Thought, politics and ignorance

Although knowledge and books have increased excessively, the feeling that this has not formed the ground for stronger thought is gaining wider currency. An excess of information is not an indicator of healthy thought; it has not been so since of old. Being very knowledgeable does not necessarily bring healthy thought, of course. Often the increase of knowledge can be a factor that also increases a person's ignorance of true knowledge. Here ignorance is a disease that cannot be cured by knowledge and can, on the contrary, grow with more knowledge.

There is a profound wisdom in our seeking refuge in God from useless knowledge. There is a process of acquiring knowledge that triggers and feeds a person's arrogance, disdainful self-sufficiency and boastfulness. We know that these feelings are a reflection of a person's extreme ignorance about himself and his position in the world. It is no coincidence that the most arrogant and intolerant people come from among those who make knowledge their profession.

It is a frequently repeated finding of sociological studies that there is an inverse relationship between the level of education and the development of democratic values. The type of the educated person who derives a badge of superiority by comparing the shepherd's vote with his own is no coincidence. This arrogance is a state of mind that acquiring knowledge, or joining certain communities of knowledge, triggers by itself if the person does not know himself. That is, arrogance that is born of ignorance and increases ignorance still further… What do the great philosophers, whom people regard as "great", who seriously debated whether philosophers are superior to prophets, do other than produce an arrogance in favor of their own mode of acquiring knowledge? We also know that the same is done by those who have advanced along Sufi paths of knowing. By what motives and how does a person arrive, in the course of a Sufi journey, at the point of thinking or feeling that the saint is superior to the prophet? If knowledge distances one from knowing oneself, it can turn into such a dry toil. This dry toil has no history, nor any guarantee of being remedied by scientific progress. It has no history, that is, it is a behavioral pattern that human beings have displayed from primitive ages to the most advanced modern societies.

Truly, in advancing along this critical line about thought, one must also develop a separate vigilance against the danger of being caught in a self-proclaimed claim to authenticity. Vigilance, that is, a state of constant guard against oneself.

Beyond all these considerations, we look for concrete indicators of the presence or absence of thought in a society. How many books are published in a society in a year? What is the state of the print runs of these books? How much are these books discussed, and how much do they trigger new thoughts or other books? If we aim for a certain level in all these indicators, it is in fact not so impossible to take appropriate measures and reach them.

It can be possible to meet numerical targets by increasing the number of universities, multiplying the number of theses correspondingly, and giving prizes and material or moral incentives for writing books or articles. Even academics' citing one another in books and articles can somehow be turned into a widespread trend through the criteria and incentives introduced. But in these processes the superficiality and artificiality of an official formality, of the performance of a formality, always sticks out. The increase in references does not show a cumulativeness of people who discuss one another well, question one another, open one another's way, and lay stone upon stone in thought. It is often seen that references are squeezed in between at random, irrelevantly and without context.

That is why all these "concrete indicators" are neither a guarantee of the development of thought nor sufficient to make thought a culture as a level of quality.

In fact, the factors that obstruct thought and the factors that obstruct the political are fed by more or less the same sources. A politics that presents criticism, innovation and different openings as a fitna that disrupts the unity and peace of the community is reflected in thought as well (thought, as a human action, is itself politics anyway).

Meanwhile, either some communities nurture their own thinkers, finding them sufficient customers-readers-followers and so fattening them up, or some writers form their own communities and do the same in reverse. Having books that are widely printed and widely read therefore may not always show the presence of strong thought, but that a creed, a rote formula that will gather a community together, is being operated well. Of course the writer or thinker cares more about being in harmony with the (laic or secular) community he has formed or that has formed him, keeping it together, and moving within limits that will not create fitna for it or produce innovations.

This arche-political level of politics holds equally for the world of thought. For instance, newspapers too are such communities, or as the organs of such communities they are typical reflections of both the world of thought and the world of politics. Cases of writers fired because of a contrary article in a newspaper are not examples attributable only to the right or the left; they are a reflection of this arche-political level of our political and intellectual world.

That there are different communities, even that there is communitization in thought, is natural, but their being in debate and dialogue with one another, beyond the debate within themselves, can somehow lead them to transcend their own limits.

"One of the greatest evils of 28 February," a writer had said, "was that it completely destroyed the ground of the very rich debating environment formed before it, the ground on which different people met and debated in that environment."

In fact, although this ground was destroyed then, it was reproduced over time, but it suffered another dispersal with the atmosphere created by the 27 April (2007) coup attempt and the Republic rallies. It was reproduced again over time, and this time it took a great blow again with the Gezi events. Today we are at the threshold of an arche-political level where each of those from different political or intellectual communities has closed in on itself and can produce nothing other than repeating its own rote formulas, and we must overcome this.