A worker in the sweatshop somewhere in Shanghai works harder for lesser pay. [break]
A young mathematician at Seoul University is extraordinarily bright. A cyber coolie working out of a cubicle in one of the shiny towers located at the outskirts of Bengaluru can write complex programs.
Everybody living above subsistence level in the networked world is in rivalry with each other.
Sentences in the above paragraph are fairly simple. On the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, a readability index adopted by the Department of Defense of the US Government to determine the ease of reading and comprehension it scored 11.2 when tested with the inbuilt tool of MS-Word.
In MS-Word, everything above 12 is grouped together. Its programmers probably assumed that anything above 12 on FKGL was essentially incomprehensible to most computer users anyway.
Theoretically, nothing so far has been said that does not make sense. However, does that claim make sense? Could not the observation have been made simple, simpler still, or explained in the simplest possible terms? It is impossible to answer such a question in a definitive way.
Scriptures say that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all.
Time and chance, however, happen in different ways for different people. In the fable of the tortoise and hare, the mammal would have had a walkover had the reptile read the track record of the competitor on her handheld device.
In the lore of Silicon Valley, it is not the bigger that wins, but the faster. The anxiety over complexity is born out of the fear of not being fast enough in an environment where everyone around seems to be on the run.
Even a paragraph of FKGL scale of 11.2 appears perplexing when read over the screen of an iPhone while waiting for one’s turn at the Starbucks or when traveling in a rush-hour subway.
Fear of thought
The acronym KISS once meant the “keep it short and simple” principle, which was then reinterpreted into an informal “keep it simple, stupid” instruction. However, the idea of simplicity is far from simple.
Simple is a two-syllable word; simplicity has four syllables. Conceptually, these terms are extremely complex. Take a “simple” word like love for example.
The statement that love is a four-letter word is fairly straightforward. At first, the meaning appears to be obvious. Then doubts begin to surface.
The observation is simultaneously true and false. The word has four letters. One can count it. But it is not a swear word. The intent of the remark then becomes confusing.
The idea too is unclear. What does the word “love” stand for in this sentence? Love, as in love for one’s country and often expressed through slightly more complex concept of patriotism, also has four letters in it.
So does the same term in love for rock climbing or playing chess. “And then we made love,” could be an expression of extreme tenderness, high passion, or a mechanical statement of a teenager on his first prowl into the flesh market.
Even to make sense of a word as simple as love, one has to make an attempt to see its context, examine the content, guess its intent, and try to understand several possible implications.
The observation that all words are merely symbols is apparently true. By the way—btw in iSpeak of text-savvy netizens—true too is a four-letter word.
John Locke (1632-1704) propounded that intuitive knowledge is clearest because it can be perceived without the intervention of another idea.
A sentence like “White is not black” does not need a linguist, a grammarian or an interpreter to explain. The meaning is self-evident.
At the second degree of knowledge, demonstration requires intervening ideas. Locke proffers the geometric example of the discovery that three angles of a triangle were equal to two right angles. At the third degree, knowledge comes from sensation.
Awareness of existence of external object through senses, of rose from its scent, for example, is the least certain of all knowledge. According to Locke, whatever falls short of intuition or demonstration is either faith or an opinion.
Anything that appears to be a statement of faith has to pass the conformity test. A different belief is inherently suspect. Most people examine others’ opinions through the lens of their own convictions.
Defense of one’s position and antagonism towards dissenters are positions of default. If the opinion confirms one’s biases, it is brilliant. Should it question one’s beliefs, it needs to be dismissed as heresy.
An opinion that neither confirms nor questions but attempts to broaden the horizon of understanding invites derision. Such an idea is an invitation to contemplate and few in the hyper-connected society have the time or inclination to think for themselves.
The media does the thinking for them by simplifying realities for its consumers in a perpetual hurry.
Fact fetishism
In an interview to Karan Thapar, Justice Markandey Katju, Chairman of the Press Council of India, stated that in his opinion a majority of media people were of a poor intellectual level.
It is hardly a revelation to anyone who watches Indian television channels or reads papers that have perfected the practice of “paid news” into fine art.
However, media people are not solely responsible for the degeneration in the values of journalism. When viewers and readers want only facts, people like Rupert Murdoch have every reason to manufacture realities and claim unabashedly, as Fox News does, “We report. You decide.”
The pronoun in the sentence probably stands for the owner of the company or its advertisers. Viewers have no time to test the credibility of the claim.
Most facts do not fall in the category of intuitive knowledge. Demonstration too is often difficult because evidences tend to be circumstantial.
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and looks like a duck, chances are that somebody is bent upon proving that the bird in the middle of a desert is a duck.
Lawmaker Balkrishna Dhungel has been convicted of murdering Ujjan Kumar Shrestha of Okhaldhunga.
The government thinks that the deed was done for political reasons. The aggrieved family believes that it was a case of “honor killing” to take revenge against violation of caste rules in marriage.
The fact, no matter how hard one tries, is impossible to ascertain. It lies behind a thick smoke of passions from both sides. What is the way to understand intricacies of such a reality? Perhaps a review of the context could be helpful.
Possible implications of the presidential decision would probably clarify positions that parties to the case are forced to take. But such examinations and speculations would be too complex for most readers, listeners or viewers.
It is much easier to hold a SMS poll: Should presidential pardon be granted, withheld or denied? Text your response and a computer would do an impartial counting.
Slant of the news has to follow one of these three positions to gain the approval of the respective section of the audience. Analysts must take a stand and defend it. Opinions have to either condone or condemn Dhungel. There is no place for ambiguity for the issue has become moral.
Morality, however, is waiting for new definitions. To quote Justice Markandey Katju again, “Old values are crumbling, but new modern values have not yet been put in place. Everything is in flux, in turmoil. What was regarded good yesterday is regarded bad today, and what was regarded bad is regarded good. As Shakespeare said in Macbeth: Fair is foul and foul is fair.”
It is not easy to be simple in such difficult times. In the Mahabharata, Bhisma Pitamah discovers the pain and pleasure of lying on a bed of arrows, waiting for the moment of self-willed death, while all around him an epic war destroys everything that he had held dear throughout his life.
The great warrior had tried to live by simple beliefs.
Cole Porter bemoans in Anything Goes: “Good authors too who once knew better words, / Now only use four-letter words. / Writing prose, / Anything goes.”
Now, that observation is really simple.
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