OPINION • Nov 10, 2020
Politics and economics... where it is not supposed to be...
About three months back, I read somewhere that Church organizations in the USA tried to lobby to remove the theory of evolution and adding that the world is created some 10,000 years ago in science textbooks and history books. It got sizeable support. They even came close to implementing the teaching of both creationism and evolution as science. Honestly, my first reaction to that was laughter in disbelief, as if I was living in a place where education is unadulterated. And boy, was I wrong??
Being wrong is okay, but being wrong to that extent is somewhat embarrassing. But the thing is that we don’t see the biases in the textbooks when we were studying them, specifically when we were young. And that is the power of them. Extremely insidious. We can never see them coming.
Think deeply about this. What did you learn from your history books about the death of Mahatma Gandhi? Honestly, it depends on when and which syllabus you studied. If what I remember is correct, it did not discuss a crucial detail; The MOTIVE. And it is not a trivial detail (If you don’t know, Gandhi is killed by a Hindu supremacist because Gandhi was too tolerant of Muslims). Given the number of trivial-details that we studied in our schools, think about why we did not learn this crucial and significant detail (As Gandhi is arguably the most influential person in Indian History).
I remember lucidly learning about the cruel and bigoted rule of Aurangzeb and savage Muslim conquests. Coincidence… I don’t think so…
I never thought about this until very recently, reading Amartya Sen’s book The Argumentative Indian. A lot of people have a lot of incentives to keep us bigoted and dumb – Dumb and divided people are the easiest to rule. I will first discuss the scenario in America about the evolution thing. Everyone knows that America is a Christianity dominated country, but so are the European countries, and this shit never happened there, at least not recently. The reason here is, counter-intuitively, economics, not religious fervor. European Countries are constitutionally Christian countries and, Churches are under the control of the State; For example, the Church of England (COE). Whereas America is constitutionally secular and, Churches are private institutions. Churches have a lot of money at stake to keep people religious.
Now let’s get back to India. The problem here is simple; Religious Politics. To put it in other words “Our Ruling Party”. They made conscious decisions to hide, conflate, and even outright deceive people to keep in the dark. They had tangible incentives in cultivating Hindu pride and Muslim resentment. The “Gandhi issue” is just one of the many things they did; the Non-sub-continental origin of Sanskrit, Age of Vedas, Conflating Aryabhata’s math with Vedic math, thereby falsely increasing the age of science in India, emphasizing certain things, hiding others, etc, etc, etc.
The extent of this in history books doesn’t mean that this bigotry is limited to history. I don’t know this as a fact, but this is a reasonable speculation. Teachers and the syllabus taught me the fundamental stuff like Newton’s law or the periodic table or the Atoms. The syllabus really wanted us to know that stuff, given the emphasis they have given in our books. But why the same emphasis was absent for the theory of evolution and I am reasonable in claiming that it is equally if not more important. I don’t remember anything more than 3 or 4 pages dedicated to the evolution and I was having tens of pages about how names of different classes and species of plant and animal life and all of which hardly matter.
Honestly, someone wants us to be blind religious. The purpose of religion is to answer existential questions. If something scientific can answer those questions, it is an act of religious heresy. Once again, these concealments and deception aren't done as an act of devotion to god. The motivation is always either political or economic.
There is this old quote.
“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful”
And it is still at play.
What we learn in our schooling years forms your core beliefs; it basically creates who you are, at least for most people. Controlling what schoolchildren learn gives the person control over the future. The worst part is there is no defense against it. I have good reasons to believe that what we have learned in school is partly prejudiced and I know I must be skeptical of my core beliefs, and so must you.