buddhism as part of
its soft power and so has China which
pursuing this has held global conferences on
Buddhism.
Border crossings in the social
sciences
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The broad question is, with the shift to Asia,
can Asian perspectives on culture and
knowledge emerge that would be as
powerful as some of the Western ones.
A notable attempt to do this occurred when
the first wave of Asian countries from East
Asia began to reach high economic growth
rates.
An attempt to incorporate Asian
conceptual elements
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Reminiscent of Max Weber evoking a
Protestant Ethic for the rise of the West; a
cultural factor was now invoked, a Confucian
Ethic was invented for these predominantly
East Asian countries.
It was said that Confucian values of group
solidarity and hard work had been the major
contributing factor to the sudden upsurge of
East Asian economies.
Confucianism or authoritarian
regimes?
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But Confucianism had been there for 2,500
years without an industrial breakthrough.
Further, during the periods of their initial
growth in the 1960s and 1970s these East
Asian countries had very repressive and/or
authoritarian regimes where labour dissent
was not tolerated.
Confucian ethic untenable
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Soon, the East Asian countries were joined
by another set, namely those of the ASEAN
region such as Thailand, Malaysia and
Indonesia and later South Asia who have
populations with cultural traditions
different from the Confucian one.
The Confucian ethic was as untenable as the
original Weberian perspectives.
Max Weber
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Weber used cultural factors to explain the
rise of Europe and for the lagging behind of
Asia
His views of Protestantism and in turn,
those of other religions constitute an
important part of his total system of social
theory. In his sociology of religion,
Buddhism also finds an important place.
Significant errors of a basic kind
of Weber’s Buddhism
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Most of Weber’s sources of Buddhism, are
from the Sinhalese sources which were
translated to European languages in the late
19th and early 20th century.
But as I show in the paper there
are significant empirical errors of a very
basic kind of Weber’s knowledge of
Buddhism making his grand
pronouncements untenable.
Buddhism a common cultural
overlay
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Before European influence in recent
centuries, Buddhism was a common cultural
overlay across most of Asia. Buddhism has
developed approaches in epistemology guidelines for observation and coming to
conclusions.
Are there elements within Buddhist
epistemology which can give insights into
social sciences as it locates itself in a
confident Asia?
Much unusable cultural furniture
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There is also outside these philosophical
aspects of Buddhism, much cultural
furniture - elements outside the
observational realm such as gods and
goddesses
Yet outside such untenable cultural
furniture, the observational and Buddhism’s
philosophical essence could stand on its
own.
"me" radically deconstructed
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Unique among philosophies, Buddhism
denies the existence of a self or soul.
Through observation, the existence of a
permanent abiding "me" is radically
deconstructed in Buddhism.
Buddhist observation breaks down the
component, physical and mental factors that
constitute the psychophysical personality.
Only a stream of becoming
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Mental phenomena and the external
environment are both in a perpetual state of
becoming, changing from moment to
moment, there is no individual, only a
stream, a stream of becoming.
These conclusions are obtained by
observation of both the world outside as
well as the internal world of mental
phenomena.
Humans: change and process
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Humans are in Buddhism a process, a
collection of swiftly changing mental and
physical processes. A conventional
empirical self is recognized as only a
momentary crystallization of a process
which interacts with the world outside.
The world, including the environment of
other humans in which the individual lives,
is itself changing and is in a state of flux.
Buddhist epistemology:
Change central
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A foundational social sciences using
Buddhist epistemology would have a
platform of a changing observer to track,
examine and come to conclusions about a
continuously changing social field.
Changing social field
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This social field would consist of
continuously changing individuals,
continuously changing groups and
continuously changing classes.
The detailed outcomes of such a changed
epistemological position cannot be
discussed here.
The sociological project could be
reexamined
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From such a foundational change ingrained
epistemological approach the whole of the
sociological project could be reexamined.
It would differ from the convention of
dividing the world into a subject which
cognises a social object from a fixed
subjective platform which then comes to
conclusions on the social world. It would
not imply as absolute, a subject-object
relationship.
Radical Reordering of the
Epistemological
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The Buddhist relationship between one self
and the social other could be compared with
the Ich and Du (I and thou) relationship of
Martin Buber which had been proposed for
sociological thought.
Buber's central thesis was that social life was
a dialogical existence, a relationship
between pairs such as “I and thou”.
“I” and ever-changing thous
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In a Buddhist formulation the dialogue of
existence is between a flowing and everchanging “I” and a flowing and everchanging thou or more correctly with sets of
flowing and ever-changing thous.
Changed epistemology changed
the natural sciences
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Such changed epistemological positions
have given rise to far reaching changes in
the natural sciences.
A most notable example is the case of
Einstein’s use of Mach’s position in
epistemology (which incidentally had
echoes with Buddhist positions) which
changed the direction of physics and gave
rise to relativity.
Radical Reordering of the
Epistemological
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Just like modern physics taking a Machian
epistemological position changed physics
and gave rise to a new way of looking at the
dynamics of the material world, a similar
foundational approach using Buddhist
epistemology would change the perspectives
on the dynamics of the social world.
An application
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Exploring the effect of such a change
would require much detailed reexamination
of the changing social world from a
changing observational platform
In the applied field such a Buddhist
epistemological position could help solve
some of the challenging ethical problems in
the emerging technological future.
Radically Reconstructing the Body,
Mind and Environment
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Recent developments from gene therapy, stem
cells to cloning and in the future, artificial genes
and artificial chromosomes and humans
augmented non-biologically through say artificial
intelligence implants challenge some of the basic
assumptions about the human.
We are, or will soon be, constructing and
reconstructing the human body and brain/mind,
from new developments in nano technology,
biotechnology and information technology
Social theory for new technologies
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In this new world there are new ethical
challenges not met before.
These problems are raised because these
technologies change dramatically parts of
the body and the mind.
The essential nature of the human is being
intruded upon by these technologies.
Deep questions
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Deep questions are raised by these coming
developments. They intrude on ethics.
The ethics on which these issues have been
hitherto discussed are Western ones, HinduBuddhist ideas for example have not
influenced this debate.
[Except for a preliminary conference in
Delhi in 2009 organised by me through the
Anthropology Survey of India and Shanti
Niketan]
Urgent challenges
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Many such challenges rest on what it is to be
a person in the very body and mind that is
being changed and the nature of the self
Some recent approaches to the living world
and the environment have utilized cultural
elements from major non-Western
philosophies as well as those of simpler
belief systems eg Ecofeminism.
Continuous Change Is Central To
The Emerging Human
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Continuous change of the self and the
person is the condition of the emerging
human or as some say “post human”
A major cultural approach that has
continuous change as its core is Buddhist
philosophy.
Central Buddhist position
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Both the human person, including his body
and mind, as well as the environment he
operates in, are not given or sacred in
Buddhism but constructed and changing.
This approach has direct relevance to a
future where both the human and his/her
environment are constructed and
reconstructed
Disclaimer
In using Buddhist philosophy here, one need
not accept all the unprovable cultural
aspects of Buddhism such as gods and
goddesses just as one does not have to
believe all Christian mythology to use the
philosophical counterpart of a Creator,
namely a First Cause.
“Religion”, “Philosophy”, “Science”:
S Asian and West
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In discussions on bioethics, the fields of
science, philosophy and religion
intermingle.
But “religion”, “philosophy”, and “science”
have different connotations from a South
Asian - say Buddhist - perspective and a
Eurocentric one.
Hence an explanatory aside is needed
South Asian and Judeo Christian
systems differ
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South Asian belief systems possess a heavy
overlay of philosophy as foundation.
Western religions, Christianity, Judaism or
Islam (the “Abrahamaic” family of
religions) are firstly revealed systems, to be
by a higher power, ‘God’.
Philosophy comes later.
Judeo Christian systems & ethics
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The ethical system is “revealed” and to be
“God’s word” (for example the Ten
Commandments).
There are also seeming “secular” ethics
To look at Buddhist ethics one has to go to
its core philosophy.
Buddhism’s core philosophy
of the individual
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“Anicca” and “Anathma”
Meaning “Impermanence and change”, and
“No abiding soul or self ”
These are not “mystical” but realistic and
matter of fact statements
In Buddhism …
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There is nothing durable or of static being.
The continuity of life is not through an
abiding permanent structure, an 'I'.
Buddhism is unique in the philosophies of
the world that it denies the existence of a
self or a soul.
A belief in a permanent abiding 'me' is
radically deconstructed in Buddhism
Buddhist deconstruction of self
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Buddhism breaks down physical and mental
factors of the person into changing
components
"there is no materiality whatever ..... no
feeling ... no perception .... no formations ...
no consciousness whatever that is
permanent, everlasting, eternal, not
inseparable from the idea of change” – the
Buddha
Buddhist deconstruction of self
[contd]
"When neither self nor anything pertaining to self
can truly and really be found, this speculative view
[of] a permanent, abiding, ever-lasting,
unchanging [self] is wholly and completely
foolish" - the Buddha
 A disciple of the Buddha elaborated further that
what one calls 'I AM' is:
"neither matter, sensation, perception, mental
formations nor consciousness"
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Buddhist deconstruction of self
[contd]
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Physical elements change, as do mental
phenomena.
All are in a state of perpetual becoming. All
phenomena are but fleeting strings and
chains of events.
As the constituents of an individual change,
s/he does not remain the same for two
constituent moments
Buddhist deconstruction of self
[contd]
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There is no individual, only a changing
stream:
“Life is a stream (sota), an unbroken
succession of aggregates. There is no
temporal or spatial break or pause in this life
continuity. This continuity is not through a
soul, but through a stream of becoming”.
Buddhist deconstruction of self
[contd]
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This analysis is partly arrived at from observing
the innermost subjectively felt inside a person.
One of the objectives of Buddhist mental
exercises, 'meditation' is to observe, experience
and describe for oneself this lack of self and of
permanence from within one's own streams of
thoughts and mental phenomena.
From within our own innermost subjectivity, the
problem of identity and of an abiding "I" is
shown to be a false one
Buddhist Deconstruction and New
Technologies
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From such a perspective, the questions
raised by new technologies on identity are
seen differently.
The existential angst of being a hybrid, of
having genes of plants and animals inside
one is seen differently. The problem of one's
'self' being spread over several artifacts now
loses its potential terror. The threat of being
a cyborg, of Frankenstein's creature; the
concerns of a Jeremy Rifkin the
fundamentalist critic of biotechnology is
seen differently.
Buddhist Deconstruction and New
Technologies
Living things, complained Rifkin “are no
longer perceived as carrots and peas, foxes
and hens. …. All living things are drained of
their aliveness and turned into abstract
messages. ……... There is no longer any
question of sacredness ….. How could there
be when there are no longer any
recognizable boundaries to respect”.
Buddhist Deconstruction and New
Technologies
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Further, Rifkin continued “as
bioengineering technology winds its way
through the many passageways of life,
stripping one living thing after another of its
identity, replacing the original creations with
technologically designed replicas, the world
gradually becomes a lonelier place” .
Buddhism stripped this seeming sacredness
of identity over two and a half millennia
ago.
Buddhist Approach to New
Technologies?
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A gene does not make a sentient being.
Only the stream of a being's existence, of
an onwards flowing history constitutes the
sentient human or the sentient cyborg.
A person does not exist as a unique
individual but as a constructed ever
changing flow, an onwardly moving lineage.
If to this lineage are added new elements,
new parts, it is but in the very 'normal'
nature of such streams. All such streams are
constructed from constituents in an ever
moving process. A person's normal
existence is of such a constructed being.
Buddhist Approach to New
Technologies?
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The artificial introduction of elements say
to the internal flow from new genes or
artifacts to humans is but another
manifestation of the normal construction of
such flows.
From a realist's perspective, there is no
difference.
Angst and Fear
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But such a perspective makes one squeamish.
Raises fright, alarm and even disgust. One would
not mind, a set of false teeth, even an implanted
one, a prosthesis for one's limbs say, a walking
stick or for that matter even a motorized
electronically controlled one. But messing up one's
interiority, ones subjectivity, evokes an entirely
different order of emotions.
The aliens taking over minds, raises different
feelings, of one's own consciousness being
invaded. It is after all, putting doubt on one's own
subjectively-felt oneness that is at stake.
Angst and Fear Normal
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But in such instances, the Buddha himself had
been very firm, rejecting the views of persons who
take the thing called the 'mind' or 'consciousness'
to be an unchanging substance.
In that case it was better he argued, for a person to
take the physical body as an unchanging 'self',
rather than thought, mind or consciousness,
because the body was at least more solid in
appearance than the mental, which are ephemeral
and continually change and so are hardly
candidate for permanency
Fear of flying?
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But experiencing the intrusion of the new
technologies that remake us biologically and
culturally, in an internal sense is disturbing. It
challenges our sense of self.
"This idea that I may not be, I may not have, is
frightening to the uninstructed" as the Buddha
himself put it.
And, as the belief in an abiding self is deep rooted
in humans, the contrary position is 'against the
current' as the Buddhist texts say on one other
occasion
Facing constructed humanity
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If then in the coming future, it is inevitable
that we be constructed and reconstructed,
from bio, nano, and information technology,
what should be our epistemological,
philosophical, ethical and subjectively felt
guiding principles be.
If "we" would then be cyborgs and hybrids,
what should the interiority of robots, of
constructed hybrids be, as they navigate
reality, and tunnel through time subjectively
Inside constructed humanity
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The person is not a ‘what’, but a process.
Being is only a snap shot in the process of
becoming, lasting only the length of one
thought.
"Just as a chariot wheel in rolling, rolls only
at one point of the tire, and in resting rests
only at one point; in exactly the same way,
the [internal] life of a living being lasts only
for the period of one thought. As soon as
that thought has ceased, the being is said to
have ceased”.
Inside constructed humanity
There is no stable sub stratum to be considered the
self. It just symbolizes a stream of physical and
psychological phenomena that is perishing. This is
the correct view to be internalized in the inevitable
day of the cyborg. As the 5th C Sri Lankan text
Vissudhi Magga put it:
There is no doer but the deed
There is no experiencer but the experience.
Constituent parts roll on.
This is the true and correct view
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Constructed Humanity:
Mind And Body
“The mental and material, both are here in
fact,
A human substance though cannot be found,
Void it is, set up like a machine,
A mass of conflict, like a bundle of grass and
sticks.”
- 5th C AC Vissudhi Magga
Constructed Humanity: “I” as Robot
"As a puppet walks and stands through a
combination of wood and strings, although
it is empty, without life, without impulse, so
this contraption of mental and material
factors [the person], void, without soul,
without free will can walk and stand, as if it
had will and work of its own”
5th C AC Vissudhi Magga
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Buddhist Constructed Humanity?
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Those bio, nano and information technologists
who are reconstructing humans may not know it,
but they are foundationally Buddhists
In both perspectives the body and mind are
intertwined and changing.
In both perspectives the body and mind are not
mystical but constructed
In both perspectives the body and mind are
malleable in definable ways
There is a difference
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Those who are making a new reconstructed
humanity view their phenomena from the
outside, as objects
Buddhists have analyzed partly subjectively,
partly from within
May be we should examine constructed
humans internally
That is internalize being a robot, a cyborg
Like asking “What is it to be a robot?”
The future
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The future according to Buddhist
epistemology is definitely not “human”.
There was no such unique "human" entity
in the first place. In the beginning we were,
if you will, only empty souls, “robots”.
Welcome then to non-self actualization, to
Nirvana (in the original technical Buddhist
sense).
An exploratory exercise
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The above was an exploratory exercise into
fact, epistemology and the imagination,
some might even say of the speculative. But
it is no more speculative than the faulty
constructions of Asia by a Marx and Weber.
And as Asia comes to its own we need more
exercises in epistemology and the
imagination as guides to view the coming
world.
 Thank
you!