The following are excerpts from the author’s book
January 22, 2024, was the moment of arrival of the Hindu Raj for a Hindu Rashtra. As prana, or life-breath, was being infused into the stone idol of Rama, life-breath was draining out of the secular India of the Constitution.
What happens next? What lies ahead for post-secular India?
That is the question this book sets out to explore. The central thesis of this book is that the post-secular India will be a post-truth India. It examines the refashioning of thought in the ongoing Gleichschaltung of the public sphere. Under the pretext of decolonization, our fundamental conceptions of reality and truth are being brought in line with a highly romanticized and Vedicized Hinduism. A post-truth culture is emerging in which pseudo sciences parade as science, mysticism lays claim to a legitimate scientific method, myths substitute for history and baldfaced lies drown out objective facts. Post-secular India is on its way to become a post-truth society.
Post-truth: A Culture of Bullshit
America-First nationalists in the US and their Hindu-First counterparts in India are threatening to tear apart the secular-democratic fabric of their societies. The difference, of course, is that in India, the state itself has all but declared itself to be a state of the Hindus and for the Hindus, whereas Christian nationalism still dares not say its name openly in America.
What these two faltering democracies share is that both have descended into the Kali-yuga of post-truth, when asatya, untruth, alone wins.
‘A Field Guide to post-Truth India,’ Meera Nanda, Three Essays Collective, 2024.
Underlying the Big and the Deep lies is a shared political impulse, namely, to bend our sense of reality to fit political agendas and religious dogmas. In these post-truth times, accepting the facts of the matter, and respecting truth-conducive methods of inquiry, have come to be seen as matters of expediency; truth comes to be treated as if it were an optional accessory, or an “ornament” that we may choose to put on, or not, depending upon whether “it suits me? Is it a good thing to wear to the social party?” as Simon Blackburn put it in his 2003 book, Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed. When factual truth ceases to be a constraint on power and becomes an artifact of power, an ornament to be worn, or not, depending upon what looks and feels good for political ends, we have entered the post-truth world.
The word “post-truth” was chosen by the Oxford Dictionary in 2016 as the word of the year. The dictionary defined post-truth as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” The “post” in post-truth is not meant in the sense of the “time after” truth – a time after the idea of truth is dead and done with. If there was no concept of truth, would we even know that we are post-truth? If the idea of truth were to disappear, how would we even recognize a lie, or a half-truth, or a quarter-truth, or plain bullshit?
In the post-truth condition, truth still exists, and a lie is still a lie.
Two and two still make four; Trump did lose the 2020 presidential election, the lies of the Sangh Parivar about the “pampered” minorities are lies, no matter who repeats them and how often. What happens in the post-truth world is that objective, verifiable facts lose their relevance in public discourse. In the post-truth world, the public becomes so inured to being lied to and being fed a diet of pseudoscience, that we lose the ability to call a spade a spade, a lie a lie, a fraud a fraud.
Like weeds choking a pond, “bullshit” takes hold of a society that is sliding into the post-truth condition. Post-truth culture is a culture of bullshit described brilliantly by Harry Frankfurt, an American philosopher, in his 2005 book, On Bullshit. Bullshit, Frankfurt argues in this celebrated essay, is different from lies in the sense that the liar knows that what he is saying is not true, while a bullshitter does not care one whit whether what he is saying is true or false, as long he can get what he wants. A liar knows the truth but hides it, while a bullshitter is indifferent to the whole business of truth, and that is why, Frankfurt believes, “bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are.”
No one can trump Trump when it comes to bullshitting; the man can casually and habitually bullshit even when what he says contradicts events caught on camera. The real crisis of post-truth America is not that Trump bullshitted, but that his bullshit swung enough votes to put him in the White House.
India has its share of bullshit, but it appears in the guise of pseudoscience routinely put forth by top “experts” and the everyday snake-oil peddlers alike. One could say that pseudoscience is the preferred style of bullshit in India wherein seemingly profound claims –all backed by “science” – are made which have no determinate, verifiable content. Pseudoscience belongs to the family of bullshit because, like bullshit, it too produces epistemic noise that pretends to be supported by scientific evidence but is, in fact, completely indifferent to the scientific method and established scientific facts. Both bullshit and pseudoscience are more dangerous than outright lies, because lies can be debunked by sufficient scrutiny but pseudosciences resist refutation by not making definite claims at all (Ladyman 2013, 53). Whereas Trump-style plain bullshitting has led to the conditions where Big Lies thrive in the United States, the proliferation of pseudoscience, as we shall see, is feeding into Deep Lies in India.
Two Routes to Post-Truth
There are two ways in which truth is hollowed out and made irrelevant in the post-truth era.
The first takes the form of simple bullshit: outright, bald-faced lies which knowingly disregard the facts of the matter. This kind of subversion of truth has become widespread in the age of social media and the internet which have made it possible for just about anything to pass as “fact.”
Simple bullshit is corrosive to public discourse, but it is relatively easy to debunk by due diligence using standard procedures of evidence and logic. Although they can be spotted and debunked, lies are difficult dislodge once the culture of bullshit has taken hold. You can fact-check with all your might, but since the bullshitter and his public do not care about truth or facts, no amount of fact-checking can make a difference. Let us call this variety of post-truth which can be breathtakingly outrageous but remains, at least in principle, amenable to fact-checking the “Big Lie.”
The second is a higher, deeper form of bullshit which is more akin to religious fundamentalism because it relativizes what is taken as real and what is accepted as rational to the dominant religious traditions. It erases all distinctions between factual truth and religious dogma, between truths backed by empirical evidence and Absolute Truth revealed by gods or spiritually endowed ancestors, and between history and mythology. This kind of bullshit is harder to debunk because it refuses to play by the accepted secular-rationalist procedures of inquiry denigrating them as scientistic and “Eurocentric.” Let us call the second variety which can be as outrageous as the Big Lie, but remains, in principle, immune to falsification the “Deep Lie.”
Big Lie is simple fakery, Deep Lie is deep fakery. Both mock and subvert the ideal of objective truth, and both deny the spirit of truthful inquiry.
Deep Lie in Action: National Education Policy
Here is one telling difference between a Big and Deep Lie. Trump’s Big Lie in the United States was not accompanied by school boards, colleges, and universities starting Trumpian courses in how to bullshit and how to spin alternative facts. It cannot be denied that the cultural wars fueled by Trump and the Republican party’s xenophobic, nativist politics continue to reverberate in American educational institutions, with many states enacting laws that would limit what teachers can say regarding race, sexuality, and American history in classrooms. But there is also a resurgence of critical thinking, accompanied by re-reading of Hannah Arendt, George Orwell, Sinclair Lewis, Vaclav Havel, and other critics of totalitarian regimes’ distortion of truth. If anti-science rhetoric has become “democratized,” it is also facing strong pushback from public intellectuals who are making a fresh case for the importance of science and critical thought for a functioning democracy.
In India, in contrast, the Big Lies are being supplemented with an overhaul of education, from top to bottom, under the National Education Policy (NEP) announced in 2020 that gives pride of place to millennia-old Hindu sciences and philosophical systems. The proposed changes would amount to rewriting the fundamental rules and background assumptions of what constitutes justified true belief. If modern secular education, at its best, aims at cultivating a critical spirit that gives primacy to questioning, revising, and even discarding those ideas that fail the test of best-available modes of knowing, the goal of NEP is to inculcate pride in Hindu heritage and a sense of patriotic duty to think and live according to the tenets of this heritage.
The stated motivation of the NEP is to decolonize and spiritualize education. Instead of the ham-handed way in which the earlier BJP-led government (1998-2004) tried to ram through degree courses in astrology and priestly rituals, Modi’s education policy seeks to braid traditional sciences and traditional philosophies of knowledge under the rubric of “Indian Knowledge Systems” (IKS) in all disciplines, at all levels of education. The objective is to create a seamless web of beliefs based upon the traditional Hindu panpsychist metaphysics which sees the material world as permeated by a spiritual “shakti,” and traditional epistemology that allows the outdated methods of analogies, correspondences, and the testimony of the spiritual “seers” as valid sources of evidence. These much-hyped knowledge systems, moreover, evolved as part and parcel of Hindu religious traditions whose goal was not objective knowledge of the external world, but liberation of the soul from the physical body. The introduction of these knowledge traditions into secular education serves no purpose other than to cultivate a false pride in India as the world’s guru and to declare India’s mental independence from the colonial hangover.
Also read: Big Lies and Deep Lies in Post-Truth India
Introducing traditional ways of knowing in public education is treated as harmless and even commendable as an antidote to Westernization. Even the critics of Modi’s drive for Hinduization have largely responded to the IKS component of Modi’s education policy with a shrug. After all, they argue, students will still study all the modern subjects; and the institutes for scientific and technological research will not cease to exist. What possible harm can come from introducing indigenous traditions, they ask? They might even restore some balance, for have we not been toeing the Western line for too long. This, in broad strokes, is where the majority opinion stands.
What they don’t fully appreciate is that IKS is a Trojan horse for the Hinduization of thought. The teaching of IKS in school curricula, alongside the regular modern natural and social sciences, is no different in principle from the attempt in the US to teach intelligent design creationism alongside Darwin’s theory of evolution in high schools as was tried under the Bush administration. In the US, where the First Amendment prohibits the state from making any law “respecting the establishment of religion,” the courts shot down this proposal on the ground that intelligent design was not science because it relied upon the unproven existence of a Christian God. In India, on the other hand, we have no safeguard against introducing Hindu knowledge systems, all of which assume the existence of an all-pervading, all-knowing spirit.
The NEP is a silent coup against secular education because the injection of Hindu metaphysics and modes of knowing can substantially inflect the background assumptions so that an alternative reality begins to feel real and comes to co-exist with, if not overshadow, the secular content of the curricula. Introducing the paradigms long overturned by advances in modern science means presenting the rejected knowledge and sterile methodologies of these paradigms as viable options for learning and research in the 21st century. Rewriting textbooks that present thinkers of an earlier era – an Aryabhata or a Kautilya, for example – as if they were working on the same problems that engage modern-day astronomers, political scientists, and economists, turns them into the founding fathers of modern astronomy, political science, and economics, thus laying claims of Hindu India’s priority on modern ideas. What is worse, the intellectual revolutions that have overturned Aryabhata, and radically revised Kautilya, are erased from the consciousness. Thus, the ancient comes to be made contemporaneous with the modern, and any critical impulse the students might have harbored is nipped in the bud.
This kind of intellectual engineering will prepare the grounds for Deep Lies to take root and flourish. In such a culture, unfalsifiable assertions can be passed off as scientific facts, because what constitutes evidence itself gets redefined along the lines of what traditional knowledge systems consider as evidence. Because traditionally the memory of the past was passed down in the form of myths, myths can now be justified as history under the cover of following the intellectual traditions of our ancestors. Because the evidence of analogies (upamana) and correspondences (bandhus) is accepted as valid in most Indian philosophical schools, pseudo-sciences like astrology and vastushastra that depend upon analogies and correspondences can pass as legitimate sciences that are as empirical and rational within the Indian cultural universe, as modern science is within the Western world. Because the shabda (word) of the shista (the “cultured,” and those learned in the Vedas) is pramana (proof, or means of knowledge), shlokas from the sacred books become incontrovertible “proof” that can be deployed in support of any assertion.
This analogical and mystical mode of apprehending empirical realities constitutes the philosophy of the Indian variety of the Deep Lie. An ordinary lie, or even a really Big Lie, can be shown to be a lie because it contradicts the available evidence that can be accessed through due diligence by ordinary mortals, deploying the ordinary tools of observation and reason. Deep Lies, on the other hand, are propositions that appear perfectly coherent and plausible within the parameters of their own metaphysics and rules of evidence. For those who accept these parameters – which includes the vast majority of everyday Indians – even the suspicion that they are being lied to would not arise, because they would be given irrefutable “evidence” to support the narrative. Refuting these kinds of Deep Lies would require refuting the entire world picture of classical Hindu thought – something beyond the abilities of even the most talented fact-checker.
***
“The sleep of reason produces monsters,” as the title of Francisco Goya’s well-known etching would have it. The monsters that lie in wait for India are the Deep Lies that will pass as “scientific truths” as Modi’s education policy takes hold of India’s schools and universities. These monsters will devour all that is still standing in our secular democracy.
Meera Nanda is a historian of science.
