On simplicity and simple people

A portrait of an old woman by Sofia Minson

"...he who seeks to gain all things by cleverness ends by losing all in blindness and ineffectuality...it is better to go to heaven artlessly than to go intelligently to hell..."      
                                                        Shaykh Isa Nur al-Din Ahmad

"We live in an age of plenty, but what use is plenty of rubbish?"  
                                                       Lord Northbourne

“Yogurt! It’s yogurt”, she said to me once. “The secret to my long years is yogurt. A healthy person always has a natural desire to have yogurt”, she used to say. She lived to be 96 or 97. Originally from the Sistan region of Iran, she was a tall, broad-shouldered woman with engaging, sunken eyes and an aquiline nose set on a time-worn corrugated face that often reminded me of the graceful Red Indians or the First Nations of North America. The resemblance was not just physical but also, and more importantly, metaphysical. She was our paternal great grandmother. She was our, and everybody else’s who knew her, Aaja, the Faarsi word for a grandmother or a grandmotherly woman. In this blogpost I want to recall and reflect upon the “philosophy” of this wise woman who belonged to a generation of people, who are now all but extinct, like the human version of the unfortunate Dodo, both species being the victims of the vicissitudes of what we often mindlessly celebrate as “our time”---as if it were an objectively real and eternal phenomenon and not just a blip in the current cycle of time---or just “the times” that always seem to be “a changin…”

Aaja used to say that goodness travels the furthest in life, so try to do good as often as you can. The good will live and will be remembered the longest than all the other acts done and words spoken: both the goodness of the tongue and of the deed. On food and eating, her one most valuable advice that I will never forget and which I often pass on to others was, “ When you sit to eat, never leave the dastarkhwan (or the meal table) with a full stomach; always stop eating just before you start feeling full. Don’t eat that last bite if you know that it will make you feel full!” The tone in which she would utter that last part of her advice and the facial expression that underlined its gravity were most suitable for saying something like, “Stop killing yourself!” or “Stop digging your grave with your teeth!”  Years later, I discovered similar insights on food and eating in the works of the great Islamic theologian and Sufi Al- Ghazzali. Another of her gems was, “Observe more and talk less. Listen and listen attentively, because the art of listening is the most difficult to master and the one least taught these days. Therein lies man’s true tarbiat (education)”

I have called her utterings as “philosophy”. She was a philosopher, in other words. By that I mean philosophy not in the usual, modern sense which often amounts to not much but mental gymnastics, one or the other kind of cerebral monkey play. I use the expression in its ancient sense, which is also its original form: as a way of life, manière de vivre or as bios in the French classicist Pierre Hadot’s words. Philosophy, according to this view is not just a truncated and compartmentalized discipline of knowledge that provides information or informs but what transforms the student, or forms its practitioner. It was, therefore, always called taleem au tarbiat, and not just education or taleem. In that kind of world, knowledge was essentially transformative in nature.

Old woman, a portrait

These “philosophers” were straight talking, simple and down to earth people. The simplicity, the unpretentiousness in both their thinking and lifestyles was more than anything else a reflection of the fact that they never confused the few things that are essential in life with what is accidental---the ever-multiplying flotsam and jetsam that first compete for our attention and then distract, disorient and eventually destroy us. They were people who were closer to the origin of things and hence were the "true"  originals than their amnesiac modern and postmodern counterparts. Many people nowadays think of original, or of originality, as novelty, as something new. But the word “original” has its roots in the word origin which makes something original to be closer to its source, and not just being novel.

Comfortable living with many ways of seeing and understanding the past for example, through myths, shared memories, stories, parables, sacred poetry, songs and so on, and not just consumers of hyper-rationalized, scientized history written by professional historians, they knew very well that history does not take man towards a clearer and more sophisticated understanding of his world and reality, but that history is always a house of paradoxes and ironies. In other words, they held that progress in one domain is undermined by regression and decadence in others. Or that every story of a chest-thumping civilization is also a tale of soul shattering barbarism, a sobering lesson that many modern Westerners not so much learned but re-learned the hard way in the latter half of the twentieth century mainly through the critical work of the Frankfurt School thinkers like Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and Walter Benjamin and what they called “negative dialectics”. We may have progressed technologically and materially but not morally and ethically. Morally, we are pygmies in front of our “naïve” and “simple” ancestors, while technologically we stand tall as giants. But the modern techno-monstrosities that we have produced reflect those same paradoxes and ironies of history:  they may well become the source and cause of our annihilation, of the annihilation of life as such on this planet.

We congratulate ourselves that we are sophisticated and complicated people and those who came before us were naïve, simple. Simple, yes, but simpletons they were not. In our self-congratulatory mood, we often forget that stupidity can also come wrapped in sophisticated worldliness speaking the urbane language of the metropolis. Just a quick look around us will confirm the truth of that claim. As a sage has reminded us, “…complication does not make error less false, nor stupidity less stupid.” In fact, the pathologies of modern forms of rationality are now more destructive, deadlier than those of the irrationality that we quickly and unthinkingly associate with most things, if not everything, past and with which we reproach everybody who lived in that past.

Nobody I think has provided a better formulation, in verse, of our Aaja’s philosophy than the great contemporary poet and thinker Iftikhar Arif when he says:

Buss ek hee rasta hay duniya ko zer karnay ka, jeetnay ka

Yeh jittni pur pech hoti jaaye ussi qadar sehl au saada ho jaa 

(There is only one way to win over and conquer this world,

The more it becomes complicated, the simpler you must become)

My great grandmother was semi-literate like most people of her generation in that part of the world. Judged according to the criterion of literacy-as-we-understand-it now, that is. But I do not know many people who are as literate, to use this word in its best sense, as Iftikhar Arif. He is the very model, the very definition, of authentic literacy and integral education. As the well-known poet, writer and literary critic, Saleem Ahmed, once said: “The poetry of Arif is the poetry of a man who is clearly in his own class when it comes to thought, feeling and expression.  Most of his contemporaries fail in one of these departments: those who know how to think cannot express or articulate, and the ones who can articulate, cannot think clearly. And when they are good articulators and thinkers, they are emotionally infertile.” The erudite Indian literary theorist and critic Gopi Chandar Narang has called Arif  “The empathetic poet of new (modern) alienation” by which he means that as an artist, Arif is someone who “first and foremost, has a profound love for humanity, enjoys life and living” ( what the French so charmingly call joie de vivre) and who is keen on understanding and feeling the suffering that is the human condition, by being both inside and outside of social structures because only by having a cold and objective stance on, or distance from, these structures and social norms, can one have the epiphany of that suffering, of that dukkha.  Such is the art of this man, the aesthetically sublime and philosophically profound quality of which is matched by his character as a decent, caring and humble human being, as witnessed by all those who have had the privilege of meeting him.

So, what Iftikhar Arif is saying in his verse is what our Aaja and people of her generation---at least the philosophers among them---were the embodiment of. They were people in possession of the sharp sword of simplicity that could cut through the complicated and accumulated layers of dross that engulf the contemporary man. Those “naïve” old-timers, who lived philosophy rather than propound and preach it, had eyes and vision that could penetrate through the fog of compound ignorance parading as authentic insight. They were people who were acutely attuned to quality rather than craving quantity, as I have also argued elsewhere in one of my blogposts; they knew that to be truly rich and contented one had to possess less. For them what was not absolutely necessary to sustain life, was just corrupting burden. That is how the sehl au saada in the above verse should be understood.  Life always meant being first and then something else, and definitely not just having or possessing.

I am not an expert interpreter of Iftikhar Arif's work but let me try to open up what he says in the above verse lines a bit more. Saadgi, or simplicity, affords us the power of discernment with which we can make the crucial distinction between what is real and what is illusory, between error and falsity, necessity and contingency, or between light and darkness. This ability is actually a kind of critical thinking whereby the simple person has courageously protected his or her ability to discriminate between what is right and what is wrong, between truth and falsity; in them, this critical ability is intact and whole because they have refused to let the clutter of this world inundate their minds, harden their hearts, and corrupt their entire beings. Unlike in the past, in our times the real problem is not the lack of information but its excess; we are submerged in it 24/7 and 365 days a year, bombarded with it from all directions and in all forms and formats. We are floating, nay, drowning in information. So, the critical skill that is urgently needed is not just to have access to information and knowledge but to filter out, to sift and sort, to separate and dig out the deeply buried wisdom and truths from under the mountains of falsities. The late historian and philosopher of art Ananda Coomaraswamy expressed it beautifully when he said, “It is far better not to know how to read than (not to know) what to read.”  What can be more insightful in this post-truth age of information glut, of alternative facts and fake news? That, the critical filtering and sifting, can only be done if one has made a conscious choice to live the simple, the saada life, just like Aaja and the other old philosophers would have liked us to live.

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