Religion v the Right to Philosophize

Philosophy imposed is religion. A piece of philosophy served with the sword, articulated in captivating rhetoric, propagated and practiced by exemplary conviction and dedication, put across through magical performances, or passed on by mixing moral value with cock-and-bull stories, imposes itself on people. Philosophy must remain a personal tool of making sense of existence. Personal autonomy must be recognized and respected with this right to philosophizing. Denial of this right is unjust and the breeding ground of so many ills. 

Niraj Kumar Jha

Education: the Endeavour

Education is the toughest of the human endeavours. Things you have to beat, you know, include among others your genetic coding and the language that makes you express yourself. And this is why it is very rare that we encounter an educated one. 

Niraj Kumar Jha

The Post-university Age: A Hypothesis

The university system, as it prevails today, emerged in the medieval world and outgrew its age to become the fountains of the modern age. They emerged as adjuncts to the churches but developed to take away the main job of the churches – the education. They also moved from the domain of the Pope to the that of the King, and became the main agency of the state for disciplining the subjects. Today, with the technologies (ICT), education is about to shift to the corporations; the big corporations, or the public limited companies, would be the imparter of required skills and also the guardians of public morality. The universities would exist as churches do but education would move closer to the people, to their closer ownership. 

Niraj Kumar Jha

The Ideological Peril

Ideologies, no matter how crude or sophisticated they may be, give credibility to our existential phantasies. And this is their anavoidable charm and we try to buttress those wild thoughts with our agency and material constructions. Overall, these deny reality, degrade real human beings, distort our agency, and make our life more miserable than the original from which we wanted to escape. 

Niraj Kumar Jha

The Shishupal Moment

Is there a transcendental mechanism of divine justice? The believers vouch for this. One may doubt this but the reality is no different even if it is viewed from a secular perspective. Persons or peoples commit wrongs and they have to pay for that; here I am talking about the phenomenon beyond the legal mechanism which societies devise for ensuring justice. And here it is not meant to explain the plight of people suffering disasters or calamities, natural or not so. Some people have the leeway; they go on doing so for say ninety-nine times, but it comes to them finally as Shishupal faced his nemesis at the hundredth time. Sometimes, it is delayed further and actually the descendants have to face the consequences of the misdeeds of their ancestors. Is it justified? The answer is not despairing as this happens only when a person willingly remains part of the heritage, that is, the person remains embedded in the legacy and thereby the person also carries the liability for the punishment. How does this happen? The existential reality is all about inter-connectedness or interdependence and though all exist as separate entities but as parts of a greater whole. Our consciousness is shaped by our personal experiences, as we can make out apparently, but it also carries inputs from our genetic coding and so many unknowns inform our consciousness, that is to say that our consciousness works as an agency of collective consciousness, transcending immediate time and space, too and it applies to species other than the human beings. All persons and their collectives act and these inevitably invite responses. If somebody commit wrongs, he may avoid the consequences but things keep on accumulating and these come back. Here is another issue, other than this obvious one, which is the intent of this post to underline. That is an act may have intrinsic merit or demerit, irrespective of what we mean by it or propagate it to be, or what the persons other than the doers perceive it to be or believe it to be and that intrinsic virtue or vice leads to corresponding consequences. And if one has to avoid the undesirable results of his doings, the person must look up to science than to the unexamined received moral precepts However, the things do not work so neatly or accurately but we see the happenings at broader scale and we get the idea of this phenomenon.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Veil of Ignorance

Not a hypothetical Rawlsian veil of ignorance but a very real one obstructs our viewing of the future. Simply we do not know what is there in the future for humanity. The aggressive reassertions of the old values and the entrenched forces though  give the impression of the return of the old twentieth century order, rather that may  only be the last bright flickering of a dying order. The present is anything but about the past but it is the big take off point for a new future with massive build-up of forces happening right now, that we live with not to realise their criticality. The new norms, practices, institutions, instruments and their absences are getting into our lives thick and fast. 

This makes the times critical for studying the unfolding of new realities with most care as the future is going to suck us into its unknown belly. This is the time for renewing contracts as people may not be sure of what may be in store for them in the future, and they would consent for a fair order with relative ease. The tasks we have before us are much more daunting than Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau had in their trying times. However, the bursts of technological innovations only contrast with the dumbness of collective minds. We are faltering badly and we may be inviting lots of pain when the new takes us along anyhow. 

Niraj Kumar Jha

Pure Secularism

 A pandemic earlier caused a separation; politics divorced religion. This pandemic we see the unease of science.

Niraj Kumar Jha