In search of quality and truth amid a blizzard of wokeness and virtual reality

Quality and quantity are two sides of the same coin, each trait contrasting the other. In any aspirational society, the blind motivation is to capture and own both; a state of everything, everywhere, all at once! Without balance and modicum, it becomes one virtue at the expense of the other. Voltaire, ever pragmatic, stated that the perfect is the enemy of the good. In striving for excellence, one would not even achieve the good, as these two aims are an inherent contradiction. What is the best is often not the quickest resolution. Einstein was more idealistic, valuing quality over quantity; thereby pitting one directly against the other. In the end, the civilised world turns with a healthy tension between quality and quantity, striving for a synergistic convergence of the two traits.

Bhārat today has a huge demographic dividend, a quantitative advantage over our competitor China. In India, 26 per cent of the population is aged between 10 and 24, while 25 per cent of people are in the 0-14 age group, according to United Nations Population Fund, UNFPA. About 18 per cent of China’s population is in the 10-24 age group and 17 per cent in the 0-14 age group. What are we doing with our population dividend? Not very much, I am afraid.

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After I voted in the recent election in late April, I posted a simple selfie on X that showcased my voter’s mark rather prominently and asked voters to just go out there and vote. The post had a mere eight words. Within 24 hours, it had 1.1K likes, an unreal number for me, given my modest engagement with X. I have never got so many likes for a post, including several I quite liked myself viz. well-considered opinions of current events, that barely made it past double digits. So I asked myself what it was about this innocuous post, that “grabbed eyeballs”.

Going back to Occam’s Razor, a ploy I often rely on, I came to the conclusion that most people reading my posts in X or anyone’s else’s for that matter, lack basic cognitive, analytical and logical skills. Mind you, X has a relatively small number of subscribers in India, perhaps two crore at the limit, and all of them presumably have some working knowledge of English, although their grammatical and spelling skills are nothing short of deplorable. X is important because its contributors tend to ‘shape opinion’ and the potentates within this group are anointed social media influencers. I have no idea what they might influence. Now, the inescapable conclusion is that most readers of my posts, nearly 20K of them, are too lazy to read or even try to understand what I have written. A photograph, that too a casual one of me voting and showing off my inked forefinger, does not tire or exhaust their brain. All of them are eligible voters, I assume. Each of them would have identified with my post because they saw themselves in it. And this is why they punch that like—the easiest thing to do on a holiday. This is what our demographic dividend is doing.

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Cogito, ergo sum, I think therefore I am, said René Descartes. Our magical educational system has produced masses of people who cannot think—therefore they are not. Examples of this abound freely in the public space. A 28-year-old was elected to Parliament in 2019. There were ‘psycho’phantic reactions that predicted a future Prime Minister. A 38-year-old, who just might make it into Parliament this time around is facing such a daunting fate today. As if it is that trivial to become Prime Minister of India! And then there’s the Rajya Sabha, the inevitable dumping ground for all these shrill English TV debaters. Whither this august body?

Those students who make it through the monkey mills of the IIT JEE and UPSC exams, the so-called success stories of our system, know facts, in fact too many facts. Their brains are chock full of facts. But we forget that information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom—not by a long shot. What India needs are knowledgeable and wise people, not walking libraries. Anyway, why do we even need libraries? Everything we need is available with Google and ChatGPT. Before long, AI will dispense with human beings altogether.

To the so-called successes of the Indian education system, I would point out that Swami Vivekananda said that education is not the amount of information put into your brain to run riot there undigested all your life. He also said that the very essence of education is actually the concentration of the mind, not the collection of facts. We see a manifestation of things running riot in the posts on X and other social media platforms. We will have produced millions of mental hooligans and vagabonds, not responsible citizens, who should guide the less fortunate members of society forward responsibly.

What we need for Bhārat to achieve its rightful place in the world is quality. In trying to seek the golden mean between Voltaire and Einstein, one must ask how quality may be identified. Quality is so difficult to define, that in the age of machines, it has simply been quantified. Anything is quality if one has oodles of it; houses, cars, foreign labels, even disciples on social media. Einstein actually expanded his observation and elaborated that not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted. How true this is and how far we have deviated from this essential truth. And yet, truth is given the go by in the age of post-truth. We inhabit a culture where emotions and personal beliefs often override objective fact and evidence in shaping public opinion. We saw an example recently—the DGP of Hyderabad closed the case on Rohith Vemula on the grounds that his caste certificate was a fake. There was an immediate outcry from students and political parties and it is now sought to reverse the findings of an investigation that had completed its work seven years ago.

What is truth? Unless this can be answered, we will not be able to identify quality. Quality has four essential attributes: (1) it must be a group decision; (2) it must be time independent; (3) it must be culture independent; (4) it must arise as a result of human activity. Let us look at these four conditions.

Today, quality has become individualistic, as society becomes lonelier and has split into single voices over social media. An individual cannot proclaim quality, only a critical mass can. Swathes of readers consider Shakespeare, Austen and Hemingway to be writers of the utmost quality. Equally, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are revered as great literary works. Fitzwilliam Darcy and Karna, King of Anga, are etched in our minds for all time, as they embody universal qualities, both good and bad. When quality is identified by critical numbers across culture, country and conceit, the particular extends to the universal. Such evaluations stand the test of time. An adoring echo chamber of semi-educated people in a book release function in Lutyens’ Delhi cannot make a quality evaluation that will stand the test of time. Once quality is reduced to individual vanity, it has no relevance. This is what we Indians fail to understand.

Quality must be time independent. The literary works mentioned above span centuries in human history. If one considers the Madurai Meenakshi temple, the Kinkaku-ji Temple in Kyoto, the Sacre Coeur sepulchre in Paris, the Empire State Building in New York City and the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai, one recognises a certain similarity in these man-made objects built across the centuries. All of them exemplify quality as they span the grounded earth to the limitless sky, propelling our imaginations to unimaginable fancies. True quality has a very long shelf life because it is time independent.

Quality is also culture independent, and nowhere can this be seen so clearly as in the fine arts. Who is to say that the cave paintings of Ajanta are superior to the Sistine Chapel ceiling or to Picasso’s Guernica? Who is to say that Yehudi Menuhin or Vladimir Horowitz are better than Bismillah Khan or Lalgudi Jayaraman? No one can. All these people and phenomena represent quality at the highest level and are culture independent. They evoke strong feelings of individual joy and collective euphoria when viewed, heard or observed. In a fascinating musical comparison, the similarities between Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and Muthuswami Dikshitar’s kriti,  Chandram Bhaja Manasa, both written at the turn of the early 19th century are striking. Clearly, the moon evokes similar emotions across widely different cultures, and in the skip of a heartbeat, the specific transcends to the universal.

Quality is created by humans and is enjoyed by humans. The appreciation of quality is an essential part of a full life. Therefore, it is an obligation of humans to be able to identify it correctly and preserve it properly. We Bhāratiyas find ourselves at a critical juncture in our intellectual and moral development. We need desperately to be able to identify true quality in a world that is being battered by political currents and counter-currents, by a blizzard of wokeness, virtual reality and an inability to distinguish the truth from what is not. Our national motto is Satyameva Jayate. This is all very well as long as we are able to define satya. This is the challenge that confronts all of us.

The author is an Emeritus Professor in the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru and is the author of Bharat: India 2.0 published in 2021. He has an H-index of 104. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.