The Peripatetic Philosopher on the Power of Belief:

 What we can learn from Hinduism.

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© October 28, 2018

The Power of Belief 

“Amish and the Jews have it right," Klaus writes, “everybody can believe what they want to believe, and they make no effort to convert.”  The Hindus have it better.

The Amish population is around a quarter million while the world Jewish population is about 15 million with 6.8 million of that total in Israel.  By contrast, Hinduism is practiced by a billion souls, most of them in India, while Confucianism which is not actually a religion, but an ethical discipline is practiced by a billion with most of them in China.  Christianity is the world’s largest population with nearly 3 billion souls with Islam the next most populous religion with more than 1.5 billion practicing the faith.  That said, Hinduism appears to be the least contentious and polarizing faith on the planet for reason. 

Hindus, like Confucians, do not believe in God.  They believe in hundreds of thousands of gods with every sect, or sub sect of Hinduism worshiping its own God, Goddess, or holy creature. 

With Hinduism, you can pay your respects to some beliefs and not to others or you can believe in none at all.  You can be vegetarian or eat meat.  You can pray or not pray.  None of these choices determines whether you are a Hindu.  There is no apostasy or heresy because there is no core set of beliefs, doctrine or commandments.  Nothing is required.  Nothing is forbidden.

Sir Monier-William (1819 – 1899) captures the essence of this in Hinduism (1877):

Hinduism is all tolerant . . . It has its spiritual and its material aspect, its esoteric and exoteric, its subjective and objective, its rational and irrational, its pure and impure.  It may be compared to a polygon  . . . It has one side for the practical, another for the severely moral, another for the devotional and imaginative, another for the sensuous and sensual, and another for the philosophical and speculative.  Those who rest in ceremonial observances find it all-sufficient; those who deny the efficacy of works, and make faith the one requisite, need not wander from its pale; those who are addicted to sensual objects may have their tastes gratified; those who delight in meditating on the nature of God and Man, the relation of matter and spirit, the mystery of separate existence, and the origin of evil, may here indulge their love of speculation.  And this capacity for almost endless expansion causes almost endless sectarian divisions even among the followers of any particular line of doctrine.     

Incidentally, the absorptive power of Hinduism is illustrated by its impact on Buddhism.  Buddha was Indian, and Buddhism was founded in India, but it has been essentially absorbed into Hinduism in India today.  That is not the case with Islam in India.  But it is a fact that no Al Qaeda terrorist so affiliated has been found in India.  On the other hand, India is a Hindu country that was ruled for 400 years by Muslin dynasties so its history of tension with Islam is real. 

While India is an emerging economic, political and technological power with more than a billion souls in the largest democracy in the world, the Hindu caste hierarchy and its cultural beliefs and practices make this something of a daunting task.  British historian, Paul Kennedy (born 1973) writes:

The sheer rigidity of Hindus religious taboos militated against modernization: rodents and insects could not be killed, so vast amounts of foodstuff were lost; social mores about handling refuse and excreta led to permanently insanitary conditions; a breeding ground for bubonic plagues; the cast system throttled initiative, instilled ritual, and the influence wielded over local rulers by the Brahman priests that this obscurantism was effective at the highest level (The Rise & Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, Random House, 1987, p. 13).

Acquiring Independence from Great Britain in 1947, only 71 years ago, it is now a nuclear power, burgeoning economic market with an emerging professional class of engineers, technicians and scientists, Kenney adds:

Here were social checks of the deepest sort to any attempt at radical change.  Small wonder that many Britons, having first plundered and then tried to govern India in accordance with Utilitarian principles, finally left with the feeling that the country was still a mystery to them.

That is because Hinduism is not a religion in the conventional sense, but a loose philosophy, one that has no answers but many open questions with its only guiding principle that of ambiguity.  Still, it is a misnomer to consider India a “Third World” county as it is a do something society comfortable in contradiction and obscurantism, while not obsessing with its history or mountainous climb out of once pervasive poverty.   Then there is the United States of Anxiety.

The American sickness that won’t seem to go away.

The United States has a history of anxiety despite its legendary accomplishments worrying about losing its competitive edge and hegemony. The country retreated back into complacency after the successful conclusion of WWII in 1945, only to be stunned with the Soviet Union’s successful launching of the Sputnik satellite into space in the late 1950s.  The American Space Program followed with the push for new math and science in schools.  

The US went through a similar anxious period when OPEC in the 1970s cut off oil supply, and the economy tanked with double digit inflation and double digit unemployment.  Forty years later oil exploration in Alaska and off the coastlines of the nation has put ecological sentiments on hold.  

The economic boom of the 1960s following WWII did not prepare the nation for the emergence of Japan, Inc. as a competitive threat in the 1970s and 1980s.  Once sacrosanct American industries -- the automotive industry, and manufacturers of machine tools, electronics, glass products, and household appliances -- felt the economic presence of Japan, Inc. shaving away market share with higher quality less expensive products, panic set in.  Pandemonium followed.  While America slept, Japan, Inc. suddenly appeared to be the economic superpower of the future.  

That proved not to be the case, but as we moved into the 21^st century, commercial American airliners filled to capacity with passengers were commandeered by Al Qaeda terrorists and flown into the Twin Towers in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, DC on September 1, 2001.  The Twin Towers were destroyed taking the lives of 3,000 citizens and the Pentagon severely damaged. 

What now appears in hindsight a monumental miscalculation, perhaps even a watershed moment was the preemptive invasion of Iraq with the suspect intelligence from the CIA that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.  American political scientist Fareed Zakaria (born 1964) puts this in some perspective by referencing Great Britain’s descent:

(In the Boer War of 1899 in South Africa) the British commanders resorted to brutal tactics – burning down villages, herding civilians into concentration camps (the world’s first), sending more and more troops.  Eventually, Britain had 450,000 troops in southern Africa fighting a (Afrikaner) militia of 45,000.  The Boers could not hold Britain back forever, and in 1902 they surrendered.  But in a larger sense, Britain lost the war . . .

Fast forward to today.  Another all-powerful superpower . . .  takes on what is sure will be another simple battle, this one against Saddam Hussein’s isolated regime in Iraq.  The result a quick initial military victory followed by a long, arduous struggle, filled with political and military blunders and met with intense international opposition.  The analogy is obvious, the United States is Britain, the Iraq War is the Boer War – and by extension, America’s future looks bleak (Post-American World, W.W. Norton & Co., 2008, pp. 172-173).   

A common sentiment to Great Britain’s decline from international dominance is “if only it had avoided the Boer War,” while others are saying “if only the United States had avoided the Iraq War.”   

In any case, five years after the start of the Iraq War, there was the economic crash of 2008 demonstrating self-indulgent America was to pay for its consumer mania along with the prohibitive costs of that war.  The Federal Government came to “bail out” General Motors and Chrysler from their bankruptcy status with the rationale “they were too big to fail.”  The era of behavioral politics without consequences continued.

*     *     *

It would be comforting if some learning took hold from these episodes, but there is little evidence that is the case.  Wall Street in 2018 is again unhinged.  People are spending like there is no tomorrow and the American political system has lost its ability to compromise; its ability to bite the bullet and endure the pain of correction, putting that off for another day. 

Meanwhile, across the length and breadth of the nation, America has become a contentious and polarized society with no one seemingly in charge or manning a highly dysfunctional political system with the nation's constituency in complete denial of its complicit role in this state of affairs. 

America’s high anxiety status is not new and has been going on at least since the “panic of 1837” which found the United States in financial crisis.  Then as now an overly rigid political system became captive to money, special interests, a sensational media, and adversarial ideological groups in Washington, DC and across the nation. 

Author Fareed Zakaria writes:

A “can do” country is now saddled with a “do nothing” political process, designed for partisan battle rather than problem solving.  By every measure -- the growth of special interests, lobbies, pork barrel spending – the political process has become far more partisan and ineffective over the last three decades (The Post-American World, 2008, p. 212).

Today there are few moderate Democrats and Republicans in Congress or in either party with the result gridlock.

If the American people could only loosen the screws a single turn, take themselves less seriously, retreat from the debilitating myth of “American exceptionalism” and embrace the world as it is, not as they would like it to be; if the American people and its political leaders could learn something from the opposite end of the cultural spectrum, such as that of Hinduism, perhaps it is not too late for America to regain its momentum, not only for the United States, but for the world at large.