Read and become ignorant

 

Read and become ignorant!

"Perhaps at no other time have men been so knowing and yet so unaware, so burdened with purposes and so purposeless, so disillusioned and so completely the victims of illusion. This strange contradiction pervades our entire culture, our science and our philosophy, our literature and our art."
(W.M. Urban, "The Intelligible World", 1929, p. 172)

"It is better to have a well-made head than a well-filled head."
(Montaigne )
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The great art historian, metaphysician and perennialist hakeem, Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, once wrote, "...it is far better not to know HOW to read than not to know WHAT to read." This may surprise many people and may even sound absurd to many others. But there is wisdom in it, pertinent wisdom for our times.

There was a time when literacy, mainly the ability to read, meant awareness, knowledge, culture and cultivation. To be literate was to have access to information and to become knowledgeable, even wise. Books were prized possessions because they were so rare, expensive and difficult to get hold of. The technology of book and printing, after the invention of the moveable Guttenberg printing press in the fifteenth century, made literacy the sole criterion of success, of fame and fortune, of culture and civilization. Reading and writing became essential, so much so that to be illiterate was automatically equated with being ignorant. That was the context then, long time ago.
We live in a totally different age now. There is no lack of information or of books now. Books are easily available and information, every kind of information, is just a click away. Google, Wikipedia, OpenAI and ChatGPT, social media...all at our service to fetch us within seconds whatever we want to find and know. In fact, we are now drowning in the oceans of information. We have terms like "information glut" and "information overload", choking on it all, as if drinking from a big hose; we are simply overwhelmed by the tsunami of information. So, it is not about literacy anymore, or the mere ability to read.

What the Coomaraswamy sutra means is that literacy is now a kind of burden, or a tool that puts a lot of responsibility on our shoulders and conscience. The issue is not "how to read", or not that only, anymore; it is essentially about "what to read". Ignorance now means the lack or the dulling of that discriminatory faculty that can sift through all that "information" with which we are bombarded 24/7, 365 days all year round. We are not faced with the problem of "lack of information" anymore, but with too much of it and most of it is useless and obviously harmful. Not everything is worth reading, but how do we decide? Therein lies the problem and its solution, too. In fact, just saying "information" in an innocent or naive and neutral manner is not helpful anymore; most, if not all, information is now suspect, either as misinformation or as disinformation. Among other things, the critical mind now needs to be able "only (to) connect" as the writer E.M. Forster once said. Everything is fragmented and compartmentalized, especially knowledge in the institutions of learning where specialized disciplines have gained depth in knowing the minutest details of things but have lost breadth and connection with other disciplines or fields of enquiry. It is not an exaggeration to say that a well educated person today lacks the crucial and critical ability to "connect the dots" that are spread all across disciplines and fields of enquiry; practitioners across discipline can't communicate with one another at all and all of them resemble tribes of experts with specialized, even esoteric, vocabularies and discourses and often busy in protecting the boundaries of their fields, something called "gate keeping" inside the academia.

A serious implication of the sutra above, therefore, is that ignorance now, in its compound form (jehl e murrakkab in Urdu), is more likely to be the result of literacy or of reading without discrimination, or without knowing WHAT to read and not the result of illiteracy. In other words, whereas in the past, it was illiteracy that was often equated with ignorance (often wrongly though even then but for different sets of reasons), it is literacy that now leads to compound ignorance.

"Where is the life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
("The Rock", T.S. Eliot)

(Dervaish Ali, Quetta walla)