Seventy-five years ago this month occurred an extraordinary debate in an Indian newspaper that retains enormous resonance today. On the surface, the debate concerned India’s system of caste, regulating both employment opportunity and social standing based on the accident of birth. On a deeper level, the debate concerned the role religion should play in matters of governance.

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar was born in 1891 into a family of Mahars, one of India’s “Untouchable” castes. That alone would have sealed his fate to a life of abject degradation (9 of his 13 brothers and sisters died in childhood), but for the fact that his father was employed by the British Army, and used the contacts he made there to secure his children an education denied to virtually every other Untouchable in the land. Young Ambedkar made the most of his opportunity, and wound up earning advanced degrees from Columbia University and the London School of Economics.

As one of the only well-educated Untouchables in all of India, Ambedkar rose to political prominence as the leading representative of his caste. Throughout the 1920s, he fought tenaciously for more equal treatment, and was rewarded with a seat at the table in 1931 when the British convened a “Round Table Conference” to move India closer to self-rule.

The star of that show, though, was not Ambedkar but Mohandas Gandhi. Gandhi fused religion with politics; he led a campaign of civil disobedience in 1921 that brought India to the brink of independence, but suddenly called it off because a handful of followers were not conducting themselves as God intended. Again in 1930, Gandhi led a civil disobedience campaign, initially centered on opposition to the salt tax. India’s prisons overflowed with tens of thousands of protestors, rendering the country virtually ungovernable – until Gandhi agreed to a one-sided “compromise,” without consulting anyone, that didn’t even modify the salt tax. It did, though, lead to the Round Table Conference.

The Muslims who comprised a quarter of the population had supported Gandhi’s campaigns enthusiastically at first, but became disenchanted by his capriciousness and his insistence that his actions were dictated by the “Voice of God” he heard inside his head. At the Round Table Conference, they insisted on “separate electorates,” with Muslims given the right to elect a fixed proportion of the new Parliament, to protect themselves from being swamped by the Hindu majority. Gandhi was willing to accept that, because the Muslims were so politically powerful.

Ambedkar then made the case for similar treatment for India’s Untouchables, who were nearly as numerous as the Muslims. In fact, for anyone who believes in the equality of human worth, the argument for the Untouchables was far stronger than the argument for the Muslims. They had been oppressed so severely, for so many centuries, that the only way to begin to dig themselves out of their hole was to become a voting bloc in Parliament to be reckoned with.

Gandhi was fiercely opposed, because he could count. If you give away a quarter of the seats to the Muslims, and nearly a quarter to the Untouchables, then throw in the complication of the Sikhs and a smattering of Christians, then suddenly his upper caste Hindu working majority might not be a majority anymore. Besides, the Untouchables were Hindus, and he – Gandhi – was God’s choice to speak for the Hindus.

The more secular British listened to Gandhi, they listened to Ambedkar, and they made a decision: Ambedkar was right – the Untouchables should have a separate electorate just like Gandhi had agreed the Muslims could have. This would last for a period of 70 years, which was judged to be sufficient time for them to achieve equality.

Gandhi responded to not getting his way in a calm, mature, and sportsmanlike manner. He announced that he was going to kill himself. More than just announcing it, he started doing it, by means of a “Fast Unto Death” that he would maintain until the British agreed to reverse their position on political rights for the Untouchables.

Gandhi’s fast riveted the attention of the entire world, no one more than Ambedkar. He saw the riots breaking out across India, and he could picture the bloodbath that would ensue against the entire Untouchable population if it were blamed for murdering the revered Mahatma. As Gandhi lay on his suicide bed, Ambedkar reluctantly concluded that he had to surrender the only victory his people had ever won. The resulting compromise ended the dream of the separate electorate, in exchange for a promise that a fixed number of seats would be filled by Untouchables who had been hand-picked by their higher-caste superiors. Nothing, of course, prevented the selectors from filling the quota with Uncle Toms, which Ambedkar believed is exactly what ensued.

Realizing that he needed to shore up support, politician Gandhi then embarked on a campaign to urge upper caste Hindus to treat Untouchables more like human beings, even to go to the extreme of occasionally sitting at the same dinner table with them. The rhetoric was strikingly similar to that of American Protestants 80 years earlier, urging slaveholders to treat their property more humanely while preserving the institution of slavery itself. The results were pretty much the same as well: pious promises to do better, followed by nothing at all. Two years later Gandhi abandoned the campaign, after God sent him a message (by means of an earthquake in Bihar province) that he should be working on something else.

In 1936, a group of Hindu reformers sympathetic to Gandhi’s “Be kind to Untouchables” push invited Ambedkar to speak at their conference. They were aghast, though, when they received the text of what he proposed to say. The first ¾ of what Ambedkar called The Annihilation of Caste was bad enough, with Ambedkar’s devastating critique demanding not kinder treatment but the complete dismantling of the whole rotten structure. What pushed them over the edge, though, was the closing, where Ambedkar blamed caste on Hinduism itself and boldly announced his personal decision to abandon forever the religion of his ancestors.

The organizers neatly eliminated this headache by canceling the entire conference. Gandhi, though, realized he needed to do more than that. If Ambedkar led 50 million Untouchables out of the Hindu fold – especially if they landed (Rama forbid) in Islam – his claim to speak for the Indian majority would evaporate. He tossed Ambedkar a bone by allowing him to publish his undelivered speech in Gandhi’s own newspaper, where he could later publish his own rebuttal to calm the troubled waters.

So 75 years ago this week The Annihilation of Caste appeared in Gandhi’s newspaper. “Why is it that the large majority of Hindus do not inter-dine and do not inter-marry?” asked Ambedkar.

There can be only one answer to this question and it is that inter-dining and inter-marriage are repugnant to the beliefs and dogmas which the Hindus regard as sacred. … the Hindus observe Caste not because they are inhuman or wrong headed. They observe Caste because they are deeply religious. People are not wrong in observing Caste. In my view, what is wrong is their religion, which has inculcated this notion of Caste. If this is correct, then obviously the enemy you must grapple with, is not the people who observe Caste, but the Shastras [Hindu scriptures] which teach them this religion of Caste. … The real remedy is to destroy the belief in the sanctity of the Shastras. … You must destroy the Religion …

Reformers working for the removal of untouchability, including Mr. Gandhi, do not seem to realize that the acts of the people are merely the results of their beliefs inculcated upon their minds by the Shastras and that people will not change their conduct until they cease to believe in the sanctity of the Shastras on which their conduct is founded. No wonder that such efforts have not produced any results. … To agitate for and to organise inter-caste dinners and inter-caste marriages is like forced feeding brought about by artificial means. Make every man and woman free from the thraldom to the Shastras, cleanse their minds of the pernicious notions founded on the Shastras, and he or she will inter-dine and inter-marry, without your telling him or her to do so. …

You must not only discard the Shastras, you must deny their authority, as did Buddha and Nanak [founder of Sikhism]. You must have courage to tell the Hindus, that what is wrong with them is their religion—the religion which has produced in them this notion of the sacredness of Caste. Will you show that courage?

Next week: Gandhi’s reply

Luis Granados

Trend-setting San Francisco will vote this fall on an important child-protection referendum that ought to be a no-brainer. Sadly, thanks to the pervasive power of God experts, it will probably lose.

Circumcision is a procedure for cutting, and sometimes permanently removing, part of a person’s genital organs. Sound appealing? Something you’d rush to sign up for? Well, you can – and no one, in San Francisco or elsewhere, proposes to stop you. If you want to inflict this insanity on another person, though, that’s different – especially when the other person is a child entrusted to your protection. The San Francisco referendum would ban the circumcision only of minors, allowing adults to choose for themselves.

In fact, circumcision of children is already flatly banned by federal law in the United States, for half the population – the female half. Nonetheless, thousands of American girls have suffered through the procedure, as have 140 million women around the world. For boys, though, anything goes. Is this because boys are tougher? Is it because male circumcision is less severe than female circumcision? Not really. Just last year, the American Academy of Pediatrics approved, then quickly rescinded, a proposal by “moderate” Muslims to achieve the religious benefits of female circumcision by means of a small nick to a girl’s clitoris, that would quickly heal – a far less intrusive procedure than whacking off an entire part that will never grow back. In a burst of common sense, AAP said no, that’s still outrageous, and no doctor should ever do it. The whole idea that a particular variety of mutilation is ok because it is “less severe” than some other variety is ludicrous: punching a stranger is less severe than shooting him, but I still wouldn’t recommend it.

But what about the rights of parents? Those rights are broad, but not infinite – and they terminate abruptly when the physical well-being of children is involved. It is now well-settled in most jurisdictions, even Oregon, that religious parents may not rely on prayer rather than medicine when their children are sick. What, then, gives parents the right to slice off their children’s body parts? Nothing at all – other than a chorus of experts telling us all about God’s will. Circumcision, they say, is an ancient religious practice, mandated by the Book of Genesis itself.

Well, so is slavery. So is genocide. Humanist common sense prevailed against those barbarisms – now it’s circumcision’s turn.

Female circumcision is an ancient religious practice as well, mandated today by Al-Azhar University, the closest Muslim equivalent of the Vatican. If the law can protect girls from religious circumcision, why can’t it protect baby boys? I even dimly recall something or other in our Constitution using the phrase “equal protection of the laws.”

Other supports claim that circumcision is justified by health benefits, including reducing urinary tract infections, and can even help prevent the spread of AIDS. In fact, the health benefits of genital cutting are minuscule, and offset by the risk of infection – as medical organizations around the world agree.

Opposition to the referendum comes not just from Jews and Muslims. Catholics like the Archbishop of San Francisco and Protestants like the National Association of Evangelicals are in full howl – despite the fact that Saint Paul unambiguously warned that “if ye be circumcised, Christ shall profit you nothing.” One more case of “pick and choose” theology, where God experts plumb for the Bible commandments they agree with and ignore the ones they don’t.

For their efforts, San Francisco’s child protection advocates are being likened – naturally – to the Nazis of the 1930s. This is par for the course whenever someone challenges the prerogatives of Jewish God experts. Somehow, the desire to protect Jewish boys from irreversible harm strikes me as being the 180-degree opposite of anti-Semitic.

Where did the whole monstrosity of circumcision come from, anyway? If you guessed it came from Genesis, you’d be wrong. It was practiced by the Egyptians long before the Torah was dreamt of, and was one of many ideas (along with not eating pork) borrowed by the fertile minds who pasted together the Jewish religion. Some historians speculate that the original symbolic point of circumcision was a ritual castration to make boys more like girls, which seems a little farfetched. Others speculate that circumcision was intended to be a “less severe” substitute for human sacrifice. But Jews kept right on sacrificing humans long after circumcision was introduced, so that seems farfetched as well.

Maimonides, the 12^th century sage who imagined rationalizations for all 613 laws of Judaism, perhaps came closer to the truth:

With regard to circumcision, one of the reasons for it is, in my opinion, the wish to bring about a decrease in sexual intercourse and a weakening of the organ in question, so that this activity be diminished and the organ be in as quiet a state as possible. … The fact that circumcision weakens the faculty of sexual excitement and sometimes perhaps diminishes the pleasure is indubitable. For if at birth this member has been made to bleed and has had its coverings taken away from it, it must indubitably be weakened.

Maimonides went on to address today’s issue in San Francisco, of why circumcision must be performed on infants rather than limiting it to persons old enough to make up their own minds:

If the child were let alone until he grew up, he would sometimes not perform it. … if it were left uncircumcised for two or three years, this would necessitate the abandonment of circumcision because of the father’s love and affection for it. At the time of its birth, on the other hand, this imaginative form is very weak, especially as far as concerns the father upon whom this commandment is imposed.

Jews have not always practiced circumcision. Around the turn of the 3^rd century BC, Israel was ruled by the secular Tobiad faction, that sought to bring society more in line with the humanist practices of the surrounding Mediterranean world. Circumcision, among other things, became verboten. One of the popular pastimes back then was to hang around naked in the public baths, where everyone could check out whether you were circumcised or not. Circumcision became so unfashionable that clever Jewish doctors developed a procedure to reverse it, to make it appear to your buddies that you were one of the cool modern guys rather than one of the circumcised hicks. Amazingly, this was even before the invention of duct tape. The Tobiads didn’t last, though; they were soon overthrown by the God expert Maccabees, who busied themselves whacking off every foreskin they could find.

My take is that circumcision isn’t really about demasculinization, human sacrifice, or libido repression. It’s about power. It’s about God experts permanently branding new members of the community, in the most intimate manner, with the message that “You count for nothing as an individual. You’re here to serve an invisible spirit, who communicates to you through me. So stay in line.”

This is why God’s commandment in Genesis was to circumcise not only your sons, but your slaves. This is why the Maccabees forced the circumcision of the neighboring Gentile peoples they conquered. It’s why Christian God experts, anxious to protect their own power against humanist common sense, are so quick to jump to the defense of a Jewish and Muslim practice. It’s why even in modern times, according to Israel Shahak, Israeli burial associations, who have a monopoly over the burial of all Jews except kibbutz members, circumcise the corpses of non-circumcised Jews before burying them (and without asking the family’s permission). And it explains the great romantic story of the book of Samuel, about how young David won the hand of the girl he loved:

And Saul said, Thus shall ye say to David, The king desireth not any dowry, but an hundred foreskins of the Philistines, to be avenged of the king’s enemies … Wherefore David arose and went, he and his men, and slew of the Philistines two hundred men; and David brought their foreskins, and they gave them in full tale to the king, that he might be the king’s son in law. And Saul gave him Michal his daughter to wife.

Back in college, many decades ago, I developed a crush on a beautiful Jewish girl, whose name now escapes me. What I do remember is that she only grudgingly acknowledged my existence. If only I had thought to read my Bible! If I had just brought her father a gift of two hundred enemy foreskins, she might not have loved me, but she surely would have noticed me.

Luis Granados

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but apparently the government is to blame for a struggling economic recovery. Regulations and taxes are bootstrapping American business, and the only cure is free-market capitalism. Fifty-nine percent of Americans favor free markets, a central issue of conservative groups, particularly the Tea Party.

But after reading a McClatchy-Marist poll that reports 68% of conservatives (70% among Tea Party supporters) oppose cuts to federally funded social programs like Medicare and Medicaid, I’m starting to think they don’t understand what capitalism is.

A free market is one which is absent of government interference. It is directed by supply and demand. The idea goes that if allowed to trade freely, people will choose the best goods and services at the best prices. This forces costs to fall and quality to rise. Socialized medicine like Medicare and Medicaid artificially increase the demand for healthcare while the supply of health care providers stays the same, affecting the opposite outcome.

We don’t actually know what the exact outcome would be under a system of laissez-faire capitalism, instability being a key feature. No such market has ever existed; Hong Kong and Singapore are pretty close, but their governments spend public money on things like housing and education, thereby adversely affecting the market.

So just for fun, let’s build ourselves a pure capitalist mecca and venture through it, from the height of its ivory towers to its deepest ditches.

Once Upon A Time

You’ve never seen a city so beautiful. Its buildings pierce the clouds with their uniquely sculpted peaks. Each one is given special attention by the architect who designed it and treated like an individual. They are monuments that reflect the human spirit—anchored to the ground but always reaching higher than the generations before. Sure, every so often one will collapse by the negligence of an unscrupulous contractor, but the occurrence isn’t common and justice is duly meted out.

Commerce has made the best of everything available in the many pristine shops lining the streets— even sex and drugs. And quality is guaranteed; none of the weed is brown, and the prostitutes have all their teeth.

Despite the concerns of the family-oriented, these products that once fed vice have been made clean by bringing them out of the alleys. No one is shot because their cocaine is cut with too much baking soda. Customers can easily buy a superior product elsewhere. No one beats up their sex workers. They’d get reported to the Better Business Bureau. There is still corruption, but shrinking the size of government has made it much easier to keep an eye on things.

Education standards are consistently rising. Technology is advancing at an unprecedented rate. Rain tastes like candy, and everyone shoots sunbeams out of their jolly asses. They are all happy, healthy, and comfortable.

The End. A happily-ever-after of unregulated capitalism that makes everyone’s life better.

Atlas Sagged

Well okay, so not everyone. A free market prohibits government interference; no Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid or other welfare. Schools and other once-public services are competely privatized. Employers are free from regulations on working conditions and minimum wages.

The median household income is close to that of Hong Kong, where the average family of 3 brings in HK$17,500 (about $2,250 USD) every month, 42.5 percent make less than HK$15,000 per month. But at least taxes are low.

There are various charities aimed at educating the poverty-stricken, but there are too many to care for and generosity hasn’t expanded with the economic freedom. For their part, the rich have kept the youth out of trouble by giving them jobs in their homes and factories.

I’d tell you about the living conditions for the unfortunate—infant mortality rates, deaths caused by curable disease, hunger, homeless rates—but they would seriously undermine the capitalist utopia I’ve painted for you.

Anyway, that’s how Social Darwinism works. Everyone has the same opportunities to succeed regardless of the class into which they were born.

It’s interesting that so many Republicans dismiss Darwin’s theory of what is, yet readily adopt what they think it should be. But hey, that’s America for ya.