RELIGION, CULTURE, CIVILISATION AND DOMINATION - II
From the quotations given in Part I of this series it should be clear that I have not used religion and culture to mean the same. Religion is part of a culture and most of the cultures in the present world are associated with a religion. A civilisation could have more than one culture and most of the civilisations are also associated with a religion(s). For example the western civilisation or what I would like to call the western white Judaic Christian civilisation is associated with Christian and Judaic religions. This civilisation can be found in western Europe, north America, Australia and New Zealand. There are many cultures within this civilsation which dominates the whole world today, the white Anglo saxon Christian culture found in Britain, the white Anglo American Christian culture found in USA, the white French Catholic culture found in France being some of them. However, this does not mean that any one of these cultures is homogeneous. There are differences in the cultures of English in the South in Sussex and say for example those in Yorkshire, but in general it is not difficult to identify a culture common to the white Anglo Saxon Christians living in England, which is the hegemonic culture in that country.
What is Christianity, meaning the Christian religion? Is religion a body of knowledge as given in the books say for example the bible the old testament as well as the new testament? There are other books written and we may have to include those as well when we identify the particular body of knowledge. Then there are the rituals either written in books or handed over from generation to generation that also have to included in a religion. It is clear that neither the knowledge in the books nor the rituals remain static. Even if the same book is used, in the sense that the words and sentences are not changed, different interpretations could be given by different people to the words and the sentences. Rituals could be modified and the Christianity of Elizabeth II could be shown to be different from the Christianity of Elizabeth I, not to mention the Christianity of Jesus. Now where do we draw the line between religion and culture. In a culture associated with a religion, the religion is only part of the culture though it could be called the main part of the culture. Sometimes one could find cultures not strictly conforming to the religions with which they are associated. Both religions and cultures are (wo)man made and men and women have been busy creating and modifying religions and cultures throughout history sometimes pretending to be adhering to a religion.
There are certain things that human beings "inherit" biologically. People eat, drink, sleep and procreate like the other animals. Though the human beings have to eat for survival different people eat different things. What we eat and how we eat are dictated by our cultures. The table manners of the western Christian civilisation have to be learnt and practiced not only by those Asians and Africans who want to climb the social ladder in the present world dominated by the western civilisation but also by the western children. They are not born with the skill of using fork and knife though they can learn how to use them. Some of the food habits and "table" manners ( some may not be using tables at all) are dictated by the religions. But there are many aspects of a culture that are not dictated by the religion though some of them may be modified by the religion after some time. For example human beings use language. According to Chomsky we are born with the ability to learn the grammar and hence a language(s). However we do not speak the same language and the languages had been created before the "main" religions of the world were created. Moreover any one religion could be "communicated" in more than one language. However, a religion always enriches the vocabulary and adds expressions to a language and one also finds that certain religions could be expressed better in some languages for the reason that very often these languages through long associations with the particular religions have been endowed with a vocabulary, that suits the religion, by the followers of the religion.
Any religion with its rituals form a body of knowledge within a culture. However, religion is not the only corpus of knowledge and people have created other systems of knowledge within a culture. Sciences, Arts, Philosophies, Literatures, Music etc., have been created within a culture (civilisation) with the western civilisation separating them into their respective categories in a very significant way that is not found in the other cultures. These bodies of knowledge, like religion, though created within a culture nevertheless changes the cultures as a result of the creation. For example the Buddha was able to create "Buddhism" in a Vedic culture that believed in sansara and karma. The Buddha was able to change this culture, by the introduction of anicca, dukka, anatta that were not found in the Vedic (not Hindu, which came long after Jainism and Buddhism) culture, meaning the culture associated with the Vedic religion. In Buddhist literature it is said that before the Bodhisathva left the abode thavthisa he surveyed the world (pas maha belum) to chose the place and time of birth in addition to look for the prospective father and the mother. If the Bodhisathva had decided to be born in a culture that did not have the concepts of sansara and karma he would not have been able to attain Enlightenment. Jesus was a product of the Judaic culture prevailing at that time though he was able to change the culture or introduce a different stream within that culture through his sermons.
In any other field the situation is the same. There would not have been an Einstein if not for Newton and his mechanics. Space and time (absolute, Newton did not use the word absolute) of Newtonian mechanics had become part of the western civilisation, not only through the mechanics and physics of Newton but also through the philosophy of Kant. Einstein who was born into this civilisation was able to change the concepts of absolute space and absolute time. After Kuhn, we would say that Einstein changed the Newtonian paradigm and created the Einsteinian paradigm within the western white Judaic-Christian civilisation. (It is ridiculous when some people talk of paradigm shifts referring to insignificant changes within a paradigm.). One would not say that Newtonian Physics is part of Christianity (as a religion) though not only Newtonian Physics but even Einsteinian Physics have been created within the western white Judaic Christian civilisation. In that sense Newtonian Physics as well as Einsteinian Physics are Judaic Christian. Even the big bang theory that can be deduced from Einstein's general relativity, subject to some assumptions like homogeneity of space, is a product of the western Judaic Christian civilisation, though it does not talk of a creator God. The big bang is not very much different from the creation given in the genesis in the old Testament and it is clear that the cosmologists in the west as well as those in Asia who merely follow them (I was one of them about twenty five to thirty years ago) have been influenced/dominated by the western Judaic Christian civilisation. The western education given to us in Asia (and Africa) dominates our lives unless we are conscious of that fact and our so-called thinking (we are conditioned to think that we think!) is merely an imitation (a third rate imitation at that) of the western thinking. Those in the so-called third world who "think" like the westerners have lost their roots and hence they do not exist as thinking beings. They exist merely as puppets. "I think therefore I am" of Descartes could be modified in the case of the so-called third world intellectuals to say I think therefore I am not!
Even the most trivial knowledge created within a civilisation or a culture changes the civilisation or the culture even in an insignificant way as the latter is the sum total of all knowledges of the people, the way they express their emotions, their attitudes etc. In certain cases a person like Einstein through his or her creation would change a paradigm that has been existing for a long time. A change or shift in a paradigm is necessarily a change in the culture or the civilisation though the converse may not be true always. In our work we have developed another concept called chinthanaya, originally due to Dr. Gunadasa Amarasekera. The chinthanaya is deeper than the paradigm and a paradigm shift could occur without change of the chinthanaya. In that sense the chinthanaya is at the core of a culture and it is possible to have not only cultural changes within a chinthanaya but many cultures based on a single chinthanaya. We consider all the cultures in the western white Judaic Christian civilisation to be based on the Yudev or Judaic Chinthanaya. The chinthanaya of cultures associated with religions are sometimes changed with changes or modifications of the religion.
A chinthanaya comprises of an epistemology and an ontology (not separated from epistemology in Sinhala Buddhism), philosophical background and attitudes in general. (details with respect to Yudev Chinthanaya in Mage Lokaya). They are not mutually exclusive and are inter connected. The philosophical background includes not only the application of philosophical systems such as rationalism, pragmatism, positivism but also logics such as two valued formal logic, three fold logic of Catholicism, four fold logic (chatuskoti)etc. Rationalism is associated with two valued formal logic and Yudev Chinthanaya has been struggling for the last two hundred years or so to break away from this two valued formal logic without any success. The post-isms created during the last fifty years or so and the so-called dialectics reflect this unsuccessful attempt.
The western white Judaic Christian civilisation based on Yudev Chinthanaya has been experiencing a crisis during the last hundred years or so. No new ideas are created in the western cultures. After the paradigm change of Einstein nothing has come out from those cultures. The post-isms and the so-called new trends in "theory" are nothing but apologies for not having being able to come up with new ideas. Leave alone the social sciences and get back to the most advanced science Physics created by the western civilisation. It is said that Quantum Field Theory is the most successful theory in the western sciences that has predicted and explained most of the observed "facts". However, for the last seventy years Quantum Physics in general has been without a philosophical foundation and has been oscillating between realism of Einstein and positivism of Niels Bohr. The experiments and technology proceed though nobody knows what is happening in the sense that no new ideas have been created to "understand" the results of the experiments. It was the Nobel Prize winning Physicist Feynmann who once said "nobody really understands Quantum Physics". I am afraid this understanding has been denied to people in the western white Judaic Christian civilisation due to their inability to break away from two valued formal logic. In that sense a change in the chinthanaya and hence of the civilisation of the westerners is long overdue. They have not been able to change their chinthanaya and as a result technology has taken control over science and also the lives of the people with people having no control over the development of technology. The western man who tried to create robots mechanically and who tried to make the other people in the other continents robots ideologically has become a robot of technology.
(To be continued)
Professor Nalin de Silva
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