Ajit Baral

One of the best brains was Pierre Bourdieu’s, who has wonderful thoughts on issues ranging from arts and aesthetics to contemporary society. His thoughts are, I am sure, shaped through reading. Yet he distrusts the learned (the learned meaning those who batten on books) because, he thinks, they regurgitate what they have read.

Bourdieu is not alone in distrusting the learned. For example, one of the finest essayists of his time, William Hazllit, was contemptuous of the learned. In his essay, The Ignorance of the Learned, he wrote: “A lounger who is ordinarily seen with a book in his hand … is said to carry his understanding about with him in his pocket, or to leave it at home on his library shelves.” Sample another one: “The bookworm wraps himself up in his web of verbal generalities, and sees only the glimmering shadows of things reflected from the minds of others. Nature puts him out. He can only breathe a learned atmosphere, as other men breath common air.” Both Bourdieu and Hazllit’s contempt for the learned stems, I think, from their belief that reading is a passive act and that true knowledge is necessarily experiential.

Reading is by no means a passive act. In fact, the well-known editor of The Times of India, Sam Lal, writes in one of his essays: “It’s much more than a conversation — between the author and the reader. And it is the reader that gives meaning to a text (reader-response theory, remember).” Jean Paul Sartre also contested the belief that reading is a passive act when he wrote in his classic book What is Literature? That “reading is a dialectics between coming and going”. This dialectics prevents reading from becoming a passive act.

If reading were a passive act, with all those book reading there should have been much more homogeneity of ideas today (and no space for the postmodernist pontification); Aristotle’s theory of mimesis and Heraclitus’s theory of flux should have been reigning supreme still, and there should not have been any psychoanalytical approaches other than that of Sigmund Freud, and much more.

Knowledge acquired through experience can complement but never substitute the book knowledge. For there is a limit to what one can know through experience. Life is short — too short — to know everything through experience that we now know through reading. Live to be a thousand, and still you wouldn’t know even an ounce of what you now know thanks to books.

Perhaps, a century back it was possible to think in terms of highly segmented, narrow area of expertise. Not anymore. Categories like economics, international relations, politics, development, environment are so seamlessly woven that it is impossible to understand one without understanding the others. So, make no mistake, the world today needs globalists/generalists, not specialists. And I am afraid we cannot turn people into globalists by whipping them back to Nature.