Homi Bhaba & Kipling's 'the Man who would be King'.

About 7 years after Kipling described the failure of a fictional attempt by 2 disreputable, ex-Drill Sergeant, British loafers, to become 'Kings of Kafiristan' and make a present of it to Queen Victoria, Muslim Afghans did succeed in colonising that mountainous realm, extirpating its native Religion, and adding  it to their Empire.

After the Soviet invasion, Nuristan- the 'realm of Light' as that 'realm of the Infidel' had been renamed- stood foremost in the resistance struggle against what Ronald Reagan termed an 'Evil Empire. The same thing happened after 9/11 when N.A.T.O put boots on the ground.

Why, according to Kipling, did the (fictional) British attempt fail and does that reason also explain why the Muslim Afghans succeeded?
Remarkably, yes.
In Kipling's story,  the priestly elite amongst the Nuristanis (who are a sort of lost tribe of Britishers) have a passionate inkling of the rituals of Freemasonry up to the Second Grade. Fortunately, the 2 British mock-Imperialists have been instructed one level higher. However, instead of confessing this purely human source of their esoteric knowledge, they let it be thought that they themselves are Gods. Since, sooner or later, one or the other of them is bound to suffer some injury or illness, their imposture is sure to be detected and thus their Kingdom is built on sand.
One of the soldiers, the brains behind the operation, decides to get married to a local girl. She thinks he is a God and knows that mortal women die if they marry either gods or demons. Thus, instead of kissing the groom, she bites his cheek and draws blood.
Since Gods don't bleed- except in Christianity- the two Imperialists meet a gristly fate.
Afghan Islam, on the other hand, could fare better. Its Prophet was wholly human and acceptance of its doctrine was not contingent upon it being a more advanced version of what was previously adhered to.
Nuristan is still a sort of palimpsest where ancient customs and practices remain faintly visible under the Kufic of Islamic orthopraxy. However, this 'sous rature' erasure or over-writing has not made that Province more amenable to the promises held out by new, non-Islamic, conquerors. On the contrary, the Nuristanis have offered such misguided Imperial adventures the most spirited resistance.

This, it seems to me, is a good reason to dismiss Post Colonial Theory as mischievous nonsense.

Consider the following excerpt from a representative text-

Vegetarian Hindus did not consider the Christian Eucharist to be a kind of cannibalism or vampirism any more than they thought the 'aja' grain they offered in sacrifice was actually a goat. The Namboodri did not taunt his Syrian Christian neighbor in such scurrilous terms over the score of centuries the two communities cohabited. Later on, Tamil Brahmins would scarcely have welcomed Fr. Roberto de Nobili or Fr. Joseph Besci into their agraharams if such prejudices in fact obtained. Raja Ramohan Roy has a criticism of Trinitarian Christianity, Radhakrishnan of eschatological Gospel hermeneutics, but neither they nor countless other Hindus who engaged with Christianity ever descended to such illiterate or school-boy invective.
The text Bhaba quotes- a typical Catechist's litany of improbable excuses for having taken a lot of seed-money but provided no great harvest of human souls in return-  has been taken out of context and interpreted in a wholly ludicrous manner.

Let us take a famous example of a comic muddle arising out of 'hybridization'- the Jesuits wrote a Christian Purana. Who was taken in by it? Not the Indians, it was the Frenchman, Voltaire.
Similarly, the first Professor of English Literature anywhere in the world was wholly taken in by the forgery- 'Ossian'- which also fooled Napoleon and Goethe and so on. But, in both these cases, no actual Bhaba type mimicry or mockery had occurred. Voltaire's education wasn't very different from that of the Jesuits. The English Professor who acclaimed Ossian was in fact a near neighbor to its forger.
Examples of culturally influential 'hybridization'- Carlos Castaneda, Lobsong Rampa, the French-Cambodian shemale David Cameron- more often than not, represent no vestige of conquest, or Colonial cross-pollination but are imaginary simply.
This is not to say that Bhaba's claims are wholly empty. No. But they are trivial.
Currently, some 'Hindutva' nut-jobs raise a hue and cry when they see foreign Missionaries deliberately using 'Hindu tropes- e.g. pilgrimage to the Ganges or Tirupati etc- or when Bishops claim that the Gita derives from the Gospel. But these nut-jobs will get exercised over anything- including the cutesy custom of little  kids sending each other Valentines, rather than 'Raakhees', thus obviating the guilt of having kissed one's 'Raakhee' brother behind the bike-shed. Of course, as a Hindutva intellectual myself- not a nutjob at all- I condemn the practice of saying 'Hello' because this is the secret Christian name of God as in the infamous Lord's prayer- 'O God who art in Heaven, Hello be thy name'.
Forster speaks of a 'muddle' and there will always be muddle where there exist Loves that dare not speak their name, and must-have gloves that cut off circulation to the scarlet hands of shame, with the result that Paideia's Credential becomes indistinguishable, to even the most discerning anus, from the pensive coprolite it itself extrudes. But that muddle had nothing to do with the functioning of the Colonial State nor contributed anything to its demise.
Dravot's divinity fails because he suffers an injury. Suppose he had slipped and broken his leg. The same cry would have gone up- 'How can a God break his leg?' Suppose he had suffered from dysentery- the scandal would have been 'how can a God suffer the shits?'
Dravot's crime is against the tenets of Freemasonry, belief in which he holds in common with the Priestly class of his new subjects- who, in any case, he considers British. The punishments he and his comrade suffer parallel those to be found in Masonic lore.
Kipling's point, in modern terminology, is a simple one. The establishment of a 'stationary bandit' suppresses wasteful vendettas and represents a Pareto improvement. The 'stationary bandit' gains both legitimacy and revenue by considering existing Schelling focal solutions to Society's co-ordination game (i.e. existing sacred geographies, conventions and shibboleths) and figuring out how to extract a rent from these choke points. However, if the 'stationary bandit' does not do this in a rational manner than some irrational hybridization will occur- such as the notion of a Man-God- causing his own extinction event.
Post Colonial theory could have been a stationary bandit turned Imperium extracting rents from University Depts. better funded and less obviously worthless than 'World Literature' or 'Area Studies'.
But, being as opportunistic, Epimethean, and fundamentally declasse as Kipling's Dravot, it has been horribly tortured, has gone mad, suffered dismemberment and finally and most fiendishly suffered the torments of death and damnation as a Research Project.
Witness this-

Did Churchill, once a subaltern in India 'practicing domination', become hybrid in his language as a result? When he says 'We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender,' though the cadence is Augustan, he is not really saying something very different from- '“And therefore I am come amongst you at this time, not as for my recreation or sport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live or die amongst you all; to lay down, for my God, and for my kingdom, and for my people, my honour and my blood, even the dust. I know I have but the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart of a king, and of a king of England, too.” 

What of Thackeray, of Kipling, of Saqi, of Lawrence Durrell- was their language really hybridised? Are there passages in any of their works which suggest the authorial hand of Desani's H.Hatter?
What of contemporary Indians? Does Vikram Seth's poem on George Herbert (whose house he now occupies) smell of curry rather than whatever modish Californian fusion cuisine feeds M.F.A aesthetic inedia?

Hybridity is a grotesque- its grotto sacred to School Boy scurrilousness and Pot House puerility. It does not 'shift power' or 'question discursive authority'- rather it is a Carnival mostrance of the incompossible nature of mimetic desire, which far from overthrowing Lent points to the purgative necessity of the Man-God's korban or pharmakos.

The 'Rice Christian' who relapses points not to 'cultural differences' underpinning a notion of hybridity as strategic resistance but to Instrumentalized Charity's univocal status as whited sephulchre. 
Colour or Culture don't come into it. E.M Forster's Clapham Sect ancestors had faced the same problem with London's proletariat and his audience back in Blighty knew this full well.

Returning to Kipling's story, look at this by no means illiterate Post Colonial interpretation of it by a Bengali vidhushi- a female savant- whose PhD is from Ohio and who now teaches in Hong Kong.
My remarks are in bold.

In discussing Bhabha's theory in the context of Kipling's story, we

may substitute the English book, or the Bible, for the Masonic grid;

No we may not! Christianity has a Man-God who bleeds for us. Masonry doesn't.

Daniel and Peachey know the missing Master's Mark which the natives
have no knowledge of and the revelation of this mark convinces the
natives of the supernatural status of these two men.

Daniel and Peachey's crime against Masonry consists in permitting this hybridization of Masonic practice- a sin against the Mother lodge- and are punished for this Epimethean act of expediency.

Bhabha writes, 'The acknowledgement of authority depends upon the immediate – unmedi-
ated – visibility of its rules of recognition' (Bhabha: 1994, 110) and
the Mark represents to the native the authority of the two English men.

Quite false.Their Martini guns, skill as drill masters, and shrewdness in tactics had already established their authority. The King of Kabul, too, had better guns than the Kaffirs and he would use them to establish his authority. But, his commanders weren't so foolish as to allow any expedient act of hybridisation which, since hybrids soon come a cropper in the real world, would have created a scandal, a stumbling block to faith, fatal to the legitimacy of the new Religion they introduced. Indeed, not as an atavistic 'return of the repressed', the Taliban are better understood as a rebellion against the hybridity of Iqbal's 'pirzada' and ISIS as expressing ire at the hybridized hereditary Sayyad/Saoshyant claiming an Achaemenid descent.

Bhabha asserts that hybridity turns the gaze of the discriminated back
upon the eye of power: '. . . faced with the hybridity of its objects, the
presence of power is revealed as something other than what its rules of
recognition assert' (Bhabha, 112). 

Nonsense! Saki dealt with a case of hybridity in his story 'Tobermory' about a cat which learns to talk. It does not cause the humans to question their authority over the animal kingdom. Instead, its revelations undermine the cordiality of their mutual relations. But since, as Saki well knew, 'in the Turkish bath all are naked', their solidarity is quickly re-established in the demand that the cat be destroyed. However, nature has done their job for them. Speaking elegant English confers no Darwinian advantage on a cat- which is why my neighbor's tabby refuses to say 'O long Johnson'- and thus Tobermory loses his battle with the big Tom from the Rectory.

Once again, this juncture is reached in "The Man who would be King" at the moment when Daniel is bitten by the native woman and begins to bleed. The earlier articulation of
the God/Devil-Englishman equivalence is now destabilized so that the
colonial authority of Daniel and Peachey is weakened and split.
The natives had no such concept as 'Englishman; Daniel and Peachey appeared to be of the same race as themselves. They had already established their authority before they foolishly let it be thought they enjoyed God like omnescience, rather than a superior inculcation in the rites of Freemasonry.

Daniel would have been found out even if his bride hadn't bitten him. Sooner or later he would have suffered some accident or injury or would have come done with a case of the shits.

Moreover, no 'equivalence has been destabilised', rather a thesis has been decisively refuted by an empirical test. The writer speaks of Daniel and Peachey as possessing 'colonial authority'. They did not. The locals had no concept of the British Raj. Daniel and Peachey had not disclosed their plan of gifting the Province to the Queen Empress to them and, of course, possessed no official warrant, or indeed complaisance, for their mission.
 According to Bhabha, 'The display of hybridity its peculiar 'repli-
cation' terrorizes authority with the ruse of recognition, its mimicry,
its mockery' (Bhabha, 115).

'Ruse of Recognition' is a conflation of 2 Hegelian tropes- The Master/Slave'Struggle for Recognition' by which the useful stuff the slave produces creates a dependency and craving for Life in the Master who was previously more unafraid of death and thus thymotically superior; and the 'Ruse of Reason' whereby people are merely the puppets of the Welt Geist.

Both tropes are fucked in the head. The Americans were much more not much less afraid of death than the people of the Phillipines. That's one reason their technology was so much better- Scientific advances make our lives safer they baffle Death's many snares- and also why they were much more ruthless- they invented the Concentration Camp. 

If Hegel was correct, the Japanese Kamikaze pilot would have defeated the U.S Navy. Not indifference to one's own death but the means and will to deal it out with massive ruthlessness is what establishes Mastery. As for the 'ruse of Reason'- perhaps, it was reasonable, at one time, to think of Napoleon as having been used by the Welt Geist to prod Prussia into that Perfection Hegel eulogized- but History has moved on since then; we all know that notion is utterly fucked in the head.

Sooner or later, by the Cliodynamics of Christaller Central Place theory, an ergodic, i.e. Economically rational, and more or less unitary State would have arisen even absent any 'heroes' or 'world-historical personalities' like Napoleon or Hitler. Reason needs no ruses, if it genuinely is reasonable- not Hegelian shite.

Bhaba says hybridity- like a cat that speaks upper class Edwardian English- 'terrorizes authority'. It does not, cats that talk are for the freak show. Even had Tobermory got to the office of the local paper and spilled the beans on the various fornications and defalcations of the upper crust inhabitants of the Country House, which Newspaper would have printed his revelations? Will the testimony of a cat really be given credence in a Court of Law? The Newspaper proprietor has no defense against a Libel suit militating for exemplary damages.

If hybridity can't terrorize but only give one a fright before proceeding to amuse, what of Bhaba's 'ruse of recognition'- i.e. a situation where the slave's work is one of mimickry and mockery which the Welt Geist itself has ordained so that Society can reach that state of Perfection Hegel himself saw mirrored in the Prussian Constitution?

'Hail to the Chimp' is a movie in the Simpsons universe. Suppose it was actually made and gave rise to a TV show where chimps re-enact the doings of the great and the good. No doubt, initially some people in authority will freak out. But, if sanity prevails, the show will become increasingly anodyne- a Disney cartoon. President Chimp will show himself increasingly statesmanlike. If he misses his son's Little League game because he had to stop a nuclear war, we know he will say to his son- 'Champ, I know I should of been there for you for your big game, but, y'know what?, I had a pretty tough time myself today and thinking of you helped me get through it.' At which point the little monkey hugs him and says 'I love you Dad'.

 In order to reduce resistance from the Kafirs, the colonizers seek to establish such a "replication" between themselves and the natives and in this they are aided by the absence of racial difference. 

The Kafirs stopped resisting once it became clear that the 2 Brits had superior technology, tactics and, what's more, were savvy enough to suppress wasteful vendettas in favor of a lean 'stationary bandit' type regime which was a Pareto improvement. However, for enhanced rent extraction without territorial expansion, Economic Development is needed. But such Development can only occur if people trust each other- i.e. Credit burgeons- and also if productivity improves by reason of the adoption of a sterner work-ethic.

Freemasonry ab ovo was concerned with increasing mutual trust and replacing thymotic competition with productive co-operation. It has its own mythology centered on Solomon's Temple and could, plausibly, within its own universe of discourse, have spread to Kafiristan.

Daniel does not say that he and his friend can't fight any more but they don't want to fight anymore. Moreover, the local priests are already second degree Masons and have an inbuilt tropism towards the arcana of the Third.

Here is the relevant passage-

“‘Peachey,’ says Dravot, ‘we don’t want to fight no more. The Craft’s the trick so help me!’ and he brings forward that same Chief that I left at Bashkai — Billy Fish we called him afterwards, because he was so like Billy Fish that drove the big tank-engine at Mach on the Bolan in the old days. ‘Shake hands with him,’ says Dravot, and I shook hands and nearly dropped, for Billy Fish gave me the Grip. I said nothing, but tried him with the Fellow Craft Grip. He answers, all right, and I tried the Master’s Grip, but that was a slip. ‘A Fellow Craft he is!’ I says to Dan. ‘Does he know the word?’ ‘He does,’ says Dan, ‘and all the priests know. It’s a miracle! The Chiefs and the priest can work a Fellow Craft Lodge in a way that’s very like ours, and they’ve cut the marks on the rocks, but they don’t know the Third Degree, and they’ve come to find out. It’s Gord’s Truth. I’ve known these long years that the Afghans knew up to the Fellow Craft Degree, but this is a miracle. A god and a Grand-Master of the Craft am I, and a Lodge in the Third Degree I will open, and we’ll raise the head priests and the Chiefs of the villages.’

“‘It’s against all the law,’ I says, ‘holding a Lodge without warrant from any one; and we never held office in any Lodge.’

“‘It’s a master-stroke of policy,’ says Dravot. ‘It means running the country as easy as a four-wheeled bogy on a down grade. We can’t stop to inquire now, or they’ll turn against us.

“The most amazing miracle was at Lodge next night. One of the old priests was watching us continuous, and I felt uneasy, for I knew we’d have to fudge the Ritual, and I didn’t know what the men knew. The old priest was a stranger come in from beyond the village of Bashkai. The minute Dravot puts on the Master’s apron that the girls had made for him, the priest fetches a whoop and a howl, and tries to overturn the stone that Dravot was sitting on. ‘It’s all up now,’ I says. ‘That comes of meddling with the Craft without warrant!’ Dravot never winked an eye, not when ten priests took and tilted over the Grand-Master’s chair — which was to say the stone of Imbra. The priest begins rubbing the bottom end of it to clear away the black dirt, and presently he shows all the other priests the Master’s Mark, same as was on Dravot’s apron, cut into the stone. Not even the priests of the temple of Imbra knew it was there. The old chap falls flat on his face at Dravot’s feet and kisses ’em. ‘Luck again,’ says Dravot, across the Lodge to me, ‘they say it’s the missing Mark that no one could understand the why of. We’re more than safe now.’ Then he bangs the butt of his gun for a gavel and says:— ‘By virtue of the authority vested in me by my own right hand and the help of Peachey, I declare myself Grand-Master of all Freemasonry in Kafiristan in this the Mother Lodge o’ the country, and King of Kafiristan equally with Peachey!’ At that he puts on his crown and I puts on mine — I was doing Senior Warden — and we opens the Lodge in most ample form. It was a amazing miracle! The priests moved in Lodge through the first two degrees almost without telling, as if the memory was coming back to them. After that, Peachey and Dravot raised such as was worthy — high priests and Chiefs of far-off villages. Billy Fish was the first, and I can tell you we scared the soul out of him. It was not in any way according to Ritual, but it served our turn. We didn’t raise more than ten of the biggest men because we didn’t want to make the Degree common. And they was clamoring to be raised.

Returning to the lady savant's Post Colonial account, we read-

However, they are suddenly and violently made aware
of the degeneracy of their imperialist project when the recognition
between them and the natives becomes absolute. 

The savant is right to speak of degeneracy in this context- but it is a degeneracy only with respect to Freemasonry as practiced in Kipling's own Mother Lodge. 

Daniel had a duty, as a Mason, to deny any claim to the hybrid status of a Man-God. It was very foolish of him to neglect this duty, but then Daniel was a fool. Earlier Kipling had saved him from certain death when he formed a scheme to blackmail a native prince by passing himself of as a  correspondent for Kipling's own paper. In other words, Daniel had tried the ruse of 'repetition' but Imperial systems stand in no terror of such monkey tricks and maintain a well oiled machine to detect and stamp out such freaks or frauds.

Our learned vidushi tells us that the recognition between the natives and the man who would be King became absolute. She surely can't be claiming that the natives could suddenly place Daniel in his socio-economic context or his relationship to the British Raj. However, it is true to say that, from the point of view of Masonry, there was indeed an absolute recognition on both sides that Daniel has reduplicated the crime against Hiram, the Widow's son in that he has sought to usurp a Gnosis- he had, in Vogelin's phrase, 'immanentized the eschaton'- by means both forceful and fraudulent. The punishments both men suffer, too, are prefigured in Masonic lore.

Returning to our learned theorist, we learn

'The natives are like them in more ways than they had imagined possible. The consequence
of such a horrifying recognition can only be, in Kipling's scheme of
things, madness and dismemberment as is demonstrated by the ultimate
fate of Daniel and Peachey. Bhabha's theories on the discourse of colo-
nialism therefore, suggest that the native is somehow in possession of
colonial power, although his culture and economy are destroyed. The
natives of Kafiristan in Kipling's story assert this power in the most
crucial moment of the story.

Freemasonry isn't about Colonial Power anymore than it is about Daniel's crowned Baphomet head which disappears at the end of Kipling's story. But even if it had been, ab avo, an Imperial instrumentality,  it still isn't true that Colonial Power could or has ever been extinguished by the terror struck by purely sanguinary means.
Rebellions which sought simply to instrumentalize atrocity, or enforce a univocity of unspeakable terror, rather than securing obligatory passage point status for their instigators, backfired horribly. Kipling grew up hearing stories of the 'Ghaddar'- the events of 1857. There could be no question that the atrocities committed by the Sepoys were utterly destructive to their own ethos and rendered their natal districts more supine than ever before.
The British did leave Kenya, the French did leave Algeria, but did not return to their own shores with a human cargo displaying the horrific Mau Mau marks of 'madness and dismemberment'. On the contrary, the Govts. and peoples of the ex-Colonial powers enjoyed increasingly cordial and profitable relations with their former colonies. There were some exceptions. After the assassination of Aung San, (with the complicity of disaffected British traders and officers but in defiance of Atlee) Burma did leave the Commonwealth. It is the only country that was less than welcoming to retired British Army soldiers.
Does anybody really believe that Kipling was saying 'guys, let's give up Imperialism. It will end badly. My Daddy will go mad and Mummy will be dismembered. Fuck the British Raj. Let's get out while we still can.'?
Even suppose there was some way to prove this really was his sub-conscious sub-text, why bring up the matter unless all you are interested in doing is showing Kipling was as stupid as shit? Surely, we can find plenty of other texts in his oeuvre- for example his opposition to Statutory limitations on working hours on the grounds that this was the thin edge of the wedge of the Teutonic type of slavery which Herbert Spenser denounced in 'The Servile State'?

What about the notion that 'the native is somehow in possession of Colonial Power'? Either Imperialism is a viable project or it isn't. If the native, in some occult manner, possesses Colonial Power how come Cairo doesn't still rule over Khartoum or Delhi over Aden and Rangoon?
Epistemic power doesn't exist. Epistemic violence is gesture politics of the most pointless sort.
Post Colonial Theory, illiterate and developmentally challenged though it undoubtedly is, nevertheless has an audience. We are all unwitting Bhaba black sheep when we whine about being wogs.
I once had a Trustafarian g.f who claimed she felt 'mentally raped' when I suggested we split the rent. I quickly responded that I felt like a nigger being whipped in the cotton field while Missy twirls her parasol and looks on. She upped the ante by becoming Anne Frank. I suppose, if I'd read enough Bhaba, I could have gotten off a snappy comeback featuring my own horrific apotheosis as the trajectory of the sodomized Subaltern in Singur, but the truth is I've always considered Anne Frank kinda hot. It turned out, she did too. So that ended quite unedifyingly with me continuing to have to pay all our bills out of my exiguous earnings as a Gayatri Spivak celebrity lookalike.

Kipling & Khusrou

A stripling Kipling and Kara Khitan Khusrou

Taught me Ind to naught Indian know

So the Soul dream, let God sleep

Baa baa, Baba's Orhan sheep

Vikram Seth's 'A suitable girl'- first review

In keeping with this blog's long-standing commitment to passing judgement on tomes it hasn't read, we take pleasure in bringing you our review of Vikram Seth's latest book fresh from the redoubtable pen of Prof. Vagina Dentata Choothopadhayay, dipped, we need hardly add, in her own copious menstrual blood.

In consideration of our readers' tender sensibilities, we have taken the liberty of excising certain four letter words and acrimonious references to the size of our genitals from Prof. Choothopahdyay's article. Since nothing was then left to publish, our Senior Editor has very kindly supplied the following.

Vikram Seth, like Jane Austen, takes his subject matter from the Sense vs. Sensibility dilemma facing Female Mate Choice. He gives a sort of Feminist tinge to his project by forbidding his Heroines the right to sacrifice themselves so as to keep an otherwise Unsuitable Boy functional as opposed to turning into a monumental  fuck-up. However, in so doing, he cuts off his project from 'Greatness' because though a Utilitarian 'Heart vs Head' dilemma is Universal, it is not Fundamental and carries no Soteriological or Existential flavor in the manner that the subject matter of truly Great Literature does.
True, Jane Austen doesn't deal with the case of women sacrificing themselves for their Mates- but it is very evident that they sacrifice their own prejudices or proclivities in the interest of Marriage-as-partnership- albeit Sleeping Partnership because women in her age were second class citizens to start off with. Married women had no rights over their own property. She herself, for Socio-Economic reasons was doomed to Spinsterhood. Rudyard Kipling's 'the Janeites', which only makes us cringe because we have not tears enough to cry, offers a collective act of reparation such that our tears wipe away the ink of a hundred years of English Literature and Jane marries her suitor up in Heaven with Sir Walter Scott doing the honors. In other words, there is something outside Austen's texts which makes them Great- there is a vishodhana purgation whereby, at least for Kipling's readers- the Literature to which Austen so signally contributed, or which she incarnated, precisely by a consideration of what both elide, gains the Jordan of our heart-felt tears from which to arise in the bridal vestments of a Gangetic dawn. At least, hopeless and hereditary Babu that I am, such is my Babuish judgement.
For Seth's heroines, Self-sacrifice isn't on the menu. Thus, the arena in which they judiciously exercise Mate Choice is one from which any higher type of Love than can be captured by Revealed Preference is rigorously ruled out. Thus, though 'Universal', this Mate-Choice remains confined to the trivial plane and can give rise to no tragedy save adventitiously or under the rubric of 'there but for the Grace of God.'
Seth's subject matter and style are not deficient- the milieus he describes and the powers of language that he commands militate rather for than against the invocation of the grand literary precursors of amor fati or doomed romance to whom he, in the very same texts, pays tribute. Nor is it the case that by forbidding a particular type of sacrifice- that of a woman for a man- is its theo-ontic Terror and/or Necessity axiomatically excluded from the scope of a text, yet for Seth, this is what transpires.
Why?
Jealousy is so like not cool dude.
True, in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, Sacrifice is linked to Jealousy- Jehovah is a jealous God, Cain is jealous of Abel, Caiaphas is pissed off coz Judas got a bigger dick (what? Ask your Rabbi why don't you?)- and, at the heart of things, Rene Girard tells us, is the drama of mimetic desire- envy and the necessity of a scapegoat, a pharmakos, a korban, to inoculate Society against internecine Violence.
But, Seth isn't Jewish, he isn't Christian. His is an Indo-Islamic culture to which has been grafted on a Victorian belief in Progress. His 'A suitable boy' may be dismissed as wishful thinking in that he shows India in 1951 as being the same as in 1991. All that is needed is a bit of 'know-how' and bilateral good will for all the  problems bequeathed by History to simply disappear. The fact is Kabir or Amit or even Haresh won't lose anything very substantial if Lata turns them down. Their 'transfer earnings' are zero. Lata possesses no Economic Rent. Thus Choice is benign simply. There are no Essences- Strategic or otherwise- there is no hysteresis- Historicist or otherwise- and since nothing matters very much, fine, let there be free Choice because after all only Matter exists, nothing immaterial supervenes, the very notion of Sacrifice is otiose.
I haven't read 'A suitable girl'- I've no doubt it will be readable enough and present some points of interest or virtuoso passages which more than justify the price of the book. However, what it will lack is a sense of the Fundamental, as opposed to merely Universal, Horizon of Human Life, which is Death, which is Sacrifice, which, in so far as it is chosen, is the after-Life of Love nobody chooses and of which we can only despairing say, Yea, at the limit, such becomes the Choice of God.

Gehazi vs Gandhi

Few occupants of Rashtrapati Bhawan had such unpromising antecedents. A delinquent at School, a sailor who jumped ship at the age of 16, then a stockbroker 'hammered' on 'Change for losing his client's money, Rufus Isaacs, though 9 years older than Gandhi, was called to the bar a couple of years before him and that too only thanks to his family business connections. A further strike against Isaacs, as if being Jewish wasn't enough, was that he was considered to have a bullying style as a prosecutor and was on the wrong side of the original of the Winslow case. Indeed, given these antecedents, one can scarcely blame Cecil Chesterton for focusing on Isaacs as the epitome of Political corruption in the Marconi affair. Yet, within a span of just 15 years, Isaacs  gathered up all the glittering prizes- Attorney General, Lord Chief Justice, Ambassador to Washington, Viceroy in Delhi, and the second highest rank in the Peerage. Not since Wellington (whose ancestral Title was Irish) has a commoner scaled such heights in such a short span of time.

A tribute not less flattering than a peerage, is this poem by Kipling written a couple of year after Reading was appointed Lord Chief Justice- an office he found boring and wished to escape.

Gehazi  1915

WHENCE comest thou, Gehazi, So reverend to behold, In scarlet and in ermines And chain of England's gold ?" "From following after Naaman To tell him all is well, Whereby my zeal hath made me A Judge in Israel." Well done; well done, Gehazi! Stretch forth thy ready hand, Thou barely 'scaped from judgment, Take oath to judge the land Unswayed by gift of money Or privy bribe, more base, Of knowledge which is profit  In any market-place. Search out and probe, Gehazi, As thou of all canst try, The truthful, well-weighed answer That tells the blacker lie - The loud, uneasy virtue  The anger feigned at will, To overbear a witness And make the Court keep still. Take order now, Gehazi, That no man talk aside In secret with his judges The while his case is tried. Lest he should show them - reason To keep a matter hid, And subtly lead the questions Away from what he did. Thou mirror of uprightness, What ails thee at thy vows ? What means the risen whiteness Of the skin between thy brows ? The boils that shine and burrow, The sores that slough and bleed - The leprosy of Naaman On thee and all thy seed ? Stand up, stand up, Gehazi,  Draw close thy robe and go, Gehazi, Judge in Israel, A leper white as snow !

Isaacs was close to Lloyd George who was fanatically pro-Greek and anti-Turkish. Thus, on the face of it, Isaacs was a terrible choice for Viceroy at at time when Khilafat had transformed the Indian political scene. The Indian view of Reading (Isaacs was raised to the peerage as Lord Reading) is that he tried to drive a wedge between Gandhi and the Ali brothers but, I think, the picture is more complicated. The British were using a self-proclaimed Khilafat agent to assassinate Kemal Attaturk at about this time. The beefing up of the Imperial Intelligence Service had the unfortunate effect of muddying the waters of Populist Politics such that  Governments were under pressure to keep a schismatic 'lunatic fringe' type radicalism alive because, more often than not, it had been penetrated and instrumentalized for murky geopolitical ends.

Kipling, of course, could not have dreamed that his Gehazi would become the Viceroy of India at the time of Khilafat & 'Hijrat'- when 30,000 people emigrated to Afghanistan with predictably tragic results. Yet, his poem- precisely because it is a poem- provides a more suggestive method of approaching Reading's Vicereoyalty- and thus answering the question whether Gandhi could have actually delivered 'Swaraj' within the time-scale he promised- than conventional Historical wisdom on this topic.

Isaac's forte was negotiation and his special skill that of intuiting what was not being said, the mercenary motives and existential threats that dared not speak their own name. It was he who brokered the deal with the Americans, or was it the house of Morgan?, which brought them into the War.

By contrast, the Secretary of State for India, Montague, from a prominent Jewish Banking family, was less happily endowed and cuts a somewhat tragic, or perhaps merely wooden, figure.  Yet, in fairness to him, the lesson of Ireland seemed all too clear. Why was Isaacs not simply arresting Gandhi and prosecuting him for sedition? Or to put it another way, how come Gehazi hasn't gone down in History as the man who single-handedly lost India for the Empire?

The answer is that Gandhi, without asking anything in return, simply hands Isaacs an unqualified victory by both calling off the Bardoli agitation and also pleading guilty on all counts and voluntarily embracing imprisonment.

Gehazi knew he had been out-witted but for the life of him couldn't figure out how or why it had happened.

'And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet: and none of them was cleansed but Naaman the Syrian" (Luke 4:27).

Gandhi may have been an innocent but, at the end of his bout with Isaacs, if not his second, he won on all point precisely because his defeat was so abject, his pusillanimity so obvious. Yet, even cowardice is better than non-violence and non-violence better than a victory over cowardice. 
Gehazi was needed, he could have been the great Liberal Foreign Secretary who stopped Hitler dead in his tracks. Defeating Gandhi so comprehensively- especially since the little fellow was literally whimpering with fear and not ashamed to say as much- turned him, turned Liberalism, into a Political leper. 
Come to think of it, even Gandhi's second round with Reading- delaying Provincial Autonomy by a decade- gave Indian politics more time to develop without 'foreign entanglements'- chaps turning up with suitcases of cash and arranging assassinations and so on all in the name of Khilafat, or Communism or eating up all your Carrots. Now that's a sort of swadesi, a type of swaraj, we can all get behind. 

Hilary Putnam on Amartya Sen's Economics

Hilary Putnam thinks logic exists independently of metaphysics- i.e. talk of possible or impossible worlds- as the form of coherent thought. He also thinks Ethics can do without ontology- though Lebenswelts can be  partially ordered only according to purely ontological criteria. This permits him, in his book 'the collapse of the fact/value dichotomy', to abolish the distinction between Values as ends-in themselves and purely  instrumental Epistemic values- e.g. a Physicist thinking he's on the right track because his equation is elegant, or a Chemist who feels  he's onto something because his theory is more parsimonious, or a Mathematician whose confidence in a conjecture arises out of its 'beauty'- even though no Physicist will stick with an equation, no matter how elegant, which doesn't fit the facts; nor will any Chemist stick with a parsimonious theory which leads to his lab blowing up; or any Mathematician stick with a beautiful conjecture which has been proved wrong.
Elegance can be an end in itself- the dandy may persist in wearing a garment unsuitable for the weather though he perish of influenza- Parsimony can be an end in itself- the Miser might starve to death so as to increase his pile of gold coins- Beauty can be an end in itself- I wear a paper bag over my head while crossing the road because...urm... well, my g.f. makes me wear one in bed and I mean a chap likes to look his best...
I suppose one could argue that all values are instrumental. There is some other Value lurking behind them or else some blind Schopenhauerian Will. But, some values are ontologically dysphoric- their instrumentality lies in granting their holder a vantage point from which to devalue and denigrate this world and everything that goes on in it. But this is not Putnam's own belief. For him Values aren't ontologically dysphoric at least not those he holds to be truly valuable. Perhaps his book is a defense against the unconscious realization that the reverse is the case.

Is this why Putnam now abolishes the distinction between instrumental or heuristic 'values' and absolute values? Or has his long life really led him to the conclusion that everybody just synchronically rapping in a coherent way in is a good thing and like mebbe results in Ethics developing super-powers, coz it gets bit by a radio active spider,  and then it like takes over Economics and things  just becomes so much nicer and I needn't get up three times a night to pee and though we can't rule out that we'd all know what to think about abortion and capital punishment and so on,  that still would be swell because we could have a gentleman's agreement not to talk about it in plain terms- at least, y'know, not pas devant les domestiques.

Thus, Putnam's role in Philosophy is now to say only incoherent things like 'Economics is  a 'policy' Science'- i.e. Economists are Scientists of a particular sort whom Govts. and NGO's ought to consult before deciding what to do or even what to want to do.
Are there any circumstances when this could be called a cogent or coherent point of view?
No, unless we adopt a linguistic conventionalism whereby 'Economist' is defined as the guy whom at any moment is most helpful in getting a Govt. or NGO to do something everybody later agrees was the best thing. Thus, in Kipling's story 'Todd's Amendment', Economist means the 5 year old boy whose providential remarks enable the Govt. to make the right decision. The senior Civil Servants holding appointments as Economic Advisers, however, can't be called Economists because what they are saying is not helpful and is in fact counter-productive.

I suppose, in a one period Economy- a momentary kshanikavada Universe- one can coarse grain one's definitions as much as one likes so as to retain the appearance of logical coherence.
This is what Putnam does to collapse the 'is' /'ought' dichotomy and praise up to the Skies, Amartya Sen's brand of Economics.

This raises the question- is Amartya Sen, Putnam's paradigm of a 'good' Economist, a guy Govts. or NGO's should consult before deciding what to do? The answer, for India, is- Fuck, No! He has never given a good Policy prescription, advanced a viable hypothesis, or made a sustainable forecast. Instead, he's muddied the waters and stalemated the reform process in a manner which most harms precisely those he would have us believe are closest to his heart.
             
Putnam may argue that Sen is still a good Economist because he tells Govts about what sorts of things they should want to do- stuff like making life better for everybody including the poor, the disabled, women and so on. But can't anyone do that? In fact, what would be a hundred times more effective than Sen gassing on  would be a You Tube video of a poor disabled woman actually saying 'hey guys, my life is real crappy right now, but guess what, if you do x and stop doing y then I can do z and the Social benefit of z outweighs the cost of x minus y and what's more it will have a demonstration effect and so the dynamic benefits are even greater. So, guys, get off your arses and do x and stop doing y already. '
Clearly the experience of the last decade and a half is that listening to Sen-tentious shite hasn't been good for the clients of Govts or NGOs as opposed to 'Moral Entrepreneurs' & Academic or Bureaucratic Careerists. Paying attention to Sen is a waste of resources. It crowds out genuine research. Sent-tentious nonsense about Famines being about democracy rather than crop failure increased African vulnerability and reduced funding for Norman Borlaug type Green Revolution programs there. He's now telling Indians to ban private tuition- the one thing preventing India lapsing back into mass illiteracy.
Even if Sen didn't always say the stupidest possible thing under the circumstances, even if all he did was say 'hey guys, be nice to the poor' he'd still not be a good Economist in Putnam's sense.
This is because Economics itself tells us that employing an Economist to tell you stuff like - care about the disadvantaged why don't you. Stop being such an almighty dick!- is throwing money out of the window. Plenty of people will do it for free if you will also permit them to slap you silly while doing so.

Now it may be Putnam believes that non Sen-tentious Economists are all very evil and bad and they trip or push the good Economists down in the playground and steal their lunch money and then when the good Economists try to complain they just accuse them of not having properly understood David Hume or Kant or some other dead Racist which makes the good Economists burst into tears and go running home to their Mommies.
If this is what Putnam believes, then his book makes perfect sense. Since good Economists- with the notable exception of Sen and some other guy who was Putnam's best pal at School- are really stupid and don't know from John Dewey and get cowed by the attacks of the bad Economists, which is why the bad Economists are running things and telling Govts. to be really corrupt and to implement really stupid policies. Thus Putnam has written a little book- or had it distilled out of some of his lectures- which will help good Economists to fight back and turn the tables on the bad Economists by getting off snappy comebacks  like- '1950 called. It wants back its 'analytic-synthetic dichotomy' which Quine totally ass-raped in 1951.' at which point the bad Economists  all get like real red in the face and start to sweat through their Brooks Bros. suits and then next thing you know they are blurting out in these like real tight little voices- 'Quine molested me! He touched me on my no no place behind the book stacks when I went to borrow a copy of Ayn Rand or Rice or whatever and he smelt just like my Grandmother and and and why are you being so mean to me? My other car is a Prius.'

Of course this is not what Putnam actually thinks but he's just going to go ahead and say it anyway because he believes by doing so he will be able to breathe new life into Classical Economics- i.e. strident feuilletonism or dyspeptic armchair polemics providing a mask for hypocritical rent-seeking within a game of elite musical chairs.
Putnam isn't an Economist so we mustn't blame him too much. The question is- what theory or theories within Economics itself are relevant to it as a 'Policy Science'? If Putnam addresses these theories in his book then it is worth reading. If he doesn't but just goes after dead-in-the-water Research Programs then his book isn't worth reading.
Obviously different people will have different notions of which theories are alive and which are dead. But, off the top of my head, my guess is everybody would agree that for real Economics, useful stuff, people can agree about 'facts' and have grounds to be suspicious of 'value-judgments' for reasons roughly similar to what I outline below.
1) Economics is a Science which only has a subject matter when preference diversity isn't too great or too small. It may be that Socio-Biology of some sort can tell us when Economics will have a subject matter but, assuming the fitness landscape is unpredictable then it can't tell us why and when genotypal canalisation type choke-points on phenotypal plasticisty will arise. Still, once preference diversity is within the 'Economic' range  , everybody studying it is going to good-faith agree that there are some canonical, or Schelling type, 'fact' demarcators which are the solution to the co-ordination problem. In other words, if a situation is one where Economics has a subject matter, then Economists can good faith agree on what are facts. If they can't, then the field probably isn't Economic at all and other disciplines (except Philosophy because it isn't a discipline) can explain why.
2) Values aren't necessarily subjective- they could be strategic or they could arise by 'preference falsification' or as being in joint supply with 'availability cascades'. In any case, if Values or meta-preferences themselves have Utility then there is going to be
 a) a drive to 100% preference diversity since everybody has an interest in valuing what he himself has or will have
b) some sort of Girardian mimetic desire type dynamic which constrains the bargaining problem re. Values to the neighborhood of a strange attractor such that 'the more things change, the more they remain the same'
In other words, Values are unknown and unknowable. We can show that Evolution might endow us with Rationality re. Choice of Technique, Bargaining, Optimization etc, because Engineering beats intuition in certain fields, but we can't show that Evolution would have given us a faculty for telling us what is really valuable or how to rank states of the World given an unknown future. If the future is going to be really hairy, maybe Thrift is the supreme Value Economists need to inculcate. On the other hand, if the Future is going to be fabulously wonderful, Thrift is the enemy. So long as there is no God constraining Evolution, not only would the Evolutionary Stable Strategy be for Value diversity but agents are going to be doing 180 degree Value reversals pretty often. If unpredictable changes in Values are what generate the 'mixed' (i.e. stochastic) aspect of the E.S.S, then another way of doing the same thing as Value pi-jaw is to say 'Let's randomly reward a certain percentage of crimes and punish a certain percentage of good deeds because that's a mixed strategy which can't be simply dominated so, actually, lets not even bother to do that but just let the current system of hack journalists and publicity hound D.As and corrupt Judges and bat-shit crazy celebrities and senile Professors talking shite, continue to muck things up such that a certain percentage of crimes are rewarded and good deeds punished the way it's always been.'

So far my contention is that Putnam is wrong about Economics. Still, some Economists may be trying to emigrate to Philosophy-land coz they have laxer drug laws there or else to escape alimony payments or something similar. So the question arises, is Putnam right about Philosophy? The short answer is no. He is making the assumption that Pyrrhonism isn't already everybody's default position from which they are momentarily seduced by ephemeral Faustian pacts. Worse, he refuses to see that 'Values' are what we are all most inclined to be skeptical about. If I tell you I suffer from hemorrhoids you are likely to believe me. If I tell you that my experience of hemorrhoids has led me to have a change of heart, I've now quit the Tea Party and support Gay Marriage coz why should the homos have it easy? You may still believe me. What you won't believe is that I've suddenly seen the light and stopped being a nasty little homophobe because 'Suffering is Redemptive' or any such pi-jaw.
Putnam stretches the word 'Values' to breaking point and then some.Maybe this would be okay if he weren't sticking with notions like 'logic is coherence' and 'partial ordering is possible' because new vistas upon the nature and implications of universal ontological dysphoria would be opened up.
One reason to think that logic isn't the 'form of coherent thought' is that imperative statements, though having logical form, gain visceral force by being incoherent- 'be sure to post the check to the Insurance company before Friday' is weaker than 'burn down the house. That will save you the trouble and inconvenience of posting the check by Friday. Go on, what are you waiting for?' This seems incoherent and violates transitivity because it says burning your own house down is better than living with an uninsured house, but it is effective which is why Moms use this strategy all the time.
Indeed, it may be- a subject for a future post- genuine Value Judgments, at least of a sort that give rise to a lexical ordering of preferences, always have this logical form. Rawls stipulates for a 'threshold of prosperity' and Nozick for a catastrophic event loophole for their lexical orderings such that they are lexical only in name. The question raised by the Prophet Amos- do two people walk together except they are agreed?- i.e. does some pre-established harmony obtain such that strategy and tactics are always univocal- can be answered in the affirmative only alongside 'Shall there be Evil in the City and the Lord has not done it?'

The other problem with Putnam's analysis is the notion that people currently believe 'facts' actually exist in such a manner that a Fact/ Value dichotomy can be usefully erased. But, the truth is, we don't believe there are any genuinely factual statements, just stuff that's as factual as we can get given our instruments and understanding and so on. So ' the facts' are just a pragmatics which evolves in one type of game. Do 'Values' arise in exactly the same type of game? Suppose I have a theory of Ethics which says real Value-judgments don't change when the facts change. Suppose, further, that I feel a sense of quiet virtue because I am deliberately failing my exams so as not to become complicit in the frauds of the Power Elite. Consider what happens when  I suddenly learn that the Power Elite only recruit candidates who deliberately fail the Exams by the widest margin- indeed, all the smart kids knew this and adjusted their answers accordingly but the Power Elite were smarter yet- in other words the reason that I'm a failure is not because I was too good for the system but that I was too stupid. Still, I feel my Virtue stands. The important thing is I wasn't tempted by power. I might even say that it is to my credit that, though stupider than other people, prompted by Virtue alone, I nevertheless succeeded where they failed.
In other words, if one says 'Value-judgments are what don't change when the facts change' then one can  also say, fine, in this case, we have a different sort of game than the one about facts. But, is it a game without ontology? I'd say- no. In the case mentioned above, I realize that all stupid people as a class have a sort of virtue similar to mine precisely because the Power Elite don't want to co-opt them. Those stupid people who clamor to be co-opted and try to pass their exams might even be said to be more virtuous than myself because they have an unconscious Faith in their own worthlessness which is certainly better than my own neurotic doubts about my essential idiocy.
I stand upon the threshold of becoming a Tolstoy or a Gandhi- if not a Christ.
But, Putnam has nothing to say about this sort of ontologically inflationary Value-judgement.  Putnam focuses on Sen's 1967 paper on Prescriptivism which shows that, for most types of Utilitarianism, Facts are relevant to value judgments. However, instead of a supervenience relationship of some sort, Putnam thinks this means that facts and values are hopelessly entangled. We can't decompose or 'factorize' them.
But why should this be so? Is it because Putnam wants an Ethics without Ontology but doesn't want to break with 'Classical' Utilitarian Consequentialism?
Before addressing that question, let's see whether decomposing facts from values is really so very difficult.
Let's say we're playing poker. Two different games are going on simultaneously. One is about the cards that have been dealt. The other is about reading 'tells' or strategically simulating such signals. In this case, we could go through a video of the game and construct two totally different narratives- one about probability which has to do only with the cards, and another which has nothing to do with probability but has to do with reading facial expressions and deducing psychological motivations. Is there any reason not to believe 'Facts' and 'Values' aren't similarly decomposable in any actual Economic policy debate? Couldn't we run back the Video of it and perform just such a decomposition? True it would be difficult. We'd have to look at a whole classes of similar videos before we got a sense of what we were actually discussing. We'd also need models, simulations- videos shot on possible worlds, or aesthetically important impossible worlds- and so on before we had finally got an idea about what our different claims actually amount to. From then on there is no reason why the game should not be decomposable with 'Values' turning into Ontological propositions about possible worlds and 'Facts' referring to stuff that can be measured or which has a measurable proxy.

 Because Putnam thinks Ethics without Ontology is possible, and because he endorses Sen's mania for partial ordering- he has no real answer to this objection. His invocation of 'thick concepts' only defines the antechamber to Economics' arena. Thick concepts are like the pre-fight Press Conference where each contender makes a statement mixing descriptive elements with intentional elements- 'I'm in the best shape of my life and I'm damned if I'll go down to a little pussy like him'- stuff like this may determine the outcome of the actual fight- but Economics is not about the fight. Its what what happens when the post-fight analysis starts. There everything is separated out. There can still be strategic differences of opinion- but in the long run, after everybody has retired, there's either a consensus about the facts or a factual question  has been referred on to some other discipline- Biology, Psychology, Game theory  or whatever.
Okay, if we break completely with Consequentialism of any sort, Utilitarian or otherwise, then we might  still have 'entangled statements'- but they would be Ontological in nature- and refer to an ordering of possible or impossible Worlds- and thus not at all part of the sort of 'ethical Econ' Putnam wants which would enable us to get an ought from an is without recourse to Ontology. This is important because every fuckwit can do the other thing- vide my cri de coeur in the Eighties- 'You must pay my air-fare to Calcutta coz my punching Mother Theresa in the face is that supremely Christ- like Act which will cause the Universe to turn into a Golden Syrup which appears exactly like whatever it takes the place of.'

Putnam's chapter on Sen, the Economist, is the weakest thing in his book. He believes Sen said something important about Famine. Sen said something horribly foolish and mischievous about Famine and then defended himself by unfair and stupid means. As for the 'missing millions'- when did Sen raise his voice against abortion? Infanticide was already illegal. Legalizing abortion, essentially as a population control method, with the postivie encouragement of sex selective feticide, went against all preexisting Values, Human or Religious. Yet abortion was supposed to be a very wonderful and good thing- 'pro-Wimmin' donchaknow- so Sen did nothing about this genocide which, unlike the Bengal famine, occurred on his watch.

Putnam misses the point that people pretend to have 'Values' they don't actually have. Even if there was some window of Momus into the heart and Values were known exactly, still unless Evolution had given us a mechanism for acting rationally on the basis of one's Values, then they remain a dead-letter. But anything which can be used to predict our actual behavior is covered by the notion of Revealed Preference already. What Putnam is objecting to is the convention of arbitrarily constraining this to tractable Mathematical shapes. But Sen, as a professional Academic has been pushing nothing else these last fifty years. How does this make him one of the good guys all of a sudden?
Putnam thinks there was something sinister in Lionel Robbins getting rid of interpersonal comparisons of Utility. But what else was he supposed to do? Hitler  had plenty of followers who gave very good reasons why Jews and Blacks and Chinese and Slavs get negative utility from breathing and why, if they weren't too stupid to do 'inter-personal Utility maximization', they'd all have killed themselves or offered themselves as slaves to the Master Race. Similarly, Stalin worshipers were saying the Capitalist Class is yearning to be liquidated. It takes no genuine pleasure in its luxuries. The Capitalist actually wants to be re-educated in the Gulag. He's just too neurotic to do it himself. He's like a drug addict. He can't help himself.

Putnam thinks Sen is one of the angels because Sen made a big deal about men in China and Kerala outliving African American Males . Yet, once prison sentencing got a lot harsher and racially discriminatory, African American Male health and longevity started to improve because those most at risk spent more time locked up- and there was a material incentive for a greedy privatized Justice/Penal System to gravitate to that outcome. In any case, once statistics were adjusted for risk-factors like diet, drug use, gang membership, as well as for reward factors like differential Societal rents to Seniority and Male status, African Americans were back ahead. Any given Chinese of Malyallee would have been better off migrating to America but no African American, ceteris paribus, would have been better off going the other way.

The crux of Putnam's argument is his contention that all 'capabilities approach criteria'- like 'self respect', 'well nourished' 'able to take part in the life of the community'- are 'entangled' terms, i.e. values and facts are hopelessly intermingled. This can't be true in the light of  Putnam's other contention- viz. that Sen on partially ordering isn't foolish- because we can always run the video back on each evaluative occasion and turn every instance of a 'value' into something we can agree about how to better measure. Suppose this weren't the case. Then, there is no partial ordering. No partial ordering means Sen has been talking worthless nonsense for the last forty years.

Putnam's chapter 'on the rationality of preferences', gives the clue to his confusion. He doesn't have a theory of why concurrency deadlock is good and necessary and something our decision making has evolved to mimic because of its inertial or buffering properties. In other words, as Computers got off the drawing board the actual engineering problem of concurrency fixed the lacunae in decision theory which Putnam has returned to so as to talk up his fellow Harvard Prof.

Economics has a good theory for why there is so much bad Economics- it's supply and demand dude. Ethics does not have a good theory why every Ethical theory counsels only the most brutish and foolish thing to do under any circumstances. Putnam is a good guy. He's done great work. Yet he has written a book which will promote Sen-tentious pi-jaw as a substitute for helping poor people. Has Ethics, as a branch of philosophy, gained anything from this book? No- unless you read it in conjunction with 'Ethics without Ontology' as a method of showing why the latter must be crap. But, doing that wouldn't be playing fair.

Flatulence as Philosophy- Purushotam Bilimoria on Kant,Matilal & Spivak

This is a link to a paper by Prof. Bilimoria which makes the astounding claim that Gayatri Spivak can throw some light on Matilal's relationship with Kant. Spivak  has pointed out in a recent book that Prof. Matilal, in his final days, suffered from a serious medical condition which caused flatulence and that, to ease his embarrassment, she had quoted Derrida- 'Ontology can't lay hold of a fart'- a remark whose fatuity lies in demonstrating that its subject does nothing else- but, regrettably, Bilimoria hasn't approached his topic from this angle- one singularly fecund for Socioproctology- but rather from something he claims to be a ' genuine critique of the rational'- this in the context of the 'Post Colonial Subject'- such a critique being, he assures us, 'Spivak's gift.'

Before wading into Bilimoria's essay, let me first say that there was another female Professor at Columbia, Graciella Chichilnisky, who addressed the same issue and resolved it once and for all by using innovative mathematical techniques. Essentially, a concept of 'limited arbitrage'- i.e. constrained preference diversity as in Amos 3.3- 'can 2 walk together except they be agreed?' - is sufficient to clarify all the so called 'aporias' of Reason dating back to Hegel's career as a Calculus instructor or Kant's senile failure to engage with the drunkard, but solid Math student, Solomon Maimon.
Chichilnisky, an Argentinian Jew who, quite unforgivably, lacked a penis, studied the North South problem as an engaged intellectual. Because she was five types of Smart, she cracked the Math and published her solutions. Mediocre men hated her but great men, like Ken Arrow, but also Amartya Sen, recognized her genius. Perhaps, Cambridge, England, would have been more hospitable to her but the fact remains that her results, at least in this respect, have stood up to scrutiny and though she may not get a Nobel, she has prevailed.
Essentially, Chichilnisky's work shifts the focus to preference diversity- too much of it and there is no Economics, no Literature, no prescriptivity in 'Rational' Ethics or 'Rational Historicism'- indeed, those projects are empty. Think about it for a moment. If all human beings were completely different from each other in terms of what they wanted or how they thought or what linguistic collocations appealed or felt 'natural' to them, then there would be no Commerce, no Society, no meaningful interchange. Man would be a feral animal interacting according to some Evolutionarily Stable Ethology to which he himself had no cognitive access. Granted, this describes almost everything about my own inwardness- and it may be the vast majority of people out there are like me in being what modern Philosophy of Mind calls 'p-zombies' (in other words, beings who look like or even sound like 'real' people, but who in fact are no such thing)- but Commerce & Law, if not Literature & Ethics, do exist and supervene on the Zombie Apocalypse of my Species Being. It may be that I don't actually do 'limited arbitrage' myself- in the quod nescis quo modo fiat, non facis sense (i.e. I don't know what I'm doing so I don't really do it)- but statistically the survival (or perhaps preponderance) of people like me still gives rise to Economics and Social Choice without aporias.
The corollary of the p-Zombie, for shite Ethics, is the Kantian heteronomous subject. Billimoria, in charity to Kant, points out that some of his writing militates for the notion that  'primitive' people like Iyers and Hottentots can progress towards autonomy through trade and interaction with Europeans and, in that context, it might be a good idea to treat them as thought they possessed rights. However, Billimoria undoes his charity, he proves an Indian giver, by going on to say that Post Colonial Reason arises out of the ashes of the Nietzche-Heideggerian 'destruktion' of a 'purer metaphysics of reason'. This is sheer nonsense. It is like saying, 'Obama's thinking arose out of the ashes of the John Birch Society's critique of the Ku Klux Klan's deconstruction of the purer metaphysics of reason' of Abraham Lincoln or Dr. Martin Luther King'. The fact is, back then, Kant was still a guy who knew from Science, even Hegel had actually taught Calculus- he could do sums. By contrast, Nietzche was merely mad and Heidegger was really bad. Fuck they have to do with 'Post Colonial Reason'?
 Germany didn't have any colonies- they were taken off them at bayonet point- there is no actual Post Colonial Subject who isn't simply jumping on an academic bandwagon who pretends those two shit-heads have any fucking relevance to their own Credentialist Ponzi scheme aimed at making out they actually 'represent' some great seething subaltern mass of alterity.

 I recall reading about Alexander Gershenkron- associated in Development Econ with a (specious) theory or relative backwardness such that the State dominates Civil Society- who, while a Prof at Harvard, had to deal with the ridiculous claim that like the Ivy League gotta cater for Black Studies- mebbe 'Fuzzy Wuzzy Logic'?- coz them niggers now got guns, dude! The truth was, niggers with or without guns, were like Obama's dad- the threat they represented proved useful coz it led to the foreign language requirement being dropped in favor of more Math for Econ PhD candidates- surely a good thing.
There is no 'Post Colonial Reason'.  What there has been- and here I have been as guilty as any- is whining about how being black aint no picnic coz like it don't actually make your dick any bigger and how like Kipling aint really racist- he's a treasure trove of positive images of the kind of working class people in India I still fondly remember. I recall being addressed as 'Gunga Din' by an elderly Cockney warehouse 'gaffer' back when I was 17. I loved that little old man and the richness of his baritone 'palaver' .
 I remember I got into a little tiff with a real big, muscular, white guy and waited for him after work 'to have it out'- i.e. get a black eye and thus become properly integrated into the team- but, it turned out there was this little white guy who had been riding the big fellow all day and he was of Turkish origin and had three brothers in Jail and two out and about with Boxing fucking trophies. Anyroad, this little guy wouldn't let me get a black eye in a good cause. I ended up looking a stupid 'toff'- insisting on 'fisticuffs to clear the air' when the truth was I'd have had my head kicked in. The old gaffer got wind of what had happened and, sadly, he changed towards me. He wanted me to do the books rather than tote boxes. He even wanted to call me 'College'- the final nail in my coffin. I wanted to remain 'Gunga Din'- if only for him- and recited the poem (badly) to try to tearfully defend my 'birth-right' in this respect. How could I prevail? 'Gunga Din' is a fucking beautiful poem- the Saqi-e-Kausar as a Kabir-panthi bhishti, what's not to like?- but it did me no good- suddenly I was like Pundit fucking Nehru or Mahatma fucking Gandhi rather than just one of the lads. I had screwed myself.  Anyway, that's my bit of Post-Colonial reason. What does it amount to? Things aint what they seem. Teachers are good people but they get Literature wrong. Well, they don't get their own literature wrong- the Irish Christian Bros. at St.Columba in Delhi loved teaching us Joyce- they knew he was a good Catholic precisely because he wasn't- but I can't blame a White School teacher in Hackney or Hounslow or wherever not showing enthusiasm for Kipling's 'Gunga Din'. Indeed, if I weren't a big made feller (though crap at fighting), what's more one with a 'posh' accent,  some well-meaning idiot might have protected me, despite myself, from being called Gunga Din. BTW, Sambo was actually a little Tamil boy- so I'm reclaiming that name as well. Anyroad, it beats being called 'Iyer, you fat cunt' though I've got to admit Mum does put a lot of affection into her voice when she addresses me thus.
  Prof. Billmoria, who is probably a posh guy who never wanted to tote boxes in an East London warehouse- still the best job I've ever had and that was 35 years ago when I was sweet 17- don't get that there are actual Post Colonial people- billions of us- and we do too Reason. He thinks Dilthey and the historicist turn in hermeneutics was a good thing. It wasn't. It turned everybody against everybody. It negated Scripture and the factual truth of 'the unseen' by which we all dun be brothers from different mothers. The Turkish guy who wouldn't let me get my black eye would, according to historicist hermeneutics, be obliged to fucking give me the cold shoulder either as a kaffir or a descendant of a supporter of Khilafat. I'm supposed to hate all White people. Fuck, I'd wanna do that? But, I myself, must be an object of hate to all non-Brahmins, not to mention females (okay, the latter have a legitimate complaint against me- vide Prof. Vagina Dentata Choothopadhyay's magisterial - 'Fat is not a Feminist issue- Penis size is').
  Okay, okay, I know there was an earlier theory according to which we could all get along if we could only agree to just eat the rich already. But those days are gone. Anyway, nowadays, I feel rich- I probably am not but how the fuck is anybody supposed to know whether they are actually rich or totally impoverished what with all them shenanigans in the City and what have you?
   Billimoria, following Spivak, thinks the West wants us guys to fuck each other over coz that's like 'authentic'. Believe me Billimoria Sahib- the West wants no such thing. Not after 9/11. What they are saying to us is- Could u guys just kindly go back to just being darkies or wogs or whatever? Fuck we want to know which type of towel head sand nigger u r?  Get with the fucking program already. You know you want to. Just say yes.
Billimoria says Spivak has a defence against being cast as Brahmin apologist herself. She does- it is ignorance. She says in her book, apropos of nothing, that India is called Bharat coz that was Ram's younger brother's name. Is Billimoria equally ignorant or did he read no more than one chapter of Spivak's shite book? The notion that anyone with any power with respect to India ever read Hegel is ludicrous. Yes, Hegel was European- but from a backward, piece of shit, Princedom called Prussia which the Brits have long abhorred and anathematized. (Think Thatcher's Cabinet's fervent espousal of the traditional British belief (as in A.J.P Taylor's post-War book for Allied Occupation troops I remember reading for my History A level) 'Good Germans are Rhinelanders or Hanseatics like Schopenhauer (big fan of India)- Bad Germans are Prussians.')
Berlin did become a great Educational centre but in Maths and Physics and Electrical Engineering. There was literally no fucking bleed through, to either Brit or Indian, of their provincial, racist, shite- and, if you read the Education of Henry Adams, one can easily see why. German Gymnasiums were crap. Their PhD's- at least in Econ, were and are shit- Hoppe & Sinn looked kosher for a bit but they have now abundantly shown the kraut or cloven hoof, so fuck them. Germany has a good Economy coz it has only self-evidently crap 'famous' Economists. It's just Rothbard's Law is all it is- Economists fuck up the more the more famous they get- and Germans (I was born there myself) are very good at obeying laws coz if it aint forbidden it's compulsory (my winsome humour and sparkling wit, such as is displayed in this post, conforming entirely to the law regulating such scatology in the country of my birth).
Billimoria writes-

This is mad. Schopenhauer and Herder and Karl Krause may marginally affect Indian reception of the Gita, Hegel does not. He was too fucking Racist and, in any case, couldn't write worth toffee.
I don't know who Sardesai and Bose are- fuckwits apparently- but Tilak, Ghose and Radhakrishnan have nothing to do with Hegel. You may say, what about Bradley & McTaggart? My reply is- what about them? They don't fit the bill. Radhakrishnan could availability cascade along lines they'd laid down but there is nothing from Hegel on the Gita in them. Kosambi is a different story- indeed the only good bits in Spivak come from him- but he was a Maths guy who did folk-lore on the side. He built no Academic Empire and created no School. This son of Acharya Kosambi was the opposite of Matilal. Not a flaneur precisely- just a rasika, perhaps- but certainly not a fucking Credentialist Ponzi scheme running Academic.
  Billimoria sees Matilal not as a fuckwit rescued from penury by getting a job in the West based on knowing a bit about Voodoo- sorry I mean worthless navya-nyaya shite no fucking Hindu ever subscribed to- who tried to set up as an Analytic or mebbe Ethics guy and fucking failed- no, that would be the common sense view, Billimoria sees Matilal as doing something else- viz. listening for a 'dissident voice' (subversive of Brahminical orthodoxy) within the text.
This is incredibly stupid. The Gita and Itihasas and so on aint Brahminical orthodoxy. They are not dim & dissident but a loud and resonant voice which says- Brahminism is a worthless fucking pile of shite. The very castes and classes which patronized or purveyed this sublime message were non-Brahmin in the main. Brahmins themselves had every reason to espouse this view. Otherwise they would constantly be at risk of beheading or ostracism for some tiny ritual mistake. The rains didn't come on time- guess the Bhramins goofed up, let's kill them. Who wants this? The pure Occassionalist doctrine propounded in the Gita (God does everything, humans do nothing) doesn't just let Bhramins off the hook if the rains don't come on time or the Turks invade, it fucking re-valorizes karma kanda rituals as a purely gratuitous theistic gesture. 
An evil fuckwit like me will act as yajman for a Brahminic ceremony if
a) it's very very fucking cheap and imposes no educational burden on me- like learning that Gayatri mantra which is way too long
b) I already very firmly believe that the Lord of the Universe is just like gonna borrow my beloved Mum and Dad and everybody else I love and keep them in Heaven till the cup of my inequities is full and I voluntarily turn back to the virtuous path of harassing all those noble souls with my importunate love and affection and demands to like tell me a story already.
Come on Billimoria- you may be a high I.Q type. Did you really have no fuckwit friends or siblings like me growing up? Do you really know shit about how Hinduism works? What was the date of the last 'Smarta Vicharam' or khap panchayat down your neck of the woods? For Tamil Iyers- you have to go a hundred years back. That's a long time dude. I'm not saying there aint a specifically Hindu preference falsification based Social Inquisitorial process- I'm just saying it's non Brahmin is all. You know this. Why pretend otherwise?
Further to a pretence that Dharma-ethics does not forbid its own grounding in a rational choice hermeneutic (because, if this were possible its 'apurva' or epoche making element would vanish along with its own topos-as-Maya) Billimoria highlights a particularly crap essay by Matilal- though I suppose it has a resonance, or conjures a revenant, with respect to the crap Traditionalist anti-Brahmo polemics of the mid-Nineteenth Century, but that shite was dead in the water by the time Tagore published 'Gora'- Ramakrishna and Vivekananda and Aurobindo Ghose's younger brother didn't just steal the Reformist's clothes, they fucking cat-walked it in Chicago and all points East of the Pacos- but, what does Billimoria's highlighting of that shite essay say about his own project? Only this- the availability cascades he surfs are such as might occur in not Adelaide but land-locked Canberra.
Take a butchers at this me old ocker-

The point here is that Kant and Hegel were stupid, racist, fuckwits. I'm sure Hinduism had its Kants and Hegels- them's the guys our Sacred Books hold up to ridicule, hatred and contempt. Nobody has any problem with Utilitarianism- deontology cashes out as Utilitarianism once you admit some course of action can expand your information set because it becomes your duty to so act. Buddhism knew this. No doubt some Brahmin fuckwits had fun with Buddhist wholly Intentionalist Ethics and this has been preserved somewhere BUT those Bhramin fuckwits were laughed at as fuckwits by everybody, including their teachers. 
Billimoria thinks India's corruption has to do with Utilitarianism. Why? How fucking ignorant is he exactly? Utilitarian Social Engineering- i.e. mechanism design- tackles the problem directly. It's what Arthashastra says- but also what Tiru or anybody else says. No fucking Indian, Muslim or Hindu or whatever ever said the way you get people to stop stealing is by preaching at them. No. Carrots and sticks and fucking Tiebout model Law-compliance as a local public good was what these guys not just said but actually fucking implemented.  What is Matilal's alternative? Worthless pi-jaw. His thought is irrelevant. He was a fuckwit. No fucking Indian reads him and he made no attempt, not ignominious, to get them to read him. How is his 'thought' prescriptive? Why does Billimoria mention it? To whom exactly is he flashing this Credentialist laissez passer? 
Does Billimoria really believe there was some supposedly 'liberative event'? Which Indian shares that belief? Fuck the 'official ideology'. It is 'pakhand', it is 'munafiqat', it is a 'preference falsification/ availability cascade' in the terminology of Prof. Timur Kuran- a future Nobel winner surely? (his analysis of Islamic Societies is crap, racist crap, so Stockholm has already booked his flight youbetcha).
Who does not know this?
How fucking stupid are the people who read Billimoria and Spivak and Amartya Sen? Certainly not more stupid than me. They are just more successful coz hypocrisy is a work-skill.
Read this and tell me Billimoria isn't a wanker.

Why is this fucked? What Billimoria and Spivak are talking about is a 'Transfer paradox' whereby shite donated by 'an advanced' country further impoverishes a 'developing' one. Graciella Chichilinsky did the Maths on this dude. She showed, so long as there are at least 3 countries, 'Transfer paradoxes' were phipty-phipty. 

I suppose, at this stage, I should say something nice about Matilal coz de mortuis &c- okay, he highlights an episode that is the dual to the Gita whereby Krishna prevents Arjuna killing the guy he thinks is his elder brother (as opposed to his actual elder brother whose will it is that the battle go forward). 
But Matilal misses the most important point about this (I've dealt with this in my book Ghalib, Gandhi & the Gita) which is that it shows that Krishna's Visvarupa in the Gita is a 'self-slaying', a Christ like sacrifice.
Matilal sees no mathematical structure to the Gita. Nor does Billimoria. These guys can't stop Spivak from writing ignorant, school-girl, crap- like saying 'India is called Bharat coz that's what Ram's younger bro was called and like... I dunno... well, like maybe at the end of the film he gets to be the Emperor of India or something? What? India is named after the son of Shakuntala? Oh! Right! Coz like Goethe really liked Kalidasa's 'Shakuntala'. But, I mean my point still stands coz Goethe was like all you know Bourgeois or something and like Hegel, y'know, he was like y'know totally NOT like sittlichkeit guy or maybe he was but then like y'know there was like Marx and Mamta Bannerjee- not Mamta- anyway, you know what I mean. 

Billimoria, worthless cunt that he is, writes this- 

Kant as the 'father of speculative reason'? Okay, there's an academic availability cascade there so let it slide; but 'father of the conceptual conditions for the possibility of imperialism that affected colonialism as an anthropological reality'? Are you fucking kidding me? Spivak writes shite but not quite such shite shite. What is this cunt? A fucking 'mayavadi'? Did he learn phenomenology from Colin Wilson's 'the Space Vampires' (okay, full disclosure, I did. Happy now?) where the value of pi actually changes as people get better at mensuration- or menstruation, BTW, as the only under 50 middle aged Hindutva blogger in Fulham, being 'groomed' by the witchy Wimmin at the Elderly Iyengar Mamiar Activity Centre, down Dawes road- I know it is only you guys who leave comments on my posts-  I will not fucking go down on you however menopausal you claim to be. Once bitten twice shy. Mind it kindly.