Dear and Glorious Physician

Dear and Glorious Physician
By Taylor Caldwell


I picked this book up at random. It was sitting on a coffee table and I knew not how it got there. I have great appreciation for Taylor Caldwell, both her work and the exceptional life she lived. In classic Caldwell style she paints every scene so as to place the reader in it. Caldwell is surely 20th a century rival to the likes of Hugo. You can actually smell the pomegranate in the Roman gardens while reading her book. You get a real sense from this book that the wealthy of Rome had many of the luxuries of today’s modern man. The missing mechanical inventions of the 19th and 20th centuries were simply replaced with slaves and servants. Lucanus, the Physician and main character was the son of a Greek freedman. From that perspective the reader gains a purely neutral view on the strife between Jew and Greek or Roman gentile. Caldwell never speaks directly to it; however the reader, late in the book, begins to sense that in too many cases that the Jews though good people were their own worst enemy when it came to integrating with other cultures.

As the story the story goes: Lucanus the young boy of a freed Greek slave still serving the son of his one time master Diodoris was a prodigy philosopher, though after reading his scripture not a very good writer, aspiring to be a physician. His mentors early on were a Roman tribune, a Greek record keeper, and a Greek tutor. The first two were both frauds in their association with their social setting which was a fraud in itself. In spite of those mentors, Lucanus pursues the one unknown God of the Jewish religion.

Mid way through the book, as Lucanus prepares to leave the Alexandria school of medicine, a graduate Physician, his Jewish teacher bids him farewell and tells a story of a boy born under a star in the East. The teacher predicts that Lucanus shall seek this boy and its only then that this reader of the book has the epiphany; Lucanus - Luke. It allows the author to make Luke an objective critic. An interesting twist of events exposes the Jews as the first to discriminate against the black man, by Caldwell's reference to the legend of HAM. It is also the Jew who doesn't recognize Christ as a messiah but is the Jew who is the early physician/scientist. Karmaiclly it is the Jew who has witnessed a millennium of Diaspora and its discrimination. In a few places the book Caldwell implies that the fate of the 'Diaspora' Jew was of his own making.

While early on Caldwell uses Lucanus to examine a merciless and hateful God, later she introduces the evil man as an alternative. Within the evil man is greed and envy where it's envy playing the evil role over a wealthy man who found his wealth through generosity? Generosity is hinted as being the channel to wealth as a generous person is a good steward of money. This reader was receptive to this hint because of outside influence. It is at this point that the light begins to come into Lucanus’s life that perhaps it is not the vengeful God, but vengeful man at the root of his depression

Caldwell provides a narrative, through the voice of Lucanas’s brother Priscus, the Roman Captain who supervised Christ's crucifixion the telling of that event. The story rivals all I had previously read in any Catholic program that I was raised in. This mainly speaks poorly upon my study. Lucanus's reaction is a revelation to the tormenting he had bore through his life. It was his 'born again' moment where, albeit only implied by Caldwell, that Lucanus became a Christian. Interestingly enough in that moment Lucanus tells his brother of the resurrection purely out of internal conjecture. Lucanus in Caldwell’s book had no fact or word from anyone that Christ had risen.

The first theme of the book is the search to define God. While the ancient people had there gods, Lucanus was busy examining the One God to the extent his challenge to that idea brings forward the notion that the word God is a concept and not a being at all. And so in exploring the concept of god, the second theme being developed is; there is no one philosopher or philosophy that is complete. Caldwell writes through one of her characters Keptah, Lucanus/’s tutor; many philosophers are not wise at all things. Keptah went on; "If a man were to live solely by the theories of the philosophers he would not survive, nor would he retain his sanity. I take this to mean two things. First man is incomplete…until his death.

A third theme comes to full maturation as Lucanus, a seasoned physician, treats the father of three wealthy sons. His illness is derived from a psychosomatic condition. In his analysis Caldwell, through the voice of Lucanus drives home the treatment of a person is more than the function of his body. The point stressed is your health is largely determined by how you both live and view your life. At this point the reader would be reflecting back on the death of an early main character, Diodoris, and contemplating the meaning of death with honor. While it may have not registered with the reader at than moment, Lucanas makes real clear that a physician’s role recognizes that death is every part of life and he must help the dying find comfort in death.

A forth theme may be Lucanas's philosophy that everything can be explained by science. There are many occasions where his treatment of a patient apparently on the brink of certain death, saves his life. In every life saving event Lucanus would say the patient was miss diagnosed. A physician would intuitively be of this mind. Its logical, reason of the mind. However Lucanas's loss of an early love to a fatal illness perpetuates revulsion to anything of the heart as well as a deep rooted contempt for those who believe in the unknown God; though he struggles with both. Lucanus advocates to the unlearned that they must trust the wise. Where as the wise reader knows that no collection of man, let alone any one man, knows everything; as this is the justification for science... what a paradox!!! The purpose of this theme I suspect is to discount all the life saving miracles of Christ and in the balance to poke a stick in the eye of science.


I was compelled upon finishing the book to read Luke’s Gospel and Acts. Specifically to Caldwell’s gradual enlightenment on this subject Luke directly writes the following in ACTS 10:28:
Peter to Cornelius: “You yourself know it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or visit a Gentile, but God has shown me that I should not call on anyone profane or unclean. So when I was sent for, I came without objection. Now may I ask why you sent for me?”

My translation: From the days of Christ to 2012 follows this train of semantics. While the Jews associated with creature and man by nomenclature, naming, categorizing and applying rules of law to them; Peter a new Christian delineated between, clean and unclean [in spirit]. He then approached a man of unknown character, looking for the opportunity to recognize his Holy Spirit [‘clean’ intention’, spirit of whole man, using my term - w’holy, one man] in him.

Did Caldwell, by putting Luke's Gospel including Acts I & II in the context of his life put the whole story on trial? Is their divine coincidence in the undercurrent of the spirit of mankind? Is there an ethos that science has yet to discover? Could science and religion surrender their swords and come to an agreement that there is indeed a mystery not to life but in life. Luke’s was a life of long bitterness and then long searching for the One God. Apparently, according to Caldwell this search was a common place, though not necessarily of Romans, of Rome at that time. Luke's gospel is taken in a tone of mystic allegory, where Caldwell's reconstruction of Luke's life gives a rise to the story that was behind the author(s) that was behind the allegory. That rise takes the mysticism out and lends a sense of realism to the accounting of the life of Jesus Christ.

I am not sure to what degree Caldwell intended, she implies an unfavorable character in the Jews. To those early adopters of Christianity many of whom were Jews there is no admonishment of the Law. But rather a following of tradition and fervor of the rabble character of simple people that became the agent of the birth of the Way of which we know today as Christianity. Christianity came to man as the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy of which only the humble paid credence to. The Jews, who proclaimed only they to be chosen, were their own worst enemy. If only they lowered their adulation's to themselves, could they have avoided the following 1947 years of what became a Diaspora of tumultuous tragedy.

John the Baptist’s angry and vengeful announcement of the Messiah lit the fuse for Christ's crucifixion. Was that the way God intended the story to unfold? Or is this simply the nature of God...man? Is the nominal name we apply to nature, God? Praise be the nominalists, whether he/she be the High Priests of Judea, the Holy Imams of Mecca, or the Popes and Cardinals of the Vatican, that fall way short of their goal of simply stating reality, physical observation of our world including the psychology and sociology of man, is to be accepted purely as it is. This is the meaning of love. Between Luke a Gentile along with Paul a Jew, Christianity wins it's case in court, where the rabble continue the argument. In Caldwell's version she closes with a case for motherhood. Caldwell uses an allegorical story between Christ and a dark angel. The allegory tells of the virtue of mother earth...nature. Unfortunately it is the nature of man through his nominalistic character, with its dependence on the use of words, one required so far to communicate, a function of community, to argue. The argument is not of reality, but of their rendition of it.


Annotated Bibliography

Page 59: a long predicted Star is witnessed by Keptah he recognizes the message of love. He says to himself have been cleansed... I have been born. Blessed is the Name if the Lord.". A he knees dud have to see him for he knew he who had been born was with all men, in every place on earth, at this hour, and would never depart again.

Page 103: Diodoris, already characterize as one who despises the new Rome, remarks in a fit of rage “corrupt citizens breed corrupt rulers, and it is the mob who finally decides when virtue shall die....Rome's soldiery virtue died with Caesar Augustus.

My note: Caldwell spends enough time drawing a dichotomy between the virtues of a soldier and the decadence of the egalitarian society of the rulers that the read suspects either the weaving of a moral message or the drama in the plot.

Page 137: [Lucanus at the death of Rubria his child love vows to his mother Iris to defy God and not allow Him to snatch life from people.]. Lucanus murmured to Keptah, " surely it would be merciful to give him a potion and bring him death."

Keptah shook his head slowly, "Hippocrates has declared that is forbidden. Who knows at what instant the soul shall recognize God? Shall we kill the sufferer tonight when in the morning the recognition would come? Besides man cannot give life. Therefore it is not for him to give death. These are reserved only for Him, who is unknowable to our natures, and who moves in mysteries. "

My note: Caldwell wrestles as late as the 1950's with a physician’s decision of life or death. I appreciate she may be a clairvoyant in terms of regression. However examining the same decision in 2011, the physician’s role has become that of a scientist]. In this context has science and religion merged, or has the Scientist assumed the role of God? If he as assumed such, is he qualified? It begs the expression: 'only God knows.’ While medical science may have usurped God in giving life (cloning) and preventing death, has science overlooked the rest of the equation... A universe or at least an earth that can sustain a population explosion?


Page 149 [in the reconciling of the deaths of Aneneas, Lucanus' father, and Rubrea, Diodorus' daughter; Lucanus describes his regret for having treated his father in such a condescending way]. “I lost my father," Lucanus said ... " I am a son who came not to hate his father, but to be despise him lightly as a man if little learning and of many pretensions. I became arrogant and impatient, and condescending. I forgot all he suffered, all he had known.... I did not lose my father in those years, but my father lost a son. And now the son has lost his father, and I cannot reach him and ask his forgiveness for cruelty and impatience and pride of youth."

Diodorus' ... "Surely the gods do not reject contrition, and surely the shades in the regions of death are aware of repentance."

[Diodorus found peace in their dialogue. Lucanus, found in his youth only revenge. Revenge railed against a God who showed mo mercy for the one he loved. The dialogue and all of chapter 12 was about the dichotomy of selfishness and love for life].

My note: Does the scientist of 2011 have the moral compass to navigate the shoals of selfishness? Is it death itself that promulgates morality itself? Death being the prime variable to scarcity prompts moral thinking to choose between himself as though his body and spirit were inseparable and the living, all the living, mankind.

Page 153: comfortlessly, Lucanus would ask himself (If we are not immortal then why were we born? If I could only believe there is no God! But I believe in Him, and from Him I will have His victims, if not his answer! He haunts all men for the satisfaction of his hatred.

Page 186: says Diodorus; "Remember this, my children, that oppressive government is fiercer and more feared than a tiger.

My note: a common thread woven into the author’s moral message with Diodorous as the raw material.

Page 195: [in dialogue with a Jewish professor on a Indu professor of art, comparing Hindu to Judaism]. He has discussed with Joseph ben Gaiel [Lucanus poses the question on Hindu and Karma]. Then the Jew had said, "No. One only has to consider the illimitable harmony of nature, which is the reflection of God, it's precise laws which never deviate, its exactness. God is the Law and the Law is perfect and immutable."

My note: if the Jews has stopped there as opposed to writing the Torah and the Talmud’s their religion may not have run in to so much opposition...perhaps?

Page 196: As all patients were either slaves or destitute, experimentation upon them was sometimes merciless and quite often the experiments had no relationship to the immediate disease at all. This Lucanus found intolerable and hateful, and again only the Jewish teacher understood [not the other three in the room; Indi, Egyptian, or Roman]. The others kindly laughed at Lucanus. “Is it not justifiable that one man die so that others, multitudes, may live?" they would ask him. To which he would reply, while the Jewish teacher listened in searching silence, "No. One man is as important as a mass, and perhaps even more so."

My note: With the Holocaust in mind; why did Caldwell write this? She implies that only the Jew understood the concept that one life was as valuable as many. She clearly in context of the pertinent chapter condemns directly the Hindu, and then non specifically draws in any other than Jews. This is before Christ, so Christians get a pardon so far.

At this point this reader is dedicated to reading Luke in the Bible to see where one mans life equates to One Man as this Christian of Unity Doctrine sees it.

And finally to this point, I have to ask; has modern medicines challenge to death lost its moral compass? There was once a role where physicians allowed man to die in dignity. Have we evolved to ongoing experiments in biology to the advancements of medical research and the material rewards that come to the physician that breaks through?

This queer attitude did not diminish the affection and respect of the physicians. But when Lucanus would lament over mortal illness and work until he sweated to relieve its pain and to save the patient, all but the Jew were puzzled. Truth, knowledge was the object of
medicine. Death was the fate of all men, and pain also. "Yes, men must die,” Lucanus would say bitterly. "But is it not our duty to be most greatly concerned with pain? Even the pain of a slave?

My note: We know Caldwell is well researched and clairvoyant. What is her source on this philosophical question?

My note: This passage also speaks to the mission of doctors that would form the view of the American Founding Fathers. The scope of medicine then recognized death and at the same time looked to preserve life. But first and foremost was the dignity of the life while living, knowing death is inevitable. What is today's scope of medicine? Is it to prolong the biological term for the sake of medicine, as could be the case in Mary Schiavo? Does today's medicine exceed or deviate from the scope of our Founding Fathers. This question is most pertinent with the onset of Obamacare. Tying this to the other theme Caldwell explores through Diodorus, can government be so big to be oppressive through egalitarian excesses? Example IRS employees get free mass transit passes for work, so as to sponsor the government mass transit system. Would government employees, ie Congress and their families continue to get special medical care over the masses? These are moral questions that challenge not only medicine but also society. At present medical advances are out in front of our moral consensus as a society. Should we wait? Or shall we proceed and throw out the compass, as well as the rudder and sail into uncharted waters and leave the fate of man kind to chance? With 300 pages to go, I am hoping Caldwell speaks to this in more broad terms than the specific chapter, which speaks directly to whole medicine rather than specialized medicine. Was Mary Schiavo kept alive by medicine so as to study her organs? After all the current television series House speaks exactly to this subject.

Page 249: said Diodorus: "Listen to me Keptah! A mans first duty is to God and his country. Nations are God's expression of spiritual realms. When those nations become abandoned and debased, given up to bloody pride and debauchery, to war and tyrant, then they have deaaced the kingdoms of the earth, and penalty is death. Rome will inevitably
die unless many like me shall speak, and where are the voices raised in her behalf? Who shall cry out to Romans, 'You have destroyed what God has built and you must return to freedom and purity and virtue at once, lest you die'?"

Page 276: Keptah to Cusa on Lucanus; He said Rome was already lost, but man is not lost, a sophistry I did not refrain from pointing out to him. Man is his own executioner; he hangs himself in his own cross; he is his own disease, his own fate, his own death. His civilizations are an expression of him.

Page 281: Keptah says to Lucanus: Civilization to you is man's pathetic attempt to bring order to nature, to regulate it in to some form of meaning, to guide it's pointlessness in to some semblance of significance To you nature in it's seeding, it's growth, it's death is
a sum without an equation, a circle encompassing nothingness, a tree that flowers and bears no fruit and dies in a from desert. Such thoughts are lethal; they are frightful with death.

My note: my first thought was Godell, Escher, Bach. Most importantly was Godell's incompleteness theorem. Nature is incomplete and therefore we live on as a species. Science's penchant to remake nature under the pressures of society to be first more comfortable and then to defy death is a slippery slope with a frozen pond o tf thin ice at its foot. Yet in this conversation both Lucanus and Keptah are only half right, yet rather than merging thought to complete a beautiful interpretation of life; they part company of different views, the drama in the dichotomy of science and religion.

Page 282: Again Keptah shook his head. “You are wrong. Nature is absolute order, rules by absolute and immutable laws laid down at the beginning of the universe by God. Civilizations, so long as they agree with nature and it's laws, such as creation, freedom of growth, the dignity of all that lives, and beauty of form, and reverence for the being of God and their own being, survive. Once they turn to rigidity and anonymousness under State , and regulation of large and small forms to one flowerless level, the degradation of the best to the fruitless masses of men, the rejection of freedom for all - then nature must
destroy them, through wars or pestilences or quick decay. You are in the midst, in these days, of the workings of the Law.

My Note: Rome fell and it gave way to Dark Ages, then Renaissance, then Enlightenment, now? Are we again in the midst of the working laws of nature, often referred to as God?

Page 296: of Tiberius Caesar’s mind: He was trying at the time to save Rome, to restore some of the qualities that made her great. But a depraved people would not accept their liberty and former discipline and their character. [The dialogue continues to dwell on the faults of Christ's time Rome and the meaning of life, which was lost on Romans]


My note: Caldwell published this in 1959. Disclosed in her preface, She actually wrote it in a period of American history that found supremacy over all other nations. How is it at this time that Caldwell could have the premonition to draw a parallel to the United States and Russia, and then discount it in her peace?

Page 310: If man dies valiantly in armor on some battlefield of principle or patriotism or in protection of what he held most dear, then he had not lived in vain. But those who won battles and baubles lived ingloriously and died as ingloriously, the object of later
satires or a warning to the ages. It was strange that empires never learned that lesson, thought Lucanus. It was stance that man never learned anything at all.

Page 312: Lucanus thought [of the Roman elite]. Cicero had lamented that though the forms of the Republic were still celebrated the Republic no longer existed. Among these men and women there was no love for their country, no celebration of freedom, no honor for the mighty dead who had founded their nation and their institution.

My note: I instantly thought of Lincoln. If he knew he'd be followed by the likes of FDR, LBJ, BHO, would he have ratified the fourteenth amendment? Or would he have recognized that as imperfect as man is; the Constitution as it stood would be preferable to the democracy of debauched society that prevails in 2011 American society. My evidence lay in the TV show Entertainment Tonight where the antics of the debauched Hollywood celebrities invade households of the easily
lead only to entrance the multitudes across this once great Republic for which we once stood.

Page 319: So this was what the emancipation of Roman woman had led to, this vulgar and unabashed wantonness, thus witless shrieking, this half-drunken quarreling, thus continuous chatter of business, gossip, and politics, this effrontery, this noisy insistence! He thought of Aurelia and his mother, Iris, skilled in household duties, gentleness, the care of children, the cherishing of husbands. They might have known little of Virgil or Homer, nor could they have discussed military campaigns or legal suits of prominence of legal suits of prominence in the public courts, as these women had done earlier, but they could bring peace and joy to a home, and honor, and their children and their husbands revered them, and divorce and adultery were unknown. Lucanus mused. Did a nation decline and decay when women won dominance and when no doors of law, business or
politics were closed to them, or did the dominance of women merely indicate the nation was decaying?

My note: I marvel that Caldwell wrote this passage in the 1940's. Well before the women’s movement of the 60's and 70's. She wrote it at America's zenith. We have fallen from there since, I feel. I do know in my wife that she display's along with her friend the traits of this passage. Traits of a marriage, a family, and hence a nation all not in decline but decay. How does Caldwell reach so vividly in the past and foretell the future with such clairvoyant perception?

Page 351: Lucanus looked at the tablet for a long while. Finally he shook his head. "I understand the Jewish religion. It was Noah who upbraided his sons for finding him in his drunken nakedness. He particularly laid the curse on his sin, Ham, of black countenance. It is true that the black man has been truly cursed, but not by any deity, but only by man. If there is a God, and I know there is a God, he has cursed any of His children. Nor to any man has He given the command and to curse other men, but only to do good to them.

My note: obviously one would draw suspect on Jewish doctrine to a degree. If we were to accept Caldwell's research. Do we find here a root to anti- Semitism?

Page 395: [the centurion Antonius and Lucanas’s thought ] Nevertheless, I believe all these lips of the centurion, Antonius, is doubtless true - fro his point of view. Perhaps that Jewish rabbi, the teacher, knows some secrets which seem supernatural to us, but which ate part of natural law we have yet to discovered. And again this seems most reasonable to me, the physicians who attend the servant of Antonius made an error. The servant was not mortally I'll; he would have recovered in any event.

My note: Oddly enough today we call the study of nature science and find science in opposition to religion and this story is making reference to Jesus Christ.

Page 405: [Sara to Lucanus after he realizes he has been running from love and asks for Sara's hand in marriage] You gave been made empty in order that you may be filled with joy an peace beyond al your imaginings, Lucanus. Love tells me so but love does not tell me how. No Lucanus I cannot marry you, for in marrying you I will keep you from your destiny. That which you must find is not in my arms. God calls men from outbid the cities, from their own firesides, from their wives and their children from all they love, and his voice cannot be ignored. He has called you.

My note: People criticize those who use the phrase "its Gods will". But in this example Sara is only pointing out what has been Lucanas’s will for the past 404 pages of the book. Sara is saying to Lucanus it is in your nature to answer to a higher calling than love of Sara

Page 407: [Lucanus Rubria younger brother Priscus] I know that it was inevitable that Rome become what she is. Republics decay into democracies, and democracies degenerate into dictatorships. That fact is immutable. When there is equality - and democracies shall always bring equality - the people become faceless, the lose their initiative, they lose their pride and independence, they lose their splendor. Republics are masculine... [The rest of the paragraph is worth capturing] ...[on page 428] Priscus, you ad a husband and a father, and most particularly a father, can cultivate the masculinity
of free and noble men in your children; a man must always begin with his family, and then reach forth for his neighbors. He may fail, but at least he has tried. It is not in his failing that man is judged, but by the lack of his efforts. At last man is judged singly, and never in mass.

Page 446: [Hilell a wealthy Jew who admonishes first Jews then others to Lucanus to]. "And then there is the rabble, the marketplace rabble which afflict all cities and all nations, demanding always, greedy, eager for sport, with lusty animal appetites, quarrelsome, milling restlessly, incapable of learning anything, contentious and
dependent. Have you not such trouble in Rome, and will Rome not die of them, and the taxation they impose on their betters for their idle support.

My note: I am sure, have done some background reading on Caldwell, there is no 2011 agenda here. She wrote this in the 1940's. Yet my oh my, the ominous parallels.

Page 447: [Hilell continuing] "So you have the priests, frightened for their people and their faith; you have self appointed guardians if the Law, the Pharisees, who detest the humble; you have the shrill rabble, always searching for a victim. And you have Rome, ever watchful for signs of a rebellion against her power. Considering all these, it is a marvel that He was denounced to Roman officials, and that was the end. Or in the beginning" added Hilell.

Page 475: Lucanus. Looked down at the sleeping man and murmured;

" Oh You who have brought me from the wasted spaces, and the darkness, and barrenness, out of Your love and Your eternal mercy! Oh you who are companionate beyond imagining, You who know the suffering of men, because You have suffers them! [How profound a statement. Caldwell is actually saying that God, Nature has suffered man]. Oh hallowed are You in my soul, and I implore that You will accept my life that I serve You! Always have I loved You even when I contended with You out
of my lack of understanding.

My note: Profound to say God has suffered man. A world without that reality made apparent was a world where Lucanus witnessed the suffering of one mans actions upon another only to discover that the omni presence of God included suffering. A simple expression of 'it is what it is' absent a trait of the nominalist’s interpretation. How often have you heard the expression, 'it's beyond words'. When it's real, a revelation, it's beyond words. Or better said words are not necessary.

Page 482: Lucanus put his hand to his forehead and rubbed it dazedly. "I do not understand ", he muttered. Then he flung the coverlets from his brother's body and felt over his stomach and liver, and his glands. The ominous tumors have disappeared. The flesh was thin and emaciated, but also firm, and the pulse was strong.

Lucanus straightened. "It is not possible!" he cried. He looked at Nicias and Joshua imploringly. "We made an error."

"No," they said, and smiled at him.

"Through you God wrought his miracle, as a witness to us." said Joshua. [this was Lucanas’s revelation, his baptism in to Christianity]

My note: Up to this moment of all other 'miracle cures' that Lucanus witnessed, he was certain he made an error in his diagnosis. This time he implores two other physicians who confirm it was no mistake. The message I get is not so much the miracle, as that men of medicine at time accepted the concept of miracles for things of biology that they could not explain. Science and religion were not as adverse as 2011's current of pagans have us conceding to.

Page 508: [Lucanus] thought of Rubria and Sara, the dead he loved with such tenderness, and he said to himself that in reality there was no age, no weariness, no pain, no despair, no parting, no death. The world and the planets, the countless suns, rang with immortal youth, and the constellations and galaxies rejoiced in it. An exhilaration filled him. All he had ever loved was with him forever.

My note: I genuinely related to this passage. As death separates Lucanus from his first love, life's stories separate me from mine. I have always known in the physical world that physical aspect of love is long past and never to present itself in the future. I take extreme solace however knowing in spirit the immortal youth and the love that goes with it lives on... nothing more nothing less, just what is and it's acceptance...love. This is my reality. It is what makes the memories cherishable.

Page 535: [as Lucanus come upon the Sea of Galilee]. The foliage of the olives had the aspect of fettered silver; the green palms did not sway in the pure and windless air; the pomegranates bore their red fruit on their branches Luke jewels. Sheep slept about the olive trees, their wool pale gold. There was no cry of bird here in this aureate effulgence. The peace beyond understanding, the light that never lay on land or sea, was here caught as in glowing crystal, eternal and unchanging.

Page 546: [in the story of Zachary, father of John the Baptist]. Visions were no rare things to these simple and pious people; legends of the appearances of angels and portents ran through all their conversation.

My note: to the skeptic anti Christian, here lay a notion to your argument. While Luke was a physician of legend, wise of the world; his gospel was a recording of events among these simple people.

I wonder if it's like that there.

Page 562: [top] John [The Baptist] was a man of furious temporment.
Jesus knew he was his kinsman. John...

Cool Metaphors

Retreated like the moon behind a cloud
Pure as a cows milk
Soft as a doves call
Murmurous as a softly struck harp
On feet that moved no heavier than a breath

An interesting contrast; greed & envy
Interesting trivia: the fish symbol is a Greek anagram for Christo.

The Argumentative Indian

The Argumentative Indian
by Amartya Sen

Is mankind free to speak his mind? Does differing opinion add value to civilized society? The argument begins millennia ago with creation. It finds only argument on these questions with no real value placed on either side. Oddly enough at the root of much of the debate is religion where the same balance goes with the need or not, to subscribe to any religious orthodoxy; hence heterodoxy best describes the Argumentative Indian. By page four I found argument with Sen. Having read the Bhagavad-Gita I came away with a different scenario on allegorical portrayal of a principle. That of non attachment to the physical world is central to the Gita, I was impressed that it was Arjuna making the argument for fate. It was Krishna doubting the reason for war. It was Arjuna rationalizing on the separation of body and soul, making material outcomes not important. Oddly enough My argument is only technical in merit an so, why should I argue. None the less, surely I the reader must make way to the well studied author; a modest degree of skepticism shadowed my reading of this book. When you think of it do not skepticism and argument find them selves bookends to leaves of theories put to the test of debate.

Basically the book is a collection of essays that Sen has written over the course of his career as an author, amongst many other accomplishments, including a Nobel Prize. His main thrust is that giving man the power to freely debate his views is the reason for hope in a future for man kind. He makes clear that fertile ground for debate is democracy. The reader becomes keenly aware that India is now the world’s largest democracy. To make sure the reader appreciates this Sen demonstrates that democracy is intimately connected with public discussion and interactive reasoning where Indian history is rich with evidence. Lesson learned; traditions of public discussion exist across the world, not just in the West. And to the extent that such a tradition can be drawn on, democracy is easier to institute and also to preserve. As I read through this book I was always looking for a that evidence supporting a general theme and characteristic in Sen’s argument. Upon entering my last foot note I landed on it. This last foot note is an example of Sens many posed arguments, where he sites two antonym notions and finds congruency in the application of their outcomes. Just when you have caught on to one side of an argument he would reverse the strategy. It paints a complex picture, where there is always room for two winning sides of an argument and therefore unity through politics.

Hinduvta having roots in Hindu is a recent movement, relatively speaking, in what appears to be an effort to attach a religious identity to India. Accidentally or on purpose, Hindu’s characteristics in doctrine are one that brings unity to people by accepting all walks of life. Hinduvta is actually a heterodoxy faith and the root of Indian Democracy. To qualify Sen’s views one must appreciate that he is Bengali, a culture with strong Muslim influence. Yet he himself is a secularist with acceptance of all and at the same time no real attachment to any religion. Ironically, a prime tenant of Hindu is non attachment. The aforementioned makes Hindi a religion different from the major religions, yet it does practice a belief in one god.

Sen makes a lengthy argument against the Hindutva movement basically because of his secular orientation. He advocates heterodoxy separate from a Hindu policy which seems to me superfluous. Why argue about things that don’t need argument. I wrap with one anecdotal question on this. His argument lay with the fact that there are many religions comprising India today and Hindu is simply the majority. He continuously argues for equal distance the Indian government must maintain, which is different from separation of church and state here in the United States. As a secularist and in conjunction with the coincidence that he is a native Bengali he makes a strong argument that Hindu is not a religion of the same unity as Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Hindi are a people that by their doctrine embrace all religions not just their own. So I am a bit puzzled by Sen's concern with Hindutva. It appears that Hindutva is the solution to found a multi-religious state around Hindi doctrine. Sen speaks to the secular Carvaka system and went further and suggested the need for methodological scrutiny of knowledge that is services - directly or indirectly from perception. I suggest he take that same approach in his argument with the Hinduvta movement. I could say in a with all due respect yet as an American, what is his beef?

Enfolded within Sen’s argument he uses the phrase "homogenize to ‘hegemonize’". He associates that with the violence foisted on the people by some policy of the State of India. While I see numerous intervening steps here in America, I can surely see through the departure from 150 years constitutional interpretation, Roosevelt ushered a slippery run of Federal hegemony over the individual States of our Republic. Obama has done it with Obamacare, his law suit against the State of Arizona and his deployment of funds to support his position against the Governor of Wisconsin. Franklin D. Roosevelt was accused of much the same maneuvering in the 1930s. History will remember Obama the same way. These draw ominous parallel to Hitler's consolidation of power from 1932 to 1936, In America the protests may be of agitated spirit but rarely of violent nature to the degree found in India. I can only suspect that as economics improve, India’s people will be become less desperate and therefore less violent towards one another. In this ominous parallel I find fertile ground for Sen’s concern. The safeguard both governments have is term limits in power.

With regard to India’s culture front through literature Sen first talks on the author, lecturer and educator, Tagore in an essay aimed and literature in India. with it's influence on diversity. He follows with an essay on Satyajit Ray and the film industry's influence on India. The theme of Tagore is mostly introspective. Ray drives home the notion of India's cosmopolitan nature; one that while embracing Asian borne diversity, there is not much that convinces me on the reception of this in the Western ways. While received thru force, I am not convinced Western culture runs very deep in India. In saying this I am also suspect that India does not require Western culture. In fact they may receive it but like two year olds playing next to each other, it is not essential to share their toys to have a relationship. Hence a deep India-Western relationship may be rare for a reason. And then when I read about the abject indifference the wealthy have on their surrounding poor, I suspect perhaps there is some common ground in capitalistic democracy. Ironically right after I made this note, Sen deals with this under the headings of External Sources and Modernity, The Elusive 'Asian Values'. He answers it directly in his concluding paragraph under the section title Ours and Theirs: The essences of his conclusion that so much parallel the ideology of the United States :

The difficulties of communication across cultures are real, as are the judgmental issues raised by the importance of cultural differences. But these recognitions do not lead us to accept the standard distinctions between ‘our culture” and ‘their culture’. Nor do they give us cause to overlook the demands of practical reason and of political and social relevance in contemporary India, in favor of faithfulness so alleged historical contrasts….

The celebration of these differences – the ‘dizzying contrasts’ – is far from what can be found in the labored generalizations about ‘our culture’ and the vigorous pleas, increasingly vocal, to keep ‘our culture’, ‘our modernity’ distinctly unique and immune from the influence of ‘their culture’, ‘their modernity’. In our heterogeneity and in our openness lies our pride, not our disgrace. Satyajit Ray taught us this, and that lesson is profoundly important to India. And for Asia and for the world.


Sen illustrates many cases in Indian literary history in making the argument that public discussion (argument) is a tradition much older in India than the West. At high level we are familiar with the phrase, “never talk religion and politics in family discussion”. Well think of a people that transitioned from Buddhism to Hindu, while mixing in home grown Jainism and Sihk and importing Islam, Christianity, Judaism and a few others all having equal distance from the government. And Sen is careful to distinguish the ideas of “equal distant from religion” from “separation of church and State” Just the analysis of the two phrases suggest India’s diverse religious beginnings where even in conquest, the conquerors adopted or embraced the religions of the conquered. These are described in events centuries before America’s rooted in a Judeo-Christian/Greco-Roman foundation. Sens key word through the book is heterodoxy: the inclusion of religion as opposed to the separation from religion

Sen delves into the popular subjects on India such as Class, India’s international positioning, and calendars. I have captured the high points in the notes section of this review. What I most appreciated were Sens views on the subject of Reason. After three hundred or so pages of reading his rationale, brought forth in an ‘argumentative setting’, Sen comes out with his views on Reason. Sen attempts to excuse those who cling to Cast by saying: “Attacks on ethics based on reason have come recently from several different directions. Apart from the claim that the ‘Enlightenment view of human psychology’ neglects many human responses (as Glover argues), we also hear the claim that to rely primarily on reasoning in the ethics of human behavior involves neglect of culture specific influences on values and conduct. People’s thoughts and identities are fairly comprehensively determined, according to this claim, by the tradition and culture in which they are reared rather than by analytical reasoning.” He adds “Indeed, the importance of instinctive psychology and sympathetic response should be adequately recognized, and Glover is also right in believing that our hope for the future must, to a considerable extent, depend on the sympathy and respect with which we respond to things happening to others. To this I say: How about calling a person out for mindless adherence to tradition. How about simply telling a Brahman that systematically denigrating those of lower class only adds to the weight of the anchor on the Indian economy? To Sen’s credit his agreement is seemingly balanced in the end, so much so that if there is a point to be made, it is obscured by the balance beam of justice leaving lady justice so blind that a way forward becomes something that you must feel for.

This book will certainly add to ones ability the appreciation for eloquent argument. It grapples with many difficult topics. And in the end Sen leaves it open for argument. If you want to survive a cocktail party and be well recognized as being well versed in controversy this book is worth your time. India has yet to master, though may be on the verge of it, an Indian-ness of democracy that could one day master the world. As debate would have it, the jury is still out. However I believe that on Sen’s ring of keys, one of them is the master key to success. The key is placing it in the correct box. So there are two options accept argument as essential to agreement or if your are not up to the argument, find some value in perspective and simply say to another’s opinion….aaaahhh I see.



Notes:

Page 16 Ashoka tried to codify and propagate what must have been the
earliest formulations of rules for public discussion- a kind of ancient
version of the nineteenth century 'Roberts Rules E
of Order'....Even when in arguing 'other sects should be duly honored
in every way on all occasions'

Page 26: the Carvaka system went further and suggested the need for
methodological scrutiny of knowledge that is services - directly or in
directly from perception.

My comment: this can only be made from the assumption that non
interactive minds are just that, virtually dead and un able to draw
from that kernel that produces judgment. When judgment is based on
the survival of the body one direction is taken in the assembly of
knowledge. If one can transcend the body, at least in thought, a
different perception allows of a different assembly of knowledge.
Hence the need for Carvaka skepticism to be rooted in the original and
possibly "born again" thought. The key is transcending the paradigm
of time being a linier phenomena to one where time is vertical.

Page 27: Buddhaghosa, a Buddist philosopher in fifth- century India,
thought that even though Lokayata can literally interpreted as the
discipline that bases knowledge only on the “material world", it
could perhaps be better described as the 'discipline of arguments and
disputes'. In this respect, the rationale of the Lokayata approach is
quite close to the methodological that Francis Bacon would make with
compelling clarity in 1605 in his treaties The Advancement of Learning

My comment: India was 1100 years ahead of the west.

In the chapter India Large and Small, Sen makes numerous arguement
against the notion that India is not a Hindu country. He diluted the
over all 4/5 Hindu majority using a series of sub classifications. Then he challenged history to site Buddhism as the first religion of India. He attempts to make a case that Hindi and Islam share equally in India's history. As he defends Islam he becomes much like the inverse of what he accuses the Hindutva of; rewriting history to make his argument. I find this fare play, given the title of the book. In his argument on the Muslim population he uses a comparison of Muslim India to countries out side India. I find this delusionary on statistical basis due to the fact that India is One Billion people. When you pro-rate one country the other India is still 4/5 Hinduism. Sen's conclusion makes the argument that while Hindu is 4/5 that even Hindu doctrine promotes doubt and skepticism as a means to heterodoxy or more-so Sen, being non-aligned with any religion, would promote non-religious secularism. In contrasting America's "separation of church and state" doctrine where the concept of exclusion prevails to the idea of inclusion through heterodoxy; I find strong agreement to the positive spirit of inclusion.

Sen begins the book two by contrasting Tagore and Gandhi. And Tagore's view on Nationalism and Colonialism

Page 40: The features of India’s unity vary greatly with the context. Some of them are more often recollected than others, though they all have their specific relevance. Consider, for example, the emergence, far less often discussed than it should be, the city Ujjain, in early centrist of the first millennium CE, as the location of the ‘principal meridian’ for Indian calendars, serving fro Indian astronomers as something like and Indian Greenwich. As discussed in Essay 15, it is still the base of Indian standard time today…

Page 44: Of course, it is impossible to foresee the future turn of event. In politics and history, perhaps in everything, that unknown power the ancients call Fate is always at work. Without forgetting this, I must add that, in politics as well as in private life, the surest method for resolving conflicts, however slowly, is dialogue.

Page 56 While the statistics of Hindu majority are indeed correct, the use of statistical argument for seeing India as a pre-eminently Hindu country is based on conceptual confusion: our religious is not our only identity, no necessarily the identity to which we attach the greatest importance.

My comment: this is clearly Sens opinion of which he finds much argument.

Page 69 Despite the veritable flood of religious practices in India, there is also resilient undercurrent of conviction across the country that religious beliefs, while personally significant, are socially unimportant and should politically in consequential. Ignoring the importance and reach – of this underlying conviction has the effect of systematic overestimating the role of religion in Indian society.

Page 70: It is important to understand the hold of the skeptical tradition in India, despite the manifest presence of religions all across the country. In responding to the exploitation of religious demography in the politics of Hindutva, the defenders of secular politics of the take for granted the Indian population would wan religious politics in one form or another.

Page 71: Rabindaranath Tagore thought that the idea of ‘Indian’ itself militates ‘against the intense consciousness of the separateness of one’s own people from others’

Page 93: Given the vast range of his creative achievements, perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the image of Tagore in the West is its narrowness; he is recurrently viewed as ‘the great mystic from the East.’ An image with putative message for the West, which some would welcome, others would still find deeply boring.

Page 104 The two remained deeply divided over their attitudes towards science. However, while Tagore believed that modern science was essential to understanding physical phenomena, his views on epistemology were in interestingly hetrodox. He did not take the simple ‘realist’ position often associated with modern science. The report of his conversation with Einstein, published in the New York Times in 1930, shows how insistent Tagore was on interpreting truth through observation and reflective concepts. To assert something is true or untrue in the absence of anyone to observe or perceive truth, or to, or to form a conception of what it is, appeared to Tagore to be deeply questionable…Truth said Tagore is realized through men.

Page 119: in India, Tagore wrote, 'circumstances almost compel us to learn English, and this lucky accident has given us the opportunity of access into the richest of all poetical literatures of the world.'. There seems to me much more force I'm Rabindranath's argument for clearly distinguishing between the injustice of a serious asymmetry of power (colonialism being a pre example of this) and the importance nevertheless of appraising Western culture in an open minded way...

Rabindrabath insisted on open debate on every issue, and distrusted conclusions based on mechanical formula, no matter how attractive that formula might seem in isolation. The question he persistently asks is whether we have reason enough to want what is being proposed, taking everything in to account.

Page 123: in the Vienna conference on human rights in 1993, the Foreign Minister of Singapore, citing differences between Asian and European traditions, argued that 'universal recognition of the ideal of human rights can be harmful if universalism is used to deny or mask the reality of my diversity

Page 124: There is I think, much wisdom in what we can call his ‘critical openness’, including the valuing of of a dynamic, adaptable world rather than one that is constantly ‘policing’ external influences and fearing ‘invasion” of ideas from elsewhere

Page 127: There is, for example, nothing false about Indian poverty, nor the fact – remarkable to others – that Indians have learned to live normal lives while taking little notice of the surrounding misery.

Page 131: The growing tendency in contemporary India to champion the need for indigenous culture that has ‘resisted’ external influences lacks credibility as well as cogency.

Page 132: Even in matters of day-to-day living, the fact that the chili, a basic ingredient of traditional Indian cooking, was brought to India by the Portuguese from the ‘new world’, does not make current Indian cooking any less Indian….

Given the cultural and intellectual interconnection, the question of what is Western and what is ‘Eastern’ (or Indian) is often hard to decide, and the issue can be discussed only in more dialectical terms. The diagnosis of a thought as purely ‘Western’ or purely Indian can be very illusory. The origin of ideas is no the kind of which ‘purity’ happens easily.

Page 144: Even though Alberuni’s was almost certainly the most impressive of these investigations, there are a great many examples of serious Arabic studies of Indian intellectual traditions around that time. Brahmagupta’s pioneering Sanskrit treatise on astronomy had first been translated into Arabic in the eighth century and several works on medicine, science and philosophy had an Arabic rendering by the ninth century.

Page 147: The invention of the decimal system with placed values and the placed use of zero, now used everywhere, as well as the so called Arabic numerals, are generally known to be Indian developments.

Page 150: Gandhi himself was severely attacked in [Mayo’s] book, but, given his campaign against caste and untouchability, he might have actually welcomed her exaggerations because of its usefully lurid portrayal of caste inequities. But while Gandhi may have been right to value external criticism as a way of inducing people to be self critical, the impact of the ‘magisterical approach’ certainly gives American perceptions of India a very clear slant.

Page 151: There are various other accounts of exotic Indian travels by ancient Greeks. The biography of Apollonius was, we are assured, richly rewarded in India: ‘I have seen men living upon earth and not upon it; defended without walls, having nothing, an yet possessing all things. How such contradictory things can be seen by the same person from the same observational position may not be obvious, but the bewitching charm of all this for the seeker of the exotic can hardly be doubted.

Page 195: While we must give credit where credit is due, Indian democracy has to be judged also by the strength and reach of public reasoning and its actual accomplishments.

Page 202: The remedy for many of eh central failures of Indian society is closely linked to broadening the force and range of political arguments and social demands.

Page 210: Class is neither the only concern, nor an adequate proxy for other forms of inequality, and yet we do need class analysis to see the working and reach of other forms of inequality and differentiation

Page 211: When I come to discuss the issue of what I call “friendly fire”, the role of such manifest concurrence in the lives of the extreme underdogs of society will become particularly relevant. Many of the distributional institutions that exist in India and elsewhere are designed to defend the interests of groups with some deprivation but who are not by any means the absolute underdogs of society. There is the understandable rationale for seeing them as “friendly fire” institutions in the battle of against class divisions. Yet they also have the effect of worsening the deal that the real underdogs get, at the bottom layers of society, the overall impact may be to strengthen class division rather than weaken them.

Page 213: In this context, it is particularly remarkable that India has continued to amass extraordinarily large stocks of food grain…the stocks substantially exceed one tonne of food grain for every family below the poverty line.

Page 217: Effective elementary education has in practice ceased to be free in substantial parts of the country, which of course is a violation of a basic right. All of this seems to be reinforced by a sharp class division between teachers and poorer families. Yet teachers unions – related to the respective parties – sometimes vie with each other in championing the immunity of teachers from discipline.

The Reach of Reason

Page 277: Attacks on ethics based on reason have come recently from several different directions. Apart from the claim that the ‘Enlightenment view of human psychology’ neglects many human responses (as Glover argues), we also hear the claim that to rely primarily on reasoning in the ethics of human behavior involves neglect of culture specific influences on values and conduct. People’s thoughts and identities are fairly comprehensively determined, according to this claim, by the tradition and culture in which they are reared rather than by analytical reasoning.

Page 278: Indeed, the importance of instinctive psychology and sympathetic response should be adequately recognized, and Glover is also right in believing that our hope for the future must, to a considerable extent, depend on the sympathy and respect with which we respond to things happening to others.

My comment: How about calling a person out for mindless adherence to tradition. How about simply telling a Brahman that systematically denigrating those of lower class only adds to the weight of the anchor on the Indian economy?

Page 279: Adam Smith argued that our ‘first perceptions’ of right and wrong ‘cannot be the object of reason, but of immediate sense of feeling’. But even these instinctive reactions to a particular conduct, he argued, rely – if only implicitly – on our reasoned understanding of casual connections between conduct and consequences in a vast majority on instances’. Furthermore, our first perceptions may also change in response to critical examination,….

My comment: Sen’s eloquent way of foisting both sides of an argument to cast a light on a solution.



Page 267: There might have been pleasure in official circles at the success of President Clinton’s visit to India and the asymmetrically favoured treatment he got in that visit vis-à-vis Pakistan, but the tendency to attribute that asymmetry to Indian nuclear adventure, rather than to India’s large size, democratic politics and its growing economy and technology, is difficult to understand.

Page 269: Strengthening of Pakistan’s stability and enhancement of its well-being has prudent importance for India, in addition to its obvious ethical significance. That central connection between moral and the prudential – must be urgently grasped.

Page 284; It is of course easy to find the advocacy of particular aspects of individual liberty in Western classical writings. For example, freedom and tolerance both get support from Aristotle (even though only for free men – not women and slaves). However, we can find championing of tolerance and freedom in non-Western authors as well. A good example is the emperor Ashoka in India, who during the third century BCE covered the country with inscriptions on stone tablets about good behavior and wise governance, including the demand for basic freedoms for all- indeed, he did not exclude women and slaves as Aristotle did…

Page 285: because of Western bias…Different cultures are thus interpreted in ways that reinforce the political conviction that Western civilization is somehow the main, perhaps the only, source of rationalistic and liberal ideas – among the analytical scrutiny, open debate, political tolerance and agreement to differ….

Once established, this view of the West, seen in confrontation with the rest, tends to vindicate itself. Since each civilization contains diverse elements, a non-Western civilization can then be characterized by referring to those tendencies that are most distant from the identified Western traditions and values. These selected elements are then taken to be more authentic or genuinely indigenous that the elements that are relatively similar to what can be found also in the West.

Page 289: When he died in 1605, the Islamic theologian Abdul Haq concluded with some satisfaction that, despite his innovations Akbar had remained a good Muslim. This was indeed so, but Akbar would have also that his religious beliefs came from his own reason and choice, not from blind faith, or from the marshy land of tradition.


My comment: Clearly in this passage Sen defines the traditional Muslim one lost in blind faith and thus you put credit to Ashoka’s good deed to Ashoka before you include Muslim foundation. Yet Sen makes numerous argument elsewhere painting the Muslim culture under Ashoka as part and parcel to the heterodoxy of India.

Secularism and Its Discontents

Page 295: Despite this broad and forceful challenge, secularist intellectuals in India tend to be somewhat reluctant to debate this rather unattractive subject. Reliance is placed instead, usually implicitly, on the well established and unquestioning tradition of seeing secularism as a good and solid political virtue for a pluralist democracy. As an unreformed secularist myself, I understand, and to some extent share, this reluctance, but also believe that addressing these criticisms is important.

Page 295: Secularism in the political – as opposed to ecclesiastical – sense requires the separation of state from any particular religious order. This can be interpreted in at least two different ways. The first view argues that secularism demands that the state be equidistant from all religions – refusing to take sides and having a neutral attitude towards them. The second – more severe – view insists that the state must not have any relation at all with any religion. The equidistance must take the form, then, of being altogether removed from each.

My comment: and here is the fundamental difference between India, adopting the former and the United States adopting the latter view.

Page 310: In fact, seeing Hinduism as a unified religion is a comparatively recent development. The term Hindu was traditionally used mainly as a signifier of location and country, rather than any homogeneous religious belief. The word derives from the river Indus or Sindu (the cradle of the Indus valley civilization which flourished from around 3000bce) and the name of that river is also the source of the word India itself. The Persians and the Greeks saw India as the land around and beyond the Indus and Hindus were the native people of that land.

Page 313: The principle of secularism, in the broader interpretation endorsed in India, demands ( as was discussed earlier) symmetric treatment of different religious communities in politics and in the affairs of the state. It is no tobvious why such symmetric treatment must somehow induce inescapable violence to achieve and sustain ideologies as the new opiates of the masses.


My comment: thru much of the book Sen makes a continuous argument against the Hindutva movement. His argument lay with the fact that there are many religions comprising India today and Hindu is simply the majority. He continuously argues for equal distance the government must maintain, which is different from separation of church and state. As a secularist that Sen is in conjunction with the coincidence that he is a native Bengali (largely Muslim oriented) on page 310 he makes a strong argument Hindu is not a religion of the same Unity as Muslims and Christians. Hindi are a people that by their doctrine embrace all religions. So I am a bit puzzled by Sen's concern with Hindutva. It appears that Hindu is the solution to found a multi-religious state.

On page 313 Sen uses the phrase "homogenize to ‘hegemonize’". He associates that with the violence imposed on the people by the State of India. While I see numerous intervening steps here in America, I can surely see from the departure from 150 years constitutional interpretation, Roosevelt ushered a slippery run of Federal hegemony
over the individual States of our Republic. Our President Obama has done it with Obamacare, his law suit against the State of Arizona, and his recent deployment of funds to support his position against the Governor of Wisconsin. These draw ominous parallel to Hitler's consolidation of power from 1932 to 1936. In this ominous parallel I find fertile ground for Sens concern.



Page 322. My comment: Thru the book and fro other sources of read that Kerala is
one of the more socially advanced States of India. I read on page 322 that Jews fled to Kerala at the fall of Jerusalem. Kerala uses the Judaic Calendar, suggesting a parallel between today's Palestine and Kerala. I find just a thread of a clue. But perhaps the thread is worth testing it's strength in validity. The first question I would ask is why is it that Jews and Kerala’ians live side by side, but Palestinians cannot do the same?

Page 331: Buddhist, Jain, Judaic, Christain, Parsee – were already flourishing in India, along with Hindu calendars, when the Muslim conquest of the north led to influence of the Hijri calendar. Islam’s arrival further enriched the religious – and calendrical diversity of India.



On page 339: It is in particular, important to distinguish between the inclusionary role identity and exclusionary force of separatism. To want to do something in the interest of a country is not the same thing as wanting the country to be distanced from the rest of the world, or to be isolated from it. The sense of identity leaves the issue of appropriate actions and policies entirely open to scrutiny and choice. This applies to science and technology on the one hand and to economic, social and cultural relations on the other. India’s relations with the world may demand significant use of Indianan identity, but they also call for critical scrutiny of specific ends and particular ways and means through which those relations may be appropriately advanced. Since identity politics and communitarian reasoning often have the effect of nurturing and promoting separatism, the distinction is important to seize.

My comment: This last foot note is an example of Sens many posed arguments, where he sites two antonym notions and finds congruency in the application of their outcomes. Just when you have caught on to one side of an argument he would reverse the strategy. It paints a complex picture, where there is always room for two winning sides of an argument and therefore unity through politics.

Complimentary books:

Mahabharata
Bhagavad Gita
Four Quartets, Elliot
India After Ghandi
Ramayana