One of the interesting things about my childhood, and there were very few, was that I was brought up atheist in a place where everyone was religious. It is possible that I was the first of my ancestors not to have a default religion at birth. For everyone else in the family, atheism was an acquired taste. My father and grandfather were atheists. They were socialists and, even more so, didn't like how the church always asked for money. My mom and grandmother prayed away from the sight of the men and asked me to read the bible in hushed tones. In some ways, I was a failed experiment in the family - my younger sister went to Sunday school and church. I suppose my family saw how I turned out and thought, "alright may be there is a god."
I became acutely aware of religion around the age of 6. This was when the kids in school began to ask what religion and caste each other belonged to. It was an early mechanism to find out who was cool. If you were catholic, in a catholic school, that was cool - you got to attend special catechism classes and knew the prayer that was recited at school functions. I felt left out when I saw a group of kids draw a cross with their hands. The catholic kids also became a bit suspicious when I didn't do the same. I had told them I was Christian. It was the appropriate thing to say to fit in with the cool 6-year-olds.
I learned how to draw the cross. The tricky part was figuring out whether to go left or right after you touched your chest. I went right until a little girl told me that going right was how Satanists drew the cross. I perfected my imitation, but there was a microsecond of hesitation every time I did it. What if I was found out as a Satanist trying to fit in with the Catholics? The cross-drawing continued until I was transferred to a predominantly Hindu school in 6th grade1.
Of course, if you were Hindu in a Hindu school, it was cool. You knew all the prayers at school functions and the precise movements involved in quirky rituals that got inculcated into your day-to-day. I took a Hindi class, and the language was taught using the Hindu epics Ramayana and Mahabharata as textbooks. And so, Ramayana and Mahabharatha became the first religious texts I ever read. A few years later, my grandmother got me a study bible - probably disappointed that the Hindus had got to me first. She made me read Psalms, but I was distracted by the lone steamy section of the bible - Songs of Solomon.
One of the interesting things I notice about secular atheist Americans around my age is that a lot of them have a visceral hatred towards organized religion. In some, it is because of a traumatic childhood encounter with religion, and in others, it feels like an over-imitation2 of an opinion that they know their peers hold. Their hatred feels unearned.
The ones who truly escaped religion in America are always trying to replace it with something that has the same fervor. Some move to Berkeley and believe in the power of drugs to reveal truths about the universe. Some try to emulate the failure of organized religion by becoming an American communist. In a lot of cases, both the former and latter decide to go back to religion in their early to mid-thirties. It is quite popular in online culture to portray this return to god as an act of rebellion, but it is the most predictable thing to do when faced with frailty and loss of youth.
Perhaps I'm simply envious of the ability of someone to fervently believe in the power of a singular ideal. I have always been on the outside, looking in, watching closely and imitating when it fits my needs.
Sons of the Soil
Last week, my friends at the Yak Collective and I read an interesting paper. Sons of the Soil, Migrants, and Civil War, by James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin (World Development, V 39, No. 2, 2011). It maps a subset of civil wars across the world post-1945 that could be classified as Sons of Soil conflicts. These are conflicts between an ethnic minority that sees themselves as "sons of the soil" of a region and a migrant demographic majority from another region (In a lot of cases, the demographic majority has Sons of Soil claims in another region). The paper has 139 examples, of which Israel - Palestine is one. It uses the Sri Lankan civil war as its main case study. Highly recommend reading the paper.
The paper does a great job uncovering a framework of how Sons of Soil conflicts evolve from migration of demographic majority enjoying state support to low-level conflicts for a long period of time to the ineffectiveness of the police to stop violence.
The paper does not go into the mechanics and psychology of how Sons of Soil claims come about in the first place. This is confusing for someone like me, who has felt no claim to any soil anywhere. As Venkat points out in his notes:
"Since we're all parts of waves of interacting (and inter-breeding) migration out of Africa and there are no actual autochthons anywhere, if you zoom out properly, everybody has a SoS soil mythopoetic narrative anchored somewhere, or more likely in more than one place, and every war has an SoS causal factor to it. It's all SoS wars all the way down."
Fervent belief seems to be a pre-requisite for Sons of Soil claims. After all, claims to a holy land is what distinguishes starter religion from a true powerhouse. Even the church of Scientology knows this, which is why they have prime real estate in every mid-tier downtown in America. It does not even have to be religious belief - every other day I overhear someone at the coffee shop lament the death of the real Austin because of the new migrants. I've been told that people have been talking about the death of the real Austin since the late 1970s.
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Sometimes the wind makes me take notice of a new tree in my neighborhood. I look at it closely for the first time, the jagged paths the branches had to take for some sunlight, the roots jutting out of the concrete sidewalk. I imagine all the things that tree would have seen - the real Austinites and the migrants who supposedly turned Austin into plastic. The indifferent tree that provides shade to both.
Lot of private schools in Southern India was originally started by religious organizations in the 20th century
Anthropologists define over-immitation as immitating behaviors that are not needed for survival. h/t
What’s remarkable is the growth of cities almost everywhere integrating diverse people with relatively little conflict in the past 50 years.
Wondering what the state’s selection criteria is (who to support?) .. some explore / exploit (in the Comp Sci sense) algo I bet .. after all even the state is self-preservatory