Religion — guide or chore?

It is commonly believed in Western lands that India is a religious and mystic land; yet surprisingly it seems to me that in a way, people in the United States (where I have been staying for the past four months) may actually be more religious than people in India. India has often touted itself as a land of culture, religion and values, but is it really such? How does religion contribute to the lives of people in India, as compared with in Europe, America and Africa?

Let me take the example of Hinduism, the “dominant” “religion” in India. More than 80% of the population of India is Hindus, and many Hindus pray to God every day, go to the temple regularly, and even go on pilgrimages. This would suggest that Hinduism has a crucial impact on the way people live and make decisions. Yet, in my experience, Hindu religious activity constitutes yet another chore in many people’s lives, a chore that they believe is important to be “good”, but a chore that is done and forgotten.

Religion can be viewed in two ways: one, as a system of beliefs about the universe, and the other, as a guiding system of values and beliefs that helps one cope with and make decisions in life. For religion to function effectively in the latter way, and to make an impact on the life of people, religious leaders and activists need to play the role of problem-solvers and guides: people to whom individuals can go, share their problems, and get strength and courage to proceed further in life. Further, religious leaders should tackle issues about daily life that concern people the most. This tackling issues could be in many ways: it could be through taking rigid positions, it could be through offering perspectives, it could be through explaining to people how to make sense of the situations. Religion should, in this respect, offer a sense of community and solidarity.

In the traditional Church system, the local priests and vicars play the role of guides; they make statements about current issues, they explain how to interpret current events and the role of such events in their lives. True, some of these views may not be agreeable to all followers of the religion; some of them may be considered oppressive or exploitative, and some of them may be based on an erroneous understanding of recent developments. Nonetheless, the religion makes an attempt to provide a framework relevant to one’s current life. The rabbi plays a similar role for the Jews.

Hinduism has no such canonical reference point. While it’s hard to say whether this is good or bad, what is probably more notable is that there is hardly any reference point for Hinduism. There are some modern-age gurus who try to address problems of modern-day life, yet the typical image when one thinks of a Hindu priest is as somebody who arranges ceremonies, leads processions, and chants mantras. I do not know anybody who would consider going to the local Hindu priest to make a confession. Hindu temples are rarely places where a lot of people get together to discuss matters of day-to-day importance, or to pray together. There is no equivalent of the namaz that Muslims do every Friday.

This is also seen in the interplay of religion and politics in India. Politics in India is hardly affected by actual religion; the effect is more in terms of “religious politics”. In a number of more modern countries, churches and religious organizations have an active set of demands regarding prominent issues that affect the people; often these demands get voiced. In India, most demands of religious politicians center around the building and re-building of religious monuments, the declaration of religious holidays, and playing one religious subsection against the other.

In fact, I have a strong feeling, contrary to popular wisdom, that it is the very irrelevance of religion in the life of many Hindu Indians that has led Indians to adapt so quickly to the world; not influenced by too many religious beliefs, and not really believing strongly in any approach to living, Indian Hindus have readily taken to Western habits. This is not so much the case with people from other communities, particularly Muslims. Having a greater sense of community and closer direction and guidance from religious precepts may actually have encumbered Muslism from adapting.

It is possible that the irrelevance of religion in the lives of people in India, apart from the occasional ritual here and there, is a recent phenomenon. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is debatable. What is unfortunate is that though the guiding value of religion in daily life is low, the effect on superstitions, prejudices, and inter-community separation continues to remain high.

Prejudice, yet again

What are the roots of prejudice and discrimination and why do these continue to haunt society today? These are big questions, and the typical answer — that prejudice is a tool for oppression, is only half the truth. In this post I’ll try to explore some of these.

The University of Chicago area has had serious law and order problems over the past few decades; mugging and looting are very common here, and whenver one is walking on the streets here, one needs to be on the lookout for suspicious individuals. Unfortunately, thieves and burglars do not carry a unique identifying mark by which one can recognize and avoid them; hence it is important to develop a sense of who is more likely to be a thief. Some of the heuristics I have developed in this regard border on prejudices, for instance:

The crime statistics indicate that most crimes are perpetrated by locals, rather than University students, and moreover, by young teenagers among the locals. Males are more likely to undulge in mugging. Thus, if I know that a person is a university student, I am less apt to suspect the person. Unfortunately, it’s not even clear, looking at a person, whether he or she is a university student. If the person across the street is female, I don’t feel so scared. Then again, the age group matters: if a person looks the age of 20-25, the chances of that person being a university student are higher, so I’m more relaxed; on the other hand, a person aged around 15 makes me suspicious.

But even age is not obvious, so I use other cues. For instance, I know that a large fraction of the local population comprises Blacks, whereas the fraction among university students, though not zero, is considerably lower. Thus, a person being Black increases the chance that that person is not a University student. On the other hand, if I see somebody who looks Chinese or Japanese or Indian, I surmise that the probability of this person being a university student is high.

This can qualify as prejudice, because I appear to be making an implicit statement that Blacks are more likely to commit crime than Indians or Chinese or Japanese. Actually, that’s not the statement I am making; if I were in India, I would probably be more suspicious of a native Indian than a Black, since I’d consider it unlikely that a person would come from another country to mug me. The point is that certain heuristics which I hav edeveloped for self-protection (of course, these heuristics may be wrong) effectively cause me to be prejudiced against certain people.

However, this level of prejudice differs from what people usually call prejudice because it is only prejudice pending further information. It is prejudice based on conditional probability under limited information, and even a little more information I have about the person can immediately change the amount of “danger” I perceive in him or her.

As in this example, prejudice involves association of certain characteristics with certain others, even though there may or may not be any logical implication from one to the other. A person’s skin colour or religion may be no indicator of that person’s honesty or criminal tendencies.

Prejudice pending further information is the mildest form of prejudice, and the one that is most open to correction, if one is willing to receive further information. Most prejudices run deeper than that; we typically call a person prejudiced if the prejudice survives strong information or evidence to the contrary. Moreover, a number of prejudiced people do not even realize that the information they have is far from sufficient to draw the conclusions they are drawing.

Why do people acquire such prejudices? The hint is in the notion of association; if an association is strengthened a lot in one’s mind, then that association proves itself and no further proof is required. To give an illustration, even in today’s modern India, where crores of Hindus and Muslims co-exist, a number of my Hindu friends, and more so people a couple of generations older, have strong anti-Muslim prejudices. The interesting thing is that although India has a large number of Hindus and Muslims, and there is no open friction or hostility among the communities in most areas, the Muslim community remains largely separated from the Hindu community, and interaction is very little; much of mainstream Indian cinema has all its lead characters as Hindus, despite a sixth of the population being Muslim. Thus, a number of Hindus have had hardly any interactions with Muslims, and yet some of them harbour strong prejudices against Muslims. While these prejudices may not result in active war or fighting, it could have lots of other effects: fewer interaction with people from Muslim families, discriminating against working for a Muslim employer’s shop, or discriminating against hiring a Muslim employee, and many other things.

This brings up yet another point: it is often said that prejudice is a tool for exploitative oppression. This is true to a large extent: the people who kickstart a prejudice may use it to justify the oppression of a certain community, and hence greater gains for another community. However, it would not be correct to say that everybody who suffers from a prejudice is using it to exploitatively oppress, or benefit from it. A number of prejudiced people just inherit the prejudice as a passive legacy from others, through constant reinforcement. They do not gain from the prejudice, but they have nothing to gain (as faras they can see) from the painful process of introspection and openness by which they can get rid of the prejudice, so they see no reason to put in an effort (even if they realize they have a prejudice).

The fight against discrimination and towards greater equality certainly must address prejudice, but it must do so in novel ways; in ways which take into account the rational roots of prejudice, which take into account that among the people who are prejudiced, there are those who benefit exploitatively from it and there are others who passively move along; that there are some prejudiced people who will shed their prejudices given further information, while there are others for whom shedding the prejudice means questioning what they have always believed in.