Now that I'm a Hindu, I probably have to post about the caste system.
In my posts about Uncle Tom's Cabin and about sentimental literature, I made several statements that commenters disagreed with. First, I said that the Christian worldview is that good things happen to good people. Second, I said slave-owners knew what they were doing was wrong.
Both of these are not totally accurate. The contemporary Christian worldview involves original sin, which means there's no such thing as a good person, so if by 'good things' I mean 'Heaven', then actually your actions have nothing to do with it. What matters is Christ's intercession for you.
Second, many slave-owners didn't think what they were doing was wrong. They had the world-view that's described in Uncle Tom's Cabin by Augustine St. Claire, when he writes about his father:
Now, an aristocrat, you know, the world over, has no human sympathies, beyond a certain line in society. In England the line is in one place, in Burmah in another, and in America in another; but the aristocrat of all these countries never goes over it. What would be hardship and distress and injustice in his own class, is a cool matter of course in another one. My father’s dividing line was that of color. Among his equals, never was a man more just and generous; but he considered the negro, through all possible gradations of color, as an intermediate link between man and animals, and graded all his ideas of justice or generosity on this hypothesis.
That's probably how many slave-owners thought.
My own worldview has changed quite a bit over the last year because of The Mahabharata. I've been reading Bibek Debroy's ten-volume unabridged translation into English. This epic is a story about two sets of cousins who are fighting over control of a kingdom, but it's also a summary of the entire Vedic worldview: it contains an immense amount of Iron-Age Brahminical thinking on economics, governance, ethics, and cosmology.
Over nine months of reading this book, I’ve slowly gained the intuition that the universe is governed by dharma: a principal of rightness and justice that pervades everything. And if you go against dharma, then you will suffer the consequences. Often those consequences will come in this life: Duryodhana lost this war because he was wicked and acted against dharma. Yudhisthira won because he studied the holy books, paid homage to priests, and otherwise acted in accordance with dharma. He is literally called Dharmaraja, the Dharma King. But even if you evade the consequences of going against your dharma, they will accrue to you in the form of karma, which will affect your future lives.
Dharma is something you can understand through logic and by studying the sacred texts, but it's not a human invention. It has some non-material existence. It doesn't exist merely because people have decided that it does.
I, personally, believe this to be accurate. I think that justice has some real existence, and that those who act against justice will be punished.
As a result, I have started calling myself a Hindu, which is the religion I was nominally born into, although my parents aren’t particularly religious and are likely horrified if they’re reading this.
Of course, one logical issue presents itself. This book, The Mahabharata, also espouses a worldview that is quite similar to that of Augustine St. Claire's father. The Mahabharata is to a large extent about how there is a priestly caste, the brahmanas, who are superior, because of their birth, to other classes of people. I have now read many stories in The Mahabharata about how people of lower castes ought to be treated worse and differently. Earlier this month I read a story about a shudra, a low-caste person, who gained some wealth, and he became uppity and started thinking he was important, and as a result he was reborn as a worm. He was punished, by the fabric of reality, for aspiring to something above his station. As the worm puts it:
In earlier times, I was also a man. I was an extremely rich shudra. I was not a brahmana. I was cruel and wicked in the means I used to earn subsistence. I was harsh in speech. I was deceitful and unwise. I hated everything in the universe. I violated agreements in pursuit of riches. I was devoted to appropriating the possessions of others.
Earlier in the book, a sage describes how a brahmana can’t even accept a gift from an outcaste:
If a brahmana who has studied the four Vedas is overcome by confusion and accepts a gift from an outcast, he is reborn as a mule. O descendant of the Bharata lineage! He lives as a mule for fifteen years. When he dies as a mule, he is reborn as a bull and lives in that state for seven years. When he dies as a bull, he is born as a Brahma-rakshasa. After living as a Brahma-rakshasa for three months, he is again born as a brahmana.
The Mahabharata is full of this stuff. That’s because the dharmic worldview is that if people in this life have bad things, it's because they deserve it. They are being punished for some past sins.
Caste is a problem with the text, and it’s a problem with religion on the subcontinent. Various religious reform movements have arisen to try and make sense of this problem.
One possible solution is bhaktism. This is a religious movement that prioritizes a direct connection to God. You are saved—you go to Heaven—through your devotion to God. Bhaktism tends to de-emphasize the caste system, because it makes your karma somewhat immaterial. No matter what you did in a past or present life, you can break through the cycle of rebirth and skip directly to Heaven, just by devoting yourself to God.1
The Mahabharata offers up a similar solution: moksha dharma. No matter your caste, you can escape the cycle of rebirth by focusing your atman and putting aside human concerns. As Krishna puts it:
If they resort to this dharma, those with inferior births, women, vaishyas and shudras, also go to the supreme destination, not to speak of extremely learned brahmanas and kshatriyas, who are always devoted to their own dharma and to the object of obtaining Brahma’s world. This has been indicated in the reasons and means for that pursuit. There are determinations about misery and the successful obtaining of the fruits of emancipation. O bull among the Bharata lineage! There is no bliss that is superior to this. O Pandava! A man who is learned, faithful and brave, one who abandons the insubstantial practices of the mortal world, can use these means to quickly obtain the supreme destination. This is all that needs to be said and there is nothing more. O Partha! This becomes evident if one steadily practises yoga for six months.
Other Hindus have attempted to keep the caste framework but de-emphasize the idea of treating people differently based on caste. Gandhi is the most famous example here. He did not think there should be Untouchability. He supported bills to force Hindu temples to admit untouchable people.
But...it's clear from his writings that he thought Untouchable people were lesser. That they had a different place in society, and you shouldn't treat them worse, but...they belonged at the bottom. Arundhati Roy has a long essay about this called “The Doctor and the Saint”, where she quotes from various letters by Gandhi that really don’t sound good. For instance, when inveigling a Christian minister to stop attempting to convert Untouchables, Gandhi said:
Would you, Dr Mott, preach the Gospel to a cow? Well, some of the untouchables are worse than cows in understanding. I mean they can no more distinguish between the relative merits of Islam and Hinduism and Christianity than a cow. You can only preach through your life. The rose does not say: ‘Come and smell me.’
There is a whole history of privileged-caste Hindus attempting to keep the caste framework while eschewing caste prejudice. I'm reading Dr. Ambedkar's Annihilation of Caste right now, and it's clear he's very frustrated with these attempts.2 Caste is right in the Hindu holy books. It's deeply embedded in the Hindu worldview, and it's a natural consequence of that worldview. In his view, a Hinduism without caste wouldn't be Hinduism.
I don't know the answers. I have the intuition that there is something very true in the idea of dharma. But if you combine a belief in dharma with a belief in reincarnation, then the caste system is a natural corollary: Some people acted against dharma in their past life, and as a result they are born into worse circumstances in this life.
Christianity is also built on the intuition that human suffering occurs for a reason, but Christianity tends to articulate that intuition in much more universal terms.
In Christianity, because of original sin, there's no such thing as a human who is good, or a human who doesn't deserve to suffer. For me, the best statement of this idea is in Jonathan Edwards’ famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”:
The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to hell the last night; that you were suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep.
One natural corollary of this belief is that Simon Legree, the evil, brutal slave-owner in Uncle Tom's Cabin, is no more or less likely to go to heaven than Tom. That since we are all impossibly sinful, then Christ could intercede just as well for Legree as for Tom.3
At this point, I would call myself a Hindu, but it’s a label that comes with troubling implications. Every time I write about Hinduism, I can hear people wondering, “What about caste?”
I don’t think the caste system is good. Inequality exists, yes, but I don’t think the cause of justice is advanced by formally reifying inequality into a religious belief system.
Moreover, my intuition is that Ambedkar was more right than wrong, and that Hinduism and caste are inextricably intertwined. The Hindu understanding of dharma seems to require caste, because dharma hinges on the idea that different people have different ethical responsibilities, depending on their current situation in life. It's some peoples’ dharma to rule, other peoples’ dharma to study the sacred texts, and other peoples’ dharma to do the dirty jobs the first two kinds of people don't want to be bothered with.
Framed in that way, the idea seems repellent to me. And yet, it is precisely the concept of dharma that draws me to Hinduism. I like the idea that behaving rightly has some cosmic meaning. Yes, under Hinduism you can renounce action and/or the fruits of action, but you are not required to do those things. Which is good, because personally, I don’t see myself ever renouncing action, nor do I see myself renouncing the fruits of successful action. The Hindu cosmology has a place for people like me, and that’s something I appreciate. I like the idea that if you treat people well and fulfill your duty, then there will be some reward. You might not go to Heaven, but who knows, maybe some good thing will happen for you someday.
Of course, whether I am living in accordance with dharma or against dharma is unclear to me. Luckily, the Hindu worldview makes this a somewhat lower-stakes issue. I don't think I'm going either to hell or to heaven (both of which exist in the Hindu cosmology). Probably I'll end up as a worm, like that uppity shudra.
In The Mahabharata itself, the book says many times that one of the ways you can accumulate merit is by studying this text. So...that's something at least.
But, to me, this idea that justice has some deeper meaning—it's been a huge consolation in this time. And I don't just mean that God is a cosmic couples therapist, who at the end of our lives will say "Oh yes, Naomi was correct about this situation being messed up".
What I mean is that if justice is real, then ultimately people will be able to come to some agreement on right and wrong, the same way we've been able to agree that slavery wasn't a good thing. That it was unjust. And the way we've been able to agree, on a broader level, that this system of morality where some people are inherently superior to other people—what Nietzsche called "master morality"—was a bad system. That the master morality didn't allow people to grow in virtue and lead dignified lives, and that it was good when this system fell out of fashion. The caste system is another thing that ought to fall out of fashion in exactly the same way.
And yet I feel very keenly the inadequacy of this post. I know that many Hindus have spent their lives trying to either to apologize for the caste system or to pretend that it's not an integral part of Hindu cosmology, and I'm not equal to performing the same task in the course of a blog post. At the moment I am left with the simultaneous awareness that the caste system is wrong, and that there is something about Hinduism that is very true. Perhaps that contradiction will be resolved for me eventually, or perhaps it won't. I have no idea.
In the meantime, I do feel very strongly that injustice has some meaning. When things are wrong, they are not merely unfair or painful—they are wrong because they are against the order of the universe, and that our struggle against injustice is a struggle to uphold a cosmic order that I can perceive, even if I can't quite describe it.
P.S. I’ll be at AWP in Los Angeles next week. I have a signing at the Feminist Press table (Booth 626) from 1:30 to 3:00 PM on Saturday, March 29th, so feel free to drop by and say hello. I’m also doing an off-site reading that evening at 7 PM at 818 S. Spring Street, details below:
Amos Wollen is on fire these days
Okay, so there is a philosophy grad student called
on Substack that I’ve been following for a while, and he’s the latest person I’ve encountered to do that thing where something clicks, and they just completely start killing it with every post.4 He also recently wrote a post on the very subject of karma, and how / whether it should influence our beliefs about punishment. It’s a paid post, unfortunately, but he uses an elegant thought experiment to make the point that if God is truly punishing people for their past sins, then…let’s let God punish them! There’s no need for human beings to join in the punishment as well:You’re still a pro-death penalty retributivist, and there’s still a firing squad training their rifles at a man in handcuffs; this time, though, there’s been an upgrade in the squad’s technology. If they shoot now, he’ll be killed, regardless of whether the man is really guilty. However, if you intervene and the man escapes, the squad’s captain will fire off a “guilt-seeking missile”. If the man is innocent, the missile will sputter and spark and fall lifeless out of the sky. If the man is guilty, the missile will inevitably find its target, even if it has to search for many years.
Suppose, in this version of the case, that you’re 80% sure the man is guilty and deserves to be killed. Should you intervene to save the man, assuming there’s a safe and easy way to do so? To my mind, the answer is surely Yes: if he’s guilty, he’s going to eat crow regardless; by saving him, you only postpone the inevitable. In contrast, if the man is innocent, you’ve saved a life and averted a tragedy. As a result, in expected value terms, the option of saving the man strictly dominates the option of letting him die; given what you know, you ought to save the man, even if you have a credence of .8 that the man you’re saving doesn’t deserve to be saved.
Previous writing about the Mahabharata
Today’s post was inspired by the tenth and final volume of the most recent English translation, by Bibek Debroy, of the unabridged Mahabharata.
I’ve collected in order my series of posts on the Mahabharata, from oldest to newest. Oftentimes the posts are only very loosely related to the volume in question: I apologize for that. My readership grew a lot while I was writing these posts, and in the future I hope to have a cleaner approach to classic texts. I’d like to devote at least a couple paragraphs to describing the contents of each book I read, instead of launching immediately into analysis.
My older posts tended to make very broad, sweeping claims about Hinduism—I still stand by what I said, but I don’t know if I’d use that rhetorical approach in the future, since, fundamentally, it was an approach that was geared to a non-Indian reader, and this blog has now grown to have a pretty substantial Indian audience—an audience I hope to treat somewhat more respectfully than I have treated them in the past.
Volumes 1 and 2
Volumes 3 and 4
Volume 5
Volumes 6 and 7
Volume 8
“The most important news you’ll hear about today” - This post, a sort of obituary for Bibek Debroy, attempts to contextualize the size of his achievement
Volume 9
The most well-established Hindu sect in America, ISKCON, is a bhakti movement that formally rejects caste. Arya Samaj and Brahmo Samaj are two other Hindu reform movements that arose in the 19th-century in part out of opposition to caste.
Ambedkar was an Indian founding father and the author of India’s constitution. He was also a dalit and a leader of the opposition to Untouchability.
The theology is one thing, but in practice I think every reader abhors Simon and believes he’s going to Hell. Everyone can be saved, yes, but people who act against justice will be punished. There is no way that Simon Legree is going to the same place as Tom. The idea is absurd. I do think that, in practice, the Christian worldview is that good people go to heaven and bad people go to hell, even though I know this isn't theologically accurate.
*I do think that, in practice, the Christian worldview is that good people go to heaven and bad people go to hell, even though I know this isn't theologically accurate.*
No, it's more or less theologically accurate, at least for Catholics and those Protestants who believe in free will. It's a very broad-strokes way of saying it, and it excludes the fact that none of us are good except insofar as God gives us the grace to be good, but it's more or less right.
Wrinkle is that we are all good (insofar as we are made in the image and likeness of God) and we are all bad (all of us do evil things and are stained by sin) but people who choose to co-operate with God's grace and live virtuously will go to heaven, and people who choose bad things will go to hell, unless they change their ways.
“The contemporary Christian worldview involves original sin, which means there's no such thing as a good person, so if by 'good things' I mean 'Heaven', then actually your actions have nothing to do with it. What matters is Christ's intercession for you.” It sounds like you’ve gotten your information from a Protestant, which is not synonymous with a “contemporary Christian worldview” (because there is no single Christian worldview).