While you enjoy Abdul’s post below, please checkout my guest post on RK’s blog – Has twitter killed blogging & How to blog in the age of Twitter.  - Sukumar

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“Larding your conversations with small bits of erudition is more likely to irritate than to win friends and influence people.” – Stanley Fish as quoted in NYTimes.

From Class V onwards I studied Hindi for my second language in school. However, Tamil as the medium of conversation and medaipeccchu around me never ceased to fascinate me. Among them were the speeches of one of our Tamil Pandits Mr. Swaminathan. I was bowled over by the mastery of the language but was also simply transfixed by the power and speed of his delivery. Today I would consider him an erudite presence simply because I did not know the word erudite well enough then to use it.

That school student went onto attend several years later a workshop on ‘legislative processes.’ I was left well-confused at the end of the workshop, when speaker after speaker, or rather trainer after trainer, called the participants of the workshop as “erudite.” I was scratching my head as to beyond a comment or two by the well-meaning participant as to what they had said that could be considered erudite.

As Stanley Fish’s sharp comment raises the question: is erudition of any use these days? Whether it is business or the academy or society, the clamour by our citizenry is clear: give us knowledge that is useful. The first problem is how do we define knowledge that is useful? Is it only technology or science and technology or those plus the arts, humanities and social sciences and those plus that of theology and divinity. There is of course, the discipline of the history of ideas at which we all converge, have a stake but is an interest-area that is yet to enter the popular domain. Things have reached a stage of dispensability that not just the humanities but the conventional physics, chemistry and biology departments are coming under threat from funding crunches because they have neither anything more erudite to offer or are no longer considered useful.

One wonders what the Sir Isaac Newton’s up in the stars would be thinking. Add to it the processes of globalization that have added to the confusion. Everything that is profound /eternal and even the repository of modern knowledge has to be reduced to sound and visual bytes over the media, if not over cyberspace in order to gain TRPs. Erudition is headed to be reduced to a competition for eyeballs. So, while some would contend that globalization has actually expanded the vistas for knowledge, I would think it has actually shrunk that space. Parents are worried about the TV fixation of their children even if it is over the innocuous cartoon and animation channels.

Story-telling by parents/adults to the children about the great warriors, legends, Mahatmas, the scientists and the scholars is passé. There does not seem to be any inspiration found outside the electronic medium. However, are the parents themselves any better role-models for their children with their regular consumption of inane, hysterical and retrograde soap-operas? This is not to say that regurgitating ancient wisdom for 21st century media is bad but can we afford it to stop there or lose the originals. Or did I hear someone say that McLuhan style that the ‘medium is the message?’

What is the problem with erudition? Erudite interventions are perceived as ‘heavy’, they may make one think and they might intervene in the way we organize our life. We have passed Gen-X, Gen-Y and Gen-Next and now we are thinking about Gen-Z. So erudition is emerging to be a different kind of space it seems. It is to be safely contained within lecture halls of universities or debating societies or certain platforms dedicated for that purpose. Perhaps it was always that way and this post might be flogging a dead horse.

Does erudition have something of a preachy-preachy tone to it or are people just intimidated that there is someone out there who might have some wisdom different from theirs and has a perspective on a subject dear to him/her? SME’s or Subject-matter experts are doted upon within industry. Is not an erudite person simply an SME on a particular field plus that special something? What is that special something: call it commitment or effort or wisdom, that person has chosen to break barriers through knowledge.

It is no one’s contention that all conversation must be erudite and we should all be serious all the time. Some of the most erudite interventions can and have happened over humour. Sir Winston Churchill was a classic example of an erudite man who is humorous. Slightly different but of that genre is Mr. Khushwant Singh. There are yet so many examples of satirists who were erudite in their interventions. Surely there would emerge erudite people among Gen-Z who would make people stand up and listen.

Part of the problem with erudition is its boring. One can get very impatient with erudition. Of what use is (un)solicited gyan? It is a sedative like no other in the hands of the untrained and the disinterested. So, what are our priorities? Why do we moan about so many social problems the moment we step out of our homes and offices onto the roads and wish for alternatives to decadent politicos?  Why are we today effectively  clamoring for “thought leaders” rather than politicians, those who can provide “solutions” to our economic, political and social problems.

I think we have reached a stage where we are dismissive about knowledge. There is one more problem with certain forms of erudition. If you have it, flaunt it. However, most erudite people are of a modest variety. The world often passes by erudition. The brushing aside of erudition to what avail? The honest answer is I don’t know. The generation after Gen-Z or beginning with Gen-Z might make haste to claim ownership of that erudition or the global intellectual heritage that is truly ours and useful to boot. At least, that’s my dream.