Purvapaksha, debates and the role of ideas

Justice Markandaya Katju pulled in as Chairman of Press Council of India and immediately made some interesting comments about the state of media. He then further clarified providing a philosophical and cultural argument leading to what should be the role of media today in India. There are three interesting points he makes

He first places the state of the nation as a society in transition and highlights the role of ideas in this:

Today India is passing through a transitional period in our history, the transition being from feudal agricultural society to modern industrial society. This is a very painful and agonizing period in history. The old feudal society is being uprooted and torn apart, but the new modern industrial society has not been fully and firmly established. Old values are crumbling, but new modern values have not yet been put in place. Everything is in flux, in turmoil. What was regarded good yesterday, is regarded bad today, and what was regarded bad is regarded good.
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In this transition period the role of ideas, and therefore of the media, becomes extremely important. At a particular historical juncture, ideas become a material force.
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In my opinion the Indian media too should play a progressive role similar to the one played by the European media. This it can do by attacking backward and feudal ideas and practices like casteism, communalism, superstitions, oppression of women, etc. and propagating modern rational and scientific ideas, secularism, and tolerance.

Then he comments on the debates on Indian television and detachment from classical Indian philosophical practice:

While criticizing, however, fairness requires that one should report the words of one’s opponent accurately, without twisting or distorting them. That was the method used by our philosophers. They would first state the views of their opponent, in what was called as the ‘purvapaksha’. This was done with such accuracy and intellectual honesty that if the opponent were present he could not have stated his views better.

He was commenting on how many shrieky newscasters on Indian news channels paraphrase statements into "burning questions that face the nation" making the deeper issues look trivial.
Lastly, he elaborated on the difference between "uneducated" and "a poor intellectual mind".

I did not say that this majority was uneducated or illiterate. This again was a deliberate distortion of what I said. I never used the word ‘uneducated’. I said that the majority is of a poor intellectual level. A person may have passed B.A. or M.A. but yet may be of a poor intellectual level. 

This distortion by media is not a one-off thing. In India, people consider the letters after a person's name as indicator of his eruditeness. But as Justice Katju says clearly, passing exams and getting a degree does not make you wise nor intelligent. There is a larger sensitivity and engagement that is required for a person to achieve any kind of insight in any subject of his or her choice.
Here are some of the people Justice Katju refers to in his clarification. A reading of these eminent thinkers and intellectuals will do a lot of good for one's evolution.
William Shakespeare. Voltaire. Rousseau. Thomas Paine. Junius. Diderot. Helvetius. Holbach. Charles Dickens. Raja Ram Mohan Roy. Nikhil Chakravarty. Munshi Premchand. Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay. Saadat Hassan Manto. Rahim. Madhavacharya. Emile Zola. 

Chaos, Complexity, Thermodynamics and Entropy

On Chaos:

Chaos is the Anti-Calculus revolution. Chaos is the rediscovery that calculus does not have infinite power. In its widest possible meaning, chaos is the collection of those mathematical truths that have nothing to do with calculus. And this is why it is distasteful to twentieth century physicists.

On Thermodynamics

Thermodynamics, another name for statistical mechanics, is about disordered energy - understanding the relationship between disordered energy and ordered energy.

On Disorder

When we say entropy is a measure of disorder, the disorder is in our head, in our knowledge of the situation.

On Evolution and Entropy

The spontaneous evolution of an isolated system can never lead to a decrease of its entropy (= disorder). The entropy is always increasing as long as the system evolves. If the system eventually reaches equilibrium and stops evolving, its entropy becomes constant.

On Entropy and Knowledge

...our dimensionless entropy, which measures our lack of knowledge is a purely subjective quantity. It has nothing to do with the fundamental laws of particles and their interactions. It has to with the fact that chaos messes up things; that situations that were initially simple and easy to know in detail will become eventually so complicated, thanks to chaos, that we are forced to give trying to know them.

Michel Barranger explains these concepts for the general student. For students of human systems, this syncretism from the natural sciences is essential. Any human collective which is engaged in a common purpose operates has exchanges of energy. And all social systems demonstrate the tendency to move towards an equilibrium, often accompanied by some level of decadence and degradation. Civilisations have appeared in different parts of the world and over history, flourished and then suddenly vanished. There are some communities who become rulers, dominating the entire civilisation. But over time, they fall apart either due to internal struggles or through an external force. The Mughal Empire after Bahadur Shah I shrank as subsequent rulers could not manage the "system" with the result that with a little force, the Mughal Empire was replaced by the British Empire. Like Michel Baranger explains, from one chaotic volume, the system was modified into a new volume which was initially smooth by the 1940s had become (due to various factors) so chaotic and complex that the Britishers found it worthwhile just to leave - creating a new system.

At a practice level, for the individual and for the organisation, there are implications. In business, markets cannot be defined as sets of static silos based on demographic or psychographic parameters. Markets are complex communities of human beings and there is a constant interaction between order and disorder as communities evolve over time. When one sees markets as such, there is a different paradigm of engagement that is required. And for individuals, one cannot be merely satisfied by knowing "analysis" or believing in the "exact" aspect of the "exact sciences."

Related articles:
An interesting paper on evolution and entropy (second law of thermodynamics presented by Kaila and Annila of the University of Helsinki