#235 Right Diagnosis, Wrong Prescription

The Case for Reason, Government-aided Schools vs Government-run Schools, and the Art of Building Digital Communities

Global Policy Watch: What Ayaan Hirsi Ali Gets Wrong

Global policy issues relevant to India

— RSJ

A couple of weeks back, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an outspoken atheist and perhaps the most visible Muslim apostate, wrote a piece in the Unherd titled, ‘Why I am now a Christian’ where she claimed that the Judeo-Christian religion is the answer to threats facing the western civilisation today. Ali is an influential voice today because of her remarkable backstory. Born in Somalia, her family moved to Kenya after the civil war that followed the ill-judged Ogaden war ravaged their lives. In Nairobi, as a teenager, she was radicalised by the Muslim Brotherhood, an experience she recalls quite vividly in her piece:

“The most striking quality of the Muslim Brotherhood was their ability to transform me and my fellow teenagers from passive believers into activists, almost overnight. We didn’t just say things or pray for things: we did things. As girls we donned the burka and swore off Western fashion and make-up. The boys cultivated their facial hair to the greatest extent possible. They wore the white dress-like tawb worn in Arab countries or had their trousers shortened above their ankle bones. We operated in groups and volunteered our services in charity to the poor, the old, the disabled and the weak. We urged fellow Muslims to pray and demanded that non-Muslims convert to Islam.

We were told in no uncertain terms that we could not be loyal to Allah and Muhammad while also maintaining friendships and loyalty towards the unbelievers. If they explicitly rejected our summons to Islam, we were to hate and curse them.”

Quite remarkably, Ali broke out of that mould, sought asylum in the Netherlands and started questioning the many certitudes of her religion. Post 9/11, her disenchantment with Islam led to a series of articles and public appearances where she critiqued Islamic fundamentalism and, over time, turned an atheist. She became a member of the Dutch parliament in 2003. In 2004, she wrote the script for a short film titled ‘Submission’ directed by Theo van Gogh that was a no-holds-barred attack on the position of women in Islamic culture. The film generated huge outrage and the predictable death threats, except it turned grimly real when Van Gogh was assassinated in an Amsterdam street with a death threat pinned to his body. Ali went into hiding where she lived with Geert Wilders; yes, the same right-wing guy who has won the elections in the Netherlands this week, sending liberals into a tizzy. Once she got back, she became an international celebrity for her strident stance against Islamic fundamentalism and her involvement in the new atheist movement led by the likes of Hitchens, Dawkins and Sam Harris. As she puts it:

You can see why, to someone who had been through such a religious schooling, atheism seemed so appealing. Bertrand Russell offered a simple, zero-cost escape from an unbearable life of self-denial and harassment of other people. For him, there was no credible case for the existence of God. Religion, Russell argued, was rooted in fear: “Fear is the basis of the whole thing — fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death.”

So, why has she turned Christian now? Going through her piece, I concluded she has the right diagnosis of the problems facing the civilised world today but a completely wrong solution. This is important to parse because similar thinking pervades the minds of what goes for ‘right-wing’ in India. It will be useful to dig a bit deeper here.

Ali identifies, correctly, in my opinion, the three threats facing the world today and how much of a losing battle combating them feels like today. As she writes:

“Western civilisation is under threat from three different but related forces: the resurgence of great-power authoritarianism and expansionism in the forms of the Chinese Communist Party and Vladimir Putin’s Russia; the rise of global Islamism, which threatens to mobilise a vast population against the West; and the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.

We endeavour to fend off these threats with modern, secular tools: military, economic, diplomatic and technological efforts to defeat, bribe, persuade, appease or surveil. And yet, with every round of conflict, we find ourselves losing ground. We are either running out of money, with our national debt in the tens of trillions of dollars, or we are losing our lead in the technological race with China.”

Like I said before, it is a great diagnosis of the problem.

Her solution?

Turning back on atheism and going back to Judeo-Christian tradition, which she believes is the foundation for everything good in our modern world. She writes:

“That legacy consists of an elaborate set of ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom and dignity — from the nation-state and the rule of law to the institutions of science, health and learning. As Tom Holland has shown in his marvellous book Dominion, all sorts of apparently secular freedoms — of the market, of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity.”

I’m afraid this is a very shallow appreciation of what has brought us here. There’s a whole lot wrong with this thesis, beginning with the old sin of conflating correlation with causation. I have a whole raft of arguments against this, of which I will present three. 

First, suppose the Christian tradition was the basis for the freedom of conscience and speech, which allowed it to outgrow its dogmas. Why didn’t it happen in the almost thousand years of the Byzantine empire that ruled from Constantinople in the name of Christ? The Eastern Orthodox Church had the wealth, the power and total control over the polity and the society for centuries. So, why didn’t enlightenment ideals flower during the peak of their reign in the 8th and 9th centuries? Instead, these were decidedly dark ages in Europe with all kinds of superstitions, religious wars and intolerance. In contrast, things were rather ‘liberal’ during that millennia in China, India and the Islamic world. In fact, there’s a good argument to be made that had there been no Islamic golden age between the tenth and twelfth centuries where science, philosophy and new ideas flourished, there would have been no renaissance and the subsequent awakening of Europe.  

Second, how true is the claim that the the age of enlightenment and the industrial age which combined in mysterious ways to produce the liberal, democratic order of the west today could take shape only because of what Ali claims is “the product of centuries of debate within Jewish and Christian communities. It was these debates that advanced science and reason, diminished cruelty, suppressed superstitions, and built institutions to order and protect life, while guaranteeing freedom to as many people as possible.” Really? How is it that simultaneously during those times the same communities were using religion to perpetrate the worst kinds of crimes on humanity? From the excesses of Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions, the ghettoisation of Jews, the terrible crimes of slavery where people of an entire continent were treated worse than animals (I’m sure Ali knows the history of Congo), the persecution of heretics among whom were some of the greatest artists and philosophers, the burning of women at stake and the subjugation of women till early 20th century, the crimes of fascism when the church looked the other way; these are just from the top of my head. The list can be endless. So, what happened here? If the Christian tradition of debate produced the greatest of thinkers, philosophers and artists during these centuries, how was the same tradition presiding over the worst forms of genocide and discrimination at the same time?

Third, some of you may argue that these excesses that I have mentioned above were in the past. That the Christian tradition has a self-correcting mechanism and it has learnt from the past and evolved. Well, it may be true to some extent. But then what explains the murderous dictatorships in avowedly Christian societies of Latin and Central America over the last hundred years? The lawlessness and crimes in the streets of Mexico and Brazil and the exploitation of women and indigenous communities there, in possibly the most devout of Christian communities. If “Christianity has it all”, as Ali claims, what explains the high rates of crimes against women, drug abuse and murders in these countries?

So much for running down her thesis but what do I have to offer as an explanation for why enlightenment ideas took roots in 17th and 18th century western Europe than anywhere else? Well, I think Ali stumbles upon two truths in her piece, of which one possibly is the answer to this. She writes:

“Unlike Islam, Christianity outgrew its dogmatic stage. It became increasingly clear that Christ’s teaching implied not only a circumscribed role for religion as something separate from politics. It also implied compassion for the sinner and humility for the believer.”

She doesn’t explain why this happened? Why did it “become increasingly clear that Christ’s teaching implied …a circumscribed role for religion?”

In my view, the two most significant events that were instrumental in this were the Protestant reformation triggered by Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses in 1517 and the Church of England’s break with Rome on the back of Ten Articles and the support of Henry VIII in 1536. These were significant ruptures in the religion where a large section of people rejected the current authority and dogma and chose a different path. That they were all called heretics and excommunicated by Rome and yet didn’t incur the wrath of the god was seminal to how people then thought about religion. You could challenge a dogma and create a new path without your generations being condemned to burn in hell. The ruptures in Christianity were not without bloodshed and wars but they also gave a sense of freedom to people to observe and study things on their own, reach their own conclusion and then question orthodoxies based on them. The scientific method of Bacon therefore could only emerge in the late 16th century as could the notion of Lockean notion of rights of man. These emerged because those ruptures in that monolithic edifice enabled people to draw religion out of their political, economic and social lives over a period of three hundred through rigorous debates and thinking. What remained was the role of religion in the private domain of the individual which was sacred and left to their own although Marxian communism went after this too. The age of enlightenment happened because generations of brave and original thinkers got rid of the insidious, all pervading hold of religion in every sphere of human endeavour. Ali reaches precisely the opposite and in my view, the wrong conclusion.

The other point on which I agree with Ali is on her view on why religion matters in the personal sphere. As she writes:

I have also turned to Christianity because I ultimately found life without any spiritual solace unendurable — indeed very nearly self-destructive. Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?

Russell and other activist atheists believed that with the rejection of God we would enter an age of reason and intelligent humanism. But the “God hole” — the void left by the retreat of the church — has merely been filled by a jumble of irrational quasi-religious dogma. The result is a world where modern cults prey on the dislocated masses, offering them spurious reasons for being and action — mostly by engaging in virtue-signalling theatre on behalf of a victimised minority or our supposedly doomed planet. The line often attributed to G.K. Chesterton has turned into a prophecy: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

This is true. An absence of religion will have terrible consequences in our personal lives. But going the other extreme and claiming that just one religion, the Judeo-Christian tradition, is the answer is worse. Yes, wokeism is terrible, and the new dogmas of the left are worse than religious beliefs. But we have reached here by using reason. By questioning dogmas. Of all stripes. 

Not by privileging one set over another. 

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India Policy Watch: Shaking the Status Quo

Reflections on current policy issues

— Pranay Kotasthane

I ended the last edition with this stat:

Did you know that only 30 per cent of schools in Kerala are run by governments? The national average is 69 per cent. A large chunk of Kerala’s schools (44 per cent) is financed by governments through aid but run by private administrations. The national average for aided schools is 5 per cent. How often do we consider this when discussing Kerala’s education success?

Let’s pick this matter up for further discussion. Indian schools are classified into three categories based on the type of management running them. Government schools are where governments produce education, i.e., they finance and operate these schools. Private schools are those that governments regulate peripherally but are run by non-profit trusts, societies, or Section 8 companies (for-profit schools are not allowed in India). Finally, government-aided schools are those where the government finances education, i.e., they are run by private management but adhere to government guidelines on fees, teacher appointments, etc. The level of government aid to such schools varies.

Those of you who follow education policy in India might not consider that stat surprising. But the chart below is striking for a novice in this domain like me.

My chart based on UDISE+ data

When most people think of Kerala’s relative successes in education, the picture they have in mind is of government-run schools that magically work well. This leads quite a few to advocate for more government schools and colleges. However, it’s a myth. Government-run schools in Kerala are merely 31 per cent, while privately-run schools are at about 20 per cent of the total. Government-aided schools comprise the largest category at 44 per cent (miscellaneous schools account for the remaining 5 per cent). As this chart suggests, Kerala is an outlier in embracing government-aided schools. Well-performing government-aided schools might partially explain the better education outcomes in Kerala. It’s at least worth an investigation.

I realise there might be a “correlation vs causation” issue here. This is insufficient evidence to claim that government-aided schools cause better education outcomes. But better evidence exists. I couldn’t find a neat chart in the ASER report linking government-aided schools with learning outcomes. Their methodology treats government-aided and government-run schools together as government schools. Nevertheless, an older paper on their website exploring middle schools confirms that government-aided schools have vastly better graduation rates at Grade X than government-run schools, as shown in the table below.

Source: Middle Schools in India: Access and Quality, Endline Report

The education debate in India is often about ownership. Of course, governments should permit for-profit schools to operate. Vouchers for students enabling school choice are also likely to improve incentives. But an intermediate step to get there might be through government-aided schools.

Osborne and Plastrik’s Banishing Bureaucracy tells us that although privatisation is often desirable, it might not always be politically feasible. The education sector in India is in a similar situation. That doesn’t mean a dead end for reform.

The first step should be to uncouple steering functions, such as policymaking and rule-setting, from rowing functions, such as compliance and service delivery (check this framework in edition #15). In the case of education, this implies taking the government out of “producing” education and into “financing” education as far as possible.

When the umpire is not also a player, there will be better incentives for the government to improve learning outcomes. Government-aided schools won’t be entirely free of the pathologies that government-run schools suffer from, especially if the government continues to pay teachers directly and without sufficient monitoring. However, managed competition between government-aided schools is an improvement over the status quo where government-run schools deliver poor-quality education at relatively high teacher salaries. With government-run schools becoming less salient, government-aided schools could become the first step towards education vouchers.

If nothing else, government-aided schools demand a serious study.

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A Framework a Week: Building Digital Communities

Tools for thinking about public policy

— Pranay Kotasthane

Since we spend a significant portion of our lives online, creating and running great digital communities is a superpower for individuals and organisations. But as the past decade of social media surge has shown us, it is no easy task.

I formulate the failures of digital communities as a trilemma among three goals:

1. the degree of openness: how easy it is for an outsider to join and participate

2. the community's health or quality: is there scope for good faith disagreement and discussion? No ‘cancel culture’ and bigotry.

3. the level of activity: how often do conversations happen?

Many well-established digital communities end up achieving only two of the three objectives. Here’s an illustration.

The rare digital communities that have transcended this trilemma are Wikipedia and HackerNews. Are there others I have missed? Some great subreddits?

I am interested in knowing how the likes of Wikipedia have managed the impossible. A recent paper Rule Ambiguity, Institutional Clashes, and Population Loss: How Wikipedia Became the Last Good Place on the Internet provides one answer. Here’s the abstract:

Scholars usually portray institutions as stable, inviting a status quo bias in their theories. Change, when it is theorized, is frequently attributed to exogenous factors. This paper, by contrast, proposes that institutional change can occur endogenously through population loss, as institutional losers become demotivated and leave, whereas institutional winners remain. This paper provides a detailed demonstration of how this form of endogenous change occurred on the English Wikipedia. A qualitative content analysis shows that Wikipedia transformed from a dubious source of information in its early years to an increasingly reliable one over time. Process tracing shows that early outcomes of disputes over rule interpretations in different corners of the encyclopedia demobilized certain types of editors (while mobilizing others) and strengthened certain understandings of Wikipedia’s ambiguous rules (while weakening others). Over time, Wikipedians who supported fringe content departed or were ousted. Thus, population loss led to highly consequential institutional change.

The paper argues that the population loss of undesirable elements is crucial for building good digital communities. Moreover, it is necessary to introduce some friction on the platform such that not all its members have the same privileges. The paper then goes on to explain the specifics of how Wikipedia managed to get this gameplay right.

I encourage you to read the entire paper. This knowledge is crucial for thriving in the Information Age.

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HomeWork

Reading and listening recommendations on public policy matters

1. [Podcast] A Puliyabaazi on photolithography, a pinnacle of human ingenuity, lucidly explained by Awanish Pandey.

2. [Book] The Economics of Creative Destruction is a promising new book on innovation and growth.

3. [Paper] Private Education in India: A Novel Test of Cream Skimming by Alex Tabarrok suggests that private schools are indeed better than public schools. It challenges the notion common in India that private schools are better only because better-placed students attend them.

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