A Question of Answers
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The Information Age is driven more by fuss over factoids than craving for knowledge, writes RUKMINI BHAYA NAIR

Except perhaps for a few bemused souls on that rivetting quiz-show Kaun Banega Crorepati, everyone knows that Charles Darwin wrote The Origin of the Species. Not quite so many people, however, are acquainted with the tome called The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. This work describes the craving among higher mammals for excitement, for companionship and for knowledge. In it, Darwin suggests that all living creatures are congenitally greedy but none more so than man. Not only are human beings constant prisoners of desire but we seem programmed to express this lust for life in utterly obvious ways across cultures.

Despite the multiplicity of our social systems, evolution decrees an underlying sameness. Shame is almost universally accompanied by downcast eyes, joy with laughter, anger with a scowl, scepticism with raised eyebrows. Tedious, is it not — why, one wonders, is it so inadmissible to display a loving warmth by frowning fiercely? But alas, biological conventions bind us just as firmly in the dotcom age as they did in our dotty past.

Hegemonic American or humble Indian, each one of us succumbs to, let’s say, the lure of television with much the same stupefying predictability. Modern genetics, too, tends to confirm this boring view of human existence — which could be why Expression was reprinted in 1999, 127 years after its first publication in 1872. The difference between any individual and another, we are now informed, is only about one part in a thousand. Skin colour, height, shape — all those features that keep us in a swoon of longing, since but for these variations we might have been Aishwarya or Hrithik (oh happy, happy!) — are contained in the tiniest jiggle of a chromosome. How wretchedly unfair! So, the next time you escape from the marauding concrete jungle out there and huddle with family and friends round the flickering flames of television, transfixed by the sight of the divine Amitabh doling out the moolah, go a little easy on yourself. Evolution, more cunning than any corporate conglomerate determined to manipulate its audience, is at work here.

If we truly wish to understand the genesis of the ruthlessly competitive games we engage in today — quiz shows, beauty contests, drug-infested Olympics or political double-talk — it could be important, then, to analyse some of those basic urges that Darwin discusses. Of these, the most intriguing in my opinion is indubitably the thirst for knowledge unique to our language-governed human species. The cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett has named this drive ‘epistemic hunger’. Eve bit that fatal apple and Steve Jobs marketed his Apple computers on account of this ancient fire in the belly and there is no sign that the trait is about to disappear in the much vaunted ‘information age’ stretching before us.

Like real hunger, our desire for information needs to be serviced at regular intervals. It is not enough to eat one big ‘knowledge meal’ once and for all. Human societies, unless they suffer collectively from cognitive anorexia or bulimia, require regular info-feeds. And it is here that the quiz programmes which have currently caught our national fancy, come in.

Quizzes might be characterised as miniature exam questions because they share a crucial logical feature of examinations. These are essentially fake queries rather than genuine enquiries because the inquisitor already knows the answer. Also, there is always a right answer — recall, for instance, Siddharth Basu’s inimitable ‘is correct’ here. Thus quizzes are, so to speak, the counterpart of smart fast-food joints, catering to the enormous demand for mental sustenance in modern societies.

Are our intellectual muscles really strengthened by knowing whether some scion of the Kapoor family was nicknamed Chimpu, Chintu, Chinku or Chichi? Of course not, but note how large a cross-section of the KBC audience responds confidently to this sort of probe. On the other hand, neither contestants nor floor appear to do well on ‘national pride’ questions such as which Indian won an Olympic gold-medal, jettisoning the hapless Leander Paes in favour of Milkha Singh, P. T. Usha and Jaspal Rana (wrong candidates all). Now, what exactly is going on here? Well, first, we are being reminded that the Darwinian forces which bind large social groups together may not consist in ‘high culture’ tidbits but in the common diet of gossip and value such as Hindi cinema has to offer. Thus, although it concerns ‘trivia’ this particular message is, to my mind, non-trivial and must be pondered long and hard by our education boffins. Second, we must at this juncture make a distinction between ‘information’ and ‘knowledge’ — words I’ve used interchangeably so far.

To go back to the example of the quiz, I’d say that when questions have solutions that are already well attested, what’s conveyed is ‘information’, while conundrums which do not possess such ready answers involve ‘knowledge’. Knowledge questions fascinate us precisely because they have no known answers. They arouse curiosity and the instinct for intellectual adventure, keeping boredom at bay.

As such, they are basic motivators for our Darwinian will to survive. When C. V.Raman asked why the sky was blue, his wonderment seemed to resemble that of a poet — and in fact a poet could provide one sort of illuminating answer to Raman’s enquiry. But Raman ended up with a physicist’s explanation, one that won him the Nobel Prize for the molecular scattering of light. My point is that, poetry or physics, the intellectual communities a country produces must be encouraged to ask, not just quiz questions but seemingly ‘pointless’ questions as well — questions which permit robust philosophical argument and derive from an eclectic variety of cultural sources. Six samples:

Gautama Buddha’s ‘sarvam dukham’ : Why is there suffering in the world?’
Freud’s : What does a woman want?
Kabir’s : Kahu ke man ki ko jaanat?
Plato’s : Why with so much evidence around us, are we so ignorant of ‘reality’?
Aristotle’s : What is the essence of tragedy?
Shankara’s : Katav kanta? Kaste putra? Samsaroyam ativa vichitra.

Allow yourself to imagine for a counter-factual moment the chaotic but highly enlivening exercise that could result from a cross-fertilisation of these enquiries. For instance, we might graft the brash filmi question which Aamir Khan asks in Ghulam — Ai, kya bolti tu? on to Aristotle’s superior brand of literary poetics; or pose Plato’s question about truth to Shankara; or request computer scientists to tackle Panini’s puzzlement about the structures of language. Or we could refer Kabir’s haunting question ‘Kahu ke man ki ko jaanat?’ to the ruling digerati of cyberspace.

Too far-fetched, you think? Surely not for a global community immersed in virtual reality! Nor for a nation which allegedly values its pluralism as much as ours. Social justice, rights and freedoms are at stake in these debates, not just information. This is what underwrites their salience in an age where we are so bombarded with advertising images, facts and figures that our emotional reflexes have turned numb under the assault. Indeed, I would argue that a very sane economist such as Amartya Sen has already employed this sort of method when he imports the epistemological questions about human suffering posed by Gautama Buddha in the 6th century into modern welfare economics. And look at the glittering prize he garnered!

My own inclination is to propose a whole new area of study, contiguous with the old philosophical domains of ethics and aesthetics. I’d call the discipline ‘epithymetics’ meaning ‘pertaining to desire’ (from the Greek epi ‘upon’ and thymos ‘the soul’; it’s a real word, I promise — you can look it up!). The aim of this discipline would be to examine our contemporary consumerist hungers and especially our aching desire to plug into world chat-rooms. As such, it would be ideally suited to questioning the recent dramatic transformations in the nature of knowledge and the difficult Darwinian choices consequently imposed upon us.

The alternative is dismal. It is no secret that our educational system in India has gone tragically wrong in its near total reliance on ‘info-cramming’ to the detriment of the more fundamental form of the ‘knowledge-question’. That is why we routinely hear our school-children groan at being force-fed irrelevant facts; why entrance to the best institutions in our country just cannot be effected without attending expensive coaching classes that drill their ‘brilliant’ candidate to death; and also why we get the phenomenon of a B. Sc. student on KBC display a startling lack of assurance about nitrogen being the most common gas in the air — information every elementary science textbook records. It is under these alarming circumstances that computers are welcomed as a magical panacea. The societies of the future, opine the culture-gurus, will need armies of ‘knowledge workers’. Ho hum, but we must not confuse two categories of hunger. In a country where at least a third of the population suffers from physical as well as mental malnutrition, we cannot afford to forget that a) dining off megabytes is impossible, and b) computers are a literacy-based technology.

Should we fail to ensure education and primary healthcare for all within the next decade, it logically follows that most Indians will become victims rather than beneficiaries of the information revolution. At any rate, this might have been Darwin’s prediction. Any major eco-shift in knowledge technologies, comparable to a geological change of climate, would inevitably push the weak under. Yet, the utopian aim of all civil societies must be to prevent such a grim Darwinian outcome. How? Simply by being stubborn epithymeticists and not being afraid either to give the wrong answer or ask questions which have no right answers. It’s not KBC’s dumbing down that we have to fear, it’s our silencing of ourselves. Oh, and just to end on a quizzical note, who coined the phrase ‘‘the survival of the fittest’’? A: Charles Darwin B: Thomas Huxley C: Queen Victoria D: Hebert Spencer. Sorry fellas, it’s D! Computerji, lock kiya jaaye.
(Poet and critic Rukmini Bhaya Nair is Professor of Linguistics and English at IIT, Delhi. Her latest book is The Ayodhya Cantos,Viking Penguin, 1999)

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