About the Blog
In this blog, I provide comment on questions of politics and economics, two subjects that I have studied and love. The name comes in part from the city where I grew up. Delhi is heir to a great civilization and a long tradition of debate, and is today the seat of the largest and perhaps noisiest democracy. The “Express” in the title evokes for me both long train journeys spent arguing with good friends and the gentle thud of a newspaper striking a verandah.
The blog was born after I had a drawn-out argument with someone who had a pointed style of debate remarkably like my own. The experience, I have to say, was unpleasant, and I’ve since reformed. Our conversation centered on “The Brothers Karamazov,” which I had been digesting for some time. For those who haven’t read it, it is the story of three brothers, Dmitri, Ivan, and Alexei (Alyosha), who are the sons of a dissipated Russian landlord, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov. Almost every page of the book flashes with truth and insight into the human condition, and it is concerned with many questions: crime and punishment, collective guilt, patricide, and the nature of love. But one of its fundamental themes is the belief in God.
Each of the three brothers has something of their father. Dmitri, who is large and physically powerful, is a slave to his senses and passions, which ultimately leads him to tragedy. Ivan is very intelligent but is diseased by the encompassing doubt that comes with a too great capacity for reason. Ivan is an atheist, and Dostoevsky employs him to make the case that there is no rational basis for believing in God. All the senseless suffering in the world is hard to square with an argument for a supernatural being concerned with the affairs of man. But Dostoevsky was deeply conservative and he uses Alyosha, who is instinctively loved by everyone around him, to argue that those endowed with a simple, unquestioning faith live lives of compassion and fulfillment.
My interlocutor, who is a computational geneticist, and I agreed that there is no rational foundation for believing in God, though you might still have belief regardless of the reasons. But I suggested to him that whether the belief in God made people act in different, and possibly virtuous, ways was an empirical question. He disagreed and contended that it was neither a theoretical nor empirically valid question. Our argument began quite late over a pint around the corner, and then continued, with increasing ill-will and decreasing focus, over several hours and several cups of chai at my house. My friend is gifted with a faculty for clear thought, and he got the best of me on most of the important points, although I think he may have granted that my central argument was valid. In any case, at a particularly heated juncture, I told him that I had had enough of his rudeness and asked him to get out of my house. Incredible, I know. I woke up the next morning feeling a little ashamed, and my friend graciously accepted my proffered apology.
But I learned, or relearned, a couple of things that night, which may seem like tired clichés to you. There are always people who are smarter than you or have a better grip on the issues at hand, and it pays to listen carefully rather than thinking that your opinions are correct in principle or fact. I also learned that it is infinitely more valuable to treat your partners in debate with uniform respect rather than allowing yourself to be carried away by the urge to be right, particularly when so little is at stake. So even if it doesn’t always seem like it, I’m humble and willing to change my opinions in light of new evidence.
I also grasped that although good conversation over a beer or two is one of life’s great pleasures, the best vehicle for rigorous discussion is the written word, and the order and precision it provides. I want this blog to be a place where I engage meaningfully with issues that interest me, and not a repository for cool trivia. I will try to lay out my position clearly, and will refrain from using the fog machine to disguise fuzzy thinking. Thank you for reading.