02 April 2002, 865 words
I used to think that, if this country's thinly-knitted social fabric ever unravels, the core cause would be a failure of ethics. But I've changed my mind. Now I think that, if ever we reach the stage of a Jamaica or a Haiti, the core reason will be sheer stupidity.
The thing that started me on this trend of thought was innocuous enough: an article by UWI engineering lecturer Richard Clarke, titled "Physics and religion", which appeared in the Sunday Express of 17/03/02. Clarke's thesis is that a physics theory called "non-locality", which he says shows that everything in the universe is connected to everything else, proves the existence of a spiritual reality because God is also everywhere.
I cut out Clarke's article and put in the folder where I keep such clippings: I call it my "Absolute Crap" file. It isn't necessary to know physics to see how foolish Clarke's argument is. There is obviously no explanatory connection between the behaviour of sub-atomic particles and how human beings behave, or ought to behave. Nor is there any logical reason to believe that non-locality has any implications for uniting religion and science, or science and the humanities, as Clarke argues.
It seemed to me that the holes in Clarke's argument would be plain to all but the meanest intelligence. Yet at least two university lecturers, Dr. Ramesh Deosaran and Lloyd King, were impressed enough to writer letters to the editor in support of Clarke's rubbish. Deosaran seems to think mind can control matter, while King, who believes that religious intuition is a valid form of objective knowledge, even goes so far to state that it is a fact that prayer can heal people.
Is this the kind of muddled and superstitious thinking which dominates at UWI? Apparently, since not one scientist or philosopher from the institution felt moved to point out Clarke's obvious fallacies. It could be that the brighter academics felt that Clarke's (and Deosaran's and King's) opinions were too stupid to comment on: but, if this is the reason for their silence, these persons clearly feel no obligation to save the general public from mis-education on intellectual matters.
These deficiencies from the country's highest centre of formal learning are naturally reflected elsewhere. It is one reason why Brother Michael Samuel's retirement speech has found such favour with the ignorant amongst us. Brother Michael showed exactly what is wrong with our education system, not by his opinions per se, but by demonstrating how he himself embodied these flaws: in his anti-intellectual attitude, lack of logical rigor, class-bias, and unenlightened pedagogy.
In his speech, Br. Michael recommended that children be beaten, one of his arguments being that 90 percent of the populace favour corporal punishment. (By this logic, he should also support capital punishment and pre-marital sex.) He also asserted that 20 percent of students will be fit only for manual labour: the good brother clearly being an educator who has never wondered why no white or Chinese children from his school end up carrying concrete; and he dismissed psychologists as "old-talkers": after all, why should a school principal and cleric have any respect for research?
Not only did Br. Michael's speech show the truth of Lloyd Best's observation that it is our educated elites who are the problem, but it may also explain why Presentation College should have moulded both Patrick Manning and Basdeo Panday: for rationality and ethics are closely allied, and both these political leaders clearly embrace neither.
None of this would be especially worrisome if the upcoming generation had better intellectual standards; but what got me truly disheartened were recent personal and professional encounters which suggest to me that Clarke's pseudo-intellectualism is typical of those younger persons who are passionate about intellectual matters.
Among them are individuals who claim to be cultural critics but can't read and understand plain English; literary journalists who dismiss critical rigor as pretentious "high science interpretation"; wanna-be novelists who spout the bogus ideology of feminism and are totally self-obsessed; artistes who promulgate Afrocentric rubbish and think Western culture is a conspiracy against ethnic minorities; and cultural writers who proudly define themselves as socialist, as though the economic collapse of the Soviet Union and its oppressive political system never happened.
It's not encouraging. I do know a few rational young people; and I estimate that about one-third of this column's readers are in their teens and early 20s; and in bookstores I see good popular books on physics and biology in the children's section. But I don't think this is enough to offset the baleful influence of the pseudo-intellectuals and the religious, cultural, and political demagogues.
We like to pat ourselves on the back because this society produces so many bright people. But it is useless to produce bright people if their thinking is befuddled by religious superstition and personal insecurities, or if they have to emigrate to the metropole because their intellectual rigor ensures that they can't make a decent living here. That it why I say, if this society fails, it will be mainly because of stupidity.
Copyright ©2002 Kevin Baldeosingh