In chapter 2 of @jsaideepak ’s book, he draws our attention to the concepts of Modernity and Rationality that were used by the European colonizers as whetstones for validity of concepts and practices. Interesting to see this normative inversion with respect to Lindy’s Principle.
You might have come across statements like “This is the 21st century. Why are you still sporting a religious mark on your forehead?” The hidden assumption here is that sporting religious marks is a pre-modern practice. So, why are you, being a sane person, still following it? In this paradigm, a pre-modern practice or an idea is viewed with suspicion(5). Furthermore, suppose you insist on the practice being valid, you may have come across, “Can you prove what are its benefits?”. Again, the assumption is that you are required to prove the validity with respect to a model of the world that is acceptable to the modern society.(4) This is the famous rationality that Lemurs go ga-ga over. “Oh you cannot prove it ? Then it is irrational. How can you continue a practice which is irrational ? "
Contrast this with how ideas and practices were evaluated for their validity in traditional societies? The answer was to see if they were “time-tested”.(5) What NNTaleb has described as the “Lindy’s principle”. Every Hindu scholar/philosopher took pride in showing that they were merely continuing along the lines of the hoary tradition. Note that the famous Kalidasa had to exhort Sahridaya’s of his time not to ignore his works merely because they were new/novel. Thus with this normative inversion, where the validity of ideas are evaluated based on whether they have a root in modern times, or if they can be explained using a modern model of the world, the Hindu struggles to understand/explain his own practices.
The reaction to this is two-fold :
- An outright rebellion whose adherents seek to discard everything that is not consistent with modernity and rationality. Reformers fall into this category.
- The apologia where every Hindu idea or practice is sought to be justified w.r.t modern and rational outlook, even if that means changing/restricting what the idea/practice originally meant.
Neither is good for the Hindus in the long run.