A n article in the Sunday Times of yester week shook me up. The
news item that deeply disturbed me had the headlines: “The whole world is
waging war on unintelligent people.( I take
exception to the phrase “unintelligent people”
to refer to those who are not the intellectuals). The article is an
indictment of the intelligent minority (again “smart’ is not the right wor for Intelligent people as the word has a subtle,
pejorative signification) who use the s-bomb to degrade the less intelligent as
“stupid”. It concludes with a preachy paragraph from David Freeman: “W must
stop treating our society as a playground for the smart minority. We should
instead begin shaping our economy, our schools and even our culture with an eye
to the abilities and needs of the majority and to the full range of human
capacity.” These are great words dripping with egalitarian sympathy and affirming
democratic principles of equal opportunity to level the meritorious and the
mediocre. In fact, mediocrity is the blight of democracy. The encouragement of
mediocrity breeds mediocrity. The result is the eclipse of the smart minority by
the vast mediocre majority. The whole world is not waging a war on unintelligent
people, but on the minority of intellectuals.
Paradoxically the same newspaper had a detailed report on RBI
Governor Raghuram Rajan’s decision to return to academics with his statement of
intent: “My ultimate home is in the realm of ideas.” RR3exit is proof of the
war waged against the intellectual minority who is often accused as being
selfish, arrogant and omniscient. It is the smart minority of Raghuram Rajans
who provide the roadmap for a stable, welfare society and who are the enablers
of the vast majority to realize where its potential lies and how it can rise up
to its potentiaI. Amartya Sen, belonging to the intellectual minority speaks of
welfare and development in terms of the society providing the needed space
and opportunity for every citizen to realize his/her capability potential. Such a platform can be
organized, preserved and supported only by the small minority of educated and
knowledgeable people.
The indelible fact of life is our body politic functions like our
five fingers where each finger has a distinctive role to play and no one finger
can claim to possess the ability to make the hand function optimally. The long
and short of the five finger exercise is the recognition of the importance and
use of every finger whose function cannot be replicated by the other four
fingers. It is the same with human population. All people are not endowed with the highest
intellectual potential. There are those with distinct talent in creative fields
like, arts, music, theatre and dance; others
with talent for sports. Many others have skills suited for working in industry
and there are many who can take up just pedestrian jobs in shops and offices
that require alertness and not any special skill or intelligence. While
education is essential for the development of both cognitive faculty and
competence even for mundane, run-of-the-mill tasks, it is only a few who can
excel in academics and make use of it to generate ideas that are needed to
develop society holistically. Modern
society regards the smart minority as a threat to the survival of the non-smart
majority that is in large numbers .It is a known fact that the bad penny drives
away the good penny. The smart minority is resented and frowned upon and is
denied its rightful place in the new social and political structure in all
democratic nations.
It is the smart minority who are the path breakers and pathfinders
who pioneer a new idea or a new view or an innovation that contributes to
public good. There can be only one Socrates, one Buddha, one Shakespeare, one
Vivekananda, one Mahatma, one Aurobindo, one Ambedkar, one Mother Teresa etc.-
only one out of the billions of world
population. How many Newtons, Einsteins, Ramanujans, Heisenbergs, Stephen
Hawkings has the world produced? Even
the selection of a cricket playing eleven is reserved for those who comprise a
small minority of talented players. In business the name Tata is associated
with quality and trustworthiness. How many philanthropists we have like Bill Gates
or in our own backyard, how many industrialists like Narayanmurthy have
succeeded in setting a benchmark for global consultancy? We have just one
Sreedharan as an exemplar of dynamic
leadership, one Kurien for pioneering white revolution, one Swaminathan for starting the Green
revolution in India to make the nation self sufficient in food.
Humanity cannot progress without the smart minority. They are the
entrepreneurs who galvanize knowledge into vehicles for transforming society to
a higher standard of living and welfare. Knowledge is a two edged sword- it has
the power to create and the power to destroy. We know the advantages of harnessing
nuclear energy for the benefit of mankind, but if misdirected it can sound the
death knell of humanity. While learning and education give us knowledge, we gain
wisdom by developing the ability to make good decisions with the use of
knowledge. Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote: “Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. “ The
smart minority without the wisdom quotient often gets pilloried when it looks
down on the rest as stupid. It is then that the vast mediocre majority reduces
the smart minority to irrelevance. We have instances of history where Ashoka
transcended knowledge to become Ashoka, the great. It is the other way round
when a dynamic leader like Hitler used his knowledge to become a cruel
monstrous hydra to decimate and murder six million Jews. Democracy should guard
against such multi- headed hydras , but not at the cost of wiping away the
smart, wise minority. “A learned man is like
a tank, a wise man is like a spring”.
The world is
waging a battle against the intellectuals out of envy and the intellectuals sans
wisdom have a scathing contempt for the vast majority who do not have the intelligence
to be learned and educated. The two fight for hegemonic dominance- one through intellectual
arrogance and the other through brute majority. It is like a plant in a garden cohabited by an obscure weed that sucks at the
water and nutrition needed for the growth of the plant. The plant bears no
grudge against the weed and seems to share with the weed whatever is available.
It is only the gardener who plucks the weeds for the plant to grow uninhibited.
Some weeds attract beneficial insects, which in turn can protect
crops from harmful pests. Weeds may also provide ground cover that reduces
moisture loss and prevents erosion. Weeds may also improve soil fertility;
dandelions, for example, bring up nutrients like calcium and nitrogen from deep
in the soil with their tap root and hosts nitrogen-fixing bacteria in its roots,
fertilizing the soil directly. Some people have appreciated weeds for their
tenacity, their wildness and even the work and connection to nature they
provide. It is important to remember that weeds have as much use as the plants
growing in the garden.
It is the unintelligent people who divide the smart minority and the mediocre
majority, gnawing at the vitals of society. There is enough space to
accommodate both. Both need one another. In fact in the theory of John Rawls
these smart elites are needed in society to address and redress the problems of
the disadvantaged majority. If a small minority is prevented from entering the
realm of ideas, civilization will collapse. Much the same way, if the vast
majority is looked down with disdain from the high pedestal of the intellectuals,
it will engender envy and violence that will retard human growth and development.
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