Some Comments on Hinduism, Bioethics and Human Rights
in Response to Professor Desai’s Paper
John Lunstroth, LLM, MPH
I make a few points in response to Dr. Desai’s paper.
The East
1.Baker Roshi, the long-time former head of the San Francisco Zen Center, once observed that whereas in the west we have four primary family relationships: husband-wife; parent-child; child-grandparent; and sibling-sibling; in the east there is a fifth, the guru-student relationship. It is a part of everyday life for most people, whether or not they have a guru. The guru-student relationship, and the knowledge structures that go with it, have a profound effect on the way human and other life is understood, and therefore frame the subject of human-rights and bioethics in a very non-western way.
Definition of Hinduism
2.With regard to the description of Hinduism, Dr. Desai’s description is very thorough, but it is also narrow. Hinduism, to the extent there is such a thing, is not a religion. Rather, it is a way of life, and today its history and present manifestations are exceedingly complex. It is perhaps more easily defined in geographic terms than in cultural or ethnic terms. The sub-continent is the mother-ship, the epicenter of Hinduism, but its influence through history extends north into the Himalaya, into the north-west and north-east territories and beyond, and south into Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia, Cambodia, Burma, etc. directly, and into those countries and China and Japan indirectly through Buddhism. Hinduism is so ill-defined, or so all-encompassing, it has adopted Buddha and Jesus as incarnations of Vishnu, and through those acts has incorporated into its embrace Christians and Buddhists. Islam, while politically very distinct, is much less distinct at the human level, with nominal sufi, sikh and hindu gurus serving flocks from the other traditions. Hinduism, whatever it is, is amazingly flexible both on the inside and the outside.
Dr. Desai’s description focuses on a core identity of Hinduism as a brahmanical, priestly tradition that has long been excoriated for being misogynist, caste conscious, and very rigid. That tradition is maintained, and does play a role in the day to day life of almost everyone on the sub-continent. One can see it, e.g., in the rings and other items appearing on persons of all walks of life, prescribed by an astrologer or conferred by a priest, offices often found in the same person.
Hinduism, in the broader remit, is associated not only with the tradition/texts Dr. Desai described, but with the guru-student relationship, with the doctrine of karma, and with a pantheon of various heavens, gods, goddesses and all manner of other non-corporeal beings. At the more sublime levels it is associated with a teaching about human nature, that it is identical to the nature of god. I will return to the significance of this below.
The status of individualism in Hinduism
3. Contemporary political theory, including the institutions of rights and property, are based on a western notion of individualism that developed in 17th and 18th centuries in Western Europe. As a result contemporary comparative political theory focuses on a dichotomy between the community and the individual. In the standard reading the non-Western cultures are organized along community lines, and the individual’s path in life is subordinate the needs of the community. If we keep in mind the dichotomy itself is an artifact of the west, and that the west itself was communitarian in similar ways prior to the Protestant Reformation, then we can explore eastern or communitarian political communities for institutions on or from which contemporary notions of rights and property, as western ideas, can be seen to be linked to.
Communities in the Indian subcontinent are communitarian, but if we do not acknowledge a counter-narrative in Indian history we will not understand things we see in contemporary India. Keep in mind as I make the following historical remarks, that Sanskrit, the language of Hinduism, with Latin and Greek, “sprang from a common source,” as one Sir Wm. Jones informed us in the late 18th century. In other words, the traditions associated with Sanskrit are deeply linked with the Indo-European traditions.
I recently spoke with a well-to-do Indian businessman of about 40 years, educated primarily in India, but who had studied, worked and lived in the west at various times. His home in India was in a high-rise in Gurgaon, a wealthy suburb of New Delhi. He was very proud of the fact that he did not know any of his neighbors, and did not want to know them. He had adopted western individualism with a vengeance. Why and what in Hinduism led him to be open to this?
High status males, and sometimes females, have always had a relative freedom to be individualistic, especially in the narratives of moksha, or spiritual freedom attained at the feet of the guru. This is similar to the west, in which high-status males were always relatively free. In terms of human rights, we would say high-status males always had the fullest complement of rights, with everyone else, including their children, wives, and extended families had lesser status.
But let us accept that in the longish period between the Buddha, who rebelled against “Hinduism-as-brahmanism”, and about the 13th century, the “religion” described by Dr. Desai prevailed, ignoring while we do a rich variety of texts that focus on the freedoms of the atma acting through its vehicles, and ignoring to some degree the reforms and profound philosophical reflections ofAdiShankara. As Islam and Hinduism collided a rich mixture of saints, many of whose works are collected in the Sikh holy book, emerged. Characteristic of their teachings was the rejection of Brahmanism, the priestly way. The sublime but flexible monotheism of AdiShankara (advaita Vedanta), itself said to originate in Buddhism, served as the link with Islamic monotheism, and conjoined with the devotional spirit of bhakti the groundwork for an extraordinary variety of forms of “Hinduism” emerged. This renaissance coincided in interesting ways with that occurring in the West. Saints that now define “Hinduism” from this period include Kabir, Nanak, Surdas, Farid, Namdev and many others. Their teachings were for everyman (and woman), although certainly traditional forms of gender and ethnic discrimination persisted. There was another wave of reform and revival in the 19th century, most importantly for non-political purposes those initiated by Sri Ramakrishna, whose students Vivekenanda and Sivananda contributed tremendously to the continuation and popularity of the swami tradition begun by AdiShankara.
Thus the political atmosphere of Hinduism in the late 1940s was saturated not only with the individualism sanctioned within the guru-student relationship, but the anti-priestly sentiment developed over hundreds of years, and along with it a strong distaste for its caste-system and endless controls over daily life through priestly controlled rituals. As the ideals of European Enlightenment science spread from the west to India and China in the 19th century, both countries went through an assimilation process that stimulated fundamental realignments of traditional ethnic and cultural commitments. Those assimilations laid the groundwork for the bill of fundamental rights set forth in the Constitution of India (adopted 1950), one of the strongest bills of rights in the world. That bill of rights establishes individual and community rights, and individual and community duties. There is no question it incorporated into Indian political life the language of natural rights that seemed to emerge without precedent in 18th century Europe.
Western Science, Scientific Institutions and Economic Interests in India
4.Western science is a set of beliefs, or ideologies, about nature. It includes the ideologies of physicalism and materialism, and the related conclusion (via Darwin) that all living things are machines. These ideologies were established in the 18th century and are intimately linked to the emergence of the theory of the political individual, individualism. Prior to the European Enlightenment the west was also communitarian (Aristotelian), and just as in India, only the powerful had rights. Science on one hand recognized individuals, and on the other stripped them of moral content by casting them as machines. The bacterial theory of disease and development of the laboratory sciences and biostatistics (1870-1920) devolved on science and scientific medicine tremendous social authority, an authority that reached its apotheosis in the decades following WW2.
Beginning in about 1980, as neoliberal economic theory began to be implemented in the US and UK, the pharmaceutical companies began to gather strength as various regulatory schemes that had controlled them began to be dismantled. When the Cold War came to an end in 1989, the world itself saw radical changes to the international community that resulted in the flourishing of globalization, and at the forefront of globalization were the pharmaceutical companies, never more powerful. Their influence extended into UN organs such as the WHO and the GATT/WTO, and they deeply influenced the development of laws in the various large state markets such as the US and the EU.
To grow economically the pharmaceutical sector needs two things: 1) human bodies on which to experiment; and 2) populations that have been medicalized, taught that the proper response to getting sick is to take pills made by pharmaceutical companies. India has always been one of its primary targets. It has an immense population that is not medicalized which is good for finding relatively chemically “clean” human to experiment on; and it has an immense potential market. As we speak the American and European pharmaceutical companies are busy doing research in India and in medicalizing the population so it will buy their drugs.
Bioethics, Human Rights and Hinduism
5.Bioethics emerged in the west in the 1960s as philosophers and lawyers began to question the medical profession and other medical scientists in their acts towards experimental subjects and their patients. There had been earlier references to core ideas such as consent, in case law dating from the late 19th century, and then again in the doctor trials at Nuremberg after WW2; however none of those references or doctrines would flourish until after the 1960s, and for all practical purposes it was not until the 1980s that the discussion took off, and not until the 1990s when it began to assume its current form. Bioethics is not a long-established branch of ethics.
Bioethics is a child of science. It represents a socio-political response to the immense power medical scientists began to use on human beings (and animals) in the 1950s and 60s. Thomas Beauchamp and James Childress, both philosophers, are credited with creating the first coherent bioethical framework, contained roughly within the parameters of three principles: consent, beneficence and justice. Unfortunately, both Beauchamp and Childress are naturalist philosophers, believing in the limitations science has imposed on nature. In other words, their philosophical framework contains a deep and unpleasant commitment to the idea nature and all living things are physical machines. These underlying commitments have resulted in a huge discussion about the meaning and role of human dignity in bioethics.
Human dignity entered the bioethics lexicon through its encounter with human rights. The development of human rights, as a political/legal/moral movement, occurred just beneath the development of bioethics, prior to bioethics temporally and theoretically. Human rights, those legal/moral things we talk about now, are similar to but not the same as the natural rights spoken of so frequently in the late 18th, and virtually ignored from about 1800 to the end of WW2. The main difference is that human rights are said to originate in human dignity. That formulation was adopted by the international community in an effort to remove human rights, as the objects of legally binding treaties, from natural law talk and religio-political commitments. Human rights are a legal/moral system somewhat ungrounded from its philosophical heritage.
Bioethics, because of its commitment to naturalism (the physical machine theory of life), is deeply at odds with political order, with human rights, and with any vision of life that recognizes life itself and the capacity for free will. Machines, you may recall, cannot make decisions. Thus, it is at odds with the main forms of Hinduism which are based on the idea that ALL life arises from the interaction of consciousness (Atman) with matter, albeit matter of varying degrees of beingness. In Hinduism, life/consciousness is first, then form/matter combinations (Aristotelian substances) in which life is cloaked. The substances that cloak life/consciousness can limit its expression in various ways, e.g., through karma and dharma, but the life/consciousness is common to all living things, whether on this planet or elsewhere.
Thus Hinduism recognizes a radical sameness to all living things, and a radical sameness of capacity to reach freedom, the state of being in which consciousness is free from its vehicles. This freedom, like all earthly freedom, is expressed through various kinds of substance and thereby limited (Aristotle/Hegel), but nonetheless it is real and we understand it in the west through such concepts “free will.” At the heart of Hinduism is a teaching very far removed from the ideology of science and the metaphysical restrictions of naturalism.Concomitantly bioethics is foreign to the Hindu way of life, but the legal forms of human rights can be grafted onto “Hinduism” without too much pain even though they can be understood as springing from the same source as the ideology of science.
Bioethics for India
6.Wallerstein[1] argues science is heir to colonialism and orientalism, being used as a language of western universalism to dominate and colonialize those who cannot and do not control it. Prime examples of this are the export of western medical sciences and concepts to the east, and the use of those populations by western pharmaceutical companies as experimental subjects for their western drugs, and as markets for them. One cannot have a market for the experiments and the drugs without the underlying western scientific medical and neoliberal economic systems (“science”).
Bioethics is thescientistic language developed in the west to critique science, even in its colonialistic form. Thus as a language of critique for colonialized peoples it itself is another form of domination. We cannot and do not want to adopt it willy-nilly as a system of critique for India or for Hinduism. Rather, let us start from ethics per se, the contemplation of justice or right. What harms, we can then ask, do science and its private sector economic model pose for people in the Indian sub-continent?
I move the discussion from Hinduism as a subject of analysis because it is only valuable in a discussion about right to the extent it is incorporated into the larger political theory embodied in the Indian Constitution. We have noted that India has a complex bill of rights that accommodates contemporary and universal notions of right while at the same remaining committed to its deeper value system. One of the fundamental values in the Constitution of India and in its history is religious tolerance, even religious assimilation, as we have also seen. The Constitution reflects this religious tolerance, but only in service to the secular state (Art 25). It is safe then to make this move from a discussion of bioethics, Hinduism and human rights to a discussion about the ethical implications of the acts of the international institutions of western medical science in and among the Indian peoples as defined in and by their Constitution. Let me note further, without analysis that constitutionalism itself is in many ways a western ideology. I use the word in its Aristotelian sense (politeia) to refer fundamentally to the principle by which peoples are organized, whether written or not, the basic principle of community.
Science is destructive of“Hindu” values in two ways. First, it conceives of people in general as the subjects of science, as scientific objects with no inherent moral value or dignity. It is a collective assault in this sense. Second, it approaches individual humans as individual subjects, unconnected politically and morally from the group. These political and ethical moves degrade collective and individual life as the first steps in treating human bodies as experimental objects and as potential medicalized consumers of drugs. It is a form of torture, and reminds us that the prohibition against experiment without consent is located in Art 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, that clause which establishes an absolute prohibition against torture.
If Indian people are treated as individuals without moral content, without the real capacity to exercise free will (how can a machine exercise free will, and if that is true why even be concerned about it?), then they can give neither collective nor individual consent, at least not in a meaningful way. Consent is a fundamental principle of bioethics, and one of the most fundamental concepts in political theory. Science and its bioethics construct the need for consent in naturalistic terms, in which the need to recognize dignity is marginal at best. On the naturalist, the positivist, approach, consent is something that can be bought through corruption and lobbying at the collective level, and through empty words at the individual level. The ethics or right of Indian values tells us scientific and neoliberal colonialism should be carefully scrutinized by the Indian state and the Indian peoples, and the claims of the western medical establishment and its pharmaceutical and device companies approached with the utmost skepticism.