Dawkins and Prabhupada on Cultural Relativism

Note: My "Devotional Dawkins" series of posts is not designed to prove or even assert the factual correctness of either Dawkins' Darwinian narrative or the Vedic worldview narrative. Its purpose is to demonstrate that there are significant points of congruence between the two. Caveat Lector. And on with today's post...

It is often thought clever to say that science is no more than our modern origin myth. The Jews had their Adam and Eve, the Sumerians their Marduk and Gilgamesh, the Greeks Zeus and the Olympians, the Norsemen their Valhalla. What is evolution, some smart people say, but our modern equivalent of gods and epic heroes, neither better nor worse, neither truer nor falser? There is a fashionable salon philosophy called cultural relativism which holds, in its extreme form, that science has no more claim to truth than tribal myth: science is just the mythology favored by our modern Western tribe. I once was provoked by an anthropologist colleague into putting the point starkly, as follows: Suppose there is a tribe, I said, who believe that the moon is an old calabash tossed into the sky, hanging only just out of reach above the treetops. Do you really claim that our scientific truth — that the moon is about a quarter of a million miles away and a quarter the diameter of the Earth — is no more true than the tribe's calabash? “Yes,” the anthropologist said. “We are just brought up in a culture that sees the world in a scientific way. They are brought up to see the world in another way. Neither way is more true than the other.”

Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I'll show you a hypocrite. Airplanes built according to scientific principles work. They stay aloft, and they get you to a chosen destination. Airplanes built to tribal or mythological specifications, such as the dummy planes of the cargo cults in jungle clearings or the beeswaxed wings of Icarus, don't. If you are flying to an international congress of anthropologists or literary critics, the reason you will probably get there — the reason you don't plummet into a ploughed field — is that a lot of Western scientifically trained engineers have got their sums right.

- River out of Eden, Richard Dawkins, p. 31-32

A nice example of Richard Dawkins doing what he does best - arguing in a cogent, entertaining, memorable and widely-accessible way.

In my copy of the audio book, which Richard Dawkins personally narrates, he goes on to say:

This is not the first time I have used this knock-down argument, and I must stress that it is aimed strictly at people who think like my colleague of the calabash. There are others who, confusingly, also call themselves cultural relativists, although their views are completely different, and perfectly sensible. To them, cultural relativism just means that you cannot understand a culture if you try to interpret its beliefs in terms of your own culture. You have to see each of the culture's beliefs in the context of the culture's other beliefs. I suspect this sensible form of cultural relativism is the original one, and that the one I've criticised is an extremist, though alarmingly common perversion of it. Sensible relativists should work harder to distance themselves from the fatuous kind.

I don't agree with all of Richard Dawkins' conclusions, but I do admire his intellectual rigour, his clarity, and his intellectual honesty.

Dawkins will lay the "cultural relativist smack" down hard when he feels he needs to - for example in the video below. This use of the argument is public debate, so it's more populist than the carefully measured argument he makes above.

What he is doing here, pre-emptively I must add, is defusing what he perceives as an attempt to inject another cultural context into the conversation he is having within the cultural context of modern science. You hear the murmuring of the crowd when the question is asked? That's Dawkin's signal to go on the offensive to keep the crowd (and note the rock star applause he gets at the end - classic). However, we can see from the above statement that he is not opposed in principle, and in fact thinks it a good idea, to analyse cultural belief systems as a gestalt - a complete whole.

This sensible approach to understanding an unfamiliar system of thought is echoed in A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada's introduction to his commentary on Bhagavad-gita, called Bhagavad-gita As It Is:

So according to the statements of Bhagavad-gita or the statements of Arjuna, the person who is trying to understand the Bhagavad-gita, we should at least theoretically accept Sri Krishna as the Supreme Personality of Godhead, and with that submissive spirit we can understand the Bhagavad-gita. Unless one reads the Bhagavad-gita in a submissive spirit, it is very difficult to understand Bhagavad-gita, because it is a great mystery.

- Bhagavad-gita As It Is, Bhagavad-gita As It Is

"Submissive" in this sense means suspending critical analysis of the work until all the pieces of the work and their relationship have been grasped, and the work can be considered and critiqued as an integral whole. Readers of Bhagavad-gita who attempt to analyse it piecemeal, without comprehending the gestalt, will be defeated in their attempt to understand it.

I know this, because that is what happened to me. I read through the first three chapters of the book without any problem, but when I hit the fourth chapter, and read a statement that the Bhagavad-gita had been extant in human society for 120 million years, I put the book down, saying: "This is ridiculous". That statement, admittedly, is not in the original text, but is in Prabhupada's comment on a text.

Some time later, by associating with persons who had grokked the metaphysical system expounded in Bhagavad-gita, I was able to again study the work and gain some comprehension of the overall system that it presented.

There is some debate today among students of Bhagavad-gita As It Is as to the effectiveness of Prabhupada's commentary in the contemporary context. Personally I think it is a double-edged sword. Some people find it very beneficial in helping them to understand the Bhagavad-gita, as do I now. In my case, however, the commentary initially ejected me from the book. I find a commentary such as that provided by Swami B.V. Tripurari, Bhagavad-gita, Its Feeling and Philosophy to be more initially accessible, and the one that I would probably recommend for a first read to friends who are intimately familiar with the ins and outs of Dawkins' world view, written as it is with them in mind.

Swami BV Tripurari is a student of Srila Prabhupada, one who has studied Bhagavad-gita As It Is in depth, and produced a commentary in which he wanted to (and I feel he succeeded) preserve the intent of Prabhupada's commentary, while making it more digestible for an audience coming from a modern scientific background, and perhaps lacking the close personal association that made Bhagavad-gita As It Is accessible to me.

My own teacher, Devamrita Swami, frames his presentation of the Bhagavad-gita's metaphysical system, Perfect Escape, in a similar way. I am paraphrasing here from memory, as I do not have the book to hand:

[Update: I located my copy, and it is now verbatim. One thing to note is that the target audience for this argument, and the book itself, are not those influenced by Dawkins, but rather those influenced by 'new age' concepts]

Often contemporary seekers of spirituality look askance at spiritual texts from another era. "Why trouble yourself with the dry bones of previous millennia?" they say. "Those books had value for people then, but not now! All you need for your enlightenment is right there within yourself - here and now. The book is a dead artifact from someone else's distant past, but you are the living truth, at this ever-present moment."

I would like to point out that you can only be aware of something through consciousness - your consciousness. Whether that object seems to be of the past, present, or future, it is, in effect, of your consciousness at the present moment. So there is no need to try to isolate yourself from spiritual classics by artificially exporting them to a lifeless Siberia, a barren terrain "outside of consciousness: commonly known as "the past". Just as you are here, now, so is this transcendental text... why not see if there is some advantage to acknowledging the book's presence - in a reality, of course, that can only be known as you and of you?

- Devamrita Swami, Perfect Escape, p.2

The structure and intent of the argument is the same - the idea is to suspend judgement until the whole picture has been assembled, then treat it as a complete whole.

So in terms of how this information should be approached, as a gestalt - Dawkins and our Vedic spokesman, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada are in agreement.

I don't think that fundamentalist Creationists would be so intellectually liberal as to allow for that. My experience of critiques of both Dawkins and Bhagavad-gita by persons who subscribe to Creationism as a doctrine is that in a majority of cases they have not understood either as a complete whole, but rather try to poke holes in pieces of them, taken out of context. Ted Haggard's statement about the "eye or ear forming accidentally" in Dawkin's video "Root of all Evil" is a classic example of this.

So on this point, I call 100% congruence.