Tunnel vision

In a wonderful essay “Who is in charge?” (the first chapter of Paul Seabright’s “The Company of strangers: a natural history of economic life”) Seabright defines ‘tunnel vision’ as the capacity to play one’s part in the great complex enterprise of creating prosperity of a modern society without knowing or necessarily caring very much about the overall outcome. He gives the delightful example of how the economy works when one buys a shirt; essentially nobody is in charge. This seems to be a fact of modern life, we get some training with the view of making a living and somehow do not have to worry about all the factors of modern economic life. Often, it is difficult to know all the changing factors of supply, demand politics of various nation states. If we are reasonably successful, we may even develop an arrogance of the right way to do things. However, when your kith and kin start committing suicides because farming is failing in some places despite the great developments in technology, or when there are wars or when you are in a decision making position you start wondering and feel inadequate. This sort of ignorance and tunnel vision seems to be a common phenomenon partly because we lack good all round education and the new developments are, even those which can affect our daily lives are not quickly assimilated. The ignorance of many developments in science seems widespread. Even among university professors, you see many who do not know the difference between bacteria and virus, or DNA and RNA or the suitable age for language learning or the problems of pregnancy for mother and child, just to name a few. We generally have vague ideas about communism and democracy but not much more. We often talk about culture but it just seems to mean a few traditions and rituals. Here is a passage from Edge http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/selfish06/selfish06_index.html:
“In the twentieth century, a period of great scientific advancement, instead of having science and technology at the center of the intellectual world — of having a unity in which scholarship included science and technology along with literature and art — the official culture kicked them out. Traditional humanities scholars looked at science and technology as some sort of technical special product. Elite universities nudged science out of the liberal arts undergraduate curriculum — and out of the minds of many young people, who, as the new academic establishment, so marginalized themselves that they are no longer within shouting distance of the action.

Yet it's the products of this educational system that go straight from their desks at university literary magazines to their offices in the heart of the cultural establishment at our leading newspapers, magazines, and publishers. It's a problem that's systemic and not individual. Unless one is pursuing a career path in science, it is extremely difficult for a non-science major at a top research university to graduate with anything approaching what can be considered an education in science. I recently talked with a noted Italian intellectual, who is as familiar with string theory and as he is with Dante, and writes about both in his philosophical novels. In appraising this situation, he argued for restraint and compassion. "They just don't know," he sighed, "they just don't know." He might well have added, they don't even know that they don't know.

Somebody needs to tell them. Otherwise, we wind up with the center of culture based on a closed system, a process of text in/text out, and no empirical contact with the real world. One can only marvel at, for example, art critics who know nothing about visual perception; "social constructionist" literary critics uninterested in the human universals documented by anthropologists; opponents of genetically modified foods, additives, and pesticide residues who are ignorant of genetics and evolutionary biology.”
In a recent artcle in The Guardian, Ian McEwan says:
“I say all this somewhat dutifully, because there actually is a special pleasure to be shared, when a scientist or science writer leads us towards the light of a powerful idea which in turn opens avenues of exploration and discovery leading far into the future, binding many different phenomena in many different fields of study. Some might call this truth. It has an aesthetic value that is not to be found in Galen's confident and muddled assertions about the nature of disease. For example, there is something of the luminous quality of great literature when the 29-year-old Charles Darwin, just two years back from his Beagle voyage and 21 years before he will publish The Origin of Species, confides to a pocket note-book the first hints of a simple, beautiful idea: "Origin of man now proved ... He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke””.

This brings me to ruminate about the role of ‘elite’ in a society
and the uses of literature and writing in general; whether it can bring social change etc etc. I am not very literary; I just remember a few lines here and there both in Telugu and English. They come unannounced giving a brief moment of pleasure or pain or wonder and then go away for a while. From what little I know, literature, if at all was used at least until the 20th century, to preserve the hegemony of the privileged classes and thus preventing social change rather than encouraging social change for the betterment of all. If one wants to know the power of the medium, one has only to look at the polls in various countries about the WMDs in Iraq; still 85 percent of the American soldiers in Iraq believe that Saddam Hussain had WMDs. Some say that if one reads various Telugu classics, one can find about the life of people in those times or history as people lived; may be not in terms of dates etc. but their aspirations. Some of the books I read did not give me much more than glimpses in to court life and sringaram. The book “Castes of mind” by Nicholas Dirks gave a bit more. Widows in the Nayaka period could remarry in temples and when the management of temples passed to different groups during the British period and women were barred from entering the same temples. Things seemed better in Tamilnadu for Khushboo’s ancestors some centuries ago. Coming back to sringaram, nuanced lines like ‘gopee peena payaodhara mardita chanchala karayugasalee’ gives me the image of an aged debaucher in the early stages of Parkinson’s disease. Whereas lines like “Akasamuna harivillu viriste adi makenani anandinche papallara, puvullara’ brings me the scene of happy and innocent children; a scene that I feel should be preserved.( But the very next day I hear reports of Iraqi children playing among war debris and depleted uranium.) Even meaningless lines “Go and catch a falling star” or “Find which wind serves to advance an honest mind” bring moments of happiness. Or a line like “No man is an island” brings visions of an eternal truth which is confirmed more and more by science. For a Telangana farmer ‘it may be a line like “Bamdenuka bamdi katti..” and for a village woman it may be a dampudu pata or tummeda pata. For educated people, it may be a line of Srisri “Kharidu gatte sharabu ledoyi’ which brings a temporary empathy for a factory worker. It seems difficult to calculate these ephemeral feelings over populations and see whether they have brought or likely to bring any social change. What all I can say from my experience is that they sustain me like they sustained many poor and rich people from time immemorial. To ask for their use seems to be like asking whether the time we spend with family and friends has any use.
Does this all mean that there is no point looking for any changes through literature or writing in general. I am not so sure and I think one should try. After all one of the advantages of sound and word is to convey things which cannot always be conveyed rationally. There are perhaps atavistic memories. Scientists have been able to instil fear of snakes in monkeys raised in zoos but only temporarily the fear of flowers. Some have the gift to find some of these essences and convey them through perhaps an unconscious grasp of word and sound. But there is a lot of change in what has to be conveyed. Though some things seem eternal, science continually comes up with surprising confirmations as well as hints of new revelations. This has been prominent in the recent years through the work of people like Trivers and Hamilton, Boyd and Richerson, Cosimides and Tooby, Richard Putnam, Fehr, Hrdy and others which have brought new insights to cognition, empathy, parochialism, cooperation etc. I do not see how writers go on with primitive notions of Marxism, feminism etc without taking these new studies in to account. I think in these times of too much information, this is the challenge to writers: to assimilate the new discoveries, incorporate them with the earlier insights and present them using the magic of language in a form that common people can understand or at least get a feel to sustain them and to ‘improve’ their lives. I had only glimpses of the work of the above people through the writings Jarred Diamond, Herbert Gintis, Matt Ridley and through google search.
Swarup