Things read - Week 40

For the last couple of weeks, I have been reading Salman Rushdie's autobiography - "Knife." I picked up this book with the same sense of uncertainty that I pick up 93% of other books, wondering if I will be able to enjoy it, especially since I have not read any of his works. But I did enjoy it. More than getting to know about his life, I enjoyed his ideas and the way he communicated them throughout the book. Let's take a look at some of them here.

I was never able to explain the kind of peace and happiness that comes from keeping things private. Many a times, it almost felt selfish to keep things to the self. At other times when I did share and received acknowledgments, I wondered should I do that more often. But when I did things for sharing, it felt performative. So always a tussle between opting for internal peace or external acknowledgments. In the book, he briefly touches on this:

There is a kind of deep happiness that prefers privacy, that flourishes out of the public eye, that does not require the validation of being known about: a happiness that is for the happy people alone, that is, just by itself, enough.

Something strange has happened to the idea of privacy in our surreal time. Instead of being cherished, it appears to have become, for many people in the West, especially young people, a valueless quality—actually undesirable. If a thing is not made public, it doesn’t really exist. Your dog, your wedding, your beach, your baby, your dinner, the interesting meme you recently saw—these things need, on a daily basis, to be shared.

And then the following paragraph hit it home for me that privacy isn't secrecy. When you experienced something, instead of sharing it with the world, share it with your friends and families. With the people that matter in a way that actually matters – 1-on-1.

This did not mean we kept our relationship secret. My family knew, and so did hers. Her friends knew, and so did mine. We dined out together, went to the theater, cheered at Yankees games at the Stadium, walked around art galleries, bopped at rock concerts. We led, in short, the ordinary life of New Yorkers. But we stayed off social media. I didn’t “like” her, she didn’t “like” me. And as a result, for five years, three months, and eleven days, we flew almost completely under the radar.

And now, his most controversial take on religion and god:

Many people, liberal as well as conservative, find themselves in difficulty when asked to criticize religion. But if we could simply make the distinction between private religious faith and public, politicized ideology, it would be easier to see things as they are and to speak out without worrying about offended sensibilities. In private life, believe what you will. But in the rough-and-tumble world of politics and public life, no ideas can be ring-fenced and protected against criticism.

I have long thought of this hypothetical past as something like the childhood of the human race, when those distant relatives of ours needed gods in the way that children need parents, to explain their own existence and to give them rules and boundaries within which to grow up. But the time comes when we must grow up—or ought to, because for many people that time still hasn’t come.

I—have no need of commandments, popes, or god-men of any sort to hand down my morals to me. I have my own ethical sense, thank you very much. God did not hand down morality to us. We created God to embody our moral instincts.

There is no denying that, at first glance, these arguments make sense. However, upon further scrutiny, you can see some tiny gaps. When he says that the past is the childhood of the human race and that they needed gods the way children need parents, he assumes that being secular is equivalent to being mature. It is up for debate whether modernity is necessarily wiser than tradition.

The 20th century's secular ideologies such as Nazism and Stalinism committed unprecedented atrocities for decades. So abandoning god in the past, hasn't helped much either.

And final counterargument is that religious traditions contain accumulated wisdom from thousands of years. Religion isn't just about gods, but they encode solutions to recurring human problems. They have been surviving for so long because they work at some level.

• Jewish kosher laws about not mixing milk and meat probably have prevented food borne diseases before we understood bacterias.
• Islam prohibits excessive interest which aligns with modern concerns about debt traps.
• Hinduism multiplicity (many gods, many paths) suggests that there are multiple ways to experience reality or live a good life. (Sure the religion has other challenges like Sati, caste discrimination etc which are deeply problematic but indulge me for a second :) )

I will leave you with something called The Chesterton's Fence principle: It states that before tearing down a fence, understand why it was built. Maybe it's preventing something you haven't encountered yet.