Directed evolution of reason

Evolution, while sometimes desperately needed, is a very slow process. We do not have millennia at our disposal to wait for a discourse on reason and tolerance to emerge. One flips the channels — at any time of the day or night, as I did with great hope — and fails every time to find a single programme that had anything to do with innovation, education, science or creativity. There are plenty of programmes on imagination though, where we collectively imagine the whole world to be our enemy, every failing on our part to be a giant conspiracy against us and every weakness of our system to be a carefully-choreographed manoeuvre perfected over decades in a high-tech institution in a land far away.



The airwaves are full of biased political punditry in the evening, and misogyny, hatred and intolerance in the morning. I find it ironic that every one of us wants our children to become doctors or engineers, which happen to be domains of science, yet there is nothing in the way of fostering creativity, big ideas, grand challenges or scientific inquiry on our TV channels. The bookstores are glad to carry the latest book on the ‘great games’ being played in the region but nothing on the great ideas that transformed the world.

I am told, by friends in the media, that it is pure and simple supply and demand. There is a demand for shouting matches on TV but none for scientific pursuits. If so, there is something seriously wrong with both the media and us as a society if there is a high demand for misogyny, hatred and bigotry and for words that serve as death sentences for an individual or a group. My friends in the electronic media say that their schedule is full and there is no space for discussion on unlocking the mysteries of the universe. I find it sad that in this packed schedule, there is a harrowing vacuum.

I am not pessimistic about the future, but I do not have patience for a random mutation event that slowly and gradually brings us to a station of more tolerance and reason. I do not want to wait for that. The stakes are too high to leave our future to natural selection. Hard as it may be, we have to plant a few seeds, in the sphere of medium that reaches the general public, that engages the mind and takes us out of the mundane to the profound. As in biotechnology and drug design, we have to start with directed evolution. We have to diversify the pool with ideas and events that are different from what we have. We start with a few but as they take root, we have to continue this cycle until we are on track towards where we want to be.

I am not saying that there should be no discussion of the events that envelope us today. Indeed, there is a need and necessity of news and analyses, but there is also a need for investing in our future generations. Outside of the world that comprises finger-pointing, marriages of politicians, their denials and the political musical chairs is a world unfamiliar to most of our youth. In this real but unfamiliar world, new discoveries change the world, where new galaxies push our imagination and where new inventions save the lives of those who did not have a chance previously. A nod to these ideas is not only needed for a richer understanding of the world, and a recognition that we are all not so different after all, but is also an inspiration for a pre-teen or a teen who has a choice. A choice between whether to save the future by getting rid of the ‘other’, or to create a future through knowledge and discovery.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 6^th,  2015.

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