The Hedgehog and The Fox

The Hedgehog and the Fox


A Srinivas Rao
23 October 2011

“The fox knows a great many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing” wrote Archilocus a Greek poet, making scholars down the centuries scramble to decipher those dark words. Probably all he meant was that the hedgehog’s single great defence was better than the varied wiles of the fox. It was the polymath Isiah Berlin who gave a plausible interpretation to them. Berlin believed that scholars and thinkers and human kind in general are divided on a deep chasm of contesting visions. On the one hand are those who hold a central vision, one system, and one single organising principle in terms of which all they say and think revolve around, more or less coherent and on the other hand lay those who pursue a diversity of ends often unrelated and disparate, connected only fleetingly, unrelated to any moral or aesthetic purpose. Berlin’s essay was really about dividing writers into two camps; on the one hand were the hedgehogs Plato, Proust, Hegel, Dante, Dostoyevsky, Ibsen and on the other were the foxes Aristotle, Shakespeare, Pushkin, Joyce etc. Berlin’s concern was where to place the complex figure of Tolstoy who he concludes was probably a fox who tried to be a hedgehog.

A Brief History of Disbelief in India

A Brief History of Disbelief in India


A Srinivas Rao
1st October 2011

Recently I watched Jonathan Miller’s presentation of his television series on Atheism a History of Disbelief on the BBC and was quite impressed by the programme while being rather disappointed by Richard Dawkins ‘Root of All Evil’ another serial on atheism on the same channel. It was not just that disbelief tends to verge on the polemical as was the case with Richard Dawkins (who seemed to claim that religion by corollary was incapable of any good), but that it tends to be as fanatical in its dismissal as the assertions of centuries and legions of theists. Dawkins and Christopher Hitchins over the last decade by adopting their polemical stances seem more antitheists than atheists. It is not in the content and assertions of indefensible beliefs that the understanding of atheism comes from. They come from the motivations deep within the human breast, of the need to make sense of the great uncertainties of life which are death disease and decrepitude. Anthropologists have maintained that the origins of belief lie in random interventions of unseen beings or forces that are pliable to mischief, placation and propitiation; not in the contesting portrayals of monotheistic patriarchal (and senescent) deity who intervenes in the trajectories of our lives. These rather early hypotheses that uncertainty in our daily lives are caused by extra empirical forces/beings/agency and that they can be mitigated by placating them is the beginning of science and religion. They no longer are scientifically valid but belong to the realm of myth which is a domain of early attempts to model the workings of the world and its diverse inhabitants. They were in other words ‘working hypotheses’. Neither can we dismiss belief altogether as it is not belief but the content of them which is subject to interrogation. We cannot survive without belief which is shorthand of our mental models of our ethical and political assumptions that underscore our social behaviour. It is only certain kinds of beliefs that are beyond the pale of our modern faith in empiricism that are held suspect, as they suffer from their un-verifiability by independent inquirers; whose converse is the touchstone of thinking in our times.