Let Ideas Play. Don’t Dogmatise Them

The thinker’s life fills our bookshelves. A random selection of titles, as a lazy morning exercise in demystifying the world we are still struggling to cope with, makes the moment, this pause in the journey over which we can only pretend to have control, a bit more comprehensible. What we are now looking at, or skimming through, is a partial biography of the past, an unauthorised translation of the present, and an argument with the future. Or we are looking at an alternative that can dazzle and frighten us; or at a world born in imagination we can enter and exit at the flip of a page, but without our permission, it has taken a permanent space in our consciousness. A book is a story. An explanation. A question. A journey. The pleasure of pursuing ideas through the thoughts of others.

Hang on a sec. Ruminations of the romantic are fine as long as the world remains in your mind as the sum total of abstractions you acquired from what you had read, but without empirical validation. That world is beautiful, and its mysteries relentless. Close the book and open your eyes, and you may realise that you are being deceived by perceptions, by a reality altered by the cleverness of the learned class. The poet is a trickster, so beware. Everything is explained by the divinity of data, and by the magical powers of algorithms, and our destiny is semaphored by the wisdom of the machine. The ultimate book of revelations is not written by the poet or the philosopher but by the mind benders of science and technology. Knowledge is not acquired by observation but by the alchemy of information. The machine is the mind. The romantic is on the verge of being outwitted. He is being invited to marvel at the metaphysics of the machine.

Maybe we are better off if we are modest enough to see this tension in the realm of ideas not as a confrontation but as a confluence. There is a sweet irony buried in this: what we consider to be opposites are not as independent as they seem to us. One is indebted to the other. Go a little further: one can trace its ancestry to the creativity of the other. Even as the machine rules, spare a thought for the long line of minds behind it. In the beginning was the book. The stylus led the way to the keyboard. Even as data declares its adulthood, the image that persists in the arena of ideas and arguments is that solitary figure in the scriptorium. Everything is thought out. There are no accidents in evolution.

What sends some of us to Doomsday paroxysm is the dogmatisation of data. The new becomes the ruling theology, and its high priests are the real masters of the universe. But theologies are closed books. New Tech—or Big Tech—is liberating, and the arguments for regulation and bifurcations are not always honest; they are actually as dishonest as the noble intentions of the Silicon priesthood. Paranoia is not the prerogative of the authoritarian regimes alone; it permeates democracies too. Still, the righteous authority of data regimes has a historical parallel, if we accept the truth that these regimes, borderless, too, are born from the lonely pursuit of the human mind.

In another time, at another point in the evolution of freedom, ideology was ideas dogmatised. In the mind of the theorist, sitting in the British Library, the idea of the socialist state was the ultimate ideal of freedom and equality—and a correction of history. Those who made an ism of his ideas built the most fortified empires of unfreedom. Dogmatisation is the killing of the ideal, whether it’s communism or dataism. Concentration of power in the hands of a few—the politburo of knowledge—stifles ideas. Those who claim copyright over our minds—and our choices—turn the most liberating ideas into ideologies. It happened before. It may happen today.

Dogmatisation is calcification, of ideas and culture. It is the slow death of creativity. It is how empires begin to rot. And it is how the next big thing, the next challenger of certainties, comes to the fore. Change gets a new definition whenever someone out there—a political theorist or a space scientist, a novelist or a footballer, an actor or an activist—breaks through the fog of dogmatisation and begins a new argument, adds a bold new adjective to freedom. They are the redeemers. They keep the intellectual life of a nation alive. Their ideas and arguments ensure that it is a life not subordinated to power. They provide freedom’s newest words.

Such words, such discoveries of truth, are not appreciated by certain varieties of politics, from both sides of the aisle. The knowledge class is marked by populists from the Left and the Right as elitist and remote from the majority left behind by globalisation and other such sins of the Establishment. The fear-mongering anti-elitists sell the notion that the new Brahmins wield power disproportionate to their size, that the elitist emphasis on intellectual Darwinism creates a new underclass. In the playbook of progressives, for instance, the privilege of education marks the persistence of a historical guilt. The elite is being condemned to carry his class and classroom as an apology. To realise the fallacy of this punishment, meted out by populists and progressives alike, I recommend the book The Aristocracy of Talent by Adrian Wooldridge. As he concludes after a compelling argument, “The meritocratic idea made the modern world, sweeping aside race- and sex-based barriers to competition, building ladders of opportunity from the bottom of society to the top, and electrifying sluggish institutions with intelligence and energy.”

Let’s not frighten talents away. Ideas are born and appreciated only in societies where the mind is autonomous. We may be coming out of a biological horror story; we may be learning to treat the expert with a little more respect; and we may be struggling to cope with bad stories and the profusion of dissent. We need to let ideas play, without paranoia, with the confidence of a people who enjoy unfettered minds. We at Open, not a browser’s magazine but a reader’s magazine, love ideas. Turn the pages and you will know why.

About The Author

S Prasannarajan

•