In his essay “Poetry and Apolitical Culture”, published in From the Pages of Day and Night (Northwestern University Press, 2000), the Syrian poet Adonis writes: “Arab culture has suppressed all questioning. Based on the Answer, it has instituted a poetry that can only say what is known, a poetry of the explicit. Thus the first difficulty confronting Arabic poetry lies, paradoxically, in the culture of ease.”
I find that this observation applies not only to Arabic poetry, or to poetry as such, but touches many aspects of modern life – politics, economics, the media, art and so on – to the point where one may rightly speak of a “culture of ease”: a culture in which effort, discipline and rigour seem to have been relegated to the rank of the archaic.
From earliest childhood, the young are taught that success no longer necessarily comes from surpassing oneself. They are encouraged to take another road that leads there painlessly: the path of least effort. For some educationalists, education must above all be entertainment; asking a child to learn the multiplication tables by heart or to memorise a poem is, in their eyes, a form of child torture.
Outside, in a society of abundance, everything pushes the child towards ease. He has only to snap his fingers to get the latest Barbie doll or the newest version of his favourite video game. As he grows up, he is naturally drawn to easy money, easy fame, easy talk, easy sex. This produces the generation of artistic “Star Academy-isation”, linguistic “text-speak-isation”, stock-market speculation, sporting “doping” and political “celebrity-isation”. But there are two fields in particular affected by this culture of laziness that I would like to discuss here: science and information.
Some 2,000 scientific publications are produced every day around the world. In the mountain of papers published each year, what fraction is original? How many are worth more than the wood sacrificed to print them? Very few. The same is true, incidentally, of literary output. Research no longer goes hand in hand with innovation. It has been “castrated” ever since it was formatted and “protocolised”.
In most cases, today’s researchers know in advance what they will find at the end of their research. Laboratory heads know beforehand how many theses will be defended at the end of the academic year, since they must report on them, and account for them, to their sponsors. In modern laboratories the concern for profitability leaves little room for the unexpected and for suspense. As in other fields of economic activity, one must produce the most results, as fast as possible, at the lowest cost. Uncertain paths and risky leads are therefore avoided. Apart from rare chance discoveries, the outcome of a piece of research is timed, like a baby, from conception to birth.
Research is now done “on the assembly line”; each person works in a corner on a small detail. In this unbridled “scientific Taylorism”, which makes one lose sight of the whole, human intelligence often gives way to software that detects correlations. Some researchers, particularly in the life sciences, rely on mathematical devices to do the research for them, such as statistics, often poorly understood and therefore poorly used. And we end up in absurd situations where we learn that a scientific team has “proved”, by means of a “t” or a “chi-squared”, that parameter X has a beneficial effect on phenomenon Y, and a few weeks later we discover that another scientific team has “demonstrated”, by the same “t” or “chi-squared”, the exact opposite.
The world of information also suffers from the culture of least effort. More and more journalists do not carry out investigations in order to learn, know, discover, verify, confront and compare with a view to writing, but seem to do so in order to gather factual elements to fill a pre-prepared template and to support a thesis and conclusions already established. They often resort to easy solutions, which consist in “twisting” a statement to make it say what it was not meant to express, or in instrumentalising facts to fabricate a pseudo-reality that suits their own convictions and certainties.
How many journalists are acutely aware of the need to free themselves ideologically and intellectually if the quest one sets oneself is the search for truth and its transmission to as many people as possible? How many realise that truth is not met on the well-trodden paths of dominant thinking, but must be sought elsewhere, and is often encountered on trails made rough by human distress? How many know that the finest pens in the history of journalism are those that learned to “swim” against the current, and that any other approach to journalism only produces one more element in the mass of spreaders of media pollution that clutter newsrooms around the world and in the end leave no trace of their passing?
I am no follower of “happiness through pain”, but I observe that the works that have left their mark on humanity were often produced in creative suffering. And I believe, like the Canadian pastor Eric Lanthier, that instead of giving birth to creative beings, “the culture of least effort produces drop-outs”, who judge a work not by its intrinsic value but by its market value and, above all, by the reception it gets from the public, measured by audience ratings, an impact factor or the result of an opinion poll.
The reader may find this note excessive and perhaps judge it a caricature, lacking a certain depth of analysis. Would that not be proof that today no one is safe from the culture of ease?
Abbas Aroua, 11 July 2007
