Hinduism, Plato, Caste and Technological Supremacy

            Hinduism appears to have attracted both Himmler and Oppenheimer because it enunciates the close relation of pure knowledge to impersonal service and the renunciation of moral scruple in the pursuit of power, knowledge and the commission of acts of violence. It might be worth noting here that Plato's theory of caste, enunciated in the Republic, lines up almost exactly with the Hindu theory. This is the result of both the Platonic and Hindu system being based on a vision of a totalistic unitary principle to which all else is reduced. The idea of the caste system grows from the reduction of all values to one highest value which Plato calls the 'Sovereign Good' and Hinduism calls Brahma or sunyata, the undifferentiated truth that is One.

            The caste system, justified in the Upanishads, the Vedas and the Mahabarata, proceeds from the concept of the Divine Self, which is a projection of human consciousness into an ultimate and totalist abstraction. By projecting and inflating human consciousness into a supra-cosmological principle called Atma, or the Divine Intellect, Hinduism generates a hierarchy. From this Divine Self or the Atma, Hinduism derives a descending order that stretches from 'Beyond-Being' or the impersonal Godhead, to Being or the personal Godhead, to Maya (Samsara in Buddhism), which is the created world. From this metaphysical hierarchy is modeled the castes, which constitute a earthy hierarchy.

             Plato's stratified society is structured in an almost identical manner,  It seems likely that Plato's system was either directly influenced by the Hindu model, or indirectly, through Iranian sources. In either case, the ancient theocratic systems, from India, China, Palestine, Egypt and Japan, to Persia and Christian Europe appear to have all created systems of religious knowledge which dictated similar social structures, oppression and inequalities. All of these systems erect the subjectivised intellect into an authoritative and transcendently 'objective' principle by which reality is sublimated or reduced to totalistic explanations. The religious explanation of reality in all these cultures were enormously successful in maintaining powers, institutions and behaviors, despite different cultural variables and conditions.

             In any case, the caste system is part of the Hindu system of knowledge/power.  The Platonic system is another. Degrees and criteria of worth are determined by adequation to this ultimate criterion of legitimacy, and the whole hierarchy of cosmological and anthropological types results; Jnanas(men of knowledge) are higher than Bhakti(devotional types), men are higher than animals; one will come back as an insect if one does not obey the social norms. In Plato's Republic he recommends, like the Hindus, selective breeding, rigorous social control and a doctrine of mind control that would oversee the intimate behavior and thoughts of all citizens in his 'utopia'. Like Himmler and the Hindus, Plato devalues both men and the world to make it conform with a vision of intellectual supremacy. He notices only the benefits of this system of knowledge and power and does not consider the victims against which it perpetuates its violence. The victims, like the Jews Himmler murdered, or Oppenheimer's Japanese victims, are, in the heat of their discovery and will to power, irrelevant and non-human or less than human. The Cosmos, and human beings within it are devalued in the excess of the contemplation of knowledge and abstract "truth".

             Plato's guardians and philosopher Kings are equivalent to the Brahmins. There may be an historical derivation of Plato's ideas from the East into Greece that would explain the similarity of the two systems. But it is also likely that the concept of a knowledge-caste hierarchy grows out of a highly centralized, differentiated society looking for an ultimate justification of its power.  Ultimate unified power and empire requires a unified theory of knowledge to justify it. Plato's god is not an anthropomorphic deity but a pale abstraction he calls the Sovereign Good. Little is said about it. One of his parables to describe it is the famous Parable of the Cave. In this parable one man escapes from a cave in which the rest of humanity is caught deceived by phantasmagoria and illusions. This elite man discovers the hidden world above. The rest of humanity witnesses only a lesser reality, whereas the elite understand the hidden laws that govern the world, and thereby are entitled to rule over the lesser beings who do not see the truth. Beneath the elite, other human beings are lesser and of diminished status and therefor can be subjected to Plato's views that children should be taken from parents, that labor should be forced, slavery is a norm, eugenics is preferable and a spiritual elite should rule over all with a totalitarian hand. The result of Plato's vision of reality is that the elite men of knowledge, in touch with scientific truths about the superior aspects of reality have the right to treat those of lesser status with brutality and injustice. The world itself is made a lesser reality by Plato's delusions of transcendent knowledge, and his philosophy, combined with Christian views of the world as a place of sin, are important keys for understanding the roots of many of today's environmental and social injustices.

            The Greeks and Indians did not develop caste systems because caste is "in the nature of things" as some have claimed. There are many cultures that were more egalitarian. The process appears to be one of a mythological culture becoming increasingly differentiated and totalistic, and this is reflected in an increasingly abstract system of knowledge; the early Upanishads become the Vedanta as the Homeric Epics become the abstract and quasi-mathematical systems of Plato and Aristotle. Myths are stories that organize a culture's conceptions of knowledge and power into actions and behavior. Categorizations, numbers, bureaucratic functions, sciences, corporate structures and medias replace mythic lore. Not that myths cease to function in modern societies, since even the primacy of mathematical analysis is in some sense a mythic belief. Rather, the increased differentiation and abstraction of science based culture yield greater power and social control. 

            The transition from Homer to Plato, which occurred between 900-500 B.C.E. involves a movement from an undifferentiated mythology to a differentiated philosophy or metaphysic. In Homer, symbols and reality are intertwined: the gods act out human brutality and human brutality reflects the will of the gods. In Homer, the gods are unrelenting and obsessively cruel: "let no male or female god frustrate my stated will...or I will thrown them into the deepest abyss", says Zeus the 'highest' of the gods. [1] Homer depicts gods as laying waste to cities, plotting disasters and cruel strategies and covering battlefields with blood and hacked corpses. It is no wonder that this atrocious book was long considered a 'classic' by the British Universities and is pushed by conservatives in America today as one of the "Great Books".  It is a classic work of glorified violence, which justifies atrocity in the cause of empire building. In any case Plato sanitizes the Homeric gods while increasing the power of sublimated abstractions. 

            By the time of Plato, the gods are largely out of the picture. Plato reduces the gods to abstract generalizations like "Truth" or "Justice" and thereby creates an even greater potential for centralized elites to control society than was possible in Homer's time.[2] Plato's abstract ideas are much less obviously bloody minded and elitist, and more mathematical than Homer's. But despite this appearance, Plato's ideology and justification of violence in the name of abstractions is as war like and  as in violation of basic human rights as Homer's, perhaps moreso. But Plato hides this behind the seeming neutrality of numbers and grand, unaccountable ' archetypal ideas'. When Homer writes that  "bright eyed Athena began breathing life into Diomedes and he began killing all around him", it is clear that an inner motivation to murder is being personified by a goddess, in this case Athena. [3]But Plato's concept of the "Good", which orchestrates the same murderous bloody-mindedness that  Homer depicts so vividly, seems to be merely a harmless abstract concept. No one can complain about the "good".  Some have said that Western civilization was born from Plato and Aristotle, and there is some truth to this. The tendency to justify or commit grotesque atrocities and justify them by beneficent sounding abstractions is certainly a tendency that is implicitly condoned in Plato's writing..

            A similar process of mythological diversity leading to theocratic abstraction, as is visible in the transition form Homer to Plato,  can be seen in Tibet and China. In Tibet a a centralized state was developed out of a combination of Siberian, Mongolian or Himalayan forms of Shamanism combining with Indo-European Yogic ideas of caste and hierarchy. The process is repeated in China in the refinement of Taoist thought by Confucian political centralization. The absolutist character of the Imperial Chinese state is built on an abstract theory of knowledge which grew out of a more shamanistic or Homeric-like and mythic oriented society. The process is repeated again in the transition from a Christian paradigm to the Scientific paradigm. The increased level of mathematical abstraction that one sees in Descartes and Newton reflects an increasingly absolutist culture in Europe.[4] Increasing levels of abstraction increase explanatory power and this increases social power and centralization.

            Moreover, when increasingly differentiated systems of power gain cultural control, the appeal of older mythological systems sometimes take on a romantic nostalgia. The Nazi fascination with Aryanism grows out of the Romanticism of Herder, Schelling, Nietzsche and Shopenhauer to some extent, as well as various Romantic occult groups like the Ariosophists, the Order of the New Temple headed by Jorg Lanz Von Liebenfels, Rudolf von Sebottendorff of the Thule Society or Karl Wiligut. Bertrand Russell, in his History of Philosophy, traces the origins of Nazism to Rousseau, which may be loosely accurate. But Rousseau probably could not have envisioned the blood baths that would result from the various strains of romantic transcendentalism and nationalism in the 20th century. Such Romantics as  the Schlegel brothers, one of whom, Wilhem, translated the Bhagavad gita, Goethe, who wrote, like Nietzsche, some orientalist works, Max Muller, Blavatsky, and many others, were contributing to a growing Imperial culture in Europe, which was beginning to see the entire world as conquerable and assimilable. [5] The romantic appeal of the East is closely connected, as Edward Said has shown, to the rise of an individualistic and transcendentalist will to power in Europe. The transcendentalist will to power generates imperial drives, and this is visible not only in Germany, but in England and America. God becomes a patriotic symbol of empire. Science, in its turn, also become the symbol of empire, and many of the builders of the bomb thought they were serving both god and the state by engineering weapons of mass destruction.

            In any case, Oppenheimer's interest in the Bhagavad Gita is both a romantic  interest, and an outgrowth in his nearly religious or 'gnostic' faith in Physics and Science as a model for reality. In seeing himself as Krishna, Oppenheimer is exulting in the power that scientific knowledge offers, at the same time as he is invoking a nearly 2,500 year old document to immortalize his longing for transcendental power. He is explicitly identifying the 'highest' ambitions of science with the glorified metaphysical and political ideology of the Bhagavad Gita. But he is doing this within the context of his identification with the U.S. war effort against Hitler. This involves the Hindu symbolism with the American civil religion of Manifest Destiny, and thus also with a racist ideology that saw the Japanese as even more 'evil' than the Germans. Seeing the Japanese as inhuman beasts is a major factor in the ease with which the bomb was dropped on largely civilian targets. Columbus, and those after him also saw the Indians as beasts, excusing their greed and murderousness on the grounds that Indians were not human.

            Like Columbus or Darwin, Oppenheimer is piloting into a 'new world'.  In the process he seems to have consciously or unconsciously opened himself up to a millennia old tradition of justifying terror and atrocity by elite and transcendent ideologies. The particular pastiche of Hindu, Christian, scientific and modern associations and justifications which Oppenheimer invokes would probably not be understood by someone belonging to one of these traditions exclusively.  But the tendency to pastiche is modern phenomena, which inevitably brings into question the sacrosanct illusion of infallible impermeability that characterizes rigid orthodoxies. The basic pattern of justifying atrocity by the 'highest' and most rarefied metaphysical and cultural abstractions is a tradition that goes back to Innocent III and before, all the way back to Hinduism and Plato. Despite his tendency to pastiche together elements of differing systems of knowledge/power, Oppenheimer is following an ancient pattern.

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