By most evenings, I feel old fashioned, not as an act of complaint but out of a sense of irrelevance. As I watch Narendra Modi and Donald Trump enact a farce called politics and teach students who think history began 10 years ago, I wonder if there is a knowledge society. I sometimes feel we are a philistine era, where ideas do not count. What I miss is the conviviality of debate, the sense that ideas create a community, that there is a sense of the critical and the classical, that life, like ideas, can be playful.

Knowledge

When I tell my students about fascism and Stalinism, teach them about the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, talk about how to read a book, they laugh and shrug me off. Knowledge is no longer critical for them. They only survive on information. They have no sense of history or even the craft of conversation. They play with the rudraksh called mobile phone because they avoid face to face conversation.

I have heard grandparents complain that their grandchildren do not talk to them anymore. A conversation across generations seems impossible. Wisdom is an outdated recipe in the age of downloaded knowledge. It is the irrelevance of older generations that worries me.

Yet it is strange that we call ourselves an information society when this generation knows so little. They look blankly when you talk about the Holocaust, the Partition and shrug it off as “before me”. I can understand they do not want the burden of the past, but what is worse is that they have no sense of it. When I tell my students languages are dying, they ask why do you need so many languages. A language is not a way of dreaming.

The suspicion of ideas is not a disease of Trump and Modi alone. It runs through our society where dissent is seen as suspicion. Photo: Reuters/file

It is treated as functional like a piece of plumbing. Even the literate among them cannot write five lines. A paragraph seems a remote possibility when e-mail takes over. Writing a love letter or reading a novel is a pleasure they have rarely experienced. They prefer Blade Runner to Dostoevsky and prefer a TV serial to a novel. When you tell them about classics, they wonder what it is all about. In fact, I remember one of them tell me, “We could not read novels because we were too busy preparing for entrance exams.”

This is a generation where a Modi makes sense because he treats knowledge functionally. For him and this generation, the modern university is a mere place for certification, a degree giving factory. The syllabus is not sacred and ideas are not something you grow into. He talks about “skilling” as if it is something different from learning. No government has a greater contempt for the university than the BJP and yet it pretends to be up to date.

This is a regime that prefers think-tanks, experts and consultants, where policy is more important than ideas. We do not want to experiment or explore as a paisa vasool notion of knowledge takes over. The tutorial college is the great educational institution while universities are being systematically developed. Both science and the humanities are laughed at. Asking questions is unfashionable and asking unfashionable questions is anti-national. In fact, one cannot think of a more mediocre regime of ideas than the one we have today

Ideas

Because a Trump and a Modi want to police ideas, they have destroyed our media. If there is one thing more supine than the university, it is the media. Newspapers are on the decline not because of technology but because they have no sense of ideas as news. The betrayal of the intellect by media is something one needs to go into. The editorial page which once evoked style is now taken over by droppings of bureaucrats who conjure policy for ideas, where a tactic is confused for a strategy. I think magazines like the Economic and Political Weekly and Seminar are today trustees of ideas that we must treasure.

They are not only custodians of memory, they are a refuge for the intellect. Today, if you wish to celebrate ideas, executives say give it to me in fifty words. They have no sense of the difference between a potted plant and a tropical forest. They think, one is a substitute for the other. In fact, what people call an “executive summary” is an illiterate’s idea of a classic.

Dissent

The suspicion of ideas is not a disease of Trump and Modi alone. It runs through our society where dissent is seen as suspicion. Dissent is not just anti-national. It is seen as a form of knowledge that is not welcome. The tragedy is our society is almost “idea free” because we have stifled dissent. We thrive on a few official words like security, development, patriotism, without realising we cannot run a twenty-first century regime on a 19th century vocabulary.

Nobody seems to realise we are an outdated society, growing obsolescent on failed ideas while the West is outthinking us. Oddly, one realises the more old-fashioned one gets, the more futuristic one becomes.

The West has the universities, the libraries, the sense of how knowledge creates new possibilities, while we encourage mediocrity. We imitate superficial ideas but have no part in the real debates of knowledge. As a regime, we are desperate to be taken seriously, but we lack the knowledge base for it.

In fact, this might be our biggest tragedy, our inability to invent or respond to ideas floating across the world, where new notions of the city, the body, of philosophy are being worked out. We are consumers of bad knowledge, not producers of creative ideas and the tragedy is we are going to destroy a generation this way. It is not only the battle of left and right that is haunting us, it is the fact we have no sense of intellectual debate. It is this that the next generation will not forgive us for.

(Courtesy of Mail Today)

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