The Web and Dharma

Almost everyday as I drive to work, I witness this episode. In one of the traffic signals on the way to work, there would inevitably be this one guy, dressed as Hanuman, and begging for alms from the vehicles that have stopped at the signal. 

I have witnessed this for the past several years, and it is quite clear that the aim of his activity is to get some money for himself or the racket that he is part of (unless of course, he is some kind of an undercover agent pretending to be a beggar). 

But why is he dressed like Hanuman? Why is he not begging as himself? 

Actually, such a practice (of asking for alms being dressed as a deity) has a long history. In earlier times, people used to sometimes undertake long, arduous journeys to pilgrimage centres that would have taken several months or years to complete. Such arduous journeys would be made once in a lifetime, and some of them of course, would never return. And not everyone had the means to fund such a long journey. In order to raise funds for their journey, they often went on this crowdfunding campaign, dressed as the deity that they are going to visit, and ask for support from others, on whose behalf they would visit the deity as well. 

Today of course, the guy at the traffic signal is most likely just begging for alms. If he had plans to visit some pilgrimage centre, he would have done so long ago-- given that he has been at this activity for several years now, and we have good transportation options, and affordable package tours to most pilgrimage centres. 

Crowdfunding, is not a new concept at all in our society. And it is not just crowdfunding, there were several more "open-source" initiatives that were an integral part of Indian culture. 

Another notable feature of life not too long ago, is the concept of dharmachathra. These were community-owned institutions that would give free shelter and boarding to travellers and wayfarers who often set upon long journeys by foot. These institutions relied upon donations and support from the village or town where it was situated, and it was often expected for the travellers who used the facility to help out with the upkeep of the place. Some of them who had money with them, also made donations. 

Similarly, university towns had this concept called Vaaradanna, where, students who were studying in the town would be able to visit one household once a week (vaara means week), for their meals. For the household, hosting a few more students once a week would not be too much of a burden, and for the students, they got to get to know several families in the town and dine with them. 

Yet another notion is that of community-owned farms and enterprises, which are called cooperatives these days, where groups of interested people sharing a common concern (like say, promoting increased use of their farm produce, in the population) would work as an organisation, but without strict organisational hierarchies. 

And it is not just about organisations, even concepts of democracy and republics, which were called janapada (literally "foothold of the people") have existed in India much before similar concepts took roots in ancient Greece. 

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These and several other structures and practices were designed based on an underlying concept called dharma-- referring to the state of sustainability of a system of being. The main idea here is that any system of being-- be it our individual bodies, or a town or a country, has some states of being where it is stable and resilient against perturbations. Understanding and upholding these states of being in a society for instance, helps make the society free enough to develop its creative pursuits and agency. For instance, a state of health, financial fitness and social harmony makes our individual lives stable and resilient-- which allows us the latitude to pursue our interests, experiment with new ideas, and exercise our agency. 

The above is quite an obvious statement-- and does not need any holy book or commandment for it to hold. The idea of dharma is not a decree or commandment-- it is a postulate, that can be empirically verified. There is no one authority for dharma (although, some subcultures in India had Dharmadhikaris-- who would arbitrate on issues where conflicting views were expressed by different parties, around what constituted dharma.) 

Just about any social construct in India has been historically designed around considerations for dharma-- that is, for improving systemic resilience. These include, joint families, a largely vegetarian diet, ahimsa or non-violence, and various community-driven practices that we saw above. 

Dharma is not about ideology-- it is about the science of building resilient systems. No priest or king can decree what is dharma-- it has to be argued out with empirical evidence and logical proofs. Dharma is not a political movement nor is it something specific to a culture. It is a physical property of systems-- much like gravity or magnetism. 

The idea of dharma was developed in a time when we had complex societies, but not complex machinery, and the examples used to explain this concept hence, have tended to be from the social realm, rather than from the physical realm. In fact, one of the ways I see if someone has really understood the concept of dharma, is to ask them whether the notion of dharma is relevant on Jupiter or Saturn today-- where there is no life. The concept of stable, resilient states of a system, are relevant everywhere-- not just to human societies.

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But thanks to increasing influence of the "modern" worldview on our education, media, administration and even upbringing, many of these conventional notions and worldview are dying fast, and replaced by very simplistic narratives about our past. Social organisation today, is increasingly moving away from a systematic inquiry into the science of sustainability to be replaced by several ideologies like capitalism, communism, imperialism, socialism, etc. 

The "modern" paradigm has its roots in the industrial revolution characterised by the factory, where impact and scale took greater precedence over local resilience. Factories can sustain only when they can create economies of scale-- that is in turn, achieved by mass production and standardisation. 

But the importance of local resilience started making a comeback in modern society following World War II, where our manufacturing abilities had reached such a peak, that destroying the world several times over in a nuclear holocaust, was a distinct possibility. The Cold War took this possibility to a peak, with major nuclear powers keeping several armed nuclear warheads on a hair-trigger. 

It is in this backdrop, we started exploring resilient infrastructures. The Internet, for example, was designed to be a decentralised network that could be resilient against nuclear attacks. The idea behind the TCP/IP protocol that powers the Internet today, was to build mechanisms where routes between sources and destinations can be dynamically discovered on the fly, if some part of the network were to go down. 

This increasing emphasis on resilience lead to several "open source" and community driven initiatives that resonate very well with the dharmic worldview. 

In the 1980s AT&T gave away all of its source code for the Unix operating system, for free. This helped create an ecosystem that formed the basis for modern-day computing. Similarly, key components of the Internet and the World Wide Web, like TCP/IP, HTML, HTTP, etc. were released to the public, on a royalty-free basis, forever. In addition, open source movements like GNU started by Richard Stallman, heralded what might be called the present information era. Even today, much of the Internet servers are powered by open source software like Linux operating system, Apache web server, etc. 

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Indian history can be characterised as the struggle between community-driven decentralised systems, and approaches focused on power and impact that tended to organise society into strict, stratified structures.

A very similar struggle is underway today on how the Internet and the WWW is evolving. The web has moved far beyond its initial vision of a decentralised, community-driven information infrastructure for the benefit of humanity as a whole. 

Today, there are at least two forces that tend to consolidate power on the web, and increase their impact. The include commercial entities, and political entities. Both of these entities aim to centralise control and knowledge, in order to increase their impact and further their interests. 

Increased impact and profits, often result in collateral damage that promote unsustainable configurations. Increased profits for a media house or for a political entity for instance, may come at the cost of mental-health issues, addiction, and increased social distrust in the population. 

In response to this, ideological battle lines are drawn among different segments of the society, resulting in the Hegelian dialectics of the clash between thesis and anti-thesis. 

But in the midst of all this, what we are losing out on is the science of sustainability. In today's discourse, the choice is between either this or that. We have to for example, choose between exclusive categories of nation or world-- not realising that nations are part of the world, and a healthy world comprises of healthy nations. Similarly in India today, we have to choose between civilisation or constitution-- not realising that our constitution was itself a result of a civilisational movement asserting for freedom and self-rule.  

Today, we are quick to classify people and societies into ideological buckets and organise ourselves against the "other"-- without a thought towards how can we holistically work towards sustainability. Nations, commerce, civilisation, family, gender, military, and anything else that we train our guns on, do have their place in the scheme of things. As are notions that transcend these constructs-- like trans-national structures, trans-commercial structures, trans-civilisational concerns, etc. 

The question is not whether we need the nodes or the edges of a graph-- we need both, in order to make a good network. What we need is to focus on what makes a "good" network-- something that is resilient against perturbations, and promotes capability and agency.