My dear students,
(My dear students’, a fortnightly column that is a conversation with young minds on current events, books, popular culture — just about anything that’s worth talking over a cup of coffee.)
I want to talk to you about expanding your intellectual repertoire, but please allow me a small digression first. In my student days, I was drawn to a book called “In Defence of Anarchism” by Robert Paul Wolff. It’s an alluring book for young people, because it sets the philosophical ground for a rebellion against political authority.
Young people love to rebel but they need a cause. Wolff provides a powerful cause. Wolff argues that, as people, we have a right to take decisions on our own. Our autonomy of decision making is of fundamental moral importance, and cannot be subject to any expediency. A political authority by definition denies us this right. Therefore, all authorities are morally illegitimate. We may obey authorities for pragmatic reasons (we will go to jail if we don’t obey police orders), but no one has the moral authority to tell us what to do. Only we can decide that for ourselves.
In a sprawling democracy such as ours, Wolff’s idea of personal autonomy is difficult to achieve. How can citizens take a call on the major social and political issues of the day? Wolff’s solution is to explore direct democracy more seriously. People must not leave social and economic issues to the politicians but must deliberate and decide collectively on these issues.
Wolff was writing at the time of great angst among the young about American participation in the Vietnam war. He thought a large majority of Americans went into the war because of a quiescent attitude among the people towards authority.
There is one major issue with Wolff’s proposal. The intellectual culture of the country must allow for his ideas on citizen participation in the issues of the day.
My dear students, you are at the cusp of becoming full-fledged citizens and yet we have bequeathed you a culture which simply does not allow for any meaningful discourse on a topic that reaches a certain level of complexity.
We know from a survey of social media that people are polarised on topics. But the problem goes deeper. When people are polarised, there is a tendency of doing ad hominem attacks. The ensuing discussion is debased even further. Further, discussions are becoming hyper specialised. Economists argue with other economists, engineers argue with other engineers. Only lawyers argue with anyone who cares to listen. People are withdrawing from areas they are not familiar with.
Finally, people are not making connections between domains of inquiry. But the world is connected. Nuclear policy is connected to employment; employment is connected to democracy; and democracy is connected to emotional well being. When CLR James said ‘What do they know of cricket who only cricket know’, he was speaking about the problem of understanding a sport by focusing only on the sport. His admonition, however, can be generalised to any domain.
How do we solve this problem? Fortunately, there are a few resources available. I will give one example and I am sure that if you dig a little bit more you will come up with more examples. There are the BBC Reith lectures (available online and without a paywall) which go back to 1948 with the first lecture by Bertrand Russell, and interestingly, given what we have been taking about, his talk was on ‘Authority and the Individual’. I spent many happy hours going through multiple Reith lectures.
I wanted to know more about the impact of AI on the military, the economy, and on our work lives. I listened to Prof. Stuart Russell from the University of California, Berkeley. The topic was complex and yet was delivered in a way that anyone with a basic familiarity with AI could understand. It was laced with anecdotes and humour. The questions and answers bit at the end of the lecture brought out aspects of the topic that further enriched the lectures.
On the BBC Reith website, there are lectures on virtually any topic of public importance you can imagine. If you are like me and prefer to read rather than listen, that’s not a problem either. The BBC website has a transcript for all the
talks.
The world around us is not only complex, but is becoming complicated in complicated ways. Two aspects of our world are hurling in different directions. On the one hand, all parts of our lives — education, health, governance, work — are transforming in ways we are not yet ready for.
On the other hand, our echo chambers are restricting us from coming to terms with this change. We have
no choice but to grapple with issues that demand technical expertise — climate change, pollution, health risks, military expenditures, welfare programmes, immigration, to mention a few. We can’t hope to read the technical papers in these areas; we are barely able to manage reading materials that we are supposed to be familiar with.
The only alternative is to explore resources that give us some thoughtful insights into these subjects, that make us understand, with simple language and humour if necessary, the fundamental processes that drive activities in these areas. The alternative is that we decide to rely wholly on experts. In practice, this means that we cede our ability to critique to paid lobbyists or the government.
That would be a descent into the kind of political system that led Prof Wolff to despair. We must seek accessible knowledge rather than the solace of philosophical anarchism.
'Young people love to rebel but they need a cause,' says Nigam Nuggehalli. (Graphics by Abhishek Mitra) 
Share
