07 September 2000, 805 words
Human beings are not naturally logical creatures. Psychologist Bernard J. Baars, author of In The Theatre Of Consciousness, writes: "...most of the time we humans do not engage in logical or even structured thinking. We can do it, but it is something of a feat...[we] devote most of our conscious stream to fantasies, dreams, disconnected thoughts, and debatable beliefs...For most of human history that has been the norm. Structured reasoning is a recent cultural product."
This is so because only the overwhelming complexity of modern Western societies required a cadre of persons devoted to structured thought. Without them, neither the science nor the institutions needed to keep modern societies functional could have evolved.
Mind you, this doesn't mean that the average person is fundamentally irrational. Baars points out that "people are wonderfully sensitive to accurate reasoning and reality when they are provided with rapid and accurate consequences...But wherever we cannot obtain clear reality feedback we seem to spin beliefs that are contradictory, idiosyncratic and fantastical."
In developing societies like ours, however, the intellectual cadre often does this too. In a recent set of columns in the Independent, for example, Wayne Brown promulgated the thesis that civilizations as high as the 20th-century's existed eons before recorded history. His favoured evidence of this unknown past is an African tribe called the Dogon, who supposedly have millennia-old knowledge of an invisible star called Sirius B.
Brown did not pose the logical questions. Why did the Dogon's vanished civilization not leave more significant knowledge or artifacts? If it was extraterrestrials, why did they give the Dogon only that useless piece of astronomical information? He didn't even bother to do a search on the Net, where he would have easily discovered that the Dogon story was bruited by two anthropologists who may not have got their facts right, and that the Dogon had been trading with Europeans long before these anthropologists got on the scene and so could have gotten their astronomical information from the traders.
Ironically, Brown berates Establishment anthropology for its "tunnel vision", apparently quite unaware of classic anthropological gaffes like Eskimos having 400 words for "snow", Samoan free sex and resultant lack of crime, sex-reversed cultures, the different Hopi concept of time, ancient matriarchies at the dawn of civilization - the list is endless. As one young anthropologist complains: "...complete cultural relativism makes anthropologists far more credulous of almost any absurdity...than any ordinary person would be, equipped with only common sense."
Even more ironically, Brown throughout these columns pats himself on the back for his "common sense" and "disinterested intelligence". Yet, in this arcane topic, there is a clear continuum between Brown and those religious fundamentalists and ethnocentrists who posit some pristine state of grace from which humanity has fallen.
The main issue here is not Brown's errors of history, anthropology, archaeology and evolution, but the background that favours such deficiencies. The continuum is not only vertical, but horizontal. Lloyd Best writes, "I know how fashionable it is to be scientific...we cannot do without the legitimation of objectivity. But is that not the problem?"
Nor is it scientific issues alone that suffer from intellectual slackness. Guardian columnist Bukka Rennie, who like Brown favours the first person plural, says that "progressive West Indian literature, in our view, is concerned with restoring health and strength to the damaged psyche of a rudderless people." Dr. Hollis Liverpool (Chalkdust), objecting to cussing in plays, writes in a similar vein, "It is the duty of the artist especially to lead us in that fight [to raise the levels of society's morals]."
Such commentaries could only be made by persons who haven't a clue about the psychology and sociopolitics of the creative process. V.S. Naipaul, in The Middle Passage, comments: "The insecure wish to be heroically portrayed...the West Indian, more than most, needs writers to tell him who he is and where he stands. Here the West Indian writers have failed."
Naipaul attributes this failure to writers taking racial sides. I think it goes deeper than that. The average person's distrust of intellectuals is often rational, as demonstrated by Ken Ramchand's hasty capitulation in the face of criticism of his marijuana speech.
Best, significantly, notes that our leading politicians come from the people and so mirror us perfectly. This is why intellectuals have little or no influence on the realpolitik of our society. And that can change only if we produce a cadre of intellectuals with the mental and moral capacity for informed, analytical and independent thought.
Such a cadre is crucial for providing "clear reality feedback" to citizens because, without a significant sub-culture of empirical and considered thinking, we will remain a society where venality, superstition and racial insecurity dominate our politics.
Copyright ©2000 Kevin Baldeosingh