'True Blood', Hysteresis Costs and Repugnancy Markets.

Vampires like human blood. Humans are willing to sell blood, preferably that of somebody else, for a price.  So long as Vampires are willing to sell their services to humans- say as night-watchmen-the conditions for a co-operative equilibrium exists.
However Vampires may be very impulsive by nature and so their 'time-preference' may be too extreme to permit them making binding contracts. However, since Vampires by their nature are immortal, it follows that so long as they have non zero phenotypal polymorphism- i.e. so long as small differences in 'time preference' exist in that species- then there must be an evolutionarily stable equilibrium in which some older vampires kill young vampires for humans in return for a steady supply of blood.
The problem here is that this is a 'repugnancy market'- Vampires may feel it infra dig to do deals with humans and humans may find it disgusting to live peacefully with their historic predators- and so  irrational barriers or restrictions may arise which make the co-operative equilibrium infeasible.
The TV show, 'True Blood' deals with a synthetic food for Vampires which allows them to 'come out of their coffins' and enter Civil Society by getting rid of the overt repugnancy cost associated with blood sucking. However this is an unstable equilibrium on both sides for purely thymotic reasons and, in the current episode,  militant Vampires are planning to dynamite the 'True Blood' factories so as to restore overt repugnancy costs and set the stage for a final conflict between the dead and the living.
From the human point of view, what lies at the root of this repugnance? Is it that something which is dead is having commerce with the living? The same 'repugnancy cost' was associated with usury- the notion that 'dead' money can multiply in the same way as cattle or sheep. At a later stage, Marx introduced the idea that Capital- i.e. some fungible asset vital to the production process- was 'dead labor' and that it was morally repugnant that Capitalist Vampires get to dictate how and when and where 'living' Labor is to be employed.

More broadly, we can say that anything created before today which nevertheless has a bearing on our present decisions, is an example of the 'dead hand' of something or other constraining us in a morally repugnant way. Let us take an example. Suppose a new Bank wants to set up its H.Q. in the City of London. The Govt. could say 'look, the City of London already has plenty of Banks. Why don't you set up in Liverpool?' The Bank may reply- 'It is precisely because there are plenty of other Banks in London that we need to set up there. London has 'external economies of scope and scale', for the Banking industry.'

The Govt. may reply (and in the Seventies quite often did reply) 'but these 'external economies' are merely a historical accident. Why should we let the 'dead hand' of Capitalism's vampirical past dictate the future shape of Britain?'
Moving away from Govts., in the de-regulated Eighties, we find a lot of factually inaccurate memes cropping up which protested against 'lock-in' inefficiency by reason of historical accident.
Thus, people asked- Why should we be stuck with the qwerty key-board? It was only introduced to slow down professional typists who might otherwise type too fast and break the primitive machines which were available a Century ago. Why should the 'dead hand' of past typewriter technology constrain us to a sub-optimal keyboard which, going forward, imposes an ever rising Social Cost? (Actually, qwerty reduced jams and thus enabled people to type faster.) Similar, generally mistaken, points were often made about VHS vs. Betamax or the Windows Operating System and so on- i.e. there was a notion that 'historical accident' had got us stuck with an inferior product because producers were too stupid or unimaginative or downright sucky to understand that they needed to be competitive just as much against potential rivals as actual rivals.

Why did these 'memes' gain such widespread and unquestioning currency? Is it because of an irrational repugnancy cost attaching to the notion that 'the dead past' still constrains us modern, living, human beings?

In Economics, 'lock-in' effects are studied under the rubric of 'hysteresis' or 'path dependence'.
One reason why Moral Philosophers were attracted to 'Neo-Classical' Welfare Economics was because it used hysteresis-free models. This meant that the opportunity cost of breaking with the past- what we might term hysteresis costs- was set to zero. Thus, a playground was created where all manners of pseudo repugnancy costs could be conjured out of thin air.
Any form of intersubjective Just Proceeding, that is widely acknowledged as such, is going to have hysteresis effects as it is a sort of moving target for successive co-ordination problems. But, by simply ignoring hysteresis- the way most Economists do in their models (because hysteresis is less mathematically tractable)-  Moral Philosophers got to re-label every form of Just Proceeding as an example of a grievous injustice. The comedy here is that Philosophy's own in-built path dependence is the reason it has been shunned by all sensible people and not just starting from Aristophanes either. But this itself is an example of a hysteresis cost becoming the basis of an irrational repugnancy effect! Equally, had philosophers been alert to the hysteresis ridden nature of their own profession, they wouldn't have made fools of themselves by so sedulously manufacturing bogus repugnancy costs! This stricture applies not just to Moral Philosophy but also to every Philosophically informed Methodenstriet (dispute over what constitutes proper methodology and thus what results can be thought of as valid) such that there was a repugnancy cost attached to truths only derivable by one method of proceeding or which violated some preferred ontology. Empirical results, e.g. experimental confirmation of Bell's inequality, ought to have killed this sort of Philosophy off, but the evidence is it didn't.

As a case in point, Putnam argues that the Many Worlds interpretation is wrong because any time there's a Schrodinger's cat type situation then, no matter what the probability of the cat being killed, half of the observers across multiple worlds will see a dead cat. This because there are only two possible worlds- dead cat and live cat world. What about a sequence of Schrodinger experiments- so we have sequences of dead or live cats?  Surely, the Universe splits every time the Schrodinger box is opened such that you have a bunch of these Universes out there. Putnam asks ‘What is the probability in the naive sense—not the ‘‘probability’’ in the quantum mechanical sense, this real number which I calculate by finding the square of the absolute value of a certain vector, but the probability in the sense of the number of my future histories in which I will observe that, say,( the cat was dead) half of the time plus or minus 5% of the time divided by the total number of my future histories?’ 
Putnam thinks it very strange that this naive probability is 50 percent and not whatever the chance of getting a dead cat was according to the Q.M probability theory. Yet, what else could it be? These multiple worlds (generated by the experimental sequence) differ only according to the criteria dead cat/ live cat. In every other respect they are indistinguishable. Putnam is ascribing a repugnancy cost to the Many Worlds interpretation based on discerning a bogus hysteresis. To see why, consider the following- is there anything in Many Worlds which constrains the arrow of Time to a particular direction? If your answer is yes, then Putnam is right- there is some sensible use of the word 'probability' such that he can say 'On the Many Worlds interpretation, quantum mechanics is the first physical theory to predict that the observations of most observers will disconfirm the theory.' In other words, if path dependence is a feature of Many Worlds, then its use has a repugnancy cost. But, if Many Worlds is hysteresis free- i.e. if it says there's a block Multiverse containing all the possible worlds- then Putnam's use of the word 'probability' is not logically coherent. As a matter of fact, Many Worlds doesn't have to make any ontological commitments at all and can plume itself as a paradigm of, hysteresis free, 'logically coherent thought'

Bearing this in mind and returning to take a closer look at repugnancy markets- prostitution, abortion, drug dealing etc.- the problem with each of these is that once hysteresis effects are taken into account, the picture changes. In each case, the relevant information- viz. was this particular  act of prostitution/abortion/drug dealing, welfare and capability enhancing or was it deleterious?- is difficult to extract because it is so highly correlated with everything else that was happening or had happened or was likely to happen.  Contemplating this mess we find there are no easy answers. It may be that licensing a repugnancy market reduces the social evil and enables Society to move more quickly to a better path in which that evil diminishes to a purely medical problem affecting very small numbers of people. On the other hand, it could happen that a small increase in the Social evil has a run-away effect. How are we to know in advance what sort of attractors are lurking in our vicinity on the fitness landscape? Might not hysteresis effects save us from disaster? But is it not somehow repugnant that we can even ask ourselves this question? Whatever are we to do?

The answer, of course, is watch more TV, because the Series Finale of 'True Blood', will reveal that beverage not to have been synthetic at all. It was ordinary human blood purchased from willing humans out of wages paid by humans to Vampire night-guard guild. This guild contains the oldest Vampires with lowest time preference. They secretly manipulated the militant Vampires to blow up the True Blood factories not so as to re-establish overt repugnancy costs and thus drive a wedge between the dead and the living, but to show that repugnancy  costs are irrational and ought to be abandoned when a stable co-operative equilibrium exists.
Thus it turns out the 'True Blood' fraud had two objectives
1) to get the dead and living used to living together
2) to shake out the low time preference or high repugnancy cost militants and hate-mongers on both sides.

My question is, once this co-operative Utopia is established, would sex with Vampires still be hot?
No. Not at all. Think about it, what would women need tampons for if Vampires were on tap?

Negative Probabilities & the Bhagvad Gita.

Here is a story about negative probabilities called Albert's Socks 

Spooky Socks

Once upon a time in a small university town, a natural philosopher called Albert filled his days contemplating life, the universe and everything. Like many of his colleagues, Albert struggled each morning to equip his feet with a matching pair of socks. Would you spot Albert on a number of days, chances are you would occasionally observe his shoes filled with a red left foot and a green right foot or any other combination of colors. 

Although his absent-mindedness was strong enough to serve as explanation for any ill-fitting garments, Albert did have a valid excuse for his poor choice of outfit. His Danish housekeeper, Niela Bohr, kept his socks in a chest of drawers. Three rows, each consisting of three drawers, made up this piece of furniture. Whenever Albert pulled open a drawer in search for socks to wear, he would be presented either a pair of matching socks or a single sock. Every subsequent drawer he opened, would reveal socks of a color different from those in the drawers already opened. To make things worse, each drawer opened would block from opening all drawers not in the same row and all drawers not in the same column. This effectively limited Albert each morning to the opening of three drawers configured in a horizontal row or in a vertical column. 

Each night Niela prepared the chest of drawers for the next morning. To Albert's frustration, he couldn't figure out what procedure Niela followed. Each morning when opening a line of three drawers, the outcome came to him as a compete surprise. Albert labeled the drawer rows A, B and C, and the columns X, Y and Z, and started recording his observations. Each morning he wrote down a line like  B121, indicating the opening of the drawers in row B containing 1, 2, and 1 socks respectively.

Following a few weeks of observations, Albert has recorded the following set of data:

C112     B222     X212     Y111
A211     Z111     Y221     B121
Y221     X122     A112     A222
B112     C211     Z212     X221
Z122     Y212     Y122     Z221
A121     C112     C121     B211

When questioning Niela about the way she filled the chest of drawers each day, she responded that she didn't fill the drawers, rather she prepared them according to the laws of quantum physics. "What do you mean you don't fill the chest of drawers?" Albert asked, "surely you fill it as I have never encountered an empty drawer." Niela hesitated. "Sir, this is a quantum chest. There is no reality associated with the contents for each drawer." Albert looked puzzled. "You mean the unopened drawers don't contain any socks?" Albert focused at her face. Was she making a joke? She seemed perfectly serious. "Sir, an observation not made is a non-existent observation. Now if sir would please excuse me, I need to wash sir's socks for tomorrow and prepare sir's chest of drawers." And off she went.

Albert thought about Niela's puzzling remarks. It all didn't make sense. He knew about this weird quantum theory. A statistical theory that he was sure, could not represent the deepest truth of nature. He knew for a fact that each time all drawers are filled. If that was not the case, surely he would on occasions have hit an empty triplet of drawers. There must be some explanation. Probably she was playing a game with him, and filling the drawers according to some secret allocation algorithm. 

Months go by, the list of drawer observations kept growing, but Albert didn't manage to work out the algorithm. One day, he explains the issue to his colleague, Jim Bell. Jim was a practical guy and an expert on quantum theory. "Can I have a look at the data?", he asked. Albert handed over a sheet of paper. It took Jim only a few seconds to remark "This is interesting, a horizontal line of drawers always contains an even number of socks, while a vertical line always contains an odd number of socks". He handed back the paper to Albert, who once more  inspected the data. His mouth opened. With his eyes wide open and still fixed on the paper, he uttered "But this is impossible". Jim smiled, "Well, the results are puzzling indeed. But those are your own observations. If you doubt them, you have to redo them."

Albert was still staring at the paper, and didn't look up. "This really is impossible. If at any given morning I would open three rows, I would end up with an even number of socks. But would I open three columns I would end up with an odd number of socks. Yet in both cases I would have opened the same nine drawers. This is absolutely impossible." 

"Right. Albert, can I remind you that you started by telling me that chest of yours contains quantum drawers and that on each given day you can open only one row or one column of drawers at a time?"
"Yes, but let's assume, just for sake of argument, that we can open all drawers."
"Albert, you have to make up your mind. Can you, or can you not open all drawers? If not, then you should realize it is not that you don't know the facts about the contents of the drawers that can not be opened, there simply aren't any such facts."

Hours later, back at home Albert was staring at his spooky drawers. He had checked the data many times. There was no doubt, Jim's observation on even and odd sock counts was correct. Jim had tried to convince him it is meaningless to discuss the contents of drawers that can not be opened. But still, a-priori there is no drawer that can not be opened. Each morning he can decide to open any of the nine drawers, it is just that already opened drawers limit the opening of subsequent drawers. So each drawer must contain either one or two socks. Or not? This quantum stuff was really driving him crazy.

Could it be that the chest contained a hidden mechanism that played tricks on him? Maybe the socks could move from one drawer into the other based on the drawers that he opened. The next few mornings Albert checked the drawers that he pulled open and inspected them for any hidden mechanics or other tricks. Nothing of that. There was no way for the socks to move from one drawer to the other.

Could it be that Niela knows in advance if he was going to select a row or a column of drawers? No, this is a crazy thought. Precognition is pseudoscientific nonsense. But physical reality not allowing him to talk about the contents of unopened drawers seemed even crazier. So what the heck. Albert took a die and marked it with the symbols A, B, C, X, Y and Z. Henceforth, each morning he threw the die and opened the row or column of the cupboard corresponding to the symbol on the die.

Basing the choice of the drawers to be opened on the throw of a die didn't change anything to the outcomes. Rows continued to come up with even numbers of socks, and columns with odd numbers of socks. Albert looked again at the chest of drawers. What a spooky device! A spooky and revealing cupboard that was telling him something deep about the nature of physical reality. His observations on drawer contents did not leave room for any other explanation than what Jim was telling him all along: we are living in an utterly strange quantum universe. A universe in which what could have happened but didn't has no meaning.   

I suppose from an Anthropic, Many World, point of view, we're talking about a constraint on the outcome that our own 'quantum immortality' imposes.  What can't be denied is that experimental evidence exists for negative probabilities, for e.g. in Bell's theorem, because our 'common sense' says logical possibilities exist which tests proved to be wholly imaginary.

 An interesting paper by Burgin (available here)  uses the following analogy to elucidate negative probability-
'Let us consider the situation when an attentive person A with the high knowledge of English writes some text  T. We may ask what the probability is for the word “texxt” or “wrod” to appear in his text T. Conventional probability theory gives 0 as the answer. However, we all know that there are usually misprints. So, due to such a misprint this word may appear but then it would be corrected. In terms of extended probability, a negative value (say, -0.1) of the probability for the word “texxt” to appear in his text T means that this word may appear due to a misprint but then it’ll be corrected and will not be present in the text T.   Negative probability becomes even less (say, -0.3)  when people use word processors because misprints become more probable.  For instance, it is possible to push a wrong key on the keyboard or pushing one key also to push its neighbor.

In physics, negative probability may reflect the situation when instead of a particle its anti-particle appears. For instance, probability -0.3 that in a given interaction an electron appears means that there is probability 0.3 that in this interaction a positron appears.


 The wikipedia article on negative probability states-
In Convolution quotients of nonnegative definite functions^[6] andAlgebraic Probability Theory ^[7] Imre Z. Ruzsa and Gábor J. Székely proved that if a random variable X has a signed or quasi distribution where some of the probabilities are negative then one can always find two other independent random variables, Y, Z, with ordinary (not signed / not quasi) distributions such that X + Y = Z in distribution thus X can always be interpreted as the `difference' of two ordinary random variables, Z and Y.

I guess one way of looking at the 'difference' of Z & Y is to think of X as the site of a constraint or concurrency problem- i.e. there is some buffering or lagging or information bottleneck 'off screen'- which is picked up by the negative values in its probability distribution.


This is a link to a fascinating video lecture on why negative probabilities are essential in Machine Learning. The same points may be made for any Social or Cognitive Science. 

Suppose an Occasionalist writer wanted to set up a plot in which every episode is a balanced game. One way to do so would be by creating characters in pairs so they either balance or  'cancel each other'- i.e. act as either commuting or non-commuting 'ghosts' such that either you get partial-avatars, on an analogy with bosons, or mimetic rivals, on an analogy with fermions. 
Another method of constraining the plot to conserve symmetries would be to introduce negative probabilities. But the sort of considerations discussed above show a deep connection between negative probabilities and anti-particles, with the former appearing more fundamental as representing the way our consciousness constrains Reality such that novelty, freedom, apoorvata, is the way we experience the lag between cause and the apurva effect.

This gives a- to my mind bitter- twist to the Gita as the dual of the episode where the Just King's Depression is dispelled by gaining instruction in Probability theory.

Gandhian interessement- Negotiation or Noble Lie?

Leo Strauss makes a distinction between two approaches to Political Philosophy. Either one can have Negotiation on the basis of the true interests of different parties or else you can have a 'Noble Lie' which everybody agrees to pretend to believe and act in accordance with.
Gandhism looks like a Noble Lie. The elite pretend to believe it so as to fool the masses into thinking the only way they can gain power is by following tactics the elite knows are doomed to fail.
 The record shows that Gokhale knew that Gandhi was no good at negotiation and that his achievements in South Africa, if the truth were known, were actually little to write home about. Nevertheless, Gandhi swiftly gained a pivotal role as the most important interlocutor for Viceroy Reading. Was this because the Indians weren't prepared for negotiations because they didn't want to admit, even to themselves, what their true interests were? Perhaps all they wanted was some glorious myth or Noble Lie.
 Swadesi was in the interests of Indian manufacturers, khaddar was in nobody's interest- yet khaddar and the Charka displaced Swadesi as the banner of the I.N.C.
Similarly, Islam could have gained a lot by the establishing of a sort of Imam ul Hind who could speak for all Indian Muslims. Khilafat, on the other hand, was bad for Indian Muslims, a disaster for Turkish Muslims and only of use to some British Secret Service operation aimed at assassinating Attaturk.
Indians needed Education. What Gandhi offered them was 'Basic Education' whereby people who couldn't earn a living by spinning, taught spinning such that an enormous amount of cotton was wasted in the creation of unusable yarn. Yet the 'Noble Lie' that this sort of Education was self-financing trumped the blindingly obvious truth that, as Dr. Zakir Hussein later admitted 'Basic Education, as practiced today, is nothing but a fraud.'
I suppose one could say that the Indians were actually negotiating through their Noble Lies- they were sending a signal that ...urm.. they wanted to emigrate from the Real World to some other Solar System?

The big question is why the Indians didn't want negotiation. Defining what you really want and spotting what the other guy really wants or needs is the way not just to make agreements that stick but also to introduce the  possibility of co-operation on the basis of engineering or other such technical knowledge. One would have thought that the Indian elites would have eagerly embraced that possibility. After all, Industrialists, like the Tatas, were doing very well by working with foreign concerns. Indian Scientists and Academics were part of the Global community. Even poets, like Tagore, or artistes, like Uday Shankar, or Religious leaders like Vivekananda, were International in their outlook. So why did the Indian elites not embrace the path of Negotiation as opposed to a particularly stupid 'Noble Lie'?
If they were subject to pressure from below, that would be understandable. But these weren't all Zamindars trying to control disaffected tenants. True, Industrialists used Nationalist leaders, like Bose, to break strikes but the workers were making genuine advances and Trade Unions were becoming more independent- a position they only lost post-Independence when compulsory arbitration was imposed.
The truth, I suppose, is that 'Noble Lies' should be looked at more as an interessement mechanism rather than in an abstract Straussian way.
Still, to my mind, there was something very peculiar happening during the early Twenties which would repay study.

Implausible Indian- Feisal Devji on Gandhi.

 South Africa. It's a kinda spooky place. First you have a Xhosa leader who thinks the way to win power for his people is to kill all their cattle coz that will bring dead warriors back to life. Next, you have a smart guy like Smuts throwing his lot in with boorish illiterate Boers who had no conception of the extent of British power, or their ruthlessness. Finally you have people like the Chinese leader, Leung Quinn,, who managed to get 50,000 of his people deported, and Gandhi, who thought the Pass Law was a good idea.
Smuts smartened up quite quickly, the Xhosas produced politicians of the caliber of Sistulu and Mandela. Leung Quin disappears from history but I imagine lived to see Sun Yat Sen's revolution.

Gandhi alone remains to so fascinate academics as to cause them to write mischievous nonsense.

Born, not  in South Africa, but Zanzibar, Prof Feisal Devji- who believes Gandhi created a new type of sovereignty based not on violent conquest but the abject victim-hood of those effortlessly vanquished after a merely masochistic display of non-violence- has this to say in Tehelka-

'what Mahatma Gandhi objected to about the colonial order in India was the very thing he disliked in Britain’s liberal society. For, in some ways, the colonial state was even more liberal than its metropolitan cousin, since it could, with far greater certitude, assert its impartiality with regard to the varying interests of a subject population. And so, it was not simply its lack of representative government to which Gandhi objected, but more importantly, the colonial state’s role as a third party. His targets were law and order, ostensibly the most attractive part of British rule in India. The peace brought about within such an order, argued the Mahatma, was illusory because it also produced the violence against which order had to be maintained.

In other words, Devji is telling us, Gandhi wanted the Brits to leave because they were stopping Indians killing each other. But by stopping the Indians from turning each other into kebabs the British just made them want to do it all the more. And that's really bad. It's like Smuts saying Indians all have to give their fingerprints and carry Passes and pay handsomely for that privilege.  I mean, actually carrying a Pass is a very good thing but it's wrong of Smuts to force us to do it because that's like totally insulting because we do too  WANT to carry passes- it's just Gandhi hasn't yet explained to us why Passes are so wonderful. 

Gandhi explained all this with reference to the stereotyped, if sometimes violent, rivalry between Hindus and Muslims, seen as the two great political interests in British India. Nationalists had often claimed that conflict between these communities was fostered by a colonial policy of divide and rule, and while the Mahatma agreed with this theory in principle, he did not view religious violence among Hindus and Muslims as the consequence of any deliberate planning by the British. Instead, he argued that the colonial state’s neutrality made religious conflict possible, its autonomy permitting Hindus and Muslims to define themselves as equally autonomous interests. And it was because the State stood as a third party between these interests that it was able to mediate between them, thus actively preventing any direct dealing among the Hindus and Muslims. In this way, the colonial state served not as a perversion of its liberal alternative, but rather as its secret truth.

What is Devji saying here? The State is neutral if it does not take sides in a quarrel between two groups. But, surely, if it takes sides then it becomes the main party to the dispute. Hitler did not take sides with the Anti Semites to kill Jews. He killed Jews. That was the policy of his Reich.
The Colonial State did take sides in various disputes between communities. It persecuted some people and protected some others. But this was in accordance with the Laws it enacted. To speak of the Colonial State as a perversion of 'its liberal alternative' is to utter an oxymoron. A Colonial State may have Liberal Institutions and the Rule of Law but it is not a Liberal State unless it has representative Government. But if it has that, it isn't Colonial in any sense of the word. This business of  saying things like 'the Nazi State was the Secret Truth of its Liberal alternative'- is simply paranoid gesture politics at its silliest. 
The Colonial State did not impede Hindus and Muslims working directly with each other. The direction in which the Administration was going in the Twenties and early Thirties was precisely the opposite. Sidney Webb delivers full adult franchise with strong minority protection to Ceylon in 1931. Only after that protection was disabled did Ceylon spiral into chaos. In India, Reading and Irwin were more cautious than Webb but, nevertheless, that was the direction in which things were moving.

Because they didn’t have to deal directly with one another, Hindus and Muslims could press their claims by enlisting the State’s support against each other, giving rise to a manipulative politics of solicitation in which loyalty was offered in exchange for rewards designed to discomfit the rival community.

What is Devji talking about? The Communal awards? But, that changed nothing on the ground. Is Devji suggesting that the Brits favored the Muslims because they were 'more loyal'? Did the Aga Khan get Tanganika because he was 'loyal'? 
I don't recognize Devji's analysis as applying to India in the Twenties and Thirties. During the War, yes, that was a factor but it existed mainly in the mind of Churchill. 
India was run by bureaucrats who wanted a quiet life. The British did minority protection because that was their job for which they collected tax money in return. They were quite good at minority protection because, in the long run, you secure a quiet life at a cheaper cost by doing 'broken windows theory' type vigilance. 
If the majority got to loot the minority, what would be their incentive to hand over a portion of the loot in taxes? A Colonial State is a 'stationary bandit'. Metic protection is part of that racket.

 And since they had no responsibility for governance, these interests could afford to look upon the outbreak of violence with equanimity, for it was after all the role of the colonial state to impose order. Riots were, therefore, a sign of political luxury as much as anything else, which is to say risks that might be run because the state would always be there to limit their effects and at most return to the status qua ante. 
Were riots a 'political luxury'? No. Not for Gandhi. Riots lost him legitimacy- they forced him to the Conference Table. Kanpur was a disaster for Gandhi and, to his credit, he apologized. Only the Salt March, which was financed by Dalmia, retrieved his reputation, though, of course, it didn't achieve anything.
Riots may have helped the Muslim League after the War but that is a different story- one where Wavell had confessed his inability to do anything more than evacuate the European population.
Of course, the liberal centre could not hold, and eventually the colonial state, buffeted by opposing interests, was forced to relinquish its impartiality. The British had lost legitimacy simply by holding so firmly to it.

What liberal centre is this that 'could not hold'? There could have been a Liberal Center if the Indians, led by Gandhi- or whomever- had co-operated with the British in creating Responsible Govt based on the Rule of Law- but they did no such thing. The British kept legitimacy by being financially solvent and having the political will to fight. After 1945, Britain was bankrupt. Attlee was thinking of releasing kids from School so they could bring in the harvest. 1948 was the worst year for rationing in the U.K.  America was calling the shots and America was so hostile to Britain's Empire in the East that they would have handed Hong Kong over to Chiang Kai Shek if they'd gotten to it first.
Devji's bizarre theory of sovereignty achieved through being masochistically vanquished or pointlessly blowing yourself up- for which he finds support in Gandhi- involves him in a truly mischievous piece of sophistry- viz. the notion that Gandhi wanted India and Pakistan to just duke it out over Kashmir rather than find a diplomatic or U.N solution.

Given the subcontinent’s fate as a site for some of the most destructive proxy wars of modern times, from the anti-Soviet jihad to the War on Terror, who is to say if the Mahatma was not correct in his estimation?

The scary thing about Devji's article is not that the picture of Gandhi that he paints isn't plausible but that a leading academic can believe that military conflict can occur without third party help. India and Pakistan simply didn't have enough bullets to keep a war going for more than a few weeks. Indeed, no two countries can go to war without involving the big powers who have great mounds of military hardware to sell. Perhaps Devji believes the Indians and Pakistanis would have just started hitting each other with lathis when they ran out of bullets, till their lathis broke and they then had to chuck stones at each other. At that point, they might decide to settle their dispute by a wrestling match or bout of fisticuffs or something equally honorable.

Sadly, this is not a reasonable scenario. Armies don't tamely pick up lathis when they run out of bullets for their guns. They demand guns, more guns, better guns, from the political leaders till either the politicians make peace or they are all slaughtered.
Fighting does not clear the air- look at Burma or Sri Lanka or Karachi or any Naxalite afflicted district. Locking up stupid agitators and shooting rioters, on the other hand, is the duty of the State. So is killing actual rebels- like Bagha Jatin- not lawyer politicians, like Gandhi who should simply be locked up from time to time for their own good. If a State does not fulfill this duty, it will cease to exist. General Dyer may not have fully pacified the Punjab with half an hour's worth of Machine gun fire, but, after Jallianwallah Bagh, the specter of the Mutiny was well and truly laid to rest.
Violence may have an ethical dimension in a 'balanced game' symmetrical agon. Non Violence may have an ethical dimension even under unbalanced games. Talking stupid nonsense has no ethical dimension.

Gandhi preferred direct dealings even of a violent kind to the protracted, if sometimes intermittent and low-grade, conflicts that were the special gift of mediation. So he would have liked to see a real war between India and Pakistan, because it might make possible an equally real resolution of their dispute by honourable means. And let us remember that the wars India and Pakistan have conducted represent perhaps their most honourable dealings with one another. For unlike Pakistan’s sponsorship of terrorism in India, to say nothing of the excessive and unregulated violence that marks internecine conflict in both countries, their wars have always been engagements of the most civilised kind, textbook exercises conducted outside civilian areas for the most part and replete with instances of camaraderie and honour among the opposing armies. And in this perverse way they might well represent the greatest step towards non-violence that either nation has ever taken.

Sadly, Devji's rosy tinted view of honorable soldiers speaking with clipped accents and all being terribly terribly honorable to each other is far from the truth. During peace-time this may be how the German and the British officer corps behaved to each other- as in Powell & Presburger's Colonel Blimp- but once hostilities heated up, both sides were quite happy gassing each other and playing every type of dirty on each other. The Kaiser was a soldier- the Honorary Colonel of a crack British Regiment. That didn't prevent the cry 'Hang the Kaiser!' from rising from the Officer's Mess. 

Wars aren't a good thing. Nor are periodic communal riots. They don't clear the air. Mediation is a good thing. Sending crackpot agitators to jail from time to time is a good thing. Not selling guns to poor countries like India and Pakistan is a good thing.

British 'Rule of Law' was, at least potentially, a good thing. The Brits needed the Indians to co-operate with them to establish a properly functioning Civil Society. Gandhi, for some reason, decided that co-operation was wrong though it was also a good idea to himself sabotage the Indian Non- Cooperation  Movement, so as to hinder an advance towards Responsible Govt and postpone the inevitable alternative-viz. irresponsible Government- a little while longer..

If Devji is right, Gandhi was a maniac who thought Violence something good in itself. The truth is less sensational. Back then, all middle aged men were convinced that the younger generation were totally effeminate and probably all getting Gay with each other and reading Oscar Wilde and like their Moms have totally spoiled them and have you seen those new skinny jeans?- don't tell me anyone who can dance in those things has any testicles left end of the day. Basically, what we need is another War- teach the lads a bit of discipline, put some backbone in 'em as opposed to them just boning each others backsides they way they do at those fancy Colleges which charge an arm and a leg and in any case, believe me, I could easily bench press 300 pounds and sure, I mean at a pinch, to repopulate the earth, I could definitely do my share- say a dozen twenty something hotties every week as a baseline- because my message is essentially one of Peace and Non Violence and every man under 50 being shipped off to the military coz they are all benders anyway.

Turning to Devji's central thesis- viz. a once and for all war is better than prolonged intermittent conflict- what does History say? In the case of India and Pakistan, the evidence is unambiguous. Both sides stepped back from conflict in '48 and both sides benefited by that decision. But for it, there would have been no Indus Water treaty- by which a casus belli involving an existential threat to Pakistan was resolved equitably. Unfortunately, Begum Fatima Jinnah attacked Ayub Khan for selling out to India on that issue and so the scene was set for '65 during which the Indians really felt miffed coz they didn't got those nice shiny American tanks like wot the Paks did and so they sulked and sulked and then started some mischief up in Bangladesh. After '71 the revanchist Pakistani Army under pressure on the Afghan front developed a counter-strategy which paid very handsome dividends and enabled it to take a hegemonic role without even pretending to deliver on Socio-Economic Goals in the manner which Ayub had done.

The reason India and Pakistan did not have a big war- like the Iran Iraq war (which, contra Devji did not clear the air between the two countries)- was because  d'uh look at the map- wot are u stoopid? Indo-Pak conflict is not 'a balanced game'- so it can't have the property Devji valorizes- viz. being a cathartic agon. True, if Pak as an American client, had developed into the Israel of the region- but, d'uh, it  couldn't coz Israel didn't trust the Pakis not to pass on military technology to their own Arab enemies- so we're back to square one. The Pak army played the hand they were dealt and enriched themselves in a manner unimaginable to their Indian opposite numbers. Oddly, this might increase Indian fighting morale and handicap the Pakistanis because they literally have more to lose.

Still, credit where credit is due, the Indian Govt has never been 'Gandhian'. They aint stupid or evil or at least not more evil and stupid than they they need to be. So mediation and interessement and pi jaw problematisation we shall always have with us- Terrorism is a small price to pay for keeping the show on the road a little longer. Give Civil Society a chance, people. Anyway, what is the alternative?

Devji, post-modern fuckwit that he is, tells us Al Qaeda type imbecility is identical with Gandhian silliness-  Al-Qaeda, he argues, uses the “abstract and vicarious emotion that characterizes the actions of pacifists or human rights campaigners.” In other words, violent jihadists act less out of a sense of personal victimhood than “out of pity for the plight of others.” And they try to foster a sense of universality by framing their struggle as one of justice and equality.

Even if Devji is right, this is an argument for just locking up all the bomb chucking idiots, who get worked up over imaginary insults and fabricated grievances, till their madness passes. This is because one can tackle a genuine grievance such that an enemy is placated, but what can one do about imaginary grievances? Shrill Gandhian, or Green, or Gramscian anal slurry, on the other hand, should be treated on a par with UFOology and the theories of David Icke. Don't lock them up till they really run amok but, by all means, do appoint them to Professorships at Ivy League Colleges where their idiocy will do no harm.

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. 

Lloyd Shapley and the Bhagvad Gita

Shapley's well deserved Nobel win has been a long time coming. I know geniuses like him don't need Nobels but it is worth pausing a moment on an occasion like this to think about how India might have been different if people of my generation- or that of Gurcharan Das, for that matter- had not gone Gadarening after Amartya Sen and John Rawls and now Martha Nussbaum and Hilary Putnam and so forth, rather than Coase and Tiebout and Shapley and Buchanan who, I think, are right about Wicksteed & Choice and thus immune to pointless palaver over what the word 'Cost' means- i.e. dining philosophers starving to death for caught in a concurrency deadlock.
Still maybe these hunger artists on Ivy League catwalks were doing Gandhian dharna so my Hindu instinct was to worship them.
My own antipathy to Shapley is summarized by this extract from my novel Samlee's daughter-

In other words, since Shapley's work is very useful and highly relevant to India, it must be 'Right Wing' and thus it is to be feared and denounced or, at any rate, studied in the abstract but never applied to Policy making. At the same time, I guess people like me were uneasily aware that every semi-literate dehati politician was a master of calculating the Shapley index of power for various interest groups, not to mention  the most computationally efficient collocation method for solving for correlated equilibria (we call it corruption)- indeed that sort of thing is virtually hard-wired in their brains- and that even if us City boys mastered the maths or wrote a Computer program to do the same thing, we'd simply be outclassed by them.

It was only later on, thinking about Game theory in the Gita, that I realized that the paleo-discrete maths tradition in ancient Tribal Republics would have been strongly focused on the sorts of things Shapley taught us guys to at least be aware of, if not actually do. Since the Mahabharata's own compositional heuristic- at least in my belief- is part and parcel of that wider paleo-mathematical politics Welt Bild- it follows that the Bhagvad Gita, as its Pyrrhonist epoche- tells us that it is our 'svadharma' (i.e. there is a 'public signal' telling us our strategy so that, in a manner more general than Nash, we come to Aumann correlated equilibrium) to do Shapley not for the sake of the fruits of Shapley (good stuff, like getting democracy to work properly) but in an Amartya Sen-tentious spirit of utterly abnegating constructive Politics in favor of cunt-queefing pi-jaw so Man remain a futile passion and God again slay himself in vain.
Shapley & Roth's approach to matching problems is, of course, something the Mahabharata does very well so as to show that all 'svadharmas' have a stable way of meshing within just a few iterations. But the central epochee of the Gita shows that one such match- that of Nar & Narayan- is thereby rendered both a Philosophical Situation Comedy as well as Occasionalism's Nightmare on Om Street.
So I'm sticking with slagging off Sen- virodha bhakti donchaknow- but, sure, you guys just go ahead and read the Gita with Shapley as its Smriti. Not everybody can be a pointless fuckwit you know. Me, I'm just lucky that way.

Our Fascism without Fuehrerprinzip

A great leader, as Pareto almost  said,  doesn't actually see the direction in which History is moving but urinates so copiously that people follow him in the natural belief that they are thus getting out of its way. By contrast, a good waiter also urinates copiously but washes his hands afterwards which is why people trust him with their orders. However, neither a great leader nor a good waiter can cause History to soil itself so intensively that the School nurse just wraps it in black plastic bin-liners and leaves it with the groundsman by the gates for its Mom to pick up. This, it seems to me, is the transcendent cloud sourced task us low rent right wing bloggers have been set.
For which I personally blame David Cameron.
That boy aint right.