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When intellect under assault
The spread of any information would be useless if received by a closed mind, a mind that ignores any information except that that aligns with predisposed beliefs.
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J
ust recently, a school teacher in France was brutally murdered; the assailant believed his act was justified as a consequence of the teacher’s showing a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad in class, which he saw as a grave insult to Islam that warrants death.
The assailant’s reasoning could not be more warped and far removed from the original issue. Samuel Paty was teaching a course on the freedom of speech to his young students and used the cartoons as a case study; we have to note that France, since the time of Descartes, has heralded the spirit of freedom of expression – the spirit that produced Sartre, Levinas and many other leaders of thought today.
What is depressing about this tragedy is how ignorance and closed-mindedness could overpower reason and intellect. Along with the rest of the country, French Muslim leaders as well as the community the assailant came from have condemned the attack, labelling it as barbarism. This was an example of how hatred and anger could manifest into savagery without any prior understanding of what the real issue was all about in the first place; a burst of enmity based solely on hearsay – the assailant was so fixated on the fact of a teacher showing insulting pictures that he completely disregarded the context and subject matter.
What happened in France is not an isolated incident. Like COVID-19, it is a pandemic, but one that infects the mind. Its spread is propagated through the advance of technology, especially social media, and a significant lack of culture, namely responsibility and critical thinking, accompanies it.
Even with all the antihoax programs, constant public relations and government efforts against misinformation, people all around still fall for false claims, deception, fraud and the occasional “your phone number has just won a cash prize”.
The spread of any information would be useless if received by a closed mind, a mind that ignores any information except that that aligns with predisposed beliefs. Raw fervor is instantly instigated when the information received challenges that belief, however ungrounded it was.
To tackle the source of the problem, that is to ensure that the mind is open and critical from the outset, from a very young age is indeed easier said than done. In France, philosophy is taught from an early age, yet it faces some of the extreme challenges, such as the attack on Charlie Hebdo and, much more recently, on Paty.
Early this month the House of Representatives passed the Job Creation Law, which was immediately met with demonstrations in many parts of the country. I am not here to discuss the law per se, as it is a lengthy discussion on its own with arguments for and against it; plus the fact that I have yet to read the law in full.
The fact I am raising here is that many, if not most, of the protesters who took to streets have never even read the law they are so vigorously against. Many of the demonstrators detained by police confessed to knowing nothing about the law, let alone how it would be detrimental to them, but it justified their aggressive protest.
To our chagrin, many of those demonstrators who know nothing about the law they were protesting are university students – our hope for our nation’s intellectual future.
My professor once said that universities now produce graduates with titles but not necessarily with knowledge; titles only mean that one has gone through formal education, but if the enrolment is filled merely by memorizing material for exams, then it does not automatically equate with the understanding of the subject.
It is true that many schools do produce mathematics and science champions, but without soft and social skills and a true understanding of how knowledge could be implemented for the betterment of society, the graduates are no better than human computers – having the ability to compute and perform tasks but disinclined to reflective analyses or creative thinking.
This is what Paty and dedicated teachers all over the world are fighting for: to produce a future generation of intellectual minds that go beyond memorizing scientific formulas.
Aside from being an obstacle to the development of the intellect (in Paty’s case his life), the ignorance virus also leaves a lingering impediment to future learning of those infected. Once the mind is closed to different ideas, it is no longer free to grow, a condition ripe for manipulation by malicious parties – just like the students protesting against a subject they hardly understand.
It is of the utmost necessity that the ability and recognition of intellectual thinking as manifested in free speech is taught from an early age; more important is the understanding and responsibility that comes with it.
Freedom of expression is a hallmark of a democratic society, but in order to work, its distribution must be based on intellect and responsibility. A democracy can only work if the citizens themselves are intellectually mature.
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The writer is an executive at Roy Morgan and lecturer of advertising and marketing at the University of Indonesia.
