Poet Brecht in his poem “Of the remains of older times” says: “Still for instance the moon / Stands above the new buildings at night/ Of the things made of copper, / It is / The most useless. Already / Mothers tell stories of animals / That drew cars, called horses / True, in the conversations of continents / These no longer occur, nor their names: / Around the great new aerials / Nothing is known / of old times”.
We take pride in the fact that we live in a new age. The incessant march of fast-paced technological advancement has no doubt empowered us in a good measure, bringing within reach what was thought to be beyond human grasp. During the last fifty years the unimaginable has happened: the fantastic has become unnoticeable everyday reality. You can receive images from thousands of miles, you can have telephonic conversations with people across the continents, you can travel at a speed that defies your sense of time, ocean is no longer an unfathomable abyss and the sky no longer the limit.
The development is so all encompassing and pervasive that it creates a feeling in us that we are capable of solving the problems which eluded all the previous generations. The power individual has now, through a cumulative process, is both real and elusive. It’s real in the sense that it can be exercised in the domain of the world we live in. It’s elusive in a different sense; it has enriched the individual not to the extent, he thinks, it has. It has outsourced many a function which, if done by the individual himself, would add to his intrinsic and acquired capacity, enhancing his power. Power placed in the collective domain, though highly useful for the individual is not his power per se, is not his existential power.
Humankind no doubt exists at a collective level but each member of human species inevitably lives his/her life at individual level. That’s why mystics and revolutionaries while recognising the inseparability of the collective and individual ultimately hold the well-being of individual as the criterion of collective achievement. That mystics place a high premium on salvation of the individual is well-known but what a revolutionary thinker like Karl Marx says on the issue is deliberately hushed up or ignored by his opponents who, we find, are in an overwhelmingly large number. He aspires for a human society where “the free development of each is the condition for the free freedom of all”.
Negated “I” of mystics and “the free development of each” of Marx are nothing other than a human, a living person of flesh and blood on whom hinges whatever is evolved, built or created for the temporal well-being and spiritual emancipation of humankind. Sadly, we witness a widening gulf between rational/scientific knowledge and human wisdom. There seems to be an inverse relationship between modern knowledge and human wisdom in our times. That’s perhaps the reason why T.S. Eliot bemoans the emergence of “–the hollow men” and “–the stuffed men”.
The more modern knowledge we gain, the more we tend to lose wisdom as if the two are mutually exclusive which they are not. Take the case of women in our patriarchy-driven society. Three or four decades ago woman though more repressed and oppressed was far richer in creative terms at a certain level. Apart from participating in the process of production, woman in the Punjab would compose marriage songs and improvise doggerel poems, render love songs and sing dirges, croon lullabies and tell tales, perform folk dances and enact skits. Man would sing and dance, tell stories and narrate legends, issue weather forecast and foretell impending natural disasters. He, with the help of wisdom born of orally transmitted long historical experience, could predict the future happenings such as drought, dust storms and torrential rains. He was, in fact, able to philosophise with the help of parables and stories. The wise could treat patients with herbal concoctions and express their incredible art of conflict resolution in public. We had men, not in the distant past, who could tell you where to dig the well for sweet water just by smelling the soil. Such an exercise was not meant to fetch money but on the contrary, it inculcated younger generation with a humane worldview and sense of community service.
Separation of knowledge from wisdom is not very old phenomenon if we look the socio-intellectual development of human society. The separation has increased incrementally. And this has happened despite the fact there is no contradiction between modern knowledge and wisdom. Both are intellectual tools that empower humankind. Modern knowledge, in simple words, is in a way concerned more with discovering the dynamics of natural laws and forces which influence our life while wisdom deals with the ways human beings ought to adopt in order to have a humanised society. Both must complement each other and they do in a sane society where knowledge and its by-product, called technology, are not merely used for profit-making. Both are employed with varying degrees of success. Knowledge and wisdom cannot be neatly compartmentalised as they overlap in real life. In wisdom we find knowledge and in knowledge wisdom.
Brecht expresses it so beautifully: “A new age does not begin all of a sudden/ My grandfather was already living in the new age/ My grandson will probably still be living in the old one / The new meat is eaten with the old forks/ It was not the first cars / Nor the tanks/ It was not airplanes over our roofs / Nor the bombers/ From new transmitters came the old stupidities/ Wisdom was passed on from mouth to mouth”. — soofi01@hotmail.com
Published in Dawn, February 17th, 2017